My paper adds a “gastrosophical” dimension to the already interdisciplinary reception of Walter Benjamin, which spans from feminism (Sigried Weigel) and ethics (Beatrice Hanssen), to cinema studies, art in general and especially avant-garde theory (Terry Eagleton, Joseph Fürnkas, Richard Wolin, Hal Foster, among many others). In particular, my analyses of those few short prose texts and fragments in which food imagery appears bring to the fore at least one key preoccupation that Benjamin shared with the Avant-garde: temporality. The paper’s aim is first to highlight Benjamin’s own modernist textual incorporation (via quotations, selections, digestion, rejections etc.) of some Avant-garde staple principles and positions, and, second, to examine how Benjamin’s acts of incorporation effectively “produce” a modernist Avant-garde in which memory and montage (heterogeneity) can coexist. Indeed, a “gastrosophical” approach to Benjamin’s most personal texts reveals that in them non-identity, split-subjectivity and collective responsibility are renegotiated in the name of a materialist Surrealist body politics which is steeped in residues, in short in a temporal politics of the left-over and/or Nachtraeglichkeit. By investigating how Benjamin and his contemporaries refracted each other as “concave mirrors” (Benjamin), my paper on the one hand hopes to contribute to the longstanding debates about the historicization of the Avant-garde, and on the other to underscore the political temporality of Benjamin’s own modernist-Avant-garde production.

 

At the outset of the paper I explain the term “incorporation” (Einverleibung), specifically in conjunction with Surrealism (profane illumination). I then analyze Benjamin’s food imagery in his hashish experiments from within the framework on the one hand of Breton’s Nadja and his 1924 manifesto of Surrealism, and, on the other, of Salvador Dalí’s “cannibal” art. (Benjamin mentions the Spanish artist in the Arcades Project.) I argue that Benjamin turns to the physical operation of incorporation (not unlike Georges Bataille’s informe) in order to re-materialize the spiritual flights of Breton, which he is at pains to ground in the sensorial apparatus. Hence, Benjamin considers Dalí’s call for a cannibalistic / edible art. And yet, Benjamin must turn upside down Dali’s “totalitarian” focus on the artist’s power of assimilation. Indeed, I conclude, Benjamin’s food-writing dissolves its own “core” and “origin” as each text approaches its climax. At the same time, identity and “spiritual” creativity are shattered. In sum, identity is questioned in the same way that (literary and visual) representation is put to the test: the subject –during profane incorporation-- becomes a collage / montage of heterogeneous ingredients –not unlike the incorporated object. These un-assimiliated components break up the subject’s and object’s history into myriads material fragments (ruins) of memoire involontaire, and are never quite ready to be recomposed in one complete image. Incorporation interrupts linear time, brings about involuntary memory and thus situates the eater into a collective counter-time of repressed and unlived desires, which he stirs up. New historical and collective constellations of the leftover –the unconscious fragments that reemerge as allegorical phenomena of history in the arts (literature as architecture)—become available for alternative narrative constructions of time and subjectivity, which Benjamin sets out to read (politically)