Winter 1996
Volume 22, Number 2

The more than forty years of commentary on Benjamin's ninth thesis [of his "Theses on the Philosophy of History"] largely constitutes a continuous ideological debate about the political validation of intellectual culture among nonpoliticians. A dozen lines of printed text, conveniently focused on one picture suitable for incessant reproduction, have become a venue for drawing out a string of fundamental contradictions between revolution and religion, activism and resignation, political partisanship and historical detachment. Thus Paul Klee's watercolor Angelus Novus of 1920 has become, on Benjamin's rather than Klee's terms, a composite literary icon for left-wing intellectuals with uncertain political aspirations.1 Benjamin's interpretation of a "modern" artwork as a mirror of autobiographical self-assurance and as a fantasy of political dissent has been turned into a foundational text for a theoretically abbreviated and metaphorically stylized alternative historical idea bent on reflecting on its own inconclusiveness. As an icon of the left, Angelus Novus has seemed to hold out an elusive formula for making sense of the senseless, for reversing the irreversible, while being subject to a kind of political brooding all the more protracted the less promising the prospects for political practice appear to be. Thus Benjamin's suggestive visual allegory has become a meditative image--an Andachtsbild--for a dissident mentality vacillating between historical abstraction and political projection, between despondency and defiance, between assault and retreat. The image keeps the aggressive tension inherent in such a mentality in an abeyance that allows it to stay put within the politically disenfranchised, and hence ideologically overcharged, realm of culture. For this perpetual holding pattern Benjamin's own notion of a dialectics at a standstill offers its own tailor-made philosophical validation. The complications of the attendant exegetical history, which has never shied away from the paradox, resulted from the effort to wrest a positive meaning from the seemingly absolute verdict, pronounced in the thesis, about the catastrophic course of history and the powerlessness of its witnesses. The angel of history has become a symbolic figure for the contradiction-laden alignment of life, art, and politics to which left-wing intellectuals have tended to aspire, an alignment that in turn fascinates left-wing academics analyzing such aspirations. It embodies the political and conceptual short-circuit between "modern" culture and revolutionary rhetoric encapsulated by the catchword avant-garde.