(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

BENJAMIN’S POLITICS OF REMEMBRANCE
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does not mean that the image of the past is merely political, nor that it is
fatally dependent on the interests of the present. It is, by contrast, based
on what Benjamin describes as “eine geheime Verabredung zwischen den
gewesenen Geschlechtern und unserem” (GS I.2:694; “a secret agreement
between past generations and the present one,” SW 4:390), according
to which the latter, instead of freely inventing the image of the past,
is obliged to respond to the (utopian) claims of the former. This figure of
“a secret agreement” is, I believe, meant as a metaphor of the particular
responsibility from which the practice of remembrance originates, that is,
the moral and political responsiveness toward the past that is demanded
from those who remember, and without which their image of the past
cannot be truthful. Although Benjamin’s historical materialist thus actively
construes the image of the past, he does not do so arbitrarily, for in it he
seeks to respect the memory of preceding generations.
The Politics of Remembrance:
The Dialectical Image as the Image of Memory
It is impossible to understand Benjamin’s concept of history without taking
into consideration his attempt, in Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project,
1927–40), to concretize and apply it to the history of nineteenth-century
Paris. Here Benjamin defines what in his theses he calls the “wahre Bild der
Vergangenheit” (GS I.2:695; “true image of the past,” SW 4:390) as a dialectical
image bringing together the demands of both the present and the
past. The dialectical image emerges in what he calls “das Jetzt einer bestimmten
Erkennbarkeit” (“the now of a particular recognizability,” N3,1), when
the present suddenly recognizes itself in the past, identifying with the suffering
of preceding generations and responding to their (utopian) claims.
The image is dialectical in that it not only testifies to an affinity, but also to
a discrepancy or an “entstellte Ähnlichkeit” (GS II.1:314; “displaced similarity,”
SW 2:240 [trans. modified]) between the past and the present. 11
More specifically, the image shows how the utopian dreams of preceding
generations have remained unfulfilled, or have even transformed into outright
nightmares in the present. The dialectical image, for example, reveals
how the nineteenth-century dream of technology’s making the inexhaustible
sources of nature available for human consumption has, a century later,
turned into the nightmare of a war machine consuming humanity instead.
In Benjamin’s view, this later betrayal of technology forms part of the
objective image of the past. The dialectical image thus juxtaposes different
moments of history that, because of an displaced similarity, together form
a critical constellation that calls into question the prevailing conceptions of
history and the totalitarian politics they support.
In her groundbreaking study of the Passagen-Werk, Susan Buck-
Morss argues that the notion of the dialectical image can be understood