Society, Representation and Cultural Memory

Date 19.09.13

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Society, Representation and Cultural Memory

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

Walter Benjamin, XV Theses on the Concept of History (9)

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Angelus Novus and the Invisibility of the Future

Like the Angel, our face is set away from the future, and all we can see is our past.

We can only judge the future from experience of the past.

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The Experience of Time

Every conception of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time, and no culture is possible without an alteration in this experience.

Agamben

Is the conception of time imprisoning?

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Future without History?

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Past without a Future?

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Themes and Contacts

• Disparate Pasts - feminist visions, Post-colonial Histories

• Spaces of Memory

• Ethics of Forgetting and Remembering

• Representations

• Future-PastTheme ChampionRichard Alstonr.alston@rhul.ac.uk