björn thorsteinsson
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. Historicism gives the “eternal” image of the past; historical
materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical
materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called “Once
upon a time” in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his
powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history. (254)The reason why the historical materialist “remains in control of his
powers” is precisely that he resists the temptation to depict history as
a homogeneous continuum of internally indiscernible “events” which
follow each other in smooth procession. Against this harmless and
watered-down conception, he is conscious of the fact that there is a
certain danger at work: “every image of the past that is not recognized
by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably” (247). In the face of this threat, the historical materialist
strives to “seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of
danger” (247). This entails an awareness of the way in which a
particular “historical subject” can appear in the form of a “monad,” in
which “thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with
tensions” (254). In this moment of history condensed into a monad,
the historical materialist “recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation
of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight
for the oppressed past” (254). And it is precisely in virtue of this notion
of specific “condensed” moments — which Benjamin also calls “chips
[Splitter] of Messianic time” (255) — that the historical materialist
severs himself from the impotent conformism of the historicist. Or, to
sum up the proper materialist conception of history in one phrase:
“History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous,
empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].”
(252–253)
Now these remarks will have to suffice, for the moment, on
Benjamin’s reconsideration of the relation between materialism and
messianism. To further elucidate the question of historical materialism
and theology at present, nearly seventy years after Benjamin wrote his
Theses, let us turn our attention to the way in which one self-proclaimed
inheritor (and proponent) of the materialist tradition, Slavoj Žižek,