Reinventing the Past with Walter Benjamin

Zizek linked on Twitter to the article by Terry Eagleton about Walter Benjamin – Waking the dead. The required Obama segways are silly but some of the thoughts on Benjamin are interesting (I don’t understand why British left is so fanatically obsessed with Israel, it seems they can’t write a paragraph without the reference). Anyhow:

“In this way, Benjamin thought, we could redeem our ancestors after a fashion. The traditional Judaic rituals of mourning and remembrance could be lent a new twist. For this unorthodox leftist, astonishingly, there could even be something revolutionary about nostalgia. Today, nostalgia is almost as unacceptable as racism. Our politicians speak of drawing a line under the past and turning our back on ancient quarrels. In this way, we can leap forward into a scrubbed, blank, amnesiac future.

If Benjamin rejected this kind of philistinism, it was because he was aware that the past holds vital resources for the renewal of the present. Those who wipe out the past are in danger of abolishing the future as well. Nobody was more intent on eradicating the past than the Nazis, who would, like the Stalinists, simply scrub from historical record whatever they found inconvenient. The past was as much clay in their hands as the future.True power is sovereignty over what has already happened, not just the capacity to determine what will happen next.

In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin remarked that what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward.

Benjamin was greatly interested in the work of a fellow Jew, Sigmund Freud, who also saw remembrance as the key to emancipation. In Freud’s view, human beings are naturally amnesiac animals. It is forgetfulness that keeps us going. We survive only by repressing a great deal of unpleasant material from our past. For Freud, it is oblivion that is natural to us. Remembering is just forgetting to forget. It can be an extraordinarily painful process, which is one reason why we tend to avoid it.”

walterbenjamin I dont know if Terry Eagleton is stealing from me but this is what I said virtually verbatim - Reinventing the Past with Sigmund Freud. But instead of redeeming the past people live with an utopian view of personal and national history. People aspire to be as good as the past generation which is a deliberate lie. They then project another utopia into the future. This deprives the past suffering of redemption and meaning and justifies the present evil by the future utopian dividend. The only moral stand is to be sober and truthful about the past and give meaning to the past by our actions in the now! Incidentally this was the life’s motto and the direction of the work by Gershom Sholem who was the closest friend of Walter Benjamin.