Document Type
Article
Abstract
[From first paragraph]
What might be considered a now famous image in the long history and tradition of Western philosophical thought and the study of aesthetics sets the stage for the discussion to follow. The image being invoked here is that for which philosopher Walter Benjamin attempted to offer an ekphrasis. In his posthumously published Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin offers a description to Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus; his description is suggestive of the thematics of temporal dispossession and repossession, which will form the foundation for the analysis forged here. Benjamin described the angel of history, Klee's Angelus Novus, as such, first by quoting his friend and contemporary Gershom Scholem....
The image, in an obvious sense perhaps, describes a rebarbative struggle against notions of linear temporality and historicity and, as well, a stuckness, a temporal stuckness within which the angel appears to be laid stagnant, imprisoned, encased, petrified, entombed even. He recedes into a future, ever being pulled facing backward into that futurity, while simultaneously he cannot help but still fixedly position his attentive look upon the historical catastrophes of the past, being piled in front of his feet so to speak, like much historical wreckage, waste, debris, and detritus. In a way, this emblematically stages the surreptitious simultaneity of both (and the push-and-pull struggle between) remembrance and forgetting. Furthermore, it shows how the flow of time and temporality works to endure both the dying of the past and the coming of the future in the same instance, and how this instance, the present instance, radically enervates both that past vis-à-vis memory, remembrance, and commemoration, while giving way to a futurity that cannot be and refuses to be delimited or even abnegated. It is in the look back of the angel, as described by Benjamin, that we might begin to regard how one may possibly relate to the demands of both temporality and historicity, particularly under the hubristic presumption that time is always already linear; that it moves, as though unchallenged, in a straight line, assuming beginnings, middles, and endings.
Repository Citation
Varghese, Ricky. "Living in the Future Anterior: Trauma and Autobiography in the Work of Vincent Chevalier and Francisco-Fernando Granados." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 15, no. 1, 2015, pp. 1–19. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol15/iss1/4