Reading Reading in Benjamin's “Little History of Photography”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25071/1913-5874/37316Abstract
The essay focuses on the problem of reading in Walter Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography”, with the ultimate aim of reading reading. To do so the essay places specific pressure on the notions of ‘aura’ and ‘allegory,’ two well-known themes in Benjamin scholarship that are instanced by Benjamin in this text in an especially crisp and particular way. As a corrective to a ‘postmodern’ theory of the sign and the championing of allegory specifically, the essay argues for the inseparability of the tropes and the risks of hypostatizing one at the cost of the other. Through a close reading of the narrative itself - a history that moves from the photography of D. O. Hill, to Eugene Atget, and finally August Sander - the author maps out a chiasmic structure that organizes Benjamin’s text as a movement from looking to reading. It is argued that this movement doubles for a shift between caricatured interpretations of symbol and allegory, that Benjamin’s narration is quite careful to mark in order to stage a far more inscrutable notion of allegory as reading. Further, by picking up on a few key themes and significant moments of literal translation between German, French and English the essay argues for a link between Benjamin’s narration of the history of photography and his autobiographical writing; questions impacted by a recurrent interest in the problems of singularity, paranomasis and translation.
References
Badiou, Alain. The Century. Trans. A. Toscano Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007.
Benjamin, Walter. “Gesammelte Schriften, Das Passagen-Werk.” Ed. Rolf Tidemann. Vol. 5. Frankfurt: 1982.
Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” Trans. M. W. Jephcott and K. Shorter, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Ed. M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith. Vol. 2. Cambridge: 1999.
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Trans. M. W. Jephcott and K. Shorter. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings 1913-1926. Ed. M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings. Vol.1. Cambridge: 1997.
Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999.
De Man, Paul. “Conclusions: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator.’” The Resistance to Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
De Man, Paul. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Gasché, Rodolphe. “Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin’s ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Ed. A. Benjamin, P. Osborne. London: 2000.
Hamacher, Werner. “The word Wolke—if it is one.” Studies in 20th Century Literature. Vol. 2. 1986.
Jacobs, Carol. “The Monstrosity of Translation.” The Language of Walter Benjamin. Baltimore: 1999.
Scholem, Gershom. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.
Wolin, Richard. Walter Benjmain: An Aesthetic of Redemption. Berkeley: 1994.
