INSTANT, and HISTORY, MOMENT, STILL, TIMEJETZTZEIT ( GERMAN )
| ENGLISH | at present, present time, the now time | ||
| FRENCH | à présent, temps actuel |
INSTANT, and HISTORY, MOMENT, STILL, TIME
Although the lexical form of this word existed before Walter Benjamin marked it ( it is found, notably in the work of the Romantic poet Jean Paul ), Benjamin was the writer who made it into both a heuristic and a philosophico-practical concept. It is not easily translatable. Benjamin seemed to have wanted to emphasize the everyday meaning of “the now-time”: its nontechnical, nonscholarly use as a common noun modernized by doubling it up as jetzt ( now, at present ) and Zeit ( time ).
Jetztzeit only appears in Walter Benjamin’s late writings, at the end of the 1930s: in his theses “On the Philosophy of History” ( often simply referred to as the “Theses” ) from 1940, in the notes relating to this text, and in the “Notebook N” of the Passagenwerk [Arcades Project], which was also devoted to “theoretical reflections on knowledge,” in particular critical reflections on the “theory of progress.” So it was in a situation of extreme personal and collective danger, and confronted by the imperious need to rethink a potential struggle against a triumphant fascism, that Benjamin attempted to formulate a concept that gives the “time of the now” ( one possible literal translation of Jetztzeit ) a decisive weight, instead of treating it as a vanishing instant, a sort of unrepresentable tipping point between the past ( which has gone ) and the future ( which does not yet exist ). This perilous situation and this necessary struggle are also two of the main aspects of this concept. Indeed, the Jetztzeit has to enable a construction of history opposed to the “homogenous and empty time” of traditional historiography, particularly that of historicism but also that of the “ideology of progress” denounced in the “Theses.” This critical construction proceeds by quite intense interruptions, breaks, and overlapping between the present and the past, accompanied by modernizing political actions:
Die Geschichte ist Gegenstand einer Konstruktion deren Ort nicht die homogene und leere Zeit sondern die von Jetztzeit erfüllte bildet. So war für Robespierre das antike Rom eine mit Jetztzeit geladene Vergangenheit, die er aus dem Kontinuum der Geschichte heraussprengte.
( History is the object of a construction whose site is not empty, homogenous time, but time filled with “the now.” Thus for Robespierre, ancient Rome was a past laden with “the now,” which blasted out of the continuum of history. )
( Thesis 14 )
The concept thus has two dimensions: a theoretical dimension, the critique of a spatialized, undifferentiated, and indifferent conception of temporal “unfolding,” in which history becomes an infinite accumulation; and a practical and political dimension, interrupting this enumeration, blocking this avalanche ( Thesis 17, Stillstellung, stillstellen [blockage, blocking, halting] ) so as to bring about a knowing transformation of the present, which also transforms the image of the past. So even though Jetztzeit is close, in its brief and radiant temporality, to Augenblick ( another frequent term in the “Theses” and which Benjamin translates as “instant” ), the word no doubt borrows many of the characteristics of kairos: the ideas of a break, of something discontinuous, of a decisive and irreplaceable moment. Benjamin notes in the Arcades Project ( N, 10, 2 ): “Definitions of the fundamental concepts of history: catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity.” The “time of the now” is precious and unique, and therefore fragile, but also sharp and decisive; it creates a new image of the past and establishes a new configuration between the present and the past. Because it enables one to act, to escape, to block the catastrophe—history as it is and as it continues to be—it is, in Benjamin’s theological vocabulary, “a model of messianic time” ( Thesis 18 ), or it even contains “splinters of messianic time” ( Er bergründet so einen Begriff der Gegenwart als der “Jetztzeit,” in welcher Splitter der messianischen eingesprengt sind ) ( “Theses,” App. A ). It is because decisive and just political action, which happens within the time of the now, is urgent, acute, and extremely precarious, since it has to grasp the “right moment” in midflight, that it is comparable to a messianic redemption that no theology of history or any ideology of progress could guarantee.
No temporal determinism can guarantee when Jetztzeit will come to pass either. One of the most difficult aspects of this concept is that it emphasizes the subjective dimension of choice and decision, the dimension precisely of being subjects of historical action, and at the same time it cannot be based on any arbitrary resolution because of the risk of thereby losing its radiant effectiveness. It also necessarily depends on a certain temporal objectivity, on a “historic trace,” a sign ( index ) that does not refer to a mechanical causality between past and present but to a sort of condensation when a forgotten, lost, perhaps repressed moment from the past can suddenly be deciphered and known by the present and in the present: what Benjamin calls “the Now of knowability [das Jetzt der Erkenntbarkeit]” ( Arcades Project, N, 3, 1 ). In order to describe more precisely this convergence of subjective decision and the fabric of objective history, Benjamin will have recourse to different models, in particular the Proustian theory of involuntary memory, the Freudian dialectic between dream and unconscious images and the action of the waking consciousness, and the drifting openness to experience of the Surrealists.
Why, then, did Benjamin not adopt, or even modify, the term kairos but instead coin the term Jetztzeit? Two hypotheses: first, in order to emphasize better the proximity of the concept to Jewish prophetic and messianic traditions ( as opposed to Greek or Christian traditions ); and second, to insist on the fact, in the very structure of the word, that only in the present can true historical knowledge and the time of just political action be united.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benjamin, Andrew, ed. Walter Benjamin and History. London: Continuum, 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. “Anmerkungen” to “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.3: 1222–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972. Translation by Edmund Jephcott and Howard Eiland: “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History.’ ” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 401–11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
. “Das Passagen-Werk: Konvolut N ( Erkenntnistheoretisches; Theorie des Fortschritts ).” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 5.1: 1222–66. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982. Translation by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin: “Convolute N ( On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress ).” In The Arcades Project, 456–88. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1999.
. “Über den Begriff der Geschichte.” In Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann and H. Schweppenhäuser. Vol. 1.2: 691–704. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974. Translation by Harry Zohn: “On the Concept of History.” In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, 389–400. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Gandler, Stefan. Materialismus und Messianismus: zu Walter Benjamins Thesen Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2008.
Mosès, Stéphane. The Angel of History: Rosenzweig, Benjamin, Scholem. Translated by Barbara Harshav. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009.
Piep, Karsten H. “ ‘A Tiger’s Leap Into the Past’: On the ‘Unhistorical,’ the ‘Historical,’ and the ‘Suprahistorical’ in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History.’ ” New German Review 20 ( 2004–5 ): 41–59.
Steinberg, Michael P., ed. Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.
Tiedemann, Rolf. “Historical Materialism or Political Messianism? An Interpretation of the Theses ‘On the Concept of History.’ ” In Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics, edited by Gary Smith, 175–209. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.
. “Jetztzeit.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Edited by Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. 4:648–49. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976.
JUSTICE, JUDGMENT
I. Justice and Equity
“Justice” comes from the Latin justitia, itself derived from jus, which dictionaries translate either as “right” or “justice.” In French, as in Latin, justice refers both to the conformity to the law ( droit; cf. Ger. Gerechtigkeit ); the justice one dispenses ( and which constitutes in modern times one of the three branches of state power, alongside the legislative and the executive ); and the sense of equity, the spirit of justice, which is bound up with morality. See LEX, RIGHT/JUST/GOOD, THEMIS, and FAIR, PRAVDA; and cf. ISTINA, POSTUPOK. On equity, refer more specifically to THEMIS, IV; cf. PHRONÊSIS, PIETAS.
II. Justice and Judgment
The judgment ( Lat. judicium, from judico, judicare ) that justice entails relates to a much broader sphere; it refers as much to the act of judging in the sense of “pronouncing a verdict,” as to that of judging in the sense of “forming an opinion of, appreciating, thinking”—and it also designates the “faculty” described by Kant ( in the second part of the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason ) as the “power to subsume within rules,” which is the source of the latter. The Greek krinein [ϰϱίνειν] does not come from the same root ( krinein comes rather from *krin-ye/o, which means “to separate out, to sift”; we find *krin in the Latin cerno, and in the French critique, critère, crise [crisis] or discernement ), but still contains the same breadth of meanings, which range between the judgment of a court and a logical, aesthetic, or moral judgment.
On logical judgment, see BEGRIFF, CATEGORY, LOGOS, MERKMAL, PROPOSITION, SACHVERHALT, TRUTH; cf. IMPLICATION, INTENTION, PRINCIPLE.
On aesthetic judgment, see AESTHETICS, GOÛT, STANDARD; see also PERCEPTION, REPRÉSENTATION; cf. INGENIUM.