Jean Genet: Flanerie, Mimesis, and Journalism

Abstract

In The Storyteller, Walter Benjamin writes, ‘traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel’ (92). In this lamenting essay on the question of a vanished art form, Benjamin’s profound thinking on the communicative gesture of art connects at once the sensuous faculty of touch with history of nature and nature of history.