Perception and Experience in Modernity: International Walter Benjamin Congress 1997

226 Pages·2002·3.344 MB·English

by  Helga Geyer-Ryan, Paul Koopman, Klaas Yntema

Perception and Experience in Modernity

Benjamin Studien
Studies 1
Edited by
Helga Geyer-Ryan
Paul Koopman
Klaas Yntema
Editorial Board
Jeanne Marie Gagnebin (Sao Paulo)
Helga Geyer-Ryan (Amsterdam)
Bettine Menke (Frankfurt/Oder)
Samuel Weber (Los Angeles)
Irving Wohlfarth (Reims)
International Walter Benjamin Assocation
Institute of Comparative Literature
University of Amsterdam
Spuistraat 210
NL-1012 VT Amsterdam
E-mail: [email protected]
URL: http:// www.hum.uva.nl/benjamin
Amsterdam/New York, NY 2002
Picture: Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin, Pontigny 1939
Design: Taluut and Koopman.
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of ‘ISO
9706:1994, information and documentation — Paper for documents —
Requirements for permanence’. Printed in The Netherlands.
Benjamin Studies, a Rodopi Series is available in PDF, free online for print
subscribers, via CatchWord/ingenta.
ISSN: 1568-5098
ISBN: 90-420-1285-4
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2002
References to Benjamin’s Gesammelte
Schriften(ed. Rolf Tiedemann and
Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt
am Main (Suhrkamp) 1972–89) are included in
parentheses within the text. The roman
numeral designates the volume, the arabic
numeral the page number.

Contents
Perception and Experience in Modernity
Helga Geyer-Ryan 9
To speak of Walter Benjamin
George Steiner 11
Between a Human Life and a Word.Walter Benjamin and the Citability of
Gesture
Samuel Weber 25
Lost in Translation.Vom Verlust des Bilddenkens in Übersetzungen
Benjaminischer Schriften
Sigrid Weigel 47
Walter Benjamin and the Idea of a Technological Eros.A tentative reading of
Zum Planetarium
Irving Wohlfarth 65
A Talk with Mona Jean Benjamin,Kim Yvon Benjamin and Michael Benjamin
Martin Jay, Gary Smith 111
Zeit und Glück.Phantasmagorien des Spielraums
Burkhardt Lindner 127
‘Jetzt’.Benjamin zur historischen Zeit
Werner Hamacher 145
Walter Benjamin,Remembrance and the First World War
Martin Jay 185
Revolutionary Time: The Vanguard and the Avant-Garde
Susan Buck-Morss 209

Perception and Experience in Modernity
The first volume of Benjamin Studies publishes the keynote lectures of the first
Congress of the International Walter Benjamin Association, which took place in
Amsterdam, July 1997. Its title bears witness to the most central concepts of
Benjamin’s philosophy of culture. Strongly influenced as he was by Kant, Benjamin
never lost his inclination to analyse the components of reality as fashioned by our-
selves. Because he was also a materialist, for him the modes of fashioning were shaped
in turn by the times and places we occupy in history. As a consequence, Benjamin’s
theory assigns a pivotal role in the interaction between the world and its inhabitants
to the media: language with its plethora of discourses, the arts, and the technology of
reproduction. The historical and social development of the media is, translated,
according to him, into our instruments of perception, and this perception constructs
the elements of the world, the knowledge of this construction and the knowledge of
the constructor. The self-knowledge of the constructor is what we call ‘experience’.
Within this broad epistemological framework, the diversity and complexity of
Benjamin’s project acquires a fundamental coherence and is therefore able to accom-
modatethe temporal volatility of the phenomena of our world. It’s not surprising,
therefore, that Perception and Experience in Modernity offers the most stimulating
variety of topics, and that the keynote lectures reflect merely an intensification of
interest in certain areas within a much larger field of investigation. The texts
presented here pinpoint the central preoccupations of today’s debates amongst
Benjamin scholars, preoccupations which are themselves responses to our own his-
torical imperatives.
Perception and Experience in Modernity is also a memorial to the late Wil van
Gerwen and bears witness to the strength of his vision. This young Dutch scholar
laid the foundations for the International Walter Benjamin Association and played
the most crucial part in getting this first congress off the ground before his
untimely death in 1995 at the age of 44. Wil van Gerwen’s vision was to bring
together on the neutral terrain of the Netherlands all the different factions
engaged in the study of Walter Benjamin, factions which had often proved so hostile
to each other in the past. Without wishing to ignore or disguise their differences,
Wil van Gerwen wanted the combined intellectual forces at the congress to unite
in the exploration of Benjamin’s extraordinary universe. By means of the Association,
he sought to bring Benjamin scholars together in all their diversity on an interna-
tional scale and so promote the global dissemination of Benjamin’s equally diverse
and irreducible mode of thought.
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