Benjamin's Theory Research Articles

Ethics and Dialogue in the Works of Levinas, Bakhtin, Mandel'shtam, and Celan (review)

New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 294 pp. $85.00. Michael Eskin's project is an interesting, ambitious, and in my view finally successful one. He would like to read Emmanuel Levinas's notion of ethical in context of Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of and both as a theoretical background for understanding Paul Celan's engagement with poetry and prose of Ossip Mandel'shtam as well as development of Celan's own poetic practice. While Levinas's notion of ethical and Bakhtin's of dialogic have certainly been studied before (although Bakhtin's notion of metalinguistic perhaps less so), implications of work of both writers for an actual third poetic practice has not, and no one has put them together in context specifically of Celan's engagement with Mandel'shtam. The strategy appears to work. An introductory chapter informs us that study follows the method of a detailed phenomenological description (p. xiii) which means a series of more or less independent studies, although thesis argument is developed throughout. A chapter on Levinasian ethics (distinguishing it on one hand from Kantian ethics and on other from Heideggerian ontology) is followed by one on Bakhtin. In this chapter, both differences between Bakhtin's socially dependent understanding of dialogic and Levinas's pre-existential ethics, and identicality of reliance of both writers upon some logic of social, some logic of intersubjective or interdividual realities, are developed. The third chapter follows Celan's inter-textual dialogue or encounter with Mandel'shtam and his practice of a poetics that confers upon his interlocutor an infinite respect while assuming by its practice an infinite responsibility for it. Chapters four, five, and six develop a close reading of Celan's work, Die Niemandsrose (The No One's Rose). The final concluding chapter asks whether a generalized poethical method is possible. Can method developed in Celan's reading of Mandel'shtam be universalized? That would mean, Eskin tells us, taking it beyond circumscribed context. Against grain of Levinas's, Bakhtin's, Mandel'shtam's, and Celan's insistence on enunciatory and ethical singularity, Eskin claims finally, it appears to be possible. If I have a criticism or two to make of Eskin's book, they are minor in comparison to book's enormous achievement. Eskin might have made more use of Walter Benjamin's theories of translation on one hand, and of Martin Buber's understanding of dialogue, ethical, and answerability (from which in fact both Levinas and Bakhtin historically derive a great deal) on other. Benjamin's essay on Task of Translator (which eschews customary ways of thinking about translation as representation for its understanding as survival, as echo of original language in target language), seems a natural for this study, if only as a point of departure. Moreover, as Buber and Rosenzweig invented discussion that in different ways all four writers pursue (think of importance of Buber's I and Thou to these writers), it would seem appropriate that their intertextual influence be brought into discussion. Moreover, more could be made of Levinas's not uncomplicated view of poetic. …

The Critical Theory of Society: The Longing for the Totally Other

This essay is concerned with the religious and theological dimension of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Walter Benjamin's and other theorists' critical theory of society. It aims at a new critical theory of religion, which would go beyond the religious and theological concerns of the critical theory of society. The essay concentrates on the way, in which the critical theorists of the first and second generation dealt with the modern dichotomy between the religious and the secular, the sacred and the profane, revelation and enlightenment, religious faith and autonomous reason, church and state. The critical theorists have left behind the idealistic attempt to reconcile the modern dichotomy of the religious and the secular: e.g., that of Leibnitz, Hegel, Goethe, or Beethoven. The essay focuses on the critical theorists' materialistic attempt — not to reconcile faith and knowledge, that is not possible at this point in history — but at least to prevent the modern contradiction between monotheism and enlightenment to be closed prematurely either fundamentalistically or scientistically and positivistically. Adorno and Benjamin have initiated an inverse theology, which presupposes a. that religion has indeed contributed to the humanization of mankind, and b.that the secularization process cannot be stopped. The inverse theology allows semantic and semiotic materials and potentials to migrate from the depth of the mythos into the secular discourse among the expert cultures — sociology, psychology, anthropology, philosophy — and through it into communicative and political action, in order thus to prevent the further rebarbarization of the Western civilization. The inverse theology is a test in so far as that semantic or semiotic material, which cannot be translated into the profane discourse of expert cultures, cannot be rescued and will be lost. One central semantic element, which Adorno and Horkheimer intended to rescue, was the longing for the totally Other than the slaughterbench, holocaust — altar and Golgatha of history. In this longing for the entirely Other is concretely superseded, i.e., criticized, but also preserved and elevated and fulfilled, what once in the world — religions and — philosophies had been called: Eternity, Beauty, Heaven, God, Infinite, Transcendence, Being, Idea, Absolute, Unconditional. The critical theorists transform once certain religious dogmas into longings. The longing for the totally Other has been the fundamental motive and motivation of the critical theorists, which gave them manifestly or latently energy for almost a whole century, and which allowed them to survive two world wars, and fascism, and emigration, and to make it possible for them on one hand not to regress into mythology, and on the other hand not to fall victim to positivism as the metaphysics of what is the case.

Świat oczyma Benjamina (tłum. z j. niemieckiego: E. Nowak-Juchacz)

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was one of the first important philosophers who, at that time, tried to develop a new concept of art. For him, it is a matter of changing our way of perception which refers to the change of social moral concepts due to technological development. The new aspects which were hidden due to the prevailing perception referred to as rationality or consciousness can result from the so-called un-rational dark side. This is because our rational side is back-upped by its negative irrational side. With the allegoric way of cognition, according to Benjamin, one can understand this structure of perception; one can find not only the already existing relations but also the hidden interconnections among things at the same time. In my opinion, this versatility of the human view is a kind of our perception of reality. In this context, I would like to show three fundamental concepts of Benjamin's cognition theory in this paper: the origin as goal, the allegory as method, and the time of the now as the period of decadence.

Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts

Introduction: Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts ]ohn Docker Subhash ]aireth These essays arose from an international symposium "Adventures of Dialogue : Bakhtin and Benjamin" staged at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra, in June 2001. We formed the idea to hold a conference, as the twentieth century ended and the new millennium ushered itself in, on two of modernity's greatest literary and philosophical thinkers, who were born almost at the same time, and in the late 1920s published two of the last century's most challenging, brilliant, speculative works, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics and The Origin of German Tragic Drama. We decided to call on the term "Adventures" because, as with "Adventures of Identity: Constructing the Multicultural Subject," a conference organized by John Docker and Gerhard Fischer at the Goethe-Institut in Sydney in 1998, such a title and approach seems to elicit imaginative and adventurous contributions. As with the Goethe-Institut conference, we would aim to include topics and participants from around the world. The "Eurocentric," we hoped, would be thoroughly challenged in our Canberra conference, as it had been in Sydney. In July of 2000 we sent out a call for papers, suggesting a wide range JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 32.3 (Fall 2002): 261-265. Copyright O 2002 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 262 JNT of possible symposium themes—from "Being and Becoming" to "Philosophy and Representation"; from "Vision and Visuality" to "Space, Place, Travel" and "Time"; from "Objects and Things" to "Monotheism and Polytheism." Each of these rubrics implied a diverse subset of possibilities including the individuality of cities; the public sphere; places sacred, uncanny and mystical—pilgrimages, shrines, temples, synagogues, mosques, churches; sea, ships, ship decks and voyages; museums; railway stations; war/peace memorials; absence of memorials; massacre sites; genocide and trauma; inns, taverns, pubs, salons, the tea shop, the coffee shop; geocultural areas—"the Levant," "the Mediterranean," "Africa," "Asia," "the Pacific ," "Europe"; the prison in history; education; cosmopolitanism; postsecularism ; Egyptology; Exodus; the Bible and critical theory; settler-colonialism and religion; Freud's Moses and Monotheism; heresy; the sacred and the ludic; creation stories, etc. In our call for papers we wrote that we "see the symposium as staging intimate multiple conversations between Bakhtin and Benjamin's ideas and theories," and that we would "particularly like offers of papers that entwine discussion of both thinkers, in terms of possible affinities and differences, in a spirit of agonistic respect." We also sought out and encouraged paper givers for the conference outside of Europe and "the West," and were also very interested in papers that might engage with indigenous cultures. We were attracted to ideas for papers that surprised us and that we thought were truly "adventurous"—that might proceed from Bakhtin or Benjamin and explore new areas or motifs or texts or figures, often in almost eccentric or idiosyncratic ways. We hoped such papers would stretch the boundaries, taking Benjamin and Bakhtin away from canonical enclosed treatment of them that we thought was, if not boring, at least restrictive and predictable. In conceiving the symposium, we recognized that Bakhtin remains closely tied to the two sites of Slavic and Literary studies, whereas Benjamin has "traveled" far and wide. One of our aims was to encourage an investigation of Bakhtin and a dialogue with Benjamin that would address the question of influence. Theorists came in from the US, Scotland, Hong Kong and Singapore, as well as the Australian cities of Newcastle, Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra itself. Proceedings were entertainingly visual, with much showing of slides, movie excerpts, photos, postcards. The high intellectual Introduction-. Benjamin and Bakhtin: New Approaches, New Contexts 263 quality was set at the beginning of each day by the keynote speakers Katerina Clark and Rajeev Patke. These were our noble bookends, investigating and extending current knowledge and research into our major figures. Then younger scholars took over, glancing off Bakhtin and Benjamin to give witty, unusual, innovative talks. The well known cultural theorist and public intellectual Meaghan Morris arrestingly summed up proceedings at the end. There were no parallel sessions, so rapport and camaraderie easily developed over the two days. There was much fun and laughter. There...

Manfredo Tafuri's theory of the architectural avant-garde

Despite its frequent use, the meaning of the term architectural avant-garde is ambiguous and an explicit theory delineating its parameters has not been written. What would be the theoretical glue that binds various architectural movements of the early twentieth century, which are commonly referred to as historical avant-gardes? What might be a specific theory of architectural avant-garde, one that is not necessarily synonymous with the theories of avant-garde in visual arts or literature? In this paper, I suggest that a theory of architectural avant-garde is inscribed in Manfredo Tafuri's writings, and I excavate this theory in relation to three related themes: End (death) of history, metropolitan condition and end of architecture as auratic object. Tafuri considers 'death of history', in the sense of the rejection of the past or aspiration for newness, as one of the leading principles of avant-garde movements. The metropolitan condition that requires a brave confrontation with the 'intensification of nervous stimulation', 'rapid crowding of changing images' or 'blasé attitude' that Tafuri observes via Simmel is the second theme I underline. According to the historian, far from feeling anguished for the lost past, the avant-gardes confront the new chaos of metropolis as a fruitful condition of existence. Yet these two themes alone have the risk of culminating in the cult of novelty as the sole ground of avant-gardism, and of dissolving the distinction between avant-garde and fashion. Though Tafuri accepts the description of avant-garde in terms of the shock of the new, contingency and ephemerality, I suggest that it is the third theme that differentiates his theory from a definition based solely on novelty. Following Hegel's theory on the 'end of art' and Benjamin's theory on the 'destruction of aura', Tafuri formulates avant-gardism in terms of the end of architecture as auratic object. Just as mechanical reproduction and mass production gave an end to the status of art as cult objects, 'the dialectic between architectonic object and urban organisation' enters into a radically new phase with the avant-garde. If one translates (Tafuri's reading of) Benjamin's and Hegel's theories into architecture, it follows that the ultimate architectural avant-garde would mean the end of architecture in the sense of its total dissolution into the urban structure of the modern metropolis. The fulfillment of the architectural avant-garde would be the total dissolution of Architecture into something outside itself, of aura into mass, of form into process, of author into producer, of architect into organiser. According to this interpretation, the architectural avant-garde thus demands a radical challenge to the institution of architecture itself, to the ways architecture is produced and consumed within the modern metropolis. I discuss Tafuri's theory of architectural avant-garde in relation to his own architectural examples especially in Weimar Germany, suggest that the Siedlung projects hold one of the most crucial places in this theory, and explain why the historian considered the avant-garde as an historically conditioned, critical but failed attempt.

Aesthetic Prejudice in Modern Drama

The aesthetic prejudice chiefly in question is that subordination or suppression of the performing subject that is particularly associated with realism in modern drama. It stands revealed as such not only in the staging but also in the performative elements of the verbal texts in which dramatic realism, rather paradoxically, defined itself. The incommensurability of an act of representation and a corresponding embodiment of a performing subject is often made quite obvious in the juxtaposition of modern dramas and their operatic versions, and it is a given in the aesthetics of physical theatre. In the earlier twentieth century, such aesthetic issues were so embroiled in fateful political struggles as to induce such crises of representation as those instanced here: the transmutation, in Walter Benjamin's theory, that brought with it an acceptance of didactic performance; the severe problems encountered in Marc Blitzstein's operatic and remedial transformation of Lillian Hellman's flawed aesthetic in The Little Foxes and its associated moral blindness; and the divergent theatre practices of W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot with respect to speech, music, and dance. In these instances, performativity versus discourse is a critical issue, and it remains so in contemporary practice, though hardly the dangerous one that it has been in the past.

Бен’ямін і Гольдман як читачі Паскаля. Теорія смутку В. Бен’яміна і теорія трагічного бачення Л. Гольдмана

The article describes and partially compares Walter Benjamin's theory of sorrow and Lucien Goldman's theory of tragic vision. The comparison is made in the light of the connections between both theories and Pascal's philosophy. The author concludes that these theories are essentially analogous and complementary. In the author's opinion, both theories, despite all the differences, clarify sadness and tragedy by addressing the paradox of human existence that consists in the discovery of the vast infinity of the world and the inaccessibility of transcendence, in the light of which, however, we are forced to think about our own existence. Based on the results of the review, the author emphasizes the essential parallelism and connection of both theories with Pascal's philosophy, which to some extent can be seen as their common ground.

Walter Benjamin: Traces of Craft

This paper considers Walter Benjamin's theory of the object in the industrial age. Benjamin's work is replete with images of craft practices. Pot-throwing and weaving appear as paradigms of authentic experience and the processes of memory. Prominent in Benjamin's account of craft practice is the hand that feels and marks its objects; authentic knowledge of the world is envisioned as a 'grasping hold' of the world. The shift from artisan labour to industrial labour, with its growing redundancy of the hand in the processes of production, impacts on modes of memory and experience. Benjamin's delineation of modern, industrialized experience is shown to be redemptive. He re-evaluates Dada and photography as manual craft processes that might rediscover a modern authenticity of experience and memory.

Massenmedien und Bildung. Eine pädagogische Interpretation der Adorno-Benjamin-Kontroverse

Die hier vorgelegte Studie versucht, die ADORNO-BENJAMIN-Kontroverse bildungstheoretisch zu interpretieren. Sie beginnt mit einer kurzen Darstellung der unterschiedlichen Problemsichten von BENJAMIN und ADORNO und erortert die Differenzen zwischen ihren Positionen vor dem Hintergrund ihres gemeinsamen Anliegens, das sich mit BENJAMIN vielleicht am klarsten mit dem Begriff Erfahrungsarmut fassen last. (DIPF/Orig.) Adorno and Benjamin did not discuss educational problems systematically. Their educational theories were principally within the scope of aesthetical reflexions. These theories outlined the modern condition of education notably clearly though they were based on the aesthetical point of view. The interpretations of the modern condition of education, which Benjamin called Erfahrungsarmut (poverty of experience), however, were quite different between Benjamin and Adorno. The resembling and controversial points between the two can clearly be seen in the Adorno-Benjamin-Dispute in the 1930's. Starting from an analysis of this dispute, this paper will attempt to reconstruct differences between Adorno and Benjamin in their views of education. The focus of this paper will placed on how Benjamin's educational theory differs from the traditional ones. This deviation represents a realistical consequence of his radical confrontation with the modernity. (DIPF/Orig.)

Walter Benjamin's Urban Thought: A Critical Analysis

In this paper I offer an introductory survey of Walter Benjamin's writings on cities and urbanism in order to explore the potential value of his insights for urban studies, I address the following issues: the complexity and variety of Benjamin's urban writings; the status of Benjamin's theory of modern urban experience in his thought; the distinct textual strategics developed in his urban writings; and the relationship between memory, the built environment, and historical processes. I argue that Benjamin's concept of ‘aura’ can be used to place his interest in cities and urbanisim in context, I conclude with the suggestion that these notions can usefully inform current writings in urban studies.

The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis (review)

Reviewed by: The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis Peter Wolfe Gregory Comnes . The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1994. 188 pp. $24.95. William Gaddis's fiction, says Gregory Comnes, puts forth a "vision of plurality and contingency" that disallows "prescriptive utterances" based on Christianity, humanism, or Newtonian epistemology. But the preponderance of chance and accident in Gaddis not only constitutes meaning; this randomness also clears a path to meaning. The folly of relying too heavily upon reason in our random world finds voice in Gaddis's belief that, if the conscious mind craves clarity and precision, the unconscious seeks out paradox and mystery. As Comnes shows, alchemy fascinates Gaddis because it probed deep interactions where reason was secondary. The production of the philosopher's stone subsumed but also transcended reason. The redemption of matter was a psychological as well as a scientific procedure, the psyche projecting itself into the physical realm. Even the stars could influence the success of a procedure. Because the procedure wasn't strictly mental or material, it could only be conducted by means of a symbolism both confusing and arcane. Thus Gaddis, mostly in Recognitions (1955), favors a narrative texture that's thick and messy with a good deal of spill-over. This unwieldiness squares with his ontology. He resists imposing clean, consecutive discourse upon a reality consisting largely of a scumbling of depths, mirror images, and puzzling alternatives. The mysteries deepen. Judgments are a caution in Gaddis, mostly because the human nature he portrays is so tricky and evasive. For one thing, life's many demands preclude the stability of being just one person at a time; "There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people," says Oscar Crease of A Frolic of One's Own (1994), either quoting or paraphrasing Montaigne. [End Page 375] But this instability doesn't rule out moral choice or even moral development for the stalwart. "Don't bring a God damned thing to it can't take a God damned thing from it," says Jack Gibbs in JR (1975), in a passage Comnes quotes more than once. But how much to bring? An important idea may appear in a foreign language which Gaddis won't translate. Sometimes, he'll run an obscure reference before us, daring us not to look it up, as if he expects it to mean as much to us as to him. He may report only part of a scene. He has Liz Booth of Carpenter's Gothic (1985) tell her brother, "I wish you wouldn't smoke," without first describing Billy either taking out or lighting a cigarette. By eliminating the acts that prompted Liz's rebuke, he's not merely practicing good narrative selection and economy; he's hinting, too, at the richness of experience by indicating that he's only showing part of it. His practice of splintering traditional storytelling modes forces us to seek merit and value along the margins. Comnes believes that the search reaps rewards. Drawing upon Walter Benjamin's language theory, he claims that Gaddis' collaborative fiction puts the reader on the same level as the characters. For instance, by keeping the chronology of his books vague, Gaddis transmits the pressure his people feel living amid guidelines and controls that can't be seen or felt, let alone made sense of. This pressure induces a dialogue between reader and text. Rather than reading passively, we join the quest for meaning and value—a quest that can send McCandless of Carpenter's Gothic all over the backwaters of the southern hemisphere. Our activity helps us live the fiction through. The rigors of living our actions through go against the American predilection for speed and instant gratification personified by Gaddis's 11-year-old investment wizard JR Vansant; one needs time, patience, and imagination. But the process of living it through also teaches us that existence has intrinsic worth; it shows us how to soldier on without the help of absolutes; it confirms Tolstoy's belief that doubt, confusion, and even pain abet growth and self-transcendence. Invoking Alfred...

The allegorical text and history: J.M. Coetzee'sWaiting for the Barbarians

Summary This article attempts to move beyond what are perceived to be the limitations of both Lukacsian Marxist and Deconstructionist accounts of J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. If a Lukacsian Marxism has correctly introduced the category of “history” into the analyses of the novel, it has done so only to berate Coetzee for its absence. Teresa Dovey's Deconstructionist analyses have helpfully focused attention on the novel's intertextual critique of the South African liberal novel. However, her criticism is deformed by its inability to confront the complexities of the text's meditation upon its relationship with “history”. The linguistic theory of Saussure, and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory, are used to analyse that relationship. While the allegoric form acts as a critique of “classic realist” writing, this does not signal the text's refusal of “history”. Rather, it affirms its location as a signifying “interpretation” of the real that recognises its discursive specificity. The novel exa...

Borderline versus other personality disorders in the eating disorders: Clinical description

The authors compared eating-disordered patients with borderline personality disorder to those patients with other personality disorders or none at all. Borderline subjects differed from other personality disorders in several ways; most notably their histories of sexual abuse, self-mutilation, suicide gestures, and perceived hostile parental relationships. Borderline subjects failed to differ from other personality-disordered subjects in eating attitudes and showed only limited differences in eating symptoms. The results are discussed also in terms of their support for Benjamin's theory of borderline personality.

Daughters and Fathers (review)

Reviews167 digkeit"—an aesthetic union of antithetical principles signified by "a peculiar deadening" of men and gods alike (p. 52). If Nägele and Wellbery give innovative accounts of the crucial role caesural inexpression plays in Benjamin's critical methodology, Avital Ronell in "StreetTalk " explores the topic of speech as rumor while inadvertendy describing the language of the death's head in its aspect as wild expression. Ronell's staged encounter between Benjamin, Heidegger, and Rousseau addresses the question of "rumorological paranoia" (p. 120)—especially in the efforts of the latter two to quell rumors damaging to their reputations and legacies. Conversely, Benjamin 's relation to rumor is largely theoretical: focusing on "The Destructive Character" and "Karl Kraus," Ronell elucidates Benjamin's concept of rumor as a promiscuous rhetoric of pestilence in which public and private discourses, to quote Benjamin, "commingle demonically in pratde" (p. 121). Analogous to Nägele's and Wellbery's ground of historical life, rumor represents the monstrous materiality ofexperience untouched by intellectual form. One could wish that Ronell's writing exhibited less of a stylistic cleverness itself verging on Tumorous excess; but on the whole, she subjects her topical ground to rigorous thought. Others may respond more readily than I to Rodolphe Gasché's location of an intersection between philosophy and theology in Benjamin's theory of language , or to Beryl Schlossman's and Werner Hamacher's singular accounts of the caesural image, while Timothy Bahti's analysis of fate and forgetting may seem less obscure to those who can accept a quasi-deconstructionist approach to Benjamin's texts. If Nägele's praxis of reading requires the critic to admit the otherness ofBenjamin's oeuvre, this prerequisite further implies the adoption of what Wellbery calls "the discourse of modesty," which "endeavors to efface itselfbefore the inner movementofthat text" (p. 39). According to this definition of the relation between reading and commentary, the three essays discussed above particularly distinguish their authors as expert readers in a genuinely Benjaminian sense. University of California, BerkeleyLynne Vieth Daughters andFathers, edited by Lynda E. Boose and Betty S. Flowers; vii & 453 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, $39.50 cloth, $12.95 paper. The editors of this anthology of feminist criticism begin with two questions: why has the interaction of daughters and fathers been, until recendy, a subject that stands "virtually unmapped" (p. 1), and what has happened in both aca- 168Philosophy and Literature demie and popular perception in the last few years that has broken centuries of silence? A phenomenon of "sudden emergence . . . makes it equally relevant to consider not only what accounts for the historic erasure of a subject but also what cultural signals suddenly authorize its articulation" (p. 2). Boose and Flowers suggest a variety of current societal and economic phenomena. One certain cause, however, is the joining togetiier, for the first time in intellectual history, ofa "critical mass" ofacademic "daughters" examining their own routes (and roots) to power. This anthology suggests that a daughter's psychological inheritance from her father can be both an enormously empowering and inhibiting factor in her ability to claim personal and professional authority. The traditional dynamic is oudined in the long introductory article by Lynda E. Boose. In the anthropological "narration of family," the father's control is established through the exchange of women. The most easily bestowed woman is his daughter. "Thus, if the prohibition of incest is essentially a mechanism to control internal family sexuality so that outward exchanges can take place, then the incest taboo would seem to have a special applicability to one particular pair. And if it is true, as anthropology asserts, that the origins of culture are synonymous with the evolution of kinship, then culture has essentially been built upon die relationship it has seemed least eager to discuss—that between father and daughter" (p. 19). That has not meant, however, that the daughter's value to the family— and to the father in particular—has traditionally been acknowledged. Indeed, her position has more often been that ofa "sojourner." And yet, though destined to be exchanged, her connection with her father is difficult to dissolve, often due to the father's reluctance to release...

Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (review)

Reviews391 underestimates the analogy to the Kabbalah, Hans Mayer asserts in "Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka" (1980) that Benjamin's understanding of Kafkaesque aUegory was gready influenced by Scholem's insistence on the Talmudic plurality of Kafka's texts with their "endless possible interpretations" (p. 197). Since explanation is perpetuaUy postponed in aUegory, Ulumination in Kafka's world becomes purely "prophecy without hope" (p. 208). In "Walter Benjamin's City Portraits" (1962), Peter Szondi suggests that Benjamin 's "language of images" is actuaUy twofold (p. 26): there is indeed the allegorical fragment that destroys mythic analogies, but there is also the reconstructive moment "when the author takes two different objects and reveals their essence by linking them in a metaphor based on common property" (p. 28). In "Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck" (1981), Pierre Missac locates a liminal imagistic category between fragmentand metaphor—theBruchst ückor productofrupture—manifesting what Benjamincalled the "weak Messianic power" through which the past is transmitted to the present (p. 216). Irving Wohlfarth in "Resentment Begins at Home" (1981) is weU aware that this historical interaction requires complex maneuvering on the part of Benjamin's "materialist historian," who must fragment the myths of tradition yet save the significant pieces (p. 226). In "Dialectics at a StandstiU" (1982), RolfTiedemann accordingly demonstrates that "dialectical images" as "configurations ofthe Now and the Then" constitute the central category in the unfinished edifice of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk (p. 284). Two essays undermine the general exceUence of Smith's collection. Hans RobertJauss's "Reflection on the Chapter 'Modernity' in Benjamin's Baudelaire Fragments" (1979) is a virtually uninteUigible excerpt from a longer essay. In "Walter Benjamin's Theory of Myth" (1983), Winfried Menninghaus aU too briefly distinguishes Benjamin's approach to myth from seven venerable theories . If one is going to argue that "Benjamin wants to appropriate the universalizing capacity of a purely formal conception of myth" (p. 295) while avoiding "the radically unhistorical, formal semiohgical concept ofmyth oftwentieth -century structural anthropology" (p. 293), one would be weU advised not to dismiss Lévi-Strauss in two sentences. University of California, BerkeleyLynne Vieth Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction, by Malcolm Bowie; xii & 225 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987, $39.50 cloth, $15.95 paper. This volume consists ofpreviously read papers and lectures loosely organized into an introduction, an epilogue, and five chapters, ofwhich Freud and Proust receive one each and one shared, while Lacan receives two. To what extent 392Philosophy and Literature does the author contribute to our knowledge and understanding of these theorists /fictioneers and their interrelationships? Bowie rejects the stress placed by the most subtle analysts of Proust on the central role of intuition, synthesis, and metaphor, dismissing their views as "misleading" and "absurd" (p. 47), or as "thrusting a false simplicity upon the book" (p. 48). He himself then proceeds to view the whole work through the themes of lying and jealousy, and thus neglects the cruciaUy important first and final volumes to concentrate on La Prisonnière. As for theory, he rejects empirical verification—the only real test of the value of theory for criticism— with heavy irony, and remarks: "Many critics, it seems, are wüling to grant seriousness and coherence to a given social or psychological theory only if they are able to show that theory to be pre-eminendy applicable to novels, plays or poems. . . . The process is not a particularly arduous one. There is no need for the critic to feel exhausted or forlorn. . ." (p. 5). Lacan's Ecrits were published by Le Seuil in 1966, and his brilliant lessons on the analyst-patient relationship were used in the 1970s to radicalize the interpretation of first-person narration. However, Lacan, already notorious for his obscurantism, has gradually been discredited by his association with the selfcontradictory deconstructionism extracted from Derrida by disciples like Paul de Man and Hillis Miller. Bowie seems unaware of this. He discusses Lacan's famous "Séminaire sur la Lettre volée" but fails to grasp the essential fact that Lacan's errorwas to see in Poe's purloined letter a pure empty signifier. Derrida's error (and Bowie's) is to claim that "the mobility of the...

Terror as Usual: Walter Benjamin's Theory of History as a State of Siege

A question of distance that's what I'd like to say about talking terror, a matter of finding the right distance, holding it at arm's length so it doesn't turn on you (after all it's just a matter of words), and yet not putting it so far away in a clinical reality that we end up having substituted one form of terror for another. But having said this I can see myself already lost, lost out to terror you might say, embarked on some futile exercise in Liberal Aesthetics struggling to establish a golden mean and utterly unable to absorb the fact that terror's talk always talks back super-octaned dialogism in radical overdrive, its talk presupposing if not anticipating my response, undermining meaning while dependent on it, stringing out the nervous system one way toward hysteria, the other way toward numbing and apparent acceptance, both ways flip-sides of terror, the political Art of the Arbitrary, as usual. Of course that's elsewhere, always elsewhere, you'll want to say, not the rule but the exception, existing in An-Other Place like Northern Ireland, Beirut, Ethiopia, Kingston, Port au Prince, Peru, Mozambique, Afghanistan, Santiago, the Bronx, the West Bank, South Africa, San Salvador, Colombia, to name but some of the more publicized from the staggering number of spots troubling the course of the world's order. But perhaps such an elsewhere should make us suspicious about the deeply rooted sense of order here, as if their dark wildness exists so as to silhouette our light, the bottom line being, of course, the tight and necessary fit between order, law, justice, sense, economy, and history all of which them elsewhere manifestly ain't got much of. Pushed by this suspicion I am first reminded of another sort of History of another sort of Other Within, a history of small-fry rather than of the Wealth of Nations, as for example in a letter in the Village Voice in 1984 from an ex-social worker in the state of Colorado, in the USA, commenting on an article on Jeanne Anne Wright who killed her own children. The social worker notes that it was axiomatic that the deeper you dig, the dirtier it gets; the web of connections, the tangled family histories of failure, abuse, and neglect spread out in awesomely unmanageable proportions. When the social worker asked a young mother about the bum marks on her nine-year old daughter, she replied in a passive futile voice that her husband used a cattle

Walter Benjamin's Phantasmagoria

Confronting the ruins of the Jamf Olfabriken Werke (Jamf Petroleum Factory Works), in the light that breaks some night at too deep an hour to explain away, Thomas Pynchon's Enzian reaches an extraordinary understanding. This serpentine slag-heap ... is not a ruin at all. It is in perfect working order.' If readers of Walter Benjamin sometimes grasp the Passagen-Werk in an Enzian-like epiphany, at other moments they apprehend it in a fashion more suitable to Coleridge. Briefly imagining this text in all its completed majesty, they see fully developed concepts where Benjamin left only fragments. The following essay results from one such glimpse into Benjamin's Kubla Khan, for it elaborates a concept that I imagine would have become a keystone of the Passagen-Werk, had Benjamin ever brought his project to completion. This concept is the phantasmagoria, which recurs with troubling insistence throughout Benjamin's arcades project. Suggesting that Benjamin's interest in the phantasmagoria derives primarily from its technological manifestation, as 19th-century visual spectacle, I will reveal how this concept is particularly well-suited to figure Benjamin's Marxist-Freudian theory of base-superstructure relations in a society ruled by the commodity form. In addition, I will argue that the phantasmagoria fascinates Benjamin for its power to capture his own method of critical illumination. Challenging an Enlightenment opposition between ideological mystification and cultural critique, Benjamin's phantasmagoria emblematizes one of the Passagen-Werk's central methodological projects: to free Marxist analysis from its overwhelming valorization of rational forms of representation.

The Trauerspiel of the Prostituted Body, or Woman as Allegory of Modernity

he topic of woman and modernity, from the viewpoint of Walter Benjamin's theory of culture, has raised the following question for me: if modernity is defined by a loss of experience, and if woman can indeed be viewed as an allegory of modernity, can one also detect a corresponding loss of femininity along with the loss of historical experience? In connection with this question, woman and her femininity are related to the experience of history. The so-called historical avant garde of the turn of the century aimed to break with a tradition of mimesis that had its roots in the Renaissance and was still alive in the latter half

Density currents or density wedges: boundary-layer influence and control methods

Density currents and density wedges are two observed manifestations of interactions between an ambient flow and a horizontal buoyant intrusion. In a density current the buoyant pressure force is primarily balanced by the local form drag of the current head which has a blunt shape and abrupt depth change. In a density wedge a distributed interfacial drag is the primary balancing force, leading to a stretched-out shape and long-distance intrusions. A perturbation analysis of the approach flow to the inclined front of a density current shows that slight momentum changes caused by viscous effects in the ambient flow determine which of these two flow types is established. In a uniform ambient channel flow, any momentum deficit relative to the inviscid case will lead to a local flattening of the front and ultimate breakdown into a density wedge. On the other hand, a momentum surplus will support a steady-state density current. Several exploratory experiments on control of the ambient boundary layer through local non-uniformities were performed with the objective of achieving stable density-current forms with limited intrusion lengths. These methods include a small step, a barrier and suction and are applied for intrusions at either the bottom or surface of an ambient water flow. In all cases, good agreement is found with the force balances predicted by Benjamin's (1968) theory and its extension by Britter & Simpson (1978) which accounts for entrainment in the wake zone of the head.

Proust and Benjamin: the Invisible Image

Benjamin's essay "Zum Bilde Prousts" questions the status of the image even as it leafs through the possibilities and variations that form it—as photograph, figure, representation, disappearing trace or promise of creation. As the image of Proust's novel, Benjamin's text takes up the elements of A la Recherche du temps perdu (poetic language, autobiography, critical commentary) in the terms of Benjamin's theory of allegory reflected through the Proustian strategy of reading and writing. "Zum Bilde Prousts" examines the traditional markers of "art" and "life," locating Proustian recherche—and Benjamin's image—in the deep waters beyond them. Through an interpretation of Benjamin's image of Proustian ecstasy (the descent of the mystic) and the images unfolded "Au Temps Perdu" (Benjamin's mystical station of nineteenth-century allegory), Benjamin's essay sollicits a new reading of time and eternity, memory and ecstasy. The final illumination of Proust's artful night indicates the decisive turn toward writing at the spot where "Niles of language" come together—the point of convergence of the image and its invisibility.