One time traverses another

• My wing is ready to fly
• I would rather turn back
• For had I stayed mortal time
• I would have had little luck.
• --- Gershom Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”

“The chronicler, who recounts events without distinguishing between the great and small, thereby accounts for the truth, that nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history.”

Perhaps there will be another ending to this story

• The analysis of the relationship between law and violence leads to the critique of violence (experienced in the present as the class struggle illuminated by Marx) through the historical gaze, which confronts the overflows and tensions of thought
• See relation to Deleuze’s diagrammatics vs the image of thought and its application in the critique of human rights (WTP), immanence of transgender experience (logic of flows), and the “everything breaking apart” (logic of sense, what happened in ATP)
• There are two ways Benjamin sets up the relationship between the messianic and the sovereign, both heavily tied to his and Scholem’s conception (taken from Lurianic Kabbalah) of divinity as the condition of exile
• One application is in Benjamin’s handling of Zionism / calls for cultural Zionism (wherever we are is our homeland)
• The dialectical rising and falling of violence contra the standstill
• Benjamin anticipates the situation coming to Germany in his analysis of violence. He knows only a genuine confrontation with the roots of violence (in the logic of sovereignty presently manifest as imperialism and capitalism, and he conceives of this in opposition to Social Democratic reformism) can go beyond the vulgar critiques of violence (pacifism, appeal to state authority) and sees the possibility of messianic/divine violence only in the proletarian general strike. He identifies the Spartacist movement as the only historical force capable of redeeming history. Social Democratic reformism operates in a homogeneous and empty time, Marxist class struggle, in its perception of the fundamental antagonisms underlying the mechanism of the state, is capable of a genuine confrontation with and abolition of the state and of violence. Law is not capable of this mediation to the extent it makes its claim within the realm of sovereignty/alienation/capital. These are all LITERALLY the same, not metaphorically. See early Marx on alienated labor (1844 manuscripts)
• Historicism sees empty patterns, historical materialism sees virtual worlds waiting to explode (for the same reason Benjamin sees it as redeeming the dead)
• To Benjamin, the Spartacist victory and the following confrontation with imperialism/colonization/the invocation of emergency powers on a global scale (unfulfilled) would literally represent a fundamental shift in the relationship to time by social organization. This is what Benjamin means in describing the opposition of the form of the state and the immanence of a life.
• This messianism is totally antithetical to millenarianism and emergentism. He is not claiming history simply explodes in the right moment, he is pointing to a really existing militant movement capable of confronting the German Empire (and wider European colonialism). He literally sees this as the metaphysical completion of the struggle of universal emancipation, and the fulfillment of all past struggles for liberation (see the third servile war, namesake of the Spartacists)
• The question is: how do we escape the eternal cycles of political violence and expulsion? The historical gaze is perception of a way out of the knot of competing claims of sovereignty. Its agents are decolonization and militant Marxist labor organizing (in Benjamin’s day, this is an eternal process).
• Understanding the fundamental incapability of positive law and natural law (critique of violence) to facilitate its own goals except by the (at times implicit, at times explicit/violent) invocation of emergency powers
• The antinomianism of happiness as the grounds of history (opposed to the emergency situation as the norm of history). See the progressive loosening of the notion of marriage, legal victory of gay marriage as a part of a process of self nullification of law, not as a fulfillment of positive law but as an exposition of the limits of law confronted through struggle
• “Historicism justifiably culminates in universal history. Nowhere does the materialist writing of history distance itself from it more clearly than in terms of method. The former has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive: it offers a mass of facts, in order to fill up a homogeneous and empty time. The materialist writing of history for its part is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts but also their zero-hour [Stillstellung] Where thinking suddenly halts in a constellation overflowing with tensions, there it yields a shock to the same, through which it crystallizes as a monad. The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour [Stillstellung] of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past. He perceives it, in order to explode a specific epoch out of the homogeneous course of history; thus exploding a specific life out of the epoch, or a specific work out of the life-work. The net gain of this procedure consists of this: that the life-work is preserved and sublated *in *the work, the epoch *in *the life-work, and the entire course of history *in *the epoch. The nourishing fruit of what is historically conceptualized has time as its core, its precious but flavorless seed.”
• The moment of suspension of life at the moment of falling in love
• “Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal nexus of various moments of history. But no state of affairs is, as a cause, already a historical one. It becomes this, posthumously, through eventualities which may be separated from it by millennia. The historian who starts from this, ceases to permit the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers like the beads of a rosary. He records [erfasst] the constellation in which his own epoch comes into contact with that of an earlier one. He thereby establishes a concept of the present as that of the here-and-now, in which splinters of messianic time are shot through.”
• The suspension of the territories of life / standstill as one of the fundamental components of the transgender experience, the realization of a virtual world opposed to the homogeneous and empty time of the cis-sexed body; the inescapability of the biunivocal logic of self as an intervention of the imperative heterogeneity common to every familiar fascist impulse (see Bataille’s psychological structure of fascism). This rupture of life fulfills a truer life slumbering in the wreckage of the self.