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Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History
Composed Paris 1940 (exile), before his own death
Seen as last major text
Aphoristic, koans; parables, metaphors, images

1. Chess Automaton as Hist Mat

• Puppet looks like it plays chess, but really there’s a chess expert hidden, pulling its strings
• It is hist mat because you think there’s some Law running it, but truly it’s about the people behind it.

2. Redemption

• Each present generation has to settle the “claim” the past generation has on it, for the past expects the future to redeem it, and you must take this responsibility seriously.
• Settling the claim will not be “cheap.”
• Says hist mat understands this: knows you owe the past something, a return for its faith in you, save them from their sins.

3. Fullness of the Past

• Redeemed mankind will feel the fullness of the past: “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.”
• All is relevant; nothing is major or minor.
• “Citable in all its moments:” creepy b/c you can’t let anything slip past you, must be responsible, prevent all awful stuff.

4. Secret Heliotropism

• Class struggle should be accompanied by “courage, humor, cunning, fortitude.”
• Doing so will cast retroactive judgment on past, transforming what the past looks like (sounds like Eliot’s tradition!)
• “a secret heliotropism” in which the past stretches towards the future
  • in Thesis 6, he says “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins”

5. Image of the Past

• “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.”
• “Where historical materialism cuts through historicism:” hist mat’s recognition that the past is one of our own concerns, and that this recognition is what makes it our “true past”
• The past disappears when you don’t see it in terms of your own present

6. Danger

• “to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” b/c danger “affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers”
• What’s the threat? To become “tool of the ruling classes,” so you must keep tradition away from conformism

7. Sad Historicists

• They empathizes w/victors, which “benefits the rulers,” letting you forget the trodden below the victors
• “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”
  • b/c think of the “anonymous toil” behind it, which you “cannot contemplate without horror”
  • so don’t get too comfy loving “spoils:” cultural treasures
• You will be barbarous if you support this mode of telling history. This hist mat folks go “against the grain.”

8. Emergency

• History is a history of “states of emergencies.” We’re always in a cramped state.
• You should create true states of emergencies.
• Blank amazement about Fascism won’t do anything; recognize that it used the state of emergency to gain unfair power.

9. Angel of History

• Klee’s Angelus Novus
• Turned towards past, the angel, “where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.”
• Angel can’t help anyone: the storm (progress) is “caught in his wings”
• “This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned”

10. High Price

• Compares his Theses to the “monastic discipline” used to focus the friars
• Wants us to see the high prices of a particular view of history: its bland trust in masses and progress: leads to “servile integration” into systems we abhor

11. Technocratic Lies!

• Conformism has paralyzed Social Democracy
  • Sidenote: it has accepted dangerous view of labor, one of mastering nature, which is too diff from views of labor within utopian thinkers pre-1848
    • Prefers the utopianism of Fourier to the positivism of technocratic folk who see exploitation of nature as better than that of proles
• “Illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement:”
  • The wrong view of industry (in this case, a secularized Protestant work ethic) can create political tragedy
  • Technocratic is bad b/c forgets the social organiz behind it: can’t accept tech progress at all costs (“recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society”)

12. Past, not Future

• Working class is “depository of historical knowledge”
  • Thus, avenges past: “task of liberation in the name of the generations of the downtrodden”
• Social Democrats have wrongly made them think about the future: “redeemer of future generations”
  • But the hatred and sacrifice necessary for success is “nourished by the image of the enslaved ancestors, rather than of the liberated grandchildren”

13. Progress

• Even Social Democrats have believe that human progress 1) happens, 2) is boundless, and 3) is inevitable/automatic.
  • All of those things are wrong
• Need to revise our understanding of time to fix it: shouldn’t see time as “homogeneous, empty time”

14. Fashion of History

• Instead of homogeneous, empty time, you have “time filled by the presence of now”
• “Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago.”
• Robespierre channeling Rome is symptomatic: you can leap in time; that’s dialectical: “leap in the open air of history”

15. Revolutionary Time

• “about to make the continuum of history implode:” that’s revolutionary awareness
• “moments of historical consciousness” might not happen for awhile, but they’re ready to erupt at any time (cf July revolution)

16. The Present, in the mind of an Historical Materialist

• It’s a full stop: not a transition
  • A position from which you write history
• “supplies a unique experience with the past”
  • Unique rather than historicism’s “eternal”

17. Blasting Out of the Lifework

• Historicism
  • Additive, not theoretical
  • Mass data
• Materialism
  • Constructive principle: thinking stops in “configuration pregnant with tensions” and “crystallizes into a monad”
• Why crystalized monad?
  • “Messianic cessation of happening” where you can intervene
  • You “blast out a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history”
  • To subject it to Hegel’s aufheben: cancel/preserve/elevate (dialectical)

18. Length of Human History

• The biologist’s timeline wherein the entire span of human development lasts a fraction of a second in the day of universal time
• Compares this to Messianic present: b/c the Messianic present “comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement”

A. Causality v Constellation

• Remarks on historicists attributing causality: remarks that in this case what happens previously acts “posthumously:” this is the key to good history
• Instead, see “the constellation whcih is own era has formed with a definite earlier one”

B. Remembrance

• Soothsaying and remembrance as negations of idea of time as empty and homogeneous
• Can’t have homogeneous time when at any moment Jesus might return

Historicism

• What is historicism?
  • Dominant mode of history at the time
  • Pure context: to understand some text, you must understand its historical context
• What’s Benj upset about?
  • Historicism regards time as homogeneous and empty
  • It believes in progress, in closure
  • Empathizes with victors
  • It believes understanding past in terms of present is anachronistic
  • “Melancholy desire to ‘relive an era’” cf Peter Buse, Drama and Theory, 114
    • Problem: makes you think you can access historical moment as a whole, in its entirety, and that it’s safely cordoned off from the present
• Benj wants to understand past in terms of present