the future of emancipationtime was the straitgate through which the Messiah might enter” (255).
This idea, according to Benjamin, prevented Jewish believers from suc-
cumbing to the opinion that time was “homogeneous” and “empty.”
It is precisely such a conception of time — which Benjamin relates al-
ternatively to historicism and to (social-democratic) con formism
— that he sets out to combat in his Theses. What is wrong with such an
attitude towards time is, among other things, that it essentially comes
down to a justification of the present situation, or, in other words, it
only contributes to the dominant interpretation of history — the his-
tory of the victors. The historicist, for example, sincerely believes that
“nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history”
(246). This stance ultimately boils down to the standpoint that we, in
our present situation, have no obligations towards the claims of the
past. For us, past generations are gone, but they are no more lost than
anything else; they are safely preserved in the grand museum of his-
tory, and therefore we do not need to pay any attention to them other
than as curious artefacts. Implicit here is a naïve and uncritical (and
doubtless familiar) idea of progress (252) — an idea that inevitably
serves as “a tool of the ruling classes” (247). Against this subservient
and impotent attitude, Benjamin advances another conception of
time — an essentially messianic conception that he wants to relate to
historical materialism in order for the latter to become what it truly should
be. We can regard materialism in this context to refer to a certain sym-
pathy with the victims, with the slain and the fallen in the process of
history. If there is ever to be a genuine redemption of mankind as such,
and not only the ultimate and categorical triumph of the victors (the
strong, the mighty, the wealthy), the downtrodden need to be reha-
bilitated, as it were. This can only happen through the “dialectical
leap” into the unknown, the “leap in the open air of history” that Marx
termed revolution. The revolution inescapably has to take place “in an
arena where the ruling classes give the com mands” — which entails,
among other things, that the notion of history that is prevalent, in this
arena, is the conformist-historicist one. Revolution entails, precisely,
that “the revolutionary classes” (253), or in other words “the struggling,
oppressed class” (251), makes “the continuum of history explode” (253).
To make the opposition between the historicist and the historical materi-
alist even clearer, let us reproduce Benjamin’s Thesis XVI in its entirety: