The Aura and the Angel of History: Walter Benjamin's "Illuminations"

Walter Benjamin was one of the most original and elusive thinkers of the twentieth century, a literary critic, philosopher, and essayist whose work resists easy categorisation. Illuminations, the famous collection of his essays edited by Hannah Arendt, is the best introduction to his luminous, fragmentary genius. Benjamin, a German Jewish intellectual who took his own life in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis, wrote about art, history, literature, and culture with a unique blend of Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and poetic insight. Two of his ideas from this collection have entered the permanent vocabulary of modern thought: the loss of the “aura” of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, and the haunting image of the “Angel of History.”

Here is what Illuminations taught me about the aura of the artwork, about the Angel of History, and about rethinking progress.

Key takeaways

• The “aura”: the unique presence of an original artwork, lost in mechanical reproduction.
• Reproduction changes art, democratizing it but stripping its ritual uniqueness.
• The “Angel of History” is blown backward into the future, seeing only mounting wreckage.
• Progress is questioned; what we call progress leaves a trail of catastrophe.
• History should be told from the standpoint of the defeated, not only the victors.

The aura and its loss

In his famous essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin introduces the concept of the “aura.” The original work of art, a painting, a sculpture, possesses a unique presence in time and space, a singular “here and now,” bound up with its history, its authenticity, and originally with ritual and religious function. This unique presence Benjamin calls its aura. But with modern technologies of reproduction, photography, film, the printing of images, art can be copied endlessly and perfectly, and in the process the aura withers. A reproduction has no unique presence, no singular history; it can be everywhere at once. Benjamin’s analysis is fascinatingly double-edged. On one hand, something is lost, the reverent uniqueness of the original. On the other, reproduction democratises art, freeing it from elite ritual and bringing it to the masses, with new political possibilities. He neither simply mourns nor simply celebrates; he tries to understand a profound transformation in how we experience art, one only intensified in our own age of infinite digital copies.

The Angel of History

The most haunting image in all of Benjamin’s work comes from his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” and it is inspired by the Paul Klee painting he owned, Angelus Novus. Benjamin imagines this as the “Angel of History.” The angel’s face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, the angel sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, to awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught his wings with such violence that he 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, Benjamin writes, is what we call progress. It is one of the most powerful and disturbing images in modern thought, a vision of history not as triumphant advance but as accumulating disaster, with humanity blown helplessly backward into a future it cannot see.

Rethinking progress

Through the Angel of History, Benjamin mounts a profound challenge to the comfortable idea of progress, the faith, shared by liberals and many Marxists alike, that history is a story of steady improvement, an upward march toward a better future. Benjamin, writing as fascism engulfed Europe, could not believe it. He insisted that every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism, that the triumphs we celebrate were built on the suffering and defeat of countless others, and that history, told honestly, must be told from the standpoint of the defeated and the oppressed, not only the victors. The “progress” that propels us forward leaves a mounting pile of wreckage in its wake, and we must refuse to look away from it. This is a deeply sobering vision, born of a dark time, and it remains a permanent warning against the easy narratives of progress that let us ignore the costs and the casualties on which our comforts rest.

What I’m taking with me

Illuminations is a collection to be read slowly and returned to, full of insights that lodge in the mind. What I am taking from Benjamin is the concept of the aura and its loss, which illuminates how technology has transformed our experience of art; the unforgettable image of the Angel of History, blown backward into the future amid mounting wreckage; and his profound challenge to the idea of progress, his insistence that we tell history from the standpoint of the defeated and refuse to look away from the costs of what we call advancement. Benjamin teaches me to see both art and history with new and more honest eyes, and to be suspicious of any story of triumph that hides the wreckage beneath it.

Frequently asked questions

What is Illuminations by Walter Benjamin?

It is a famous collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays, edited by Hannah Arendt, including his influential writings on the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and his theses on the philosophy of history.

What is the “aura” of a work of art?

Benjamin’s term for the unique presence, authenticity, and history of an original artwork, its singular “here and now,” which he argues is lost when art is endlessly reproduced by modern technology.

What is the “Angel of History”?

An image, inspired by a Klee painting, of an angel blown backward into the future by the storm of “progress,” seeing the past not as a chain of events but as one mounting catastrophe of wreckage. It challenges optimistic views of progress.

References & further reading

1. Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. (Edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.)
2. Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism. Verso, 1981.
3. Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption. Columbia University Press, 1982.