Phantasmagoria and spectrality: Benjamin and Derrida on cinematographic image

Abstract

The aim of this study is to think about the political dimensions of cinema and its technical functioning through a cross-reading of Benjamin and Derrida. Firstly, the paper will analyze several critical readings of The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, with emphasis on concepts such as aura and phantasmagoria. Secondly, it will tackle the ways in which cinema becomes a machine with emancipatory possibilities. This evaluation will question the metaphysical assumptions inherent to cinema’s political conception, such as its ideological ability to veil or unveil reality and the fetishism of filmic images. Finally, the study will invoke the Derridian concepts of specter, trace, and graft, in order to find a political dimension of cinema consisting in the production of an alteration of sensibility and of new conditions of experience.