Society, Representation and
Cultural Memory
Date 19.09.13
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)
2
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.
3
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?
4
Future without History?
5
Past without a Future?
6
Themes and Contacts
• Disparate Pasts - feminist
visions, Post-colonial Histories
• Spaces of Memory
• Ethics of Forgetting and
Remembering
• Representations
• Future-Past
7
Theme Champion
Richard Alston
r.alston@rhul.ac.uk