In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin turns to Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus: an angel whose face is turned towards the past, where he sees a single catastrophe piling wreckage at his feet. He wants to repair what has been shattered, but 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 as a starting point for exploring the nature of history and time: can the past interrupt the movement of progress by making a claim on the present? We will approach time, history and memory as fields of intervention, asking how our relations to the past and future can change. As digital infrastructures 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 interruptions, bifurcations and coexistences. Memory, in turn, is not an archive but a force capable of reconfiguring, and even redeeming, the past.

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For Walter 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 demand for a justice that cannot be deferred. This power is “messianic” because it concerns the redemption of the past, but “weak” because it offers no mastery over history, no guarantee of reconciliation, and no final standpoint from which the meaning of human suffering could be secured.

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Memory becomes more than recollection. An important past may return not through mainstream historical narratives but through an insignificant detail, a photograph, a gesture, a quotation, a smell, a fragment that seems to have escaped its own time. Benjamin’s historical materialism, developed in dialogue with thinkers of the Frankfurt School, seeks precisely such moments: points at which past and present suddenly form a constellation. Historical time becomes charged, capable of being made to “stand still.” The historical present is not simply the latest point on a timeline, but can become the site at which something unfinished in the past suddenly becomes legible.

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This structure connects Benjamin’s philosophy of history to his broader critique of modernity. His writings on law, violence, photography, urban life, capitalism, translation, and mass culture repeatedly ask how apparently neutral structures conceal their own histories. Benjamin looks for interruptions of systems that present themselves as continuous, necessary, and complete.

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Gilles Deleuze approaches the problem of time from another direction: cinema. In Cinema 2: The Time-Image, the crisis of classical narrative cinema becomes the occasion for a new philosophy of temporal experience. Classical cinema had largely organised images through what Deleuze calls the sensory-motor schema: in films, characters perception of a situation leads to action, actions produce consequences, and the world remains organised through coherent spatial and causal connections. After the Second World War, this structure begins to break down. Characters wander, situations become dispersive, causal links weaken, and seeing is no longer automatically followed by knowing what to do. In Italian Neo-realism, New Hollywood, and French New Wave, Deleuze discovers “pure optical and sound situations” in which perception is suspended from action and the image begins to reveal time directly.

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This occurs through memories, dreams, fantasies and flashbacks, where the past is no longer something that has just ceased to exists and must be reconstructed by the present. The past persists virtually, coexisting with the present and capable of entering into new circuits with it. A recollection is therefore not simply an image retrieved from storage, but changes the present from which it is recalled.

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We will explore films where time appears as a process of splitting: the present passes, yet at the same moment it is preserved as past. Mirrors, reflections, memories, performances, repetitions, false recollections, and contradictory versions of events, become ways through which cinema makes time perceptible rather than just narrating its passage.

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Works by Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Joseph Mankiewicz, and others construct temporal labyrinths in which memory produces new relations between what happened, what might have happened, and what continues to insist within the present.

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Throughout the course, we will develop conceptual tools for thinking time concretely across philosophy, history, film, literature, photography, and contemporary media. We will ask what it means for the past to survive rather than simply to have happened; how memory can become a political and aesthetic force; how cinema can make time itself visible; why interruption may matter more than continuity; and whether the future must always be imagined as what comes next. 

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The course will pause over the Christmas and New Year period, with no sessions taking place during the final two weeks of December. The course will still consist of 12 sessions in total.