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  • Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis
  • Karl Ivan Solibakke
Elizabeth Stewart . Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010. 228 pp.

Walter Benjamin's concern for "mere life" induced him to seek out phantasmagorical traces in the collective archive, particularly in light of his assumption that these represent the clearest juncture between cultural epistemologies and practical approaches to a "trans-historical temporality" measured not in chronological or historical time but in time that reveals itself instantaneously. Searching for the traces of socio-cultural experience, in which temporality has either been ruptured or adapted to new and changing perceptions, we, like Benjamin before us, are compelled to voice discomfort about what phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes engender our identities and where these are accumulated for future reference. Seen as a vast textual labyrinth limning the depths of the individual unconscious as well as a warehouse of artifacts for the collective, the archive absorbs cultural debris and transforms heterogeneous signs into the semiotics that embody Benjamin's approach to the dangers and catastrophes confronting modern individuals and cultures.

In Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Stewart argues that "psychoanalytic readings of Benjamin" and "Benjaminian readings of psychoanalysis" convey Benjamin's understanding of an "ethics of subjectivity" (6). Fundamentally, incongruous levels of discourse and material fragments are superimposed onto the archaeology of socio-cultural transformations, which, as Benjamin himself explains in his seminal essay on Eduard Fuchs, are replete with meanings for modern subjects in their roles as collectors. Not only does he focus on the derivation of the semiotics comprising the cultural fabric or on how to access the vast amounts of debris in the archive, but also on reading the circularity of past and present signs as well as [End Page 397] interpreting their reiterations. For Benjamin, the temporal and spatial dimensions of the fragments form the dialectics of past and present images, which are subject to a continual process of layering or superimposition.

In keeping with Stewart's claims, superimposition is one of the primary principles underlying the methods of recollection encapsulated in Benjamin's concept of similarity. Pinpointing the relation of language to the signified, Benjamin conjectures that the primary archival medium is script, since the written word contains a temporally coded mimesis of nature. As he sees it, mimesis is mankind's aptitude to decipher real and ideal similarities in the plurality of signs comprising the micro and macro cosmos. Stewart's exegesis builds on Benjamin's theories, especially when she asserts that the mimetic faculty is "profoundly and archaically related to physical gesture, sound, and body" (90). In her estimation, the body and its psychosomatic conditions become the nexus for grasping the similarities embedded in the circulation of collective signs. Transmitted from each generation to the next as archetypes about origin, death and redemption, these signs also retain some semblance of individual and collective integrity. Indeed, since time immemorial mankind's triumphs and defeats have been encoded in artifacts that come to figure as a highly valued reservoir for collective experience and cultural commemoration. The emphasis should be placed on noticeable, since transformations to the signs resulting from the passage of time must be cognizant of the memory of an origin that is more often than not buried under numerous layers of language in the collective archive. What follows from this notion of sediment is Benjamin's concept of the "non-sensuous similarity," in which the maxims of the mimetic faculty are encapsulated, though not immediately felt, and which serves to ascertain the psychosomatic condition of the group. Aptly, Stewart asserts that "the historical ambiguity of the idea of mimesis is as important to Benjamin as it is to other explorations taking place in Benjamin's immediate cultural context in the 1920s and 1930s, where we see a small, possibly esoteric, but certainly intense, explosion of interest in the psychological and anthropological significance of the phenomenon" (91). Accordingly, she embeds Benjamin's mimetic faculty within a corpus of analogous concepts elaborated in the writings of Sandor Ferenczi, Melanie Klein, Wilfried Bion, as well as Roger Caillois and Aby Warburg.

While the notion of folding the...

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