Thoughtsteam

20th April 2013

Quote with 3 notes

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.

— Walter Benjamin on “Angelus Novelus”
IX Theses on the Philosophy of History

Tagged: walterbenjaminhistorycritical theorypoetrysocial justiceinspiration

8th March 2013

Quote reblogged from Misplaced Efforts with 14 notes

Foucault would, undoubtedly, have been wryly skeptical about the growth of ‘Foucault studies’ and the related attempt to discipline his thought and turn it into an orthodoxy. The texts collected here certainly do not invite this kind of treatment: they set out to open things up, not close them down; to complicate, not simplify; not to police the boundaries of an oeuvre but to multiply lines of investigation and possibilities for thought. They are not aspects of a single project, but fragmentary - experiments, interventions, provocations and reflections. Foucault, in these explorations, is constantly asking himself questions about the nature and implications of his work: what I have been doing, where am I going, where have I been, where are ‘we’ today, who is the ‘we’ of whom I write, who might be a future ‘we’, what might be the role of thought or the work of writing and thinking in clarifying and transforming who we are?

Source: shrinkrants