> > Walter Benjamin is the only Marxist intellectual whose writings may
>be described as millenarian in an authentic sense.
>
>Yoshie
>
>What about Ernst Bloch? --jks
I've only read the third volume of _The Principle of Hope_. Bloch & Benjamin are kindred spirits in their passionate love of collecting citations (their writings manifest something like a bookish child's delight in copying out words, phrases, sentences that speak to him), but they seem to highlight contrasting attitudes toward the concept of Time.
Bloch attempts to unearth "dreams of a better life" buried in fragments of culture -- from fairy tales to religious mysteries, from architecture to utopian writings. Everywhere he sees unrealized possibilities for an emancipated future in the ruined wishes of the past and present:
***** No dreaming may stand still, this does no good. But if it becomes forward dreaming, then its matter looks consuming in a quite different way. Even the weary, weakening quality that can be characteristic of mere longing then disappears; on the contrary, longing now shows what it can really do. Men have always been expected to cut their coat according to their cloth, they learnt to do so, but their wishes and dreams did not comply. Here almost all men are future, rise above the life that has been granted them. (Bloch, _The Principle of Hope_ vol.3, p. 1365) *****
Through his writing, Bloch seeks to make "mere longing" into "forward dreaming." The Future is his guiding idea.
Benjamin is more preoccupied than Bloch with the theme of redemption. The Past has a claim upon us, says Benjamin:
***** The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a _weak_ Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that. (Benjamin, _Illuminations_, p.254) *****
How are we to redeem the claim made upon us by the Past? By "bring[ing] about a real state of emergency," or by making "the continuum of history explode" (Benjamin, pp. 257, 261) That, Benjamin says, is the duty of historical materialists, both as revolutionaries and writers of history. "A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop" (Benjamin, p. 262). In other words, the Past asks us to bring the Present to an End, so we may start "a new calendar" (Benjamin, p. 261).
And there is a third take on how we live Time, but this time from a truly religious man:
***** We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never do so. (Pascal, _Pensees_). *****
Here, Pascal gives us an image of how capital consumes the present through its ceaseless drive toward futures and innovations while the working class are trapped in debilitating nostalgia in our attempt to escape the present that hurts (though Pascal didn't mean to say any such thing).
Any other interesting citations about Time? I'm fond of collecting citations, like Bloch and Benjamin.
Yoshie