Antiquity and Modernity at a Standstill—Interpretating Walter Benjamin’s Allegorical Image and Dialectical Image Through Charles Baudelaire

Abstract

Abstract In the preliminary schematization of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin conceived the title “Antiquity and Modernity” for the second part of the book. In his unpublished paper “Introduction to Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism,” Michael Jennings asserts that the second part of the book on Baudelaire develops, as a formal element of allegorical perception, the “dissolve” through which antiquity comes to light in modernity and modernity in antiquity. In Baudelaire’s terms, nothing in his own century comes closer to the task of the hero of antiquity than the task of giving form to modernity. This paper investigates how Walter Benjamin, by interpreting Baudelaire’s two poems—“The Swan” and “To a Woman Passing By”—processed a symptomatic diagnosis of modernity and attempted different methods of salvation for modernity. In the first attempt, Benjamin resorts to the allegorical images of ancient myths to break through the projection of the linear chain of historical progress, but he suffers from a sense of incurable melancholy and nostalgia due to the irretrievable ancient grandeur in modernity. In the second attempt, he replaces these melancholic allegories with dialectic images in the hope of awakening the masses from the Capitalist phantasmagoria. Nevertheless, from a fundamentalist Marxist point of view, Walter Benjamin’s mystification of Marxist dialectics and his revised Marxism focus mainly on the transformation of consciousness. It is thus arguable that Benjamin distorted and reversed the hierarchy of superstructure and economic base in the orthodox Marxist historical materialism. More regrettably, Benjamin’s dialectic image pales into insignificance due to its confinement within the transformation of mass consciousness and its renouncement of revolution in the economic and production realms.