Fractured Subject : Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud

An investigation Walter Benjamin’s conception of the subject as fractured, via a reading of Benjamin’s use of Freud; the topics cover gender, dreams, memory, childhood and mental illness.

The Fractured Subject investigates the relationship of the work of Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud, centered around the concept of the fractured subject. Through a reading of Benjamin’s work on sovereignty and myth, Betty Schulz establishes the emergence of this fractured subject in the Baroque and 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, Schulz delineates the persistence of this fractured subject, showing how Benjamin conceptualises its development over the course of modernity while analyzing the change of memory and experience in modernity. Finally, having introduced the importance of the dream in the Arcades Project and associated work, Schulz examines Benjamin’s dream theory, establishing the ways it draws from Freud, as well as Benjamin’s concept of awakening as a therapeutic, collective, political gesture that points beyond the fractured subject.