Introduction to "Angels and Messengers." 2008

TEXTUS English Studies in Italy Volume XXI (2008) No. 2 (May-August) ANGELS AND MESSENGERS edited by Alessandra Violi and Elisabeth Bronfen CONTENTS Alessandra Violi and Elisabeth Bronfen Introduction ... .... .. .... ... .... Sybille Kramer Messenger-angels: Can Angels Embody a Theory ofthe Media avant la lettre? ................... ......................... ...... .............. .. Francesca MontesperelIi Electric Angels ..... ... ....... ... ...... ........... .. .... Julia Straub Diaphanous Angels. Julia Margaret Camerons and Waiter Paters Go-betweens ........... ......... ..... .. ........ .... ................... Greta Perletti ':4 Medium that Bears Up Our Spiritual Wings': Sensibility, Pathology, and the Angelic Body in Victorian Culture ....... Arianna Antonielli The Deification ofthe Fallen Seraph: Revisions of the Myth in Anatole Frances La Revolte des Anges and Clark Ashton Smiths Schizoid Creator ....... ............... ............... ............ Chiara Sciarrino Ekphrastic Representations ofAngels in Anglo-Irish Literature .... .......... ..... .. .......... ... ... ..... .... ....... ....... ........... ............. Pietra Palazzolo Without a Tepid Aureole: Angels and Messengers in Contemporary Literature and Film.... ............ ......... .......... ..... ....... Contributors ...................................................... .................... ..... ...... . (Instructions: p. 354) LlD : ..' 1.Jk;G.H.ER-GENOYA 197 221 235 261 279 295 31 5 333 351 INTRODUCTION 1 ; TEXTUS Registrazione presso il T ribunale di Genova n. 36 del 16.6.1988 ....,......'. . . Direttore responsabile: Renato VentureIIi Proprietario: Associazione Italiana di Anglistica Edirore: Tilgher-Genova s.a.s. Stamparo presso la Microart's S.p.A. in Recco (Genova) per como delIa Casa Editrice Tilgher-Genova s.a.s. ISSN 1824-3967 © Casa Editrice Tilgher-Genova s.a.s. Via Assarotti 31 - 16122 Genova (Italy) www.tilgher.it S.p.A. Spedizione in AP. - D.L. 353/2003 in L. 27102/2004 No. 46) - arc. 1 comma 1 DCB Genova' "' No. 212008 Around 1940, the American comic strip team of writer J erry r Siegel and designer John Shuster came up with what would in no time become one of the most popular versions of the angel myth in the cultural imaginary of the twentieth century. On the distant planet of Krypton ("secret", "hidden"), the scientist J 0- El (meaning "the divine") finds out that his world is about to disintegrate. His son, Kal-EI, will be the messenger and survivor of this cataclysm, after being enclosed in a spherical crystal rocket and launched across light-years of space to arrive on the planet Earth. Here, Kal-El's superhuman powers (his ability to fly) will turn him into Superman, the secret double of a human being (Clark Kent, who, as a reporter on the Daily Planet, is in a way a messenger too) as well as a new Christos ange/os, a freshly minted guardian angel of the world (of America) in the war against evil. We have, what is seminal to the cultural imagination of angels, a figure who is both transmitter and translator of a: message that comes from beyond the world of the living, sent to ascertain their survival. Like all angels, Superman is a spiritual entity yet must take on a bodily existence. As such, he illustrates a further point any discussion of angels in textual and visual representations must address. As a figure that connects the world of the present with that of the past, the angel also renders the invisible visible. As a medium, giving corporeal presence to an immaterial message; the angel always also refers to the materiality of the mes- 198 Introduction sage his body comes to transmit. The embodiment the angel affords is, after all, a highly transient one. Angels cannot stay, they can only hover between two worlds, can only oscillate between emergence and fading. While the 40s popular icon embodies the needs of the period of crisis between the two world wars, another host of militant guardian angels had already come on the scene in 1914, presumably inspired by Arthur Machen's story "The Bowmen" of the same year, with the legend of the Angels ofMons, which myth placed in the skies over the battlefield that August to protect the British troops. Apparitions of angels in the air reactivate the mythic power of those modern technologies that have invaded the zone intermediate between heaven and earth or that have filled the ether with invisible messages,: thus allowing the sort of distance communication that had be<;u the prerogative of angels as celestial mediums. If Superman, the alic;n angel, travels in a crystal rocket, H.G. Wells had re-imagined the Revelation as the mysterious motors of the planet Lawrence -later followed by Pynchon, with the Rainbow - rediscovers in the aeroplane an angelic te<..giIi:>logy, already latent in the tradition: "It was like Milton - then Heaven. But it was not Angels. It was that small like a long oval world, high up" (Boulton 1981: " Vaughan, the Second World War pilot who apofEros in Patrick McGrath's Haggard's Disease " a hermaphroditic transformation of his own body " hybrid, he rings the changes on the short-circuiting of : :.(liffer:ences-(inspace, of sex) that angels typifY as mixed and intermed.iate" . .., . get to contemporary angels, such as those of Salman Carter, they are wholly identified with modern ?etw:Ql'ks "of social ;and technical-communicational exchange that are J.p.ltum embodied in media whose spectral bodiliness is just as angelic as they. are. In The Passion ofNew Eve (1982), Carter gives the name Tristessa de St. Ange to her hermaphroditic diva embodying perfect celluloid desire, while, in the Satanic Verses (1988) Gibreel Farishta (the ancient archangel Gabriel) and·his satanic CQun,erRaU ",-.-.,. Introduction 199 Saladin Chamcha do not merely travel in an aeroplane, but, when it crashes after a hi-jacking, find themselves occupying the marginal space of visual and audio media communication: Gibreel's body of pure light now becomes as luminescent and as immaterial as that of a cinema star, engaged in transmitting a text (the divine revelation? or the script of a film he is shooting?) of which he knows nothing. In his turn, Saladin becomes the disembodied voice of British radio and television, renewing the dream of incorporeal sound recording and of angelic transmission that had nourished recording technolowe may recall how a single, gies from the start. In this stereotyped, image of an angel using a,.stylus to write sounds directly onto a phonograph was adopted as .a recurrent logo - paradoxically for a trademark - by the precursor"company that became HMV, by Schallplatte in Germany and even in the officially atheistic Soviet Union. Finally, in his installation Five Angels for the Millennium, shown at London's Tate Gallery in 2003, video artist Bill Viola calls on angels to express the passage between the visible and the invisible, identifYing their slow and dreamlike appearance with the production of a trembling visuality of the screen, and once more with the medium whose logic they seem to embody. As we can see from the multiplicity and diversity of the foregoing sampling, far from abandoning angels as a hangover from religious helief, modern and contemporary culture shows itself ready to adopt what Michel Serres has recently called a new "angelic mythology" (1993), in which old formulae, iconographies and traditional concepts of angelology have migrated and placed themselves at the disposal of new configurations of the imaginary. We are thus witnessing a process of cultural history that can in its turn be called angelic insofar as the angel is par excellence the mediator, the being of passage, placed at the interval or hesitation between two realms conventionally regarded as distant and opposed. As WaIter Benjamin pointed out in his well-known comment on Klee's Angelus Novus (1999: 249)"the time of the angel is thus the time of a threshold or ofa flashing instancthat, in exploding the past, at the same time a different readability from-the future, allowing it to survive asa ,ghost collective memory; 20! Introduction In troduction Reflection on the modern myth of angels is thus also an exploration of how images of them have migrated across time, across different aesthetic and cultural media and across disciplines. The aim of the essays collected in this number of Textus is to offer a first response to this, paying attention to certain significant moments in this migration, especially at the beginnings of modernity, when secularization seemed to have consigned angels (or the infantile version, the mere "chubby little cherub") to obsolescence. While emphasizing, from various points of view, that the modern concept of the -angel insists on its in-between or hybrid status, the different authors are well aware that these aspects, just like angelic being as such, derive from a rich repertoire of imaginative representations without which we would have no idea whatever of the angel. As Julia Straub describes with reference to Julia Margaret Cameron and Walter Pater, artists who conceive of themselves as go-betweens in order 'to link past and future work precisely within this inherited tradition, but reverse its reactionary sign towards something transgressive and revolutionary. In her analysis of angels and messengers asa·".theory of media avant la lettre", Sybille Kraemer for her part summarizes this heuristic premise in the formula "we never see any 'Wgels,:-btlt only images of angels", which leads her to conclude that the medium of is, in the first instance, the imaginat-ive:,fa£ulty that allows (their) absence to become present and to be a fictum. They represent the event of embodied rep reserltai jeo" rendering visible one of the core contradictions inherent iri,thermedern aesthetic sign. What we see is precisely not what we g'et,:;:but rather the embodied emanation of an immaterial message. At -g resarrie time what we get is an enactment of the incongruence beryveen::mediality and message. The image of the angel we see (or reacLabout) exceeds its spiritual substance, even while its uncanny v-isual-presence is marked by the fact that it is an effect of presence, not actually present. :; Setting-to-one side for a moment the implications of this conclusion for--<1: theory of the im;lginary, we can thus agree with Regis Debray (1-997, also mentioned by Kraemer} -on the to set on foot the same son of anthropological mythic-religious beliefs of Europe, and therefore into angels as a key figure within that scheme, as writers like Malinowsky or Levi-Strauss devoted to the "myths of the other". From this point of view, the hybrid mixtute, the in-betweeness and the mediality that attract toin the day's angelology are brought to the fore as already angel's virtual potentialities right from the first pre-Bibhcal ances, as having been sublimated and remodulated under the lOfluence of Christianity, and then as ready to reappear and fix the angels that are called for today. 200 ; Messengers, Intermediaries and Mediums .t In order to contextualize the modern predicament, it is helpful to set out, albeit summarily, some of the periods of continuity and moments of fracture in the history of the angelic imaginary. Even though the concept of the angel is the preserve of Christianity and of the other monotheistic religions Oudaism and Islam), it feeds on a wide variety of figures of mediators and messengers that are drawn from pre-Biblical cultures and taken over, in latent or defused form, . ' - ·by the Christian angels. ! In the Assyrian-Babylonian keroub, which was a wlOged bull With a human face guarding temples, the role of mediator between species (bestial, celestial) and spaces (earth, sky) was more important than that of the messenger. In the first instance, it appears as material and embodied, passing on to the Old Testament chetubim (Ezekiell: 425) the triple nature able physically to combine the connecting principle and that of the transgressive passage between opposed realms. By contrast, the intermediate zone is explicitly occupied by the many winged genii of Greco-Roman culture, noted by Kraemer and Montesperelli. Among these, the most important is Hermes, the angelos or messenger par excellence, but also, according to Plato (Cratylus, 407},the god of circulation and exchange of money-goods and of words, as well _as the guide of souls into the land of Hades 1 On' the history ofangd s; see Brari:don (1963), Davidson (1967); Coudert (1987), Krauss·-(2000).:- - - ' .:- : -.- -- < 202 Introductio n (,Hermes psychopompus') and of dreams from the underworld to the surface. Likened to a butterfly or a bird, Psyche is winged, as is Eros, the intermediary between man and the divinity (daimon) who must guarantee the passage of messages between the separate spheres and the connection "of all with itself' (Plato, Symposium, 202E); likewise furnished with the power of flight are Hypnos, Thanatos as well as creatures such as sirens and harpies or Nike. The role of the angel is thus here that of ensuring the possibility of atopic communication, that is to say, a communication which can "pass across" the established order and connect not just the human and the divine but also the oppositions between the sexes, between the sensible and the intelligible, between life and death, and especially between the inside and the outside in dream states (half-waking, fantasy, visions, ecstasy, and so on) or in the role assigned to the messenger daimones, a person's transcendent "double" set to guide and protect him. -Living in the air, these angels' vocal and visual apparitions take on:a rhapsodic and instantaneous quality, and their presence depehds'Precisely on their being cancelled in the very act of manifestthey make themselves volatile and their time becotrr'es+t hat of the interim, the interval. They also draw from the air itsel£i.:Hi'dlows that run through it (currents, rays, wind) and the that goes with breath and with an inarticulate sound (:ifzJans}/ ftom which comes that peculiar wordless language that assOc1ateS'-the angels with the myth of the ineffable "white" voice, and often imitated by humans in the (sexually) undj.f,fel'eIlt,iated 'singing of castrati, operatic divas and modern elect(onrciIJ:ly-generated music. ·/A!:though, along with other figures of the harbinger to be found irf'Serhitic and Persian religions (the malaak and the Jereshta respectively:); -the 'Greco-Roman angeloi contribute to the image of the Christian angel, their many-sided functions are drastically curtailed. GhHstian 'angelology certainly retains a clear trace of them especially irtAhe i conography, where the wings seem to remain as a sort of "quotation'" (Grubb 1995), but it subordinates the variery of cont@xts in which they are called on to mediate to that of divine munication. The modes in which they manifested "' -" 203 Introduction retained in the dream, such as Jacob's ladder (Genesis 28: 10-12), the revelatory vision, such as the Resurrection (Matthew 28: 2-7; Luke 24: 4-7) or the Apocalypse (Revelation 12: 7-9), and the fecundity of the word, as with the Annunciation (Luke 1: 28-31). By contrast, Eros will migrate into the putto-cherub; and the daimon will be imprisoned in the body as the subject's "conscience". In what Henry Corbin has described as the "paradox of monotheism " (1981) , the invisible, ineffable One now needs intermediaries in order to communicate. So much so that the angels, which have been multiplied into an infinite plenitudej turn from being occasional messengers into permanent of the graduated order (ladder) that fills the otherwise onrologically void space between the ' divine and the human. It was the writer known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite who, in the early sixth century, introduced the idea that angels are "mirrors" or "divine simulacra" (De ca:lestis hierarchia, 3, 2), by which he meant that they are at one and the same time a reflection of God and a means that allows us mediated knowledge of Him insofar as they make up a third term or middle in the relation between the invisible and the visible. Pseudo-Dionysius' theory, indebted as it was to Neoplatonism and St Augustine, was to remain canonical for angelology throughout the Middle Ages, down to St Thomas and beyond, not to mention Dante, who takes it up in Paradise XXVIII. What it established was a thoroughgoing hierarchy of the angelic hosts, where the higher orders move the stars and planets, and so on at each successively lower level in a scale of differences that clearly serves also to legitimate social and political arrangements on Earth. Although angels are often depicted as bodily and male, it was with Pseudo-Dionysius that they took on the diaphanous and immaterial consistency of spirits made of air and light, to which St Thomas would later attribute the power of becoming embodied in the visible world by condensing in the appearance ofa (Summa Theologit£, I, 51,2). Like the glowirig -halo that-emanates from within and yet envelops from without, ·angelsbe20mefigures of a materialized invisibility and ofah 'exiem;aIized intei:rbrityt ciscillating betWeen the bodily and v' ," 204 Introduction the disembodied. Because it is not impeded by the flesh and so is indifferent to the limitations of time and space, the speech of angels had already become for St Augustine the very model of an ideal semiotics (Durham Peters 1999: 66-80); as St Thomas would put it, in addition to communicating "telepathically" from the one to the many, the angel is now here, now there, with no time interval in between (Summa Theologit£, I, 53, 3). This is precisely the dramaturgical point ofWim Wenders' film Himmel uber Berlin (1987). The angels that float around the divided German city hear all the voices of the inhabitants simultaneously, even while they are everywhere, neither bound to gravity nor to the spatio-temporal organization of the city. Medieval speculation on the matter was determined to circumscribe the essence and the tasks of the intermediaries, including their roles as guardians of individuals, places or whole peoples, and thus fixed an orthodoxy about how angels could and should be represented that seemed to close the question for centuries, even though it left free range to the richer and more complex issue of the angel's demonic counterpart. Nevertheless, as Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham have recently shown (2006), the period from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century witnesses a proliferation of re-readings of the angel. In some measure, this territory has still to be mapped, especially given that angels are among the few elements of the Catholic supernatural that the Protestant Reformation allowed to be represented, and that even the so-called Scientific Revolution, from Kepler's Angelus Rector to Newton, felt called on to take seriously, reading angels as the regulating intelligences in cosmology and astronomy. For its part, the Neoplatonic strain in Renaissance occultism, from Cornelius Agrippa to John Dee (see Gordon 2006: 4163), contributed to transforming "conversation with angels" into the instrument of an esoteric initiation into wisdom that permeated both elite and popular magic through the Enlightenment and beyond (Davies 2006: 297-319). As Arianna Antonielli illustrates _below:in her discussion of Cl ark Ashton Smith's Schizoid mqdel feeds into theesoteric-,-technologicaI Introduction 205 "other dimension" that is typical also of much present-day science fiction. In effect, science and technology provided the terminology for describing angels as intelligent and overwhelming objects; heralding the similes used to qualifY Superman, already in his 1702 Several Sermons on Angels, Thomas Sheperd would describe angels as "swifter than a bullet from a musket" (Davies 2006: 299); and the harnessing of electricity in the eighteenth century allowed angelic space to be imagined in terms of an invisible ethereal medium, a nervous sensorium Dei (Newton) that was now traversable and reproducible by media (starting with the whose power to comangelic (Sconce 2000). municate across space and time As Francesca Montesperelli it was precisely the new notion of the" electric angel" that provided the modern age - one that had already taken to the air in balloons - with a whole range of metaphors of radiating light, electric currents and flows of energy into which the traditional functions and invisible materiality of angels migrated to mark out the impalpable and intermediate states of matter and of the human body, which was itself seen by pseudo-sciences such as Mesmerism to be a technological instrument - a medium - attuned, especially in states of dreaming, trance or vision, to the reception and transmission of messages through the ether. Against the secularizing tendency set on foot by philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, who scorned belief in angels as mere products of the imagination, the reaction set in to remove them into a different topography from that of natural and human matter, and to place them in a cryptic system regulated by unknown forces that could therefore be reinvested with a magical and supernatural aura. Beginning with Milton, whose own religious response in Paradise Lost to the budding philosophical scepticism was to emphasize his angels' bodiliness (Raymond 2006: 255-281), the angelic condition came to be seen as not so different or distan,t from the human one, but written into it as its potential perfectibility, with the divine hierarchy translated into an evolutionary scala naturae. Just as for physiologists like Gustav Fechner (Comparative Anatomy ofAngels, 1815), the perfecl::spherical of angelic bodies (like "living evolurionary high.point for:the body, so i?:,{, c:",: ,::",':<',,',.-, :"'.'->i>;:-'-'; ,c: ii Q :i f"I' fl fl j '.i .. 1 1 1 J r1' , !j i£ 'jj !., fJi 1fl . 1' :q ·1 207 Introduction 206 Introduction also, the angels who dictate the correspondences of the invisible to 5wedenborg or Blake have already become simply the sublimated souls of the departed. Thus for the first time we find an explicit identification with the ghosts or revenants that, both as messengers and spectral traces of an absence, hover on the threshold between past, present and future, contributing to fix the modern atmospherics of the psyche in terms of an uncanny interiorization of the supernatural. As the practitioners of psychical research immediately recognized in the late nineteenth century, followed by Freud and Jung, this phantasmagoric turn allows angelic messengers to become potential metaphors for transmission within the psychic circuit (see Montesperelli). Even today, as Pietra Palazzolo shows in connection with John Banville's novel Eclipse, they are seen as "haunting" when they "live through" the mind as ambiguous "translucent sightings" of a past that returns or, vice versa, of a future that announces itself proleptically. Nevertheless, becoming "angelic" carries the risk for humans of being consigned to a position of "in-betweeness" that verges on the pathological, as is already foreshadowed in the longstanding association of the angel with a winged Melancholy (suffice it to think of Ourer). Taking the idea of an afterlife in angelic form , novelist Nathalie Barney is induced, in the footsteps of Mark 5: 9, to imagine the complete dispersion of an "I" that "becomes legion" (The One Who is Legion. Or A.D. Afterlife 1930). By contrast, Banville's character, craftily named "Cleave", is an actor and is thus himself a mere transponder deprived of authority over the voices and texts that he recites; in Cleave's daughter, on the other hand, the continuous theatricality is a sign of the ego's absence that transforms angelic status into a pathological symptom, whether it be of hysteria (with 5t Theresa or Jeanne des Anges of Loudun as her best-known forerunners) or, as Greta Perletti suggests in connection with the nineteenth-century imaginary of TB, of a body that is consumed by an excess of sym-pathy (tele-pathy) towards the messages whirling around it and that therefore attains the angelic condition of perfect bodily transparency only at the cost of volatilizing into a pure medium of reproduction and transmission. In a modern context 1P s which the ethical polarities come to be "existentialistically" sus• pended, as in Anatole France's The Angels ' Revolt, discussed by . Antonielli, God Himself could in the end turn into a Schizoid Creator (Ashton Clark), a mere impersonator of the Other as a morally indifferent exemplar of Power. The ambiguiry of angels as between pathological symptom and creativity prompts their inclusion among the figures of the interval and of suspension, like tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, puppets and androgynes (see Starobinski 1970) that countless artists and scholars (in a long list running from J?oe to Baudelaire, Benjamin to Warburg, and taking in Rilke, Kafka, Klee and Wallace Stevens) have chosen as their own ."doubles" and as the intermediate r place in which to locate their cultural operation. It comes as no sur. prise, therefore, that Wim Wenders' angel, after having had his visions of the catastrophic past of what at the time of the filming was Germany's former capital city, falls in love with a trapeze artist and decides to give up his angelic status in order to be with her. In the last scene of the film Bruno Ganz is shown holding the rope along :; which 50lveig Dommartin elegantly defies gravity. As a couple, the .' former angel and the body artist conjoin what is at stake in angelic . transmission: the masculine and the feminine, a recollection of the past and a hope for the future, earth-boundness and aerial floating. In the course of his transformation into a man, Wenders' angel has endowed the female body artist with angelic qualities in the sense of a transubstantiation. Wenders thus illustrates another seminal aspect of modern angelology: the angel becomes the guardian of the indeterminate from which forms are born (Serres 1995: 115136), or the portrait of the artist as diaphanous, marginal and androgynous hero to whom, as Julia Straub's reading of "Diaphaneite" shows, Waiter Pater delegates his revolurionary project for culture and gender. The secularization that modernity sets on foot thus bestowS on angels the different role of the third element with which to think through the intermediate and the notion of passage, namely thar of the "mediunL'. performer of exchanges and messages, be they technical, aesthetic·, ep.i.steITIological or of identity. ',-,: - W ;ij :-,' I:'; C' ': ;l _;'f Q a ::--:1 s; .' '1 j 208 Introduction Configuring the In-between In the contemporary world, the angelic function that the nineteenth century attributed to the technologies of audiovisual communication (photography, cinema, radio, telephone) has become so widespread and pervasive as to permit today's resurgence of angelology in terms of a "media turn". Mobilizing the full repertoire of pre- and post-Biblical lore on angels, Michel Serres calls on their natute as telephone exchanges and as networks of interrelation and transmission to supply the most fitting anthropological myth to describe a culture that today depends on mediation and translation among codes rather than on a totalizing language. In the globalized agora, where satellites fill the skies, where DXing (fishing for alien communication) is ever more common, and where transactions of words, goods and money have dematerialized into volatile circuits, the. angelo: has become an indispensable tool for understanding the logiC not Just of communication, but of these exchanges and of intra- and inter-subjective relations. Referring to Serres and to other theorists of the "actuality of angels" such as Andrei PIC§u (2005), Sybille Kraemer explores in the essay presented here the ways in the various forms of in-betweeness represented by angels proVide media studies with the hybrid categories that allow us to reflect both on the media as such and on the relations they generate, which are no longer oppositional and antinomian but rather infinitely modulated and graduated, like the angelic mirrors in an intermediate space of the interval. Ple§u picks Out this border space also as the knowledge-forming and aesthetic dimension of the imaginary, or rather, in the neologism coined by the angelology of Henry Corbin, of the mundus imaginalis, a world that is "known through images" (2005: 47-73; see also Cacciari 1986: 71-90). This is the liminal zone where the opposites of the sensible world (matter, body) and the intelligible (spirit, mind) find themselves side by side thanks to the medium of . the angelic mirror, which makes them appear momentarily combined in the intermediate form of an evanescent trace or virtual image. The hybrid bodiliness of angels, which is itself Introduction 209 between the material and the immaterial, between the visible and the invisible, thus dictates the nature of the images ptoduced within the mundus imaginalis and is at the same time the figure of the mediatic process: an image of the image. Surpassing every dichotomy between the real and the unreal, the mundus imaginalis performs a necessary function in the formation of knowledge precisely because it brings two othetwise separate spheres into communication at the crossing point between the inside and the outside, between the individual and the culturally shared. Here are articulated the evanescent or apparitional forms of the imagination, of the spiritus phantasticus or .of dreams, where, according to St Thomas, angelic knowledge is "impressed" (Summa Theologite 56,3) as a matter of physiology onto human mind, which in turn sets verbal and visual images in circulation outside itself. Thus arises, for instance, the medieval figure of the woman as angel (Agamben 1993: 121-129), as an image not of the sublimated female as such, but of Eros androgynously fusing subject and object, spirit and matter or, in short, of the very energy (in the word of PseudoDionysius, dynamis, 11, 2) that moves the image and articulates its dialectical tension. When this figure is transmitted through cultural memory to the Victorian "Angel in the House", as Straub shows, Julia Margaret Cameron and Walter Pater will reactivate precisely this valence of an image that oscillates in-between the polarities ' rather than confirming them, and thus they relaunch the latent revolutionary meaning of the anachtonism of the angelic imaginary. After all, Dante saw the angel as the point of visualization and transmission of a memory image when, recalling Beatrice on the first anniversary of her death, he writes "I was sitting to one side where, remembering her, I drew an angel on some tablets" (Vita Nuova, XXXIV). As the image of an image that, in becoming embodied, is transmitted between the inside and the outside and across space and time, the angel comes to designate, then, also the verbal, visual, audible and mnemonic media that contribute to the formation, circulation and cultural exchange of the imaginary. It is noteworthy.that Michel de Certeau (1984) has identified ,as: the,meclium,that has itself as its 210 Introduction message: the angel "says that there is saying' (11) and this performance should be seen in relation to the trace that it leaves. For instance, with St Francis or St Theresa, its inarticulate and uncircumscribable auditory manifestation leaves as a trace of its own passing the material impression of the stigmata, a sort of image writing. This effect of reception in turn inscribes the angelic apparition in a "memory theatre", a deposit in which "there remains the trace of what is lost" (16) and whose processes of communication and transmission the imagination is ready to reactivate anew. For De Certeau, writing is therefore always and already photo-graphy, a luminous and unembodied apparition that flits across the image of a media mirror: "as in a photograph, the angel marks instantaneous articulations between an evanescent vision and a foreign place of registration" (17) . Photographing angels, as Julia Margaret Cameron would in her experiments with the daguerreotype (see Straub and Montesperelli), thus means photographing photography, interrogating its ambiguous visual status following a strategy that, as we have seen, will return in modern video installations of artists like Bill Viola, and that set the multimedia dimension of the cinematic angels of Wim Wenders (see Palazzolo). Likewise, Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1986) has seen in the pictorial angelology of the Baroque the formation of a non-place, atopic and "imaginal", that serves as a metaphor for the very act of painting (229), while art historian Georges Didi-Huberman (1990), commenting on the iconography of F ra Angelico's Annunciation, has gone so far as to suggest that Pseudo-Dionysius' treatise that first set out the celestial hierarchy of angelic mirrors gives us in fact "a genuine theory of the figure" in the terms of angelology. The mirror that mediates between the opposed and distant dimensions of the visible as against the undepictable is thus identified with the "figure", a third element able to hybridize them because it is distinct from both: like the angel, its setting is "always between two things: it is situated between the sensible form (schema) and its opposite, the ideal form (eidos); or even between form and the formless" (1995: 13-22). Here we find the angels as "figure of figure" and the ',,".n .... tunity to reinterpret the motif ofehe Annunciation, or Introduction 2 11 apparitions, in terms of an aesthetic theorization of the gentransmission and reception of images that, once again, draw the individual and collective circuit of memory-imagination in to communicate themselves over time. As Chiara Sciarrino in her "Ekphrastic Representations of Angels", when painted "scream down the centuries", what they transmit are therefore symptoms and traces of the visual that can still today offer conporary artists an initiation into the artistic and verbal realm of figurable. It should by now be clear how, r<}ther than being a product of mundus imaginalis, the imaginary;of angels organizes the formuof that world and its entire media apparatus. Angelic images thus the power to pass across borders and oppositions between disoccupying, as the essays in this volume show, the frontiers betwf:en the media, the arts, science and technology as well as those h"'rr,,vP demarcations among self-identifications or between thought and sensible pathos. But that power at best gives the of the most general knowledge-forming and anthropological •• of the imaginary as an in-between category, through which configurations come to be traced over time. The time of the plays a fundamental active role in this process. - As is well known, it is in the writings of Benjamin, from the comment on Klee's Angelus Novus to the fragment Agesilaus Santanthat the angel lends itself to a philosophy of history suspended destruction and redemption. Much has been done to bring idea of destruction into a dialectical relation with salvation, as usan Hobson has recently shown (2007: 494-507) in her study of angel of history in writers like Carolyn Forche (The Angel of History, 1994) and Tony Kushner (Angels in America, 1992). Nevertheless, our era of terror after 11 rh September, inaugurated by what Marina Warner describes as angelic "engines of destruction" (2006: 337), presents itself as an apocalyptic time, the reactionary involutions of whose dominant discourse seem to depend as much as anything on the power of i.mages -to vaporize the actuality of history. While Warner demands,iu' scrutiny [of] the new conditions of reality"that to bear on our lives by ' C;.<1U'uu, nplrUTI'pn -"1". 212 Introduction Introduction the angels and engines of now" (2006: 354), we might observe in the first instance that this is exactly the theoretical function that the angelic image can serve today, in its role as "image of the image" empowered to convey the visible while at the same time always pointing to its own status as medium and thus leading us to interrogate visibility itself. Precisely because it is fixed on the threshold between reality and unreality, the angel mirror of the imaginary is not a space of mere narcissistic reflection, but a zone of passage where opposites coexist in a continual mutual tension. Let us backtrack one last time to Milton's Archangel Michael, who in Book XI of Paradise Lost takes Adam up on the highest hill of Paradise to show him the "Visions of God", while Eve is peacefully sleeping below. The sky has turned into an enormous screen, and what unfolds before the eyes of God's first man, as though in cinemascope, are scenes that enact the effects of his original crime and Eve's original sin. Significant for the materialization of prophecy Milton introduces into this scene is that his angel does not foretell all the deaths, battles and catastrophes that will befall the children of Adam and Eve but rather functions as the figure who calls forth these future events as dramatically visualized scenes. What his epic poem thus prefigures is the moviegoer, enraptured by an angelic message that straddles the invisible with the visible, the spiritual with embodiments, the absent with the present. We find Adam, all in tears, lamenting to his guide about the woes to come, in response to what he sees in the sky before him. Once the pageant, both terrifYing and uplifting, is over, Adam explicitly thanks Michael for having represented future things as present. The significant point, however, is not only the juxtaposition of two temporal moments in this celestial show but rather the fact that we are explicitly in the realm of representation. If, as has been argued so far, the angel has repeatedly come to function as a selfreflexive figuration of mediality, the image of the image, the figure of the figure, then what we might now add is that the message the angel transmits, and in so doing translates for its audience, is equally self-reflexive. What Archangel Michael has to foretell appears before us as a visual enactmeptof biblical history, .removed 213 even while proleptically invoking a history that is to much as the figure of the Archangel we are called upon to in this scene of prophecy is precisely an image of an angel, any celestial body itself. Read in the retroactive manner Mieke Bal (1999) calls "pre' pc)ste:rOl.lS history", this scene of anagnoresis in Paradise Lost points us one final arena in which angels have always played a seminal role, the genre films produced in Hollywood's dream factory and stars, whose bodies, gestures, and voices give visual substance to e film narratives. In the most conventional transcription of 's epic poem, Hollywood' s offer a visual representation the future. In Frank Capra's It's a Wonderfol Life (1946), Clarence Travers) still has to earn ins wings, and so he is sent back to just in time to prevent George Bailey Qames Stewart) from tting suicide. Like Milton's archangel, he uses a cinematic '..• C::U:<ll..lHH:Ul of what the future holds, although in this case we are not what will occur, but rather what might happen, were Baily to his life. Suddenly James Stewart and his guardian angel find Ul<01U<>"!V'-'> in a transformed world, utterly dominated by the capitallogic of his enemy Henry F. Potter; a dark world bereft of joy, ty and openness. The effect this cinematic representation has Bailey is comparable with the celestial visions Adam has on the hill in Paradise. Filled with a sense of destiny, he returns to family and the economic troubles that await him in his home, ply to find that on this Christmas Day his guardian angel has . transmitted the spirit of generosity to his fellow women and men. his decision to relinquish his despair and continue to work for a world, a deeply democratic myth, George Bailey will be richly rewarded in Frank Capra's post-war fairy tale. But there has also always been a particularly salient gendering of .. the angel in Hollywood, of whom Marlene Dietrich in Josef von Sternberg's Blue Angel (1932), standing on the stage of a Berlin nightclub with cherub wings on her back, is perhaps the most meqlorable example. & embodiment of desire, she comes to transmit to. theunwitting·High, School rea.cher, Prof. Rath (Emil Jannip.gs), .the sexual l:!el!p."harbouring, which is to say X C(:>Inc::. 214 hztrodu.ction Introduction she translates not a divine message but rather that of the unconscious. In the most benign versions of romantic narratives called forth by the sudden appearance of an angelic being, as in Touch of Venus (1948), a statue of the love goddess of antiquity, exhibited in a department store, comes to life because a young window dresser has kissed her marble cheeks. Once Ava Gardner has stepped off the pedestal, desire is in the air, transmitting her message of love throughout New York City. Although she has only a day among the mortals, this angel leaves many newly formed couples behind. In a more sombre tone we encounter Jean Simons in Otto Preminger's Angel Face (1952) as Diane T remayne, a traumatized survivor of the Battle of Britain, who is willing to kill not only those who threaten to abandon her but also herself. The message she transmits is not that of romantic love but rather one pertaining to the ethics of a desire that cannot cede. In so doing, Diane reconfigures the conjunction of pathological symptom and creativity found in Victorian angels of the house and their hysteric counterparts. What she forces others to recognize is a purity of desire beyond any moral distinction between good and bad, which one might call an instance of pure insistence. Neither those she chooses as the recipients of this message of desire, nor she herself can resist this force, and all are, instead, swept away by it. As such, Preminger's angelic femme fotale offers an example for precisely the migration of cultural energies at stake in the survival of the angel in our cultural image repertoire, re-coding in the cinematic language of film noir Rainer Marie Rilke's claim in his Duino Elegies that to gaze upon an angel is terrifYing. Though in a somewhat less fatal manner, Closer (2004) also reconfigures the image of the terrifYing angel, embodying a force that sweeps humans away, though the spirit that takes hold of a mortal woman's body in Mike Nichols's film is not a harbinger of death, but rather a messenger of the implenitude of love. As in a Touch of Venus a young woman, who, having been hit by a car, is lying as though deanimated on the ground, suddenly opens her eyes. . While Dan Gude Law), who writes obituaries for a London daily newspaper, has not kissed her cold cheeks, his enraptured :gaie 'has re-invigorated her. Alice (Natalie Portman) will disclose her '.nCarrle-I'o 215 in a cemetery, after she has pointed out to him that the people along one of the walls all died saving others. She is, in fact, on the name of a dead woman, and in so doing signalling the knowledge she is about to transmit to those she touches her brief stay in London about the fickleness of love, comes m the past. As such, she, too, brings forth hidden knowledge to sexual fantasy work. Yet more explicitly than that of other Hollywood angels, the message she embodies and her bodily appearance perfectly correlate. She is as transient as the desire she inspires, pointing not only fO her own ephemeraliry but to the fragility of the spirit of love. Revolving around an angel, as a dead woman, who those who confront her in a state of puzzlement once she has disappeared, Mike Nichols's Closer self-consciously plays with angelic mythology in the register of cinematic language. He calls us to read his celestial messenger not only as mediator between living and the dead, but also as a mediator of the survival of the . c images across time. If angels are the ones who bear souls . tween the world of the living and the world of the dead, one t also fruitfully see them as embodiments of a negative dialectic forgetting and commemoration. Their ephemerality is precisely guarantees the survival of the cultural energies whose message translate from the past and transmit to the historical age they to. They vanish only to reappear, as Alice will in New York in the final tide sequence of Closer. If, then, a negative dialectic of disappearance and re-emergence to be one of the seminal traits of Hollywood's angels, we read them as figurations of cinema's more general claim to . rendering the invisible visible. Coming into existence at the same as both psychoanalysis and a late nineteenth-century fascination with spirits, this new medium came to unfold what Lotte . Eisner (1974) called a demonic screen, on which fleeting images from the past were made present again. At the same time, even while the emergence of all cinematic images is explicitly limited in time, the fact that at:die end of the show they will again vanish into darkness also implies-cllefr:piojetti6n into the future. In their fragile .' I I I I V I I I 216 Introduction state as traces of a past, often lost world, briefly resurrected in the present, stars, and the cinematic image they embody, can potentially re-emerge endlessly, depending simply on a repeated showing of the fIlm. As such, the film image enacts the idea of the angel as a third term or middle, as was already found in early modern discussion of angels as divine simulacra. The star body, which Hollywood fabricated as the main bearer of this evanescent trace of the past, the absent, the lost, emerges as a virtual image par excellence, materializing invisibility by oscillating between the bodily and the disembodied. The star, after all, is in between the imagined world projected on the screen and the real world to which mimetic representation refers. While the actual actresses and actors are present only in spirit but not in body, the virtual embodiment of the cinematic star-body nevertheless recalls concrete historicity. These people were once on a film set, giving voice, body and gesture to a script. As transmitters of this script, along with the cinematic vision of the director, stars thus function as one of the most resilient instances of angels in modernity. They draw our attention to the mediality of film itself, turn it into their message as well, since we know their presence to be the result of a play of white light on a white screen in a perfectly dark space. Like all other angels, stars have no place; the charm and intensity of their constant re-emergence is predicated on the certainty that they will again vanish. If then the conjunction between cinematic image, star body and angel resides in their mutual gesture of rendering an invisible spirit visible, they not only give vision but also question visibility. In line with one of the key concerns of modern aesthetics, they critique the very certainty of the representationability that they also perform. We are won over by the cinematic image and the star that embodies it precisely because we know it is not what it appears to be: a strict formalization of intensities, a virtual embodiment, between complete absence and full presence, between pure darkness and pure light. This conjunction between the star and the angel recalls Aby Warburg's notion of the pathos formula (Pathosformel), and:inqeed, Introduction 217 several of the panels of his Mnemosyne Atlas, a guardian angel is as a variant on the Nymph, so as to foreground the imporof the "middle" (die Mitte) in his project on cultural memory. the immobile space of tension between two poles which arburg called Denkraum, (or, in the terminology we've already Mundus lmaginalis) angels point to the function of images in general, as these oscillate between death and resurrection, between a that has faded only to return in a different guise. The cultural Warburg claims, consists in the survival of pathos gestures, of previous times, have returning from the image refIgured so as to fit the nee.<l's of the present. The distance hpl'VJf'pn the affective power contained in the preceding image forand its new configuration produces the intermediary space in the past and its affective intensities are resurrected and thus live on in the present, by virtue of a constant renegotiation. . But the immobile space of the middle, whose entrance War's angel guards, is also an intermediary Denkraum, a third space between, because the image formulas that return with their from the past by virtue of a contemporary reconfiguration effects on and in the future. Cultural survival always includes world of images that are still to come. The intensity, which, the auspices of the guardian angel, finds a new articulation, . ' never die; it can only be transformed, or rather it must con. fade in order constantly to re-emerge. If the angelic rule of survival dictates that nothing stays the same, it also guaranthat nothing is ever lost. That is the reassuring message angels for us. We need, however, to be able to hear their transmission, this we can when we ourselves - if only for a brief period of - enter into the intermediary Denkraum, where the difference between spirit and body, death and life, past and present, .ind visibility comes fruitfully to be suspended. Alessandra Violi and Elisabeth Bronfen .' 218 Introduction ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors would like to thank Prof. Maria Del Sapio for proposing such an inspiring subject, and Maristella Cervi, Richard Davies and Luisa Villa for their invaluable suggestions and help. REFERENCES Agamben G . 1993, Stanze. La parola e it fontasma nella cultum occidentale, Einaudi, Torino (Engl. tr. R.L. Martinez, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1993). BaI 1999,. Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History, UniverSIty of ChIcago Press, Chicago. Benjamin W., [1940] 1999, <Theses on the Philosophy of Histoty", Illuminations, Pimlico, London, pp. 245-255. 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