Mourning, the Messianic, and the Specter

Abstract

The question of Jacques Derrida's appropriation of Benjamin in Specters of Marx revolves around the issue of messianicity-how each conceives of the messianic. Indeed, the relationships between Walter Benjamin's "weak messianic power" and Jacques Derrida's "messianic without messianism" have been intensely debated. Often overlooked in this debate, however, is Derrida's notion of mourning. The following discussion will explore mourning's pivotal role in Derrida's critical adoption of Benjamin. In light of this exploration, I will attend to two basic arguments in the debate. The first asserts that Benjamin generally lacks a concept of "future," which I will address primarily with a discussion of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History.'" In engaging the second kind of argument, which focuses on the differences between Derrida's and Benjamin's uses of the word "messianic," I will probe Jacques Derrida's treatment of Benjamin's ideas in Specters of Marx.2 Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the specter, which is a hallmark of Specters of Marx and a restatement of messianic justice that interprets Benjamin's influence on mourning, messianicity, and time in a new light.3 The first kind of argument, then, asserts that while Derrida focuses on the future, Benjamin critiques the future and instead focuses only on the past. I would suggest, however, that while Benjamin shuns the Ideological future of linear progress as a Derridean future-present which he elsewhere associates with Bergson's duree* he does have a non-linear, non-predictable sense of time. This time, often called messianic or convoluted time, does not preclude an openness to the future along the lines of Derrida's future-to-come [l'a-venir]. Thus, Benjamin's messianic time, like Derrida's disjointed time, does more than merely disrupt linear time; it keeps the present structurally open to both the past and future. Benjamin uses two images to illustrate possible orientations to the past. One is Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus and the other is the prophet. The haunting image of the angel in the painting has its back turned toward the future, wings outstretched: It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.5 Though he wants to stay and attend to the dead at his feet who have been reduced to rubble by historicism in the name of "progress," the angel is powerless to save the dead and is thrust into the future. The historical materialist, on the other hand, is the "prophet." He also wants to attend to the trampled dead, so he "has turned away from the future: he perceives the contours of the future in the fading light of the past as it sinks before him into the night of times."6 Benjamin's concern in presenting these two images is with the duty that present generations have to past ones. Yet both figures turn toward the past out of a concern for the future. The historical materialism which Benjamin champions in this essay represents a way of telling and writing history that attends to the largely overlooked dead in the past who were sacrificed on the Hegelian "slaughterbench" of history while history marched on in the name of "progress." "We" of the present generation are Benjamin's messianic figures who have this duty to the dead. We are always already contracted to them, and they have been expecting us: "There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one [unserem], Then our coming was expected on earth. …