Benjamin’s concern about lost aura was really about historicity

Evidence

What is often missed in discussions of the aura and its loss is that for Benjamin what was at stake was not simply tradition but a sense of historicity itself (see Asad on this point in Shaikh 2002 ). — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 800

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what exactly Benjamin meant by historicity being at stake, and how that reframes the aura-of-tradition debate.