Le bouleversement de la perception dans la modernité : Au-delà du principe de plaisir, l’armature théorique de l’essai sur Baudelaire de Walter Benjamin

Abstract

ObjectiveWalter Benjamin was a great reader of Freud. In his essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1938–1939), his rigorous and original reading of Beyond the Pleasure Principle allowed him to structure the opposition, already present in his first works, between two categories of experience, Erfahrung and Erlebnis. MethodBenjamin showed that, from the 19th century onward, modernity has imposed an impoverishment of Erfahrung. Benjamin's analysis relies on Freud's hypothesis of the incompatibility between consciousness and memory, already present in The Interpretation of Dreams, and the economic conception of trauma exposed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. ResultsTo avoid or to reduce the potential traumatic effects of modernity in big cities, to avoid extensive ruptures of the protective shield, the perception-consciousness system has to be prepared by anxiety. DiscussionBut this defensive overinvestment of consciousness leads to diminished attention to the internal psychic world. The more consciousness will have to counter the constant shocks of the modern world, the more lived events will not be articulated in a living, mobilizable, and transmissible experience. ConclusionEven if trauma can be avoided, the individual and collective cost of overinvesting in the perception-consciousness system, in a world where shock has become the norm, is considerable and led, in Benjamin's eyes, to the catastrophes of the 20th century.