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Denkbilder.

 

Denkbilder or thought-images were a writing form utilised by members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Probably the most famous denkbild being Walter Benjamins “Angel of History” from section IX of Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is an image in words, but an image that cannot be rationally explained despite the proliferation of different interpretations.

‘A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows as 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 towards 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. This 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. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 249.

One night, haunted by this passage and the sense that something about it was just out of reach, the question of its meaning was addressed directly to Benjamin. A direct question to the departed, in the manner of asking before sleeping and having an answer on waking. Instead, the answer was immediate and frightening. A wind blew up which shook the house, the tiles rattled as though they were about to lift off the roof, panic set in, then it was gone as suddenly as it had arisen.

Professor Gerhard Richter accurately sums up the haunting nature of Benjamin’s writing and the fascination it holds,

‘… his texts strangely resist assimilation. They work to withdraw from straightforward meaning and transparent expression. The enigmatic truths that they offer must always be sought elsewhere, in a space that his texts perpetually cross and delimit but never fully inhabit… his concepts are most themselves when they are changing into something else, when their logic can no longer be accounted for by what the texts in which they are embedded seem to be arguing. One can never fully grasp his concepts and sentences, which return to haunt once we turn our back on them. In short, they are ghostly.’

Gerhard Richter. ‘Introduction: Benjamin’s Ghosts,’ in Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory, (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2002), p.3.

 

Hannah Arendt in her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations points out that Benjamin’s thinking was metaphorical. Concepts are transformed into metaphors,

‘provided that ‘metaphor’ is understood in its original, nonallegorical sense of metapherein (to transfer).’ Arendt suggests, ‘… a metaphor establishes a connection which is sensuously perceived in its immediacy and requires no interpretation…’

Hannah Arendt. ‘Introduction,’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn, (London: Pimlico, 1999), p. 19

 

That which was transferred could have been unconscious contents that manifested in the outer world. In Psychology and Alchemy Jung suggests,

‘The psychologist will find nothing strange in a figure of speech becoming concretised and turning into a hallucination.’

Jung, C.G. Psychology and Alchemy, trans. R.F.C. Hull, (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 251.

 

Haunting or unconscious contents I cannot say for sure. All I know is that I will never ask the departed a direct question ever again.

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