/lit/ - Literature

>>15978982
>A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress
No your shitty interpretation of a shit painting is't really the force of history.
(Yeah know your post was bait.)

You could try to determine the historical arc and ideological aim of the ideas you articulate. None of us are free from the wreckage the angelus novus observes until all of our historicist narrative is subsumed by historical materialism, so you can work towards reframing your philosophy in those terms. For that I'd advise research; you probably know where to start.

You could also always do the easier thing and buy into esotericism and theology. Its very very simple and gives sense to the abstract pain caused by capitalist alienation by removing it from its attendant difficult cause. Instead of a complex intellectual history of political economy determined by interdependent ideological forms like nation and race and so on you can call it 'the fall of man' or 'the kali yuga' and stare towards the horizon as if it represents nirvana or apocalypse. It's not a bad way and lots of people have managed it well enough. Esoteric abstraction has an expiry date of course but that won't be for a while yet.

There are lots of things you can do, maybe even therapy if you want to do something for yourself. Good luck!

>>12582417
Let's clear something up about Benjamin.
>A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Gnosis is reached through either this excerpt or the one about the coming on the Messiah in the Thesis.
I remember reading it for the first time during a presentation I was watching on Paul Klee and it had me in fucking tears. This is how I have always felt on some level and Benjamin puts it down so beautifully:
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress"

>>10556680
Another one by my man Walter to compliment yours, OP

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

From Theses on the Concept of History.

>>10495813
Benjamin is probably the biggest theorist of the early vanguards, one of the few thinkers of worth to write about modernism as it happened. His texts The Work of Art in the Age of it's Mechanical Reproduction, Surrealism - The Last Snapshot of Intelligence in Europe, The Translator's Task and The Author as Producer should be obligatory reads to anyone who wants to study modern art and literature.

Besides, his snippet on Klee's Angelus Novus is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read and I'd love Benjamin as much as I do now if he had only written this:
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

>>6485857
>>6485929
>>6485943
>>6485943
Not even a /pol/lack, I actually love Benjamin, but he was pretty open about the influence judaism and kabbalah on his works, specially when discussing history / politics.

That being said, dude was goat, love his Angelus Novus text:

"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures 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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."