In his essay on “Surrealism” (1929), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) introduced the term “body space” (Leibraum) along with the terms “profane illumination” (profane Erleuchtung) and “image space” (Bildraum), signaling a new concept of the political beyond the politics of representation.[1] Rather experimentally and tentatively than analytically or apodictically, these terms delineate a zone of indistinction where individuality and collectivity, time and space, sobriety and ecstasy, corporeal mediacy and figurative presentation lose their distinctiveness. To unpack the peculiarity of body space, let us first consider the two other terms to which it is linked.

(1) In the realm of non-representational politics, profane illumination can be understood as sort of materialist epiphany, a sober intoxication or intoxicated sobriety—a suddenly embodied inspiration, collective or individual, inaccessible to contemplative thinking, moralist metaphors, or intentional acting. This inspiration is material, embodied, and political. Rather than creating intoxicated illusions or relying on mystical rituals, it ushers in what Benjamin calls “image space.” 

(2) The image space of politics is not an image of politics or a metaphor for political acting. Rather, the image space opens up and takes place where “an action puts forth its own image and exists, absorbing and consuming it, where nearness looks with its own eyes.” Such a space cannot be mapped (geo)metrically or (geo)graphically, represented in another image; as an unstable site, it stages itself as an unrepresentable image, emerging only in the mediacy of political action without figuring the illusion of unmediated immediacy. Charged with dialectical tensions, the image space introduces into: 

“the world of universal and integral actuality, where the ‘best room’ is missing—the space, in a word, in which political materialism and physical nature share the inner human, the psyche, the individual, or whatever else we wish to throw to them, with dialectical justice, so that no limb remains untorn.”

Hence the collective subjectivity that inhabits and literally incorporates this space cannot be represented by the political imaginary of representation—whether these be images of bourgeois moralism or traditional Marxist party politics. Moreover, there is no political community that precedes politics within the image space. Thus, for Benjamin, image space and collective political action mutually presuppose one another; there is no assigned place or measured ground on which revolutionary politics can be based. Due to its non-representational emergence, the political collective inhabiting this space has no stable essence in itself. Vice versa, the image space does not designate a stable zone or place, but a site of transforming transformations: what is “at work” in the image space “unworks” the boundaries of collectivity and individuality, body and image, physis and logos. 

Combining the concepts of profane illumination and image space, Benjamin’s understanding of politics does not repeat the pitfalls of a naïve romanticism; the political struggle is not simply about affirming the ecstatic intoxication inherent to authentic revolutionary action but about letting its sober, profane face come to the fore. This is what is meant when a profane illumination opens up an image space in the midst of political action. “To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution” does not mean the total immersion of the self in a collective communion of transgressive ecstasy—but to traverse the thresholds (Schwellengebiete) of these experiences, to oscillate between reality and sur-reality, in order to exit them and to enter the image space of politics. But how are we to conceive of this dialectical process of exiting and entering?

In terms of surrealism, Benjamin mentions the sur-real world of individual dreams and fantasies which intersect with the political reality of the collective and its collective dreams. Dream-like threshold experiences are not the final goal, but a necessary transition for political action to perforate the boundaries of the capitalist individual—to give rise to a non-totalitarian, non-formatted community-yet-to-come.

“In the world’s structure, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth. This loosening of the self by intoxication is, at the same time, precisely the fruitful, living experience that allowed these people to step outside the charmed space of intoxication. (…) But the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in a profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”[2]

This intoxicated introductory lesson opens up a medial sphere “where sound and image, image and sound interpenetrate with automatic precision and such felicity”[3] whereby no space is left for meaning, sense, or moralism—and collective acting is freed from representational imaginary and metaphorical moralism. What instead emerges in the image space is an embodied image of collective political action; hence the image space is a body space, too. 

If profane illumination, that is, the experience of intoxication and its unmediated reversal, is able to loosen the biopolitical cage of the modern individual subject by permeating its boundaries vis-à-vis the collective, these boundaries are taken down within the image space so that “no limb remains untorn”, and no line of demarcation remains at work. This is what is meant by body space—a space in which the inner experience is turned inside out and the corporeal individual shares a collective body without being subsumed under it like in the case of “formatted” mass formations, party cadres or institutionalized politics. In its conclusion, Benjamin’s essay states: 

“The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced in that image space to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto.”[4]

The key concept of this dense passage is “innervation”, a term that according to Miriam Bratu Hansen and Sarah Ley Roff has not a primarily psychoanalytical but neuropsychological origin.[5] In neuropsychology, innervations refer to transfers of energy between the neurological system and the mind. Benjamin’s interest in innervation, however, dates back to his early sketches on “psychophysics,”[6] a discipline coined by the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner. Benjamin's early psychophysical studies are concerned with the double intersection of the theological duality of soma (Leib) and psyche (Seele) and the modern split between body (Körper) and spirit (Geist). In the essay on surrealism, he adds an anthropological-materialist polarity to this psychophysical problem, that is, the division between the individual and the political collective. As a result, innervation concerns the intersections, interplays, and interdependencies of (1) an individual corporeality (individueller Körper) and a collective spirit (Kollektivgeist)—or, to use a Marxian term from the Grundrisse: “general intellect”—and (2) a collective body (Kollektivleib) and an individual psyche. The implicit reference to Marx and his famous “fragment on machines” from the Grundrisse—a text Benjamin could not have read at that time[7]—indicates that bodily collective innervation and bodily innervations of the collective allude to a new form of technology in which a collective spirit becomes corporeal, leiblich, has a collective body. 

It should come as no surprise that Benjamin would later quote from this passage on innervation in his most famous essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” from 1935/36. In this later essay the intertwinement of individual and collective innervation by which individual bodies literally become the nerves of the collective and vice versa sheds light on what Benjamin calls zweite Technik, “second technology”—a liberated, emancipatory technology the goal of which is not anymore “mastery over nature,” as in the “first technology” of capitalist exploitation, but an “interplay (Zusammenspiel) between nature and humanity.”[8] The Surrealism essay already features key elements of this new emancipatory, non-anthropocentric, and non-instrumental form of technology, one able to master the interplay of techne, soma and physis, technology, body, and nature. (One might add here that subsequent elaborations like Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto point in a similar direction.)[9]

Benjamin’s theologically charged name for the specifically modern mode of existence, inhabiting the zone of indistinction between politics, psychophysics, and psychoanalysis, is “creature”—a term he distilled from the works of Franz Rosenzweig, Karl Kraus, Bertolt Brecht, Adolf Loos, and the utopian science fiction novelist Paul Scheerbart. The creature designates a non- or post-humanist state of being devoid of idealist notions of humanity like creativity, organic wholeness, or proper origin. As such, creatureliness is not a pre-social “natural” substratum but a deprived mode of human existence produced by modern social relations. As Benjamin notes in his fragment on Walt Disney’s comic figure of Mickey Mouse, the creature articulates a form of life that “can still survive even when it has thrown off all resemblance to a human being.”[10] For him, Mickey Mouse is such a creature, a creature undermining “the entire hierarchy of creatures that is supposed to culminate in mankind.”[11] The theological charge of the term “creatureliness” hence does not refer to theology proper but to the decentering of the modern anthropocentric hierarchy of creatures. This decentering, although addressed to modernity, works through a theological imaginary: The human being is the creature language was given to; humans are beings created rather than Promethean creators. In this sense, creaturely life can never function as the self-sufficient source of its own creations, be it in language or in non-discursive practices. Hence from the perspective of creatureliness, the creations of political representation cannot be grounded in a sovereign subject master of their representations, symbolic order, or moral meaning in the world. 

Rather than origin and source, in the course of modernity creatureliness became the “bared” bearer and distorted mirror of allegorical, that is, fragmented meaning. “The creature is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed to the Baroque. A concave mirror; for this was possible only with distortions.”[12] Although these distortions undermine the fantasy of wholeness and natural meaning, the creature functioned as the naturalized body for the (re)assembling of meaning in modern societies run by abstract social relations, materialized in legal and capitalist social relations. As Rainer Nägele comments:

“Kreatur, as the figure of modernity, figures human subjectivity as a sexualized body that speaks, as the flesh permeated by the word, inscribing the body in the experience of the law. Under this premise, the baroque allegorical personifications as incarnations of virtues and vices are the most precise model of a human subjectivity whose flesh can be reduced neither to a pure physis nor to nineteenth-century psychologism. It is in the Kreatur that, for Benjamin, the discourses of Marx and Freud intersect in a way that puts Benjamin’s thinking at a far distance from the ‘Freudo-Marxism’ of such members of the Frankfurt School as Erich Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, but also from the more subtle ‘mediations’ of Adorno.”[13]

On the one hand, it denotes the subjection under the law, the biopolitical inscription of life as sexualized body and “bare life” into a juridical web,[14] which (re)produces the modern creature and its transindividual nervous system. On the other hand, the creature might be called the persisting yet non-vitalist remainder of life at the moment when life is subtracted from itself. Creaturely life is not simply bare life, the allegorical flesh permeated by logos, but points to its flipside. If bare life, a life subjected under the law, is deprived life, a life without a dimension “more” than life, creaturely life expresses the “more” without “life”—the surplus without its imagined essence. As Nägele rightly points out, the creature is not reducible to a human essence; it rather designates a death-driven singularity that has lost its proper “human” form, which nevertheless materially embodies a dimension of life where life proves to be “more” than life. In this way, the creature could be understood as the “psycho-theological” name of a life form, in which a certain pressure, a “too muchness of life”[15], exists and persists as such. From such a psychoanalytically informed perspective, the creature is the deprived, desubjectified, undead life that remains once the humanist boundaries of the atomized individual have been crushed. 

Benjamin’s revolutionary body politics of the image space is creaturely insofar as it does not allude to a carnival of bodies, an ecstatic communion, but on the contrary to a de-potentialization or radization (from radix, root), an implosion of organic wholeness, an “unworking” of binding energies,[16] an undoing of humanist essences—be it physics, metaphysics, or the psyche. Consequently, the image space as the “world of universal and integral actuality” is to be thought of as the universal and integral actuality of creaturely life. This integral stage of actuality is neither a higher ideal nor an intensified humanity, a Nietzschean Übermensch, but a reduced, de-potentialized actuality that paradoxically contains more actuality than the potentialities of everyday life. This infinitely abbreviated, condensed “integral actuality” is only real within the body- and image space and it is in this space that a loosened or “unworked” collective can become reality—a reality fully charged with creaturely life, a reality that extinguishes all vitalist, humanist, and idealist forms of community. Politics, hence, becomes the “inoperative operation” that interrupts the political-economic (“value-formal”) laws and aesthetical (“phantasmagorical”) representations on which both the symbolic order and imaginary of capitalism hinge. 

[1] All references to Benjamin’s essay on “Surrealism” are taken from Walter Benjamin: “Der Sürrealismus. Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz,” in Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth abbreviated“GS”), ed. Hermann Schweppenhäuser and Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt a. M., 1977, vol. ii, pp. 295–310, and the English translation Walter Benjamin, “Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia,” trans. Edmond Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, pp. 207–18. Earlier versions of passages of this article have been published under the title “‘To Win the Energies of Intoxication for the Revolution’: Body Politics, Community, and Profane Illumination,” Anthropology & Materialism. A Journal of Social Research, vol.2, no.1, (2014): “The Persistence of Myth,” stable URL: http://am.revues.org/348.

[2] Benjamin, “Surrealism”, pp. 208–9.

[3] Benjamin, “Surrealism”, p. 208.

[4] Benjamin, “Surrealism”, pp. 217–18.

[5] Cf. Sarah Ley Roff: “Benjamin and psychoanalysis”, in David S. Ferris: The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 115–33, here: p. 129.

[6] Benjamin, Schemata zum psychophysischen Problem, in GS vi, pp. 78ff.

[7] Marx’s Grundrisse were firstly published in 1939/40 in Moscow, however, the war and the ‘Stalinist purges’ prevented the text from reaching a wider audience. In 1953, the German text of the original Rohentwurf draft version was published by the Institute for Marxism-Leninism of the GDR. 

[8] Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Howard Eiland Edmund Jephcott; Rodney Livingstone, et al., Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, p. 26; cf. “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Zweite Fassung”, in GS vii, p. 350.

[9] Cf. Haraway: “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. . . . By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of ‘Western’ science and politics--the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other - the relation between organism and machine has been a border war.” (Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–81, here: p. 149f.

[10] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, p. 338; cf. GS vi, p. 144.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019, p. 80. 

[13] Rainer Nägele: “Body politics: Benjamin's dialectical materialism between Brecht and the Frankfurt School”, in David S. Ferris: The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004, pp. 152–76, here: p. 161.

[14] The term “bare life” was originally introduced by Benjamin’s essay “Fate and Character” (1919) and further elaborated in “The Critique of Violence” (1921). Bare life or “das bloße Leben” (GS ii, p. 200; cf. ibid., p. 175) is life deprived of all its super-natural, that is ethical and meta-ethical features. This reduced form of life is not to be conflated with natural, quasi-biological life. Bare life is the product of a social reduction, a privation of super-naturalness to mere naturalness. Life as bare life thus does not designate a primal state before society but, on the contrary, the product of a society in which life is violently subjected to the law. Benjamin’s technical term to account for the dual character of legal violence (law-establishing or law-constituting violence and law-preserving violence) is “mythic violence”—a violence that endlessly reproduces itself in the positing of law and its application to bare life. In the essay on The Critique of Violence, Benjamin opposes mythic violence by introducing the term “divine violence,” which is a paradoxical non-violent or “pure” violence capable of undoing, abolishing, de-posing state-power, the law, and the latter’s supplementing forms of violence: “For blood is the symbol of bare life (bloßen Lebens). The dissolution of legal violence stems (…) from the guilt of more natural life, which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that 'expiates’ the guilt of bare life—and doubtless also purifies the guilty, not of guilt, however, but of law. For with bare life, the rule of law over the living (den Lebendigen) ceases. Mythic violence is bloody power over bare life for its own sake; divine violence is pure power over all life for the sake of the living” (Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002, p. 250, transl. modified). Drawing on Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben coined the term “bare life” in his Homo Sacer series, stressing its social, non-biological meaning: “There are not first life as a natural biological given and anomie as the state of nature, and then their implication in law through the state of exception. On the contrary, the very possibility of distinguishing life and law, anomie and nomos, coincides with their articulation in the biopolitical machine. Bare life is a product of the machine and not something that preexists it, just as law has no court in nature or in the divine mind” (Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell, Chicago; London: University Press of Chicago, 2005, p. 87f.).

[15] Eric Santner’s term “psychotheology” could provide a framework to grasp this “too muchness” of life: “Psychoanalysis differs from other approaches to human being by attending to the constitutive ‘too muchness’ that characterizes the psyche; the human mind is, we might say, defined by the fact that it includes more reality than it can contain, is the bearer of an excess, a too much of pressure that is not merely physiological. The various ways in which this ‘too much’, this surplus life of the human subject, seeks release or discharge in the ‘psychopathology of everyday life’ continues to form the central focus of Freudian theory and practice.” Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig, Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2001, p. 8.

[16] Cf. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Gisela Febel and Jutta Legueil, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991, p. 31.