Mure, Federica. 2024. Textures of the Liminal Image at the crossroads of Modern German Aesthetics, Art History and Contemporary Visual Cultures. A Comparative Study from Benjamin to Didi-Huberman. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

Taking as its main reference the work of Walter Benjamin, this thesis examines the complex status of the image and its ambivalent positioning at the frontiers of thinking and seeing, pondering the way in which this construct offers an occasion to problematise the relation between the philosophical and the visual, while questioning the limits of what is thinkable, sayable, readable, intelligible. Drawing from a selection of literary and visual images, vis-à-vis philosophies of the limit that have conditioned the history of aesthetics and informed the development of visual cultures, this project also charts the resurgence of Benjamin’s insights on the liminal efficacy of the image within Georges Didi-Huberman’s contemporary image theory, arguing for the ongoing urgency to rethink the interstice between image and thought.

The thesis is structured as follows: pursuing the theoretical anchor of the ‘border stone’, as it cryptically appears in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the first chapter provides the contextual framework within which Benjamin’s early diagnoses of image’s liminality are first brought to the fore, vis-à-vis Kantian, Neo-Kantian (Panofsky and Saxl) and post-Kantian (Heidegger) revisitations of the limits between seeing and thinking. Chapter two then proceeds to investigate the liminal motifs of ‘transversality’ and ‘simultaneity’ as they appear in the context of Benjamin’s reflections on the interlacing of the body and the picture plane. The chapter argues that these two paradigms form the matrix for a repurposing of the nexus of ethics and life, philosophy and art, the human and non-human, through the lens of perceptual relations to the picture plane.

Equipped with the interim results of the analysis, chapter three offers an original interpretation of three under-investigated liminal images in Benjamin’s corpus - the ‘tangram’, the ‘cloudy-spot’ and the ‘legendary painter’, through the leitmotif and gesture of image-construction. This analysis, in turn, serves as an entry point to a confrontation between Benjamin’s and Aby Warburg’s interrelated methods of questioning limits via image, which reveals two variations of undoing - emphatic binding; imagistic insurgence - devised as different solutions responding to the same problem. Finally, chapter four situates the question on the liminal image within the contemporary setting of Didi-Huberman’s own image theory. Tracing the afterlife of Benjamin’s insights on the ‘swelling’ quality of the image - its ability to act as a point of simultaneous delimitation and un-limitation - the chapter addresses a significant gap in English-language scholarship, first by providing a critical scrutiny and an original reading of Didi-Huberman’s own species of the liminal image, and second by demonstrating the contemporary significance of rethinking, via image, the very notion and function of the limit, at a time of relentless and unbounded proliferation of visual information.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00038246
Keywords:	Aesthetics - Visual Studies - Walter Benjamin - Critical Theory - Philosophy of the Image
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	English and Comparative Literature
Date:	31 December 2024
Item ID:	38246
Date Deposited:	31 Jan 2025 12:06
Last Modified:	31 Jan 2025 12:12
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/38246

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