Chapter 4 Fomenting the Constellations of Revolutionary “Now-Time”: Walter Benjamin’s Dialectical Theory of Religion, Society and History

Michael R. Ott

Articulating the past historically means recognizing those elements of the past which come together in the constellation of a single moment. But knowledge within the historical moment is always knowledge of a moment. In drawing itself together in the moment – in the dialectical image – the past becomes part of humanity’s involuntary memory [Now – Time]. The dialectical image can be defined as the involuntary memory of redeemed humanity.1 … [the dialectical] image is that wherein what has been comes togeth- er in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent. … Awakening.2

This chapter3 seeks to give expression to Walter Benjamin’s dialectical theory of religion/theology, society and history as he developed it from his earliest writings in 1910 to his last writing in 1940 on the “Theses on the Philosophy of History”/“On the Concept of History” and its “Paralipomena.”4 As this essay

1 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 403. 2 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1999b), 462. 3 This essay is in honor and celebration of my beloved teacher, colleague, friend, and brother Professor Rudolf J. Siebert. 4 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–264; Walter Benja- min, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938–1940 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 389–411.

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144 Ott will explain, this dialectic between the religious and the secular, between ­radical politics and messianic theology ultimately culminated in his notion of ­Jetztzeit (Now-Time) and the “dialectical image;” revolutionary notions that can explode the ruling class’s ideology of time and history as being nothing but an empty, homogenous, and ever progressing continuum of domination for the purpose of creating a more humane and reconciled future society.5 As Benjamin stated, in the very midst of this increasingly deadly class-war sys- tem and its barbaric history of domination, wherein its “victors” are privileged to run roughshod over the masses of their fallen victims, it is with the same resolve and “cunning” of an antique collector that one must press on with the defiance of hope, which is given “only for the sake of the hopeless ones,” and with prayerful “attentiveness” to the most minute, seemingly insignificant, fragmentary details of life in the search not for facts, data, or information about the immediacy of “what is,” but for the possible discovery of all but forgotten alternatives to the historical class-war systems of hegemonic domi- nation.6 As will be explained, Benjamin’s theoretical search for truth, which dialectically transcends and thus, critiques the modern positivistic reduction of knowledge and of life into a utilitarian means for the reproduction of the dominant social system, is founded upon his determinate negation of a Jew- ish Messianic as well as Kabbalist theology that searches for the fragments or ciphers of past expressions of truth, which have been thrown on the dust heap of history as so much worthless trash by history’s ruling-class “winners.” The task was and continues to be the redemption of these historical frag- ments or ciphers of Truth that are to be remembered and then gathered to- gether in the hope of fomenting an “awakening” of involuntary memories, epiphany-like “lightning flashes” of past historical struggles for justice, libera- tion, happiness, if not redemption that can become a possible source and power of resistance, solidarity, and hope in the present day class-war strug- gles. Benjamin’s methodology has no pre-established, progressively purpose- ful structure, except for its tireless process of reflective thought, which con- tinually makes new beginnings by ‘returning in a roundabout way to its original object. … For by pursuing different levels of meaning in its examina- tion of one single object it receives both the incentive to begin again and the justification for its irregular rhythm.’7 As Benjamin stated, ‘Nothing could bear

5 Benjamin, Illuminations, 260–264; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 4, 394–397, 401–411; Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456–488. 6 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255–256; Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume 1, 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 356. 7 Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, (London, and New York: Verso, 1977), 28–29.