Benjamin's aura

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 34, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 336-375

  Hansen, Miriam Bratu ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

^b Committee on Cinema and Media Studies ^*

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61949320643     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/529060     Document Type: Review

References (189)

1. Walter Benjamin, "Protocols of Drug Experiments," On Hashish, trans. Howard Eiland et al. (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), p. 58; hereafter abbreviated "P." I return to this passage below
2. This narrow understanding of aura is particularly pronounced in the essay's third, 1939 version, which was first published in 1955 and entered English-language debates under the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York, 1969), pp. 217-51
3. A thoroughly revised translation of this version is now available in Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Third Version," trans. Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, Selected Writings [hereafter abbreviated SW], trans. Rodney Livingstone et al., ed. Marcus Bullock et al., 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1996-2003), 4:251-83
4. However, I will be using primarily the second (first typescript) version of 1936, to which Benjamin referred as his urtext; see Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften [hereafter abbreviated GS], ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols. (Frankfurt, 1989), 7:350-84
5. trans. Jephcott and Zohn under the title "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version," SW, 3:101-33.1 discuss the implications of these different versions in Miriam Hansen, "Room-for-Play: Benjamin's Gamble with Cinema," October, no. 109 (Summer 2004): 3-45, an essay that offers a counterpoint to the present one; both will be part of a book that puts Benjamin's reflections on film and mass-mediated modernity in a conversation with those of Siegfried Kracauer and Theodor W. Adorno
6. See Bertolt Brecht, entry for 25 July 1938, Journals, 1934-55, trans. Hugh Rorrison, ed. John Willett and Ralph Manheim (London, 1993), p. 10: "a load of mysticism, although his attitude is against mysticism"; on Scholem, see below
7. On the concept of Erfahrung - its etymological connotations of Fahrt ("journey") and Gefahr ("peril," related to the Latin periri, also the root of experience) and its differential relation to the term Erlebnis ("momentary, immediate experience") - see Martin Jay's magisterial study Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme (Berkeley, 2005)
8. The literature on Benjamin's concept of experience is too extensive to cite here; see ibid., chap. 8, for more recent contributions. My own thinking on the role of aura in Benjamin's theory of experience is indebted to Marleen Stoessel, Aura, das Vergessene Menschliche: Zu Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (Munich, 1983)
9. The first definition - "ein sonderbares Gespinst von Raum und Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag" - appears in Benjamin, "Little History of Photography" (1931), trans. Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, SW, 2:518; GS, 2:378
10. It is resumed almost verbatim in the artwork essay; see SW, 3:104; GS, 7:355
11. The parenthetical phrase - "however close the thing that calls it forth" - is from Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, ed. Tiedemann (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 447
12. hereafter abbreviated AP. The second definition - "die Aura einer Erscheinung erfahren, heißt, sie mit dem Vermögen belehnen, den Blick aufzuschlagen" - is elaborated in Benjamin, "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1940), trans. Zohn, SW, 4:338; GS, 1:646
13. See, for instance, his first "impression of hashish," written 18 December 1927, at 3:30 AM: "The sphere of 'character' opens up.... One's aura interpenetrates with that of the others" ("P," p. 19; GS, 6:558)
14. Writing about his second experiment with hashish on 15 January 1928, Benjamin complains that Ernst Bloch gently tried to touch his knee: "I sensed the contact long before it actually reached me. I felt it as a highly repugnant violation of my aura" ("P," p. 27; GS, 6:563)
15. Something of this psychophysiological sense of aura survives into the artwork essay's comparison of the screen actor to the live actor on stage. On the relation of aura and body, see, among others, Guy Hocquenhem and René Schérer, "Formen und Metamorphosen der Aura," in Das Schwinden der Sinne, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 75-86
16. Trace (Spur) is one of those concepts in Benjamin that have antithetical meanings depending on the constellation in which they are deployed; it is rejected as the fetishizing signature of the bourgeois interior in his advocacy of the new '"culture of glass'" in "Experience and Poverty" (1933), trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:734 (and quoting Brecht, "Erase the traces!"), but valorized as a mark of an epic culture-and its implied renewal in modern literature and film-that links art with material production and tactical, habitual perception; see Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (1936), trans. Zohn, SW, 3:149
17. While in some contexts aura and trace are overlapping terms, in both negative and positive senses, a relatively late entry in the Arcades Project putsthemin stark opposition: "Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind maybe. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us" (AP, p. 447)
18. See Hans Robert Jauss, "Spur und Aura (Bemerkungen zu Walter Benjamins 'Passagen-Werk')" and Karlheinz Stierle, "Aura, Spur, und Benjamins Vergegenwärtigung des 19
19. Jahrhunderts," in Art social und art industriel: Funktionen der Kunst im Zeitalter des Industrialismus, ed. Helmut Pfeiffer, Jauss, and Françoise Gaillard (Munich, 1987), pp. 19-38, pp. 39-47
20. and Mika Elo, "Die Wiederkehr der Aura," in Walter Benjamins Medientheorie, ed. Christian Schulte (Konstanz, 2005), pp. 117-35, esp. p. 130
21. I am using Roland Barthes's language here deliberately because so many of his observations on photography echo Benjamin. See, in particular, his notion of the punctum, the accidental mark or detail of the photograph that "pricks," stings, wounds the beholder, in his Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), pp. 26-27
22. As is evident from his correspondence and diary notes from May 1931 through July 1932, Benjamin was actually contemplating taking his own life when he wrote "Little History of Photography," which is to say that the forgotten future of the woman who was to become Mrs. Dauthendey speaks to him less through an uncanny premonition than through a rather conscious and detailed preoccupation with this mode of death. See farewell letters to Franz Hessel, Jula Radt-Cohn, Ernst Schoen, and Egon and Gert Wissing (including Benjamin's will), all dated 27 July 1932, in Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 4 vols. (Frankfurt, 1998), 4:115-22
23. hereafter abbreviated GB. Also see Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Zohn (1981; New York, 2003), pp. 225-37
24. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1985), pp. 97-100
25. and the editors' chronology in SW, 2:842-43
26. See Peter M. Spangenberg, "Aura," in Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: Historisches Würterbuch, ed. Karlheinz Barcket al., 7 vols. (Stuttgart, 2000), 1:402-4
27. The nineteenth-century positivist psychiatrist Hippolyte Baraduc tried to document these symptoms by means of photographs; see Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention de l'hystérie: Charcot et l'iconographie photographique de la Salpetrière (Paris, 1982), p. 97
28. see also Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), chap. 1
29. On Benjamin's aura in the context of sensory-physiological and psychopathological research since the late nineteenth century, see Karl Clausberg, "Aura und Ausdruck: Synästhesien der Beseelung," in Ausdruck, Ausstrahlung, Aura: Synästhesien der Beseelung im Medienzeitalter, ed. Clausberg, Elize Bisanz, and Cornelius Weiller (Bad Honnef, 2007), pp. 41-86
30. See Markus Bauer, "Die Mitte der Mitteilung: Walter Benjamins Begriff des Mediums," in Walter Benjamins Medientheorie, pp. 39-48
31. For a different approach, see Sam Weber, Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford, Calif., 1996), pp. 76-106
32. and Hanno Reisch, Das Archiv und die Erfahrung: Walter Benjamins Essays im medientheoretischen Kontext (Würzburg, 1992), pp. 98-108
33. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.J., 1997), p. 120
34. On the place of the Kafka portrait in "Little History of Photography," especially its superimposition with Benjamin's own visit to a photographer's studio as a highly allegorical scene of "distorted" "similarity" (Benjamin, "Berlin Childhood around 1900" [1934], trans. Eiland, SW, 3:390, 391), see Cadava, Words of Light, pp. 106-27
35. Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle" (1932), trans. Jephcott, SW, 2:597
36. Benjamin's writings on Proust range from his 1929 essay "On the Image of Proust," trans. Zohn, SW, 2:237-47 through his late reflections on the writer in his second Baudelaire essay, SW, 4:332, 337-39
37. Also see fragments relating to the 1929 essay in GS, 2:1048-69
38. Benjamin, "The Return of the Flâneur" (1929), trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:265; GS, 3:198
39. Also see Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris, 1992), which makes extensive reference to Benjamin
40. Novalis, quoted in Benjamin's doctoral dissertation, "The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism" (1920), trans. David Lachterman, Eiland, and Ian Balfour, SW, 1:145. The entirety of section 4, on "The Early Romantic Theory of the Knowledge of Nature," is relevant to the complex that he will later refer to by the term aura
41. See Stoessel, Aura, das Vergessene Menschliche, p. 75
42. Sigrid Weigel, Body- and Image-Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin, trans. Georgina Paul, Rachel McNicholl, and Jeremy Gaines (London, 1996), chap. 2
43. and Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin's Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (Berkeley, 1998)
44. See Theodor W. Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 29 Feb. 1940, in Adorno and Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence, 1929-1940 [hereafter abbreviated CC], trans. Nicholas Walker, ed. Lonitz (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), pp. 320-21
45. Adorno proposes a distinction between "epic forgetting" (essential to hatching Erfahrung) and "reflex forgetting" (characteristic of Erlebnis) - which would amount to formulating a "distinction between good and bad reification" - to reconcile ostensible inconsistencies in Benjamin's account of experience and aura (CC, p. 321)
46. What Adorno himself seems to have forgotten is that Benjamin, in his 1929 essay on Proust, had already articulated mémoire involontaire in terms of a dialectic of remembering and forgetting - calling the author's "weaving of his memory ... a Penelope work of forgetting" (SW, 2:23)
47. Also see the fragment relating to his Proust essay, GS, 2:3:1066
48. See Stoessel, Aura, das Vergessene Menschliche, pp. 61, 72-77, and chap. 5, esp. pp. 130-40
49. see also Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La Raison baroque: De Baudelaire à Benjamin (Paris, 1984)
50. This argument goes some way toward accounting for the gendered oscillation between a semireflective fetishization of aura and masculinist insistence on the necessity of its critical destruction, its allegorical mortification. However, the disjunctive temporality of auratic experience - the glimpse of a prehistoric past at once familiar and strange - suggests that the logic of fetishism is crucially inflected with the register of the Freudian uncanny, a point I elaborate in my earlier essay, "Benjamin, Cinema, and Experience: 'The Blue Flower in the Land of Technology,'" New German Critique 40 (Winter 1987): 212-17
51. See also Helga Geyer-Ryan, "Abjection in the Texts of Walter Benjamin," Fables of Desire: Studies in the Ethics of Art and Gender (Cambridge, 1994), chap. 6
52. Giorgio Agamben suggests that Benjamin found an important contemporary source for thinking of photography and cinema as "transmitters of aura" (including the definition of Baudelaire as "poet of the aura") in the writer-physician Léon Daudet's book Mélancholia (1928)
53. see Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez (Minneapolis, 1993), pp. 44-45. (Daudet was also at the time editor of L'Action Française, organ of the right-wing, ultranationalist, and monarchist movement founded by Charles Maurras.) The notion of technological media as transmitters of supernatural phenomena was of course pervasive in occultist practices (for example, spirit photography, telegraphy). The point here is that Benjamin not only historicized and dialecticized that conjuncture but also sought through it to theorize the possibility of temporally disjunctive experience in modernity
54. The part of the news that the father "forgot" to convey to the child was that the man had died of syphilis; see SW, 2:635
55. See also the section "News of a Death" in the 1934 version of "Berlin Childhood around 1900," SW, 3:389
56. See Susan Buck-Morss, "Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered," October, no. 62 (Autumn 1992): 3-41
57. See Thierry Kuntzel, "Le Défilement: A View in Closeup" and Bertrand Augst, "Le Défilement into the Look," in Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus, ed. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York, 1981), pp. 233-47, 249-59
58. see also Raymond Bellour, "The Unattainable Text," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 19-27
59. Benjamin himself formulates a version of this question, indeed a partisan response to it, in his essay on Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, "Reply to Oskar A. H. Schmitz" (1927), trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:16-19, which anticipates the artwork essay's section on the optical unconscious
60. Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience (London, 1998), p. 94. For Caygill, this understanding of the optical unconscious encapsulates Benjamin's concept of experience, "where the future subsists in the present as a contingency which, if realised, will retrospectively change the present." Contrary to my argument here, Caygill insists that "the weave of space and time captured by the photograph is characterised by contingency and is anything but auratic" (ibid.; my emphasis)
61. The troping of the future as an invisible stranger or alien land (jene unsichtbare Fremde) is the counterpart to the déjà vu, the "shock" with which "moments enter consciousness as if already lived," in which Benjamin emphasizes the acoustical dimension of the phenomenon; "a word, a tapping, or a rustling" may "transport us into the cool tomb of long ago, from the vault of which the present seems to return only as an echo" (SW, 2:634)
62. The linkage of auratic experience, futurity, and death already appears in one of Benjamin's earliest surviving texts, "The Metaphysics of Youth" (1913-14), trans. Livingstone, SW, 1:6-17; see esp. pp. 12-14
63. See also Roberta Malagoli, '"Vergiß das Beste nicht!' Déjà vu, memoria, e oblio in Walter Benjamin," Annali di Ca' Foscari 27, nos. 1-2 (1988): 247-79
64. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin repeatedly links the decline of aura to the waning of the "dream of a better nature" (AP, p. 362), and the waning of the utopian imagination in turn to impotence, both sexual and political; see AP, pp. 342,361
65. Irving Wohlfarth, "The Measure of the Possible, the Weight of the Real, and the Heat of the Moment: Benjamin's Actuality Today," The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, ed. Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (London, 1998), p. 28
66. "Whenever a human being, an animal, or an inanimate object thus endowed by the poet lifts up its eyes, it draws him into the distance. The gaze of nature, when thus awakened, dreams and pulls the poet after its dream" (SW, 4:354 n. 77). If this account of poetic inspiration itself culminates in a lyrical image, the subsequent reference to Kraus ('"Words, too, can have an aura. ... The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it looks back'") pertains to a different, less esoteric type of language, written language or script, and thus to Benjamin's concern with physiognomic reading (including graphology) as a modern practice of the mimetic faculty
67. "Ein sonderbares Gespinst aus Raum und Zeit: einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag. An einem Sommernachmittag ruhend einem Gebirgszug am Horizont oder einem Zweig folgen, der seinen Schatten auf den Ruhenden wirft - das heißt die Aura dieser Berge, dieses Zweiges atmen" (GS, 7:355; see also Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," 1:2:479)
68. See Dietrich Thierkopf, "Nähe und Ferne: Kommentare zu Benjamins Denkverfahren," Text und Kritik 31-32 (Oct. 1971): 3-18
69. On the relationship of aura and the lyric in modernity, see Robert Kaufman, "Aura, Still," October, no. 99 (Winter 2002): 45-80
70. See Alois Riegl, "Die Stimmung als Inhalt der modernen Kunst" [Atmosphere as the Content of Modern Art] (1899), Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Karl M. Swoboda (Augsburg, 1929), pp. 28-39
71. See also Wolfgang Kemp, "Fernbilder: Benjamin und die Kunstwissenschaft," in "Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln...": Walter Benjamin im Kontext, ed. Burckhardt Lindner (Frankfurt, 1978), pp. 224-57
72. and Jennings, "Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History," in Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940: Zum 100. Geburtstag, ed. Uwe Steiner (Bern, 1992), pp. 77-102
73. At least as important a source for this opposition was Wilhelm Worringer's ideologically charged popularization of Riegl's categories in Abstraction and Empathy (1908), which had its aesthetic counterpart less (as is often claimed) in German expressionism than in cubism following Cézanne (see Jennings, "Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History," pp. 83, 89-100)
74. and in British vorticism, mediated by T. E. Hulme and "reactionary modernists" such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. See also Antonia Lant, "Haptical Cinema," October, no. 74 (Fall 1995): 45-73
75. Georg Simmel, Philosophy of Money, trans. Kaethe Mengelberg, Tom Bottomore, and David Frisby, 2d ed. (1900/1907; London, 2004), p. 473
76. Also see Simmel's book on Goethe (1912), Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, 27 vols. (Frankfurt, 1989-), 15:74-76
77. It is no coincidence that expressions like "blue distance" or "Fernblick ins Blau" (literally, "the far-gaze into the blue") appear epigrammatically in Benjamin's first avowedly modernist work, One-Way Street (1928), trans. Jephcott, SW, 1:468, 470; GS, 4:120, 123
78. Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities," trans. Stanley Corngold, SW, 1:351; GS, 1:195, my emphasis
79. Also see the fragment "On Semblance" (1919-20), trans. Livingstone, SW, 1:223-25
80. In the essay on Goethe (1919-22, published 1924-25), the term aura is used only in passing and, actually, in an antithetical sense to beauty; see Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities," 1:348
81. Gary Smith notes that the artwork essay's conflation of aura with the idea of beautiful semblance reflects a "less than seamless transfer of the grammar of beauty's relation to truth and the sublime onto the specifically modern category of aura" (Gary Smith, "A Genealogy of 'Aura': Walter Benjamin's Idea of Beauty," in Artifacts, Representations, and Social Practice: Essays for Marx Wartofsky, ed. Carol C. Gould and Robert S. Cohen [Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1994], p. 115)
82. Benjamin distinguishes beauty defined by its relationship to history from beauty in its relationship to nature. "On the basis of its historical existence, beauty is an appeal to join those who admired it in an earlier age," that is, to join the majority of those who are dead ("ad plures ire, as the Romans called dying") (SW, 4:352 n. 63). It is significant, especially in the context of his reception of Klages (see below), that Benjamin does not use the term tradition here, but speaks of generations and the majority of the dead
83. For Goethe's notion of polarity, see his Theory of Colors, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (1840; Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 293-303
84. More contemporary versions of the polarity of farness and closeness can be found in Lebensphilosophie, in particular Klages, and in Heidegger; see, for example, Martin Heidegger, "The Thing" (1950), Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York, 1975), pp. 165-66
85. Situated in the Klages-inspired closing section of One-Way Street, "To the Planetarium," this statement refers to the conditions of possibility-and high stakes-of attaining this kind of experience, predicated on "the ancients' intercourse with the cosmos," in modernity and doing so in a collective mode (SW, 1:486). Benjamin discerned a dystopian version of such cosmic communion in the technologically enabled orgies of destruction in World War One. See Wohlfarth, "Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Technological Eros: A Tentative Reading of Zum Planetarium," Benjamin Studies/Studien 1 (2002): 65-109
86. These reflections can be traced from One-Way Street (1928), through the essays on surrealism ("Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism" [1927], trans. Eiland, and "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia" [1929], trans. Jephcott, SW, 2:3-5, 2:207-21), to the urtext of the artwork essay
87. On the significance of this strand in Benjamin's thinking on film, see my essays "Room-for-Play" and "Benjamin and Cinema: Nota One-Way Street," Critical Inquiry 25 (Winter 1999): 306-43
88. See also Gertrud Koch, "Cosmos in Film: On the Concept of Space in Walter Benjamin's 'Work of Art' Essay," trans. Nancy Nenno, in Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, ed. Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (London, 1994), pp. 205-15
89. See, most recently, Maria Gough, "Paris, Capital of the Soviet Avant-Garde," October, no. 101 (Summer 2002): 53-83
90. see also Chryssoula Kambas, Walter Benjamin im Exil: Zum Verhältnis von Literaturpolitik und Ästhetik (Tübingen, 1983)
91. Josef Fürnkäs, "Aura," in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt, 2000), 1:141-42; see also p. 127
92. Adorno, "Benjamin's Einbahnstrasse" (1955), Notes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, ed. Tiedemann, 2 vols. (New York, 1992), 2:326
93. "If one [advertising] has mastered the art of transforming the commodity into an arcanum, the other [occult science] is able to sell the arcanum as a commodity" (Benjamin, "Light from Obscurantists" (1932), trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:656)
94. Fürnkäs, "Aura," pp. 105-6
95. See Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935), Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 32-37
96. While Heidegger's famous invocation of Van Gogh's painting of a pair of peasant shoes depends on the three-dimensional depth of the shoes that makes for their essential thingness, Benjamin's reference turns on the ornamental flatness of Van Gogh's later paintings. See Michael P. Steinberg, "The Collector as Allegorist: Goods, Gods, and the Object of History," in Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History, ed. Steinberg (Ithaca, N.Y., 1996), esp. pp. 96-106
97. see also Christopher P. Long, "Art's Fateful Hour: Benjamin, Heidegger, Art, and Politics," New German Critique 83 (Spring-Summer 2001): 89-115, esp. 99-101
98. See, in particular, SW, 2:733-34
99. Also see Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime" (1908), in Programs and Manifestoes on Twentieth-Century Architecture, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 19-24
100. See Siegfried Kracauer, "The Mass Ornament" (1927), The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), pp. 75-86
101. See Benjamin, "Doctrine of the Similar" (1933), trans. Jennings, Knut Tarnowski, and Jephcott, and "On the Mimetic Faculty" (1933), trans. Jephcott, SW, 2:694-98, 2:720-22
102. See also Burckhardt Lindner, "Benjamins Aurakonzeption: Anthropologie und Technik, Bild und Text," in Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, pp. 217-48, esp. 218-24
103. See Richard Faber, Männerrunde mit Gräfin: Die "Kosmiker" Derleth, George, Klages, Schuler, Wolfskehl, und Franziska von Reventlow (Frankfurt, 1994)
104. Irene Gammel, Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity - A Cultural Biography (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), esp. chap. 4, "Munich's Dionysian Avant-Garde in 1900"; Gerd-Klaus Kaltenbrunner, "Zwischen Rilke und Hitler: Alfred Schuler," Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 19 (1967): 333-47
105. Werner Fuld, "Die Aura: Zur Geschichte eines Begriffs bei Benjamin," Akzente 26 (June 1979): 360-69
106. and Karl Wolfskehl, 1869-1969: Leben und Werk in Dokumenten, ed. Manfred Schlösser (Darmstadt, 1969), pp. 138-39
107. Benjamin, on behalf of the "Freie Studentenschaft," had invited Klages to give a lecture on graphology which took place in Munich in July 1914; see letters to Ernst Schoen, 22 June 1914, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940 [hereafter abbreviated CWB], trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson, ed. Scholem and Adorno (Chicago, 1994), p. 69
108. GB, 1:237
109. See also letters to Klages himself, 10 December 1920 and 28 February 1923, GB, 2:319, 2:114
110. Benjamin discusses Klages's books, Prinzipien der Charakterologie (1910) and Handschrift und Charakter (1917) - both of which were to enjoy a wave of reprints during the Nazi period - in his review article, "Graphology Old and New" (1930), trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:398-400
111. also see Benjamin, "Review of the Mendelssohns' Der Mensch in der Handschrift" (1928)
112. trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:131-34
113. and the fragment "Zur Graphologie" (1922 or 1928), GS, 6:185
114. In his letter to Klages of 10 December 1920, Benjamin inquires about the announced sequel to the essay on dream consciousness, "which revealed to me extraordinary and, if I may say so, longed-for perspectives" (GB, 2:114)
115. In a letter of 28 February 1923, he writes: "I permit myself ... to convey to you how much joy and confirmation of my own thoughts I gratefully took away from your text on the cosmogonic eros" (GB, 2:319)
116. Also see his fragment of 1922-23, "Outline of the Psychophysical Problem" (1922-23), trans. Livingstone, SW, 1:397-401, esp. sec. 6
117. Benjamin, "Johann Jakob Bachofen" (1935), trans. Jephcott, SW, 3:18
118. As late as 1933, however, he manages to mention Schuler positively in print (not coincidentally in a "thought-image" entitled "Secret Signs"), attributing to him the insight that authentic cognition had to contain "a dash of nonsense [Widersinn] ": "what is decisive is not the progression from one cognition [Erkenntnis] to the next, but the leap [or crack, Sprung] within every single cognition" (Benjamin, "Short Shadows [II]" [1933], trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:699; GS, 4:425)
119. His letter to Scholem of 15 August 1930 suggests not only his enduring interest in Schuler ("admittedly on the basis of very special constellations") but also an awareness of the untimeliness of that connection: "I also had ordered a slim volume of posthumously published fragments that I can marvel at in secret" (CWB, p. 367; GB, 3:538)
120. Alfred Schuler, Fragmente und Vorträge aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Ludwig Klages (Leipzig, 1940), pp. 151, 262, and Klages's introduction, p. 7
121. Also see Kaltenbrunner, "Zwischen Rilke und Hitler," pp. 336-37
122. See Faber, "Karl Wolfskehl, ein deutsch-jüdischer Antiintellektueller," in "Verkannte Brüder": Stefan George und das deutsch-jüdische Bürgertum zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Emigration, ed. Gert Mattenklott, Michael Philipp, and Julius H. Schoeps (Hildesheim, 2001), pp. 117-33
123. On Benjamin's interactions with Wolfskehl, see GB, 3:312, 326, 348, 454, 460, 474-75, as well as Benjamin's homage to the poet, "Karl Wolfskehl zum sechzigsten Geburtstag: Eine Erinnerung" (1929), GS, 4:1:366-68
124. Benjamin also dissociates Wolfskehl from the spiritists (and even the Steinerites who claimed him as one of their own) in a remarkable review of 1932, "Erleuchtung durch Dunkelmänner: Zu Hans Liebstoeckl, 'Die Geheimwissenschaften im Lichte unserer Zeit,'" GS, 3:356-60; see esp. p. 357
125. Karl Wolfskehl, "Lebensluft" (1929), Gesammelte Werke, ed. Margot Ruben and Claus Victor Bock, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1960), 2:419
126. Benjamin also mentions "Die neue Stoa," Gesammelte Werke, 2:380-83, which sounds the cosmic key words of "Urwelt" and "Fernen der Ferne" ("distances of distance") in a critique of instrumental reason and scientific progress. Benjamin is likely to have also read another of Wolfskehl's articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung: "Spielraum" (1929), Gesammelte Werke, 2:430-33, a term that Wolfskehl deploys against the technological transformation of space and time in modernity which Benjamin in turn was to appropriate to describe film's enabling and therapeutic role vis-à-vis that very transformation; see Hansen, "Room-for-Play."
127. On Klages and Benjamin, see, among others, John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y., 1993)
128. Richard Block, "Selective Affinities: Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Klages," Arcadia 35 (2000): 117-36
129. Wohlfarth, "Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Technological Eros"; and Michael Pauen, "Eros der Ferne: Walter Benjamin and Ludwig Klages," in Global Benjamin: Internationaler Walter-Benjamin-Kongreß 1992, ed. Klaus Garber and Ludger Rehm, 3 vols. (Munich, 1992), 2:693-716, esp. 706-11
130. For attempts to revive Klages from the perspective of Critical Theory, including Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, ecology, phenomenology (especially Heidegger), and poststructuralism, see Pauen, "Wahlverwandtschaften wider Willen? Rezeptionsgeschichte und Modernität von Ludwig Klages," in Perspektiven der Lebensphilosophie: Zum 125. Geburtstag von Ludwig Klages, ed. Michael Großheim (Bonn, 1999), pp. 21-43
131. and Großheim, '"Die namenlose Dummheit, die das Resultat des Fortschritts ist' - Lebensphilosophie und dialektische Kritik der Moderne," Logos 3 (1996): 97-133
132. See, in particular, Klages's introduction to Schuler's writings, pp. 1-119
133. On Klages's (and Schuler's) anti-Semitism, see Faber, Männerrunde mit Gräfin, pp. 69-91
134. Benjamin, letter to Gretel Karplus [Adorno], early June 1934, GB, 4:441
135. In his letter to Scholem, 15 August 1930, Benjamin calls Klages's major new publication, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele (The Intellect as Adversary of the Soul), "without doubt a great philosophical work" that he intended to study closely. "I would never have imagined that the kind of preposterous metaphysical dualism that forms the basis of Klages's work could ever be associated with really new and far-reaching conceptions" (CWB, p. 366; GB, 3:537)
136. On the antinomic method of Benjamin's thinking, see McCole, introduction to Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition
137. Scholem, "Walter Benjamin," Neue Rundschau 76 (1965): 19
138. trans. Lux Furtmüller under the title "Walter Benjamin," Yearbook of the Leo Baeck Institute 10 (1968): 117-36
139. Benjamin, "Review of Bernoulli's Bachofen" (1926), trans. Livingstone, SW 1:427
140. For a Marxist critique of Klages, Jung, and Bergson, see, for example, Ernst Bloch, Heritage of Our Times (1935), trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Berkeley, 1991), pp. 304-24
141. Wohlfarth, "Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Technological Eros," p. 76
142. Adorno acknowledged that Klages's "doctrine of 'phantoms'" in the section "The Actuality of Images" (Wirklichkeit der Bilder) from his Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 3 vols, in 4 (Leipzig, 1929-32), 3:1:1223-37, "lies closest of all, relatively speaking, to our own concerns" (Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 5 Dec. 1934, CC, p. 61)
143. Klages, Der Geist als Widersacher der Seele, 3:1:1103
144. and Vom Wesen des Bewusstseins and Vom kosmogonischen Eros, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 3 of Philosophische Schriften, ed. Ernst Frauchiger et al. (Bonn, 1974), pp. 293-94, 422-23
145. See, in particular, Adorno's (and Karplus's) response to the first exposé of The Arcades Project in the letters of 2-4 and 5 August 1935, CC, pp. 104-16
146. See also Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)
147. Benjamin read Matière et mémoire during his student years but, to my knowledge, reserved any more systematic reflections until "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire," SW, 4:314-15, 336
148. The revival of Bergson in film and media theory has almost entirely been
149. and Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, 1985)
150. See, among others, Paul Douglass, "Deleuze's Bergson: Bergson Redux," in The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, ed. Frederick Burwick and Douglass (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 368-88
151. and "Bergson and Cinema: Friends or Foes?" in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester, 1999), pp. 209-27
152. For a return to Bergson through different routes, see, for instance, Paula Amad, Archiving the Everyday: A Topos in French Film History, 1895-1930 (New York, forthcoming), chap. 3
153. and Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)
154. Klages, Vom kosmogonischen Eros, p. 470
155. To Adorno, the mythic-oneiric premises of Benjamin's image memory (in his initial concept of the "dialectical image") were of course at least as suspect because of their propinquity with C. G. Jung's archetypes and the attendant notion of a collective unconscious; see Adorno, letter to Benjamin, 2-4 Aug. 1935, CC, pp. 106-7
156. See esp. sec. 6, "Nearness and Distance (Continued)," SW, 1:397-400. Under the heading of "literature," Benjamin lists five works by Klages, 1:398
157. See "Warum bringt es Verderben, den Schleier des Isisbildes zu heben?" appendix 1 of Vom kosmogonischen Eros, pp. 474-82, esp. 481
158. I will be referring to the 1919 version of "Von Traumbewuß tsein," which expands the 1913-14 version by a second chapter, "Das Wachbewußtsein im Traume." See Klages, "Von Traumbewuß tsein," Sämtliche Werke, 3:155-238; hereafter abbreviated "VT."
159. Klages, "Mensch und Erde," Sämtliche Werke, p. 623
160. See, for example, Hugo Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg on Film: "The Photoplay - A Psychological Study" [1916] and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York, 2002)
161. and texts by Jean Epstein, Louis Delluc, Germaine Dulac, and others in the first volume of French Film Theory and Criticism, ed. Richard Abel, 2 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1988)
162. See also Kracauer's writings on film of the 1920s in The Mass Ornament and reviews in Kracauer, Kleine Schriften zum Film, vol. 6 of Werke, ed. Inka Mülder-Bach and Ingrid Belke (Frankfurt, 2004)
163. The more direct and better-known lineage between Klages and early film theory runs through Sergei Eisenstein who, like Wsewolod Meyerhold and other bio mechanical acting theorists, found in Klages's study on "expressive movement" a confirmation of the theory (William James, William Carpenter) that bodily movement both manifests and generates affective reflexes. See Klages, Ausdrucksbewegung und Gestaltungskraft: Grundlegung der Wissenschaft vom Ausdruck (Leipzig, 1923)
164. See, among others, Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, N.J., 1992)
165. and "The Passion of the Material: Toward a Phenomenology of Interobjectivity," Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 286-318
166. The double movement of the dreamer's mimetic fusion with the phenomena perceived and, in the flux of their displacement, a sense of pathic metamorphosing is reminiscent of Kracauer's account of the subject of "boredom" in the eponymous essay of 1924, in which "the spirit" allows itself to be polymorphously "cranked away" in the movie theater: "It squats as a fake Chinaman in a fake opium den, transforms itself into a trained dog that performs ludicrously clever tricks to please a film diva, gathers up into a storm amid towering mountain peaks, and turns into both a circus artist and a lion at the same time" (Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, p. 332)
167. The image of leaves rippling in the wind has been a topos since the Lumière Brothers first showed its films in 1895, famously invoked by Kracauer in the preface to his Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960)
168. Benjamin elaborates on this thought, without attribution, in SW 1:449
169. See Heraklitus, The Cosmic Fragments, ed. G. S. Kirk (Cambridge, 1954), pp. 57-64
170. Benjamin's investment in technology (and in film as "second technology") is reminiscent of the logic of Parsifal: "Only the spear that struck it heals the wound" ("Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur, der sie schlug")
171. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 207
172. See Agamben, "Walter Benjamin and the Demonic: Happiness and Historical Redemption" (1982), Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif., 1999), pp. 138-59, esp. 145-48
173. and Harold Bloom, "Ring around the Scholar," review of The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910-1940, in Artforum 33 (Nov. 1994): 3, 31
174. In the Hebrew Bible, the word tselem refers to the creation of man in the image of God (Gen. 1:26)
175. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead: Basic Concepts in the Kabbalah, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, ed. Jonathan Chipman (1962; New York, 1991), pp. 251, 270, 254, 255
176. Bloom, "Ring around the Scholar," p. 31. This reading relies on Scholem's interpretation of Benjamin's angel as satanic; see Scholem, "Walter Benjamin and his Angel" (1972), On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York, 1976), pp. 198-236. Agamben calls Scholem's interpretation into question by emphasizing the eudaemonist side of Benjamin's angel, which is associated with his politics of happiness
177. Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead, p. 253
178. The text in brackets quotes the same passage from the 1509 compilation Shushan Sodot, which Scholem first discusses in "Eine kabbalistische Erklärung der Prophetie als Selbstbegegnung," Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 74 (1930): 288
179. Benjamin puns on the name of the Judaic scholar Oskar Goldberg to whom both he and Scholem had a highly ambivalent relationship
180. See, in particular, "On the Concept of History" (1940), trans. Zohn, SW 4:389-400, esp. thesis 18
181. The entwinement of these registers is programmatic to the surrealist-inspired, "anthropological materialist" first layer of The Arcades Project
182. See also Hanssen, Benjamin's Other History
183. On Benjamin's notion of "distorted similitude" (and its distinction from "non-sensuous similitude"), see Sigrid Weigel, Entstellte Ähnlichkeit: Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise (Frankfurt, 1997)
184. Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), p. 45
185. Anson Rabinbach, introduction to The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940, trans. Smith and Andre Lefevere, ed. Scholem (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), p. xxxii
186. See also Benjamin, letter to Scholem, 12 June 1938, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, p. 224: "What is actually and in a very precise sense folly [das Tolle; "crazy," "mad," or "great"] in Kafka is that this, the most recent of experiential worlds, was conveyed to him precisely by the mystical tradition."
187. Benjamin, "The Formula in Which the Dialectical Structure of Film Finds Expression," trans. Jephcott, SW 3:94
188. Benjamin, "Mickey Mouse" (1931), trans. Livingstone, 2:545; GS, 6:144-45
189. Wohlfarth, "Benjamin and the Idea of Technological Eros," p. 68