Peter Fenves's Walter Benjamin and the Shape ... - Adelphi University

Fenves’s Walter Benjamin and the Shape of Time:
Dialogism in Absentia
David Gleicher
is a flow of inter-subjective activity in open time. “These plays represent the stemming of nature …
to which a new world suddenly opens up in the word, the world of … unfeeling historical time …
(1916b: 247).” Similarly, the comic hero, like each human subject in open time, engages in the
mirror-nature of game and play, orienting self to other, other to self, experiencing the social whole
while acting in its creation.
Beasley-Murray aptly sums up the force of Benjamin’s break with neo-Kantian semiotics, (as
well as that of Bakhtin and Volosinov), which propels each of them in the direction of a general
philosophical critique wedded to dialogism:
Words: 9,000 (approximate)
We now see the reason for the significance that Bakhtin and … Benjamin
ascribe to language. Language becomes the medium in which the
fundamental schism that opened up in Western philosophy since
Descartes, the schism between cognizing subject and cognized objectworld,
is revealed as already healed. As [Raymond] Williams comments of
Volosinov’s conception of language: ‘It is of and to this experience—the
lost middle term between the abstract entities “subject” and “object”, on
which the propositions of idealism and orthodox materialism are
erected—that language speaks (2007: 92-3).
23