Th ere is something positively schizo about the Jetztzeit: it could happen at any time, but it doesn’t happen until it happens, and even then it doesn’t just happen.
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.
Whatever the polemical virtues of this account—and it sounds as true as anything Baudrillard ever said about the simulations of the capitalist code—it remains firmly within Hegelian coordinates.
I know all of these words but I don't really know what he's saying tbh
