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 single catastrophe pile wreckage at his feet. A storm blows from Paradise, propelling him irresistibly into a future to which his back is turned. Benjamin gives this storm a name: progress.

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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 as fields of intervention, rather than reflection. As digital infrastructures, algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligence continue to externalise memory and synchronise the rhythms of everyday life, the question of how we inhabit time becomes both urgent and political.

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Philosophers Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze belong to distinct philosophical traditions, but converge on a decisive insight: time is a fractured field of intensities, interruptions, and coexistences. Memory, in turn, is not an archive but a force capable of reconfiguring, and even redeeming, the present.

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Walter Benjamin has famously 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" reveals 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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Throughout the course, we will develop conceptual tools for thinking historical time across philosophy, history, film, and literature.