#retroactivity

(There) ...is what Heidegger called the hope for authenticity—the hope to be one’s own person rather than merely the creation of one’s education or one’s environment.   As Heidegger emphasized, to achieve authenticity in this sense is not necessarily to reject one’s past. It may instead be a matter of reinterpreting that past so as to make it more suitable for one’s own purposes. What matters is to have seen one or more alternatives to the purposes that most people take for granted, and to have chosen among these alternatives--thereby, in some measure, creating yourself. As Harold Bloom has recently reminded us, the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self. Autonomy, in this un-Kantian and distinctively Bloomian sense, is pretty much the same thing as Heideggerian authenticity.  For members of the literary culture, redemption is to be achieved by getting in touch with the present limits of the human imagination. That is why a literary culture is always in search of novelty, always hoping to spot what Shelley called “the shadows that futurity casts upon the present”, rather than trying to escape from the temporal to the eternal.   It is a premise of this culture that though the imagination has present limits, these limits are capable of being extended forever. The imagination endlessly consumes its own artifacts. It is an ever-living, ever-expanding, fire. It is as subject to time and chance as are the flies and the worms, but while it endures and preserves the memory of its past, it will continue to transcend its previous limits. Though the fear of belatedness is ever present within the literary culture, this very fear makes for an intenser blaze.

The events surrounding the historian, and in which he himself takes part, will underlie his presentation in the form of a text written in invisible ink. The history which he lays before the reader comprises, as it were, the citations occurring in this text, and it is only these citations that occur in a manner legible to all. To write history thus means to cite history. It belongs to the concept of citation, however, that the historical object in each case is torn from its context.

The lesson of media history as philosophy of history is the retroactive redescription of the previous standard as limited. […] Media thus bear the messianic power, in Benjamin's special sense of that word, to forever alter the past.

For the function of language in speech is not to inform but to evoke.  What I seek in speech is a response from the other. What constitutes me as a subject is my question. In order to be recognized by the other, I proffer what was only in view of what will be. In order to find him, I call him by a name that he must assume or refuse in order to answer me. I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it as an object. What is realized in my history is neither the past definite as what was, since it is no more, nor even the perfect as what has been in what I am, but the future anterior as what I will have been, given what I am in the process of becoming.

But what kind of freedom is thereby opened up? Here we should raise a clear and brutal question in all its naiveté: if we reject Marx's critique and embrace Hegel's notion of the owl of Minerva which takes flight only at dusk--that is, if we accept Hegel's claim that the position of an historical agent able to identify its own role in the historical process and to act accordingly is inherently impossible, since such self-referentiality makes it impossible for the agent to factor in the impact of its own intervention, of how this act itself will affect the constellation--what are the consequences of this position for the act, for emancipatory political interventions? Does it mean that we are condemned to acting blindly, to taking risky steps into the unknown whose final outcome totally eludes us, to interventions whose meaning we can establish only retroactively, so that, at the moment of the act, all we can do is hope that history will show mercy (grace) and reward our intervention with at least a modicum of success? But what if, instead of conceiving this impossibility of factoring in the consequences of our acts as a limitation of freedom, we conceive it as the zero-level (negative) condition of our freedom?

The real event has, at first, taken place in a certain sense ex nihilo, unforeseeably; only afterward does one comprehend its possibility. This is the temporal paradox, the inverted time, which characterizes the event as such. Such an event knows no foreseeability, since for this it would have to have been regarded as possible, and if this foresight had succeeded, it would not have taken place.