stranded objects
Title
stranded objects
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Description
In _Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany_, Eric L. Santner writes of the “second generation of Germans trying to constitute a viable legacy out of poisoned totemic resources” for whom
"it might yet be possible to discover in the lives, the words, the faces and bodies of the parents traces of another history, another past, that might have been but was not. The “oppressed past” that Benjamin speaks of is, in other words, one that never in fact took place but would nevertheless become available to future generations. This past would be, as Benjamin suggests, a construction. It would be pieced together . . . These stranded objects would be composed of symptoms.
Symptoms, as Freud has taught, are traces of another, unconscious reality that haunts one’s conscious reality like a revenant being. In the present context, they would be the traces of knowledge denied, of deeds left undone, of eyes averted from pain, of shades drawn, of moments when it might have been possible to ask a question or to resist. . . For the postwar generations it is . . . a matter of seizing those chances now, of constructing an alternative legacy out of the archive of symptoms and parapraxes that bear witness to what could have been but was not. It is a matter of reading the “documents” of the elders the way Benjamin looks at a photograph. That 'tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject' that Benjamin searches out in the photograph can . . . be read as an index of a historical opportunity that was left unrealized but that still remains available as a sort of energy potential that continues to dwell in history" (152-3)
"it might yet be possible to discover in the lives, the words, the faces and bodies of the parents traces of another history, another past, that might have been but was not. The “oppressed past” that Benjamin speaks of is, in other words, one that never in fact took place but would nevertheless become available to future generations. This past would be, as Benjamin suggests, a construction. It would be pieced together . . . These stranded objects would be composed of symptoms.
Symptoms, as Freud has taught, are traces of another, unconscious reality that haunts one’s conscious reality like a revenant being. In the present context, they would be the traces of knowledge denied, of deeds left undone, of eyes averted from pain, of shades drawn, of moments when it might have been possible to ask a question or to resist. . . For the postwar generations it is . . . a matter of seizing those chances now, of constructing an alternative legacy out of the archive of symptoms and parapraxes that bear witness to what could have been but was not. It is a matter of reading the “documents” of the elders the way Benjamin looks at a photograph. That 'tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject' that Benjamin searches out in the photograph can . . . be read as an index of a historical opportunity that was left unrealized but that still remains available as a sort of energy potential that continues to dwell in history" (152-3)
Creator
kk
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Citation
kk, “stranded objects,” The Middle Shore, accessed May 15, 2024, https://middleshore.omeka.net/items/show/48.