William Ross

The “Epistemo-Critical Foreword” opening Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel is one of those texts in the history of philosophy which resists the reader’s attempts to make sense of it. The resistance the text exerts on its audience is not a contingent effect of Benjamin’s writing; I suggest that one of the aims of the text is to put the reader through an experience of estrangement. This chapter attempts to shed light on its performance of estrangement as an effect and an example of the type of philosophical presentation (Darstellung) Benjamin wishes to ground. More precisely, this chapter unfolds the dialectic relation of presentation and experience in the “Epistemo-Critical Foreword.” This dialectic will be understood as both a presentation of experience and an experience of presentation. By focusing on such a dialectic of presentation and experience, this chapter aims to produce an alternative approach—one that invites the reader to surrender to the feeling of estrangement that the text seeks to evoke. This approach invites the reader to find enjoyment, if possible, in the enigmatic character of Benjamin’s writing as it takes possession of all certainty and exposes the rifts and fractures in what we perceive as the coherent unity of our experience.

This paper proposes to read Kant’s theory of presentation as hypotyposis as the mode through which the subject indirectly presents itself to itself. The thesis is articulated around the idea that hypotyposis is paradoxical because it presents the condition of possibility for presentation while exceeding the limits of what can be philosophically presented. Although Kant notes this paradox, he does not dwell on it. Taking some distance from the Kantian text, I aim to explain what is at play in such a paradox. I proceed in three steps. First, I set out the context through which Kant mobilizes the notion of hypotyposis. Second, I show that this notion of hypotyposis opens a paradox within the task of presentation itself. Finally, I interpret hypotyposis as symbolizing both the rhetorical and the poetical performance of the constitutive act of the subject.