The Experience of Modernity. Shock and Melancholy in Walter Benjamin

Abstract

If modernity involves a view through which it is possible to read the uninterrupted historical continuity of social utopia and the harmony of class and the progress of the 19th century, it is fundamental to explore what is the other face of this fantasy of progress that places the individual in modernity in a situation of depression and debt, inasmuch as those promises are never fully fulfilled. Walter Benjamin builds his idea of history rethinking this legacy. He imagines the way in which the materialist historian must act, that is, the one who will articulate justice and redemption of the past as it is proposed on the thesis of On the concept of history, a text of 1940 on which he worked until the end of his life. In this text, we can find what Michael Löwy called a critical constellation, which links the past with the present. Regarding these considerations, we pursue two main objectives: on the one hand, to delineate what a theory of modernity could mean in the frame of Benjamin's work; on the other, to examine the relationship between the experience of modernity, linked to melancholy and loss, and the aesthetic experience, understood as a privileged device to make thinkable the human doing.