Taking leave of the past gaily
Benjamin after a comment of Marx’s:
Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy.
— The Arcades Project, N5a,2
When did the 20th Century die? I was thinking in the early ’90s, with the end of the Cold War; put perhaps it was earlier, in 1968, with the death of the final attempt to redeem Marxism-Leninism (is there any mileage in an analysis of contemporary Leninist groups as undead?), which would make the 20th Century very short indeed. Or perhaps the US administration’s current imperial adventures are the death-throes of the 20th century, which means the century will probably run for an even 100 years. In any case, it’s difficult to see any gaiety here. Can we identify anyone enacting the death of the 20th Century in comedy?
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I’m saying 1998, following the death of Britpop.
Comment by Marty @ 3/7/2006 3:33 am
I think there is quite a bit of mileage not just in analyzing existing M-L groups as undead, but their concepts as well. This article on anti-imperialism, for instance, argues that it has become a ‘zombie category’ for the left. It’s not one of those stupid humanitarian arguments about why we should embrace American power to do good, but rather an argument that it has lost its critical edge:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Printable/0000000CA6BA.htm
Democracy seems like another walking corpse of a concept to me…
Comment by Alex Gourevitch @ 3/7/2006 8:15 am
hi Tim,
“Can we identify anyone enacting the death of the 20th Century in comedy?” Is this a ’second time as farce’ allusion? Also, keeping with the metaphor of dead/undead here, will the 20th century stick around in dominating death/undeath like dead labor over living?
best,
Nate
Comment by Nate @ 3/7/2006 9:06 pm
Did Britpop really stagger on till 1998? Christ. Actually, maybe the current post-punk revival is the death of the 20th century in comedy form.
Thanks for the link, Alex. It’s certainly true that imperialism does seem to get bandied about as a completely formal concept by a lot of Leninists these days - I’d almost forgotten that Lenin himself had given some kind of actual empirical content to the theory.
Nate, the Marx quote Benjamin is playing off comes from the Considerations towards a Prolegomena to the Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique, where he says “the last stage of a world-historical form is comedy.” I guess Marx may have had that in mind when he wrote the line about the second time as farce, although he seems to approve of this repetition as comedy (”Why does history follow this course? So that mankind can take leave of its past gailey”).
Comment by tim @ 3/7/2006 11:48 pm
Thanks for that Tim.
Comment by Nate @ 3/9/2006 5:40 pm