Revisiting the Benjaminian figure of HOPE IN THE PAST through the constellation between Natural history (Naturgeschichte) and History (Geschichte)

NAISHTAT FRANCISCO

Berlín

Conferencia; Hope / Rethinking with Benjamin / Hoffnung / mit Benjamin neu denken; 2021

International Walter Benjamin Society

The expression of Hope in the past (Hoffnung im Vergangenenheit) is quite familiar to Benjaminian scholars through the 6th benjaminian Thesis on the concept of History (published during the 1950s) and, just one decade after that, the appearance of Peter Szondi´s paper of homonymous title HOPE IN THE PAST (1961), where this figure is at first illuminated through the idea of the Proustian search of lost time and involuntary remembering, specially assumed, as Szondi pointed, by Benjamin´s own writings, from A Berlin Childhood to the Arcades Project. The figures of remembrance, awakening, fulfillment, Aktualisierung, shock, translation, are all vectors of this weak messianic power of every present generation on which the past has a claim. As we mentionned above, previous to Szondi´s paper, indeed, Benjamin himself had namely introduced the expression of hope in the past, at the end of his 6th Thesis on the concept of history: The only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious (emphasis by the author). Nevertheless, the motif of the dead lead us below the dominion of claim and remembrance to the dominion of what Benjamin has early designated by the name of Natural history (Naturgeschichte), as introduced in the Trauerspiel book in terms of the Facies Hippocratica of history, which means the skull, the corpse of history, pointing clearly to baroque transience as decay, decline and corruption, not only of material and sensual creatures in the dominion of the organic nature but also of institutional power and sovereignty, releasing the naked face of power, as in baroque drama. Nevertheless the idea of Naturgeschichte is not limited to the Baroque´s book but maintained through the whole Benjaminian research on history, acquiring centrality not only as transience, but also as the ideas of Origin and Ur-Phänomen, through the figure of archeology of modernity as its prehistorical manifestation. In our presentation we want therefore to address the question of hope in the past through the dialectical relation between natural history and history, through three different levels: death and transience; Origin and archeology, messianism and redemptiveness.