"Im Taktischen": Figures of Touch in the Work of Walter Benjamin

The essay aims to uncover the somehow overlooked sensorial faculty of tactility in Walter Benjamin's epistemology of images. Not only is "Das Taktische" transposed into the critical mode of reception characterizing modernity, but the meaning of the tactile, inciting a destructive relation to the integrity of the optical, lies in a certain attention to organic and non-organic decay underlying Benjamin's meditations on the inexpressive acoustical dimension of language. According to the "Work of Art" essay, the medium, or the idea of architecture is dominated by tactility. The encounter between Benjamin and Carl Linfert's study on the topic of the "borderline case" of architectural representation illuminates the architectural imaginaries used by Benjamin to capture the baroque allegorical Schauplatz. Constellating these accounts, the significance of tactility for the Benjaminian construal of the conditions of mediality, language and being unfolds.