Till bilden av Benjamin : Den dialektiska bilden som historiematerialistisk begrepp

This paper is an attempt to construct the conceptual context of one of Walter Benjamin’s central notions - the ”dialectical image”. Its aim is to actualize it for a philosophy dedicated to a concept of knowledge that corresponds and gives justice to the concrete and unique in experience (Erfahrung). Having as a point of departure Benjamin’s reading of Surrealism, mainly Louis Aragon and André Breton, this paper argues that Benjamin’s definition of the surrealist ”image” is to be conceived as a reference for his own concept of the dialectical image. In order to explicate this concept one has to conceive of what Benjamin finds as a direction in the surrealists’ image towards the sphere of praxis. Reading Benjamin’s sublation (Aufhebung) of the surrealist experience, praxis becomes a crucial methodological notion through which the question of the material and technological conditions of man correspond directly to the time-space complex of the knowledge of contemporary (synchronistisch) now-time (Jetztzeit) as actuality. Praxis is for Benjamin the true object of experience but also its just method in terms of construction. The ”construction” as a dialectical sublation of surrealist experience engenders a thematization of the historical dialectics not just in terms of then/now, but also of dream/awakening. In order to explain the philosophical significance for Benjamin of the notion of the dialectical image this paper will examine the correspondence between Benjamin and the thinking of early Marx. In this correspondence the construction of praxis becomes crucial in establishing the transcendental relation between man and his true property as a unique but universal being. The marxian term of appropriation (aneignen) becomes the very praxis in which man finds himself in an image-space (Bildraum), a space which, according to Benjamin, the Surrealists were the first to illuminate (erleuchten). For Benjamin this image-space is a space in time conceived both as a collective body and as a unique being that through and by ...