ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationship between technological or bodily vision and affect, with particular interest both in self-exposure to affect contagion and the act of self-immunization rather than focusing on the well-explored correlation between photography, mourning and melancholia in Berliner Kindheit. The process of writing and rewriting his autobiographical project Benjamin re-measures the voided field of emotion by seeking to newly define the relationship between affect and eye. Rather than utterly erasing the affective dimension from his text, Benjamin's strategy leads, to the framing of affect, to the delimitation of the transgressive and hallucinatory, affective repercussions of the auratic 'Augenblick. Showing empty facades and emptied spaces, Benjamin's memory images keep the past at a visual and affective distance. Filled with emotions that have dripped off the narrator's own self, these memory images become containers for Benjamin's depersonalized 'Stauung[en] des Gefuhls'.
