During our first meeting, we followed W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Addressing Media” and asked, “What is the medium of theory?” Here, I want to suggest that Benjamin’s medium for “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (or, more accurately, “On the Concept of History”) is the “thought-image” or “thinking image” (Denkbild). Before I explain, let me provide some context for the Ninth Thesis, which we discussed during our first seminar meeting.

The origin story of the Ninth Thesis is unclear. It was not published during Benjamin’s (“Ben-yum-meen”) lifetime, yet it was almost certainly written in 1940, just before Benjamin committed suicide at the French-Spanish border while fleeing from the Nazis. (Prior to that, he was in exile in Paris, which Germany invaded in 1940, and also incarcerated in a transit camp in Burgundy. In September 1940, he planned to sail via Portugal to the States, for which he obtained a visa.) Benjamin’s letters to Gretel Adorno suggest he was thinking about the Ninth Thesis and related material for some time, well before writing it in 1940. Whether he made a conscious decision not to write or publish the Ninth Thesis prior to 1940, we’ll never know.

But we do know that Benjamin acquired Klee’s (“Clay”) Angelus Novus (1920) in 1921, and Gretel and Theodor Adorno had a facsimile of it in their apartment. Indeed, Angelus Novus was popular within Benjamin’s circle and the Frankfurt School of social theory. In the Ninth Thesis, he calls it a painting; however, it was a monoprint made using oil transfer. Klee produced the work early in his career, and throughout most of the 1920s he was at the Bauhaus. Like Benjamin, Klee died in 1940.

Now, when we interpret the Ninth Thesis, we actually have three different angels at play (see Weigel’s chapter, “Thought-images,” in Body- and Image-Space). Benjamin points to Klee’s Angelus Novus (a monoprint), includes the fifth stanza of Scholem’s “Gruss vom Angelus” (a poem), and writes:

“There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at 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 and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm” (Harry Zohn, trans., Selected Writings, Vol. 4).

Klee’s angel faces us (without necessarily looking at us), Scholem’s angel communicates via the first-person, and Benjamin differentiates between the angel of history and “us.” Echoing Benjamin’s other theses, in the Ninth Thesis we see a critique of homogeneous, empty time (e.g., of standardized clocks; see Simmel in Week 3) and historicism and historical wholes, which rely on conventions of the epic (e.g., they are general, not specific) and benefit the victor (see the Seventh Thesis). In fact, we might argue that historicism (as opposed to historical materialism) uses homogeneous, empty time as its medium and, more specifically, as its vehicle, conduit, or instrument. Here, historicism’s medium is not about matter; time is a force. It is the mechanical or monotonous transmission of abstractions and their corresponding values. It’s the wind blowing in the storm called progress. Or, we might just say it is progress.

Brushing against the grain (see the Seventh Thesis) of historicism and homogeneous time, Benjamin’s angel of history attempts to arrest or interrupt time with a political philosophy for a history of the oppressed. (On this interruption, I recommend listening to Judith Butler’s 2011 EGS talk, especially her discussion of the “now” or “now-time.”) While there’s significant debate regarding how and where this interruption occurs, I would argue that its emphasis is on action (see Arendt, in Week 2), the introduction of change in the present, and the collapse of then into now. Such action may differ, if only in part, from other critical modes, such as scholarly distance or contemplation, even if Benjamin frequently mentions the latter. As Butler observes, it also corresponds with remembrance and remembrance days (see the Fifteenth Thesis: “Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do” (261)). Re-membering would involve, for instance, repetition, discontinuity, and heterogeneity (e.g., re-compiling the wreckage amidst constant change, or re-calling an event from multiple perspectives or positions), which give the present its significance and texture. Taken together, these observations suggest that Benjamin’s action depends on the arrest of thoughts, epic narratives, progress, inevitability, and universal history (see the Seventeenth Thesis) with an attempt to contemplate and decipher how meaning is produced. Yet more important, this arrest is a shared experience (both self and other, subject and object) resulting in collective consciousness (not an act of individual imagination or agency) about ideology as well as making history to benefit the victor, with whom historicism always empathizes (see the Seventh Thesis).

Most germane to this seminar, this arrest or interruption results in images: for example, “The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (255, the Fifth Thesis). In this instance, the image is Benjamin’s “dialectical image” or “dream image.” It is a constellation of factors that afford a unique experience of the past against continuity. It is philosophy manifest in images, also called “dialectics at a standstill” (see Benjamin’s Arcades Project). However, the dialectical image is not the thought-image. Like a dialectical image, a thought-image is neither a photograph nor a painting (Weigel 46-56). It is not a mental or psychological image, either (46-56). Yet they are both “constellation[s] of resemblances” (46), which refuse to parse form from content or container from transmission. In a compelling interpretation of the Ninth Thesis, Robert Lehman prompts us to consider Benjamin’s images as “collection[s] of disarticulated letters” (“Allegories of Rending” 246-7). Building on Benjamin’s observation that history is written through citation, Lehman adds, “The Angelus sees history . . . without reading it” (247). Even if history is written, for Benjamin it is not meant to be interpreted like an essay or any other such articulation of letters into words and sentences.

Thought-images are not dialectical images because the former reveals the production of the latter (see Weigel). As a medium for writing the Theses, the thought-image does not depict history “as it really was” (see the Sixth Thesis). It conceptualizes history, or it enacts historical materialism via discontinuous fragments, which are also constellations. To better understand this distinction between the thought-image and dialectical image, consider how various scholars have described the former. These descriptions underscore Benjamin’s tendency toward “empirical mysticism,” or a study of the infinite based in the stuff of words and things.

The thought-image:

  • Resembles an aphorism;
  • Has “a three-part form consisting of a title, a narrated image, and a related thought” (Kirst 514);
  • Corresponds with the Baroque emblem, with pictura (icon in the center), inscriptio (motto at top), and subscriptio (epigram at bottom) (514);
  • Creates an interdependency between picture/icon and description/text that simultaneously produces tensions and suggests a totality (514-16);
  • Is suggestive or elliptical (resisting truth claims), not exegetical, didactic, or analytical (514-16);
  • Lacks any immediate meaning (515) and is instead enigmatic or difficult to grasp (516);
  • Implies a secret or hidden meaning, which reveals the discontinuous relation between past and past (517-18);
  • Is a departure from the essay form (520);
  • Is intertwined with histories of allegory (Sinnbild), where the particular is treated as an example of the general (see Goethe);
  • Is not a representation, but rather an act of writing and inscription (Weigel 46);
  • Is a “synonym for likeness, resemblance, or similitude” (48);
  • Is where “the dialectic of image and thought is unfolded and becomes visible,” or where “the image, understood as dialectic at a standstill, is transformed into writing, that is, set in motion, in such a way as to reveal the origin of the idea and what has gone into its production: what has preceded it, entered into it, disappeared in it, and, simultaneously with the expression of an idea through the image, become, as its reverse side, invisible and invalidated” (48-9, emphasis added);
  • Is a “reading[] of images in written form, in which the character of images as writing . . . becomes literally transformed into writing” (50);
  • Is not a metaphor representing the relationship between object and concept, but rather a correspondence between the concrete and the general (50-1);
  • Is an “imagined image” (53);
  • More conceptually, “refuses to give up on the Hegelian ‘labor of the concept’” (Richter 14) and is thus distinct from Marx’s critique of Hegel;
  • “Embod[ies] the negative presence of the infinite in the formal aesthetic features of its very finitude” (17);
  • “Approaches the world as if it were a text” to be deciphered (18);
  • Is that which “cannot be paraphrased” (19);
  • Is not a genre, but a medium for “conceptual creation” (18; see also Deleuze and Guattari);
  • “Remains suspended in a charged tension between the figural and the literal” (21); and,
  • “Elides the binarism of self and other” (35).

Across these descriptions, we might say that the Ninth Thesis resembles a Baroque emblem: Scholem’s poem is a motto, Klee’s monoprint is the picture or icon, and Benjamin’s writing is the epigram. We might also describe the thought-image as a crystalization of perspectives without articulation or continuity. While it may not be “an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again,” it suggests how those flashes happen and may even prompt them (e.g., through fixation on the relationships between three angels). In doing so, it moves away from historicism’s use of time as a medium toward a dialectical interruption of progress.

Interpreting thought-images as the media of Benjamin’s theory is important because it underscores at least three things: 1) the thought-image addresses us, 2) it gestures to the ephemeral or infinite, and 3) the Ninth Thesis is composed of three juxtaposed or contiguous pieces (resembling Surrealist parataxis). That is, thought-images speak to us, and we are not in full or even partial control of them. Following Mitchell, we may say they have “faces.” For Benjamin, they are media because they at once produce distance and arrest thought (e.g., the fixed stare, wide eyes, and open mouth; see Kristeva in Week 7). While they may emerge from the wreckage, or from the stuff of words (as opposed to inspiration), they are not reducible to either. They also spark attention to historical specificity and reparation against the empty force of progress. For Benjamin (a German-Jewish philosopher writing in France after Germany’s 1940 invasion), they are thus central to political praxis and a history of the oppressed (to the introduction of change in the present). However, they are not the sort of revolutionary praxis we may associate with Marxian work at the time, and they share many affinities with Hegel and Schelling’s idealism, two reasons why the Ninth Thesis remains controversial amongst materialists. (Here, see Butler on the difference between remembrance and revolution, including Benjamin’s conversations with Bertolt Brecht.) At the threshold between philosophy and poetry, thought-images point to the debris of history in an elliptical or fleeting fashion (see Chun and Doane in Week 9). They are not symbols, either, at least in the sense that they cannot be captured, stored, and expressed through objects imbued with life (see Marx on commodity fetishism). And they do not attempt to explain away history as a whole without remainders (see Hegel’s articulation of history), even if they suggest a totality or absolute idea (“Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe”). By extension, Benjamin’s writing, or his angel of history, is not Klee’s Angelus Novus or even an interpretation of the monoprint. It is a correspondence (or constellation of resemblances) emerging from Benjamin’s encounter with Klee’s work, Scholem’s poem, and the material/social conditions in which he was writing between the 1920s and 1940s. Perhaps the Ninth Thesis is not meant to “add up” or represent a single account. Although scholars such as Lehman suggest it’s quite clear, I’m inclined to call it evocative.

All that said, I have quite a few questions about the Ninth Thesis:

  • Where is Paradise? And what is it? Note how the storm blows from Paradise but is also caught in the angel’s wings.
  • Is the angel of history itself a thought-image? In what relation to the Angelus Novus or “Gruss vom Angelus”? (I would not argue that Benjamin wishes to transcend writing through pictures, but I’m still curious about how to describe the angel of history.)
  • How, if at all, does Benjamin’s thought-image risk nostalgia or a particular pathos/mourning for history? Put differently, does it lack sufficient rationality for praxis? (This is an important question for his historical period, too.)
  • Does the pile of wreckage have a discernible form? It grows toward the sky, but does it have an outline or the like? (See Butler’s reading of the wreckage as a tower.)
  • Is it important whether the angel of history speaks? How, for instance, is any one of the three angels a messenger?
  • What is the relation of the angel of history to humanity? Is the angel in any way human? Where does he reside, if only for the moment? Is he in any way subject to humanity’s material conditions (e.g., see the debris hurled at his feet)? (See Weigel, who writes on page 55, “There is, too, an idea of Klee’s in a note in his Paedagogical Sketchbook [Pädagogisches Skizzenbuch] [1925] which could be taken as a comment on his Angelus Novus— ‘The human being is half winged creature, half prisoner’ (Klee 1990: 100)— a note that follows the pattern of dichotomous concepts of imagination and identity, which in Benjamin’s thought-image of the ‘angel of history’ is wrenched from its paralysis as a metaphor of existence and set in motion of a kind that, in the representation of non-synchronicity, does not seek resolution in reconciliation.”)

These are notes for the seminar. Please excuse any typos or errors. If you see any, then please bring them to my attention. Thank you!

(Thanks to Patrick Close for responding to a previous draft of these notes.)