Of Which There Is History: The Thought of Survival (Benjamin with Lifton and Lyotard)

This chapter revisits one of the most sustained preoccupations in Walter Benjamin’s critical thought, the notion of survival. Variously cast in the rhetoric of Überleben, Fortleben, Weiterleben, and even Nachleben, the refractory idea of living on in Benjamin names an irreducible category of reflection and experience that not only addresses significant issues in the politics of language and presentation but also crystallizes life itself, in its most intensified form, as a precarious and unexpected survival. This fragile and enigmatic living on, for Benjamin, cannot be separated from the thought and experience of history and the political. The chapter places Benjamin’s preoccupation with the rhetoric and politics of survival into syntactical relation with Robert Jay Lifton’s psychoanalytic account of the survivor of historical catastrophe in his 1968 Death in Life (in this case, survivors of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima by the US military at the end of World War II) and Jean-François Lyotard’s highly suggestive, but often overlooked, 1989 essay “Le Survivant,” which approaches the question of living on in Hannah Arendt’s political philosophy by means of a conceptual distinction between Hegel and Benjamin on the question of mourning historical disaster.