The Conduct of Contemplation and the Gestural Ethics of Interpretation in Walter Benjamin�s "Epistemo-Critical Prologue"

Abstract

In the "Epistemo-Critical Prologue" ("Erkenntniskritische Vorrede") to The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels) (henceforth Vorrede), Walter Benjamin was concerned with the ethics of his own interpretive gesture in that the rhythm and/or relative velocity of the operations of critical attention that he was at pains to describe as necessary to the methodological procedure of philosophical criticism had an essential rapport-one could also even more pointedly call it a performative relation-with the interpretive content of the analysis and, hence, to the artwork or works under scrutiny. My reading of the Vorrede here is designed to explore the gestural character of Benjamin's propaedeutic. There is no mentality without motility and the question of movement reconstruction concerns the possibility that thought would capture itself in and through its affinities with its own movement. As Samuel Weber has said: " [W]hat Benjamin seeks to articulate in that Preface is not simply another form of cognitive investigation, but rather a form of interpretation that does not take cognition for granted" (1991, 467). If thought partakes of an ethics and aesthetics of gesture, this realization