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"[The
legendary]
runs far too smoothly. All cross-currents, all friction, all that
is casual, secondary to the main events
and themes, everything unresolved, truncated, and uncertain, which
confuses the clear progress of the action and the simple orientation
of the actors, has disappeared.
The historical event
which we witness, or learn from the testimony of those who witnessed
it, runs much more variously, contradictorily, and confusedly; not
until it has produced results in a definite domain are we able,
with their help, to classify it to a certain extent..." (Auerbach
19)
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"Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history--blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed." (Benjamin 254) |
So the historical event is not something which follows inexorably from laws, but a gap, across which nothing follows (yet). There is something gratuitous, gift-like, about the event. Nothing follows from a gift: that's what makes it a gift rather than a move in an exchange. It's also what makes them impossible. Is Messianic another word for this impossibility?
