Karolina Jesień

This project builds on undeveloped tropes in Karolina Jesień’s PhD thesis and aims to analyze Walter Benjamin’s early post-WWI writings (1918–1923). Contrary to some contemporary readings (Friedlander 2012; Barbisan 2017; Jay 2023), Benjamin’s notion of the collective body does not oppose the organicist vocabulary of right-wing thinkers such as Spengler, Jünger, and Klages but intercepts its core ideas for a different understanding of politics. This proposed re-reading of Benjamin will focus on his post-WWI attempts at thinking collectivity, both in relation to the bodily human constitution and on a level that would escape its fascist (ab)use.