Angelus Novus y Er. Figures of the history in Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt

This paper explores a possible line of dialogue between Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt through the presentation of some intermittences between two relevant figures of their thought about history, the figure that Benjamin determines in his approach to Angelus Novus painted by Paul Klee, and the figure of Er in the terms in which Arendt elaborates it from a Kafkaesque parable. We return to both figures with the aim of showing in them the philosophical attempt to organize a critical thought that resists the sclerosis of the modern and progressive concept of history: in a context in which the past seems to dissolve in the impotence of its presence and the future is presented as an apocalyptic reproduction of the disaster, we maintain that Benjamin and Arendt summon the Angelus Novus and the Kafkaesque Er as images capable of dislocating the stagnation of criticism and the epistemological flux implied in the modern crisis of experience.