« On the concept of history. Œuvres et inédits 19 » (About the Concept of History), by Walter Benjamin, edited by Gérard Raulet, translated from German by Jacques-Olivier Bégot, under the direction of Michel Métayer, Klincksiek, 400 p., €75.
The French reception of the German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) accelerated with the fall of the USSR, when certain thinkers, such as Jacques Derrida or Daniel Bensaïd, believed they could regenerate Marxism by reimmersing it in a work that sought to give materialism a “messianic” aura drawn from Jewish mysticism. One of Benjamin’s last texts, On the concept of historyof which the Klincksieck editions publish in our language the German philological and critical edition as it was produced by the French Germanist Gérard Raulet in 2010, moreover opens with an allegory likening theology to a hunchbacked dwarf in pulling the strings of “historical materialism” under the table, itself represented as a chess-playing automaton.
In fact, the “Theses on the concept of history” – its other title – articulates, from the pen of an atheist and left-wing thinker, theology and politics in a radical critique of the notion of progress, source according to him of defeats in the face of fascism, the effects of which Benjamin ends up having on his own destiny. However, he refuses to accept that the end of the story remains with the “winners” in the name of an alleged necessity to which he opposes the irruption “messianic” of the revolt of the exploited.
On the concept of history can be considered as a kind of testament left before the tragic suicide of its author at the Spanish border, while trying to flee the Nazi invasion. Because it is undoubtedly the most commented text by Benjamin (who never considered publishing it during his lifetime), a mythology surrounds it, which Gérard Raulet tries to dispel by superimposing the six versions drawn from the archives, none of which can claim, he entrusts to the “World of Books”, to give the ” last word “.
“Aesthetic” gesture
He prefers to spot a “epistemo-critical preface” whose first elaborations date back to 1935. According to him, Benjamin would have built there the theoretical framework of the projects on which he worked in the 1930s and which he could not complete. Condensed in the extreme, the “Theses” are considered by the editor as a kind of gesture ” aesthetic ” infinitely exceeding the content in which its many interpreters seek to freeze it. The tense balance between messianism and Marxism would not necessarily result in a system, and the accent sometimes leans towards one, sometimes towards the other. Traces of tragic events such as the German-Soviet pact of August 1939 can be found there, however (“In an instant when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hopes lie on the ground and aggravate their defeat by betraying their own cause”).
You have 62.91% of this article left to read. The following is for subscribers only.
