The Angel as Wish Image: Justin Bieber, Popular Culture, and the Politics of Absolution

Abstract

In the early 21st century, the angel became a recurrent image within the visual economy of pop music stardom. By considering the case of Justin Bieber (whose angel invocations give expression to his struggles with celebrity, faith, and the pathology of Whiteness), the author reveals how biographical factors alone cannot account for the angel’s contemporary resonance. Instead, and drawing upon Walter Benjamin’s concept of wish image, the author argues that this invocational pattern reflects a general desire for a one-to-one correspondence between being and doing—here understood as a manifestation of the ur-historical longing for absolution. Because this desire is ambivalent, the angel has historically been invoked to symbolize wishes as divergent as fascism’s ideal gender relations and radical utopia’s equality. In this way, the angel’s current ubiquity alerts us to the role resonant myths often play in the elaboration of collective desires, while pointing toward their implications for emancipatory strategy.