At the Crossroad of Psychoanalysis and Marxism -Walter Benjamin's Method of City Philosophy

Abstract

Walter Benjamin is one of the most important modern 'classic' thinkerswho took cities as a central theme, as we can read especially in hisunfinished masterpiece 'Passagenwerk'. However, even though manystudies have been made on Benjamin's 'city philosophy' so far, weseem to be far away from the complete and systematic understandingof his thought. So, Examining critically the way how Benjamin hasbeen received in the academic and cultural field, this paper proposes apsychoanalytic perspective for understanding his works andaesthetics/philosophy, especially by focusing on some importantkey-concepts of Benjamin: dialectical image, allegorical image andmelancholia. For Benjamin, the city is a space in which a capitalisticphantasmagoria and urban spectacles made possible by new technologyfunction in order to keep people in an eternal sleep and hinder themfrom waking up from the myth created by capitalism. But he does notgive up hope. Historical ruins, everyday appliance, monuments, arcades,buildings, advertisement posters, beggars, whores, flâneurs, etc. can be'constructed' as a dialectical image that will be blastered out of thecontinuum of history, and this dialectical image 'destroys' the myth ofprogress, and rescues the past from the oppression. Then this paperalso shows the dialectical image as the contradictory co-existence ofthe past and now can be interpreted as an allegorical image contraryto, for example, that of Susan Buck-Morss. The city is according to Benjamin not only the space, in which thecapitalists ring the bell of triumph, but also a space through which therepressed wish of the oppressed can finally come true. So the city canbe a appropriate place for the liberating political act, because, due tothe developed technology, everything in the city is in rapid changesand people in the city feel afflicted with the sense of loss, thereforebecome melancholic. In other words, the feeling of the spleen ormelancholia is not just a pathological state that should be avoided, buta necessary condition for the future revolutionary action, and in thissense I interpret the melancholia as being integrated into Benjamin'sthought as a new category of 'concrete' subject. Benjamin found outthis concrete subject through the study of the baroque Trauerspiel andhe replaced the traditional subject concept of idealism with it.