No Large Contexts

From Williamsburg Bridge (Hopper 1928)

The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). (The collector does just this, and so does the anecdote.) Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of ‘large contexts.’  The same method applies, in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past–the Cathedral of Chartres, the temple of Paestum–when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself: the method of receiving things into our space.  We don’t displace our beings into theirs; they step into our life.

–Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (p. 206)

Walter Benjamin–Theses, IX

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.

–Walter Benjamin

from Theses on the Philosophy of History (translated by Harry Zohn)

Image: Angelus Novus, Paul Klee (1920)

Walter Benjamin on Déjà Vu

The phenomenon of déjà vu has often been described. Is the term really apt? Shouldn’t we rather speak of events which affect us like an echo–one awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from the darkness of past life? By the same token, the shock with which a moment enters our consciousness as if already lived through tends to strike us in the form of a sound. It is a word, a rustling or knocking, that is endowed with the power to call us unexpectedly into the cool sepulcher of the past, from whose vault the present seems to resound only as an echo. Strange that no one has yet inquired into the counterpart of this transport–namely, the shock with which a word makes us pull up short, like a muff that someone has forgotten in our room. Just as the latter points us to a stranger who was on the premises, so there are words or pauses pointing us to that invisible stranger–the future–which forgot them at our place.

–Walter Benjamin

Translation by Howard Eiland

Photo credit: Walter Benjamin by tellini