Of Tiger’s Leaps and Lullabies, and Historical Excess

History, it has been said, is a sign of the modern, and subsistence "without history" or "on the margins of history" was long a metonymic sign of backwardness and a pretext and justification for colonial occupation.¹

A somewhat less noted fact is that an excess of historical invocation—or a historical obsession—is a diagnostic sign of failed modernities, and especially of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called "the culture of defeat," that is, the process of mourning and recovery that follows national trauma. To the extent that it is attributed to external forces, economic collapse such as that suffered in Mexico in 1982 and again in 1995, or in Argentina in 2002, can also be assimilated as national trauma and has spurred this kind of historical excess.²

In such contexts, the present all too frequently exposes the wounds of the past and thereby prompts the sort of historical stance that Walter Benjamin favored when he wrote: "The historical materialist approaches a historical object solely and alone where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he cognizes the sign of a messianic zero-hour of events, or put differently, a revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past."³ Indeed, the messianic historical approach advocated by Benjamin—the "tiger’s leap" to and from a past moment of possibility as an outburst that ruptures the monotonous lullaby of historical domination—tends to get worn from overuse in contexts of national dependency. There, the "culture of defeat" cannot be redeemed as long as historical invocations appeal only to a national community that is imagined as sovereign but that is in reality dependent.

Indeed, the messianic sensibility advocated by Benjamin is widely present in dependent countries, like many in Latin America and the Middle East, where the combination of frustrated modern projects and Abrahamic religious traditions turns the millenarian horizon into a readily available and seductive source for an alternative political vocabulary. But national liberation in those cases is always tempered by dependency, so history there turns into a kind of neurotic obsession.

Mexico is an interesting example of this phenomenon, having suffered national trauma from civil strife following independence, catastrophic defeat in its war against the United States in 1848, further (though ultimately unsuccessful) European invasions, and numerous internal defeats during its social revolution of 1910 – 20. Mexico was one of the earliest economic dependencies of the United States in Latin America and has certainly been the most important. More recently, it suffered the spectacular collapse of what had been a successful model of import substitution industrialization and of "mixed economy." Not surprising, the country is known to have deep historical concerns and, indeed, to have had them from an early date.