Abstract

Within the plethora of unresolved tensions that charge the writing of Walter Benjamin, none is more abiding than the problem of the modern subject. While Benjamin rejects the concept of a self-identical subject, he nevertheless emplots certain rhetorical "subjectivity effects" in a number of autobiographical texts. Although critical interest in Benjamin has proliferated in recent years, there has been no serious attempt to establish an account of his theory of subjectivity as it emerges through his autobiographical writings. This study argues that Benjamin's largely unexamined autobiographical documents, Moskauer Tagebuch , Berliner Chronik , and Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert , stage a subject that complexly vacillates between construction and disarticulation, a specifically Benjaminian dialectic of perpetual turnover rather than harmonious mediation. The subject is staged by a narrative insistence on the materiality of communication, the body, and each chapter proceeds by analyzing one specific trope of anatomy. Chapter One analyzes Benjamin's theoretical preoccupation with the body as alterity, demonstrating how in the Moskauer Tagebuch the body is semiotized as a potentially readable text but finally remains strangely unknowable. This predicament is enacted by the perpetual deferral of Benjamin's access to the eroticized body of his love, Asja Lacis. Chapter Two shows how in the Berliner Chronik the ear, as an embodiment of the acoustic, is constructed as an unassimilable third term within Benjamin's noise archive of modernity. This movement is less a hermeneutic problem than a function of modern media technology, specifically the telephone, which both disrupts consciousness and functions as a mnemonic image and trigger. The Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert is the concern of Chapter Three, which argues that the vicissitudes of the eye and its gaze become a constellation of flash-like moments of insight and dialectical images that betray the subject. Finally, Benjamin's autobiographical subject, which briefly flickers up only to disappear again, can be usefully conceptualized, both ethically and politically, as a specter in the culture of Weimar