Resources on the Thesis

Version in English:
On the concept of History. (often referred as...) Theses on the Philosophy of History

Version in Spanish:
Bolivar Echeverría's commented and extended translation (PDF)

(EXCELENT) Essay by Bolívar Echeverría on Benjamin and the thesis:
Benjamin, la condición judía y la política

Benjamin's redemption

Benjamin's redemption here characteristically takes the form of memory and mimesis. A past is to be recognized and recovered; redemption refers to this recovery, or rather dis-covery for the first time, of the sense of distance and depth of time, which properly belongs to experience in the true sense of the word. In short, experience for Benjamin is something by nature in need of retrospective discovery, while each "moment of experience" is always on the verge of becoming lost in its own depthless immediacy. (518)

[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 Sep 29th, 2009.]

The 'spiritual spoils'

What's the real idea behind Benjamin's vision? An ultimate state or the riches of the process? I believe is the 2nd one. Benjamin believes in an 'allegorical' dialectic: a dialectic without final solution that recovers human 'agency'.

Seek for food and clothing first, then
the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.

Hegel, 1807

The class struggle, which is always present to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.

4th thesis.

Work & Aura: Marxism meets Theology

Experience of the aura thus rests on the transposition of a response common to human relationships to the relationship between the inanimate or natural object and man. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn. To perceive the aura of an object means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return.

Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire

It is just in his work upon the objective world, therefore, that man really proves himself to be a species-being. This production is his active species-life. Through this production, nature appears as his work and his reality. The object of labor is, therefore, the objectification of man’s species-life: for he duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he sees himself in a world that he has created. In tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labor tears from him his species-life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Maybe this is the most important point. A new relationship with 'the other', in which objects become 'subjects' to us. This entails a whole new relationship with the world that understands that the object of human labour is not the product of it, but man itself -as he 'creates' himself through his work.

All this illustrates a kind of labor which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labor.

11th thesis (fragment).

The Turkish Puppet & the little hunchback

The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each move of an opponent with a countermove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large table. A system of mirrors created the illusion that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet’s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet called ‘historical materialism’ is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight. 

1st thesis.

The image anounces the whole program of the text: Theology as allied force of Historical Materialism.
The turkish puppet, is actually a famous hoax that helps to illustrate the point.

Angelus Novus

"The historical materialist in the moment of danger."

	My wing is ready for flight,   I would like to turn back.If I stayed timeless time,  I would have little luck.	Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zurück, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich hätte wenig Glück. Gerherd Scholem,  ‘Gruss vom Angelus’

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 

 9th thesis.

Picturing Walter Benjamin

[t]he Benjamin one is left with is the one who tried in his later years to assimilate his earlier esoteric mode of thought to a theoretical framework that was both materialist and exoteric in nature - the Benjamin of "Some Motifs in Baudelaire" and related studies such as the "Theses on the Philosophy of (38)History". This is the Benjamin who refrained from comporting himself one-sidedly as either a Marxist or metaphysical thinker per se, whose thought instead can be located at the forbidden crossroads of these two theoretical poles. This is the Benjamin who conceived of himself as a redeemer of historical Jetztzeiten or now-times, those uncommon images of redeemed life whose traces occasionally grace the continuum of history. (39)

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, Sep 29th, 2009.