Ebook: Walter Benjamin’s Transit: A Destructive Tour of Modernity

Over the course of his intellectual career, the cultural critic Walter Benjamin became preoccupied with analysing certain political and philosophical trends within German society that indicated its pending collapse and the eventual annihilation of its inhabitants. Through careful observation he concluded that the German people were subject to systematic violence brought on by collective forces in government and ideology. A conspicuous absence of esteem for individual agency, coupled with an unconditional adherence to the group mentality, signaled a decline in social conscience, such that individuals were left profoundly vulnerable within their communities. That character of acquiescence paved the way for their society to stagnate politically and ideologically, eventually resulting in the rise of German fascism. Responding to such conditions, Benjamin made it his intellectual task to predict the contours of German society s coming annihilation. This task requires Benjamin to become fascism s greatest ethical observer, so as to raise alarm bells within its most extravagant perpetrator, the average citizen. Benjamin s object in writing is not to forestall the catastrophe of German fascism for Germany's Jews, but rather to signal others to adhere to a different sense of justice, of timing and authority within this political world and also its possible successors. Polsky's unique volume applies the lens of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari s philosophy to the critical writings of Walter Benjamin, the latter devised amid an atmosphere of emergent fascism in Europe between the two World Wars. Deleuze and Guattari lend crucial insight into an understanding of Benjamin s corpus, based on their pivotal understanding of fascism, which considers not only historical fascism, the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini which was able to mobilise and use the desire of the masses so effectively but also the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behaviour, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us. The reality of that fascism, even its historical guise, connotes an invisible war, a total war, a perpetual war that cannot be definitively lost nor won, but rather must be engaged as an ethical combat within oneself on a plane where politics equals everyday life. It is here that the true problem of how to locate fascism becomes proximate to the life of a body, on this occasion Walter Benjamin s life and body in particular.

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