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
the most absolute kind of debt, original sin, appears as the most foolproof way to give meaning, proleptically, to one’s death, an act that thus becomes a way to ensure that one’s debts will never be paid except by the God who granted them
footnote 7
debt names something basic to the experience of social being as a dimension of historicity, even in its most eschatological form
footnote 7
