Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 37.

2
September 2011: 3-6
 

Foreword:
Wings of Patience

Chun-yen Chen

The new does not lie in what is said, but in the

event of its return.
—Michel Foucault
L’Ordre du discourse (my translation)

The essence of a thing never appears at the

outset, but in the middle, in the course of its
development, when its strength is assured.
Having transformed philosophy by posing the
question of the “new” instead of that of
eternity (how are the production and
appearance of something new possible?),
Bergson knew this better than anyone.
—Gilles Deleuze
Cinema 1: The Movement-Image

I.

An inquiry about newness can easily come across as one about modernity, and
hence as banal. Our concern with modernity has never seemed to cease, primarily if
not solely because of the connection of modernity with capitalism: so long as
capitalism stays, the problem of modernity is with us. Whether globalization is
regarded as the newest—and the last—version of modernity or as a radical break
with it, the good and ill of things contemporary are more often than not taken to be
the effects of modernity.
There is, to be sure, validity to such a sustained interest in modernity. Yet the
issue of newness need not be confined to that of modernity alone. Newness is also
about creation, about metamorphosis, about our curiosity as to how “the production
and appearance of something new [are] possible” (Deleuze 3). Admittedly,
modernity broadly defined can translate as an impulse for the new; at the end of the
day, however, “the modern” evokes some sort of periodization or generation
differences. A rare exception is perhaps Paul de Man’s attempt to configure “literary
4 Concentric 37.2 September 2011

modernity.” Although eventually he sticks to the same term, the thrust of

“modernity” for him lies in its being not only a temporal but also an ontological
concept; hence his attentiveness to Nietzsche’s proposition of “life” (de Man
142-65).
Part of what we have hoped to see engaged through the theme “Angel of
Newness” is exactly this ontological dimension of “concepts that are in essence
temporal” (de Man 144).

II.

Much has been said about Walter Benjamin’s interpretation of Paul Klee’s
Angelus Novus. Of the more recent renderings, Giorgio Agamben’s and Samuel
Weber’s both discuss the New Angel alongside some other angelic figures. For
Agamben, this other figure is the pensive angel in Albrecht Dürer’s 1514 engraving
Melencolia I, which Agamben suggests represents the angel of art. His argument is
that, by reading Klee’s New Angel as the angel of history incapable of withstanding
the storm of progress, Benjamin is pointing to the forever lost transmissibility of
tradition, to the discontinuity between the past and the present. Our salvation,
Agamben contends, rests in art. Art can help settle the tension between the old and
the new not by restoring a usable past, but by materializing the very
intransmissibility of the past. In other words, what art transmits is precisely the
impossibility of transmission. If Dürer’s angel is melancholy, it is because he has
chosen knowledge over truth and is willing to suffer his own isolation (Agamben
107-12). “[A]rt succeeds . . . in transforming man’s inability to exit his historical
status, perennially suspended in the inter-world between old and new, past and
future, into the very space in which he can take the original measure of his dwelling
in the present and recover each time the meaning of his action” (114).
The key term here is “each time”: now that truth is unavailable, we strive to
gain knowledge over and over again in our action, and in our aesthetic practice.
Creation of the new in the act of repetition.
Weber, too, has noted the knowledge-truth distinction that Benjamin takes
pains to make, and the Saturnian message in some of Benjamin’s writings. In the
chapter “Song and Glance” in his recent book, whose complexity I can in no way
reproduce here, Weber advances an original reading of “Agesilaus Santander,” the
text in which Benjamin alludes to the New Angel picture in his possession. The title
of the text invites speculation, to begin with: “Agesilaus” is the name of a Spartan
king whereas “Santander” refers to a town in northern Spain; neither is referred to
 Chun-yen Chen 5

explicitly in the text itself. Taking his cue from Gershom Scholem, who has
famously read “Agesilaus Santander” as an anagram of “Der Angelus Satanas” (The
Angel Satan), Weber draws our attention to the centrality of the Satan figure in
Benjamin’s theory of baroque allegory: Satan the tempter of man is also the one
initiating man into knowledge (Weber 211-21). Weber then furthers the discussion
by turning to other celestial beings mentioned in “Agesilaus Santander”: in addition
to the New Angel, there is his female counterpart out on a mission to take revenge
on Benjamin—or, rather, the Benjamin persona—for having disturbed the Angel’s
work; there are also those “new angels,” countless in number, that God in the
Kabbalistic tradition creates at every instant (Weber 221-23).
While a lot of these angel references in “Agesilaus Santander” remain obscure
(even the allusion to Klee’s watercolor is suggestive of allegory), Weber comes to
suggest that the Benjamin persona’s response to the interruption of the angel’s
work—that is, to catastrophe—amounts to the “weak messianic power” that
Benjamin has proposed elsewhere (Weber 225). Weak messianism is the answer to a
world that witnesses the stark conflict between knowledge and truth. If allegory is
in order, if Satan takes center stage, and if melancholia is inevitable, Weber reminds
us, it is because the allegorical “intention” is all about “the pure curiosity which is
aimed at mere knowledge with the proud isolation of man” (Benjamin, Origin 229;
qtd. in Weber 216).
In “Agesilaus Santander,” the motif of weak messianism crystallizes in what
the Benjamin persona calls “patience,” and this patience is presented as yet another
winged creature:

Perhaps he [the Angel] did not realize that he thereby mobilized the
strength of the one against whom he moved. For my patience yields
to nothing. It beats [its wings] in a way not unlike the Angel’s, since
very few strokes are required to render it unmovable in face of the
one it has decided to await. It, however, with claws like the Angel’s
and beating wings sharp as knives, gives no sign of pouncing upon
the one it has in its sights. (qtd. in Weber 223; Weber’s translation)1

By beating its wings, Benjamin’s patience seeks not to confront its antagonist
head on, but to stay “unmovable.” As Weber puts it astutely, the mission of such
patience is to “mark time,” to “mak[e] ‘interruption’ into the possibility of salvation,

1
There are two versions of “Agesilaus Santander”; Weber is here citing the first one. For the
different versions, see Benjamin, Selected Writings 712-16.
6 Concentric 37.2 September 2011

however slim” (224, 225). In times of catastrophe, the mere act of marking time is
ennobling enough.
Benjamin has certainly offered trajectories other than melancholia.
Nonetheless, this figure of the wings of (Benjamin’s) patience, I want to suggest,
can serve as a timely reminder that inquiries about newness, if taken anew, can open
up conversations much broader than those centered on the usual suspects in
modernity scholarship.
And who says melancholia can’t be an auspicious message?

Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. The Man without Content. Trans. Georgia Albert. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne.
London: NLB, 1977. London: Verso, 1985.
—. Selected Writings: Volume 2, 1927-1934. Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard
Eiland, and Gary Smith. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Cambridge, MA:
Belknap-Harvard UP, 1999.
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
de Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary
Criticism. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Weber, Samuel. Benjamin’s -abilities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2008.