We are accustomed to classifying the various philosophies of history according to their progressive or conservative, revolutionary or backward-yearning character. Walter Benjamin escapes these classifications. He is a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, a Marxist adversary of “progressivism,” a man nostalgic for the past who dreams of the future.
The reception of Benjamin, notably in France, has taken an interest primarily in the aesthetic side of his work, with a certain propensity to regard him above all as a historian of culture or a literary critic.1 Now, without neglecting this aspect of his work, one must bring to light the far vaster scope of his thought, which aims at nothing less than a new understanding of human history. The writings on art or literature can be understood only in relation to this overall vision, which illuminates them from within.
W. Benjamin’s philosophy of history draws on three very different sources: German Romanticism, Jewish messianism, Marxism. It is not a combination or “synthesis” of these three (apparently) incompatible perspectives, but the invention, on their basis, of a new conception, profoundly original. The expression “philosophy of history” risks leading one astray. There is, in Benjamin, no philosophical system: all his reflection takes the form of the essay or the fragment — when it is not pure and simple citation, with passages torn from their context placed in the service of his own approach. Any attempt at systematization is therefore problematic and uncertain. The brief remarks that follow are merely a few avenues of inquiry.
One often finds, in the literature on Benjamin, two symmetrical errors that must be avoided at all costs: the first consists in dissociating, by an operation (in the clinical sense of the term) of “epistemological break,” the “idealist” and theological work of his youth from the “materialist” and revolutionary work of his maturity; the second, on the contrary, envisages his work as a homogeneous whole and takes no account whatsoever of the profound upheaval brought about, around the mid-1920s, by his discovery of Marxism. To understand the movement of his thought, one must therefore consider simultaneously the continuity of certain essential themes and the various turns and ruptures that mark out his intellectual and political trajectory.
Let us take as our point of departure the Romantic moment, which lies at the center of the young Benjamin’s preoccupations. To grasp its full scope, one must be aware that Romanticism is not only a literary and artistic school of the early nineteenth century: it is a veritable worldview, a style of thought, a structure of sensibility that manifests itself in all the spheres of cultural life, from Rousseau and Novalis to the Surrealists (and beyond). One could define the Romantic Weltanschauung [worldview] as a cultural critique of modern (capitalist) civilization in the name of pre-modern (pre-capitalist) values — a critique or protest that bears on aspects felt to be unbearable and degrading: the quantification and mechanization of life, the reification of social relations, the dissolution of community, and the disenchantment of the world. Its nostalgic gaze toward the past does not mean that it is necessarily retrograde: reaction and revolution are equally possible figures of the Romantic vision of the world. For revolutionary Romanticism, the objective is not a return to the past, but a detour through it toward a utopian future.
In late-nineteenth-century Germany, Romanticism (sometimes designated as “neo-Romanticism”) was one of the dominant cultural forms, in literature as well as in the human sciences; it expresses itself through multiple attempts at a re-enchantment of the world — in which the “return of the religious” takes pride of place.
Benjamin’s relation to Romanticism is therefore not translated solely by his interest in the Frühromantik [early Romanticism] (notably Schlegel and Novalis) or in late Romantic figures such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Franz von Baader, Franz-Joseph Molitor, and Johann Jakob Bachofen — or again in Baudelaire and the Surrealists — but by the whole of his aesthetic, theological, and historiosophical ideas. These three spheres are, for that matter, intimately interwoven: politics, art, and religion are so closely bound together in Benjamin that it is difficult to dissociate them without shattering what makes the singularity of his thought.
One of Benjamin’s first articles (published in 1913) is entitled precisely Romantik [Romanticism]: it calls for the birth of a new Romanticism, proclaiming that the “Romantic will to beauty, the Romantic will to truth, the Romantic will to action” are “insurpassable” achievements of modern culture. This text, inaugural so to speak, bears witness both to Benjamin’s profound attachment to the Romantic tradition — conceived at once as art, knowledge, and praxis — and to a desire for renewal.2
Another narrative of the same period (which remained unpublished) — the Dialogue on the Religiosity of the Present — is also highly revealing of the young Benjamin’s fascination with this culture: “We have had Romanticism, and to it we owe the powerful understanding of the nocturnal side of the natural… But we live as if Romanticism had never existed.” The text also evokes the neo-Romantic aspiration to a new religion, and to a new socialism, whose prophets are called Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Strindberg. This “social religion” would oppose the current conceptions of the social which reduce it to “a matter of Zivilisation [civilization], like electric light.” The dialogue here takes up several moments of the Romantic critique of modernity: the transformation of human beings into “work-machines,” the degradation of labor into a mere technique, the despairing submission of persons to the social mechanism, the replacement of the “heroic-revolutionary efforts” of the past by the pitiful (crab-like) march of evolution and progress.3
This last remark already shows us the inflection Benjamin gives to the Romantic tradition: the attack against the ideology of progress is made not in the name of a backward-looking conservatism but of revolution. One finds this subversive turn again in his lecture on The Life of Students (1914), a capital document, which seems to gather into a single beam of light all the ideas that will haunt him throughout his life. For Benjamin, the true questions that arise for society are not “limited technical problems of a scientific character, but indeed the metaphysical questions of Plato and Spinoza, of the Romantics and of Nietzsche.” Among these “metaphysical” questions, that of historical temporality is essential. The remarks that open the essay contain an astonishing first sketch of his messianic philosophy of history:
“Confident in the infinity of time, a certain conception of history discerns only the more or less rapid rhythm according to which men and epochs advance along the path of progress. Hence the incoherent, imprecise, unrigorous character of the demand addressed to the present. Here, on the contrary, as thinkers have always done in presenting utopian images, we shall consider history in the light of a determinate situation that sums it up as in a focal point. The elements of the final situation do not present themselves as a formless progressive tendency, but, as creations and ideas in the greatest peril, highly decried and mocked, they incorporate themselves profoundly into every present. (…) This situation (…) is graspable only in its metaphysical structure, like the messianic kingdom or like the revolutionary idea in the sense of ’89.”4
The utopian images — messianic and revolutionary — against the “formless progressive tendency”: here, in abridged form, are the terms of the debate that Benjamin will pursue throughout his entire work.
Messianism is, according to Benjamin, at the heart of the Romantic conception of time and history. In the introduction to his doctoral thesis on The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism (1919), he insists on the idea that the historical essence of Romanticism “must be sought in Romantic messianism.” He discovers this dimension above all in the writings of Schlegel and Novalis and cites, among others, this astonishing passage from the young Friedrich Schlegel: “the revolutionary desire to realize the Kingdom of God is… the beginning of modern history.” One finds here the “metaphysical” question of historical temporality: Benjamin opposes the qualitative conception of infinite time (qualitative zeitliche Unendlichkeit) “that flows from Romantic messianism” — and for which the life of humanity is a process of fulfillment and not simply of becoming — to the infinitely empty time (leere Unendlichkeit der Zeit) characteristic of the modern ideology of progress. One cannot but observe the striking kinship between this passage (which seems to have escaped the commentators’ attention) and the theses of 1940, On the Concept of History.5
What is the relation between the two “utopian images,” the messianic kingdom and the revolution? Without answering this question directly, Benjamin approaches it in a text — which remained unpublished in his lifetime — that probably dates from the years 1921–22: the Theologico-Political Fragment. In a first moment he seems to distinguish radically the sphere of historical becoming from that of the Messiah: “no historical reality can of itself refer to messianism.” But immediately afterward he constructs over this apparently impassable abyss a dialectical bridge, a fragile footbridge that seems directly inspired by certain paragraphs of The Star of Redemption (1921) by Franz Rosenzweig — a book for which Benjamin manifested the keenest admiration. The dynamic of the profane, which he defines as “the quest for the happiness of free humanity” — to be compared with Rosenzweig’s “great works of liberation” — can “favor the advent of the messianic Kingdom.” Benjamin’s formulation is less explicit than Rosenzweig’s, for whom the emancipatory acts are “the necessary condition of the advent of the Kingdom of God,” but it is the same approach, aiming to establish a mediation between the liberatory, historical, “profane” struggles of men and the fulfillment of the messianic promise.6
How is this messianic, utopian, and Romantic ferment going to articulate itself with historical materialism? It is from 1924 onward, when he reads Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness — and discovers communism through the eyes of Asja Lacis — that Marxism will gradually become a key element of his conception of history. In 1929, Benjamin still refers to Lukács’s essay as one of the rare books that remain living and current: “The most accomplished of the works of Marxist literature. Its singularity is founded on the assurance with which it grasped, on the one hand, the critical situation of the class struggle in the critical situation of philosophy, and on the other hand the revolution, now concretely ripe, as the absolute precondition, indeed the fulfillment and completion, of theoretical knowledge.”7
This text shows what is the aspect of Marxism that most interests Benjamin and that will throw a new light on his vision of the historical process: the class struggle. But historical materialism is not going to substitute itself for his “anti-progressive” intuitions, of Romantic and messianic inspiration: it is going to articulate itself with them, thereby gaining a critical quality that radically distinguishes it from the “official” Marxism dominant at the time.
This articulation manifests itself for the first time in the book One-Way Street, written between 1923 and 1926, where one finds, under the title “Fire Alarm,” this historical premonition of the menaces of progress: if the overthrow of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat “is not accomplished before an almost calculable moment of technical and scientific evolution (indicated by inflation and chemical warfare), all is lost. The burning fuse must be cut before the spark reaches the dynamite.”8 Contrary to vulgar evolutionist Marxism, Benjamin does not conceive of revolution as the “natural” or “inevitable” result of economic and technical progress (or of the “contradiction between productive forces and relations of production”), but as the interruption of a historical evolution leading to catastrophe.
It is because he perceives this catastrophic danger that Benjamin, in his article on Surrealism of 1929, lays claim to pessimism — a revolutionary pessimism that has nothing to do with fatalistic resignation, and still less with the German Kulturpessimismus [cultural pessimism], conservative, reactionary, and pre-fascist (Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck): pessimism is here in the service of the emancipation of the oppressed classes. His preoccupation is not the “decline” of the elites, or of the nation, but the menaces that technical and economic progress promoted by capitalism brings to bear on humanity. Nothing seems more derisory in Benjamin’s eyes than the optimism of the bourgeois parties and of social democracy, whose political program is but a “bad spring poem.” Against this “optimism without conscience,” this “dilettantes’ optimism,” inspired by the ideology of linear progress, he discovers in pessimism the effective point of convergence between Surrealism and communism.9 It goes without saying that this is not a contemplative sentiment, but an active, “organized,” practical pessimism, entirely strained toward the objective of preventing, by every means possible, the advent of the worst.
One may wonder what the concept of pessimism applied to the communists can refer to: was their doctrine in 1928, celebrating the triumphs of the construction of socialism in the USSR and the imminent fall of capitalism, not precisely a fine example of optimistic illusion? In fact, Benjamin borrowed the concept of the “organization of pessimism” from a work that he qualifies as “excellent,” The Revolution and the Intellectuals (1928) by the dissident communist Pierre Naville. Close to the Surrealists (he had been one of the editors of the journal La Révolution surréaliste), Naville had at that moment opted for political engagement in the French Communist Party, which he wanted his friends to share. Now, for Pierre Naville, pessimism, which constitutes “the source of Marx’s revolutionary method,” is the only means of “escaping the nullities and the disappointments of an era of compromise.” Refusing the “crude optimism” of a Herbert Spencer — whom he favors with the amiable epithet of “monstrously shrunken brain” — or of an Anatole France, whose “infamous jests” he finds unbearable, he concludes: “pessimism must be organized,” “the organization of pessimism” is the only watchword that prevents us from withering away.10 Needless to specify that this passionate apology for pessimism was very little representative of the political culture of French communism at that time. In fact, Pierre Naville would soon (1928) be expelled from the Party: the logic of his anti-optimism would lead him into the ranks of the left communist opposition (“Trotskyist”), of which he would become one of the principal leaders.
Benjamin’s pessimistic philosophy of history manifests itself in a particularly acute way in his vision of the European future: “Pessimism all along the line. Yes, certainly, and totally. Mistrust as to the destiny of literature, mistrust as to the destiny of freedom, mistrust as to the destiny of European man, but above all threefold mistrust in the face of every accommodation: between the classes, between the peoples, between individuals. And unlimited confidence only in I.G. Farben and in the peaceful perfecting of the Luftwaffe.”11
This critical vision allows Benjamin to perceive — intuitively but with a strange acuity — the catastrophes that awaited Europe, perfectly summed up by the ironic phrase about “unlimited confidence.” Of course, even he, the most pessimistic of all, could not foresee the destructions that the Luftwaffe was going to inflict on European cities and civilian populations; and still less could he imagine that I.G. Farben was going, barely a dozen years later, to distinguish itself by the manufacture of the Zyklon B gas used to “rationalize” the genocide, nor that its factories were going to employ, by the hundreds of thousands, the labor of the concentration camps. Nevertheless, unique among all the Marxist thinkers and leaders of those years, Benjamin had the premonition of the monstrous disasters of which the industrial/bourgeois civilization in crisis could give birth.
His adherence to historical materialism does not mean that he lost his interest in the Romantic protest against modernity — except during a short “experimental” period, between 1934 and 1935, when he writes certain texts that seem, under the influence of Soviet “productivism” — it is the era of the Second Five-Year Plan — and perhaps of Bertolt Brecht, to adhere uncritically to technological progress.12 Subsequently — that is to say from 1936 onward — he is going to reintegrate the Romantic moment into his sui generis Marxist critique of the capitalist forms of alienation.
For example, in his writings of the years 1936–38 on Baudelaire, he takes up the typically Romantic idea — suggested in an essay of 1930 on E.T.A. Hoffmann13 — of the radical opposition between life and the automaton, in the context of an analysis, of Marxist inspiration, of the transformation of the proletarian into an automaton: the repetitive, meaningless, and mechanical gestures of the workers grappling with the machine — here Benjamin refers directly to certain passages of Marx’s Capital — are similar to the automaton-gestures of the passersby in the crowd described by Poe and Hoffmann. Both of them, victims of urban and industrial civilization, no longer know authentic experience (Erfahrung) — founded on the memory of a cultural and historical tradition — but only the immediate lived moment (Erlebnis), and in particular the Chockerlebnis [shock-experience] that provokes in them the reactive behavior of automatons “who have completely liquidated their memory.”14
The Romantic protest against capitalist modernity is always made in the name of an idealized past — real or mythical. What is the past that serves as a reference for the Marxist Walter Benjamin in his critique of bourgeois civilization and of the illusions of progress? If in the theological writings of his youth there is often a question of a lost paradise, in the 1930s it is primitive communism that plays this role — as, for that matter, in Marx and Engels, disciples of the Romantic anthropology of Maurer, Morgan, and Bachofen. The review of Bachofen written by Benjamin in 1935 is one of the most important keys for understanding his method of constructing a new philosophy of history out of Marxism and Romanticism. Bachofen’s work, he writes, drawing on “Romantic sources,” fascinated the Marxists and the anarchists (such as Élisée Reclus) by its “evocation of a communist society at the dawn of history.” Refuting the conservative (Klages) and fascist (Bäumler) interpretations, Benjamin underscores that Bachofen “had scrutinized to an unexplored depth the sources that, across the ages, nourished the libertarian ideal to which Reclus laid claim.” As for Engels and Paul Lafargue, their interest was likewise drawn by the Bachofenian study of matriarchal societies, among which there allegedly existed a high degree of democracy and civic equality, as well as forms of primitive communism that signified a veritable “upheaval of the concept of authority.”15
Analogous ideas are sketched in his essays on Baudelaire: Benjamin interprets the “former life” evoked by the poet as a reference to a primitive and Edenic age, where authentic experience still existed, and where the ceremonies of worship and the festivities permitted the fusion of the individual past and the collective past. It is therefore Erfahrung that nourishes the play of “correspondences” in Baudelaire and inspires his refusal of the modern catastrophe: “The essential is that the correspondences contain a conception of experience that makes room for cultic elements. Baudelaire had to appropriate these elements in order to be able to measure fully what the catastrophe of which he himself, as a modern man, was the witness, really signifies.” These “cultic elements” refer back to a distant past, analogous to the societies studied by Bachofen: “The ‘correspondences’ are the data of remembrance — not the data of history but those of pre-history. What makes the grandeur and the importance of festival days is that they permit the encounter with a ‘former life.’” Rolf Tiedemann observes very pertinently that, for Benjamin, “the idea of the correspondences is the utopia by which a lost paradise appears projected into the future.”16
It is above all in the Arcades Project [Book of the Parisian Arcades] and in the various texts of the years 1936–40 that Benjamin is going to develop his vision of history, dissociating himself, in an increasingly radical way, from the “illusions of progress” hegemonic within German and European left-wing thought. In an article published in 1937 in the famous Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, the journal of the Frankfurt School (already exiled to the USA), dedicated to the historian and collector Eduard Fuchs, he attacks social-democratic Marxism, a mixture of positivism, Darwinist evolutionism, and the cult of progress: “It could see in the evolution of technology only the progress of the natural sciences and not the social regression (…). The energies that technology develops beyond this threshold are destructive. They give first place to the technology of war and to its preparation by the press.”17
Benjamin’s objective is to deepen and radicalize the opposition between Marxism and the bourgeois philosophies of history, to sharpen its revolutionary potential and elevate its critical content. It is in this spirit that he defines, in a trenchant way, the ambition of the Arcades project: “One may also consider as a goal methodologically pursued in this work the possibility of a historical materialism that has annihilated (annihiliert) within itself the idea of progress. It is precisely in opposing itself to the habits of bourgeois thought that historical materialism finds its sources.”18 Such a program implied no “revisionism” whatsoever, but rather, as Karl Korsch had attempted to do in his own book — one of Benjamin’s principal references — a return to Marx himself.
Benjamin was aware that this reading of Marxism plunged its roots into the Romantic critique of industrial civilization, but he was convinced that Marx too had found his inspiration in this source. He finds support for this heterodox interpretation of the origins of Marxism in Korsch’s Karl Marx (1938): “Very rightly, and not without making us think of de Maistre and Bonald, Korsch says this: ‘Thus in the theory of the modern workers’ movement too, there is a part of the”disillusionment” that, after the great French Revolution, was proclaimed by the first theoreticians of the counter-revolution and then by the German Romantics, and which, thanks to Hegel, had a strong influence on Marx.’“19
The most lapidary and radical formulation of Walter Benjamin’s new — Marxist and messianic — philosophy of history is doubtless to be found in the theses On the Concept of History of 1940, one of the most important documents of revolutionary thought since the Theses on Feuerbach of 1845.
Benjamin’s fundamental requirement is to write history “against the grain,” that is to say from the point of view of the vanquished — against the conformist tradition of German historicism, whose partisans always enter “into empathy with the victor” (Thesis VII).20 It goes without saying that the word “victor” does not refer to the usual battles or wars, but to the “class war” in which one of the camps, the ruling class, “has not ceased to prevail” (Thesis VII) over the oppressed — from Spartacus, the rebel gladiator, to the Spartacus group of Rosa Luxemburg, and from the Imperium romanum to the Nazi Tertium Imperium [Third Reich].
Historicism identifies itself empathically (Einfühlung) with the dominant classes. It sees history as a glorious succession of great political and military feats. By praising the rulers and rendering homage to them, it confers upon them the status of “heirs” of past history. In other words, it participates — like those figures who raise the laurel crown above the victor’s head — in “that triumphal cortège in which the masters of today march over the bodies of the vanquished” (Thesis VII).
The critique that Benjamin formulates against historicism is inspired by the Marxist philosophy of history, but it also has a Nietzschean origin. In one of his works of youth, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life (cited in Thesis XII), Nietzsche ridicules the historicists’ “naked admiration of success,” their “idolatry of the factual” (Götzendienste des Tatsächlichen) and their tendency to bow before the “power of history.” Since the Devil is the master of success and of progress, true virtue consists in rising up against the tyranny of reality and in swimming against the historical current. There is an evident link between this Nietzschean pamphlet and Benjamin’s exhortation to write history gegen den Strich [against the grain]. But the differences are no less important: whereas Nietzsche’s critique of historicism is made in the name of “Life” or of the “Heroic Individual,” that of Benjamin speaks in the name of the vanquished. As a Marxist, the latter situates himself at the antipodes of the former’s aristocratic elitism and chooses to identify himself with the “wretched of the earth,” those who lie crushed beneath the wheels of those majestic and magnificent chariots called Civilization or Progress.
Rejecting the modern cult of the Goddess Progress, Benjamin places at the center of his philosophy of history the concept of catastrophe. In one of the preparatory notes for the Theses of 1940 he observes: “The catastrophe is progress, progress is the catastrophe. The catastrophe is the continuum of history.”21 The assimilation of progress and catastrophe has first of all a historical signification: the past is, from the point of view of the oppressed, but an interminable series of catastrophic defeats. The revolt of the slaves, the Peasants’ War, June 1848, the Paris Commune, the Berlin uprising of January 1919 — these are examples that often appear in Benjamin’s writings, for whom “this enemy has not ceased to conquer” (Thesis VI). But this equation also has an eminently topical signification, because “at the present hour, the enemy has not yet finished triumphing” (Thesis VI, Benjamin’s own translation into French): defeat of Republican Spain, Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, victorious Nazi invasion of Europe.
Fascism obviously occupies a central place in Benjamin’s historical reflection in the Theses. For him it is not an accident of history, a “state of exception,” something impossible in the twentieth century, an absurdity from the point of view of progress: rejecting this type of illusion, Benjamin calls for “a theory of history from which fascism can be perceived,” that is to say a theory that understands that the irrationalities of fascism are merely the reverse side of modern instrumental rationality. Fascism carries to its ultimate consequences the typically modern combination of technical progress and social regression. Whereas Marx and Engels had, according to Benjamin, “the dazzling intuition” of the barbarism to come in their prognosis of the evolution of capitalism22, their twentieth-century epigones were incapable of understanding — and therefore of effectively resisting — a modern, industrial, dynamic barbarism, installed at the very heart of technical and scientific progress. Seeking the roots, the methodological foundations of this catastrophic incomprehension, which contributed to the defeat of the German workers’ movement in 1933, Benjamin attacks the ideology of progress in all its components: Darwinist evolutionism, determinism of the scientific-natural type, blind optimism — the dogma of the “inevitable” victory of the party — the conviction of “swimming with the current” (technical development); in a word, the comfortable belief in an automatic, continuous, infinite progress, founded on quantitative accumulation, the rise of the productive forces, and the increase of domination over nature. He believes he discerns behind these multiple manifestations a guiding thread that he submits to a radical critique: the homogeneous, empty, and mechanical (like a clockwork movement) conception of historical time. Against this linear and quantitative vision, Benjamin opposes a qualitative perception of temporality, founded on the one hand on remembrance, on the other on the messianic and revolutionary rupture of continuity.
The revolution is the profane equivalent of the messianic interruption of history, of the “messianic arrest of becoming” (Thesis XVII): the revolutionary classes, writes Thesis XV, are conscious, at the moment of their action, of “shattering the continuum of history.” The messianic/revolutionary interruption is therefore Benjamin’s response to the menaces that the pursuit of the maleficent storm called “Progress” brings to bear on the human species, according to the famous Thesis IX. This enigmatic and fascinating text must be interpreted as an allegory in which each sacred image has a profane “correspondent” (in the Baudelairean sense): history is represented by a powerless angel, inexorably propelled toward the future by a storm blowing from paradise, while at his feet pile up the debris and the ruins: “We give the name of Progress to this storm.” It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this paradise from which catastrophic progress draws us away is none other, in profane language, than egalitarian prehistoric society, the primitive community of which the historian of matriarchy, the accursed poet, and the fathers of socialism alike dreamed.
We thus find again, at the heart of Benjamin’s philosophy of history and of his final politico-theological reflections, the (melancholic) nostalgia for the past and the critique of progress that constitute the irreducible kernel of the Romantic vision of the world. If historical materialism has distanced him from the aesthetics of the Frühromantik, his heretical interpretation of Marxism will, by contrast, remain illuminated by the nocturnal star of Romantic culture. It is nonetheless a matter, in the expression of his 1918 letter on Péguy, of a “mastered melancholy.” The objective is in no way an impossible return to the primitive past, but a new communal life, the classless society of the future. The nostalgia for the past transforms itself into critical energy, into subversive force, entirely invested in utopian hope.
According to Habermas, there is a contradiction between Benjamin’s philosophy of history and historical materialism. Benjamin’s error was, in his view, to have wanted to impose — “like a monk’s cowl over the head” — upon Marxian historical materialism, “which takes account of progress not only in the domain of the productive forces but also in that of domination,” “an anti-evolutionist historical conception.”23 In reality, a dialectical and non-evolutionist interpretation of history, taking into account both progress and regressions — as Benjamin and his friends of the Frankfurt School did — can be founded on several of Marx’s writings. It is, however, true that it comes into conflict with the dominant interpretations of historical materialism developed over the course of the twentieth century. What Habermas takes to be an error is precisely the source of the singular value of the Benjaminian philosophy of history, and of its capacity to understand a century characterized by the close imbrication of modernity and barbarism.
Notes
Among the exceptions: Daniel Bensaïd, Walter Benjamin. Sentinelle messianique à la gauche du possible (Walter Benjamin: Messianic Sentinel to the Left of the Possible), Paris, Plon, 1990; Stéphane Mosès, L’ange de l’histoire. Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem (The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem), Paris, Seuil, 1992; Jeanne-Marie Gagnebin, Histoire et Narration chez Walter Benjamin (History and Narration in Walter Benjamin), Paris, L’Harmattan, 1994; Arno Münster, Progrès et Catastrophe, Walter Benjamin et l’histoire (Progress and Catastrophe: Walter Benjamin and History), Paris, Kimé, 1996.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “Romantik,” 1913, in Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth GS), Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977, II, 1, p. 46.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “Dialog über die Religiosität der Gegenwart,” 1913, GS II, 1, pp. 16–34.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “La vie des étudiants” (The Life of Students), 1915, in Mythe et Violence (Myth and Violence), Lettres Nouvelles, 1971, p. 37.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik (The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism), 1919, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp, 1973, pp. 65–66, 70, 72.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “Fragment théologico-politique” (Theologico-Political Fragment), Poésie et Révolution (Poetry and Revolution), Paris, Denoël/Lettres Nouvelles, 1971, p. 150. Cf. Franz Rosenzweig, L’Étoile de la Rédemption (The Star of Redemption), Paris, Seuil, 1982, p. 339.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980, III, p. 171.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Sens Unique (One-Way Street), Paris, Lettres Nouvelles/Maurice Nadeau, 1978, pp. 205–206.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “Le surréalisme. Le dernier instantané de l’intelligence européenne” (Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia), 1929, Mythe et Violence, p. 312.↩︎
Pierre Naville, La révolution et les intellectuels (The Revolution and the Intellectuals), Paris, Gallimard, 1965, pp. 76–77, 110–117.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “Le surréalisme,” p. 312.↩︎
These are notably the texts “Experience and Poverty” (1933), “The Author as Producer” (1934), and — only to a certain extent — “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility” (1935).↩︎
In this lecture, Benjamin brings to light the “decidedly religious” dualism between life and the automaton that is found in the fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Oscar Panizza, Edgar Allan Poe, and Alfred Kubin. The tales of the great German Romantic narrator, inspired by the sentiment of a secret identity between the automatic and the satanic, perceive the life of everyday man as “the product of an infamous artificial mechanism, governed from within by Satan.” Cf. W. Benjamin, “E.T.A. Hoffmann und Oskar Panizza,” 1930, in GS II, 2, pp. 644–647.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Passagenwerk, in GS V, 2, p. 966; Charles Baudelaire. Un poète lyrique à l’apogée du capitalisme (Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism), trans. J. Lacoste, Paris, Payot, 1983, pp. 151, 180–184.↩︎
W. Benjamin, “Johann Jakob Bachofen,” 1935, in GS, II, 1, pp. 220–230.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, pp. 155, 189–191, and R. Tiedemann, “Nachwort,” in W. Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1980, pp. 205–206.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, III, p. 474.↩︎
W. Benjamin, Passagenwerk — Gesammelte Schriften V, p. 574.↩︎
W. Benjamin, ibid., p. 820.↩︎
The citations from the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” are most often drawn from the translation by Maurice de Gandillac in Poésie et Révolution, Paris, Lettres Nouvelles, 1971.↩︎
W. Benjamin, G. Schriften, I, 3, p. 1244 (preparatory notes for the Theses).↩︎
W. Benjamin, G.S., I, 3, p. 1244 (preparatory notes). W. Benjamin, G.S., II, 2, p. 488.↩︎
J. Habermas, “L’actualité de W. Benjamin. La critique : prise de conscience ou préservation” (The Topicality of W. Benjamin: Criticism as Consciousness-Raising or Preservation), Revue d’esthétique no. 1, 1981, p. 121.↩︎