Black America, we are agents of the eternal.

"Black America, we are agents of the eternal."

“I think we came to this earth to save it.”
from "Dear Black America," Tracy K smith

•  The ongoing crisis of democracy has two markers: The erasure of memory and the politics of disposability.
  
  In the age of Donald Trump, history neither informs the present nor haunts it with repressed memories of the past. It simply disappears.*   

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. ... 
 
    it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.

- fragments from "Theses on the Philosophy of History"

II 
In other words, our image of happiness is indissolubly bound up with the image of redemption. The same applies to our view of the past, which is the concern of history. The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth.

III

nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. 

IV

They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. 

VI

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

VII

The nature of this sadness stands out more clearly if one asks with whom the adherents of historicism actually empathize. The answer is inevitable: with the victor. And all rulers are the heirs of those who conquered before them. Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers. Historical materialists know what that means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate. According to traditional practice, the spoils are carried along in the procession. They are called cultural treasures, and a historical materialist views them with cautious detachment. For without exception the cultural treasures he surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

VIII
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge —unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. 

XII

Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. 

XV

The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. 

XVI

time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. 

Dear Black America: A Letter From Tracy K. Smith

*Warnings of History

Walter Benjamin On the Concept of History /Theses on the Philosophy of History

image: Luis Camnitzer, “Leftovers” (1970) (all images courtesy Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid)