In the works of both Benjamin and Adorno, there is a radical departure from a salvific conception of history insofar as this salvation presupposes the unity of history and a concept of progress by which historical events are interpreted as being directed towards a certain terminal point. This theory of history, from which Adorno and Benjamin distance themselves, is one that is, at least formally, theological. However, the attempt to move beyond such a theory of history does not begin with these two thinkers. As Karl Löwith argues in Meaning and History, modern philosophy of history, beginning in the 18th century, attempts to ground philosophy of history not in “revelation and faith” but the “empirical method of Voltaire” (Löwith 1949, 1). And yet, for Löwith, there is no true conceptual evolution in this development. Modern philosophy’s interpretation of history is still indebted to the theological paradigm insofar as it merely secularizes the latter’s “eschatological pattern” instead of going beyond it (Löwith 1949, 2). Faith in the Kingdom of God is replaced with faith in ineluctable progress; modern philosophy of history seems to be a farcical repetition of its disciplinary antecedent. What, then, prevents Adorno and Benjamin’s theory of history from relapsing into a theology that nevertheless proclaims itself free from such pretensions? That is, how do they move beyond a salvific conception of history that does not simply mimic the false triumph of modern philosophy of history?

For both Adorno and Benjamin, philosophy of history is not a discipline internally riven by, on the one hand, a predilection to theology and on the other, a scientific method. It is at the moment that one assumes that one can simply abandon these supposedly facile precepts that one is most beholden to them. This is, of course, observed in the inability of modern philosophy of history to move beyond that which it desires to supersede. Both thinkers are able to avoid this impasse by dialectising this internal division. Take, for example, the first theses in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History (hereafter, Theses) which can be read as a critique of a dogmatic historical materialism that guarantees the victory of socialism by dint of immutable and mechanistic laws of history. It is clear that the positivism of this method resembles the modern philosophies of history criticized by Löwith, and is thus equally affected by all their attendant shortcomings. This is a historical materialism that, despite its ostensible positivism, begets its own theology. However, one will notice that in the Theses, Benjamin does not reject theology in toto. To do so would be to fall into the very same conceptual trap he is trying to avoid. As Margaret Cohen argues in Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, Benjamin recognizes that theology (and various theological concepts such as salvation or redemption)— the “realm of a culture’s ghosts and phantasms” — is not a “mirage to be dispelled” but rather “a significant and rich field of social production” (Cohen 1993, 11).

Benjamin does not subtract the theological from historical materialism, but, by putting these two seemingly disparate theoretical frameworks into a relationship with each other, transforms both. Likewise, Adorno’s refusal to give discursive formulation to a utopian future, approaching it only negatively, can be attributed to his “adherence to the Jewish Bilderverbot” (Benzaquén, 150). Just as followers of the Jewish faith refuse to speak God’s name outside a liturgical context since the messianic age is yet to come, Adorno remains silent in the face of the task of outlining a utopian future since, for him, “true reconciliation could never be achieved by philosophy alone” (Jay 1973, 262). For Adorno too, the invocation of theological precepts is never done for its own sake but rather to interrogate and explore the relationship between theology and historical materialism. To wit: reconciliation is, for both thinkers, an eminently Marxist category since it was Marx himself who first refused to give a positive description of a utopian, that is, reconciled, future (Benzaquén, 151).

At this point, one might object to the groundlessness of Benjamin and Adorno’s critical theory of history (arising precisely out of the aforementioned refusal). It appears that both undermine their theoretical projects by not grounding it in something stable or constant such as a unified horizon, a normative foundation, or set of transcendental conditions. The response comes, from both thinkers, that these conditions are not locatable in history. How can a theory of history utilize a language that lacks history, leading history to become mythologized, which, as Adorno points out, is connected to the philosophy of the fascists? In this respect, both are explicitly against the idea of grounding their respective critical theories of history, that is, both refuse the self-reflexive defense of the presuppositions or bases of their theories. At the core of this view is a rejection of the Kuhnian model of scientific progress and crisis whereby there is an opposition in the practice of science (whether natural or social) between the “normal” scientific programme of problem-solving and the discovery of an anomaly that triggers a disciplinary crisis, resulting in a so-called paradigm shift. Instead, critical theory, for Adorno and Benjamin (and indeed, much of the early critical theorists of the Frankfurt School) is always already in crisis— there is no normal scientific period. This informs Adorno and Benjamin’s respective methods insofar as the concept of history in their works is never taken for granted, so to speak, but is always interrogated and problematized. They do not begin their inquiries into history by beginning with a self-identical, or common-sense notion of history. One cannot, for both thinkers, distill an “essence” of a concept from its historical appearance— this applies even to the very concept of history itself. Such a philosophy of history—one that claims to have achieved a universal or holistic perspective of social totality— merely lapses into a contemplative position; investigating essences detached from their historical and social contexts.

For philosophy to become social it must cease being purely contemplative. Only Marxism can do this, that is, only Marixsm, for Benjamin and Adorno, unites theory and praxis by providing a shared problematic. The shared problematic is capitalist domination. Critical theory proper, then, as social philosophy, must have a critique of capitalism. That is, critical theory must show how modern conceptions of historical progress, far from being self-evident, neutral facts, are symptomatic of a particular historical juncture. This is why it is not possible, in critical theory, to see as separate enterprises the critique of a certain conception of history and the critique of capitalism. One needs to keep one’s critical eye, as it were, on the system that produces the concepts that one is trying to overcome. It is not enough, however, to have a shared problematic for doing critical theory. A shared goal is also necessary. This shared goal is communism, i.e., utopia— this is the precondition for all critical activity; it is neither identified with the present world, nor removed from it so far that it can never be reached. It is, then, to Marx himself that the messianism of Benjamin and the utopian thrust of Adorno’s thought is owed. Marx famously wrote that “[c]ommunism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things” (Marx, German Ideology).

Indeed, there is, at the heart of Benjamin’s Theses, a “deeply Marxian question” (Khatib, 47). As Sami Khatib argues in “The Time of Capital and the Messiancity of Time: Marx with Benjamin”, Benjamin asks “how [is one to] conceive of the relationship of the political presence of class struggle and authentic historical experience without relying on a meta- or trans-historical standpoint” (Khatib, 47). Several things become clear if we take seriously Khatib’s understanding of Benjamin’s aims in the Theses. First, the shared problematic provided by critical theory, that is capitalist domination, is centered in a matter that appears to be wholly theoretical, and thus far removed from the realm of politics. What Khatib, in his assessment of Benjamin’s project underlines, is that the theoretical is always already political. Capitalism (falsely) presupposes the universality of its own “mode of historicization”; however, the time of capital, or capital-time, far from being such a universal determination is shot through with the particularity of its condition (Khatib, 48).

Capital-time is universal only in the sense that it organizes relations under capitalism and reproduces its ideological representations. And since this universality is not natural, it is contestable: “[h]istory is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now” (Benjamin 2019, 205). What Benjamin derides, then, as the “homogenous, empty time” of the Social Democrats is his specific theoretical elaboration of capital-time, and the “now-time” is what he opposes to it. If Benjamin critiques this empty time, it is primarily due to its concept of historical progress. Since time is understood to be continuous and linear, the present is constantly displacing, or rather, erasing the past— history evolves indefinitely. It is clear how this concept of time is closely allied with the teleology of salvific conceptions of history. This is a conception of time, however, that can never deliver on its promise of redemption since for mankind to be redeemed, it would need to receive “the fullness of its past… [the] past must become citable in all its moments” (Benjamin 2019, 197). The historical materialist, then, is not a historian if the latter’s task is (despite their scientific pretensions) to narrate history— that is, imbue it with symbolic meaning by ordering historical events. The historian deems some events significant and thus worthy of further investigation, so that they can claim their rightful places in history. If the historian is to be trusted, history is only the sequence of such significant events— events that are deemed significant only in their relation to the end of history which they all help realize; a nebulous, as yet undefined terminus.

The historical materialist, on the other hand, does not narrate— he chronicles. He does not distinguish between the significant and the insignificant (indeed this distinction itself is rendered meaningless in his work). The flattening of the historians narrative is not an act of political neutrality, but is instead a revolutionary act par excellence. As Benjamin writes, “[n]ot man or men but the struggling, oppressed class is the depository of historical knowledge” (Benjamin 2019, 204). The historical materialist refuses to side with those whom history has deemed the victors. Adorno similarly argues that the task of the natural historian (who is identical to the historical materialist in all but name) is to construct constellations that contest the hegemonic narratives of the historian. In his “The Idea of Natural History” argues that an aporetic conclusion is reached if we understand the concepts of nature and history as ontological essences that are completely separate from each other. Max Pensky, in “Natural History: The Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno” argues that, according to Adorno, once we posit nature as the ground of history—that which is “beyond thought” — and history as a “wholly human process of self-constitution” we essentially give up on a proper philosophical, that is, dialectical, understanding of both (Pensky, 230). While Benjamin does not treat the concept of history in relation to nature in the Theses, both texts make similar arguments. Adorno argues that to ontologize history (as the historian whom Benjamin rebukes does) is to flee from it. He demonstrates that the question that supposedly confronts the philosopher (is ontology to be given priority over history, or history over ontology?) is in fact a false one. This tension is relieved through the construction of a “dialectical crossing-point” through which each concept can pass into its other (Pensky, 232). The narrative prepared by the historian, for example, does not go through this dialectical crossing-point since, by virtue of its claim to totality and ultimate meaning, it resides strictly within the realm of ontology— without passing into history. The solutions offered by Benjamin and Adorno to move beyond this impasse are also very similar in nature— the goal is to fracture the wholeness of these narratives. It is important to recall at this point that insofar as both thinkers are committed to thinking utopia that the solutions offered will remain entirely negative: one narrative is not swapped for another, since to do so would be to make use of the categories of the present. The historical constellations that Adorno writes of, for example, can be said to be both historical and natural (that is, ontological) in the sense that they generate only “concrete, singular, and utterly empirical facts and bodies… incapable of being incorporated into a meaning-giving conception of historical continuity and experience” (Pensky, 234). That which is usually passed over as insignificant, transient, or contingent is now accorded the highest dignity since it inaugurates discontinuity and thus cannot be incorporated into the symbolic world of the historian. It is in this sense that Adorno’s constellation can be likened to Benjamin’s own solution, the dialectical image. In Arcades Project, Benjamin writes that “[h]istory decays into images, not into stories” (Benjamin, 476). The standstill— which Benjamin identifies with utopia— induced by the dialectical image, arises precisely from the refusal to narrativise, or, as Benjamin puts it, by giving priority to image over metaphor (the latter being the building blocks of narrative).

These metaphors, ordered in a certain way, tell “the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary” (Benjamin 2019, 208). The empty time which is Benjamin’s object of critique is not literally empty but rather filled to the brim with metaphors— what one might call “tradition” — that constitute the “narrative of boundless progress” (Chowdhury, 98). But if the historical materialist is to treat tradition with the utmost caution, how is he to cite the past that is contained within it? To answer this question, it is necessary to turn to Benjamin’s treatment of the concept of repetition, which, in the Theses he defines as a “tiger’s leap into the past”, that is, a repetition that is no longer beholden to homogenous, empty time (Benjamin 2019, 205). For the historian, to repeat is to retrieve (always retroactively) those events which have occurred in the linear continuum which he himself has constructed. The historian likes to think of himself as possessing a pure gaze through which he extracts historical essences. However, for Benjamin (and in this regard he is entirely indebted to Marx), repetition always introduces something new into the world that disrupts the linearity of homogenous, empty time. Repetition deals not in essences but masks and costumes: as Benjamin writes in the Theses, “[t]hus to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past” (Benjamin 2019, 205). Similarly, Adorno argues in “The Idea of Natural History”, that if a dialectical crossing point is not constructed between the concepts of nature and history, one will understand the former as “mythical…archaic” and the latter as “that which surfaces as dialectically and emphatically new” (Adorno, 100). That is, when the dialectical relationship between the two is severed, so is the relationship between repetition and the new— history is understood to be a wholly autonomous process of self-constitution. Adorno argues that the contemporary relevance of myth undoes the fantasy of history as the production of the new ex nihilo (this also applies to the historians treatment of tradition as simply a curious artefact). Since the natural historian and historical materialist do not simply reach into the past to retrieve essences, the repetition of myth in order to introduce something new into history does occur through the repetition of that which already is (the myth is not simply transposed into the present), rather, the myth itself is only constituted or actualized “in the process of the construction of the present” (Pensky, 237). In the example given by Benjamin, however, the repetition “takes place in an arena where the ruling class give the commands” (Benjamin 2019, 205). If, as mentioned above, we understand Benjamin’s dialectical image and Adorno’s constellation as not only theoretical, but political determinations, then it is the duty of the revolutionary and not the ruling class to situate itself in the non-synchronous time of the now— this is the site of the struggle between the victor and the oppressed.

Works Cited

Chowdhury, A. (2014). “Memory, Modernity, Repetition: Walter Benjamin’s Ethico-Political History”. In Post-deconstructive Subjectivity and History. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004260047_005

Max Pensky (2004) Natural History: the Life and Afterlife of a Concept in Adorno, Critical Horizons, 5:1, 227-258, DOI: 10.1163/1568516042653620

Khatib, Sami. “The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time: Marx with Benjamin.” Studies in Social and Political Thought, pp. 46–69.

BENZAQUÉN, ADRIANA S. “Thought and Utopia in the Writings of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Benjamin.” Utopian Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1998, pp. 149–61. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20719766. Accessed 7 May 2023.

Benjamin, Walter, et al. The Arcades Project. Belknap Press, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter, et al. Illuminations. The Bodley Head Ltd, 2019.

Loewith, Karl. Meaning in History. Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1949.

Cohen, Margaret. Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution. University of California Press, 1995.

Marx, Karl, et al. The German Ideology. Progress Publishers, 1976.