Reading Reading in Benjamin's “Little History of Photography”

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

Aesthetics of Affliction

oai:intensions.journals.yorku.ca:article/37315In making Aesthetics of Affliction our theme for this first issue, our goal was to engage immediately with questions that must remain central in a journal dealing with corpo-realities of structural violence, the senses, and the theatricality of power. These questions are: how can we talk to experiences and situations that evade translation and that are mired with legacies of  objectification? What are the possibilities, limits, hopes, and risks when addressing non-linear moves of power, the work of  violence, and social yet also intensely subjective effects/affects