Pensky on Benjamin's Dialectical Images
After opening his chapter "Method and Time: Benjamin's Dialectical Images" in The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Max Pensky makes this eloquent reading of the quote I just posted:
The breathtaking evocation of an alternative temporality that this quote contains in characteristically elliptical and compacted form, the glimpse at an entirely new conception of historiography that breaks with previous categories of interpretation, the notion of an image-based historical sensibility as the genuine mode of historical interpretation... But at the same time, one cannot avoid the feeling that this quote , and others like it in Benjamin's Arcades Project, is a theoretical promissory note that would prove difficult if not impossible to redeem (Pensky, 177).
Pensky here expresses a very definite difficulty with reading Benjamin; the eloquent brilliance of his voice and ideas, and the impossibility of the potentialities his writing and ideas propose. Yet it is this beautifully impossibility which makes his writing so captivating and desirable. There is an almost utopian tone to his writing, and it must be read, I believe, in such a way that adopts a kind of utopian reading strategy.
Following this observation, Pensky goes on to state some of the theoretical problems and questions posed by and that can be posed against Benjamin's dialectical image - and this question in particular struck me:
What possible philosophy of history could explicate the difference between past and "what-has-been," between the present and the "now?" (Pensky, 177).
Distinguishing the differences between two such similar and yet so different ways of understanding things that might not immediately seem different has always intrigued me. What strikes me here as the difference being distinguished is the descriptive from the experiential; I understand this distinction as being where the past and present are descriptive and the "what-has-been" and the "now" as experiential. Both descriptors are used to reference discrete temporal moments, but the tenor of what these two descriptors refer to marks an important difference regarding how time, images, moments, and history are made legible.
Pensky, Max. "Method and time: Benjamin's dialectical images." The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
