History

"The experience of a linear organic flow of events is an illusion.. that masks tha fact that it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events"

"One must insist on the opposition between the appropriation of the past from the standpoint of those who rule [..] and the appropriation of that which, in the past, retained its utopian and failed ('repressed') potentiality.

"In order to break through, the New must first express itself in the old form"

What postmodern Theory most lacks is any historical sense - not only for the radical difference of the past, and the rebuke, the tacit questioning gaze with which the past regards us. But the trick of seeing in the present the enigmatic eddy of past and future. This eddy powered the engine of Walter Benjamin's thinking.