Destruction Of Experience Research Articles

‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III)

In this paper I explore Walter Benjamin’s complex thoughts about the concept of experience to illuminate a central paradox when thinking about madness. This paradox concerns the need to hold together constellations of concepts that appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand there is the realm of the psychopathological; a psychiatric thinking of madness as mental illness that refers to suffering, loss of existence, and dysfunction. On the other hand, there is a thinking about madness as a diverse and different experience, as possibility, illumination, and difference. Benjamin’s writings on experience can be particularly fertile here because he acknowledges the contradictions in experience, at certain points emphasising the loss of experience and at other points focussing on the possibilities of a new experience even within a destruction of experience. I will explore three aspects of Benjamin’s reflections on experience and their relationship to an experience of psychosis; the loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that lie within such a loss, the turn towards the object in Benjamin’s account of experience, and finally the concept of the limit-experience. I conclude by considering Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image and apply this idea to the experience of madness.

The I, the Eye, the Voice

This publication marks the first Russian translation of an essay by Giorgio Agamben, originally published in 1980 as a preface to the Italian edition of Paul Valéry’s cycle of works on Monsieur Teste. Agamben’s essay delves into the philosophical genealogy of Valéry’s character, Monsieur Teste, presenting him as an extension and radicalization of the Cartesian gesture of self-justification through the experience of cogito. Through Valéry’s texts, Agamben uncovers a constitutive link between Descartes’ legacy and the ultimate experience of language as revealed in Valéry’s poetry. This exploration identifies the aporia of Cartesian subjectivity, characterized by an inherent split between the experinces of seeing (eye) and hearing (voice). The significance of this essay lies in its connection to Agamben’s broader project on the human voice, which he contemplated throughout the 1980s. While some ideas from the never-completed book The Human Voice surfaced in other works, such as “Childhood and History: The Destruction of Experience” (1978) and “Language and Death: The Place f Negativity” (1982), “The I, the Eye, the Voice” holds a special place in this series. It not only offers an interpretation of Valéry’s experiences within a philosophical context but also lays the groundwork for several key ideas about voice in Agamben’s recent writings. Particularly, these concepts are elaborated upon in the chapter on voice from What is Philosophy? (2016). Therefore, this commentary on Valéry’s writings not only stands as an independent work but also serves as a pivotal element of Agamben’s overarching philosophical project.

Desmond Manderson, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts

“Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time” Giorgio Agamben, History and Infancy: the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron, Verso, 1993, p. 91 Desmond Manderson’s book, Danse Macabre, is an essential read which reminds us that “the visual and spectacular are indispensable elements of how we come to know and are known by politics, law, and regulation” (p. 16). It presents remarkable research on visual representations of the law, achieving the difficult task of ...

Experiencia y fotografía: Shiki Nagaoka de Mario Bellatin

El presente trabajo aborda la problemática de la figura “autor” en Shiki Nagaoka: una nariz de ficción (2001) de Mario Bellatin. Texto singular que, hipotetizamos, representa un punto de inflexión en la obra del autor. En este sentido, se sostiene que la aparición de la fotografía en un texto que tiene por foco reflexivo el lenguaje de la literatura y la imagen de autor supone un encuentro no sólo deseado sino, fundamentalmente, sintomático. El trabajo explora y precisa los sentidos de dicha encrucijada tomando como marco teórico general las problemáticas planteadas por Walter Benjamin en relación con el aura y la destrucción de la experiencia.

Utopías del mal en dos novelas de Mario Levrero

This article aims to explore the relationships between theoretical issues derived from the concept of utopia and the literary work of the Uruguayan writer Mario Levrero. More specifically, starting from a reinterpretation of the concepts of utopia and counter-utopia, focused on their political, literary and ethical-existential implications, this article—theoretically supported by recent reflections of Nancy, Jameson, Žižek, Vattimo and Agamben, among others—presents a critical narrative analysis of El lugar (1982) and Caza de conejos (1986), ontological novels never before read in parallel that we here propose to describe as utopias of evil. In contrast to the narrative spaces generated by classical and modern utopias and counter-utopias, which are conceived from an optimistic or ironic-satiric perspective, the narrative spaces generated in Mario Levrero’s utopias of evil shape, at the limits of nihilism, perfect and perverse kafkian representations designed for a single and radical purpose: a total, definitive, and meaningless destruction of experience. Compelled by an irrepressible death/destruction drive, this fictional mechanism operates in the construction of two different types of destruction: El lugar, marked by a movement of escape, represents the destruction of experience by means of the destruction of the subject as character in the novel; Caza de conejos, marked by a movement of persecution, represents the destruction of experience by means of the destruction of the subject as reader of the novel.

Cannibale, Frigidaire and the multitude: Post-1977 italian comics through radical theory

A direct connection between comics and contemporary critical theory is to be found in the activity of the collective of artists who created Cannibale and Frigidaire, the two most innovative Italian comics magazines of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The work of Andrea Pazienza, Filippo Scòzzari, Stefano Tamburini, Tanino Liberatore and Massimo Mattioli should be regarded as an expression of the radical movements from which Marxist Autonomist thinkers such as Antonio Negri, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and Paolo Virno also emerged in the same period. As a consequence, the writings of the latter can be used to analyse the narrative and visual style, the recurring themes, and the editorial characteristics of the comics of the former. Moreover, an interesting parallel can also be drawn between the work of the most influential of these artists, Andrea Pazienza, and the thought of another prominent Italian philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, whose earliest books were published at that time too. The aim of this article is to show that the ideas of a number of the thinkers who have recently become internationally known as representatives of Radical Italian theory, are useful to understand the work of this group of comics authors. In the first section, I examine the direct links between Cannibale, Frigidaire and the Italian social movements of the 1970s. The artists discussed here were active participants in the cultural activities and political struggles promoted by the Autonomists. In the second section, a series of concepts central to (post-) Autonomist theory, such as post-Fordism, multitude, general intellect and virtuosity, are used to analyse the comics published in Cannibale and Frigidaire. Finally, I show how Agamben’s reflections on the ‘destruction of experience’ in modern society can help us to read Andrea Pazienza’s Le straordinarie avventure di Pentothal (1982), Zanardi (1983) and Gli ultimi giorni di Pompeo (1987).

Split Level, Or, The Predicament Of Dwelling

Abstract This essay stages a dialogue between a handful of writers and artists whose works dramatize the 'predicament of dwelling'. Soren Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, and Gordon Malta-Clark shared a common sensibility with respect to the difficulties of modem life. Benjamin's 'destruction of experience' and Adorno's 'damaged life' evoked images of modern subjectivity as something as deranged and mutilated as the creatures in Kafka's storie. Matta-Clark's lacerated homes and buildings combined the despair and disrepair of the city with complex images of intrusion and redemption in ways that echo the enmeshment of melancholia and delight in Baudelaire's flâneur, in Kierkegaard's interieur. Perhaps it would do to regard these as elaborations on the experience and the ironies of modern alienation, but what interests me here is the way we are presented with a subject that is ruptured, lacerated, and split, and whose splitting is reflected in the places and spaces in which it attempts to live. What is the nature of such living, and of the subjectivities appropriate to it? Keywords Theodor Adorno, dwelling, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kierkegaard, Walter Benjamin, interior This essay stages a dialogue between a handful of writers and artists whose works dramatise what will be called the 'predicament of dwelling'. S0ren Kierkegaard, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Franz Kafka, Charles Baudelaire, and Gordon Matta-Clark shared a common sensibility with respect to the difficulties of modern iife. Benjamin's 'destruction of experience' and Adorno's 'damaged life' evoked images of modern subjectivity as something as deranged and mutilated as the creatures in Kafka's stories (Gregor Samsa and Odradek come to mind). Matta-Clark's lacerated homes and buildings combined the despair and disrepair of the city with complex images of intrusion and redemption in ways that echo the enmeshment of melancholia and delight in Baudelaire's flâneur, in Kierkegaard's interieur. Perhaps it would do to regard these as elaborations on the experience and the ironies of modern alienation, but what interests me here is the way we are presented with a subject that is ruptured, lacerated, and split, and whose splitting is reflected in the places and spaces in which it attempts to eke out something like a life for itself. I am going to suggest that we become reacquainted with the concept of 'dwelling', which in times past encompassed more than what its diminished meaning today manages to convey. Drawing from Aristotelian themes, dwelling at one time marked the intersection of life and the political - in the parlance of early Critical Theory: the intersection of 'experience' and the conditions of its (im)possibility. In The Arcades Project Benjamin archived nineteenth-century dwelling (interiors, furnishings, city planning, etc.) as a way to grasp the transformations of subjectivity in modernity. And in Minima Moralia, Adorno defied good, Hegelian dialectical procedure by arguing that in the twentieth century one had to begin with the subject and private life, with the problem of dwelling, if one was to grasp the nature of the Whole. Particularly for Adorno (who occupies the centre of my argument), dwelling became a metaphor for his controversial style of politics. Dwelling today (Adorno emphasised today-ness in what I believe was conscious disagreement with what he thought was Heidegger's ahistorica) treatment of dwelling) was the location of catastrophe where both socialist dwelling and private life were made impossible, and we drudge daily amid the failure of the 'good life' to have taken hold. It is where we pose the question of what forms of life, and what form of the political, are appropriate to the conditions in which we live. I explore the relation between dwelling and the political, inquiring into the politics of dwelling, or, politics as dwelling. Adorno's 'negative utopianism' stands in stark opposition to more robust and optimistic political philosophies in the past and the present, whether those of traditional Marxism, or the more liberal-minded sensibilities of subsequent generations of Critical Theory, or the neo-orthodox movement today, which promotes renewed commitment on the part of philosophy and politics to the notion of the Event. …

“Rimarrà solo, attorno, un lieve odore di bruciato”: la distruzione dell’esperienza in Quaderno proibito di Alba de Céspedes

In this essay, using Agamben work on The destruction of experience as a frame, I analyse the role that the acquisition of life experience plays in one of the main works of Alba de Cespedes, Quaderno proibito. I will show how the protagonist’s point of view works as a bridge between traditional experience, which became unattainable in contemporary societies, and a modern one, and I will show how the fascination that the book still has on readers is mainly related to the description of the process of destruction of the traditional form of experience.

The Techno-aesthetics of Shock: Mario Sironi and Italian Fascism

“An art of effects, nothing but effects, espressivo at any price”: the pro paganda art of the Italian painter Mario Sironi might well be seen to exemplify everything that Nietzsche deplored in his famous characteri zation of Wagner’s musical dramas—their grandiloquence, their obses sively repeated leitmotifs, and their use of every available means to maximize the emotional impact of the work on the public. But if Sironi’s lifelong passion for Wagner, first pointed out by Mario de Micheli in 1973 , deserves the closest critical scrutiny, it is to Walter Benjamin’s reflections on shock and the “destruction of experience” that one must turn to understand the working methods and the essential relevance of this unen dearing but arguably most important Italian artist between the wars. 1 For Benjamin, an “atrophy of experience” was a defining feature of modern life. He traced its beginnings to capitalist commodification and the rise of a mass culture based on technological reproduction whose effects were particularly evident in the daily press. As he noted, If the purpose of the newspaper was to allow the viewer to incorpo rate news as part of his own experience, it would be an unqualified failure, but its goal is just the opposite and it achieves it: to separate as much as possible the news item from anything that might con nect directly to the readers’ lived experience. 2 The tendency toward brevity and comprehensibility was one element that contributed to this effect; another was the newspaper’s sensational layout. Both served to screen out the living reality of an event for the impatient, distracted modern-day reader. Sironi’s propaganda art exemplifies these new conditions of recep tion. The succinctness of his graphic style of commentary, as seen in the many hundreds of front-page political illustrations he made for Mussolini’s newspaper Il popolo d’Italia , epitomizes a mode of commu nication that “replaces older narration with information and information with sensation.” 3 Much the same could be said about Sironi’s monumental installations of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which along with his

Childhood Living: James and Tarantino

Childhood LivingJames and Tarantino Patrick O'Donnell (bio) This essay is the third installment of a work in progress on the fiction of Henry James in relation to modern and contemporary film. Previous discussions explored object relations, voyeurism, and the totality of representation in James's "In the Cage" and Hitchcock's The Birds, and memory and the representation of the future in James's "The Beast in the Jungle" and Christopher Nolan's Memento. In the present instance, I will focus on issues of temporality, childhood, and the structuring and destruction of experience in James's sexual free-for-all for Edwardian adults, What Maisie Knew, and Quentin Tarrantino's postmodern chronicle of corporeal mayhem and a free-for-all of another kind in Kill Bill, Volumes One and Two. Doubtless, on the surface, it seems a stretch to compare James to Tarantino, or for that matter, James to Nolan or Hitchcock. My interest, however, is not comparison in the usual sense—not, fundamentally, shared aesthetics or worldviews or thematics. Rather, I am interested in ratios and differentials in the enscenement of states of being and nonbeing, time, and the representation of [End Page 1] experience in time, and I believe it is instructive to observe these as they occur across the fiction of a modernist writer whose fashioning of visuality as ethos is still being worked out on film. What is being worked out between What Maisie Knew and Kill Bill is a specific relation between time and experience. Both ask, What happens when the ratio between experience and temporality is skewed, when there is an overexposure to the end of experience in mortality? And both locate this conundrum in the figure of the child, whose ephemeral existence is only and always conceived as a passing away before time. Kill Bill is a film about wasting time, the wasting away of temporality, the time of wasting bodies, landscapes, cinematic repertoires. It is a film that envisages the serialization of the historical, as if history were simply a pure succession of events marked by the afterglow of their consummation. Pertinent here is Harry D. Harootunian's observation that, for Walter Benjamin, the construction of history is essentially performative, seeking to "produce a certain concrete effect, the coming together of the Then … and the Now … into a constellation like a flash of lightning" (1996, 77). The notion of history as composed of constellations that link the past and present in a series of simultaneities or instantaneous aporiae is clearly in opposition to all historicisms that posit eternal successions or reich-like continuums extending into the far reaches of time. This is a notion to be differentiated as well from what Giorgio Agamben, in "Critique of the Instant and the Continuum," refers to as the "dead time" of modernity; that is, the representation of time as homogenous, rectilinear and empty [that] derives from the experience of manufacturing work and is sanctioned by modern mechanics, which establishes the primacy of uniform rectilinear motion over circular motion. T e experience of dead time abstracted from experience, which characterizes life in modern cities and factories, seems to give credence to the idea that the precise fleeting instant is the only human time. Before and after, notions which were vague for Antiquity—and which, for Christianity, had meaning only in terms of the end of time—now become meaning in themselves and for themselves, and this meaning is presented as truly historical. (1993, 96) [End Page 2] Even though the formation of historical constellations may be instantaneous, Benjaminian temporality relies, precisely, on the linkage of then and now—a linkage that is not preordained, nor eschatologically integrated into some grand narrative of progress. As Agamben suggests, it is the forging of the relation between then and now, or before and after, that is critical to the construction and representation of an authentic historicity, one that, as he writes elsewhere, offers a resistance and alternative to the forms of experience legislated by modernist temporalities of the instance, given over to "the imposition of a form of experience as controlled and manipulated as a laboratory maze for rats" (1993, 16). "[W]hen the only possible experience...

‘A Figure of Annihilated Human Existence’: Agamben and Adorno on Gesture

In this paper, I consider Giorgio Agamben’s essays on gesture, and the loss of gesture, in relation to Theodor Adorno’s account of gesture given in his work on Kafka. I argue that both share an account of gesture as an involuntary, yet non-intentional figure of a generalised destruction of experience. However, in their respective accounts of an emphatic possibility that can be located in the loss of gesture, Agamben and Adorno move in fundamentally different philosophical directions. For Agamben, the loss of gesture opens up the possibility of a space of existing within the pure possibility of speaking itself. For Adorno, the loss of gesture returns us to a reified embodiment that can nevertheless image the possibility of a different way of relating to materiality. I argue that, in the attempt to immanently construct forms of resistance within a generalised destruction of experience, Agamben’s articulation of an absolute gesturality tends towards an immuring of the subject within the repetitive space of what Adorno terms ‘objectless inwardness’. Although Adorno’s account of gesture and its relation to metaphysics and politics is equally problematic in many ways, I argue that his account of a metaphysical experience that appears within alienated gestures offers the possibility for moving beyond the destruction of experience.

Images malgré tout (review)

Book Review Georges Didi-Huberman. Images malgré tout. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2003. Pp. 235. 22.50 €. In 2001 in Paris, an exhibit displayed photographs of Nazi concentration and extermination camps ("Mémoire des camps," organized by Clément Chéroux). Among them were four snapshots secretly taken in August 1944 by members of the Sonderkommando at Auschwitz's crematory V. The film survived its authors by being successfully conveyed outside the camp in a toothpaste tube. It eventually reached the Polish Resistance. Two pictures, taken from within the crematory, show the incineration of gassed bodies. The two next pictures are taken as the unidentified photographer walks out of the crematory and snaps two shots without looking. The art historian and leading Renaissance scholar Georges Didi-Huberman proposed a phenomenological reading of these four previously published photographs. This reading stirred up a violent outburst in Les Temps modernes, ajournai currently edited by Claude Lanzmann. Because the gruesome snapshots were taken despite SS prohibition of photographs and films, in a desperate effort to rescue a visual fragment of the event and to warn the world of Nazi barbarity, DidiHuberman entitled the catalogue of the exhibition Images malgré tout. The catalogue forms the first section of the book published two years after the exhibition. The second section of the book, entitled Malgré l'image toute, is a long and scrupulous response to the accusations launched in Les Temps modernes (56:613 [2001]: 47-108). Didi-Huberman's book explores the ontological, ethical, psychoanalytical and historical status of images in an era of visual bulimia and the destruction of experience, in the wake of Walter Benjamin's reflections on war, trauma and modern life. The author builds upon twenty years of thorough reflection on the visible informed by phenomenology and psychoanalysis and grounded in a superb mastery of ancient, Renaissance and modern aesthetics. This breathtaking inquiry concerning images, as well as the objections expressed by his opponents, help to raise timely and urgent issues. Are we making too much of images? Are we lured by our own voyeurism and iconophilia, numbed as we are by the democracy of the spectacle? Or, on the contrary , do images open the eyes of our conscience? In other words do images merely entertain and anesthetize us or do they shame us and awake our conscience? Such are some of the questions that Didi-Huberman's book addresses. The work ends on a dazzling re-reading of the myth of Medusa, which Primo Levi uses to refer to the horror of Auschwitz and which Giorgio Agamben reads, in Remnants of Auschwitz, as a trope of the impossibility of seeing. Didi-Huberman challenges Agamben's reading of Primo Levi's recourse to the myth of Medusa. By so doing, not only does he invite us to reconsider the question of testimony with respect to Auschwitz and to shatter the dogma of the "unimaginable" promoted in the wake of Lanzmann's film, he also redefines altogether our relation to the real and the visible. This book is probably the most original reflection on our relation to history and representation published in many years. Like all of Didi-Huberman's previous works, this one is informed by an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient and modern aesthetics, phenomenology, psychoanalysis and literature. This knowledge extends from Pliny to Lacan via Vasari, Kant, Hegel. Winckelman , Warburg, Freud and Benjamin. Moreover, the author has a comprehensive awareness of the most recent work on Holocaust studies in Europe and the U.S. References to traditional historians and to postmodern Holocaust theorists abound (Serge Klarsfeld, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Annette Wieviorka, Raul Hillberg, Shoshana Felman, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-François Lyotard, etc.). More important, they are discussed in a way that is refreshingly critical, provocative and polemical. 110 Spring 2005 Book Review The stakes involved in this study pertain to a wide range of fields of inquiry: post-Holocaust ethics of art, post-Holocaust philosophy and theology, the experience of history in the age of mechanical reproduction and virtual reality, trauma studies, testimony theory. Finally, at a moment when post-Heideggerianism and what is called "French thought" seem to have exhausted themselves, Georges Didi-Huberman heralds with this book...

Agamben's Potential

In a preface written for the French translation of his Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience, Giorgio Agamben states that"every written work can be regarded as the prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represent only sketches or death masks." 1 This remark, which describes every work of art as a preface, does not simply refer to the impossibility of translating the all of life into a single work. Nor does it simply refer to those purely empirical obstacles which stand in the way of creation, preventing the work of art from attaining the plenitude it might have hoped for had not greedy wine-merchants, harrying tailors, and eloquent panderers distracted the Great Minds from their tasks. Instead, in returning every work of art to its originary hesitation, in evoking the oscillation between work and draft, effort and accomplishment, Agamben invokes a much richer and darker potentiality lying at the heart of the work. It is this richer and darker potentiality that constitutes the central concern of Agamben's thought and that gives its name to this collection. Yet what is named in this potentiality? What is the nature of the potentiality of which Agamben speaks? What is this potentiality the potential for?