Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ’On the Concept of History’

136 Pages·2016·2.9 MB·English

by  Michael Lowy

FIRE ALARM
FIRE ALARM
Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of History’
MICHAEL LÖWY
TRANSLATED BY CHRIS TURNER
This edition published by Verso 2016
First published by Verso 2005
Translation © Chris Turner 2005, 2016
First published as Walter Benjamin. Avertissement d’incendie © Presses Universitaires de France, Paris
2001
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author and translator have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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CONTENTS
Introduction: Romanticism, Messianism and Marxism in Walter Benjamin’s
Philosophy of History
1 A Reading of Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses “On the Concept of History”’
2 The Opening-up of History
Notes
Index
Walter Benjamin, c. 1930.
Photograph: Charlotte Joel. Theodor W. Adorno
Archiv, Frankfurt am Main.
Introduction
Romanticism, Messianism and Marxism
in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy of History
Walter Benjamin is an author unlike any other. His fragmentary, unfinished, at
times hermetic, often anachronistic and yet, nonetheless, always contemporary
work, occupies a singular, even unique, place in the intellectual and political
panorama of the twentieth century.
Was he primarily, as Hannah Arendt claimed, a literary critic, an ‘homme de
lettres’, not a philosopher?1 I am more inclined to agree with Gershem Scholem
that, even when writing about art or literature, he was a philosopher.2 Adorno’s
point of view is close to Scholem’s, as he explains in an unpublished letter to
Hannah Arendt: ‘For me what defines Benjamin’s significance for my own
intellectual existence is axiomatic: the essence of his thought as philosophical
thought. I have never been able to see his stuff from another perspective … Just
how far it distances itself from every traditional conception of philosophy is
something I am aware of, of course …’3
Benjamin’s readers, particularly in France, have been concerned mainly with
the aesthetic side of his work, and have inclined towards regarding him, first and
foremost, as a historian of culture.4 Now, without neglecting that aspect of his
work, we must acknowledge the far wider scope of his thought, which aims to
achieve no less than a new understanding of human history. His writings on art
and literature can be understood only in relation to this overall vision that
illuminates them from within. His thinking forms a whole, in which art, history,
culture, politics, literature and theology are inseparable.
We usually classify the various philosophies of history by their progressive
or conservative, revolutionary or nostalgic character. Walter Benjamin does not
fit into these classifications. He is a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of
progress, a Marxist opponent of ‘progressivism’, a nostalgic who dreams of the
future, a Romantic advocate of materialism. He is, in every sense of the word,
‘unclassifiable’. Adorno rightly defined him as a thinker ‘standing apart from all
tendencies’.5 And his work presents itself, in fact, as a kind of erratic block in
the margins of the main schools of contemporary philosophy.
It is futile, then, to attempt to recruit him into one or other of the two main
camps contending for hegemony on the stage (or should we say the market?) of
ideas: modernism and postmodernism.
Jürgen Habermas seems to hesitate: after condemning Benjamin’s anti-
evolutionism in his article of 1966 as contrary to historical materialism, he
asserts in his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity that Benjamin’s polemic
against ‘the socio-evolutionary levelling off’ of historical materialism is directed
against the ‘degeneration of modernity’s consciousness of time’ and aims,
therefore, at ‘renew[ing]’ that consciousness. But he does not succeed in
integrating into his ‘philosophical discourse of modernity’ the central
Benjaminian concepts, such as the ‘now-time’ – that authentic instant that
interrupts the continuum of history – which seems to him to be manifestly
inspired by a ‘mixture’ of Surrealist experiences and motifs from Jewish
mysticism.6
It would be an equally impossible task to transform Benjamin into a
postmodernist avant la lettre. His de-legitimation of the grand narrative of
Western modernity, his deconstruction of the discourse of progress and his plea
for historical discontinuity are immeasurably far removed from the
postmodernists’ detached gaze on current society, which is presented as a world
where grand narratives have finally been consigned to the past and replaced by
‘flexible, agonistic language games’.7
Benjamin’s conception of history is not postmodern, firstly because, far from
being ‘beyond all narratives’ – supposing that such a thing were possible – it
constitutes a heterodox form of the narrative of emancipation: taking its
inspiration from Marxist and messianic sources, it uses nostalgia for the past as a
revolutionary method for the critique of the present.8 His thought is, therefore,
neither modern (in Habermas’s sense) nor ‘postmodern’ (as Lyotard understands