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>The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.
Why do people credit him with inverting historical materialism? Wtf did he mean by this Angel.
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He's a messenger with an insatiable desire to understand (and transmit) the How and the Why of the What that continues happening, which is itself a blissfully destructive wind that keeps him pinioned.
But I am thinking of Hoelderlin, not Goethe here.
Are you familiar with the little hunchback, anon?
Foremost B was a literary man. The frustration of his Goethe's Town friends.
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>>9507355
Is this word salad supposed to mean something?
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>>9507390
Probably not
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>>9507390
Youre too hung up on 'meaning' senpai. Precisely like the angel.
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There's an allusion to Hegel's lectures on history, too. Specifically the imagery of the 'slaughter-bench'.
Benjamin didn't live through the holocaust, but he sure as hell knew what was coming. Pic related.
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>>9507490
So your post was tripe just so you could say this?
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>>9507483
Oh?
>Goethe's Town
means Frankfurt. Append
>friends
the meaning is Adorno, Horkheimer, even Brecht et al.
Etc.
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>>9507508
what is the Paradise from which this storm blows? If the rubble of the past piles ever higher on itself before the Angel, how is this consistent with his praise of Blanqi's eternal return?
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>>9507525
Not at all. I think B was looking for some kind of (necessarily literary) insight when he wrote this. I just read it (I've read it before) and tried to make it explicable. If it fails as a reading, one discusses it either with oneself or with others-- this is called dialectic-- to see if anything can be wrung from it, which is what I suppose (you) mean by 'meaning'.
Literature requires time and patience few possess in the 21st c. Thread after thread bears this out, but so what.
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>>9507580
Paradise as in the Garden of Eden, but also the promise of enlightenment and the coming of the messiah, which are sometimes conflated in Benjamin's writing, as a kind of being-toward or anticipation.
Being a literary man, as another poster put it, Benjamin really isn't concerned with systematicity or an architechtonic of thought or whatever, but rather felicity of expression, which is likely what he found in the 'eternal return'.
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