A matter of immediacy : the political ontology of the artwork in Benjamin and Heidegger

Martin Heidegger’s and Walter Benjamin’s essays on art—“The Origin of the Work of Art” and “The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility”— are not only, or even primarily, about art. Heidegger and Benjamin use the work of art to articulate an argument against immediacy. Immediacy is seen as a remnant of the onto-theological tradition that is to be destructed, according to Heidegger. The insistence on mediacy is a marker of modernity, according to Benjamin. Even though Hegel is in the background—for instance, Heidegger borrows from his lectures on Hegel, as we see later—nevertheless immediacy is not understood simply in Hegelian terms as a description of a form of subjective experience. Rather, immediacy for both Heidegger and Benjamin is presented within a political register. Ultimately, for both thinkers, the argument against immediacy is a way of articulating a political ontology of the artwork.2 And yet, divergences in the way that immediacy is construed lead the two thinkers to espouse radically different political projects.