Abouth the "Thesis..."

This essay by Walter Benjamin explores our responsibility to ‘history’ and the past. The stimulus for the work was the painting, Angelus Novus by Paul Klee. Based on this image Benjamin wrote about the “…the angel of history. His face is towards the past (…) one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet”. The essay itself is highly allegorical and is made up of XIX thesis and two fragments. In it he aims to revise the Marxist concept of ‘Historical Materialism’, a concept defined as, “it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines their consciousness” (Marx “Preface”). Yet Benjamin builds on this concept by including theology to amplify its scope. In order to that demonstrates the need to combine ‘scientific truth’ and the ‘rest’ of truth: that of ‘the divine’.

Throughout the essay he builds the image of a ‘historical materialist’ as state capable of ‘redemption’ linked to the idea of Klee’s ‘angel of history’. Tomoko Masuzawa has interpreted Benjamin’s use of the word redemption as, “…characteristically [it] takes the form of memory and mimesis. A past is to be recognized and recovered; redemption refers to this recovery, or rather discover for the first time, of the sense of a distance and depth of time, which properly belongs to experience in the true sense of the word” (Masuzawa 518). It is the mission of the ‘historical materialist’ to turn that ‘moment of danger’ as captured in the description of Klee’s painting into a chance to use our very own ‘weak messianic power’ to redeem the past. Additionally, throughout the essay Benjamin also reflects on how historians have misconstrued ‘history’ in order to legitimate the present as ‘Progress’ specifically noting how it has left a pile of ‘rubble’ and thus suffering. Redemption of the past (specially that which has been crushed under the appalling success of Progress that of the ‘defeated’) is an attempt to fight back in the name of a humane mankind.

The Benjamin builds his argument by first declaring how the current generations need to enlist the service of theology. Theology is no other than that ‘little hunchback’ that drives the movements of the ‘Turkish puppet’ called ‘Historical Materialism’. It is in the forces revealed by the theological gaze where the true power of the ‘historical materialist’ lie: that is the ‘realm of the divine’. In order to realize the revolutionary changes needed to create a ‘real state of emergency’ the historical materialist needs to fight for our capacity for true experience. Benjamin, based on Marcel Proust’s ideas, believed this could only happen in the locus of memory (Masuzawa 519). "Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with materials of the collective past" (Benjamin in Wollin, 33). Experience opens an ‘allegorical’ space. “In Benjamin's analysis, allegory is pre-eminently a kind of experience” (Cowan 110). Allegory signals an unavailable and absent truth while portraying an antinomic situation. This situation is one of inner and irresolvable contradiction: an ever going dialectic, or ‘hyper-dialectic’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty called it in The Visible and the Invisible. This mode of experience signaled by the figure of allegory (as understood by Benjamin), acknowledges the clashing forces that condition human behavior, but still recognizes the possibility of human agency.

Such understanding of ‘experience’ (Erfahrung opposed to the simple erlebnis: ‘lived moment’) points towards a new comprehension of revolution and class struggle. Orthodox Marxist theory has traditionally been consumed by theorization about how to ‘socialize the means of production’ to achieve the communist utopia. In this way, it has put the stress on the fight for the future and is product oriented. However, Benjamin’s writing attempts to recover the idea of the ‘spiritual goods’ or ‘spiritual spoils’ of the struggle itself. He shows in a very subtle way, that this might be even more important than the material ones. His approach is ‘process oriented’ and totally consistent with Marx’s ideal of work: one where the object of the labor is the man working himself, as a natural being that humanizes his nature or naturalizes his humanism or the the transit from being a simple ‘natural being’ to becoming a ‘natural human being’ (Cfr. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

The achievement of Benjamin’s aforementioned goal demands becoming aware of ‘the secret pact with the past’ (which makes us capable of agency: our ‘weak messianic power’). Our generation was predicted by previous generations and their hopes lie with us. The ‘pact’ calls for a redemption of the past’s historical values and living sources. There is no causal relation with the past hence making it ours; the vindication of it is the way to claim its heritage and gain the possibility of experience. It means remembering and re-interpreting (mimesis) the past (revitalizing it) in our effort to inhabit and make sense in and of the world. Understanding that the fight is one not for the future generations, but redeeming the past saves the past’s future as well as our own. Our ‘weak’ messianic power lies in the encounter of ‘correspondences’ with the past, which we can enact through building upon sudden moments of realization/memory.

We can do this by empathizing with the past. When aware of the past’s desires there will be a moment or flash, when a person understands the required redemption; a kind of ‘memoire involontaire’. This standstill, this ‘discontinuity’ is an ‘allegorical’ experience. Benjamin compares these ‘flashes’ of memory to how historians have traditionally commoditized and appropriated memory/history in order to suit their own purposes, claiming that they have failed to achieve true understanding and/or change. Instead they are spaces that allows the human agency to take an ‘unfaithful leap’ from the continuum and logics of the ‘storm of Progress’. It is a sublime (hence, aesthetical) experience biding for recognition of other possibilities of relation with the ‘other’ (humans, nature, things). It is also the space for the ‘messianic power’ allowing us to choose to either serve the historically dominant classes or as Benjamin hopes, redeem the past. Additionally it is the ‘now-time’ –Jetszeit. The moment where “[h]istorical experience pulls the face of the past and present together in a short but ecstatic kiss” (Ankersmit 121). If we are able to actualize this ‘now-time’, then the ‘empty-homogenous time’ of Progress is shattered. Instead there will be a future through the past and a chance to reclaim the chips of messianic time and move toward a more egalitarian society.

According to Benjamin time is not an empty-homogenous thing. Time is historical and densely populated by discourses, institutions and structures shaping the world. Thus, he thinks that one must direct criticism against time’s foundations by blasting through its abstraction and situating it in the present. This in turn, requires abandoning of the idea of subject as transcendental and replacing it with embodied and historical one. This subject is affected by forces of history, but still has a power (even if weak) enact change. Thus it is important to remember this responsibility and stop understanding history as a ‘dialectic’ endeavor between past and present. Instead the friction between now and then, evident in the antinomic and unfulfillable structure of allegory, can ignite a spark of insight in order to explode the continuum of progress.

What is the role of theology in all of these propositions? Why bring this unfashionable concept into modern society, which unavoidably makes eyebrows rise and awakens suspicions? Why did Walter Benjamin choose to remain “located at the forbidden crossroads of these two theoretical poles” of Marxism and Mysticism (Wolin 39)? The answer is that Benjamin understood the urgency and importance of experiencing the ‘aura’ of things or the return of the human gaze by ‘objects’. This meant developing a ‘style’’ of thinking that understands and accepts the fact that chance is the contingent foundation of need and order. Both of these concepts form man’s horizon of understanding. Benjamin hopes to posit a new kind of rational discourse that allows itself to include a profane notion of ‘the divine’ and allows a new relationship with this ‘other’ and respectfully gives it dignity. In words of Bolivar Echeverría:

“A use of the rational discourse capable of recognizing the other as a subject; of not emptying and impoverishing it by reducing it to a mere object (nature), a mere pile of always renewable natural resources that are there ‘free’ at man’s –‘the’ subject-disposal; a discourse that sets out from the ‘materialist mysticism’ characteristic of a humane labor that ‘doesn’t exploit Nature but is capable of awakening the creations dormant in its womb’ –in the same way that a sculptor only ‘takes out’ of the stone block the figure that was already hidden in it.” (Echeverría 31).



Works Cited

Ankersmit, Frank. Sublime Historical Experience. California: Standford University Press, 2005.

Benjamin, Walter. On the Concept of History. Translation by Dennis Redmond. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm accessed on September 7th, 2009.

---. On the concept of history. (Often referred as...) The theses on the philosophy of history. http://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html accessed on September 7th, 2009.

---. Tesis sobre la historia y otros fragmentos. Translation, Edition and Introduction by Bolivar Echeverría. http://www.bolivare.unam.mx/traducciones/tesis.pdf accessed on September 20th, 2009.

Cowan, Bainard. “Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Allegory”, in New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism (Winter, 1981), pp. 109-122. http://www.jstor.org/stable/487866 accessed on September 7th, 2009.

Marx, Karl. “Preface”, in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm accessed on September 20th, 2009.

---. Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm accessed on September 20th, 2009.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. “Tracing the Figure of Redemption. Walter Benjamin’s Physiognomy of Modernity”, in MLN, Vol.100, No.3, German Issue (Apr., 1985), pp.514-536. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905529 accessed on September 20th, 2009.

Wolin, Richard. “Benjamin’s Materialist Theory of Experience”, in Theory and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 17-42. http://www.jstor.org/stable/657284 accessed on September 7th, 2009.