By André Spicer, Photo: Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images, The Guardian, December 30, 2022
In 1940, as the Nazis were closing in on Paris, Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish literary critic and avid collector, knew he had to flee the city. Before leaving, he entrusted one of his most treasured possessions to his friend Georges Bataille, who hid it the archives of the French national library. This was a work titled Angelus Novus, by the artist Paul Klee. The print is of a small angel, wings outstretched, and Benjamin describes how the angel’s “face is turned toward the past”, where he sees history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage”.
More than 80 years after Benjamin described the unending storm of the early 20th century through the look of an angel in a painting, the Collins English Dictionary has come to a similar conclusion about recent history. Topping its “words of the year” list for 2022 is permacrisis, defined as an “extended period of insecurity and instability”. This new word fits a time when we lurch from crisis to crisis and wreckage piles upon wreckage. Today, Klee’s angel would have a similar look on its face.
The word permacrisis is new, but the situation it describes is not. According to the German historian Reinhart Koselleck we have been living through an age of permanent crisis for at least 230 years. Koselleck observes that prior to the French revolution, a crisis was a medical or legal problem but not much more. After the fall of the ancien regime, crisis becomes the “structural signature of modernity”, he writes. As the 19th century progressed, crises multiplied: there were economic crises, foreign policy crises, cultural crises and intellectual crises.
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