Overview

This book investigates the relationship of the work of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, centered around Benjamin’s fractured subject. Through a reading of Benjamin’s work on sovereignty and myth, it establishes the emergence of this fractured subject in the Baroque. It then links these themes to ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ and two of Freud’s case studies, showing that melancholia and possession emerge as two responses to the baroque loss of a cosmological horizon. Turning to Benjamin’s work on the nineteenth century in the Arcades Project, it then delineates the persistence of this fractured subject, showing how Benjamin conceptualises its development over the course of modernity. Investigating the change of memory and experience in modernity, it discusses the resurfacing of melancholia as spleen, and the refracting of the fractured subject into types. Having introduced the importance of the dream in the Arcades Project and associated work, the book then examines Benjamin’s dream theory, establishing the ways it draws from Freud’s dream interpretation. Finally, it examines Benjamin’s concept of awakening as a therapeutic, collective, political gesture that points beyond the fractured subject.

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9781538163368

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Reviews

From melancholy to the dream-work and through death drive to awakening, Schulz's book tracks the insistent but elusive presence of Freud in Benjamin's work. Her sustained scrutiny of Benjamin's debts and resistances to Freud and psychoanalysis reveals previously unsuspected analytic and therapeutic dimensions to his thought and criticism. The absence of a sustained exploration of Benjamin's relationship to Freud has long felt like a serious and puzzling gap in Anglophone scholarship on the great German writer. Lucid, tightly conceived and replete with bold readings and insights, The Fractured Subject addresses this gap admirably, opening up a rich and fascinating seam of future discussion and debate.

The absence of a sustained exploration of Benjamin's relationship to Freud has long felt like a serious and puzzling gap in Anglophone scholarship on the great German writer. Lucid, tightly conceived and replete with bold readings and insights, The Fractured Subject addresses this gap admirably, opening up a rich and fascinating seam of future discussion and debate.--Josh Cohen, Goldsmiths, University of London

Author Information

Bernadette Schulz is a researcher at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University of London.

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