from George Steiner:
…the thesis whereby it is the ethical and cognitive duty of history, of enacted remembrance, to rescue from oblivion the oppressed, the enslaved, the victims of successful injustice, to bring them back to protesting life out of the strategic amnesia imposed by the history-writing of the victors. This is not original to Benjamin. We find it in the radical remembrancers who are the Prophets in Israel. It is in every line of the book of Amos. We find it in the humanitarian rages of Victor Hugo, throughout the dix-neuvième siècle and her miserables, which he knew so well. We find it in the outcry of Blanqui: ‘Do not let our despots lie by writing our history’.
It is an integral element of the retrospective utopias of Marxism in revolutionary socialism. But Benjamin gives it undoubtedly a singular
intensity and urgency and dignity. His is the explicit doctrine of what we call in Hebrew ‘tikun olam’. Probably again the key sentence to Benjamin, tikun olam, which means roughly, ‘the reparation’, ‘the making good’, ‘the rescuing to make good of what is left of this smashed world’. Against the dread winds thrusting the Angulus Novus into blind futurity, Benjamin’s plea for justice is at work in today’s recuperative histories of colonialism, of feminity, of the child, and most evidently, in the increasingly despairing attempts to recuperate the Shoah from
falsification and oblivion….. Read More:http://www.wehavephotoshop.com/PHILOSOPHY%20NOW/PHILOSOPHY/Benjamin/Steiner,.George.-.To.Speak.of.Walter.Benjamin.pdfa
ADDENDUM:
Such was Benjamin’s depth of spirit, such was his articulate genius for sadness, that this one man, in so many ways — let us not fool ourselves — pathetic, a beggar, and defeated, so terribly defeated, has come to stand, in his person, for a limitless immensity of waste and desolation. The waste, none of us can conceive of it, none of us can begin to conceive the waste of the Shoah, of what could have been. He stands for that. Together with Kafka, before the midnight hours, and together with Paul Celan after the midnight hours. Those three. Walter Benjamin carries on his bent shoulders the inconceivable load of a world made ash, of a civilisation annihilated, of a bestiality and injustice forever irreparable, totally irreparable. He bears immemorial witness. And he would not, I think, wish us to do otherwise. ( Steiner ) Read More:http://www.wehavephotoshop.com/PHILOSOPHY%20NOW/PHILOSOPHY/Benjamin/Steiner,.George.-.To.Speak.of.Walter.Benjamin.pdfa