T h e m eaning of B enjam in’s com m entary in the PassagenWerk is cryptic. It is a different text, a story (of nineteenth-century Paris) told w ith in a story (of B enjam in’s own historical experience) w ith the goal of bringing to life the cognitive and political pow er of the PassagenWerk th a t lies d o rm an t w ithin the layers o f historical d ata o f which it is com posed.ī u t p erhaps m ost of all, this is the story o f the interpretive p ro cess itself. W h a t is given here is no t an Englishlanguage su m m ary o f the original G erm an and F rench m anuscript. I w ould be h a rd pu t to say w hether this form of scholarship is a process of discovering the A rcades project, or inventing it.
A nd yet it will be clear to anyone fam iliar w ith the Passagen-Werk th a t I have not reproduced it here but, ra th e r, proceeded num erically, extrapolating from it in o rd er to illum inate the world th a t B enjam in experienced and de scribed. I have in the present study rem ained scrupulously close to the fragm ents o f this never-w ritten work. T hese notes consist of citations from a v ast array of historical sources, w hich B enjam in filed w ith the b arest m inim um of com m entary, a n d only the m ost general indications o f how the frag m ents w ere eventually to have been arranged. In stead o f a “ w ork,” he left us only a m assive collection o f notes on nineteenth-century in d u strial cu ltu re as it took form in P aris- an d form ed th a t city in tu rn. I t draw s its authority from a book th at was never w ritten, the Passagen-Werk (Arcades project), the unfinished, m ajor project o f B enjam in’s m atu re years. I t is a picture book o f philoso phy, explicating the dialectics o f seeing developed by W alter B en ja m in, w ho took seriously the debris o f m ass culture as the source of philosophical tru th. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940 - Political and social views. Benjamin, W alter, 1892-1940- Philosophy. cm.- (Studies in contemporary German social thought) An English reconstruction and analysis of Benjamin’s Passagen -Werk. T he dialectics of seeing: W alter Benjamin and the Arcades project/ Susan Buck-Morss. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Buck-Morss, Susan. T his book was set in Baskerville by Asco T rade Typesetting Ltd., Hong Kong, and printed and bound by The Halliday Lithograph in the United States of America. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
This perspective reinforces the political theology and its discourse ethics of responsibility and the Other (Levinas).© 1989 Susan Buck-Morss All rights reserved. It is substantial to take into account Benjamin’s mimetic theory of language and a messianic history of materialism as an alternative to a psychological notion of mimicry. Moreover, a notion of mimicry can be renewed in reference to a critical theory of mimesis in Adorno and Benjamin. I seek to revisit Hegel’s dialectical theory and his critique of religion (in reference to Nietzsche) in terms of labor, recognition, and discourse of resistance in order to cut through the psychological confinement. But my concern is to reinterpret Hegel’s notion of religion in terms of unhappy consciousness and elaborate his linguistic, critical dimension for the postcolonial political theology. In theological context, Moltmann utilizes Hegel’s notion of death of God for his political theology of theologia crucis in a trinitarian sense. He develops Fanon’s psychological analysis in terms of the ambivalence of mimicry, but its psychological limitation lies in discarding Fanon’s discussion of Hegel’s theory of master and slave. This chapter is concerned with critically analyzing Homi Bhabha’s notion of mimicry in the colonial, racially hierarchical context.
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