Editorial

       Culture, says Sigmund Freud’s tragic reading of history, originates in the murder and cannibalistic incorporation of the father by the brother horde. Poetry, says Harold Bloom’s theory of the “anxiety of influence”, originates in the poet’s Oedipal struggle with paternal predecessors: to come after a great poet is a wound of anxiety, answered through a misreading of the father’s poem. This issue originates in a conscious misreading of the concept and its familial poetology, while holding on to its terms anxiety and influence, yet in its more ambivalent German translation asEinflussangst. In one way or another, the contributions suggest that the source of anxiety lies somewhere else (both closer to and outside ourselves – in language, in institutions, in the constructions of canons, in the abstractions of capital) and that writing (and making images) under the influence of others may reveal a route, not outside, but perhaps beyond anxiety.

       Anxiety, writes the philosopher, and my dear friend, Antonia Birnbaum (who had to withdraw her contribution to this issue as she moved from Vienna back to Paris) in her new book Mut ohne Heldentum, bears a weight of immediacy and danger and therein relates to courage. While the hazard of anxiety befalls each and every subject, in order to subjectivize courage, one must traverse it; courage therefore emerges not from the absence of anxiety, but from its passage. (The courageous subject is, of course, not Oedipus but Antigone).

       Courage, I have found, is an unlikely but perhaps necessary political horizon for Einflussangst in a time when, both globally and locally, and here in Vienna, “we are no longer living ‘after fascism’, but suddenly in the midst of it,”^[3] and when Einflussangst might translate, for at least half of the Austrian voters, not into a form of intertextuality, but into “Überfremdungsangst”, and ultimately into the fascist fantasy of “remigration.”

       I am not sure that art or writing, or art writing, is the place to counter such very real fantasies – or rather, I am quite sure that it is not. Yet I like to hold on to the possibility, perhaps with a false belief in language, that writing with and against various Einflussängste – through techniques of copying, citing, appropriating, expropriation, superimposing – might allow us to practice “the art of citing without quotation marks” (Benjamin), a practice between self and other, between history and the present, on the page, from which other practices might emerge altogether: other, political practices that ultimately put writing at risk.^[4]

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       In the introduction to the essay collection Other Influences: An Untold History of Feminist Avant-Garde Poetry, I find a fourteenth-century definition of influence: “an ethereal fluid held to flow from the stars and to affect the actions of humans”. Such a fluid idea of influence – grounded in a mystical notion of influence as the influx of the Holy Spirit into a soul that willingly opens itself to it – today seems, given that in a world facing climate collapse, the fluids travel from the stars through greenhouse gas polluted air before they reach us and affect our actions and our writing, a rather disquieting vision.

       In the entry on “Einflussangst und Vatermord” (anxiety of influence and patricide) in the book Helm aus Phlox – a collective, possible theory of contemporary poetry co-written by Ann Cotten, Daniel Falb, Hendrik Jackson, Steffen Popp, and Monika Rinck – the poets (the reader never knows who writes; the book practices collective anonymity) recount the following story of tainted influential fluids: in 2008, in a slaughterhouse near Austin, workers who quite literally had to blow out pigs’ brains, which were then processed into a pudding-like cerebral mash and exported as an edible meat product, developed a strange neurological disorder. A translator, that is, a language worker who had supported the predominantly Latin-American slaughterhouse workers at the hospital, was the first to identify the inhalation of atomized pig-brain matter as the illness’s cause.

       Moving from the slaughterhouse to the subway, the poets remind us readers that we not merely suck in particles or poems, but ourselves spread infection, influence.

“Like the teenager on the subway: ‘Read the beginning of Kleist, dude, it'll fuck your eye!’ He could have also said: ‘It'll blow your mind.’ I suck in particles and cause infection myself. You are the brain and you are blown out – pollination, seeing others getting sick around you – and: That's not what I meant. Particularisation: Your brain dissolves into alien components. Fear of losing control arises.”^[5]

       Writing, and especially art criticism, is both a place where a fantasy of control is created (over the object of critique) and where, ultimately, the fear of losing control arises – when the work of art, or the language with which one aims to capture it, takes over and looks back at you.

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       Earlier this year, on a sticky summer day, I visited the Bode Museum in Berlin to see Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). While looking at the bird-footed creature looking back at me in poor, dim light, I searched for Martin Luther.

       Ten years ago, while studying the Angelus at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in preparation for a show at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, the artist R.H. Quaytman noticed that pressed between the watercolor paper bearing Klee’s drawing and the cardboard mount inscribed with its title was an old engraving of a figure in a dark robe. She examined the work more closely and noticed that the edges of the painting, which are only visible in a few reproductions of the watercolor, revealed a date from the 1520s, a monogram (“LC”), and folds of a robe against a dark background, indicating someone’s torso. It is indeed Martin Luther’s torso, as depicted in a copy of a Cranach painting, lying behind the angel of history, as Quaytman could discern.

       In a 2014 painting, created after Quaytman had noticed the engraving but before she had identified Luther in it, she employed Klee’s oil-transfer technique to replicate his angel on one of the plywood panels she regularly uses as supports, “hoping to learn more through the making of the thing.”^[6] She then obscured almost the entire image of Klee’s angel with a thick, bulbous layer of foam, with only an angel’s eye lurking behind the black mass. Around this central form, she added a pattern of closely spaced black-and-white zigzags – a dazzling re-enactment of the hiding of the angel in an attempt to read its hidden history.

       The work demonstrates, as art historian and Klee scholar Annie Bourneuf argues in Behind the Angel of History, “the distance between source and remake”, while “draw[ing] attention to the procedural similarities between crucial maneuvers in her own work – citation, superimposition, attention to the edge – and the way the Angelus was put together.”^[7]

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       It seemed a strange yet telling moment for an exhibition titled Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After WWII, for which the “angel of history” traveled from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem to Berlin – almost as if to prevent it from witnessing the present Israeli genocide in Gaza, fixing the angel’s gaze instead on Germany’s turning away from its past. Curiously, within the exhibition, Klee’s angel and Walter Benjamin’s writings on it were not situated within the context of German facism, that is, within a history to which it belongs, but were instead deliberately placed in a Post-WWII frame, presenting the Angelus Novus next to Wenders’ Wings of Desire (1987), revealing Germany’s Erinnerungskultur as Engelkitsch for German dreamers.

       Such a repression of history is countered not only by Benjamin’s reading of the Angelus Novus as the angel of history, but also, on a material level, by the temporal layering of Klee’s oil-transfer technique, which makes visible the process and duration of the work’s making and carries over the principle of copying into history. By appropriating and expropriating Klee’s method of historical citation, Quaytman extricates the source material from its familiar interpretations, allowing us to see the angel’s layered history, and an image wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.

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       Toward the end of their poetological reflections on anxiety, influence, and patricide, Cotten, Falb, Jackson, Popp and Rinck – the five father and author killing poets – raise the possibility that Einflussangst might not only refer, as in Harold Bloom’s version, to the lingering force of the past on the present, but also to an influence exerted from the future: not merely a pressure pushing from behind, but also a current pulling forward.

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^[1] Ann Cotten/Daniel Falb/Hendrik Jackson/Steffen Popp/Monika Rinck, Helm aus Phlox, Berlin 2011, p. 185.
^[2] I here borrow the title of an exhibition by the artist Ulrike Müller at mumok Vienna, curated by Manuela Ammer, October 10, 2015 – January 31, 2016.
^[3] Dagmar Herzog, The New Fascist Body, Berlin: Wirklichkeit Books, 2025.
^[4] I here misread a text by the late Marxist poet Joshua Clover on poetic subjectivity and objectivity, in which he writes: “The space of poetry cannot itself be the place in which the dialectic of subject and object is arbitrated. [...] So rather than arguing for or against the subjective in poetry, we might wish to engage in other political practices altogether, practices which put poetry at risk as they must risk all practices dependent on the opposition of subject and object.” (Joshua Clover, “Objectively speaking. Remarks on subjectivity and poetry”, in: Texte zur Kunst #103 / September 2016, pp. 40–45: 44.
^[5] Ann Cotten/Daniel Falb/Hendrik Jackson/Steffen Popp/Monika Rinck, Helm aus Phlox, Berlin: Merve, 2011, p. 181 (my translation, or rather my attempt at a translation, which necessarily involves a misreading).
^[6] R.H. Quaytman, cited in: Annie Bourneuf, Behind the Angel of History. The Angelus Novus and its Interleaf Chicago/London 2022, p. 13.
^[7] Ibid.