From the Dream Image to the Dialectical Image. On the Object of Materialist Historiography in Walter Benjamin
Keywords:
phantasmagoria, alienation, utopia, history, revolutionAbstract
This essay offers an interpretation of the concept of the dialectical im-age, aiming to cohesively explain Benjamin’s use of it in both The Arcades Project and the Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”. The starting point is the concept of phantasmagoria, which Benjamin defines in his study of nineteenth-century Paris as the image that modern society projects onto itself, intertwining its alienating nature with the realm of the dreamlike. Through this lens, the essay explores the link Benjamin draws between the dream image and the dialectical image, arguing that the latter signifies the form of knowledge emerging from the dialectical clarification of the ambiguous appearance characteristic of capitalist society’s phenomena. This interpretation elucidates the identification raised in The Arcades Project between the dialectical image and the object constructed by materialist his-toriography, as well as the equivalence of both instances with the notion of monad, which in “On the Concept of History” replaces the dialectical image without altering its meaning.
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