Shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, the Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, then living in Paris, offered a reading of a Paul Klee drawing he had bought eighteen years earlier. Klee had called his figure, suspended in a roughly sketched fiery void, Novus Angelus, the “New Angel.” And while ever since, this particular angel has borne the weight of a lot of social theory, the truth is that he is a funny little thing, crowned with grade-school cut-out curls and three-toed birds’ feet. Feeling swept into the vortex of European destruction, Benjamin burdened the peach-colored seraph with his own philosophical agonies, turning him into “The Angel of History.” Noticing that the figure’s head and torso seem to face opposite directions, Benjamin declared that the angel looks backward (toward us) into the immediate past, where a spectacle of mounting calamity registers in a bug-eyed stare. Why? Because the angel sees too much; the whole bloody mess, start to finish, while we poor mortals, the shortsighted historians of the contemporary, can only apprehend one damned thing after another; a chain of discrete episodes.
What do You think about The American Future (2009)?
