History’s losers and leftovers transcend society more than its victors do

Evidence

It is in the nature of the defeated to appear, in their impotence, irrelevant, eccentric, derisory. What transcends the ruling society is not only the potentiality it develops but also all that which did not fit properly into the laws of historical movement. Theory must needs deal with cross-gained, opaque, unassimilated material, which as such admittedly has from the start an anachronistic quality, but is not wholly obsolete since it has outwitted the historical dynamic. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 170

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The vindication of the anachronistic, the unassimilated, the ‘blind spots that escaped the dialectic’ — transcending the ruling society is assigned to waste products, not to historical progress.
• XREF: Extends Benjamin’s thesis of history written from the victor’s standpoint; also resonates with the reader’s past highlights on silence and the vanquished. — connects to: Historians should rescue losers of history from posterity’s condescension. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 1752; Narratives of political defeat can map global space better than triumphs — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 889
• SEED: Essay angle: a defense of anachronism — how what ‘doesn’t fit’ the present’s laws of movement holds emancipatory potential precisely because it outwitted history.

Broader Connections

• Historians should rescue losers of history from posterity’s condescension. #corroborates (0.95) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1752
• Narratives of political defeat can map global space better than triumphs #expands (0.85) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 889