alternative historiography, let me focus on the idea of the past in Benjamin, which,

expressed in terms of the lightning flash, becomes crucial to the writing of history.

 For Benjamin, the presence of shocking moments in modernity led to a dramatic

reconceptualization of time and particularly the role of the past in history. In his "Theses

on the Philosophy of History," Benjamin offered the most insightful account of the past

through a distinction between two ways of looking at it: traditional historicism and

historical materialism. The traditional conception of the past lay in its understanding as a

narrative of events linked by causal connections. But modernity had destroyed such an

illusion. No longer, Benjamin argued, can a historian believe that the past lies in

recognizing it (or writing about it) "the way it really was." It has now transformed itself

into a fragment that

 can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be
 recognized and is never seen again. For every image of the past that is not
 recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
 irretrievably. ("Theses" 255)

The images of the past, then, appear like involuntary memories, rising up in an instant

like a lightning flash. If they are not recognized, as Benjamin put it, they might disappear

forever. What the materialist historian thus understands is that historyoy is the subject of

a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of

the now" ("Theses" 261). In writing history, this now, the present moment, becomes just

as important as the past, since the present is implicated in the past and vice versa.

Traditional historicism, Benjamin finally argued, "contents itself with establishing a

causal connection between various moments in history" ("Theses" 263). That is to say,

traditional histories are interested in the grand events that can be linked together via a

causal chain. But the materialist historian actively seeks out flashes of lightning, those