The Time of Capital and the Messianicity of Time. Marx with Benjamin

Abstract

In 1978, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben wrote an intriguing commentary summing up his take on revolutionary critiques of capitalism.1 The original task of a genuine revolution […] is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change time’. Modern political thought has concentrated its attention on history, and has not elaborated a corresponding concept of time. Even historical materialism has until now neglected to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concept of history (Agamben, 1993: 91). Taking my cue from Agamben’s plea, I will argue in this article that it is in Marx himself that we find grounds for a materialist theory of time. Marx never wrote a chapter on the ‘time of capital’; however, the concept of timeas- measure is crucial to his entire theory of the value form in terms of materialized “congealed” labour. Distilling from Marx’s mature writings on the critique of political economy, this article plays out a confrontation between his implicit theory of the “time of capital” and Walter Benjamin’s late writings on messianic time outlined in his famous theses On the Concept of History. Benjamin’s messianic inversion of historical materialism addresses Marxism’s most decisive points of critique: (1) the historicization of capitalism as a socially specific and historically contingent mode of production; and (2) the conceptualization of history as a process of dynamic social forces and their struggles. As we shall see, Benjamin’s criticism of vulgar-Marxist and historicist historiography lays bare the fundamental paradox of any concept of history based upon linearity, succession, and