Gravity and Grace and the Virus

In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” famously writes of history as one long catastrophe, an atmosphere we continue to breathe in. “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule…The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is philosophical.” In the most often-cited thesis, Benjamin offers an image of catastrophe as physical and devastating, a continuous process of ruin blowing against a body. “This is how one pictures the angel of history… Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” Our happiness, Benjamin muses, “exists only in the air we have breathed, among people we could have talked to.” The idea, needless to say, has gained new relevance in the age of aerosols and droplets, of mass death and