Abstract

What is Walter Benjamin saying when he writes “auto-alienation”? This is the question of this work. This text will have four moments. On the one hand, a presentation of famous Benjamin’s essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" such as it can be follow in a careful lecture, paying attention to his argumentation. A second moment, where I will pause in the apparition of “self-alienation” concept, in the quoted text. In third place, I will develop the reflections about cinema of other author, Jean Epstetin, filmmaker and philosopher of the movies, attending to the possible similitude in the ways of thinking the cinema as technique. One intuition guides mi text: Benjamin was watching, in the beginnings of the XX century, the communicational environment where we live; the two last hyper-connected decades are fledgling on his thoughts. This hypothesis, fourth moment of this work, will be tested.

Keywords: autoalienation | cinema | mass-media of communication | perception | technique