ABSTRACT
Our era has been haunted by Walter Benjamin’s image of the Angel of History.1 The angel, looking toward the past, sees “one single catastrophe” that “keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” The angel would like to “make whole what has been smashed.” But “a storm is blowing in from Paradise.” The storm “irresistibly propels him into the future” while “the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” This storm, Benjamin concludes, “is what we call progress.”
