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Abstract
This article examines the ways in which Georges Didi-Huberman conceptualizes the notion of the “aura” after Walter Benjamin’s famous and elusive rendering of the term. The central focus is on the way in which Didi-Huberman theorizes the aura to showcase its capacity for transformation – specifically in terms of its connection to “place” and in terms of what he calls a “memory trace.” After an introduction, the article is divided into five sections, followed by a conclusion. The first two sections act as a foundation from which to investigate Didi-Huberman’s engagement with the aura. Therein, I explore the aesthetic debates surrounding what kind of knowledge artworks can produce and specifically how language can, most reductively, objectify the way in which artworks are critiqued, on the one hand, or produce elusive and romantic readings of artworks, on the other. Furthermore, I explore the way in which the notion of aura is engaged in Benjamin’s work upon which Didi-Huberman largely draws for his own understanding of the term. The subsequent two sections outline what I call Didi-Huberman’s two-part proposal of the aura re-imagined; this entails what he calls the “supposition” of the aura and the “secular” aura. Didi-Huberman takes Barnett Newman’s “zip” paintings as a point of entry to think how the aura can be hypothesized after Benjamin. In the final section, I look to the artworks of James Turrell as they are investigated by Didi-Huberman and to one of his short books, Being a Skull, to describe how artworks can function as vertiginous places, which implicate our conception of space in general. Didi-Huberman’s “dialectics of place” both complexifies Benjamin’s equating of place with the aura as uniqueness and smooths over some edges of his paradoxical thinking.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number 752-2014-0591].
1 I expand on this in the section entitled “To Eulogize is to Invent: A Brief Overview of Benjamin’s Aura.”
2 The French version of this text can be found in Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. It is also published in English in Walter Benjamin and History (2005). It is this 2005 reference to which I refer throughout the article.
3 Bhabha further explains that: “If rapture is to be communicated at all, then the ineffable experience has to be addressed from a perspective outside itself” (12).
4 The aesthetic debates pointed to here are also explored in this special issue with the dialogue between Didi-Huberman and Rancière (this issue 11–24).
5 See Bhabha. For a discussion of art’s relation to the “impossible,” see Didi-Huberman’s contribution to this special issue: “La dama duende [The Phantom Lady]” (this issue 25–41).
6 I follow this idea of the invention of the aura by way of its eulogy as put forth by Ariella Azoulay; see Death’s Showcase, in particular chapter 2: “[Death’s] Display Showcase: Walter Benjamin.”
7 Stéphane Symons has underscored that, in modernity, “the autonomous unity that retains a distance and presents itself to the subject, radiating with truth, beautiful semblance, ambiguity and mystery has now been famously termed ‘aura’” (103); see Benjamin, “Goethe’s Elective Affinities.”
8 Nathan Ross explains that: “The prevalence of the phenomenon of aura within aesthetic creation and experience reveals the existence of a society that is organized around rituals that reinforce the existence of hierarchy” (165).
9 Symons argues that Proust’s mémoire involontaire should be understood more in terms of a springing up of non-sensuous relations that underscore a possibility of fragmentary virtual significance rather than wholly given “eternal” or inherent significance (103, 105).
10 For an extended analysis of this passage of Benjamin’s Goethe essay, see Symons.
11 For a discussion of this self-alienating encounter with regard to photography, see Düttlinger; Leslie.
12 These are the definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary and the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (accessed Apr. 2018).
13 See, furthermore, Nathan Ross. Ross emphasizes that Adorno had identified Benjamin’s under-developed theory of the dialectics of the aura and explains Adorno’s argument against what he understood as Benjamin’s “undialectical approach” in the following way: “Art without aura would be art without negativity. Aesthetic experience without contemplation would merge fully with practical consciousness and risk becoming a mere mechanism in replicating the social order” (236–37).
14 Strathausen explains:
The destruction (that is, actualization) of the aura would be Benjamin’s political and theological dream come true. The proclaimed fulfillment of this dream, however, can be nothing but a lie, and this lie indeed informed the aestheticization of politics in German fascism. (10)
15 I take this term from Strathausen as an illustration of the way in which the aura declines.
16 See Benjamin’s “Little History of Photography.”
17 Where no English translations of the original French were available, these have been made by the author. “Telle serait donc l’essentielle ressource du déclin: la bifurcation, la collision, la ‘boule de feu’ qui traverse l’horizon, l’invention d’une forme nouvelle.”
18
Il suffit d’ailleurs de se pencher sur l’histoire du mot lui-même pour comprendre le caractère dérivé, dévié, de ce sens religieux et transcendant du culte. Cultus – le verbe latin colere – a d’abord simplement désigné l’acte d’habiter un lieu et de s’en occuper, de le cultiver. C’est un acte relatif au lieu et à sa gestion matérielle, symbolique ou imaginaire: c’est un acte qui simplement nous parle d’un lieu œuvré. Une terre ou une demeure, une demeure ou une œuvre d’art. C’est pourquoi l’adjectif cultus est lié si explicitement au monde de l’ornatus et de la “culture” au sens esthétique du terme.
19
Entre poupées et bobines, entre cubes et draps de lit, les enfants ne cessent pas d’avoir des “apparitions, ” sans aucun doute – est-ce à dire qu’ils en sont les dévots? Bien sûr que non, s’ils en jouent, c’est-à-dire s’ils manient librement toutes les contradictions sur lesquelles le langage, peu à peu découvert dans ses oppositions phonématiques et signifiantes, leur ouvre les yeux, plombant d’angoisse leur gaieté “enfantine” ou bien faisant éclater de rire leur angoisse devant l’absence.
20
L’enfant [ … ] ne craint ni d’être fasciné par les images, puisqu’il “habite” en elles, ni de les manipuler à loisir, puisqu’il se sent “libre” de le faire. Il se laisse saisir par l’aura et la profane dans l’instant [ … ] Il découvre des multiplicités à l’œuvre dans chaque image regardée avec toutes les autres. Il voit partout des “virtualités allusives.” Alors, il se livre librement à la joie d’un supplément d’écriture (Beschreibung), il recouvre de signes, il “sur-légende” chaque légende et, ce faisant, produit sa propre condensation (Verdichtung) de virtualités. Ce qui se nomme, tout simplement, poésie (Dichtung) [ … ] Et Benjamin de conclure en affirmant que, devant ces images d’abécédaires, l’enfant à la fois “s’éveille” à la réalité visible et “poursuit ses rêves” dans l’univers voyant de son imagination.
21 “Il faudrait donc séculariser la notion d’aura, et faire du ‘culte’ ainsi entendu l’espèce – historiquement, anthropologiquement déterminée – dont l’aura elle-même, ou la ‘valeur culturelle’ au sens étymologique, serait le genre.” “Il faut séculariser l’aura, il faut donc réfuter l’annexion abusive de l’apparition au monde religieux de l’épiphanie.”
22 “L’apparition n’est donc pas l’apanage de la croyance – c’est en croyant cela que l’homme du visible s’enferme dans la tautologie. La distance n’est pas l’apanage du divin, comme on l’entend trop souvent.”
23 Stanley Corngold, translator of Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” explains in his note 1 that: “Schein connotes both something negative, mere appearance or illusion, and something positive; it is the luster that marks the point, in German idealism and Romanticism, at which the numinous shines through the material symbol” (356).
24
L’espace vécu correspond plutôt, chez Didi-Huberman, à la manifestation d’un espace inquiétant: qui renvoie et qui pose question à notre corps, à notre mouvement, à notre histoire, à notre mémoire; bref, un espace humain qui nous concerne – qui nous “regarde,” dit-il souvent.
25 “C’est encore la distance – la distance comme choc. La distance comme capacité à nous atteindre, à nous toucher, la distance optique capable de produire sa propre conversion haptique ou tactile.”
26 A truncated version is employed in-text. Here is the full French quotation:
D’un côté, donc, l’aura se sera trouvée comme re-symbolisée, donnant naissance, entre autres choses, à une nouvelle dimension du sublime, dans la mesure même où elle y devenait “la forme pure de ce qui surgit” [ … ] D’un autre côté – ou plutôt conjointement –, l’aura sera comme revenue aux conditions formelles élémentaires de son apparition: une double distance, un double regard [ … ] un travail de la mémoire, une protension.
27 Benjamin explains to Adorno that: “The concept of the trace finds its philosophical determination in opposition to the concept of the aura” (“Exchange with Adorno” 106).