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Walter Benjamin–Theses, IX
Posted by matt on 17 September 2009
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
- Gershom Scholem, Gruß vom Angelus
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.
from Theses on the Philosophy of History (translated by Harry Zohn)
Image: Angelus Novus, Paul Klee (1920)
J J Cohen said
How appropriate for today. See you this afternoon?
matt said
Thank you–there is no question, I will attend this afternoon’s MEMSI conference. Dead or alive. (Hopefully some timely mix of both.) See you then! Matt
Readers–link to the gestations and afterlives of the MEMSI event starting here:
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2009/09/e-seminar-messianic-time-and-untimely.htm