Adrian Johnston
speaker
618 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2020
last heard Jan 2020
Adrian Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And all of these things forced certain Marxists like Benjamin to go back to the drawing board.
But Benjamin in particular is interesting here because I think, like what both Zizek and I in different ways want to do as well,
He, on the one hand, implicitly returns to Hegel's Alba Minerva and essentially says, yeah, we don't have any foresight into the future.
Benjamin uses the image of a Paul Klee painting of the angel of history and describes us as
like the angel of history, we are in a situation where the winds of history are pushing us in a certain direction and our wings are caught open by this powerful thrust of the winds of history.
And we're being pushed forward, but with our backs turned to the direction in which we're being pushed.
So we can't see where we're being pushed.
you know, thrust by the overall, you know, tendencies of history.
So we have no predictive power.
The future is unforeseeable for us.
But Benjamin, you know, strikes this nice balance where, you know, on the one hand, he wants to take into account just how badly things have turned out and in a way contrary to classical Marxism's predictions.
I mean, heck, he's a
a German-speaking Jewish Marxist intellectual on the verge of being captured by the Gestapo.
I mean, things really couldn't look much darker.
I mean, he's just witnessed Stalin betray true Marxism by entering into a non-aggression pact with Hitler in terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.
Benjamin wants to, on the one hand, rework Marxist materialism to take into account
just how dark things have ended up turning out, contrary to the bright, optimistic predictions of the more classical enlightenment progress narrative version of Marxism.
But without just sinking into fatalistic despair and saying we're guaranteed to be screwed, that there's, for Benjamin, there's always grounds for hope in terms of the unpredictability and unforeseeability of the future.
but we shouldn't be overconfident, you know, complacently optimistic that the invisible hand of history is guaranteed to guide us to some sort of post-capitalist paradise.
Um, so, you know, it's, it's a matter of, I think, acknowledging that the most we can do is try to occupy this position where there's a degree of uncertainty and unpredictability and there's grounds for hope.
Showing 441–460 of 618 · page 23 of 31
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