Redemption and Utopia Introduction The following is an essay based upon Redemption and Utopia of Michael L|wy published originally under the title Redemption et Utopie in 1988 by Presses Universitaires de France. I read the book in Gustaf Gimdal's Swedish translation F|rlossning och Utopi published by Daidalos in 1990. I intend to use some of L|wy's themes as a springboard for a discussion of the concepts of time and victimhood as they apply to progressive thought at the end of the 20th century. L|wy's book is an examination of the thought of 15 German Jewish writers born between 1875 and 1900. Though many of them talked or corresponded with each other, what is most striking are the parallels in their lives and thinking, the similar ways in which the events of their times, their family background, and their Jewish heritage interacted to form their ideas. What emerged in these men in varying degrees was a breathtakingly radical analysis of history, contemporary society, and possibilities for the future. Quite simply they attempted a synthesis of the fundamental and apparently contradictory trends in contemporary political and social thought. Their incredible drive toward integration was epitomized by Walter Benjamin, whom L|wy describes in the following terms: "[His] thought progresses like the painting of an artist who never erases his brush strokes, but rather constantly covers them with new layers, which at times seem to follow the contours of the original sketch and at times seem to transcend them in an unexpected form." (p. 122) One senses in reading the book that many of the writers lived their lives with the same kind of intensity that their thought reflects: a number of them expected imminent transformation of the world and committed suicide in despair when their hopes failed to materialize. Others lived on to a ripe old age, moderated their views and became accepted within liberal or more traditionally radical circles, yet even at the end of their lives held on to the messianic dreams which had fired their thought as youths. L|wy's book operates on several levels. On the most basic level he traces the development of the thought of each of the 15 men and their relationship to their times and its contradictory ideological currents. On another level L|wy distinguishes among three groups of writers: those who had an essentially religious orientation with anarchistic and libertarian tendencies, those who were primarily anarchistic and libertarian but who drew on spiritual traditions, and those who stood at the crossroads of the first two groups. A third level is L|wy's application and development of the concept of "elective affinity" that sociologist Max Weber had first employed in his analysis of the relationship between Protestantism and the growth of capitalism. A fourth level is the way in which L|wy suggests that these men influenced history and ideology in the 20th century: "Thus we are talking about a generation of history's losers...in a paradox that is more apparent than real, it is just because they were losers, outsiders that swam against the currents of their time, stubborn romantics and incurable utopians, that their work becomes more and more relevant, more and more significant as we approach the end of the 20th century." (p. 8) In particular the anti-nuclear and environmental movements reflect a great deal of their thinking. What is particularly fascinating in the "delayed effect" of their thought is its consonance with the tenor of the thought itself, its sympathy and faith in the victims of oppression and absolute belief in the power of human beings to transform history. A final level on which the book operates is in its suggestion that these men reflected a radically new consciousness of the nature of time. One cannot help noticing that their concept of time bears a striking resemblance to that of 20th century physics. I would argue that the sense of pregnancy that their work exudes and the disjointed way in which it has affected contemporary thought is a reflection of the gradual "seeping" of non-mechanistic reality into our consciousness in this century. These men stood on the threshold of a new reality, a position that helps to explain their ambivalent attitude toward science and the Enlightenment: they saw the limits of the mechanistic worldview, yet sensed that 20th century science could offer a "rational" basis for its transcendence. Section I of my essay will introduce the concept of elective affinity and the way in which L|wy employs it. Section II will highlight some of the social and political trends in 19th century Germany that constituted the basis for the ideological alchemy that L|wy describes. In this section I will also suggest that Enlightenment and rationalistic thinking was as significant an element in the alchemical reaction as the two traditions L|wy focuses on. In Section III I will discuss the substance of the thought of the writers L|wy treats. But instead of making distinctions between the primarily religious and primarily political writers, I will emphasize how different and apparently contradictory aspects of their ideas built upon each other to form a powerful whole. In particular, I will discuss Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin as concrete illustrations of the complexity and richness of these men's thought. In Section IV I will take up the implications of the failure of their ideas to triumph during their lives and the revolutionary concept of time that their beliefs represented. I will suggest that in incorporating the contradictory elements of their age, they reached the limit of what was possible at that time. And finally I will argue that perhaps the most radical aspect of their vision is the sense that history is not predetermined by economic, theological, or political factors, but depends upon real and unpredictable choices that human beings make in concrete moments of time. I. L|wy and elective affinity Lowy's book deals with the interaction of two trends of thought in the work of the writers with whom he is concerned: 19th century libertarian Romantic anarchism and the Jewish messianic tradition. The concept he chooses in order to illumine the nature of this interaction is that of "elective affinity," the attraction and merging of distinct forces or phenomena. L|wy traces this idea back to Hippocrates, describes its relevance to medieval alchemy, its importance in the work of writers such as Swedenborg, and ascribes its first modern explicit formulation to Swedish chemist Tarbem Olof Bergman (1775). In Lowy's exposition there are four phases involved in the elective affinity relationship between two forces or objects: 1) a passive or potential correspondence; 2) election - the beginning of the interaction; 3) coming together, partial or total fusion (or symbiotic relationship); 4) the emergence of a new form that is greater than the sum of the parts. L|wy relates that sociologist Max Weber consciously used the concept of elective affinity, but that he neglected the fourth and vital aspect, the emergence of a new form. It is quite interesting that L|wy identifies both Weber's truncated formulation of the concept and its scarce application in modern sociology as part and parcel of the scientific, rational nature of the age. Lowy's aim is both to apply elective affinity to the thinkers with whom he deals and to vivify the concept within sociological analysis in general. In doing so he thus reveals his sympathy with the restitutional and transcendental of the very thought he is describing. II. The historical background Nineteenth century German society as L|wy describes it was characterized by the explosive growth of capitalism and a cultural reaction against it on one hand and the partial emancipation and assimilation of the Jews on the other hand. Industrialism spread at a particularly rapid rate from 1870 until the First World War. This period also represented the height of the influence of Romanticism, the cultural reaction to industrialization. Romanticism was characterized by a harsh critique of modern society as dominated by rationalism, mechanization, and secularism. By the end of the century it was the leading intellectual current and united cultural and political thinkers across ideological lines. At the same time 70% of Germany's Jews had left the ghettos that had been their home for so many centuries and had been granted formal political equality. However, except for a privileged few, cultural equality, acceptance into German society, remained as elusive as ever. This contradiction was especially marked at the universities, where Jews in 1885 constituted a whopping 10% of the student population but were denied access to most regular teaching positions. This partial assimilation made Jewish academics ripe for the intellectual currents of their time. Though a majority of them followed the liberal or respectable Marxist trends in German thought, a number, including the men L|wy treats, became more enamored of anti-modernist Romantic ideas. On the one hand, their identification with Romanticism was a result of their emancipation, their identification with German society and even the nationalistic elements of Romanticism (for many of them Zionism was a counterpart to German nationalism). On the other hand, the contradictory nature of their assimilation was the very precondition for their rejection of that assimilation, particularly those aspects that represented acceptance of a materialistic, secularized society. Thus, many of them identified early in their careers with those trends within Romanticism that looked to previous historical periods, in particular the guild structures in medieval Europe, as a model for a more spiritualized, participatory society. This tendency often included an admiration of Christian values and mystical tradition. But as they, often as a result of exposure to the works of Martin Buber concerning the Jewish mystical tradition, got in touch with their Jewish roots, they began to identify with their own messianic tradition. This tradition's outstanding feature can be encapsulated in the rich Kabbalistic concept of Tikkoun, the obligation of Jews to work for the restitution of society to a harmoniously functioning and just entity. The concept in itself is a radical one, among other reasons because it implies a "return" to a situation that is not first and foremost "good" or "merciful" as the Christian mission is often interpreted, but to something holistic, "beyond good and evil," something like the state of innocence in the Garden of Eden. It is true that the form in which Jewish messianism had been propagated through the rabbinical and Talumudic tradition was rather more reactionary than radical: the wished-for restitution was expected to occur outside of history in an indeterminate future through the miraculous intervention of a personal and charismatic Messiah. What the men whom L|wy treats accomplished was to re-instate the radical character of the Jewish messianic tradition through its integration with 19th century libertarian anarchist ideas: the restitution, though seen as a total transformation of human life and its relationship to nature, was expected to occur within history. Furthermore, its occurrence would be expedited, if not wholly determined, by the concrete actions of human beings within history. One of the common denominators of Jewish messianism and libertarian anarchism that made for such a felicitous match was the radically anti-authoritarian character of both traditions. The state and all the forms of domination and control that it represents were regarded as the chief enemy. Drawing on their messianic tradition, the anti-authoritarianism of L|wy's thinkers often took the form of an the belief in an apparently oxymoronic "theocratic anarchy," i.e. a society in which the very absence of power relationships among people and of the abuse of nature would be insured by their absolute obedience to God. This view dovetails nicely with the most radical elements in Judaism, namely that human beings through making proper choices can be God's co-workers and compel her/him to establish a just order on earth. Though L|wy focuses on the chemistry between Jewish messianism and libertarian anarchism, he implies that the Enlightenment influenced many of the thinkers he treats, and I would argue that rationalism was an important term in the equation as well. L|wy hints more than once that these men had a more ambivalent attitude toward the Enlightenment than many of their non-Jewish Romanticist or anarchist colleagues. One clearly historical reason for their tendency to be more favorably disposed toward the Enlightenment was that its ideas of human equality had led more or less directly to the emancipation of the Jews. But in my view the more fundamental relationship arose from the fact that the idea of a just social order that is so central to the Jewish tradition has strong rationalistic components. The concept of Jews as having a special mission on earth as God's co-workers has always implied a reasoned, educated knowledge of just what it is that God expects people to do and what will work in realizing her/his expectations. The Romantic rebellion against the Enlightenment, though satisfying to these Jewish intellectuals in its attempt to re-infuse spiritual and cooperative values into society, represented also a threat against significant elements of their Jewish identity. I would argue that they identified with the spirit of the Enlightenment, that free and open inquiry was essential to creating a just and free social order. But they realized, as did the Romantics, that the content of much of the thought that had developed from the Enlightenment was no longer valid, i.e. the model of a mechanistic, deterministic universe with all of its implications for the organization of society. At the same time, however, they sensed that the Enlightenment had unleashed a wave of scientific and philosophical inquiry that would eventually transcend the deterministic model and open the way for a new concept of time and causality. L|wy summarizes Martin Buber's introduction to his book Utopia and Socialism as follows: "...[he] distinguishes between two forms of the nostalgia for justice: messianic eschatology, whose paradigm is a perfected time, creation's consummation; and utopia, whose paradigm is a perfected space, a community based on justice. As far as utopia is concerned, everything is subservient to man's conscious will; as far as eschatology is concerned - to the extent that it is prophetic and not apocalyptic - human beings play an active role in the redemption." (p. 73) This view of time runs counter to the deterministic view that had followed from Enlightenment thought. But it also runs counter to the Romantic view that society should return to some previous historical condition, such as medieval social organization. In this regard it is tempting to argue that Communism in the Soviet Union was an attempt to implement the Enlightenment perspective, whereas Nazism in Germany was an attempt to implement the Romantic perspective. However, 20th century science and philosophy have come to posit a view of the world that is radically anti- mechanistic and thus lends support to messianic anarchist thought. As I will argue in the conclusion to this essay, it is highly credible that as human consciousness changes in response to this new worldview, the chances for the realization of utopian ideals will increase; at the same time the very nature of radical messianic thought leaves unresolved the question of the likelihood of this realization. III. Currents of thought in messianic anarchism (Kafka and Benjamin) If Martin Buber, particularly in his writings on the Jewish mystical tradition and his newspaper Der Jude (1916-24), was the Godfather to the group of men whom L|wy treats, Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin can be said to be their guiding spirits. Kafka was marginally involved in political activity and only at a relatively early stage of his career. But his sympathy with and knowledge of both the Jewish tradition and radical political movements were much greater than is ordinarily assumed. In any case, his ideas were expressed powerfully in fictional form and had a profound influence on the more explicitly political and religious writers. Kafka's fiction painted a devastating, if often fantastic and ironic, picture of life in modern industrialized society. But, as L|wy suggests, Kafka's work was not primarily social criticism as such, but rather a kind of metaphysical portrayal of a "negative utopia," of a daily existence lacking all redeeming features and marked by a total absence of either spiritual awareness or of earthly justice and truth. It is, in other words, an uncompromisingly stark indictment of the present. L|wy summarizes the message of Kafka's two major novels The Trial and The Castle in the following way: "[they] describe a world in despair, abandoned to absurdity, to authoritarian injustice and to mendacity, a world without freedom where the messianic promise reveals itself only in a negative sense by means of its radical absence. Not only does is a positive message lacking, but the messianic promise exists only implicitly, in the religious sense of perceiving (and rejecting) the contemporary world as hellish." (p. 103) Particularly relevant to this essay is the way in which Kafka's fiction reflects an existence in which time has lost its dimensionality and potential, has become a kind of torture for human beings in their everyday lives, another tool for their oppression. In an interview Kafka once described modernity as a condition in which "the most sublime and least corruptible aspect of all creativity, time, is compressed and entangled in a net of obscene commercial interests. In this way not only creativity but above all man as its essential force is degraded and humiliated." (p. 95) Nevertheless, Kafka's work is written as if from the flipside of the darkness, as if the very absence of redemption suggests its possibility. Kafka's fiction implies that transcendence of the nightmare of history is possible just within and in recognition of that nightmare. The desperate and often comic struggles of human beings within an oppressive order reflect the suppressed desire to live in a wholly different way. And a concept of time as offering transcendence, as being by nature other than deterministic, empty, and endlessly cyclical, is essential to this "negative" vision. L|wy quotes Maurice Blanchot on Kafka: "All of [his] work is a search for an affirmation that can be achieved by means of negation...[and] transcendence is just that affirmation that cannot be achieved other than by negation." (p. 95) Kafka's view of the present was shared by all of the writers to whom L|wy devotes his book. Modernity was seen as bankrupt spiritually and unable to provide human beings with meaningful lives or to protect nature from human ravages. Though many of them looked favorably upon Soviet Communism (until it became clearly authoritarian and oppressive in the 1930's), their analysis was not primarily economic: they saw neither the causes nor the cure of the malaise in economic terms. Their hope for the Soviet experiment lay in its appearance of having radically broken the monotony of history and in its promise of creating a stateless cooperative society. For similar reasons many of these men supported, and were later disillusioned with, the Zionist experiment in Palestine. But though their analysis was not chiefly economic, it shared Marxism's perspective of history through the eyes of the exploited and oppressed. And they saw that oppression primarily in political and spiritual terms, in the nature of power and the way that it is intrinsically employed. This critique of power was bound up with their identities as Jews. They saw the Jews as the quintessential victims of political oppression throughout history (in this regard it is relevant to note that Jews had typically enjoyed greater economic than political rights). At the same time Jewish life in Europe, with its tightly-knit communities, statelessness and focus on obedience to God could be regarded as a kind of anarchistic model. The Jewish concept of the Sabbath, which was central to the culture and religion, could also be interpreted as a kind of revolutionary anarchistic idea. The Sabbath's proscription of work was seen to derive from the belief that labor in its current form is a reflection of man's fallen state, of his antagonistic relation to nature. The Sabbath, as well as the Jewish concept of a Jubilee every 50 years when all debts and obligations would be forgiven, represented an aspiration to break the monotonous and empty cycle of time. Thus, the Jewish messianic tradition in its radical, as opposed to rabbinic, interpretation, namely that human beings in their daily lives choose or prepare the way for a radical transformation of human life, was seen as exemplified in the particular way in which Jewish history and culture had developed. But it was also just their Jewish identities that made it impossible for L|wy's thinkers to fully embrace Romanticism, which, in its tendency to look to the past for social models, reminded them of the nightmare that history had been for Jews, and by extension all oppressed (the majority of) people. A concrete corollary of this proclivity was that, as opposed to the Romanticists in general, they saw technology as important to the realization of their vision, though they condemned its misuse in both capitalist states and the Soviet Union. L|wy says of Walter Benjamin: "The cardinal point in his criticism is not a denial of technology, but rather its radical re-definition, its mastery not over nature, but rather over the relationship between man and nature." (p. 131) If one remembers that the fundamental critique these men levelled was against power and authority in itself, it should come as no surprise that they could view technology as a positive element within a non-authoritarian social and political structure. Thus, although these men were heavily influenced both by German culture and by cultural Zionist ideas, they came to oppose either full Jewish assimilation into German society or the goals of political Zionism. Assimilation into German culture represented accepting a bankrupt social order, abandoning the special insight into the nature of political power that the Jews had garnered, and aligning with the reactionary tendencies within the Jewish tradition itself. Political Zionism represented the acceptance of the concept of the state, the abandonment of revolutionary struggle in Europe, becoming tools of Western imperialist aspirations, and taking on the role of oppressors over another people (the victimization of the Arabs was apparent to these men as early as the 1920's). Overarching all these considerations was a radical political interpretation of the essence of Jewish prayer, belief, and the concept of the "chosen people": that Jews could not be free from oppression without a transformation of society that would be carried out by and lead to the freedom of all oppressed people and in the liberation of nature from human exploitation. L|wy's entitles his chapter on Walter Benjamin, "Outside all currents, where the ways cross" to describe the rich complexity of Benjamin's thought and relationship to other writers. Throughout his long and prolific life Benjamin attempted a vast synthesis of the currents of thought of his time and held to a devastating criticize of modernity and of the withering role of the power principle in history. His work is also rich in its focus on the restitutional and transcendental elements that are central to the thinking of the men L|wy treats. It is noteworthy that of all the writers he deals with Benjamin is the one whom L|wy explicitly identifies as an admirer also of rationalist (particularly Kantian) thought despite his base in the Romantic tradition. The following is an attempt to summarize L|wy's treatment of the various elements of Benjamin's thinking. In this way I intend to more concretely convey the sense of the dynamism of the work of these messianic anarchists. Benjamin's early writings during the First World War were smack in the middle of the Romantic tradition. Though he was to grown beyond Romanticism, it always maintained a strong hold on him. However, rationalism was also an early influence on his thought. Kafka had once referred in an interview to a passage from Plato concerning poets: "[They]... are enemies to the state, because they advocate change." Benjamin believed that all free inquiry was inimical to the state and the power principle. As early on as his doctoral thesis, Benjamin emphasized that life is a striving for perfection and transformation, not endless evolutionary progress. He was also influenced early on by the Jewish Kabbalah, with whose restitutional elements he strongly identified: he related utopia to the perfection of speech which had been corrupted by the fall from grace in the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. Around the same time he wrote of anarchistic elements in the Catholic medieval cloisters. At an early stage as well Benjamin levelled a blistering attack not only against the concept of state power but also against its oppressive and reactionary function in modern society: he saw institutions such as the police as the most degenerate and despicable representatives of power and, unlike many anarchists, was favorably inclined to revolutionary violence as a means of breaking the stranglehold of state institutions, the endless cycle of oppression. On a more existential level, he regarded the futile pursuit of pleasure in a degenerate social order as a kind of pale reflection of the utopian ideal within each person. Thus he often called himself a nihilist as opposed to an anarchist in order to emphasize the need for a total break with reigning values in order to forge a complete restitution. Despite his scepticism of political movements in general, Benjamin was drawn to Communism in the Soviet Union, where he perceived the potential of blending Marxist theory and practice. L|wy coyly paraphrases a 1926 letter from Benjamin to Gerlom Scholem: "The anarchist methods [are] 'clearly inappropriate' and the Communist goals 'pure nonsense'; but this doesn't detract a jot from the Communist approach, because it is a corrective to its goals and because there is no such thing as a sensible political goal...The goals of anarchism are significant in that they are not political goals, but the best method for achieving them is offered by the Communist approach." (p. 129) Though Benjamin was later to renounce the Soviet experiment, its very existence strongly affected the direction of his thinking: his messianism took on a more secular tone. In one telling example cited by L|wy, a phrase in a text in which Benjamin had cited the role of prayer in overthrowing oppression was changed two years later to focus on the role of proletarian revolt. From the beginning Benjamin's formulation of Marxist class-struggle theory was particularly nuanced and conscious of contemporary realities: he saw the seizure of power by the proletariat not as somehow historically inevitable, but rather as urgent, not only in their own interests, but in order to check the rampage of technology as it had developed under bourgeois control before it could lead to irreversible catastrophe. Benjamin was also intrigued by the surrealistic movement in the arts. He saw surrealism as a successful application of the Marxist doctrine that all ideas and structures should motivate their own transcendence. But the conscious application of Marxist theory in the Soviet Union proved to be a source of great disillusionment for him: not only the mass executions of the 1930's but also Stalin's emphasis on industrialization to the exclusion of class struggle and popular political awareness horrified him. Benjamin would have perhaps abandoned the Soviet Union even earlier had he not been so acutely conscious of the growth of Fascism, which he saw as representative of modernity, and against which he regarded Soviet Communism as a bulwark. His focus on Fascism reflected not only his sensitivity to the political realities of his time, but also his radical critique of modernity in general; whereas liberals and even Marxists generally saw Fascism as an isolated phenomenon in European history, Benjamin regarded it as typical of modernity, a natural historical development, and representative of the growing barbarity of the industrialized world. Benjamin's critique of a liberal "progressive" view of history included a reinterpretation of the Marxist doctrine of "historical materialism": he saw the attainment of a classless society not in deterministic or gradual terms ("the withering away of the state"), but rather in the "actualization" of a latent but by no means inevitable possibility of social transformation. One of the key distinctions Benjamin made was between conscious experience (Erfahrung) and episodic experience (Erlebnis). Conscious experience was conceived of as a kind of free-floating culturally-integrating phenomenon shared by a group of people and possessing the capacity to bind the present to the past. Episodic experience involved the physical and psychological impressions of isolated human beings. Benjamin argued that conscious experience had been lost in modern society. Max Weber had remarked on a similar phenomenon but had viewed it in a less negative light: modernity had freed mankind from the "enchantment" of more primitive cultures. Benjamin, on other hand, viewed just that "enchantment" as a "liberating magic" capable of uniting human beings with each other and with nature; its loss had led not to clarity but to the greatest "myth" of all, that of the separation of man from his origins. The parallel between Weber's and Benjamin's radically different interpretations of modernity and Weber's and L|wy's radically different use of the concept of "elective affinity" is striking. Also striking is the prophetic nature of Benjamin's explicit characterization of experience in modern society as episodic and traumatic; such an analysis has been incorporated into popular social thought and has been adopted as the basis of "self-realization" movements (such as Werner Erhardt's EST) in the late 20th century. For Benjamin the restitution of a just, harmonious, and non-exploitative society as encapsulated in the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkoun involved an interplay between conscious experience and social relationships. In a reflection of the Jewish sabbatical tradition as noted above, he explored the concept of play as opposed to exploited and exploitative labor as key to the restitution. Similarly, he was fascinated by the research of Bachofen and others concerning the more egalitarian and nurturing nature of matriarchal societies. However, Benjamin's essential differences with traditional Romanticism are evident. The concept of restitution did not imply for him the return to an earlier social structure but rather an integration of the past and present to create an "actualized" as opposed to a deterministic future. He was not interested in the "reproduction" of an historical model, but rather in the "recovery" of the spirit of egalitarianism. Technology was not in itself inimical to this project; on the contrary it was an essential tool for the integration of ancient spirit and contemporary reality. Benjamin, like Kafka, points to the central paradox and the central hope of modernity. To Benjamin, it is just those elements of modernity that are the most ominous - Fascism and unbridled industrialism - that are also the most characteristic. He is Kafka's philosophical counterpart in his portrayal of the ravages of authoritarianism and mechanization. But just as Kafka's fiction was not primarily social criticism but rather a portrayal of man caught in the nightmare of history, Benjamin focused on the catastrophes of modernity for their capacity to illumine the barbaric tendency of historical development. And in the same way as the streets, corridors, and outposts of the nightmare constitute the stage on which Kafka's dramas unfold, Benjamin is not much drawn, as were the Romantics, to an idyllic, agrarian, or medieval ideal. The very hopelessness and bleakness, as well as the humor and irony, of Kafka's work suggest that only by a transformation of consciousness within the nightmare can an escape hatch be found. Utopia is not an ideal of perfection at the end of the rainbow of historical progression, but the other side of the coin of modernity: it is not the ideal or best way out of the nightmare, it is the only way out. And as Kafka's fiction shows modern man in a futile search for pleasure and meaning, so Benjamin sees in the barbarity and mechanized soullessness of modernity a kind of mirror image of the playfulness, trust and simplicity that restitutional anarchism strives to achieve. IV. Conclusion: on losing and time The following examination of the interweaving of the concepts of the role of the victim in history and the nature of the phenomenon of time is intended to illustrate the richness, complexity and compassion of the thought of the men L|wy treats in his book. Hopefully, this discussion will contribute also to understanding the fertility of the elective affinity between Romantic anarchism and the Jewish messianic tradition. One might say that this interplay of time and victimhood reflected a species of optimism that is central to the Jewish historical experience, not the optimism of eternal progress or of this as the "best of all possible worlds" (the Enlightenment), or the optimism of "man's essentially good nature" (Romanticism), but a more existential view of man's ability to choose justice and fulfilment. According to this view the "darkness" of modernity reflects man's lack of awareness of that choice but at the same time is a kind of negative evidence that the choice nevertheless exists. The view of history as a never-ending progression toward greater justice, freedom, prosperity, etc. was largely a product of the ideals of the Enlightenment combined with a belief in the power of science and reason to promote the unfoldment of the good in history. L|wy's thinkers rejected this view on a number of counts. First, it flew in the face of the evidence as they saw it. History had consisted not only of continual war, brutality, and poverty, but also of a successive consolidation of power by a smaller and smaller minority over a greater and greater majority. This view differed sharply from Marxist analysis in that its perspective was chiefly non-economic and because it was anti-deterministic: it did not see a kind of inevitable triumph over oppression. The catastrophes of the 20th century - unbridled industrialism, genocide, Nazism, environmental destruction - were for them not historical exceptions, and not primarily the culmination or latest stage in the development of barbarity, but a kind of microcosm of history itself. In particular, for Kafka and Benjamin was 20th century authoritarianism a logical expression of the dominance and arbitrariness of the power principle in history. The second reason that these men rejected the view of never-ending progress was its relationship to the nature of everyday experience within modern society. To them what modern man experiences is an eternally repetitive, empty and impenetrable cycle of time. Benjamin employs the myth of Sisyphus to describe contemporary life, the man who rolls the boulder to the top of the hill only to have to start all over again. Images from the modern assembly line, wheels in our machines, factory gates (the entrance to Hell according to Marx and Engel's imagery) conveyed contemporary versions of the Sisyphus myth. But for the messianic anarchist thinkers the power of the myth was not in its description of economic conditions but rather in its portrayal of daily experience, of time. Modern man experiences life as an endless series of minutes, hours, days, weeks in which he has no power to transform the nature of his life or to make any fundamental choices. In Kafka's fiction the distortion and compression of time represents the very way in which the possibility of choice is seemingly intentionally - through the arbitrary exercise of power - excluded from human awareness. It is ultimately the perceived inability to transform experience, to choose to experience something other than endless repetition, that lies at the heart of the existential pain behind much of what Lowy's thinkers express. L|wy quotes one of them, Gy|rgy Lukacs in his analysis of a passage from Das Kapital on the effects of the machine on man: "As a result time loses its qualitative, transformational, fluent character. It solidifies into a continuum that is wholly limited, quantitatively measurable and stuffed with quantifiable 'things' (i.e. the worker's labor that is reified, mechanically objectified and essentially cut off from the human personality as a whole). Time solidifies into space." (p. 252) But the messianic principle, at least in its alchemy with anarchism and rationalism, finds hope in despair, presence in absence, light in darkness. And this hope has little to do with faith or belief but rather with its analysis of the nature of the darkness. The absence, darkness, distortion represents a kind of pregnancy or potential. The power principle has distorted or veiled the potentialities of human beings and the richness of time but has not aborted them. In other words, man's perceived ability to choose has been suppressed but not his essential will. The will, however, is expressed in distorted ways in modern life, i.e. through the search for entertainment, fame, wealth, sexual conquest etc., all of which proceed from time as empty and needing to be filled rather than as a potentiality offering choice and fulfilment. The third reason these men rejected the concept of history as never-ending progress was that it is a self-contradictory idea in itself. To understand this, one must look at the concept of being a sort of hybrid of two aspects of the Enlightenment, on one hand the superiority of scientific and rational thinking, and on the other hand the virtues of justice and equality. The contradiction lies in the fact that the adulation of science carried with it the view of the universe as deterministic. What a universe that operates according to fixed laws (where the most that man could hope for is to come closer and closer to an understanding of their operation) has to do with justice and equality, or why in any case one would feel empowered to strive for justice and equality within this framework, is, to say the least, problematic. On the one hand, there did not seem to be much evidence that 19th century scientific progress had brought greater justice and equality - quite the contrary. On the other hand, industrialization seemed to provide the hope of a society in which human beings could escape the harshness of bare existence. Similarly, the revolutions, constitutions, nationalist movements and formal emancipations of the 18th and 19th centuries seemed to testify to the fact that rational ideas could inspire people to action. On a more metaphysical level, human beings, despite the reigning model of a deterministic universe, continued to experience at least occasional impulses that they could or should be able to affect the course of their lives and of history. Despite the failure of the scientific revolution to reverse the barbaric trend of history, for L|wy's thinkers the return to some previous historical phase, as the Romantics were drawn to, represented the nightmare from which the oppressed majority of mankind, and Jews in particular, were striving to emerge. And it was just the ideal of reason, justice, even mission (not in terms of conversion but of bringing light to superstition and injustice), not the power principle as in the case with popes and emperors, that had sustained the Jewish community through centuries of persecution. It was the reign of power that had subverted reason and turned time and choice into meaningless categories. Thus it was the victims of history, not only the economic victims but all those who had felt the brutality of power and who through their desperate search for fulfilment as well as bare subsistence, represented the longing for real experience and bore the hope for transformation; one might call them the "consciousness proletariat." What was needed was a transcendence of the reigning sterile categories of existence, a restitution of time as a vibrating possibility. And it was just in the moment, in the apparent banality of everyday life, that this transcendence is possible. This is messianism in its most radical and stark form, the promise of the moment, the opportunity for human awareness and choice. It is also the central meaning of the Jewish tenet that the human project is to pave the way for the messiah, who can arrive "at any moment," a paradoxical but fertile concept. Benjamin said, "As is well-known it was forbidden for Jews to try to read the future...But the future was not regarded in their eyes as therefore homogeneous and empty. Every second of the future represented a narrow gate through which the Messiah could enter." (p. 252) But as usual it was Kafka who put it most felicitously and engagingly: "The Messiah arrives at that moment when he is no longer needed, he doesn't come until the day after his arrival, he comes not on the last day but on the very last day." (p. 99) Almost breathtaking is the fact that 20th century physics seems to have borne out this view of time, choice and human action. Physics no longer talks of pre-determined events according to fixed laws, but rather of a range of probable events. Which of a number of possible events actually "occurs" depends on one's perspective, the instruments one uses to measure them, and what might be called a central built-in unpredictability factor that one can, at least on a metaphorical level, identify as the human will, man's consciousness of his ability and willingness to make choices. In modern physics time is not an empty vessel or a straight line waiting to be filled by events; rather events are woven into the texture of time itself - time and events create and shape each other. One often hears that the principles of modern physics are too difficult, abstract, or removed from everyday experience to be understood by the "layman." But it is everyday experience as shaped by a mechanistic worldview that is resistant to quantum reality, not human consciousness itself. And it is reasonable to postulate that it is just those people who have been history's victims but who are at the same time closest to everyday experience - in my words the "consciousness proletariat" - who will be the most able to grasp the "new reality" that modern science offers. And it is likely that they will understand the "unpredictability factor" that science now sees as built into the universe as just that human will that we, however confusedly, experience as existing. All this points to the possibility of transcendence, of acting within discrete moments of time to transform the sense of hopelessness and futility that characterizes modern consciousness. The "nightmare of history," according to messianic anarchism, can and must be ended within history itself. The transformation does not occur at the end of history, nor does it occur in a kind of personal, inward awareness of the "illusion" of time, but rather in aware action that creates an opening for the messiah, that activates time's potential. But what enriches, integrates and distinguishes this thinking is that the transformation itself is by no means destined to occur. Through cowardice, duress, malice or whim people may fail to prepare the way for the messiah. The catastrophe may quite simply continue. The outcome cannot be predicted because its very nature is unpredictability - as is the nature of the human will, whose triumph as well as it downfall resides in its ultimate independence.