Body- and Image Space. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin.

Englisches Pendant zu: Entstellte Ähnlichkeit. Walter Benjamins theoretische Schreibweise. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer 1997.

Body- and Image Space. Re-Reading Walter Benjamin. Transl. by Georgine Paul. London: Routledge 1996.

The subject of this book is Walter Benjamin as theorist—not as philosopher of history or art, not as historian or critic of literature. The central focus of the study is the specific way in which Benjamin thinks and the figurations in which that thinking takes on form. For in his writings the mode of thinking and of writing cannot be seen as separate since they—beyond the dualistic opposition of content and form—come together in a third: namely, in the image, which Benjamin himself referred to as a ‘third’ (ein Drittes) (GS II.1, 314; Ill 207). In an image, however, that in Benjamin’s thought does not have the status of a reproduction (Abbild), a ‘mental picture’, or the like, but rather that of a constellation, a heteronomous and heterogeneous similitude, in which figures of thought correlate with those of history or of experience and reality.