ベンヤミン「歴史哲学テーゼ」（英訳：
Dennis Redmond）
On the Concept of History
ベンヤミン「歴史哲学テーゼ」（英訳：
Dennis Redmond）
On the Concept of History
池田光穂
(Translation: Dennis Redmond 8/4/01. Two brief notes on the
translation: Jetztzeit was translated as “here-and-now”, in order to
distinguish it from its polar opposite, the empty and homogenous time
of positivism. Stillstellung was rendered as “zero-hour”, rather than
the misleading “standstill”; the verb “stillstehen” means to come to a
stop or standstill, but Stillstellung is Benjamin’s own unique
invention, which connotes an objective interruption of a mechanical
process, rather like the dramatic pause at the end of an
action-adventure movie, when the audience is waiting to find out if the
time-bomb/missile/terrorist device was defused or not).
I
It is well-known that an automaton once existed, which was so
constructed that it could counter any move of a chess-player with a
counter-move, and thereby assure itself of victory in the match. A
puppet in Turkish attire, water-pipe in mouth, sat before the
chessboard, which rested on a broad table. Through a system of mirrors,
the illusion was created that this table was transparent from all
sides. In truth, a hunchbacked dwarf who was a master chess-player sat
inside, controlling the hands of the puppet with strings. One can
envision a corresponding object to this apparatus in philosophy. The
puppet called “historical materialism” is always supposed to win. It
can do this with no further ado against any opponent, so long as it
employs the services of theology, which as everyone knows is small and
ugly and must be kept out of sight.
II
“Among the most noteworthy characteristics of human beings,” says
Lotze, “belongs… next to so much self-seeking in individuals, the
general absence of envy of each present in relation to the future.”
This reflection shows us that the picture of happiness which we harbor
is steeped through and through in the time which the course of our own
existence has conferred on us. The happiness which could awaken envy in
us exists only in the air we have breathed, with people we could have
spoken with, with women who might have been able to give themselves to
us. The conception of happiness, in other words, resonates irremediably
with that of resurrection [Erloesung: transfiguration, redemption]. It
is just the same with the conception of the past, which makes history
into its affair. The past carries a secret index with it, by which it
is referred to its resurrection. Are we not touched by the same breath
of air which was among that which came before? is there not an echo of
those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears
today? have not the women, who we court, sisters who they do not
recognize anymore? If so, then there is a secret protocol [Verabredung:
also appointment] between the generations of the past and that of our
own. For we have been expected upon this earth. For it has been given
us to know, just like every generation before us, a weak messianic
power, on which the past has a claim. This claim is not to be settled
lightly. The historical materialist knows why.
III
The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the
great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has
ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would
fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a
resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be
citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour
[order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgement.
IV
Secure at first food and clothing, and the kingdom of God will come to
you of itself. – Hegel, 1807
The class struggle, which always remains in view for a historian
schooled in Marx, is a struggle for the rough and material things,
without which there is nothing fine and spiritual. Nevertheless these
latter are present in the class struggle as something other than mere
booty, which falls to the victor. They are present as confidence, as
courage, as humor, as cunning, as steadfastness in this struggle, and
they reach far back into the mists of time. They will, ever and anon,
call every victory which has ever been won by the rulers into question.
Just as flowers turn their heads towards the sun, so too does that
which has been turn, by virtue of a secret kind of heliotropism,
towards the sun which is dawning in the sky of history. To this most
inconspicuous of all transformations the historical materialist must
pay heed.
V
The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which
flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the
past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this
remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical
materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is
an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with
every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it.
VI
To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really
was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment
of danger. For historical materialism it is a question of holding fast
to a picture of the past, just as if it had unexpectedly thrust itself,
in a moment of danger, on the historical subject. The danger threatens
the stock of tradition as much as its recipients. For both it is one
and the same: handing itself over as the tool of the ruling classes. In
every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from
the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it. For the
Messiah arrives not merely as the Redeemer; he also arrives as the
vanquisher of the Anti-christ. The only writer of history with the gift
of setting alight the sparks of hope in the past, is the one who is
convinced of this: that not even the dead will be safe from the enemy,
if he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.
VII
Think of the darkness and the great cold
In this valley, which resounds with misery.
– Brecht, Threepenny Opera
Fustel de Coulanges recommended to the historian, that if he wished to
reexperience an epoch, he should remove everything he knows about the
later course of history from his head. There is no better way of
characterizing the method with which historical materialism has broken.
It is a procedure of empathy. Its origin is the heaviness at heart, the
acedia, which despairs of mastering the genuine historical picture,
which so fleetingly flashes by. The theologians of the Middle Ages
considered it the primary cause of melancholy. Flaubert, who was
acquainted with it, wrote: “Peu de gens devineront combien il a fallu
être triste pour ressusciter Carthage.” [Few people can guess how
despondent one has to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.] The nature
of this melancholy becomes clearer, once one asks the question, with
whom does the historical writer of historicism actually empathize. The
answer is irrefutably with the victor. Those who currently rule are
however the heirs of all those who have ever been victorious. Empathy
with the victors thus comes to benefit the current rulers every time.
This says quite enough to the historical materialist. Whoever until
this day emerges victorious, marches in the triumphal procession in
which today’s rulers tread over those who are sprawled underfoot. The
spoils are, as was ever the case, carried along in the triumphal
procession. They are known as the cultural heritage. In the historical
materialist they have to reckon with a distanced observer. For what he
surveys as the cultural heritage is part and parcel of a lineage
[Abkunft: descent] which he cannot contemplate without horror. It owes
its existence not only to the toil of the great geniuses, who created
it, but also to the nameless drudgery of its contemporaries. There has
never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of
barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is
it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one
set of hands into another. The historical materialist thus moves as far
away from this as measurably possible. He regards it as his task to
brush history against the grain.
VIII
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency
situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of
history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the
task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and
our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not
the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in
the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment
that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still”
possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of
knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of
history on which it rests is untenable.
IX
My wing is ready to fly
I would rather turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”
There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted
there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from
something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth
stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must
look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the
appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which
unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.
He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to
Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been
smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up
in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them.
The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is
turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we
call progress, is this storm.
X
The objects which the monastic rules assigned to monks for meditation
had the task of making the world and its drives repugnant. The mode of
thought which we pursue today comes from a similar determination. It
has the intention, at a moment wherein the politicians in whom the
opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes have been knocked supine,
and have sealed their downfall by the betrayal of their own cause, of
freeing the political child of the world from the nets in which they
have ensnared it. The consideration starts from the assumption that the
stubborn faith in progress of these politicians, their trust in their
“mass basis” and finally their servile subordination into an
uncontrollable apparatus have been three sides of the same thing. It
seeks to give an idea of how dearly it will cost our accustomed concept
of history, to avoid any complicity with that which these politicians
continue to hold fast to.
XI
The conformism which has dwelt within social democracy from the very
beginning rests not merely on its political tactics, but also on its
economic conceptions. It is a fundamental cause of the later collapse.
There is nothing which has corrupted the German working-class so much
as the opinion that they were swimming with the tide. Technical
developments counted to them as the course of the stream, which they
thought they were swimming in. From this, it was only a step to the
illusion that the factory-labor set forth by the path of technological
progress represented a political achievement. The old Protestant work
ethic celebrated its resurrection among German workers in secularized
form. The Gotha Program [dating from the 1875 Gotha Congress] already
bore traces of this confusion. It defined labor as “the source of all
wealth and all culture”. Suspecting the worst, Marx responded that
human being, who owned no other property aside from his labor-power,
“must be the slave of other human beings, who… have made themselves
into property-owners.” Oblivious to this, the confusion only increased,
and soon afterwards Josef Dietzgen announced: “Labor is the savior of
modern times… In the… improvement… of labor… consists the wealth, which
can now finally fulfill what no redeemer could hitherto achieve.” This
vulgar-Marxist concept of what labor is, does not bother to ask the
question of how its products affect workers, so long as these are no
longer at their disposal. It wishes to perceive only the progression of
the exploitation of nature, not the regression of society. It already
bears the technocratic traces which would later be found in Fascism.
Among these is a concept of nature which diverges in a worrisome manner
from those in the socialist utopias of the Vormaerz period [pre-1848].
Labor, as it is henceforth conceived, is tantamount to the exploitation
of nature, which is contrasted to the exploitation of the proletariat
with naïve self-satisfaction. Compared to this positivistic conception,
the fantasies which provided so much ammunition for the ridicule of
Fourier exhibit a surprisingly healthy sensibility. According to
Fourier, a beneficent division of social labor would have the following
consequences: four moons would illuminate the night sky; ice would be
removed from the polar cap; saltwater from the sea would no longer
taste salty; and wild beasts would enter into the service of human
beings. All this illustrates a labor which, far from exploiting nature,
is instead capable of delivering creations whose possibility slumbers
in her womb. To the corrupted concept of labor belongs, as its logical
complement, that nature which, as Dietzgen put it, “is there gratis
[for free]”.
XII
We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones
in the garden of knowledge.
– Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life
The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class
itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging
class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of
generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which
for a short time made itself felt in the “Spartacus” [Spartacist
splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was
objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the
course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the
name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the
preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the
working-class the role of the savior of future generations. It thereby
severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the
class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both
nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the
ideal of the emancipated heirs.
XIII
Yet every day our cause becomes clearer and the people more clever.
– Josef Dietzgen, Social Democratic Philosophy
Social democratic theory, and still more the praxis, was determined by
a concept of progress which did not hold to reality, but had a dogmatic
claim. Progress, as it was painted in the minds of the social
democrats, was once upon a time the progress of humanity itself (not
only that of its abilities and knowledges). It was, secondly, something
unending (something corresponding to an endless perfectibility of
humanity). It counted, thirdly, as something essentially unstoppable
(as something self-activating, pursuing a straight or spiral path).
Each of these predicates is controversial, and critique could be
applied to each of them. This latter must, however, when push comes to
shove, go behind all these predicates and direct itself at what they
all have in common. The concept of the progress of the human race in
history is not to be separated from the concept of its progression
through a homogenous and empty time. The critique of the concept of
this progress must ground the basis of its critique on the concept of
progress itself.
XIV
Origin is the goal [Ziel: terminus]. – Karl Kraus, Worte in Versen I
[Words in Verse]
History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in
homogenous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by the
here-and-now [Jetztzeit]. For Robespierre, Roman antiquity was a past
charged with the here-and-now, which he exploded out of the continuum
of history. The French revolution thought of itself as a latterday
Rome. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a past
costume. Fashion has an eye for what is up-to-date, wherever it moves
in the jungle [Dickicht: maze, thicket] of what was. It is the tiger’s
leap into that which has gone before. Only it takes place in an arena
in which the ruling classes are in control. The same leap into the open
sky of history is the dialectical one, as Marx conceptualized the
revolution.
XV
The consciousness of exploding the continuum of history is peculiar to
the revolutionary classes in the moment of their action. The Great
Revolution introduced a new calendar. The day on which the calendar
started functioned as a historical time-lapse camera. And it is
fundamentally the same day which, in the shape of holidays and
memorials, always returns. The calendar does not therefore count time
like clocks. They are monuments of a historical awareness, of which
there has not seemed to be the slightest trace for a hundred years. Yet
in the July Revolution an incident took place which did justice to this
consciousness. During the evening of the first skirmishes, it turned
out that the clock-towers were shot at independently and simultaneously
in several places in Paris. An eyewitness who may have owed his
inspiration to the rhyme wrote at that moment:
XVI
The historical materialist
cannot do without the concept of a present
which is not a transition, in which time originates and has come to a
standstill. For this concept defines precisely the present in which he
writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the “eternal”
picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it,
which stands alone. He leaves it to others to give themselves to the
whore called “Once upon a time” in the bordello of historicism. He
remains master of his powers: man enough, to explode the continuum of
history.
XVII
Historicism justifiably
culminates in universal history. Nowhere does
the materialist writing of history distance itself from it more clearly
than in terms of method. The former has no theoretical armature. Its
method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a
homogenous and empty time. The materialist writing of history for its
part is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only
the movement of thoughts but also their zero-hour [Stillstellung].
Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with
tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it
crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a
historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad.
In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour
[Stillstellung] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance
in the struggle for the suppressed past. He perceives it, in order to
explode a specific epoch out of the homogenous course of history; thus
exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of
the life-work. The net gain of this procedure consists of this: that
the life-work is preserved and sublated in the work, the epoch in the
life-work, and the entire course of history in the epoch. The
nourishing fruit of what is historically conceptualized has time as its
core, its precious but flavorless seed.
XVIII
“In relation to the history
of organic life on Earth,” notes a recent
biologist, “the miserable fifty millenia of homo sapiens represents
something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour day. The
entire history of civilized humanity would, on this scale, take up only
one fifth of the last second of the last hour.” The here-and-now, which
as the model of messianic time summarizes the entire history of
humanity into a monstrous abbreviation, coincides to a hair with the
figure, which the history of humanity makes in the universe.
(Addendum)
A
Historicism contents itself
with establishing a causal nexus of various
moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a
historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities
which may be separated from it by millenia. The historian who starts
from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run
through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records [erfasst]
the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that
of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as
that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot
through.
B
Surely the time of the
soothsayers, who divined what lay hidden in the
lap of the future, was experienced neither as homogenous nor as empty.
Whoever keeps this in mind will perhaps have an idea of how past time
was experienced as remembrance: namely, just the same way. It is
well-known that the Jews were forbidden to look into the future. The
Torah and the prayers instructed them, by contrast, in remembrance.
This disenchanted those who fell prey to the future, who sought advice
from the soothsayers. For that reason the future did not, however, turn
into a homogenous and empty time for the Jews. For in it every second
was the narrow gate, through which the Messiah could enter.
Source: http://members.efn.org/‾dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html
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