Claudia Iddan The Unconscious in Photography - The Dialectical Image (excerpt) “Walter Benjamin granted the image an important place in his reading and analysis of historical processes, as well as in the possibilities it offered in the critique of historical recognition. For him, “dialectical images” are the images fit for the task, that is, those images that create tension between the present and the past. This concept evolved into a central axis of his work. In Benjamin’s writings, the references defining the dialectical image unfold mainly in two directions: the first is a conceptualisation, which links the dialectical image to the dream image or the wish. The second links the dialectical image with the historian’s task of writing history. Both conceptualisations indicate mutual permeation, the unification of present and past in the formal dimension. The first linkage concerns the place of archaic dreams and their influence on modernity, which in fact is motivated by them. The second reference concerns the union between the image of the past which enters into an immediate “glowing” connector with the present in such a fashion, that the image can only be understood in that specific present and thus influences the way history is written. How does this union between the past and present of the dialectical image occur ? ” Translated from the Hebrew by Noa Farchi and Naama Patinkin
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:32:00 +0000