Medusian politics: Walter Benjamin and the aesthetics of power

Although much debated, Walter Benjamin's 1935/36 remarks about the aesthetic moment in modern politics and his related critique of fascism remains enigmatic. The dissertation unfolds the multifaceted implications of Benjamin's aestheticization thesis, considering his positioning of art, mass culture, and political legitimation as perhaps the most relevant legacy of the Frankfurt School today. As it first traces earlier attempts to separate and collapse the spheres of artistic expression and political representation, and then situates Benjamin's comments on art and power in fascism vis-a-vis his entire oeuvre, the dissertation identifies crucial shortcomings of the aestheticization thesis, but also suggests avenues to bypass built-in dilemmas for a better understanding of postmodern scopic politics.; Part One discusses how numerous German authors and artists between the late 1800s and the 1930s considered art a vessel to reinstate cultic communities and stable forms of political authority. In all these models, art, emancipated from classical autonomy aesthetics, is mobilized to dedifferentiate the institutional complexity of modern Germany. Part Two explores the triple sense of what Benjamin understands as aesthetic politics: the confusion of different modes of judgement, the attempt to superimpose on political practices the aesthetic notion of genius, and finally, the regime of visual modes of political representation that transfixes the masses as mute spectators within the aesthetic configuration of the Volksgemeinschaft. In contrast to recent critiques, Benjamin locates the fusion of art and politics within a broader theory of capitalist modernity: modern societies, he argues, address desires for distraction to the extent that they need to generate new sources of legitimacy against the grain of social fragmentation.; If the dissertation cites the image of Medusa's gaze, so not simply to understand Benjamin's account of fascism in terms of a petrification of political mobility, but also a precarious feminization of the public sphere that undermines proper judgement, moral reflexivity, and representational authenticity. Although hailed in recent years as an advocate of otherness and non-identity, Benjamin's concept of aesthetic politics relies on a problematic notion of gender identity as he grafts male anxieties onto his theory of modern visuality.