Walter Benjamin's transit : a destructive tour of modernity
This thesis focuses specifically on Walter Benjamin's philosophical insights into the emerging climate of fascism, in Europe, between the two World Wars. These were inseparable from a challenge to modern understandings of history. For Benjamin official histories function to record the spoils of the victors effectively erasing the losing side from the annals of history. This has particular resonance given that Benjamin, a German Jew, was himself under constant threat of cultural erasure during the course of his writing, thus making him in a way the embodiment of a certain constellation of fascist forces. The theme of an 'embodied' fascism will be applied to Benjamin's corpus as well as to other's directly involved and affected by the rise of German fascism. Throughout this thesis I chart the ways in which Benjamin applies alternative methods to reading history, in order to unearth the violence beyond his present situation of fascism. Benjamin argued that violence subtends all modern state function, insofar as its power is won and maintained by the silent suppression of its citizens. Such suppression was the cause of periodic eruptions of violence with society. It was built into the very fibre of what we call
Polsky, Stephanie
Walter Benjamin's transit : a destructive tour of modernity. This thesis focuses specifically on Walter Benjamin's philosophical insights into the emerging climate of fascism, in Europe, between the two World Wars. These were inseparable from a challenge to modern understandings of history. For Benjamin official histories function to record the spoils of the victors effectively erasing the losing side from the annals of history. This has particular resonance given that Benjamin, a German Jew, was himself under constant threat of cultural erasure during the course of his writing, thus making him in a way the embodiment of a certain constellation of fascist forces. The theme of an 'embodied' fascism will be applied to Benjamin's corpus as well as to other's directly involved and affected by the rise of German fascism. Throughout this thesis I chart the ways in which Benjamin applies alternative methods to reading history, in order to unearth the violence beyond his present situation of fascism. Benjamin argued that violence subtends all modern state function, insofar as its power is won and maintained by the silent suppression of its citizens. Such suppression was the cause of periodic eruptions of violence with society. It was built into the very fibre of what we call
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