I am, today, still a socialist. I write “still” because we have all encountered many commentaries on the supposed death of socialism. Over and over again throughout the 1990s we heard that the dream of a redeemed humanity, one that finally realizes the truth of its freedom in democratic control over the means of life and of death, had itself died. There is an obvious irony here in what it means to condemn a dream to death. After all, isn’t a dream exactly what cannot be killed off because it does not have actual existence? The death of the dream, at least on the part of those determined to put it to death, clearly has an implicit, if not explicit, agenda to marginalize those who still identify themselves as socialists and as dreamers.
Particularly after 9/11, dreamers and idealists were condemned as being hopelessly out of touch with reality. The supposed reality of the post-9/11 world is one in which “we” are pitted against “them” and have to take all the steps “we” need to make sure that “we” contain “them” before “they” obliterate “us.” But is this reality, or itself just a myth? Have we not heard over and over again about this reality from the Cold War until the present? Indeed, it is precisely the simple outlines of this recurring claim that this is a reality that Walter Benjamin would have called myth in the negative sense in which he used the word: to denote the fate of an eternal recurrence that wipes out the possibility of any meaningful moral agency where we have no choice but to go after “them” because this is the way the world must be. But Benjamin teaches us there is also, in even the most brutal reality, a dialectical opening that can illuminate another way of being in the world that allows us at least to have a glimpse of what a redeemed world might be like and, perhaps more importantly, what is our responsibility to those who have lived and died for it. As Benjamin reminds us:
Fate is the guilt context of the living. It corresponds to the natural condition of the living, that illusion not yet wholly dispelled from which man is so far removed that, under its rule, he was never wholly immersed in it, but only invisible in his best part. It is not, therefore, really man who has a fate; rather, the subject of fate is indeterminable.... For fateful moments only exist in bad novels.1
Of course, the story of how we are fated to live in a post-9/11 world in which violence and war are inevitable counterparts of each other does not deny the terrible suffering of those who encounter the wrath of these two antagonisms. So many people have died in the wake of this needless suffering: thousands in the initial attacks and even more on both sides in the ongoing war in Iraq and in Afghanistan. But, what is particularly shameful, and perhaps dialectically startling, are the moments when people feel that there is seemingly no way out of the nightmare of advanced capitalism and its hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Even faith is not beyond of the reach of this nightmare, such as when we saw several young people become suicide bombers in England—something that perhaps only could be understood as a scene in a bad novel.
Expanding on this idea of living in a world that phantasmagorically seems to swallow up our deepest dreams of freedom in various capitalist nightmares of despair we can look to South Africa for further harrowing images of suffering that confront us with the brutal reality of life under apartheid. Many of those images have been kept alive in museums that have been built in the new South Africa. I am going to speak of only two such images, which in the language of Walter Benjamin I hope will give us the sort of dialectical jolt that might move us further into awakening and out of the nightmare-like slumber at hand.
First, there is a famous photograph taken during the Soweto uprising in which thousands upon thousands of children rebelled against being taught in what they saw as the language of the oppressor: Afrikaans. They were indeed children. Famously, the police gave no heed to that reality and shot into the crowd, leaving hundreds dead, more injured, and many who were never seen again after that tragic day. In a famous photo a young man, perhaps in his early teens, is carrying the dead, or dying, body of Hector Petersen. A young woman is running by his side. On both faces is a look of absolute horror. To this day, we do not know where that young man is, nor do we know where the young woman by his side is. What we have of these two children is this moment into which they have been forever frozen: a moment in which a child, rather than simply flee to save himself, picks up his dead or dying friend with the hope of saving him, or at least salvaging his then dead body from further brutalization by the police.
This image undoubtedly represents an act of salvation, of the young boy and girl salvaging what they can of what remained of Hector Petersen. Their companion is with them—grieving and terror-stricken—but with them still. This photograph can help us understand what Walter Benjamin means by a dialectical image. In the background we can see the township and the children who are rebelling against their oppressors. But they are running toward us. Who is this “us?” It is a generation that is beyond temporalization: a constellation of past, present, and future generations that are all being called to in equal force. As Walter Benjamin explains in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again. “The truth will not run away from us”: in the historical outlook of historicism these words of Gottfried Keller mark the exact point where historical materialism cuts through historicism. For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present, as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth).2
If Benjamin teaches us anything, then we should always remember that it is not a coincidence that “history” is best told in images. From the standpoint of those who had to endure apartheid such a lived brutality could be nothing other than senseless suffering. To give it meaning as a significant form of human social organization would already be a betrayal of those who had to live under its brutal disregard of their humanity.
As Benjamin also writes, “A dialectical image flashes up at a moment of danger,”3 but it also illuminates a possible beyond. In that “possible beyond” we hear the call to justice of those children who had the daring and courage to shout out at their oppressors what their humanity demanded: “Justice! Noting more and nothing less.” But we do not see a “risk manager” in this photograph. We see a young boy and girl, even in their terror, cherishing the body of their fallen comrade, and yet they are but children themselves. But we know that they not only saw something that took them out to the streets that day—perhaps a hope for a redeemed world beyond apartheid—but showed in their act of refusing to abandon Hector Petersen the depths of a humanity that would not bow down before the bullets and simply flee. They will never be gone to history, in Benjamin’s sense, if we remember them. But, we can only remember them if we allow ourselves to see them. It is up to us to do it.
This is Benjamin’s fundamental point when he calls us to anamnestic solidarity. As Benjamin writes:
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 has preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which that past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that.4
What does it mean to “fan the spark of hope”5 in the past if at the same time it demands that we look and force ourselves to see the terrible suffering inscribed forever on those children’s faces as they confront the unbearable reality that another child has died, and that no matter what they do they will not be able to save him? For Benjamin, in this “call” we are made to face the figure of the one who refuses to stand still before the dialectical image. It is this call that, despite all odds, demands that we live up to such an image, one archetype of many, giving us a glimpse of the anamnestic solidarity with the dead we must bring into our own lives.
The dialectical image blows apart messages of good cheer and at the same time keeps open forms of experience in Benjamin’s unique use of the word Erfahrung, which makes accessible the possibility of self-reflective passage through myth and with it the moral agency that insists such an experience is possible. In German the title of Benjamin’s Arcades Project is Passagen-Werk, which we can at least translate as working through the passages of both history and myth. Thus, although Benjamin is critical of myth when it tempor-alizes the self as inevitably teaching a lesson that things will always be as they are now, this rebellion against historical compulsion still seeks to keep alive a horizon that does not relinquish the potential of myth to point to a different form of knowledge of the world around us. This passageway, and the rights of passage, between dreamful sleep and awakening is a phatasmagoric zone for Benjamin that in a deep sense breaks apart myth by its own means and thus salvages from it the possibility of a redeemed world of humanity despite our nightmarish surroundings. This fidelity before the threshold of another world that might yet be shows us that this passageway is open before us if we allow ourselves to move through mythical constraints so as to find the future under the ultimate myth of advanced capitalism, claiming that there is no truly different future but only the forever new that displaces one commodity for another commodity that is new only insofar as it is the same: a commodity.
Against what Benjamin thinks of as tired and fated truth he takes us through a passageway in which we can still be exposed to the Wahrtraum. Literally translated this word means “true dream,” or to dream of what is true in the promise of the dialectical image itself: a humanity worthy of its own name. What is the trueness of the dream? How can a dream be true? It is true to what humanity might yet be when it is salvaged from the sameness of advanced capitalism. But we do not have to wait for that truth because, as we saw in the image of the young woman who runs away with the dead body of Hector Petersen, we have already glimpsed what it means to be a true human being (true here in the sense that it is true to an ideal that refuses to give in to the world-weariness of inaction).
In his endless effort to show us the reworking of symbols and allegory, we can still find a passageway that lights up the “tireless leap of action” Benjamin forever held onto as the truth of revolutionary courage. We find that courage in the act of the young man and woman. Yes, it is true that Benjamin tells us that the messiah might enter time at any minute. But, we are not fated to remain and wait as Benjamin tells us, “The Messiah comes not only as the redeemer, he comes as the subduer of antichrist. Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”6 There is a sense in which we, the next generation with the weak messianic power, can subdue the antichrist. And it is only we who can do it. Benjamin never ceased calling us to action in the name of justice. As he tells us, “The past carries with it a temporal index by which it referred to redemption.”7 Perhaps the antichrist is our stillness before the dialectical image. For those of us in the United States, that we must subdue the antichrist should ring true indeed. For this antichrist comes very close to what Kant would have called the absolutely morally unfettered will, the Willkur, which can be expressed to us in the endless longing of the consumer for the false promises of empire that suggest we, and only we, are the ones, the chosen ones, who can drive Hummers.
But Benjamin’s anamnestic solidarity itself keeps open the passageway between the living and the dead, but not in the historicist sense that we in any way belie the suffering of those who died by giving it a meaning as it were itself part of a context that already fated people to do what they did. We know that young man and woman as those who broke with apartheid and all of its claims upon them in that moment in which they are captured forever; we must heed their demand on us that we remain faithful to our own weak messianic power as the next generation is called to the struggle for a just world. Seeing the young man and woman gives us an image; heeding their call makes it dialectical.
In another photograph from South Africa, one of many that haunt me, a mother is speaking to the charred remains of her son. She is waving her hands gently over the body, coming as close as she can to stroking those charred remains. She cannot touch these remains, otherwise the body will dissolve. And she seeks to take her child home to the ancestors: the one place where this young man can finally rest in peace. Khulumani, an organization in South Africa, dedicates itself to those who continue to seek out the dead and the missing, and who by so doing keep open what Benjamin would call a passageway between the dead and the living. It is an ongoing work that is itself a remembrance of the horror under which so many died and a constant reminder of the ever-pressing danger which we are called to guard against. In a deep sense, the dead are allowed to speak to us.
Alongside the charred remains of the lost son is an AK-47 which for so many young people of my generation, and still in the world today, remains a symbol of empowerment even if it can only deliver vengeance. Again, we see the dialectical image before us in the sense Benjamin suggests to us. It is a deep ambiguity, this gun, because it represented, or became a kind of symbol loaded with the myth of, liberation, precisely in Benjamin’s sense of the negative aspect of myth. In this figure liberation is reduced to a tragic necessity of violence—a tragic necessity that Benjamin believed in some circumstances we might be called to but may itself turn would-be liberators into shadows. In the movie Lord of War, a film in the “present,” we also see young children proudly holding that same gun, which is now a popular item often sold by gunrunners. Benjamin teaches us how to unpack this simple thing, this gun, that promises what it itself cannot deliver, but only if we allegorize it through the lens of the despair that inheres in the belief that only in violence can we hope to save the dream of the better world.
Indeed, the very figure of the suicide bomber can be read as the figure who no longer believes that there can be meaningful action that could actually change the world. And, yet, still the call to act is necessary. In a deep sense, suicide bombing carries within it the recognition that any kind of killing must exact its retribution. But we are far here from the dream of armed struggle that could deliver us from the nightmare world of colonialism and, of course, advanced capitalism. The suicide bomber, in a profound sense, figures the moral basis for action as part of how we shape who we are as freedom fighters in the world (to use an old-fashioned phrase). The suicide bomber figures the moral basis for action precisely in the implicit acceptance of retribution as the result of killing. Suicide bombing is in a sense a last act, a last gasp that seeks to break out of the enclosure of a suffocating reality that buries the weak messianic power within us by turning us to death. Such a last gasp is the acceptance that to die is better than to live cut off from what is most meaningful in a human life: to transform ourselves together into who we might be in a better world, which would not silence the heed to the call of justice. It is the call to justice that echoes in the shattering blast of the suicide bomber that reminds us what was sought after was really a better world and not the obliteration of oneself in the fate turned character of killing.
This ethical basis for action was often lost in some of the Marxist-Leninist groups and parties, turning it into either a strategic necessity or the scientifically mandated end of capitalism. I was in many of those Marxist-Leninist groups in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and tried my best to defend then what I am defending here: the idea that socialism, as a better way of living together because it insists on mutual respect and responsibility for the world we make together, is always with each one of us now as a call to make ourselves the kind of people who in day-to-day actions in the present already promise the future. I know that may sound abstract. In my days as a union organizer—and a feminist union organizer at that—we did, of course, fight to bring an actual unions into the workplace. But we also did so by working together in union now. This being together “in union” was to be an experience in Benjamin’s sense of the word Erfahrung.
Benjamin in his first published essay on experience writes against the so-called commonsense notion of experience. He writes:
We, however, know something different, which experience can neither give to us or take away: that truth exists, even if all previous thought has been an error. Or: that fidelity shall be maintained, even if no one has done so yet. Such will cannot be taken from us by experience. Yet—are our elders, with their tired gestures and their superior hopelessness, right about one thing—namely, that what we experience will be sorrowful and that only in the inexperienceable can courage, hope, and meaning be given foundation? Then the spirit would be free. But again and again life would drag it down because life, the sum of experience, would be without solace.8
Benjamin is ironically commenting on how experience that points to hopelessness can never ground itself in the very idea of itself because experience is something we are always bringing into being. To return to my example about being in union, we were bringing into our day-to-day lives the experience of what, in Benjamin’s sense, had been inexperienceable in the brutal workplaces where I organized: solidarity, comfort, solace, and support for each other in all of the actions we undertook together. It is not just that Lenin had it exactly wrong when he said the end justifies the means—although, of course, I believe he did—it is that the struggle for a better world is constantly bringing into our experience not only how we might shape that world, or what that world would look like, but how we ourselves become different as we try to actualize ethical relationships among ourselves. Sadly, it is only through bringing that experience into existence together, as so many of us did in the 1960s and 1970s, that we can retain a memory of different forms of solidarity and support: a memory that points us toward the future that many young people who do not have that “experience” refuse to struggle with today and see as beyond their reach. Ironically, it is the young now who before their time are world-weary, telling us that the fate of the world is such that the longing for socialism can only be utopian.
In his book Specters of Marx, Jacques Derrida argues that all of the metanarratives of “the end” run afoul of the mistake that inheres in Hegelian philosophical history. We read back the institutional structure of European modernity into all previous stages of history as if they were just incomplete precursors of it. Clearly, this kind of argumentation is circular at best and a self-congratulatory myth, in Benjamin’s sense, at worst. For Benjamin, myth inheres in the sedimentation of what is our actual and ever-changing history in which all of the small challenges and resistances go unnoticed with the story of the victor claiming itself as truth. Derrida stands with Benjamin in that there is an undeconstructable experience of what he calls an “experience of the impossible” which marks the limits of history to finalize itself in the self-proclaimed inevitability of advanced capitalism as the only meaningful form of social organization. Derrida and Benjamin are using the word experience in a similar, if not identical, manner. But what both definitions of experience share is that any attempt to fully describe experience fails because it always points beyond itself to its own limit and how that limit opens up the space of the beyond.
In my book The Philosophy of the Limit, I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit to bring out this integral connection between Benjamin’s early writing on experience and Derrida’s experience of the impossible. To quote Derrida:
Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction, what remains undeconstructable as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice—which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights—and an idea of democracy—which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today [permit me to refer here to “force of Law” and The Other Heading].9
For Derrida, it is only in this experience of the impossible limit that keeps the beyond, the beyond and the other as the other so that we can ethically respect and, indeed, heed the coming of the other and the other’s demand on us. For Derrida, this “coming of the other” as the event, as the one who demands our hospitality, is a messianism without the messiah. If we are open to it then it can always pull us out of the supposed world of day-to-day experiences. An event for Derrida is only possible if it is indeed impossible in the commonsense notion of experience that Benjamin speaks of in his early essay. That world-weary experience predicts that everything will have to continue as it is now, but an event that could be described and predicted in all of its outlines would not be an event.
In 1992, I was writing against deconstructionists who interpreted Derrida’s experience of the impossible as leaving us with another version of waiting for God to save us, or for a passivity before what might call us if we were to wait in silence. This reading of Derrida relies on his supposed alliance with Heideggerian pessimism, where we are fated to wait for God to save us. I have always read Derrida against this pessimism. Derrida tells us again and again that ultimately we have a promise to the other and that as a promise we must seek its fulfillment. Toward the end of his life, Derrida argued that this promise actually calls us to institutional action now, or what he calls “the demand of negotiation.” This demand for negotiation and institutionalization cannot, then, remain content with the “yes, yes” of a Nietzschean abstract affirmation. So, one must be patient but also organized. To quote Derrida:
That is to say that in its self institutionalization in its very success threatens the movement of unconditional affirmation. And yet this needs to happen, for if the affirmation were content—how shall I say it—to wash its hands of the institution in order to remain at a distance, in order to say “I affirm, and then the rest is of no interest to me, the institution does not interest me ... let the others take care of that,” then the affirmation would deny itself.10
In a deep sense then the ethical call of this other demands that we risk “dirtying our hands.” We risk knowing that any attempt to act in union might turn against itself precisely because we are struggling to move experience beyond itself as we shape a different way of being together. Although I cannot repeat that argument here, Derrida’s experience of the impossible should never be read as knowledge of what is impossible, including the big dreams of socialism and justice. Indeed, the opposite is the case. Precisely because we cannot know what is impossible, precisely because every experience points beyond itself to its limit—which both defines the experience and yet marks it as limited—we are left with our own responsibility in whatever context we are in to struggle for justice. Derrida tried to make more and more explicit in his later writings that in the call for infinite responsibility to the other to this beyond we are never “off the hook” just because we can say it is no longer possible for us to live differently or for us to live well.
To return to Benjamin’s essay on “Fate and Character,” Benjamin reminds us that we cannot by definition be fated to have a particular character, nor can any previously ordained character be found to be the basis of our suffering. In the earlier quotation from Benjamin, he writes that “fate is the guilt context of the living” and he also reminds us that in notions of our fate what is best in us—our capacity for moral and ethical action—remains invisible. For Benjamin, our character is ultimately ethical, and in this of course he follows Immanuel Kant. But for our purposes Benjamin points to the ethical interests of those who are among the oppressors—all who live with all of the privileges of empire and the spoils of racism—in finding in themselves a source of responsibility that is not self-punishing but unfolds from an aspiration to be worthy of happiness.
To take us back to the example of Africa, Wole Soyinka argues that the beneficiaries of colonialism have a reason for accepting, and indeed demanding, of themselves reparations to all of the enslaved in Africa and, of course, those who were brought to the “new world.” In broad brush strokes, Soyinka’s argument was directed at a Truth and Reconciliation process, such as the one that was realized in South Africa, demanding it hold on to an idea of justice. Simply put, there can be no reconciliation without justice. But, I am in agreement with Soyinka that the challenge of South Africa is to be found in this struggle for justice, and that what justice demands—if it is not to be vengeance—has yet to be adequately addressed. But I want to return to the point by Benjamin which helps us to understand the profundity for each one of us as an individual of what it might mean to free ourselves from our so-called fated position as the beneficiaries of colonialism.
Instead, for Derrida the call for mourning and respect for what has gone before—and therefore constitutes us from within a relationality of debt—is ultimately inseparable from our mourning for actual ghosts: the ones who have gone before us, the ones who have suffered and died so that we may be. To quote Derrida again:
And all the grave stakes we have just named in a few words would come down to the question of what one understands, with Marx and after Marx, by effectivity, effect, operativity, work, labor [Wirklichkeit, Wirkung, work, operation], living work in their supposed opposition to the spectral logic that also governs the effects of virtuality, of simulacrum, of “mourning work,” of ghost, revenant, and so forth. And of the justice that is their due.... Inscribing the possibility of the reference to the other, and thus of radical alterity and heterogeneity, of différance, of technicity, and of ideality in the very event of presence, in the presence of the present that it dis-joins a priori in order to make it possible [thus impossible in its identity or its contemporaneity with itself], it does not deprive itself of the means with which to take into account, or to render an account of, the effects of ghosts, of simulacra, of “synthetic images,” or even, to put it in terms of the Marxist code, of ideologems, even if these take the novel forms to which modern technology will have given rise.11
There is a certain sense in which this openness to the other can keep us from bowing down to our fate as a colonizer: the privileged class who has joined the so-called victors of history. There is no apology for suffering except the action of redemption. As we have seen in Derrida, we must negotiate and pay back what can never be paid. Soyinka invites us all, as a hypothetical experiment in the imagination, to ask ourselves why there should not be a general levy imposed for such reconciliation, and defended in terms of reparations on the population of South Africa as part of their own struggle to free themselves from the imposed fate of the inevitable oppressor of the black population. To quote Soyinka:
If, however, this attribution of self-redeeming possibilities within the psychology of guilt remains within the utopian imagination, and some external prodding proved necessary, the initiative could be taken up by someone of the non-establishment stature of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The respected cleric and mediator mounts his pulpit one day and addresses his compatriots on that very theme: “White brothers and sisters in the Lord, you have sinned, but we are willing to forgive. The scripture warns us that the wages of sin are death but, in your case, they seem to be wealth. If therefore you choose to shed a little of that sinful wealth as a first step to atonement . . . etc. etc.12
Benjamin would argue against the use of religious language of sin and atonement here and insist instead on the self-redeeming possibilities inherent in the unknowability of character, as we might yet become men and women of justice and begin to carve out a new pathway—one which would include the freedom that inheres not only in our acceptance but in our call for reparations for African slaves more generally. Soyinka is actually a part of a movement calling for reparations to Africa, but I am not speaking here about the programmatic efforts to make such a demand a reality. I want to stay with Benjamin’s point about the self-redeeming possibilities of a character that does not submit to its fate to live out its life unjustly. I believe it is the insight of Benjamin that led Derrida to begin his book with the question: what does it finally mean to learn to live (and I would add “well”)? If Benjamin teaches us anything, then it is that we cannot learn what it means to live well once and for all but we can seek to live up to its call and, indeed, do so in the name of our own freedom as well as that of others.
Benjamin’s essay writes against the kind of discursive fate that gets frozen into bad idealizations of human nature. We all know of these static representations. For example, some say we are all utility maximizers and we can be no other way in this world. Or, we are all risk managers, and therefore incapable of something like true courage. But, these assumptions should be seen for what they are: myths propping up what we are fated to be in unjust world. And, yet, we know that millions upon millions of people in the twentieth century alone showed the falsity of such characterizations of fated nature by giving their lives for the fight for socialism. South Africa has become both a symbol and an allegory for many in the world today because the victorious struggle against apartheid ultimately took place in negotiations rather than through armed revolution that would have led to some system of government and law capitulating to the other in annihilation. In a certain sense the victory over apartheid is one of the most notable institutional state victories of a party that was once firmly committed to socialism. But the negotiations of course were only made feasible by wave after wave of rebellion and resistance as each next generation took on its own struggle against apartheid long after the leaders of the ANC (African National Congress) were in jail and the party in exile. Certainly, the ANC has wavered in its commitment, and some critics would argue capitulated to the demands of advanced capitalism. But, Benjamin and Derrida are suggesting to us that there is no end to what South Africa can become because of some metanarrative that dooms it in advance: to be eaten up by the machinery of capitalism.
Ironically, there is an ethical warning in Derrida about what it means to ascribe to such metanarratives because they allow us to get ourselves off the hook and ultimately fail to see that we are submitting to a fate as if it were necessary when our very submission was part of what it makes it seem as if it were inevitable. We may not be able to tell grand stories that will guarantee the ultimate success of socialism, but it is precisely because we cannot tell such grand stories that doom it to failure that leaves it up to us to make the “truth” of the ideal of socialism something that cannot be beaten out of this world. It is indeed up to us, and Benjamin gives us a complex answer as to why we might want to take up the challenge to live our lives in accordance with the call of justice rather than to submit to the fate of our utility-maximizing self-interest. For, it is in this struggle that we find our freedom, precisely because freedom is never something that is just there but in the slow work of forming a character that knows itself only in its endless effort to be other than its so-called fate. In this struggle we find our dignity; it is what we owe to ourselves and the dead.
Walter Benjamin, “Fate and Character,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, 308 (New York: Schocken Books, 1978).
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Walter Benjamin Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arednt, 255 (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255.
Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254.
Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), 1–5.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 59.
Jacques Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews, 1971–2001, trans. and ed. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Standford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 25.
Derrida, Specters of Marx, 75.
Wole Soyinka, The Burden of Memory, the Muse of Forgiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25–26.