Walter Benjamin's sex work: prostitution and the state of exception

Abstract

Hitherto critics have developed a very articulate sense of how The Arcades Project draws on a psychoanalytic theory of sexuality to reframe a Marxist analysis of commodity culture, as Sigrid Weigel puts it. This essay argues that the issue of sovereign violence, implicit in patriarchy, is a crucial and neglected facet of how The Arcades Project frames the ‘erotic phenomena of modernity’, one that emerges most clearly through Benjamin's engagement with the figure of prostitution. If Benjamin, at moments, can imagine his own political awakening as a sexual flight from the bourgeois habitus into the labyrinth of the polis, with the prostitute at its centre, it is a flight that also falters precisely at the moment that it encounters the compromising entanglement of sexuality with those forms of life abandoned by the law. The tensions in Benjamin's work, between autobiography and critique, between prostitution as a figure for a broader sense of objectification and sexuality as a specific site of power that insists on the literal presence of the other's body, point to the anxieties attending his particular version of materialism as it encounters its own foundations in the exclusions fundamental to modernity.