The following is the first of a three-part series. A previous version of this article provided an incorrect name and bio for the author. We apologize for the error.

History is like Janus; it has two faces. Whether it looks at the past or at the present, it sees the same things.» -Maxime Du Camp, Paris, vol.6, p.315 “The subject of this book is an illusion expressed by Schopenhauer in the following formula: to seize the essence of history, it suffices to compare Herodotus and the morning newspaper. Walter Benjamin, Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century, Exposé of 1939

“How could they not have foreseen?” asked Isabelle Stengers to the readers of Le Monde after the catastrophe of Fukushima in 2011. “How could they – the experts and decision-making elites – not foresee, that an earthquake of exceptional magnitude, followed by a gigantic tsunami, would certainly devastate an overpopulated seismic island and contaminate durably the neighboring Pacific ocean by causing a massive rejection of radioactive waste?”

This was actually more of a rhetorical question, as the philosopher of sciences seemed already to know the answer: “The only compass which now seems to define our future is the upholding of economic growth and competitiveness (…) Tepco had been, for example, very efficient in the rationalization of the production costs and the securing of profits. The experts, on their side, had to collaborate in a constructive manner in the mobilization for innovation and progress”.

At a time when the “principle of precaution” could be suppressed from the French constitution in order to be replaced by an ambiguous principle of “responsible innovation” – which could, indeed, but does not refer to the “imperative of responsibility” developed by Hans Jonas (1979) – and despite the major nuclear risk still threatening French national territory, Jean-Pierre Dupuy called on his part not only for the advent of a “slow science” (Stengers 2013) but rather for the advent of an “enlightened catastrophism” (un “catastrophisme éclairé”) (Dupuy 2004; 2012).

Beyond the risk paradigm – or the intuition of a “risk of risks” – of our late modernity, which would simply be another avatar of modern rationalist thought and have proved several times its inefficiency, a catastrophist consciousness at a global “time of catastrophes” (Stengers 2009) – when the impossible has not just become possible but is precisely ineluctable – should recall us that we are not only, in the words of Heidegger, “beings-towards-death” but also, unavoidably, “beings-towards-catastrophe”.

The intuition that modernity has created the conditions of its own disasters had already been formulated long before the institution of a “risk society”. Inn the aftermath of the destruction of Lisbon in 1755, after that Voltaire had lamented on divine perversion and abandoned the optimism of Leibnizian theodicy in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (1756), Rousseau defended in his Lettre à Voltaire the idea that neither God nor Nature were to blame.

If this earthquake, followed by this tsunami coming from the Atlantic, have had a so high faculty of destruction, it was precisely because man and society had concentrated human populations in huge cities, confined them in precarious constructions and created social inequalities which made the poorest of them mostly vulnerable in such disastrous contexts. Rousseau’s intuition forged the motive of an upcoming social progressism that was interwoven with the idea of a perfectibility of human condition and therefore a certain linearity in the progress of human history, one of the major topics of the Enlightenment, even if Rousseauist skepticism already denounced the discrepancy between technical progress on the one hand, and “human” progress on the other hand.

If the tragedy of Fukushima could in part be explained by “capitalist sorcery”, according to Pignarre and Stengers, the Soviet context which allowed the disaster of Tchernobyl in 1986, it also shared a belief in the infinite progress of technique: catastrophes, in this sense, are spectacular events blowing up – but never for a long time – the expectations of a continuum thought as the guarantee of better tomorrows.

Walter Benjamin died before the catastrophes of Tchernobyl and Fukushima. He died even before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima, in 1945. He committed suicide in the village of Port-Bou before reaching the Spanish border, in 1940, when he understood that he would certainly be sent to Auschwitz. But because he did not believe in the modern mythology of progress, he did not believe either in the potentiality of risks, understood as its collateral damages. “The concept of progress has to be based on the idea of catastrophe.”

But the fact that things are still going on this way is precisely the catastrophe. It is not what could await us, but indeed what already happened”, as he wrote in his text On The Concept of History a few months before his death, nineteen theses which could be considered as his philosophical testament (3). In it, the allegorical figure of the Angel of history, inspired by the Angelus Novus of Paul Klee, has got caught his wings in a storm that propels him irresistibly into a future which he nevertheless refuses, this storm being the principle of progress. The accumulation of ruins (Trümmer auf Trümmer), forming the landscape in which the angel is being forced to evolve, evokes the ineluctable obsolescence threatening all material creations of modernity: under such conditions, the “state of emergency” usually declared in exceptional cases of catastrophes, represents in Benjamin’s catastrophism the rule, and not the exception.

His theses On the Concept of History, written in the hectic runup to the Second World War, were a critique of conservative historicism, positivism and evolutionism, three very modern trends of thought which he identified as being common to the pressing dangers of fascism and Stalinism, but also to social democracy. During more than a decade before dying in Port-Bou, Benjamin spent most of his time in exile in the rooms of the Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, where he could collect materials in order to write his “prehistory of modernity” (Urgeschichte der Moderne), set in the context of the French nineteenth-century.

The Arcades Project, through the use of “dialectical images” assembled in a montage at a standstill, through constellations of voices coming from the past, represents an attempt to write a counter-history of nineteenth-century’s Parisian life. Thought as a chronicle from below, it refuses to celebrate the triumphant continuum of progress: Parisian arcades and gas lightings, Haussmanian boulevards and crinolines, railroads and locomotives, portrait paintings and photographies, panoramas and universal exhibitions, form altogether a landscape of ruins to be explored by critical posterity

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. (…) The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.” – On the Concept of History, These VIII, 1940

Dealing with uncertainty regarding the future is as much a collective as an individual burden. After all, as Nick Bostrom argues, “the future of humanity comprises everything that will ever happen to any human being, including what one will have for breakfast next Thursday and all the scientific discoveries that will be made next year” (1). As we have chosen to think of Benjamin’s Theses of 1940 as a methodological introduction to his Arcades Project, this forces us to begin our analysis with the end, Benjamin’s end, as the starting point of a genealogy of catastrophe. Could Benjamin have foreseen what awaited him in Port-Bou?

After the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939, which beyond the symbolic shock of seeing communism joining the ranks of fascism, changed drastically the situation of refugees in France, he already had to endure a traumatizing internment of three months in the Nevers Camp and wrote in a letter to Horkheimer: “the future prepares for sure even worse events for us”.

With the instauration of the Vichy Regime in July 1940, Benjamin had to flee towards the South of France, like millions of other refugees. He would undertake an exhausting two-days long crossing of the Pyrenees. Benjamin was a heavy smoker and had a heart condition – together with a little group of travelers guided by Lisa Fittko. After having reached the promised border, he would finally realize that the Franquist authorities would not let them pursue their path, for him towards Lisbon, and finally America. As Taussig notes, “refugees carried vials of poison in their vest pockets, just in case (…) and Arthur Koestler claims he was given large amounts of morphine by Benjamin in Marseille, just in case”, amounts that were surely “enough to kill a horse” (307).

Benjamin had never been a “débrouillard”, as Lisa Fittko wrote later, singling out “his lack of adaptability, a euphemism with her for a variety of incompetence that, it so appears, was all too common among these refugee intellectuals, lacking what today we call survival skills or street smarts. (…) But of course the practicalities of suicide were not beyond reach – as if the lack of adaptability had a certain ethical principle behind which was, precisely, not to adapt” (12). During his crossing of the Pyrenees, Benjamin had refused to get rid of a heavy black suitcase which was slowing the progression of the group

We can’t resist here to quote the words of Lisa Fittko, as quoted in Taussig:

The apocalyptic atmosphere in Marseille in 1940 produced its daily absurd story of attempted escape : plans around fantasy boats and fable captains, visas for countries unknown to Atlas, and passports from countries that had ceased to exist. One had become accustomed to learning through the Daily Grapevine which foolproof plan had suffered today the fate of a House of Cards. We still were able to laugh – we had to laugh – at the comic side of some of these tragedies. The laughter was irresistible when Dr. Fritz Fraenkel, with frail body and gray mane, and his friend Walter Benjamin, with his sensitive scholar’s head and pensive eyes behind thick glasses, were, through bribery, smuggled on a freighter, dressed up as French sailors. They didn’t get very far, towards Spain: some say he was carrying an important manuscript with him, which he didn’t want to leave to the nazis; this was perhaps a revised version of the Theses on the philosophy of history together with a final version of the Arcades Project. When Rolf Tiedemann tried to find it again years later, it had disappeared. (9).

The Angel of History

A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. 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 and hurls 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The 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. – Walter Benjamin, On The Concept of History, These IX, 1940

The first reference to the document of the nineteen theses appears in a letter to Horkheimer dated from the 22th of February 1940, originally written in French: Benjamin claims in it that he wishes to “establish an irremediable scission between our way to look at things and the legacies of positivism”, which haunt even to the historical conceptions of the left (29). In the words of Victor Serge (1939), it was “Midnight in the century” when Benjamin undertook this work; in his last letters to Gretel Adorno, who was already in New-York with her husband, he writes: “war and the constellation which it has formed have conducted me to lay down on paper thoughts, of which I could say that I keep them on me – and even in me – since approximately twenty years.” (30).

Twenty years earlier, he had made the acquisition in Munich of Paul Klee’s painting which exerted on him a deep fascination; he certainly had the time to contemplate it on the walls of his Berliner bedroom during a few years, but in exile from the beginning of the 1930’s, he had decided to leave the Angelus Novus to Gershom Scholem, who settled later in Jerusalem, where the painting stayed since then. The symbolic interpretation made of the Angel by Benjamin is certainly very personal and quite arbitrary, but it can be used as an entrance door to his philosophy of history.



“But a storm is blowing in from Paradise”: if the allegory of the storm was also used by Hegel in his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte as “the tumult of world events blowing in the present”, Benjamin pursued an implicit confrontation with the Hegelian philosophy of history, a rationalist theodicy legitimating each “ruin” and each historical faux-pas as the necessary step on the necessary and triumphal progression of Reason and as the realization of the Progress of humanity towards the consciousness of liberty.

This linearity and necessity in the modern conception of history has left in Benjamin’s perspective its legacy in a denominator common to the most “vulgar” form of Marxism, to social-democratic evolutionism and of course traditional historicism. Adorno and Horkheimer also made a use of the angelic allegory in their Dialectik der Aufklärung, evoking thereby the expulsion from the Garden of Eden: “the angel which has hunted humanity from paradise towards the path of technical progress, is itself the sensible image of this progress”.

But what would be this profane equivalent of a lost paradise which progress, in its irresistible progression, keeps keeping away from us? It could be read as the old topic of primitive classless societies, in continuity with Rousseau’s Bon Sauvage: in an article on Bachofen’s Mutterrecht (1861) published in 1935, Benjamin celebrated the imaginary of ancient matriarchal communities, understood as “communist societies at the dawn of history”, thought as profoundly egalitarian and peaceful, and combining themselves with new realities in order to give birth to utopia (82).

In his Theorien des deutschen Faschismus , Benjamin had on the contrary already described his representation of Hell: years before the rise of nazism and the engagement of final solution, he announced that “millions of human bodies would certainly be torn to bits and eaten up by gas and iron” in a foreseeable future. In order not to emphasize too much his prophetic abilities, we have here to recall that Benjamin belonged to a generation which had made a sensible experience of the First World War.

In this event, an intimate relationship was built between technical progress and exaltation of warfare, rendering hereby the discrepancy between the potentialities of technical innovation on the one hand and the state of “moral elucidation” that should accompany it on the other hand, more obvious (267). Klee himself had suffered in his flesh from the insanities of the First War, and took in the 1920’s the habit to paint caricatures of the Emperor Wilhelm II as commander in chief of the German armies, under the traits of a monstrous “Eisenfresser”. For the same reasons, Benjamin would write in his theses of 1940 that “there is not a document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”.

If the total administration of camp systems, followed by the industrial extermination of Jews and Gypsies in death “factories” would only be fully engaged one year after his death, Benjamin had already sensed that nazism would perform a new perverse alliance between the love of technique and modern barbarism. The personal experience of antisemitism had of course formed in him an acute sense of danger. In August 1933, just after the beginning of the national-socialist dictature, he mentioned for the first time the Angelus Novus in an autobiographical text named Angesilaus Santander, in which he reflects on the secret non-Jewish names given to him by his parents, in case he would become a writer . Seven years later, he would write in his theses: “one reason why fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical”.

Against the social-democratic thought making of fascism an anachronical and pre-modern vestige of the past, like in the writings of Karl Kautsky, explaining in the 1920’s that fascism was after all only possible in an agrarian country like Italy, but certainly not viable in a modern and industrialized nation like Germany, Benjamin wishes to recall on the contrary the intimate relationship entertained by it with industrial capitalism, and therefore its very modern character, criticizing hereby the illusion of those blinded by the idea that scientific and technical progress would be incompatible with political and social barbarism.

At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldliness from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.

In his tenth thesis, Benjamin wishes to settle accounts with communism in its Stalinist version, referring implicitly to the traumatizing event of the Hitler-Stalin pact, which had sounded the death knell of the hope of a consequent opposition to Hitlerian fascism. Like Adorno, Benjamin had embraced quite late Marxist theories through the reading of Lukacs’ Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein (1923), but before the vast majority of the left intellectuals of the period, he had already identified the tendencies making of Stalinism a dead end, problems which were to be acknowledged decades later: the illusory promises of the left, interwoven with a blind faith in the infinity of progress, would have neutralized the real capacities of thought and action of the people, in submitting them to a bureaucratic apparatus and the fetishism of the party as an end in itself.

But social democracy was in Benjamin’s perspective only another false alternative to the deadly duo of Nazism and Stalinism In his eleventh thesis, he asserts that “the conformism which has been part and parcel of social democracy from the beginning, attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. Nothing has corrupted the German working-class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old protestant ethics of work was resurrected among German workers in a secularized form”.

Beyond the denunciation of the conformist progressism of social democracy through fragments of the discourse of Josef Dietzgen in his Religion der Sozialdemokratie (1906) – “every day, our cause becomes clearer and the people get smarter” – Benjamin criticizes here the sanctified productivism defining, in the words of the Gotha program of 1875, labor “as the source of all wealth and of all culture”. His further denunciation of the effects which this ideology and its practice have on “Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, would exist gratis” as raw material for the progress of humanity, and its identification as “a complement to the corrupted conception of labor” could appear avant-gardist.

At a time when environmental preoccupations were far from being a priority, Benjamin made a radical critique of both capitalist exploitation of nature and its continuity in the positivist and technocratic ideology of both “vulgar” Marxism and social-democracy. In echo with Marx’s Critique of the Gotha program, Benjamin wishes to recall the intuition of the first socialist utopias – before the failure of 1848’s revolutions and the triumphal ascension of capitalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, which at the time did not oppose the exploitation of labor forces to the exploitation of nature.

He wrote that “the new conception of labor amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naive complacency is being contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound”. Benjamin’s fascination for Fourierist utopia and the indeed non- productivist system of Phalansteries can be viewed in parallel with his sympathy for Bachofen’s fantasized Matriarchy, in the Rousseauist romantic ideal of the reconciliation of Man with a Mother Nature which had been declared as an enemy to be, in Cartesian terms, “mastered and possessed” by positivist modernity.

The Doll and the Automaton