ABSTRACT
The comparison between Walter Benjamin’s quest to redeem the forgotten past in his posthumous ‘The Concept of History’ and Marcel Proust’s quest to recover lost time in A la recherche du temps perdu brings out both the correspondences and the divergences in their respective images of the past. The memory of the past that returns in Benjamin is not cathartic as with Proust but traumatic. Benjamin’s urgent sense of danger in face of the looming threat of the Third Reich reinforced his counter-conception of progress as catastrophe, which became the inspiration for the new historiography of the 1970s, informed by a vision of history as trauma. If in an act of retroactive redemption we can now read Benjamin as the prophetic voice of the contemporary historical imagination, when did the prophet become readable? When does the history of the present begin and when does the new historiography of the present begin? Benjamin plays a pivotal role in Henry Rousso’s answers to these questions in The Latest Catastrophe. History, the Present, the Contemporary (2017).
