Abstract

Socialism has been dismissed as a dream in the reality of the world of 9/11. But a mythical narrative that erases the possibility of moral agency doesnot honor the dead. In Walter Benjamin’s language, photographs of the actual dead can supply the “dialectical jolt” that illuminates a possible beyond. Myth isdangerous when it teaches that things will always be as they are now, but myth can also point to a different form of knowledge of the world, beyond the despairthat says only violence can save the world. Socialism, through mutual respect and responsibility, calls us to be people in whose actions the present promises thefuture, shaping the world and becoming ourselves something different. Benjamin and Derrida agree that any attempt to describe experience fails because it points beyond itself to its own limit and how that limit opens space beyond it. Derrida’s “impossible” should not be read as knowledge of what cannot be done, but as a recognition that every experience points to its limit, and we are left with our own responsibility for justice in any given context. Beyond despairing meta-narratives, freedom comes in forming character through effort.