In this chapter I explore some of the various ways in which modernity configures repetition as an improper relation to the past. This exploration mediates the wider question of what modernity wants to do with the past, whether it is to break with it, to sublimate it, or to form a new kind of relation altogether. This leads us to consider the tropes of repetition and of exemplarity as the grounds for an engagement with the past. That is to say, modernity does not merely employ these tropes in configuring a relation with the past; rather modernity's relation with the past is marked by the difference between ancient and modern uses of these tropes. Therefore, in the middle section of this chapter I turn to the theory and practice of exemplary thinking in ancient Rome, as a mode of thinking which infuses the present with the complex temporalities of subjective pasts and futures. Framing this discussion is a consideration of some ways in which Marx, in particular, characterised repetition and engaged with exemplarity in his attempt to create a new modernity.

In the Eighteenth Brumaire Marx presented, in the form of a political commentary on the revolutionary events in France between 1848 and 1851, a historical meditation on what it was to be modern, differentiating nineteenth-century forms of repetition – and of revolution – from what had gone before.