Dada mime

October

Volumn , Issue 105, 2003, Pages 166-176

  Foster, Hal ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34548332220     PISSN: 01622870     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/016228703769684263     Document Type: Review

References (27)

1. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary (1927), trans. Ann Raimes (New York: Viking Press, 1974).
2. Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings: Volume I, 1913-1926, ed. Michael Jennings et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 487.
3. Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. xxxi.
4. Roger Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia" (1937), October 31 (Winter 1984), p. 30.
5. For another account of traumatic mimesis in Dada, see Brigid Doherty, "The Trauma of Dada Collage," Critical Inquiry 24, no. 1 (Fall 1997).
6. Also see Michael Taussig, The Nervous System (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 149-59.
7. Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Male Subjectivity," Camera Obscura 17 (May 1988), p. 51.
8. Her argument is elaborated in Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992).
9. On masochism in Francis Picabia see George Baker, Lost Objects (New York: Columbia University dissertation, 2000).
10. See Gilles Deleuze, "Coldness and Cruelty," in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
11. Werner Spies, Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe, trans. John William Gabriel (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991), p. 79.
12. Ursula Dustmann suggests "maggoty shame" in Max Ernst in Köln, ed. Wulf Herzogenrath (Cologne: Rheinland Verlag, 1980), p. 118.
13. Max Ernst, Beyond Painting (New York: Wittenborn and Schultz, 1948), p. 16.
14. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 55.
15. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 21. Benjamin: "The unique importance of Baudelaire resides in his being the first and the most unflinching to have taken the measure of the self-estranged human being, in the double sense of acknowledging this being and fortifying it with armor against the reified world"
16. (The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], p. 322).
17. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), p. 168.
18. Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften 6, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972-91), p. 132; thanks to Michael Jennings for the translation of this fragment.
19. For a rich account of this genealogy, which Benjamin extends to Charlie Chaplin and Mickey Mouse, see Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory, and the Avant-Garde (London: Verso, 2002).
20. In a 1931 fragment on Mickey Mouse, Benjamin writes: "In these films, mankind makes preparations to survive civilization" (Selected Writings: Volume II, 1927-1934, ed. Michael Jennings et al. [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999], p. 545). He uses similar lines in "Karl Kraus" (1931) and "Experience and Poverty" (1933).
21. I associate the strategy of mimetic adaptation (or better: mimetic exacerbation) with this challenge of Marx: "petrified social conditions must be made to dance by singing them their own song" (Karl Marx, "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introduction," in Early Writings, ed. T. B. Bottomore [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964], p. 47; translation modified).
22. It is also akin to "the kynical irony" that Peter Sloterdijk ascribes to Dada in Critique of Cynical Reason (trans. Michael Eldred [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987]); I borrow the term "bashed ego" from him (see pp. 391-409).
23. Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 441.
24. This catharsis is less Aristotelian than Barthesian: "What liberates metaphor, symbol, emblem for poetic mania, what manifests its power of subversion, is the preposterous" (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard [New York: Hill and Wang, 1977], p. 81).
25. Benjamin was also fascinated by this figure; see Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands, pp. 80-90.
26. See If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. Stuart Wool (London: Abacus, 1987), pp. 94, 96.
27. T.J. Clark comments on this passage vis-à-vis modernism in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 407. Sadly, given present circumstances, Muselmann means Muslim. In The Truce (1963) Levi does not leave this figure anonymous, but that is little relief: "Hurbinek was a nobody, a child of death, a child of Auschwitz. He looked about three years old, no one knew anything of him, he could not speak and he had no name; that curious name, Hurbinek, had been given to him by us, perhaps by one of the women who had interpreted with those syllables one of the inarticulate sounds that the baby let out now and again. He was paralyzed from the waist down, with atrophied legs, as thin as sticks; but his eyes, lost in his triangular and wasted face, flashed terribly alive, full of demand, assertion, of the will to break loose, to shatter the tomb of his dumbness. The speech he lacked, which no one had bothered to teach him, the need of speech charged his stare with explosive urgency: it was a stare both savage and human, even mature, a judgment, which none of us could support, so heavy was it with force and anguish" (Ibid., p. 197).