The Gender of the Angel

The Gender of the Angel THE GENDER OF THE ANGEL by Jonathan Boyarin Jonathan Boyarin is an independent scholar trained in anthropology. His work centers on the relation between Jewishness and Western discipline. He is currently attending Yale Law School. 125 Mein Fluge1 ist zum Schwung bereit ich kehne gem zuriick denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit ich hane wenig Gluck (My wing is ready for flight, I would like to tum back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck.)l Well, there I was, walking past the United Nations of all places on a quiet Sunday afternoon, walking uptown to retrieve the baby from his great-grandmother's, enjoying the melancholy irony of my current situation , trying to adjust my expectations toward starting law school of all things at this date rather than toward finally becoming a professor. The epigraph to the most famous moment in Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" came into my mind and out of my mouth, un· resisted though somewhat garbled in my memory. In that famous "Thesis" Benjamin describes a solitary and unitary Angel of History struggling to resist the destructive storm of progress constantly expelling humanity from the Paradise of memory. Over the past decade or so, Benjamin's work on the poetics and politics of memory has inspired my own struggles with Jewish memory and' identity. Before the great disaster of mid-century, Benjamin had suggested ways to articulate the power of generational memory that avoided the dangers of Romantic or Fascist mythification, yet clearly saw through the liberal construction of the autonomous individual determined by nothing before her own birth. But now it was the analogy lGershom Scholem, "Gruss yom Angelus/Greeting from the Angel," cited as the epigraph to Thesis IX ofWalter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt and tr. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), p. 257, 126 SHOFAR Fall 1995 Vol. 14, No.1 between the image of the Angel and my immediate personal situation that captured my imagination: right now I'm· poised to change course (from trying to become a professor to becoming a student once again); I'd love to go back (to a critical practice which is "pure" in the sense that the rewards it expects are based solely on its intellectual valuation); I'm not sure I'd be successful there no matter how long I was able to stay (I could keep producing critical scholarship on Judaism and never be able to care for my family securely). Indeed. Then I caught myselffiguring myselfas the Angel, and felt a little silly. It's not just that the Angel is referred to in Benjamin's text as "he": it struck me suddenly that the Angel offers a characteristically masculine style of lonely, melancholy, and heroic resistance, a style that may be particularly seductive to marginalized male Jewish intellectuals.2 The truth is that while I was indeed walking by myself, I was not quite facing the storm at that moment. I was rather, once again, between my work and my child. Once I reached him and his Nanny, my angel wings would certainly turn into a pair of arms to lift him into his stroller and push him all the way down Second Avenue back home. The "Theses" have come to stand, and not only for me, as a kind of last will and testament ofGermanJewish critical thought before World War II. What remains for me the key moment, still the starting point, in Benjamin's testament is his renunciation of hope for the future without cynicism or even (in his writing at least) overt despair. A glance at the daily newspaper will reconfirm that today, as in 1939 when Benjamin was writing, there's not much to be hopeful about. But what choice do we have except to think of the future? What's most important in relating Benjamin's inSights and their iimitations to our own situation is to realize that whereas Benjamin implicitly links these two terms "hope" and "the future," we need to learn how to separate them. It is something we are hardly accustomed...