Numbing and Splitting

Susan Buck-Morss "Walter Benjamin's Artwork Essay Reconsidered" October 62 (Fall 1992).

We are — by a long detour — back to Benjamin's concerns at the end of the Artwork essay: the crisis in cognitive experience caused by the alienation of the senses that makes it possible for humanity to view its own destruction with enjoyment.

How we think is connected to how we feel (perceive) and how we imagine.

This gains some purchase on the reader because earlier in the essay Buck-Morss comments on a passage in Husserl:

This separation of the elements of synaesthetic experience would have been inconceivable in a text by Kant. Husserl's description is a technical observation, in which the bodily experience is split from the cognitive one, and the experience of agency is, again, split from both of these.

Agent, body and observer. Their relations argues Buck-Morss are influenced by the social distribution of the technologies of anaesthesia.

And so for day 500
26.04.2008