Profound Interiority, Immediacy of Transparency and Poverty of Experience : Three Prisms on Modern War
Brosteaux, Déborah
Profound Interiority, Immediacy of Transparency and Poverty of Experience : Three Prisms on Modern War - 2020.
45
This article examines the way in which war, during the interwar period (1918-1939), became the site upon which a scene of violence unfolded whose two poles are exposure and depth. On the one hand, there was a world increasingly on show, where everything seemed exposed to violence, and where this violence was associated with demands for continuous and endless light shining everywhere. On the other, war was constantly reappropriated by new calls from the depths, by new demands for interiority. This article proposes to get a sense of the subject – making it possible to resist these two tendencies and their infernal dialectics – by way of Walter Benjamin, whose texts from the 1930s are haunted by the need to wrest thought from the horizon of war. Our foundation for this approach will be what Benjamin called the poverty of experience, in particular how this phenomenon calls upon a certain kind of material: glass, and the new environments that it makes possible. The reference to glass is entirely bound up with images of violence: glass enables the fiction of imagining ways to resist violence, but on the basis of its closeness to those images, and not by dreaming of moving beyond them.
Profound Interiority, Immediacy of Transparency and Poverty of Experience : Three Prisms on Modern War - 2020.
45
This article examines the way in which war, during the interwar period (1918-1939), became the site upon which a scene of violence unfolded whose two poles are exposure and depth. On the one hand, there was a world increasingly on show, where everything seemed exposed to violence, and where this violence was associated with demands for continuous and endless light shining everywhere. On the other, war was constantly reappropriated by new calls from the depths, by new demands for interiority. This article proposes to get a sense of the subject – making it possible to resist these two tendencies and their infernal dialectics – by way of Walter Benjamin, whose texts from the 1930s are haunted by the need to wrest thought from the horizon of war. Our foundation for this approach will be what Benjamin called the poverty of experience, in particular how this phenomenon calls upon a certain kind of material: glass, and the new environments that it makes possible. The reference to glass is entirely bound up with images of violence: glass enables the fiction of imagining ways to resist violence, but on the basis of its closeness to those images, and not by dreaming of moving beyond them.
Réseaux sociaux