“This hand is the hand of all”: Walter Benjamin on Drawing, On Walter Benjamin’s Drawings

This chapter reconstructs some of Walter Benjamin’s most fundamental ideas on the medium of drawing. Building on an analysis of Benjamin’s own ‘word-drawings’, made during an experiment with mescaline, the chapter focuses on the drawing’s ability to interrupt the meaning-giving capacity of the human word, while simultaneously giving way to a wholly different type of language. Drawings can thus reopen a dream-like sur-reality with sensuous qualities (abstract lines and curves) that are wholly its own. Crucial issues such as the importance of bodily perception and motion while drawing, and the difference with the medium of painting are also addressed.