Fire Alarm

Reading Walter Benjamin’s "On the Concept of History"

Michael Löwy, Chris Turner

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781784786410
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784786427
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Jewish Literary Criticism

Revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, nostalgic of the past yet dreaming of the future, romantic partisan of materialism - Walter Benjamin is in every sense of the word an "unclassifiable" philosopher. His essay "On the Concept of History" was written in a state of urgency, as he attempted to escape the Gestapo in 1940, before finally committing suicide.

In this scrupulous, clear and fascinating examination of this essay, Michael L?wy argues that it remains one of the most important philosophical and political writings of the twentieth century. Looking in detail at Benjamin's celebrated but often mysterious text, and restoring the philosophical, theological and political context, L?wy highlights the complex relationship between redemption and revolution in Benjamin's philosophy of history.

1

A Reading of Walter Benjamin’s
‘Theses “On the Concept of History”’

Before moving on to a ‘talmudic’ analysis of Benjamin’s text – word by word and sentence by sentence – a few short remarks are in order as an introduction to the reading of the ‘Theses’. The document ‘On the Concept of History’ was written in the early days of 1940, shortly before its author’s attempt to escape from Vichy France, where Jewish and/or Marxist German refugees were handed over by the authorities to the Gestapo. As we know, that attempt failed: intercepted by Franco’s police at the Spanish border (Port-Bou) in September 1940, Walter Benjamin chose suicide.

The first reference to the document appears in a letter from Benjamin to Adorno, written in French, on 22 February 1940. This explains the aim of the text to his friend: to ‘establish an irremediable break [scission] between our way of seeing and the survivals of positivism’, which haunt even the historical conceptions of the Left.¹ To Benjamin, positivism appears, then, as the common denominator of the tendencies he will criticize: conservative historicism, Social Democratic evolutionism and vulgar Marxism.²

We must make clear that the document was not intended for publication. Benjamin gave it or sent it to a number of very close friends, such as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno, but he stressed, in the letter to Gretel Adorno, that there was no question of publishing it, as ‘that would throw wide open the doors to enthusiastic incomprehension’.³ His prophetic fears were fully realized: much of the literature on the ‘Theses’ displays incomprehension, some of it enthusiastic, some of it sceptical, but, in any event, incapable of grasping the significance of the text.

Cemetery, Port-Bou.

The direct spur to composing the ‘Theses’ was doubtless the Germano-Soviet Pact, the outbreak of the Second World War and the occupation of Europe by Nazi troops. But it was, nonetheless, the summation – the ultimate, concentrated expression – of ideas that run through the whole of his work. In one of his last letters, addressed to Gretel Adorno, Benjamin writes: ‘War and the combination of circumstances that brought it about have led me to put down on paper some thoughts about which I may say that I have kept them about myself – and even from myself – for some twenty years.’ He could have written ‘twenty-five years’ since, as we have seen, the lecture on ‘The Life of Students’ (1914) already contained some of the key ideas of his spiritual testament of 1940.⁴

We have, then, to situate the document in its historical context. It was, to use Victor Serge’s expression, ‘midnight in the century’ and that terrible moment of contemporary history doubtless represents the immediate background to the text. However, we cannot for all that see it solely as the product of a precise conjuncture: it bears a significance that far exceeds the tragic constellation that gave birth to it. If it still speaks to us today, if it arouses so much interest, so many discussions and polemics, this is because, through the prism of a determinate historic moment, it raises questions that bear on the whole of modern history and on the place of the twentieth century in the social development of humanity.

The history of the ‘rescue’ and publication of the ‘Theses’ has been minutely reconstructed by the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften. It was a copy given by Benjamin to Hannah Arendt and passed on by her to Adorno that was first printed in a kind of mimeographed booklet entitled Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis (In memory of Walter Benjamin) which was intended for a relatively limited audience. A few hundred copies of this were printed in 1942 by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, exiled in the USA.

Paradoxically, the first publication, in the full sense of the term, was in French, in Pierre Missac’s translation, and this appeared in October 1947 in Les Temps modernes (25, pp. 623–34). It provoked no reaction. The same absence of response followed the publication in German, through Adorno’s good offices, in the journal Neue Rundschau (4, pp. 560–70) in 1950. It was only after the appearance of the text in the first collection of Benjamin’s writings edited by Adorno – Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1955) – that the reception of the document and the first discussions really began. Finally, in 1974, the critical edition of the ‘Theses’, variants and notes, with a commentary – together with the French translation made by Benjamin himself – appeared in the Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp), edited by R. Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser, with the collaboration of Adorno and Scholem. To this we have to add the last copy, entitled Handexemplar (which has the peculiarity of converting one of the preparatory notes into Thesis XVIII), discovered by Giorgio Agamben and incorporated into volume VII of the Gesammelte Schriften (1991).

In the debates which, from the 1950s onwards, followed the publication of the ‘Theses’, we may distinguish three main schools of interpretation:

1.The materialist school: Walter Benjamin is a Marxist, a cxoherent materialist. His theological formulations have to be regarded as metaphors, as an exotic form in which materialist truths are clothed. This was the position adopted by Brecht as early as his ‘Working Journal’.⁵

2.The theological school: Walter Benjamin is, first and foremost, a Jewish theologian, a messianic thinker. His Marxism is merely a terminology and he falsely appropriates such concepts as ‘historical materialism’. This was the view of his friend Gershom Scholem.

3.The school of contradiction: Walter Benjamin tries to reconcile Marxism with Jewish theology, materialism with messianism. Now, as everyone knows, the two are incompatible. Hence the failure of his endeavour. This is the reading shared by Jürgen Habermas and Rolf Tiedemann.

In my view, these three schools of thought are simultaneously right and wrong. I should like, modestly, to propose a fourth approach. Walter Benjamin is a Marxist and a theologian. It is true that these two conceptions are usually contradictory. But the author of the ‘Theses’ is not a ‘usual’ thinker: he reinterprets these conceptions, transforms them and situates them in a relation of reciprocal illumination that enables them to be articulated together in a coherent way. He liked to compare himself to a Janus figure, one of whose faces was turned towards Moscow and the other towards Jerusalem. But what is often forgotten is that the Roman god had two faces but a single head: Marxism and messianism are simply two expressions – Ausdrücke, one of Benjamin’s favourite terms – of a single thought. An innovative, original, unclassifiable thought, characterized by what he calls, in a letter to Scholem of May 1926, the ‘sudden paradoxical change of one form of [religious or political] observance into the other (regardless of which direction)’.⁶ The better to grasp the complex and subtle relationship between redemption and revolution in his philosophy of history, we should speak of an elective affinity or, in other words, of a mutual attraction and reciprocal reinforcement of the two approaches, on the basis of certain structural analogies, leading to a kind of alchemical fusion – like the amorous encounter between two souls in Goethe’s novel, Die Wahlverwandschaften, to which Benjamin had devoted one of the most important of the essays of his youth.⁷

Though Scholem’s unilateral approach must necessarily be criticized, we should not underestimate the deep attraction his thinking exerted on Benjamin, including at the time when he was writing the ‘Theses’. An as yet unpublished document that I have been able to consult in the Scholem Archive at the library of the Hebrew University shows without a shadow of a doubt that the very title of the ‘Theses’ was inspired by an unpublished manuscript of Scholem’s, which Benjamin doubtless knew, entitled Thesen über den Begriff der Gerechtigkeit (Theses on the Concept of Justice), dated 1919 and 1925. Reading this text, one realizes that Benjamin was not just inspired by the title, but also by the content of the manuscript. Take, for example, the following passage: ‘The messianic age as eternal present and the justice of the – substantial – existent [Daseiendes] correspond to one another [entsprechen sich]. If justice were not there, the Messianic Kingdom not only would not be there, but would be impossible.’⁸

The objective of the notes and comments that follow is not so much to ‘judge’ Benjamin’s theses as to attempt to understand them. This will not prevent me from paying homage to his lucidity or, where necessary, criticizing what seems questionable. The interpretation proposed does not seek to be exhaustive; even less does it claim to be the most ‘correct’, the ‘truest’ or the most ‘scientific’. At best it attempts to bring out a certain coherence where so many others merely see dissonance, contradiction or ambiguity.

Benjamin’s concepts are not metaphysical abstractions, but relate to concrete historical experiences. I have, therefore, chosen to illustrate his remarks with examples – both from modern European and ancient Jewish history – inspired, directly or indirectly, by his own writings. I have also added a number of contemporary Latin American examples. Though this may initially be surprising, it seems to me that this addresses an important issue pointing up both the universality and the topicality of Walter Benjamin’s concept of history. I came upon the ‘Theses’ at the point when popular insurrectional movements were developing in central America: the document enabled me to understand these events better and, conversely, they shed a new light on the text.

For the original French edition of this work I took as my starting point Maurice de Gandillac’s sober and elegant translation published in 1971 by Éditions Maurice Nadeau in the collection of Benjamin’s essays entitled Poésie et vérité, even though it is imprecise at a considerable number of points.⁹ I also often drew on the incomplete, but infinitely precious translation drafted by Benjamin himself, which differs in certain respects from the German text and hence constitutes something of a variant. Lastly, following the example of Italian scholars, I have added to the known list of theses a new one that figures as number XVIII in the copy discovered some years ago by Giorgio Agamben.¹⁰ This thesis already appeared among the preparatory notes published in the Gesammelte Schriften as number XVIIa. The Handexemplar found by Agamben shows that Benjamin intended to include it in the final version of the document. It is, indeed, an autonomous text of the greatest importance, and not a variant. It figures here as Thesis XVIIa, to avoid changing the accepted numbering of the last theses.

For the interpretation of the ‘Theses’, I have often referred to the preparatory notes, published in volume I, 3 of the Gesammelte Schriften, some of which are available in English translation as ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”’.¹¹

A few personal remarks to close this introduction. I discovered the ‘Theses “On the Concept of History”’ belatedly. Paradoxically, it was thanks to the writings of Gershom Scholem, whom I met in Jerusalem in 1979, that I became aware of this document, at a point when I was becoming interested in the relations between messianism and utopianism in Judaism. Yet the text had been available in French since 1947 and in German since 1950. I do not know whether this delay is to be attributed to ignorance, blindness or misjudgement. In any event, there is, in my intellectual itinerary, a before and an after the discovery of the Thesen “Uber den Begriff der Geschichte”.

Since I read the text some twenty years ago, it has continued to haunt, fascinate, intrigue and move me. I have read it, reread it and reread it again tens of times, with the sense – or the illusion – at each rereading of discovering new aspects, of delving deeper into the infinite density of the text, of at last understanding what, just a short time ago, still seemed hermetic and opaque. I admit that there are still zones of shade for me in some passages, while others seem blinding in their clarity, their inner luminosity, their incontestable self-evidence. These differences show themselves in the very unequal treatment of the theses in my commentary.

Above all, however, the reading of ‘Theses’ has shaken my certainties, upset my hypotheses, overturned (some of) my firmly held beliefs: in short, it has forced me to think differently on a whole string of fundamental questions: progress, religion, history, utopianism and politics. Nothing has emerged unscathed from this crucial encounter.

Gradually, I have also come to realize the universal scope of Benjamin’s propositions, their relevance in understanding – ‘from the standpoint of the defeated’ – not just the history of the oppressed classes, but also that of women (half of humanity), of Jews, Gypsies, American Indians, Kurds, blacks, sexual minorities – in a word, of the pariahs (in the sense Hannah Arendt gave to this term) of all ages and all continents.

Over the last fifteen years I have made a great many notes for an interpretation of the ‘Theses’. I have followed the courses and lectures of such eminent specialists as Stéphane Mosès and Irving Wohlfarth. I also devoted a year’s seminar at the EHESS to the ‘Theses’ and, later, another at the University of São Paolo in Brazil. I have read a large proportion of the ‘secondary literature’, but I remain convinced not only that there is still room for other interpretations – such as the one I propose here – but that Benjamin’s text belongs to that rare species of writings whose destiny it is to prompt new readings, new viewpoints, different hermeneutic approaches and original thoughts ad infinitum. Or rather, as the Shema Israel, the age-old prayer of th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 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