The Arcades Project - Operi

primacy over history. The facts become something that just now first happened
to us, first stmck us; to establish them is the affair of memory. Indeed, awakening
is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to
remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious. What Proust intends with the
experinlental rearrangement of furniture in matinal half-slumber, what Bloch
recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment,' is nothing other than what here
is to be secured on the level of the historical, and collectively. There is a not-yetconscious
knowledge of what has been: its advancement' has the structure of
awakening. [Kl,2]
There is a wholly unique experience of dialectic. The compelling-the drasticexperience,
which refutes everything "gradual" about becoming and shows all
seerning "development" to be dialectical reversal, eminently and thoroughly
composed, is the awakening from dream. For the dialectical schematism at the
core of this process, the Chinese have often found, in their fairy tales and novellas,
a highly pregnant expression. The new, dialectical method of doing history
presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to
which that dream we name the past refers in tTIlth. To pass through and carry out
what has been in remembering the dream!-Therefore: remembering and awaking
are most intimately related. Awakening is nanlely the dialectical, Copernican
turn of remembrance. [Kl,3]
The nineteenth century a spacetime (a dreamtime