A breathtaking philosophical journey through angels, art, and language, where Massimo Cacciari reveals the Angel as the radiant, paradoxical key to understanding transcendence, meaning, and the limits of human speech.
In this luminous and daring work, Massimo Cacciari traces the figure of the Angel across theology, philosophy, literature, and art to reveal a profound meditation on language itself.
From Judaic, Islamic, and Christian angelology to the visionary poetics of Dante Alighieri, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, and Walter Benjamin, Cacciari follows the Angel as a being "suspended between all the axes of creation." In dialogue with the art of Paul Klee and Franz Marc, he uncovers an arresting metaphor for the paradox at the heart of the human condition: absolute freedom and absolute determination, transcendence and finitude, silence and speech.
The Angel, Cacciari argues, is not merely a religious symbol but a philosophical figure—an intermediary presence that discloses the world while remaining itself elusive and unsayable. Through a sweeping, poetic approach to phenomenology, he confronts the defining concerns of modern thought: nihilism, representation, intelligibility, and the fragile status of language in a fractured age.
Erudite yet incandescent, rigorous yet imaginative, The Necessary Angel is a tour de force—an original vocabulary for thinking the limits of meaning and the mystery at the core of human expression.
Table of Contents:
Preface to the French Edition
Preface to the English Edition
Translator's Note
1. Since the Days of Tobias
2. Angel and Demon
3. The Problem of Representation
4. Zodiacs
5. Apokatastasis
6. Birds of the Soul
Notes
About the Author :
Massimo Cacciari is Professor of Aesthetics at the University of Venice, Italy. He is the author of Krisis; Dallo Steinhof; Icone della Legge; Zeit ohne Kronos; and Drama y duelo.
Review :
"Cacciari tells a story. It is the story of the history of angels in Judaic, Islamic, and Christian traditions; and it continues as an amplification of the metaphor of angels in such writers as Dante, Rilke, Kafka, Benjamin, Klee, and Marc in order to speak about the phenomenology of language. Cacciari talks about angels in order to describe the contradictory nature of linguistic signs (absolute freedom and absolute determination). The greatest importance of this book is its 'poetic' approach to phenomenology and the genre of philosophical writing." — Beverly Allen
"Massimo Cacciari's book The Necessary Angel is both an extremely erudite elucidation of angelology that discusses philosophy, religion, literature, music and painting; and a philosophical focus on the figure of the Angel as 'suspended between all the axes of creation.'" — Alexander Garcia Düttmann
"Cacciari's unpredictable approaches to the literary, philosophical, and artistic tradition that frames our present intellectual situation, particularly the one that takes shape in the Germanic world of the early twentieth century, are always penetrating and at times even dazzling. This book is an astounding tour de force, eclectic to be sure, but compelling in its defining the contours of that 'angelic' apriori, which is both beyond the human yet intimately inherent in the human—an apriori which discloses the world in its indeterminate, finite transcendence and which makes of the human a locus of intermediary meaning whose ultimate terms are ungraspable, unsayable, and enigmatic. It offers a new figure, an original vocabulary, a fresh network of references, for the intellectual issues that concern so many of us: nihilism, post-modernism, the conditions of intelligibility, and the status of language." — Robert Harrison
