Walter Benjamin and New Angel...Paul Klee@140

#PaulKlee140

 

Artist: Paul Klee

Walter Benjamin:

"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 upon 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 from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such 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."

Raymond Biesingers, The Baffler:

"....By the mid-nineteenth century, faith in progress was already so ubiquitous as to be largely invisible to its adherents, whether they counted themselves revolutionaries or traditionalists and whether they lived in Europe itself, in the rapidly expanding settlements in the Americas and Australia, or in colonial outposts in Africa and Asia. To question it with any seriousness was to marginalize yourself as a crank, a heretic, or a fool. In the European imagination—which increasingly operated in racial terms, understanding itself as white—progress defined the world..."

...आणि १९व्या शतकातील महाराष्ट्रातील सुद्धा तेच चालेले होते... सगळ्यांनी "प्रगती"चा नुसता धोशा लावला होता.. पेशवे गेले म्हणजे प्रगती झाली... हा विचार सुद्धा नाही की शिवाजीमहाराजांच्या आधीचा किंवा नंतरचा महाराष्ट्रातील इतिहास पुन्हा वेगळ्या स्वरूपात , पुढील काळात परत येऊ शकतो... उदाहरणार्थ: 'नवकोट नाना' १८व्या शतकाच्या शेवटी गेले पण २०-२१ व्या शतकात सर्व जातीत नाना निर्माण होऊ शकतात.... (आणि तसे झाले!)

वॉल्टर बेंजामिन सुद्धा प्रगतीला भुलले नाहीत आणि काही काळा पुरती  प्रगती नाही म्हणजे काही निराशेच्या खाईत पडायची गरज नाही ...  For Walter Benjamin at least, refusing to be blinded by the false promises of progress did not mean that hope was lost....