The dialectical image of empire

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Chin Davidson
Keyword(s):  
Dialectical Image

Vor- und Nachgeschichte Bild und Zeit bei Walter Benjamin

2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 198-212
Author(s):  
Cornelia Zumbusch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Hidden Agenda ◽  
History Of ◽  
Chronological Time

Abstract Benjamin’s approach to the history of the nineteenth century as a prehistory (Vorgeschichte) of modernity relies on his concept of the dialectical image. Starting from Benjamin’s interpretation of Proust’s narrative endeavor as the evocation of images that have not been seen before, this essay tries to situate Benjamin’s dialektisches Bild in new contexts. Examining Benjamin’s interest in Goethe’s Urphänomen as well as implicit references to Lessing’s concept of fruchtbarer Augenblick or Cassirer’s idea of symbolische Prägnanz, this essay stresses not so much the important but often considered aspects of discontinuity and destruction of chronological time, but tries to trace a hidden agenda: the affinity of Benjamin’s dialectical image to genetic processes.

scholarly journals "East Germany Lives!”: An Encounter with Rural Graffiti

2014 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Anne Winkler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Practices ◽  
East Germany ◽  
Entry Point ◽  
Alternative Possibilities ◽  
Slavoj Zizek ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Slavoj Žižek ◽  
East German

This essay undertakes a provisional reading of spray-painted writing on a dilapidated rural bus shelter that I encountered while investigating cultural practices that evoke and invoke the East German past in contemporary Germany. The graffiti, which read “DDR lebt!” (“East Germany lives!”), appeared in large red letters and was accompanied by the shape of a heart. I propose interpretive possibilities for the themes to which the graffiti allude, acknowledging that I construct a translation that others may not share. The bus shelter with its adornment serves as entry point into interrogating how East Germany is remembered and historicized today. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek (2002) and Svetlana Boym (2001), I point to the limitations of applying the construct of nostalgia to practices that appear to appraise positively Germany’s socialist past. Alaida Assman’s (1996) use of the trace, Kevin Hetherington’s (2010) theorizing on the ruin, and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image emerge as alternative possibilities for interrogating how individuals intervene in unconventional, unpredictable, and contradictory ways as they connect what has been to the present.

scholarly journals From Displacements of Form to Auratic Trace: Notes on Didi-Huberman’s Thinking on Images

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (26) ◽  
pp. 248-272
Author(s):  
Alice Mara Serra
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
The Other ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Nous Voyons ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This text underlines the way in which, for Georges Didi-Huberman, topics including matter, symptom and memory become primordial to the thinking of images. But as Didi-Huberman proceeds, the course that leads him to highlight such topics first addresses other topics that, inphilosophy and iconography, sought to deny such readings, namely: image as form and its correlative meanings, that is, image as symbol and image as visibility. Didi-Huberman, however, argues that the notion of form may no longer be merely opposed to that of matter, nor be considered as solely idealistic. If, on the one hand, Didi-Huberman presents the insufficiency of the deconstruction of the notion of form presented by Jacques Derrida, on the other hand, the displacements of the notion of form proposed specially in Ce que nous voyons ce qui nous regardepoint to an approximation to deconstruction, mostly to the themes of trace, index and “the belows” (les dessous) of images. In addition, passages of this and other works of Didi-Huberman may insinuate a connection between the notions of trace and aura, which refer to convergences concerning the deconstruction of the visible and the dialectical image. This text seeks to reconstruct such directions from writings of Didi-Huberman and, in this way, restores other writings that border on them: specially from Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin.

La mímesis como lógica del recuerdo: una lectura sobre la noción de «imagen dialéctica» en la obra de Walter Benjamin desde una perspectiva warburguiana

2010 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florencia Abadi
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Main Topic ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Intimate Connection

ResumenEl trabajo investiga la relación entre las nociones de «imagen dialéctica» [dialektisches Bild] y de recuerdo [Erinnerung] en la obra tardía de Walter Benjamin. Parte de la hipótesis de que, para comprender dicho vínculo, es necesario recurrir a la categoría de «mímesis» como mediación entre ellas. El abordaje de la mímesis busca recuperar su íntima relación con lo figurativo y la experiencia sensible, relegada frente al énfasis que los estudios sobre el tema han puesto en la filosofía del lenguaje. Con este objetivo, se indaga el diálogo velado de Benjamin con la tradición warburguiana, cuyo tema central es la imagen.Palabras claveBenjamin, Warburg, imagen dialéctica, recuerdo, mímesisAbstractIn this paper we research the connection between the concepts of «dialectical image» and «memory» in Walter Benjamin’s late work. We start from the hypothesis that, in order to understand this relationship, it is necessary to turn to the notion of «mimesis» as a link betweenthem. We draw attention to the intimate connection of mimesis with the figurative and sensible experience, generally left out by the studies that emphasize its relationship with the philosophy of language. To reach our aim we investigate the veiled dialogue between Benjamin and the Warburgian tradition, whose main topic is the image.KeywordsBenjamin, Warburg, dialectical image, memory, m

Uses of the dialectical image: Adorno, surrealism, Breton, Benjamin

Continuum ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (6) ◽  
pp. 876-884
Author(s):  
Darren Jorgensen
Keyword(s):  
Dialectical Image

Postindustrial Waterfront Redevelopment and the Politics of Historical Memory

2021 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-208
Author(s):  
Harris Feinsod
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Long Beach ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Waterfront Redevelopment ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Aesthetic

Abstract How have cities reorganized attention to their waterfronts after the decline of urban seaports? What kind of cultural record attends this reorganization? This article investigates the politics of historical memory at several sites of postindustrial harbor redevelopment since the 1960s. It locates the aesthetic sensibilities of waterfront renewal in a scattered network of comic tableaux in literature, art, and moving images, including the documentaries of Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, the sitcom Arrested Development, and a mural at Baltimore’s National Aquarium. Like fragments of Benjamin’s dialectical image, these scenes bring together the allegorical ruin of the urban seaport with comic efforts to inaugurate its future as a commercial esplanade, as if virtualizing and intensifying those two phases of Benjaminian historiography (early modern allegory and nineteenth-century commodity). Intermittently, where this dialectical image begins to be realized, these sites have erupted in acts of de-monumentalization by anticolonial and alter-globalization activists. The article locates fragments of this dialectical image in seaports including Rotterdam, Baltimore, Barcelona, Long Beach, and Genoa, studied under the names given to their harbors by developers: Europoort, Harborplace, Port Vell, Rainbow Harbor, and Porto Antico.

Adorno and the Humanist Dialectic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacques Lezra
Keyword(s):  
Economic Relation ◽  
Dialectical Image ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Dynamic Objects ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Way

This chapter puts in relation what is here referred to as Marx's “dynamic objects” and what Theodor Adorno calls the “dialectical image.” It takes the language of exile—pushed to an extreme philosophical consequence in Adorno's writing—to provide a definitive rearticulation of the notion of “dialectics,” and so too of the way we should understand, today, how objects (conceptual, material) and identities are produced, shaped, valued, and brought into and out of (political, economic) relation. The chapter imagines two ways of approaching the “dialectical image” that is “Adorno,” and hence of sketching out the ways in which the humanist dialectic excludes the specific account of mediation that Adorno, and “Adorno,” provide. Both of them necessarily sit, uneasily, on the mobile border that lies between disciplinary and meta-disciplinary arguments.

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