Description:

The Chicago-Area Consortium in German Philosophy is pleased to host Dr. Rebecca Comay (University of Toronto), who will be giving a lecture entitled "Walter Benjamin and Revolutionary Inheritance" on Friday, February 17. The talk will be held from 4-6pm in Cuneo Hall, room 217, at Loyola University Chicago.

Abstract: "Our heritage was left to us without a testament.” Hannah Arendt repeatedly borrows this formula (from René Char) to capture what she takes to be the predicament of revolutionary modernity. Without a testament, without any symbolic means of transmitting the event, there is no way to bequeath the “treasure” to future generations – no way to harvest its energy, to prolong its impact, or even to bear witness to what happened. This predicament is epitomized, for Arendt, by the destinies of its two most exemplary incarnations. Whereas the French Revolution, in its failure, would manage, literally, to succeed all too well – it would breed successor after terrifying successor-- the American Revolution, for all its manifest success, would conspicuously fail to produce a successor.

Here’s the thought experiment: what if Char’s formula needs to be reversed? What if the predicament is not intestacy, as Arendt suggests, but rather a kind of hyper-testamentarity --not a deficit but a surfeit of testamentary protocol? The past confronts us as a thicket of imperatives, injunctions, promises, exhortations, incitements, excitations– obscure messages from the dead, unsigned and undated but nonetheless time-stamped and indelibly addressed to us. What if the testament itself were the heritage —or rather, if there were no heritage, no patrimonial substance to transmit or but only the pressure of a demand as enigmatic as it is insistent?

This is precisely what Benjamin is pointing to when he speaks, in the second Thesis on History, of a secret covenant, rendezvous, or assignation between the dead and the living. This talk will explore some of the implications of this testamentary excess.