Except What We Forgot To Do

[lapsedmodernist]

Benjamin constructed a binary of what to do with images from the past that flash up--either they are to be used in the project of revolution
or
they disappear back into the past, forever lost.
that's a false binary. it's diachronic. Benjamin had nothing to say about being trapped in a synchronic moment, like a fly in amber, with images from the past always flashing everywhere like lightnings in the Bermuda triangle. It's a frozen moment, like the anti-Faustian "ah linger on, thou art so fair"

i drink too much, i think too much

Comments

[tomorrow-devil.livejournal.com]

All this with the caveat that my knowledge of Benjamin is pretty brief: So long as Benjamin was speaking more critically that metaphysically, then it seems to me that his recommendation actually assumes that there is only the moment of synchronicity. His prescription for using images as they crop up from the past is, naturally, anti-institutional; doesn't his notion of ideology entail that the past is somehow out of reach, and that any images we may have of it are products of the present?

[lapsedmodernist.livejournal.com]

often it is hard to separate critical from metaphysical with Benjamin...Brecht criticized him for being too into astrology and mysticism and stuff like that. sure, one can argue that there is only one synchronic moment, that would be Benjamin's "moment of danger" but the past is not inherently out of reach for him, I don't think--it is presented as being different from the present, and containing the possibility of engagement with the present in a constructuve fashion, or being "lost"...in a kind of sociologically-metaphysical way, I think.
Having said that, the exercise of applying 20th-century philisophy to one's personal problems while drunk often results in epistemological nonsense.