An Impossible Exchange

Translator's note

There are those who build castles in the face of the Queen of Tides. They wake up early in the morning (with the line of the dawn), and hurry down to the beach, dragging behind them their variously idiosyncratic implements; the simplest, most primitive tools: sticks of all shapes and sizes, buckets, little stones; but also the strangest, most incongruous ones: pipes (to divert the water?), large cocoon-shaped sheets (to throttle the wind?), sundials, pendulums, abacuses… Most importantly, the minds of these die-hard fanatics are full of hands itching with action. They know that at regular intervals the Queen of Tides will not hesitate to destroy their most exotic of creations: labyrinths within labyrinths, systems of tunnels and shadows, impossible cities. And yet every day, with increasing enthusiasm, with every urgency and vitality, they bury their fingertips into the yielding sands, and give birth, once more, to futile paradises.

Prologue

On opposite sides of the same avenue, heading in the same direction, their feet incongruously symmetrical, shedding words like stones to skim the surface of history, eyes occasionally askew, occasionally askance, always ready to be ready, always giving each other maps through corridors that turn out to bear many worlds. On yet other occasions there are even more celebrations (which they could not hear, and which we can hear in the echoes of random arrows): fingers cross over to tickle ribs, shadows withdraw to gather as hunger on the other side, snorts and sneezes become blinks and gazes, rabbis dance on baldness, libraries remain libraries.

Editor's impulse

All the following come from either:
1. Benjamin, W. 'Theses on the Philosophy of History'. Illuminations. London: Fontana, 1992.
or
2. Foucault, M. 'Nietzsche, Genealogy, History'. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. New York: Cornell UP, 1977.

The (charlatan) writer obviously took many liberties in the construction of the following 'dual monologue,' although he did make sure quotations remained faithful to the original.

Benjamin: The concept of historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.

Foucault: An entire historical tradition (theological or rationalistic) aims at dissolving the singular event into an ideal continuity-as a teleological movement or a natural process…. Once the historical sense is mastered by a suprahistorical perspective, metaphysics can bend it to its own purpose.

Benjamin: Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time.

Foucault: The historian's history finds its support outside of time and pretends to base its judgements on an apocalyptic objectivity.

Benjamin: Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical…. A historian who takes this as their point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the 'time of the now' which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.

Foucault: Genealogy does not pretend to go back in time to restore an unbroken continuity that operates beyond the dispersion of forgotten things; its duty is not to demonstrate that the past actively exists in the present, that it continues secretly to animate the present, having imposed a predetermined form to all its vicissitudes…. The purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity but to commit itself to its dissipation…make visible all those discontinuities that cross us.

Benjamin: The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only by an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again…. For every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

Foucault: History also teaches how to laugh at the solemnities of the origin…. Genealogy opposes itself to the search for origins…. Given this, it corresponds to the acuity of a glance that distinguishes, separates, and disperses, that is capable of liberating divergence and marginal elements-the kind of dissociating view that is capable of decomposing itself, capable of shattering the unity of man's being through which it was thought that he could extend his sovereignty into the events of the past.

Benjamin: A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognises the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognisance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogenous course of history.

Foucault: 'Effective' history, however, deals with events in terms of their most unique characteristics, their most acute manifestations…. A genealogy…will cultivate the details and accidents that accompany every beginning; it will be scrupulously attentive to their petty malice; it will await their emergence, once unmasked, as the face of the other.

Benjamin: The awareness that that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action….

Foucault: Genealogy does not resemble the evolution of a species and does not map the destiny of a people. On the contrary, to follow the complex course of descent is to maintain passing events in their proper dispersion; it is to identify the accidents, the minute deviations-or conversely, the complete reversal-the errors, the false appraisals, and the faulty calculations that gave birth to those things that continue to exist and have value for us; it is to discover that truth or being do not lie at the root of what we know and what we are, but the exteriority of accidents.

Benjamin: We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those who succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogenous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through the Messiah might enter.

Foucault quoting Nietzsche: The desire for knowledge has been transformed among us into a passion which fears no sacrifice, which fears nothing but its own extinction. It may be that mankind will eventually perish from this passion for knowledge. If not through passion, then through weakness.

Benjamin quoting Nietzsche: We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it.

Foucault quoting Nietzsche: We must be prepared to state our choice: do we wish humanity to end in fire and light or to end on the sands?

Max Leskiewicz