State of Emergency
solo performance, Blind Montage Festival, die MelkFabriek, SʼHertogenBosch, Holland. 1992
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of
events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurts it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
From an interpretation of a painting by Paul Klee
Angelas Novus, in the ninth Philosophy on History, Illuminations. Walter BenJamin.
State of Emergency
The state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule.
Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," (Spring, 1940)