Index and Image

Although Walter Benjamin anticipated a confrontation with Martin Heidegger regarding the theory of historical knowledge, this confrontation was never fully elaborated. This essay contributes to filling out this lacuna by arguing that Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image was conceived as a phenomenological corrective to Heidegger’s historicity. To clarify the phenomenological sources of Benjamin’s conception of the image, it reads the traces of Benjamin’s engagement with the early phenomenologist Jean Héring in the first sentences of entry “N3,1” in Das Passagen-Werk, where Benjamin presents his notion of the image in explicit opposition to Heidegger. The essay argues that Benjamin relied on Héring’s notion of phenomenological essences as indexically individuated to conceptualize the historical index of the image and to provide a better (i.e., more concrete) way of “saving history for phenomenology” than Heidegger’s historicity. By tracking Benjamin’s debts and departures from Héring, this essay prepares the ground for a reconstruction of Benjamin’s confrontation with Heidegger and argues for the relevance of Benjamin’s conception of history for contemporary critiques of historicism.

Postindustrial Waterfront Redevelopment and the Politics of Historical Memory

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.

Corpo-caleidoscópio: as siluetas de Mendieta

The article is developed based on the hypothesis that the Silueta’s series (1973-1979) of Ana Mendieta (1948-1985) can be thought through the relation with the kaleidoscope. On the one hand, as a paradigm of thinking about the dialectical image present in Walter Benjamin's thesis, and on the other, as a metaphor for sensible understanding the series created by the Cuban artist. The text is grounded in the thought of four of these works and relates them with reflections presented in the writings, mainly of Georges Didi-Huberman and Walter Benjamin.

PLAS AYITI (PROJETO NEON): UMA POLÍTICA DAS IMAGENS / Plas Ayiti (neon project): the politics of images

Este artigo analisa o trabalho Plas Ayiti (projeto neon) da artista brasileira Milla Jung com o propósito de investigar uma política das imagens. Em um mundo do excesso de informações na era midiática somos incitados a não ver nada que está debaixo dos nossos olhos. Entretanto, a imagens constituem e constituem-se de um campo de forças e relações de poder que produzem subjetividades e signos dos sistemas culturais. Plas Ayiti (projeto neon) propõe uma política das imagens não apenas pelo fato de captar um aspecto visível do mundo, mas por pensar a produção e a circulação de imagens dialéticas que produzem o dissenso e restituem um saber histórico no qual a imagem e o sujeito que a olha se constituem mutuamente.Palavras-chave: Política das imagens; Imagem e esfera pública; Imagem dialética; Plas Ayiti.AbstractThis article analyzes the work Plas Ayiti (neon project) by the Brazilian artist Milla Jung with the purpose of investigating a politics of the images. In a world of over-information in the media age we are urged not to see anything under our eyes. However, the images constitute and constitute a field of forces and relations of power that produce subjectivities and signs of cultural systems. Plas Ayiti (neon project) proposes a policy of images not only by capturing a visible aspect of the world, but by thinking the production and circulation of dialectical images that produce dissent and restore a historical knowledge in which the image and the subject which look at it constitute at each other.Keywords: The politics of images; Public sphere and image; Dialectical image; Plas Ayiti.

Delírio Fantasma, ou os Tempos de "Era uma Vez Brasília"

Resumo: Este ensaio realiza um experimento de pensamento a partir da análise dos tempos do filme “Era uma vez Brasília” (Adirley Queirós, 2017). A obra apresenta uma interação entre temporalidades heterogêneas para pensar o tempo histórico em que se insere. Desse arranjo, emerge uma imagem dialética (Benjamin, 2018) em que o passado de Brasília e Ceilândia interage com um evento do presente: o golpe de Estado que destituiu Dilma Rousseff da Presidência do Brasil em 2016.Palavras-Chave: análise de filmes; Adirley Queirós; temporalidade; imagem dialética; cronotopo PHANTASMAL DELIRIUM, OR THE TIMES OF "ERA UMA VEZ BRASÍLIA"Abstract: This essay perform an experiment of thought through the analysis of Once there was Brasília (Adirley Queirós, 2017). The film presents an interaction of heterogeneous temporalities to think the historical time that enmesh this work. The film construct a dialectical image (Benjamin, 2018) that makes Ceilândia’s and Brasília’s past interact with an event of the present time: the 2016 coup d’etat which dismissed Dilma Rousseff from Presidency of Brasil.Keywords: film analysis. Adirley Queirós. temporality. dialectical images. chronotope

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

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.

RHIZOMATIC COSMOPOLITAN AND WILSONIAN RECURSIVE VISION IN JOE TURNER’S COME AND GONE

Being the constant wanderer for the lost identity in the polyethnic land of America, African Americans bear striking resemblance to the figure of flâneur with dialectical image of local and cosmopolitan citizen of the universe. The spirit of flânerie proves its geographical historical expansion in both postmodern and African American context while its performative action navigates it in dramatic texts. Hence, Wilsonian characters identical with constant existential quest for the lost self can be African American incarnations of flâneur. Drawing on Baudelaire’s definition and Benjamin’s theory of flâneur, this study seeks to demonstrate possible manifestations of African American flâneur in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone (1986). Moreover, through Deleuze and Guattari’s postmodern theoretical concept of rhizome in A Thousand Plateau (1987), the study aims to explore the postmodern manifestation of flâneur and consequently manifest how it functions to be the means for Wilsonian postmodern recursive dramatic vision that represents mysterious aspects of African Americans life. Flâneur’s versatility appropriates it to be the quintessential manifestation of African Americans inasmuch as the latter’s multifaceted African nature can accommodate the former’s flexibility