Abstract

In an important fragment in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin points to two perspectives on the present. The present is defined either as catastrophe or as triumph.1 Two perspectives, Benjamin seems to suggest, constitute two modes of temporality. Whereas for a triumphant history, the present is located in the duration of time that Benjamin famously calls “homogeneous, empty time,”2 in the movement of the same, for the historiography of the oppressed, on the other hand—and that is how Benjamin sees the position of historical materialism—the present is located in a temporal disjuncture “in which time stands still and has come…