Contemplative distance makes it possible to fetishise 19th-century novels of manners. These generally represent bourgeois affairs that awaken admiration in the reader and can lead to the alienation of the self and escapism.
This behaviour is not without antecedents, i.e. the phenomena of 19th-century alienation in the works of Alexandre Herculano, Eça de Queiroz and Mary Shelley. We explore a key Kantian concept based on Susan Buck-Morss’s study “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”: autogenesis, a state of alienation of the übermensch that aims at rationalising the world. Alienation will therefore be regarded in two distinct but not incompatible ways: one that acts within the subject, via narcotics and other psychological depressants, and another that manifests outside the subject, via theatre productions and dioramas of alienation in social space. From taverns to dioramas, man seeks, through a series of anaesthetic tools, to soften the blows of everyday life. This mental predisposition, portrayed by Herculano and Queiroz and thoroughly analysed by Buck-Morss and Byung-Chul Han, repositions man’s sensibilities of the 18th and 19th centuries towards the cult of sensation via the omnipresence of anaesthetic objects. We will provide an overview of 19th-century states of alienation in the light of Buck-Morss’ study and explain how this state is updated within the framework of Byung-Chul Han’s Saving Beauty.
