Being Present: Benjamin on Image, Temporality, and Trauma

Abstract

This article examines Walter Benjamin’s conception of the image through the temporal relation in which what-has-been and the present become historically recognizable together. A restricted comparison with Freud’s Nachträglichkeit brings into focus the non-coincidence of occurrence and later significance, while preserving the difference between psychic experience and the historical and aesthetic mediations of such recognizability. The dialectical image, I argue, does more than register temporal rupture: it configures a relation in which heterogeneous temporal moments become historically intelligible together. Aesthetic mediation and Benjamin’s engagement with Proust bring this problem into the sensible and embodied temporalization of the subject, where remembrance exceeds voluntary recollection. The argument then reaches a threshold at which remembrance concerns pasts never experienced by those to whom they later become significant. Historical remembrance here depends upon materially transmitted traces without their assimilation to the memory of a collective subject. Trauma returns at this threshold as a political problem, since its belated efficacy remains bound to singular experience even where the violence from which it arises is historically organized. Being present finally designates the temporal-political relation emerging from these differentiated mediations: a present answerable to histories it has not itself experienced, whose encounter with what has passed can alter its historical situation and leave its possibilities otherwise than settled in advance.