Walter Benjamin’s Cosmos: Correspondence, Aura, and the Cosmo-Geological Subject

Abstract

Abstract:In the interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy, his thinking is commonly divided into two distinct blocks: the culture-language-aesthetics block, where language functions as a mediation between the critique of culture and the analysis of technology at work in art, and the politics-history-theology block, where history mediates between Benjamin’s (quasi-)Marxist politics and his heterodox messianism. I propose to question this conventional interpretation by exploring Benjamin’s cosmology, his thinking of the universe and the Earth, the way this thinking determines the concept of aura, and the new type of subjectivity that this philosophy induces. Benjamin’s cosmos is neither an ordered and hierarchical space, nor a totality of celestial objects, but rather the occasion of a lightning experience, an improbable “constellation” where the most distant in space and time fleetingly encounter the here and now.