...empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but...materialist approaches a historical subject only where he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance...

...the particular. Cognition—as released by the freezing of movement—is something that "flashes up": Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant...historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad (702ff.). To this extent, Thesis XVII contains a methodological discussion of materialistic historiography...

...arrives at an explosion. Benjamin writes in the seventeenth of his 'Theses on the philosophy of history': 'A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad ... He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history...

..."materialistic historiography," under which he subsumes his works: it "is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well" (702). That indeed does describe Benjamin's specific form of philosophizing, which uses "thought images"...

...but also the arrest of ideas or images in time. In other words, it reads time as iconized history. "Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration...historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad" and exploits the tension in this structure "to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of...

...suggestion that "nerve centre" might be a neurological metaphor as well.105 Walter Benjamin writes that "thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts,...with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, but which it crystalizes into a monad."106 The reader's crystallization of the narrated thoughts in...

...Benjamin recruits to destabilize familiar motifs of time and history as cumulative. Thinking, he asserts, "involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well." When this arrest occurs it creates a configuration in shock, and here the flash of recognition asserts...

...unpredictable happens to interrupt the timid calculations of individual rationality. In Benjamin's words, Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant...configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. ... In this structure [the historical materialist] recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of...

..."materialistic historiography," under which he subsumes his works: it "is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well" (702). That indeed does describe Benjamin's specific form of philosophizing, which uses "thought images"...

...language. And yet at this cross-roads, a flash of light bursts forth, which is the light of thought: "Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts but their arrest as well."29 Between the image and its rendition into the flow ("Fliess") of words the writer is crystallized,...