Benjamin, Badiou, Becker: Messianic Time and the Event in Goodbye Lenin and Madison

In this essay, the author reads a Democratic Party flyer as an object lesson in how the amorphous upsurge of a political protest can be channeled into the narrow confines of a political party. Using the flyer as an artifact, and a methodology drawn from Alain Badiou and Walter Benjamin, he argues that the political force released in the Madison protests in 2011 was domesticated by the American Federation of Teachers and the Democratic Party. However, some of the unrest expressed in Madison was not exhausted in the narrowly political ends toward which it was directed. This excess force links the Madison protests to analogous historical moments, if one employs the mode of historicizing that Benjamin names "materialist historiography." Benjamin's method allows the author to conclude by connecting the Madison protests to the fall of the Berlin Wall and, specifically, to a filmic version of that fall, the movie Goodbye Lenin.