Synopsis: “The "survival" of "bare life": the physical nature and translatability of elective affinities. In Benjamin's essay on translation speaks of "life and survival of the art". "Can consist of sensation, which characterize it only occasionally," according to him is the "life" or from organic physicality alone is to define, but the story it contains. How is this 'life metaphysics would relate' to what he laid out a critical scientific novel whose translatability he presented although not in question?

Goethe's Elective Affinities is actually a comedy personified the four elements, according to a controversial doctrine of affinity, they are motivated to adultery, 'and finally brought by the minor characters disguised as scientists to decomposition. The story alludes to historical events and technology scientific findings, Goethe, transferred to the carnival games matter to the emergence of industrialization and the disciplining of human caricature *.

However, he made the transfer process in the chemical only visible parable, where the characters learn (elements) of some of their presumed destiny. Encrypts remained linguistically untranslatable picture puzzles: those of the technical equipment, the proper names of body parts had been viewed, etc. They ignore or "mutatis mutandis" as part of a 'tragic' or 'murky' love story. Benjamin also did not want to destroy her 'dull' appearance. Only he fell to distinguish the inserted novel one of the novel's action following analogies: In the novel there is the "heat" before the "storm" in the novel but "the storm and peace", in which the former will only dull light of the "eclipse" in the latter, everything from "light [s] light" sharply outlined. These images correspond exactly to the inventions described therein encrypted and tests. Despite this 'enlightenment' he took only a sublimated nudity true story of the character and complained about the rootedness of the characters in the "association of bare life." The question is whether or not his life, metaphysics, the exact weather has disturbed sensation."

* My detailed analysis of work published first in Japanese, 'Shinwaryoku <no KOUBOU (Illuminations of Elective Affinities'), in: 19 Seikigaku Kenkyu (Study of the 19th Century Scholarship), Vol 4, 2010.”

Abstract: “Goethe composed Elective Affinities as a satire on prominent scientists such as Newton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Young, Marie Lavoisier and Count Rumford. Disguised as supporting characters, they experiment with the so-called four elements – which are represented by the four protagonists – and bring them to death and separation (decomposition). The relationship of the protagonists symbolizes not only the law of chemical affinities but also theories of astrophysics. The events in their estate suggest how the correspondence of macro- and microcosm is transformed: The alchemical view of nature and human life was destroyed both by new discoveries in astronomy and by physiological experiments of chemists and physicians.”

“Goethe used the landscapes of two spas as the background of his story: the Egerland where he visited a volcano with Sylvie von Ziegesar, and Bad Pyrmont where Charlotte von Stein had stayed for convalescence. As the latter’s birthday coincides with that of Newton, a Newton-like “mason” celebrates “Charlotte’s birthday”. The ceremony on “Ottilie’s birthday” caricatures the Birth of Venus with allusions to the contemporary anatomy, to the physics of foam (Young) and to the astronomy of Cassini and Laplace; its unspecified date suggests a combination of the dates of the discoveries of Uranus and uranium with those of St. Odile’s feast day and of Minna Herzlieb’s birthday. Ottilie is thus opposed to “Luciane” as Aphrodite Urania to Aphrodite Pandemos in a quasi-Platonic manner. “Eduard’s birthday”is not celebrated, for it would imply the delivery of the Earth (= Eduard) from the Catholic geocentricism. Eduard’s “gardener” is confronted with Ottilie’s unreliable floriculture (parallax and aberration of light) and with the unfamiliar new stellar “catalogs”; like George III who supported Hanoverian astronomers, he is bothered also with Luciane’s Napoleonic vandalism while expecting the florescence of aster(oid)s.”

“The [following] pictures relate to Part II, Chap. 5 of the novel (the first of the three tableaux vivants which actually illustrate caloric theory and kinetic theory of heat). They were included in my slideshow for the conference (and not in my new article). Their subject (respiration experiment) is important for human chemistry, as you know.”

Left: French chemist Antoine Lavoisier (center) shown conducting animal heat combustion experiments on his assistant, French chemist Armand Seguin; his wife chemist Marie-Anne Paulze (Madame Lavoisier) seated. [6] Right: (add)

Abstract: “Walter Benjamin’s writings on visual arts include not only the famous ‘materialistic’ essays on aura but also seemingly esoteric notes on painting and the graphic arts. The content and correlation of all these writings become clear once we grasp how they perform the task of describing childhood experience. His theory of aura was prefigured in his philosophical ‘Diaries’ where his struggle with his depression was often followed (or interrupted) by dreamlike visions of "youth". The discursive structure of these visions – which will prove to be a strangely ‘photographic’ one – is to be analyzed by using the second Freudian topology as a comparison. Through this analysis we will be able to reconsider the well-known (oversimplified) antagonism between his historical materialism and the ‘apolitical formalism’ of Clement Greenberg from a new viewpoint. Greenberg’s criticism helps us also to decipher the ‘esoteric’ texts of Benjamin. They puzzled scholars especially because they described children’s vision at first (about 1915) misleadingly in accordance with the conventional dichotomies of Romanticism (line / color; masculine / feminine; adult / child…); Benjamin could specify their original implication only after he had set up – based on his reflexions on the ‘horizontality’ of the graphic arts, and by speculating further on the magic nature of ‘Zeichen’ and ‘Mal’ (1917) – a trichotomy of genres (painting / the graphic arts / ink and watercolor illustrations). We will reconstruct this development of his theory not only through detailed analyses of related works of art but also in view of his ‘materialistic’ late writings (the Arcades Project and ‘Berlin Childhood’), for it is only there that we find out an essential relation – a singular ‘constellation’ – of his early art theory and his theory of money.”