“There came the Angel of Death…”1
The End of the World has always been the paradigm through which history operates. Its always-having-been is a result of its very nature. The moment it was posited, it colonized history itself. There never was a pre-eschatonic world. In this paradigm, The End has been granted an absoluteness—a divinity—like nothing else. It is the sovereign of history. This ‘god’ faces both the past and the future, manifesting both as prophet and angel; as redeemer and creator. The former, although a product of the latter, comes to yield the conditions for the latter’s creativity. Such is the problem of the logic of history: it can only be thought if one includes an immanent moment of retroactivity. The past engenders the future and vice versa. As the End of the World, through these figures, is sublimated and contained, it takes on different forms: notably the Church and the State. The Modern, however, breaks its container and yields immediate extinction. One is now forced to think the impossibility of their own impossibility. Apocalypse has assumed a novel reality. Messianic history cannot be read except within the framing of an imminent end to itself. We live in the longue durée of the Now in which nothing happens except the impossible: extinctive closure.
The Messiah, if profane, cannot have been sacrificed on the Cross, for sacrifice renders its victim sacred. The Messiah cannot be anything but worldly. This base god must have usurped God’s transcendent throne. In William Stanley Merwin’s 1967 poem, “For a Coming Extinction”, he writes:
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing[...]2
This poem is addressed to us only insofar as we are going extinct. The very first line may remind one of the Biblical ‘great fish’ which was prepared by God to swallow Jonah. In Verse 90 of Beha'alot'cha in the Zohar, it is written that Jonah’s three-day exile into the sea was, in fact, a mystical and immediate experience of the Torah (or the sea thereof). In the stomach of the great fish, Jonah comes to a personal gnosis and abandons his effort to escape God’s will. In Merwin’s poem, we are Jonah. We are trapped in the bleeding stomach of that Gray whale, forced to acknowledge “[t]hat great god”: “The End”. What does it mean that The End is our god? Who is The End?
In his Nudities, Agamben begins by positing ‘the angel’ and ‘the prophet’. These two figures are differentiated by their works; by their praxis. The former mediates creation and the latter mediates salvation. Akin to Janus, the former looks forward (osteoblastic) and the latter looks backward (osteoclastic). Contrary to what one may think, however, it is salvation that precedes creation. Agamben writes: “what will save the world is not the spiritual, angelic power [...], with which humans produce their works [...], but a more humble and corporeal power, which humans have insofar as they are created being.”3 Both the angel and the prophet proceed from God and are, consequently, moments of creation, or creatures. Despite this, the act of saving is a pre-creative act bestowed upon a creature: the prophet. The saving of the world, according to Agamben, is an act of recursivity—not of futurity. The prophet, in a sense, really precedes creation. Creation is retroactively overdetermined by the prophet. It is only with its embodiment in the prophet that creation can posit itself.
If ‘The End’ is our god, what does this mean for the angel and the prophet? In Walter Benjamin’s excessively-cited “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, he articulates what he dubs ‘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.4
Two critical points emerge: 1) the angel faces backward, and 2) the angel desires the salvation of the World. These two points, when placed within Agamben’s framework, render the angel of history a prophet. Agamben, in his exposition, writes: “The crying angel turns itself into a prophet[…]”5 Benjamin’s angelus novus looks back at the past and weeps. The angel of history is faced toward the future until, due to some event, he turns around only to find that he has left behind a terrible trail of corpses. Bruno Latour writes:
[C]ontrary to Benjamin’s interpretation, the Modern who, like the angel, is flying backward is actually not seeing the destruction; He is generating it in his flight since it occurs behind His back! It is only recently, by a sudden conversion, a metanoia of sorts, that He has suddenly realized how much catastrophe His development has left behind him. The ecological crisis is nothing but the sudden turning around of someone who had actually never before looked into the future, so busy was He extricating Himself from a horrible past.6
The Modern in this instance, unbeknownst to Latour, is not at odds with Benjamin’s angel. The Modern, here, appears to fulfill an identical angelic-prophetic role. Both are quintessentially extinctive. As angels, they both mediate creation in an act of unknown, totalizing destruction. This act is unknown precisely because they are facing forward. It is important to remember, however, that the angel and the prophet are two faces of God, and that, simultaneously, that angel which is also a prophet in its exorbitant grief is constantly lamenting what has become of his world (as he unknowingly continues its destruction). Salvation, or the hopeless desire for salvation, precedes creation; the horror of the past precedes the poietic destruction of the future. This does not mean that the past generally informs the future in the sense of historia magistra vitae—a sentiment held by many, including Montaigne and Bodin—but that the past, posited by the future, ‘retroactively’ grounds the future and the creative act from which the past proceeds.
Here, then, we have a model that comes to form a strange spiral. The future engenders the past which then engenders the future so that the past can be posited in the first place. First, we must investigate how the future articulates the past. Reinhart Koselleck quotes Johann Georg Hamann: “Can one recognize that which is past if one does not even understand that which is present? And who can conceptually appraise what the present is without knowing what is to come in the future? What is to come determines the present, and this determines what is past.”7 In other words, we can only posit the past-qua-past once it has occurred. Here, one may think of Hegel’s proposition: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational.”8 This is often cited as a moment of unidirectional teleology in his thought, especially when he uses this framework to assert the end of history:
A new epoch has arisen in the world. It would appear as if the World-spirit had at last succeeded in stripping off from itself all alien objective existence, and apprehending itself at last as absolute Spirit[...] The strife of the finite self-consciousness with the absolute self-consciousness [...] now comes to an end[...] This is the whole history of the world in general up to the present time, and the history of Philosophy in particular, the sole work of which is to depict this strife. Now, indeed, it seems to have reached its goal, when this absolute self-consciousness, which it had the work of representing, has ceased to be alien, and when spirit accordingly is realized as spirit. For it becomes such only as the result of its knowing itself to be absolute spirit, and this it knows in real scientific knowledge[...] This then is the standpoint of the present day, and the series of spiritual forms is with it for the present concluded.9
History seems to have reached its goal. While it might seem an absurd statement, Hegel is entirely correct in declaring the end of history. Because the rational is the actual and the actual is the rational, all critique—including historical critique—is a retroactive positing of that which has happened. Nothing can be posited until it has concluded. One cannot think that which does not appear for thought. Consequently, it is inconceivable to think the past except through the eyes of the present. This, of course, yields a paradox. How can we posit the present if we do not yet know the future? The answer, according to Koselleck, is simple: “one must foresee the future”10 by “[p]lanning and optimization”11; by prognosis. Foresight of the future, however, is contingent on the future’s being posited by the past. It might seem odd to state that the past retroactively determines the future, but this retroactivity is not temporal. It is, rather, logical-genetic. The horror of the past, as the realm of the prophet which has been created by the destructive future simultaneously comes to precede this futurity by the future’s embodiment in the past. The entirety of the future is contained, immanently, within the past. The desire for redemption (the actual) manifests as the potential for the future’s destructive onslaught (the virtual).
The angel and prophet of extinction are symptoms of The End, but The End has been continually postponed by its sublimation in these two figures. First in the sacred Ecclesia, and then in the secular Rechtstaat. Koselleck writes: “Until well into the sixteenth century, the history of Christianity is a history of expectations, or more exactly, the constant anticipation of the End of the World on the one hand and the continual deferment of the End on the other.”12 Further: “The Church integrates the future as the possible End of the World within its organization of time[...] The end of time can be experienced only because it is always already sublimated in the Church. The history of the Church remains the history of salvation so long as this condition held.”13 The End of the World, as long as it had been sublimated in the Church, was perpetually in the future, figuring as a historical impossibility, or what Slavoj Žižek terms the Real, “the ‘absolute’ of a given historical constellation, its fixed impossibility or point of reference.”14 The past, at this time, was cognized through the present, and the present was cognized through the ‘End of the World’ which functioned as the absolute of history—as ‘that great god’, to recall Merwin’s poem. The End was endlessly held off by the katechon, and yet history remained oriented toward The End. While Apocalypse was sublimated in the Church, history appeared univocally angelic—looking ahead without remorse, “destroy[ing] time through its fixation on the End.”15 It leaves behind nothing but wreckage. After 1555, however—after the Stände—“peace and religious duty were no longer identical[...]”16 “Heresy no longer existed within religion; it was founded in the state.”17
The State is first and foremost distinguished by the independence of its head—the sovereign. Karl Ludwig von Haller elucidates this point in his Restauration der Staatswissenschaft:
[The] natural and necessary chain of subordination, which we encounter the world over, by necessity must cease at some individual who is completely free, and has no superior other than God. And wherever this free or independent man is found, there the social network is perfect or crowned; the State (the self-sucient and self-contained entity), is achieved; sovereign power results, not by external delegation, but the very nature of things. The ancients also said, with very good reason, that in this sense States, as well as all other social relations, are the work of God and not men.18
An issue in this description, however, is found in its depiction of the sovereign’s relationship with God. Schmitt, in contrast, argues: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts[...] [F]or Example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver…”19 The state is thoroughly secularized, but in its secularism, it necessarily maintains a relationship with religion insofar as it is religion-qua-secularism. Although the container for The End has broken from its immediate theological underpinnings, it remains determined by them all the same. Religious wars turned into wars between political states, but these states were nonetheless religious. Still, The End became a secular convention: “The End of the World became a datum within the cosmos, and eschatology was forced into a specially prepared natural history.”20 History was divided into providential history and natural (human) history. “The state enforced a monopoly on the future by suppressing apocalyptic and astrological reading of the future.”21 The State—the photo-negative image of the Church—reshaped history and stripped it of its angelicism, thus turning its gaze toward the past and the salvation thereof.
Natural history, as exemplified by the State, is a process of ‘demythification’. “Nature provide[s] the key for exposing the nonidentity between the concept of history (as a regulative idea) and historical reality, just as history provide[s] the key for demythifying nature.”22 The State’s mediation of the End of the World via a decentering of the future distinguishes the subjectivity of history (its concept) from its corresponding objectivity (its reality). In the context of the State, providential history is usurped by natural history—a movement that complicates and demythifies our idea of history insofar as it is shown to be fungible. In the decentering of the future, prophecy was displaced by prognosis, but ironically, this prognosis was a strengthening of prophetic history because of its orientation toward the past. In fact, prophecy was strengthened to such an extent that it veered into a creative angelicism: “Prognosis produces the time within which and out of which it weaves[...]”23 Here we can observe the redeeming prophet yielding the creative angel. How did secular-prophetic history ground the present? Because “the future cannot be observed or checked”24 it had to ground itself in a prognostic utopia. Koselleck argues: “Planning and optimization bind the present to the future. [...] With perfectibility, with the capability of becoming perfect, the goal is completely temporalized and incorporated into the human agents themselves, without an end point.”25 Utopia is an “anti-apocalypse”26 of optimized outcomes rather than a foreshadowed telos.
Recounting Latour’s concept of the Modern, however, the distinction between the angel and the prophet appears to be canceled without remainder. We are not, as in the case of ecclesiastical-angelic history, grounded in and through the future; nor are we, as in the case of secular-prophetic history, grounded in and through the past. The Modern is fundamentally groundless, and this is because the End of the World is no longer mediated. What grounds us is now immediate. Christian Eschaton and secular Utopia were conceivable vantage points from which to view the present, but both have disintegrated. The present now creates itself—as an angel—and simultaneously yields the possibility of its creation—as a prophet. Fredric Jameson writes:
It is this vital energy of the present and its violent self-creation that not only overcomes the stagnant melancholies of the epigones, it also assigns a mission to a temporal and historical period which ought not yet have the right to be one. For the present is not yet a historical period: it ought not to be able to name itself and characterize its own originality. Yet it is precisely this unauthorized self-affirmation that will finally shape that new thing we call actuality, and for various forms of which our contemporary usage of modern and modernity are made to stand. 27
It is not merely that the Modern refuses the future—it posits an absolute nonfuture. Because it does not posit the future, that which lies beyond the Modern is extinction—or the absolute, impossible exclusion of us. Extinction is the unmediated End of the World. It has leaked out of the State and has been injected into everything historical. We are no longer waiting for a distant End, nor are we perfecting the world toward Utopia. As the angel of history is propelled forward, we are literally living extinction, and moreover, we are approaching extinctive closure: the extinction of the thought which thinks the unthinkability of extinction. Extinctive closure is impossible to cognize, and yet it is the nonfuture through which we must posit ourselves. Yet when we look into this nonfuture nothing gazes back. From this only one thing can be concluded: we are already extinct.
Heinrich Guggenheimer, The Scholar’s Haggadah (Lanham: Jason Aronson, 1998), 146. Emphasis added.
W.S. Merwin, The Lice (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967), 68.
Giorgio Agamben, Nudities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 5.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), 257.
Agamben, op. cit., 8.
Bruno Latour, “An Attempt at a ‘Compositionist Manifesto’”, in New Literary History, Volume 41, Number 4 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2010), 485-486. Cited in Tom Cohen, “The Angel and the Storm”, in Material Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 131.
Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 131.
G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 10.
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on The History of Philosophy: Volume III (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1955), 551-552.
Koselleck, op. cit., 133.
Ibid., 89.
Koselleck, Futures Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 11.
Ibid., 13.
Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil (London: Verso, 2014), 103.
Koselleck, op. cit., 19.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid.
Karl Ludwig von Haller, Restoration of Political Science, Volume 1 (Imperium Press, 2023), chapter xvi.
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 36. Cited in Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 81.
Koselleck, op. cit., 15. Emphasis mine.
Ibid., 16.
Susan Buck-Morrs, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 49.
Koselleck, op. cit., 19.
Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 87.
Ibid., 89.
Ibid., 91.
Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity, (London: Verso, 2012), 25.