As the first moments of the Paris Commune showed, redemption might arrive not when the revolutionary messiah appears but when the pawn shops are closed and the back rents are cancelled.
In his notes on the philosophy of history, Benjamin repeatedly opposes the spectacle of progress and catastrophe to the aporetic thought that the history of the oppressed is marked by discontinuity.
In the meantime people deal with history as a compound mixture of exigencies, obligations, and potentialities that have to be worked through in practice, on their own terms, collectively and immanently.
Th e very idea that we live in history as a kind of immediate and infinite indebtedness can be understood as a defining attitude of modernity. On one hand, as Nietzsche described, human societies undergo a ruthlessly inward reorganization as soon as each person internalizes the drama of obligation …
So we live between two debts. On one hand, there is the ineradicable debt described by Agamben that comes from having or being a potentiality that we can never really possess, exhaust, or fulfill, which prompts us to live as if we were always in pursuit of something else, like happiness, which can …
