Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920)

‘Angels of History’ completes the History & Textuality module with three major readings, each of which addresses issues and concepts that have arisen in earlier parts of the course. They also highlight some of the major themes in the novels we have read on this course, particularly the questions we've discussed about how history is made and re-made, and who has access to it; how novels might go beyond the history produced by professional historians; and whether some histories might deserve to be forgotten, or even destroyed.

 

Week 22: Angels of History I

Reading:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, 'On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life', in Untimely Meditations (1874, 67pp.)

Suggested (additional) reading:

• Charles R. Bambach, ‘History and Ontology: A Reading of Nietzsche’s Second “Untimely Meditation,”’ Philosophy Today 34:3 (1990, 14 pp.)
• Vanessa Lemm, “Animality, Creativity and Historicity: A Reading of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Vom Nutzen Und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben,” Nietzsche-Studien 36:1 (2007, 31 pp.)
• Jenkins, Scott, ‘Nietzsche’s Use of Monumental History’. The Journal of Nietzsche Studies 45, 2 (2014): 169-181Link opens in a new window
• Jensen, Anthony K., Nietzsche’s Philosophy of History. Cambridge: CUP, 2013. (Ch. 4)Link opens in a new window
• Brobjer, Thomas H., ‘Nietzsche's View of the Value of Historical Studies and Methods’. Journal of the History of Ideas 65, 2 (2004): 301–322Link opens in a new window
• Brobjer, Thomas H., ‘Nietzsche's Relation to Historical Methods and Nineteenth-Century German Historiography’. History and Theory 46 (2007): 155–179Link opens in a new window
• Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil (London, 2019) - and this critical review in the London Review of Books

The final reading for the module is Friedrich Nietzsche’s celebrated essay ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’, first published in 1874 at an early stage in Nietzsche’s extraordinary philosophical development. His essay opens with a consideration of memory and forgetting, and of the role that memory plays in distinguishing the human from the non-human – all themes that we’ve previously encountered. At the heart of the essay are three different modes of history, the ‘monumental’, the ‘antiquarian’, and the ‘critical’ – each of which, Nietzsche claims, has ‘uses and disadvantages for life’ that prompt us to consider the relationship to the past in which we are placed by our own reading and writing of history.

 

Week 23: Angels of History II

Reading:

• Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History', in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4 1938-1940 (1940, 12pp.)

The title of this unit comes from a painting by Paul Klee that was owned by the German writer Walter Benjamin, whose profound and enigmatic essay ‘On the Concept of History’ discusses Klee’s Angelus Novus as a representation of history and of the historical enterprise. Composed in the shadow of the Nazi occupation of Europe, Benjamin’s theses on history warn us against consigning the past to the past, calling instead for an idiosyncratic form of historical materialism that might have the capacity to save us—and the past itself—from becoming ‘a tool of the ruling class’. Understanding history in this way, Benjamin suggests, is a potentially redemptive practice.