Flâneur, Phantasmagoria and Existence in Modern Cities: An Analysis of Benjamin and Sartre

Abstract

The modern city ethos has been a significant subject in social and literary theories since Charles Baudelaire, the 19th-century poet and author. Baudelaire's interest in the relationship between city imageries and modernity has inspired many of his successors that look at politics, culture, gender, phenomenology, and ontology. Thus, contemporary philosophy has approached the modern city as an intersectional sphere of existence. The two prominent 20th-century thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Paul Sartre endeavor to use Baudelaire's work as a theoretical structure to ground their understanding of the modern city ethos. Benjamin uses Baudelaire's concept of flâneur, which initially symbolizes the idle, extraordinary, and lonely individuals in early modern cities, to interpret the experience of modernity. Sartre includes city characters that resemble flâneur in his novels and essays to disclose his existentialist thought. Both see the tension between modernity and the city ethos as an enigma that produces alienation, exploitation, and exclusion. In this study, we analyze the thoughts of Benjamin and Sartre regarding the problem of existence in modern cities. First, we look at the concept of flâneur as a subject of modernity. Then we respectively explain the thinkers' works, thus emphasizing their differences. We argue that Benjamin ascribes a relatively sociocultural context to the modern city experience, while Sartre mainly looks at the problem from a phenomenological perspective.