Benjamin and The Mexican Revolution (Legrás)

Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution: A Meditation on the "Theses on the
Philosophy of History" and Diego Rivera's Murals

Author(s): Horacio Legrás
Source: Discourse, Vol. 32, No. 1, Benjamin in Latin America (Winter 2010), pp. 66-86
Published by: Wayne State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41389831
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Walter Benjamin and the
Mexican Revolution
A Meditation on lhe "Theses on the Philosophy

of History** and Diego Rivera's Murals
Horacio Legras
I want to start by acknowledging a possible objection. The names

"Walter Benjamin" and "Mexican Revolution" (or Diego Rivera,
for that matter) don't seem to belong together. Latin America - or
Mexico- doesn't seem to occupy a significant space in the work of
Benjamin. We should not hold this lack of interest on Latin Amer-
ica against Benjamin. He was keenly aware of the geopolitical limits
of his own thinking and insisted, more than once, that his prop-
ositions were limited to a spiritual entity called "Europe." As for
the expression "Mexican Revolution," it is not without problems
of its own. The revolutionary nature of the Mexican Revolution
has been contested by Latin Americanists themselves.1 So, as if the
name Benjamin were not extraneous enough to Mexican history,
we are confronted with the additional problem of validating Mex-
ico's revolutionary credentials if the tide is going to be credible.
The same effort of authentication - it is interesting to note - is not
required in the case of Walter Benjamin. If Benjamin doesn't need
credentials to think the revolution, it is not because the revolution
is thought to be an eminently European issue, but rather because
the business of thinking itself has been for a long time a purely
Discourse, 32.1, Winter 2010, pp. 66-86.

Copyright © 2010 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution 67
European territory. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it, for modern

thought, only Europe is a theoretical object, whereas the periphery
is subject only to empirical knowledge.2 One of the few areas in
which this epistemological division of labor has been reversed is in
the case of revolutions - especially in the 1960s and 1970s when the
Third World in general and Latin America in particular emerged
as a properly revolutionary location.
Another doubt may arise from my use of a painter and a phi-
losopher to approach the question of revolution, an approach that
seems to go against the grain of the intellectual division of labor that
I have just criticized. Against this prejudice, it would be necessary to
state that divisions such as empirical and theoretical or praxis and
thinking are of little avail in dealing with revolutions. A revolution is
also, and prominently, a time of invention and improvisation. Para-
phrasing the first romantics, we can say that the thinker willing to
think the event of revolution must have the same spiritual power
as the poet. When it comes to revolutions, the real question is not
so much how an artistic activity can provide an account of this phe-
nomenon, but rather how a positive discourse of the social can illu-
minate a realm that had been for centuries the constitutive outside
of any positive rendering of politics and society.
This epistemologically eccentric nature of revolution has
definitive effects on the way Benjamin arranged his text "Theses
on the Philosophy of History." We know that the final confronta-
tion of the "Theses" is with historicism : the doctrine that sees history
moving in the direction of the arrow of time under a constant con-
solidation of old achievements and the prosecution of new goals.
Historicism is to history what developmentalism is to politics: a
belief in a continuous, increasing, and bçnefic progress of human-
ity. Since this is precisely the assumption that Benjamin wants to
question, he cannot conduct his quarrel with historicism in the
linear style proper to historicism itself. Instead, Benjamin unpacks
his argument around a series of discontinuous questions: What is
the relationship between history and politics? Why is the histori-
cal perception of historicism false? What is the perspective on his-
tory proper of materialism? Is this perspective still material in any
traditional sense? The cost of avoiding the path of linear exposi-
tion is a multiplication of the proverbial intricacies of Benjamin's
style. Moreover, Benjamin does not only indicate the difficulties
at stake, but performs them in his very text. As we will see later in
this essay, none of these problems is alien to the artistic practice of
Diego Rivera, whose murals confront the same problematic inter-
section of history and revolution that also occupies Benjamin in
the "Theses."
68 Horacio Legréis
Benjamin's "Theses on th
Benjamin did not intend th

not in his lifetime. He feared it would elicit a form of "enthusias-
tic misunderstanding."3 He was granted this wish. The text would
have to be "reconstructed" on the basis of copies that circulated
through Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno. As for the pub-
lication, Adorno produced a small edition of the theses in the
United States in 1942. Five years later, Les Temps Moderns published
a French translation (but not the one prepared by Benjamin him-
self), and Adorno republished the text in 1950. But it was not until
the "Theses" appeared as part of Benjamin's collected works that
they started drawing the attention of a wider audience.4
As Benjamin foresaw, the "Theses" are many things for many
readers. In my case, I stress the question of the mutual implication
of history and revolution. By mutual implication, I mean the extent
to which our notion of the historical has revolution as its concep-
tual correlate. This correlation, which in Benjamin takes forms like
"The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred as
redemption,"5 was first established by Hegel through his dictum
"everything rational must become real."6 The formula turns rea-
son (or the subject) into an arbiter for the modification of real-
ity. Marx's statement that philosophers should transform the world
rather than explain it is a direct descendant of this Hegelian pos-
tulate. This does not mean of course that the idea lacked anteced-
ents. The turning point between the enlightened idea of history
(historical change as catastrophe) and the post-Hegelian idea of
the historical as a man-made activity lies perhaps in the theological
crisis prompted by the Lisbon earthquake of 1775 and the atten-
dant development of the question of theodicy. The thing to notice
is that from that constellation on, the idea of history would never
become independent of the possibility of an intentional trans-
formation of human societies. Some theorists of revolution like
François Furet have criticized what he considers an unwarranted
centrality of revolution in the narrative of history.7
Benjamin adds a peculiar twist to this genealogy of social tem-
porality by introducing a thinking of the messianic into the calcula-
tion of history. As I would like to prove shortly, the introduction of
the messianic testifies to Benjamin's idea of an unbreakable con-
nection between history and politics. The idea of the messianic
(whose embodiment is the tradition of the oppressed) endows Ben-
jamin's argument with an astounding historical depth and with an
equally far-reaching conceptual inclusiveness along a synchronic
axis. It is a notion that reaches back to precapitalist eras as easily
as it extends its conceptual arm to figures like the lumpenprole-

tariat or the prepoliticai peasant, all of them normally eschewed
in a more conventional Marxist approach. The messianic is also a
principle of order in a universe of chaos. Redemption makes his-
tory because history in itself is a pile of wreckage - or, as Fredric
Jameson once put it, is no other thing than the Real itself.8
The "Theses" were not Benjamin's first approach to the ques-
tions of history and revolution. In 1921, the same year that Diego
Rivera returns to Mexico to participate in the vast postrevolution-
ary experiment, he published one of his best-known essays: "On
the Critique of Violence." As suggested by the title, the argument
is composed in a Kantian key that calls for a pure (transcenden-
tal) investigation of violence. A pure critique of violence should
sever violence from its ends, as a pure intuition severs the intu-
ition from any impure form of materiality. Although the "Critique
of Violence" and the "Theses" share many important features -
prominently among them the odd mixing of a Marxist-materialist
language with a messianic religious expression and the perennial
although largely implicit criticism of Hegelianism - -what is most
interesting are their differences. While "Critique of Violence" still
dreams of a pure relationship between intellect and law, the "The-
ses" not only abandon the terrain of purity, but elaborate a theory
of history in which past and present, the subjective and the objec-
tive, appear simultaneously on the same plane.
The true nature of the historical that I referred to before in terms
of a mutual constitution of history and revolution can be more prop-
erly rephrased as follows: in a chronology dominated by the figures
of justice and injustice - within a notion of the historical that has
redemption as its goal - nothing is subject to death, or as Thesis III
puts it, "nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost
for history."9 Something to be noticed is that this conception of the
historical is thoroughly teleological. The pair justice/injustice works
as its principle (in the ancient sense of arche) while also providing a
meeting place for the languages of materialism and the messianic.
Although this conjunction between principle and end is for Benja-
min a condition of possibility of a genuine historical experience, it
is not itself thought of as a structural or transcendental condition,
but rather as the result of contingent historical unfolding. However,
by now - by the time of Benjamin's writing - one cannot exist with-
out the other, to the point that our notion of the historical would
lose all consistency without a reference to the foundational pair in
question. The target of Benjamin's criticism is, then, not teleology -
which is unavoidable - but historicism as an alienating ideology of
providentialism secularized as progress.
70 Horacio Legras
The identification of histo

rialist thinker comes as a su
critique of historicism is m
such as postcolonialism than
Marxism is often singled
historicist tenets. The fact that a confrontation with fascism led Ben-
jamin to this type of "peripheral" position of enunciation gives fur-
ther credence to the argument, first mounted by Aimé Césaire in
his Discourse on Colonialism (1955), that Nazism is in its essence a
deployment of colonialism inside Europe itself. Benjamin aims for
the same "epochal" type of criticism at one point in the "Theses."
Speaking of a Marxism that has lost its way into the web of a bour-
geois worldview, Benjamin writes, "It recognizes only the progress in
the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society."10 This criti-
cism of modernity has clear connections with Max Horkheimer's
and Adorno 's writings on instrumental reason and a family resem-
blance to Heidegger's writings on enframing. It is also a position that
reaches to the post-phenomenological tradition that indicts reason
for overreaching into realms that lie beyond its domain. Benjamin's
criticism of historicism is, however, qualitatively different from the
one that we may encounter in the works by authors like Emmanuel
Lévinas (ontology as expression of an Imperial Ego) or postcolo-
nialist critics like Robert Young (White Mythologies, 1990). Benjamin's
criticism is internal to the modernizing logos to which historicism
itself is supposed to belong. It is criticism in its traditional sense,
not a rejection. This criticism takes in the "Theses" a double-headed
strategy. It is simultaneously philosophical and political.
The Philosophical Aspect Like any hegemonic construct, histori-
cism is an ideology of which different positions imagine they can
take advantage, only to discover later (if enlightenment is granted)
how deeply indebted they are to a paradigm that they cannot
master. Benjamin does not offer any explanation for why histori-
cism has such a hold on so many different intellectual positions.
A possible interpretation (suggested by the words of Benjamin
just quoted) could point towards a phenomenology of modernity
that the historicist and Benjamin read in radically different ways.
The historicist looks around and sees technological innovations
and a massive accumulation of wealth, knowledge, and culture
and concludes that history is a process of constant and increasing
enlightenment. Benjamin, on the other hand, sees this progress as
a version of the Fall - an interpretation suggested by the moral of
the famous passage of the angel of history in Thesis IX. The fall of
modernity is a fall from reason into administrative forms of tech-
nological governance.
The ideology of progress that confuses technological improve-

ment with human development clearly results in an alienation
of the human into the technical. A historical time objectified
under a form of material progress is not human time any more.
History itself appears estranged from its actors. Certainly, histori-
cism invokes "humanity" in its constructions, but this is a generic
notion of the human and is not present in any particular man, to
use the Aristotelian expression. Humanity, especially a humanity
whose time is dictated by figures of justice and injustice, oblivion
and redemption, must out of necessity eschew this figure of the
general. It is not humanity in general that is "the depository of
historical knowledge" but rather "the oppressed class."11 (One can
detect in this passage a bold recasting of Georg Lukacs's History and
Class Consciousness [1923], a text that was Benjamin's introduction
to Marxism.) Benjamin does not deny that development and prog-
ress are possible. But true historical advance can come only as a
result of the destruction of the nihilistic ground of society: its class
structure. Without this radical step, it will always live in the mirage
of a progress towards which the historical materialist has to show
"cautious detachment."
The Political Aspect. The philosophical deficit of historicism is
the ground for a most troubling practice. The dogma of progress
shows its worst face in the case of historical materialism, because
it is only there that it can decisively affect the political praxis that
grows in the shadow of the tradition of the oppressed. The Marx-
ist, lured by a myth of progress whose final station is socialism, puts
trust in a renewed form of providence for something that can be
achieved only by means of historical agency. A subjectivity that lives
the present in the delusional expectation of a deliverance towards
which it itself does not contribute is marked as the scandal of a
revolutionary soul living a nonrevolutionary life. It is because of
the dire need to reposition revolutionary agency at the center of
the historical process that Benjamin proclaims that class struggle
and class struggle alone is the fundamental notion of historical
materialism.12
The Present as an Ethical Category
Historicism doesn't propose just a picture of the past, but more

consequentially it implies a vision of the present. But what is the
present? As always in the "Theses," the grasp of a concept demands
a previous dismantling of the positions that induce error in anal-
ysis. Historicism 's greatest sin lies in reducing its relationship to
72 Horacio Legrás
the past to the parameters

"to articulate the past histo
'the way it really was'," but r
the past is, in the final anal
cal may be surprising. The f
to refer to historicism's sho
tions - above all the word tha
is recognition, or Anerkennun
possible ethics is tempo-mat
ness- of shared time as the
Benjamin writes, "[E]very im
by the present as one of it
irretrievably."14 From the
appears fundamentally as an
pens not only because histor
but also because historicism
itself. If what the present rec
cerns, the nonrecognition o
at self-recognition.
It is important, however, no
The dimensions of seizing an
past images with their truth,
in the present. I do not intro
Benjamin's language is preci
that flashes up before us.15
only in that "instant when
again."16 "Never seen again
the past is the non-iterable n
This non-iterability - or sin
the present sustains with it
untrue) and that is thus tra
tains to the relation throug
constituted. This mutual co
objectivism and willful subjec
Instead of entering into a
present of historicism is mar
the past. This detachment allo
an almost absolute sovereignty
ereignty severs politics from
consciousness of the present
of Europe, it blocks access t
gency in which we live is not
ereignty of the present is a p
can be said to be fundament
outlook. The "Theses" contain an important indictment against this

intellectual form of dénégation - so many laughs at the expense of
Plato or Rousseau! But laughter is not an intellectual position. It is
a purely ideological (violent) principle grounded in what Adorno
once called "the dubious good fortune to live later."18
A more adequate relationship between past and present is
developed in Theses I to IV, which describe the way in which past
struggles inform the perceptions and actions of the present. The
idea of a constitutive grip of the past over the present may sound
like a mere truism to those working on traditions like subalternity
or postcolonialism. However it is an insight that went against the
grain of the ideology of progress in whose name Marx called upon
the poetry of the future to defeat the ghosts of the past in the 18th
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte , Nietzsche advocated for forgetting the
useless past in his essay "On the Uses and Disadvantages of His-
tory for Life," and Hegel simplified the work of past generations
through the notion of an ontohistorical Aufhebung in his Phenom-
enology. It is also a deceptively simple statement. We will miss Ben-
jamin's point if we read this relationship between past and present
merely in terms of remembrance. In my own paraphrases of Benja-
min, I use expressions such as "the past informs" or "has a constitu-
tive grip" in order to emphasize the way the agency of the action
falls upon the past as much as on the present.
Benjamin does not provide any explanation about how this
encroachment of past into present actually happens. Understand-
ably, the question has been either ignored or thrown into the dust-
bin of the messianic. I will try to follow a different path. It would
be possible to argue that for Benjamin the past engenders the
present under the form of an intentional act. Intentional act has to
be understood here in the phenomenological sense of the inten-
tionality of human consciousness. Humans do not simply bump
against the world. Instead, they orient themselves towards this tree,
that house, or that river. They see these objects, identify them, or
misrecognize them. They give them names. Even in perception,
human consciousness moves towards its objects as the "what" of
what this consciousness is about. In other words, the act of percep-
tion is not passive but bears the mark of a constitutive subjectivity.
Without this direction towards the world the actual experience of
living would not be an experience at all, but a constant assault of the
outside upon a subject permanently under siege. Freud reasoned
along similar lines when he defined "attention" as a psychological
development that allowed the mind to meet its objects halfway.19
The Freudian simile may be misleading, however. Intentionality is
not just the active side of cognition. What is intended is not equal
74 Horacio Legrás
to what is perceived. Wri

tradition, Emmanuel Lévi
ition of sociality."20 And t
it possible to discern the t
and novelists encrypted in t
writings.21 The English t
himself using the word "i
the present by the past in T
of the past which threaten
not recognize itself as inten
The original German te
the word "intentional." Ins
nals the part of meaning
illocutionary force of the
Although it is not my goal
worthwhile to point out tha
writing. Husserl different
its intended meaning (Gem
is not exhausted in its mea
that the past has a claim
was expected on earth,"23 d
sciously anticipated but ra
termination, not by this pa
by the transcendental stru
is transcendental does not mean that is not factical. These words
to which we are still indebted are words that were once uttered
(parole in Saussure 's sense) but not without the intentionality of
consciousness coloring (indexing, Benjamin would have said) the
very structure of language (la langue in Saussure terms) via the
event of speech. Thus intentionality remains readable in the more
general dimension of language.
The Present as Inherently Revolutionary Time
In the "Theses," the present represents not only an ethical cate-

gory, but also the transcendental condition of possibility of revolu-
tion in general. As we have seen, historical truth pertains to the
relation through which past and present are mutually constituted.
However, something momentous happens to this truth in the act
of its revelation. The ideality of truth does not survive its own com-
ing into existence. Once revealed, the true knowledge of the past
passes the tremulous frontier between the historical and the politi-
cal. It disappears as historical image (never seen again) only to be
born as political consciousness. This is the time of the Jetztzeit, the

now-time, the time of recognition and empowerment. Once the
past has breached the autonomy of the present, the present has
to react to this loss of autonomy. On the one hand, the present
loses its claim to sovereignty upon the past, because it knows itself
permanently assaulted and constituted by these images in which it
"recognizes" itself. On the other hand, this knowledge engenders
in the present the consciousness of its own being. It belongs to
itself more deeply by knowing that it is not self-sufficient and self-
constituted. This knowledge provides the present with its sense of
nonalienated time. It is at the point when the present is lived in an
authentic way (Benjamin doesn't use this word) that the present
time becomes revolutionary time.
Authentic time and revolutionary time are coeval terms. The
case for the identity of present and revolution is not Benjamin's
discovery, but rather a persistent subject in the bibliography on
revolution - although sources relating to this question do not
abound.24 Benjamin himself remains silent on this subject, and he
does not broach the point until the last sentence of his text and
then only in a veiled form: the present is the "strait gate through
which the Messiah might enter."25 The best rationale for the per-
vasive identification of nonalienated present with revolution is
indebted, once again, to Hegel. The equation rests on the fact that
when the present knows itself to be present, this knowledge trig-
gers a transformative action upon reality. To be in one's present
is to be bound to action. As in the case of the proverbial Hegelian
figure of the man absorbed in the contemplation of a landscape
and who can only be brought back to himself (to the present of his
experience) through desire, the result of the gathering of the his-
torical subject upon himself cannot but end in an outburst of activ-
ity designed to negate an alienating reality and to impose its will
upon the world. In the Hegelian story, paraphrased by Alexandre
Kojève, a desire (hunger) makes the contemplating man return
to himself and propel him into action. Likewise, a nonalienated
present is constrained to recognize its actual rather than illusory
sovereignty upon the world.
The Intentional Transformation of the Past
By now what counts as present (and more importantly as presence)

in our experience of the historical has been greatly complicated.
The complexity of the mutual determination of past and present
(history and politics) is revealed to its full extent in Thesis IV, which
76 Horacio Legrcís
represents the conceptual c

purpose of my essay. The the
Class struggle, which for a hist

dence, is a fight for the crude
refined and spiritual things could
present in class struggle, are not
the victor. They are alive in this
cunning and fortitude, and have
They constantly call into question
rulers. As flowers turn towards t
dint of a secret heliotropism - to
of history. The historical mater
spicuous of all transformations.26
The thesis is preceded by

"Seek for food and clothing
be added unto you." I don't
Benjamin's use of this quote
a crude materialist. At first
"intention" seems to serv
"class struggle" with "food
say: attend to class struggle f
ments of culture - will com
equally argue that what the
plication of what counts as
this complication the whole
tion of the present by the pa
The complication of wh
happens at the level of the
words, the interpretation
between material/spiritual)
separates the two hemistich
"then" is not a logical or c
not say, then, that the kin
causal relationship. (The En
relationship not so much b
of the verbal phrase "adde
translations of the same qu
which no doer - or giver -
sequential, everything hap
and clothing opens, simult
kingdom of survival and t
is that language is not su
moment in which an identity
as well as for its other. Th
that exists only at the figurai level of language, but not in reality.
In reality, the material and the cultural emerge as the product of
a disjunctive synthesis.
The realm of the spirit is also doubled or split. It is represented
by things - works of art, documents of civilization - but it is also
present as a set of less tangible attributes. Benjamin lists five: "con-
fidence, courage, humor, cunning and fortitude."28 The important
point is that these qualities close the circle, so to speak. They "reach
far back into the past"29 and, since they cannot be objectified as the
spoils of the victors, they directly connect the spiritual realm of
"fine things" to the crass realities of class struggle in a positive way.
They are the representatives of culture in class struggle (proving
once again that the material and the cultural emerge in simultane-
ous identity in difference). Aside from the reason Benjamin may
have had to pick these five specific qualities (a point that Löwy's
discussion illuminates), what is certain is that an intentional subjec-
tive structure is, by definition, a strong component of their being.
Moreover, it is only insofar as they represent intentions that they
can give place to a fluid transformation of past and present.
It is at this point that we should notice that the historical exis-
tence of these five attributes of the oppressed that permanently call
into question every victory of the oppressors follows a tortuous path
that we have not encountered so far. In a superficial reading, it may
seem that what Benjamin is saying is just that the cunning of the
present struggle points towards the tradition of the oppressed in a
sort of continuity - along the lines of remembrance à la Bakhtin.30
The reasoning seems to be chronologically linear, which it cannot
be since a genuine relationship to the past has already been estab-
lished as one of mutual determination. When the past flashes up
into the present, the agency of the rememorative praxis falls obvi-
ously on the present. However, Benjamin says that it is "what has
been" (the past, not the present) that strives to turn "towards that
sun which is rising in the sky of history." The past is the subject of
this "imperceptible heliotropism." The past is not said and done.
Here Benjamin takes to a new level his radical assertion of the ulti-
mate identity of politics and history. It is not just that any politics is
informed by history. But if the identity between the historical and
the political is going to hold, any history of the oppressed classes
(who are the only subject of history, because they are the only ones
interested in fostering the dialectical process of change) should
be marked by the politics of the future. This does not happen in
remembrance - and this is the scandal of this passage - but in actu-
ality. Benjamin refers to this transformation of the past as this most
inconspicuous of all transformations.
78 Horacio Legras
The intentional acts of the

assumed sovereignty of th
own constitutive excess, they
terminacy that they create
of all transformations is th
is most ours (the tradition
change this tradition. This
no answer in Benjamin as to
happen. The explanation lie
live through a successful r
to turn now to Diego Rivera
around the question of how
triumphal revolution.
Mexico
As I noticed before, some historians have doubted the propriety of

the word "revolution" to refer to the vast upheaval that took place
in Mexico roughly between 1910 and 1920. Establishing a historio-
graphical or sociological rationale that would allow us to classify the
Mexican Revolution as a true revolution is an enterprise that would
take too long and will lead too far astray from the goals of this essay.
It would also be a waste of time. I will, instead, put the question in
very cursory terms. Between 1910 and 1920, there was in Mexico an
almost total military mobilization of peasants and workers. The gov-
ernment was overthrown and the constitution rewritten, giving rise
in 1917 to the most progressive constitution of the Western world
at the time. The army (federal army) was dissolved, and a new army
was put in place. The state apparatus was totally reworked - not
along the lines of class consciousness, to be sure, but in a way that
paid an unprecedented level of attention to the disenfranchised
and the underdogs. One can argue that the Mexican Revolution
was betrayed, incomplete, unfinished, or whatever other adjective
one wants to use to mark the distance between the actual historical
event and the ideal meaning of "revolution." Still, one would be
hard pressed to prove that there was no revolution in Mexico at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
It is the unorthodox development of the Mexican Revolution
that brings that event surprisingly close to Benjamin's work. A revo-
lution that continues to be a revolution even when lacking many
of the traits of a revolution (intention, leadership, revolutionary
vanguard party) must be a revolution almost in its purity. Benjamin
has surely the socialist revolution in mind: the revolution that will
end all revolutions because it will do away with both state and class
society. This line of thought appears in Benjamin and cannot be
discarded. But it only proves that for Benjamin revolution was the
revolution at hand. As for his texts, Benjamin always thought and
wrote about the revolution itself, whose destiny is to be iterated any
time the tradition of the oppressed collects enough force to blast
open the continuum of time.
However, it is not the revolution itself- of which we know very
litde since it is permanently eschewed in academic research - but
rather the cultural reconstitution that takes place in Mexico after
1921 that is the object of my exposition. When the revolution
ended, there was no clear dominant sector willing, or rather able,
to attribute a meaning to the decade that had just transformed
Mexico. This means that the political legitimacy of the post-
revolutionary government was not backed by any consistent narra-
tive. The solution to this predicament came from the most unlikely
place: culture. As recent historiography has insistently remarked,
the construction of the postrevolutionary state was the product of
a vast and largely unintentional collaboration of a variety of peo-
ple, discourses, and practices that coalesced in a very open-ended
process of state formation.31 It is no secret that the work of Diego
Rivera represents a peculiarly strong contribution to this process.
He created and cemented a powerful notion of the revolution that
ended up identifying revolutionary ideology as a whole. In Rivera's
work, the revolution inherited a tradition of struggle for emancipa-
tion anchored in the history and misfortunes of the Indian masses.
Although Indians were either unaware or uninterested in the idea
of the nation, Rivera also understood that nationalism was the lan-
guage best suited to stir up the type of political mobilization that
the revolution needed for its consolidation.
Revolution and nationalism are not compatible in any obvi-
ous way. Revolution (or negativity) is one of the few possible and
always fragile incarnations of universality. Nationalism, on the
other hand, is by definition an expression of the particular. In the
case of Mexico, one can explain the purchase of nationalism in
light of the inherent traits of the revolutionary process. The revolu-
tion was composed of multitudinary, multiethnic, and multiclassist
contingents who mobilized without any clear direction or ideology.
Rousseau's famous paradox of sovereignty (a people only becomes
a people by giving themselves law, but how can they give themselves
laws if they don't exist already as a people?) was exacerbated by the
fact that the peasant's contingents knew of sovereignty and enfran-
chisement as a practical outcome of their revolutionary activity
rather than in the most abstract language of rights. Nationalism
80 Horacio Legrás
offered a solution to this

revolt to an almost millena
america. Nationalism was
enough to reach almost ev
ency. We would be mistaken
"representational" activity
just learn to be Mexicans,
inhabit a country they h
is, incidentally, a very Ben
tionary action is not just -
realm of reality or material
ferent type of subjectivity.
An upper-class painter e
ticipant of the Cubist boh
painting that identified in
ditions of the Mexican pe
traditions, it is worthwhil
appropriation. While the
enous were routinely dem
the period, there were few
fications to actually bring
representation. The task o
invent a tradition out of a
cultural autochthonous values.
An unexpected use of Christian imagery at the level of repre-

sentation and a more predictable recourse to enumeration at the
level of composition are the stylistic benchmarks of those murals
such as the Courtyard of Labor and the Courtyard of Fiestas at the Sec-
retary of Education (Secretaría de Educación Pública [SEP] ) and
the History of Mexico painted on the walls of the National Palace.
Although Rivera had studied Renaissance murals in some detail -
he referred to them as books for the illiterate - the public present
at the inauguration of the murals at the SEP were astonished by
what they perceived as an odd mixture of social Marxist critique
(condemnation of private property, exploitation, colonialism) and
allusions to a Christian iconography. For Rivera, the Christian tra-
dition provided a dignified version of the popular classes, a version
that considers the popular sector to be exemplary of the category
of the human in general, elevating these groups to a universality
thus far denied to them. Rivera, however, borrowed from Chris-
tianity not its iconographie tradition (in which a certain figure
carries an already codified meaning) but rather a mode of figura-
tion. The elevation of the neglected people to prototypes of the
universal did not detach them from their place and their time. It
entailed, rather, a carnivalesque inversion of the religious imag-

ery. Instead of these peasants and Indians becoming more "saintly"
and ethereal, "saindiness" became more mundane and embodied.
Meanwhile the trope of enumeration was mobilized as the ideal
medium for a maximum effort of incorporation. Enumeration is
here the pictorial equivalent of populism as the ingrained ideology
of the revolution. The Courtyard of Fiestas presents the viewer with
an apparently endless string of human faces that cover the whole
mural. No figure stands out as allegorizing or symbolizing the joys
and sufferings of all.
However, I will argue that Rivera's final goal did not lie in rep-
resentation but rather in affection. In a proper Benjaminian way,
Rivera's problem became how the past modifies the present and
how the present could have a redemptive effect on the past. In
addressing this question, I will circumscribe my comments to the
central wall of the History of Mexico . From the tide of the mural, we
appreciate Rivera's intention to place the revolution in the most
general context of the historical existence of the Mexican people.
The avowed intention of the mural is to retell the history of Mexico
from the vantage point of the underdogs.
As viewers enter the central patio of the National Palace to con-
template the mural, they are invited into a pictorial journey that
starts with the pre-Columbian civilizations, die arrival of Hernán
Cortés to the coast of Mexico, the defeat of Tenochtidan, and the
rise of the white God. At the opposite specter of time, we find the
figures of Marx and Lenin, who show the way to the future to the
Mexican workers. Everywhere, through every century and decade,
Rivera paints the anonymous faces of Indians and peasants, not as
backgrounds but as present-ghosts of the historical process. (Rivera's
enormous subdety: Some of these figures have their backs turned
to the spectator. They are as unreachable for them as they were for
Rivera.) Now, what is the time of the present? The present is outside
representation. It is the time of the spectator, of the single, titanic
gaze that should incorporate this totality into its own moment of
apprehension. But it is also the time of the return of the contem-
plating gaze upon itself since, as spectators, we are driven out of
the representation and forced into our own temporality. (This
effect is not unrelated to the fact that in all likelihood the viewer
has to be constandy moving, pushed forward through the stairs of
the national palace and lacking therefore any point of view from
which the totality can be at the same time visible and distinguish-
able in all its subde details.) There is only one possibility left to the
viewers: to accept this historical concatenation as their own history.
This merely "situational" reading of the mural is emphasized by the
82 Horacio Legrás
composition of the centra

History of Mexico as a pedag
central panel from this read
tral wall can be seen as me
amongst each other becaus
as equals, and not necessar
historical importance."32 Af
shared by the two side walls
[t]his refusal by the mural to c

properties of episodic history
mural is not, in spite of its site
didactic in any explicit manner.
own telling/viewing. Zapatistas w
a different visual construct, tha
than Spaniards."
Folgarait's analysis is per

ically based reading of th
preexist the encounter wi
tas, Americans, or Zapatist
murals aimed to create an id
tive disposition. In my rea
different possibilities of i
choose. Taken as a whole, th
tory one cannot choose. R
with whom he could not p
ally abhorred: bankers, rut
ish empire first and of th
Catholic fanatic who killed
now is going to redeem all
of this past can be renoun
the past objectively, so to sp
ing the difference between
stands as mere datum to b
ent, made the stuff of the
an alienated past becomes
often referred in Lacanian
terrain of art and politics
a similar process.34 The hi
be brought back to life in
just reproduced as dead w
a productive reproduction
in their mutual determin
Columbian civilization, th
mous backs of peasant Ind
forefathers of the revolution his or her own. Even the Inquisition,

even Porfirio Díaz, has to be accommodated into the picture. The
viewer may think that he has to identify only with one portion of
this past. But in the central panel, at the most important moment
of representation, Rivera closes this option.
Through the re-production of history, the present knows itself,
finally, constituted by the intentional acts of the past. It is by receiv-
ing the fullness of the past that Rivera may come to the conclusion
that his presence was also awaited on earth. Now, the productive
reproduction of the past does not prove that the recognition of
its intentional acts is more than a fancy of the artist. Neither can
this reproduction address the crucial Benjaminian point that the
past itself is transformed, albeit imperceptibly, when its face turns
toward that sun that rises in the sky of history. This was all too obvi-
ous for Rivera. In his painstaking reconstruction of the history of
the humiliated masses, he soon runs into a properly Benjaminian
predicament. The virtues of the oppressed (cunning, fortitude)
are lost not because they have been forgotten, but because they
have been overwritten by successive inscriptions of redemptive dis-
courses. The tradition of the oppressed often reaches us through
forms that try to convey a message of deliverance and emancipa-
tion. In the case of Mexico, these include Christianity, the move-
ment of independence, the fight against foreign powers (the war
against the United States and the French occupation).
This overwriting confronts us with a paradox that becomes
more and more common throughout modernity: the same con-
tainer that protects these traditions from the erosion of time is the
one silencing the intentionality of their original acts. Even aesthetic
revelation seems to be no match for the long process of reinscrip-
tion by which the intentional acts of the past have been concealed
by a strand of movements acting in their name, but from which
their proper name itself is absent. What can be then the effective
connection between past and present? How does knowledge of the
past become consciousness of the present? How can we and the
painter ever be sure that his act of giving voice to the oppressed
is not resolved into another betrayal of their intentions? The obvi-
ous answer is that we will never know. But this not-knowing is not
simply ignorance, but rather the very condition of possibility of
redemption. As David Lloyd writes in Irish Times,
Only in remaining out of joint with the times to which the dead are lost
is there any prospect of a redress that would not be concomitant with
the desire to lay the dead to rest. . . . The paradox of redress is that the
catastrophic violence of history can be righted only in relinquishing the
desire to set it right, in order to make room for the specters in whose
restlessness the rhythms of another mode of living speak to us.55
84 Horacio Legras
Benjamin would have fou

renovated rationale for hi
ing, as Rivera was well aw
inaction. It is at this poin
sion of Christian imaginary
becomes relevant once agai
language in which genera
the singularity of their own
are certainly denounced in
trial, and yet the popular
anity is not only accepted,
ful embodiments of the t
in the hope that as a lan
the clamors that it rescues
refuses to depict Christian
simultaneously he refuses
historical voice of the opp
supplements the struggles
the present is also able to
tones the more metaphysica
tradition to life in a new
guage. In this careful disa
from the ghosts that they
alliance between history a
Notes
1 See, for instance, chapter 1 in Raul Ruiz's The. Great Rebellion : Mexico 1905-
1924 (New York: Norton, 1980) and also Leonard Folgaraiťs hesitation about the
word "revolution" in his Mured Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940:
Art of the New Order (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.
2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 6.
3 For the history of the text, see the introduction to Michael Löwy's Fire Alarm:
Reading Walter Benjamin 's "On the ConcefH of History " (London: Verso, 2006) .
4 There is a large secondary bibliography on Benjamin and the "Theses." For

the purpose of this essay, I have consulted, besides Michael Löwy's acute book, Ron-
ald Beiner's essay, "Walter Benjamin's Philosophy of History," Political Theory 12, no.
3 (1984): 423-34; and the volume edited by Andrew Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and
History (London: Continuum, 2005).
5 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations , ed.

Hanna Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 253-64, quotation on 254.
6 Herbert Marcuse attributes this statement to Hegel in Reason and Revolution:

Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (New York: Humanities Press, 1958), 4-5.
7 Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge

University Press, 1981), 11-12.
8 Fredric Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," in The Ideologies of The-

ory (London: Verso, 2008), 77-124, quotation on 92.
9 Benjamin, Illuminations, 254.
10 Ibid., 259.
11 Ibid., 260.
12 Ibid., 254-55
13 1 am referring here to the already classic study by Johannes Fabian: Time and
the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Objects (New York: Columbia University Press,
1983).
14 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255.

15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid., 257.
18 Theodor Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 1.
19 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis , trans. James

Strachey (New York: Norton, 1965), 23.
20 Emmanuel Lévinas, "Is Ontology Fundamental?" in Basic. Philosophical Writ-

ings, ed. Adriaan Peperzak, Simon Critçhley, and Robert Bernasconi, Studies in
Continental Thought series (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 1-10.
21 For a thorough explanation of phenomenology in literary criticism, see

Robert Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction (West Lafayette, IN:
Purdue University Press, 1977). See also J. Hillis Miller, "The Geneva School: The
Criticism of Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, Jean-
Pierre Richard, and Jean Starobinski," in Theory Now and Then (New York: Harvester
Wheatsheaf, 1991), 13-30.
22 Benjamin, Illuminations , 255.
23 Ibid., 254.
24 A discussion of present and revolution can be found in Stathis Kouvelakis's

Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx, trans. G. M. Goshgarian (London:
Verso, 2003), 3-5 and passim. The equation between knowledge and action is dis-
located in some contemporary accounts of the social such as Peter Sloterdjik's Cri-
tique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1987).
25 Benjamin, Illuminations , 254.
л Ibid.
27 Hegel's phrase appears in a letter to his friend Karl Knebel in the context of a
very explicit assertion of materiality. Hegel is talking about how his duties as teacher
and editor allowed him to write his speculative work. For a reference to the letter to
Knebel and an illuminating comment on the word "granted" (which translates here
the German zufallen ), see note 5 by the editors to the "Theses on the Philosophy
86 Horacio Legreis
of History," in Walter Benjamin: Se

Eiland and Michael W. Jennings,
Belknap Press of Harvard Universit
28 Benjamin, illuminations, 255.

29 Ibid.
3,0 In his book on Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin sees the novel as containing (and
saving) a carnivalesque principle in the epoch of noncarnival ( Rabelais and His
World [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984]).
31 See Mary Kay Vaughan, ed., The Eagle and the Virgin : Nation and Cultural Revo-
lution in Mexico 1920-1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Although
more centered on the role of the state, a similar argument in favor of culture as an
instrument of political stabilization is made by Thomas Benjamin in La Revolucion:
Mexico s Great Revolution as Memory , Myth , and History (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2008).
32 Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940:

Art of the New Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 101.
33 Ibid., 102.
34 For the Lacanian notion of subjectifìcation see Bruce Fink, The Lacanian
Subject (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).
35 David Lloyd, Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity (Dublin: Field Day, 2008), 12.

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Walter Benjamin and the Mexican Revolution: A Meditation on the "Theses on the

Philosophy of History" and Diego Rivera's Murals

A Meditation on lhe "Theses on the Philosophy

I want to start by acknowledging a possible objection. The names

Discourse, 32.1, Winter 2010, pp. 66-86.

European territory. As Dipesh Chakrabarty put it, for modern

Benjamin did not intend th

as it extends its conceptual arm to figures like the lumpenprole-

The identification of histo

The ideology of progress that confuses technological improve-

The Present as an Ethical Category

Historicism doesn't propose just a picture of the past, but more

the past to the parameters

outlook. The "Theses" contain an important indictment against this

to what is perceived. Wri

The Present as Inherently Revolutionary Time

In the "Theses," the present represents not only an ethical cate-

born as political consciousness. This is the time of the Jetztzeit, the

The Intentional Transformation of the Past

By now what counts as present (and more importantly as presence)

represents the conceptual c

Class struggle, which for a hist

The thesis is preceded by

The intentional acts of the

As I noticed before, some historians have doubted the propriety of

offered a solution to this

An unexpected use of Christian imagery at the level of repre-

entailed, rather, a carnivalesque inversion of the religious imag-

composition of the centra

[t]his refusal by the mural to c

Folgarait's analysis is per

forefathers of the revolution his or her own. Even the Inquisition,

Benjamin would have fou

2 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical

4 There is a large secondary bibliography on Benjamin and the "Theses." For

5 Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations , ed.

6 Herbert Marcuse attributes this statement to Hegel in Reason and Revolution:

7 Francois Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge

8 Fredric Jameson, "Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan," in The Ideologies of The-

9 Benjamin, Illuminations, 254.

14 Benjamin, Illuminations, 255.

19 Sigmund Freud, New Introductory lectures on Psychoanalysis , trans. James

20 Emmanuel Lévinas, "Is Ontology Fundamental?" in Basic. Philosophical Writ-

21 For a thorough explanation of phenomenology in literary criticism, see

22 Benjamin, Illuminations , 255.

24 A discussion of present and revolution can be found in Stathis Kouvelakis's

25 Benjamin, Illuminations , 254.

of History," in Walter Benjamin: Se

28 Benjamin, illuminations, 255.

32 Leonard Folgarait, Mural Painting and Social Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940:

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