Weaving Aura, Gendered Textures: The Secret of Walter Benjamin’s Language Magic

Sabine Golz (University of Iowa) [BIO]

Email: sabine-golz@uiowa.edu

 

ABSTRACT:

This presentation will investigate Walter Benjamin’s micro-textual strategies through readings of selected manuscripts that allow us to trace his writing process. We can observe how his process of revision works towards creating certain patterns in the distribution of gendered pronouns that can then be connected to a larger poetics governing his writing more generally. These strategies in turn play a subtle but central role at that micro-level of writing, but they also, in conjunction with other strategies, bring about a subliminal “disciplining” of reading which ultimately generates large-scale effects. The goal of this paper (and the project of which it is a part) is to give a theoretical account of the ways in which the social and cultural gender-asymmetries in Western cultures have become part of the very functioning of language itself, intervening at the very heart of the processes that stabilize (or de-stabilize) representation and thus ultimately the ability to pass on (or delete) aspects of cultural memory. Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” are a central text for the current discourse on the ways in which history is constantly re-written from a present. Yet a closer look at the decisions Benjamin made in writing that essay also reveals some startling choices that are apt to change the perception of his position. His essay “Doctrine of the Similar,” finally, can productively be appropriated as a starting point for a theoretical account of the historical genesis of a gendering of language.