Fiat urbs, pereat mundus: Walter Benjamin, um vaga-lume na meia-noite do século.

Abstract

The work Fiat urbs, pereat mundus: Walter Benjamin, a firefly in the midnight of the century focuses on the aesthethical crisis at the base of the impoverishment of experience diagnosed by Benjamin, whose ethical and political consequences are undeniable, but which also reverberates severe epistemological consequences for his historical-philological method, since it poses impasses to access genuine historical experience as the event as such of his method. Therefore, the dissertation assembles a constellation of the impoverishment of experience as a plethora of impasses to be crossed by the method formulated and operated by Benjamin as a response to the ongoing demand since 1917. Through this vein, the dissertation constructs a possible genesis of the historical conditions of sensibility in modernity, closely linked to the experiences of the modern metropolis and its masses, as well as all its paraphernalia of technical apparatus. To this end, the text disposes phenomena that contribute to impoverishment - the discrepancy between technique and imagination; the shock of war and the metropolis; automatism; hyperaesthesia and its anaesthetic twist; the aestheticization of politics and war; or the mass character and monumental character of fascist art - with the intention of constructing the idea of the impoverishment of experience in the oscillating dialectic between 19th and 20th century urban experiences.