ABSTRACT
Despite these times, I invoke an old book. I cling desperately to it and one of its central images—the exterminating angel (l’ange exterminateur). The schizo figure is seared into my memory and I remain strangely entranced by it—that ‘surplus product, proletariat, and exterminating angel’. It lingers, burrows itself, surreptitiously and mischievously refusing to disappear; the exterminating angel is my Angelus Militans. I have long tried to expunge it from my mind it, starting in my youth which saw the fall of the Berlin Wall and exhaustion of the Soviet empire, thinking it safer to invoke other less-violent angels. Yet even through the bleak, early 1990s, when communism, hope and utopia were words seldom spoken on university campuses in England, the specter of the exterminating angel abided—giving a faint angelic hope of something to come.
