Conserveries Mémorielles (Apr 2010)
Benjamin’s gamble: commodifying life in the age of heroic demise
Abstract
In the last years of his life Walter Benjamin’s critical project was centred on locating a threshold between Paris of the nineteenth century and Berlin of the twentieth that would reveal an affinity between two ages, which together set the parameters of modernity itself. Jointly they would emerge, for Benjamin, as the ultimate arch of fascism, lending new depth to our understanding of the present historical crisis, as well as acting as an augur for future generations. He associated the rise of fascist terror with a breakdown of the threshold that separated the living from the dead, a threshold that had become increasingly ambiguous with the modern advent of global colonial warfare and the attendant call for the total mobilisation of entire civil populations. Benjamin became fascinated with charting the social narrative of the future dead, whether they existed in a celebrated state as it was the case with heroic suicide or as tragic disposable bodies that National Socialism would eventually excise by deeming them unworthy of life. It was hard to locate a singular perpetrator within the scheme of the new system of violent explosion from the body of the state. Benjamin eventually happened upon an unlikely culprit in the rise of the flâneur as a professional conspirator and his later counterpart in the fascist brown shirt. This strategy of reading the flâneur does much to explain Benjamin’s fascination with Charles Baudelaire as a figure that skirts the threshold between hero and villain. The spectre of the crowd is never far from this scene of bodily danger.
