Pink light and iron: Epistemo-critical writing in Walter Benjamin and Philip K. Dick

McLoughlin, John 2024. Pink light and iron: Epistemo-critical writing in Walter Benjamin and Philip K. Dick. PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

In their labyrinthine and non-linear approaches to philosophical representation, Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick each come to embody a pluralistic notion of truth; one which can only be glimpsed perpendicularly, indivisible from the form it takes yet greater than the sum of its parts. This study traces the development of Walter Benjamin’s critical methodology from his early studies of Kant and the German Romantics through to his work on translation, film, and politics—then finally onto the Arcades Project itself. The framework which emerges is one of citation without citation, montage, collage, and immanent representation. Interwoven with this account of Benjamin’s developing critical philosophy is a working exposition of Philip K. Dick’s exegetical writings and related fictions: their origins, goals, and philosophical engagements. The result is twofold: defense of Dick’s earnest and insightful—if sometimes unorthodox and disorganised— philosophising and a clearer picture of the relationship between its method and subject matter. Dick’s text, published only in abridged form but reaching a million words over thousands of handwritten and typescript pages, is a reflexive, self-contradicting, infinitely regressive monster completed only by the death of its author. It shares this with the Arcades Project, whose sad conclusion was the death of its author at the periphery of Nazi Europe. Benjamin’s critical philosophy offers a scaffold which, overlaid with Dick’s text, gives us fresh insight into the power both wield for questioning linear, normative modes of philosophical explanation. Instead, each suggests that philosophising and critique are modes of thinking whose relationship with truth is negatively dialectical: necessary but insufficient to the task of describing it.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General)
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	2 May 2024
Last Modified:	02 May 2024 14:04
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/168670

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