angelus in the midnight hour

from George Steiner:

…the thesis whereby it is the ethical and cognitive duty of history, of enacted remembrance, to rescue from oblivion the oppressed, the enslaved, the victims of successful injustice, to bring them back to protesting life out of the strategic amnesia imposed by the history-writing of the victors. This is not original to Benjamin. We find it in the radical remembrancers who are the Prophets in Israel. It is in every line of the book of Amos. We find it in the humanitarian rages of Victor Hugo, throughout the dix-neuvième siècle and her miserables, which he knew so well. We find it in the outcry of Blanqui: ‘Do not let our despots lie by writing our history’.

---I’ve been thinking of The Angel of History a lot these days, in terms of globalization, the financial meltdown, and the Big Recession. When Benjamin wrote this essay, he was thinking of the revolutions in France in of 1789, 1830 and 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1870. These “revolutions” are separated in time, but are part of a constellation. This is what the Angel sees when looking back at the rubble and the destruction of revolutions, but nothing can be done, as progress propels a trajectory. Benjamin’s view of the world was non-linear and dealt in gestalts. In a global sense, I wonder if we are witnessing a shift. Progress and history are moving along a trajectory punctuated by discontinuities that affect the entire globe. These discontinuities aren’t isolated, but part of a constellation of ideas, concepts, events, actions, etc.---Read More:http://thesocietypages.org/thickculture/tag/paul-klee/

It is an integral element of the retrospective utopias of Marxism in revolutionary socialism. But Benjamin gives it undoubtedly a singular
intensity and urgency and dignity. His is the explicit doctrine of what we call in Hebrew ‘tikun olam’. Probably again the key sentence to Benjamin, tikun olam, which means roughly, ‘the reparation’, ‘the making good’, ‘the rescuing to make good of what is left of this smashed world’. Against the dread winds thrusting the Angulus Novus into blind futurity, Benjamin’s plea for justice is at work in today’s recuperative histories of colonialism, of feminity, of the child, and most evidently, in the increasingly despairing attempts to recuperate the Shoah from
falsification and oblivion….. Read More:http://www.wehavephotoshop.com/PHILOSOPHY%20NOW/PHILOSOPHY/Benjamin/Steiner,.George.-.To.Speak.of.Walter.Benjamin.pdfa

---Henri Carier Bresson. 1945 Dessau. Benjamin: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..... Image:http://www.afterimagegallery.com/bressonrussianchild.htm

ADDENDUM:


Such was Benjamin’s depth of spirit, such was his articulate genius for sadness, that this one man, in so many ways — let us not fool ourselves — pathetic, a beggar, and defeated, so terribly defeated, has come to stand, in his person, for a limitless immensity of waste and desolation. The waste, none of us can conceive of it, none of us can begin to conceive the waste of the Shoah, of what could have been. He stands for that. Together with Kafka, before the midnight hours, and together with Paul Celan after the midnight hours. Those three. Walter Benjamin carries on his bent shoulders the inconceivable load of a world made ash, of a civilisation annihilated, of a bestiality and injustice forever irreparable, totally irreparable. He bears immemorial witness. And he would not, I think, wish us to do otherwise. ( Steiner ) Read More:http://www.wehavephotoshop.com/PHILOSOPHY%20NOW/PHILOSOPHY/Benjamin/Steiner,.George.-.To.Speak.of.Walter.Benjamin.pdfa

---Federal regulators have discovered that hundreds of millions of dollars in customer money has gone missing from MF Global in recent days, prompting an investigation into the brokerage firm, which is run by Jon S. Corzine, the former New Jersey governor, several people briefed on the matter said on Monday. The recognition that money was missing scuttled at the 11th hour an agreement to sell a major part of MF Global to a rival brokerage firm. MF Global had staked its survival on completing the deal. Instead, the New York-based firm filed for bankruptcy on Monday. Regulators are examining whether MF Global diverted some customer funds to support its own trades as the firm teetered on the brink of collapse.--- Read More:http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/regulators-investigating-mf-global/

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