The Fractured Subject: Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud

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.