The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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Multitemporal materialism. History and

unconscious memory, between Freud and
Benjamin

Leandro Drivet

To cite this article: Leandro Drivet (2020) Multitemporal materialism. History and unconscious
memory, between Freud and Benjamin, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 101:4,
685-705, DOI: 10.1080/00207578.2020.1772074

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2020.1772074

Published online: 18 Aug 2020.

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INT J PSYCHOANAL
2020, VOL. 101, NO. 4, 685–705
https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2020.1772074

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

Multitemporal materialism. History and unconscious memory,

between Freud and Benjamin
Leandro Drivet
Centro de Investigación en Filosofía Política y Epistemología (CIFPE), Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación
(FCEdu), Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos (UNER)/CONICET, Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article addresses the tense relationship between Sigmund Materialism; temporality;
Freud’s thinking and the materialist perspective of history. It psychoanalisys
presents a theoretical contribution that emerges from this
dialogue and thoughtfully considers its contradictions. First, I
synthesise Freud’s critiques of historical materialism, with the
issue of psychic temporality occupying a key role. I then address
the work of Walter Benjamin, who, in my view, has managed to
fruitfully integrate a good part of Freud’s insights into the
construction of a peculiar heterodox materialism that I call
multitemporal. I support this claim in two ways: (a) I demonstrate
the relevance of psychoanalysis as an indispensable source of
nourishment for Benjamin’s thought; and (b) I identify a shared
heritage (with Nietzsche) and some parallels between Freudian
thought and Benjaminian materialism with respect to their
conceptions of time, history, and unconscious memory, as well as
the key differences that both distinguish them and enable them
to question one another. I conclude by pointing out that, if we
reflect upon what may be its theological impediments in a critical
—that is, irreligious or metapsychological—light, Benjamin’s
thought can provide a way to explore the contributions of
psychoanalysis to critical social theory.

Auerbach … has not broken with tradition nor exposed the pre-history which tradition has
always suppressed. (Freud 1935, 104, in a letter to Arnold Zweig about Elias Auerbach’s Moses)
We are living in a specially remarkable period. We find to our astonishment that progress has
allied itself with barbarism. (Freud 1939, 53)

Introduction
Today, Sigmund Freud’s thought is of unquestionable relevance for contemporary social
theory. Of the range of perspectives his work has modified or engendered, I am interested
here in what has emerged from the relationship of psychoanalysis with historical materi-
alism—not its relationship with the concept of historical materialism itself, but with the set
of ideas that, since The German Ideology (Marx and Engels 1846), has expressed the

CONTACT Leandro Drivet [email protected], [email protected] Centro de Investigación en

Filosofía Política y Epistemología (CIFPE), Facultad de Ciencias de la Educación (FCEdu), Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos
(UNER)/CONICET, Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina
© 2020 Institute of Psychoanalysis
686 L. DRIVET

superstition-free point of view that the economic structure of a society constitutes the
basis of that society. Understood in this way, this broad current of detheologised
thought, enriched by diverse contributions, seeks to develop an empirical theory of
social evolution that dissolves “essences” and “purposes,” considering them to be histori-
cal outcomes and processes of nature and/or society, and is instead based on the theor-
etical and methodological principle encapsulated in Marx’s (1859, 11) dictum: “The mode
of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intel-
lectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their
social existence that determines their consciousness.” To establish the possibilities and
limits of a theoretical combination of psychoanalysis and materialist conceptions of
history, I first address Freud’s critiques of certain limits to historical consciousness
focused on economic determination, and especially his observations on the issue of tem-
porality. I then address the work of Walter Benjamin, who, I contend, has integrated Freu-
dian notions to construct a specific materialism that I call multitemporal. To lay the
foundations for this perspective, I demonstrate the relevance of psychoanalysis for Benja-
min’s thought and then indicate some similarities (and differences) between Freudian
thought and Benjaminian materialism with respect to the concepts of temporality,
history, and memory. This Freudian reading of Benjamin allows us to explore, simul-
taneously and inversely, the political and cultural richness of Freud’s work in a Benjaminian
way.

Freud and the materialist conception of history

What eidetic components of the materialist notion of history can explain the sceptical dis-
tance from which the creator of psychoanalysis viewed attempts to combine it with his
intellectual project? First, if Freud repeatedly expressed his refusal to affix psychoanalysis
to the plexus of a given cosmovision (Freud 1927a, 1933), it was to protect his thought
from both religion and philosophy (metaphysics), which he considered, from the point
of view of the evolution of humanity, to be a relic of the religious Weltanschauung (see
also Freud 1927b). In the last of the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud
(1933) distances himself from the naturalist and dialectic interpretation of historic pro-
cesses, which he credits to Marx at one point (with reservations, because he is unsure
of having understood it [Freud 1933, 175–176]), but which actually belongs more to the
dialectic (and metaphysical) materialism of Engels.1 Freud took aim at the philosophical
tendency to develop systems that attempt to be entirely self-reliant, leading to a prohibi-
tion of thought in the areas where these systems appear insufficient. For these reasons,
Freud rejected the notion of teleology in history that a part of (metaphysical) “materialism”
adopted, and he assumed that natural history and the historicity of the subject lacked
rigidly pre-established ends. Instead, he accepted that people make history in conditions
they have not chosen (see Marx 1852), even though they often do not know what they are
doing.
1
In Anti-Dühring, Engels (1878) attempts to articulate the materialist perspective of social history with the natural sciences.
Freud does not seem to be aware of these differences. At the same time, it is no less true that none of the great revolu-
tionary theorists understood psychoanalysis, with the partial exception of Trotsky, who showed some sympathy and
understanding but, after 1923, lost his authority in the orthodox circles of communism.
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 687

The objections by Freud that are of most interest here are those based on the “anthro-
pology” underlying some currents seen as the offspring of Marxism. Freud (1921, 1930)
refused to attribute people’s aggressiveness and their tendency to segregate to historically
contingent circumstances; in Freud’s opinion, an aggressive tendency is not learnt but
constitutional. The internalisation of aggressiveness that makes culture possible does
not take away from the fact that, keeping the unconscious logic in mind, all sociality
has been based on segregation since long before private property appeared. The commu-
nist ideal of a redeemed society seemed to Freud to be a repeat of the old Christian utopia
of the Last Judgement.2 Freud rejected the Christian illusion of universal love, and he per-
ceived the projection of its secularised shadow even in the proclamations of the tie of
communist atheism. In 1921, he noted that, “even during the kingdom of Christ those
people who do not belong to the community of believers, who do not love him, and
whom he does not love, stand outside this tie” (Freud 1921, 97). And he added (98):
Therefore a religion, even if it calls itself the religion of love, must be hard and unloving to
those who do not belong to it. Fundamentally indeed every religion is in this same way a reli-
gion of love for all those whom it embraces; while cruelty and intolerance towards those who
do not belong to it are natural to every religion … . If another group tie takes the place of the
religious one—and the socialistic tie seems to be succeeding in doing so—then there will be
the same intolerance towards outsiders as in the age of the Wars of Religion; and if differences
between scientific opinions could ever attain a similar significance for groups, the same result
would again be repeated with this new motivation.3

This critique, which Freud repeats in 1930 (Freud 1930, 112), concerns the aggressiveness
that becomes translated as privilege and is rationalised: it is of natural origin, certainly, but
reinforced by the gigantic weight of human history.
Rationalisations, which do more to conceal than to explain the reasons for action, are
not limited to aggressiveness. Freud’s most suggestive observation about certain ingenu-
ities of historical and materialist consciousness—which takes on special value in this article
—has to do with the popularised assumption of primary, definitive economic determi-
nation. As we will see below, this is, in Freud’s view, a simplification of the psychic,
topical, and dynamic structure that responds to more complex and profound motivations.
In one of the New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, Freud explains the origin of the
superego: it becomes the bearer of tradition, of all enduring values, and it becomes an
advocate of the pursuit of perfection. Freud then formulates his partial disagreement in
an illuminating way, which at the same time holds the key perhaps to Freud’s own lack
of understanding of the possibilities of a materialist view of history:
It seems likely that what are known as materialistic views of history sin in under-estimating this
factor. They brush it aside with the remark that human “ideologies” are nothing other than the
product and superstructure of their contemporary economic conditions. That is true, but very
probably not the whole truth. Mankind never lives entirely in the present. The past, the tradition
of the race and of the people, lives on in the ideologies of the super-ego, and yields only slowly

2
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud (1930) accepts that the complete satisfaction sought by the pleasure principle is
unattainable, and not only due to external factors. Roazen (2001, 246 ff) notes that this not at all encouraging message
was partly intended to dispute Reich, or, in other words, communist “anthropology.”
3
This was already clear by 1921 for German readers, yet not for readers of the French translation of Freud’s “Group Psy-
chology and the Analysis of the Ego” (1921), in which, according to Roudinesco and Plon (1997), the translators
Samuel Jankélévitch and Angelo Hesnard transcribed “extremist party” where Freud had written “socialist tie.” The
error was corrected in the new translation by James Strachey, but not until 1981.
688 L. DRIVET

to the influences of the present and to new changes; and so long as it operates through the
super-ego it plays a powerful part in human life, independently of economic conditions.
(Freud 1933, 62–63, my italics)

In sum, economic factors cannot be the final instance of the driver of actions, but only,
possibly, the first, and not always the most important. With respect to Freud’s possible lack
of understanding, alluded to above, the final statement in the above citation is revealing:
that the powerful role of the past operating through the superego is independent of econ-
omic relations. Is Freud not overreaching? What Freud can claim, in any case, is that the
superego is independent of current economic relations—not that its creation excludes
this dimension. On this point, the materialist view of history holds its own. Yet it must
accept, with the weight of experience, that aggressive humanity, lacking destiny, is also
multitemporal.
This Freudian view renders symptomatic the Marxist questioning of the supposed
“fixation on the past” attributed to psychoanalysis (see, for example, Bloch 1954), as it is
this temporal dimension, or at least some key aspects of the past, that certain tendencies
of historical materialism tend to overlook, whether by scorning or by simplifying it. A Marx-
ist’s self-critique on this matter is particularly persuasive. Commenting on Madame Bovary
in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre (1976) writes that to understand the vital experience
encapsulated in this work, it is not sufficient to refer to the socio-political structure and
evolution of the bourgeoisie; rather, one must examine Flaubert’s lived reality in his child-
hood, as if this time gap were evidence of a plurality of time periods condensed into one
concrete historical moment. For Sartre, Madame Bovary presents a delay with respect to
the period in which it appears. We do not necessarily belong to a given time, like a
forced harmony, precise and shared by everyone with the calendar; it is not something
simple and indivisible. Only psychoanalysis, argues Sartre (1968, 60), makes it possible
to understand and reflect upon the historical process of individuation and socialisation
through which the child becomes a particular adult. Said differently, ideology takes root
in the past and is fed by affects that are hard to reduce to the linear adult rationality of
capitalist modernity. But,
To-day’s Marxists are concerned only with adults; reading them, one would believe that we
were born at the age when we earn our first wages. They have forgotten their own childhoods.
As we read them, everything seems to happen as if men experienced their alienation and their
reification first in their own work, whereas in actuality each one lives it first, as a child, in his
parents’ work. (Sartre 1968, 62, italics in original)

For the most prominent voice of mid-twentieth-century European consciousness, then,

dialectical materialism could no longer do without the privileged mediation that would
allow it to go from general and abstract determinations to certain features of the singular
individual. Psychoanalysis discovers the person’s point of insertion in their class (and, we
should now add, in their gender); that is, the singular family as mediation between a singu-
lar class, the state, religion, and the individual. Sartre is thus one step behind Adorno (1967,
67), for whom analytical social psychology is “the only one seriously to go into the subjec-
tive conditions of objective irrationality.”
Thus far, psychoanalysis and the materialist perspective of history show areas of tension
and disagreement that do not prevent them from engaging in dialogue. Exchanges
between the two perspectives have been as real as they have been fruitful, and the
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 689

possibility of a combination between these two somewhat incommensurate views

depends on our acceptance of the partial nature of all critique. Below, I explore Walter Ben-
jamin’s reception of psychoanalysis. He is an author uniquely inscribed in the tradition of
critical theory, which he did not fail to influence, perhaps precisely because of his
interpretation of Freud’s legacy.

The reception of psychoanalysis in Walter Benjamin’s historical

materialism
vLike all sciences, historical materialism (broadly) and psychoanalysis are names of plural sets
of perspectives that are in dialogue and in debate—they are not entirely consistent with one
another and do not always get along harmoniously. Walter Benjamin’s work is an example,
within Marxism, of thought that is suspicious of the pursuit of systematicity, that critiques
the ideology of progress (understood as something linear, limitless, and automatic), that
warns of the need for a theory of violence, and that explores complex human temporality
and its relationship with the theory of action. In what follows, I attempt to demonstrate
that his perspective remains unclear if, as is frequently the case, we do not think of Benjamin
as an attentive and lucid reader of Freud—a reader who not only understands the Freudian
revolution with respect to the polyphonic mental stratification of subjects but also creatively
appropriates from psychoanalysis to identify and question, through his unique historical
materialism, the structural injustices from which the eradicable component of cultural
unease arises.4 To understand this, we must take into account that both thinkers are united
by the same tradition—Judaism—which precedes and influences them.
In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Habermas (1987, 11) states that “the conscious-
ness of time expressed in Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ is not easy to clas-
sify,” attesting to a difficulty that Adorno (1995, 19) attributed to all of Benjamin’s work, which
he defined as “Philosophy against Philosophy” due to Benjamin’s differences with traditional
philosophy. Confronted with an identical, seemingly impossible task, Löwy (2016, 2) con-
cluded that Benjamin “is, in every sense of the word, ‘unclassifiable’,” and he reminds us
that Hannah Arendt (1968, 10–11) had also noted the insufficiency of our ways to describe
him, considering him a “man of letters” in contrast with Scholem, who welcomed him
without any reservations into the universe of philosophers. Benjamin’s inscrutable character
seems to have been the distinctive mark that accompanied him—too often as a real stigma—
as he navigated the boundaries of the spheres that would circumstantially offer him shelter,
along the edges and peaks of the frontiers where he would find both death and immortality.
Jewish and “heterodox” Marxist are just two salient features of this thinker’s fragmen-
tary identity, characteristics that fall short in accounting for his nuances but are more than
sufficient for understanding his outsider status. Benjamin was, as the readers of his work
declare when faced with the difficulty of describing him, a being of borders, a stranger
everywhere. Löwy (2016, 20) reports that some considered him to be a historical materi-
alist with a fondness for theological metaphors; others, a Jewish theologian with Marxist
rhetoric; yet others, an elegant exponent of the vain attempt to reconcile Marxism and
Jewish theology. Lastly, like Löwy himself, there are those who prefer to describe him
as a Marxist and a theologian, acknowledging, in this attempt to bring the two together,
4
The relevance of Benjamin’s reading of Freud for the field of history is strangely absent in Freud for Historians (Gay 1986).
690 L. DRIVET

shared with Ernst Bloch (1954, 1972), the success that others denied him. Regardless of the
option we are tempted to choose, there seems to be a basic consensus among these four
perspectives—an agreement that consists of considering German romanticism, Jewish
messianism, and Marxism as the sources of nourishment for the author of Das Passa-
gen-Werk (The Arcades Project). Disagreements revolve around the relative proportions
of the various elements of this alchemy—fundamentally Marxism and messianism. None-
theless, what is questionable in my opinion is not any of the pillars of Benjamin’s theoreti-
cal edifice, which are rightly acknowledged, but rather the failure to see psychoanalysis as
one of the key conceptual contributions for understanding the peculiar Benjaminian phil-
osophy, only occasionally acknowledged in Benjamin by way of surrealism. Even in the
history of psychoanalytic Marxism or Marxist psychoanalysis (Jay 1976, 86–112; Jensen
1991; Wolfenstein 1993), Benjamin has not been recognised—as have Wilhelm Reich,
Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Theodor Adorno (after the first attempts by Siegfried
Bernfeld, Otto Fenichel, and Paul Federn)—as one of the intellectuals who worked to
establish the conditions for this dialogue. The extent to which the theoretical and epis-
temological value of psychoanalysis for understanding Benjamin’s heretic historiography
is underestimated is surprising. So too is the silence about the parallels between aspects of
psychoanalytic methodology and those characteristic of the Benjaminian process,5 which
make Freud and Benjamin agents of the same research process, using detailed inquiry to
retrieve the forgotten history(ies) of culture from the rubbish. Benjamin’s methodological
self-understanding (Benjamin 1999, N1a,8, 460) uses the image of a literary montage
rooting out the secret of things in the rubbish, in the details, in an interpretation of the
singularities, in the dregs of observation. Freud (1916a, 26) similarly wrote that the material
of psychoanalysis consists of “the inconsiderable events which have been put aside by the
other sciences as being too unimportant—the dregs, one might say, of the world of
phenomena.” With almost identical words, Freud (1914a, 221) compared his technique
to that used by Italy’s Morelli to identify the creators of different paintings:
It seems to me that his method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psycho-analysis.
It, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed fea-
tures, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations.

The approximations closest to my approach emphasise the impact of surrealism on Ben-

jamin’s education (Habermas 1974, 299; Ibarlucía 1998, 54: Löwy 1996, 1–16), but they are
far from developing a systematic connection between the two authors as co-constructors
of a new, multitemporal materialism, a historical thinking characterised by its acute sense
of the concrete, by its salvaging from periods of decadence, and by its revisions of the
breaks between the periods.
Some specialists in Benjaminian thought have explored the reasons for his epistemo-
logical and methodological dismissal of psychoanalysis. Naishtat (2009a) identifies at
least three causes. (a) He suggests that the importance of psychoanalysis in Benjamin’s
work was eclipsed by the wide dissemination of “On the Concept of History” (Benjamin
2003a) (often referred to as “Theses on the Philosophy of History”), which does not

5
Ibarlucía (1998) informs us of at least one exception: Benjamin’s “task of ‘expound[ing] the nineteenth century in fashion
and advertising, in buildings and politics—as the outcome of its dream visions’ emerges, writes Winfried Menninghaus,
from the amalgam of the concept of myth and the Marxist interpretation of the psychoanalytic theory of dreams” (Ibar-
lucía 1998, 63).
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 691

explicitly mention psychoanalysis. He proposes that this has been to the detriment of the
late publication of The Arcades Project, with which the other work should be understood in
conjunction, and in which psychoanalysis is openly appropriated and analysed. (b) He
adds the hypothesis that psychoanalysis is a difficult element to reconcile with the theo-
logising interpretations in Benjamin’s materialism (which, as can be deduced from the pre-
vious point, find fewer contradictions in the “Theses” than in The Arcades Project). (c) He
reviews the key points in the debates around psychoanalysis at the Institute for Social
Research, which reserved the study of Freud for Erich Fromm and, hence, made it
difficult for Benjamin to develop a systematic approach to psychoanalysis.
These obstacles are not enough to conceal that Benjamin himself, in his work on the
mechanical reproducibility of art (Benjamin 2008), emphasises Freudian hypotheses
about lapsus as an extension of our capacity for perception, similar to that achieved by
a cinematographer, or that in another, less widely read piece, he recognises in psychoana-
lysis the discovery of anamorphosis [Verxierbild] as a schematic of dream work (Ibarlucía
1998, 47 and 113). Nor can these obstacles obscure the explicit reference to Beyond the
Pleasure Principle in point III of “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin 2003b), a late
essay highly appreciated at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research in which Benjamin,
following Freud, presents the hypothesis of the (inverse) correlation between (involuntary)
memory and consciousness and says he wants to limit himself to exploring its fruitfulness.
These are not isolated or marginal mentions: I believe it is plausible to sustain that there
are certain parallels between Freud and Benjamin’s work that—often finding inspiration in
Nietzsche (either to further Nietzschean thought or to question it)—lead to seeing Benja-
min as a reader of Freud and illuminate, in a Benjaminian way, Freud’s texts.
While Freud’s work used critique to counter the dogma of the desire for totalisation,
Benjamin’s work, disputing the positivism of both the ideology of progress and vulgar
historicism, is composed of essays, fragments, and quotes that thwart any attempts at
systematisation (Naishtat 2009b). At least in his final period (in which he tried to
wrestle the Marxist theory of social evolution from the domain of the philosophy of
history), Benjamin was a spokesperson for concerns about Marxism, with which he
had identified since the mid-1920s (see letter from Adorno to Benjamin dated 2–4
and 5 August 1935 [Adorno and Benjamin 1999, 104 ff]). Far from the interpretive frame-
work of the Second International (positivist, mechanistic, economicist, and voluntarist),
Benjamin mainly reproached it for its unfounded and complicit optimism in “progress”
(see Löwy 2016, 65–67, 85–86, 116, and especially the final chapter, “The Opening Up
of History,” 107–116; as well as Ibarlucía 2000, 131). This and others of Benjamin’s cri-
tiques of Marxism are notably similar to the very aspects of this current of thought
that Freud battled. Freud and Benjamin were both influenced by their identification
with a progressively detheologised Judaism (more in Freud than in Benjamin [see
Steiner 2002]) and their vocation for the human condition. Brought up in a Jewish
family in which his parents’ beliefs prevailed, Freud, too, “experienced a sociability con-
ditioned by a teleological interpretation of history” (Acha 2007, 36) that he nonetheless
experienced in secular (see Freud 1925a, 1926),6 and even anticlerical and irreligious
terms (Gay 1987). The Jewish insistence on remembrance encapsulates part of the

6
Anzieu (1986, 93–94) establishes an order of priority in Freud’s formative elements, mentioning (1) his Jewish spiritual
upbringing, (2) his literary and philosophical education, and then (3) his positivist, scientific training.
692 L. DRIVET

mystery of a notion of temporality bearing multiple meanings and subordinated to an

absolving intervention, which, though shared with Benjamin, was totally detheologised
in Freud. To explain Freud’s peculiar Judaism, and by extension that of Benjamin, Yerush-
almi’s (1991) research is indispensable (see also Bakan 1958; Gay 1987, 1988; Robert
1974). Yerushalmi briefly reconstructs the history of Central European Jews in the
century and a half from Wessely’s Shirey Tif’eret to Freud’s Moses and Monotheistic Reli-
gion, claiming that the Haskalah and the initial struggle for emancipation led German
Jews at the vanguard to different degrees of breaking with Jewish tradition and to a
secularisation of life and, often, points of view that were more radical than anything
the previous apostles of the Jewish Aufklärung had foreseen. This is how the modern
version of the gotloser Jude [Godless Jew] came about. God’s vacant spot gave way to
a range of substitutes: a devotion to the new critical historical scholarship, varieties of
Jewish nationalism, socialism, philanthropy, fraternal organisations, Hebrew culture,
and Yiddish. We might also add reason and the god Logos in the case of Freud
(1927a, 28, 53). There are even more nuances if we also consider those who did not
define themselves as Jews yet felt irreducibly so. Yerushalmi proposes appropriating
the expression from Philip Rieff and calling them “psychological Jews.” For these non-
religious Jews, Judaism emptied of all dogmatism becomes Jewishness—pure subjectiv-
ity. It is a category that is better suited to Freud, who defined himself as Jewish only
when persecuted, than it is to Benjamin, less disengaged from some of Judaism’s dog-
matic content. The features of the “faithless Jew,” to use Freud’s expression, are intellec-
tuality and independence of spirit, the highest ethical and moral standards, concern
about social justice, tenacity in the face of persecution. Yerushalmi noted that Godless
Jews tend to be sensitive to antisemitic prejudice in a particular way: at the worst
times, under the pressure of antisemitism, they are forced to understand that vital
aspects of their lives are determined by ancestral choices they may no longer under-
stand and, in any case, feel that they have either transcended or repudiated. An under-
standing of such underlying, long-term conditioning factors is not limited to a specific
period in Freud’s work. This notion and this view of broad areas of the unconscious,
including the idea of “archaic heritage,” aim to accommodate this ineffable yet felt
past for which one feels, as strange as it may sound, a diffuse, indemonstrable certainty.
If Marx introduced the theory of future time, Benjamin blew up the polemical nature of
the past, that, in contrast to Bloch’s (1954) interpretation and in line with that of Herbert
Marcuse (1955), I shall attempt to demonstrate is also present in Freud. The time of
remembrance, of Jewish origin, that Benjamin reclaims in appendix B of his “Theses” is
remarkably close to the experience of time theorised by Freud. It is a central notion:
“That the past is what is pending,” writes Oyarzún Robles (1995, 29), “this is the decisive
element in Benjaminian thought.” Benjamin had explicitly developed his notion of time
since his youth. During times of violent confrontation, there was no lack of violent confron-
tations about time. In July 1915, Heidegger spoke about “The concept of time in the
science of history” at the University of Freiburg’s Faculty of Philosophy (Ibarlucía 2000,
113). That same year, Benjamin (2011, 197) published a text titled “The Life of Students”
in which he stated, unmistakably:
There is a conception of history that, trusting in the infinity of time, distinguishes only the
tempo, rapid or slow, with which human beings and epochs advance along the path of
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 693

progress … . The following remarks, in contrast, concern a particular condition in which history
rests concentrated, as in a focal point … . The elements of the ultimate condition do not mani-
fest themselves as formless progressive tendencies, but are deeply embedded in every
present in the form of the most endangered, excoriated, and ridiculed creations and ideas.
The historical task is to give shape to this immanent state of perfection and make it absolute,
make it visible and ascendant in the present.

Later, Benjamin (1925) would sketch out The Origin of German Tragic Drama with the
intimate aim of confronting Heidegger’s notion of history. In this book, he addresses
a different temporality from that which clocks can measure, although as Naishtat
(2009b) makes clear, he was not yet in a position to understand it as messianic time.
In Vienna, also in 1915, Freud (1915a, 1915b) published two of his most important
works on metapsychology, developing a concept of time that was different from
chronological, linear, progressive time, focused on subjective experience (affected by
the unconscious). These three thinkers arrived at considerations about time following
three distinct ways to give prominence to language and using three fundamental
types of listening: postmetaphysical philosophy (listening to the Self) in the case of Hei-
degger; psychoanalysis (listening to the unconscious), which replaces metaphysics with
metapsychology; and heretic historical materialism (listening to the subaltern, the dis-
possessed, the defeated, persecuted, and forgotten). If it is true, as Arendt (1968, 13)
says, that “the abstract concept Vernunft (reason) can be traced back to its origin in
the verb vernehmen (to perceive, to hear),” then it is reasonable to conclude that
what was being transformed (broadened) was the concept of reason itself. Nietzsche
(1872a) had expanded the contours of this idea to include the body, passions, and
art, gradually marginalised in the tradition of “aesthetic Socratism” and culture
marked by Christianity. Freud, using scientific language, questioned the direct associ-
ation between reason and consciousness. Language, the place where dialectic images
“are found,” seemed to Benjamin to enable the possibility of experience and the
exchange of experiences, faculties that commodification and war—as the glorification
of technology—and even some aspects of modernity endangered (Benjamin 2016).
And does the core of Freud’s concerns about his analysands not lie in their inability
to speak? Do the two—Freud and Benjamin—not both address the simultaneously
savage and civilised expropriation of language, of experience? And was it not ultimately
the extenuation of experience and the contraction of the audible that alarmed the
young Nietzsche (1872a) in The Birth of Tragedy?
As is clear, the Benjamin of 1915–1916 had already distanced himself from the tra-
ditional historical “narrative” that, with the eyes of the present, like Medusa, petrifies
the past that dares to look at it or devours it empathically to incorporate it. At the same
time, the polemical writings collected in “On the Concept of History,” meant to introduce
the more extensive reflections in The Arcades Project, seek to give voice back to the past
overlooked by traditional historiography and to question the ideology of progress, which
ties each technological invention to the development of humanity in a linear fashion.
Despite the lack of explicit mentions of psychoanalysis, this is where we see some clear
parallels with Freudian theories (due to his psychoanalytic interpretations) that reinforce
the idea of history and interrogate the discipline of history. Convolute K, especially, but
also Convolute N of The Arcades Project, the brief text titled Dream Kitsch (a concept
that Ibarlucía [1998, 45] says refers to what Freud calls the “psychopathology of everyday
694 L. DRIVET

life”), and “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” show us that Freud’s thought was indeed inte-
grated into the backbone of Benjaminian theory.
What aspects of Freud’s thought would support our hypothesis? It can rightly be said
that Freud set aside the “whore called ‘Once upon a time’” of vulgar historicism with his
polymorphous inquiries, his elucidation of dreams, his development of the unconscious
system (Ucs) in metapsychological terms, his case histories, his postulation of the death
drive, and his successive theoretical recapitulations. The past and the unconscious in
Freud are not offered as homogeneous, linear, or continuous notions, like the warehouse
of passive and definitively past content that Bloch (1954) tried to find there. Freud is an
enlightened man who believes in the progress of science and in the possibility of the
moral improvement of humankind. But his idea of progress is not totalising, automatic,
or indefinite, thus he especially contemplates the possibility of regression in different
fields of human life. Proof of this is everywhere. He says it clearly in Civilization and Its Dis-
contents: “we have been careful not to fall in with the prejudice that civilisation is synon-
ymous with perfecting” (Freud 1930, 95). This opinion could also be derived from his
previous theoretical speculations. In “The Unconscious,” Freud (1915b, 186) mentions
the particular properties of this “system” (Ucs): “To sum up: exemption from mutual contra-
diction, primary process (mobility of cathexes), timelessness, and replacement of external by
psychical reality—these are the characteristics which we may expect to find in processes
belonging to the system Ucs” (my emphasis). Unconscious timelessness requires thinking
about processes that “are not ordered temporally, are not altered by the passage of time;
they have no reference to time at all” (Freud 1915b, 186). Concretely, Freud was referring
to mechanisms such as condensation, displacement, and reversal into the opposite, amply
developed in The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900) and in The Psychopathology of
Everyday Life (Freud 1901)—works with which Benjamin was familiar. The consequences
that the unconscious entailed for the notion of history in the broad sense, whether biogra-
phical or generic, are not trivial. To get an idea of their magnitude, we must estimate the
timelessness of the unconscious in relation to the evidence of its conservation within the
psyche, which Freud had postulated with great clarity as early as 1907.7 Freud’s notion that
“We can only hold fast to the fact that it is rather the rule than the exception for the past to
be preserved in mental life” (Freud 1930, 71) precedes the chronicler in Benjamin’s third
thesis, who holds that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost to
history” (Benjamin 2003a, III, 390). The unconscious logic brings coexistence and incursion
into reciprocal relations of representations and quotas of affect that do not contradict one
another, nor are they incompatible or extemporaneous, except from the point of view of
consciousness. To the theories that hold that it is time (its natural passing) that ruins mem-
ories, and to those theories that technically explain forgetting as failures of the mnemic
mechanism, Freud adds his analysis of examples of forgetting caused by the displeasure
of remembering something that can awaken painful feelings (Freud 1901). Memory is not
a passive sphere where biological fatalism reigns, ultimately culminating in memory
deterioration, nor does a random, electrochemical short circuit produce memory lapses
as soon as memory production stops; rather, memory is a terrain of dispute between

7
Concretely, in a footnote added in 1907 to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life: “all impressions are preserved, not only in
the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further devel-
opments. This is a state of affairs which cannot be illustrated by comparison with another sphere” (Freud 1901, 273).
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 695

representations and drive impulses that battle for recognition/satisfaction. Defensive pro-
cesses are continuous efforts to subdue the ongoing attempts of the repressed to slip past
the barrier of repression and gain access to consciousness, a conquest it can only win at
the cost of disfigurement. Psychic censorship is effective because it plays a vital role that
Benjamin (2003b) discovers reading Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In this foundational text,
perhaps Freud’s most important after The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 1900), Freud
(1920) suggests that defending against stimuli is almost as important for an organism
as receiving stimuli, and he explains traumatic shocks as breaches in the shield against
stimuli. In Benjamin’s view, Baudelaire shows that in the modern crowd, moving against
the flow entails a series of shocks and collisions for the individual. As if suffering from
the historical sickness that Nietzsche (1874) identifies in his Untimely Meditations on
history, the people in the crowd are limited to repeating, because, invaded by the coloni-
sation of their historical consciousness, they have no space–time to create. For Baudelaire,
the sensation of modernity is the disintegration of the aura through the experience of
shock.8 The experience of shock thus overlaps with the abuses of historical consciousness,
which makes experience, individuality, distinction, and culture impossible.9
It is also to Nietzsche’s credit that he recognised the polyphony of the psyche. Once
Nietzsche revealed the internal battle of the soul, it started to become clear that the
desire to remember comes up against the no-less-powerful desire to forget, in the same
way that the need to perceive must be balanced with the need to choose what is per-
ceived so as not to be overwhelmed by the experience that Freud terms “traumatic”
and Benjamin (2003b) calls collective shock. Freud, who in the 1910 edition of The Psycho-
pathology of Everyday Life cites Nietzsche’s famous aphorism about the submission of
memory to pride,10 shows us these real symbolic and energetic struggles, which he accessed
by way of the royal road of the dream, taking diverse formations of the unconscious as the
object of analysis. The creator of psychoanalysis accepts, then, the Marxist interpretation of
history as a struggle between the persecuted and the persecutors, between the oppressed
and the oppressors (no longer limited to the class struggle), much more so than the view
that holds some contradiction that is (relatively) independent of human action as the key
to “progress.” And this symbolic and political struggle has no reason to leave the field of
history to either chance or management.
To appreciate the parallel between these Freudian considerations and Benjaminian
temporality, we must remember yet another central concept in Freud. The temporality
of the unconscious can be understood as an epistemological rupture with the idea of
time as a property that is coextensive with consciousness (Cosentino 1999; Freud 1933,

8
The comparison to Nietzsche’s critique is no arbitrary occurrence: Benjamin (2003b, 343) says towards the end of the essay
that Baudelaire’s poetry shines like “a star without atmosphere”—an expression taken from point seven of Nietzsche’s
(1874) second untimely meditation.
9
There is also a Nietzschean tone in the Benjaminian critique of modernity in Benjamin’s critique of newspapers, which he
accuses of preventing individuals from appropriating their experience—a reproach that is analogous to Nietzsche’s cri-
tique of the press in his writings about the future of educational institutions (Nietzsche 1872b). Nonetheless, we must add
nuance to the comparison: for Benjamin, the experience of shock also entails a “promise,” because if on one hand it is a
sign of the devaluation of experience in modernity, it also points to a path for transformation. For Benjamin (2008), the
dissolution of the aura due to the effect of mechanical reproduction is also dialectical. See Buck-Morss (1979) for a
detailed study.
10
“‘I did that’, says my memory. ‘I could not have done that’—says my pride, and refuses to yield. Finally—memory gives in”
(Nietzsche 1886, §68, 65).
696 L. DRIVET

73). The Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit11 is key to understanding the unfinished and
revolutionary nature of the past in Freud and to dismissing the thesis of the unidirectionality
of time in psychoanalysis as reductionist (see Braier 2009, 195–255; Laplanche and Pontalis
1973, 110; Roudinesco and Plon 1997). Freud gave rise to the hermeneutic crisis of the very
evolutionist context he had come from, not to replace it, as Acha (2007) clarifies, but to
complement it with evidence about the deferred performativity of language in the
psyche. The mark of evolutionism never ceased to be present in Freud, as if he were refusing
to oust the pulse from the body due to the omnipotence of the signifier.12
The relations between language and body for Freud are mutually and reciprocally
determined. When referring to the philosophical interest in psychoanalysis, he argues that
the setting up of the hypothesis of unconscious mental activities must compel philosophy to
decide one way or the other and, if it accepts the idea, to modify its own views on the relation
of mind to body so that they may conform to the new knowledge. (Freud 1913, 177)

As this quote shows, Freud does not assume that the hypothesis of the unconscious leads
unilaterally to language, and even less so if language is understood as an entity with a
metaphysical, extrapsychological location. Without the presence of evolutionism (as a
long history of bodies and nature and as a history of the individual), we could not
explain the hypothesis of an archaic heritage either, which Freud maintained to the
end. In this never-abandoned tradition, the concept of Nachträglichkeit allows Freud to
account for a temporality that starts in the present and influences the contents of uncon-
scious memory, with direct consequences in the present, without voiding the unconscious
memories inscribed in the body that, though they do not speak, they make themselves be
said, or they make themselves current by projecting from the past.
However, it is the memory of childhood—which to a great extent becomes accessible
through an analysis that works against resistance—that opens the way for Freud to dis-
cover unconscious or involuntary memory. And the involuntary memory from childhood
that suddenly comes to the subject against his or her conscious will is the topic of
various citations Benjamin collects in his reading of Proust in The Arcades Project (Benjamin
1999, K8a,1, K8a,2, K9,1, 403–404) and to which he dedicates long passages in “On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire” (Benjamin 2003b). Benjamin uses a thesis of Freud’s to explain what
he finds in Proust: that becoming conscious and the persistence of memory traces are
mutually incompatible in the same system. In other words, only that which was not experi-
enced consciously (or was not fully understood) can suddenly appear as an involuntary
memory. Benjamin seems to break down the common-sense rejection of the conden-
sation of different times, making use of a resource similar to Freud’s. “Appendix A” of Ben-
jamin’s “Theses” refutes the thesis of historicism that settles for establishing a causal link
between different moments in history to determine their significance. Instead, Benjamin

11
Nachträglichkeit: a noun/concept translated into English as “deferred action” by Strachey in the Standard Edition’s com-
plete works of Freud, and into Spanish as “retroactivity,” “delayed effect,” “deferred action,” “posteriority,” and “retroac-
tive posteriority.” Sources agree that it was Lacan who conferred the definitive status of “concept” to this term in his
analysis of a Freudian case history (that of the “Wolf Man”), translating it into French as après-coup, and Braier notes
that later, Laplanche would demonstrate its validity in all Freudian theory.
12
Rieff (1951) emphasises the double register—“historical” and “analogical”—of temporality in Freud. See also the inter-
esting disagreements between Freud and Lacan pointed out by Acha (in Acha and Vallejo [2010, 267–282]). Jara (1998)
has attempted to demonstrate that it is the consideration of the body as a centre of gravity that transforms the notion of
historicity in Nietzsche, and it is safe to say that in Freud, a reader and admirer of Nietzsche, something similar happens. I
have explored this point in Drivet (2013b).
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 697

(2003a, 397) believes that “no state of affairs having causal significance is for that very
reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that
may be separated from it by thousands of years.” The expression “posthumously” refers
to the retroactive bestowal of meaning that confers the status of historical event to an
event not yet reconstructed.
Freud (1896, 207) inferred early on the idea of a psychological multitemporality based
on the assumption of a periodical rearranging or retranscription of the psychic apparatus
that went beyond processes strictly characterised as pathological: “what is essentially new
about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over, that
it is laid down in various kinds of indications.” This Copernican turn in the conception of
time was correlated to a transformation of experience—a broadening—that Benjamin
understood. The concept of retroactivity would prove to be of as much significance for
Freudian metapsychology as that assigned to repression.
Acha (2007, 15) notes that, “The particularity of the Freudian concept of time does not lie
in knowledge about the past or about the present but rather in its reciprocal implication.”
And Löwy (2016, 95) writes that, “It is the task of remembrance, in Benjamin’s work, to
build ‘constellations’ linking the present and the past.” Ibarlucía (1998, 73) brings us
closer to the double temporality of Freud with his explanation that in Benjamin, “Historical
truth is created in a dialectical image through contact between the ‘now of its cognoscibility’
and ‘specific moments or conjunctures of the past’.” Both suggest the union between a past
that is not overlooked but unknown and a present, achieved by establishing mediations that
are not one-way. Freud and Benjamin might claim that human history is not constructed by
means of a chronological succession of events but by the significant evaluation of these
events as a function of regressive-progressive processes (Braier 2009). Without going any
further, Benjamin himself (1999, N2a,3, 462) outlines an idea not incompatible with Freudian
notions about the memory of the repressed with his notion of “dialectic image”:
It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on
what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with
the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For
while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the
relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly
emergent.—Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place
where one encounters them is language.

Access to hidden memory occurs in Freud by virtue of a type of unconscious (pre)-“com-

prehension” of the hidden memory that is not reduced to chance. A traumatic memory is
an unconscious memory (a reminiscence or activation of the scene) that has the same
effect as if it were a recent experience. What is peculiar about this unconscious activated
memory trace is that it implies forgetting as a result of repression; it is, before memory, a
(re)experience, a return of the repressed.
Freudian reminiscence (a Platonic word) presents itself covertly and fleetingly, like “the
genuine historical image” that, in Benjamin’s (2003a, VII, 391) words, “briefly flashes up.”
Freud similarly understood the temporary and ephemeral accessibility of the “truth”
that resists being known: on one page of his brief essay “A Note upon the ‘Mystic
Writing Pad’,” Freud (1925b, 230) refers to the impulse with which the unconscious, in irre-
gular bursts, reaches beyond the barriers of resistance and registers the reactions its
698 L. DRIVET

careful incursions produce: “It is as though the unconscious stretches out feelers, through
the medium of the system Pcpt.-Cs., towards the external world and hastily withdraws
them as soon as they have sampled the excitations coming from it.” Freud does not
limit himself to merely describing a few disruptions of classical temporality; rather, he
derives from this a radical conclusion: “I further had a suspicion that this discontinuous
method of functioning of the system Pcpt.-Cs. lies at the bottom of the origin of the
concept of time” (Freud 1925b, 230, my italics). The logic of the unconscious is the logic
imprinted upon it by the struggle between what is repressed and the censoring agency,
between the drive to know and the filters that protect it from the excitations that could
endanger the ego. Subversive memories, which because of their suspicious meaning
have been kept in the unconscious, appear suddenly to one who is unaware of them:
the ability to capture them at that moment of danger constitutes the task of the psycho-
analyst or the Benjaminian historical materialist. In Benjamin’s writing, the notion of pro-
gressive-regressive processes proposed by Freud disputes both the unquestioned
principle of progress and the past understood as accessible to conservative empathy.
Before Freud (1933, 66) objected to the anthropology of a certain Marxism claiming that
“Mankind never lives entirely in the present,”13 he had advanced a critique of uni-
directional temporality in “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming,” in which he emphasised
the importance of phantasies in experience, illustrating how “the wish makes use of an
occasion in the present to construct, on the pattern of the past, a picture of the future”
(Freud 1908, 147). And the study of unconscious memory and of different ways of remem-
bering features prominently in “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” (Freud
1914b). In this piece, Freud suggests a contrast between memory and repetition, and
more precisely between working through and repetition, as repetition appears at times
like a specific type of unconscious memory unthinkingly expressed as acting out. Freud
recommends treating illness “not as an event of the past event, but as a present-day
force” (Freud 1914b, 150): the individual’s past that takes control and causes the individual
discomfort is not something dead, but distressing. The goal of the doctor of the soul is to
evoke the memory of the repressed that repeats itself, unbeknown to the patient’s con-
sciousness: in the course of treatment, analyst and analysand cooperate (differently) to dis-
cover the repressed impulses that have fed the resistance, thus working towards the
subject’s reconciliation with the repressed, which has been manifest in the form of symp-
toms. If, however, the traumatic past is associated with a reaction of resistance in order to
perpetuate control over the psychic scene, then the analysis uses transference, critique,
and resignification of the trauma governing psychic life without the participation of con-
sciousness, eluding the costly elaboration that would put an end to the concealment and
perpetuation of the distressing cause. An attempt to extend this to political theory, locat-
ing in tradition the repetitive inertia of what has been and considering justice to be the
opposite of “forgetting” and revenge, as we see in Benjamin, can only surprise those unfa-
miliar with even the rudiments of psychoanalysis. Likewise, the desire to understand the
historical-political—and therefore modifiable—origin of the portion of distress that
afflicts the vast majority of humans using the tools with which psychoanalysis intervenes

13
This idea was present in Schopenhauer, one of the few philosophers Freud admired. The author of The World as Will and
Representation believed that it was reflection that distinguished people from animals, and this modified our temporal
positioning: “Animals live only in the present; human beings in addition in the future and past simultaneously” (Scho-
penhauer 2008, 68).
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 699

in the clinical setting to intervene similarly in the field of culture, should surprise only those
who have chosen to convert Freud into someone uninterested in the future of humanity.
It is likely that Freud and Benjamin would agree that we are charged with the perhaps
impossible task of redressing the crimes that appear to make our present time possible.
For Benjamin (2003a, Thesis II, 389–390), truth and happiness were inseparable from
redemption: the salvation from “The tradition of the oppressed [that] teaches us that
the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (2003a,
Thesis VIII, 392). While Freud contrasted the return of the same with elaboration, justice
was for Benjamin the opposite of forgetting the history of oppression. We have a debt
to our predecessors to the extent that those who deny them continue to triumph. And
is redeeming not equivalent to liberating from guilt/debt?
Freud and Benjamin believe in an idea of redemption, secular or political: with the wish
to rid redemption of religious illusion in Freud, and with the aim to politicise faith in Ben-
jamin. Therein lies a key difference. The question of redemption finds its most radical
manifestation in Nietzsche, read by both Freud and Benjamin: in the speech titled, pre-
cisely, “On Redemption,” Zarathustra wants to “redeem those who are the past and to
recreate all ‘it was’ into ‘thus I willed it!’—only that would I call redemption!” (Nietzsche
1883, 110). The spirit of revenge, against which we must struggle, is defined by the tena-
city with which the will rebels against the past. Noting and accepting one’s own choices in
the past that made the past possible, without therefore giving up on transforming the
future, redeems us from resentment. For this, we need something superhuman: Nietzsche
(1887, 60) calls it grace.
The question about the reach of this messianic possibility that shatters the tyranny of
Cronos is located on the troubled border between science and religion, between reality
and unreality, between illusion and delusion. This is where Horkheimer establishes—in dis-
cussion with Benjamin—a sharp limit to the “opening” of the past. For him, it is an inter-
pretive possibility, metaphoric, not real. “The slain,” he states, “are really slain,” and thus, “If
one takes the lack of closure entirely seriously, one has to believe in the Last Judgment”
(cited in Löwy 2016, 31). Putting aside the fact that Benjamin is not sceptical about the
apocatastasis, it is possible to say that he was ahead of his executor on one point: as Hor-
kheimer’s principal enemy seemed to be, on that occasion, the obscurantism of religion,
Benjamin’s greatest enemy was more the advance of Nazism that communed with
science and technology as ideology, which it used to strengthen its antidialectic natural-
ism. The author of The Storyteller seems to respond to Horkheimer that in remembrance,
we create an experience that prohibits us from conceiving of history non-teleologically,
even when it does not grant us the right to write it teleologically. And it is between
these two positions that Freud acts as mediator: the possibility of the opening of the
past, when it exists, is real by means of a resemantisation, real on the intersubjective
terrain that prepares transference and makes it possible.14 Freud would never allow the
comfort offered by a hypothetical Last Judgement, not even with a definitive synthesis
(Aufhebung) that could reconcile all the contradictions and losses. From his perspective,
at the bottom of the soul and the depths of time, desire and meaning merge with

14
Countertransference is of special value for historiography. When he noted it, Freud defined it as an affect that arises in the
analyst as a consequence of the patient’s influence on the analyst’s unconscious feelings. The analyst would realise that it
was a resistance that had to be diagnosed and overcome: “It does to the psychoanalyst what unacknowledged bias does
to the historian,” says Gay (1988, 254).
700 L. DRIVET

death (Freud 1916b, 1920), and if culture is not equivalent to improvement, it is because in
each synthesis (Aufhebung) there is an irreparable loss and an unpayable yet inevitable
cost. Reason may confer meaning to pain once suffered, but it is unable to redress or com-
pensate the countless victims of arbitrariness and cruelty without risking being confused
with the god it has displaced. The sad can also be true: despite the crude realism of this
Freudian conviction, we can confidently declare that Freud would no less decisively refuse
to approve a closure of the meaning of the past for those who continue to wonder about
the demands, enigmas and enigmatic messages that constitute them.

Acknowledgements
This research is a revised version of two previous texts (Drivet 2010, 2013a).

Translations of summary

Cet article traite de la relation tendue entre la pensée de Sigmund Freud et la perspective matéria-
liste de l’histoire. L’article présente ensuite une contribution théorique se dégageant de ce dialogue
et examinant ses contradictions. D’abord sont résumés les critiques de Freud au sujet du matéria-
lisme historique, un rôle clé occupé par la question de la temporalité psychique. Ensuite est
abordé le travail de Walter Benjamin, qui, à mon avis, a réussi à intégrer de manière avantageuse
une bonne partie des idées de Freud dans la construction d’un matérialisme hétérodoxe particulier
que j’appelle «multitemporel». L’article soutient cette affirmation de deux manières: a) en démon-
trant la pertinence de la psychanalyse comme source indispensable d’alimentation de la pensée
de Benjamin, et b) en identifiant un héritage partagé (avec Nietzsche), et quelques parallèles
entre la pensée freudienne et le matérialisme Benjaminian quant à leurs conceptions du temps,
de l’histoire et de la mémoire inconsciente, ainsi qu’aux différences clés qui les distinguent et leur
permettent de se remettre en question. La conclusion souligne que, si nous réfléchissons de
façon critique à ce qui pourrait être ses obstacles théologiques –c’est-à-dire irréligieuses ou métap-
sychologiques–, la pensée de Benjamin peut fournir un moyen d’explorer les contributions de la psy-
chanalyse à la théorie sociale critique.

Dieser Beitrag setzt sich mit dem angespannten Verhältnis von Freuds Denken zur materialistischen
Geschichtsauffassung auseinander. Er präsentiert dann eine theoretische Überlegung, die aus
diesem Dialog hervorgeht und dessen Widersprüche genau betrachtet. Zunächst fasse ich Freuds
kritische Betrachtungen des historischen Materialismus zusammen, wobei die psychische Zeitlichkeit
eine Schlüsselrolle spielt. Im Anschluss befasse ich mich mit dem Werk Walter Benjamins, der meiner
Ansicht nach einen großen Teil der Erkenntnisse Freuds nutzbringend in die Gestaltung eines spe-
ziellen heterodoxen Materialismus integriert hat, den ich ‘multitemporal‘ nenne. Diese Behauptung
untermauere ich zweifach: a) Ich zeige die Bedeutung der Psychoanalyse als unentbehrliche Quelle
auf, die anreichernd in Benjamins Denken einfließt und b) Ich stelle einen gemeinsamen kulturellen
Hintergrund (mit Nietzsche) und einige Parallelen zwischen dem freudianischen Denken und dem
benjaminianischen Materialismus im Hinblick auf ihre Konzeptionen von Zeit, Geschichte und unbe-
wusster Erinnerung fest, aber auch die entscheidenden Unterschiede, die beide ausmachen und die
ihnen ermöglichen, sich gegenseitig zu hinterfragen. Ich schließe mit dem Hinweis, dass bei einer
kritischen – also irreligiösen oder metapsychologischen – Betrachtung dessen, was theologische Hin-
dernisse sein könnten, Benjamins Denken einen Weg aufzeigen kann, um die Beiträge der Psycho-
analyse zur kritischen Sozialtheorie zu untersuchen.

Prendendo in esame una serie di tensioni che caratterizzano il rapporto tra il pensiero di Sigmund
Freud e la prospettiva materialistica della storia, il presente articolo propone un contributo teorico
che scaturisce precisamente da questo dialogo, considerandone anche gli elementi di contraddi-
zione. Presenterò innanzitutto, in forma sintetica, le critiche di Freud al materialismo storico, met-
tendo in primo piano il ruolo fondamentale che in esse ricopre il concetto di temporalità psichica.
Procederò quindi a esaminare l’opera di Walter Benjamin, che a mio parere è riuscito a integrare
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 701

fruttuosamente buona parte delle intuizioni freudiane nella sua costruzione di un particolare materi-
alismo eterodosso a cui darò il nome di materialismo "multitemporale." Sosterrò questa mia tesi in
due modi: a) dimostrando quanto la psicoanalisi abbia rappresentato un’indispensabile fonte di
nutrimento per il pensiero di Benjamin; b) individuando una filiazione comune (a partire da
Nietzsche) e alcuni parallelismi tra il pensiero freudiano e il materialismo di Benjamin rispetto alla
concezione del tempo, della storia e della memoria inconscia, oltre a una serie di fondamentali dif-
ferenze che, laddove distinguono i due autori, fanno anche sì che il pensiero dell’uno possa interro-
gare quello dell’altro. Concluderò il mio articolo osservando che, quando si riflettesse da una
prospettiva critica (ossia non-religiosa, o metapsicologica) su quelli che potrebbero essere consider-
ati impedimenti teologici nel pensiero di Benjamin, l’opera benjaminiana potrebbe indicare una
strada per esplorare il contributo della psicoanalisi alla teoria critica della società.

Este trabajo aborda la tensa relación entre el pensamiento de Sigmund Freud y la perspectiva mate-
rialista de la historia para luego identificar un aporte teórico que surge de ese diálogo y asume reflex-
ivamente sus contradicciones. Se sintetizan, en primer lugar, las críticas de Freud a dicha corriente
del pensamiento, en las que la cuestión de la temporalidad psíquica ocupa un lugar protagónico.
Luego, se aborda la obra de Walter Benjamin, quien, afirmamos, ha logrado integrar con fecundidad
buena parte de las intelecciones freudianas en la construcción de un peculiar materialismo hetero-
doxo que llamamos multitemporal. Para fundamentar esta idea: a) se demuestra la relevancia del
psicoanálisis como una fuente indispensable que nutre el pensamiento de Benjamin, y; b) se
señalan una filiación común (con Nietzsche) y algunas homologías entre el pensamiento freudiano
y el materialismo benjaminiano en lo referente a las concepciones del tiempo, la historia y la
memoria inconsciente, sin dejar de mencionar las diferencias claves que los singularizan y que les
permiten cuestionarse recíprocamente. Se concluye afirmando que, volviendo reflexivo su eventual
lastre teológico, el de Benjamin es un camino para explorar los aportes del psicoanálisis a la teoría
social.

Funding
This work was supported by Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET).

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