Azure no. 18, Autumn 5765 / 2004
Snow White, the Ambassador, and the Aesthetics of Death
By Daniel A. Doneson
Art in the age of terror.
A conference on genocide with an exhibit depicting a glamorized female suicide bomber provokes an angry Israeli ambassador to pull the plug on the piece. As a result, he is kicked out of the national museum of a friendly country. A diplomatic storm brews, the winds of which blow across Europe and the Middle East, making front-page news and filling the airwaves for days.
The exhibit in question featured a digitally aestheticized photo of a female suicide bomber of the Islamic Jihad, Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old Palestinian lawyer who sent 19 Israelis to their deaths in the popular Haifa restaurant Maxim on October 4, 2003. Her photograph serves as the sail of a small boat bearing the word Snovid (“Snow White” in Swedish), floating serenely in a large basin of blood-red water. The work, entitled Snow White and the Madness of Truth, appeared at an exhibition that opened this past January 16 at Stockholm’s Museum of National Antiquities. The exhibition, part of a conference on genocide hosted by the government of Sweden, had been promoted by Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson himself. And there had been a prior guarantee from the Swedes that the conference on genocide would leave the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians out of things. Yet there she was, a digitally enhanced Hanadi Jaradat, sailing on a lake of blood.
Accompanying the display was a text that alternated between bold quotes from the Grimms’ telling of Snow White and the artists’ own italicized musings. It read as follows:
Snow White and the Madness of Truth
Once upon a time in the middle of winter
For the June 12 deaths of her brother, and her cousin
and three drops of blood fell
She was also a woman
as white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony
Seemingly innocent with universal non-violent character, less
suspicious of intentions
and the red looked beautiful upon the white
The murderer will yet pay the price and we will not be the only
ones who are crying
like a weed in her heart until she had no peace day and night
Hanadi Jaradat was a 29-year-old lawyer
I will run away into the wild forest, and never come home again
Before the engagement took place, he was killed in an
encounter with the Israeli security forces
and she ran over sharp stones and through thorns
She said: Your blood will not have been shed in vain
and was about to pierce Snow White’s innocent heart
She was hospitalized, prostrate with grief, after witnessing the shootings
The wild beasts will soon have devoured you
After his death, she became the breadwinner and she devoted
herself solely to that goal
“Yes,” said Snow White, “with all my heart.”
Weeping bitterly, she added: “If our nation cannot realize its
dream and the goals of the victims, and live in freedom and
dignity, then let the whole world be erased”
Run away, then, you poor child
She secretly crossed into Israel, charged into a Haifa restaurant,
shot a security guard, blew herself up, and murdered 19 innocent
civilians
as white as snow, as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony
And many people are indeed crying: the Zer Aviv family, the Almog
family, and all the relatives and friends of the dead and the wounded
and the red looked beautiful upon the white1
In addition to the blood-red pool, the face of Hanadi on the floating boat, and the text mentioning the murders in Haifa, the exhibit was accompanied by a Bach cantata, entitled “My Heart Swims in Blood,” which features a soprano lamenting her wretched sinfulness and begging for salvation.
The work was said to have been made by an “Israeli artist.” But in truth it was the product of two artists: Dror Feiler, an Israeli living in Sweden as a Swedish citizen; and his Swedish wife, Gunilla Skold Feiler. More precisely, Mr. Feiler’s contribution was primarily the choice of music. In addition, he heads a Swedish organization called “Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace,” whose manifesto calls Israel’s elected prime minister Ariel Sharon “the biggest threat to the Israeli people and to Jews around the world.”
So what happened on January 16, 2004?
In an amazing performance captured on closed-circuit video, we see the Israeli ambassador, Tzvi Mazel, ripping out the electrical wires attached to the spotlights highlighting the exhibit, and hurling one of them into the pool, short-circuiting the display. In effect, he pulled the plug on Snow White. In his own words, “My wife and I stood there and began to tremble.... There was the terrorist, wearing perfect makeup and sailing placidly along the rivers of blood of my brothers and the families that were murdered.”2
At this point an irate Dror Feiler, who was present at the incident, began haranguing Mazel in Hebrew. “You’re doing exactly what you do in Nablus,” he shouted. “This is a free country and I can say what I want to say here. Not like in your apartheid country.”3
Mazel’s protest, it turns out, was sincere but not spontaneous. He told the press that he had planned the act after learning about the exhibition from the local papers. “We are in the 1930s now. That is the feeling of many of us who know history,” he said. “There is a feeling among many people, including me, of a tragedy that could be coming.”4
The ambassador, moreover, denied that Snow White and the Madness of Truth was anything more than trite propaganda. “For me it was intolerable and an insult to the families of the victims. As the ambassador of Israel, I could not remain indifferent to such an obscene misrepresentation of reality.… This was not a piece of art.… It was a monstrosity.”5 Speaking to Israel Television’s Channel 2, Mazel called the work “a complete legitimization of genocide, the murder of innocent people, innocent civilians, under the guise of culture.”6 For this reason, he added, “I have no regrets whatsoever…. I acted according to my feelings. You saw the installation and what happened. I could not have acted differently.”7
Doron Luria, a curator at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, concurred. He said he understood Mazel’s act and deemed the artwork an inferior piece of provocation. “The piece is simply not worth all of the excitement,” he told the press. “I sympathize completely with the ambassador’s actions. There is no place for such an idiotic piece in Stockholm.”8
But in Sweden, the ambassador’s actions were widely assailed. While stopping short of endorsing the work, the Swedish prime minister told Swedish television’s TV4 that “Artists have their freedom.” Kristian Berg, the museum’s director, said that while he realized the installation may have been emotional for Mazel, destroying art was unacceptable: “If you don’t like what you see, you can leave the premises.”9 Yet both Persson and Berg distanced themselves from the art’s content, refusing to take a stand on something about which ambivalence itself is startling. Asked what he actually thought of the work, as opposed to the abstract principle putatively protecting it, Persson replied: “I neither liked nor disliked it.”10 Berg was more forceful. “You can have your own view of what this piece of art is all about,” he opined, “but using violence is never, ever allowed, and it is never allowed to try to silence the artist.”11
As if the issue were one of the right to an opinion: The ambassador has his, the artists, theirs. In a caricature of much of today’s European Left, Berg offered the possibility that perhaps if everybody were to get together for a discussion, the politics of life and death, justice and injustice, could give way to mutual understanding: “We will display this entire exhibit for the length of time that was initially planned, including this installation.… But on Monday we will also send an invitation to Israel’s ambassador to come to an open discussion about this piece of art, about his actions, and about art and freedom of expression.”12
Then there were those who berated the ambassador’s poor taste, lamenting his inability to understand a simple work of art, and accusing him of gross misapprehension. “The whole problem,” argued Sweden’s ambassador to Israel Robert Rydberg, “is by and large based on a misunderstanding, a misinterpretation of a piece of art which may very well be in bad taste…. The piece is about a Palestinian woman having murdered innocent civilians. It mentions the names of the tragic Israeli victims in Haifa. It is not a justification of suicide bombings. It is, in my view, an example of bad taste…”13
Now, there is surely something amiss: On the one hand, art aficionados the world over have promoted the concept of “political art,” art that is meant to be a political act, an intervention into the public or political sphere, and not merely a museum item; and yet, the moment political art meets with a political response, they hide behind the bourgeois museum and the liberal idea of freedom of expression. After all, what was the Israeli ambassador doing if not breaking the facade of good taste in order to engage politically with the message of this work? Even in a European Union beyond politics and theology, one can’t have one’s apple and eat it too.
II
The bride of blood meets Christian symbol. For what is essential to the piece is the Lutheran symbolism of Snow White, a symbolism lost on no one in Sweden. Snow White, often found in glass around the Christmas tree, is a symbol of innocent sleep, waiting Christ-like for redemption, waiting to be awakened by a mystical kiss. Thus the work is really a translation of Islamic martyrdom into the terms usually reserved for Christian salvation, a translation of Islam into Christian symbolism. Desert turns to snow in an act of artistic domestication.
What we witness in Snow White and the Madness of Truth is a theological symbol used aesthetically, which is to say sentimentally. Walter Benjamin has taught us about the deterioration of such symbols: A certain kind of secular art aspires to contain the sacred within the aesthetic realm, without any recourse to God. Benjamin writes in his notoriously difficult The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928):
For over a hundred years the philosophy of art has been subject to the tyranny of a usurper who came to power in the chaos which followed in the wake of romanticism. The striving on the part of the romantic aestheticians after a resplendent but ultimately non-committal knowledge of an Absolute has secured a place in the most elementary theoretical debates about art for a notion of the symbol which has nothing more than the name in common with the genuine notion…. The unity of the material and the transcendental object, which constitutes the paradox of the theological symbol, is distorted into a relationship between appearance and essence. The introduction of this distorted conception of the symbol in aesthetics was a romantic and destructive extravagance which preceded the desolation of modern art criticism. As a symbolic construct, the beautiful is supposed to merge with the divine in an unbroken whole. The idea of the unlimited immanence of the moral world in the world of beauty is derived from the theosophical aesthetics of the romantics…. What is typically romantic is the placing of this perfect individual within a progression of events, which is, it is true, infinite but is nevertheless redemptive, even sacred.14
In the case of Snow White,the sentimental symbol of the beautiful face of the dead, the digitized face of Hanadi Jaradat, was aggressively glamorized, and therewith aestheticized, which is to say, made unreal, inhuman. Here she is emphatically not a person but a symbol, infinite and redemptive—the symbol of beautified terror.
To be sure, the Snow White of contemporary Christmas trinkets is a symbol that is by now without a theology. The translation of the shahid into a theological symbol happens in the context of a Europe depleted of God. There is a sense in which the translation is supposed to awaken the original theological symbol that has now fallen into a vacuous sentimental shell for Christmas trees. This is an act of translation, as if the Christian symbol can be brought back to theological life by linking it mystically, aesthetically, with the shahid. In other words, reborn through sacrifice. The symbol of the lifeless land of snow, of the “whites,” can be brought to life when wed to the “black” shahid. With the aesthetical symbol of Snow White, what was originally a powerful theological symbol has sunk to the level of a vacuous sentimental symbol, a mere bit of as-if theology. The original theology is drained, leaving only an empty shell. What can a symbol of Christ mean in a Europe depleted of God? How can it still be the site of something sacred, moving, powerful? What can bring back its original power, its original shock, horror, and promise? How to resurrect the dead, to bring back God, the sacred sacrifice? Answer: Revive the corpse—the corpse of theology, the corpse of feeling—with a bang.
There is a whole theology lurking in this translation.
The translation of the shahid,the martyr in an Islamic holy war, into a Christian symbol is meant to function aesthetically within the religion of art. The lifeless image of Snow White is brought to life by the theology of sacrificial murder. The two images of rebirth, quickening, the kiss of redemption, are set in motion by a fantasy of a Christian symbol without Christianity.
Hanadi Jaradat is thus the symbol of beautified terror. The real issue is what it means, in the face of such aestheticization, to refuse to play the aesthetic game? This is the meaning of the ambassador’s gesture, of defying sentimentalism and taking politics seriously.
III
Writing in Ha’aretz on January 19, 2004, in an article entitled “This Isn’t Sweden,” the Israeli poet and critic Yitzhak Laor wrote one of the more interesting, if confused, essays of the day. As he wrote:
The incident in which Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, Zvi Mazel, wrecked the installation in the museum in Stockholm, succeeded in explaining to the Swedes how far we—not “the region,” not “the conflict,” but we—are from notions of the freedom of artistic expression…. Israel is indeed a democratic country, and in some respects it is even very democratic; and freedom of expression is also protected there, perhaps, with the help of rulings by the Supreme Court. But the law is a marginal factor in the existing public atmosphere, and notions of freedom of artistic expression in Israel are very far from what is known in the West.
Moreover,
The violence of the Israeli ambassador in Sweden is not an opportunity for the Swedes to take a close look at us, but rather for us—precisely because it occurred in the European arena, the arena of which we are so keen to be a part—to take a close look for a moment at our ideas of tolerance.…15
Now, we understand from this that Laor has heard of democracy, freedom of artistic expression, and tolerance, and that he is in favor of them. But what exactly is he saying? Is he saying that de jure there is freedom of expression in Israel, but de factothere is not because of the intimidation he and his friends suffer? This would be news to many, I think. By most accounts, after all, the problem in the Israeli art scene is not so much that you cannot express certain things, but that while you can express whatever you want, nobody seems to care.16 And who, exactly, is this “we”? We bourgeois readers of Ha’aretz? We bourgeois writers for Ha’aretz? Finally, it seems that one can be far from the freedom of expression, or ignorant or confused about a notion. But what could it possibly mean to be “far from notions of the freedom of expression”?
Perhaps, we may suggest, Laor is just intoning a kind of catechism, the typical late-bourgeois confession of faith: Artistic freedom as the last residue of the sacred in ritual life, the sole remaining holy of holies after the death of God. One keeps repeating it, in other words, no matter how much artistic freedom one has.
And with all his culture, tolerance, and taste, what kind of a reader is Laor? How did he understand what transpired that day in Sweden? In his estimation, Snow White and the Madness of Truth is nothing short of beautiful. We Israelis, however, cannot see it, because we are blinded by our taboos. As Laor puts it, Snow White “is a beautiful text. It has one serious flaw: It violates an Israeli taboo whereby it is prohibited to look hard at the faces of the suicide terrorists. Breaking this taboo made the Israeli ambassador blow a fuse.”17
According to Laor, the stormy reception that Snow White received in Israel is due to the fact that this work shattered our tribal taboos by humanizing the suicide bomber, by “looking hard” into her face. But this is exactly wrong. Nothing that comes within hailing distance of humanization, the hard look at another human face, is to be found in the work. The glamorized, digitized, aestheticized image of Hanadi Jaradat that finds its way into Snow White is, on the contrary, completely inhuman. The idea that there is some referent here, as if it is to some actual person, is itself perverse. She is merely the figure of a beautiful death. And this notion of the beautiful death is the heart of terrorism.18
In this, Laor is a good European. For just like the work itself, Europe refuses to engage the theological significance of the Other and its true political ramifications. For such European intelligentsia the basic conviction is that the “humanitarian” denial of difference—“she has a face like ours”—means she has the same motives, and is driven by the same passions, as are we Europeans. All humanity wants the same thing; they all want to live like us. Since living like Europeans is a basic human right, politics is nothing but the securing of a European lifestyle. In this kind of thinking there is no place for a radically different politics, for acknowledgment of the possibly incommensurable passion of the Other. There is no acknowledgment of the right not to be European.
Works such as Snow White betray an amazing inability to see the Other. They exhibit a completely reductionist understanding of human motivation. Snow White, like Laor’s criticism, is a symptom: Neither compels one to experience the strangeness of the Other; they are complete domestications, rendering the Other all too familiar. This is another side of the aestheticization of theology, the as-if theological character of the symbol. The work is a supreme example of what the sociologist Guy Dubord has called the spectacle: Modern people lack theology or political life, and as a result cannot engage the Other on his own terms.19 To protect themselves from the dangers of theology and politics, they seal themselves off and become completely passive, contenting themselves with an endless stream of visual imagery in lieu of genuine life. With the “spectacle” the audience is led to identify with full life without having to engage it. This allows it to remain passive, avoiding any real engagement with the Other, with the strangeness of life.
Moreover, there is the strange way in which this European nihilism feeds off of the old nihilism—as if there is still a sense of the theological origin of the symbol. This is a very subtle dialectic. Islamic nihilism is a species of the old nihilism, the idea that life is for the sake of death, that the only point to living is the final deed and the afterlife. But in the European form, this nihilism is devoid of the belief in an afterlife, and seeks only security and comfort, and to “express itself.” In the words of that connoisseur of nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche:
This perishing takes the form of self-destruction—the instinctive selection of that which must destroy. Symptoms of this self-destruction of the underprivileged: Self-vivisection, poisoning, intoxication, romanticism, above all the instinctive need for actions that turn the powerful into mortal enemies (as it were, one breeds one’s own hangmen); the will to destruction as the will of a still deeper instinct, the instinct of self-destruction, the will to nothingness.20
In other words, the negation of life evident in the nihilism of the shahid is translated in Snow White and the Madness of Truth into the iconography of European nihilism.
The issue comes up in the question of how to read the photograph. Laor, like many good Europeans, has a faiblesse for the aestheticized image; they look for beautiful women. And we know at least since Poe’s impish symbolisms that, “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”21
The fundamental issue, however, is how this photograph, this theological symbol, continues to function even after the death of God. What we have in Snow White and the Madness of Truth is precisely Romanticism, the idea that what is most important for the work of art is that it be aesthetic experience. That is to say, the work of art, and not wisdom or science or religious knowledge, is the proper locus for the experience of the Absolute.22 In the Romantic theory of the symbol, what was once meant as an actual incarnation of the divine in the sensuous realm—the wafer and wine were the body and blood—is rendered merely aesthetic. The symbol is taken as a substitute for, rather than an instance of, the transcendent of theology. Symbols become the last residue of the sacred in a world depleted of God.23
This is felt most powerfully when the symbol takes the form of a photograph. Photography has immense potential to be political art, meaning art that belongs to the realm of life rather than outside of it; and this sets it apart from the older, ritually derived forms of art. But as Walter Benjamin pointed out, photography can fill this role only when it cuts itself off from theology, from the aura which emanated from the previous forms as a function of their cultic character. Benjamin’s analysis is worth quoting at length:
Originally the contextual integration of art in tradition found its expression in the cult. We know that the earliest works originated in the service of a ritual—first the magical, then the religious kind. It is significant that the existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function. In other words, the unique value of the “authentic” work of art has its basis in ritual, the location of its original use value. This ritualistic basis, however remote, is still recognizable as secularized ritual even in the most profane forms of the cult of beauty. The secular cult of beauty, developed during the Renaissance and prevailing for three centuries, clearly showed that ritualistic basis in its decline and the first deep crisis which befell it. With the advent of the first truly revolutionary means of reproduction, photography, simultaneously with the rise of socialism, art sensed the approaching crisis which has become evident a century later. At the time, art reacted with the doctrine of l’art pour l’art, that is, with a theology of art. This gave rise to what might be called a negative theology in the form of the idea of “pure” art, which not only denied any social function of art but also any categorizing by subject matter….
An analysis of art in the age of mechanical reproduction must do justice to these relationships, for they lead us to an all-important insight: For the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the “authentic” print makes no sense. But the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics.24
But political art, art that belongs simply to immanent life, without reference to the transcendent, is not so easily attained. This “cult value,” with its basis in ritual, does not simply disappear without a fight:
In photography, exhibition value begins to displace cult value all along the line. But cult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: The human countenance. It is no accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of pictures. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty.25
Here, with the technologically glamorized image of Snow White, we have the aura of Absolute in the face of the killer. Laor and his associates, therefore, completely miss the point. Blind to the revolutionary, political, life-affirming power of photography, they lapse into a jejune conservatism, despite or because of themselves, in which they do not look for the crime, only the beautiful face of death.
Snow White is the opposite of breaking a taboo. In the end, the best the work’s defenders come up with is the aestheticization of death—the Romantic culture of the beautiful death. And this we have known for a long time is but a formula for fascism. As Benjamin points out, “Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves…. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life…. [Mankind’s] self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic.”26
Aesthetics uses theology: We are given a kind of aesthetic theology, which uses the residue of icons, the residue of symbols, to suggest some sort of transcendence, as a defense against the death of God. Here, the artists take the ultimate violent gesture, aestheticize it, identify with it, producing the effect or feeling that one has a calling, something transcendentally higher than oneself, resulting in the illusion that one is overcoming death. But there is no overcoming; there is only death.
It is only against this backdrop that we can properly evaluate the ambassador as a reader, and assess the worth of his gesture. The ambassador’s gesture was an act against nihilism. As befits his station, he insists on the irreducibility of the political, in contrast to the theological nihilism of radical Islam and the cultural nihilism of the Swedish museum. The ambassador’s gesture is therefore one of refusing such naisseries. It is an act of maturity.
In the face of such dehumanizing nihilism, the ambassador’s was a performance that called on the children of Europe to desist from their sentimental games and act their age. But it was also a call for wakefulness, an attempt to arouse a sleepy Europe dreaming pleasant aestheticized dreams, to the reality of a nascent fascism.
His gesture, we might say, was in lieu of a kiss.
Daniel A. Doneson is Literary Editor of AZURE.
Notes
1. The text is taken from the Swedish Museum of National Antiquities; head curator and creative director: Thomas Nordanstad. Commissioned by the Stockholm International Forum.
2. Ha’aretz English Edition, January 19, 2004.
3. Ha’aretz English Edition,January 19, 2004.
4. “Israel Backs Art Attack,” cbsnews.com, January 18, 2004, www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/18/world/main593870.shtml.
5. “Ambassador Wrecks Suicide Bomber Exhibit in Sweden,” FreeRepublic.com, January 17, 2004, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1059906/posts.
6. “Sweden Objects to Israeli Diplomat’s Action over Artwork,” cnn.com, January 17, 2004, www.cnn.com/2004/world/europe/01/17/sweden.israel/.
7. “Israel May Boycott Genocide Meeting over Artwork,” abc NewsOnline, January 20, 2004, www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1028349.htm.
8. Yossi Melman, “Swedish Envoy: Artwork Exhibited in Stockholm ‘In Bad Taste’ (Palestinian Terrorist as Snow White),” FreeRepublic.com, January 18, 2004, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1060249/posts.
9. “Israel’s Ambassador to Sweden Destroys Artwork in Stockholm Museum,” WomenforPalestine.com, January 17, 2004, www.womenforpalestine.com/020403v2/newsflash_israel17012004.htm.
10. Lest there be any doubt, the Swedish Policy Coordination Minister Paer Nuder, the minister in charge of the gathering, felt compelled to declare that there was “no doubt about the fact that the Swedish government distances itself from suicide bombers.” “Israel May Boycott Genocide Meeting over Artwork.”
11. Melman, “Swedish Envoy.”
12. Greg Myre, “Israel Envoy Defends His Attack on ‘Suicide Bomber’ Art Exhibit,” IHTOnline, January 19, 2004, www.iht.com/articles/125522.html.
13. Melman, “Swedish Envoy.”
14. Walter Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” in Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), pp. 159-160.
15. Yitzhak Laor, “This Isn’t Sweden,” Ha’aretz English Edition, January 19, 2004.
16. See Neri Livneh, “On the State of the Political Artist,” Ha’aretz Weekend Magazine, February 13, 2004, pp. 50-58, on the hilarity of Israeli artists pontificating on “political art.”
17. Laor, “This Isn’t Sweden.”
18. Aestheticization is a way of redeeming death, a manner of conferring eternal presence on the picture. Nothing can be worse, artistically speaking. It is crucial to stress what is happening with the image here: It is loaded with iconic value, and that is why there is nothing human about it. We might ask, what could be a human depiction, given the reality of the dissected bodies? The problem is that this work is, even in the very way in which the picture is presented, as the picture of a saint, as the question of sainthood, secular sainthood to be sure, an icon without religion. Snow White recoils from any human encounter. It behooves the viewer to ask, how does this work transform the religious character of the work and the iconic transformation of the picture?
19. Guy Dubord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Zone, 1995).
20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 37.
21. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings (Penguin: England, 1974), p. 486.
22. Thus Holderlin writes in his “Hyperion”: “Poetry… is the beginning and end of this science (philosophy). Like Minerva from the head of Jupiter, she springs from the poetry of an infinite divine being.” Friedrich Holderlin, Complete Works: Large Stuttgarte Works, ed. Friedrich Beissuer (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961), GSA III, 81. Here is Novalis in his “Vorarbeiten” 31, in Historical Critical Works (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1960), HKA II, 533: “Poetry is as it were the key to philosophy, its purpose and meaning.” Schelling declares in his “System des transcendentalen Idealismus”: “Art is the model of science, and where there is art there science should follow”; as well as: “Art is the single true and eternal organon and document of philosophy.” Complete Works, ed. K.F.A. Schelling (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856-1861), III 623, 627.
23. See Benjamin, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” pp. 159-160.
24. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken, 1968), pp. 223-224.
25. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” pp. 225-226.
26. Benjamin, “The Work of Art,” pp. 242-243.