A Vision of Hell: Walter Benjamin's Angelus Novus and the Catastrophe of Progress

By: Preciosa Regina Ang De Joya
Language: English Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University< c2014Content type: text Media type: unmediated Carrier type: volumeSubject(s): Philosophy -- Marxism -- HistoryGenre/Form: philosophy and humanitiesDDC classification: . LOC classification: HM101 B859 2014
Contents:
ABSTRACT: Before his untimely death in 1940, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an essay, entitled Theses on the Philosophy of History, marking his recovery from the shock of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. This study reflects on the philosophical and historical significance of this essay, unraveling Benjamin's critique of Marxism as a critique of progress. Progress, which the angel of history sees as a storm coming from paradise, has caused a growing pile of rubble of historical blunders and environmental disasters. This uncritical submission to progress, however, can be seen not only in the blind confidence of the communists and the social democrats towards Marxist teleology, but also in historicism, which reduces the writing of history to a form of disaster: a heaping up of information that forgets the memory of enslaved ancestors, thus losing its weak, Messianic power.
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Item type Current location Home library Collection Call number Status Notes Date due Barcode Item holds
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Periodicals Section 		Periodicals HM101 B859 2014 (Browse shelf) Available Budhi. 18 (1) : April 2014. pp. 18-53 PER 1691
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ABSTRACT: Before his untimely death in 1940, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote an essay, entitled Theses on the Philosophy of History, marking his recovery from the shock of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact. This study reflects on the philosophical and historical significance of this essay, unraveling Benjamin's critique of Marxism as a critique of progress. Progress, which the angel of history sees as a storm coming from paradise, has caused a growing pile of rubble of historical blunders and environmental disasters. This uncritical submission to progress, however, can be seen not only in the blind confidence of the communists and the social democrats towards Marxist teleology, but also in historicism, which reduces the writing of history to a form of disaster: a heaping up of information that forgets the memory of enslaved ancestors, thus losing its weak, Messianic power.

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