Walter Benjamin

In this essay Walter Benjamin discusses issues about historicism and historical materialism through the present days.  He points out these two concepts sees the history, one of them which is the historicism see the past but out of unknown place, but the historical materialism sees it as time that makes history be still in the present.

He also explains a process which is appear in the one of the Klee’s paintings “Angelus Novus” which is an angle that doesn’t have wings، his mouth is open and according to Walter Benjamin his face is toward the past therefore, it is shows that the painting is against the future and is still in the past. It is what he calls the progress, which we never achieve if we go toward the future. He defines the future like a storm that destroys everything so he calls it the progress. A progress which we all have to get out of it and think of our future, and how we face it, or how it is going to happen; these are the things we never understand in terms of knowing the future. It is like something that we don’t know what we will see in heaven as Benjamin says.  I think this progress that he talks about is a pretty magnificent thing that we all have to wait for it and see what happens.