File spoon-archives/seminar-11.archive/benjamin_1999/seminar-11.9910, message 2


From: "L Spencer" <L.SPENCER-AT-TASC.AC.UK>
Date:          Mon, 4 Oct 1999 14:31:32 +0000
Subject:       Re: starting the discussion


As a reply to some of the opening remarks I will try to be brief:

(1) The Harvard UP edition of Benjamin's SELECTED WRITINGS represents 
incredible value for money. Translations are excellent and the bulk 
of them are being done by the same hand (Rodney Livingstone). Lots of 
fascinating material (a piece on radio was a recent discovery for me) 
which has not only not been available in translation but has lurked 
undiscovered in the editorial apparatus to the multivolume German 
editions. And beautifully bound, good paper, low-ish price. It is an 
edition which will soon supercede all others. Lets try to use it. 
ARCADES project due to be published around Xmas! 

(2) I sent off and bought CRITICAL INQUIRY for a very reasonable 
price. Several excellent pieces in the volume. But above all a quite 
stupendous piece as the first essay - on Benjamin's silence. A 
reading of the trauma of WW1 and especially of the suicide of his 
close friend Fritz Heinle and the way that this colours all his 
subsequent writing. An essay that anyone at all interested in 
Benjamin, the man should read. But several other very substantial 
pieces in the volume.

(3) A few notes about my own present preoccupations with Benjamin:

How many people realise that Benjamin sees "trace" and "aura" as 
paired concepts - the one explored as the counter-point to the other?

I am interested in the upsurge of interest in Benjamin as a "visual 
thinker" or the thinker of the visual... from his "thought-images 
(Denkbilder) to his stress on "gesture" in Brecht's epic theatre (and 
in Neapolitan life). "Gesture" is related to another interest of mine 
- the role of the body in WB's thinking and writing. Benjamin's own 
gestures and gait, the pace and habits of the flaneur/ the 
bibliophile hunched over his cards ... 

Finally I am very interested in the way that WB not only wrote ABOUT 
the concept of experience but went out of his way to give himself new 
experiences and new forms of experience - with drugs for example - in 
order to explore his overarching intuition about the fate of 
experience, the decline in the capacity for certain types of 
experience - what Adorno referred to as their "materialist 
anthropology".

The flaneur is a hot topic among cyber-pundits. Excellent essay by 
Mike Featherstone is to be found in digital form on the web 
somewhere. Originally published in Urban Studies. Benjamin crops up 
in discussions of internet, virtual reality, cyberspace all over the 
show.

Best wishes

lloyd

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