Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History
by Eduardo Cadava
# Paperback: 204 pages
# Publisher: Princeton University Press; New Ed edition (August 3, 1998)
Here Eduardo Cadava demonstrates that Walter Benjamin articulates his conception of history through the language of photography. Focusing on Benjamin's discussions of the flashes and images of history, he argues that the questions raised by this link between photography and history touch on issues that belong to the entire trajectory of his writings: the historical and political consequences of technology, the relation between reproduction and mimesis, images and history, remembering and forgetting, allegory and mourning, and visual and linguistic representation. The book establishes the photographic constellation of motifs and themes around which Benjamin organizes his texts and thereby becomes a lens through which we can begin to view his analysis of the convergence between the new technological media and a revolutionary concept of historical action and understanding.
Written in the form of theses--what Cadava calls "snapshots in prose"--the book memorializes Benjamin's own thetic method of writing. It enacts a mode of conceiving history that is neither linear nor successive, but rather discontinuous--constructed from what Benjamin calls "dialectical images." In this way, it not only suggests the essential rapport between the fragmentary form of Benjamin's writing and his effort to write a history of modernity but it also skillfully clarifies the relation between Benjamin and his contemporaries, the relation between fascism and aesthetic ideology. It gives us the most complete picture to date of Benjamin's reflections on history.
1ST TIME ON THE NET
Here is one of the books which changed my path of thinking. I was already a company of Benjamin, but Cadava helped me to constellate with Heidegger, JL Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. amazing is the words that are flashes, letting the gesture, a fissure we are, actuality in its full absence -a logical modality that absences all predications- you see how Benjamin: dwelling at the margins of modernity, shows us the boundaries that it can extend(i.e. excessive moments of the law): Theses on History. I think the most radical answer given to Benjamin is from Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster.
"The disaster does not put me into question, but annuls the question, makes it disappear – as if along with the question, “I” too disap-peared in the disaster which never appears. The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event: it does not happen, not only because there is no “I” to undergo the experience, but because (and this is exactly what presupposition means), since the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it." (WD 28)
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