Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution: A Meditation on the “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and Diego Rivera’s Murals

I want to start by acknowledging a possible objection. The names “Walter Benjamin” and “Mexican Revolution” (or Diego Rivera, for that matter) don’t seem to belong together. Latin America—or Mexico—doesn’t seem to occupy a significant space in the work of Benjamin. We should not hold this lack of interest on Latin America against Benjamin. He was keenly aware of the geopolitical limits of his own thinking and insisted, more than once, that his propositions were limited to a spiritual entity called “Europe.” As for the expression “Mexican Revolution,” it is not without problems of its own. The revolutionary nature of the Mexican Revolution has been contested by Latin Americanists themselves. ¹ So, as if the name Benjamin were not extraneous enough to Mexican history, we are confronted with the additional problem of validating Mexico’s revolutionary credentials if the title is going to be credible. The same effort of authentication—it is interesting to note—is not required in the case of Walter Benjamin. If Benjamin doesn’t need credentials to think the revolution, it is not because the revolution is thought to be an eminently European issue, but rather because the business of thinking itself has been for a long time a purely European territory. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it, for modern thought, only Europe is a theoretical object, whereas the periphery is subject only to empirical knowledge. ² One of the few areas in which this epistemological division of labor has been reversed is in the case of revolutions—especially in the 1960s and 1970s when the Third World in general and Latin America in particular emerged as a properly revolutionary location.

Another doubt may arise from my use of a painter and a philosopher to approach the question of revolution, an approach that seems to go against the grain of the intellectual division of labor that I have just criticized. Against this prejudice, it would be necessary to state that divisions such as empirical and theoretical or praxis and thinking are of little avail in dealing with revolutions. A revolution is also, and prominently, a time of invention and improvisation. Paraphrasing the first romantics, we can say that the thinker willing to think the event of revolution must have the same spiritual power as the poet. When it comes to revolutions, the real question is not so much how an artistic activity can provide an account of this phenomenon, but rather how a positive discourse of the social can illuminate a realm that had been for centuries the constitutive outside of any positive rendering of politics and society.

This epistemologically eccentric nature of revolution has definitive effects on the way Benjamin arranged his text “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” We know that the final confrontation of the “Theses” is with historicism: the doctrine that sees history moving in the direction of the arrow of time under a constant consolidation of old achievements and the prosecution of new goals. Historicism is to history what developmentalism is to politics: a belief in a continuous, increasing, and benefic progress of humanity. Since this is precisely the assumption that Benjamin wants to question, he cannot conduct his quarrel with historicism in the linear style proper to historicism itself. Instead, Benjamin unpacks his argument around a series of discontinuous questions: What is the relationship between history and politics? Why is the historical perception of historicism false? What is the perspective on history proper of materialism? Is this perspective still material in any traditional sense? The cost of avoiding the path of linear exposition is a multiplication of the proverbial intricacies of Benjamin’s style. Moreover, Benjamin does not only indicate the difficulties at stake, but performs them in his very text. As we will see later in this essay, none of these problems is alien to the artistic practice of Diego Rivera, whose murals confront the same problematic intersection of history and revolution that also occupies Benjamin in the “Theses.”

Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy...