HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Google Scholar Articles by Chowdhury, A.

Memory, Modernity, Repetition: Walter Benjamin's History

In an important fragment in The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin points to two perspectives on the present. The present is defined either as catastrophe or as triumph.¹ Two perspectives, Benjamin seems to suggest, constitute two modes of temporality. Whereas for a triumphant history, the present is located in the duration of time that Benjamin famously calls "homogeneous, empty time,"² in the movement of the same, for the historiography of the oppressed, on the other hand—and that is how Benjamin sees the position of historical materialism—the present is located in a temporal disjuncture "in which time stands still and has come...