Patterns of Meaning and the Claims of History: S.J. Naudé’s The Third Reel

This essay examines Walter Benjamin’s politico-theological conception of time (the messianic time) against the background of the mechanical philosophy which the Copernican turn brought about. My argument is that the messianic time which intervenes in the mechanical, ‘homogenous, empty time’ shares the formal logic of the divine which intervenes in the Newtonian mathematical space–time via the differential as the non-all (not universal). Newton formulated the mathematical space as ontologically closed by ‘the dominion of One’. But, as George Berkeley’s critique of Newton’s differential shows, the differential comes to reveal the non-all in it. The divine in fact cannot be ontologically closed, leaving the universe divided into the merely mechanical (secular science) and the infinite (the divine as the non-all which does not fit the mechanical). Quentin Meillassoux formulates the mathematical space–time as simultaneously All and non-all too, but with no theological project for interpretation. By contrast, Benjamin’s use of the term the differential shows that he conceives the non-all left from the mechanical as a differential point within the mathematical space–time which enables manifold translations of the divine as the All beyond the mechanical space–time.

Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger are famous for their critique of teleological understandings of time and their critical approaches towards established 'meanings'. In his Theses on History, Benjamin (1999), arguing against fascism and social democracy, opposes the notion of homogenous time (or empty time), which is associated with historical progress. According to him, such an understanding of time only reproduces the interests and ideologies of ruling elites. Benjamin argues instead for what he calls 'messianic time', which concerns itself with oppressed classes and the possibilities of reclaiming the past in the present: 'Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous empty time' (Benjamin, 1999, pp.262–263). Different from chronological order, according to Benjamin, what we have instead is a constellation which can rearrange itself in a flash. It is important to mention here that Benjamin's conception breaks away from the notion of future salvation, and instead directs its impetus to the notion of 'redemption of the past': 'Benjamin's usage of the expression the Messiah differs from its conventional usage. The "messianic cessation" involves revolutionizing the past, not the future' (Ware, 2004, p.103). But it seems to be Heidegger who pushed the questions of meaning and time the furthest.

In the summer of 1816, a young woman of nineteen eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to Geneva, Switzerland.[...]

It has been said time and again that the paradigm of Third World nationalism is the Hegelian narrative of lordship and bondage – the struggle for recognition. As the hegemonic petty‐bourgeois elite...

It is arguable that what has most bedevilled the recent academic practice of history in Britain has been the triumph over integrative history - or that mode of history which seeks to reconstitute and to explain the multi-dimensional nature of past experience - of what might be called the disintegrative historical approach, that is, specialised thematic history. The former mode includes local history, national history (by which here is meant much more than the political or constitutional history of the Nation State), international history - even histories of ‘civilisations’ or of the world - and takes ‘society’ as the central organising principle over time. The latter mode comprises, for example, political history, demographic history, economic history and so on through to such exotic sub-species of the so-called new social history as the histories of class, gender, sex, crime or leisure. Put crudely, if this second type of historical approach concerns itself with particular categories of persons or activities, with pre-selected processes and with highly specific tendencies in the relatively short term, then the first has to do with the fluctuating development of recognisable social entities in the round, and with their changing interrelationships usually over longer time scales. Instructive and fascinating as is undoubtedly the detailed thematic approach, and vital as it continues to be as the indispensable technical preliminary to the accurate reconstruction of the past in a multi-dimensional sense, it is hardly deniable that - as the Victorians recognised - it is the broader interdisciplinary approach which should represent the ultimate aspiration of the historical practitioner, simply because it is that which is most culturally relevant to the education of the citizen. It is equally clear, however, that few professional historians today are seeking either to construct their undergraduate syllabuses on such lines or to write connectedly for a wider public about such matters over periods much longer than a century or two.

A Revolutionary Narrative of European History: Bonneville's <i>History of Modern Europe</i> (1789–1792)

In A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam invades the consciousness of the protagonist to reveal the subliminal enmeshed spaces of the personal and the political. The distance between the traumatic events of the Sri Lankan civil war and the alienated individual who has apparently remained aloof, is obliterated through the refracted memories that have embedded the subject in the matrix of his country’s political history. The individual memory thus coalesces into the fabric of collective memory as the narrative unfolds. The concatenation of the traumatic realities and the sequestered psyche, untethers the individual from its ensconced private sphere and situates it within the macrocosmic and pervasive sociopolitical structure. The transmutation of subjectivity is attuned to the affective sites of collective trauma. The dichotomy of proximity and distance elucidated by the apprehensive reflections of the survivor is symptomatic of the subterranean intensities that elude corporeal presence and agency. The memories of the individual become resonant with the affective (un)lived experiences of traumatic violence, that deconstruct the tension of presence/absence, and consequently reconfigure the preconceived notions of subjectivity. The theoretical framework of this paper would foreground Michael Rothberg’s conceptualization of the implicated subject, to limn the trajectory of identities who are indirectly implicated in traumatic legacies. This paper argues that the trauma of the genocidal war and its aftermath is transcribed into affective memories, that bear the potential to reconstitute identity by recognizing and transcending the state of implication.

Reviewed by: Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent by Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien Regine Criser Post-Wall German Cinema and National History, Utopianism and Dissent. By Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012. Pp. 348. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-1571135223. With the sudden collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1989, the already charged debates about Germany’s national identity became even more complicated. In her recently published monograph, Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien argues that through the events that brought the postwar era and the Cold War world order to an end, 1989 replaced 1945 as the primary caesura in modern German history. Hence, she takes 1989 as the starting point for her investigation of history films produced over the next 20 years until 2009 and approaches them as a crucial discursive network with a decisive impact on the ongoing construction of national identity in Germany. Expanding Alison Landsberg’s notion of prosthetic memory (Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. [2004]), O’Brien sets out to investigate “how history films help viewers to comprehend the dynamics of change, agency, and passivity that play an equally important part in historical understanding” (16). Based on her extensive research of post-wall German cinema, she arrives at the conclusion that utopianism and dissent function as prominent models for the creation of a German identity after 1989. O’Brien’s monograph contributes to a growing number of publications in the field of German Studies that all approach contemporary German cinema as a crucial cultural institution that actively shapes and participates in the creation of a national identity tied together through overarching historical narratives. Despite some overlap with regard to movie selection with recent publications such as Nick Hodgin’s Screening the East: Heimat, Memory and Nostalgia in Film (2011) or Paul Cooke and Chris Homewood’s edited volume New Directions in German Cinema (2011), O’Brien leaves these predecessors unaddressed. This is especially noteworthy, since Cooke and Homewood share a similar starting point with O’Brien in that both publications challenge Eric Rentschler’s claim that post-Wall cinema is a “cinema of consensus” (“From New German Cinema to Post-Wall Cinema of Consensus.” In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, 260–77 [2000]). A possible reason for these publications’ absence among O’Brien’s otherwise extensive disciplinary and interdisciplinary references could be that Cooke and Homewood’s movie selection is limited to films produced in the 2000s, thus starting significantly later than her own selection, and that Hodgin’s analysis focuses on the notion of nostalgia. In contrast, in her first chapter O’Brien argues for the concept of anamnesis over nostalgia, arguing that in approaching the immediate aftermath of 1989 and the collapse of socialism movies employ tropes of amnesia and imprisonment to address sudden historic change. The four chapters of the monograph are organized around conceptual clusters that guide and establish coherence between [End Page 480] O’Brien’s expert readings of individual movies. In addition to amnesia and anamnesis, the chapters circle around political oppression and resistance, terrorism in East and West Germany, as well as utopianism and violence. While the well-written individual chapters are convincing on their own, these thematic and theoretical clusters connect the cinematic analysis throughout the book and create a narrative and argumentative flow that underscores the thoroughness of O’Brien’s scholarship. Throughout the four chapters she convincingly demonstrates how the GDR and its sudden collapse, the student movement of 1968 as well as German Terrorism, most famously embodied by the RAF, are all equally unresolved episodes of Germany’s national history. By bringing these historic flashpoints and their filmic representations in dialogue with each other, O’Brien successfully points to cinematic trends and shifts and highlights the thematic interplay between individual historic events and their cultural conversions. As O’Brien shows, the void of utopianism after multiple failed experiments with social and ideological alternatives to capitalism have left Germany with yet another challenge in the already difficult undertaking of creating a national identity. The strength of O’Brien’s monograph is twofold: firs of...

This article focuses on peculiarities of historiography in Germany in the light of German historians’ works from Chladni to Lamprecht. It deals with both continuities and periodical differentiations. The distinctive features of historicism consisting the main tradition in the historiography in Germany can be formulated as “history as an empirical science”, “history for history”, “respect for the particular” and “knowledge of inevitability of historian’s subjectivity”. Historiography in Germany has been loyal to aims of “cultural history” (Kulturgeschichte) and “universal history” (Universalgeschichte) put forward by Herder, and developed the “universal cultural history” program. This program advocates that fields of human activities such as politics, economics, religion, culture, besides old ages and foreign cultures have to be dealt with “as of themselves”. Thus works of “universal cultural history” written beginning from 1750s in Germany can be seen as a kind of early forerunners of the attempt of “social history”, even of “history of civilizations” meaning “integrative history” in Braudelian terms. Even if the pendulum of historiography in Germany swung from 1750 to 1900 between Ranke’s naive objectivism and Droysen’s subjectivism, or between “political history” as put by Iggers and “cultural history” devoid of political and economic base as put by Braudel, its main axis has been defined by the holistic program of “universal cultural history”, which combined “cultural history” and “political and economic history”, and surpassed “national history”.

The German in Weimar Republic: Studies in History of German Conservatism, Nationalism, and Antisemitism, edited by Larry Eugene Jones. New York & Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2014. xxiv, 332 pp. $95.00 US (cloth). What is role and responsibility of political right in Weimar Republic--which consisted of a myriad of political parties, associations, and combat leagues--when it comes to rise of Nazi Party and Hitler's ascendance to chancellorship in Germany in 1933? This new collection of essays, edited by Larry Eugene Jones, on political, organizational, and social history of German right in Weimar Republic offers useful insights into this long-debated question and makes a number of persuasive arguments. The picture that emerges from this book is of a political right characterized by continual quarrelling, disunity, competition, and ongoing and increasing fragmentation. The volume is made up of ten individual chapters that look at some of major players of Weimar's Right. Half of studies deal with history of German National People's Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei, DNVP) and that of Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband, ADV); other essays focus on German combat leagues, Catholic right, Reich President von Hindenburg, jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, and Protestant theologian Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, director of Bethel Institutions. The volume is impressively coherent for an essay collection and thus convincingly achieves what Jones claims as its purpose in his cogent and useful (especially historiographically) introduction: to reinforce through several case studies master narrative that the disunity of was every bit as important as a prerequisite for establishment of Third Reich as schism on socialist Left or fragmentation of political middle (2). The organizational and ideological disunity of political right is clearly demonstrated by scholars here, with individual essays often complementing each other by highlighting different shards of fragmenting movements. For example, pieces by Daniela Gasteiger and Jones both look at fissures in German National Party. Gasteiger's essay focuses on DNVP leader Count Guido von Westarp and his relationships with volkisch politician Albrecht von Graefe-Goldebee (initially a member of DNVP and then founder of German-Racist Freedom Party [Deutschvolksiche Freiheitspartei, DVP] and Central Association of German Conservatives [Hauptverein der Deutschkonservativen]), closely examining deterioration of both relationships. The collection's next is Jones' analysis of inner-party quarrels within DNVP and inconsistency of party in regard to Jewish question. The reader is convinced by both essays not only of disunity of DNVP, but also of its multiple disunities. The Jewish question is a topic of other essays here as well, and again internal divisions are identified. Brian E. Crim's essay looks at Jewish question in regard to German combat leagues. The anti-Semitism Crim finds in two largest, Stahlhelm, League of Front Soldiers (Stahlhelm, Bund der Frontsoldaten), and Young German Order (Jungdeutscher Orden, Jungdo), is mostly a strategically chosen ideology, a situational antisemitism derived from opportunism, pragmatism, and vicious competition in a crowed German Right (195). Variations of this diagnosis are also made (implicitly) in essays by Gasteiger and Jones on DNVP and in essay by Bjorn Hofmeister on Pan-German league. …

The relationship between Australian political and social history has received little historiographical attention. Political history has been lauded or, more often, dismissed as traditional historical practice, while from the 1960s social history took its place as a catch‐all phrase for various “new” histories concerned with everyday life. This article examines the place of political and social history in the nascent Australian academic historical profession of the 1950s to the early 1970s, and then explores the impact of the new social history on academic political history. It will suggest that while there was only limited exchange before the late 1980s, in the last twenty years social history has contributed modestly to a reconstituted understanding of political history as part of lived experience.“[…] I can read poetry and plays, and things of that sort, and do not dislike travels. But history, real solemn history, I cannot be interested in. Can you?”“Yes, I am fond of history.”“I wish I were too. I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all — it is very tiresome: and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention […]”.1

Personal and political histories in the designing of health reform policy in Bolivia

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. …

Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history-blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. (1) ********** In his "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin enjoined Marxist critics to "constellate" rather than "tell" history, by bringing a threatened past into a meaningful relation with an equally endangered present (Thesis XVIIIA). This article is both excursus and exemplum of the Benjaminian method in that it seeks to constellate the work of the Chartist poet, Gerald Massey, with that of Benjamin himself. It will demonstrate that Massey's messianic vision of history anticipates many aspects of Benjamin's own messianism. Both, for example, will be shown to turn on the opposition between the "homogeneous, empty time" of capitalist modernity and the charged potentiality of "Jetztzeit" ("the time of the now"; Thesis XIV). In addition, the article will demonstrate that, like Benjamin, Massey conceives of past and present as containing "temporal indices" which refer to redemption, and that his task as a poet is to produce a "constellation," a meaningful temporal alignment (of past and present) which allows those scattered "chips of Messianic time" to be gathered together, thereby endowing the present with sufficient power "to blast open the continuum of history" and usher in a new, just, social order (Thesis XVI). Finally, the article also explores the poetics of social transformation with a particular emphasis on the relation between forms of temporal understanding and political activity. Gerald Massey was born on May 29, 1828 in Tring, Hertfordshire, the son of an illiterate father, William, and a semi-literate mother, Mary. Both his working life and poetic career began relatively early. Aged eight, he was sent to work in a local silk mill and some ten years later he published (by subscription) the improbably titled Poems and Chansons by a Tring Peasant Boy. (2) Massey's involvement with the Chartist movement began in 1848 when he joined the Uxbridge Young Men's Improvement Society. There he met John Bedford Leno with whom, in 1849, he founded the Uxbridge Spirit of Freedom, a short-lived radical periodical which nonetheless garnered praise from the leading Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star (Shaw, pp. 26-29). Indeed, between 1849 and 1851, Massey became the most published Chartist poet in the Northern Star's Poetry Columns. In addition, throughout 1850 his poetry was frequently printed and reprinted in The Red Republican and The Friend of the People (both edited by G. J. Harney) and Cooper's Journal (edited by Thomas Cooper), making Massey the most important Chartist poet in the immediate aftermath of the continental revolutions of 1848. By 1850, as a result of his friendship with Harney, Massey had become a serving member of the committee of the Society of Fraternal Democrats (an organization of English and emigre, mainly German and Polish, socialists) and secretary to the committee of the Red Republican (which published the first English translation of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto). At the same time Massey was involved in the Christian Socialist movement where he found paid employment as secretary of the Working Tailors Association (WTA; Shaw, pp. 31-39). However, Massey's Christian Socialist employers, unhappy at his involvement with the "Red Republicans," told him to choose between the WTA and the Red Republican. …

The preceding essays give us much to think about concerning the role that public historians might play in shaping the future of memory studies. Michael Kammen rightly emphasizes the need for more systematic empirical and comparative research into the social and political processes through which public memories are created, disseminated, understood, and changed over time. For all the recent scholarship on memory, we still do not know nearly enough about how memorial practices vary by race, by class, by gender, by region, or by nation. The interrelation of historical images disseminated by commercial mass media and the modern nation-state offers especially fruitful ground for investigation, as Kammen perceptively notes; so too are the ways that individuals conflate their personal histories with the national past. Scholars who have declared that the history of the nation-state no longer matters to most Americans have yet to explain the enormous personal investment in national history evident in the conflicts that Edward Linenthal has so thoughtfully analyzed over the display of artifacts such as the Enola Gay or the renaming of national historic sites such as Little Big Horn National Historical Park. Not everyone cares openly about national history, but perhaps, like many other beliefs, a sense of national identity and history for the majority of Americans is so pervasive and deep-seated that it goes without saying, and only surfaces when challenged. Indeed, as both Michael Frisch and David Lowenthal observe, the intense personal and familiar meanings that individuals attach to the past, a phenomenon I slighted in my essay, is an important next step for historians to explore. If the past is truly a foreign country disconnected from present