Abstract

Representations of historicism as the loss of meaning in history and critiques of historicism as the critique of such a loss had been pervasive since late nineteenth century till the Second World War. Among historicism’s most powerful and representative critics were the young Nietzsche and Benjamin in his Parisian exile. This essay seeks to trace from Nietzsche to Benjamin an unbroken yet growing line of critique—of historicism as the “sickness of time” from which modernity suffers, and from which it has been trying to recover. Two attempts at such a recovery will be examined and juxtaposed: The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life and Theses on the Philosophy of History. By thus situating both historicism and its critiques within the desires and anxieties of modernity, this essay tries to delineate and to understand the peculiarly modernist shapes assumed by the historical and its discontents.