In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin famously invokes Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus - an angel whose face is turned toward the past, watching a singular catastrophe pile wreckage at his feet. A storm blowing, which Benjamin calls "progress," propels this angel of history into a future to which his back is turned.

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This course takes Benjamin's image not as a metaphor to be interpreted, but as a problem to be inhabited. Time, history, and memory are approached here not as objects of reflection, but as fields of intervention. At a moment when digital infrastructures, algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence increasingly externalise and automate memory, while synchronising the rhythms of everyday life, the question of how we inhabit time becomes both urgent and political.

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Although Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Paul Ricoeur belong to distinct philosophical traditions, they converge on a decisive insight: time is a fractured field of intensities, interruptions, and coexistences. Memory, in turn, is not a passive archive of what has been, but a force capable of reconfiguring, and even redeeming, the present.

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We begin with Walter Benjamin, the "singular and difficult" thinker who fused historical materialism with messianic intensity. For Benjamin, history is not a story we tell about the past, but a charged relation between the past and the present. We will explore his concept of "weak messianic power": the fragile, non-transferable responsibility each generation holds to rescue the defeated from disappearance. Here, messianism is stripped of future promises, and becomes a "force of arrest," a demand for a justice that cannot be deferred.

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In Cinema 2: The Image Image, Gilles Deleuze invents a cinematic concept of time. Drawing on Henri Bergson’s "crystals of time," we examine how the "time-image" transcends simple movement to reveal the "bifurcating maze" of existence. Through the study of Mnemosigns (memory-images) and Onirosigns (dream-images), we enter a zone where time is a perpetual splitting - a "labyrinth of forking paths" where incompossible potentials press against the present.

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Finally, we engage with Paul Ricoeur and the "just allotment of memory." In his final great work, Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur navigates the unsettling tension between an "excess of memory" and an "excess of forgetting." Moving from Mnēmē (memory as a passive affection) to Anamnēsis (the active, pragmatic search), we ask how we might represent a past that is no longer there. In the wake of historical catastrophe, we explore how narrative reconstruction allows us to inhabit the "empire of forgetting" with both responsibility and hope.