Flashback as Flashforward: The Idea of Eingedenken Between Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin

This chapter aims at clarifying the notion of “Eingedenken” that plays a key role in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. For an adequate understanding of this notion, it is necessary to delve into the first edition of Ernst Bloch’s Spirit of Utopia, in which the idea of “Eingedenken” makes its first appearance on the scene of the philosophical thinking of the twentieth century. On the basis of this assessment, I will then move forward to a concise reconstruction of how and why at the end of the 1920s Benjamin feels the urge to steal this concept from Bloch while recasting it in light of his own research. It will thus be argued that “Eingedenken”—a term that I suggest should be translated by the neologism “immemoration”—is not simply a particularly intense act of recollection, but something completely different, namely an experience in which one can access the hidden potentialities of a past event, thereby disrupting the seemingly eternal present in which we are stuck.