Benjamin’s angel of history frames imagination toward an unknowable future

Evidence

Anderson (1991, 162) quotes a well-known passage from Walter Benjamin on the angel of history: “His face is turned towards 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… . [T]his 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.” And he adds his own words as an epilogue to the book: “But the Angel is immortal, and our faces are turned towards the obscurity ahead.” — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 107

Categorization

• XREF: The angel of history is discussed in Walter Benjamin’s theses; connects to how Adorno read Benjamin’s theological-materialist fusion. — connects to: God as transcendental imagination is a temporalizing instance opening an absolute future — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 896; Speculative imagination gives provisional images to future chaos we can live with; The concept of the future itself has a history (+2 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: God as transcendental imagination is a temporalizing instance opening an absolute future — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 896; Speculative imagination gives provisional images to future chaos we can live with; The concept of the future itself has a history (+2 more)