AESTETICS OF VIBRATION AND WALTER BENJAMIN

The author of the study shows that Walter Benjamin can be considered, on the basis of the analysis of his key notion 'Jetztzeit', a significant theoretician of the aesthetics of the sublime. Thanks to the exposition of the moment of fear in the 20th century, it became a legitimate counterpart to the 'aesthetics of cruelty', the Avant-Gardes lead into. Even though Benjamin never defined the aesthetic programme of the sublime explicitly his essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' as well as the correspondence with Adorno from the end of the 1930s bring evidence about his specific paradoxical perception of the sublime as a fear of its lost. The experience with several forms of mechanically reproduced fine art in the 20th century at the same time shows, that it is not necessarily to be reserved the utopian moment of uniqueness, suspended in Benjamin's notion of aura, merely for the so-called auratic art insomuch that it can also be present in the forms of mechanical reproduction of art.