The Angel of History as a Symbol of Resistance
The unforgiving war will be long and bloody. Yet the Angel of History seems to have caught a second wind.
It’s one of the most mesmerizing passages in the history of knowledge. In the 9th of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin – Jewish, tragic figure, solitary genius – dissects Paul Klee’s haunting painting Angelus Novus and graphically explains to posterity the drama facing the Angel of History:
“His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events: he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm propels him into a future to which his back is turned – whilst the pile of debris before him goes even higher. This storm is what has been called progress.”
The time has come to go beyond what may be read as a very apocalyptic Christian parallel between divinity and violent retribution. As Alastair Crooke detailed in his astonishingly perceptive 2010 book, Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, it was the need to restrain the furies of “divinely inspired” violence that led Hobbes to conceptualize Leviathan, where he called for a social contract between the individual and a necessarily strong, implacable government.
Moreover, it was the Hobbesian version of a social contract that laid the basis for John Locke to assert a dubious “natural goodness” of humanity, complete with a – very private – “pursuit of happiness” and the general welfare gleefully coalescing via the work of an invisible hand.
This fallacy/fairy tale shaped Western thought for over the next 300 years.
Now it’s a completely different ball game. We have been prisoners of
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