A Bond of Knowledge: Reading Bond with Benjamin

Abstract

With Daniel Craig we are seeing a radical shift in the trajectory of the James Bond series, one that seeks to take into account the dramatic implications of new technologies on how we understand ourselves as human, as individuals, as members of a community, and as a society. Working from Walter Benjamin’s notion of aura and authenticity, which rely on the Classical notion of the body as complete and fully knowable, through to Judith Butler’s paradigm of sex and gender as performative, this article identifies a return to the body as a reconfigured source of authority for twenty-first century narratives.