The aesthetics of the shock, part II: the dialectics of the instincts in the artistic uncanny

Tidhar Nir

Authors

Tidhar Nir Tel Aviv University

Keywords:

Adorno, Freud, Benjamin, uncanny, aesthetics

Abstract

This second part of Tidhar Nir's essay on the aesthetics of the shock deals with Adorno and Benjamin's dialectical implementations of Freudian concepts such as Thanatos, repetition compulsion, and Eros as part of their relation to the autonomy of art. Interpreting works of art as uncanny and as animistic fantasies reveals how art, in their mind, is related to social reality and social struggles for individuality. Benjamin's account of the French photographer Atget stresses commercial fetishism by giving the inanimate new life through the absence of subjectivity. Atget's empty city is uncanny in its repetitiveness of unused objects, and nostalgic trends give a paradoxical expression to a yearning for innovation amidst the ``always the same.'' Alienation in this context can be understood in two different ways: 1) as the conjunction of inner and outer reality that takes place when the ego is objectified and comes to be regarded as a mere instrument; or 2) as a blurring of ego with outer reality in an effort to undermine the forces that have fixated the ego erotically by conjoining it with other life elements. Adorno designates this phenomenon as the ``return of nature'' or the aesthetization of the ego. Adorno's interpretation of poetic language draws the contours for a narcissism in which repetition compulsion may be expressed as an unintelligible sound. But that sound is not meaningless: it reiterates and uncovers the trauma inherent in the reification of language.

References

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
------. Negative Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973.
------. Notes to Literature Vol. I. Edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991-92.
Atget, Eugène. “Boulevard de Strassburg,” 1912. In Surrealism at Play, by Susan Laxton, figure 2.2, p.76. Duke University Press, 2019.
Benjamin, Walter. “Little History of Photography.” In Selected writings Vol. II, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996-1999.
------. “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings Vol. IV, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press, 1996-1999.
------. “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.” In Selected Writings Vol. IV.
Jameson, Fredric. Late Marxism: Adorno, or, The persistence of the Dialectic. London: Verso, 1990.
------. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Social Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981.