L’ écriture photographique de l’ histoire et la remémoration messianique

Abstract

To pull out the messianic from theology and from Marxism. The Messiah revealed by writing represents, at the bottom, a joker of history, or a joke, in the Jewish and desperate sense of the term. The chance that humanity may escape from historical catastrophy and from political cataclysm is unlikely, considering that it consists mostly in a writing of history, which notes the secret traces and tacit or faint signs from the past. To do justice to past is to repeat it, not to rebirth it, but to reiterate it, to make it return in another way by general writing. More than a dissident position in Communism, Benjamin’s thought initiates an heterodoxy that serves to think revolution in another way, from the suspended moment of messianic insurrection.