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Beginning with Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," this paper unfolds a supplementary set of theses on the genealogy of a different concept (survival) and different figure (the survivor). Benjamin's distinction between the "victor" and the "angel" serves as a binary framework for an understanding of the philosophical legacy of survival in the twentieth century-as it runs through the philosophy of history and across a tradition that continually imagines the survivor as historian. The paper traces this narrative through selected readings in the writings of major figures, from Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Blanchot to Hannah Arendt and W.G. Sebald. The question throughout is whether the survivor-historian writes the history of the ruling class or the history of the defeated. The paper concludes by offering some reflections on the ramifications of this genealogy of survival for recent debates about the legacy and ongoing practices of settler colonialism.

This paper offers a set of conceptual reflections on the politics of deferral. Beginning with an examination of this idea in analyses of colonialism, human rights, and liberalism, the paper turns to Gershom Scholem’s well-known opposition between Jewish messianism (“life lived in deferral”) and Zionism (concrete political action). The paper troubles this distinction by tracing the concept of deferral back into Scholem’s earliest writings on messianism and by showing the term’s genealogical reliance on the theological-political vocabulary of sovereignty. Against this critical background, the paper returns to the present, in order to reframe Scholem’s distinction and suggest that, far from negating messianic deferral, Zionism and Israeli colonial rule capture and redeploy its logic as a secular modality of power. The paper concludes by inscribing this secular, political theology of Zionism within a Christian history of deferral, messianism, and empire.

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