ABSTRACT
Starting with Walter Benjamin’s comments on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, this chapter looks at the present as a place between past and future, a place where past actions and future intentions meet. Angelus Novus shows an angel caught at the threshold of time, allowing the coming together of the past and the future in one instant. Occupying a threshold position in space, time and consciousness: between history and myth, between dream and awakening, between antiquity and modernity, Klee’s angel was a key image for Benjamin. The figure of the angel is dialectics at a stand-still – a frozen moment encapsulating dialectical contradiction. At this moment, the present is allowed access to the past. Here the past and the future,
the ‘has-been’ and the ‘not-yet’, come together in a single configuration creating, for Benjamin, a ‘monad’.
