Walter Benjamin, subjectivity, and gender – the eternal recurrence as a collective dream of modernity

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article, I wish to elaborate on Benjamin’s reading of so-called “dark thinkers,” i.e. those radical thinkers of the fin de siècle whose cultural criticism willingly or not reinforced and reiterated what they actually criticized. I will refer to Benjamin’s early writings on the German youth movement as well as to his later writings on Baudelaire, Jugendstil, and Lebensphilosophie and thereby focus on motives that connect these diverging periods of Benjamin’s oeuvre, notably contemporaneous gender relations, gender identity, and images of the feminine, which Benjamin used in order to delineate an immanent messianism. In this way I want to demonstrate that while Benjamin followed Nietzsche in understanding history as loss and decline, he nonetheless insisted on moments of becoming intrinsic to this very understanding of history. In this dialectical turn the Nietzschean cultural criticism, just as the criticized itself, emerge as two connected sides of one coin.