My Preface *Caution work in Progress

One of you asked me to share my own preface with the rest of you, so here it is.  It's not perfect.  I'm still working on some of the language.  But I think it does most of what I want it to do.  Another round of revisions, or additions will include a bit more about how our own time might be rewarded by a reading of this piece:

Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History was one of the last pieces he composed before his flight from Germany and untimely death in 1940  [He shot himself rather than submit to fascist border guards].  It is also one of his most enduring.  Compared to his other most widely read piece, “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” this eighteen part thesis is positively opaque.  Borrowing from the panoply of the humanities, his explication runs the gamut.  Nietzsche and the Angelus Novus share space with the mechanical Turk.  He moves in multiple tongues, perhaps to impress the readership, but also because his meaning is manifold and eludes easy translation.  This opaque quality of Theses makes the text both maddeningly difficult, and tough to pin down, but like the Grimm Brothers’ Golden Goose, it continues to reward the reader upon each return.

In the eighteen pages (and two addenda) that follow, Walter Benjamin invites readers to question reductive forms of historical narrative.  For Benjamin, history is more than a linear timeline stretching from the past to the present, easily traced into the future.  His arguments offer a challenge to the positivist interpretation of the past forwarded by Germany’s Third Reich.  Philosopher Michael Löwy has suggested that Benjamin’s attempt to wrest the Marxist interpretation of history out of the hands of Stalin and other authoritarian communists constitutes “a fire alarm.”  Maybe so.  In its place, he offers metaphors.  In number 5, time is “a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability.”  In number 6, history is but a memory, “as it flashes in a moment of danger.”  In number 9, it is storm and rubble-heap.  None of these metaphors is settling or easily rendered in realistic detail, let alone words and paragraphs.

Within this murky bog of words and ideas, historians might find liberation.  Benjamin proposes a kind of history that defies simplicity and invites interpretation.  Explaining the past is hardly a science.  It requires care and thought.  It is fragile and rewards reflection.  Most of all, the past looks different each time we gaze back upon it.  Contours that appeared as mere rubble heaps before gain shape and definition.  Faded or inconsequential memories appear much brighter in a moment of danger.  Ideas that once appeared recognizable and all-important fade with the passage of time.  Benjamin’s philosophy of history in an active one, requiring constant engagement and reflection.