Figuring out Benjamin's 'angel of history

The image of the ‘angel of history’ forms the centrepiece of one of Walter Benjamin’s most famous essays: ‘On the Concept of History’. This text has a troubled exegetical history, with numerous competing interpretations attempting to explain what Benjamin really meant. Few, with the exceptions of Timothy Bahti and Sigrid Weigel, have stopped to examine the fragments’ rhetorical structure or to ask what it is about ‘On the Concept of History’ that leads to such a proliferation of readings. This essay, rather than searching Benjamin’s corpus for the ciphers to decode the fragments’ meaning, instead focuses on the complex rhetorical structure of ‘the angel of history’. It argues that an interplay between grammar and rhetoric induces a multiplication of possible interpretations, and indeed that this poetic density seems to involve an imperative to ‘translate’, both the ‘original’ (German or French) text and its complex relationship with the ‘derived’ English version, both interlinguistically and intralinguistically, as Roman Jakobson (1959) would say. It shows that this complex rhetorical structure actually performs the argument put forward in the fragments about the impossibility of historicist totalising readings of history, yet in its injunction to translate or interpret, ‘bear witness to the unpresentable’ (Lyotard), seems to ask that very impossible over and over again

Art · Epistemology · Historicism · History of literature · Impossibility · Linguistics · Literature · Metaphor · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sublime · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

• A Multidisciplinary Approach for the Conservation Design of the Medieval Fortress of Vogogna from the Analysis to the Valorization of the Archeological Site

  Open Access•G Martinelli, M Previtali et al.•Heritage•2025

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• Discovering the culture-led regenerative transformation of a city. Walter Benjamin as an inspiration for the Eco-Flâneur

  Open Access•Ingrid Molderez, Carina Brânzilă et al.•European Journal of Cultural…•2022

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• Critique of the Power of Judgment

  Open Access•Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer et al.•Critique of the Power of Judgment•2000

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• Melancholy Dialectics

  Noah Isenberg, Noah W Isenberg et al.•The German Quarterly•1996

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• Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism

  Donald Maddox, Donald L Maddox et al.•Books Abroad•1972

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• Semiology and Rhetoric

  Paul De Man•diacritics•1973

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• History as Rhetorical Enactment

  Timothy Bahti, Walter Benjamin et al.•diacritics•1979

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• Locating the Messianic

  Eric Jacobson•Journal for Cultural Research•2009

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• Portrait of Melancholy (Benjamin, Warburg, Panofsky)

  Beatrice Hanssen•Modern Language Notes•1999

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• White Mythology

  Jacques Derrida, F C Moore et al.•New Literary History•1974

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• Allegories of Rending

  Robert S Lehman•New Literary History•2008

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• On Fascination

  Ackbar Abbas•New German Critique•1989

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• Walter Benjamin's Theory of Allegory

  Bainard Cowan•New German Critique•1981

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• L'Ange comme figure messianique dans la philosophie de l'histoire de Walter Benjamin / The Angel as a Messianic figure in Walter Benjamin 's Philosophy of History

  Philippe Fleury•Archives de sciences sociales des…•1992

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