:This paper explores a form of corporeal copying which it terms mimetic communication, and explores the way it is not limited to human communication but can and does operates across species. Focusing on the way movement and vision can be seen to be at work in this kind of mimetic communication, the paper argues that it constitutes an important form of affective knowledge about both human and non-human others. Taking the work of early twentieth-century documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who worked (...) extensively with marine creatures, as a case in point, it explores the way in which certain technologies – in this case, cinema – can make use of mimesis as a communicational strategy which comprises the key feature of an aesthetic practice. It examines the implications of this for the way we conceive of affective spectatorship in cinema and for the way we understand our relations with animals, especially as we seek to study them. (shrink)

_Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action._.

Este artículo plantea el problema de la multiplicación de comentarios en torno a la obra de Benjamin como una situación que ha de incidir en las metodologías de su interpretación. A través del tratamiento de dos términos precisos – teología y mesianismo – se argumenta la importancia de una crítica que tome en cuenta el contexto de recepción sociolingüístico del intérprete. Se busca así contribuir a generar metodologías que puedan abrir paso a tratamientos que propongan una recepción crítica renovada.

:This paper explores a form of corporeal copying which it terms mimetic communication, and explores the way it is not limited to human communication but can and does operates across species. Focusing on the way movement and vision can be seen to be at work in this kind of mimetic communication, the paper argues that it constitutes an important form of affective knowledge about both human and non-human others. Taking the work of early twentieth-century documentary filmmaker Jean Painlevé, who worked (...) extensively with marine creatures, as a case in point, it explores the way in which certain technologies – in this case, cinema – can make use of mimesis as a communicational strategy which comprises the key feature of an aesthetic practice. It examines the implications of this for the way we conceive of affective spectatorship in cinema and for the way we understand our relations with animals, especially as we seek to study them. (shrink)

Excavates the experiential structure of Habermas’s communicative action.

This thesis examines the notion of experience in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. It focuses on the relationship between its constructive and disruptive features in four facets of Benjamin’s work, starting with the early writings dedicated to history and tradition and then moving towards different analyses of the reception of the work of art in modernity. Chapter I examines Benjamin’s early characterisation of experience on the basis of the transmissibility of tradition and suggests that the constructive character of experience manifests (...) in the historical development of knowledge and truth in language. Chapter II is dedicated to The Origin of the German Mourning-Play and the shift towards an examination of the development of language from the perspective of the moments of rupture, forgetting and those deviations inherent in the transmissibility of tradition. I argue that experience appears immanently in the momentary suspension or interruption of the transmissibility of tradition: origin and allegory serve to characterise the double movement of concentrating the totality of tradition and suspending its objectivity. The ‘shattering of tradition’ that Benjamin regards to be the hallmark of modernity in his later writings is located within this dynamics. This shattering undermines the conditions for understanding the conflict out of which the present emerges, thereby producing a historiographic crisis which unsettles experience. Chapter III examines modern epic narration and the resources it develops to contests the forgetting which informs late capitalism. I specifically discuss the method of montage and the fragmentary memory associated with it to suggest that Benjamin looks at history from the standpoint of memory rather than from the perspective of tradition. Chapter IV discuses the radicalisation of the forgetting informing modernity and the possibility of developing, though momentarily, an equilibrium or interplay between technology and sensibility by means of long-term practice formed according to technical reproducibility and the principle of montage. It is finally argued that despite Benjamin’s constant emphasis on its destructive character, experience necessarily entails a cumulative or constructive dimension which Benjamin reformulates throughout his authorship in terms of tradition, memory and practice. (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)