The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
-
David Gleicher
David Gleicher (b. 1949) is an associate professor at Adelphi University 〈gleicher@adelphi.edu〉. His research interests include social semiotics, political economics, Benjamin, and Kafka. His publications include “Who survived the Titanic? A logistic regression analysis” (with L. Stevans, 2004); “The working poor: a comprehensive study” (with L. Stevans, 2005);Rescue of the third class on the Titanic (2006); and “Social action, dialogism and the imaginary community: toward a dialogical critique of political economy” (2011).
Abstract
This paper is a rereading of Peter Fenves's readings of leading texts among Benjamin's early writings; readings contained in Fenves's important work Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time. Of chief concern here is a crucial lacuna in Fenves's idea of Benjamin's thought, a blind-spot that reveals, in relief, Benjamin's radical and consistent rejection of a fundamental Cartesian/Kantian premise: what is commonly termed the ergodic axiom (aka “identity axiom”). In these early writings, it is argued, Benjamin was indeed constructing a new philosophical foundation, residing in dialogism. And remarkably, an almost identical foundation simultaneously was being built in Russia by Mikhail Bakhtin and Valentin Volosinov, leading members of the Bakhtin circle (1918–1929).
About the author
David Gleicher (b. 1949) is an associate professor at Adelphi University 〈gleicher@adelphi.edu〉. His research interests include social semiotics, political economics, Benjamin, and Kafka. His publications include “Who survived the Titanic? A logistic regression analysis” (with L. Stevans, 2004); “The working poor: a comprehensive study” (with L. Stevans, 2005); Rescue of the third class on the Titanic (2006); and “Social action, dialogism and the imaginary community: toward a dialogical critique of political economy” (2011).
©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Munich/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Semiotic degeneracy of social life: Prolegomenon to a human science of semiosis
- Heterosemiosis: Mixing sign systems in graphic narrative texts
- Do speakers really unconsciously and imagistically gesture about what is important when they are telling a story?
- On the institutional aspect of institutionalized and institutionalizing semiotics
- At the intersection of text and talk: On the reproduction and transformation of language in the multi-lingual evaluation of multi-lingual texts
- Cave paintings of the Early Stone Age: The early writings of modern man
- Revisiting legal terms: A semiotic perspective
- Two child narrators: Defamiliarization, empathy, and reader-response in Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue's Room
- The development of an idea in a context of rejection
- Stopovers at logic and cybernetics: Georg Klaus's road to semiotics
- The sign in Heidegger's Sein und Zeit
- The semiotic logic of signification of conspiracy theories
- Biopolitics, surveillance, and the subject of ADHD
- Signification in atonal, amotivic music? Extending the properties of actoriality in Ligeti's second string quartet
- Translation, materiality, intersemioticity: Excursions in experimental literature
- Teleological historical narrative as a strategy for constructing political antagonism: The example of the narrative of Estonia's regaining of independence
- Testing the limits of oral narration
- How to do things with websites: Reconsidering Austin's perlocutionary act in online communication
- Fashionable yet strategic similarities: Diego Velázquez's creative consciousness seen through Saussurean-Hegelian composite approach
- Piaget's system of spatial logic: The semiosis of index
- The types of codes and their combinations: Visual perception and visual art
- Minimal acting: On the existential gap between theatre and performance art
- Visual semiotics and the national flag: A Kenyan perspective of Anglo-America's globe-cultural domination through mainstream music videos
- Dinner is ready! Studying the dynamics and semiotics of dinner
- Linking transculturality and transdisciplinarity
- Towards a semiotic theory of historico-cultural cycles: The semiotic contours of Spengler's “prime symbols”
- The taxicab-hailing encounter: The politics of gesture in the interaction order
- A semiotic model of visual change
- Semiotics, theatre, and the body: The performative disjunctures between theory and praxis
- On Peirce's diagrammatic models for ten classes of signs
- Phytosemiotics revisited: Botanical behavior and sign transduction
- Review article
- The dialogic lacuna in Fenves's Messianic Reduction: Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time
