Papers by Anat Messing Marcus
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2018
In its consideration of the work of the senses, notions of truth and language and political aesth... more In its consideration of the work of the senses, notions of truth and language and political aesthetics in Walter Benjamin's epistemology of images, this thesis takes as its touch-stone Benjamin's somewhat overlooked meditations on the sensorial faculty of tactility ("das Taktische"). According to the first version of the "Work of Art" essay, along with the distinctive structures of perception of the new modes of reproduction, film and photography, architecture is the artistic domain which tactility most intimately inhabits, in which it is at home, "more originally". The nexus between tactility, through figures of touch, and affect as the absence of intentionality informs the Benjaminian settings of "natural history". These are scenographic sites permeated with "creaturely life" and perceived by way of melancholy and lament, as explicated in the early work The Origin of the German Baroque Trauerspiel. In this constellation, th...
Journal of Architectural Education, 2009
Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity, 2016
The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 2018
The essay aims to uncover the somehow overlooked sensorial faculty of tactility in Walter Benjami... more The essay aims to uncover the somehow overlooked sensorial faculty of tactility in Walter Benjamin’s epistemology of images. Not only is “Das Taktische” transposed into the critical mode of reception characterizing modernity, but the meaning of the tactile, inciting a destructive relation to the integrity of the optical, lies in a certain attention to organic and non-organic decay underlying Benjamin’s meditations on the inexpressive
acoustical dimension of language. According to the “Work of Art” essay, the medium, or the idea of architecture is dominated by tactility. The encounter between Benjamin and Carl Linfert’s study on the topic of the “borderline case” of architectural representation illuminates the architectural imaginaries used by Benjamin to capture the baroque allegorical Schauplatz. Constellating these accounts, the significance of tactility for the Benjaminian construal of the conditions of mediality, language and being unfolds.
Transformations, 2018
This article outlines the ontology of ruins presented in Homo Sapiens, a 2016 film by the Austria... more This article outlines the ontology of ruins presented in Homo Sapiens, a 2016 film by the Austrian director Nikolaus Geyrhalter, through the lens of "natural history," an aesthetic and philosophico-historical category developed by Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. In glossing natural history's concomitant concepts such as "mood," "aura" and "creaturely life," the significance of the cinematic medium for the question regarding the nature of the relation between "first" and "second" nature and between the human and the non-human-unfolds. In the second move of the article, the film's auditory dimension of perception through which "creaturely life" is sensed will be put into constellation with Kafka's "The Burrow." The claim is that Homo Sapiens's particular form of expression, in line with the spatio-temporal dimension of the reality it seeks to capture, demarcates a threshold whereby the realm of the aesthetic and the realms of ethics and politics are mutually imbricated. This point takes its lead from Giorgio Agamben's meditations-following Benjamin's "angel of history"-on what he termed the "angel of photography."
Thesis Chapters by Anat Messing Marcus
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Papers by Anat Messing Marcus
acoustical dimension of language. According to the “Work of Art” essay, the medium, or the idea of architecture is dominated by tactility. The encounter between Benjamin and Carl Linfert’s study on the topic of the “borderline case” of architectural representation illuminates the architectural imaginaries used by Benjamin to capture the baroque allegorical Schauplatz. Constellating these accounts, the significance of tactility for the Benjaminian construal of the conditions of mediality, language and being unfolds.
Thesis Chapters by Anat Messing Marcus
acoustical dimension of language. According to the “Work of Art” essay, the medium, or the idea of architecture is dominated by tactility. The encounter between Benjamin and Carl Linfert’s study on the topic of the “borderline case” of architectural representation illuminates the architectural imaginaries used by Benjamin to capture the baroque allegorical Schauplatz. Constellating these accounts, the significance of tactility for the Benjaminian construal of the conditions of mediality, language and being unfolds.