Benjamin’s gamble: commodifying life in the age of heroic demise

TL;DRAbstract

In the last years of his life Walter Benjamin’s critical project was centred on locating a threshold between Paris of the nineteenth century and Berlin of the twentieth that would reveal an affinity between two ages, which together set the parameters of modernity itself. Jointly they would emerge, for Benjamin, as the ultimate arch of fascism, lending new depth to our understanding of the present historical crisis, as well as acting as an augur for future generations. He associated the rise of fascist terror with a breakdown of the threshold that separated the living from the dead, a threshold that had become increasingly ambiguous with the modern advent of global colonial warfare and the attendant call for the total mobilisation of entire civil populations. Benjamin became fascinated with charting the social narrative of the future dead, whether they existed in a celebrated state as it was the case with heroic suicide or as tragic disposable bodies that National Socialism would eventu

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