The Angel of History
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.
The angel’s fixed contemplation is the substance of Benjamin’s meditation in Thesis IX. The angel is amazed and, as we will learn later, is looking with both horror and reverence on the past. This image of fixed contemplation stands in contrast to the acedia that Benjamin describes in the previous two theses. To see history as progress — Benjamin’s real target — is to empathize with the victors, those who have come out on top in the struggles that make up history. This empathy’s “origin is the indolence of the heart, acedia, which despairs of grasping and holding the genuine historical image as it flares up briefly” (VII). It is an empathy with “the triumphal procession in which the present rulers step over those who are lying prostrate” (VII).
The angel of history does not display this type of amazement. It is altogether of another kind. It does not and cannot look forward as if progress were inevitable.
His face is turned toward the past.
His (her?) job is not to lead us into the future toward an end of history. Her (his?) job is to keep our attention focused on the past as a way of breaking down our acedia; as a way of breaking down our empathy with victors. This empathy is the requirement we implicitly accept for seeing history as an inevitable progress. “One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm” (VIII). We continue to be amazed that “the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century.” This is the amazement of acedia — a hollow amazement of resignation and nihilistic acceptance. Our faith in progress orients us to the future and thus allows for only certain memories of the past to survive. Such a disposition even excuses the violence of Fascism as a perverted form of progress, but progress nonetheless. If only it could be adjusted and corrected, would it be ok? Is it a necessary stage on the road to mankind's ultimate redemption? This acedia is the orientation of Martin Luther King’s addressees in his Letter from Birmingham City Jail: the “moderate clergymen” who have asked the oppressed to wait, yet again, for some other time in the future to raise their voices and demand that the US live up to its promise that everyone is equal before the law.
The angel remains “turned toward the past” as a way of defying this obsession with progress and its necessarily optimistic orientation to the future. Oriented to the past, what does the angel see?
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.
If one believes that progress is inevitable, then one’s disposition to the sins of the past can only be acedia — the resignation that the catastrophes of the past had to happen for history to keep moving inexorably toward its own obsession with progress. Such resignation cannot see catastrophe; it can only ask the oppressed to wait a little longer, for a better time. At best, the resigned can only be amazed that something like Fascism is “still” possible.
“Where we perceive a chain of events” — we have been conditioned to see history as progress and, therefore, to empathize with the victors who are the vanguards of forward movement. We must keep looking forward and empathize with whomever comes along to lead us in continuing to move forward.
“He sees one single catastrophe” — The angel offers a different orientation. History is not a chain of events that forces us to see the past only from the vantage point of the present as the result of an inevitable progress. The further we move along the chain, the less and less we see of the reality of the catastrophe. The more we are encouraged to lament the past catastrophes as the inevitable and unfortunate price of progress. Trails of tears, gulags, gas chambers, recurring clashes of the “savage and the civilized” will all be undertaken in the name of Manifest Destiny in all its forms, and we will struggle to remember them as history marches on, stepping over “those who are lying prostrate.” Those on the Right will write off the Holocaust as fiction while those on the Left, or even moderates, will beg us to “never forget” while they implore the oppressed to wait a little longer for a better time and a better place. Our amazement cannot be acedia — the amazement of resignation and acceptance because history is providentially arranged as progress. We must see the wreckage as wreckage and nothing else. Of course, this means trying to stop history in its tracks so that we can see, grasp and hold onto the wreckage as wreckage.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
The angel struggles against the narrative of progress to “brush history against the grain” (VIII). He (she?) “would like to stay” but cannot. The force is too strong. Her (his?) Messianic power is weak (II) but for its weakness it remains effective if only momentarily. This struggle faces off against the very notion of time as progress. Such a notion of time posits an emptiness of the future that is waiting to be filled up by progress. The angel struggles to stay focused on the past not only by breaking with time as progress , but by breaking it down and “exploding” it. This is the time of historicism and the historicist as an empathizer with the victor: the historicist “musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time” (XVI). To “brush history against the grain” is Benjamin’s way of mustering a different kind of energy, one that “blasts open the continuum of history” (XVI) and is “about to make the continuum of history explode” (XV). This energy recognizes that “the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule” (VIII). This recognition is not merely intellectual. It is aesthetic, emotional, and sober. It is a real struggle against how we conceive of ourselves as participants in a history that is taking care of us through its inevitable march toward progress. To blast open the continuum of history requires a depth of breaking with ourselves and our prejudices that have made us comfortable in our acedia — our passive nihilism that sees concrete moral catastrophes as historically necessary.
To blast open the continuum requires an energy that must be stronger than the energy of this acedia.
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. This storm is what we call progress.
His back is turned not because he is passively resigned to a better future. His back is turned because the state of emergency requires fixation on the pile of debris that grows skyward. The orientation to look backward is deliberate. It is a willed orientation. It is the opposite of Nietzsche’s acetic ideal that denies the present as denigrated, inferior and evil in the name of a future that is full, complete, and an end point of history. The angel of history is not the ascetic priest but is his Anti-Christ.
In this image of the angel of history facing backward, I see a denial of the ascetic ideal. I also come to better understand the Stoic’s commitment to deeply bear witness to a providential universe. The angel of history teaches us to change oue orientation against the violence of a storm that is the ascetic ideal. Paradoxically, the pile of debris growing before him contains within it a kind of beauty. This beauty manifests itself “not in the form of spoils which fall to the victor…. They [spiritual things] manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude” (IV). The beauty of spiritual things is not found in the spoils as the ultimate rewards of the struggle. This beauty of courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude is not History’s desire for its end point. That is the ascetic priest’s orientation to the future that denigrates the past. This beauty is found in the struggle itself as the manifestation of courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. The angel of history — and the historical materialist — apprehends this beauty and desperately seeks to remember it even as the storm of progress piles up more and more debris while pushing the angel away from it.
Is this Nietzsche’s amore fati? I think so if by this I understand him to mean finding the beauty in necessity, and to love the things that have happened simply because they have happened (The Gay Science 276). To love fate, however, is not to justify it. It is to hold two thoughts at once: what has happened cannot be changed, and I must commit to find the beauty in this necessity. On the one hand it is an acknowledgement of facts; on the other it is a commitment to find the beauty in the facts even if that seems impossible. To love fate is to see the beauty in a genealogy of our own morality that looks backward and finds, within the darkness of the ascetic ideal, the beauty of the birth of a will to power as human agency. Nietzsche’s Genealogy is Benjamin’s angel’s looking backward that does not justify the present as the inevitable march of progress. This is how Nietzsche can avoid thowing out the baby of the will (human agency) with the bathwater of ressentiment, guilt and bad conscience.
To see the pile of debris climbing skyward is not to pity it or condescend to it. This pity and condescension are themselves indicators of the ascetic ideal. The angel’s backward looking vision realizes that within the catastrophe are unfathomable acts of courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude — acts of human agency that were no mere mistaken efforts by people who misunderstood that History was marching toward its own end with or without them. To love this catastrophe — to acknowledge the wreckage as wreckage — is the amore fati that refuses condescension, that refuses passive nihilism and acedia, and refuses to permanently look away in a blind hope that History will redeem us on its own. To write a genealogy that refuses to empathize with progress but does not pity those who have suffered and lost is to love the things that have happened because they have happened.
Acceptance and resignation are not the same disposition. One accepts like a Stoic, but like a Stoic this acceptance is the ground on which one marshals a full, vigorous, and virtuous response. To find beauty in the wreckage is not a Panglossian moment that denies real tragedy and real loss. It is the willingness and commitment to find beauty in the tragedy and honor it without that honor becoming a condescending pity that consigns the wreckage to futility.
Nor should we see what has happened as signs of a future working itself out. We can embrace what has happened as the necessity we must live with without resigning ourselves to a future that is fore-ordained. We can seek to “blast open the continuum of history.” We have a “weak Messianic power” that can bear witness to the struggles of the past as themselves beautiful “spiritual things” without desiring the apocalyptic gesture of a total overthrow of the present in the name of an end of history as final redemption and reward. Such a gesture would be its own enactment of the ascetic ideal as a strong Messianic power. Our weak Messianic power is what I imagine Benjamin to have found in his history of the Paris Arcades and what Nietzsche enacted in the Genealogy. Perhaps also these are something like Lyotard’s “bearing witness to the differend.”