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The title of this essay is drawn, in part, from the title of the second chapter of Kant's Streit der Fakultäten (Conflict of the Faculties), which is concerned with the conflict between the "lower" faculty of phi- losophy and the "higher" faculty of law. Despite the fact that Kant is unconcerned with any actual representatives of the faculty of law, and despite the additional fact that he had originally written the chapter for another purpose altogether, the placement of an essay under the title of "Erneuerte Frage: Ob das menschliche Geschlecht im beständigen Fortschreiten zum Besseren sei" ("Renewed question, whether the human race is constantly progressing toward the better") at the very center of the Conflict of the Faculties is appropriate insofar as the faculty of law is de facto, if not de jure, committed to the presumptive principle that the law does not and cannot be fundamentally altered-which means, for Kant, that jurists by the very nature of their profession already answer the "renewed question" before it is posed as such. History, from their perspective, cannot continually progress, for the sole phenomenon that would vouchsafe the possibility of continual progress is the discontinuous and thus revolutionary advancement of positive law in the direction a form of right or law that can be called "natural" because it is determined by reason alone.1 As the title of this essay is drawn from Kant, so the underlying direction of its argu- ment derives from what I take to be one of the generative paradoxes of Rainer Nägele's work, which can be broadly characterized as the paradox of Darstellbarkeit. In all-too-schematic terms, the paradox is this: whatever is presentable-where "presentable" here functions as an inadequate translation of darstellbar-cannot be captured in a pre- sentation and therefore always appears only to disappear. To state the paradox of Darstellbarkeit more succinctly, the presentable cannot be presented. This paradox guides the following discussion of "historical time"-a term that derives from some notes and conversations of the young Walter Benjamin, especially certain notes and conversations preserved by the even younger Gerhard (later, Gershom) Scholem. Before concentrating on these fragments of Benjamin's youth, how- ever, this paper will briefly examine one of the primary points of departure for both Benjamin's and Nägele's engagement...