Walter Benjamin The Angel of Victory and the Angel of History

1991

Written shortly after the Hitler-Stalin pact, Benjamin's On the Concept of History could be viewed as an attack on the ideology of progress both as the conceptual attire and the collective fantasy of the Enlightenment era that aspired to realize Reason in history, as well as the social democratic illusion that the immense development of the productive forces will automatically bring about the advent of a socialist paradise on earth. Benjamin's theses on history become a bitter comment on the belief, dominant since the eighteenth century philosophy of history, in the incessant progress of history in virtue of human Reason, and with this an unmasking of history as a fixed itinerary with its destination pre-given. While the account of history in modernity is a discourse of hope oriented toward a promising yet distant future, Benjamin's theses are the fragments of despair incarnated in the staring eyes and the open mouth of the "angel of history," inspired by P. Klee's Angelus Novus. 1 While modernity's linear time sets history on the railway tracks for the long journey to the "happy end" of humanity, each station of

In his famous ninth Thesis “On the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin introduces the “Angel of History” by referring to Paul Klee’s watercolored drawing “Angelus Novus” (1920). The gaze of this angel has often been associated with Benjamin’s allegedly melancholic yearning for the restoration of a lost and catastrophically crushed past. Challenging mainstream interpretations of this allegory, Giorgio Agamben asked a simple question: what if the ‘Angel of History’ could close his wings and had his will? Against the grain of melancholic messianisms, Agamben invites us to see the “Angel of History” in a different light. Relying on Freud and Lacan, this paper discusses the split image of Benjamin’s “Angel of History” torn between vision and gaze, melancholia and destruction.

Thrice Fiction 26, 2019

"A rich, albeit complex and sometimes opaque exploration of how one piece of art and one philosopher's interpretation can be seen as a microcosm of the human struggle with history, identity, and the search for meaning amidst apparent chaos. This interpretation is both a critique and an expansion of Benjamin's original thoughts, bringing in elements of psychology, mysticism, and cultural critique."

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture, 2014

Before his untimely death in 1940, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an essay, entitled "Theses on the Philosophy of History," marking his recovery from the shock of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. This study reflects on the philosophical and historical significance of this essay, unraveling Benjamin's critique of Marxism as a critique of progress. Progress, which the angel of history sees as a storm coming from paradise, has caused a growing pile of rubble of historical blunders and environmental disasters. This uncritical submission to progress, however, can be seen not only in the blind confidence of the communists and the social democrats towards Marxist teleology, but also in historicism, which reduces the writing of history to a form of disaster: a "heaping up of information" that forgets the memory of "enslaved ancestors," thus losing its "weak, Messianic power.

Historical Materialism, 2016

Uwe Steiner’s Walter Benjamin: An Introduction to His Work and Thought is a comprehensive and compelling account of Walter Benjamin’s life and work, which will satisfy both newcomers to Benjamin and those with an existing interest. In this review, I argue that Steiner’s account goes beyond similar encounters with Benjamin in two main ways: first, by focusing specifically on Benjamin’s personal and intellectual relationship with ‘modernity’ and, second, by presenting Benjamin’s enduring appeal as a result of the creative interpretation of his work according to changing times and tastes. Yet Steiner’s historicising account of Benjamin also somewhat neutralises his critical potential as a historical-materialist thinker. Drawing on the work of Benjamin’s erstwhile friend and contemporary Ernst Bloch, as well as on Peter Osborne’s concept of modernity as a specific consciousness of time, I argue that the act of interpretation itself requires a weakly teleological concept of history, such...

European Journal of Social Sciences Studies, 2021

If Walter Benjamin's writings have been mostly interpreted in the fields of art and literature critique, we would like here to take his philosophy of history more seriously, despite its acknowledged lack of unity (Habermas 1988: 32) and systematicity (Arendt 1960: 248). Drawing from the well-known allegory of the “Angel” developed in his theses on the concept of history written at the beginning of the Second World War and just before his death in Port-Bou, we will further analyze his genealogical critique of Parisian modernity contained in the Arcades Project, a work undertook more than a decade before, during his exile in France. In echo with the imagination of prospective ruins which florished during the modernization of the French capital after the 1850's, Benjamin's conception of progress, understood as a catastrophe submitting industrial capitalist societies to a permanent “state of emergency”, is thus combined with the theorization of a “Copernician revolution in t...

Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 2010

• Walter Benjamin, a Jewish German literary critic of modest reputation during the interwar years, has become an intellectual celebrity in our times. In fl ight from Nazi Germany, he took refuge in Paris during the 1930s before dying in 1940 in a vain eff ort to escape to America. In this essay, I analyze his ideas as conceived in his Paris exile, with particular attention to his turn to the topics of memory and of history and of the relationship between them. I close with some thoughts on how his ideas about memory's redeeming power played into the humanist Marxism of the intellectuals of the 1960s and subsequently the preoccupation with memory in late twentieth-century scholarship.

How can one think of History in a time in which Europe happened to be haunted by the specter of catastrophe, in our modern times? How can one escape the perils of Progress? This urgency determined the thought of Walter Benjamin since his youth, and decisively marked his conception of history itself, but also of his vision of language and of translation, of his own critique of art and reception. Starting from the concept of dialectic image as a new paradigm of comprehension of history, Benjamin tries to substitute an idea of a narrative of progress for discontinued and figurative idea of history, that regains in the present the possibility of reactivate the past and that values a qualitative dimension of temporality, instead of a quantitative temporality that homogenized and disfigured his reading of history. Benjamin takes, essentially from the idea of Messianism, as a secularized category of Jewish tradition, to “build” what he designated as the dissident and revolutionary gesture of the historian of “brushing history against the grain”, focusing on himself that potentiality of rescuing the “messianic parcel” that become our fate and that brings in itself the echoes of voices that come to us. This is also the most important dimension of Benjamin’s thought, eminently political and ethical, configuring a radical gesture that reclaims justice for the ones that the history of Progress forgot: the overpassed and the victims of history.