Between the Canon and the Messiah by Colby Dickinson

Author:Colby Dickinson [Dickinson, Colby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781441142030
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Fragmentary glimpses of the canonical form

For example, in a note written to himself on the back of a letter dated December 22, 1938, and as what was to be perhaps his last addition to the outline of his monumental Arcades Project (No. 25 in “Materials for the Exposé of 1935”), Benjamin sketched some notes concerning the “ephemeral nature” of the dialectical image, that revolutionary image of the oppressed which had been silenced from history. As a recurring central concept in his work, the dialectical image, or the always singular and yet entirely fluid result of bringing “dialectics to a standstill,” is here shown to be the object of history presented in contrast with the “fixity of the philological object.”67 Certainly not a “timeless truth,” as a universal approach to history might prefer, the dialectical image was a process of awakening to what lies already singularly pronounced within history, not that which is caught up in a progression toward an historically immanent end or goal. As he had already outlined among the cards preserved of the project, the image, in its legibility, in the “now-time” (Jetztzeit) of its recognizability, is present in a singular sense at a particular time only; but this time, as with the relevant image it accompanies, changes for each epoch.68 In this manner, it presents a unique portrait of what it means to do justice to history, from within history, and to seek the fulfillment of time as an infinite process that is ever-changing in each epoch, or for each age. Time, in essence, interrupts history and this becomes his vision of messianic time.69

It is also here that the theological motifs which saturate his work surface again most directly in accordance with his use of the “messianic” as a “weak force” working from within to fulfill or redeem a history yet only presentable in a (renewed, or “more just”) canonical form. Indeed, the weak messianic force is portrayed as a movement to make history theological in some sense, over and beyond its secular form as the “Theological–Political Fragment” had hinted at, to posit history as an act of remembrance and as opposed to science:

What science has “determined” [festgestellt], remembrance [Eingedenken] can modify. Such mindfulness [Eingedenken] can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance [Eingedenken] we have an experience [Erfahrung] that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological [grundsätzlich atheologisch], little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts [theologischen Begriffen].70

Theology, again, must be veiled, or hidden, as the dwarf inside the puppet (to borrow the image of the “magical” chess-playing automaton from Benjamin’s theses on the concept of history), yet its essential importance is not reduced in the least. Consequently, this is also why he is able to state that his thought is “saturated” with theology though his direct engagement with the discipline is often muted.71 This is, of course, how we are also led

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