Benjamin's Mimetic Re-Turn: Language, Body, Memory

Abstract

Abstract: Walter Benjamin is a crucial figure in modernist mimesis. He was highly receptive to mimetic influences and at the same time a prolific and sensitive theoretician of those experiences. He moved far beyond the traditional aesthetics of a realistic and representational mimesis and must be located within the post-Nietzschean, modernist 'mimetic turn or re-turn.' Even if occluded by modern rationality, the mimetic faculty still takes effect for Benjamin in 'non-sensuous similarities,' in poetic language, in drifting expression, the unconscious, the body and its memory. To place Benjamin within mimetic modernism I will first adumbrate what I call linguistic magic in the context of modernist literature, ethnological and linguistic theory. Secondly, I will describe the modernist fascination with the body in and through which mimesis takes place. The third and main part centers on Benjamin's theological (and magical) interest in language. It focusses on his own occupation with (linguistic) magic and his conception or 'patho-logy' of mimesis. This he locates in the body, the pre-reflexive and unconscious, in the play of children, in early experience, and memory or mémoire involontaire (Marcel Proust).