历史唯物主义视域下的叙事批判与记忆解放:论本雅明的意象辩证法

Historical Narrative Criticism and Memory Liberation from the Perspective of Historical Materialism——On Benjamin’s Dialectics of Image

本雅明的历史批判思想带领我们重回青年马克思,在新的历史环境中再次审视历史客观性与主体性的关系。历史唯物主义揭示了历史客观规律,依托生产力发展,困扰诠释历史的主体性因素被合理扬弃。然而,如何通过思想解放优先合理判断历史趋势的问题依然没有得到彻底解决。由于历史视域只能从当下出发,关于发展趋势的判断就极易陷入当前的主体视域之中,正确开启未来存在困难。当下视角又受过去影响,在此意义上,如何面对未来取决于如何面对过去。若记忆被叙事逻辑束缚,未来也就等于被逻辑设定,用合逻辑性替换历史发展的合规律性。因此,记忆必须从历史叙事中获得解放,这是正确判断历史趋势的前提。对此,本雅明提出意象辩证法,以超越叙事逻辑为目的,结合星丛、语言、摄影艺术等思想,讨论记忆的解放与重构路径。虽然其中不乏令人费解的理论,但他所提出的问题为历史唯物主义的发展开辟了新领域,即仅仅从理论上诠释生产力的决定性还不够,必须依托客观力量优先解放思想,由此才能使历史唯物主义更具有实践性。

Benjamin’s thought of historical criticism leads us back to young Marx and reexamines the relationship between objective history and subjectivity in the modern era.Historical materialism reveals the law of history.Relying on the productive forces,the subjectivity that perplex the interpretation of history could be reasonably sublated.However,how to make a correct judgement on the historical trend through ideological emancipation is not clear.As the historical perspective only lives in the present,the knowledge of history is about to fall into the subjective vision,there will be no future but only present.In this sense,the future depends on how to read the past.If memory is bound by narrative logic,the regularity of historical development will be replaced with the logical.Therefore,memory have to be liberated from historical narration,which is the premise to correctly interpret the history.In this regard,Benjamin proposed the image dialectics,with the purpose of transcending the narrative logic,combined with the ideas of constellation,language,photography etc.,to discuss the liberation and reconstruction of memory.Although there are some puzzling theories among them,his questions have opened up a new field for the development of historical materialism.It is not enough to explain the productive forces only in theory.Only by relying on objective forces can we give priority to emancipating the mind so as to make historical materialism more practical.