![]() ![]() The article proposes that Franz Kafka served as a point of mediation for Benjamin’s changing formulations of tradition. This article aims to address Walter Benjamin’s theory of tradition through the prism of Benjamin’s works on Franz Kafka, his ongoing correspondence with Gershom Scholem on Kafka, and a dream he had in the French internment camp, which in my reading relates to the world of Kafka. In tracking Benjamin’s seemingly melancholic emplotment of the literary image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire”, the essay ultimately focuses on how he amplifies its sociohistorical potential to attest to the dehiscence of tradition as a community-sustaining force. The resulting configuration emerges against the backdrop of a lament about the decline of tradition-infused, long-term experience that accompanies the rise of isolated experience. Notably, however, his “energetics” does not remain bound by closed-system economic premises insofar as he conceives Baudelaire’s correspondances as an antidote to reification and modernization fatigue. Drawing upon Freud’s thermodynamic model of a selective and protective perceptual-conscious system from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin explains how perception calcifies in adapting to industrialism. ![]() To contextualize the second section of “Motifs”, where Benjamin discusses the novelist’s “immanent critique of Bergson” this essay offers a reading of “On the Image of Proust” as a propadeutic to Benjamin’s privileging of “Baudelaire” over “Bergson” in the first section of “Motifs” to broach the destinies of diminished perception before he turns to Freud in the third section. Notably, Baudelaire is not the only figure to upstage “ahistorical” Bergson, since Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud facilitate this victory. If the literary critic might be viewed here as weighing in on a long-running antagonism between philosophy and literature, then his assessment is resolute: by praising the self-conscious historicity of Baudelaire’s lyric, Benjamin declares that poetry succeeds where Lebensphilosophie fails. Benjamin subsequently defines Bergson’s philosophy as “an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent record”, an endeavor that inadvertently “furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself undistorted to Baudelaire’s eyes, in the figure of his reader”. Yet even as Bergson shuts out the historical import of modernization, according to Benjamin, he also spotlights a “complementary” visual experience “in the form of its spontaneous afterimage”. Despite his initial affirmation of Bergson’s understanding of experience as connected with tradition, Benjamin criticizes the philosopher’s account for sidestepping “the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism” in reaction to which, as Benjamin insists, Bergson’s philosophy of memory developed. This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses”. ![]()
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