Memory, Modernity, Repetition:

Walter Benjamin’s History

Aniruddha Chowdhury

In an important fragment in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin points

to two perspectives on the present. The present is defined either as catas-
trophe or as triumph. Two perspectives, Benjamin seems to suggest,
constitute two modes of temporality. Whereas for a triumphant history,
the present is located in the duration of time that Benjamin famously
calls “homogeneous, empty time,” in the movement of the same, for the
historiography of the oppressed, on the other hand—and that is how Ben-
jamin sees the position of historical materialism—the present is located
in a temporal disjuncture “in which time stands still and has come to a
stop” (Thesis XVI). What is progress for a triumphant history is catas-
trophe for the historian of the oppressed. “The concept of progress must
be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ (that
things just go on) is catastrophe” (N9a, 1). The historical materialist con-
ception of the present as site of catastrophe will serve as a guiding thread
of the paper.

.  Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaugh-
lin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), convolute N9a, 8. All future references to
convolute N of The Arcades Project will be cited parenthetically in the text as “N” fol-
lowed by the fragment number.
.  Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), thesis XIV, p. 261.
Hereafter all references to the individual theses of “Theses on the Philosophy of History”
will be cited parenthetically as “Thesis” along with the corresponding thesis number.
References to the other essays collected in Illuminations will be cited in the text as “I”
followed by the page number.

22
Telos 143 (Summer 2008): 22–46.
www.telospress.com
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   23

“The modern is a principal accent” of Benjamin’s thought. An

important aspect of our reading of Benjamin is to situate his literary-
historiographic thought in the context of his theoretical articulation of
the experience of the modern. It will be crucial to think of Benjamin’s
articulation of the modern as designating a structure of experience and
its distinctive temporality, rather than a historical period. Experience of
the modern, for Benjamin, is “devoid of substance” (I 177); its time is
homogeneous and empty. In several places Benjamin mentions that the
aim of his book on the Baroque plays is partly to “expose the seventeenth
century to the light of the present day” (i.e., the nineteenth century) (N1a,
2). There is a certain originary technicity in the experience of the mod-
ern. Similarly, script rather than language, death’s head rather than face,
citation rather than mimesis—these are the allegorical emblems in which
the baroque world is “expressed,” or better, shattered. Benjamin’s histori-
cal materialism is a response to, and a match for, the modern experience.
One of the arguments of this paper, to be developed through a reading of
Benjamin’s reflections on Marcel Proust, as well as of Benjamin’s theses
and fragments, is that memory that characterizes historical materialism is
a temporal experience of image. A certain temporal asymmetry, a deter-
minate non-identity (between image and experience, between Gedächtnis
and eingedenken, between repetition and the new) structures the dialecti-
cal image, which is the enigmatic core of Benjamin’s historical thinking.
Benjamin’s conception of “actualization,” to which repetition belongs as a
strategy without finality, has to be grounded, I will argue, in the non-iden-
tity and asymmetry between the messianic and the historical. Crucial in this
context will be the idea that repetition, as a theatrical concept in Benjamin,
is a relation of difference (non-semblance) between the “fore-history” and
“after-history,” the relation that constructs the interiority of the event of
repetition or historical event. This construction of the “inside” of an event
from a certain “outside” is the work of repetition. It will be my argument
that actualization/repetition, in Benjamin, is in-finitely negational.

I. Death and the Aura of Memory

In “The Image of Proust,” Benjamin speaks of Proustean time as “convo-
luted,” as opposed to “boundless” time. Proust’s true interest, Benjamin

.  Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 10.

.  Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of
Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1971), p. 72.
24   Aniruddha Chowdhury

says, lies in “the passage of time in its most real—that is, space-bound—
form” (I 211). The Proustean experience of time is a retroactive experience
of time that has passed. Time of the present, lived time, is a time under the
sign and shadow of death. Infinite effort of mémoire involontaire consists
in rescuing the un-lived time from death. “On a larger scale, however,”
Benjamin writes, “the threatening, suffocating crisis was death, which
he was constantly aware of, most of all while he was writing” (I 214).
Benjamin describes memory as “a match for the inexorable process of
aging” (I 211). In a fascinating paragraph, Benjamin describes the death as
manifested in aging, to which Proust responds by “letting the whole world
age by a lifetime in an instant”:

[Proust] is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true
dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us—this and
nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of
the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters,
were not home. (I 211–12)

Our unhomeliness, our oblivion is precisely the sign of the domination of

death. It is the work of death, Benjamin would argue. In “The Storyteller,”
Benjamin returns to the idea of the work of death that is presupposed and
matched by remembrance: “Death is the sanction of everything that the
storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other
words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back” (I 94).
The paradigmatic theme of natural history in Benjamin’s extraordinary
study of the seventeenth-century German baroque dramas, The Origin of
the German Mourning Plays, conveys the idea of history as “petrified
nature,” and nature as “petrified history.” The popular baroque emblems
of human skeletons and skulls signify the idea of history as constant morti-
fication and transience. In the baroque image of the fossil is embodied the
idea of the survival of the past in the present. It is Theodor Adorno who,
in the remarkably complex essay “The Idea of Natural History,” offers a
philosophical interpretation of Benjamin’s idea of natural history. A brief
discussion of some of the crucial themes of Adorno’s essay might give
us an important perspective on the broader historiographic dimensions of
Benjamin’s thinking, to which we will return later.
In “The Idea of Natural History,” Adorno compares Benjamin’s
concept of natural history with Lukácsian idea of “second nature.” This
term designates, for Lukács, the reified world of capitalism, the alienated
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   25

world, the world of convention. Adorno quotes from Lukács’s Theory of

the Novel: “This (second) nature is not mute, corporeal, and foreign to the
senses like first nature: it is a petrified, estranged, complex of meaning that
is no longer able to awaken inwardness, it is a charnel-house of rotted inte-
riorities.” The charnel-house, Adorno suggests, is the cipher, the signifier.
For Lukács, the petrified history is nature, or the petrified life of nature
is an effect of historical “development.” But Lukács, in keeping with the
German idealist tradition, “can only think of this charnel-house” within
the horizon of eschato-theological totalization. For Adorno, Benjamin
represents “the decisive turning-point in the formulation of the problem of
natural history.” The emblem of natural history is “a cipher to be read.”
Natural history is the “original-history of signification.” Natural history
appears as a sign language of transience. History and nature meet deeply
in the elemental transience. Adorno thus articulates the essential differ-
ence between Lukács and Benjamin:

If Lukács demonstrates the retransformation of the historical, as that

which has been, into nature, then here is other side of the phenomenon:
nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history.

Here, Benjamin’s concept of allegory and its difference from symbol is of

crucial importance. What marks their difference is “the decisive category
of time.” As Adorno quotes Benjamin:

Whereas in the symbol, with the glorification of death and destruction,

the transfigured face of nature reveals itself fleetingly in light of redemp-
tion, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratia of
history, a petrified primordial landscape.10

Allegory “expresses” the original-historical relationship between

nature—as what appears—and its signification, i.e., transience. Nature
never appears alone as simply present; it appears with its double, its

.  Theodor Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” trans. Bob Hullot-Kentor, Telos 60
(Summer 1984): 120.
.  Ibid., p. 119.
.  Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, quoted in ibid., p. 119.
.  Ibid., p. 119.
.  Benjamin, Origin, quoted in ibid., p. 120.
10.  Ibid., p. 120
26   Aniruddha Chowdhury

destructive double, i.e., with death. Allegory expresses this original dou-
bling of nature (life) and history (death).
According to Adorno’s reading, the structure of Benjamin’s natural
history is a constellation, “namely those of transience, signification, the
idea of nature and the idea of history.”11 Nature and history are not simply
fused with each other; “rather, they break apart and interweave at the same
time in such a fashion that nature appears as a sign for history and history,
wherever it seems to be most historical, appears as a sign for nature.”12
The essential point that Benjamin and Adorno make is that natural history
as constellation, as signification, illuminates the original-history of signi-
fication. Original-history cannot mean an original presence from which
history is a fall. Rather, origin is already transience; decay is the origin.
Original-history, in this sense, is originary historicity. Historicity here is
not an abstraction from historic experiences, which would then amount
to another hypostatization, to a divination of history (second nature) as
immutably given. In the chapter “World Spirit and Natural History” of
Negative Dialectics, Adorno takes Hegel to task for hypostatizing the
“spirit” (second nature) into world spirit, thereby absolutizing domination
and projecting it on Being itself.13 “In the midst of history, Hegel sides with
its immutable element, with the ever-same identity of the process whose
totality is said to bring salvation.”14 On the other hand, in Benjamin’s
reading of the baroque, the historicity that natural history signifies does
not require identity of the nonidentical, does not return to a suprahistori-
cal, or, which is the same thing, ahistorical reconciliation of chance and
necessity. Rather, historicity signifies an originary passing, an unrecover-
able diachrony. If nature and history form a constellation as signification
of transience, then the constellation can only be momentary. As Adorno
writes in Negative Dialectics: “The moment in which nature and history
become commensurable with each other is the moment of passing.”15 For
Adorno, as for Benjamin, that moment of passing is precisely present as a
ruin.16 “As transience all original-history is absolutely present. It is present

11.  Ibid.
12.  Ibid., p. 121.
13.  Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Contin-
uum, 1973), p. 356.
14.  Ibid., p. 357.
15.  Ibid., p. 359.
16.  Ibid.
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   27

in the form of signification.”17 In other words, the present is the site of

original-history. But as a site, the present is also a return of original-his-
tory. The latter, as Adorno comments, is “signified in allegory, returns in
the allegorical.”18 The apparently paradoxical concept of the present as
a site of passing, and of the return of what is passed, offers us a proper
angle and perspective on the Benjaminian idea of the present as a critical
or an interruptive moment of history, and thereby provides us an entry into
Benjamin’s broader notion of historiography as a record and articulation
of memory. We will have occasion to return to this idea in the context of
Benjamin’s historiographic response to what he calls modernity.
The present as a site of passing and of return is, Benjamin would argue,
endowed with the claim that he describes as “a weak messianic power”
(Thesis II). The messianic is weak because the moment that is the tempo-
ral space of the constellation of the past and the present is the moment of
passing. The messianic has a structure of haunting in that it returns at the
moment of passing. Benjamin calls this haunting “the unforgettable.”
The unforgettable receives several redemptive descriptions through-
out Benjamin’s writings. The unforgettable, in Benjamin’s writings, is not
a naïve antithesis of what is forgotten. Rather, as we will see later in the
context of Benjamin’s reflections on Proust, the unforgettable is situated
in a dialectic of forgetting and remembering. Something becomes unfor-
gettable when it threatens to be irretrievably lost. In both “The Task of
The Translator” and “The Storyteller,” the unforgettable appears—or, to
be more precise, returns—as a claim.
In “The Task of The Translator,” Benjamin states his central point
at the very beginning: “The translation is a mode” (I 70). Translation is
not simply derivative of, or secondary to, the original. Rather, as a mode,
translation issues from the original itself. The original itself “contains the
law governing the translation: its translatability” (I 70). Translatability is
the essential feature of the original. Benjamin explains his contention by
introducing the crucial idea of the “afterlife” of art and of language as
such: “A translation issues from the original—not so much from its life
as from its afterlife” (I 71). A work of art, or, for that matter, language
as such, according to Benjamin, is characterized by a beyond. Its sig-
nificance and its truth lie beyond its natural presence, beyond its “organic

17.  Adorno, “The Idea of Natural History,” p. 121.

18.  Ibid. (emphasis added).
28   Aniruddha Chowdhury

corporeality” (I 71). But Benjamin distinguishes the idea of the afterlife of

truth from theological notions like “scepter of the soul” (I 71). On the con-
trary, “in the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history
rather than by nature. . . . The philosopher’s task consists in comprehending
all of natural life through the more encompassing life of history” (I 71).
We will misunderstand Benjamin fundamentally if we regard his view of
the determination of nature by history in properly historicist terms. Rather,
the historicity of art and language should be understood, Benjamin sug-
gests, beyond the category of natural growth, ripening, and unfolding, and
thus beyond the category of organic corporeality.19 Historicity signifies a
movement of constant mortification and—this is Benjamin’s most crucial
argument—“the course of its survival” (I 72). So, it is not so much life as
after-life that determines the translatability and reproducibility of linguistic
art work. The original itself attains its truth, its actuality, in its reproduc-
tion, which also means that the life of the original is already marked by
death. The original lives on, as it were, after its death.20 The unforgettable
is precisely that which lives on and makes its anachronic claim. It is the
task of the translator (and analogously, of the historiographer) to respond
to this claim.
It is not my intent here to discuss in detail Benjamin’s enigmatic “The
Task of the Translator.” What we are trying to see, rather, is how in that
essay, as in “The Storyteller,” Benjamin articulates the historiographic
dimension as a movement not so much of life as of mortification and of
living-on (neither simply life nor simply death), and also as a space of
remembrance and bereavement. In “The Task of The Translator,” the idea
of the after-life allows Benjamin to speak, in metaphysical terms, of the
essential relation between the law of translation (and, by extension, lan-
guage as such) and of remembrance. Benjamin writes:

It should be pointed out that certain correlative concepts retain their

meaning, and possibly their foremost significance, if they are not referred
exclusively to man. One might, for example, speak of an unforgettable
life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such
life or moment required that it be unforgotten, that predicate would not

19.  I owe this point to Paul de Man’s reading of Benjamin, in his essay “Walter
Benjamin’s ‘The Task of The Translator,’” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis:
Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986).
20.  Ibid.
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   29

imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably
also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance.
Analogously, the translatability of linguistic creations ought to be con-
sidered even if men should prove unable to translate them. (I 70)

“God’s remembrance” is perhaps an analogue for the messianic end of

what Benjamin calls pure language. In “The Storyteller,” epic memory
serves as a model of that holistic remembrance. But in Benjamin’s think-
ing, that holistic memory is not accessible to man as it does not belong to
historical time proper. In his “Theologico-Political Fragment,”21 Benjamin
draws the distinction between messianic temporality and the temporal-
ity of history. The messianic does not unfold from within history; rather,
the messianic represents a cessation, a termination of historical time. The
Messiah, Benjamin seems to suggests, comes from outside of history and
“himself consummates all history.”22 More importantly, as we will see
later, the messianic end of remembering the unforgettable is available to
us (in history) only as an instantaneous image. That image is a concern of
the present because, as a site of passing and of return, the present itself is
the unforgettable. As Benjamin writes in Thesis V:

The true picture of the past flits by. 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. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by
the present as one of its own concern threatens to disappear irretrievably.
(Thesis V)

The only instant in which the image of memory flashes up, as we read in
next thesis, is the “moment of danger” (Thesis VI). Elsewhere, Benjamin
refers to that image as the straw for the drowning man: “The smallest
guarantee, the straw at the drowning man grasps. . . . Eingedenken as the
straw.”23
And that moment of danger is, as we read in “The Storyteller,” the
moment of dying. This brings us back to the point we started with: the

21.  Walter Benjamin, “Theologico-Political Fragment,” in Reflections: Essays,

Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken
Books, 1978), pp. 312–13.
22.  Ibid., p. 312.
23.  Quoted in Wohlfarth Irving, “On the Messianic Structure of Walter Benjamin’s
Last Reflections,” Glyph 3 (1978): 148.
30   Aniruddha Chowdhury

relation between dying and the form of memory that we know as storytell-
ing. Let me quote an important passage from “The Storyteller,” where,
just after giving an historical account—account that already blurs the con-
ventional distinction between history and story—of the epochal change in
man’s perception of death, Benjamin writes about the relation of dying and
the unforgettable:

It is, however, characteristic that not only a man’s knowledge or wis-

dom, but above all his real life—and this is the stuff that stories are
made of—first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death.
Just as a sequence of images is set in motion inside a man as his life
comes to an end—unfolding the views of himself under which he has
encountered himself without being aware of it—suddenly in his expres-
sions and looks the unforgettable emerges and imparts to everything that
concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying
possesses for the living around him. This authority is at the very source
of the story. (I 94)

II. Storytelling, Modernity, and Proustean Non-Identity

In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin looks at another world, another time, which
is “remote from us” and “is getting even more distant” (I 83). There is
pathos, but no revivalist nostalgia, in this looking back. Story is no longer
a “present force” in its “living immediacy” (I 83). Storytelling embodied
a structure of experience whose ground has been permanently eroded by
what Benjamin calls modernity. So, to reflect on “someone like Leskov as
a storyteller does not mean bringing him closer to us but, rather, increas-
ing our distance from him” (I 83). The word “reflection” in the title of the
essay involves a “proper distance and angle of vision” (I 83) on the part
of the observer.
Why does Benjamin reflect on the story, then? What is precisely at
stake in this retroactive reflection? What is at stake is not simply the story
and its vanishing beauty, but the historiographic dimension to which story
belongs as one of its forms.24 Story involves a specific form of memory
that Benjamin still wishes to retain in his own version of historical materi-
alism. So, the proper angle of vision, in the context of our reading, can be
achieved when Benjamin’s reflections on story are read together with his
“Theses On The Philosophy of History” and with his reflections on another
24.  In my discussion of the historiographic dimension of the storytelling and the
novel, I am indebted to Irving Wohlfarth’s important essay mentioned above.
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   31

“storyteller” of modern times, Marcel Proust. For both in the “Theses” and
in his reflections on Proust, Benjamin seeks to retain a certain messianic
traits (in his word, “utopia”) that the storyteller’s remembering involves
while at the same time canceling its historicist legacy.
Benjamin opens up this historiographic dimension in sections XII and
XIII of “The Storyteller.” It is evident that in these two crucial sections, as
well as later in the essay, he keeps faith with Lukácsian triadic structure
of the development of literary forms in the West, as it is articulated in The
Theory of The Novel. Storytelling as an essentially oral literary form can
only originate in a space where experience is shared and transmitted from
one to another. In contrast to the novel, the story presupposes a collective
sharing of experience, a space of community based upon tradition: “[T]he
listener’s naïve relationship to the storyteller is controlled by his interest in
retaining what he is told. The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is to
assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story” (I 97). Thus, the
story, by virtue of its structural possibility, belongs to the epic dimension
of memory. As Benjamin writes: “Memory is epic faculty par excellence.
Only by virtue of a comprehensive memory can epic writing absorb the
course of events on the one hand and, with the passing of these, makes its
peace with the power of death on the other” (I 97). It is memory that “cre-
ates the chain of tradition” (I 98). And it is in this context that Benjamin
relates the literary forms of the story and the novel to the broader ques-
tion of historiography. The important and distinctive aspect of Benjamin’s
analysis is that he relates the development of the western literary forms to
the question of the temporalization of memory itself. According to Ben-
jamin, it is historiography that forms the common ground of all forms of
the epic. Benjamin uses the term “historiography” in the broadest pos-
sible sense, that is, as “the record kept by memory” and which “constitutes
the creative matrix of the various epic forms” (I 97). The epic is the old-
est form of historiography, its original and undivided form. Epic art has
“Mnemosyne, the rememberer” as its muse and contains within itself the
germs of two distinct and partial literary forms of memory: the story and
the novel. The emergence of two distinct literary forms of memory and of
historiography signifies “a parting of the ways in world history” (I 97).
The passages of occasional invocations of the Muse in the Homeric epics
contain within themselves the unity of two distinct forms of memory: “the
perpetuating remembrance of the novelist as contrasted with the short-
lived reminiscences of the storyteller. The first is dedicated to one hero,
32   Aniruddha Chowdhury

one odyssey, one battle; the second to many diffuse occurrences. It is, in
other words, remembrance [Eingedenken] which, as the Muse-derived
element of the novel, is added to reminiscences [Gedächtnisse], the cor-
responding element of the story” (I 98). The historiographic counterpart
of the story is the chronicle. “The chronicler is the history-teller” (I 95).
The chronicler, unlike the historian or writer of history, whose task it is
to explain the happenings with which he deals, has from the outset lifted
the load of explanation from his shoulder and only shows how his tales
“are embedded in the great inscrutable course of the world” (I 96). The
storyteller, Benjamin says, is the secularized chronicler. His remembrance
rescues the events of the past from history. What Benjamin writes of the
chronicler in Thesis III is true of the storyteller, too:

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major

and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that
has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. To be sure, only
redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past. (Thesis III)

The novelistic memory (Eingedenken) is messianic, too, in that it bears

testimony to the cessation of happening and to the founding moment of
history. A new calendar that is introduced by the revolution is an exem-
plary form of such Eingedenken. We read in Thesis XV:

The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial date of the
initial day of calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And,
basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays,
which are days of remembrance. (Thesis XV)

But after the fragmentation of the epic unity, if we follow Benjamin’s

Lukácsian narrative, Gedächtnis and Eingedenken remain in sharp con-
trast. Only a redeemed humanity will get them in their unity. The past
will become “citable in all its moments.” That day is Judgement Day.
Judgement Day, then, is a messianic end of history when Gedächtnisse,
reminiscences of many, will appear at a flash of an instant in Eingedenken,
memory of the one. Such is Benjamin’s utopia. The peculiar form of mem-
ory that Benjamin calls historical materialism will be a unity of both or, as
Irving Wohlfarth reminds us, a remembrance of that unity.25 But it is not
simply utopian hope that is in question in Benjamin’s articulation of such
25.  Wohlfarth, “On the Messianic Structure,” p. 151.
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   33

unity in historical materialism. Rather, this rearticulation is a response to

the present that we know as the modern. Modernity designates a structure
of experience and of temporality that has already eroded the basis of sto-
rytelling. Whereas the story is based on transmissibility of experience that
makes possible the authentic continuity of tradition, modernity represents
“a tremendous shattering of tradition,” a historical shock.
Before moving on it is important to assert that for Benjamin, unlike
much of sociological tradition, modernity is no mere name for a historical
period and the specific social forms that belong to it. Rather, it designates
a structure of experience and its distinctive temporality.26
In “The Storyteller,” Benjamin notes the distinctive characteristic of
storytelling as “an artisan form of communication” (I 91). “It does not
aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report.
It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to bring it out of
him again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the
handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (I 92). Modernity, Benja-
min suggests, marks an epochal shift from the mode of production based
on artisan manufacture to that based on industrial machine. Crucial, in
the context of machine, is the decline of practice. With practice as the
basis, Benjamin writes quoting Marx, “each particular area of production
finds its appropriate technical form in experience and slowly perfects it”
(I 176). The cumulative experience of practice provides the ground for
“the process of assimilation which takes place in depth” (I 91), which is
the defining characteristic of storytelling. In contrast, machine production
“requires early drilling of the worker” (I 176). “His work has been sealed
off from experience; practice counts for nothing there” (I 176). Each seg-
ment of work at the machine is without any connection with the preceding
operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition. The work at the
industrial machine, Benjamin concludes, is “devoid of substance” (I 177).
It is the voiding of substance, the experience of being voided, that char-
acterizes the experience of not only the industrial worker, but the modern
as such. As Benjamin reflects in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” moder-
nity designates the structure of experience “for which shock experience

26.  Peter Osborne has already described Benjamin’s conception of the modern as
“a kind of phenomenology of structure of consciousness” rather than a period term. See
Peter Osborne, “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of
Time,” in Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benja-
min (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 83.
34   Aniruddha Chowdhury

has become the norm” (I 162). The shock experience of the passerby in a
crowded city, the worker’s experience at the industrial machine, the film
actor’s sense of exile in front of the camera, and the mass reception of
films are all metonyms of the “same” shock experience. In his essay on
Baudelaire, Benjamin employs the Freudian interpretive model to explain
the paradoxical situation of consciousness without experience. In Freud’s
term, a living organism confronted with a traumatic shock uses its pro-
tective shield against stimuli by readily registering in consciousness such
“external” threat without retaining them in memory. The latter becomes
the repository of what is repressed, of unconscious traces. Consciousness
becomes empty space of memory, of memories without memory. True
memories become involuntary, becomes heavier with traces of “what [the
subject] has not experienced explicitly and consciously, what has not hap-
pened to the subject as an experience” (I 160–63).
In the empty space of modern experience, what is new always appears
as “ever-always-the-same”; new as eternal recurrence of the same. Such,
according to Benjamin, is also the fetish character of commodities,
whose privileged example is fashion. The thorough impoverishment of
experience has its menacing impact on human communication as such.
Communicability of experience is replaced by a new form of communica-
tion: information. The latter “reflects the increasing atrophy of experience”
(I 159). It is one of the features of information (a news item, for example)
that it conveys the happenings without connecting them with the experi-
ential realm of the reader. The brevity of information means that it does
not survive the moment when it is fresh for consumption. It does not enter
the tradition.
Modernity, as it appears in Benjamin’s phenomenological description,
is that temporal space where experience is characterized by a loss of what
is experienced. The experience is marked by time lag. Temporality of the
modern is without duration. The modern experience, if we follow Ben-
jamin’s employment of Freud, is a retroactive experience. In this precise
sense, the modern is a temporal space already marked by a certain post.
The prefix “post” before the modern means that modern as a beginning is a
beginning after, an after-beginning. “Post” expresses the mode of existing
of the modern.
Now it is the task of the historical materialist to (re)articulate a his-
toriographic form that can be adequate to the experiential structure of
the modern. To return to the story will be a pure nostalgia. Worse still,
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   35

storytelling after modernity will amount to the empty chronology charac-

teristic of historicism that tells “the sequence of events like beads of rosary”
(Thesis XVIII). In historicist chronicle, epic continuity is transformed into
a homogeneous empty time of “tradition” and into the narrative of infinite
progress. The empty continuum of “tradition” and of boundless progress is
precisely what Benjamin calls catastrophe. Thus, “historical materialism
must renounce the epic element of history” (N9a, 6).
And yet, historical materialism has the task of articulating a unity of
the two forms of memory. To be sure, this projected unity would not be a
simple fusion of the story and the novel; neither of them would remain the
same in this unity. Rather, it would appear as constellation in the form of an
image. The model of messianic remembrance in contemporary modernity,
Benjamin asserts, is neither the story nor even the novel, but the image.
One of the elementary doctrine(s) of historical materialism is, Benjamin
reflects generally, that “[h]istory decays into images, not into stories”
(N11, 4). The remembering thinker gathers his energy to seize hold of the
image that “in the next moment is irretrievably lost” (N9, 7). The literary
model of this historiographic form Benjamin finds in the work of Proust.
The time lag, the lateness, that characterizes the structure of experience
and of temporality of modernity also structures the remembering work
of Proust. In “The Image of Proust,” Benjamin quotes Jacques Rivière’s
enigmatic observation that “Proust died of the same inexperience which
permitted him to write his works” (I 213). The word “inexperience” in this
quotation does not so much mean a simple lack of experience as, rather, a
time-lag in experience. Experience itself is structured by this lag. In “the
inhospitable, blinding age of big-scale industrialism” (I 157), experience
means the empty message of information that we can recollect at will. This
empty (in)experience is the basis of what Proust calls voluntary memory,
“one that is in the service of the intellect” (I 158). But the true dramas and
experiences of existence that call on us, but which “we the masters” “never
(have) time to live,” become experience only in the instant of spontane-
ous remembrance. This is the domain of Proustean involuntary memory.
What lies at the bottom of Proust’s frenetic, infinite, efforts is the desire
to “rejuvenate,” in a flash of involuntary memory, things that have always
already been past, the past that he has never experienced, the past that, in
this precise sense, never existed as such. This desire—Benjamin describes
it as “elegiac idea of happiness” (I 204)—to rejuvenate the past and pull it
together with the present in an instant “transforms existence into a preserve
36   Aniruddha Chowdhury

of memory” (I 204). This is the other side of the “inexperience” to which

Rivière refers. The inexperience that “had begun to crush him” (I 213) also
becomes, for the writer, the enabling condition of the involuntary memory
to which the writer’s enormous work of remembrance is dedicated.
The time of involuntary memory is convoluted, interwined time, as
opposed to historicism’s boundless time. It is a constellation of a particular
past and a particular present in a space-bound form. In this constellation,
the particular past becomes recognized, for the first time, as a mark, a trace,
in an instant. “This concept [of involuntary memory] bears the marks of a
situation which gave rise to it” (I 159). The past that never had a chance
to live, if we follow Benjamin’s reading of Proust, lives on as traces in the
fragile density of some material objects or in the sensation that it arouses in
us “though we have no idea which one it is . . . it depends entirely on chance
whether we come upon it before we die or whether we never encounter it”
(I 158). The chance of involuntary memory that Proust refers to here in a
tone of private despair is, in Benjamin’s language, the messianic instant
that arrests the empty continuum of voluntary memory, “a revolutionary
chance in the fight for the oppressed past” (Thesis XVII).
The astounding weight of Proust’s work consists in the fact that it is
not so much a remembrance of the past as it was lived and experienced
as, rather, a weaving of memory. This is what Benjamin says in “The
Image of Proust.” Proust’s work, as Benjamin reads it, is a dialectical
“web”—“the Latin word textum means “web” (I 202)—of remember-
ing and forgetting. “Is not the involuntary recollection,” asks Benjamin,
“Proust’s mémoire involontaire, much closer to forgetting than what is
usually called memory?” (I 202). In Benjamin’s fascinating expression, the
Proustean weaving of memory is “a Penelope work of forgetting” (I 202).
But it is also a counterpart to Penelope’s work rather than its likeness:
“For here the day unravels what the night has woven” (I 202). With the
night comes not the events of life, but “an everyday hour.” With the night
unfolds the most banal, most fleeting, “weakest hour” of lost time. This is
what joins Proust to the art of storytelling. We read in “The Storyteller”:
“The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens
to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him,
he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes
to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of
storytelling is cradled” (I 91). In the nighttime of “listening,” then, the self
(the “dummy” of purposiveness, of day time) is loosened and forgotten in
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   37

the passivity (web of weakest hour) of immemorial. What emerges in the

night is the web of “memory” of the immemorial woven by forgetting. In
such a Proustean web, Benjamin has discovered “the bridge to the dream.”
“No synthetic interpretation of Proust can disregard it” (I 204).
Let us follow Benjamin’s “synthesis” more closely. Involuntary mem-
ory has the structure of dream, and, like dream, it is a world of opaque
resemblances. The experience of similarity that we have in our wakeful
state, the domain of voluntary memory, reflects only superficially “the
deeper resemblance of the dream world in which everything that hap-
pens appears not in identical but in similar guise, opaquely similar one
to another” (I 204). This should suggest, let us note, a crucial, yet only
initial, similarity between involuntary memory and Benjamin’s historical
materialism. If “historiography in the strict sense is thus an image taken
from involuntary memory,”27 then a historiographic image shows the past
in its non-identity with the present. Whereas “historicism gives the ‘eter-
nal’ image of the past,” the image of eternal identity of things, “historical
materialism supplies a unique experience with the past” (Thesis XVI),
a unique experience of non-identity. But this is only the first move of
Benjamin’s articulation of the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, of
waking and dreaming. Whereas our purposive recollection of daytime, of
“waking consciousness,” offers us only images of empty (in)experience,
the “forgetting” of night time, of “dream consciousness,” weaves a web of
images of deeper resemblances. In the “forgetting” of spontaneous recol-
lection, “the eye perceives an experience of a complementary nature in the
form of a spontaneous afterimage as it were” (I 157). In the second move,
however, Benjamin makes a second crucial reversal of the earlier reversal.
“Proust,” Benjamin reminds us, “finally turned his days into night, devot-
ing all his hours to undisturbed work in his darkened room with artificial
illumination so that none of those intricate arabesques might escape him”
(I 202). “Proust,” writes Benjamin, “did not give in to sleep” (I 203). The
work of involuntary memory—and historical materialism—cannot be
the self-forgetfulness that once characterized the community of listeners
to stories in the days of weaving and spinning. With alert attentiveness
(the mark of voluntary memory), Proust actualized the element of dream
consciousness in another waking consciousness. The actualization is dia-
lectical, because here the “presence of mind” is predicated on its initial

27.  Wohlfarth, “On the Messianic Structure,” p. 163.

38   Aniruddha Chowdhury

absence and the time lag in which memories interact in the unconscious.
We read in The Arcades Project:

Realization of dream element in the course of waking up is the canon of

dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian.
(N4, 4)

But actualization is dialectical, as it is less akin to “daydreaming” than to

the consciousness of an insomniac. For actualization, strictly speaking,
is not only a realization of “what has been from time immemorial” in
an instant, but, more critically, it is a recognition of image as particular
image, in and for the instant. “Proust,” Benjamin writes, “could not get his
fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke in order to keep garner-
ing that third thing, the image” (I 205). Actualization, Benjamin seems to
suggest, is no longer a dream moment of non-identity, but rather the actual
recognition of non-identity, which we can properly call a determinate non-
identity, “the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this
particular dream image as such” (N4, 1). The double, split recognition of
the immemorial in the “flash” of an image and of image as (particular)
image introduces asymmetry to the core of actualization and brings the
moment of recognition to a “standstill.” In this sense, “the image is dia-
lectics at a standstill” (N3, 1). “For while the relation of the present to the
past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to
the now is dialectical: is not progression, but image, suddenly emergent”
(N2a, 3).
In crucial passages in The Arcades Project, Benjamin deploys the
term “awakening” to describe this moment of non-identity. Awakening,
according to Benjamin, is “the synthesis of dream consciousness (as
thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)” (N3a, 3). But then, the
dialectical synthesis does not amount to a supra-identity of identity (wak-
ing consciousness) and non-identity (dream consciousness). Rather, as
determinate non-identity, it constitutes, in Benjamin’s description, “life’s
supremely dialectical point of rupture” (N3a 3). “Thus, in Proust, the
importance of staking an entire life on life’s supremely dialectical point
of rupture: awakening. Proust begins with an evocation of the space of
someone waking up” (N3a, 3). In our reading, awakening is a constellation
of double, asymmetric recognition that makes the moment both a realiza-
tion of “dream” and waking up from dream. In other words, awakening is
a realization of dream as dream image.
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   39

The double, split recognition introduce historicity into the moment

of actualization. Distinguishing his project from Louis Aragon’s, Benja-
min writes: “Whereas Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the
concern is to find the constellation of awakening. While in Aragon there
remains an impressionistic element, namely the ‘mythology’ . . . here it is a
question of the dissolution of ‘mythology’ into the space of history” (N1,
9). In several important passages in The Arcades Project, the synthetic
moment of awakening is identified with the “‘now of recognizability,’ in
which things put on their true—surrealist—face” (N3a, 3). The “now of
awakening,” insofar as it is a realization and a recognition of dream as
dream image, is a pregnant constellation or configuration of the two forms
of temporalities, the messianic and the historical, in that the now condenses
into the space of the instant the “presence” of the immemorial, as a whole,
mediated by a historically specific present (the specific image). The dual,
dialectical character of the now of awakening—constellation of immemo-
rial and the specific image—brings the moment to a standstill, crystallizes
it into what Benjamin most ambiguously calls a “dialectical image.” The
dialectical image is an image in which is constellated, differentially, the
vision of the image and the image as image. A certain “internal” resistance
to image is what is constitutive for dialectical image. In dialectical image,
image tears itself away from itself. An internal dispersion belongs to the
constitution of dialectical image. Benjamin writes:

Where thinking comes to a standstill in a constellation saturated with

tensions—there the dialectical image appears. It is the caesura in the
movement of thought. Its position is naturally not an arbitrary one. It is
to be found, in a word, where the tension between dialectical opposites
is greatest. (N10a, 3)

The dialectical image, Benjamin writes, is “genuinely historical—that is,

not archaic—image” (N3, 1). It is important to reflect on the nature of the
historicity of the dialectical image. What constitutes the historicity of the
image is not any essential “semblance” or identity between the past and
the present. The image must be strictly distinguished from “essences” and,
Benjamin asserts, must be thought of entirely apart from the categories of
habitus (N3, 1). “It is the inherent tendency of dialectical experience to
dissipate the semblance of eternal sameness . . . in history” (N9, 5). Rather,
historicity of image lies in its indexicality. Image functions as a temporal
index only when there exists non-identity between the past and the present.
40   Aniruddha Chowdhury

(Does not Combray in Proust represent difference in-itself?) Image is not

an index for the past “the way it really was,” i.e., its identity, but for the
past’s essential difference. In this precise sense, “the past carries with it a
temporal index by which it is referred to redemption” (Thesis II). On the
other hand, and more critically, image as a temporal index is synchronic
with every present (N3, 1). Image, so to speak, releases the non-identity of
the present. Dialectical image is an imagistic—thus determinate—spacing
of non-identity itself. As an index, image is a repetition. But whereas in the
modern experience, new is always the recurrence of the same, the dialecti-
cal image, in as much as it is synchronic with the present, produces the
new in its repetition. As a figure of non-identity (repetition and the new),
the image is dialectical and genuinely historical. The dialectical image can
thus be conceived as a dialectical counterpart to the empty identity of the
modern experience.
“The Image of Proust,” Benjamin writes, “is the highest physiognomic
expression which the irresistibly growing discrepancy between literature
and life was able to assume” (I 202). The image of Proust does not recon-
cile, but synchronizes, the “discrepancy” between poetry and life, between
image and experience. As synchronization of the non-synchronous, of the
non-identical, the image of Proust is a dialectical match for the modern.

III. Toward a Destructive Historiography

It was our contention that in Proust, Benjamin finds the historiographic
form that is adequate to the temporal structure of the experience of the
modern. Materialist historiography responds to the time lag that struc-
tures modernity precisely by dialectically transfiguring that retroactivity
into the “afterimage” of the past. And this transfiguration that the history
writer sets as his task constitutes the present as what Benjamin calls the
now-time.
In a brief reflection on Benjamin in The Sublime Object of Ideology,
Slavoj Žižek points to the distinction between the method of hermeneutics
and Benjamin’s historical materialism. Whereas the fundamental guidance
of hermeneutics is to situate a text or event in the totality of the historical
epoch, Benjamin’s historical materialism, in contrast, isolates a specific
work from the totality and continuity of history.28 But the distinction in
method can only be explained by the broader asymmetry between the
28.  Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989),
pp. 137–38.
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   41

two different modes of temporality: homogeneous, empty time proper to

historicism; and the now-time of historical materialism. What marks the
difference is the decisive articulation of the present. From the perspective
of historicism, the present is an empty point, a moment, in the infinite,
boundless perfectibility of mankind, which it calls progress. Time of pro-
gressive history, as Benjamin famously describes, is “a homogeneous,
empty time” (Thesis XIII), whether conceived of as an empty sequence
of instants, or a homogeneous, even ecstatic, duration of past, present,
and future. “Historicism [which] rightly culminates in universal history”
(Thesis XVII) is accumulative; it accumulates, as its data, the spoils of
past successes and triumphs. In this continuous and progressive time
frame, the present is always a transition. It is a hollowed-out space or,
more properly, a non-space. But, for a materialist history writer, as for the
writer of involuntary memory, authentic historical time is a time “in its
most real—that is, space-bound—form” (I 211). This is the crucial point
of distinction that Benjamin draws between historicism and materialist
historiography. Whereas the former places every event within an ideal
time frame of history, and thereby empties out the singular spatiality of
happening, the latter spatializes time, presents a spacing of time. There is
thus a fundamental asymmetry between historiographic evolutionism and
historical materialism:

A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which

is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop.
For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history.
(Thesis XVI)

Is the present of historical materialism to be conceived of in utterly ahis-

torical terms? If not, then to what kind of temporality and historicity is
Benjamin pointing?
A present not as transition and progression, but as disjuncture, defines
the temporality of now-time. To be sure, now-time is not the present in
any simple sense of the term. Rather, it is a certain historical presenta-
tion of the present. The historian finds now-time as what Benjamin calls a
“historical object.”
Strictly speaking, as we have suggested above, now-time (now of
awakening) is a configuration of two different dynamics of time, the mes-
sianic and the historical. In it, the now condenses into the space of the
instant the immemorial as a whole, mediated by a specific historical present
42   Aniruddha Chowdhury

(i.e., a specific image). It is messianic because, as an allegorical significa-

tion, it “transubstantiates” the immemorial as a whole into “one single
catastrophe” (original-history), in order to redeem history as a whole. It is
historical as it always remains the now of particular (historical) recogniz-
ability. The configuration of two temporalities thus remains asymmetric
and non-identical. The asymmetry is evident in the asymmetry of optics
depicted in the famous Thesis IX: “Where we perceive a chain of events,
he [the angel of history] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet” (Thesis IX).
But it is the present instant as site of catastrophe that joins the messianic
and the historical, since the chain of events itself is catastrophe. By the
same token, the very transient nature of the present instant also disjoins
the historical and the messianic. We may also recall, in this context, that,
for Benjamin, the messianic remains radically exterior to history. From
the standpoint of history, the messianic is not the goal but the termina-
tion. Redemptive remembrance of the fullness of the past will be possible
only on the Judgment Day: the end of history. The now-time, in spite of
being a paradigmatic constellation of now and then, remains transient and
incomplete. If now-time is the time of rescue, as Benjamin believes, then
the rescue “can operate solely for the sake of what in the next moment is
irretrievably lost” (N9, 7). It is for this reason that Benjamin can think of
the now-time as the site of the weak messianic, a messianic without the
Messiah.
It is tempting to see the “angel of history” (Klee’s Angelus Novus) as
the Messiah, as “a prophet looking backwards” (Friedrich Schlegel): “His
face is turned toward the past,” and he sees one single catastrophe. But
there is no futural prophecy in Benjamin’s description.29 The angel wants
to be the Messiah. He “would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed.” But there remains a temporal asymme-
try, a time lag between the motion of the angel and this profane historical
world. The storm blowing from Paradise “has got caught in his wings
with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm
irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while
the pile of debris before him grows skyward” (Thesis IX). And yet the
time lag is determinate, for in the space of the time lag is located the his-
torian himself, whose task, in the absence of the Messiah, it is to actualize
29.  For an insightful discussion of prophecy in Benjamin’s thought, see chap. 1 of
Ian Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002).
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   43

the immemorial in the specific living present. The struggling, oppressed

class itself, “as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the
name of generations of the downtrodden” (Thesis XII), is located in the
interface of the messianic and the historical. Prior to the coming of the
Messiah, the now-time is the time of historical actualization. The task
of the historian of the oppressed is to disrupt the “chain of events.” His-
torical actualization, as opposed to progression (in homogeneous time),
Benjamin reminds us, is the founding concept of historical material-
ism (N2, 2). Actualization signifies genuine progress insofar as progress
means, in Benjamin’s radical definition, interference in the “continuity of
elapsing time” (N9a, 7).
Actualization is the work of repetition. But for the historian of the
oppressed, there cannot be such a thing as repetition or retrieval (Wie-
derholung) of the essence of the past. Empathetic “reconstruction” of
the past, “which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical
image as it flares up briefly,” Benjamin critically reminds us, always ends
up empathizing with the victor (Thesis VII). Repetition that defines the
materialist historiography is a repetition and the first time, a repetition
sundered from the notion of empty progression of the same. In “Theses
on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin describes repetition as “a tiger’s
leap into the past” (Thesis XIV). As a leap, repetition terminates the
temporal continuity between the past and the present. Repetition, thus,
has to be strictly distinguished from gazing purely into the past “with-
out involving in this retrospective glance anything that has taken place in
the meantime” (N7, 5). An event becomes historical, attains its historical
actuality posthumously, as Benjamin writes, “[b]ut no fact that is a cause
is for that very reason historical. It becomes historical posthumously as
it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of
years” (Thesis add. A). Time of actualization/repetition is thus a convo-
luted time, as opposed to an identical, boundless line of time. Rather than
being a retrieval of the essence of the past, repetition, if we may assert it
once again, synchronizes a particular past and a particular present in their
non-synchronous and non-identical constellation. Not only ancient Rome
became charged with “the time of the now” (French Revolution), and thus
became something entirely different from “the way it really was,” but also
the French Revolutionaries saw themselves as resurrected Romans when
they created something entirely new. Repetition relates the “past” and the
“present” through difference. Revolutionary repetition, Benjamin would
44   Aniruddha Chowdhury

have argued, following Marx or Blanqui, is a theater, a costume drama.

But, more importantly perhaps, underneath the theatrical masks, the event
of repetition, the historical event, really becomes a “force field in which
the confrontation between its fore-history and after-history is played out”
(N7a, 1).
“Force field” is another term for what we have called a non-synchronous
constellation. The distinction and confrontation between “fore-history”
and “after-history” appears in important passages of The Arcades Project.
Thus we read:

For the materialist historian, every epoch with which he occupies himself
is only prehistory for the epoch he himself must live in. And so, for him,
there can be no appearance of repetition [Wiederholung] in history, since
precisely those moments in the course of history which matter most to
him, by virtue of their index as “fore-history,” become moments of the
present day and change their character according to the catastrophic or
triumphant nature of that day. (N9a, 8)

But repetition, repeatability, belongs to the “original” as the original itself

is marked with an after. The claim of fore-history is fulfilled only when it
is recognized by after-history:

Historical “understanding” is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife

of that which is understood; and what has been recognized in the analysis
of the “after-life of works,” in the analysis of “fame,” is therefore to be
considered the foundation of history in general. (N2, 3)

The event of repetition in which the “historical confrontation” between

the claim of fore-history and its recognition by after-history takes place
turns the (remembered) event into a monadic historical object which the
historian blasts out of the historical succession. And with this act of rep-
etition, with the blasting of historical continuity, Benjamin argues, the
historical object first constitutes itself (N10, 3). The historical confronta-
tion “makes up the interior (and, as it were, the bowels) of the (monadic)
historical object, and into which all the forces and interests of history
enter on a reduced scale” (N10, 3, emphasis mine). There is consequently
no transhistorical foundation of history (and thus no History with capital
“H”). Foundation is located, as we read, in the event of repetition itself,
in the event of acceding “to legibility” of the claim of the particular past
 Memory, Modernity, Repetition   45

in the particular present in the form of an image: “Every present day is

determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each ‘now’ is the
now of particular recognizability” (N3, 1). But Benjamin distinguishes
historical actualization from historical relativism. Although constellation
is something entirely different from “timeless truth,” “truth is not—as
Marxism would have it—a merely contingent function of knowing, but
is bound to a nucleus of time lying hidden within the knower and the
known” (N3, 2). And yet, as we have already noted, it is the present, as site
of catastrophe, which joins the messianic and the historical. The dialecti-
cally presented historical circumstance becomes the force field “insofar
as the present instant interpenetrates it” (N7a, 1). It is the singularity of
the present instant that “determines where, in the object from the past,
that object’s fore-history and after-history diverge so as to circumscribe
its nucleus” (N11, 5). Thus, since the present is the site of repetition, the
repetition takes place “always anew, never in the same way” (N7a, 1). If
we may attempt to articulate it more rigorously, each “now” is actualiza-
tion and articulation of “what has been” (the same) as new, as opposed to
new as the same. In this precise sense, the now-time is a non-synchronous
constellation.
It is in this context that we may return to Benjamin’s historiographic
project of rearticulating the unity of two forms of memory: unity of remi-
niscences of many, and the remembrance of one. One might be tempted to
read Benjamin’s couching of the monadic now, as a modern form of Ein-
gedenken, as another attempt to salvage the whole through its embodiment
in part itself; a dialectical fusion of eternity and time—a holistic recollec-
tion (Erinnerung). Our discussion above points to the opposite conclusion.
If now-time, as a model of messianic time, “comprises the entire history
of mankind in an enormous abridgement” (Thesis XVIII), then that can-
not mean that now-time preserves the whole of the past in the present,
as Benjamin seems to suggest in Thesis XVII. Eingedenken will bespeak
an uncritical hypostatization “as soon as it becomes the signature of his-
torical process as a whole” (N13, 1). Benjaminian Eingedenken marks
a progress not because it represents tradition as a whole, but because it,
as avant-garde, isolates the monadic, and necessarily non-synchronous,
constellation (“where the tension between the dialectical opposites is
greatest”) from the whole. Ultimately, the now is “the fissure” within the
tradition (N9, 4). Benjaminian historiography, as Eingedenken, can only
be an infinite act of destruction (negation):
46   Aniruddha Chowdhury

Historical materialism must renounce the epic element in history. It blasts

the epoch out of the reified “continuity of history.” But it also explodes
the homogeneity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins—that is, with
the present. (N9a, 6)

The now-time presents the present as an impossible spacing of ruins of

time itself. The destructive historian and the rememberer places himself in
the time filled with the now—that is, with ruins. He gathers his power to
situate himself in a spaced-time that remains, in this precise sense, blank:

No vision inspires the destructive character. He has few needs, and the
least of them is to know what will replace what has been destroyed. First
of all, for a moment at least, empty space, the place where the thing stood
or the victim lived. Someone is sure to be found who needs this space
without its being filled.30

30.  Walter Benjamin, “The Destructive Character,” in Reflections, p. 302.