WALTER BENJAMIN’S COSMOS

Keywords: Walter Benjamin, cosmos, cosmology, Earth, aura
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 11

Abstract

In the interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, his thinking is commonly divided into two distinct blocks: the culture-language-aesthetics block, where language functions as a mediation between the critique of culture and the analysis of technology at work in art, and the politics-history-theology block, where history mediates between Benjamin’s (quasi-)Marxist politics and his heterodox messianism. I propose to question this conventional interpretation by exploring Benjamin’s cosmology, his thinking of the universe and the Earth, the way this thinking determines the concept of aura, and the new type of subjectivity that this philosophy induces. For most commentators, the aura is supposed to characterize the work of art before “the age of its technological reproducibility.” In my talk, I show that this approach, overdetermining the aura from the technological dimension, represses the cosmological and more precisely the stellar origin of the aura that Benjamin posits as a hypothesis in this crucial text: “Are there earthly creatures as well as things that gaze back from the stars? That actually only open up their gaze in the heavens? Are the stars with their glimpse from out of the distance the original phenomenon of aura?”