Un A whirlpool in the stream of the becoming The now and the history in Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

In the first part, this text shows how the young Ernst Bloch, inspired both by Nietzsche and Christian mysticism, has come to a philosophy of history in which the Now can on certain occasions give rise to something similar to what Meister Eckhart called the birth of God in the soul. In this conception, the present moment is understood as an infinitesimal origin which constitutes the axis of the totality of time, of the future as well as of what was unfulfilled in the past. The second part shows how Walter Benjamin, on the basis of a different, theological framework, has taken up several aspects of Bloch’s philosophy, particularly the emphasis on the Now seen as “a whirlpool in the stream of the becoming”, that is, as an interruption of the course of time and as the moment of a possible salvation of the past. The third part emphasizes the properly ontological character of both authors’ conceptions of time, then it points out some of their key theoretical differences, and finally it highlights their shared motive of the infinitesimal origin, which, although little noticed, is an authentic figure of the negative in history.