The Claim of History

Abstract

Let us presume that Benjamin's parentheses acknowledge in some manner the profound differences between the whose essences lack the historic index proper to the dialectical image and the phenomenology within which Heidegger elaborated his notion of historicity (and if they do not, Benjamin's assertion requires too much qualification to bear interpretive development). Would Benjamin be correct in arguing that the experience of finitude Heidegger describes in Being and Time1 (an experience that includes a confrontation with a historically determined factical situation as well as the possibility of a choice vis-a-vis the tradition) is not really a historical experience, not a true engagement with history? question is not without interest either for a study of the existential analytic and its fate in the late twenties and early thirties-a fate that makes Benjamin's claim all the more worth entertaining-or for a consideration of Benjamin' s relation to Heidegger. Nor is it so easily resolved-that is, if we allow Benjamin's assertion to guide a questioning that develops the full potential of Heidegger's notion of historicity. But in its context, Benjamin's remark raises a perhaps more significant question about his relation to Heidegger on the question of history (more significant for those who seek to pose this question after Heidegger and Benjamin). It is a question about the relation between language and history. For Benjamin's description of the linguistic character of the dialectical image in this same note from Passagen-Werk [N 3.1] overlaps in a remarkable way with Heidegger's analyses of the event that he terms the speaking of language. Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens (the essence of language: the language of essence), we read in Heidegger's On the Way to Language. Benjamin was arguing already in the twenties (in The Task of the Translator and in the Epistemo-Critical Prologue to Origin of German Tragic Drama), but in more concrete terms in the meditation on the dialectical image of the early thirties, that the speaking in question is the address of history. question, then, is this: would it be possible to read Heidegger's later thought on language in the light of Benjamin's reflections on history and thereby develop this later thought in more concrete, historical terms (or at least allow these reflections to activate possibilities in the earlier thought of