“Eternity by the Stars” & “Now-Time” on Earth: Rethinking Revolution with Blanqui & Benjamin
In the final months of 1871, as the sole prisoner in the islanded Fort du Taureau, half a mile beyond the shores of Morlaix, Louis-Auguste Blanqui sought refuge in the stars. Earlier that year, the Paris Commune had fallen to the forces of the Third Republic, and it was against this backdrop of defeat that the socialist revolutionary composed the first and last philosophical treatise of his life. In L’Eternité par les astres (Eternity by the Stars), Blanqui begins with a rather elementary repertoire of scientific facts and fashions from it a radical cosmological thesis: that the finitude of matter and the infinitude of space and time, together, render the eternal return of every form and event a mathematical certainty. There are echoes here of Nietzsche, but for Blanqui—writing a decade or so before the aforementioned (Hallward 41)—eternal return is not only temporal but spatial, unfolding through the existence of an infinity of earths consubstantial with our own, each populated by our kindred selves and even kindred grains of sand (Blanqui 17-18). Across these earths, moreover, the malleable organization of matter means that “everything we could have been on [our] earth, we are it somewhere else” (147, italics from original). Upon an infinity of globes, then, Blanqui is chained to his seaside fortress, composing his elegy for the revolution for all time: “That which I am writing at this moment, in a dungeon of the Fort du Taureau, I have written and shall write again forever, on a table, with a quill, under clothes and in entirely similar circumstances,” he reflects (146). Yet, upon another infinity of globes, the revolutionary cause which he now mourns has already triumphed, a more virtuous order installed.
Blanqui’s cosmology thus serves not to eternalize that which has been, but, as Peter Hallward underscores (41), to eternalize the possibility of that which might have been. As such, it resonates with Walter Benjamin’s historical materialist endeavor in “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), to reconfigure revolution in terms of its redemptive relation to the past. For both Benjamin and Blanqui, revolution is waged not merely for the sake of a more noble future, but, perhaps more urgently, to redeem those past generations whose dreams failed to bear fruit in their own lifetimes. Recognizing Blanqui’s pervasive presence within Benjamin’s thought, this essay positions the socialist revolutionary as a monadic and Messianic figure whose life, work, and historical context illuminate key facets of Benjamin’s historical materialist theory of revolution. Viewed through the lens of Benjamin’s theory, Blanqui’s cosmological vision—and the historical, psychological, and phenomenological circumstances under which it was forged—reveals the essence of revolution as a gesture of both rupture and remembrance.
I. The Unity of Revolution
In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin conceives of “a secret agreement between past generations and the present ones” that consists, in essence, of a debt owed by the present to the past to strive towards those dreams which previous generations failed to actualize (Thesis II, Illuminations [I] 253-254). For Benjamin, the sanctity of this pact was nowhere more apparent than in the proletarian movement of which Blanqui was a figurehead. With its uncommon revolutionary fervor, the proletarian movement, as Benjamin observed, was “nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren” (Thesis XII, I 260). In light of this transhistorical bond, the Blanqui of L’Eternité appears to us as an ancestral figure speaking in the prophetic perfect tense about future generations who have yet to walk the earth: “Progress on this earth is reserved only to our nephews. They are luckier than us. All the beautiful things that our world will see, our future descendants have already seen them, are seeing them now and will see them always…,” writes Blanqui (147). If, as conceived by Benjamin, the gaze of proletariat is affixed upon “the image of enslaved ancestors,” then Blanqui himself is one such ancestor, his own proleptic gaze directed towards the interplanetary futures where his utopian project may yet be realized. It is in the dialectical convergence of these gazes—one oriented toward the past, the other toward the future—that the “secret agreement” binding past and present is consecrated.
The result of this covert binder, as Benjamin’s philosophy demonstrates in theory and Blanqui’s historical moment exemplifies in practice, is the transhistorical and transcultural unity of all struggles for emancipation. Throughout the “Theses,” Benjamin often casts the class struggle in dehistoricized and universalizing terms such that it comes to encompass not only the proletarian movement underway in his own time, but all such struggles that have been waged by the downtrodden against the ruling class since the now untraceable inception of class society. Elsewhere, in The Arcades Project (1982), Benjamin equates “primal history” with “classless society” (894); hence, it is implied, the history of civilization is the history of class struggle. That all emancipatory struggles partake in the same historical lineage is further made explicit when Benjamin, following Marx, designates the proletariat as “the last enslaved class” and “the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden” (Thesis XII, I 260). In the same thesis, Benjamin references the Spartacist group, a leftist organization formed during World War I in opposition to the pro-war German Socialist Party. As Gregory Marks notes in his reading of Benjamin, this brief allusion to the Spartacists, named for the escaped slave Spartacus who led the Third Servile War, underscores the “identity of cause” which tethered the proletarian uprisings of Blanqui and Benjamin’s time to ancient slave revolts against the Roman Republic. Likewise remarking upon the similitude of all confrontation between oppressor and oppressed, an 1836 pamphlet likened the rebels of the Paris Uprising of June 1832 to the Spartans of the Battle of Thermopylae: “A republican, is virtue, perseverance; is devotion personified…[he] is Leonidas dying at Thermopylae, at the head of his three hundred Spartans; he is also the seventy-two heroes who defended during forty-eight hours the approaches of the Cloître Saint-Merry, from sixty thousand men, and who … threw themselves onto bayonets to obtain a glorious death” (Gazette des Tribunaux). The unity of revolution thus extends, both spatially and temporally, far beyond the bounds of a particular historical moment.
II. The Image of the Past
From what, we might then ask, do revolutionary acts that unfold in such diverse regions and epochs derive their continuity? In analogizing the French Revolution’s emulation of ancient Rome to the manner in which “fashion evokes costumes of the past” (Thesis XIV, I 261), Benjamin locates the source of the unity of revolution in gestures and rituals of a specifically aesthetic nature. Again, we find this line of thought concretized within Blanqui’s own historical milieu: Each of the insurrections that transpired in France over the course of the long 19th century drew not only logistical but aesthetic inspiration from its predecessors. The June Uprising of 1832, for example, not only gathered from Robespierre and the Jacobins of 1789 their theatrical rhetoric and glorification of martyrdom, but also their fashion, from the Phrygian cap to the color red (Cranston 47). Just as the “French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate” (Benjamin, Thesis XIV, I 261), the revolutionary generations of 1830, 1832, 1834, 1839, 1848, and 1871 each saw themselves as historical actors inheriting and executing the legacy of the original 1789 revolution. And, just as the French Revolution evoked Rome by way of an aesthetic emulation, so too did its successors evoke it through that very same mechanism.
The power of the image to lend the struggles of the past a sensuous immediacy, and in turn political urgency, can be understood with recourse to Benjamin’s early differentiation between the symbol and the allegory. Whereas the symbolic image formally and sensorily incarnates its referent, the allegorical image functions by way of the “mortification of sensuous form” (Ross 56). The “true image of the past,” for Benjamin, synthesizes both of these categories. On one hand, as an image that “flits by” (Benjamin, Thesis V, I 255), it is akin to the allegory in that it is defined by the transience of its referential content. Yet, at the same time, it exerts its hold upon the present through a sensuous immediacy that is the province of the symbolic. In his essay on Baudelaire, Benjamin recounts a moment from Proust’s A la Recherche du temps perdu in which the narrator finds his childhood town of Combray brought to life by the taste of a madeleine (I 158). Like Proust’s madeleine, the Phrygian cap and even the color red itself have the capacity to trigger a pre-reflective, involuntary memory (mémoire involontaire)—in this case, a collective remembrance of the previous episodes of the revolutionary struggle, one that stretches beyond one’s own lifetime and serves as fuel for political action in the present by imposing upon it the stakes of a past struggle. While the early Benjamin is wary of the potential for the symbolic image to inundate the senses and disorient consciousness (Ross 56), the Benjamin of “Theses” thus discerns in the sensuous plenitude of the symbol a politically redemptive potential.
In the manner of Leibnizian substances that strive to pass from essence to existence, the visions of revolution catalyzed by the symbolic image harbor an entelechy that compel them, inexorably, from the imaginal to the real. Standing trial for her life in December of 1871, at the very same time that Blanqui was composing L’Eternité from within his cell, communard Louise Michel affirmed through poetics Blanqui’s thesis of eternal return: “We will return, an infinite mob / through all your doors, we’ll return / vengeful spectres, out from the shadows / with raised fists, we will return” (Bonney). Once the image of revolution has taken root in historical consciousness, its spectre is one that nothing—not the liquidation of bodies, not the destruction of the symbols of revolution, not the installation of Haussmann’s boulevards and open parks—can annihilate.
III. Time, Reconsidered
Our receptivity to the transportive power of the image, as we have seen, is thus predicated upon a view of time that would allow for the formation of genuine experiential bonds between the past and the present. For the image of the past to enact an aesthetic and sensorial shock that collapses the distance between the dead and the living, that is, our model of history cannot be founded upon what Benjamin calls “homogeneous, empty time,” wherein time is no more than a linear sequence of uniform segments accumulating one after the other, no segment bearing greater qualitative significance than the next (Thesis XIII, I 261 and passim).
The facticity of involuntary memory itself is sufficient to lay bare the inadequacy of such a temporal structure. Transported momentarily by the images, colors, and scents of the past, the revolutionaries of 19th-century France found themselves participating in a historical lineage that preceded their bodily existence. The dead, too, may be resuscitated and made to walk among the living: With an abundance of memoirs circulating in Paris, “Robespierre, Saint-Just, Couthon, Marat, and the rest of the dead”—figureheads of the 1789 revolution—“were almost as alive in the France of the 1830s as those of their contemporaries who survived,” writes Elizabeth Eisenstein (98). The romantic republicanism of the 1789 revolution, moreover, was kept alive in the 19th century through the works of Romantic poets such as Byron and Hugo (Cranston 47). In such instances of communion between the living and the dead, or of the resurrection of the dead among the living, both parties are, in some immaterial yet non-trivial sense, displaced from their respective historical loci and inserted into a realm beyond that of linear time. Such quotidian experiences—of involuntary memory, of conversing with the dead through narrative—suggest that there is something fundamentally amiss in the conception of time as empty and homogeneous.
More insidiously still, such a view of time, when coupled with the illusive faith in the “infinite perfectibility of mankind,” produces a picture of progress as an unbroken, linear continuum, and further invests this continuum with a false impression of automaticity (Benjamin, Thesis XIII, I 260-261). The possibility of revolutionary thought and action is precluded, and what results from this hubris is, to the contrary, the “eternal return of the selfsame”: barbarism (Benjamin, Thesis VII, I 256), the accumulation of ruin (Benjamin, Thesis IX, I 257-58), class society.
To articulate an alternative to homogenous empty time and the narrow-minded purview it engenders, let us look again to the figure of Blanqui. Rejecting the false continuum of progress, Blanqui embodied what we might call, following Benjamin, a Messianic comportment to time. As Benjamin himself notes in The Arcades Project, Blanqui “[did] not presuppose any faith in progress” and “refused to develop plans for what comes ‘later,’” guided as he were by “the firm resolve to snatch humanity at the last moment from the catastrophe looming at every turn” (339). This strategy of seizing a fugitive revolutionary moment so as to institute a genuine qualitative break with the status quo exemplifies Benjamin’s notion of the Messianic: a mode of being marked by the “arrest” of thought (Thesis XVII, I 262), the “cessation of happening” (Thesis XVII, I 263), and “the presence of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Thesis XIV, I 261), or “now-time.”
After all, if history is a “pile of debris” that is forever “[growing] skyward,” (Benjamin, Thesis IX, I 258), then progress consists not in adding to this pile but in halting the process of accumulation altogether. Amid the July Revolution of 1830, Benjamin recounts, there unfolded a remarkable moment when insurgents across Paris collectively took up arms against the clocktowers of the city (Thesis XV, I 261-62), as if to press pause upon the forwards pulse of time. We can read in this moment, as Benjamin does, an attempt to eternalize the revolutionary moment by bringing time itself to a standstill. Moreover, we can posit the moment as a “monad” in Benjamin’s sense of the word: a singular, self-sufficient image in which the totality of history is distilled to its essence.1placeholder Indeed, from this uncommonly revelatory and poetic moment, we can glean almost instantaneously the essence of the “tradition of the oppressed” (Benjamin, Thesis VIII, I 257) as rupture.2placeholder Against Marx’s characterization of revolution as “the locomotive of world history,” the revolutionary event is perhaps better metaphorized, in Benjamin’s words, as “an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake” (Selected Writings 402). True progress unfolds through rupture: the caesura of movement, the interstitial made substantial in and of itself.
IV. Blanqui’s Astral Odyssey
Perhaps the greatest testament to the Messianic potential that lies in the arrest of time, however, can be found in the circumstances of exile under which Blanqui’s L’Eternité was conceived. Irrespective of the truth or falsity of its content, Blanqui’s cosmological vision constituted a radical break with the linear temporality that governed—and continues to govern—capitalist modernity. If living one’s daily life under the strictures of homogeneous empty time precludes Messianic thinking, then the opposite is also true. One can hardly imagine the sense of suffocation felt by the iron-willed Blanqui as he wrote his treatise from within an ageing body, enclosed in a prison cell, situated within a fortress, encircled by the waters of the Atlantic. Yet, it was precisely under these circumstances of bondage that the exiled revolutionary turned his gaze both inward and heavenward: Barred from the window by the threat of force (Blanqui 8), the revolutionary instead concentrated his attention upon sound, transmuting the rhythmic lapping of the Atlantic waters into a musica universalis governing the heavens. Blanqui’s imprisonment thus became an astral exile, a journey to the stars made possible by his expulsion from earth.
In the same way that the topology of a city can either inhibit or foment insurrection—a subject which Blanqui treated in Instructions pour une prise d’armes (Instructions for an Armed Uprising), a decade before his imprisonment—our environment plays no small part in shaping our perceptual phenomenologies. Within a prison cell such as Blanqui’s, with its circular walls and vaulted ceiling (Blanqui 3), both space and time might undergo peculiar distortions, contracting and expanding in ways foreign to the sense-consciousness of a free man. And, if imagination derives its raw materials from sense impressions, then this “derangement of all the senses,” to borrow a notion from Rimbaud (307), makes way for an imagination able to conceive of worlds that diverge radically from the present. Under the yoke of his prison cell, the exiled revolutionary thus found his consciousness paradoxically emancipated from the rectilinear logic of bourgeois society.
It is no surprise, then, that L’Eternité abounds with echoes of the Messianic effort to substantiate and eternalize revolutionary “now-time.” At the heart of Blanqui’s swan song is the image of bifurcation:
“For tomorrow, events and men shall resume their journey. From now on, only the unknown is before us. Like our earth’s past, its future will change direction millions of times. The past is a fait accompli; it belongs to us. The future shall come to an end only when the globe dies. Until then, every second will bring its new bifurcation, the road taken and the road that could have been taken” (125).
For the Blanqui of L’Eternité, as for the Blanqui of the barricades, the revolution is to be won—and “the tradition of the oppressed” redeemed—not by predicting the future but by decisively seizing each moment of bifurcation as it presents itself. Each crossroads is after all, as Benjamin writes, a “strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” (Addendum B, I 264).
V. Revolution, Reconsidered
L’Eternité par les astres was published on February 20, 1872, three days after Blanqui’s sentencing to life imprisonment at the hands of a Versailles tribunal (Blanqui 7). Indeed, the history recounted throughout this essay might appear, at first blush, as a sequence of irreparable defeats: The July Revolution of 1830 overthrew the conservative government of Charles X only to install the constitutional monarchy of Louis-Philippe I in its place, failing to establish a republican France (Zhai 112); the June Uprising of 1832 was swiftly and brutally suppressed by the National Guard, fading from collective memory save for its depiction in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables (Zhai 129); the Paris Commune of 1871 governed the city for merely two months before meeting a similar fate in La Semaine Sanglante (“The Bloody Week”) (Bird). Each of these revolutionary episodes failed to vanquish the old order and erect a more virtuous one in its place.
Yet, if the essence of the revolutionary act lies in both rupture (the Messianic cessation of time) and remembrance (the revitalization of past struggle), then the triumph or failure of revolution cannot be measured solely by its material effect on generations yet to be born. “The experiences of such a [classless] society—as stored in the unconscious of the collective,” writes Benjamin in The Arcades Project, “engender, in combination with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configurations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions” (894). This dream of utopia (that is, of classless society) is illuminated anew with each revolutionary event, no matter how enduring or short-lived. Moreover, each instance of renewal is not an atavistic regression to the dream in its archaic form; rather, in each renewal, the dream is fused “with what is new.” That is, the dream is continually reconfigured in response to the shifting political demands, conditions of legibility, as well as material and technological apparatus of the present moment.
Above all, it has become clear that our understanding of revolution—what determines its success, what constitutes its essence—is inextricably bound up with the shape with which we conceive of historical time. While Blanqui’s life offers a monadic distillation of many elements of Benjamin’s thought, his cosmological vision itself ultimately fell short of a truly Messianic thinking. Under the temporal structure of eternal return, each moment is guaranteed to occur again, such that the crossroads which lies before us in the present is deprived of its singularity, and, in turn, its urgency.3placeholder In contrast, under Messianic time, each opportunity to awaken the past through a redemptive act is given to us only once: “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Thesis V, I 255, my italics)—neither in a future that has yet to transpire nor upon some distant earth where the dreams unrealized upon our own planet may be won by our cosmic avatar.
Ultimately, then, Blanqui’s sidereal vision is closest to Benjamin’s Messianic spirit when lowered from its cosmic stage and transposed to the domain of our terrestrial lives. In L’Eternité, Blanqui mourns the “estrangement of brother-worlds caused by the inexorable barrier of space” (148), painting a melancholic vision of planets ceaselessly orbiting the cosmos, each under the illusion of its own singularity. In lamenting this illusion, Blanqui is lamenting our blindness to the contingency of the political present, to the fact that our bodies and lives might be otherwise. Blanqui’s brother-worlds are not remote, inaccessible planets, but the earthly futures that might elude us if we fail to seize the image of the past at the decisive moment of its appearance: What if, among them, lies the world in which I might have attained the greatest sum of happiness, where humanity might have realized the greatest share of welfare and justice? At every crossroads in our individual and collective lives, we experience a muted echo of Blanqui’s cosmic vagabondage. The purpose of revolution, then, is not strictly to achieve immediate success, but to awaken us to the fact of this vagabondage: to confer an aesthetic existence upon the unmetabolized aspirations of the past and thereby renew the possibility of their reification in the present. So long as the revolutionary moment is seized with Messianic resolve, the dream of emancipation will not, in Benjamin’s words, “disappear irretrievably” (Thesis V, I 255) beneath the wreckage of history.
Works Cited
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—. Selected Writings, Volume 4: 1938–1940. Edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003.
—. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Bensaïd, Daniel. “Politiques de Marx.” In Engels, Friedrich and Karl Marx, Inventer l’inconnu: Textes et correspondance autour de la Commune. La fabrique éditions, 2011.
Bird, Danny. “The Paris Commune’s Bloody Week.” History Today, https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/paris-communes-bloody-week. Accessed 3 November 2024.
Blanqui, Louis-Auguste. Eternity by the Stars: An Astronomical Hypothesis. Translated by Frank Chouraqui. New York, Berlin: Contra Mundum Press, 2013.
—. “Instructions for an Armed Uprising (1868).” The Blanqui Archive, https://blanqui.kingston.ac.uk/texts/instructions-for-an-armed-uprising-1868′. Accessed 4 March 2024.
Bonney, Sean. “Comets & Barricades: Insurrectionary Imagination in Exile.” Blackout (Poetry & Politics), https://my-blackout.com/2018/07/17/sean-bonney-comets-barricades-insurrectionary-imagination-in-exile/. Accessed 4 March 2024.
Cranston, Maurice Cranston. “The French Revolution in the Minds of Men.” The Wilson Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3, 1989, pp. 46-55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40257906.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The First Professional Revolutionist: Filippo Michele Buonarroti. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959.
Gazette Des Tribunaux. April 25, 1836, IIe Conseil de Guerre. Paris, 1836.
Hallward, Peter. “Blanqui’s Bifurcations.” Radical Philosophy 185, May/June, 2014. pp. 36-44.
Jameson, Fredric. The Benjamin Files. London: Verso, 2020.
Marks, Gregory. “Labour, Nature, and Dream (Reading Benjamin’s Theses XI & XII).” The Wasted World, https://thewastedworld.com/2023/03/18/reading-benjamins-theses-p6/. Accessed 2 November 2024.
Martineau, Jonathan. Time, Capitalism and Alienation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.
Miller, Tyrus. “Eternity No More: Walter Benjamin on the Eternal Return.” In Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context, pp. 279-95. Budapest and New York City: Central European University Press, 2008.
Rimbaud, Arthur. Complete Works, Selected Letters. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1966-2005.
Ross, Alison. Walter Benjamin’s Concept of the Image. New York: Routledge, 2015.
Zhai, Vernita. “From the Bourgeois Epoch to the Nascent Socialist Movement, 1789-1832: Foundations & Significance of the June Uprising of 1832.” The Concord Review vol. 30, no. 1, 2019, pp. 97-140.
As Fredric Jameson writes in his reading of Benjamin, “The logic of the monad… refracts the totality into its parts, into all its elements, of whatever dimensions” (238).
To put this more concretely, we might look to Marxist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd’s assertion that revolutions operate by disrupting the course of daily life and rupturing the flow of clock time that undergirds bourgeois rule.
It is perhaps for this reason that linear progress and eternal return are, for Benjamin, “the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical time must be developed” (AP 119).