Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History

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."

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

Walter Benjamin’s 9th thesis on the concept of history is his most-quoted and -commented text. As it is well known, his idea of the »Angel of History« appears as a commentary on Paul Klee’s famous watercolor titled Angelus Novus. I think it is necessary to open another way of interpretation through the connection of Benjamin’s Angel of History with the political iconography of Berlin, the city where he was born and lived for many years and about which he wrote in his memories of childhood, his Berlin chronicles and radio programs.

Textual Practice, 2019

ABSTRACT The image of the ‘angel of history’ forms the centrepiece of one of Walter Benjamin’s most famous essays: ‘On the Concept of History’. This text has a troubled exegetical history, with numerous competing interpretations attempting to explain what Benjamin really meant. Few, with the exceptions of Timothy Bahti and Sigrid Weigel, have stopped to examine the fragments’ rhetorical structure or to ask what it is about ‘On the Concept of History’ that leads to such a proliferation of readings. This essay, rather than searching Benjamin’s corpus for the ciphers to decode the fragments’ meaning, instead focuses on the complex rhetorical structure of ‘the angel of history’. It argues that an interplay between grammar and rhetoric induces a multiplication of possible interpretations, and indeed that this poetic density seems to involve an imperative to ‘translate’, both the ‘original’ (German or French) text and its complex relationship with the ‘derived’ English version, both interlinguistically and intralinguistically, as Roman Jakobson (1959) would say. It shows that this complex rhetorical structure actually performs the argument put forward in the fragments about the impossibility of historicist totalising readings of history, yet in its injunction to translate or interpret, ‘bear witness to the unpresentable’ (Lyotard), seems to ask that very impossible over and over again.

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.

arcadia, 2023

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.

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF IDEALISM AND IMMATERIALISM, 2022

Walter Benjamin regarded the figure of the angel “Angelus Novus” in Paul Klee’s drawing as an allegorical Denkbild, a picture to provoke thought. He had begun to analyze the concept of progress, which he critized in his interpretation of Klee’s picture, in his essay on the collector and historian Eduard Fuchs, and continued to develop his criticism in File ‘N’ of The Arcades Project, titled ‘On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,’ as well as in the theses belonging to On the Concept of History. In the latter writing, Benjamin sees the most radical option of resistance against the disastrous logic of progress and the fatal vision of the past as a completed history in an anamnetic procedure that has the potential for bringing together all times and leads to recognizing the force of the past in the present and the future. The ‘dialectics at a standstill’ carried out in arrested and at the same time extremely charged thought, which Benjamin proposes as a revolutionary practice to counteract the logic of progress and to prevent catastrophe, finds its fulfillment in Eingedenken.