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What Is There in a Portrait?: Adami's Benjamin, Seliverstov's Bakhtin and the Aura of Seeing and Showing

2003; Eastern Michigan University; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/jnt.2011.0059

1549-0815

Subhash Jaireth,

Literature and Cultural Memory

What Is There in a Portrait? Adami's Benjamin, Seliverstov's Bakhtin and the Aura of Seeing and Showing Subhash jaireth I'm asking myself if technology isn't the site of an inversion of the relationship between the subject and the object. Rather than thinking of technology as the site of a subject which, by means of technology, masters the world, captures die world and so on, I'm beginning to wonder if—almost ironically and paradoxically —technology may prove to be the site where the world or the object plays with the subject. —Jean Baudrillard1 Every picture is a picture of me body. Every work of visual art is a representation of the body —James Elkins2 I begin this essay by juxtaposing two portraits: Valerio Adami's Ritratto di Walter Benjamin and Yuri Seliverstov's portrait of Mikhail Bakhtin. Through these portraits I want to speak about portraits and the way they are seen and shown as portraits, but in doing this I want to traverse the words of Bakhtin and Benjamin. For me the two portraits function as quotations or cit(sight)ations of someone else's speaking and seeing. By juxtaposing them I am bracketing each of the portraits with the presence of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.1 (Winter 2003): 33^17. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 34 JNT the other. Through them I want to focus on the citedness of acts of seeing and speaking. For this I shall read/see through Derrida's famous essay about Adami and his portrait of Benjamin. In Denida's essay I find that a well-known photo of Benjamin has been inserted into the visual space of Adami's portrait of Benjamin. Does this insertion add "aura" to the portrait ? I ask in my essay. The question forces me to engage with Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and explore the notion of aura. In "The Problem of Speech Genres," Bakhtin notes "All our utterances are filled with someone else's words ..." ("Speech" 460). Elsewhere he writes "I live in the world of someone else's words" ("Notes" 367). Bakhtin's heteroglossia underlines the presence of someone else's words in my words. Bakhtin can't imagine in this world an object which has not been spoken or talked about, that is not circumscribed by the glow or mist of some one else's words; in this world, there is, no word which has not been uttered previously. The words which I speak, or which I employ to speak are thus always cited by me. I speak always in and through quotations . It is interesting that Benjamin, as Hannah Arendt in her wonderful introductory essay to the book Illuminations remarks, was an avid collector of not only books but also of quotations. In a letter to Gerhard Scholem, Benjamin notes that he is surprised at the way his book The Origin of German Tragic Drama is taking shape. "What surprises me most of all at this time," he writes, "is that what I have written consists, as it were, almost entirely of quotations. It is the craziest mosaic technique you can imagine and, as such, may appear so odd for a work of this type ..." (256). "No one could have collected any more valuable or rare mottoes (quotations)— almost all of them are taken from baroque texts that are impossible to find ..." (256). Even his unfinished or perhaps never-to-be-finished work bearing the title The Arcades Project (project: plan, concept, road to destination but not the destination, not the walk but the act of walking, not the text but the act of writing) was also conceived as some sort of an Eisenstein -montage of fragments. "It is tempting to question," notes Rolf Tiedemann , "the sense of publishing these oppressive chunks of quotations— whether it would not be best to publish only those texts written by Benjamin himself (931). He suggests that what Benjamin had in mind was to attempt a new way of writing history, "to carry over the principle of VJhat Is There in a Portrait? 35 montage into history. That is to...