Petek, 19. maj 2017, ob 17. uri, Trubarjeva hiša literature

In his last text, the famous theses “On the Concept of History” (1940), Walter Benjamin introduces the “Angel of History” by referring to Paul Klee’s water-colored drawing “Angelus Novus” (1920). Turning his gaze towards the past, the angel only sees catastrophe where we see history as progression. In its afterlife, the figure of the angel of history has often been associated with a melancholic yearning for the restoration of a lost, catastrophically crushed past. Questioning such interpretations, the talk discusses the dialectical nature of Benjamin’s angel caught between the fantasy of melancholia and the practice of mourning, the vision of loss and the gaze of lack, the positive desire to repair and the negative drive for destruction. Against his sympathetic readers, Benjamin does not provide us with an “Andachtsbild,” devotional image, for left melancholy. If the angel of history is not an icon inviting sympathy, narcissism and identification, it can be read as a split-image, an image of a cut, the split between memory and the past, history and trauma. Following this line of thought, Benjamin’s ambiguous references to Freud, Hegel and Marx reveal the nihilist structure of a peculiar sort of messianic materialism.