The Arcades Project - Operi

superstition. Thus in gambler and prostitute that superstition which arranges the
figures of fate and fills all wanton behavior with fateful forwardness, fateful
concupiscence, bringing even pleasure to kneel before its throne.
The Copenncan revolution in historical perception is as follows. Formerly it was
thought tlmt a fixed point had been found in "what has been;' and one saw the
present engaged in tentatively concentrating the forces of knowledge on this
ground. Now this relation is to be overturned, and what has been is to acquire its
dialectical fixation tllrough the synthesis which awakening achieves with the
opposing dream inmges. Politics attains prinlacy over lnstory. Indeed, historical
"facts" becOlne sOlnething that just now happened to us, just now struck us: to
establish them is the affair of memory. And awakening is the great exemplar of
memory-that occasion on which we succeed in remenlbering what is nearest,
most obvious (in the "I"). What Proust intends with the experimental rearrange­
ment of furniture, what Bloch recognizes as the darkness of the lived moment, is
nothing otl,er than what here is secured on the level of the lnstorical, and collec­
tively. There is a not-yet-conseious knowledge of what has been: its advancement
has tl,e structure of awakening.