In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE EVENTS MARKED by the year 1989 can largely be seen as severing a certain political messianism from its institutionalization. Thereby, they provide the opportunity to reopen the inheritance of Marx’s text with the intention of salvaging and reformulating its promise for a future, a promise that had been overshadowed and appropriated by totalitarian systems. It is not the case, of course, that Marx’s promise for a classless society could only be reinterpreted after its institutionalization in the Soviet Union had been overcome . On the contrary, such reinterpretations constitute the multifarious history of Marxisms. However, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, and the waning of institutionalized Marxism elsewhere, provide a perhaps privileged starting point, and even an obligation, to reinterpret the promise. On the other hand, this privilege comes with an additional burden. Especially after 1989—and the opening of Soviet archives, revealing more clearly than before Soviet atrocities, beginning with Lenin—any reinterpretation of the Marxist promise of social justice can no longer afford to ignore the violence committed in the name of its institutional realization. One way of broaching this reinterpretation, then, consists in the attempt to ask about the relation between the promise of a classless society and the memory of such violence in history, with the intention of seeking a closer integration between them. Among the previous, pre-1989 rewritings of this promise there is arguably none that concerns itself more intensely with the relationship between the promise of a liberated future and the memory of the violence that explains the need for such a promise—a violence that attends both the failure to fulfill the promise and the claim to have instituted it—than Walter Benjamin’s. Thus, this chapter will investigate Benjamin’s relationship to Marx. My main concern will be the unfolding of Benjamin’s argument that this promise for liberation, even for its own sake, has to be related in a noninstrumental manner to a particular attention given to precisely the victims 11 ONE Benjamin’s Reading of Marx of political and economic violence in the past. On pain of losing its emancipatory impulse, the promise may not view itself as surpassing or overcoming that history. Benjamin’s work on the Paris Arcades (the Passagenwerk) in particular asked these questions of the inheritance of Marx, under very different political conditions, to be sure, but in a way that, nonetheless, merits closer analysis today. Given these reasons for rereading Benjamin on Marx, however, the reader who consults the rapidly expanding secondary literature on the former ’s oeuvre will be surprised to find that little of substance has been written about his relation to Marx. The student movement of the 1960s, especially in Germany, might be said to have rediscovered Benjamin for political theory and action, reopening the texts that his friend Adorno had made available in the 1950s, after a period of near-total neglect by the broader public. Although the discussions that followed were dominated by the question of the opposition between Marxist materialism and theological messianism, scholarly investigations into Benjamin’s complicated relationship to Marx’s texts are rare. No doubt the unavailability of the Passagenwerk, published only in the 1980s with certain manuscripts still outstanding, contributed to this lack of research, since that left scholars with only the sparse comments on Marx in the “Theses on the Concept of History” and the essays on Baudelaire and Eduard Fuchs. Particularly earlier essays—like the 1921 “On the Critique of Violence,” which the third chapter will take to be crucial to an understanding of the “Theses”—were mostly neglected or bypassed as precisely belonging to the early, “theological” Benjamin. It is, however, perhaps this very opposition between Marxism and theology, materialism and messianism , that disallows a proper assessment even of Marx himself: It brushes aside the way in which Marx—despite his claim that the critique of political economy begins after the critique of (Christian) religion—is reworking and renegotiating a tradition of messianic and eschatological thought, as Karl Löwith was perhaps the first to systematically argue—and cast in a negative light.1 One of the merits of Derrida’s Specters of Marx is, as we will see, that it excavates and reformulates this messianic thought in the Marxist tradition after 1989. By insisting on the idea of unconditional responsibility that messianic thought harbors, Derrida attempts—against the scientific, structural interpretation of Althusser, for example—to interpret the liberation of the messianic aspects in Marxism from their institutionalization...

Share