Temporalities of Revolution: On the Representation of History and Collective Action

This thesis opens with a discussion of Rosa Luxemburg’s notion of “spontaneity,” which departs from a consideration of Luxemburg’s scientific socialism, the inevitability of capitalist collapse, and her assertion of socialism as the objective response to the contradictions of capitalism. For Luxemburg, then, spontaneity refers to the way in which proletarian consciousness forms in response to these conditions. The second chapter argues that Luxemburg’s notion of spontaneity represents what Walter Benjamin would call an historical articulation of the past, which is an articulation of the present and its struggles in terms of their historicity. I develop this argument through a close reading of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” with particular attention paid to Benjamin’s notion of “weak messianism,” the historical burden of past generations’ failed revolutionary hopes that the present carries. The third chapter considers the second volume of Alfred Döblin’s November 1918 and the question of history’s commensurability