Download The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, by Matthias Fritsch PDF
By Matthias Fritsch
Rereading Marx via Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, The Promise of reminiscence makes an attempt to set up a philosophy of liberation. Matthias Fritsch explores how thoughts of injustice relate to the guarantees of justice that democratic societies have inherited from the Enlightenment. targeting the Marxist promise for a classless society, because it features a political promise whose institutionalization resulted in totalitarian results, Fritsch argues that either stories and can provide, if taken by way of themselves, are one-sided and probably justify violence in the event that they don't consider the implicit relation among them. He examines Benjamin’s reinterpretation of Marxism after the discontentment of the Russian and German revolutions and Derrida’s “messianic” inheritance of Marx after the breakdown of the Soviet Union. The ebook additionally contributes to modern political philosophy via referring to Marxist social objectives and German severe conception to debates approximately deconstructive ethics and politics.
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Extra info for The Promise of Memory: History and Politics in Marx, Benjamin, and Derrida
Example text
Before Marx’s disillusionment, in 1852, with an impending proletarian revolution, he had concerned himself in a newspaper article with the memory of the ‘victims’ (Opfer)—a word he, but not Benjamin, is willing to use, at least in minor texts14—of the 1848 June insurrection in Paris. 17 To bind the laurel wreath, sign of victory, around the dead victims of emancipatory struggles: This is how Marx envisions the work of mourning of those who continue the struggle. Taking over the struggle from those who can continue it no longer is perhaps the best way to both remember them and to assume their promise for emancipation.
40 As this brief excursus makes clear, Benjamin’s preoccupation with the historicity of historiography, and the relation to the past in general, is motivated by political concerns that do not harmonize with Gadamer’s classicism. This is, if you wish, the epistemological background to Benjamin’s political polemic against “historians who wish to relive an era” by “blotting out everything they know about the later course of history” (Thesis VII). For by denying the dialectical interplay of past and present, and by trying to understand historical events from the perspective of the actors, Benjamin argues, these 30 THE PROMISE OF MEMO RY “objective” historians will inevitably side with, or “empathize” (einfühlen) with, the victors of history.
For Benjamin’s relation to Marx is situated within these consequences and unintelligible without reference to them. I have already remarked that Benjamin encountered Marxism mostly in the form of the German Social Democrats, and he often—in 22 THE PROMISE OF MEMO RY unorthodox formulations that in turn cannot be equated or reconciled with the ‘classical’ Marxist theory—defended Marx against this party’s interpretations, premised on the growing disjuncture between classical Marxism and the political practice of Social Democracy.