Religious Studies 250
Seminar in the History of Religions
Fantasy, Imagination, and Walter Benjamin’s
“Profane Illumination”
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Fall, 2007 |
Richard D. Hecht,
Professor |
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Thursday, 12:00 to 2:50 |
Office: HSSB 3076 |
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HSSB 3041 |
Office phone: 893-4552 |
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Office Hours: W. 10:00
to 12:00 or by appointment |
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Syllabuses: http:www.religion.ucsb.edu/syllabuses.html |
e-mail: ariel@religion.ucsb.edu |
Seminar Description: In 1982, Jonathan Z. Smith described the study of religion as preoccupied with a second order, reflective imagination. “That is to say,” he wrote, “while there is a staggering amount of data, of phenomena, of human experiences and expressions that might be characterized in one culture or another, by one criterion or another, as religious – there is no data for religion. Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no independent existence apart from the academy. For this reason, the student of religion, and most particularly the historian of religion, must be relentlessly self-conscious. Indeed, this self-consciousness constitutes his primary expertise, his foremost object of study.” (Imagining Religion, p. xi). These few lines created a revolution in the modern study of religion, among others, freeing the student of religion from interpreting only those data which were “essentially” religious, helping us to understand that the phenomena we seek to interpret is as much a “construction” and the constructions that constitute our interpretations, focusing our attention on the acts of imagination which constitute our work and in the phenomena we interpret, and finally, expanding the range of methods that can be used by the student of religion.
Over the past few years this seminar has taken up a number of twentieth-century Jewish thinkers whose work has been of great significance for the study of religion and cultural analysis. These have included Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Emmanuel Levinas, Edmund Jabès, and Walter Benjamin. It can be argued in each case that their self-perceived ambiguity of identity contributed much to a canon of ideas and theories which have animated intellectual discourse over the course of the past century. Each was interested in the interpretation of culture and we might call the new history of religions which emits from Smith’s definition of the study of religion, a cultural history of religions.
This quarter we will again take up the work of Walter Benjamin. In past seminars, we have considered his interpretations of matter, memory, and the transformations of urban space. The walker in these material and urban spaces, the flâneur, became the model for his philosophy of the future, his hermeneutics, his “profane illumination,” and his new understanding of experience (set apart from experience in the neo-Kantian tradition that
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Seminar in the History of Religions
Fall, 2007
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he had been exposed to in the German universities he attended). The flâneur has a knowledge which includes a knowledge of “dwelling” which he describes as a shell or matrix which enables him to read the exact figure of that which lives or resides within. Benjamin understood that the flâneur is the paradigm for the new interpretation that he hoped to accomplish in his work, a reading of material images in all their multiple forms. He described this “reading” as a “profane illumination.” This “profane illumination” for Benjamin had two central dynamics – fantasy and imagination. Fantasy and imagination are elevated to central roles in what we might call hermeneutics and he draws both from literature – literature and material forms are joined in his hermeneutic. Our project is to understand how Benjamin understood fantasy and imagination with the goal of understanding the imaginative act in the study of religions. Not only is imagination critical to scholarly activity according to Smith, but fantasy and imagination are the central dynamics of discursive structures in religious phenomena.
We will consider many of Benjamin’s central treatises,
articles, and essays in our exploration of imagination and fantasy, but we will
also read Franz Kafka’s Amerika or The Man
Who Disappeared which Kafka began in 1911 and David Grossman’s See Under: Love.
Benjamin may have seen in Kafka a kindred spirit who like him was
wrestling with an alternative understanding of the sacred and profane. David Grossman has been described as a
contemporary Kafka in his extraordinary narrative power. Benjamin, Kafka, and Grossman will be linked
in our study. Karl Rossmann
and Momik are exiles, strangely out-of-place, much
like Benjamin.
It should be noted that Benjamin’s work has had little impact upon the study of religion, this despite his importance as a central figure in much of what is called cultural analysis today. How can we explain this? Perhaps it is a result of the New Left’s reading of Benjamin as a kind of vulgar Marxist. This is the argument that Gershom Scholem made in his testament to their friendship. For Scholem, Benjamin was a figure driven by religious impulses. While one can argue that Scholem’s effort to locate Benjamin in the religious sphere was an extension of the debate they had since their first meeting in 1915 about the nature of Judaism and Jewish nationalism or Zionism. Irrespective of this argument to save Benjamin for Judaism it underscores that religion is a significant category in his thought which is perhaps obscured by the a backward reading of his contributions which begins with “Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1939). In part, our study of Benjamin is an effort to (re)claim him for the study of religion.
Required Texts:
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Fall, 2007
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Seminar Requirements:
Reading Schedule:
Week of September 27 – Introduction
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Week of October 4 – Scholem’s Walter Benjamin and Benjamin’s “One-Way Street” (3) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second Version” in Selected Writings.
Week of October 11 – Read Kafka’s Amerika: The Man Who Disappeared.
Week of October 18 – Read Benjamin’s “The Return of the flâneur,” “On the Image of Proust” (6), “Surrealism” (10), “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel,” “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” “Review of Brod’s Franz Kafka” and “Letter to Gershom Scholemk on Franz Kafka” in Selected Writings.
* No meeting on Thursday, 25 October.
Week of November 1 – Read Benjamin’s “Naples” (1), “Moscow” (4), “Marseilles” (5), “A Berlin Chronicle” (16), and “Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “Exchange with Theodor Adorno on the Essay ‘Paris, the Capital of Nineteenth Century,” “The Significance of Beautiful Semblance,” and “Berlin Childhood around 1900” in Selected Writings.
Week of November 8 – Read Benjamin’s “The Arcades of Paris” (12), “Dream House, Museum, Spa” (13), “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (22) and “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on ‘Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (23).
Week of November 15 – Read Grossman, See Under: Love, “Momik” and “Bruno” (pp. 3-186).
* No meeting on Thursday, 22 November (Thanksgiving Holiday recess).
Week of November 29 – Read Grossman, See Under: Love, “Wassermann,” “The Complete Encyclopedia of Kazik’s Life,” and “Glossary: The Language of ‘Over There” (pp. 187-452).
Week of December 6 – Concluding discussion – Exile,
Additional Reading: Eric Jacobson, Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (2003); Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989); Gary Smith, ed., On Walter Benjamin: Critical Essays and Recollections (1995); Gerhard Richter, ed., Benjamin’s Ghosts: Interventions in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory (2002);
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Beatrice Hanssen, Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels (1998); Sigrid Weigel, Body-and-Image Space: Re-reading Walter Benjamin (1996); Margaret Cohen, Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (1995); Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (1994); Graeme Gilloch, Myth and Metropolis: Walter Benjamin and the City (1996) and Walter Benjamin: Critical Constellations (2002); Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000); Pierre Missac, Walter Benjamin’s Passages (1995); Howard Caygill, Walter Benjamin: The Color of Experience (1998).