Sunday, February 22, 2009

Walter Benjamin's Theses



The guiding thought behind this chart is that Benjamin is ultimately speaking about one of two types of people in every thesis from his "Theses on the Philosophy of History:" either those who align themselves with theology and historical materialism on the one hand, or those who think of themselves as social democrats or adherents of historicism on the other. The latter should not be thought of as "the enemy;" they are much closer to "Obama supporters."

A few notes:

1) I have put the chronicler on the side of the historical materialist, though I am still troubled by the exact function of this character (imported from the Kafka essay) in the Theses. My thought is that the chronicling impulse is something like the condition for the possibility of historical materialism: because nothing is lost, history can be redeemed.

2) I think Thesis 8 is a mistake. Getting involved in the game of whose state of emergency is more "real" is always a mistake for historical materialists. In other words, I don't think there is a way to separate a good sense of urgency from a bad sense.

3) I might add "Judaism" to the first column and "Christianity" to the second.

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