‘… the most complex and lyrical song of experience’: Walter Benjamin and a dialectical image of madness. Introduction to Walter Benjamin for psychiatry (III)
International Review of Psychiatry May 20, 2024 DOI: 10.1080/09540261.2024.2354375 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Key points | Argues that Walter Benjamin's reflections on experience illuminate a paradox in thinking about madness: psychiatric conceptions of madness as illness, suffering, and dysfunction must be held together with conceptions of madness as a different, illuminating experience of possibility. Proposes that Benjamin's accounts of the loss of experience, the turn toward the object, and the limit-experience, culminating in the dialectical image, offer a way to think this contradiction. |
Abstract
Abstract In this paper I explore Walter Benjamin’s complex thoughts about the concept of experience to illuminate a central paradox when thinking about madness. This paradox concerns the need to hold together constellations of concepts that appear to be diametrically opposed. On the one hand there is the realm of the psychopathological; a psychiatric thinking of madness as mental illness that refers to suffering, loss of existence, and dysfunction. On the other hand, there is a thinking about madness as a diverse and different experience, as possibility, illumination, and difference. Benjamin’s writings on experience can be particularly fertile here because he acknowledges the contradictions in experience, at certain points emphasising the loss of experience and at other points focussing on the possibilities of a new experience even within a destruction of experience. I will explore three aspects of Benjamin’s reflections on experience and their relationship to an experience of psychosis; the loss of experience in modernity and the possibilities that lie within such a loss, the turn towards the object in Benjamin’s account of experience, and finally the concept of the limit-experience. I conclude by considering Benjamin’s idea of the dialectical image and apply this idea to the experience of madness.