Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin and the Spectre of the Messianic. Is there a Materialist Theory of Time?

In the light of the current crisis of capitalism, the utopian search for a new place outside of capitalism has gained urgency once again. Instead of raising the inevitable question of alternatives, my paper takes a step back.[1] I would like to suggest that if today we are to ask the question of a non-capitalist future, we also have to rethink our concepts of time, history and temporality.

In Marx, we can detect at least two dimensions of temporality: a closed time of capitalism and a revolutionary opening-up of historical time. This duality is doubled and twisted in itself: it can be addressed in terms of the historical process within time, that is to say, political struggles, social relations and dynamic productivity, as well as in terms of time itself as a repetitive, linear or homogenous time of capital. The same applies to the prognosticated end of capitalism: whereas for orthodox Marxism history was immanently driven by “objective” historical forces towards its communist telos (the classless society) within history, critical Marxism attempts an anti-teleological, utopian or messianic blast of the horizon of history itself.

In my paper I will concentrate on the latter aspect and ask the question of how capitalist history and its intrinsic temporal structure can be criticized from a materialist point of view. Indeed, if the proverbial saying ‘time is money’ is to be taken literally rather than merely proverbially, we have to look closer at the inner connection of capital and its temporal structure. Capital, as Marx famously claimed, is not simply an object but a dynamic social relation made of congealed, abstract human labour. If the latter proceeds as a homogeneous, empty and repetitive time, I argue that a materialist subtraction of capitalism cannot merely rely on traditional concepts of temporality such as absolute Newtonian, relativist Aristotelian, or transcendental Kantian time. Since orthodox Marxism was constructed along a scientific-economist concept of time broadly based on Newtonian physics and Aristotelian ontology, it retrospectively might not be surprising that its revolutionary thought remained within the boundaries of an objectivist linear, evolutionist or historicist framework. To sketch an alternative model of time, my paper is threefold:

Firstly, I will refer to the messianic Marxism of Walter Benjamin and its readings by Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Derrida. As we shall see, in Benjamin’s famous last theses On the Concept of History and its materialist inversion of the Jewish idea of the messianic we can find grounds for a non-linear, non-abstract and fulfilled time blasting off the linear temporality of capital-time.

Secondly, I propose some preliminary clarifications concerning our terminology. Starting with a differentiation between the secular idea of Utopia and the theological motif of the messianic, I trace back some key elements of the messianic idea to its origins in Saint Paul, Judaism, and Hellenism. Then, with the help of Giorgio Agamben’s reading of the messianic idea in Saint Paul, I will try to clarify a common confusion concerning the theological concepts of the messianic, the prophetic and the apocalyptic.

Thirdly, I will argue for a political reading of the messianic and a non-religious, ultimately atheist understanding of messianic time. If the messianic is to be taken politically we have also to rethink the temporal structure of the messianic Event in terms of a non-eschatological or non-dualistic mode of time. Finally, I aim to lay bare the materialist kernel of the messianic which is also inherited by Marx and has strictly to be differentiated from common places such as ‘Marxism/Communism is a kind of a secularized eschatological religion’ (see e.g. Karl Löwith). Rather, one could argue with reference to Slavoj Zizek, it is monotheist (here: Judeo-Christian) theology itself which reveals a materialist kernel at a certain point.

1. Marx with Benjamin – or, what is messianic Marxism?

Let me start with one of the most famous Marx quotations which then became the basic theorem of historical materialism.

“At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production […]. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution.”
Karl Marx: Preface of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859)

Orthodox historical materialism conceived of this inherent antagonism in capitalism famously in terms of the dialectic of the (dynamic) productive forces and the (static) social relations of production; the Second International’s wager was precisely to believe in this historical-dialectical process which would necessarily lead on to humanity’s telos: the classless society of communism. Once historical time was reduced to a mere mechanical, evolutionist or even organic process, it became an empty container providing the temporal space for a scientifically almost foreseeable political progress.

In his thesis On the Concept of History from 1940, Walter Benjamin rejected any evolutionist belief in progress and radicalized Marx’s disruptive notion of revolution as stated in the Communist Manifesto:

“The communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”
Marx/Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, 1847/48

Therefore, for Benjamin the revolutionary Event must also introduce a temporal rupture:

“The existence of the classless society cannot be thought within the same time as the struggle for it. But the concept of the present, in its binding sense for the historian, is necessarily defined by these two temporal orders.”
Benjamin, Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, 1940[2]

This temporal rupture is reflected by Benjamin’s anti-historicist concept of history. Uniquely in Marxism, his revolutionary thought is not directed towards a future messianic Advent – as the famous allegory of the “Angel of History” indicates – but towards the past. This powerful image, however suggestive, should not be confused with a melancholic sentiment, a gaze at a lost past – an interpretation that rather stems from Adorno’s reading of Benjamin than from Benjamin himself. Benjamin’s revolutionary “tiger’s leap into the past” (Thesis XIV) aims, as we shall see, at something radically different. At first sight, his concept of history is explicitly directed against orthodox and vulgar-Marxism and its naïve belief in historical progress which was irretrievably discredited after the Hitler-Stalin-Pact in 1939. His criticism, however, transcends its direct political situation.

In his reading of the Theses, Slavoj Žižek (1989, 139) stressed Benjamin’s attempt to retroactively redeem the potentialities of past failed revolutions and to actualize the still insisting claims of the undead of history. For Benjamin the past is never ontologically fully constituted, it can be rewritten, re-opened at a certain critical moment, at the moment of the “now of recognisability” implying two irreducibly intertwined aspects: a certain Event in time (revolution) which cuts off – arrests – the flow of “empty and homogenous” time, and an epistemological method to grasp the true image of history (“the dialectical image”). That is why Benjamin, in contrast to the historicism of traditional Marxism, had to invert the traditional understanding of historical dialectic suggesting a continuous, quasi-organic flow of events.

Theoretically speaking, Benjamin’s theses aim at nothing less than a radical inversion of historical materialism which – as some Benjamin scholars (Michael Löwy, Hans-Heinz Holz) claim – is only comparable to Marx’s attempt in the Theses on Feuerbach. Like Marx,  Benjamin calls for a shift of perspective moving away from an objectivist and merely contemplative materialism towards a new materialism always already involved in its subject matter. Unlike the early Georg Lukács to whom Benjamin comes closest among Marxist thinkers, he never conceptualized his thought systematically – neither in a Hegelian, Fichtean or Kantian way. Of course, this is one of the reasons why Benjamin is still regarded – even in the field of critical theory – as a “soft” or “aesthetic” theorist lacking any systematic backbone and always running the risk of standing, as his friend Adorno famously put it, “at the crossroads of magic and positivism”. Indeed, Benjamin’s complex thought is utterly unsystematic in the good sense of German early-Romanticism: it forms a constellation of thought images [Denkbilder] introducing a third register of theoretical writing that subverts the classic opposition between philosophical concept and literary critique. Without going deeper into the misty realm of Benjamin scholarship, I just want to stress the following point: Benjamin’s leitmotifs are always at least threefold – politics (revolution), epistemology (recognisability), and theology (redemption) are irreducibly intertwined. Thus, his peculiar sort of materialism does not mark a certain discipline among the other various fields of his interest (reaching from aesthetics, language and literary critique to theology and politics); rather, his materialism forms a specific approach or methodology to these fields of study. Therefore, a materialist reading of Benjamin has to be aware that there are various materialist ways of looking at a problem. With regard to his last Theses, there are at least three: a materialist-political, a materialist-philosophical, and a materialist-theological dimension.

Although Benjamin’s enigmatic and complex reflections On the Concept of History demand a close reading of all of its theses, I will only focus on an alternative version of thesis XVIII which was initially not published in the first editions of the text, though it might be the most politically crucial one.

“In the idea of classless society, Marx secularized the idea of messianic time. And that was a good thing. It was only when the Social Democrats elevated this idea to an ‘ideal’ that the trouble began. […] Once the classless society had been defined as an infinite task, the empty and homogeneous time was transformed into an anteroom, so to speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary situation with more or less equanimity. In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance – provided only that is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new resolution [Lösung] of a completely new problem [Aufgabe]. For the revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation. But it is equally grounded, for this thinker, in the right of entry which the historical moment enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to that point has been closed and locked. The entrance into this chamber coincides in a strict sense with political action, and it is by means of such entry that political action, however, destructive, reveals itself as messianic. (Classless society is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequent miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.)”
Benjamin, On the Concept of History, Thesis XVIIa

Without going deeper in this dense passage, I will very briefly focus on the following antithetical arguments:

• Marx versus Social Democrats
• Revolutionary chance versus progressive positivity/certainty
• Constellations of the past versus orientation towards the future
• Interruption/cessation versus final goal
• Politically messianic and, indeed, destructive action versus infinite (moralist) task
• Messianic time versus empty and homogeneous time

Let us concentrate on the latter: What is messianic time in contrast to the “empty and homogeneous time” implied by vulgar-Marxist, historicist, or evolutionist historiography? From the vantage point of a philosophy of time, Benjamin’s messianic Marxism tried to conceive of a time different from absolute chronometric, Newtonian or Aristotelian concepts of time. Benjamin calls this time Jetztzeit or Now-Time – a fulfilled or contracted time providing a model of messianic time. But what is the nature of this contracted time and how can this duality be differentiated from theological concepts of a mystical or eschatological end-time giving birth to the Golden Age of divine reign? Before I can elaborate further on the specificity of this contracted or fulfilled time and its political implications, some preliminary clarifications on the messianic in contrast to secular utopian thought and theological end-time-vision are needed.

2. Some notes on terminology: how to differentiate between utopian, messianic, eschatological and apocalyptic thought?

In Jacques Derrida’s structural reading of the messianic idea, he “prefer[s] to say messianic rather than messianism, so as to designate a structure of experience rather than a religion” (Specters of Marx, 210f.). Although I partly disagree with Derrida’s otherwise fascinating and elucidating book on Specters of Marx, I am following this terminological shift. In my view, Derrida here alludes to the very kernel of what is at stake in a political reading of the messianic: can we think of an authentic political or even revolutionary affect which has nothing to do with fixed religious rituals or beliefs? And if so, how can the messianic in its urgency and imminence be separated from mere expectation and openness on the one hand and apocalyptic visions on the other?

2a) The messianic is not Utopian thought

As is well known, the notion of Utopia is an early-modern compound of the Greek ou (no) and topos (place). Hence, Utopian thought is a spatial concept referring to a non-place, a place that does not (yet) exist. Unlike Utopian thought, the messianic idea is of theological origin and alludes to a religious concept of temporality, a cessation of profane time, which is – as we shall see – not merely to be mistaken for an end of time.

Structurally not unlike Utopian thought, the messianic at first sight seems to express a hope or an expectation of an ou-chronos, an “uchrony”, a time that does not (yet) exist. However, utopian and messianic thought are not similar or interchangeable concepts merely functioning in different spatial or temporal registers. The authentic messianic idea does not just replace space for time but introduces an alternative experience of time which suspends or interrupts the symmetrical commensurability of time and space. To unfold this argument, I follow Agamben’s reading of the messianic idea in Saint Paul.

2b) The messianic is not to be mistaken for eschatology, prophecy or apocalypse

Although there is no exact definition – neither in its Jewish nor Pauline-Christian variant –, the specificity of messianic time can only be grasped when it is differentiated from similar religious concepts of time such as eschatology, apocalypse or prophecy. Starting with the latter, it is quite difficult to distinguish prophetic and messianic thought from a merely temporal perspective since both could be either oriented towards the past or the future. The difference is rather to be found on the level of their theologico-political function. Whereas, according to Agamben, the ecstatic prophet “is foremost a man with an unmediated relation to the […] breath of Yahweh, who receives a word from God which does not properly belong to him”, the messianic persona, “who as an emissary with determinate purpose, must carry out his assignment with lucidity and search on his own for words of the message.” (Agamben, 60). Hence, political subjectivity is essential to the messianic discourse.

The next confusion to be dealt with concerns the mistaking of the messianic for apocalyptic time. Both the messianic and the apocalyptic are often levelled to eschatology, to an idea of an “end of time”. To give you at least one famous example: Gershom Scholem’s influential essay Towards an understanding of the messianic idea in Judaism (1971) irreducibly linked the messianic to an apocalyptic, destructive and imminent vision of an end-time. Agamben, however, – and this is maybe his strongest point concerning messianic time – insists on a minimal but nonetheless crucial difference: “the messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.” (Agamben, 62) But what is meant by this quasi-Hegelian chiasm? Agamben offers the following answer:

“[M]essianic time is the time that time takes to come to an end, or, more precisely, the time we take to bring to an end, to achieve our presentation of time. This is not the line of chronological time […], nor the instant of its end […]; nor it is a segment cut from chronological time; rather, it is operational time pressing within the chronological time, working and transforming it from within; it is the time we need to make time end: the time that is left us.”
Agamben, The Time That Remains, 2000

Agamben’s reference to an operational time – a term he borrows from the French linguist Gustave Guillaume – brings us back to Benjamin’s argument of a secularized messianic time which can be found in Marx’s revolutionary thought. For Benjamin and Agamben, only messianic time is true historical time, a “time that we ourselves are” in contrast to a contemplative-idealist concept of time in which we are only impotent “spectators who look at the time that flies without any time left.” (Agamben, 68) Again, it is worthwhile looking at how Benjamin’s adaption or – as one could argue – appropriation of the Jewish idea of the messianic introduced a minimal but politically essential shift. Whereas for Gershom Scholem “the Messianic idea in Judaism has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitely, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished” (Scholem, 35), for Benjamin the messianic works on two levels: on the one hand it indicates the finally achieved interruption or cessation of history by virtue of “political action, however destructive, reveals itself as messianic” (Benjamin, SW 4, 402), and, on the other hand, it maintains a never irrevocably accomplished historical happening [Geschehen] which can therefore be retroactively redeemed. Thus, for Benjamin the Jewish experience of remembrance [Eingedenken] and the retroactive actualization of history’s hidden potentials are two sides of the same messianic structure of history. That is why his materialist messianism is not to be mistaken for an impotent “life lived in deferment” (Scholem), an eternal postponement of the coming of the Messiah – neither in its theological nor in its deconstructive Derridean sense as mere openness or waiting without horizon of expectation.

So, if messianic time is a time of political intervention, a time of theoretical-practical operation, how can this time be enacted? The crucial point not to miss here is that Benjamin’s idea of messianic time does not refer to a mystical nunc stans or to a qualitative different time beyond or above chronological time. On the contrary, the messianic inner loop of time takes place within the vulgar “empty and homogeneous time” itself.

2c) Kairos and Chronos

To give an example of this operational, contracted time that is “out of joint” and to grasp entirely the difference between messianic time on the one hand and eschatology (“the end of time”), apocalyptic visions (“the end of the word”), millenarianism, and other end-time theologies on the other hand, we might remind ourselves of the Greek word for time. In contrast to Romanic or Germanic languages the ancient Greek knows two words for time: chronos and kairos. While the former refers to chronological or sequential time, the kairos (καιρός), which can be roughly translated as the “right” or “opportune” moment, indicates a time in between, a moment of an undetermined period of time in which something extraordinary happens. Although the Greek duality of chronos and kairos can be linked to the messianic idea in Judaism and the early Christianity of Saint Paul, the specific time structure of the messianic cannot fully be understood by means of antithetical attributes such as sequence-rupture, linear-curved, empty-full etc. Of course, Agamben is right to claim, that “[k]airos and chronos are usually opposed to each other, as though they were qualitatively heterogeneous.” (Agamben, 68) But unlike the eschatological idea of an end of time, messianic time does not employ any Manichaean, dualist or mystical-Gnostic oppositions. On the contrary, as Agamben puts it, for messianic thought the kairos, the opportune moment in which the messianic “healing” happens, “is nothing else than seized chronos.” (Agamben, 69) Hence, the kairological time, the time of the Event, is not of a different quality opposed to mere chronological or “vulgar” (Heidegger) time but the messianic time is precisely a contracted, condensed and performatively “enacted” chronological time.

3. A plea for a political reading of messianic time

Finally, I propose a political reading of Benjamin’s messianic time and Agamben’s interpretation in terms of an operational time, a time that is needed to end time. Agamben’s definition of messianic time introduces a complication, an inner loop of time, a doubling that subverts the classical subject-object-relation of temporal acting. Although messianic time is the time of the acting of a historical subject, it is not objectively “just there” to be actualized; rather, it only exists as a non-actualized pure potentiality. But what does this imply for a materialist understanding of the messianic? In his definition of messianic time, Slavoj Zizek draws the following consequence making implicit reference to Agamben:

“[W]e cannot deduce the emergence of messianic time through an ‘objective’ analysis of historical process. ‘Messianic time’ ultimately stands for the intrusion of subjectivity irreducible to the ‘objective’ historical process, which means that things can take a messianic turn, time can become ‘dense,’ at any point. The time of the Event is not another time beyond and above the ‘normal’ historical time, but a kind of inner loop within this time.”
Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 2003

The crucial point here concerns our reading of “at any point”. Was Marx’s insight not precisely that scientific discovery of “objective conditions” without any revolutionary attempt would always be left to mere “Don Quichotteries” or voluntarist Anarchism? Here, Zizek’s understanding of the messianic could provide an alternative to the standard opposition of ‘objective historical conditions’ and ‘subjective voluntarist agency’. In contrast to a common misunderstanding, the messianic is not just about potentialities, possibilities, expectations etc. that are (hopefully) to be actualized, realized or fulfilled. For Benjamin and Zizek, the messianic structure of history undermines this classic scheme. That is why, as Zizek claims, we have to reject

“the standard Aristotelian ontology which is structured around the vector running from possibility to actuality. In contrast to the idea that every possibility strives fully to actualize itself, we should conceive of ‘progress’ as a move of restoring the dimension of potentiality to mere actuality, of unearthing, at the very heart of actuality, a secret striving toward potentiality.”
Zizek, The Parallax view, 2006

In Benjamin, this secret striving is famously coined as a “weak messianic force”, an insisting claim of the past or, as Zizek puts it, of the “hidden possibilities (the utopian emancipatory potentials) which were betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome.” (Zizek 2006). Ultimately, the restoring of potentiality, the messianic “restitutio in integrum” (Benjamin, Theologico-Political Fragment, 1921) is nothing else than the redemption-through-repetition of past failed or betrayed potentials. In contrast to Zizek’s neo-Leninist approach, however, a Benjaminian “move of restoring the dimension of potentiality to mere actuality” is not possible “at any time” – the famous “small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter” (Thesis B) is not ‘just open’ in “every second”; rather, “for the revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation.” (Thesis XVIIa) This seemingly hair-splitting, but nonetheless crucial distinction between the “at any time”, “every second”, and the “peculiar revolutionary chance” is not merely to be mistaken for the difference between a theological and a political terminology; rather, it irreducibly links every chronological second to a political situation and its specific (kairological) potentiality. Only a critical constellation formed by this situation (presence) and its potentiality (past) can allow for a messianic Entstellung [distortion] turning every chronos into the kairological gateway.

But if we are not merely to endlessly wait for this turnover of the repetitive, homogeneous and empty time of capital into messianic Jetztzeit, how can we grasp this critical constellation? At this stage, things become even more complicated. Benjamin’s messianic thought is embedded in a complex epistemologico-political construction in which the revolutionary/messianic chance coincides with the flashing up true historical image. The latter is not merely a given historical imagery; rather it only “unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in an moment of danger” (Thesis VI), “in the now of its recognizability” (Arcades Project, N 3,1). Benjamin’s conceptualization of this “now” hinges on a constellation formed by an unintentional “perilous moment” (Arcades Project, N 3,1) and the intentional acting of a political subjectivity (“the fighting and oppressed class”). To grasp the status of this “now” and its consequences, I am tempted to follow Werner Hamacher’s very succinct close reading of the Theses proposing a transcendental interpretation of the Benjaminian “now”:

“With the notion ‘Now of recognizability’, which is fundamental for his philosophy of history, Benjamin insists on the transcendental status of that to which he refers. He is not concerned with the Now of cognition, but with the Now which, ahead of every actual cognition, fixes, the structural condition of the possibility of cognition.”
Hamacher, ‘Now’: Walter Benjamin on Historical Time, 2005

For Benjamin, however, the “structural condition of the possibility of cognition” is only given by the political situation; therefore, the “subject of historical knowledge” is not a Kantian Transzendentalsubjekt[3] but “the struggling, oppressed class itself.” (Thesis XII) At this point, a comparison with the early Georg Lukács of History and Class Consciousness (1923) and his notion of “the standpoint of the proletariat” might be instructive. Not unlike Benjamin, for Lukács this standpoint is twofold: it marks at the same time an epistemologico-transcendental condition of knowledge as well as a politico-economical standpoint within society. For Benjamin, however, this knowledge is not a given (by virtue of an ‘objective standpoint’ within capitalist society) but an ability of knowledge, or, to be more precise, a recognizability, which is itself twofold: it accounts for the knowledge of a political subject, the flipside of which is the site of an unintentional historical truth (“the true historical image”) flashing up like a Proustian mémoire involontaire.

Without going further into detail, I finally sum up my reading of Benjamin’s messianic Marxism with regard to its epistemological, political and theological dimension. If the Benjaminian “now” marks the irreducibly contingent encounter of the true image of the past and the revolutionary chance of the struggling, oppressed class – which is, even for the late Benjamin, the proletariat –, the idea of messianic time concerns the temporal structure of the political. According to my structural reading, the messianic consists of an inner loop of time, a “time differential” (Arcades Project, Q˚21), a time of an epistemologico-political operation unearthing a hidden potentiality of the past which is more than just a possibility to be actualized. The task of the ”historical materialist”, respectively the “true historian” is to conceive of this inner loop of time giving us time to free and retroactively redeem the contracted, congealed time encapsulated in capital-time. If the latter consists not only of condensed chronometric “empty and homogeneous time” but also expresses a non-linear time-function of congealed abstract human labour spatialized/reified in the form of the commodity, a materialist-structural reading of messianic time is motivated by the temporal structure of capital itself. Finally, messianic time is nothing else than an inner loop of/within capital-time providing an operational time to subtract human labour from capital-time – to deactivate capital-time and ultimately to bring the latter to an end. This operative ending of capital-time in terms of a classless society, however, “is not the final goal of historical progress but its frequent miscarried, ultimately [endlich] achieved interruption.” (Thesis XVII)

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[1] Slightly reedited paper presented at the Historical Material Conference, London (UK), Nov. 28, 2009. I would like to thank Ali Alizadeh, Caroline Edwards, Andrew McGettigan, Massimiliano Tomba, Alberto Toscano and Alison Hugill, Peer Illner, Alina Khatib, Birte Löschenkohl for their comments, critical remarks and corrections of earlier versions of this paper. It is still a “work-in-progress”.

[2] Benjamin, Walter, Paralipomena to On the Concept of History, GS I, 1245/SW 4, 407; emphasis mine and translation changed.

[3] In the German edition of the “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’” we can also find the following variant, which demonstrates Benjamin’s difference from Kantian transcendentalism even more unambiguously than Thesis XII: “Die Befugnis des Historikers hängt an seinem geschärften Bewußtsein für die Krise, in die das Subjekt der Geschichte jeweils getreten ist. Dieses Subjekt ist beileibe kein Transzendentalsubjekt sondern die kämpfende unterdrückte Klasse in ihrer exponiertesten Situation. Historische Erkenntnis gibt es allein für sie und für sie einzig im historischen Augenblick.“ (Benjamin, GS I, 1243, emphasis mine.)

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