Angelus Novus, Angst of History (in diacritics, 2012)

ANGELUS NOVUS,ANGST OF HISTORY

S. D. ChroStowSka

DIACRITICS Volume 40.1 (2012) 42–69 ©2012 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

S. D. Chrostowska teaches European Studies at York University in Toronto. She is the author of Literature on Trial (2012) and Permission (2013). She has contributed articles to, among others, New German Critique (forthcoming), New Literary History, SubStance, Telos, and Angelaki.

In reality, there is not a moment that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance—provided only that it is defined in a specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new resolution of a completely new problem (Aufgabe). For the revolutionary thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical moment gets its warrant from the political situation. But it is equally grounded, for this thinker, in the right of entry which the historical moment enjoys vis-à-vis a quite distinct chamber of the past, one which up to that point has been closed and locked. The entrance into this cham-ber coincides in a strict sense with political action, and it is by means of such entry that political action, however destructive, reveals itself as messianic.— Walter Benjamin, “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History’”

For staying is nowhere.— Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

>> all the time in the world

Paul Klee’s “new angel” is a figure of balanced asymmetries: upper body and glance cocked slightly to the right, lower half counterweighing with left-shifted arrangement of costume and limb.1 The evidence of this winged compensation, its suggestion of horizon-tal motion and central placement in the composition (defining a space otherwise with-out coordinates) give the angel its uneasy fixity. Even in innocence of its canonical alle-gorization, the picture distantly recalls the melancholy face of petrified clocks, striking in time’s absence. The apparent suspension—in equilibrium—of the angel’s movement between invisible fields, one before and one behind it, already evokes time’s balancing act; as past and future hang in the balance, the pivotal present (pictured here) seems either static or “absent.” If we nonetheless find ourselves turning toward Walter Benjamin, turning the alle-gory of time into an allegory of history, it is to grant this seemingly fixed, empty pres-ent the gravity of historical presence (by raising to a higher power the historicity of its origins—1919–20, Munich, the rise of fascism . . .). The present’s balanced stasis belies the tug-of-war in which it is effectively locked; a minute shift in the balance of time would wrest it from its here-and-now. The order of adjustments that entered into the figure’s disposition is nowhere legible: Had lapsed time formed a vortex before the gusts of progress reached the scene? Were these claims simultaneous? The faint suggestion of motion, moreover, does not extend to its effective orientation. The angel’s positional ambivalence should immediately dispel any impression of partiality—of being, in how-ever tentative a way, on the side of the future; one would be wrong to render its name unequivocally as a valorization of progress. Drawn equally in both directions, it is a fig-ure of split allegiances. Not to prelapsarian Paradise and Utopia of the Future, but to the abortive reality said to follow the one and precede the other: human punishment and sacrifice, respectively. Though immobilization and equipoise make its pendant-like suspension in the sky appear ornamental, spared the vicissitudes of history, the angel is

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Paul Klee, Swiss, 1879–1940. AngElUS nOVUS, 1920 India ink, color chalks, and brown wash on paper, 32.2 x 24.2 cm

gift of Fania and gershom Scholem, Jerusalem, John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo-Carole and Ronald lauder, new York; Collection The Israel Museum, Jerusalem B87.0994. Photo © The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, by Elie Posner

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really an angel-doll, a plaything of time, at the behest of the past and the mercy of the future. Something in its breast, the center of tension—the threshold on which time’s taut line chafes incessantly—threatens to snap. The angel may be modern, “new,” even in its novelty “revolutionary” (progress is pressing and comes on with neither warning nor moderation). It may be caught in a vio-lent air current as in the spokes of a spinning wheel, whose revolution would instantly carry it off into the future—were it not for a counterforce, retardatory but no less revolu-tionary (or violent). Given the understated pattern of dynamism in the angel’s frame, it is hard not to suspect the storm of progress of having the mildness of a breeze. What could be blowing it out of proportion? The sublime dream of progress’s disciple, the nightmare of the materialist historian—in both of them the force is a juggernaut (idolized in one, feared in the other). Benjamin saw the relation between the Angelus Novus and the forces of history somewhat differently: the angel’s wings engage the wind like sails, but the creature con-fronts the tempest. For the time being, it resists (without contesting) a force believed to be irresistible. Rather than pinioned to the present by equal and opposing currents, it is anchored here by conscience: pure consciousness (it is the present) and pure moral sense. The “pull” of the past is really an inner force. For all its apparent firmness, however, the angel’s resolve to remain here seems ultimately uncertain: will it suddenly change its mind, we wonder, and leave us? Will it let itself be spirited away? Why else give it wings? The angelic vantage, no doubt, far transcends the historical situation and comprehen-sion of mortals, whom the angel might be said to oversee doubly, like Janus. But gods are known to depart, and angels to pass. Whichever way we look at it, the creature’s permanence in this timeless instant, this spaceless spot, is an illusion of representation. And what is this, its moment, its place, if neither past nor future? The angel exists out of time, yet flaps its wings within it. Its presence, pulled down by the gravity of history (through which tempus fugit), is simulta-neously its evanescence, the fugitive standstill of a hummingbird. The radical present here represented, a moment in which time appears to have stopped or disappeared, is a blank screen on which to cast images of utopian longing. For Benjamin, the angel’s presence is imbued with hopes antithetical to progress and its “tail” of wreckage which, lizard-like, it is quick to discard. This (angelic) present is not left fallow or burdened by an “incoherent,” demand of converting past disasters into future triumphs.2 Rather, it arrests the wheels of progress, halts it at maximum mo-mentum, gathering up into the present “the entire history of mankind in a tremendous abbreviation.”3 Now is the time to sublate the course of history: instead of postponing the inevitable, pending without judgment, wavering between desire and despair—in-stead of this, an “eternal present” wherein all time would be messianically unified and redeemed. Only in Jetztzeit—now-time, time filled by the presence of the now—only in a “messianic arrest (Stillstellung) of happening, or . . . revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed (unterdrückte; also, ‘suppressed’) past,” only in the volatile reaction to the onrushing, mechanical clock time of modern ideology, to the “homogeneous, empty”

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continuum of history as a function of capital, can the dialectical revolutionary-utopian synthesis become integral.4 The angel thus stands for the imminence of what cannot be represented: the coming Messiah, the utopia to come.5 The angelic present is no point on the line of historical causality, but a moment, imprinted by eternity, in which the totality of history, all its material exigency, can at last be grasped.6 In view of this, the angel holds the only just and ethical stand on time: open to the past and closed to the future as uninterrupted progress.7 In its diaphanous, unruffled evanescence lives the conscience and revolutionary potential of the present, promising a unity of being/mind and transcendence of history that once compelled Rilke to write (emphatically in the present tense):

[Am I not right,] if I feel like it, to wait before the puppet stage, no, to gaze there so intensely that, to balance out my watching at the end, an angel must appear as actor there, who jerks the bodies up. Angel and doll: then at last it’s theater. Then it comes together, what we split apart continually through our being here. Our seasons only then bring forth the sphere of the entire walk of life. The angel plays beyond above us then.8

Without the angelic spirit we are as puppets without roles, longing for direction from this puppet-master—itself only master-puppet. Of course, Benjamin’s puppet-master was no angel in the firmament, but a disfigured dwarf hidden in the pit of a chess-playing automaton. The cripple’s (messianic theology’s) winning strategy is executed by means of a puppet (historical materialism).9 The two spheres, the sacred and the profane, act in accord. The illusion of automatic infallibility is so successful thanks to the appearance of transparency: a system of mirrors conceals human agency, while the disclosure of a faux, clockwork-like “motor” “undeceives” about the mechanism’s “inner workings.” Also, and above all, the hoax works because it plays richly on our assumptions and im-age of hierarchy. In the role of chess-master is cast a stunted hunchback stowed “below decks”; power emanates from where no one would care to look. Thus, while the disen-chanted are left to gawk, unsuspecting, at the “wonders” of science, theology performs its subterranean coup de main. A secret dwarf with a secret: he has an angel as the bird of his soul.10 Without its unbeatable revolutionary inspiration—“without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time takes a stand (einsteht) and has come to a standstill (Stillstand)”—without, that is, a concept of Jetztzeit “shot through with splinters of messianic time”—the explosive encounter with the past sought by historical materialism becomes impossible.11 The cooperation of the mystical and the mechanical manifests itself in perfectly syn-chronized play, the control by the former of the latter,12 in victory over each and every


opponent. But the temporal parallels between this angelic dwarf and his life-size puppet run deeper still: the angel faces the past, as does Benjamin’s materialist historian, both occupy an elusive, politicized present—which is retrospectively foreseen and revolution-ized. “[The materialist] historian turns his back on his own time, and his seer’s gaze is kindled by the peaks of earlier generations. . . . Indeed, the historian’s own time is far more distinctly present to this visionary gaze than it is to the contemporaries who ‘keep step with it.’” Benjamin takes the idea of the present becoming the focus of prophecy as a pro-foundly political concept from Turgot, perhaps the first theorist of progress: “‘Before we have learned to deal with things in a given position,’ says Turgot, ‘it has already changed several times. Thus, we always find out too late about what has happened. And therefore it can be said that politics is obliged to foresee the present.’” As Benjamin concludes: “It is precisely this concept of the present which underlies the actuality of genuine histo-riography. . . . Someone who pokes about in the past as if rummaging in a storeroom of examples and analogies still has no inkling of how much in a given moment depends on its [the present’s—S. C.] being made present.”13 By virtue of this engagement with the past, the present can be stilled and progress derailed. The angelic standstill “defines the very present in which [the historical mate-rialist] writes history.”14 The ageless problem of the present, as Augustine noted, is that, despite being the only certain reality, it cannot be known directly, only remembered, anticipated, or experienced subjectively as an immaterial transition. Its problem is thus its non-presence, elusiveness, unself- consciousness. The relation of the present to itself, being either historicist or oracu-lar, but in each case dogmatic, must fall short of the political—unless, as Benjamin believed, it becomes both at once, spiral-ing ever more closely around itself, cast-ing itself within a magic horizon (horizon kuklos, “bounding circle”), a magic circle that does not bound but protects. If, in Au-gustine’s words, the present of things pres-ent (the present considering the present) is vision, immediate awareness, or attention (translations vary), for Benjamin’s historian this vision can become “visionary”—not in the sense of anticipating or predicting the future, but, rather, of reading off of the present the possibilities it implies. That is what it means to intuit the present politically.15 The phenomenological ungraspability, unidentifiability of the present to itself does not justify ignorance or misrecognition of it in favor of the apparently more definite past (or projected future). The definiteness of the past, its processed “eternal” images, must be cast off as illusion: “The true image of the past flits by” (390). But, for the material-ist historian, the “retrospective seer” (396), “thinking involves not only the movement of thoughts, but their arrest as well” (396). A true image of the past is “seized only as an image that flashes up at the moment of its recognizability, and is never seen again”

The angelic present is no point on the line of historical causality, but a moment, imprinted by eternity, in which the totality of history, all its material exigency, can at last be grasped.

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(390). The present, in instantaneously recalling-retrieving the past, “recognize[s] itself as intended in that image” (391).16 The “now of recognizability” is also the moment of recognizability of the now—the dialectical instantiation of the “true” present, recogniz-able only in its instancy.

It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words, image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely temporal, continuous one, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: is not progression but image, suddenly emergent.17

While “the historical construction is dedicated to the memory of the anonymous,” it is not about the past per se, but always about the past’s prophetic relation to the present, the arrested time of imminence when the past can also be redeemed. “In the field of his-tory, the projection of the past into the present . . . is secured at the cost of completely eradicating every vestige of history’s original role as remembrance (Eingedenken). The false aliveness of the past-made-present, the elimination of every echo of a ‘lament’ from history, marks history’s final subjection to the modern concept of science.”18 The puppet-dwarf apparatus works because it exploits the modern faith in science, whose determin-istic ideology breeds blind, unquestioning spectatorship. This exigency calls for subver-sive means, an appearance of reconciliation between modern antagonists, whereas in fact, as in the old days, a science is pressed into service by theology, and only thereby finds justification. The present’s political (historical-prophetic) relation to itself thus relies on the ma-terialist historian’s wish “to hold fast that image of the past which unexpectedly appears to the historical subject in a moment of danger”—a present danger—when, at a critical moment in the game, tradition threatens to become “a tool of the ruling classes,” over-

powered by conformism. This wish is the soul of the historian’s proper task, his spiritual vocation.19 As the young Benja-min already noted, “in every present” are “rooted” the “elements” of “a particular condition in which history appears to be concentrated in a single focal point, like those that have traditionally been found in the utopian images of the philosophers. . . .

This [ultimate, immanent, perfect] condition cannot be captured in terms of the prag-matic description of details . . . ; in fact, it eludes them”20 (and what eludes must be held fast). The onus of the present is “to win all the time,” since “every age must strive anew to wrest tradition away from the conformism that is working to overpower it.”21 A fleet-ing glimpse of the true image of the oppressed-repressed past breathes spirit into this struggle in the clutches of history. The future is what is at stake and hence never in view. Nothing can be done presently in view of the future but only in light of the past (the prophet perceives only the contours of the future in the past’s “fading light”).22

The “now of recognizability” is also the moment of recognizability of the now—the dialectical instantiation of the “true” present, recognizable only in its instancy.


Because of its fixation on the past—which makes the present distinct, its presence radical—the angel has a synoptic view of history, toward which it maintains a dialectical relation. After all, it is in the tempest of progress that the creature realizes its potential for both resistance and flight. Unable to close its wings, it is “irresistibly” driven onward, withstanding by turning its back on the future23—if backing (or being backed) into it in fact (in a similarly dialectical way, it takes in the past while seemingly backing away from it). Is this because it knows the way too well, or because it is paralyzed by fear, or because blindness makes the yielding easier? We cannot say. The angel may, or may not, possess insight into what is to come. In animating its body, the wind of change—time rallying to its side—is not out to win the angel over, but to capture it. The creature looks askance; per-haps it recognizes the cage built specially for it. Though its face is in full view, the source of its expression may be as much horror of certain doom as pleasure of its elusion. Let us look more closely at this New Angel. It hovers in a cloud corrupted by soot; the tarnish of its dress is plain to see. Its wings, inchoate or stunted, are tipped with nails, a vestige of evolution. Its copious curls resemble unfurled scrolls left blank. The golden bands framing its cheeks bring out the sallowness of its complexion. Despite a waifish, bloodless constitution, its ears are overfleshed with age, its lips with youth. The mouth is parted and bares a nasty set of teeth. This is how time marks the likes of angels (and why they filled Rilke with awe24). While progress impels it, the past holds it fast; our angel tarries, transfixed by what it sees there; it “seems about to move away from” this vision of the past . . . In impotence? Incomprehension? Oblivion? Fascination? Aversion? Self-preserving flight? As we have said, a singular sensibility forbids the angel to be swept away just yet. A sentiment makes it stay put: it would like to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.” To dramatize the tension in his allegory, Benjamin underscored, on the one hand, the force of progress bestirring the helpless creature, and, on the other, an equally helpless desire on its part to abide and undo the devastation wreaked by the storm. But let us not attribute nostalgic compassion to a creature without temporality. The angel does not (fore)see the unbroken “chain of events” that runs from the future down to the mountain of rubble, yet it feels this catastrophe as a storm.25 What to us, disciples of progress, is a “revolutionary” wind bound for earthly paradise (the storm’s origin itself is paradisal!), to the angel seems a pileup of debris of futility and failure. Perhaps, too, it looks past the man-made chronology of history (our endless source of warning against regression) to something beyond it. What it sees there is of no practical use to us, to whom Paradise is an archetype with diminishing returns (though lasting currency); post-paradisal history does what it can to end not in its origin—but improve on it.26 And what is this Paradise, this memory of lost happiness, if not a deceptive wish for suffering forgotten? The uni-versal salvation offered by progress is dissociative amnesia (Hegel’s spiritual panacea of conciliatory “remembrance”—no less a form of sublation and redemption—healing wounds inflicted by Geist’s unfolding, does absolutely nothing for its material victims). When memory bears down on our mind, we ask for nothing more. We would rather the angel be on its way to scope out the New Paradise; we are fast losing our patience and humility. Instead of internalizing its wise intuition, we decry its lack of will and senti-

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mental dawdling. (This chronic human lapsing and this constant angelic stalling thwart all prognostication.) We urge it to “go on!” Still, the angel does not seem ready to abandon its post. It renews its rebellious calling as a witness to this violence in our past, this compressed human ruin—as a forlorn figure of redemption that memorializes all suffering without exception. Its wings, spread out, now appear clipped or dismembered—what before we took for nails are stumps from which feathers once grew. The sublime wind matched its resolve to bear witness to op-pression: the price of its struggle was trauma. Can such “wings” carry us to Paradise? Having beaten the time of disremembering, they are no longer fit for flight. This present cannot take off from itself. It has missed its chance to “save itself.” Insofar as the past is the mounting catastrophe of progress, the angel resists all of history—and would fly off, if it could. Yet, as revolting as that past may be, the crea-ture is moved to attend to it. It is, after all, the “angel of history.” Without this attention, this conscience, this negative resistance to the entelechy of progress, it would have been swept up without dignity. Progress cannot carry it off on wings broken by opposition (besides, what trophy would it now make?). Certainly, without the storm, its defiance of the future, manifesting as moral fixation on the past, would serve no end; rather than linger here with us, the lame bird would make it back to Paradise one way or another—follow who may. But, given the ever-present conflict of forces, resistance to forgetting, resistance to desiring (oiling the engine of world history and smoothing over its tracks), make the angelic revolutionary. The present as angelic presence is the connective dis-continuity of historical time, a potential change of course, a turning point of crisis.27 Its openness to the past, its radical critical consciousness, carry the possibility of transfor-mative action and redemption; it is the resisting spirit, the dialectical standstill (vis-à-vis the past) that no agent of revolution can do without. If we now return to Klee, it is not to insist that all these threads and intricate as-sociations (history, messianic time, paradise, progress, revolution) were already in the picture, and that Benjamin’s contribution lay in spinning them into the silk of allegory (or worse, providing a “caption”), but rather to note their correspondence in vision. If for Benjamin the profane (history, social revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist general strike) and the sacred (messianism, apocalyptic interruption of history, the mystical nunc stans) are joined by a “dialectical bridge,”28 for Klee they exist on a continuum. His long series of semi-angels, of incomplete human-angel transformations, illustrates their gradation. The “new angel” is one of fifty images of angels in his oeuvre, thirty-two of them created in the final two years of his life, 1939–40, also Benjamin’s final years. Most of these angels are “quirky, anthropomorphic,” “puzzled creatures.” “Still groping,” “still ugly,” “dubi-ous,” “more bird” (than angel), “forgetful,” “unfinished”—these epithets are taken from their titles—the first three from 1940, the latter three from 1939. While the earlier vi-sions, including Angelus Novus, have an “aura of prophecy” and positive metamorphosis, an indeterminacy to be resolved in attaining full angelhood, the late angels—deformed, or not quite done, compromised, ill-conceived, in desperate need of salvation, mutely testifying to the failure of human rising—radiate Benjamin’s sense of foreboding. Where-


as Rilke’s angels come down from heaven, Klee’s aspire to it.29 Klee envisioned art as world-creative, a metaphor of Genesis: an act in which “the artist replaces mechanical time with ontological time, in which past, present, and future are all present at once.”30

The same temporal convergence, of course, fascinated Benjamin.) Klee’s work, though ranked as visionary, sprang from a private, inward religion, which surrealism, a move-ment with which he had strong affinities, dismissed with iconoclastic relish. Reconciling within himself the stray mystic wrestling with the godhead and the clan-destine revolutionary of dreams, Benjamin embraced both. If Klee’s picture became an emblem of his spiritual mission, “the dia-lectical allegory of a powerless historian,”31 the surrealists were his next-of-kin: “the adoptive children of the revolution” (209), who challenged comatose “religious illu-mination” (209) to a duel with “profane illumination” (209) and wrested the con-cept of freedom from “sclerotic, moral-humanistic” (215) idealism (as well as “well-meaning” traditionalism on the left [213]).32 In a 1929 sketch, focused on surrealism’s critically overlooked political significance, Benjamin calls on the surrealists “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution”:

For them it is not enough that, as we know, an intoxicating component lives in every revolu-tionary act. This component is identical with the anarchic. But to place the accent exclusively on it would be to subordinate the methodical and disciplinary preparation for revolution entirely to a praxis oscillating between fitness exercises and celebration in advance. Added to this is an inadequate, undialectical conception of the nature of intoxication. . . . For histrionic or fanatical stress on the mysterious side of the mysterious takes us no further; we penetrate the mystery only . . . by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impen-etrable, the impenetrable as everyday.33

Through the surrealist “interpenetration” of body and image, “revolutionary tension” innervates the collective body, unleashing a “revolutionary discharge” of latent energies. Only then

has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. For the moment, only the Surrealists have understood its present commands. They exchange, to a man, the play of human features for the face of an alarm clock that in each minute rings for sixty seconds.34

The timepiece proves the handiest allegory for the charged relation between tem-porality and revolutionary action.35 The surrealist’s state is drastic dreaming: the alarm, which jolts workers out of bed or drills them insensate with repetition, is what the artist must sleep through in order to work. The alert and working dream (the gist of Saint-Pol-Roux’s “Do Not Disturb” sign: the poet asleep is the poet at work) folds wakefulness into

The present as angelic presence is the connective discontinuity of historical time, a potential change of course, a turning point of crisis.

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dreaming, passivity into activity (which capitalism, by contrast, folds into productivity). Benjamin attributed to dreaming a utopian dimension—the “Exposé of 1935” takes as its motto Jules Michelet’s “Each epoch dreams the one to follow” (4). Such dreaming ahead “precipitates its awakening” (13). “Given that the realization of dream elements, in the course of waking up, is the paradigm of dialectical thinking, it follows that dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awakening” (898).36 If dialectics is “the art of experi-encing the present as waking world . . . to which that dream we name the past refers in truth,” surrealism is the art of dreaming up the future by way of the past that precipitates awakening (in) a new time. Do not seek in dreams a practical method to revolutionary action; the alert, fictile dream-time is the time “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.” “Ambiguity is the manifest imaging of dialectic, the law of dialectics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, therefore, dream image.”37 The scarred New Angel is this dialectical dream-image. It stands for the standstill, the utopian counterpoint to the nightmare of history. But have we done justice to its ambigu-ity? What, then, defines the surrealist’s task as revolutionary? Precisely the angelic gaze upon history, the just-woken conscience of the present, directed beyond the merely vis-ible: “It was Surrealism which first got a glimpse of the field of debris left behind by the capitalist development of the forces of production . . . [and] first opened our eyes to them.”38 With the art of dialectical thinking (the “offspring” of the recent past and thus “equal to” it) the artist-dreamer enacts the “substitution of a political for a his-torical view.”39 In his work (his dream), he taps into the dreams of the past, into the past of his own dream. The oneiric thread he follows, linking him to the past, is the lost history of potentiality. What unarchived affinities he discovers—in the sudden “now of recognizability”—comprise traces of a revolutionary tradition in the republic of dreams. Though the present “already stands to the recent past as the awakening stands to the dream,” the wakeful dreamer’s “unrelenting confrontation” of recent history, eye-open-ing and epoch-making, is thus nothing like the collective insomniac dormancy of his contemporaries.40 Ultimately, the point of historical dialectics is “to find the constella-tion of awakening”—specifically, the “awakening of a not-yet-conscious knowledge of what has been.”41 Surrealism’s contribution to epochal dreaming consists in the violence of epochal awakening. By retreating into the realm of the dream—a distorted, explosive temporality and ec-static spatiality—in a defiant expression of cultural pessimism, surrealism staged its own poetic-political insurrection against the present, with effects that transcend (or perhaps realize) the aesthetic. The surrealist angel is a volatile creature of this liberating revolt, this violent blasting through modern consciousness to renewed consciousness.

The socialist sees that “finer future of our children and grandchildren” in a society in which all act “as if they were angels” and everyone has as much “as if he were rich” and everyone lives “as if he were free.” Of angels, wealth, freedom, not a trace—these are mere images. . . . Where are the conditions for revolution? In the changing of attitudes or of external circum-


stances? This is the cardinal question that determines the relation of politics to morality and cannot be glossed over. Surrealism has come ever closer to the Communist answer. And that means pessimism all along the line.42

The dialectic of the politicization of the aesthetic underscores the problem of political praxis, given the poverty of existing means and ends, and of means-ends economies as such. Jacques Rancière’s conclusion gets at the heart of the aesthetic affinity between Benjamin and his angel: “artistic modernatism, in its authentic revolutionary potential for hope and defiance, was set against the degeneration of political revolution. Surreal-ism and the Frankfurt School were the principal vehicles for this counter-modernity.”43 One common feature of these two movements, besides their materialism, is the self-conscious ambiguity of their relation to transformative action (as evident, for example, in Benjamin’s locution that surrealists “provide revolutionary experience, if not action” [210]). Benjamin’s question, “have they bound revolt to revolution?” (215) is posed in the moment, at the critical time of surrealism’s “transformation” (208), its dialectical surge, its second manifesto, and remains unanswered. It is clear to him that the movement’s present development, previously unforeseeable, moved away from “public demonstra-tion” (208) but not what would ultimately come of it.44 He voices his fear of decay, of loss of momentum, of the morning after when the constructive and dictatorial side of revolu-tion could assert itself. We can perhaps understand the appeal of surrealism for Benjamin by turning to his earlier, 1921 “Critique of Violence,” where he extended Georges Sorel’s “deep, mor-al, and genuinely revolutionary conception” of the revolutionary movement as “clear, simple revolt,”45 an all-out protest, spiritual effervescence and expression of freedom. That freedom is only won through self-sacrifice and must be enjoyed “in its fullness” convinces the artist that “mankind’s struggle for liberation in its simplest revolutionary form (which is nevertheless liberation in every respect), remains the only cause worth serving.”46 Revolution is better as revolt because unalloyed by the “bloody,” “law-making” excess of revolutionary violence, yet as effective in destructiveness. Revolt is the manifestation of divine violence (göt-tliche Gewalt) which, “as a pure means, is nonviolent.” Divorced from specific objec-tives and programs, detached from right, it opens up historical causality, making it con-scious of its own (inadvertent, nihilistic) ramifications.47 No longer a means to an end, it “suspends the future without sacrificing the present to it.”48 In its pure immediacy, it is contretemporal; it “does not conform to any known temporal form, and never to tempo-rality as a form of representation.”49 Benjamin’s discourse on divine violence finds its counterpart in his embrace of the creative violence of art (rather than mere iconoclasm). His pessimism—which he dreams of organizing and activating50—about the contemporary chances of revolutionary politics

Surrealism’s contribution to epochal dreaming consists in the violence of epochal awakening.

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becomes counterbalanced by his optimism about alternative means to consciousness, to shaking awake the present from its dream about itself51—especially ones that reso-nate with his own mistrust of it, and retreat from the quotidian the better to illuminate the metamorphic power of its “image space” (Bildraum).52 The clock, the icon of nine-teenth-century “dream houses” (facilities like arcades, train stations, and factories),53

is a symbol not merely of commercial en-terprise which facilitates dreaming, but of the ubiquity of modern time and its regime of punctuality, its felt flight, the membrane that dreaming may expand and contract but never permanently rend nor abolish. The radical alertness of surrealist dream-ing—innervation by a clock that rings con-tinuously without numbing the senses—serves to liberate freedom from bourgeois mores. Like a beast speaking in a human

voice, violent anarchistic desire speaks the language of morality. The dialectical-revolutionary approach to history, the “tiger’s leap into the past,” is not a question of method but one of attitude and timing.54 Thus, it is the combination of time-keeping and crisis that sets off the loudest warning bells: the revolutionary passen-gers of the history-train headed for disaster are those who pull the emergency brake just in time.55 “Before the spark reaches the dynamite, the fuse must be cut,” we read in the fragment titled “Fire Alarm.”56 The true revolution always comes just in time; this timing defines its temporality: not in “good time” (the “appointed” or “opportune” time of kairós), but at an “improper” time (a time not “our own,” “inappropriate” for any given end, un-anticipated, unexpected in its expectancy)—a time, that is, when action seems acutely overdue and relative respite near elapsed. The possibility of revolt is predicated on “the last possible moment” (which is the only possible one); the conviction of having come just in time justifies its suddenness, violence, and redemptive thrust. The problem with critical time, however, is its convertibility to anachronism. Action just in time always risks being (retrospectively) mistimed, a contretemps, should it fail in its effects: it leaves no time for rehearsals, second chances, or multiple attempts. This exigency of action and extreme significance (given its timing) account for its power to focus and mobilize. Time in alarm, the “alarmist” conscience, is the surrealist prophecy of a catastrophe that does not follow progress, much less precede it, but constitutes it—such that progress is, properly speaking, progressive catastrophe. The point is not to dissociate progress from catastrophe, as course from accident, but to identify them. As the rattle and roll of wheels lulls the sleeping car bound for the land promised at the end of the line, the catastrophe ahead is ensured by false consciousness, by dreams that follow the lure of progress and are oblivious to its traps. The present danger is catastrophic incomprehen-sion of the roots of barbarity in the unhampered evolution of capitalism.

Benjamin’s reading of the Klee picture foregrounds a focal problem of our time: the crisis of consciousness’s relation to history and, by extension, of modernity’s to utopia.


Here, too, the angel—as consciousness of crisis, as critical consciousness—rears its head, as the present is brought to a point: the fortuitous seizure of an instant on the point of perdition, which stills all (since an instant is all the time needed) and still is (without duration). This sense binds Angelus Novus to force and violence: as victim, maimed by the violence of progress latent in its frame, and as avenger of catastrophe, set against progress, Angelus Militans (incidentally, the title of a 1940 painting by Klee).57 In 1931 Benjamin reflected on his angel’s many grotesque features as attributes of militant virtue: “Neither purity nor sacrifice have been able to master the demon [of history— S. C.]; but where origin and destruction meet, at that point his rule is over. His conqueror stands before him as a creature that is both child and cannibal: not a new human being, but a non-human (Unmensch), a new angel.” Angelus Novus is emblematic of temporally dispossessed “humanity that proves itself by destruction.”58 It is the Baudelairean, sple-netic angel-demon of action, of combat. The crux of the problem with temporality is the stymied relation of the present to political action, expressed as its incapacity to fully realize itself, in two closely related senses of that word: be fully “awake to” itself and take advantage of itself (to actual-ize itself without losing part of its potential). One discerns in this failure and sense of paralysis a potent source of frustration, an agitation of the spirit that remakes the angel into an image of militant benevolence late in the day. There is no time to lose; the now of the “now or never” is the temporal structure of the political impulse to utopia. The fixation of the present by secular, profane forces in Klee’s image justifies the sacred vio-lence summoned to trump it in the last possible instant. This precarious, critical moment transposes temporality onto another register; messianic time, the time of divine revela-tion, “of universal and integral actuality,”59 runs on a different order than the mythic and homogeneous time of history. The redemptive power of the angelic instant, the instant about to be lost, is inseparable from its destructive, apocalyptic force; only through such a materialist-theological configuration can the historical realm into which its energies are discharged be once and for all transcended.

>> Uchronia

Benjamin’s reading of the Klee picture foregrounds a focal problem of our time: the crisis of consciousness’s relation to history and, by extension, of modernity’s to utopia. Since then, philosophers and social theorists have configured maladaptation to modern modes of temporality as a liberated, even potentially liberating, pathology. A foil and, in some ways, the obverse to the “schizophrenic” (our key referent here), whose acute disengagement from everything save the present very nearly deprives him of the sense of being in time, is the likewise disengaged and atemporal, “timeless” psyche, which—far from being freed by his disengagement from time—is persecuted by the notion of having forgotten, of monumental and irredeemable memory loss.60 Paralleling the theoretical leap made by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, we can refer to the “paranoiac” as an analogous relation of consciousness to time—on the point of becoming a non-relation—but also as a step forward in making time a mental challenge.

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To be sure, the authors of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia theorized para-noia negatively, as a reactionary failure and a political hazard. The “paranoiac” is in the losing position of unfreedom that, beholden to delusion and power, spells fascism—on Adorno’s diagnosis, “a dictatorship by persecution-maniacs, realiz[ing] all the persecution-fears of its victims.”61 He is beset by time on both sides. The “schizophrenic,” meanwhile, is in a fortunate position of radical, creative freedom in an (absolute) present unchained from past and future. He knows no before and after, outside and inside, subject and ob-ject, self and world—so that the fear of the other does not arise. In clinical practice, of course, schizophrenic and paranoid features are often found together—as in paranoid-type schizophrenia or the paranoid-schizoid phase in Kleinian psychoanalysis, to which Deleuze and Guattari’s schizoanalysis is indebted. In their hands, however, they become contrasting and complementary philosophical-critical concepts endowed with historical (rather than medical) diagnostic value. It is under the strain of advanced capitalism that the newly emergent paths of paranoia and schizophrenia appear to diverge. The schizo-phrenic is now an autonomous “hero of desire” riding the wave of the new, at ease with market exchange yet abstracted from the daily grind—and virulently anti-capitalist. He is a liminal figure, representing capitalism’s “inherent tendency brought to fulfillment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel.”62 With the paranoiac, who defends himself against desiring-production, things stand otherwise. Paranoia, in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, must be resisted, since it is not actively productive of the new, only passively reproductive of the old; unlike schizophrenia, it lacks creative force. In an early work, Michel Foucault comments on a case of paranoia analyzed by Eu-gène Minkowski, whose patient lived in constant fear of his looming annihilation, of “being crushed to death by all the waste material, dead matter, and garbage in the world.” Foucault construes this as a paranoid perception of time—and does so in terms strikingly reminiscent of Benjamin’s:

It is easy enough to see a significant relation between this content of delusion and the anx-ious theme of imminent catastrophe: being haunted by “remains” expresses, for the subject, an inability to conceive how a thing might disappear, how what is no more cannot but still remain. The accumulation of the past can no longer, for him, be liquidated; and, correlatively, past and present cannot anticipate the future; no acquired security can serve as a guarantee against the threats that it contains; in the future everything is absurdly possible. Thus, in their insane intertwining, these two themes reveal a major disturbance in temporality; time no longer projects itself or flows; the past piles up; and the future, which opens up, can contain as promise only the crushing of the present by the ever increasing weight of the past.63

Unable to take flight, confined to a present paralyzed by the imminence of catastrophe (a revenge of the forgotten d’outre-tombe), the paranoiac conflates and vilifies all time, to unleash it upon himself. “Good time” contracts to an immaterial hic et nunc in which nothing is salvaged. The future yawns with the danger of the past, hallucinated as a sky-ward buildup of refuse, burying the paranoiac under its weight. This perverse “overdose on history” promises a fleeting, ecstatic pleasure in the form of release from the logics of memory and action.


His is not, in other words, the antici-pation of the future as salvation from the past, but the fear of the past’s return with a vengeance—a future always already past without respite in the present (the latter is only as sheer contingency, indistinct and immaterial to history, devoid of all singu-larity). He is, we could say, the anonymous, involuntary witness and victim of mass-produced, instantly accessible pasts that collapse instead into one great mass, in virtual simultaneity. The accrued, historicized, (re)composed, commodified past—through aggressive and invasive marketing—takes on the nightmarish guise of an undifferentiated heap of material-cultural remains that will not decompose. The paranoiac’s defensive disengagement, his progressive alienation from the experienced and historical dimensions of life, which capital/progress seem-ingly multiplies to persecute him with, accounts for the overwhelmingly present psychic burden of what has “disappeared” from memory. The weathered angel of history beholding the ruin of humankind epitomizes this par-anoid-schizophrenic sense of (non)time. But it transfigures the distressing vulnerability to the past into something quasi-transcendent. The angel does not turn away from the past; it is novus and modern in spite of itself. Its vision of history is one in which nothing is lost, and everything can be redemptively reactualized.64 It is the grave icon of a disor-dered, psychotic flight of fancy: the utopian union of theology and politics, whereby a static present encompasses, short-circuits, transfigures, and redeems all of time.65 (This, anyhow, is the fantasy of one whose time is stalled, whose present is frozen, all but oblit-erated.) Benjamin’s dialectical image of history thus synthesizes the paranoid fear of the past’s otherness and oblivion (in their reciprocity), and the negation of that fear by hope. It is, indeed, a double fantasy (insofar as the paranoiac exaggerates his assailant): on one hand, a fantasy of persecution by and futility of all resistance against the past; on the other, a messianic-utopian fantasy, still apprehensive since tempered by fear of the mate-rial return of past suffering which binds him. The paranoiac is oppressed by the past as a memory/image of oppression; he has no desire for memory, and his means of defense is affective disinvestment that further augments his anxieties about forgetting. He dreads exposure and contamination—picture his eyes and mouth tightly shut, pinched nostrils, ears stopped up . . . His angel, however, is a benevolent figure of pathos: it stands exposed, facing the ele-ments, a careworn spirit of resistance (harrowed and solitary, it is the paranoiac’s “hero of fear”).66 And this alleviates his angst. Even in Anti-Oedipus the paranoiac is turned towards past history, but his “openness” to it is as to a binding condition of necessity, his-torical determinism, teleology, and, in the end, security (at once feared and desired). The future is the past’s inexorable, if open-ended, entailment, which he can neither divine nor obviate. (This order of history is fantastically reversible: the bad past, a consequence of the futurity of progress, is made good retroactively by a messianic future.)

“Good time” contracts to an immaterial hic et nunc in which nothing is salvaged. The future yawns with the danger of the past, hallucinated as a skyward buildup of refuse, burying the paranoiac under its weight.

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Deleuze and Guattari’s idealized schizophrenic, in stark contrast, by simply turning away from history (its causal necessity), opens himself joyously to becoming other and thus to utopia. While the paranoiac suffers paradigmatically (from, but also with, history), the schizo is affectively flatter, receptive and carefree. In Anti-Oedipus, he is elevated to a “conceptual persona” heteronymous with the timely philosopher and the dynamo of his thinking. The schizophrenic-philosophical mode comes at the end of history—the radical present, actuality—precisely because it undoes “normal” subjective conscious-ness with its built-in falsity.67 But where Deleuze and Guattari saw an ethical advantage and untapped revolutionary-utopian potential, a longtime critic like Fredric Jameson discerns a symptomatic or reflective—rather than diagnostic or critical—theory on the verge of ethical-political bankruptcy. Jameson’s remarks are particularly insightful: “The Deleuzian notion of schizophrenia is therefore certainly a prophetic one but it is prophetic of tendencies latent within capitalism itself and not the stirrings of a radically

different order capable of replacing it.”68 The bottom line, of course, is that schizo-phrenia—any more than paranoia or their running together—holds no promise of freedom from politico-economic domina-tion and exploitation (of which world cap-italism represents the apogee), but only an illusion of one. The revolutionary-utopian schizophrenic is as much a fantasy as is Benjamin’s angel of messianic time. While Benjamin tries to zero in on a point on the temporal horizon of possibility for radical praxis, Deleuze and Guattari’s model of liberation of desire as flight from history is so much one with its cultural moment,

continuous with our moment, that it now reads like a visionary manifesto not of another communist revolution, but of yet another capitalist, neoliberal one. The respective pro-posals show us different—if also remarkably similar—ways in which the possibility of transformation can be constructed as a guiding idea for keeping alive a political project in the wake of failed revolutions (in Benjamin’s case 1917 and 1918–19 in Germany, in Deleuze and Guattari’s, May ’68). Each seems to stem from the sense of a missed po-litical moment, of the non-realization or loss of the potential to act. While both visions come from the Left, they stand on opposing poles of the spectrum of political action: the creative-innovative transgression of the unconscious, of delirium and excess, versus the destructive-redemptive violence of conscience, of loss and lack. Thought, in its refusal to cast an image of utopia, to confine the imagination with-in spatiotemporal limits, succumbs here to what Liliane Abensour calls the “psychotic

The bottom line, of course, is that schizophrenia—any more than paranoia or their running together—holds no promise of freedom from politico-economic domination and exploitation (of which world capitalism represents the apogee), but only an illusion of one.


René Magritte. lA ClEF DES CHAMPS, 1936 Oil on canvas. 80 x 60 cm

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 657 (1976.3). © Estate of René Magritte / SODRAC (2012). Provenance: Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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temptation” of exceeding old continents, establishing a new time. Thought held by the actual (“as mode of expression of or as solution to temporal difficulty” that abolishes or confuses the distinction between past and present)69 is both passage à l’acte and stasis—a charged suspension, a potentialized impotence. Under normal circumstances, the tem-porality of the actual (in the sense of “what is present,” “what is at the moment,” as well as “what is real,” rather than ideal or merely potential) is indissociable from action: the present is the only time of action, in which things actually occur and take place (while past and future are the projections of its effects). But in psychosis, actuality consumes all temporality. What is remarkable, however, is that something itself as phenomenally ungraspable as the instant could expand enough to draw into itself all of time, coinciding with itself without a gap. The actual, in short, has become the ideal. Schizophrenia, and now paranoia, far from a mode of revolutionizing utopianism, is best seen as a Magrittean window to historical involution—that is, an image of action at a standstill, where memory is dialectically a longing for transcendence, and past and fu-ture curl into the present like the shriveling of a leaf.70 In Magritte’s oil La clef des champs (Key to the Fields, 1936) a ruptured windowpane reveals the open field represented in it as

trompe l’oeil. This “ideological” glass that a moment ago must have appeared transpar-ent must then have been opaque. The im-age of an identical field, onto which (to tell by its remnants on the floor and those still in the frame) the now-broken image was perfectly mapped, can come “through” as a vista on reality, but equally as another painted perspective (copy) whose original is kept out of sight and inaccessible. The titular “solution” to this field is given as a jagged opening which, following Magritte’s idiomatic title, is a focal means of escape with a view symbolic of freedom—clichéd and quite possibly illusory.71 Do we take it? (Prendre la clef des champs is to take one’s freedom, to escape.) It is now that we are

struck by a coincidence, if not identity, of representation and represented (“outside”). To look here for a point of transcendence is to go afield. What at first sight appears as a dia-lectical image—Dialektik im Stillstand—is an impasse, a perspectiveless breach, a virtual promise, a dilemma of time and act, a dissociation of actuality from action, rather than their solution (which remains occluded). The clef des champs is our surrealist key to the paranoid attitude toward the future qua progressivist utopia. A stone has been cast at an image.72 The paranoiac’s suspicion of ideological deception explodes the framed, static picture of perfection, the cloudless coda to history apparently within reach, to expose the “real” presence on which the sham

Schizophrenia, and now paranoia, far from a mode of revolutionizing utopianism, is best seen as a Magrittean window to historical involution—that is, an image of action at a standstill, where memory is dialectically a longing for transcendence, and past and future curl into the present like the shriveling of a leaf.


was evidently modeled. The incitement to action and sudden violence of this iconoclasm are represented only in their static effect, as splinters (of “messianic time”) at the foot of the “present”; its presence has inevitably passed into memory. Exhibit A is nowhere in sight, neither is its thrower. (It is moot whether he made the toss—the coup d’oeil?—from “here” or over “there.”) A quasi-space delineated only by an inner frame and, stretched across or beyond it, a second nature-utopia, as ambiguous in its status as the first must have been clear this side of the act. This latest topos of futurity—the emergent view (or idea) of a field through the broken glass—may be stayed by hope but is best approached with mistrust. For now, the exit-pass through it and to “the other side” remains unused: a visionary vision. The present’s potential (represented) is obscured by the memory of action and the anticipation not of its continuation (given the breach) but of its transposi-tion, where past and future do not function properly as extensions of time, but instead collapse into one. All at once, we are presented with objective crisis, the anonymity of violence, the conspicuous absence of actuality, the impotence of a redemptive act,73 and the incapacity to seize the moment. For the problem is still: How to enter this place whose “reality” lies smashed? Where to set foot in a present so vague? When is now?

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This research was supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I wish to thank James D. Ingram for his critical comments on multiple drafts of this paper.

1 Paul Klee’s drawing, Angelus Novus, was purchased by Benjamin in 1921. In the same year, Benjamin planned a literary review called Angelus Novus, whose actuality (Aktualität, timeliness) would be like the host of angels created only to disappear into nothingness after having sung the hymn to god. Though the project was never realized, the artwork remained in his possession until his death, and thereafter passed into the hands of his friend gershom Scholem. Its allegorical interpretation is the best-known part of Benjamin’s last work, “On the Concept of History” (1940).

2 Reference is to Benjamin, “The life of Students,” 37–47.

3 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396 (XVIII).

4 Ibid., 396 (XVII); Benjamin, “The life of Students,” 37.

5 As Rebecca Comay observes: “The Jetztzeit announces the imminence [the angel is “about to move”—S. C.] of that which, impending, resists the immanence of what is given or presentable . . . [It] is thus nothing like a present, but rather that which un-dermines the very presentability of that which comes” (Comay, “Benjamin’s Endgame,” 272). The “prohibi-tion on images” rooted in Jewish eschatology (cf. Thesis B)—which Benjamin shared with Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno, like him grappling with the relation of history and utopia—is mirrored in the ethi-cal imperative to remember suffering. Their refusal to give content to utopia, along with their critique of its positive images, is perhaps as much a symptom as a theoretical way out of the crisis of modernity’s rela-tionship to utopia. For Benjamin, “the image’s absence is a precondition for the present to be charged with

potentiality” (Andrew Benjamin, “The Illusion of the Future,” par. 5).

6 One must understand “actuality . . . as the reverse side of eternity . . . and to take the imprint of that hidden side of the seal (Medaille)” (Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 4.2:910). Where not noted, translations are my own.

7 This is the literal import of its body language: gaze averted from the future, it faces the past wide-eyed, agape, nostrils flared, ears flapping. It is top-heavy (with a grossly oversized head) and fully awake, alert—unmistakably conscious.

8 Rilke, Duino Elegies, 55 (Fourth Elegy).

9 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389 (I).

10 To borrow a comment by giorgio Agamben, “theology and angelology can no longer be distin-guished” (Agamben, Potentialities, 127).

11 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396 (XVI), 397 (Supplement A).

12 The relationship is one of interdependence: theology can only work through the counter-science of history, while historical materialism gains mastery of its opponent by “enlist[ing] the services of theology” (Ibid., 389 [I]).

13 Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 405 (The now of Recognizability); italics mine. That Benjamin favors making the present present, rather than the past, is borne out by his denunciation of “the notion that the historian’s task is to make the past ‘present’ (das Vergangne zu ‘vergegenwärtigen’),” which he feels “is guilty of the same fraudulence, and is far less transpar-ent,” than positivist historiography, assimilating history to the natural sciences (401). Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81) was an aristocrat and economist.

14 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 396 (XVI); translation modified. Scholem described Benjamin’s attachment to Angelus Novus as “a me-

Notes


mento of a spiritual vocation” of practicing history, or retrospective prophecy (Scholem, “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” 62).

15 Mosès, The Angel of History, 105.

16 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390 (V) (see also thesis XVI), 396 (XVII), 390–91 (V).

17 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 462 (n2a,3).

18 Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 406 (The Dialectical Image), 401.

19 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 391 (VI).

20 Benjamin, “The life of Students,” 37 (the parenthetical qualifiers are culled from the same paragraph).

21 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 389 (I), 391 (VI).

22 Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 407 (Dialectical Image).

23 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392 (IX).

24 The first and second elegies in Rilke’s cycle contain several instances of such emotional ambiva-lence and the line, “Every angel strikes terror” (Duino Elegies, 27 and 35). Behind his lament lies the split human consciousness, our position between angelic transcendence and animal naturalness/openness of pure being, which deprives subjective experience of unity and flow.

25 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 392 (IX).

26 Benjamin’s concept of history is the opposite of this. As löwy (who on this point follows Irving Wohlfarth) concludes, the messianic vision of history is spiral, rather than linear or circular, because of its dialectical structure (löwy, “Religion, Utopia and Counter-Modernity,” 95, 102). The epigraph to thesis

XIV taken from Karl Kraus—“Origin is the goal” (Ben-jamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395)—does not mean regression or literal revolution (as recurrence of time or celestial rotation).

27 Adorno saw in Benjamin’s angel an “authentic expression for the union of the continuity and discon-tinuity of history,” history being “highly continuous in discontinuity, in . . . the permanence of catastrophe” (Adorno, History and Freedom, 92).

28 löwy, “l’utopie Benjamin,” 153.

29 Hirsch, The Demon and the Angel, 141–42, 147.

30 grohmann, Paul Klee, 11.

31 Scholz, “Angelus novus,” 354.

32 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 209–15 passim.

33 Ibid., 215–16.

34 Ibid., 217–18.

35 The iconic moment becomes for Benjamin the defacing of public clocks in 1830 by the people of Paris “to make the day stand still” (Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395 [XV]).

36 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 4 (Exposé of 1935), 13 (Exposé of 1935), 893 (Exposé of 1935, Early Version) (n.b. the Michelet quotation also heads Convolute F), 898 (Exposé of 1935, Early Version). The line from Michelet crystallized for Adorno the undialectical nature of Benjamin’s utopianism. It turns the oneiric image of utopia into “the content of some [objective] consciousness,” whose subject, moreover, is a self-contained and contradiction-less “epoch.” “If you transpose the dialectical image into conscious-ness [or unconsciousness] as a ‘dream,’” he contin-ues, “you not only rob the concept of its magic and thereby rather domesticate it, but it is also deprived of precisely that crucial and objective liberating potential that would legitimate it in materialist terms” (Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 105).

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37 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 389 (Convolute K), 10 (Exposé of 1935).

38 Ibid., 898 (Exposé of 1935, Early Version).

39 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 210.

40 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 898 (Exposé of 1935, Early Version).

41 Ibid., 458 (n1,9).


43 Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 27. By modernatism Rancière means one of the two forms of the modernist aesthetic paradigm: “the identification of forms from the aesthetic regime of the arts with forms that accomplish a task or fulfill a destiny specific to modernity” (26–27).

44 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 208–15 passim.

45 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 246 (quoting Sorel in the second instance). The violence essay can be read productively in relation to Benjamin’s angel, which serves as a concentrated reflection of/on violence, caught as it appears between its mythic and its divine forms.


47 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 249, 246. “Revolutionary violence, the highest manifesta-tion of unalloyed violence by man,” while possible, saddles us with the conundrum of its temporality and recognizability. “less possible and also less urgent for humankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed vio-lence has been realized,” since it is not “recognizable as such with certainty, unless it be in incomparable effects, because [its] expiatory power is invisible to men” (252). (It is on the order of Alain Badiou’s event, a comparison also made by Slavoj Žižek.) The realm of myth (mythic violence, mythic time) bastardized violence (Gewalt; also, “force,” “power”) by law, by demanding sacrifice and exercising power over bare

life (Žižek, “Allegro,” 199). Once posited as “pure” and “immediate,” however, violence breaks with the mediatory relationship to just/unjust ends and—rather than serving the establishment of the rule of law and carried out in the name of predetermined values which make it “meaningful” (Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 249, 252)—becomes “a politics of pure mediacy” (Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” 110). The problem of justification is thereby circumvented, since divine law, standing above manmade law, is not determinable objectively but validated by a subjec-tive leap of faith and recognized as such only by the believer. In Dominick laCapra’s more critical reading of the “Critique,” “secular faith in revolution becomes the surrogate for an experienced loss of the sacred, and one is moved to act—indeed to act forcefully or even violently—independent of consequences and in spite of (perhaps because of) the absence of security or knowledge about—even good grounds for—the action which is prompted by a blind leap of faith. This messianic politique du pire [is] closely bound” with Benjamin’s reflection on violence (laCapra, “Violence, Justice, and the Force of law,” 1066). For an exhaus-tive analysis of Benjamin’s concept of divine violence, see also chapter 6 of Honneth, Pathologies of Reason.

48 Balfour, The Rhetoric of Romantic Prophecy, 14.

49 Hamacher, “Afformative, Strike,” 112.

50 Benjamin, “Surrealism,” 216–17.

51 One of the epigraphs to Convolute n is a quo-tation from Marx’s famous 1843 letter to Arnold Ruge: “The reform of consciousness consists solely in . . . the awakening of the world from its dreams about itself” (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 456).


53 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 405 (l1,3).

54 Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395 (XIV).


55 Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 402 (XVIIa). “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency” (“On the Concept of History,” 392 [VIII]; translation modified).

56 Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” 470; translation modified.

57 The only other to merit a latin name in the angel series was Angelus Militans (drawing 1930, oil painting 1940), perhaps as a wizened transformation of Angelus Novus refracted through Klee’s pessi-mism. Despite its menacing title, its militancy seems compromised somehow; it does not hover, but stands or sits pondering whether to blow the trumpet to an-nounce the coming apocalypse.

58 Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” 367.

59 Benjamin, “Paralipomena,” 405 (Dialectical Image).

60 I take Karl Heinz Bohrer’s elegant discussion of the “historiosophic glance,” which takes subjectivity out of itself or any subjective-transcendental modality of temporal experience to be pertinent here: “This pri-ority of things [qua mementos, catalysts of remem-brance—S. C.] over the subject saves the subject in things. Being historical, however, they in fact triumph over oblivion. Benjamin’s objective ego-weakness can in no way afford the forgetting or letting-go of things, or: the ego-weakness results from the primacy of things that never disappear, not least the things of the past.” In this way, “Benjamin hypostatizes subjective time as eschatological, in which no thing can be lost” (Bohrer, Der Abschied, 506, 538).

61 Adorno, Minima Moralia, 164.

62 Deleuze and guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 39. I follow the authors in referring to the schizophrenic in the masculine.

63 Foucault, Mental Illness and Psychology, 50–51.

64 Mosès, The Angel of History, 125.

65 löwy points out that the notion of time “at work in the politico/religious reflection of Walter Benjamin, and which impregnates all the allegories of the ‘Theses,’” is qualitative, “founded on remembrance on the one hand, and the messianic/revolutionary rupture of continuity on the other” (löwy, “Religion, Utopia,” 102).

66 Benjamin certainly figures paranoia not explicitly or positively, but implicitly and critically, as a passive position from which the potential for revolutionary counteraction can dialectically arise. The paranoiac’s alarm is justified by prophetic reason, which “formu-lates [its] appeals in the conditional: catastrophe is certain if . . .,” all will stand or fall unless . . . (löwy, “l’Utopie Benjamin,” 151; see also löwy, Fire Alarm, 111). The appeal to messianic, apocalyptic violence, in other words, is justified by the premonition of disaster in the historical process, in the name of resistance to human force.

67 As in norman O. Brown’s oft-quoted anti-psy-chiatry classic of a few years earlier, all is turned on its head: “normality . . . is split-minded; in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating. . . . Schizo-phrenics are suffering from the truth. . . . Schizophren-ic thought is ‘adualistic’” (Brown, Love’s Body, 159).

68 Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 711. This “prophecy,” Jameson stresses, is not a critique but a projection. The likeminded Žižek unmasks Deleuze as “an ideologist of late capitalism” (Žižek, Organs without Bodies, 184). A parallel critical move is offered by Antonio negri’s reading of Jetztzeit. Benjamin’s now-time, ranged in negri with utopia and innova-tive precision, assimilated by capitalist temporality and reduced to zero-time, is a “ruinous” conception, “represent[ing] the utmost modernization of reaction-ary thought” (negri, “The Constitution of Time,” 108, 112).

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69 Abensour, La tentation psychotique, 10, 78. See in particular chapters 2 and 3, which deal with modes of temporal experience among the “malades de la temporalité” (20), especially pages 73–91.

70 Involute might be a more accurate description of Benjamin’s idea of revolution, which löwy calls spiral (see also note 26). Psychoanalysis speaks of memory not as regression but as involution, an “attraction towards the limitless” (Abensour, La tentation psycho-tique, 91). Revolution seen from the messianic vantage is the potentiated present, an axis obscured by all of time suddenly curled inwards (involute).

71 The reversibility (window/painting) of the fram-ing device generates the impression of both insular distance and claustrophobic proximity. Attention is drawn to limits, which are here policed and violated, tempting to new violation or to transgression.

72 The actual (the radical present) is a function of action, while a program for the future, a function of reflection; the twain are irreconcilable. The present must efface what drives it (pursuit of pleasure, picture of happiness) in order to become fully present to itself; to access utopia, it must destroy all thought of what it would accede to (desires).

73 The phrase is meant to reflect both the (im)potentiality (or the virtuality, unpresentability) of the prophet turning his back on the future and divine violence being effective yet invisible.

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Adorno, Theodor W. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–1965. Translated by Rodney livingstone. Ed-ited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.

———. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life. Translated by E. F. n. Jephcott. new York: Verso, 2005.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Walter Benjamin. The Complete Correspondence, 1928–1940. Translated by nicholas Walker. Edited by Henri lonitz. Cambridge: Polity, 1999.

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Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

———. “Critique of Violence.” Translated by Edmund Jephcott. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1:236–52.

———. “Karl Kraus.” In Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 2, Pt. 1, edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 334–67. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1977.

———. “The life of Students.” Translated by Rodney livingstone. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1:37–47.

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———. “Surrealism: The last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia.” Translated by Edmund Jephcott. In Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 2:207–21.

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IMAGE: David Maisel, HISTORY'S SHADOW gM16 Archival pigment print, 30 x 40 in. Courtesy the artist and Haines gallery, San Francisco

Angelus Novus, Angst of History (in diacritics, 2012)

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