Many considerations of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre refer to the central role of the image and of the visual. Much has been written on terms such as the “optical uncon...

In this paper I consider the four images from Auschwitz analyzed by Didi- Huberman in Images in Spite of All —the so-called Sonderkommando photographs— through the lens of the “historical sublime” as proposed by historian Eelco Runia. These photographs are taken as an example of a possible reconciled aesthetic experience with an “unimaginable” past that horrifies us. Moreover, I argue that aesthetic depictions are able to champion a model of historical commemoration which makes these events imaginable again. In order to (...) show this, I will first employ the concept of the “sublime historical event” which Runia proposes to interpret the Holocaust’s historical catastrophe. Runia’s “historical sublime” provides a framework to understand the process of becoming what “we are no longer” through the invention of new identities that defy our former ones and explain historical discontinuities. Secondly, I will examine the Sonderkommando photographs by applying Runia’s notion of commemoration to the viewer’s aesthetic experience of these images. I will finally suggest the possibility of a reconciliation with our former identities, those who committed sublime historical acts with which we no longer identify, thanks to this aestheticized experience of commemoration. (shrink)

Post-critical pedagogy, which offers a significant alternative to the dominant trends in contemporary philosophy of education, objects to seeing education as instrumental to other ends: it attempts to conceive of education as autotelic, namely as having intrinsic value. While there are good reasons for accepting the post-critical reservations with the instrumentalization of education, I argue that its autonomy is equally problematic, as it risks turning the philosophy of education—perhaps education itself—into a privileged activity, out of touch with the most important (...) issues in the contemporary world. In this paper I offer post-critical pedagogy a way out of this dilemma, by drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”. After presenting the thesis concerning the autonomy of art held by Benjamin’s Frankfurt School friends, and pointing to the similarity between their view and that of post-critical pedagogy, I articulate six Benjaminian theses on post-critical pedagogy. Following Benjamin’s claim that the technological reproducibility of art changes the way it is perceived as well as its political function, I argue that school is an educational technology that reproduces the world to the masses without an “aura”, in a way that allows for political critique that does not reduce education to politics. Next, I highlight the importance of the school to post-critical pedagogy, and contribute to developing the critical-political aspect that remains essential to post-critical pedagogy. Finally, the Benjaminian perspective also makes it possible to reflect on the relation of digital technologies of reproduction to post-critical pedagogy. (shrink)

This paper argues that Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility” provides a rich analytic framework for understanding how the many dimensions of aesthe...

This article examines the ways in which Georges Didi-Huberman conceptualizes the notion of the “aura” after Walter Benjamin’s famous and elusive rendering of the term. The central focus is on the way in which Didi-Huberman theorizes the aura to showcase its capacity for transformation – specifically in terms of its connection to “place” and in terms of what he calls a “memory trace.” After an introduction, the article is divided into five sections, followed by a conclusion. The first two sections (...) act as a foundation from which to investigate Didi-Huberman’s engagement with the aura. Therein, I explore the aesthetic debates surrounding what kind of knowledge artworks can produce and specifically how language can, most reductively, objectify the way in which artworks are critiqued, on the one hand, or produce elusive and romantic readings of artworks, on the other. Furthermore, I explore the way in which the notion of aura is engaged in Benjamin’s work upon which Didi-Huberman largely draws for his own understanding of the term. The subsequent two sections outline what I call Didi-Huberman’s two-part proposal of the aura re-imagined; this entails what he calls the “supposition” of the aura and the “secular” aura. Didi-Huberman takes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings as a point of entry to think how the aura can be hypothesized after Benjamin. In the final section, I look to the artworks of James Turrell as they are investigated by Didi-Huberman and to one of his short books, Being a Skull, to describe how artworks can function as vertiginous places, which implicate our conception of space in general. Didi-Huberman’s “dialectics of place” both complexifies Benjamin’s equating of place with the aura as uniqueness and smooths over some edges of his paradoxical thinking. (shrink)

In his famous 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Walter Benjamin tells us that in his time art became valued for its exhibition value instead of what he refers to as its secularised ritual or cult value. This essay makes this bold claim plausible by arguing that it means that a historicising gaze no longer has a function in the reception of art. Although this argument is supported by Benjamin’s use of the concepts of (...) authenticity and aura, it is somehow missed by Benjamin’s many readers. His essay, as it turns out, presents an end of history thesis, which foreshadows the condition of the image in contemporary media. (shrink)

Key sections of Walter Benjamin's montage-text Berlin Childhood around 1900 figure the relationship between human experience and modern media, with the sections that frame the text, ‘Loggias’ and ‘The Moon’, structured around metaphors of photography. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, and especially his seminal essay ‘Photography’, Benjamin develops, in the course of his book, a theory of photography's relationship to experience that runs counter to the better-known theories developed in such essays as ‘Little History of Photography’ and ‘The (...) Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, theories that are part of the broad currents of technological utopianism and, as such, emphasize photography's transformative potentials. In the Berlin Childhood, Benjamin instead emphasizes photography's role in the mortification and annihilation of meaningful human experience. Photography emerges here as the mausoleum of youth and hope. (shrink)