Abstract

Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" have been interpreted almost exclusively in relation to Marxist historical materialism and, in that context, inevitably found wanting, misunderstood as the unwelcome intrusion of mystical and voluntarist notions into a rational method of historical explanation. Levinas, although he never mentions Benjamin, nonetheless affords a better clue as to what Benjamin might have been trying to accomplish. The major distinction animating and structuring Levinas's work is that between ethics, or the ethical relation, and ontology, or the disclosure of being. One of the principal ways this distinction is elaborated is in terms of the contrast and conflict between the synchronizable time assumed by the historical memory belonging to the ontological project and the diachrony of the ethical relation, or the non synchronizable time, the posterior anteriority of the memory of radical separation and interiority. The distinction between synchronic temporalization and diachrony can enable a different understanding of the central concept of Benjamin's "Theses...", viz. "empty homogeneous time, and also thereby of the perspective of Benjamin's "angel of history" from which the liberatory(non-)activity of the Benjamininan historical materialist follows. What the historical materialist does in allowing the flow of time and thought to be arrested in the grand abridgement of a monadic image is to speak for those Others whose being has been functionalized within universal history.

Highlights

  • There Levinas, linking interiority inalienably to memory, conceives of mortal existence as already disqualifying the time of universal history as the measure of the reality of the subject

  • In Levinasian terms there can be no politics of generosity, not because this is analytically, semantically an oxymoron, but because of the logic of the history of the real society, which, resting upon the works of a separated being, must inexorably cover over its being-for-the-other, in the process concealing the holy with the sacred, betraying ethics with justice

  • - 142 PhaenEx materialism from the ontological imperialism of Western philosophy and from the subject of that ontology, whose freedom is always conceived as spontaneity, possibility or power

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Summary

Introduction

There Levinas, linking interiority inalienably to memory, conceives of mortal existence as already disqualifying the time of universal history as the measure of the reality of the subject. - 147 Asher Horowitz the universal histories (in Hegel and Marx), and in the anti-humanisms, becomes "the way of access to social reality starting with the separation of the I ...

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