Sex and Gender

Abstract

In The Fall and The Happy Death, Albert Camus describes, with kaleidoscopic perspicuity, the fragmentary quality of modern experience and poetically articulates the experience of modernity as a fallen condition. Aamir Mufti draws our attention to the ways in which the perception of modernity as a fallen condition encourages the cultural critic to begin the work of recovery—the recovery of the self and of tradition through tradition itself. Identifying a trend that, referencing Benjamin, he calls “auratic criticism,” Mufti traces the ways in which the concept of religious tradition operates to fulfil this role of recovery. The task, he believes, is to distinguish the commitment to critique, which requires a scrupulous elaboration of the homelessness of modern experience, from the impulse to resolve the crisis of modern culture, through a gesture of recuperation of a lost world.¹ Such recuperation might be witnessed in the effort to recall and reproduce an “auratic consciousness” of a precolonial past or, in Camus’ case, a lost connection with a very earthy natural life. Similarly, a romantic recovery of a lost condition is also noticeable in Sartre’s introduction to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where the “native” seems to stand for a more complete, yet to be attained, humanity. More recently the account of reification as the forgetfulness of a more original recognition can be found in Axel Honneth’s Tanner lecture on reification.