Title

Messianic Time and Empirical History (of Walter Benjamin)

Description

Once the Messianic promise is not a myth but historically “actual" in the sense that it is realizable, from this point on, time can be said to exist in two registers: as secular history, the sequence of (catastrophic) events that mark human time without fulfilling it; and as revolutionary “now -time," every moment of which is irradiated with the real anticipation of redemption…These time registers do not follow one another sequentially in the new era; they overlap [see Figure], the one given, the other, continuously a rational possibility. They remain disconnected until the act of political revolution cuts across history’s secular continuum and blasts humanity out of it…

Designer

Buck-Morss, Susan

Date

1989

Source

The Dialectics of Seeing

Bibliographic Citation

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. The MIT Press. Display G. Pages 242-243.

is composed of

English Cross/axis

has attribute

English Arrow

English Angled Line

English Solid Line

English Dash Line

depict things of type

English Structural or Hierarchical

Coverage

history

myth

time