City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin: Fragments of Metropolis

MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS
City and Modernity

in Georg Simmel and
Walter Benjamin
Fragments of Metropolis
Vincenzo Mele
Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
Series Editors
Marcello Musto
York University
Toronto, ON, Canada
Terrell Carver
University of Bristol
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Vincenzo Mele
City and Modernity

in Georg Simmel and
Walter Benjamin
Fragments of Metropolis
Vincenzo Mele
Political Science
University of Pisa
Pisa, Italy
ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Marx, Engels, and Marxisms
ISBN 978-3-031-18183-2 ISBN 978-3-031-18184-9 (eBook)
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Acknowledgments
This book is the culmination of years of research, during which some por-
tions of its text have appeared, either verbatim or in similar form, in vari-
ous publications. Said portions are integral to the reasoning laid out in the
book and could hardly be omitted or substantially modified without
undermining its coherence. The following represent the most significant
publications:
–– Walter Benjamin e l’esperienza della metropoli, Plus, Pisa 2003.

–– George Simmel’s Sociology of Sociability: Contemporary and Historical
Remarks, in The Present and Future of Symbolic Interactionism.
Proceedings of the International Symposium, Pisa 2010, Vol. II,
edited by Andrea Salvini, David Altheide, Carolina Nuti, Franco
Angeli, 2010, pp. 113–132.
–– Metropolis. Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin e la modernità, Belforte,
Livorno 2011.
–– Origin, Meaning and Relevance of Georg Simmel’s Sociological
Aesthetics, in Sociology, Aesthetics & the City (ed. by V. Mele), Pisa
University Press, 2011, pp. 29–54.
–– ‘At the Crossroad of Magic and Positivism’. Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm through Benjamin and Adorno, Journal of Classical
Sociology 2015, Vol. 15(2) (Special Issue ed. by V. Mele on What Is
Living and What Is Dead of the Positivist Dispute? Fifty Years Later,
A Debate), pp. 139–153.
–– Before and Beyond the Masses. Simmel, Benjamin, and the Sociology of
Crowds, The Tocqueville Review, 2018, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 119–140.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
–– The Blasé and the Flâneur. Simmel and Benjamin on Modern and
Postmodern Forms of Individualization, in Simmel Studies, 2019,
Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 37–70.
–– Georg Simmel and the Metropolization of Social Life, in The Cambridge
Handbook of Social Theory, ed. by P. Kivisto, Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge, 2020, pp. 161–178.
–– Georg Simmel and Critical Theory, in Routledge International
Handbook of Simmel Studies, ed. by G. Fitzi, Routledge, 2020,
New York/London, pp. 261–275.
I am very grateful to a great number of individuals with whom I discussed

some of the arguments contained in this book over the years. I had the
pleasure to talk them over with Otthein Rammstedt, who firstly intro-
duced me to Simmel’s work. I am grateful to Klaus Lichtblau (and his
Forschungs Kolloquium in Frankfurt am Main) and Gregor Fitzi for their
thoughtful comments, suggestions, and ideas. Some topics of this book
have been presented at the wonderful Simmel Conference in Portbou in
October 2018: the inspiring location favored a beautiful discussion, for
which I am thankful to Natàlia Cantó-Milà, Swen Seebach, and all the
participants. Finally, I must thank the participants of the first Italo Franco-
German trilateral conference at Villa Vigoni for their timely comments on
the paper I gave at the colloquium on “Simmel. Aspects of Transdisciplinary
Research in the Social and Cultural Sciences” on October 28, 2022. I am
especially grateful to Denis Thouard for his critical remarks that stimulated
me to clarify some of the theses in this book. All errors, omissions, and
oversights are of course mine.
I need to thank Anthony Cafazzo and Suzanne Kirkbright for patiently
reading and reviewing my writing. Thanks are also due to Vinoth Kuppan,
Mary Al-Sayed, Elisabeth Graber, and the staff at Palgrave for their
patience and help.
I would especially like to thank Prof. Marcello Musto for his warm
encouragement to publish the book in the series under his direction and
Babak Amini and for his kind support. Above all, I wish to thank my family
for all their understanding, patience, and assistance: my mother Adele, my
daughters Bianca and Carmen, and my son Mario, who happened to be
born during the final months of work.
The metropolis at the core of this book is named Paulina Sabugal “after
her who as an engineer cut it through the author” (W. Benjamin to Asja
Lacis, One Way Street, 1928).
Contents
1 I ntroduction: Investigating Postmodernity Through

Modernity 1
2 Metropolis and Modernity 33
Part I City and Modernity in Georg Simmel 61
3 Deconstructing
History, Morality, and Society: Simmel’s
Theory of Knowledge 63
4 The Sociological Aesthetics of Modernity101
5 Monetary Culture and the Intensification of Nervous Life133
6 The Metropolization of Social Life173
Part II City and Modernity in Walter Benjamin 215
7 What Is The Arcades Project?217
8 Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Knowledge 247
vii
viii Contents
9 The
Phantasmagoria of Modernity: On Commodity
Fetishism 285
10 Baudelaire
as the Lyric Poet in the Age of Mature
Capitalism309
11 Conclusions:
Metropolis as Tragedy, Metropolis as
Trauerspiel347
Index 383
Abbreviations and Translations
The following abbreviations are used throughout the text and notes:
GS I–VII Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiede-

mann and Herman Schweppenhäuser. 7 vols. Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995.
GSG 1–24 Simmel, Georg. Gesamtausgabe. Edited by Otthein Rammstedt.
24 vols. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2015.
When no bibliographical source in English is given, the translations

are my own.
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Investigating Postmodernity

Through Modernity
To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of

the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities and in
the modern men and women of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow.
—Marshall Berman
1 Why Simmel and Benjamin Again?

Why yet another comparison of the thought of two dead, White, European
males who lived last century? Why is this still important to us? What could
be the relevance of their thought for our globalized, fragmented, (post-)
pandemic present? Do we not live in the age of a chaotic, disorganized,
new cultural and economic order? Contemporary social theorists tend to
think that the world we live in now, in which modernity is decisively “at
large,” involves a general break with the past and, consequently, with the
modernization theory of “grand Western social science” (Auguste Comte,
Karl Marx, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim). With
sound arguments, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai tried to map out the
“new global cultural economy” that is able to interpret the “disjunctures”
between economy, culture, and politics currently characterizing contem-
porary “disorganized capitalism” (Appadurai 1996). In this context we
can even question the overlap equivalence between modernity and urban
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
V. Mele, City and Modernity in Georg Simmel and Walter
Benjamin, Marx, Engels, and Marxisms,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9_1
2 V. MELE
experience. Anthony Giddens, a sociologist very attentive to the problem

of analyzing spatial configurations, has argued that “with the advent of
capitalism, the city is no longer the dominant spatiotemporal container or
crucible of power; this role is assumed by the territorially bounded nation-
state” (quot. in Harvey 1989, p. 6). David Harvey replies that the study
of urbanization is the study of a process and not a thing. It concerns the
processes of capital circulation, the flows of power, labor, commodities,
and capital, the spatial organization of production and transformation of
space-time relations, information movements, geopolitical conflicts
between territorially based class alliances, and so on. The fact that cities in
the legal sense have lost political power and geopolitical influence, that
urban economies now take the form of megacities expanding through
suburbs to the rural fringes, does not imply that they are no longer
included in the urban process. It is therefore necessary to understand the
urban process in the context of a more general dynamic analysis of capital-
ism and to understand how each is at once part and container of the other.
Harvey’s considerations also apply to the metropolis as the “expressive
platform of modernity” (Abruzzese and Mancini 2011, p. 12), as its privi-
leged social and cultural form.
I share Marshall Berman’s opinion that “the modernism of the past can
give us back the sense of our modern roots, roots that go back two hun-
dred years” (Berman 1982, p. 47). In his now classical study dedicated to
Goethe’s Faust, to Marx as the first modernist, to Baudelaire’s Paris,
and Tolstoy’s Petersburg, Berman intends to “revive the dynamic and dia-
lectical modernism of the 19th century,” in the belief that nineteenth-
century modernism is more dialectical than that of the one-dimensional
and one-way twentieth century. Berman describes this experience of
modernity paradigmatically, in a way that is still quite appealing:
There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self

and others, of life’s possibilities and perils—that is shared by men and
women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience “moder-
nity.” To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us
adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—
and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, every-
thing we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences
cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality,
of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all
mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into
1 INTRODUCTION: INVESTIGATING POSTMODERNITY THROUGH… 3
a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contra-

diction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe
in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.” (Ibid., p. 15)
This description of Berman’s experience of modernity is dynamic and

dialectical, and we can say that in its essentials it has remained unchanged
despite the momentous changes that have occurred since its appearance
on the historical scene. It best represents the object of research at the heart
of this book. For the philosophical and sociological thought of the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, the metropolis represented a min-
iature model of Western civilization, that is, the social formation where
modernity manifested itself in the most evident and extreme manner. It
was not only the “founding fathers” of classical German sociology (such as
Ferdinand Tönnies, Werner Sombart, Max Weber, as well as Georg
Simmel) who dedicated a substantial part of their reflections to the “big
city” (the Großstadt), but also the “critics of culture” (Kulturkritiker) of
the subsequent Weimar era, including Siegfried Kracauer and Walter
Benjamin. It can therefore be said that the metropolis best represents “the
general social form of modernity” (Cacciari 1993; Jonas 1995; Füzesséry
and Simay 2013; Mele 2011; Rafele 2010; Abruzzese 2017). In particu-
lar, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) both
contributed to interpreting and elaborating this new form of metropolitan
culture, albeit in different ways. Paris and Berlin, the cities that form the
backdrop to the biographies and work of Simmel and Benjamin, since the
mid-nineteenth century experienced a series of technological and cultural
changes that would constitute the elements of the movement and mod-
ernist sensibility. The urban landscape was undergoing major transforma-
tions: the birth of boulevards; the spread of iron and glass architectural
structures for consumption (such as galleries and department stores) or
for transit (railway stations); changes in aesthetics, culture, and costume
thanks to the spread of fashion, advertising, and newspapers; profound
changes in the perception of space and time as the result of major technical
innovations such as railways, artificial lighting, radio, telephone, photog-
raphy, and cinema. The metropolis as a general social form of modernity
has fundamental importance in their work as well as in their personal his-
tories. Georg Simmel dedicated only one essay—which is the transcript of
a lecture he gave at the Gehe-Stiftung in Dresden—explicitly to the sub-
ject, namely The Metropolis and the Life of Spirit (“Die Grossstädte und das
4 V. MELE
Geistesleben” (Simmel 2021 [1903]), but his entire work is arguably per-
vaded by a “metropolitan spirit.” The essay on the metropolis summarizes
the main themes of The Philosophy of Money (Simmel 2004 [1900]), in
which he carries out an extensive philosophical, sociological, and aesthetic
analysis of the monetary economy, which largely coincides with metropoli-
tan culture. For Simmel, the metropolis paradigmatically represents the
problem on which he reflected for nearly his entire life, namely the rela-
tionship between the individual and society. This problem is latent not
only in his sociological and philosophical work, but also in much of his
copious essayistic production, some of the most important contributions
of which were published in his 1911 collection titled Philosophical Culture
(Simmel 1996).
The metropolis has similar theoretical and biographical importance in
Walter Benjamin’s work. He devoted fourteen years to his unfinished
work on the arcades of Paris (Benjamin 2002 [1982], The Arcades Project,
1926–1940, uncompleted materials firstly published in 1982), the city
that for him (as for Siegfried Kracauer) was the emblem of modernity. He
intended this study to be a “primal history of modernity” (Urgeschichte der
Moderne) as represented in the events and culture of the French capital
between the rise of the “bourgeois King”, Louis Philippe, and the decline
of the fragile republic with the empire of Louis Bonaparte. Understanding
how these authors theorized and described the experience of the metropo-
lis is particularly meaningful from the perspective of the history of social
thought. Indeed, Georg Simmel (1858–1918) and Walter Benjamin
(1892–1940) assume two representative standpoints on twentieth-century
thought regarding the relation between subjectivity and mass society, sym-
bolically represented by the metropolis as its characteristic social and cul-
tural manifestation. Their visions of modernity are largely the result of
perspectives that are respectively on the threshold and internal to twentieth-
century philosophical and sociological discourse on modernity. Simmel’s
standpoint precedes “the short 20th century” (as defined by the English
historian Hobsbawm 1994), and hence his perceptions are significant for
their otherness with respect to the period’s affairs and tragedies. Simmel
died in 1918, when the tragedy of the First World War (on which he ini-
tially had taken an activist stance for intervention, only then to be con-
sumed by the dilemma between Nationalism and Europeanism) (Watier
1991; Thouard 2014; Fitzi 2018) and the consequent cultural crisis
marked a definitive turning point from the previous era. Benjamin’s
perspective on modernity, on the other hand, was cultivated in complete

awareness of the one-way street—echoing the title of Benjamin’s work
(Benjamin 1996 [1928])—that European civilization was taking; he
sensed that unless some sort of “emergency brake”1 was engaged it would
inevitably lead to the catastrophes of fascism and the Second World War.
The project for a “primal history” (Urgeschichte) of modernity that he
embodied paradigmatically in “Paris, capital of the 19th century” was thus
formulated in one of the absolutely “darkest” times of the short century
(Arendt 1968), which saw, on the one hand. the inexorable rise of mass
totalitarian regimes in Europe, and on the other, the degeneration of the
hopes kindled by the October revolution into the catastrophe of Stalinism.
Beyond their different political and epistemological approaches, their the-
ories are not based in any way on an institutional and historical analysis of
modern society, but rather aim to trace the originality and uniqueness of
the experience of modernity, intended as a way of perceiving space, time,
the randomness of social relations of metropolitan capitalism that then—at
the end of the nineteenth century—was emerging. The metropolis repre-
sents the grandiose summation of the new ways to experience space and
time, the physical and social environments that have characterized western
societies since the spread of capitalism, the perpetual becoming, the con-
tinual, uninterrupted upheavals of social order, unstable social relation-
ships, and at the same time, the longing for an eternal, immaculate, stable
present.
As the English sociologist Mike Featherstone perspicaciously observed,
the rise of the metropolis moreover represents a key, even founding,
moment in the sociology of cultural processes and cultural studies in
general:
while we can utilize Weber and Habermas to orient ourselves in the tastes
and life styles of artists and intellectuals, and their interest in generalizing
aesthetic perceptions and sensibilities, Benjamin and Simmel can be utilized
to direct us toward the way that the urban landscape has become aestheticized
and enchanted by the architecture, the billboards, shop signs, advertise-
1
The reference here is to Benjamin’s concept of history and his re-reading of the idea of
revolution as an “emergency brake”: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world
history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by passengers
on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake” (Benjamin 2003
[1940], p. 402).
6 V. MELE
ments, packaging, road signs, etc., and by the people who, immersed in this
setting, consequently move about in these spaces: individuals dressed up to
various degrees, fashionable clothing, hair styles, makeup, or who move or
hold their bodies in a particularly stylized way (Featherstone 2007, p. 76).
Featherstone suggests that Simmel and Benjamin still furnish some key
elements for interpreting any analysis of the postmodern “culture of con-
sumerism” and the phenomenon of the “aestheticization of daily life.” An
analysis of the metropolis enables us to understand the aesthetic contribu-
tions to the modern process of reflexivity. This is especially true if we
consider the problem of subjectivity and its survival in the context of mass
society culture, whose true “paradigm” is to be found precisely in the
social form of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century metropolis. If we
regard the blasé and the flâneur, respectively, as emblems of Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s models of metropolitan subjectivity, we can see how analyzing,
reconstructing, and comparing these two figures can help understand
some essential aesthetic and cultural characteristics of our modern times.
Paraphrasing the renowned closing of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic and
the Spirit of Capitalism, Zygmunt Bauman, a contemporary author very
attentive to the ethical and sociological dynamics of individuality, splen-
didly framed the importance of the figure of the flâneur in the contempo-
rary cultural scene:
The flaneur wanted to play his game at leisure; we are forced to do so. For
when flâneurism was carried out from of the Parisian arcades into everyday
life, and began to dominate worldly aesthetics, it did its part in building the
tremendous cosmos of the post-modern consumerist order. This order is
now bond to the technical and economic conditions of machine production,
which today determine the lives of all individuals who are born into this
mechanism, not only those directly concerned with living their life as play,
with irresistible force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last bit of
information is turned out by the computer. In Baudelaire’s or Benjamin’s
view the dedication to mobile fantasy should lie on the shoulders of the
flâneur like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment. But
fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage (Bauman
1994, p. 153).
Thus, in contemporary society we are all forced to become flâneurs, to

wander aimlessly through the labyrinths of consumerism. That which
nineteenth-century individuals did for amusement and relaxation, curi-

ously exploring the first consumer paradises, has nowadays become a mass
practice: we are all flâneurs, zapping through myriad TV channels, surfing
the Internet or cruising the Shopping Malls in the outskirts of our cities.
The flâneur can with good reason be viewed as a metaphor for the subjec-
tivity of modern consumerism, of life lived as a “representation” − a game
whose natural setting is the world of conspicuous consumption, where it
is possible to take on disparate “virtual” identities that meet and are played
out in the domain of acquisition. This “generalization” and massification
of the flâneur experience is a good example of one transition of the age.
Experience of the metropolis seems to have moved from the boulevards of
the nineteenth century to the shopping malls, to our TV screens and other
non-places of supermodernity (Augé 1995) or contemporary postmoder-
nity. Is this the reason that the experience of the metropolis has changed its
ways and means? Has there, in other words, been a “postmodern” meta-
morphosis in the processes of the dialectics between individual and society,
to the point of representing a truly new phenomenon in the social and
cultural panorama of Western modernity? To try to answer this question—
an endeavor that could easily take up the research agenda of a lifetime—I
would like to introduce here some conceptual elements that will enable us
to, if not actually answer it, at least suitably contextualize it, and thereby
open up a path for in-depth research into Simmel’s and Benjamin’s theo-
ries of the metropolis.
2 On the Nature of the Present Work:

A Pre-history of Postmodernity
In a brief, but highly cogent, well-documented essay, the German philoso-
pher and sociologist Axel Honneth delineated the “fragments” (Bruchstüch)
of a “sociological diagnosis of the time” containing some essential aspects
of postmodern culture; these turn out to be particularly important for any
proper comparison between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century
metropolis and the “aestheticization” of contemporary daily life. Referring
back to a formula that entered the vocabulary common to much social
theory, inspired especially by systems theory or French poststructuralism,
for Honneth the concept of postmodern is inextricably tied to the matter
of the “end” or the definitive “erosion” (Auflösung) within the “social
8 V. MELE
milieu,”2 which has some important consequences on the development of

individual subjectivity. In contemporary reality, instead of traditional nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century models of self-realization, based upon more
or less sound interior subjective motivations, fictitious biographies are
constructed aesthetically through the virtual culture of electronic media.
Thusly defined, according to Honneth, the transition to the postmodern
represents nothing more than the pessimistic cultural diagnosis that
Adorno and Horkheimer formulated in the chapter on the Cultural
Industry of the Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944] 1997). The difference
however resides in the fact that, contrary to these latter, postmodern
authors judge the cultural erosion and loss of individual authenticity posi-
tively, hence according to Honneth (Honneth 1994, pp. 15–16), the tran-
sition from the Dialectic of Enlightenment to postmodern theories and
cultural diagnosis can be meaningfully compared to what Simmel had
already stated regarding the cultural transition from Schopenhauer to
Nietzsche (described in his 1907 book):
While one [Schopenhauer] still remains oriented to the idea of an objective

goal (Zweckgebundenheit) of human life, in the light of his definitive insolu-
bility, but also in the pessimism of his Metaphysics of the will, the other
[Nietzsche] can free himself from such negativism by dissociating himself
2
Honneth used this formula to include the three fundamental circles of experience that
describe the phenomenon of the “aestheticization of daily life.” Firstly, the technological
innovation that came about in the late twentieth century, together with the extensive process
of internationalization of capital, has led to a massive entry of culture into the processes of
economic evaluation, whose most prominent manifestation is the growth of mass media and
advertising. This, in turn, has led to a phenomenon that has become daily experience for
modern westerners (and not only), that is, the ever-increasing flow of electronically produced
information and images that enter our homes daily through TV screens and computers. One
result of this is the “trend to erosion of the aesthetic means of communication of the world
of social life” (Honneth 1994, p. 12). To put it in other, simpler terms, cultural activities lose
their particular nature as the means to communicate a symbolic representation of the living
world of men, and instead take on the characteristics of an electronically reproduced “techni-
cal environment” designed exclusively for amusement and entertainment. Secondly, this pro-
cess of erosion of the media goes hand in hand with a process of erosion of the normative
bonds of the world of social life itself, a phenomenon that the French philosopher Jean-
François Lyotard has described perfectly as “the end of the great narrations.” Finally, this
“erosion” of the social also involves a weakening of individuals’ communicative and rela-
tional capacities, which indicates a tendency toward the “atomization” of the individual and
erosion of the social bonds through which social groups expressively and normatively
reproduce.
from the idea of fulfillment of human life and internalizing it to the mere
growth of its possibilities; in place of an idea of “self-realization”, the image
(Vorstellung) emerges of an experimental invention of the self
(Selbsterfindung). (Honneth 1994, pp. 15–16)
The question is therefore formulated in terms of a conception of sub-

jectivity (Schopenhauer) that remains anchored to an idea of an objective
goal of life, even though colored by pessimism regarding the possibility of
its realization, and another conception (Nietzsche) that definitively frees it
from any presupposition of fulfillment, of self-realization of subjectivity,
whence the question of the mere growth of possibilities arises.
Schopenhauer is the philosopher who refused the principium individua-
tionis and revaluation of the dimension of the body and all those external
appeals to rational subjectivity (dreams, myths, the unconscious), which
opened up new perspectives for research in western thought (Nietzsche
himself, Pareto, Freud, Benjamin, Adorno, and Horkheimer).
Schopenhauer represents one of the fundamental poles between which the
dialectics of twentieth-century subjectivity oscillates: that which can be
described and characterized as skepticism toward the evidence of subjectiv-
ity, of the capacity for self-determination and fulfilling oneself through
reflection (Bodei 2002, p. 52). However, this vision remains tied to the
idea of an objective goal to life: indeed, it is the blind will of self-
preservation. Twentieth-century currents of Schopenhauerian thought
can thus be said to be critical of the metaphysics of the free and autono-
mous individual, holding instead that individuals are not constituted sim-
ply by consciousness, and self-aware reasoning. However, they do not
extend this fundamental skepticism to the objective goal of life, which in
currents that connect to Marxism, the need for organic exchange with
nature still remains (man’s essential need for work). For Schopenhauer, the
ego, one’s individual, personal identity is only a marginal and secondary
phenomenon of the will to live, which despite the term, has nothing to do
with man’s free will and discretion, but rather represents an undifferenti-
ated energy that characterizes every being in the world. All individuality is
therefore a deceptive reality and intrinsically void of any value, or better, as
he put it in The World as Will and Representation, “we are like the swirls
that the will to live scribbles on the infinite blackboard of space and time,”
quickly canceled to make room for others (quot. in Bodei 2002, p. 47).
Although men appear different one from the other and are endowed with
unique, exclusive individual characteristics, their affairs are actually similar
10 V. MELE
to those of theatrical masks in plays, where the same characters with the
same passions and the same destiny are always present. In his fundamental
cycle of lectures published in 1907 (now in (Simmel 2006, pp. 167–408),
Simmel underlines that the importance of Nietzsche with respect to
Schopenhauer consists in having posed the question on the meaning of
life per se:
From the thoughts on evolution, Nietzsche, in contrast to Schopenhauer,

attained an entirely new concept of life: that in and of itself, by its own, most
intimate essence, is elevation, growth, increasing concentration of the forces
of the world surrounding the individual. Through this instinct, immediately
set-in motion in him to guarantee elevation, growth, the perfection of value,
LIFE ITSELF CAN BECOME THE GOAL OF LIFE and hence exoner-
ated from the question regarding its ultimate goal, which remained beyond
its process that unfolds purely and naturally. (Simmel 1991 [1907],
pp. 20–21)
Simmel therefore calls attention to Nietzsche’s new concept of life,

which is “the Darwinian absolutization of the idea of evolution,” by which
he diverges radically from Schopenhauer. Both philosophers, however,
assumed as their point of departure the fact that “the contents of life do
not suffice to confer value on it”: while Nietzsche resolves the problem of
value by establishing a “qualitative growth of life,” Schopenhauer instead
insists on the absurdity of the life process, on its circularity and its sense-
lessness (Rammstedt 2003, p. 89).
Nietzsche attributes analogous importance to the primacy of the vast
and obscure region of the body. This does not however completely obscure
its philosophical counterpart, “the ancient and venerable hypothesis” of
the soul, as it seems to occur in Schopenhauer. According to Nietzsche, it
is simply a matter of overturning the original Platonic texts, taken up by
Christianity, and declaring − in the words of Michel Foucault, who echoes
Nietzsche’s − that “the soul is the prison of the body” (Bodei 2002,
pp. 83–84). The problem of the individual therefore is that he does not
simply have a body, but rather is a body, made up of an enormous quantity
of monads, each in turn endowed with consciousness: “there are […] in
man as many consciousnesses as there are beings − in every instant of his
existence − that constitute his body” (ibid.). The presumed “conscious-
ness” of the Ego can maintain its consistency and its unity over time only
because it detaches itself from the infinite variety of the experiences of the
many “bodily” consciousnesses and, as a consciousness of superior rank,
chooses only a selection of simplified experiences, which are rendered per-

spicuous and intelligible. Only through this “reduction of complexity”
(this expression of Luhmann’s is absolutely relevant here) is it possible to
prepare what we commonly call “a will.” If decisions were not taken, if
there were no continuous “coup d’état of the will,” humankind would die
off in the paralyzing chaos provoked by the myriad voices of the body.
Thus, according to Nietzsche, the Ego represents “a plurality of forces of
the personal sort, of which now one and then the other come to the fore-
front, as the ego, and regards the others as an individual looks at an exter-
nal world rich with influences and determinations. For a time, the
individual is at one point and then for another at another” (ibid.). In such
a context consciousness is no more than a “multiplicity of consciousnesses,
and that which we call Ego is nothing more than the societary construc-
tion of many souls.” Here we find the model of subjectivity sometimes
defined as the model of the “Plural Self” (Ferrara 1996).
If we accept the scheme proposed by Honneth, and consider
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as two points of fundamental oscillation of
the cultural dialectics of the twentieth-century modern and postmodern,
from both the general philosophical point of view and the sociological
point of view due to its effects on what has been defined as an “erosion”
of the social (or “aestheticization of daily life”), then our research on
Simmel and Benjamin takes the form of a “pre-history” of modern and
postmodern subjectivity, insofar as Simmel’s and Benjamin’s reflections on
the metropolis—symbolized by their major works, respectively, The
Philosophy of Money (1900) and The Arcades Project (1927–1940)—repre-
sent two archetypes, two “original forms” of twentieth-century reflection
on subjectivity that oscillate between these poles. The blasé and the flâ-
neur—the most significant social types of metropolitan personalities elab-
orated by these two authors—thus become the necessary reference points
for delineating two models, sometimes converging, other times diverging,
regarding the representation of the individual and its possible autonomy
in the context of the “metropolization of social life.” Therefore, even the
characteristics of current modernity, which are often included under the
label of postmodernism, can be better understood through in-depth inves-
tigation of the metropolis as the “original form” of modernity. It is not by
chance that diligent commentators and analysts of postmodernity as “liq-
uid modernity” (Bauman), felt the need to refer to the conceptual histori-
cal period of the turn of the twentieth century. Simmel’s blasé and
Benjamin’s flâneur represent two symbolic figures of the cultural dialectics
12 V. MELE
of twentieth-century subjectivity, which focused its reflections on the

problem of the conservation and development of an autonomous subjec-
tivity in the context of mass society, represented emblematically by the
social form of the metropolis.
3 Analogies, Similes, and Different Centers:

On the State of Art of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s
Research
Often comparisons in social theory and philosophy are conducted within
the “homogeneous empty time” of an imaginary contemporaneity.
Authors belonging to different historical and political contexts are envi-
sioned to carry on a dialogue as if their lives and thoughts were not influ-
enced by specific events and contingencies. Here, on the contrary, we
must be aware of the different historical, philosophical, and political con-
stellations which Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin belonged to. They
lived through different moments in European intellectual history, through
diverse philosophical seasons, and hence sought to respond to disparate
cultural and social urgencies. The different historical settings for their
reflections could not but have consequences for their political, sociological
and philosophical orientation. The analogies between their perspectives
are significant, yet at times deceptive. In a portrait dedicated to Georg
Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer—who was one of Simmel’s scholars and, later,
became Benjamin’s rather controversial friend—claims there are two ways
to cross the surface of reality: analogies (“Analogie”) and similes
(“Gleichnisse”).3 “Analogy links two phenomena that, in certain respects,
reveal the same behavior. The simile seeks, through an image, to express
and make evident the meaning that a certain phenomenon has for us”
(Kracauer 2004, p. 156). This distinction gives rise to two wholly different
philosophical and cognitive styles:
The man of the analogy never gives an explanation of the world, since he is
not driven by a preconceived idea; he is satisfied to know the laws that
govern the course of events and, turning his gaze to the wealth of the phe-
nomenal world, to pair off all that is uniform; he keeps his own ego to him-
3
My translation. The German term Gleichnis poses important problems of translation.
Some authors translate it as “likeness” (Frisby 1986, p. 60); others as “metaphor” (Thomas
Y. Levin, in Kracauer 1995, p. 237). We prefer “similes,” also chosen in the insightful book
by M. Vedda (Vedda 2021, p. 28).
self. The man of the similes, by nature much less objective, allows the world
to act on him; the world means something for him, and he wants to repre-
sent this meaning. His soul is brimming with the absolute, his ego aspires to
lose itself in it. (Ibid.)
Comparing Simmel and Benjamin is a very rich and insightful exercise

in distinguishing analogies and similes. As we will see, most of the second-
ary literature observed that there are many analogies between these two
thinkers, but it is also necessary—and this will be one of the main goals of
this work—to research the similes in the very particular ways indicated by
Kracauer: not just what is similar, but what represents an objective mean-
ing. In other words, tracing the similes also leads us to take a stand on
concepts and problems indicated by the authors in question, trying to
express which could better approximate the truth—provide an even pre-
carious, approximate truth. Such indication is clearly given by Theodor
Adorno in his portrait of Walter Benjamin in Prisms when he states: “the
decisive differences between philosophers have always consisted in
nuances; what is most bitterly irreconcilable is that which is similar, but
which thrives on different centers” (Adorno 1997, p. 231).4 Adorno’s
methodological indication is important since it not only suggests starting
with what is similar—similes—but also encourages finding the “centers” of
the thought of different authors. Only in this way can we reach a satisfac-
tory comparison in which—using Kracauer’s words—“the one casts its
light into the other, and onto it alone” (Kracauer 2004, p. 155). In what
follows a purposeful attempt will be made to treasure and apply these indi-
cations. In this sense all the topics that Simmel and Benjamin have in com-
mon—first the metropolis as the metaphor of modernity, but also the
“concrete” and fragmentary way of thinking, the epistemology of history,
the reflection on historical time, the analysis of commodity culture—must
be considered similes (not simple analogies) that “thrive on different cen-
ters” that need to be explored.
4
Here, Adorno is comparing Benjamin with the contemporary ideology of the “con-
crete”, under which concept he includes Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s onto-
logical existentialism mainly, but also Simmel’s philosophy. Adorno sustains the superiority
of Benjamin’s concept of history and historiographical practice because this was directed “at
the construction of constellations of historical entities which do not remain simply inter-
changeable examples for ideas but which in their uniqueness constitute the ideas themselves
as historical” (Adorno 1997, p. 231). Simmel, on the contrary, merely purses an “innocuous
illustration of concepts through colourful historical objects […] when he depicted his primi-
tive metaphysics of form and life in the cup-handle, the actor, Venice” (ibid.). One of the
goals of this book is to explore if such a harsh judgment is founded.
14 V. MELE
3.1 David Frisby’s Fragments of Modernity

The analogies and similes between Simmel and Benjamin’s thought are at
the center of David Frisby’s fundamental work of rediscovery of these two
authors, something that he accomplished firstly and foremostly in
Fragments of modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel,
Kracauer and Benjamin (Frisby 1986). Published in 1986 (just four years
after Benjamin’s publication of the enormous quantity of material known
as the Das Passagenwerk, “The Arcades Project”), Frisby offers a detailed
account of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s views on modernity and urban life.
For Frisby, the social theorist in search of a theory of modernity is con-
fronted with a paradoxical situation: either modernity becomes subsumed
under the theories of “modernization”—that refer in large part to the
transformation of political, economic, and social systems or sub-systems—
or it is fused with the “modernism” of the aesthetic sphere. In either case
it disappears as an autonomous object of investigation. What Frisby tries
to accomplish with his research is to extract some key social dimensions of
modernity from the writings of the three authors who are the focus of his
book. He highlights some methodological, thematic, biographical, and
textual analogies between Simmel and Benjamin,5 the most important
5
I momentarily overlook the connections of both thinkers with Siegfried Kracauer,
which—however significant—are not at the center of this discussion. Although, not dis-
cussed (for reasons of space), Antonio Rafele’s interesting book deserves mentioning (Rafele
2010). It deals with Georg Simmel’s Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben (1903) and Walter
Benjamin’s Das Passagen-Werk, and consists of presenting excerpts from each of these works,
preceded and followed by interpretive remarks. The author leaves it to readers to establish
connections and correspondences between Simmel and Benjamin, presenting one and the
other in succession and giving the latter a more important place than the former. Simmel
deciphers the sensitive experience of metropolitan life. The big city allows for the loosening
of constraints and traditions, and the individual can enjoy greater freedom. But, as the author
reminds us in direct reference to Simmel, “it is of course only the reverse of this freedom
when one feels nowhere so lonely and forlorn as in the bustle of the big city.” Indeed, in
general, it is not at all necessary for man’s freedom to be reflected in his emotional life in the
form of happiness. Benjamin, in the selected passages, refers specifically to fashion and pho-
tography. In both these forms of expression, it is duration and timelessness that seem elusive.
Each photograph represents an instant that contains within it a part of the history of the
world; no linearity, no progressiveness is established between one photograph and the next.
Life unfolds in this pattern of a succession of just concluded moments. Benjamin and Simmel,
each in his own way, describe this new mode of individual existence, which consists of innu-
merable events, discontinuous and without clear links to past experiences. Constructed in the
manner of Benjamin’s Passages, that is, by juxtaposed fragments, this short book, more than
a systematic study and comparison of the two authors in question, is a beautiful invitation to
discover their arduous but stimulating thoughts.
being that Simmel’s and Benjamin’s analyses of modernity have in com-

mon the importance conferred to chance “fragments” of reality. Their
attempts to investigate the social dimensions of modernity owe little to
Max Weber’s historical and sociological analysis of modernity, intended as
the delineation of what distinguishes modern western societies from ear-
lier forms of society and from other civilizations. For Frisby, on the con-
trary, Simmel and Benjamin “in their different ways … were concerned
with the new modes of the perception and experience of social and histori-
cal existence set in train by the upheaval of capitalism. Their central con-
cern was the discontinuous experience of time, space and causality as
transitory, fleeting and fortuitous or arbitrary—an experience located in
the immediacy of social relations, including our relations with the social
and physical environment of the metropolis and our relations with the
past” (Frisby 1986, p. 4). More than any of their contemporaries, Simmel
and Benjamin were able to capture and express the “new” and the “mod-
ern” life-world of metropolis. This was mainly due to their strong aes-
thetic interest in modernity, as well as to their own mode of representing
modern experience, which Frisby considered to be “modernist.” Actually,
neither of them can be reduced to the simple category of social theorists
of modernity, nor can they be considered exclusively sociologists. Simmel
and Benjamin have in common a strong aesthetic interest in literary and
artistic modernism, which informs their social analysis and even their
mode of writing. Therefore, it is clearly proper to highlight a “modernist”
analogy between Simmel and Benjamin.
As is known, Simmel wrote frequently on the literary and aesthetic
movements of his time—naturalism, expressionism, l’art pour l’art, orien-
talism—as well as about some central figures in the art of his time such as
Arnold Böcklin and Rodin. He also wrote about some literati, such as
Gerhardt Hauptmann, Stefan George, and corresponded with writers such
as Paul Ernst and Reiner Maria Rilke. Benjamin too was not just interested
in aesthetic modernism—Baudelaire, Kafka, surrealism, Brecht’s theater,
and many others—but also actively absorbed these sources in his analysis
of society. Their analyses of modernity also have in common above all “an
orientation—often unwitting—towards that which Baudelaire, as the orig-
inator of the modern concept of modernité, characterized as ‘le transitoire,
le fugitive, le contingent’” (Frisby 1986, p. 2). This is a very original and
fascinating hermeneutic strategy adopted by Frisby, but it runs the risk of
being precisely just an analogy unless the “different centers” around which
the thought of the authors under comparison revolve are sufficiently
16 V. MELE
clarified. In other words, if Frisby’s main thesis is: “it is plausible to argue,
in the sense in which Baudelaire understood modernity, that Simmel is the
first sociologist of modernity” (Frisby 1986, p. 39), then the reader feels
entitled to ask the following questions: did Simmel know Baudelaire? Did
they have similar aesthetical conceptions? Is Simmel a Baudelaire sociolo-
gist? These important questions need to be answered, especially because
Frisby’s book and his entire hermeneutic work on Simmel is full of analo-
gies, the most popular probably being the portrayal of Simmel as “flâneur
sociologist” and Simmel’s sociology as a form of “sociological impression-
ism” (Frisby 1981, 1984, 1985, 1986, 2013). Using these suggestive
metaphors, Frisby aims to read and criticize Simmel from Benjamin’s and
Lukács’ perspectives, but if he does not elaborate on the differences
between Simmel’s and Baudelaire’s flâneurie, then we are faced with a
morphological analogy, rather than a—supposed—similarity of content.
Regarding the different centers of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s thought,
Frisby is clearly relying on Benjamin’s Marxism, echoing Lukács and
Adorno’s judgment of Simmel lacking points of analysis of modern cul-
ture. In fact, when it comes to Simmel’s conception, this aesthetical
account of modernity reveals some typical—and for Frisby mostly despi-
cable—characteristics. Firstly, it is not grounded in any historical investiga-
tion of the important changes in German society around the turn of the
century: “there exists no systematic historical analysis of any of the phe-
nomena that he describes” (Frisby 1986, p. 41). Frisby’s opinion is that
“Simmel’s theory of modernity does not take the form of a historical anal-
ysis, but rather an account of the modes of experiencing the social reality
of modernity” (ibid., p. 61). However, these social experiences are lim-
ited. They are neurasthenia, the social experience of the metropolis and the
world of money and commodities. This characteristic of Simmel’s social
theory of modernity—united with the “complete absence of references to
earlier contributors to the field of study”—transposes Simmel’s social frag-
ments and vignettes into “eternity, that is, into the sole form of existence
in which it can exist as pure essentiality and can be contemporary with us
at any time” (ibid., p. 51). “In other words, social reality is viewed as sub
specie aeternitatis” (ibid.). For Frisby Simmel fails to analyze modernity in
its historical dimension: modernity would in his view be an “Eternal
Present”—as he titled the book chapter dedicated to Simmel. Furthermore,
Simmel’s social theory exhibits a somewhat problematic stance toward
the possibility of grasping the totality of existence, and hence, the social
totality. The fragmentary—impressionistic/modernist—representation of
modernity “oscillates between asserting that the fragment is the totality

and that the fragment, by virtue of its connections with the essential, pro-
vides the gateway, as it were, to the totality” (ibid., p. 58). Frisby is skepti-
cal about this philosophy: “such intuitionism as the basis for grounding
knowledge is hardly the firmest foundation, as the basis for grounding
knowledge is hardly the firmest foundation for the development of a soci-
ology of modernity” (ibid., p. 53). Herein lies the superiority of Benjamin’s
“Prehistory of Modernity,” which is founded on “dialectical images.” In
fact, the central focus of Benjamin’s analysis is the working out and exem-
plification of commodity fetishism within the fragments of modernity, in
such a way that one could see beyond and behind the reified world of the
commodity halo. Frisby remains convinced that “Marx is a better guide
out of the world of the appearances generated by the exchange and circu-
lation processes precisely because, like the classical political economists
before him, he did not regard them as the end point of his analysis” (ibid.,
p. 107). Frisby seems here to share a Marxist perspective that needs to be
updated confronting the present conditions of production and consump-
tion: if we adopt a view that places more importance on culture, commu-
nication, and aesthetics in the production process (Harvey 1990; Lash
and Urry 2002; Featherstone 2007; Fraser and Jaeggi 2018), probably
one would find that Simmel’s and Benjamin’s fascination with the world
of exchange and circulation can help us to better understand contempo-
rary post-Fordist capitalist consumer culture.
Although Frisby’s suggestive and pioneering study remains a funda-
mental introduction to Simmel’s and Benjamin’s theories of modernity,
Fragments of Modernity neglects at least five other key aspects needed to
fully grasp and understand Simmel’s and Benjamin’s view of modernity
comparatively; these will be addressed in this book. Firstly, although
Frisby’s suggestive and pioneering study is very insightful, as it highlights
a “modernist” analogy between Simmel’s and Benjamin’s fragmentary
methods, it is too contradictorily close to Lukács’ criticism of the modern-
ist movement as a form of “destruction of reason.” On the one hand,
Frisby admits that it is this aesthetic dimension that made Simmel’s social
theory of modernity possible, while on the other, he rejects this method as
a form of “intuitionism”—echoing, again, Lukács’ judgment: are we
merely dealing with a form of intuitionism and irrationalism, or is there
something that we can save for a renewal of the social and historical sci-
ences? What are the epistemological and philosophical roots of their theo-
ries of knowledge? How differently are they related to aesthetics?
18 V. MELE
Secondly, although Frisby rightly states that Benjamin centered his

thought on Baudelaire’s rather than Weber’s view of modernity, there is at
least some indication that Benjamin drew from Max Weber literally, spe-
cifically regarding the relation between capitalism and religion. When
Benjamin was frequenting Marianne Weber’s circle in Heidelberg, he for-
mulated a telling research project titled “capitalism as religion,” as a direct
reaction to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Certainly, Benjamin’s approach
immediately appears to be rather different from Weber’s, but nevertheless
their affinity is latent—even if not fully developed—in Benjamin’s arcades
project and remains a fruitful legacy of Benjamin’s investigation of
modernity.
Thirdly, Fragments of Modernity neglects—or places in the margins—
the pivotal problem of metropolitan modernity: the construction and
defense of individuality. As previously stated, the blasé and the flaneur
represent the emblems of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s models of metropoli-
tan subjectivity, and it is worth analyzing, reconstructing, and comparing
these two figures to understand some essential aesthetic and cultural char-
acteristics of our modern times.
Finally, Frisby’s fundamental, pioneering analysis lacks an investigation
of the gendered character of modern culture and the importance of love as
a form of criticism of this culture. In a sense, for Simmel and Benjamin,
women represent the possibility of a different outcome of modernity itself
and a form of critical resistance within it.
However, despite these shortcomings, Frisby’s work remains an insight-
ful and indispensable introduction to Simmel’s and Benjamin’s accounts
of modernity.
3.2 Marian Mičko’s Walter Benjamin und Georg Simmel

While Frisby was in fact convinced that “evidence of Simmel’s influence
on Benjamin’s early work is difficult to find” (Frisby 1986, p. 9), Marian
Mičko’s book Walter Benjamin und Georg Simmel (2010), on the con-
trary, seeks to show that “Benjamin dealt with Simmel’s writings again and
again throughout his life: information about this is provided in particular
by the mentions, excerpts, and quotations of Simmel in Benjamin’s writ-
ings and letters, his remarks referred to by friends and acquaintances, as
well as their own remarks” (Mičko 2010, p. 23). Her book therefore is an
attempt to fill the research gap on the supposed intellectual influence of
Simmel on the young Benjamin. Benjamin in fact took his first steps in the
same academic environment where Simmel was an influential and well-

known intellectual, albeit with a notoriously unfortunate academic career
that earned him a professorship only in 1918—the year of his death.
Benjamin’s direct involvement with Simmel’s writings is in fact docu-
mented by many sources. Even though in his Verzeichnis der gelesenen
Schriften (“list of works read”) he quotes only two of Simmel’s writings
(Die Mode [“fashion,” 1911] and Das Problem der historischen Zeit [“The
Problem of Historical Time,” 1916]), it is certain that he attended one or
more of Simmel’s courses in Berlin (Eiland and Jennings 2014, p. 49;
Landmann and Gassen 1958, p. 151) and he read many of his works. A list
of Benjamin’s readings is given in the first detailed chapter meaningfully
titled Belege für Benjamins Beschäftigung mit Simmel (“Evidence for
Benjamin’s engagement with Georg Simmel,” Mičko 2010, pp. 23–50)
and also includes Philosophie des Geldes, Goethe, and Essai sur la sociologie
des sens. While those who are familiar with Benjamin’s late work can easily
locate these quotations from Simmel, it is not certain—but highly proba-
ble—that Benjamin knew important essays by Simmel, such as Die
Großstädte und das Geistesleben, Der Begriff und die Tragödie der Kultur
and the essays on historical understanding, Das Wesen des historischen
Verstehen and Die Probleme der Geschichtephilosophie. Benjamin’s probable
first readings of Simmel are cited in his diary, Von der Sommerreise 1911,
where he mentions studying Simmel’s book Die Religion [1906]. Here
Benjamin could have found, firstly, “the specifically religious mood of
man,” secondly, its connection with “religion as an entity to which the
religious function has consolidated itself,” and thirdly, in a detailed man-
ner, “the reciprocal relation” existing in analogies and interactions
“between social and religious life” (Mičko 2010, p. 24).
After his Baccalaureate in March 1912, Benjamin studied one semester
in Freiburg im Brisgau, transferred in the winter of 1912/1913 for one
semester at the Königliche Freidrich-Wilhelm-Universität in Berlin, and
then after one more semester in Freiburg, finished his studies in Berlin dur-
ing the winter semester 1913/1914. In these years Benjamin was also
involved in the “movement for school reform” (Schulreformbewegung)
and the “youth culture movement” (Jugendkulturbewegung) founded by
philosopher and pedagogist Gustav Wynekens (1875–1964), who had a
strong and enduring influence on Benjamin, as testified to by the note-
worthy essays Die Schulreform, eine Kulturbewegung [1912], Dialog über
die Religiosität der Gegenwart [1912] and Erfahrung [1913]. It is possi-
ble that in the context of these formative years Benjamin was also attracted
20 V. MELE
by the essayistic style of the “youngest philosopher” of Berlin, Georg

Simmel, who enjoyed great popularity with young students. Looking at
the University Calendar (Vorlesungsverzeichnis) of Berlin University dur-
ing the winter semesters 1912/13 and 1913/14 it is possible that
Benjamin attended the class on Philosophie der Kunst, Grundzüge der
Logik, as well as Simmel’s conferences on the style of applied arts
(Kunstgewerbe). However, Mičko’s most interesting and original contri-
bution is highlighting Simmel/Benjamin Jewish analogies. It was precisely
such “cultural Zionism,” which was advocated in opposition to Theodor
Herzls “Palestine Zionism” especially by Simmel’s disciple Martin Buber
(1878–1965), that may have attracted Simmel to him. But it was
Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem, of all people, who was committed to
Zionism and who was to be a source of Jewish knowledge and conscience
for Benjamin throughout his life, despite having attested to his “rather
total ignorance of Jewish matters” (Scholem 1997, p. 75, quot. in Mičko
2010, p. 30). Benjamin was one of those students of Jewish descent who,
according to Scholem, might have liked Simmel; however, Benjamin—
unlike Scholem—apparently did not mind Simmel’s lack of commitment
to Judaism, because he was able to identify Jewish values everywhere in his
cultural Zionism. Although he was not a convinced Zionist and probably
only very rarely spoke of himself as a Jew, Simmel was nevertheless per-
ceived by many—both by his behavior and by his way of thinking—as a
Jew. Even more than any possible Jewish influences, however, it may have
been this personal experience that was so significant to Benjamin. Simmel
seemed “a typical Jew” in his appearance and behavior, so much so that he
was also a victim of anti-Semitism, but his life experiences were also
reflected in his work, especially in his late writings. Klaus Christian Köhnke
pointed out that it was probably for this reason—as is particularly evident
in his academic career—that Simmel repeatedly had the “experience of an
absolute boundary, of struggle, dispute, enmity, and possibly irreconcil-
able conflict.” This experience explained not only his repeated descrip-
tions of social or metaphysical conflicts and dualisms, as Simmel condensed
them in his remarks on the “stranger” (as well as elsewhere), but also his
“critique of common sense, represented in particular by reference to the
use of language by questioning and analyzing semantically, economically,
and value-wise what is valid in terms of origin and function.” However, it
is important to state—more definitively and clearly than Mičko does—that
both Simmel’s and Benjamin’s centers in relation to Judaism are quite dif-
ferent. As we will see later, Benjamin will clearly express the need to
transfer some insights and concepts present in Simmel’s and Goethe’s phi-
losophy of life from the “pagan” sphere of nature to the “Jewish” sphere
of history. These remain two distinct philosophical centers of Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s reflections that it is good to bear in mind in order to analyze
the analogies of their thought. These quite distinct tendencies will result
in marked differences with respect to the more distinctly religious aspect
of Jewish culture. Where Benjamin will clearly espouse the messianic ele-
ment, Simmel will have toward religion a more detached attitude marked
by his tragic conception of life. The failure to focus on this different way
of interpreting the Zionist heritage is also a defect in the comparative
analysis of the phenomenology of modern life in Simmel and Benjamin
that constitutes the most substantial part of the research. Mičko, as a
Köhnke scholar, interestingly compares Simmel and Benjamin on the so-
called “objective spirit” (objective Geist). Simmel’s master Lazarus consid-
ers the process of the “condensation of thought in history”
(Vedichtungsprozesses des Denkens in der Geschichte) central to the cultural
theory of the modern (Köhnke 2019, p. 256 ff.). The “culture of an
epoch” (Cultur des Zeitalters) can be understood from the individual and
collective spirit condensed in the objects of everyday life.
The fact is that this “fundamental research question” (Fragestellung)
fits Simmel very well, while Benjamin not so much. It is absolutely true
that Benjamin’s work contains some of the finest analyses of the culture of
things (The Arcades Project can be considered a project on “history made
thing”) and represents more generally a theory of reification. The differ-
ence lies precisely in Benjamin’s radical desire to overturn the very concept
of “bourgeois” autonomous culture and culture in general. “There is no
document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barba-
rism” (Benjamin 2003 [1940], p. 392): in its drastic reductionism, this
very famous statement reveals the difference between Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s approach to culture which appears to be neglected in the book
(on this see Barbisan 2016). Objects for Benjamin are “allegories of the
un-expressed,” where the baroque spirit of catastrophic utopia is revealed
with its tendency to destroy appearances and false totality. In this sense,
there is no such concept as “Benjamin’s concept of culture.” The differ-
ences between Simmel’s and Benjamin’s positions are not trivial: Simmel
remains attached to values that Benjamin describes as “bourgeois”—and
as such, seeks to overcome them. This essential aspect turns out to be
barely present in the book by Mičko, whose well-documented work seeks
above all to highlight Benjamin’s intellectual debt to Simmel. Indeed,
22 V. MELE
while Marian Mičko succeeds in emphasizing the closeness of the two

authors, she does not bother to explore the points where their interpreta-
tions diverge. A more comprehensive comparison—one that not only cited
some differences, but also compared the two thoughts in greater depth—
would probably have avoided the impression of repetition that sometimes
imposes itself on the reader of Walter Benjamin und Georg Simmel.
3.3 Stéphan Symons, More than Life: Georg Simmel

and Walter Benjamin on Art
While the two previously mentioned works are significantly marked by
the prevalence of analogies over similitudes, the matter is decidedly differ-
ent for Stéphan Symons’ agile volume More than life. Georg Simmel and
Walter Benjamin on Art (Symons 2017). Here Symons tried to compare
Simmel and Benjamin directly by focusing on their aesthetic conceptions,
while comparing their view of life, death, and meaning broadly. His inter-
pretative key is truly courageous and innovative in the specialized litera-
ture on the two German thinkers: at the center of his study, he sets the
concept of life, toward which Benjamin expressed great antipathy
throughout his life. For Symons, the most relevant element for compar-
ing Simmel’s and Benjamin’s aesthetic works is the former’s peculiar ver-
sion of Lebensphilosophie (“Philosophy of Life”), which he developed in a
late stage of his writings, and which is foundational for his view on the
relation between nature and culture. Simmel famously divides his main
category of life in two subcategories, “more life”—the constant tendency
of life to replenish itself—and “more-than-life”—the birth of something
new and different from life, generally associated by Simmel with the prin-
ciple of “form.” In Simmel’s view the principle of form coincides with the
creation of a meaning for life and this process—as the prefix “more-than”
indicates—it is internal and immanent to life. Following other prestigious
commentators such as Siegfried Kracauer and Max Horkheimer, Symons
is of the opinion that Simmel does not consider life to be merely a given,
and he refuses to simply identify life with nature, whether it be human or
non-human. This marks the difference between Simmel and the life phi-
losophers of his time, namely, Nietzsche and Bergson. The former put
“life itself” at the center of his analysis and considered the cultivation of
an unspoiled “will to life” to be the most crucial component in the quest
for meaning, while for Simmel the latter failed to sufficiently acknowl-
edge that life cannot be separated from death.6
For Symons the difference between Simmel and Benjamin stems from
conflicting ideas on the connection between life, death, and meaning:
“while Simmel understands life as a principle of infinite variation and inno-
vation, Benjamin’s views on ‘eternal transience’ and a ‘total passing away’
confront us with the very antithesis of variation and innovation” (Symons
2017, p. 11). In fact, Benjamin rejects Simmel’s view of life as a continu-
ous unity of infinite and meaningful renewal. An important step in the
analysis of this relation involves Benjamin’s concept of “mere life,” which
takes on the same role as the natural in Simmel. Life, in Benjamin’s view,
is primarily marked not by change and renewal, but by empty repetitions
and endless recurrence: what Benjamin called “the always-the-same.” “In
short, while Simmel replenishes life with the capacity to ceaselessly rejuve-
nate itself, Benjamin empties life of precisely this capacity of self-
innovation” (ibid.). In the book we find a rich and complex constellation
of the differences between Simmel’s and Benjamin’s views of life and the
consequences that these have on their aesthetical conceptions. Perhaps the
most important indication comes from Benjamin himself and is correctly
reported by Symons. The fundamental philosophical concept to evaluate
Simmel’s and Benjamin’s different views of life comes from the most posi-
tive reference to Simmel’s work that can be found in all Benjamin’s writ-
ings: that on the concept of “origin” (Ursprung). “Calling his own concept
of ‘origin’ a ‘rigorous and decisive transformation of this basic Goethean
concept from the domain of nature to that of history’, Benjamin indicates
both the affinities and the differences between his framework and Simmel’s
philosophy” (Symons 2017, p. 16). Simmel’s concept of life presupposes
“the pagan context of nature,” whereas Benjamin operates in the “Jewish
context of history” (Benjamin 2002, p. 462). This is the decisive differ-
ence—in Adorno’s words: a similitude that revolves around a different
philosophical center—between Simmel’s and Benjamin’s views of life,
which is worth expounding upon, as it contains the key distinction between
their perspectives. Simmel’s concept of life—even in the changes from his
6
As Simmel himself stated, “It seems as if [Bergson] did not at all understand the tragedy
that life needs to transform itself into no-life, simply in order to exist” (Simmel 2000 [1914],
p. 63). “Culture in general,” Simmel notes in his last book on The View of Life, “arises where
categories produced in life, and for life’s sake, become autonomous shapers of intrinsically
valued formations that are objective with respect to life” (Simmel 2010 [1918], p. 33).
24 V. MELE
first naturalist writings to the last “vitalistic” ones, a difference that also
seems to have been overlooked in the book—is totally an immanentistic
one, whereas Benjamin sees in “mere life” (bloßes Leben) the possibility of
redemption. For Simmel “insofar as life’s essence goes, transcendence is
immanent to it” (Simmel 2010 [1918], p. 9). Symons grasps this point
when he rightly states: “While Simmel connects the creation of meaning
to the inseparability of life and death (death is the “form giving … shaper
of life”), Benjamin connects meaning to the possibility, however implau-
sible it may seem, that life and death can nevertheless be disentangled”
(Symons 2017, p. 11). In Benjamin’s eyes, death and impermanence are
ultimately not to be considered irrevocable. “Benjamin thus rejects
Simmel’s suggestion that meaning can be drawn from the experience of
death and shifts the ultimate challenge of philosophy to an attempt to
think against death rather than with it” (ibid., p. 12).
The five central chapters of Symons’ book are dedicated to Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s analyses of specific works of art, both of which revolve around
the fundamental idea that artwork is a human construct that creates mean-
ing by reproducing a part of the world. The first three chapters provide a
detailed reading of Simmel’s three most important essays on art, namely
the texts dedicated to Michelangelo, Rembrandt, and Rodin. While Simmel
regards artwork as symbolically representing the continuity of life in con-
centrated form, Benjamin believes that the fundamental effect of artistic
creation is discontinuity. The book’s second part is then dedicated to
Benjamin’s view that innovation and renewal in life, as in art, are not meta-
physical givens, but necessitate a momentary intervention that needs to be
created. The fourth chapter offers a particularized reading of those places
in Benjamin’s work where he describes moments of meaningful interrup-
tion. It analyzes Benjamin’s ideas on friendliness, melancholy, recollection,
mémoire involontaire, and photography, whereby a detail or fragment can
strike us as significant, despite the fact that it cannot become visible as uni-
tary or a continuous totality in its own right. The fifth chapter—arguably
one of the most innovative and original ever written on Benjamin—tries to
interpret Benjamin’s views on the political relevance of Charles
Chaplin’s work.
With regard to the relevance of Simmel’s aesthetic and philosophical
conceptions, Symons makes his point clearly: “Simmel’s fear that his spiri-
tual legacy will be all but obliterated by the very people who consider
themselves his heirs is not without grounds. Not a few of his insights are
among the most contested philosophical ideas of the twentieth century.
The Frankfurt school, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, postmodern thought,

and deconstructionism have joined forces in battling the view that life
spontaneously renews itself and that individual identity designates a
unique, continuous, and unified existence” (Symons 2017, p. 151). At the
turn of the century and subsequent period, Simmel was preoccupied with
the work of great philosophers and artists—such as Kant, Goethe,
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, George, Rembrandt, Rodin, and Michelangelo—
who, for him, were genuine producers of cultural goods for humanity and
who, through their achievements, represented the intellectual creative
power of man. However, Simmel’s lifelong preoccupation and conceptu-
alization of individuality should not be confused with the individuality of
these luminaries alone. For the young Simmel (Köhnke 1996), influenced
by Spencer and Darwin, the Unity of the ego, human soul and individual-
ity are demystified through natural science-oriented psychologies and
developmental history. What remains is a concept of individuality as a
mere intersection of social circles, a point of view that Simmel would even-
tually—in his late reflections on the doctrine of the “individual law”—call
a form of “extreme sociologism.”
Contrary to Symons’ estimation, Simmel’s reflection on individuality
deserves to be recovered and discussed. Simmel is unique among the clas-
sics of sociology in posing the problem of individuality, its construction,
and its preservation in a differentiated modern society. If one thinks of the
relevance of the theme of radical individualism in today’s phase of capital-
ism, as pointed out by authors of different cultural backgrounds such as
Lasch, Sennett, and Honneth in the social sciences or writers such as
Michel Houellebecq, one can infer that Simmel was right in pointing out
this profound tendency of modern culture. Simmel was not the only one
to have noticed this tendency more than a century ago, but he was one of
the few who did not base his thoughts on the dichotomy individual-
society—where the latter represents the positive pole and the former the
negative pole—and therefore judged radical individualism exclusively as a
pathology. Therefore, to accuse Simmel of being tied to a last century
ideal of personality as the only ideal of personality makes little sense. He
did not have a ready-made recipe for solving the problems associated with
the phenomenon, but it was certainly clear to him that there was no turn-
ing back from the radically individualistic structure of modern society.
“Rather,” he asserted at the end of his little sociology—which, unsurpris-
ingly, was devoted to the problem of the relationship between the indi-
vidual and society as expressed in the subtitle—“I prefer to believe that
26 V. MELE
with the ideas of free personality and individual uniqueness, individualism

is far from having said the last word: that is, that the work of men results
in an ever-increasing multiplicity of forms and enables personality both to
assert itself and to conform to the value of its existence” (Simmel 1999
[1917], p. 149). For this reason, the issues at the very foundations of the
metropolis under consideration here are worth further investigation.
4 The Structure of the Present Work

The next chapter (Metropolis and Modernity) aims to clarify why the
metropolis can be considered the “general social form” of modernity and
what its main problems are. The beginning of the twentieth century
marked a caesura in the history of social thought that broke with the cer-
tainties (epistemological, social) of the positivist era and began to doubt
the very existence of the concept of progress. “Classical German
sociology”—Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand
Tönnies—was influenced by this self-description of modernity that we
might call “literary aesthetic” (Lichtblau 1996, p. 73), whose main expo-
nents can be considered Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Nietzsche. From
a reflection on society, the focus shifted to a reflection on modernity, par-
ticularly through a sociology of culture that sought to develop a disciplin-
ary response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s diagnosis of decadence.
In the “sociological discourse of modernity,” a metropolis emerges as
an “aesthetic object” characterized by a number of privileged themes—in
particular: (1) the crisis of the idea of progress and the self-description of
the modern as an emphatic “time now”, symbolized by fashion; (2) as a
consequence of this, the attempt to interpret the “newness” of the cultural
and social forms of the modern on the basis of specific objects of study and
no longer through the study of “society” as a whole. For Simmel and
Benjamin in particular, one object of study prevails over the others: the
so-called “aestheticization of everyday life,” which in Simmel takes the
forms of reflection on the philosophy of money and in Benjamin the physi-
ognomy of the commodity; (3) the concern for the fate of the survival of
the individual as a differentiated entity in this new social and cultural con-
text that sees the increasing importance of the masses (symbolized by the
Baudelerian theme of the crowd), of technology and bureaucracies, seen
as homogenizing and depersonalizing forces; and (4) the general “reha-
bilitation of love” and erotic culture as a consequence of the rise of the
“gender question” posed by the modern feminist movement. The latter in
particular will play an important role in the establishment of sociology as

an autonomous scientific discipline, on a par with the so-called “social
question,” although this is often not recognized with sufficient clarity in
historical reconstructions.
In this sense, the metropolis functions for “classical German sociology”
(Tönnies, Weber, Sombart) and Weimar-era social thought as a veritable
“total work of art” (Gesamtkunstwerk) of modernity, where its character-
istics and paradoxes can be observed.
The first part of the present work, entitled City and Modernity in Georg
Simmel, delves into Georg Simmel’s metropolis, which is articulated as
follows. Chapter 3 delves into some aspects of Simmel’s theory of knowl-
edge: a theory of knowledge that attributes a privileged cognitive function
to the random fragment of reality, of which the essay is the privileged form
of expression. It stands in an almost mimetic relationship to metropolitan
social reality, which is by definition groundless. Chapter 4 then takes up
some significant aspects of Simmel’s sociological aesthetics to understand
his conception of modernity. For Simmel, in fact, the analysis of modernity
is always situated at the point of “indifference” between aesthetic analysis
and sociological analysis, as demonstrated by the “epochal” concept of
style at the end of The Philosophy of Money, analyzed fully in Chap. 5.
Finally, Chap. 6 enters the social analysis proper of the metropolis, which
is also the main epistemological question of Simmel’s sociology: how is
society possible? In the metropolis, “society” ceases to be a taken-for-
granted object of inquiry and instead we question (in analogy to Kant’s
philosophical style) its very possibility. The theoretical solution that
Simmel seeks to propose—the identification of the sociological a priori
that make “association” (Vergesellschaftung) possible—represents the fea-
tures of a social ontology in which the concrete characters of the relations
between the individual and society and modern society are fixed and
described.
The second part, City and Modernity in Walter Benjamin, seeks in anal-
ogy with the previous part to outline the features of Benjamin’s metropo-
lis. Chapter 7 presents an attempt to reconstruct the stages of the work on
Benjamin’s Paris Passages, highlighting the various phases and changes in
the overall project, which lasted for a full fourteen years (1926–1940). It
develops from the hypothesis of an article (written in collaboration with
his writer friend Franz Hessel in a few weeks) to a comprehensive research
project on the origins of bourgeois culture. The work on the Paris Passages
was in fact intended to be an “original history” of the modern. In it, the
28 V. MELE
social and cultural forms of the nineteenth century were to be understood

as original forms in which to discern the fundamental characters of the
modern era. The chapter also raises a question regarding the status of the
publication of Benjamin’s materials and notes, which has been questioned
by scholars and philologists. Finally, we analyze the portraits of cities
(Naples, Moscow, Berlin) that constitute the accomplished models of a
work that has unfortunately remained unfinished. Chapter 8 analyzes the
method employed by Benjamin in his writings on the arcades and the city.
Benjamin—similar to Simmel—uses a neo-Kantian lexicon and would
have preceded his work on the passages of Paris with a gnoseological
premise (Erkenntniskritische Vorrede) along the lines of his study on the
German Trauerspiel. These reflections on the theory of knowledge com-
prise the features of the “historical-sociological physiognomy” through
which Benjamin intended to interpret the social and cultural phenomena
of the city of Paris, which—as is well known—would produce a reflection
on the concept of history that constitutes Walter Benjamin’s theoretical
testament. Chapter 9 deals with the main concept around which the Paris
arcades project was to revolve: commodity fetishism. Benjamin, creatively
elaborating Marx’s reflections, intended to develop a social, historical,
psychological, and theological theory of metropolitan modernity as a
dream world. The phantasmagoria spoken of at the beginning of Das
Kapital becomes for Benjamin the very culture of the commodity-
producing society: it tends to realize in the social reality of the metropolis
a world in which things become “sensibly supersensible.” Chapter 10
delves into the part of the project on arcades that reached a state of greater
completeness, namely that devoted to the Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire.
The peculiarity of Benjamin’s analysis is to place Baudelaire’s poetry in
relation to the experience of the capitalist metropolis. The allegorical sen-
sibility of the German Baroque comes up again in the context of Second
Empire Paris. The backdrop this time is not the historical-theological
cleavages of the seventeenth century but rather the reification of metro-
politan man also described by Simmel. Finally, Chap. 11 pulls the threads
together and offers a comparison of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s conceptions
of the metropolis. The sense of this research is that of a pre-history of
postmodern culture. Simmel’s and Benjamin’s reflections on the metropo-
lis are similar, but not analogous, and revolve around different centers.
These centers are precisely modernity as tragedy and modernity as
Trauerspiel.
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CHAPTER 2
Metropolis and Modernity
1 Premise
It is important to clarify how, in the context of contemporary sociology
with Simmel and later in the Kulturkritik of the Weimar era, the move
came about from “society” to “modernity” as a concern and object of
reflection and research with wide-ranging themes. Why and in what terms
does modernity become an issue? Why, especially in the field of sociology,
is there a shift from reflection on society to one on modernity? How is
modernity represented by the metropolis? It is moreover essential to
understand how we arrive at a different conception of sociology, one that
regards the study of social reality as an analysis of the empirical reality of
the present, as a specific experience of what is new, that is to say, the expe-
rience of modernity. Metropolis in this sense coincides with the historical
experience of the great European metropolises at the turn of the nine-
teenth and twentieth centuries (Berlin, Paris, Vienna),1 but ends up
becoming a “cultural category,”2 a metaphor, an “Ur-phenomenon” in
the Goethian sense (cf. Chap. 7). Thus, there is a difference between
“metropolis” as an historical-empirical reality of large Western cities and
1
For a difference between the different modernisms in Paris, Berlin, and Vienna see
Lash (1990).
2
For the metropolis as a “category” of “culture theory,” see the collection of essays edited
by Füzesséry and Simay (2013).

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9_2
34 V. MELE
metropolis as a social and cultural “form,” which assumes significance

beyond any historically defined geographical and temporal boundaries.
This chapter aims to define some general features of this latter.3 The fol-
lowing will provide a reconstruction of some of the general features that
characterize the metropolis as a “general form of modernity.” First of all,
we will ask what is meant by modernity, at least in the context of the tradi-
tion of thought that has contributed to the (very controversial) birth of
the discipline of sociology. Section 2.2 then analyzes the consequences of
the crisis of the idea of “progress” on “classical German sociology.” The
“Generation of the 1890” (Weber, Simmel, Sombart, Tönnies) would find
in Friedrich Nietzsche’s analyses a clear and lucid diagnosis of the crisis of
Western civilization associated with the crisis of the idea of progress and,
with the different elaborations of Kultursoziologie, would try to provide a
“disciplinary” answer to Nietzsche’s analyses. Weber, Sombart, and
Tönnies would devote important analyses to the city and the Großstadt,
from which it is possible to outline a form of metropolis as a “destiny” of
Western culture. However, this metropolis represented not only a signifi-
cant manifestation of Weber’s “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) with the
tendency toward “integral rationalization of social relations,” but also
urban “re-enchantment,” from both a sociological (primacy of consump-
tion over production) and a methodological point of view: it is not possi-
ble to understand the metropolis without first analyzing aesthetic-cultural
modernity (from a sociological perspective, as well).
3
This perspective, apart from Massimo Cacciari (Cacciari 1993, as we will see below), gave
rise to a significant current of thought and social movement in Italy. Metropolis was an Italian
magazine published from the mid-1970s, edited by the philosopher Paolo Virno, an expo-
nent of the so-called Italian theory (Virno and Hardt 2006; Gentili et al. 2018). Such reflec-
tions on the metropolis has continued and has yielded theoretical-sociological fruit (among
others) in works by Massimo Ilardi (Ilardi 1999, 2007, 2017). In one of his first books Ilardi
writes: “To support our hypotheses we do not have documents, statistical data, interviews,
historical reconstructions. Ours is a metropolis of the ‘possible’, a place of the mind, a sce-
nario of ideas. The privileging of such an operation does not necessarily require that the
metropolis be physically known. It is our point of view that contributes to determining the
‘object described’” (Ilardi 1990, p. 7). According to Ilardi, Metropolis is thus a “metropolis
without places”—partly following Marc Augé (1995)—in which the culture of consumption
has replaced that of work, the present has erased the past and the future, the demand for
freedom has buried the ethics of responsibility, social revolt has taken the place of revolution
and movements, and the individual rises on the rubble of the collective.
2 METROPOLIS AND MODERNITY 35
2 Modernity in Question
The concept of “modernity” in the lexicon of the social sciences has been
associated with a multiplicity of different conceptual categories, depend-
ing on the tradition of thought to which it refers.4 One concept has proved
more successful (and, as we shall see, more abused) than the others: that
of “rationalization,” as described by Max Weber in the famous Foreword
to the collection of essays on the sociology of religion. Here Weber unrav-
els that “problem of universal history” to which he devoted the scientific
work of his entire life, namely the question of why on Earth, outside of
Europe, “the scientific, the artistic, the political, or the economic develop-
ment did not take those paths of rationalization which are peculiar to the
Occident?” (Weber 2001, p. xxxviii). For Max Weber, the relationship
between “modernity” and what he called “Occidental rationalism” was an
inherent and obvious necessity. He defined “rational” as that process of
“disenchantment” (Entzauberung) by which a secular culture in Europe
sprang from the disintegration of religious images of the world. With the
modern experimental sciences and the autonomy of the arts, and the theo-
ries of morality and law based on principles, cultural spheres of values were
established that made possible the study of theoretical, aesthetic, or
practical-
moral problems, each according to its own inner norm. In
Europe, artistic, political, and economic development followed a charac-
teristic path that led to the emergence of modern experimental science,
art, and morality into autonomous “value spheres” as a result of the pro-
cess of “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of society.
The process of rationalization affected not only Western culture, but
also modern society as a whole. The new social structures were character-
ized by the functional differentiation of society into various subsystems,
the main ones being the capitalist enterprise and the modern bureaucratic
state. At the level of everyday life, the prevalence of what Weber had called
“rational action over purpose” resulted in the disappearance (or at least
the marginalization) of “life-worlds” and forms of life that legitimized
themselves based on affective and traditional criteria. Traditional or reli-
gious forms of life obviously did not disappear, but they lost their almost
“natural” character, legitimizing themselves “reflexively.” The structural
4
On the concepts of modernity and the critique of modernity in sociology the literature is
obviously immense. For a recent characterization of the concept useful for the purposes of
the present research, see Susen (2015) and Wagner (2021).
36 V. MELE
autonomy of the different spheres resulted in an increase in the efficiency

of the social system, with the consequence of an acceleration of social
change unprecedented in the history of the West.
Awareness of the “rupture” of the modern era with respect to the past
has been accentuated in an unprecedented way: modernity has conceived
itself as new with respect to previous eras. Obviously, the representation of
the social world as a tabula rasa, upon which the new can be inscribed
without reference to the past, is—in the best of cases—purely wishful
thinking. We can consider this idea of modernity “a myth, because the
notion of a radical break has a certain persuasive and pervasive power in
the face of abundant evidence that it does not, and cannot, possibly, occur.
[…] So if modernity exists as a meaningful term, it signals some decisive
moments of creative destruction” (Harvey 2003, p. 1). What distinguishes
the temporal consciousness of modernity is its configuration as a present
open to the future and detached from any normative reference to the past.
The “new” or “modern” age sees in the foreground a present that turns
its expectations toward the future. It can be conceived as such only when
the energies set in motion by social modernization lacerate the experiences
handed down by previous generations. Experience of the vital worlds
marked by a peasant and artisan reality and its places, toward which the
“horizon of expectations” was directed, is firmly replaced by the experi-
ence of progress. What distinguishes the modern age from the previous
ones becomes, in other terms, a radical orientation of expectations—
eschatological, utopian—toward the future. From this drastic reversal and
this equally radical break with tradition, it follows that modernity finds
itself forced to rely on itself, without any possibility of drawing its own
criteria for orientation from the past.
It must therefore pose the problem of its own self-foundation:
“Modernity can and will no longer borrow the criteria by which it takes its
orientation from the models supplied by another epoch; it has to create its
normativity out of itself” (Habermas 1987, p. 7). According to Habermas,
therefore, modernity—compared to other eras—has a spasmodic need for
reassurance (Vergewisserung) of itself. In order to do so, its main instru-
ment is critical self-consciousness. The “heroes” of the sociological and
philosophical discourse of modernity according to Habermas are Hegel
and Weber. For Habermas, “Hegel inaugurated the discourse of moder-
nity. He introduced the theme—the self-critical reassurance of modernity.
He established the rules within which the theme can be varied—the dia-
lectic of enlightenment. By elevating contemporary history to the rank of
philosophy, he put the eternal in touch with the transitory, the atemporal
with what is actually going on” (ibid., p. 51). He in fact—following
Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic of Enlightenment ([1944]
1997)—departs from the question about the rationality of the modern
age. Aesthetics plays a subordinate role in his investigation.5 Indeed, he
never ceases to establish the specific difference between philosophy and
sociology—instruments of rational inquiry—and literature. He also warns
us of the dangers of an aesthetic reconciliation of the cleavages of moder-
nity. However, it is precisely in the field of art that social, political, and
cultural changes are often announced, even before philosophy and the
social sciences become aware of them. In fact, it is precisely the aesthetic
sphere that plays a decisive role in the emergence of a specific sense of
modernity as a definitive “break” of the present with the past and with
tradition. Reflecting on what distinguished the “classical” conception of
beauty among the ancients from that of the moderns, Charles Baudelaire
identified the characteristic of contemporary art in its ability to discern a
lasting or even eternal meaning even in the most superficial and ephemeral
manifestations of modern life, anticipating its future status as classic. In his
famous prose work The Painter of Modern Life [1863], Baudelaire (using
the term for the first time in this sense) describes “modernity” as “the
transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art, whose other half is
the eternal and the immutable” (Baudelaire 2010, p. 4). In aesthetic
reflection, therefore, the radical break with the models of tradition (classi-
cal models of beauty, in this case) and the characteristic of the self-
foundation of modernity mentioned above, which can no longer draw its
aesthetic criteria from previous eras, are affirmed in an even more vehe-
ment manner. Baudelaire’s modernité is evidently an aesthetic definition
and not a social one: nevertheless, it takes on a particular sociological sig-
nificance and meaning. Reflecting on figurative art and poetry, one finds
admirably expressed, through the language of art, the experience of the
uninterrupted change of cultural and social forms that capitalism has
imposed on the human species: in his 1848 Manifesto, Karl Marx described
it with the words “all that is solid melts into air” (Berman 1982). In this
sense, Simmel and (later) Benjamin differ from the tradition of reflection
on the modern in that, while remaining within the realm of social theory,
they draw extensively on the sphere of aesthetics in their reflections. Since
5
For a discussion of the relative unimportance of aesthetics in Habermas’ conception of
modernity see Ingram (1991); Duvenage (2003).
38 V. MELE
this conception is generally rarely adopted in the lexicon of the social sci-
ences, it is appropriate to revisit it in order to highlight its sociological
value, despite its origins in a fundamentally aesthetic-cultural reflection.
Excursus: Modernité
2.1
As Marshall Berman has argued, two of Baudelaire’s major essays, “The
Heroism of Modern Life” and “The Painter of Modern Life,” “set the
agenda for an entire century of art and thought” (Berman 1982, p. 132).
“Baudelaire was the one who in the nineteenth century did more than
anyone else to make the men and women of his century self-conscious as
moderns” (ibid.). Berman argues that in Baudelaire there are at the same
time “lyrical celebrations” of modern life (representing “modern pasto-
rals”), but also vehement denunciations of modernity, which gave rise to
modern forms of “counter-pastorals.” The pastoral vision of modernity
would generate what in the twentieth century we might call “modernola-
try,” a cultural attitude of unconditional exaltation of the modern and the
wonders it necessarily brings with it. The counter-pastorals would inspire
“cultural pessimism”—that attitude widespread in a part of the European
intelligentsia—, which tends to see only the negative consequences of
modernity and progress. Baudelaire’s vision, however, is much more pro-
found and original; it stems from a perspective that resists all final judg-
ments and resolutions, aesthetic or political, that wrestles physically with
all the internal contradictions of modernity and that can better illuminate
not only his modernity, but ours as well.
In this, Marshall Berman’s approach to the experience of modernity, we
find a very different conception from that profiled by Habermas in The
Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas 1987). Berman—who is a
political scientist from a disciplinary standpoint, and whose objective is the
study of the “dialectics of modernization and modernism” (Berman 1982,
p. 16)—actually implicitly carries out, without theorizing it from a meth-
odological point of view, a reading that we could define as “the metropolis
as an aesthetic object.” According to this reading, genres are consciously
confused: an eminently historical-political text such as Marx and Engels’
Communist Party Manifesto is read as a cultural and aesthetic text, “the
archetype of a century of modernist manifestos and movements to come.
The Manifesto expresses some of the modernist culture’s deepest insights
and, at the same time, dramatizes some of its deepest inner contradic-
tions” (Berman 1982, p. 89). Goethe’s Faust, on the other hand, shows
us the “affinity between the cultural ideal of self-development and the real
social movement toward economic development” (ibid., p. 40).
As medical anthropologist Byron Good argued in the Lewis Henry
Morgan lectures (1990):
The aesthetic object is not reducible to the oil on the canvas or to a musical
score or even its performance. It is also not reducible to a representation or
reflection of these in the mind of the viewer or the musical audience. The
aesthetic object is a particularly complex and dynamic form of relationship
among these, a relationship which depends upon and yet transcends both
performance and audience, reader and text, the material object and a reflec-
tive, sensuous response. (Good 1994, pp. 166–167)
By way of analogy, a metropolis is not simply a vast geographical area

populated by numerous individuals. Nor is it a reflection of such physical
state in the experience of its inhabitants (or visitors) or in a particular rep-
resentation in the documents produced by the bureaucratic and political
institutions which have authority to administrate it, classify its spaces and
streets, and govern it, or in the scientific literature of the social sciences, or
the artistic products of writers, poets, painters, who intend to represent it.
This is not to argue for an aestheticization of social reality that denies the
empirical data and the ethics of responsibility of the scientist moving
toward the shared and demonstrable search for truth, but rather of search-
ing for an “image of synthesis” that holds together all the components of
the vital world under investigation. From this point of view, Berman
showed us that in Baudelaire we can find “aesthetic objects” that express
in a synthetic way historical, philosophical, sociological problems of
modernity expressed in an exemplary way. On the basis of Berman’s inter-
pretation, it is possible to make a “paradigmatic” reading of Baudelaire’s
prose text. In this way, some essential problems can be derived concerning
modernité, which is the common theoretical background of Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s theories. In other words, through his alter ego, Constantin
Guys, Baudelaire tries to describe some specific scenes of metropolitan life,
showing them to us in the complexity of their original meanings, without
overpowering or moralistic interpretations. Thanks to his description, it is
possible to approach the experience of modernity as it is lived by the citi-
zen of the nineteenth-century metropolis, in all its misery and grandeur,
its daily tics and significant gestures. By virtue of his position as urban
writer and poet, Baudelaire does not place himself at the traditional
40 V. MELE
distance of the sociologist, who refers to abstract categories (capitalism,

social unease, conflict between classes, etc.). He is rather a participant
observer, a special kind of “urban ethnographer,” who is able to capture
and interpret certain metropolitan behaviors and phenomena that he con-
siders exemplary, worthy of representing the social totality from the par-
ticular case. As we will see in the following, Simmel and Benjamin, that is
to say, the authors who can be considered the main interpreters of moder-
nité, are united in belonging to an “aesthetic paradigm” of historical-social
knowledge, of which Simmel is undoubtedly the founder and which was
later picked up, albeit with substantial differences, by Benjamin, as well as
by Siegfried Kracauer and, in part, Adorno. How is it possible to fix the
eternal from the ephemeral and the transitory? How do we interpret a
reality and a phenomenology that is by definition shattered and elusive?
Moreover, since it deals mainly with fashion phenomena (spectator pumps
and carriages, female culture and dandyism, makeup and patent leather
shoes, etc.), it is eminently ephemeral, transitory, in short, superficial. In
other words, this involves elaborating a “knowledge of the surface” (Vozza
1988), which Simmel actually did, giving it the name “sociological aes-
thetics,” and which Benjamin, albeit with different means and contents,
addressed through his method of dialectical images and his social physiog-
nomy. Perhaps more than anything, Simmel showed a remarkable affinity
with this way of representing social reality. Simmel’s favorite essay subjects
(fashion first and foremost, but also essays devoted to touch, courtesy,
sociability, and ornamentation) fall squarely within these manifestations of
the surface of social reality. And not only, even the structure of his sociol-
ogy, focusing on the most ephemeral and transitory forms of association
(such as exchanging a glance or being jealous, writing letters to each other
or having lunch together), seems to belong to this form of knowledge.
The painter of modern life must therefore develop a special, particular
method, which must constitute a science of topicality, capable of keeping
up with the present. It is no coincidence that the authors under consider-
ation here have centered their work on feuilleton, radio, magazines, news-
papers: social analysis begins to experiment with means of communication
alternative to the traditional medium of the book. Beyond their different
approaches, the theories of Simmel and Benjamin are not based in any way
on an “institutional and historical analysis of modern society” (Frisby
1986, pp. 5–6), but rather aim to trace the originality and uniqueness of
the experience of modernity, intended as a way of perceiving space, time,
the randomness of social relations of metropolitan capitalism that was then
(at the end of the nineteenth century) emerging. Their reflections do not
take place in isolation, but rather reflect the general cultural and social
change that ran through German sociology at the turn of the century. We
thus see how “classical German sociology” reacted to modernité. Such a
conceptual framework—as we will see further—would turn out to be par-
ticularly important during the entire twentieth century up to the present.
3 The Crisis of Progress and German

Classical Sociology
Klaus Lichtblau in his seminal study on the genesis of the sociology of
culture in Germany at the end of the century showed how the classics of
German sociology—Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel,
Ferdinand Tönnies—were influenced by this self-description of modernity
that we could call “literary aesthetic,” whose main exponents can be con-
sidered Charles Baudelaire and Friedrich Nietzsche. Throughout their
works we therefore find scattered the motifs highlighted by Baudelaire
and—as we shall see—Nietzsche, in particular: (1) the crisis of the idea of
progress and the self-description of the modern as an emphatic “time
now”; and hence, (2) the attempt to interpret the “novelty” of the cultural
and social forms of the modern on the basis of specific objects of study and
no longer through the study of “society” as a whole; (3) concern over the
survival of the individual as a differentiated entity in this new social and
cultural context that sees the increasing importance of the masses (sym-
bolized by Baudelaire’s theme of the crowd), of technology and bureau-
cracies, viewed as homogenizing and depersonalizing forces; and lastly, (4)
the general “rehabilitation of love” and erotic culture, as a consequence of
the emergence of the “gender question” posed by the modern feminist
movement. The latter in particular would play an important role in the
constitution of sociology as an autonomous scientific discipline, on a par
with the so-called social question, although this is often not recognized
with sufficient clarity in historical reconstructions.
Between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the
twentieth, Ferdinand Tönnies, Werner Sombart, Georg Simmel, and Max
Weber, albeit in different ways, questioned the idea of progress as an
explanatory category of the social changes taking place and questioned
once again what the object and foundation of sociology should be.
Whether it was Comte’s and Saint Simon’s law of three stages, Marx’s
historical materialism, or Herbert Spencer’s general law of evolution, what
42 V. MELE
was knowable was the certainty (or presumed certainty) of the next stage
of society’s development. This form of knowledge, though grounded in
various forms of the philosophy of history, made possible an analysis of the
present: it was believed that through it one could know what the funda-
mental social structures were, what the dominant social forces would be in
the future, and what social problems would develop catastrophically for
society. If the sociology of the nineteenth century was the queen of sci-
ences, because it analyzed the most complex object, namely society, cer-
tainty about the future had the function of reducing this complexity.
Sociologists’ were not alone in casting doubts about progress; such doubts
reflected widespread pessimism in all social strata of German society and
found expression in the philosophical, cultural, and artistic spheres. It
arose primarily for economic reasons, namely because of the “Great
Depression” in Germany (1873–1896), which, especially in the economi-
cally active classes, had weakened the confidence and optimism of the pre-
vious years. Within the intellectual elite, this pessimism was partly explained
as a reaction to the optimism of the period immediately following the
unification of Germany, as well as to the demands of the labor and feminist
movements as events that disrupted the traditional social order. The new
generation of German sociologists (Simmel, Weber, Tönnies) differed
from nineteenth-century social thinkers, such as Auguste Comte, Herbert
Spencer and in some respects Karl Marx, for whom sociology was essen-
tially a discipline of becoming (Toscano 1990). The critique of the con-
cept of progress, while becoming a constitutive feature of German
sociology of the time, was not limited to a pessimistic evaluation of the
present alone: it led to “a different theoretical and methodological con-
ception of sociology, which now understands the study of social reality as
an analysis of the empirical reality of everyday life, as a specific experience
of the present, of the new, of modernity” (Dahme and Rammstedt 1984,
p. 227, italics added). Common to Tönnies, Simmel, and Weber is consid-
eration of the changes taking place in society, concern over how the “indi-
vidual” could be protected from a social reality that had become complex,
rationalized, tending to transform into a mechanism of constraint, and
whose negative effects were detectable in every aspect of daily life. Their
writings are therefore a diagnosis of the new era, of the important cultural
and social changes that occurred in Germany after the German unification
achieved by Bismarck with the war of 1870–1871 against France.
In this sense, the sociology of Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber and
Georg Simmel is closely related to Nietzsche’s thought, his critique of
modern society and his “critique of culture” (Kulturkritik). “As a critique

of modernity, as an attempt to analyze the concept of culture rather than
that of society, Nietzsche’s thought took on the character of a ‘positive
anti-sociology’” (Baier 1981, p. 7). Several times he expressed his negative
view of the English and French sociology of his time (H. Spencer and
A. Comte), which he regarded as limited to knowing mankind in its most
degraded and massified aspect, that is, “the herd man.” In this vision,
sociology is an expression consistent with the more general decadence of
society and the leveling of its values, the same process that favored the rise
of the modern “social question” and socialism as a political movement.6
Like Rousseau and the German Romantic culture before him, Nietzsche
introduced doubt that the general economic, political, and material prog-
ress of society (Zivilisation) automatically meant elevation of its values and
culture. He argued that such “true” progress (measurable exclusively in
terms of “great culture,” Kultur) could be achieved under certain histori-
cal conditions, even at the expense of improving the living conditions of
the majority of men. Nietzsche regarded as decisive for the progress of
humanity the pathos of distance, that is, “the differentiation of value
between man and man,” the “long hierarchical scale” existing in a society
that inevitably comes to include slavery. As Nietzsche states in Beyond
Good and Evil. Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future [1886]:
6
Nietzsche described the decadence of Western rationalism thusly in Twilight of the Idols
[1889]: “Ages should be measured by their positive forces—which makes the wasteful and
disastrous Renaissance the last great age and us, we moderns with our anxious self-solicitude
and our neighbor love, with our virtues of work, modesty, lawfulness, and science—accumu-
lating, economic, machine-like—we are a weak age. Our virtues are conditioned and
prompted by our weakness … ‘Equality’ (a certain factual increase in similarity that the the-
ory of ‘equal rights’ only gives expression to) essentially belongs to decline: the rift between
people, between classes, the myriad number of types, the will to be yourself, to stand out,
what I call the pathos of distance, is characteristic of every strong age. The tension, the expanse
between the extremes is getting smaller and smaller these days—the extremes themselves are
ultimately being blurred into similarity … All of our political theories and constitutions (very
much including the ‘Reich’) are consequences, necessary results of the decline; the uncon-
scious effects of decadence have even come to dominate the ideals of some of the sciences.
My objection to the whole discipline of sociology in England and France is that it has only
experienced the decaying forms of society, and innocently uses its own instinct of decay as the
norm for sociological value judgments. Declining life, the loss of all the forces of organiza-
tion, which is to say separation, division, subordination, and domination, is formulated as an
ideal in sociology today … Our socialists are decadents, but Mr Herbert Spencer is a deca-
dent too,—he sees something desirable in the victory of altruism!” (Nietzsche 2005,
pp. 212–213).
44 V. MELE
Without the pathos of distance as it grows out of the ingrained differences

between stations, out of the way the ruling caste maintains an overview and
keeps looking down on subservient types and tools, and out of this caste’s
equally continuous exercise in obeying and commanding, in keeping away
and below—without this pathos, that other, more mysterious pathos could
not have grown at all, that demand for new expansions of distance within
the soul itself, the development of states that are increasingly high, rare,
distant, tautly drawn and comprehensive, and in short, the enhancement of
the type “man,” the constant “self-overcoming of man” (to use a moral
formula in a supra-moral sense). (Nietzsche 2001, p. 151)
Kultur and Zivilisation are thusly separated and even opposed to each
other. Just as the thought of the nineteenth century had led to regarding
the social point of view as “the point of view par excellence,” it can be
argued that “Nietzsche broke the modern identification of society and
humanity” by ruling out in principle that the value of human action
depends on its “spillover” or benefit to the social sphere. However,
although Nietzsche does not share the reflexive premises of the sociology
of his time (indeed, he declares himself the bearer of an anti-sociological
spirit), he elevates them to objects of study and research according to a
specific methodology. His investigation is oriented toward a genealogical
“psychology,” whose purpose is to get at the origins of so-called moral
feelings, which are also at the center of sociological interest. According to
Nietzsche, the diagnosis of the decadence and nihilism to which Western
society had reached required an in-depth study of the Genealogy of moral-
ity and thus an understanding of “society as culture,” which undoubtedly
influenced the development of German sociology in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries.7 Nietzsche’s position profoundly influenced
the “aesthetic opposition” that spread at the turn of the century among
artists and intellectuals against the supposed universalism of the values of
bourgeois society and emerging mass society, but at the same time power-
fully stimulated the search for a historical-universal understanding of the
process of Western rationalization, which was the focus of historical-
empirical investigations by sociological research.
7
Lichtblau on this (1996, pp. 77–126): Genealogy should not be identified with histori-
ography, because historiography searches for the real beginning of an idea, for the historical
conditions that generated it; genealogy, on the other hand, searches for the opening of
meaning that a certain idea inaugurates and in which that opening is expressed. On the con-
cept of “genealogy” see Foucault (1977).
The research of Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and

Georg Simmel represent, at different levels and with different modes of
thought, attempts to respond to the need to understand the cultural “des-
tiny” of rationalistic, Enlightenment Europe.8 In particular, a practice of
“sociology of culture” (Kultursoziologie) spread and consolidated in the
German-speaking social sciences, and aimed to analyze the cultural objec-
tivations of society, such as art, music, literature, science, and religion.9 As
we shall see, Simmel’s sociological approach, of placing at the center of the
study of sociology the forms in which the interactions between individuals
are condensed, is part of this trend. Indeed, Kultursoziologie seeks to be a
scientific and disciplinary response, also allowing for historical and empiri-
cal research, at the height of the challenge launched by the philosophical
cultural diagnosis of Friedrich Nietzsche. “Cultural decadence as the prac-
tical conclusion of the nihilistic value table of the Western rationalization
process and general decadence of forms of life, on the one hand, the need
for moral-historical research and a new understanding of society as
8
Lichtblau (1996, pp. 68–76). The “sociological” characterization of Nietzsche was, how-
ever, rather peculiar and quite different from that which long afterward was to become cen-
tral, along with that of Heidegger, in French structuralism and post-structuralism, in the
“postmodern” and “deconstructivist” currents of literary criticism and the humanities.
Unlike today’s characterization, the one at the turn of 1900 interpreted his work—which
consciously ignored the disciplinary boundaries between literature and philosophy, inspired
by a new form of poetical thought—in a “literal” way, without considering the “tragic” and
existential background of his thought, portraying him as the aristocratic promoter of a “new
idealism” of ascetic moralistic character of Protestant descent, inspired by his “superhuman-
ism.” The founding fathers of German sociology have distanced themselves in various ways
from this portrayal of Nietzsche. See Tönnies (1897), reviewed by Simmel (1897). The
previous year Simmel had briefly presented his portrayal of Nietzsche as a “moralist” sui
generis, able to reconcile the demands of duty with those of the meaningfulness of existence,
in Simmel (1992a). Wolfgang Schluchter shows how the Simmelian interpretation had an
important function of “mediation” for Weber’s later understanding of Nietzsche
(Schluchter 1995).
9
Max Weber spoke in 1913, albeit with a certain methodological caution, of a “sociology
of cultural contents” (Soziologie der Cultur-Inhalte). Werner Sombart, on the contrary, pre-
ferred to speak of his work in cultural history as “historical social science,” “historical psy-
chology,” and “philosophy of culture.” “However,” Lichtblau argues with regard to Weber,
Simmel, Sombart, and Tönnies, that “there are good reasons to speak of the ‘existence of a
common intellectual tradition of sociology of German culture at the turn of the century. It
refers, on the one hand, to the numerous intersections in the subjects and interests of
research in the individual works and fragments of works of this tradition, and on the other,
to the fact that all these authors were more or less in a continuous dialogue with each other,
in part even linked by an intimate friendship” (Lichtblau 1996, p. 69).
46 V. MELE
culture, on the other hand—this is Nietzsche’s radical message, which also

for the development of German society at the end of the century was not
to remain without consequences” (Lichtblau 1984, pp. 237–238). From
the point of view of the “constitution of modern sociology” (Rammstedt
1988, p. 275), the crisis of the idea of progress and the consequent idea of
“society as culture” meant a radical change of theoretical perspective and
empirical analysis. Simmel, Weber, and Durkheim view sociology as a sci-
ence based on experience and feel obliged to perform a comprehensive
analysis of social reality, but lose, along with skepticism toward progress,
also an interpretative grid that allowed interpreting and positioning a
series of phenomena of the present. From the “handle” to “social medi-
cine,” from correspondence by letters, from caricature to the feminine
question—just to mention some of the themes of Simmel’s work—new
and different social phenomena now present themselves to the gaze of the
social observer, who no longer has definitive criteria to label them as “sec-
ondary” or “residual.” In particular, there are three fundamental orienta-
tions that characterize “modern sociology,” which involve Simmel, Weber,
Tönnies, and Durkheim in a similar way (Rammstedt 1988, p. 280 ff.).
Firstly, modern sociology espouses the positivist apology of reality. Present
social reality must no longer be looked upon as mere appearance, awaiting
the advent of a truer form of social coexistence that the sociologist must
be able to prophesize. The loss of faith in progress leaves the future open
to human activity. The fundamental consequence of this is that not only
does the future appear contingent—something known to nineteenth-cen-
tury utopian thought—but so does present-day society. Limiting inquiry
to what is, rather than what ought to be, raises the question of how to
classify, grasp, and choose the social phenomena before us, which are cho-
sen based on their modernity—thereby describing the second fundamen-
tal orientation of sociology as a discipline that seeks to institutionalize
itself. Placing what is “modern”—more or less explicitly—at the center of
research interests means placing the autonomous sufficiency of the “now”
as a specific quality of the present that cannot be investigated historically,
since it is essentially characterized by the character of novelty. Tönnies,
Simmel, and Weber grapple with the question of what really makes the
present society such that it is and different from the societies that preceded
it. The limitations to the research and evaluation of the phenomena that
characterize the essentials of the concept of modernity led Simmel to that
particular perspective which he termed the “aesthetic perspective”
(ästhetische Betrachtung), according to which “the typical is to be found in

what is unique, the law-like in what is fortuitous, the essence and signifi-
cance of things in the superficial and transitory” (Simmel 1992 [1896],
p. 197). Finally, it reinforces the question of the true object of sociology,
on the basis of which it should legitimize itself as an academic discipline.
In all the “modern classics” of sociology, “society” was dismissed as the
object of sociology, and other concepts were introduced in its place: “asso-
ciation” (Vergesellschaftung) in Simmel, which better expresses the
dynamic, relational element of social life; the category of “social action” in
Weber, and in Durkheim that of “collective consciousness.” Pareto,
instead, set “non-logical actions” as the object of sociology, and Tönnies
himself, who still remained tied to the concept of “society,” defined it as a
system of “exchange relationships.” An overall look at sociology at the
turn of the century shows how the semantically ambiguous and excessively
inclusive concept of “society” was replaced by other concepts, considered
more suitable to express the specifically “modern” modalities of social life.
4 Metropolis
It is obviously not by accident that the three major exponents of “classical
German sociology,” Tönnies, Weber and Simmel, founders of the Deutsche
Gesellschaft für Soziologie (in 1909), dedicated important essays to the city
and the metropolis. The metropolis represents “the general form that the
process of rationalization of social relations takes. It is the phase, or the
problem, of the rationalization of overall social relations, which follows
that of the rationalization of productive relations” (Cacciari 1993, p. 4).
Metropolis goes beyond the physical reality of the urban transformations
at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to become a social
and cultural form. The metropolis is characterized by the dominion of
impersonal “Vergeistigung” (ibid.): nature becomes “spiritualized,” but
loses its living character and becomes a machine, a “technical-social mech-
anism,” in the sense of the fully developed instrumental rationality that
(tendentially) integrates the social sphere in all its manifestations. In it,
there are no longer any aims or values beyond the technical values of capi-
talist production and reproduction. It poses itself simply as production as
an end in itself: “We are still in the ‘city’ as long as we are in the presence
of use values simply, or of the production of commodities simply, or of the
48 V. MELE
non-dialecticized being alongside of the two moments. We are in the

Metropolis when production takes on its own social reason, when it deter-
mines the modes of consumption and manages to functionalize them for
the renewal of the cycle” (ibid., p. 7). Production becomes the goal of all
social activities. While in the city it was still possible to hypothesize the
existence of use values and exchange values separately, that is, production
according to needs divorced from production for exchange and profit, in
the metropolis as a social form this becomes obsolete: one produces to
consume and consumes to produce. Therefore, the metropolis is the social
formation that best represents the integrated capitalist system.
Among the founders of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie,
Ferdinand Tönnies was critically opposed to this idea of the metropolis. In
his seminal work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (1887), he attempts to
overcome the “negativity” of the metropolis by reducing it back to the
attribute categories of the city, and thus of Kultur and Gemeinschaft. In
Gemeinschaft theory, the city is conceived as a system of real-organic rela-
tionships compared to the ideal-mechanical ones of Gesellschaft. It is a
“self-sufficient domestic economy […] whatever its empirical origin” and
presents itself “as a whole […] a permanent entity […] secure of its own
possession […] or regular supply.” Its social-political ideal is the corpora-
tion as a religious community: “the whole economic existence of an
accomplished city […] cannot be understood except by taking art and
religion as the highest and most important interest of the whole city”
(Tönnies 1963, pp. 69–72). On the contrary, the German sociologist
reserves contemptuous words for the metropolis: “its wealth is wealth of
capital […]. It is finally the city of science and culture […]. The arts cease
to secure the means of subsistence and are themselves exploited capitalisti-
cally” (ibid., pp. 290–291).
Max Weber also dedicates a fundamental essay entitled Die Stadt to the
city (probably composed in 1911–1913), which was later collected in
Economy and Society. As has been noted, it does not however contain a
specific discourse on the metropolis. The point of view from which Weber
traces the history of the city “is naturally that of the actualized metropolis.
The whole history of the city is the destiny of the metropolis” (Cacciari
1973, p. 34). The manifest intention of Weber’s essay is therefore to
understand the role of the development of the city in the overall process
of capitalist rationalization. The “forms” of the Weberian city are, how-

ever, political forms. The city is not only an economic or military fact, but
above all an original political organization. The disruption of previous
formations, an example of which is represented especially by medieval
European cities, is the basis for the new “foundation pact” that “formal-
izes” the relationships between citizens, furnishing them with a common
language that is no longer that of tribus, but that of “political interest.”
However, Weber grasps not only this first fundamental discontinuity with
the classical rural city, but a second no less important one: “the authentic
origin of the contemporary, political problem of the city does not consist
in the medieval coniuratio, but in its rupture” (ibid.). The origin of the
modern city (metropolis) is therefore to be found in conflict, which
according to Weber can be encapsulated only by the modern bureaucratic-
rational state: “the concept of the bourgeois state has its precedent in the
ancient and medieval city” (ibid.). The city-metropolis for Weber is the
place of origin of the political intended as conflict, struggle, a dynamic-
dialectical structure. Its existence is given as a permanent sign that charac-
terizes the modern, precisely because of its insolubility. It is configured as
class conflict, as a conflict between different worldviews, each of which
claims validity from its point of view: but in each of these cases the conflict
is and remains insoluble. An ethical or religious-corporative synthesis of
this conflict is no longer possible in the same way as those that Tönnies
evoked as still possible in the city. The state, the supreme organ of the
political, has the better of the guilds, the fraternitas, the coniuratio of the
medieval city, and allows the development of rationalization from an over-
all, political and economic point of view. Starting from the metropolis,
city, state, and capitalist development become inseparable and
complementary.
Along the same lines as Weber’s analysis is Werner Sombart’s
(1863–1941) in Liebe, Luxus und Kapitalismus (1912) and later in the
50 V. MELE
third volume of Der moderne Kapitalismus (1927).10 Sombart begins his

analysis by considering the phenomenon of the population increases in a
number of cities from the sixteenth century onward: it determines the
appearance of a new type of city, like London and Paris, with hundreds of
thousands of inhabitants, which toward the end of the seventeenth cen-
tury would approach the modern form of the metropolis with millions of
inhabitants. In fact, by 1594 Paris had about 180,000 inhabitants, while
at the outbreak of the French Revolution (1789) this figure stood at
640,000–670,000. If we ask ourselves what made these cities so large,
Sombart wonders, we still find essentially the same forces at work that
shaped the medieval cities: “the metropolises of early capitalism are cities
of consumption, in the eminent meaning of the term” (ibid., p. 103).
Consistently with his approach, Sombart therefore considers surplus at the
origin of modern capitalism: hence the importance given to consumption
rather than production. In fact, “producers,” trade and industry, did not
possess sufficient power to form and build the metropolis. The particular
relevance of Sombart’s conception cannot be overstated: in his opinion,
the engine of the metropolis is the industry of luxury, of the superfluous
and the ephemeral; by producing “love” (understood as a vital and cre-
ative force), this luxury destroys every social formation based on a simple,
direct relation to needs. The wealth of European cities grew thanks to the
trade of luxury goods: silk, cotton, wine, weapons, jewels, and later
tobacco, coffee, tea, cocoa, and so on. Similarly, these needs and this trade
developed Luxusindustrien, that is, industries whose products initially
ended up almost exclusively in the homes of the rich. The metropolises of
10
Sombart 1978. On Sombart’s work see Alessandro Cavalli’s Introduction to Sombart
(1978, pp. 9–49) and Meschiari (1987, p. 253). Werner Sombart trained as a student of
economics with G. Schmoller and Alfred Weber in Berlin and later as a student of G. Toniolo
in Pisa. He would meet his mentors again in the Verein für Sozialpolitk in 1892, at the time
of the debate on the forms and laws of capitalist development, in which Max Weber had
already taken part since 1888. In 1896 he published Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im
19. Jahrhundert, in 1902 Der moderne Kapitalismus, and in 1903 Die deutsche Wirtschaft
im 19. Jahrhundert. Sombart also dedicated the following writings to the problem of the
city: Der Begriff der Stadt und das Wesen der Städtebildung in “Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft
und Sozialpolitik,” XXV, 1907; Die Entstehung der Städte im Mittelalter, “Rivista di sci-
enza,” II, 1907; and Städtische Siedlung, in “Handwörterbuch der Soziologie,” Stuttgart
1931. Together with Max Weber, he would found the ‘Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und
Sozialpolitik in 1903 and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (together with Tönnies
and Simmel) in 1909. He also published studies of the fascist movement (in Wandlungen des
Kapitalismus, 1928) and the crisis of the Weimar Republic (Deutscher Sozialismus, 1934).
the frühkapitalischen Epoche are cities of consumption (Konsumentenstädte)

and the great consumers are the princes, the clergy, the nobility, to whom
an important social group must now be added: high finance. The expan-
sion of the big city is therefore the result of the concentration of produc-
tion and conspicuous consumption (to use the term coined by Thorstein
Veblen).
Sombart viewed the development of Naples as proof of the validity of
his thesis that the first metropolises were based on the concentration of
consumption. Naples was essentially a city of residence: it owed its gran-
deur and wealth to being the city of the king and the ecclesiastical hierar-
chy. This fundamental circumstance made Naples a metropolis at a time
when no other Italian city had been able to achieve this goal. So, luxury
consumption is the revolutionierende Kraft (revolutionizing power) that
created the metropolis and, in most cases, opened “the doors to capital-
ism.” “So zeugte der Luxus, der selbst ein legimimes Kind der illegitimen
Liebe war, den Kapitalismus” (Sombart 1922, pp. 202–206, cited in
Meschiari 1987, p. 256). For Sombart, however, the contemporary
“metropolis” (Sombart 1978, pp. 673–677) retains nothing of the
Großstadt of consumption. Its essence is defined by its being a “system,” a
multifaceted urban type, a place where complex services are provided for
the development of big capital: scarce, skilled trades; auxiliary-scientific
equipment for industrial development; financial structure; marketing; the
overall center of political power. According to Sombart, in order to be
such, the metropolis must be an overall capitalist system: it must embody
the “spirit of capitalism” (Geist des Kapitalismus), which is realized with-
out nostalgia and without utopias.
In summary, the metropolis as the “general form of modernity” in
“classical German sociology,” is characterized by the destruction of com-
munity and corporate ties, an integrated capitalist system, the original
political configuration that gave rise to the modern bureaucratic state.
The “form” of the metropolis outlined in the foregoing with the help
of the classics of sociology is fundamental in that it captures the most
philosophical aspect of the metropolis as a “moment of the spirit,” so to
speak. It also represents the totalitarian character of the metropolis as the
“definitive environment of modern man” (“There is no truly developed
spirit outside the “metropolitan type,” outside the Großstadt—nor
Metropolis that does not express the life of the spirit” Cacciari 1973,
p. 10). The distant origin of the response that Weberian sociology of the
52 V. MELE
city provides to Tönnies can be traced (according to Cacciari) to some of

the figures of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
In the discourse on “the vision and the enigma” (Vom Gesicht und
Räthsel) the “theory of eternal return” is presented, though never explic-
itly, but in the figurative manner characteristic of Nietzsche’s philosophical
style. Zarathustra tells of an ascent up a steep mountain path (a symbol of
the strenuous rising of thought toward the middle of truth), during which
he, with the dwarf who follows him, is confronted by a cart gate (a symbol
of decision and turning point), on which is written the word “moment”
(the present) and before which are joined two paths that “no one has ever
traveled to the end,” since they are lost in eternity: the first leads backward
(the past) and the other leads forward (the future). Zarathustra asks the
dwarf whether the two paths are destined to contradict each other in eter-
nity or not. The dwarf’s answer alludes to the circularity of time: “All
straight things lie. All truth is curved; time itself is a circle.” The deeper
meaning of eternal return, however, is not trivially that of the perpetual
return of the same things. Zarathustra, in a kind of dreamlike atmosphere
(against the background of a desolate moonscape and hideous boulders)
tells of seeing a sleeping shepherd, who has a snake enter his mouth;
Zarathustra tries to help him but, failing, invites him to bite the snake and
is thus saved, and the story closes with a liberating laugh from the shep-
herd, now “transformed and surrounded by light.” The snake biting its
tail symbolizes time conceived of as cyclical and which at first can be con-
ceived of as something stifling: the idea that everything returns is unten-
able since no one would want to repeat his or her life indefinitely, as our
life is not so perfect as to aspire to be desired for eternity. The snake bite
means that it is true that the doctrine of eternal return can be stifling, but
only for those whose life experience is not fully realized. The Übermensch
(“overman”), on the other hand, who knows how to live his existence
fully, can truly desire to relive it for eternity, and cutting off the head of the
snake means breaking the circle of time returning upon itself and inserting
oneself into this circle. In the chapter entitled Vom Vorübergehen (“On
Passing By”) in the third part, published in 1884, Nietzsche explicitly
mentions the “big city,” the metropolis:
In this manner, hiking slowly through many peoples and towns, Zarathustra
returned the long way to his mountains and his cave. And then, unexpect-
edly, he also arrived at the gate of the big city. Here, however, a foaming fool
with outstretched hands leaped toward him and blocked his path. And this
was the same fool whom the people called “Zarathustra’s ape,” because he
had memorized some of the phrasing and tone of Zarathustra’s speaking
and also liked to borrow from the treasure of his wisdom. The fool spoke
thus to Zarathustra:
“Oh Zarathustra, this is the big city: here you have nothing to gain and
everything to lose.
Why do you want to wade through this mud? Have pity on your feet!
Spit on the city gate instead and—turn around!
Here is hell for hermit’s thoughts; here great thoughts are boiled alive
and cooked till they are small.
Here all great feelings rot; here only tiny, rattlebone feelings are allowed
to rattle!
Do you not already smell the slaughter houses and kitchens of the spirit?
Does this town not steam with the reek of slaughtered spirit?
Do you not see the souls hanging like limp dirty rags?—And they even
make newspapers out of these rags!
…
There is also much piety here and much devout spittle lick quaking and
flatter cake baking before the God of Hosts.
…
The God of Hosts is no God of gold bars; the prince proposes, but the
shopkeeper—disposes!
By all that is bright and strong and good in you, oh Zarathustra, spit on
this city of the shopkeepers and turn around!
…
spit on the big city which is the big scum trap where all spumy crap
spumes together!
…
—spit on the big city and turn around!”
At this point, however, Zarathustra interrupted the foaming fool and
clapped his hand over the fool’s mouth… “I despise your despising… I am
nauseated too by this big city and not only by this fool. Here as there noth-
ing can be bettered, nothing can be worsened. Woe to this big city!—And I
wish I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will burn! … For such pillars
of fire must precede the great noon. But this has its own time and its own destiny.—
Meanwhile, you fool, I give you this lesson in parting: where one can no
longer love, there one should—pass by!” (Nietzsche 2006, pp. 140–142)
The concept of the “eternal return,” beyond its most distressing aspect
of a present without history (which in the metropolis takes the form of the
“eternal” production of goods by means of money and the cyclical change
of fashion), can be viewed as a liberation from the “Oedipal conception of
54 V. MELE
time”(Vattimo 2002, p. 85 ff.). This conception of temporality is opposed

to a “traditional” (recti-)linear conception of time, which regards it as a
succession of past, present, and future. By this conception, each moment
has a meaning only in relation to the moments that preceded it and that
follow it, implying a “patricidal” will toward the past and the future (in the
same way as Freud’s “Oedipus”, in which the son kills his father to take
possession of his mother). To take the perspective of the eternal return
means refusing a linear conception of time that necessarily places the
meaning and completeness of time beyond it (in the past or in the future).
The thought of the “eternal return” is, according to Cacciari, the opposite
of a return to synthesis: it is the breaking of the balance, the affirmation of
the contradiction of reality that cannot be overcome. It is not a circle, but
a straight, one-way street (Benjamin), which excludes any possibility of
return or nostalgia. Nietzsche does not romantically reject Zivilisation,
but the attitude of “Zarathustra’s monkey” (who despises the metropolis
without understanding it). It represents the attitude of the powerless that
gives birth to farce, not tragedy. Zarathustra’s problem is rather knowing
the metropolis and seeing its time and destiny. To return to before is “the
idea of dwarves and monkeys.” Denying it or despising it does not change
things. It is precisely the metropolis as a contradiction, destiny, that
Tönnies’ utopian organicism would like to overcome. This is the starting
point of Weber’s analysis of the Stadt, according to Cacciari, to which
Sombart’s is complementary. If luxury has made the metropolis a place of
consumers, the classical bourgeois economy has put an end to this image
of the Großstadt as a market: the metropolis is an all-encompassing capital-
ist system, it is the Geist des Kapitalismus, it is the organization of the
overall control of development and its continuous planning.
Only by overcoming the anguish of the eternal return, is it possible to
see the metropolis in its originality and novelty, no longer comparing it
with models of the past (the organic community city of Tönnies) or trying
to overcome it with imaginary utopian urban communities of the future.
As also Klaus Lichtblau insightfully pointed out, “this kind of self-
description of modernity as an emphatic “Jetzt-zeit” (“now-time”) runs
through the works of Charles Baudelaire, Georg Simmel, and Walter
Benjamin as leitmotifs” (Lichtblau 1996, p. 23). Simmel and Benjamin
are children of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Nietzsche’s nihilism and the
crisis of the modern conception of progress, in all its visions (positivist,
Hegelian, historical materialist). We will see how they critically confront
this model of temporality theorized in its most radical outcomes by
Nietzsche, with different conceptual outcomes. Accepting the present

completely may in fact mean renouncing history completely and accepting
the present unreservedly, without possibility of critique. Benjamin, in fact,
will conceptualize “time now” as a rupture of fate, while Simmel will
reflect on time as “duration”, especially in the later stages of his thought.
Present, past, and future of the metropolis continues to appear in their
writings animated by a different conception of critique and historical
epistemology.
5 Concluding Remarks

The foregoing has outlined some characteristics of the metropolis as the
“general social form of modernity.” This is the metropolis that is to be
investigated in detail, by delving into some aspects of the thought of
Simmel and Benjamin. It is therefore a point of view, a scenario of ideas
that contributes to determining the object described. It is an “ideal type”
in the Weberian sense of the term: a theoretical construct (“utopian”) that
arises from a unilateral accentuation of historical and cultural data, for
cognitive purposes. It does not exist in its pure form in social reality, but
gives meaning to it and allows us to understand it. This chapter has focused
on some essential aspects of this ideal type to clarify what the “modernity
in question” is, that which forms its background, pointing out that moder-
nity in the social sciences has long been conceived of through a stereotyp-
ing of Weberian categories of rationalization. To understand and analyze
modernity, on the other hand, one must go beyond the narrow disciplin-
ary bounds of sociology, using in particular the temporal consciousness of
aesthetic and literary modernity (Baudelaire’s modernité). In this way, we
arrive at a more comprehensive conception of modernity, which does not
seek a chronological subdivision (a pre- and a post-modernity), but which
conceives of it as a “differentiating” structure. Differentiation occurs both
synchronically—as differentiation of cultural spheres of value—and dia-
chronically, as differentiation of the present from the past.
Reflection on the metropolis corresponds to a change in twentieth-
century sociology and is the consequence of the crisis of the concept of
progress in the analysis of modernity as a specific object—the analyses of
the Stadt and Großstadt by Weber, Sombart, and Tönnies. As seen, sociol-
ogy undergoes a change in perspective which, in Bauman’s words, can be
described as that of the sociologist’s passage from legislator to interpreter
(Bauman 2013). The crisis of the concept of progress entails a downsizing
56 V. MELE
of the “normative dimension” in social analysis and the consequent pro-

jection into the future, in favor of an analysis of the new, of the present, of
the now. This new sociology tends to espouse the positivistic apology of
reality, to focus on the “new,” to divest itself of “society” as an object of
research in favor of more “streamlined” concepts such as “social action”
(Weber), “association” (Simmel),11 non-logical actions, and so on.
Weber, Sombart, and Tönnies center their study on the metropolis,
which includes the integrated system of production and consumption,
bureaucracy, and political conflict. From a more general philosophical
point of view, metropolis is the attempt to take up the challenge of
Nietzsche’s cultural diagnosis in the disciplinary field of sociology. The
metropolis symbolizes the problem of the irreversibility of the “Western
rationalization process” and the “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) that
would be its most mature consequence. His analysis took place in a con-
text of reflection on a destinal vision of capitalism and is to be understood
as a meditation on the outcomes of Western culture and (subsequently,
according to the model present in the entire production of the Frankfurt
School, as well as Benjamin, Bloch, and Kracauer) on its possible emanci-
patory outcomes. However, the metropolis as a form of modernity is a
research perspective that in some respects extends and complexifies the
Weberian and Marxist vision of the modern.12 Beyond the specific and
often divergent outcomes of their thought, Simmel and Benjamin agree in
affirming that the process of affirmation of metropolitan modernity is at
least paradoxical: the industrial, technological, and monetary rationaliza-
tion cannot be separated from a process of “re-enchantment,” which
would be analyzed with different, albeit similar, conceptual tools: by
Simmel through the attempt at a “sociological aesthetics” that has as its
11
We prefer the translation of Vergesellschaftung as “association” (instead of the neologism
“sociation” or the simplification “social forms”) as suggested by Thomas Kemple (Kemple
2018, pp. 10–11).
12
As Laura Boella (1988, p. 12) argues, in fact, “Simmel appears as a scholar of modernity
that, in particular for the attention devoted to the metamorphosis of the sphere of sensory
perception and to the subtle balances of forms of life and intersubjective relations, offers a
perspective that in many ways enriches and modifies the Weberian and Marxist one.” Frisby’s
affirmations have the same tenor: “if Habermas [in his discussion of the concept of the mod-
ern, A/N] had dealt with Simmel’s theory of the modern, he would have been confronted
with a conception of the modern that is concerned with demonstrating the rootedness of the
aesthetic sphere in the modern life-world and does not seek [following Weber’s example] to
establish the separation of the aesthetic sphere from the other spheres of life” (Frisby 1984,
pp. 15–16).
cultural orientation the “total work of art” of the Jugenstil; by Benjamin

through a physiognomic analysis of the mythology of the modern. From a
strictly sociological point of view, both attributed great importance to the
analysis of consumption rather than production, seeing urban space as a
space of enchantment, myth, and phantasmagoria.
The metropolis therefore does not mean only “rationalization of social
relations” (Cacciari 1973), but “aestheticization” and “re-enchantment”
of the latter, as well: for both authors—as shall be seen—the quintessence
of the aesthetic, social, temporal process of the modern is expressed in
fashion, the heart of modernité portrayed by Baudelaire. Another direct
consequence of this approach—which is inevitable given the aesthetic
interests of both authors—is that the theories of Simmel and Benjamin are
not based in any way on an institutional and historical analysis of modern
society, but rather aim to trace the originality and uniqueness of the expe-
rience of modernity, understood as a way of perceiving space, time, the
randomness of the social relations of metropolitan capitalism that was
emerging then (at the turn of the twentieth century).
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———. 1993. Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture.
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———. 1999. Negli spazi vuoti della metropoli. Distruzione, disordine, tradimento
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———. 2007. Il tramonto dei non luoghi. Fronti e frontiere dello spazio metropoli-
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———. 2017. Potere del consumo e rivolte sociali. Verso una libertà radicale.
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PART I
City and Modernity in Georg Simmel

CHAPTER 3
Deconstructing History, Morality,

and Society: Simmel’s Theory of Knowledge
“Es ist erstaunlich, wie wening von den Schmerzen der Menscheit in
ihre Philosophie übergegangen ist”.
—Simmel 1967, p. 17.
1 Metropolis and Criticism

As paradoxical as it may seem, the analysis of the metropolis as outlined in
previous chapters—as a “general social form of modernity”—must start
with a cognitive “methodological” question: how to conceptualize and
represent “the transient, the fleeting, the contingent”. How to criticize it?
The metropolis as a form of modernity means above all the fragmentation
of perspectives, and difficulty in grasping the social totality directly. Just as
the individual who lives and works within it, the sociologist who tries to
describe it does not have the possibility of overviews. Like the painter of
modern life described by Baudelaire, he is not allowed any Archimedean
point of observation, any solid and immovable foundation from which to
know the reality that surrounds him. In fact, it is not possible to observe
the metropolis from the outside, but only by being inside it, bumping into
the crowd and getting lost in its streets. For this reason, its vision and
representation are necessarily fragmentary, provisional, instantaneous. The
metropolis between the nineteenth and the twentieth century coincides

Switzerland AG 2022
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64 V. MELE
with the “tragedy of culture” and with that “crisis of the European sci-
ences” denounced by Edmund Husserl. This epoch (in which the names
of illustrious Central European intellectuals such as Robert Musil, Rainer
Maria Rilke, and others, including Albert Einstein, stand out) signified a
more general “crisis of representation”, which should be understood as an
irreversible crisis of naive positivism (based on the correspondence between
“mind” and “world”), as well as a mature awareness of the “tragic” limits
of knowledge. With the crisis of nineteenth-century positivism comes the
awareness of the finitude of the cognitive capacity of man, the “relativity
of the natural sciences” and the impossibility of an exhaustive knowledge
of the human world.
Concluding his essay on metropolises, Simmel reformulates the diag-
nosis of modernity that occupies a substantial portion of The Philosophy of
Money. Now, however, the diagnosis is decidedly negative. The world of
things, the objective culture, no longer appears as a field as threatening
and incomprehensible to the freedom and understanding of the individual:
If, for instance, we view the immense culture which for the last hundred
years has been embodied in things and in knowledge, in institutions and in
comforts, and if we compare all this with the cultural progress of the indi-
vidual during the same period at least in high status groups, a frightful dis-
proportion in growth between the two becomes evident. Indeed, at some
points we notice a retrogression in the culture of the individual with refer-
ence to spirituality, delicacy, and idealism. In any case, he can cope less and
less with the overgrowth of objective culture. The individual is reduced to a
negligible quantity, perhaps less in his consciousness than in his practice and
in the totality of his obscure emotional states that are derived from this prac-
tice. The individual has become a mere cog in an enormous organization of
things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and
value in order to transform them from their subjective form into the form of
a purely objective life. It needs merely to be pointed out that the metropolis
is the genuine arena of this culture which outgrows all personal life. (Simmel
1997b, pp. 183–184)
This condition can be described as the loss of the relationship between

intellect and the world of things. From a literary point of view, it is The
Man Without Qualities, cited by the Austrian writer Robert Musil that
best expresses this cultural climate and this state of mind. It is no coinci-
dence that the description of his novel (which actually expresses the defini-
tive crisis of the nineteenth-century novel) begins with a description of a
city. The city in general (and the metropolis in particular) becomes the
3 DECONSTRUCTING HISTORY, MORALITY, AND SOCIETY: SIMMEL’S… 65
emblem of a reality that is impossible to decipher with precision, as it is

elusive and continually changing. Faced with this reality, not only litera-
ture, but also science must experiment with new tools of knowledge. The
essay as a form is one of them: “the analysis of the city becomes a symbol
of the very form of the essay” (Cacciari 1973, p. 81). It plays a decisive
role not only in Simmel, but also in the “critic of culture” (Kulturkritik),
as in Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer, Adorno.
Therefore, a significant step in trying to understand the different philo-
sophical orientations of Simmel and Benjamin toward the metropolis as
the emblem of modernity consists in analyzing the very concept of
Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge)—and, consequently, of “cri-
tique” and “criticism”—that is implicit in their thought and its relations
with the concept of experience. This way of comparing Simmel and
Benjamin seems to be more fruitful than those used in even the most thor-
ough works reviewed in the first chapter: “modernity” and “fragment”
(Frisby), the concept of by Kultur (Mičko), and “more-than-life”
(Symons). Moreover, the term Erkenntnistheorie (“theory of knowledge,”
also translated as “epistemology”) is the term used not only by Simmel
and Benjamin themselves, but by the cultural and academic milieu in
which they were formed and against which they often reacted. It is worth
recalling that the term Erkenntnistheorie is in fact fraught with particularly
powerful connotations. Affirmed in Germany—as scrupulous studies have
shown (Köhnke 1981)—in the 1930s in the context of criticism of Hegel,
and from the beginning explicitly linked to the program for a re-foundation
of philosophy expounding a revival of Kant, it later became the flagship of
neo-Kantianism in its various currents and a sort of autonomous discipline
(Köhnke 1986, p. 58ff.). Indeed, it is a concept broad enough to embrace
the philosophical, aesthetic, and sociological production of Simmel and
Benjamin, yet not too broad to obscure the contours of the differences
between their approaches. This point of comparison can reveal not only
the analogies in their thoughts, but also the similes and the differences in
relation to the centers of their intellectual development. A fruitful com-
parison should therefore consider that Simmel and Benjamin are unified
by a common reference to the concept of experience and the theory of
knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) in relation to the philosophy of history, or
to express it in Benjamin’s words, through the concept of history. This
conceptual basis allows us to better perceive their fundamentally different
philosophical and sociological approaches to modernity and their different
judgments on the destiny of individuality in the modern context.
66 V. MELE
Any analysis of the concept of critique in general must face the problem
that the German word Kritik refers to both (philosophical) “critique” and
(literary or art-) “criticism.” Some theorists argue that these two meanings
have nothing in common except their etymological root, and therefore
can and should be strictly separated. But as what follows should demon-
strate, making such a distinction is impossible in the case of Simmel and
Benjamin, since philosophical critique and aesthetic criticism are closely
connected in their work. Moreover, in the “philosophical discourse of the
modern” (Habermas 1987) “critique” can have a very different meaning.
With a certain approximation—following Habermas’ scheme—we can
identify three basic models that would be very influential in the philo-
sophical discourse of modernity: Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Kant, who
introduced the philosophical concept, intended criticism as an analysis of
the validity and limits of human reason and judgment. He instead desig-
nates critique as the process by which reason undertakes self-knowledge,
that is, “the tribunal which guarantees reason in its legitimate claims but
condemns those that have no foundation.” Criticism is therefore not the
“critique of books and philosophical systems, the Critique of the faculty of
reason in general with regard to all the knowledge to which it can aspire
independently of experience”; it is therefore also “the decision of the pos-
sibility or impossibility of a metaphysics in general and the determination
as well of the sources as of the scope and limits of it” (Critique of Pure
Reason, preface to the first edition). Criticism is therefore linked to the
concept of subjective experience, which is equally important in Simmel
and Benjamin. Hegel’s notion of critique is “immanent critique,” in the
sense that the foundation of the critique arises from the object itself. Hegel
develops this notion of critique in several works, but most effectively in
the Philosophy of Right. Disputing the subjective idealism of Kant and
Fichte, he states that philosophy cannot instruct the world on how it
ought to be: only on reality as it is, as reflected in its concepts. “It is no
longer aimed critically against reality, but against obscure abstractions
shoved between subjective consciousness and objective reason” (Habermas
1987, p. 43). Hegel assigned criticism a more modest goal: he believed
that criticism does not consist in judging or evaluating modernity by
means of some external criterion, but rather relying on elements contained
in itself. Finally, as already mentioned in the previous chapter, Nietzsche
conceived of an “aesthetically inspired” form of genealogical criticism of
human reason as will to power. In the second of his famous
Unfashionable Observations, “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of
History for Life,” Nietzsche analyzes the fruitlessness of cultural tradition

separated from action and relegated exclusively to the sphere of interiority.
Modern consciousness, overburdened with historical knowledge, has lost
its plastic power of life and orientation toward the future.
As Habermas has (problematically) observed, “Nietzsche uses the lad-
der of historical reason in order to cast it away at the end and to gain a
foothold in myth as the other of reason” (ibid. p. 86):
For the origin of historical education and its inner, quite radical contradic-
tion with the spirit of a “new age”, a “modern consciousness”—this origin
must itself in turn be historically understood, history must itself dissolve the
problem of history, knowledge must turn its sting again itself—this threefold
must is the imperative of the new spirit of the “new age” if it really does
contain something new, mighty, original and a promise of life. (Nietzsche
1980, p. 45, quot. by Habermas, ibid.)
This program of a genealogy of a “different start” for Western culture

was realized in his Birth of Tragedy, an investigation carried out with
historical-philological means that led him beyond the Alexandrian world
and beyond the Roman-Christian world back to the beginnings, back to
the “ancient Greek world of the great, the natural and human” (ibid.).
Since Nietzsche does not negate the modern time-consciousness, but
heightens it, he can imagine modern art—which in its most subjective
forms of expression drives this time-consciousness to its summit—as the
medium in which modernity makes contact with the archaic. An aestheti-
cally renewed mythology is supposed to relax the forces of social integra-
tion consolidated by competitive society. It will decenter modern subjective
consciousness and open it up to archaic experiences. In this sense, for
Nietzsche criticism means aesthetic reactivation of the archaic mythical
heritage of humanity for restorative cultural purposes. Criticism of mod-
ern culture means the critique of its decadence and the revitalization of the
lost origins of Western civilization.
These three classic models were to be reformulated in various ways in
nineteenth-century philosophy, giving the notion of critique different and
interesting twists. The famous “positivist dispute” that took place in 1960
between Theodor Adorno and Karl Popper (among others) was a dispute
between two conceptions of critique and criticism, explicitly derived from
Hegel (Adorno’s concept of a dialectical “critical theory”) and one
inspired by Kant (Popper’s “critical rationalism”). Moreover, we can
68 V. MELE
definitely consider Michele Foucault’s “micro-physic of power” as inspired

by Nietzsche’s genealogical approach. These are just some examples to
draw a simplified map in which to position Simmel and Benjamin in order
to save them from the “demon” of analogy that obscures relevant simili-
tudes and differences.
2 All That Is Solid Melts into Relationships:

Toward a Relativistic Concept of Truth
Although Simmel never dedicated a specific book or essay to the concept
of critique, throughout his lifetime he did elaborate on a relation with
Kant’s criticism.1 Since the beginning of his intellectual journey, Simmel
embraced the idea of critique as “theory of knowledge” (Erkenntnistheorie)
and experience2: critique has the main task of evaluating what we do know
and what we can know. As he stated in a famous uncompleted fragment
dedicated to his intellectual portrait (Anfang einer unvollendete
Selbstdarstellung), his intellectual path takes its starting point from
1
In fact, Simmel’s intellectual career began with Kant. Kant’s theory of matter was the
subject of his student dissertation, for which he was awarded the Royal Prize in 1880, and on
the basis of which he was awarded his doctoral degree. The first part of his dissertation was
published as Georg Simmel, Das Wesen der Materie nach Kant’s Physischer Monadologie
(1881), in GSG 1, pp. 9–41 (on this see Köhnke 1996, pp. 42–49). His subsequent
Habilitation analyzed Kant’s theory of synthetic judgment, pure perception and pure will,
and was regarded by the examination committee as a better work than his initial study on the
origins of music (Landmann 1958, p. 20; Köhnke 1996, pp. 51–77). Simmel’s first course as
Privatdozent at Berlin University was on Kant’s ethics, and he continued teaching Kant for
many years (Gassen and Landmann n.d., pp. 345–9). Kant was a recurring theme in many of
his publications, culminating in Kant: Sixteen Lectures Delivered at Berlin University, in the
winter semester of 1902–1903 and published as a book in 1904 (Georg Simmel, Kant:
Sechzehn Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität, in GSG 9, pp. 7–226). This was to
become Simmel’s most published work: none of his other books enjoyed four editions dur-
ing his lifetime. The second edition appeared in 1905, the third in 1913, and the fourth in
1918. In addition, Simmel was among the founders of the philosophical journal LOGOS,
perceived as the platform of the south-western Baden neo-Kantian school (Podoksik 2016,
p. 599).
2
“For Simmel, Kant’s philosophy is mainly the philosophy of knowledge and experience.
[...] It is this critical aspect which constitutes the philosophical essence of Kant’s ideas”
(Podoksik 2016, pp. 604–605). In his precise and expert reconstruction of Simmel’s neo-
Kantianism, Podoksik neglects Simmel’s theory and practice of a “third space” between art
and philosophy as expressed in numerous essays and, above all, in his Philosophy of Money
(1900). However, this does not detract from the validity of the article.
“epistemological and Kantian studies (erkenntnistheoretischen und

kantwissenschaftlichen Studien), with which historical and social scientific
studies went hand in hand” (Simmel 1958, p. 9). In the early 1880s, the
time of Simmel’s first intellectual endeavors, the neo-Kantian project was
hegemonic in the German universities. This cultural project was character-
ized by the attempt to find in Kant the foundations for restoring the unity
of the world in the context of diversified modern civilization (Podoksik
2016, p. 601). It is difficult to overstate Kant’s importance for Simmel.
Despite some reservations from an epistemological point of view, Simmel
viewed Kant as providing the answers to the aporias of modern times. As
Simmel noted in his book, Kant: Sixteen Lectures Delivered at the Berlin
University (Simmel 1997 [1918]), before Kant, philosophical thought
was divided between rationalism, on the one hand, and sensualism, on the
other. According to Simmel, the history of knowledge can be regarded as
governed by two contrasting tendencies: one inspired by the “architec-
tural instinct,” according to which all parts of our knowledge can be
reduced to a coherent, closed system; the other—a more modern ten-
dency in line with the theory of evolution—views the world in the form of
unceasing development, an infinite line rather than a circle. Kant’s vision
represents a surprising hybridization of these two tendencies: on the one
hand, Kant postulates that the world based on the experiences of our
senses is infinite, and therefore knowledge of it can develop without end,
while on the other, this endless movement of knowledge is regulated by a
systematic structure of our mind that functions precisely on the basis of a
priori categories. The architectural and systematic principle is therefore
satisfied not in the ordering of external reality, but in the constitution of
the mind itself, where the inclination toward development is manifested in
the infinite exploration of the world.
The most valuable aspect of Kant’s philosophy—the only one that can
allow us to grasp coherence in the modern world—was his rejection of
metaphysics as dogma. Kant’s philosophy was generally regarded as critical
rather than metaphysical, since it mainly focused on how our experience
works, rather than on what may be hidden behind it. According to
Simmel’s interpretation—which would remain constant in his treatment
of religion throughout his work—the existence of something beyond the
realm of experience is simply irrelevant to the Kantian critique of reason.
Although we can say that Simmel’s entire oeuvre is characterized by a
metaphysical longing for totality, his position on religion is typically neo-
Kantian, and this also clearly and practically indicates to us how different
70 V. MELE
the influence of Judaism is on his thought. Just as his investigations into

the philosophy of history and historical time proceed from the question of
the conditions of possibility of history, so his approach to religion is not
ontological, but epistemological, not transcendental, aiming to analyze
the psychological conditions of possibility of religion (Vandenberghe
2010, p. 7). From a transcendental point of view, “religion appears as a
process of consciousness and nothing else” (Simmel 1989a, p. 52). In fact,
this was not the historical position of Kant, who was always interested in
metaphysics and the problem of God. However, for Simmel—unlike
Benjamin, as will be addressed in the next section—these problems are not
central to modernity and the critical-epistemological aspect in Kant is
more important than the metaphysical one.3
Having considered the “thing-in-itself” and associated problems (sub-
ject/object dualism, disunity between the phenomenal and noumenal
world) as unworthy of philosophical investigation, neo-Kantians generally
concentrated on what they considered Kant’s most relevant idea: not that
“the world is my representation [die Welt ist meine Vorstellung], but in the
more profound one of “the world is my [activity of] representing [die Welt
ist mein Vorstellen]” (Simmel 1997b [1918], p. 61). Our mind always
grasps the world actively, and the forms in which the world appears to our
perception and understanding exist a priori. Like other neo-Kantians
(Cohen, Natorp), Simmel was convinced that the idea of the synthetic a
priori was the basis of the validity of Kant’s theory of knowledge, even if
he criticized Kant’s specific doctrine of a priori categories (ibid.,
pp. 31–50). Simmel was convinced that this doctrine was unsatisfactory
for the modern mind. There is no reason why the mind’s structure itself
should be closed and limited or why the development of the world should
not regard the forms of our knowledge as well. The concept of a priori
should become more flexible and develop according to the progress of
knowledge in various fields. However, for Simmel, Kant’s discovery that
3
Naturally, on such a central issue in Simmel’s thought the debate is quite open. Arrington
and Kemple hold that Simmel after the great 1916 monograph on Rembrandt began to see
religion as an a priori of life in general (Dawes 2013). Vandenberghe believes that Simmel’s
entire work can be read from a theological rather than an aesthetic point of view. He comes
to suggest “a hidden connection between Simmel’s sociology of religion and the messianic
materialism of Critical Theory” (Vandenberghe 2010, p. 26). On the contrary, as we are try-
ing to show in this chapter and as we will discuss in the next ones on Benjamin, their theories
of knowledge and experience are quite opposite. Simmel’s concept of truth, critique, history,
society, and morality are radically different from Benjamin’s “redemptive critique.”
our experiences are conditioned by overly sensible assumptions that are

almost innate to our spirit possesses a fecundity that had not been at all
exhausted. Although Kant applied it only to the natural sciences, the entire
historical and psychological world is no less worthy of being investigated
in its a priori assumptions. In the main fields of investigation of social and
historical sciences, Simmel tried to develop new a priori postulates of spe-
cific sorts of knowledge. As he expressed himself in the Anfang einer
unvollendete Selbstdarstellung:
The initial result of this was the basic insight (set out in The Problems of the
Philosophy of History) that “history” signifies the formation (Formung) of
the events that are objects of immediate experience by means of the a priori
categories of the scientific intellect just as “nature” signifies the formation of
sensually given materials by means of the categories of the understanding.
This separation of the form and content of the historical image, that emerged
for me purely epistemologically, was then pursued by me in a methodologi-
cal principle within a particular discipline. I secured a new concept of sociol-
ogy in which I separated the forms of sociation (die Formen der
Vergesellschaftung) from the contents, i.e. the drives, purposes and material
content which, only by being taken up by the interactions between individu-
als, become societal. (Simmel 1958, p. 9)
However, it would be very limiting to seek in Simmel total and uncon-

ditional adherence to a single author or school of thought, such as the
neo-Kantian one. Simmel, in fact, concerned himself mainly, and passion-
ately with the problems that the authors or schools in question repre-
sented. Simmel’s interest in any given philosopher(s) always regarded the
“problems” that they raised and, consistently with his philosophical
approach, he never espoused absolute positions, but moved beyond them,
indicating the aporias and possible openings. This is what he does with
Kant and neo-Kantianism, just as in the late phase of his thought he feels
the need to compare Kant with the vitalism of Goethe. Thus, during his
so-called positivist phase he corrects Kant in a pragmatic and evolutionist
way, strictly avoiding espousing in toto one or other antagonistic position.
In fact, in Über eine Beziehung der Selektionstheorie zur Erkenntnistheorie4
(“About a Relation between Selection Theory and the Theory of
Knowledge”)—a less-quoted article published during his so-called positiv-
ist phase in 1885 in Archiv für systematische Philosophie, edited by
4
GSG, 5, pp. 62–74.
72 V. MELE
Natorp—Simmel suggested a synthesis between neo-Kantianism, evolu-

tionism, and pragmatism.5 Regarding the origin of the a priori, in this
article Simmel suggests that the validity of Kant’s doctrine does not find
its origin in abstract logical necessity, but is rather the result of the evolu-
tionary development of the human genre. Nowadays the functioning of
our experience works as described by Kant because over the course of
evolution these specific characteristics turned out to be the most useful for
the existence of human beings. Therefore, the truthfulness of our knowl-
edge is based on its usefulness. Even if Simmel would later abandon this
radical evolutionary position, the pragmatic (and relativistic) concept of
truth remains central in The Philosophy of Money, either pragmatically or
justified by the most fundamental fact that points of view are useful repre-
sentations for the vital interests of beings endowed with certain psycho-
physical organizations: “The truth is not originally useful because it is
true, but the opposite. We attribute dignity of truth to those representa-
tions that act in us as real strength or movement, and that lead us to useful
behaviour” (Simmel 1989a [1900], p. 102). Similar to Nietzsche, though
more skeptical, Simmel abandons the notion of absolute truth in favor of
truths related to certain psychophysical organizations. Consequently,
truths will in principle be as numerous as different organizations and vital
needs. One critic noted an analogy between these statements by Simmel
and Nietzsche’s thesis that what decides truth is ultimately the value it has
for life (“truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of living
could not live”). But he also drew attention to the difference between the
two conceptions: in calling the truth useful to life “error,” Nietzsche
would still tacitly refer to an absolute knowledge, with respect to which
the truths relative to certain psychophysical organizations are delegiti-
mized. The case of Simmel, on the other hand, is different. He does not
conclude that truths, because they are relative to a certain psychophysical
organization, are for this reason illusory. This different attitude would
become possible only because relativism “has abandoned the notion of
absolute truth.” This abandonment of the notion of absolute truth should
be kept well in mind in order not to misunderstand the meaning of that
shift from relativism to the metaphysics of life that is recorded in Simmel’s
works after 1910, and especially in the four metaphysical chapters of
Lebensanschauung. The assumption of the “metaphysical” principle of life
as the locus of origin of the infinite variety of forms of representation of
the world, which in turn necessarily come into conflict with its infinite
5
On Simmel’s relationship with pragmatist philosophy, see Kusch (2019).
creativity, does not entail any renunciation of the relativist perspective.

While in The Philosophy of Money (1900) the absolute appears accessible as
a relation of subjective elements, that is, through the very fulfillment of
the principle of relativity, in The View of Life (1918) Simmel posits as abso-
lute the underlying creative movement of forms, that is, the ultimate root
of the intuition of the world that is life. Simmelian metaphysics, unlike
traditional metaphysics, which aimed to grasp the hidden foundation of
things, aims to get behind man and his merely intellectual aspect. It has
the critical intent to demarcate—albeit in a different way from Kant—the
boundaries of experience, expanding the scope of the latter beyond intel-
lectual knowledge and thus reacting to the tyranny that intellectualism has
exercised over Erlebnis. In this it is in agreement with relativism, which is
itself a continuous revolt against the tyranny of the pure, logical image of
the world that with its objectivity drives all other images of the world back
into the shadows (Andolfi and Simmel 1996).
The concept of “reciprocal action,” which translates the German term
Wechselwirkung (also translatable as “reciprocity effect”), assumes funda-
mental importance throughout Simmel’s thought. “Moving from the soci-
ological meaning of the concept of interaction,” as Simmel reveals in the
Anfang einer unvollendeten Selbstdarstellung, “I realized that this had grad-
ually become for me a metaphysical principle of general significance”:
It seems to me that the current dissolution of all that is substantial, absolute

and eternal in the flow of things, in the historical possibility of change, in
purely psychological reality, can only be guaranteed against unbridled sub-
jectivism and skepticism if one places in the place of those stable and sub-
stantial values the vital interactivity of elements that in turn are subject to
the same dissolution to infinity. The central concepts of truth, value, objec-
tivity, etc. appeared to me then as interactive realities, as the contents of a
relativism which now no longer meant the skeptical destruction of every
solid element, but on the contrary the guarantee against such destruction by
means of a new concept of solidity. (Simmel 1958, p. 9)
It therefore indicates an overall conception of reality as a network of

mutual influence between many elements. It is a philosophical and meta-
physical conception according to which all phenomena of life—not only
the social ones—are linked together by a relation of interchange and
mutual causation: each element cannot be isolated and understood in its
singularity, but only as it is in vital interaction with all the others, in a
dynamic of action and feedback. This dynamic-processual conception of
reality opposes a mechanistic application of the principle of cause and
74 V. MELE
effect for understanding vital phenomena. The notion of cause is replaced

by that of correspondence, of mutual influence between different orders
of phenomena: A acts on B, transforming it into B’, but B does the same
on A, which becomes A’, in a virtually infinite process whose outcomes
cannot be determined with certainty. Although such a perspective may
seem distant from any form of any previously mentioned model of criti-
cism, it actually represents a form of “relativist” (in Simmel’s words) or
“relationist” (in contemporary words) criticism. The goal of this form of
criticism is the dissolution of all “solid” entities elaborated by Western
metaphysics: subject, object, truth, history, being. Simmel’s “relativism,”
which throughout his entire life he considered the only possible principle
for modern theory, was not conceived as a gratuitous skepticism or a banal
attempt to cast doubt on everything. Rather, he considers relativism a
positive metaphysical depiction of the world, as he himself explained in a
letter to Heinrich Rickert (probably in 1917):
For me, it [the relativism of truth] doesn’t mean that truth and non-truth are
relative one to the other, but rather that the truth is a relation of contents one
to the other, which no one possesses in and of itself, just as no object is heavy
in itself, but only in an exchange relation with some other. I don’t find at all
interesting the fact that single truths are relative in meaning, while what is
interesting is their totality, or rather their concept alone. […] I do not wish
to set the concept of truth against something “higher,” but only to give it a
more solid base, given that every circle is a base that cannot be against logic,
but nor can it be drawn from logic. (Landmann and Gassen 1958, p. 118)
It is around this idea of relativism that his critics have generally focused.6
What is unique about the idea of relativism advanced by Simmel is that it
is understood as the only effective means to escape the loss of all certainty.
6
Whether Simmel’s work succeeded in obviating this suspicion is a matter for debate. Dal
Lago, a great admirer and connoisseur of Simmel states: “I believe that, despite his inten-
tions, Simmel’s thought can never be entirely freed of the suspicion of skepticism” (1994,
p. 93). On the contrary, for Olli Pyyhtinen—one of the foremost scholars working on
Simmel’s writings and theories—“by building on Simmel’s insistence on examining entities
in terms of the relations of Wechselwirkung, one can also develop a nonreductionist social
ontology … Simmel’s sociology dissolves the individual, society and basically any entity at
any given scale into relations of reciprocity of their parts. Each and every entity is composed
of dynamic relations of pre- and sub-entity materials, and every unity is a product of relations
of reciprocal effect. So it is not all about individuals and society, but Simmel’s work escapes
both micro-reductionism and macro-reductionism. Thereby, I read out of his work an idea
of there being an infinite number of layers in reality” (Pyyhtinen and Beer 2018, p. 276). For
this appreciation of Simmel’s relationalism see also Pyyhtinen (2017).
Relativism leads to skeptical and disarming consequences only when it is

opposed to a supposedly timeless truth, free from any historical and social
conditioning, which it hopes to achieve—not when it is led back to the
idea of a necessary interaction and complementarity of points of view. In
what can be considered his most mature work—The Philosophy of Money
[1900]—Simmel provided a broad justification for the relativism of knowl-
edge (Simmel 2004, pp. 155–179). Here he takes note of the primitive
character of belief in an ultimate substance, which modern science rather
traces back to the interplay of relations. The need to postulate a fixed
point of reference, beyond the network of relations, subsists, but this
absolute foundation remains inaccessible. The concept of truth remains,
but it is not the absolute quality of a representation, but rather of the rep-
resentations between them. The rebuke of skepticism therefore misses the
point. Simmel does not question the possibility of valid knowledge.
Relativity for him, noted one of his early critics, “is not a weakening of the
concept of truth, a detraction of truth, but on the contrary is the essence
of truth itself, the way in which only our representations become full
truth” (Adler 1919, p. 15).
3 Theory of Knowledge of the Social Sciences

Simmel’s declared intellectual pursuit of “epistemological and Kantian
studies (erkenntnistheoretischen und kantwissenschaftlichen Studien), with
which historical and social scientific studies went hand in hand” (Simmel
1958, p. 9) was followed in the early 1890s by various attempts to work
on and clarify epistemological problems. Indeed, as revealed in a letter to
the French sociologist Célestin Bouglé, by 1895 Simmel had even reached
the point of planning to write an Erkenntnistheorie der Sozialwissenschaften
(“Theory of knowledge of the social sciences”).7 The first important work
in which Simmel provided this project with coherence is his 1890 book
Über Soziale Differenzierung (“On Social Differentiation”). However,
even in this case the inspiration for this work is very much detached from
the traditional positivist ideal of the primacy of “facts” over consciousness.
As has been rightly argued, it is possible to recognize here “the presence
of a real epistemology, as resolute in distancing itself from the then hege-
monic Comtian positivism […] as boldly innovative in proposing complex
7
Simmel an Célestin Bouglé. Berlin 22.6. 1895: BNParis, quot. by Köhnke (1996,
p. 334).
76 V. MELE
hermeneutic positions similar to aesthetics, which prefigure theoretical

acquisitions that the philosophy of science will formalize only a few
decades later” (Vozza 2003, p. 9). Therefore, the aesthetic ancestry of
Simmel’s social thought is confirmed as present in different accentuations
and in all phases of his thought. It is possible to speak of a “monist”
Simmel, in the sense that he saw no radical difference between natural life
and the life of the spirit. It is however necessary to clarify the term positiv-
ist, which in no way coincides with the caricatured representation of a
mind that faithfully reflects the data of nature, along the lines of the dogma
of “immaculate perception” (Nietzsche). For Simmel, we must rather
speak of a “naturalist” phase in which he takes into great consideration the
contributions of the natural sciences and the evolutionary and naturalistic
view of the world, strongly influenced by Charles Darwin, Herbert
Spencer, and Theodor Gustav Fechner, with regard to his philosophy and
theory of knowledge, on the one hand, and by the aesthetic point of view
in consonance with the naturalistic movement, on the other.
In the initial chapter of On Social Differentiation, entitled Zur
Erkenntnistheorie der Socialwissenschaft (“On the Theory of Knowledge of
Social Science”), Simmel clarifies the importance of his conception of cri-
tique based on the a priori, stating that “there is no science whose content
emerges from mere objective facts” (Simmel 1989d [1890], p. 117), mov-
ing definitively away from a crude positivist conception of knowledge as a
reflection. Science is based on giving meaning (Deutung) to phenomena
and the “forming” (Formung) of events, not on the mere recording of
empirical evidence. Therefore, even sociology—an “eclectic science”
because its material is provided by other sciences such as history, anthro-
pology and psychology—presupposes and contains “always an interpreta-
tion and a donation of form to the facts according to categories and norms
that for the science in question are a priori, that is, they are transported
into facts in themselves and for themselves isolated from the spirit that
conceptualizes” (ibid., p. 116).8 The peculiarity of social science with
respect to other sciences is the “complexity” of its object. “It is an eclectic
science, because its material consists of the products of other sciences.”
Sociology represents a kind of “science to the second power” in that it
“creates new syntheses starting from what for those sciences is already a
8
Simmel would hold firmly to the use of the concept of a priori in sociology until the “big”
sociology of 1908, where in the Kantian excursus How is Society Possible? he spoke of the
three a priori of social life (Simmel 1992a, pp. 42–61).
synthesis” (ibid.). Therefore, it is not characterized by a specific object,

but rather represents “a new point of view” on material already known and
elaborated. This represents Simmel’s “perspectivism,” which in common
with Nietzsche and Weber, supports both the necessity and the relativity
of conceptual constructions that precede the empirical examination of
phenomena. The constructions of meaning are necessary to undertake the
investigation, to select and reduce the infinite multiplicity of those who
have made such constructions, but they provide (like Weber’s “ideal-
types”) provisional and falsifiable orientations. The possibility must be left
open that non-coincidence between theoretical constructs and empirical
realities emerges in the course of the investigation.
In the introductory chapter of Theory of Knowledge Simmel refers not
only to a neo-Kantian conception, but also implicitly to the logical atom-
ism of Gustav Theodor Fechner, according to which science traces back
the complexity of reality to the existence of simple atoms without quali-
ties, extremely small mathematical points, whose formal relations are the
basis for all phenomena of force and matter. Reality can therefore be
understood adequately through its components and its constituent prin-
ciples, not by using the traditional metaphysical concepts, which were still
applied to sociology, psychology, and the ethics of his time, but only by
following the main idea of atomism. In fact, in Erkenntnistheorie Der
Sozialwissenschaft Simmel states: “the knowledge of general concepts—
that a revived Platonism introduces by stealth as reality in our worldview—
as purely subjective formations, and their dissolution in the sum of
individual phenomena, the only ones that are real—are one of the main
purposes of the modern spiritual form” (Simmel 1989d [1890],
p. 126). Consistently pursuing this aim, “as real beings only point atoms
remain, and every compound being falls as such within the realm of the
lower degree of reality” (ibid., p. 128). On the basis of this atomistic prin-
ciple of knowledge, by renouncing the study of the being and the sub-
stance of phenomena, science is limited to discerning the relations that are
established between them, abandoning the qualitative point of view in
favor of quantitative, and therefore relative, determinations. Instead of the
apparent stability of organic, historical, social, and psychic formations, it
investigates the constant changes in reality, which are represented as a
network of endless relations. The type of knowledge and methodological
tools that Simmel uses are comparable to the introduction of the micro-
scope in biology, as only through the perspective introduced by this instru-
ment “the vital process has shown itself in its connection with its smallest
78 V. MELE
carriers—the cells—and in its identity with the countless and incessant

reciprocal actions between them” (Simmel 1992a [1908], p. 34). Fechner’s
doctrine of atomism allows Simmel to develop a new perspective that bet-
ter represents “the real life of society as it presents itself in experience”
(ibid., p. 32) and to elaborate a view of society understood no longer as
substance, but as the reciprocal action of its elements. Thus, at the basis of
this thought there lies the central category of reciprocal action, the “regu-
lative principle … that everything is in some relationship of reciprocal
action with everything, and that between every point of the world and
every other point there are forces and relations” (Simmel 1989d [1890],
p. 130). The Erkenntnistheorie of social science developed therefrom pre-
supposes reciprocal actions: what appears as unity must be understood as
the result of relations.
Considering the complexity of the task of sociology (“to describe the
forms of human coexistence and to find the rules by which the individual
as a member of the group, and the groups themselves, define their mutual
behavior,” Simmel 1989d [1890], p. 123), Simmel further distances him-
self from the positivism that preceded, and was coeval to, him by arguing
the impossibility of the formulation of sociological laws.
Every process, phenomenon, or social situation that we take as an
object represents the “manifestation, that is, the effect, of innumerable
partial processes placed at a deeper level.” It follows that “it is not possible
to infer, from the identity of two situations or periods in great evolution-
ary series, that the consequence of this sector of reality which appears
identical in another series will be identical to that of the sector of reality
which appears identical in another series: in the further evolution the
diversity of the starting points, which had given way to an only accidental
and provisional identity, is again asserted” (ibid., p. 124). “Therefore we
cannot know, when faced with two social situations which appear identi-
cal, whether in each of them there are not latent forces which in the imme-
diately succeeding moment cause completely different phenomena to
emerge from those situations” (ibid., p. 126).
Simmel in this way dismisses not only the “fetish” of the method of
positivist sociology (the study of the laws of society), but also, and equally,
the very object of Comtian and Spencerian sociology: society is in fact
judged to be an excessively all-encompassing and indeterminate object:
If society is only a synthesis of individuals—a synthesis that is realized in our

way of considering things—which are the authentic realities, the true object
of science is constituted by individuals and their behavior, and the concept

of society evaporates. There exist tangibly only individual men, with their
situations and their movements: therefore, the problem could consist only
in understanding these situations and these movements, while society, which
came into being only through an ideal synthesis, and which is not tangible
in any given place, could not constitute the object of a thought directed to
the investigation of reality. (ibid.)
Simmel warns against both the concept of society as an autonomous

entity and an individualistic foundation of society, which reduces social
reality to isolated atoms. The latter, in fact, would also be a form of sub-
stantialism analogous to the former, in that it would hypostatize one of
the two terms of the relation (the individual as prius with respect to soci-
ety). In reality, what must be at the center of the concept of society is
interaction: “I have no doubt that there is only one foundation that pro-
vides an objectivity at least relative to unification: the interaction
(Wechselwirkung) of the parts. We designate an object as unitary precisely
insofar as there are dynamic reciprocal relations between its parts” (ibid.,
p. 129). According to this point of view then:
Society is only the name by which we designate the sum of these interac-
tions, a name that is usable only to the extent that they have been ascertained
and established. It is therefore a concept not endowed with unitary subsis-
tence, but with gradations: a concept of which a greater or lesser extent is
usable, depending on the greater or lesser number and greater or lesser
intimacy of the interactions existing between the given persons. In this way
the concept of society completely loses that mystical character that individu-
alistic realism wanted to see in it. (ibid., p. 131)
Therefore, Simmel viewed it erroneous to consider both “society” and

“the individual” as entities enclosed within themselves, as doing so reveals
the same substantialist prejudice, when in fact it is necessary to adopt a
perspective that, in modern terminology, can be called relationalist, which
heads in the most genuine direction of the “modern spiritual life”: “dis-
solve what is solid, identical to itself, substantial, in a function, in a force,
in a movement, and recognize in every being the historical process of its
becoming” (ibid., p. 130).
In this perspective, not even the individual is spared, as, in spite of
appearances, it does not constitute a closed unit on a par with society.
80 V. MELE
As long as man was considered, like all organic species, a creaturely idea
of God, a being that entered the world fully endowed with all its qualities,
it was licit and almost necessary to view the individual man as a closed
unit, as an indivisible personality whose “simple” psyche found expression
and an analogy in the unitary cohesion of its bodily organs. With the
worldview based on the history of evolution, such a view has become
impossible (ibid., p. 127).
To think and to presuppose that in some deeper part of us there is a
unitary and exclusive support of all our psychic life is an “article of faith
completely unproven and indefensible from the gnoseological point
of view”:
there are so many contrasts between the thoughts of the child and those of
man, between our theoretical convictions and our practical actions, between
the actions of our best hours and those of our weakest hours, that it is abso-
lutely impossible to discover a point from which all this appears as the har-
monious development of an original psychic unity. (ibid., p. 128)
Founding sociology on the “individual” therefore seems just as risky as

founding it on the “mystical” unit of society. Society is therefore com-
posed of the incessant interaction of its constituent elements—groups as
well as individuals—a fact that directs Simmel’s sociology definitively
toward the study of social relations (as we will see in the next chapters).
Simmel’s epistemological approach in this propaedeutic writing seems to
be hermeneutic, a “hermeneutics of complexity,” (Vozza 2003,
p. 11) which does not shy away from the task of analyzing the infinity of
combinations under which the limitless elements of reality present them-
selves to the observer.
4 Theory of Knowledge of History

No one has directly continued his way, but no one could and can undertake
anything substantial in the field of the philosophy of history without having
gone through the experience of his way of interpretation. (Lukács [1918]
1958, p. 176)
The third important book that delineates Simmel’s idea of “critique” as

Erkenntnistheorie is Die Probleme der Geschichtsphilosophie. Eine
erkenntnistheoretische Studie (1892).9 The tenor of Simmel’s reflections is

quite similar to that expressed in On Social Differentiation. The direction
of Simmel’s research cannot be summed up in terms of the search for a
philosophy of history, but in exactly its opposite. From the very first edition
of 1892 it is clear that Simmel’s Erkenntnistheorie is intended to dismiss any
possible metaphysics of history through scientific determination of what is
historical. This attempt takes the form of a causal and psychologistic reduc-
tion of “the happening”: historical events are analytically reduced to their
uniquely psychological determinants. Here too, the atomism of psychic
motives, and thus the definition of elementary psychic connections, is still
presented as the substance of historical phenomena—the genetic explana-
tion of becoming—just as the atomism of social relations was what made
up society. With the Kantian shift of the second edition (of 1905, while that
of 1907 remains almost unchanged), the realist stance of historical knowl-
edge is attenuated in favor of a probabilistic-congressional stance. In the
preface to the second edition, in the wake of Kant’s question “how is nature
possible?” Simmel formulates the question “how is history possible?” That
is to say, how can one form “from the matter of immediately experienced
reality, that theoretical construct which we call history?” What is the a
priori that makes it formally possible? In answering these questions, Simmel
seems to deviates decisively from the debate of the time on the distinction
between Natur and Geisteswissenschaften and to indicate a path that, if fol-
lowed to the end, leads toward an epistemological approach that goes
beyond the distinction between Erklären (explaining) and Verstehen
(understanding). In the same years that Max Weber, in The Methodology of
the Social Sciences, tries to establish the conditions of objectivity of the
social-historical sciences through the ideal types that are cognitive tools to
identify appropriate cases among historical phenomena, Simmel is mainly
concerned with opening up to historical knowledge access to the individu-
ality of spiritual processes that preserves cognitive objectivity from both the
psychological subjectivism of individual lived experiences (Erlebnisse) and
the opaque abstractness of universal laws. Only a synthesis of the imagina-
tion completely analogous to aesthetic sensitivity allows the historian to
grasp that unity of the individual soul, which is the methodological
9
Of all Simmel’s works, The Problems of the Philosophy of History is that which most appears
to be troubled and modified in its various drafts. The differences between the first and sec-
ond editions, respectively of 1892 and 1905, are radical, while those between the second and
third editions of 1907 are modest and do not broadly touch the overall layout of the work.
82 V. MELE
presupposition of intersubjective understanding and organization of his-

torical knowledge. Art, like history, achieves its deepest essence in trans-
forming the randomness of one’s own lived experience into a universally
valid happening, or more precisely, because within it that which is personal
is immediately experienced as universally valid. In this book Simmel also
makes clear his preference for Kant’s third critique (Critique of Judgment)
over the first and the second, as is clearly revealed in his lessons on Kant
held at the University of Berlin some years later (1902–1903, especially the
thirteenth).10
Reconnecting to Dilthey’s Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften
(Introduction to the Human Sciences), in The Problems of the Philosophy of
History Simmel bases his reflections on the psychic nature of all historical
events, coming to define history as “history of mental processes” whose
subject is “persons,” that is, “the conceptions, intentions, desires, and
feelings of personalities” (Simmel [1905] 1977, p. 39). The fact that his-
tory is primarily the history of human beings implies that “understanding”
the “other” as a person constitutes the first presupposition of historical
science. The “sympathetic adherence” to the “soul” of the “other,”
“empathizing” with it, the possibility that consciousness of the other is
experienced in the interiority of the knowing subject as the psychic life of
another, represents the “a priori that makes history possible.” Such
“reproduction in the historical-psychological sense” means that the
thoughts, feelings, desires somehow experienced by the knowing subject
are now precisely “represented not as his own, but as those of another, of
a non-ego,” and that therefore the formations of consciousness that are
10
Simmel’s approach to Kant can be divided into two periods (Podoksik 2016, p. 600). In
the first, he considered Kant not only as a great philosophical genius, but also as the creator
of the only intellectual basis for resolving the contradictions of the modern era. In the sec-
ond, he became convinced that Kant’s response to the problems of modernity was not fully
satisfactory, although he continued to hold him in great esteem. This change in position can
be dated to probably between 1896 and 1902: many works are fundamental in attesting to
this turnaround. It is important to mention here at least the essay Was ist uns Kant? (1896),
in which he detailed his initial position on the philosopher of Königsberg and the lectures on
Kant held at Berlin University (1902), in which he voiced his new attitude. Podoksik sug-
gests that a precise date for this change in attitude toward Kant’s philosophy can be estab-
lished as 1899, as two things happened then. First, Simmel stopped offering annual classes
on Kant and from then on would only lecture on Kant occasionally. Second, it was the same
year that he published the essay Kant und Goethe, in which for the first time he spoke of an
alternative way—namely, Goethe’s philosophy of life—to resolve the contradictions of
modernity.
produced in the historical understanding are detached from their root in

the “I” and transplanted into another “I” (ibid.).
The need to “reproduce” a subjectivity—in turn made possible by a
subjectivity that, however, at the same time “objectively opposes” the
first—is the “enigma of historical knowledge.” Historical knowledge, says
Simmel, does not imply cancellation of the “I,” as claimed by the historical
realism of Leopold von Ranke. On the contrary, the “I” is essential for
understanding the “other”: “without the “I,” in fact, there would be
nothing left to understand the non-ego.”
Similarly to Dilthey, Simmel emphasizes the difference between the
natural sciences (“nomothetic”), interested in the formulation of general
laws within which to include individual phenomena, and the social-
historical sciences (“ideographic”), which following the individualizing
orientation of psychology, aim instead to understand the individual event
in its unique uniqueness. If historical knowledge intends to include the
other as its object of inquiry, contrary to the theses of Dilthey and the
Einfühlung theorists—severely criticized even by Benjamin, as we shall
see—it will not have to attempt a mere psychic transposition with relative
repetition of others’ acts of consciousness, but rather produce a form in
which the processes of interpretation, selection and combination con-
verge. The divergence from Dilthey’s position becomes completely clear
in the late essay on historical understanding (Simmel 1999 [1918]), where
the abyss between ego and non-ego is transformed into recognition of the
You as an “original phenomenon on the same level as the ego” (ibid., p.
159). Such recognition functions as a general presupposition to the entire
Simmelian theory of understanding: “one’s own external-internal experi-
ence—in fact—cannot provide the key to penetrate the external-internal
experience of others” (ibid., p. 157). It is therefore a matter of recogniz-
ing the equal originality of the same act of understanding, its irreducibility
to the processes that genetically determine it and the contents that articu-
late it: “the You and understanding are the same thing, expressed once as
substance and once as function” (ibid., p. 161). Understanding, then, is a
function of otherness rather than a projection of the ego’s psychic states
onto the Other. For the construction of practical and historical reality,
such a category of “You” is for Simmel as decisive as the category of sub-
stance or causality for the world of natural sciences. “I cannot designate
the you as my representation in the same sense as any other object: I must
assign to it a being-for-itself, such as that which... I perceive only for my
own self” (ibid., pp. 161–162).
84 V. MELE
Simmel’s main treatment of the psychological presuppositions of his-

torical research is laid out in the chapter The Internal Conditions of
Historical Research contained in The Problems of the Philosophy of History.
However, it is within a theoretical framework purged of psychologistic
residues that Simmel’s reflection on the theory of historical knowledge
developed. This comes about through a reflection on history as a specific
form of experience against the background of the absolute becoming of
life. The form-history, like any other form, is radically finite and separate
from the other spheres of life or Erleben. It is a being-other-than-life that
springs from life itself: Simmel reaches this conclusion in the essay on The
Problem of Historical Time (Simmel 2003 [1916]), which is followed by a
development in the essay on The Form of History (Simmel 2000 [1917-18]),
where he also tries to clarify in what sense one can speak of an affinity
between life and history, always, however, within an original framework
different from Dilthey’s reflection. Equally central in The Problems of
Philosophy of History is the critique of the concept of historical “law,” that
is, the affirmation of the impossibility of establishing an objective sense of
history (after the Marxist example).
As seen in the previous chapter, it became difficult for the generation of
the 1890s in Germany to rely on the concept of progress, which assumes
the constant advancement of society toward the better. This philosophy of
history, like Comte’s “law of three stages” or Marx’s historical material-
ism, became difficult to accept for Simmel, who showed that he had fully
absorbed Nietzsche’s lesson: not only do historical laws offer us a static,
mechanistic image of happening, but they also contribute to leveling and
homogenizing the internal differences of historical happenings. “The
propositions which pass for laws of history are generally based on one of
these illegitimate oversimplifications of complex phenomena. In conse-
quence, we treat phenomena which are very different—from the stand-
point of their immanent or structural properties—as if they were more or
less equivalent” (Simmel 1977 [1905], p. 106). In other words, the notion
of law is merely the projection of a unity that by a decision of the knowing
subject takes the place of the multiple appearances that we denote as
“facts.” This leads to the same methodological problem that prompted
Simmel to dismiss the concept of “society” in On Social Differentiation
and which would also return in the “big” Sociology of 1908: “society,”
“culture,” “progress” are only nominalisitic concepts that we attribute, on
the basis of our needs, to the materials that we collect from phenomenal
reality:
For the military strategist, a stand of trees constitutes an entity; together

with other elements, it makes up the terrain that is important for his pur-
poses. For the forester, the individual tree is the entity which is of interest to
him in the total phenomenon; for the botanist, it is the cell of the individual
tree; for the chemist, it is the chemical constituents of the cell. Simplicity
and complexity, therefore, are relative concepts. They do not correspond to
the distinction between reality itself and the derivative conceptual constructs
of reality. On the contrary, they are both epistemological categories in the
same sense. The manner in which they apply to phenomena is a consequence
of the problematic of the inquiry that is at stake. In a metaphysical sense,
therefore, both concepts are subjective, and in an epistemological sense
both are objective. Therefore, the following thesis is certainly not prima
facie self-evident. The composite phenomena of historical life are nomologi-
cally comprehensible only if they can be deduced from the established laws
of individual psychology. (ibid., p. 114)
Even if it is possible to speak of laws in the field of history, they are not
historical laws, but philosophical laws, namely, “generalizations that have
nothing to do—or at least not necessarily—with those of empirical knowl-
edge.” Generalizations are forms of philosophical abstraction that tran-
scend the level of simple knowledge; they can be said to shift the problem
of history from the level of historiography to that of aesthetics.
In summary, it is possible to consider that Simmel made an original and
interesting contribution to this issue regarding the following aspects of the
formulation of historical methodology: refutation of historical realism (in
particular that advocated by the historian Leopold von Ranke);
historicization of the historical subject (as opposed to what was theorized
by the German philosopher Heinrich Rickert); the impossibility of estab-
lishing an objective sense of history (following the example of Marx’s his-
torical materialism); detachment from a psychologistic hermeneutics in
favor of a cultural/historical hermeneutics of the autonomous logic of
cultural content, which emerges more clearly in the later writings than in
Problems in the Philosophy of History.
Simmel thus describes the concept of Verstehen (“understanding”):
It is this latter form of understanding—and not the former—which is at

stake in the project of understanding historical persons. And in this latter
form of understanding, “recreation” obviously does not have the same sta-
tus that it occupies in the former. In other words, there is no sense in which
it represents an exact reproduction of the contents of consciousness that we
86 V. MELE
ascribe to the historical person. We believe that we can understand every

variety and degree of love and hate, courage and despair, desire and feeling.
But we do not believe that the expression of these emotions—on which our
idea or image of them is based—grasps or affects us all in the same way. It is
obvious that the sort of mental process which we recognize as the compre-
hension of these phenomena presupposes that they have been psychologi-
cally transformed or abbreviated, perhaps even that our image of them has
faded. But somehow their content must he retained or recovered. (Simmel
1977 [1905], p. 65)
What is important to note here is that for Simmel historical knowledge

(as knowledge of the “other”) is in some sense a necessary “fiction,” a
construction that takes place on the basis of the “mutual interaction”
(Wechselwirkung) between the representation of the knowing subject and
that—never fully accessible—of the known subject, from “fragments,”
“details,” “clues.” In this sense, Simmel’s approach can be said to reveal
affinities with the evidential paradigm of historian Carlo Ginzburg
(Ginzburg 1989; on this Mele 2015).
Historical knowledge coincides neither with the representation of the
knowing subject nor with that of the known subject: it is located in a
“third realm,” beyond subjectivism and historical realism.
5 Theory of Knowledge of Morality

By deconstructing the fundamental concepts of society and history, the
sociological and historical epistemology of the young Simmel could not
but effect a modification of the science of morality, as well. The two vol-
umes of Simmel’s least studied work—the Einleitung in die
Moralwissenschaften (“Introduction to the Moral Science”), published
in 1892–1893—are thus a logical continuation of his research on the soci-
ological and historiographical method. The criticism of ethics and the
“morality of the good society,” which was still mainly determined by con-
tent, as set forth especially in the first volume, was followed in the sec-
ond—“apart from the explanation of what was meant in methodological
terms by the title word ‘Moral Science’” (Köhnke 1996, p. 334)—by scat-
tered epistemological formulations and epistemological substantiation.
Once again, the main interlocutor and critical reference is Kant. While, as
described earlier, it was a matter of making Kant’s logic more flexible by
making more open his notion of a priori—that is, the structure that makes
experience possible, thereby constituting it—in this work, it is a matter of

de-intellectualizing his morality, freeing it from the privilege granted by
Kant to logical-mathematical knowledge and its foundation on a religious
basis. The aim of the work was to remove moral prescriptions from Kantian
formalism and bring them back to the historical and social conditions of
their application. The study was thus to provide a critique and contribute
to the construction of a science of ethical life based on psychology and
sociology. In the preface to the work Simmel states:
It [morality], as a part of psychology, and in accordance with the methods

determined by it, must analyze voluntary acts, feelings, and individual judg-
ments, the contents of which may or may not have moral value. On the
other hand, it is part of a science of society, in that it brings to light the
forms and contents of community life (Gemeinschaftsleben) … Finally, it is
part of history, in that it must restore every moral representation given to its
original form, and the developments of this representation to the historical
influences that determine it. (Simmel 1989b[1892], p. 3)
Simmel’s shift toward social-historical concreteness does not stem from

any positivistic claim: individual acts, associated forms of life, and historical
influences (i.e., traditions) are the components of this reality that consti-
tutes human experience.
With this already “vitalist” observation, Simmel demonstrates the con-
sistency and continuity of his thought, beyond the Drei-Phasen Modell:
Being (Das Sein) cannot be demonstrated, but only experienced and “felt”
(gefühlt), and therefore it cannot be deduced from pure concepts, but only
from those situations in which it is actually perceived. Duty (Sollen) behaves
in the same way. (ibid., p. 12)
Unike history and society, moral reality is not deducible from abstract

principles and is not governed by general laws.
In the first place, ethical forms are historically living realities and there-
fore capable of arising, but also of disappearing. Secondly, they do not
spring solely from the deliberations of the single subject, but develop
within collective representations. Third, they depend, like any other form
of acting and relating to the world, on psychic states prior to deliberation.
To study the moral problem from this point of view—eminently relational
and relative—is to look for the origin of intentional acts in a sphere in
which these domains—historical, sociological, and psychological—meet
88 V. MELE
and interact. This sphere is none other than life, which we can define as
the sphere of everything that precedes and determines the cognitive and
practical experience of individuals.
After criticizing the dogmatic claims of morality, Simmel a does not
shift his position to the opposite extreme, unilaterally privileging life in its
empirical and phenomenal manifestations. In fact, the moral scholar always
needs an a priori structure to organize knowledge: “all historical details,
all observations of the world do not yet constitute the science in ques-
tion.” Once again—as he had done in his studies of the theory of knowl-
edge of history and society—Simmel intends to criticize both the use of
general concepts and laws and the naive positivism that believes it has
immediate access to facts. The task set by the science for morality under-
stood in this way is to “criticize the apparently simple concepts with which
ethics operates, to show on the one hand their extremely complicated and
manifold character and, on the other, the conceptual realism by which ex
post abstractions have been transformed into actual psychic forces; to
show how the uncertainty concerning the meaning and scope of these
concepts allows them to be linked to completely opposite principles.” The
Einleitung then is once again the application of Simmel’s formal and rela-
tivistic concept of critique to some key concepts of morality such as duty,
selfishness, altruism, guilt, merit, happiness, categorical imperative, free-
dom, and moral purpose. The traditional categories of the philosophy of
morality and practice are thus filtered through the sieve of historical, psy-
chological, and sociological analyses, according to Simmel’s research
interests. The results of this critique would later be incorporated into
Simmel’s mature work. Even before arriving at the results of this critique,
it is important to emphasize here its characteristics that once again deter-
mine the distinctiveness of Simmel’s concept of criticism, which can be
summarized as a formal and relationalist criticism that incorporates in an
original and creative way elements of Kantian and Nietzschean criticism,
combined with influences from the natural sciences and the “psychology
of peoples” (Völkerpsychologie).
Simmel’s analysis of the individual fundamental categories in the first
part of his treatise follows this deconstructive method. Of some interest
here is the critique of the concepts of “egoism” and “altruism,” as it is
significant for understanding Simmel’s scarce, but significant, political
stances.
According to Simmel, egoism and altruism do not constitute objective
categories with stable and determined contents, but forms that can be
filled in on the basis of concrete social interactions. They therefore describe

the way in which different individual and collective interests are repre-
sented and justified and their possible conflicts. According to traditional
morality, for example, we are accustomed to conceiving of altruism as an
expression of high morality, and selfishness as dissolute behavior, but
according to Simmel in reality this depends only on ethical conventions
and as such is the domain of a certain collective representations. In another
socio-historical situation and through other representations, selfishness
can take on an equally positive value. This is the case, for example, of the
market economy: here selfishness is justified (and even encouraged) by the
fact that this generalized behavior would make the community function
optimally through the achievement of the “common good.” “The liberal-
ist doctrines of the harmony of interests not only leave the field open to
selfishness, but make unconditional claims. However, even if selfishness is
identified with an extreme subjective norm, the ultimate objective end is
the welfare of the collectivity, and selfishness is but a technical means to
achieve it.” Simmel does not defend here the economic myths of the com-
mon good as resulting from the interaction of individual interests or ego-
isms. He simply seeks to show the inevitable ambivalence of moral
categories when they are considered in a dogmatic and one-sided manner.
The same conclusions could be reached by starting with an altruistic
morality—for example, the morality of giving—which may be grounded in
the purest selfishness. Regardless of their specific contribution, therefore,
Simmel’s analyses show us the workings of his concept of relativistic criti-
cism: moral definitions have a conventional and formal aspect, to which
correspond not contents, but only changing representations, determined
by the social and historical force of interests and representations of the
world. The discussion of the conflict between ends and moral duties that
concludes the work follows the same deconstructive model that we saw at
work in Social Differentiation: instead of the single end constituted by
formal duty, the concrete realms in which the subject’s choices must
adhere to his own bonds are contrasted. An open relationship is estab-
lished between the model that Simmel calls ”ethical monism” (Simmel
1991 [1893], p. 381) and the conflict of moral interests:
Of the various systems of ethical interests, which in a formed spirit consist

side by side and have attained considerable autonomy, none tends by itself
to unification with the others […]. A conscious formation of the inner life
of the person, the perfecting of professional performance, the fulfillment of
90 V. MELE
duties inherent in the homeland, the family or friends: all these areas of
moral interest could perhaps limit each other, without intersecting in a way
that requires a particular reconciliation between them. (ibid.)
However, the evolution and differentiation of modern culture and soci-

ety makes this reconciliation difficult. The more the individual’s member-
ships—which derive from social circles of reference—multiply, the more
the different duties can come into conflict. Ethical conflicts therefore do
not concern the “objective” ideals of different groups, but those of the
individual, who is subject to the possibility of tragic conflict. The ideal-
typical representation of this dilemma for Simmel is the classic Greek fig-
ure of Antigone, whose story thematized the conflict between family duty
and the duty of citizenship. Tragedy represents the irreconcilability of
ethical conflicts that can only be tragically overcome by the death of the
hero and from an intellectual point of view can only be recognized as such
and not resolved (ibid., p. 356 ff.).
The concept of the tragic with which Simmel concludes his investiga-
tion of the science of morality as the interest in the form of tragedy is
constant throughout his work. It also demonstrates that his critique of
morality goes beyond a mere apologia for individualism (Dal Lago 1994,
p. 72 ff.; Fitzi 2019, p.146 ff). The moral subject is not only sociologically
and historically distinguished from the absolute subject of Kant’s ethics,
but is a subject fragmented into its own circles. Each social circle can pro-
duce a certain conception of duty and thus for the individual can bring
conflict for which there is no solution: “The possibility of a tragic conflict
results […] not only from the opposition of the interests of different
groups, or of the interests of the group with those of the individual, but
also when the objective ideals of a single person […] are in opposition”
(Simmel 1991[1893], p. 389). The theme of the tragic is central to his
sociology and philosophy of metropolitan culture, as we shall see.
6 Theory of Knowledge and Philosophy

The main function of the “theory of knowledge” (Erkenntnistheorie) is
precisely to reveal the presuppositions underlying every form of knowl-
edge, including the most general one: philosophy. To claim to use the
concept of philosophy without setting forth its presuppositions would be
a contradictory operation from the point of view of the form of criticism
inaugurated by Kant. Therefore, in addition to the concept of society,
history, and morality, Simmel also devotes several contributions to the

concept of philosophy itself, which lies behind all his investigations. What
is philosophy? What is its nature and purpose? What distinguishes it from
other major forms of knowledge and representation of the world such as
science and art? Simmel particularly focuses on the contentious relation-
ship between philosophical theory and the history of philosophy, and the
methodological dilemma between historical and contemporary approaches
to philosophical concepts. Some years before the systematic work Die
Hauptproblemen der Philosophie (1910), in the introductory lecture Über
die Geschichte der Philosophie (1904) Simmel offers a concise, precise
insight into his idea of philosophy as Weltanschauung, and how this is
linked to the concept of art and lived experience (Erlebnis). Here Simmel
intended to react to the “exaggerations of historicism,” which by assign-
ing to philosophers the task of a purely historical understanding, had
ended up considering immersion in the actual problems of philosophy as
aberrant. From a certain point of view, philosophy consists of its history,
that is, in a gradual explanation of the possible philosophical attitudes of
the soul. But on the other hand, every historical development of philoso-
phizing is realized thanks to the liberation from the weight of history. In
it, as in art, the element derived from tradition is relatively unimportant
compared to the creative one. Therefore, the speculative attitude of phi-
losophy can be compared to that of the artist.
What is however the specific “nature” of philosophy as distinguished
from the subjectivity of art and the objectivity of science? The history of
philosophy—Simmel continues in his 1904 essay—affords us very differ-
ent ways of philosophizing. The problems that every thinker circumscribes
as relevant correspond to the solutions that he wants to provide. If there
is however something that unites them and justifies the use of the unitary
term “philosophy,” it is to be recognized in the philosopher’s ability to
relate and react to the totality of the contents of life. For Simmel—again
following Kant—access to the totality is possible only by the formative
activity that the spirit exercises on the existing, abstracting respectively the
content (in the case of mysticism) or the form (as in the case of Kant). In
both cases knowledge of oneself is decisive for knowledge of the world.
The unity of the ego or personality, which assures Kant of the possibility
of knowledge of the world, presents an analogy with “the spark” of Meister
Eckardt’s mysticism, which opens to the soul the relationship with the
absolute totality of the existing. This centrality of the subject and self-
knowledge, in which the two fundamental ways of philosophical
92 V. MELE
understanding of totality converge, gives Simmel the cue to clarify what is

meant by the subjectivity of philosophical theories in relation to the objec-
tivity of science. The subjective nature of conceptions of the world
(Weltanschaungen) depends on the fact that in them the intellect reacts to
a very wide circle of elements, unlike what happens in the form of more
determined knowledge, about which different personalities are more likely
to agree in reacting to a smaller number of elements at stake. Science tends
to reproduce the objectivity of things, philosophy does so instead to the
types of human spirituality. For this reason, it is not a question of whether
or not the affirmations of philosophy correspond to an object, but whether
or not they are adequate expression of the philosopher’s being or the type
of humanity within him. We are therefore dealing, says Simmel, with
expressions of different personal attitudes toward the world. Philosophy
can therefore be defined synthetically as “a temperament seen through an
image of the world,” inverting the definition of art, which would be “the
image of the world seen through a temperament” (Simmel 1995, pp. 284).
Does philosophy therefore produce views that are inevitably subjective
and relative? To spare himself accusations of irrationalism, Simmel—as he
often does—recurs to aesthetics and art theory. He in fact holds that the
characteristic of the philosophical work is the same as that of the work of
art, in that that it draws on a particular layer of individuality that Simmel
designates as the layer of typical spirituality. The “type” would cover that
field of thought and sensation which does not reproduce any objectivity
beyond the subject, but which differs from the purely subjective and indi-
vidual and can therefore be shared by others. The work of art derives from
the very singular experience of the artist, but possesses an aesthetic value
or a universally recognized truth. Similarly, the great philosophical works
are creations of heroic “geniuses”—the fruit of their conceptions of life, of
their highly original personalities—, which can at the same time be consid-
ered the unfolding of a human universal. Once again Simmel resorts to the
notion of the “third,”11 which would become central for Simmel even
when he discusses the nature of philosophy; now it comes up in the guise
of the concept of “type,” which is one of the building blocks of
Hauptprobleme (Simmel 1996 [1910]: 28ff.), beyond the subjectivity of
artistic creations and the objectivity of scientific knowledge. The “type”
would cover that sphere of thoughts and sensations that do not reproduce
any objectivity situated beyond the subject but that differ from the purely
11
On the notion of “the third” see also Meyer (2005).
subjective and individual and can therefore be participated in by others.

The work of art derives from the singular experience of the artist, but it
possesses aesthetic value, that is, a universally recognized truth. Similarly,
the great philosophical works are the creation of heroic “geniuses,” the
result of the life conceptions of very original personalities; at the same
time, they can be considered the development of a human universal.
However, in his introduction to the essays contained in the Philosophische
Kultur of 1911, Simmel presents quite a different overview of the evolu-
tion of contemporary thought. In the modern era, inaugurated by Kantian
transcendental thought, the very concept of philosophy changes: the
essence and value of philosophical and metaphysical speculation are no
longer determined by the relevance of their objective problems. What
characterizes a form of thought is not the articulation and conceptual mas-
tery of content, but rather an attitude of the spirit toward the external
world and inner life, a peculiar attitude to perceive empirical multiplicity
by identifying lines and parables of meaning. From this derives what we
might call a “philosophy and sociology of forms” or, put differently, a
peculiar “sociological aesthetics” (whose potential will be investigated in
depth in the next chapter). Paradoxically, therefore, the more philosophy
acquires a formal dynamic, a procedural fluidity that was precluded to it
when the primacy of content prevailed, the more it turns to objects.
Simmel saw a liberating element in this trend, which had already been
experienced by Nietzsche and Bergson: “The fluid dynamism of the spirit,
still dedicated to the metaphysical function of understanding and unifying
the real, “it is now more faithful and adaptable to the symptoms of things
in such devotion to the metaphysical function than the jealousy of a mate-
rial exclusivity would permit” (Simmel 1997a, p. 34).
This “turning from metaphysics as dogma to metaphysics as life and
function” opens up new and inexhaustible perspectives of philosophical
investigation, which Simmel now elaborates in the “triple, as well as coor-
dinated, direction of an ontology of relation, of a knowledge of the surface
and of a philosophy of life” (ibid., p. 8). The new metaphysics—which we
could define as “procedural”—has a productive capacity unknown to the
old dogmatic metaphysics because it brings back into the philosophical
and interpretative view “an enormous quantity of cosmic and psychic ter-
ritories” hitherto unexplored by a thought that avoided “including in the
metaphysical depth the modest segments of the circle of existence.”
To describe this new intellectual figure who attains “the elevated mid-
point between scientist and artist” (to use Walter Benjamin’s words),
94 V. MELE
Simmel uses the metaphor of adventurer. It is difficult to overestimate the

importance of Simmel’s metaphor of the adventure. To it he dedicated his
famous 1910 essay Philosophie des Abenteuers (1910), republished with
small changes in the collection Philosophische Kultur (1996 [1911],
pp. 168–185). The adventure does not represent the study of one socio-
logical or psychological phenomenon among many: it is the metaphor of
Simmel’s philosophy in relation to his critique of the Kantian theory of
knowledge and experience. For Simmel, Kant’s concept of “experience”
(Erfahrung) was rooted in the natural sciences and was inadequate to
grasp the “lived experience” (Erlebnis) of human beings. Simmel was nur-
tured in “the Goethean conviction that all elements of life in general must
be active in all knowledge: artistic imagination as love, sense of beauty as
a wholly unrationalizable presentiment, the purely intellectual as the gen-
erally human in our disposition, no less than sensibility or intellect.” We
must push beyond Kant’s motto, “the whole mind knows,” to state that
“the whole man knows.”12
The philosopher who acts in the name of adventure does so in a situa-
tion of combined security and insecurity: as an “adventurer of the spirit,”
he makes the hopeless, though not senseless attempt to translate into con-
ceptual knowledge an attitude of the life of the soul. The adventurer of
knowledge delves into the uncertain and manages to make every lived
experience (Erlebnis) a whole; every fragment of knowledge becomes a
light and a sign leading toward the center of existence. Adventure is
described by Simmel as an extraneous experience in relation to ordinary
life. “What we call an adventure stands in contrast to that interlocking of
life-links, to that feeling that those counter-currents, turnings, and knots
still, after all, spin forth a continuous thread” (ibid., p. 168). The rele-
vance of adventure in the philosophy of individual existence consists pre-
cisely in its mysterious necessity—quite similar to the “normativity of the
work of art,” to which Simmel dedicated another essay, or to the concept
of “individual law”—in that the sensation that something accidental and
extraneous to the ordinary course of life can conceal a meaning and a
necessity that presents itself in the form of an enigma precisely because of
the extraterritorial character of its happening. For the adventurer of the
spirit what is at work is “the inner objectivity of a personality that obeys
12
Georg Simmel, Kant. Sixteen Lectures Held at the University of Berlin (Kant. Sechzehen
Vorlesungen gehalten an der Berliner Universität, Duncker & Humblot, München u.
Leipzig, 1918).
only its own law” (Ivi: 29). The adventure is a finite portion of time, just
as the picture—thanks to the delimitation of the frame—is a finite portion
of space. In adventure, man withdraws from history—hence his extrane-
ousness to the concept of life proper to historicism—and fully lives the
present with an energy and a creativity that has the quality of a work of art.
According to Simmel, adventure is in fact foreign to the style of old age,
because it would inevitably involve a tension of vital sentiment. Adventure
is the metaphor of Simmel’s metaphysics as “life and function” or
Weltanaschauung. In Simmel’s mature phase, epistemology as
Erkenntnistheorie is subordinated to the ontology of life, for which adven-
ture is a good metaphor. It is a subjective experience that tends to become
objective. In the adventure “the typical” and the “unique,” what follows
a law, what is fortuitous, “the essence and the significance of things” and
the “superficial and the transitory”—in other words the principle of form
and the principle of life—finally coincide.

The purpose of this chapter has been to outline the concept of “criticism”
behind Simmel’s major epistemological works. We have tried to show how
Simmel’s concept of critique merges elements of pragmatism, atomism,
neo-Kantism, and Nietzsche’s perspectivism to arrive at a relationalist con-
cept of truth and philosophy. The metropolis as a general form of moder-
nity—of which the epistemological and critical question is only one
aspect—enables Simmel’s work to be interpreted as some of the most
interesting documents of the transition between the age of certainty, or
foundations, and that of modern scientific knowledge, or unfounded cer-
tainty—transition that has not yet ended and remains a structural condi-
tion of contemporary thought. In this sense, the “tragic theory of culture”
is not only original with respect to the era in which it was elaborated, but
still retains profound explanatory value today. This applies not only to the
epistemological sphere but—as we shall see—to describing the condition
of modern man.
Simmel’s criticism often takes the form of an intellectual operation of
the type composita solvantur, that is, the dissolution of metaphysical enti-
ties (in our case history, society, morality) in a network of relations. The
form of criticism that Simmel sets up may be called a form of relational
criticism, whose purpose is the dissolution of all “solid” metaphysical enti-
ties, such as those of truth, individual, history, society, morality.
96 V. MELE
The incessant causerie and search for analogies of his writings may
sometimes give the impression of aimless digression or a skeptical position.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, Simmel was deeply convinced of the
Wechselwirkung of all phenomena, that reality (just as society) is made up
of a complex network of interrelations and interdependencies.
Although throughout the different phases of his thought Simmel main-
tained the (neo-Kantian) distinction between metaphysics, science, and
theory of knowledge (Erkentnistheorie), his project for a “sociological aes-
thetics” emerges even in the preface to his major work, The Philosophy of
Money, in which he advocates for an original “third position” between art
and philosophy.
The aesthetic sphere, in particular, seemed the ideal grounding place
for potential reconciliation of the aporia and the contradictions so ram-
pant in the broader cultural context of the German Gründerjahre. Simmel
turned his inquiry toward a new artistic style that could overcome the
division between traditional art, by now autonomous, and the rationalized
spheres of daily life. It is in this framework that Simmel’s undertaking to
formulate a “sociological aesthetics” matured, as can be gleaned from his
1896 work of the same name (Simmel 1992b [1896]).
Therefore, it can be stated that Simmel’s criticism is characterized by
what later—in another philosophical context—would be called the “world
disclosure function of language” (Benjamin 2003; Harrington 2005;
Lehtonen and Pyyhtinen 2008). Simmel’s thought is constantly searching
for analogies, opposite “dualisms” (Kant and Goethe, Schopenhauer and
Nietzsche) “problems” (Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, The Problem of
Sociology, The Problem of Style) and paradoxes: to these polarities, his
own thinking provides a “third” way that demonstrates the underlying
unity between the opposite poles and preserves the tension in all its vigor.
The “third” does not however exist independent of dualism, as it mani-
fests itself only in the relation between opposites, or becomes relativized
into new dualisms in a never-ending process.
This is why it is difficult to understand the interpretation of this kind of
thinking as “dialectical.” This interpretation has a solid foundation in the
imprudent claim of a great connoisseur of Simmel’s work—without whom
Simmel’s work would probably not even be known—such as Michael
Landmann. Landmann in fact claims that a form of “dialectic without
conciliation” would be present in Simmel’s work.(Landmann 1987, p. 16)
Landmann’s insight, however, is regularly misunderstood by less experi-
enced experts than himself, who are quick to develop only a superficial
association with the foundation of Hegel’s thought, namely the “rela-

tional” aspect of dialectics. Now, it is true that such a shrewd thinker as
Simmel could not have failed to engage with Hegelian thought, although
it appears mentioned very little in his works, as indeed do many other
thinkers. However, it is safe to say that the most characteristic aspects of
dialectical thought definitely do not appear in Simmel, in particular
– his unquestionable foreignness to the Hegelian philosophy of history
as becoming through contradictions (thus progressive, processual, teleo-
logical, eschatological), and
– his disinterest in the attainment of the concept of the noumenon and
in general in the nullification of the Kantian distinction between phenom-
enon and noumenon.
More generally, Simmel’s thought—as Adorno never ceases to point
out—can be said to lack the idea of the “broken” and “antagonistic” char-
acter of objectivity. A fundamental principle of dialectics—which grounds
the essential historicity of knowing—is that the generality and necessity of
the object are identified with the laws of historical transformation.13
However, Simmel’s approach is still topical where “problem-solving”-
oriented approaches to language actually fail, as they overlook the “world-
disclosing” functions of language. “World-disclosure,” a term drawn from
the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, indicates the revealing of contexts of
existential inter-relatedness among things in the world—a revealing that
imparts truth in the sense of total holistic illumination. Insofar as such
world-disclosure is held by Heidegger to refuse any agency of rational
critique and simply said to “happen” as an ontological “event” in which
language speaks above the heads of individuals, it is a dangerous philo-
sophical confection whose obscurantism Adorno was right to expose
(Adorno 1973). But if we can define this idea as a dimension of semantic
aesthetic plentitude in language-use, capable of opening up novel hori-
zons of perceptual orientation in the world that at the same time depend
on and enrich problem-solving attitudes to language, it must be concluded
that it has been undeservedly neglected by pragmatist and rationalist phi-
losophies. Arguably, without Simmel’s pioneering work, the conceptions
of many eminent authors, such as Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Walter
Benjamin and even Theodor Adorno and Georgy Lukács would never
have been possible. It is therefore well worth the effort to reconstruct
13
This is why new and traditional interpretations of Simmel as a “dialectician” are not
convincing: Christian (1978), Vandenberghe (1995), Schermer and Jary (2013).
98 V. MELE
Simmel’s project for sociological aesthetics and the influence this would
have not just on Benjamin, but on the different generations of critical
theorists.
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CHAPTER 4
The Sociological Aesthetics of Modernity
1 The Aesthetic Perspective

During his nearly thirty-year career as essayist, Simmel devoted a substan-
tial number of works to aesthetics and the philosophy of art, often focus-
ing on significant aspects of modern everyday metropolitan life, such as art
exhibitions and the commercial displays of goods, the rituality of the most
basic forms of social interaction, such as eating, the importance in modern
life of “style,” which leads to phenomena such as fashion and ornamenta-
tion (Simmel 1985, Simmel 2006). Consequently, his philosophical and
sociological thought has often been underestimated or criticized as
“impressionism” or “sociology for aesthetes.”1 This original philosophical
and sociological research perspective, expressly formulated in Simmel’s
1896 essay Soziologische Ästhetik—and further in that which can be consid-
ered Simmel’s “magnum opus,” The Philosophy of Money (1900)—repre-
sents by no means a minor current in twentieth-century social thought,
1
This was applied, and not in a wholly negative sense, to Simmel by David Frisby (see
Frisby, 1991, p. 91 Sociological Impressionism: A Reassessment of Georg Simmel’s Social Theory.
London: Routledge, 91). Frisby revisits, within a sociological framework, Lukács’ famous
1918 portrait celebrating his late teacher (Lukács 1958, Simmel, pp. 171-176). Lukács’ rec-
ollection is actually anything but derogatory toward Simmel, who is celebrated as one of the
most influential and important intellectuals of his generation. The expression “sociology for
aesthetes,” well-suited to “literary drawing rooms” was instead used by Leopold von Wiese,
1910, p. 900. For a discussion of the relations between aesthetics and sociology (through a
mainly critical approach), see Hübner-Funk, Simmel, 1976, pp. 44-70.

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9_4
102 V. MELE
and left us one of its most meaningful legacies “cash money.”2 It is there-
fore well worth the effort to reconstruct its connections with Simmel’s
general philosophical thought and above all with his conception of
modernity.3
As we have seen in previous chapters, Simmel, together with the main
founders of “classical German sociology,” tended to abandon the use of
the category of progress in analyzing the social present. He maintains a
critical attitude toward it, no longer assigning it a central importance for
the understanding of society, and instead deals with “social reality as an
empirical analysis of the present, as a specific experience of the present, of
the new, of modernity” (Dahme and Rammstedt 1984, p. 227). In par-
ticular, a practice of “sociology of culture,” which analyzes the cultural
objectivations of society, such as art, music, literature, science and religion,
2
In a famous aphorism contained in Simmel’s Posthumous Diary (Aus dem nachgelassenen
Tagebuche, in Fragmente an Aufsätze aus dem Nachlaß, edited by G. Kantorowicz, Drei
Masken, München 1923, pp. 3-46) Simmel writes: “I know that I shall die without intel-
lectual heirs, and that is as it should be. My legacy will be, as it were, in cash, distributed to
many heirs, each transforming his part into use conformed to his nature: a use which will
reveal no longer its indebtedness to this heritage” (quoted in L. A. Coser, Masters of
Sociological Thought. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977, pp. 198-199). This state-
ment can be regarded as a more general consideration of the relations between the present
and the cultural works handed down from the past within the context of modernity. In this
sense, it exhibits many affinities with Nietzsche’s criticisms of the “excess of history” of his
time, in which he stresses the importance of the oblivion enabling dynamic action aimed at
the future (F. Nietzsche, Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, II, Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der
Histoire für das Leben 1873). On Nietzsche and Simmel, see K. Lichtblau, ‘Das Pathos der
Distanz’. Präliminarien zur Nietzsche-Rezeption bei Georg Simmel, in H.-J. Dahme and
O. Rammstedt (edited by), Georg Simmel und die Modern. Neue Interpretationen und
Materialen, Frankfurt am M., 1984, pp. 231-281.
3
See Lichtblau, K. (1996) Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende. Zur
Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main: Suhkamp.
4 THE SOCIOLOGICAL AESTHETICS OF MODERNITY 103
was spreading and consolidating at the time in the German-language

social sciences.4
This is the context for Simmel’s “aesthetic perspective” (ästhetische
Betrachtung), which, far from being dismissible as “aestheticism,” is actu-
ally a consciously pursued cognitive strategy. Faced with the “crisis of
modern culture,” the ranks of the “1890 generation” were driven by the
need for a “new cultural synthesis” that could shed light on the existence
of mankind as a whole—a perspective that could no longer be pursued
separately by individual sciences, as they had by then reached such a level
of specialization that they were no longer suitable to such end. For Simmel,
in particular, the aesthetic sphere seemed the ideal grounding place to
potentially reconcile the aporias and contradictions so rampant in his time.
He turned his inquiry toward a new artistic style that could overcome the
division between traditional art, by now autonomous, and the rationalized
spheres of daily life. This new search for synthesis was expressed through
the paradigm of the ideal Gesamtkunstwerk, the “total work of art,” cham-
pioned by the artistic movement of Jugendstil, whose objective was to
overcome the characteristic “new bourgeois era” separation between art
and daily life, between autonomous “high art” and “Kunstgewerbe,” that
is, applied industrial art.5 The question being asked, therefore, was: what
place would modern art take in society? And, accordingly, what effects it
was to have on a new form of daily life, so as to arrive at a new cultural
synthesis. Art, literature, architecture, and industrial art thus became the
testing grounds for a modernity not yet fully self-aware, as well as for the
4
In 1913 Max Weber spoke, albeit with a certain methodological prudence, of a “sociol-
ogy of cultural contents” (Soziologie der Cultur-Inhalte). Werner Sombart, on the contrary,
preferred to address Simmel’s work on the history of culture, “historical social science,”
“historical psychology,” and “the philosophy of culture.” Referring to Weber, Simmel,
Sombart, and Tönnies, Lichtblau maintains: “There are however good reasons to speak of
the existence of a common intellectual tradition in the sociology of German culture at the
turn of the century. This includes, on the one hand, the extensive common ground between
the research topics and interests of the individual works (and fragments thereof) in this tradi-
tion, and on the other, the fact that all these authors carried on a more or less continuous
dialogue with each other, dictated in part by their close friendship’, Lichtblau 1996, p. 69.
5
Simmel wrote a number of essays and aphorisms for the journal of the Jugend movement,
often under pseudonyms. On this topic, see Otthein Rammstedt, On Simmel’s Aesthetics:
Argumentation in the Journal Jugend, 1897-1906, in: Theory, Cultures & Society, Jg. 8
(1991), Nr. 3, pp. 125-144. On Simmel’s “Vienna” writings, see also D. Frisby (edited by),
Georg Simmel im Wien. Texte und Kontexte aus dem Wien der Jahrhundertwende, WUV
Universitätsverlag, 2000.
104 V. MELE
search for suitable forms of expression. It is in this framework that Simmel’s

undertaking to formulate a “sociological aesthetics” matured, as can be
gleaned from his eponymous 1896 work. Simmel, at the time teaching at
the university of Berlin, had acquired considerable familiarity with differ-
ent disciplines, such as philosophy, art history, psychology, history, econ-
omy, and sociology. He introduced a design for sociological aesthetics
whose means was the literary form of the essay, and whose end was the
creation of an experimental frame within which different styles of thought
and research could be fruitfully combined. It was precisely from the con-
vergence of the aesthetic experience of modernity and the sociological
analysis of some particular manifestations of social life, generally city life,
that it was possible to decipher the epoch-making nature of modern life,
with all its contradictions, conflicts, and paradoxes. This, however, with-
out recourse to a “Project of modernity” (Habermas), based on a norma-
tive philosophy of history and on the characteristic trust in progress, which
was slowly eroding as the popularity of positivism was waning.6
Not that Simmel’s whole social and aesthetic thought can be easily
grouped under the heading of “sociological aesthetics”—though his
choice to base the nascent discipline on inquiry into “forms of associa-
tion” might prompt doing so, given the certainly aesthetic lineage of the
concept of form.7 It must moreover be emphasized that it did not repre-
sent a form of sociology of art, like that widely advanced by exponents of
the later Frankfurt School, among others. Nor can it be regarded one of
6
On the “normative project of modernity,” see Jürgen Habermas, Die Moderne—ein
unvollendetes Project, in id., Kleine politische Schriften (I-IV), Frankfurt am Main 1981,
p. 444, as well as id., Il discorso filosofico della modernità. Dodici lezioni, Laterza, Bari 1987.
Regarding the import of the waning faith in progress on turn-of-the-nineteenth-century
social theory and the founding of German sociology, see O. Rammstedt, H.-J. Dahme, Die
zeitlose Modernität der soziologischen Klassiker. Überlegungen zur Theoriekonstruktion von
Emile Durkheim, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber und besonders Georg Simmel, in
O. Rammstedt, H.-J. Dahme (edited by), Georg Simmel und die Modern. Neue
Interpretationen und Materialen, Frankfurt am M., 1984 pp. 449-478.
7
Sibylle Hübner-Funk maintains that there is no immediate relation in Simmel’s 1908
“grand sociology” between his theoretical formulation and his aesthetic interests (see
Böhringer/Gründer 1976, p. 66). On the concept of “form” in Simmel’s sociology, see H. J
Lieber., P. Furth, Zur Dialektik der Simmelschen Konzeption einer formalen Soziologie, in
K. Gassen, M. Landmann (edited by), Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel, Dunker &
Humblot, Berlin 1958, pp. 39-59.
those specialist branches of sociology that proliferated subsequently (e.g.,

the sociology of novels, literature, art, work), thanks mainly to the ever-
growing influence of sociology itself in academic circles. Instead, Simmel’s
essays, written over a period of nearly thirty years, exhibit all the qualities
of a true aesthetics of modern life, focusing on a specific “point of indiffer-
ence” between art and the sphere of social interactions, and revealing the
specific modern nature of the “reciprocity” between the aesthetic sphere
and the social sphere. The result is a research style that focuses on particu-
lar day-to-day manifestations of modern social life endowed with a specific
aesthetic character and “epoch-making” significance. He was thus able,
for instance, to relate the social character of the decorative arts to con-
sumer art, or vice versa, highlight the specific aesthetic dimension of cer-
tain aspects of social life and, as such, describe them both as a single,
identical form of experiencing modernity.
Simmel was convinced that only the aesthetic sphere can fully capture
and represent all modern experience of reality, especially when the focus of
attention is not limited exclusively to traditional, autonomous artwork.
He instead attempts to address all forms of daily aesthetic expression, such
as those originating in fashion, clothing, or individual styles. It was pre-
cisely the development of applied industrial art (Kunstgewerbe), which he
witnessed firsthand, that revealed that the traditional concept of style
could not be directly transposed to the aesthetic expressions of modern
daily life. In fact, while a great work of classical art represents a closed,
self-sufficient domain—a fact clearly symbolized by the “frame” separating
it from the surrounding world—the products of applied art are not char-
acterized by their aesthetic quality alone, but as much by their particular
“use value,” in that they perform a practical function in everyday life.
“The work of art is something for itself, the product of applied art is some-
thing for us … [whose] significance is the enlargement into general acces-
sibility and practical recognition” (Simmel 1950 [1908], p. 341).
Accordingly, the corresponding concept of “style” also takes on different
meaning depending on whether it is applied to the former or to the latter:
an artwork has a “style” only in the sense that it distinguishes the indi-
vidual quality of a great artist; “style” in applied art, on the other hand,
defines a general principle of form, which in fact provides for the
106 V. MELE
possibility of it being reproduced.8 Within the context of an aesthetics of

modern life, the “self-sufficient totality” and peculiarity of the great work
of art represents exclusively a “general principle of form,” whereas artistic
stylization of a product of the handicrafts or applied industrial art intrinsi-
cally includes a principle of usability and practicality in daily life: “Instead
of the character of individuality, applied art is supposed to have the char-
acter of style, of broad generality […] and thus it represents in the aes-
thetic sphere a different principle of life than actual art, but not an inferior
one” (Simmel 1997d [1908], p. 213).
Simmel enunciates his “aesthetic perspective” in his important pro-
grammatic 1896 essay, Sociological Aesthetics. The conception of sociologi-
cal aesthetics that Simmel strives to outline here encompasses and inspires
his most important sociologically oriented research: it is present not only
in his interest in the forms of social interaction (defined programmatically
two years earlier in the equally important writing The Problem of Sociology,
1894) and in monetary economics as an authentic paradigm of modernity,
but also in his studies of the forms of “stylization” of everyday life such as
fashion, sociability, coquetry, essays on female culture and psychology,
adventure, forms of courtesy (such as modesty and discretion), and the
psychology of ornamentation. The essential conviction on which this per-
spective on the social world is based is that it is possible to extract the deep
meaning of a historical and social era through analysis of its everyday aes-
thetic expressions, as they manifest themselves in the various forms of
“crystallization” of objective culture (such as money or the various forms
of interaction). It thus leaves in the background the historical and “dialec-
tical” analysis of society as a whole, favoring rather an “aesthetic” analysis
that focuses on the spatial, temporal, and sensory dimensions of the cul-
tural phenomenon in question.
8
G. Simmel, Das Problem des Styles, “Dekorative Kunst” 16, pp. 307-16, 1908. English
Translation The Problem of Style, in “Theory, Culture and Society”, 8 (1991), pp. 63-71. In
this regard, Simmel anticipates the terms of a problem that would be Walter Benjamin’s
central focus in the famous essay on The work of art in the age of technical reproducibility (Das
Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit, 1936. English translation in
Benjamin (2006 [1938], pp. 251-287). The difference between Simmel and Benjamin’s
conclusions resides in the fact that, while Simmel was keenly aware of the dangers of deper-
sonalization and the inexorable “commodification” threatening modern artistic production,
he ultimately remains faithful to the ideal of autonomous art. On the other hand, Benjamin,
albeit with a certain contradictoriness, exalts the political and democratic possibilities that
arise with the waning of classical forms.
At the beginning of the essay, Simmel clearly states the guiding princi-
ples of his theory of knowledge:
Even the lowest, intrinsically ugly phenomenon can be dissolved into con-
texts of color and form, of feeling and experience, which provide it with
exciting significance. To involve ourselves deeply and lovingly with even the
most common product, which would be banal and repulsive in its isolated
appearance, enables us to conceive of it, too, as a ray and image of the final
unity of all things from which beauty and meaning flow and for which every
philosophy, every religion, every moment of our heightened emotional
experience, searches for symbols which are appropriate for their expression.
If we pursue this possibility of aesthetic appreciation to its final point, we
find that there is no essential distinction between the amount of beauty in
things. Our world view turns into an aesthetic pantheism. Every point con-
tains within itself the potential of being redeemed to absolute aesthetic sig-
nificance. To the adequately trained eye the total beauty, the total meaning
of the world as a whole, radiates from every single point (Simmel 1992
[1896], p. 197).
The foundations of this intellectual attitude can certainly be traced to

Nietzsche’s “culture of the surface,” understood as an invitation to value
the world of “near things” and to avoid the typically Western cult of depth
(Vozza 1988), but also and no less decisively in Simmel’s lifelong—
Kantian—conviction that cognition has to be bound to “sensual impres-
sions,” that is, that “our cognition does not go beyond the circle of
sensuality, of experience” (Simmel 2004, p. 272). In his 1904 Sixteen
Berlin Lectures on Kant (in particular the second one, dedicated to analysis
of the concept of “experience”), Simmel states that the “intermediate”
choice made by Kant between “sensism” and “rationalism” opened up an
extremely fruitful path from a philosophical point of view, that his rigidly
intellectualistic scientific vision had only glimpsed and that only Goethe
would then take all the way. Kant was exclusively interested in the analysis
and foundation of that knowledge which is given as science, so his analysis
concerned the theoretical faculties which were adapted to the knowledge
of objects: sensibility, intellect, and, in a certain sense, reason. But this,
according to Simmel, is only the first step toward “the Goethean convic-
tion that in all knowledge all the elements of life in general must be active:
the artistic imagination as love, the sense of beauty as the presentiment not
at all rationalizable, the purely intellectual as the generally human of our
disposition, no less than the sensibility and the intellect” (Simmel 1997b,
108 V. MELE
p. 85). Simmel’s Sociological Aesthetics can truly stand as a programmatic

writing for all of Simmel’s sociological production: indeed, it is possible to
argue that if one considers the aesthetic point of view, one can perceive as
a unit his entire sociological essay production, which otherwise may appear
as a constellation of separate studies. Simmel’s sociology is thus traversed
in its entirety by the aesthetic perspective, which includes Social
Differentiation, such as Sociology (1908), The Philosophy of Money (1900),
as well as the writings of Philosophical Culture (1911) and Fundamental
Questions of Sociology. Individual and Society (1917).
Simmel’s sociological aesthetics, his phenomenological description of
the effects of rationalization in everyday life would influence the analyses
of later Marxist Kulturkritikers. Unlike these theorists, however, Simmel
would always maintain a certain distrust of any philosophy of history. He,
in the wake of the radical skepticism of Nietzsche, rejects the idea of an
already presupposed unity of history, society, the subject. Abandoning
progress as an explanatory category even of the theory of historical and
social knowledge, he frees himself from the need to explain the social and
cultural changes between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth cen-
tury in terms of continuity and historical unity, opting for the “aesthetic
perspective” based on apparently insignificant fragments of reality.
Simmel’s sociology, unlike that of the other subsequent critics of culture
(including, as we have seen, Adorno), is intended to distinguish itself
clearly from the philosophy of history. This is therefore a fundamental
characteristic of the aesthetic perspective on social reality: it is not inter-
preted in terms of further development or progress, but on the basis of its
own self-sufficiency and its own value.
1.1 The Essay as Form in Simmel and Adorno

As we have seen, in the theory of knowledge “the metropolis becomes a
symbol of the very form of the essay” (Cacciari 1973, p. 81). It plays a
decisive role not only in Simmel, but also in the “critics of culture”
(Kulturkritikern), such as Benjamin, Bloch, Kracauer, Adorno. In fact, it
was Adorno who recognized Simmel’s paternity of this form of writing,
arguing that the essay is a truly original approach to reality, which
renounces the stringent methodicalness of the scientific treatise to be
based rather on aesthetic preferences, on “what you love and hate.” For
this reason, instead of “an unlimited work ethic,” “joy and play are essen-
tial to the essay” (Adorno 1979, p. 6). The essay, by its very makeup, turns
“a gaze devoid of violence on the object,” renounces the claim to embrace

reality in its totality, but arranges itself starting from a fragment, from a
single phenomenon, which it tries to propose as key to interpreting not so
much a law, as a wider tendency. Unlike the “philosophical system” or the
“scientific treatise,” it renounces any claim to traditional methodicalness
and scientificity, which are exercised primarily through classification. From
the expositional form of the essay Adorno developed “the idea of happi-
ness deriving from a freedom of the object, which does it more justice
than it would obtain if it were ruthlessly inserted into the order of ideas”
(ibid., p. 27). The open structure of the essay, its being an experimental
form, a test, an “attempt,” make it a genre absolutely suitable to the sen-
sibility of the twentieth-century metropolis, also because it is, so to speak,
transverse to literature and philosophy: the essay does not have the task of
theorizing or defining objectively, but rather of opening up to the under-
standing of a new object. It is precisely its experimental nature that allows
the object of reflection to be “tried,” “tested,” and consequently trans-
formed and renewed.
Any claim to grasp the new on the basis of conceptual thought entails
fatally falling into the compulsion to repeat the old. Adorno emphasizes
that any adequate representation of the object is possible only in the ten-
sion that arises between identifying conceptuality, the hermeneutic deci-
phering of factual data and individual content of experience. The cognitive
ideal of the essay does not come from the Cartesian methodical principle
on which modern science is founded, but rather from the mimetic activity
of the work of art. Art, as a form of intuitive knowledge, helps us to
become familiar with the new sooner and better than any form of system-
atic and rational thought. Far from constituting a form of irrationalism,
this cognitive style can help to adequately represent reality at a time when
existing theories appear aged and worn out.
Certainly, Simmel’s essayism did not have the same “critical” concerns
as the Frankfurt philosopher, and he did not fail to reproach him for it. In
a portrait devoted to a comparison between Simmel and his student Ernest
Bloch, Adorno wrote:
Georg Simmel, whom Bloch knew very well, as he did most of the famous
philosophers of his youth, was, for all his psychological idealism, the first to
accomplish the return of philosophy to concrete subjects, a shift that
remained canonical for everyone dissatisfied with the chattering of episte-
mology or intellectual history. If we reacted so strongly against Simmel at
110 V. MELE
one time, it was only because he withheld from us the very thing with which
enticed us. Brilliant in a way much faded today, his attitude surrounded its
post objects with simple categories or supplemented them with general
reflections, without ever losing itself unreservedly in the material itself, as is
required if knowledge is to be more than a self-satisfied spinning in the
wheels of its preestablished apparatus. (Adorno 1992, p. 213)
The central point of Adorno’s critique of Simmel is the inability to

“lose oneself in the thing,” that is, to deprive oneself of the protections
with which traditional thought provides the subject in his cognitive jour-
ney to go to meet the “thing in itself,” the absolute. If with Kant philoso-
phy had declared beyond its reach, the “in itself” can still be captured in
the form of “tension between subject and object, of mutual irreducibility,
deep vibration between two irreconcilable elements” (ibid.). According to
the author of the Negative Dialectic, it is precisely “from the collision
between thought and thing the dialectic draws its critical and negative
force, is able to identify the absolute as what is radically other, the insolu-
ble around which grows and is stratified the concrete” (Boella 1988,
p. 31). The dialectical thought, of which Adorno declares himself bearer,
believes in a recovery, so to speak, in extremis of a critical tension in things
that derives from the irruption of that which is the fruit of historical human
praxis. From this perspective, Adorno liquidates Simmel as an innocuous
collector of objets d’art, who remains bound to a conventional and con-
templative conception of art.
This judgment seems excessively ungenerous, especially if we take into
consideration a certain crisis of the model of critical theory represented by
Adorno. This tends to dissolve “dimensions of the subject-object relation-
ship not entirely ascribable to the dialecticization of the antinomies and of
the dualism of reality” (ibid., p. 34). Thinkers close to this project, such as
Bloch, Kracauer, and—as we shall see—Benjamin, had presented correc-
tives to that model. It is not by chance that we have taken inspiration from
Simmel, according to whom “reality and meaning are also given in terms
of possibility and functional differentiation, in the space of separation and
otherness of things respect to the subject, in their state of suspension and
openness” (ibid.).9 Objects for Simmel are not reducible to pure
9
As Rammstedt observed “Simmel’s approach allows freeing the [object] from the binarity
of subject/object, by taking out… the thing as object of things, to detach it from it and to
give it back the quality of the thing among things. It is thus that the object becomes depen-
dent on the decision of the individual” (Rammstedt 2008, p. 17).
“allegories” (or “symptoms”) according to the style of normative, critical-

dialectical thinking, “but rather maintain a “sensible evidence,” a “visibil-
ity” that is all the more real and objective the more it is “constructed,” it
is the result of their quality as cultural objects, in which history, psyche,
nature have been elaborated in symbolic, metaphorical form” (ibid.).
Simmelian relationalism therefore does not represent a relativistic dissolu-
tion of the idea of truth and an aimless pilgrimage into the world of phe-
nomenal reality, but rather the construction of a “landscape of perception”
(ibid.), which represents a decisive and original step toward knowledge of
the “individual law” of the object, according to the Goethean ideal of the
Urphänomen that intuits the life of form in the sensible reality of phenom-
ena. This was the problem to which Simmel gave a determined solution
that cannot be reduced to renunciation or resignation. It is therefore
worth exploring his thought in detail.
2 How Did Simmel Come to the Modern?

As Otthein Rammstedt has observed, “no other sociologist of that time
was considered as “modern” as Simmel—in his everyday life as well as in
his writing and his scientific activities”:
Georg Simmel was there as a tennis player, as a skater, as an alpinist and

traveler or as a cyclist—he “used to come to the college by bicycle, which
was new at that time and controversial for decent people, and in knee pants”,
recalls a student (Landmann, 1958, p. 208), who smoked cigarettes, appre-
ciated good wine, played the piano superbly, was addicted to poetry—
unhappily—“I was not a poet – not a poet,” he laments (Simmel 2005,
p. 402)—and loved disputes—“and Simmel remained victorious, as always
when he spoke,” resigned Fritz Mauthner still in the obituary (Mauthner,
1918), so he castigated here the backward morality in the oppression of
women, in the prostitution question, in the labor relations in the proletariat,
fought against spiritualism, the revived pessimism and the new wealth in
conservative as well as in social-democratic newspapers and shuttled disori-
ented in his small scientific works between literary studies, philosophy of art,
ethics, Völkerpsychologie and sociology. (Rammstedt 2020, p. 71)
On October 6, 1892 in the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts, the

first part of an article by a certain Paul Liesergang appeared with the
strange title Etwas vom Spiritismus. The author aims to explain the reasons
for the boom in the sittings and evocations of the spirits of the past, which
112 V. MELE
were becoming very fashionable. From the very first lines it is clear that—
just as in the work Simmel published in 1892, the Problems of Philosophy of
History—this is what it is all about. It is difficult, however, to understand
that Paul Liesergang and Georg Simmel were actually the same person.
When future times write the history of our century, they might well empha-
size two brightly shining points alongside the dark shadows that cover the
present times: natural science and social movements. They will depict the
first in the security of that which it has achieved and the second in the secu-
rity of that which it will attain. They will describe the liberation of thought
coming from the first and the liberation of the whole of life from the second.
They will tell Our grandchildren that the conviction of the pervasive confor-
mity to scientific laws penetrated all levels of the people for the first time in
our century, and that superstition, the vague fear of supernatural, intangible
powers remnants from youthful periods of the human race retreated step by
step, except among those who had a very evident and very tangible interest
in its preservation. This is how it will perhaps look to a future historian who
sees only the great trends of the time, only the major and effective move-
ments. We, who are still in the midst of these things, still notice all sorts of
counter-movements and side-currents, emerging and soon disappearing
phenomena, which have quite a different character than that main trend of
our times, but which are important signs of our times for the contemporary
observer and show us that the times are not as uniform as they may later
appear to a comprehensive view. Just as reaction, the obstinate clinging to or
reversion to past cultural periods, takes its place alongside the great social
movement of the times, so also, alongside that progress of natural science
and the increased insight into the strict regularity and comprehensibility of
all events, we find the belief in the spirits of deceased people who have either
returned to earth or have always been with us, and are able to communicate
with us as to this and the next world through the mediation of persons with
special gifts. (Simmel 1997a, pp. 288–289)
Simmel, the epistemologist (Erkenntnistheoretiker), critic of the phi-

losophy of history, expounds here his own philosophy of history under a
pseudonym. Therefore, the same Simmel who tried to make room for
himself in the university and academia was also “Paul Liesergang,” who
participated in the movements of his time and tried to introduce the criti-
cal questions of his time into the formation of theory. As Klaus Christian
Köhnke has pointed out, “the young Simmel is characterized by the fact
that it was exclusively, or at least primarily, external relations, theoretical
relations, and social movements that determined him and made him the
object of theorizing and, conversely, that he conceived of himself as a mere

partial aspect of these collective processes” (Köhnke 1996, p. 507). It
should not be surprising, therefore, that Simmel, in an anonymous contri-
bution to a socialist newspaper, expressed himself in a sense contrary to
what he had stated in his major works. It should rather make us reflect on
Simmel’s experimental path and his search for a philosophical and concep-
tual style that would express—in dialogue with, but also in contrast to—
academic philosophy the most important problems of his time.
This testimony is important not so much to apply—pushing it to its
extreme consequences—Simmel’s criticism also to the figure of the author
and the principle of authorship, but rather to demonstrate the dilemmas
that Simmel addressed in academic writings and expressed in an even more
explicit form in his stances—theoretical, political—in non-academic inter-
ventions, which even more explicitly than the former seek to incorporate
the problems of his time into a theoretical construction. The questions
posed by Simmel’s writing thus concern both the constitution of philosophy
as an academic discipline and the influence of the “new” social movements
that flourished in Germany and Europe from 1890 until the First World
War. New social movements that differ from the “old” in that they no
longer have at their center the question of “work.” Simmel gave cultural,
aesthetic and scientific structure to his spontaneous adherence to the
modernist movement calling for the “new,” especially in the 80s, when
through his circle of friends he came into contact with the naturalist move-
ment that had existed since his student days and had found its “catch-
phrase” in the term “modern age,” created precisely in 1896 (Rammstedt
2002, p. 71)—the same year as the essay “sociological aesthetics.”
Naturalism refers here firstly to the literary-aesthetic direction that fol-
lowed Emile Zola (1840-1902) in France, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) in
Germany, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) in Russia and
Giovanni Verga (1840-1922) in Italy, and that became established in the
1880s from its centers in Paris and Berlin. In the name of truthfulness, it
demanded a reproduction of nature as a sensually experienceable phenom-
enon and expanded into a social protest movement, which experienced a
strong influx of those born after 1860, who had consciously experienced
the Gründerzeit in the newly constituted German Empire, or in Paris the
Commune and the beginning of the Third Republic.
In its proclamations the social movement appeared in a literary-aesthetic
manner, accepting the latest scientific achievements of Darwinism,
naturalistic-evolutionary monism and socialism, so it was now possible to
114 V. MELE
explain everything physical without resorting to intellectual principles, as

a new Weltanschauung that sought to press for a “reorganization of human
society.” The movement became basically a protest movement that
denounced social misery and harshly rejected the outdated leading repre-
sentatives in art, literature, science, and politics with their ideas, wanting
them to be replaced by something—at least imagined—new. For Simmel,
the fiercely presented social and cultural critique became a matter of the
heart. He recalled in 1902, in an essay that survives only in English, that
in the 1880s “social justice” was suddenly ubiquitous as an ideal: “Suddenly
we became aware of the miserable living conditions of the proletariat,
which almost cried out to heaven, the exploitation of the working class,
the injustice done to it, the destruction of its family life, its physical and
mental degeneration, especially its consequences for women’s and chil-
dren’s work,” all of which awakened—in him as well—a “social con-
science” (Simmel 2010, pp. 167–202), which then moved him to
denounce the current social conditions, such as the prudery and moral
mendacity of the bourgeoisie.
Simmel expresses his intuitions regarding a specific aesthetic character
of the modern era in his long 1890 critique of the work of Julius Langbehn,
Rembrandt as educator, which had attained considerable renown at the
time.10 From his writing—coeval to Social Differentiation—it appears
clear that the “new artistic era” of modern society could not be under-
stood simply by returning to the distinctive world image of the philosophy
and aesthetics of classical German idealism. Simmel maintains that
Langbehn’s polemical denunciation—following Nietzsche—of “the dry-
ing up of the image of the world,” caused by the spread of modern natural
sciences, did not grant due consideration to the potentialities opened up
by the resulting “Copernican revolution”: the fact that the individual is no
longer the center of the world instead had the consequence of prompting
a re-evaluation of the aesthetic and epistemological importance of the
10
The original title of Langbehn’s book is Rembrandt als Erzieher. Von einem Deutschen,
Leipsig 1890. Regarding the significance of this work in the cultural climate of the time, see
Liselotte Ilschner, Rembrandt als Erziehr und seine Bedeutung. Studie über die kulturelle
Struktur der neunziger Jahre, Danzig 1928, as well as the more recent study by Bernd
Behrendt, Zwischen Paradox und Paralogismus. Weltanschauliche Grunzüge einer Kulturkritik
in den neunziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel August Julius Langbehn, Frankfurt
am Main, 1984. Concerning Simmel’s stance in the German debate on Rembrandt, see also
Jacques Le Rider, Rembrandt de Langbehn à Simmel: du clair-oscur de’l’âme allemande’ aux
couleurs de la modernité, in “Sociétés” 37 (1992), pp. 241-252.
totality in whose context the individual is inserted. It can be grasped

through a form of “aesthetic interpretation” that accounts for the new
way of experiencing truth consequent to the modern image of the world.
In refuting Langbehn (still very much anchored to the great German and
Dutch classical arts), Simmel therefore promotes a form of “poetry of real-
ity” (Wirklichkeitspoesie), whose purpose is to extract “the poetic elements
that lie in reality itself.” This new aesthetic conception—which seemed to
be inspired by a form of pantheist-based naturalism—also represented the
framework for his “new historical-social conception,” peculiar to modern
times, which regards the individual not as a self-sufficient whole, but as the
result of social determinants. It is precisely within the context of moder-
nity that the individual is no longer “well-rounded and whole” (abgerun-
detes Ganzes), but rather society as a whole that, through the collaboration
of all its components in their various subdivisions of social work, takes on
such characteristics. Therefore, a parallel exists between the aesthetic
dimension and the social dimension:
[I]ndividuals appear to be as prosaic as they are unpleasant in their hate of

and chasing after money and pleasure, in their anxiety over specialization, in
the constraints of their egoism; and one would also like to believe that tele-
phones and cable cars, factory chimneys and the boundless, uniform roads
of the city are amongst the furthest things in the world from poetry. But this
impression lasts only as long as one remains imprisoned in the individualist
vision. If we lift up our gazes towards the great relations from which these
individual phenomena spring and that contribute to their future develop-
ment, we then see an incommensurable cultural process that by necessity
comprises them and within which every single phenomenon, which in and
of itself is worthless and inimical, acquires a meaningful position of its own.
Just as a single word by itself is meaningless and prosaic, while in the context
of poetry it contributes to complete the work of art and hence the whole is
illuminated, endowed with the poetic shine of deeper meaning: in this same
way, each and every individual, each and every particularity of our culture
asks only to be considered members of the greater whole to restore the
seemingly lost meaning and possibility of a poetic vision (Simmel 2000
[1890], p. 237).11
11
Or. ed. Georg Simmel, Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as educator), 1890, in
‘Vossische Zeitung’, 1. Juni, Sonntagbeilage 22, Spalte 7.
116 V. MELE
Therefore, the specific aesthetic character of modern society is that the

whole prevails over the one, and interconnections over isolated actions.
Only an artistic form that can address this reality positively, one that
emerges from the industrial era and the mass society, will be able to create
an artistic ideal in keeping with the times.
At first, Simmel left open the question of what concrete expressive
forms would be best suited to realizing such an artistic ideal. However,
some years later he dispenses with such reticence, when he criticizes the
banning of the performance in Berlin of Gerhart Hauptmann’s theatrical
drama Die Weber (“The Weavers”), underlining the importance of the
modern naturalistic trend in conveying the artistic and social ideal of the
time.12 “Hauptmann’s play “The Weavers” belongs in the registers of our
social movement,” reads the introduction to Simmel’s review of this most
successful play of naturalism (GSG 17, pp. 26-28).
According to Simmel, the novelty of Hauptmann’s plays resided in the
fact that the central issue was no longer the destiny of a single man, but
rather that of society’s social classes overall. The new “social vision of the
world” in Hauptmann’s work overcomes the old ones of “romantic indi-
vidualism,” and the “historical-social necessity” of collective class destiny
is represented as the truly distinctive character of this new form of play. It
expresses the “deep currents” toward which every “modern expression of
life […] must shape itself”; putting the misery of the weavers on stage is
not an agitation, but also not an implementation of naturalistic consider-
ations. Instead, Hauptmann, as himself confessed, was “exclusively inter-
ested in the poetic problem.” But this proved to Simmel precisely the
“power of that movement,” for it showed “how deeply the misery of the
masses and their longing for redemption had already penetrated into the
hidden, unconscious sources of the poetic imagination”; it stood for the
“all-pervading force” of the naturalistic movement (GSG 17, p. 26).
In Berliner Kunstbrief (“Berliner Art Letter”), which appeared anony-
mously in 1896, Simmel details this change in contemporary artistic sen-
sibilities, which were no longer limited exclusively to theater and literature,
but also manifested in modern figurative art exhibitions. In particular, he
observed that, in terms of organization and exposition, the figurative art
shows in Berlin mimicked the by then antiquated style of portrait paint-
ing—an expression of the romantic nineteenth-century “individualism”
12
Gerhart Hauptmann’s “Weber” (1892–1893), “Sozialpolitisches Zentralblatt”, II,
pp. 283-284, in (Lichtblau 1996, p. 208).
adhered to by Langbehn—particularly appreciated in some segments of

Wilhelmian society, but inadequate for modern artistic sensibilities.
In his subsequent work Simmel tried to exemplify this specific aesthetic
character of modern society through various manifestations of applied art
(Kunstgewerbe). The same year that his critique of Langbehn was pub-
lished (1890), he also wrote an essay on modern techniques of art exposi-
tion, whose peculiar features of overcrowding and concentrated stimuli
represented “symbols of our transition era”—emblematic of the uninter-
rupted changes occurring in art and modern life. Art exhibitions repre-
sented a “picture en miniatures of the currents in our spiritual life,” in
which the performance of individuals in all circles of society are secondary
to the division of work among members of society as a whole.
Simmel observed that the expositions mirrored some of the character-
istic traits of modern metropolitan culture, such as the extreme specializa-
tion of products, the compression of forces, the display of disparate trends
and ideas within a restricted space, the search for ever stronger “feelings”
of awe, and the lack of personality of individual works, though this lack
was compensated for by the enormous wealth of diversified genres
and styles.
For Simmel, late nineteenth-century trends in the art of exposition dis-
closed the realization of a true Ausstellungsprinzip, in whose context the
peculiarity of the single artwork is relativized by the broader context in
which it is inserted; hence the principle of exposition itself comes to be the
central concern. Some years later he completed and elaborated on this
analysis of new elements in his essay Berliner Gewerbe-Ausstellung, devoted
to the 1896 Berlin Trade Fair. The center of attention was still the ten-
dency toward universal “exhibitablity,” which was characteristic of the
time, but which this time concerned industrial products. Simmel observes
that the principle underlying the exhibition had taken on a characteristic
architectural style all its own, thanks to the use of the new building materi-
als of iron and glass. It was distinct from the “monumental style” typical
of the time of Emperor Wilhelm and set a basic accent on “transience,”
paradoxically identifying itself with the most singular feature of the mod-
ern era: “if the sense of every art is to incorporate timelessness of form into
the transience of the material, then it is precisely in the art of construction
that the ideal of durability strives for realization and expression—thus here
the fascination and essence of transience creates its own style and,
118 V. MELE
something even more characteristic, it does so from a material that does

not, by any means, seem designed to last forever.”13
Thanks to the enormous size of the buildings and the transparency of
their clear surfaces, the industrial Expos gave rise to spotless, bright set-
tings, where individuals are agreeably subjected to bedazzling overstimu-
lation by a colored carousel of light, sound, and an unheard of quantity of
objects on display. In this regard, Simmel observed that in such settings a
peculiar characteristic of modern industrial production becomes especially
evident: the ever greater importance of the offer of goods with respect to
the demand for them gives rise to the “shop-window quality of things”
(Schaufenster-Qualität der Dinge), according to which “objects tend to
take on a seductive aspect, to the detriment of their utility.”14 These obser-
vations—elaborated on further after developing his theory of value in The
Philosophy of Money—served to capture the structural quality of the mod-
ern capitalist economy: above and beyond their use and exchange values,
any commodities produced must be endowed with a symbolic and commu-
nicative surplus value, whose purpose is to arouse the consumer’s desire
and imagination. The birth of industrial design, the phenomenon of adver-
tising and, lastly, the increasing ascendancy of marketing in production
activities testify to the extent that the “shop-window quality of things”
had escalated in contemporary capitalism, making the consumption of
goods ever more tied to communications and the public imagination, and
13
G. Simmel, The Berlin Trade Exibition, “Theory, Culture, & Society”, Vol. 8 (1991),
p. 121 (transl. modified). Or. ed., Berliner Gewerbe-Ausstellung, 1896, in «Die Zeit» n. 8.
14
Ibid., p. 122 (modified transl.).
less and less to the actual use value of any concrete product.15 Simmel
therefore saw a fundamental aesthetic character of modernity at work in
exhibitions: the process of autonomization of form from content (in this
case, of the design with respect to the concrete commodity), which was to
become not only a salient trait of the ludic forms of “sociation”
(Vergesellschaftung), such as sociability, but quite a bit more—as we will
see in following chapter.
3 The Persistence of Tragedy: Rome,

Venice, Florence
The decade 1896-1906 can be considered the period of formation of
Simmel’s aesthetic conception, which, as we have seen, begins with the
1896 essay Sociological Aesthetics. From this essay appeared the first
Simmelian aesthetic concepts and themes that would accompany the
author in the elaboration of his major aesthetic works after 1911: aesthetic
value and beauty, the autonomy of art, the relations between form and
content, nature and spirit, symmetry and asymmetry, the attractiveness of
architectural and artistic trends in the social being, freedom, and individu-
alism. But while aesthetics was already vitalist and related, on the
15
As it will be discussed in Chap. 9, Walter Benjamin will take up these observations by
Simmel to develop his concept of “phantasmagoria” of commodities. In the exposè of his
work in the Paris Passageses, in the paragraph dedicated to the universal trade exhibitions,
Benjamin observes: “Universal exhibitions transfigure the exchange value of commodities;
they create a setting in which their use value fades into the background; they set up a phan-
tasmagoria that people enter to let themselves be distracted. The entertainment industry
facilitates this task by raising it to the status of commodity, and people surrender to its
manipulations, enjoying their own estrangement from themselves and others” (Benjamin
2002, p. 7).
Scott Lash and Celia Lury have dedicated their recent research work to an analysis of this
phenomenon within the context of the global-cultural industry (see Global Culture Industry,
Polity Press, Cambridge 2007). This research completes an empirical investigation on the
global scale of the “shop-windowing of social culture” … the spread to the entire social body
of that visual logic of the “stage setting” or “mise en scène” of commodities, which has
characterized showcases since their first appearance in the nineteenth century. This came
about at the same time as the advent of artificial illumination and Universal Exhibitions, and
has progressed into today’s massive commercial centers (aka, malls) and the myriad domains
of virtual consumption, that is to say, the Internet websites dedicated to the sale of anything
and everything. On this matter, see also the analyses of Jean Baudrillard in his study of the
“sign value” (Baudrillard, 1974), the work of Wolfgang Fritz Haug, 1971, and especially,
Gernot Böhme, 2003.
120 V. MELE
epistemological level, to the Lebensphilosphie, the approach is now socio-

logical, as demonstrated by the analyses just considered of aesthetics influ-
ence on social facts. This same “sociological-aesthetic method” is also at
work in the essays on historical cities that Simmel wrote over a short period
of time during his repeated trips to Italy. According to an authoritative
interpretation (Jonas 1992, p. 166 ff.), the three essays on Rome (1898),
Florence (1906), and Venice (1907) represent an aesthetic analysis in the
sense of Dilthey’s aesthetic contemplation, Weltanschauung, whereas the
1903 essay The Metropolises and the Life of the Spirit is a typically sociologi-
cal and psychosociological essay. It can however be argued that this thesis
underestimates the distinctness of the approach of Simmel, who—com-
pared to Dilthey—consistently remains simultaneously aesthetic and soci-
ological. In fact, Simmel’s analysis is based not only on Dilthey’s
philosophy, but also—as we have seen in previous chapters—on the con-
cept of objective culture deriving from the Psychology of Peoples and draws
upon the central theorem of Lazarus’ work, namely, the Verdichtung des
Lebens in der Geschichte (“Condensation of Life in History”). Cultural
artifacts created out of the contents of human experience can achieve their
own objective existence in distinctive forms that may be temporary, but
which may also persist over time in cultural traditions. The aesthetic mode
of condensation or crystallization (Verdichtung) is already intimated in the
concept itself, which can also be translated literally as “rendering into
poetry (Dichtung),” that is, the process of giving an aesthetic form to
particular contents. Likewise, other spheres of human existence, such as
the cognitive or moral spheres, may also be crystallized into independent
forms that may persist over time. Interaction within these spheres can cre-
ate autonomous and objective cultural forms or crystallizations. However,
the coordination or reciprocal interaction between life and form, and
between subjective and objective culture is itself seldom “perfected.”
Indeed, as these three essays indicate, the relation is viewed as conflictual,
crisis-ridden and tragic, and, for Simmel, crucial to understanding “the
tragedy of life,” which does not belong solely to modernity, but to human
culture as such. According to his philosophy and sociology of culture in
elaboration, the spirit of the city and the urban dimension represented
adequate forms to express in an aesthetic language the exceptional rich-
ness and the extraordinary complexity of life. The historical Italian cities—
like all objects considered through Simmel’s sociological aesthetics (Bridge
and Door, The Handle, The Alpine Journey, The Ruins)—become those
objects which undergo “the condensation of life in history” that Simmel,
thanks to his essayistic virtuosity, manages to represent. Simmel’s writings

on cities thus reveal a pluralistic approach that nonetheless rests on a com-
mon epistemological basis of his nascent philosophy and sociology of cul-
ture that would reach its climax in Simmel’s Strasbourg period, that is,
toward the end of his life. The coexistence of past and present, construc-
tion and destruction, ruin and renewed architectural forms that character-
ize historical cities expresses in an exemplary manner the tragedy of
culture, in the sense that continuous and incessant life in order to exist
must assume fixed and perishable forms, which in turn will be replaced by
other successive forms.
Indeed, Simmel’s 1898 essay on Rome gives the impression that his
reflections on the eternal city are merely a pretext for describing the city in
general as a work of art and transposing to the aesthetic field the concepts
and approach that he was developing for his sociology and his philosophy
of culture.
Perhaps the most profound appeal of beauty lies in the fact that beauty
always takes the form of elements that in themselves are indifferent and
foreign to it, and that acquire their aesthetic value only from their proximity
to one another. The particular word, colour fragment, building stone, or
sound [Ton] are all lacking on their own. The essence of their beauty is what
they form together, which envelops them like a gift that they do not deserve
by themselves. Our perception of beauty as mysterious and gratuitous—
something that reality actually cannot claim but must humbly accept as an
act of grace—may be based on that aesthetic indifference of the world’s
atoms and elements in which the one is only beautiful in relation to the
other, and vice versa, in such a way that beauty adheres to them together but
not to any one of them individually. (Simmel, 2007, p. 31)
Simmel suggests in this essay the idea that only great human works that
meet the various needs of life can have aesthetic value. Rome is one
of them.
Almost alone, old cities, in having grown without any preconceived design,
provide aesthetic form to such content. Here, structures that originate from
human purposes and appear only as the embodiment of mind and will [Geist
und Willen] represent in coming together a value that lies entirely beyond
these intentions while attaining through them a kind of opus supererogatio-
nis. (Ibid.)
122 V. MELE
At the heart of the essay on Rome lies the central idea of Simmel’s soci-
ology and philosophy of culture, namely the conflict—the tragedy-of
modern culture. Here it is expressed in the opposition of aesthetic value
between the part and the whole, a theme that recurs in various forms as in
that of Geist (spirit) and Verstand (intellect), life and art, nature and cul-
ture. However, Rome, a historically exceptional city, seems to overcome
this opposition because of the harmony and richness of its parts, as it is
able to arrive at the totality through the spatial superimposition of the
material and spiritual sediments of different epochs, and especially
through time:
The fusion of the most different things into a unity that characterizes the
spatial image of Rome’s cityscape achieves an effect that is no less real in its
temporal form. In a truly peculiar way that is difficult to describe, one can
perceive here how the separateness of time-periods converges into a present-
ness and togetherness. One can find this notion expressed in the sentiment
that in Rome the past appears to become the present, or vice versa: one
seems to perceive the present in a dreamlike, meta-subjective way as if it
were the past. (Ibid., p. 33)
The tendency of the historical and landscape parts of the city to become
autonomous from the unity of Rome, however, produces the conflict of
modern culture, which is expressed here—before publication of his 1911
Philosophical Culture—in the opposition of form and life. In the last
decade of his life this opposition would take on tragic overtones in Simmel
and his aesthetic work—especially in his essay on Rembrandt (1916)—and
become the great watershed, above and beyond which the principles of life
and form will be organized.
The aesthetic essay on Florence, published eight years after that on
Rome (in 1906) and three years after his sociological essay on The
Metropolises and the Life of the Spirit (1903)—represents another impor-
tant step in the development of Simmel’s sociological aesthetics. Firstly, a
certain continuity in Simmel’s approach should be noted, for in this essay,
too, he returns to the theme of conflict and the lost unity of form and life.
Indeed, the fundamental question underlying the essay is whether in
Florence—the cradle of the Italian Renaissance and heritage of European
culture—it is possible to find the unity between nature and spirit lost in
the forms of the modern metropolis.
Ever since that unified sense of life in antiquity was split into the poles of
nature and mind [Geist,] and existence perceived in its immediacy had dis-
covered alienation and opposition in the world of the mind and interiority,
a problem has emerged, the awareness and attempted solution of which has
preoccupied all of modernity: the problem of restoring this lost unity to
both sides of life. Yet this only seems attainable in the work of art, where the
form provided by nature reveals itself as the mind having come alive. The
mind no longer stands behind what is naturally visible; rather, the elements
become indivisibly one, as they were before the process of historical life had
separated them. (Simmel 2007b [1906], pp. 38–39)
In the first part of the essay, Simmel gives the impression that he believes
that Florence, as a city of art, is capable of recreating this unity through
the artistic value omnipresent in its forms. The evocation of the historical
grandeur of the ancient city-state, the description of the Arno valley and
the hills of blissful Tuscany, the idyllic landscapes of cypresses and gardens,
expressions of a refined urban culture, bring us into the atmosphere of
that famous Sehnsucht (nostalgia), which even the young Goethe experi-
enced during his trip to Italy. “Following the city,” Cacciari notes about
the essay on Florence, “means looking for a sense of value that leads
beyond Sehnsucht (nostalgia). The essay starts from there, to go beyond.”
However, Florence and its community also has a tragic dimension in itself,
in that the historical parts of landscape and time that present themselves to
us, concentrated and superimposed, and that are part of a whole—that of
the work of art hic et nunc—want to become an autonomous whole in
themselves:
That one part of a whole should become a self-contained whole itself,

emerging out of it and claiming from it a right to its own existence, this in
itself may be the fundamental tragedy of spirit. This condition came into its
own in modernity and assumed the leading role in the processes of cultural-
ization. Underlying the plurality of relationships that interconnect individu-
als, groups and social formations, there is a pervading dualism confronting
us: the individual entity strives towards wholeness, while its place within the
larger whole only accords it the role of a part. We are aware of being centred
both externally and internally because we, together with our actions, are
mere constituents of larger wholes that place demands upon us as one-
dimensional parts in the division of labour. Yet, we nevertheless want be
124 V. MELE
rounded and self-determining beings, and establish ourselves as such.

(Simmel 2007a [1913], p. 22)
In the quest for reconstitution of the lost unity of Antiquity, post-

Renaissance European civilization has so fostered the development of the
spirit that the work of art—here represented by the city of Florence—will
be exaggerated and so finished, accomplished as an individualized work,
that it will no longer seem to satisfy the mind. And, as a result, what at first
was only a tragic tension becomes the tragedy of culture: the spirit remains
unsatisfied, because the continuous current of life seems to be frozen in
historical epochs—certainly glorious, but closed:
Since in this case the form of culture covers all of nature, and since every
step on these grounds touches upon the history of the mind that is indis-
solubly wedded to it, the needs which nature alone can satisfy in its original
being remain unfulfilled, beyond any extension in the mind. The inner
boundaries of Florence are the boundaries of art. Florence is not a piece of
earth on which to prostrate oneself in order to feel the heartbeat of existence
with its dark warmth, its unformed strength, in the way that we can sense it
in the forests of Germany, at the ocean, and even in the flower gardens of
some anonymous small town. That is why Florence offers us no foundation
in epochs in which one might want to start all over again and to encounter
the sources of life once more, when one must orient oneself within those
confusions of the soul to an entirely original existence. Florence is the good
fortune of those fully mature human beings who have achieved or renounced
what is essential in life, and who for this possession or renunciation are seek-
ing only its form. (Simmel 2007b [1906], p. 41)
The question that remains is this: why does Simmel feel a contradictory
aesthetic feeling when faced with a city of art such as Florence that repre-
sents Renaissance perfection? Why does the aesthetic beauty of its land-
scapes, architecture, and history make him think of the dark forests of
Germany?
If we look at this essay from the visual angle of the Concept and Tragedy
of Culture—as Jonas (1992, p. 173) suggests—where Simmel clearly
expresses his aesthetic and metaphysical sentiment that the life of the spirit
continually generates the constructed material forms that constantly
threaten to engulf it, then the Italian city of art becomes the most eminent
and contradictory symbol of where the danger of death of urban civiliza-
tion is felt, that is, in a civilization of the division of labor and artifact, a
technological society that aspires to the perfection of the life of the spirit
by defying nature:
The fact is that, unlike animals, humanity does not integrate itself unques-
tioningly into the natural facticity of the world but tears loose from it, con-
fronts it, demanding, struggling, violating and being violated by it and it is
with this first great dualism that the endless process between the subject and
the object arises. It finds its second stage within the spirit itself. The spirit
produces countless constructs which continue to exist in a peculiar auton-
omy, independent of the soul that created them as well as of any of the oth-
ers that accept or reject them. (Simmel, 1997 [1911], p. 55)
Lastly, the aesthetic essay on Venice was written in 1906, this time only
a few months after the Florence essay, and on close inspection the two turn
out to be internally related one to the other. In Venice as well the domi-
nant theme is the concept of the tragedy of culture, that is, the impossibil-
ity for modern man to reconcile spirit and nature, form and life, in his
creations. However, what still seemed possible to reconcile in Florence is
no longer possible in Venice. As Cacciari pointed out, with the image of
Venice, the philosophical-aesthetic categories that were meant to encom-
pass Rome, that is, the whole Mediterranean as opposed to Nordic sym-
bolism, “go down” (Cacciari 1973, p. 89). If Florence is a harmonious
interpenetration of nature and culture, organicity and artificiality, interior-
ity and exteriority, Venice is decisively opposed to it. Venetian architecture,
and the urban conformation of the city are traced by Simmel to a constel-
lation of concepts that refer to each other under an unequivocally negative
aura: play, veil, mask, artifice, staging, reverie:
Perhaps here is the most profound difference between Venice’s architecture

and that of Florence. In the palaces of Florence, and of Tuscany as a whole,
we perceive the outside as the exact expression of its inner meaning, like a
defiant, fortress-like, serious or magnificent unfolding of power that can be
sensed in every stone, each one representing a self-assured, self-responsible
personality. By contrast, Venetian palaces are a precious game, their unifor-
mity masking the individual characteristics of their people, a veil whose folds
follow only the laws of its inner beauty, betraying the life behind it in the act
of concealing it. (Simmel 2007c [1906], p. 43)
Venice, a singular city at the edge of the historical Western European

city, situated between land and water, becomes the symbol of the tragedy
126 V. MELE
of culture, of the finished human work, with its frozen forms, against
which the current of life has broken:
Florence appears as a work of art because its characteristic image is bound

up with an ideal true inner life, even if that life has historically disappeared.
Venice, however, is the artificial city. Florence can never turn into a mere
mask since its appearance was the undistorted language of true life. But in
Venice, where all that is cheerful and bright, free and light, has only served
as a face for a life that is dark, violent and unrelentingly functional, the city’s
decline has left behind a merely lifeless stage-set, the mendacious beauty of
the mask. All people in Venice walk as if across a stage. (Ibid., pp. 43–44)
In this essay we can find a foretaste of Simmel’s critical works—socio-

logical and aesthetic—devoted to naturalism, which for him is not a typical
expression—along with conformism—of the conventional conception of
art (Jonas 1992, p. 174), but an occasion to reflect on the aesthetic notion
of truth in art. For Simmel, Venice lacks truth not because it is unauthen-
tic, but because it is too subject to external forces, thus conditioning
the soul:
Above and beyond any naturalistic principle that imposes the law of external
things onto art is a claim to truth which the work of art has to fulfil, although
such a claim must come only from itself. When mighty beams rest on pillars
that we do not entrust with such a task, when a poem’s words of pathos
instruct us in a passion and depth which the whole does not convince us of,
then we sense a lack of a truth, a lack of agreement between a work of art
and its own idea. In addition, the work of art is confronted with the decision
between truth and falsehood, since it belongs to an overall context of being.
(Ibid., 42–43)
Furthermore:
Only an appearance which has never corresponded to some being, and even
whose opposite has died away and yet which pretends to offer life and
wholeness, is simply a lie in which the ambivalence of life has coagulated, as
in a body. Ambivalent is the character of these places: with their lack of
vehicles, their narrow, symmetrical enclosure assumes the look of a room.
Ambivalent is the relentless crowding and contact of people in the narrow
alleyways that invest this life with a sense of familiarity and “cosiness
[Gemütlichkeit]”, but in the absence of any intimacy [Gemüt]. Ambivalent
is the double-life of the city, here in the connection of its alleyways, there in
the connection of its canals, so that the city belongs neither to land nor to
water. (Ibid., p. 45)
Simmel concludes with an association between Venice and a key figure

of his philosophical and aesthetical thought, the adventure, which here
surprisingly assumes a negative aspect:
Venice, however, has the ambivalent beauty of an adventure that is immersed

in a life without roots, like a blossom floating in the sea. That Venice was
and remains the classical city of adventure is only a sign [Versinnlichung] of
the final fate of its overall image, offering our soul no home, but only an
adventure. (Ibid., pp. 45-46)
Few commentators have noted the fact that Simmel seems to describe
the character of Venice almost exclusively negatively while—as we have
seen—adventure is his model of philosophy and art pour l’art, a signifi-
cant trait of the modern. In a noteworthy article on historic Italian cities,
Erfraim Podoksik attempts to interpret essays on historic Italian cities in
light of the classicist concept of Bildung and the search for unity16: “my
reading of Simmel is that his essays on Italian cities are much more char-
acteristic of his thought in general and of his attitude to the question of
urbanity, than his statements on the modern metropolis; that his diagnosis
of modern “fragmentation,” instead of signifying his cultural immersion
in the “modernist” experience, points rather to his detachment from it
and to his search for alternatives” (Podoksik 2012, p. 103). For Podoksik
the text of Venice makes it clear that Simmel disliked precisely that feature
of Venice which was the essence of modernity: its aesthetic superficiality.
“Instead of immersing himself in the flux, Simmel was desperately looking
for something solid to get hold in the condition of modernity” (ibid.,
p. 107). Podoksik even prefigures a possible Simmel nostalgia for Hegelian
synthesis: the Italian cities would stand for Simmel like the Greek polis for
Hegel. Now, as we have seen in the previous chapter, Simmel’s so-called
dialectic has nothing to do with the Hegelian dialectic for the simple rea-
son that he lacks the Aufhebung, that is, the final moment of overcoming
contradiction and the transition to the higher synthesis/contradiction.
The three stages of the structure of The Philosophy of Money should not be
16
Köhnke correctly showed the differences between Simmel’s and Hegel’s concepts of
objective culture and Bildung (pp. 349-350).
128 V. MELE
confused with the stages of Hegelian dialectics (thesis, antithesis, synthe-

sis), rather, they do adopt the components of Kantian criticism (theoreti-
cal, practical, aesthetic judgment). Simmel’s fully tragic (and neo-Kantian)
status, on the other hand, is revealed in the paradoxical and non-
contradictory structure of his thought. All of Simmel’s main figures, such
as individual law, the problem of style, coquetry, and so on, are paradoxi-
cal. However, Padoksik conjecturally answers a fair question to ask: how
could all the confusing aspects of Simmel’s thought be made to fit
together? Rammstedt choses to answer in Simmel’s own words from a
fragment of the Nachlass, where he argued that his works basically all
belonged together, “growing out of a metaphysical longing (metaphysische
Sehnsucht), which expresses itself equally in the sought relationship
between the part and the whole, surface and depth, reality and idea”
(Simmel 2016, p. 71). Simmel’s metaphysical nostalgia has nothing of the
historical dialectics of Hegel (progressive, processual, teleological, escha-
tological), nor—as we shall see—of Benjamin’s “dialectic at a standstill.”
Rather, it is the Kantian-Goethian-inspired realization of the project of
sociological aesthetics in which “the typical is to be found in what is
unique, the law-like in what is fortuitous, the essence and significance of
things in the superficial and transitory,” a project that Simmel fully real-
ized in his masterpiece, The Philosophy of Money.
Simmel’s ire against Venice (and his predilection for Florence) can
therefore be explained in this context, by which Venice—like art pour
l’art—is a game that has lost touch with life, an isolated adventure lost in
the sea. As Jonas writes, “in Simmel’s aesthetic journey to Italy,” Venice
becomes “the brutal term and end of romantic nostalgia”; it thus repre-
sents “a scission between inside and outside, nature and spirit, the loss of
the roots of being, like a singular city that is no longer on the water and
no longer on the land; an art city of the old historical Europe that has lost
a certain sense of life” (Jonas 1992, p. 175). The three essays on Rome,
Florence, and Venice thus represent a certain conceptual progression from
nostalgia as Sehnsucht toward acceptance of the tragedy of culture, that is,
the impossibility for man to regain the lost unity of nature and spirit, form
and life. Rome and Florence represent the organismic cities that are capa-
ble of satisfying the demands of aesthetic fidelity to inner life, the opposite
of the “intensification of nervous life” and the dominance of intellectual
life over affective life typical of the modern metropolis. Venice, on the
contrary, represents the tragic limit of that urban model, the form that has
autonomized and become unfaithful to life, like the seduction that is gen-
erated by adventure. Indeed, the model of “classical” underlying Simmel’s
discourse emerges clearly from these writings on Italian cities: the classical
is the coherence between life and form, the harmonious and established
concordance between the parts that combine to form an organic whole,
culture as the normativity of individual law, the reconciliation of form and
function, idea and phenomenon, memory and project. Therefore, while
Rome and Florence appear in Simmel’s eyes as the cities which have pre-
served their classicism—understood as Goethean organic totality, aesthetic
unity of life and form, spirit and nature, interiority and exteriority, the
ideal contemporaneity of temporal ecstasies—the urban structure and
architecture of Venice represent the tragic character of this torn totality
and the autonomy of the parts that have differentiated from each other.
Venice is disharmonious and unfinished because in it appearance emanci-
pates itself from reality, becomes pure simulacrum, flaunting a separation
from being.
While Simmel’s message about the historical inability to repair this
breach is clear, it is less clear why spirit cannot achieve this unity. Are “his
essays on Italian cities … much more characteristic of his thought in gen-
eral and of his attitude toward the question of urbanity, than his state-
ments on the modern metropolis” (Podoksik 2012, p. 103)? It rather
appears that the theme of the tragic—as we have seen—accompanies all of
Simmel’s work from its origins, and that the answer to this question is to
be found in Simmel’s extensive research and will only reap partial answers,
variations on a theme that will never be truly completed or exhausted. In
the following, the themes addressed in Simmel’s aesthetic research will be
made more explicit through his essays on the painting and sculpture of
Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Rodin. Nonetheless, the three essays on
historic Italian cities remain a significant milestone in the elaboration of
Simmel’s sociological aesthetics.
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Liguori Editore.
CHAPTER 5
Monetary Culture and the Intensification

of Nervous Life
1 Money as Symbol of Modernity

Although his entire work is pervaded by a “metropolitan spirit,” in order
to understand the nexus between metropolis and modernity according to
Simmel, it is imperative to focus attention on the famous essay The
Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit [1903]. The 1903 essay, in fact, sub-
stantially summarizes the theses contained in The Philosophy of Money
(1900), in which Simmel performs a multidisciplinary analysis of the mon-
etary economy from a philosophical, sociological, psychological, and eco-
nomic point of view. The challenging question Simmel rather ambitiously
tries to answer in the work concerns “the effects of money on human
behavior and the effects of this behavior on social relations” (Rammstedt
2003, p. 23).
Simmel was in search of an analytical style that could strike a synthetic
compromise between the world of culture and subjectivity and that of
economic life. In the important Vorrede (preface) he declares—coherently
with his “aesthetic perspective”—that he is trying “to regard the problem
as restricted and small in order to do justice to it by extending it to the
totality and the highest level of generality” (PoM, p. 82). But why does
Simmel not study capitalism—like his contemporaries Weber and
Sombart—but only a specific object of it, that is, a single seemingly

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134 V. MELE
superficial “fragment” or phenomenon? Beyond considerations of eco-

nomic theory, it can be argued that Simmel, consistent with the concep-
tion of his “aesthetic pantheism” (ästhetische Pantheismus, analyzed
previously) was fascinated by this veritable symbol of modern metropolitan
culture. If it is true that “to the properly educated eye the total beauty, the
total sense of the world as a whole, radiates from every single point”
(Simmel 2004, p. 182), then Simmel’s intellectual challenge was to dem-
onstrate how a “trivial” element of everyday life, linked to the sphere of
“usefulness” and calculation, could become the symbol of deeper spiritual
meanings and metaphysics of modern culture. Once again, we can see the
influence of Goethe’s conception of the symbol, according to which the
idea, the general concept, can and must be grasped through what is
expressed individually before the senses, and thusly be represented.
“Symbolic objects,” Goethe observed, “are eminent instances that repre-
sent many others in a characteristic multiplicity, enclose in themselves a
particular totality, and so from the outside to the inside refer to a certain
unity and totality.”1
There are a number of equally important philosophical and sociological
reasons for Simmel’s interest in money as a symbol of modern life:
The philosophical significance of money consists in the fact that within the
practical world it constitutes the clearest image and most definite realization
of the formula of being more generally, according to which things find their
meaning in relation to each other, and the reciprocity of relations in which
they are suspended determines their being and being so. (Simmel 2004
[1900], p. 127 trans. mod.)
Money is the purest symbol of the modern conception of the world, as

it expresses “the current dissolution of everything substantial, absolute
and eternal in the flow of things, in the historical possibility of change, in
purely psychological reality.” In place of the “stable and substantial val-
ues” belonging to the traditional worldview, it is necessary to replace “the
vital interactivity of elements that in turn are subject to the same dissolu-
tion to infinity.” In this way “the central concepts of truth, value, objectiv-
ity” appear as “interactive realities, as contents of a relativism that now no
1
Letter from Goethe and Schiller dated August 16, 1797, cited in Lichtblau 1996, p. 217.
5 MONETARY CULTURE AND THE INTENSIFICATION OF NERVOUS LIFE 135
longer meant the skeptical destruction of every solid element, but on the
contrary the guarantee against such destruction through a new concept of
solidity” (Simmel 1958, p. 9). Next to this philosophical meaning there is
a more exquisitely sociological one: money is the most important histori-
cal-concrete example of the Wechselwirkung between individuals that,
present in the “purest and most primitive forms of human socialization”
as exchange, gradually becomes institutionalized in the rules of the mon-
etary economy. “Money belongs to this category of reified social func-
tions. The function of exchange, as a direct interaction between individuals,
becomes crystallized in the form of money as an independent structure”
(Simmel 2004 [1900], p. 174). In this kind of institution, according to
Simmel, everything that has a subjective character is fixed and material-
ized. Since “‘life’ is nothing but the sum of interacting forces among the
atoms of the organism”, then exchange is not a secondary element of
social life, “for exchange is a form of socialization. It is one of those rela-
tions through which a number of individuals become a social group, and
“society” is identical with the sum total of these relations” (ibid.).
Exchange is not simply the sum of the acts of “giving” and “receiving”;
rather, it constitutes a new and peculiar form of mutual rapport between
men, in which they can realize their ends solely and exclusively through
the condition of reciprocity. If exchange is therefore the “original phe-
nomenon” (Urphänomen) of all social life, money represents its reified and
crystallized version in modernity. It therefore becomes a symbol of all the
social, economic, and spiritual life of metropolitan living. All such forces
come together to act on both the individual psyche and society though
money and the workings of the monetary economy. As stated in the begin-
ning of the essay The Metropolis and the Life of the Spirit, Simmel’s intent
is to try to “inquiry into modern life’s characteristic products,” in such
way as to discover “how these formations reconcile individual and supra-
individual contents of life, the adaptations of the personality through
which it comes to terms with outside forces” (Simmel 2021, p. 192). It is
important to stress the originality of Simmel’s approach, as the metropolis
he considered is truly and fundamentally a lived experience, in the sense
expressed by the German term Erleben. This has a particular consequence
for a more strictly sociological analysis: in this perspective the metropolis
is neither a purely objective formation, nor an exclusively subjective expe-
rience. It is rather set midway between individual and object, where
136 V. MELE
individual subjectivity and objective social formation coincide.2 This is

immediately evident from the extreme poles of the analysis that Simmel
conducts in the essay, which correspond to “intellectualism,” at one end,
and the predominance of the monetary economy, at the other.
Intellectualism and money are two, respectively subjective and objective,
aspects of the metropolitan Erleben. This is a clear exemplification of what
Serge Moscovici has called the “genetic” or “third way” method practiced
by Simmel, who tends to explain the genesis of social formations from the
specificity of the intellectual or affective characteristics of individuals. The
evolution of the monetary economy has, as we know, brought with it the
evolution of money from substance to function, from a thing of value
(usually gold) to a simple sign of the value of things. The value of money
became separated from the sensible appearance of things, and this went
hand in hand with the mental evolution of individuals in modern culture.
At the same time, individuals’ faculties of abstraction and reasoning refined
and took over from the sensible faculties. “In other words, its economic
metamorphosis, which changed it from substance to exchange value, goes
hand in hand with a mental evolution of individuals in modern culture.
Which of the two proceeds from the other or has greater importance will
never be known, so much so that it would be illusory to want to separate
them at any time” (Moscovici 1988, p. 351).
What then are the characteristics of the culture and psychology of
money, in detail? Even before The Philosophy of Money Simmel precisely
defined these in a series of essays and preparatory lectures, including The
2
Erleben constitutes a fundamental sociological category for Simmel, one that can in a
sense replace that of the “action” of Weberian and post-Weberian sociology. Rammstedt
observes, “as a possible counter-category to the concept of action he introduces that of
Erleben, insofar as it allows us to grasp how society expresses itself in the individual (Dahme
and Rammstedt 1984, p. 473). In Simmel’s words, Erleben can be defined as “an indifference
between subject and object,” where life is instead the “indifference between process and
content.” “Both are abstractions from a unity. The Erleben sees this unity in such a way, that
it appears to be a particular synthesis of Subject and Object; it makes that at the moment
when the content has become object, it stands before the subject as a self-evident percep-
tion” (Simmel 1928, quoted by Rammstedt, ibid.).
Psychology of Money (1889) and Money in Modern Culture (1896),3 in

which he also clearly describes money’s effects on individual psychology
and everyday culture. An analysis of these writings also reveals why Simmel
considered money to be the most significant of the “overwhelming forces”
that threaten and inhibit the development of subjectivity.
A first, highly consequential effect of money in modern culture is the
“lengthening of the teleological chain.” Simmel states that “the difference
between primitive and civilized conditions is measured by the number of
elements that stand between the immediate action and its ultimate goal”
(Simmel 1989b [1889], p. 51). Money in modern culture brings about a
distancing of means from ends. In the context of the monetary economy,
if a particular object is desired, it can be obtained indirectly through mon-
etary exchange. “Just as my thoughts must take the form of language
understood by all, in order to further, through this indirect route, my
practical ends, so my actions or possessions must come to the form of
monetary value in order to serve the furtherance of my will” (ibid., p. 53).
Money, to put it in contemporary terminology, is the “generalized sym-
bolic code of action” (Luhmann). Simmel, differently from other authors,
also analyzes the psychological feedback of this dimension of modernity.
Now, this “psychological interruption of the teleological series” manifests
itself in a wide range of fields of life as a fetishism of the medium, or to put
it another way, the obscuring of the ultimate end of actions: “certain phi-
lologists remain entangled all their lives in the investigation of the most
futile trifles without the real end of this mediated effort, the knowledge of
the spirit of an epoch or an individual, ever reaching their consciousness”
(ibid., pp. 54–55).
3
In this regard, Milà (Cantó-Milà 2003, pp. 196–199) has pointed out the differences that
exist between the 1889 paper (in which Simmel inaugurates his interest in money as an
object of research) and the 1900 Psychology of Money, which is obviously his main work on
the subject. Milà argues that the similarities concern the interest of Simmel’s analysis, which
is not economic, as we have already noted. From the point of view of changes in optics and
research interests, the major change certainly concerns the introduction of the concept of
Wechselwirkung: whereas in The Psychology of Money the perspective was still that of the
Völkerpsychologie of Moritz Lazarus and Heymann Steinthal, Simmel’s masters in Berlin, this
plays a much smaller role in The Philosophy of Money, where the “relational” perspective
enables him to analyze money, its functions and effects. The concept of Wechselwirkung thus
assumes a central theoretical position. In addition, in the 1900 work Simmel also proposes a
reflection on the historical origin of money, particularly through an analysis of the origin of
“exchange” (Tausch).
138 V. MELE
From this derives both the pleasure of pure spending and that of ava-
rice: “this psychological interruption of the teleological series is not only
manifested in the explicit greed for money and avarice, but also in its
apparent opposite, in the pleasure of pure spending as such, in the joy of
possessing as many things as possible, not to take advantage of the specific
utility for which they are produced, but only because one wants to have
them” (ibid., pp. 51–52). But what is more important is the general
obscuring of the ultimate meaning of actions and, therefore consequently,
of life that comes with this invention of modern culture and the destabiliz-
ing effects it has on individual personality. In a statement that could
cogently describe our cultural climate, this is how Simmel related money
to the general meaninglessness of his own age, which manifested itself
(now as then) in the search for “new lifestyles”:
I believe that this secret restlessness, this helpless urgency that lies below the
threshold of consciousness, that drives modern man from socialism to
Nietzsche, from Böcklin to impressionism, from Hegel to Schopenauer and
back again, not only originates in the bustle and excitement of modern life,
but that, conversely, this phenomenon is frequently the expression, symp-
tom and eruption of this innermost condition. The lack of something defi-
nite at the centre of the soul impels us to search for momentary satisfaction
in ever-new stimulations, sensations and external activities. Thus it is that we
become entangled in the instability and helplessness that manifests itself as
the tumult of the metropolis, as the mania for traveling, as the wild pursuit
of competition and as the typically modern disloyalty with regard to taste,
style, opinions and personal relationships. (Simmel 2004 [1900], p. 490)
A further important effect of monetary culture on individual psychol-

ogy, which contributes to “leveling” and threatens the development of
individual personality, is described by Simmel as the debasement of the
objective world. The psychological trait on which the metropolitan per-
sonality is based is in fact represented by the “intensification of nervous
life” (Steigerung des Nervenlebens) produced by the rapid, relentless alter-
nation of external and internal impressions, the result of which is that the
individual cannot react with the deepest layers of his psyche, but has to
create a sort of defense organ, the “intellect” (Verstand). The intellect is
the sum of the more conscious, transparent higher faculties of the psyche
and is hence further removed from the deep layers of the personality. It is
essentially based on calculation and objective neutrality in its approach to

things and relations. It is precisely for this reason that intellectualism and
money are strictly linked. Money, like the intellect, is indifferent with
regard to all that is purely individual. By virtue of its exchange value, it
becomes the means through which to express both the highest creations
of the spirit and the rawest, material things, in terms of their lowest com-
mon denominator—their price:
Money, having rendered the multiplicity of things equivalent, having trans-

lated all qualitative differences into a question of “how much?”, having
established itself in all its colourlessness and indifference as the universal
denominator of value, has become the most dreadful leveller. In place of
specificity, unique value and peer-lessness, it leaves a hollow core. All things
swim in an endlessly flowing stream of money, each having the same weight.
They lie in the same plane, different only in terms of the area they cover. In
some cases, the colouration—or, much rather, discolouration—of things
through their equivalence with money may be imperceptible; however, the
attitude that the rich adopt towards objects that can be purchased for money,
and perhaps even the cast given to these objects by the wider public, cannot
escape notice. (Simmel 2021 [1903], p. 195)
Since the finest works of the human spirit and the most trivial and mate-
rial works can be bought for the same price, being compared as commodi-
ties to the same amount of money, modern individuals become less
sensitive to individual differences, to their intrinsic value. The individual
no longer reacts to the distinctions and peculiarities of objects with a cor-
responding gradation of sensitivity and perceives them all in a uniform
coloring. What therefore happens is that objects (and objective culture in
general) no longer contribute to the enhancement and enrichment of our
personality. Simmel explains this phenomenon with the stimulus-response
schema. According to Simmel, “humans are creatures of difference”
(Unterschiedswesen, ibid., p. 193), which means that their consciousness is
stimulated by the difference between the impression of the moment and
the one that precedes it. If we are exposed to a series of uniform stimuli,
our consciousness never experiences sufficient stimulation to develop. In
other words, the metropolis stands as an environment rich in stimuli,
information, and messages that could enrich and differentiate our
140 V. MELE
personality, but we can no longer appropriate them, because we are satu-

rated and indifferent.4
Intellectualism and the rule of the monetary economy are epitomized
in the characteristic metropolitan psychological type—the blasé individual.
Blasé means bored, uninterested, detached. Such an attitude stems from
the concentrated effects of the contradictory nervous stimuli characteriz-
ing the metropolitan milieu. The nerves are subjected to such strong
inputs that they eventually stop reacting to the stimuli with the vigor that
they would normally. In addition to this peculiarity:
The blasé attitude is characterised by a dulled sensibility for the differences

between things—not in the sense that they are not perceived at all, as a dull-
witted person might fail to do, but in the sense that the significance and
value of the differences between things (and, by extension, the things them-
selves) are taken to be without consequence. To the blasé person, all things
appear matted with a grey hue; none is preferable to the other. (Ibid., p. 195)
Finally, an essential feature whereby money threatens the development

of individual personality is the fact that the division of labor, the cause and
consequence of the monetary culture, “demands increasingly more one-
sided activities from the individual and, at its highest point, it often lets the
individual’s personality as a whole deteriorate” (ibid., p. 199). According
to Simmel, the division of labor produces individuality at the price of lim-
iting its spiritual universality. This involves the process that Simmel referred
to as the “tragedy of modern culture,” according to which the contents of
objective culture present themselves to individuals as threatening and
independent, preventing them from further perfecting their personality:
4
Elsewhere (in the important 1911 essay devoted to the Concept and Tragedy of Culture)
Simmel described this situation as that of omnia habentes, nihil possidentes: “There thus
emerges the typical problematic condition of modern humanity: the feeling of being sur-
rounded by an immense number of cultural elements, which are not meaningless, but not
profoundly meaningful to the individual either; elements which have a certain crushing qual-
ity as a mass, because an individual cannot inwardly assimilate every individual thing, but
cannot simply reject it either, since it belongs potentially, as it were, to the sphere of his or
her cultural development. One could characterize this with the exact reversal of that saying,
Nihil habentes, omni possidentes, which characterized the blissful poverty of the early
Franciscans in their absolute liberation from all things that would somehow still tend to
divert the soul from its path through themselves and thereby make it an indirect route.
Instead of that, human beings in very rich and overburdened cultures are omnia habientes,
nihil possidentes’ (Simmel 1997a [1911], p. 73).
We need only to hint at the fact that the metropolis is the arena in which this
culture, which overbears anything personal, plays out. The metropolis holds
such an overwhelming quantity of crystallised, depersonalised spirit in store
in its buildings, its educational institutions, its wondrous transport ameni-
ties, its formations of social life and its visible state institutions, that the
personality is unable to hold its ground. (ibid.)
The effects of the tragedy of culture are particularly evident on indi-

vidual culture, in that which can be called “exaggerated individualism”:
Consequently, for the uniquely personal element to survive, the individual

must put on display an extreme idiosyncrasy and individuality. One must
exaggerate the personal element for it to remain audible even to oneself.
The atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective cul-
ture is one of the reasons for the high priests of individualism’s fierce hatred
of the metropolis, Nietzsche foremost among them. It is also a reason why
they are so passionately loved in the metropolis and appear as prophets and
redeemers of big-city dwellers’ unsatisfied yearnings. (ibid., pp. 119–200)
What happens, in other words, is that in response to the meaningless-

ness of society—indeed, money has no meaning, in that it is void of any
particular content—individuals attempt to enhance their own sense of
meaningfulness, even to the point of exaggeration. As we will see, such
tendency gives rise to extremely ambivalent behaviors and reactions toward
the imperiousness of the objective culture. In other words, individuals
may come to manage their lifestyles and relations to objects (always within
the framework of the money culture) in extremely contradictory and
ambivalent ways: in a word, paradoxically.
2 A “New Storey Beneath Historical Materialism”

Regarding “the problem” at the very center of his investigation in The
Philosophy of Money, Simmel explicitly calls into question Marx and histori-
cal materialism, which are probably the only constant interlocutors for
the book:
The attempt is made to construct a new storey beneath historical material-

ism such that the explanatory value of the incorporation of economic life
into the causes of intellectual culture is preserved, while these economic
forms themselves are recognized as the result of more profound valuations
142 V. MELE
and currents of psychological or even metaphysical pre-conditions. For the

practice of cognition this must develop in infinite reciprocity. Every inter-
pretation of an ideal structure by means of an economic structure must lead
to the demand that the latter in turn be understood from more ideal depths,
while for these depths themselves the general economic base has to be
sought, and so on indefinitely. In such an alternation and entanglement of
the conceptually opposed principles of cognition, the unity of things, which
seems intangible to our cognition but none the less establishes its coher-
ence, becomes practical and vital for us. (ibid.)
The reference is to the well-known “structure-superstructure” theo-

rem, which Simmel intended to revisit in the light of his concept of
Wechselwirkung, questioning the very concept of cause. Between econom-
ics and culture, between the sphere of production and the sphere of spiri-
tual life there is not (cannot be) a relationship of necessary causation, which
makes the one a prius from which the other descends. Between them there
is an endless relationship of reciprocity. Thus, it is not, for example, only
money that conditions the conduct of life (in the “methodical-rational”
sense, to refer to Weber); it is also the latter (say, a conduct of life inspired
by ascetic Protestantism) that influences the objective culture or (again to
use Weber’s concept) the “spirit of capitalism.” In this regard there is
great similarity between Simmel’s style of analysis and Weber’s in his stud-
ies on The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber also uses
the famous literary metaphor of “elective affinities” (Goethe) between
capitalism and Protestantism. Where Simmel—consistent with his project
of “sociological aesthetics”—differs from Weber’s clearly idealistic and
neo-Kantian framework, extending the use of Goethean symbolism is in
the very choice of the object of study.
Simmel’s method found an unexpected admirer: Walter Benjamin. In
fact, in a memorable letter of December 1938 to T. W. Adorno—which
will be addressed in detail subsequently—Benjamin stated that he had read
The Philosophy of Money and found in it several insights of interest for the
construction of his work on The Arcades:
You look askance at Simmel –. Is it not high time to give him his due as one
of the forefathers of cultural Bolshevism (Kulturbolschewismus)? […] I
recently looked at his Philosophy of Money [Philosophie des Geldes]. There is
certainly good reason for it to be dedicated to Reinhold and Sabine Lepsius;
there is good reason that it stems from the time in which Simmel was per-
mitted to “approach” the circle around George. It is, however, possible to
find much that is very interesting in the book if its basic idea is resolutely
ignored. I found the critique of value of Marx’ value theory remarkable.
(Benjamin 1994 [1938], p. 599)
Kulturbolschewismus is the term which Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi cul-

ture minister, used to define “degenerate art” (das entartete Kunt), that is,
the practices and movement of the avant-garde, expressionism in particu-
lar. With this reference Benjamin intended to highlight the radicalism of
Simmel’s position, which was substantially different from any possible
form of “dialectic mediation” that forged Adorno’s line of reasoning.
The Arcades Project contains numerous quotes from Simmel on this
aspect as well as numerous critiques.5 It is therefore worth analyzing this
reflection of Simmel’s work in order to better understand what he meant
when he announced that he wanted to “construct a new storey beneath
historical materialism.” The discussion of Simmel’s theory of value—how-
ever weak on the analytical level—helps to bring out some fruitful contra-
dictions within Marx’s theory to which Benjamin had evidently been
attracted. Regarding Simmel’s exposition, his analysis of the theory of
value is elaborated in two separate sections of his Philosophy of Money: the
second paragraph of Chapter I sets forth his theory of the relation between
exchange and value and advances a series of criticisms of the theories of
utility and scarcity, while the second paragraph of Chapter V addresses
Marx’s theory of labor-value. The lack of an undivided treatment and
coherent conceptual framework is attributable to the specific difficulties he
encountered in formulating a radically subjectivistic and relativistic theory
of value. He himself confessed to these difficulties in a letter to Rickert in
1898: “it seems to me that the concept of value contains not only the same
kind of regress in infinitum, as in the case of the concept of causality, but
also a circulus vitiosus, since if one follows the various concatenations
thoroughly enough, one always finds that the value of A is founded on
that of B and that of B exclusively on that of A. One could be satisfied with
this and explain it by the fact that it is a fundamental form of representa-
tion that is not exhaustible in the terms of logic, if, in fact, absolute and
objective values did not claim to be recognized as such. The solution of
5
Mostly in the convolut X dedicated to Marx, Benjamin states: “the petty-bourgeois-
idealist theory of labor is given an unsurpassed formulation in Simmel, for whom it figures as
the theory of labor per se” (Benjamin 2002, p. 660). At pp. 663–643 quotes Karl Korsch’
interpretation of Marx’ theory of value “in opposition to Simmel” (ibid., p. 664).
144 V. MELE
this difficulty, which I have found in some cases, does not satisfy for oth-
ers, and I do not see how this difficulty can find an end, since I believe, in
any case, that I can keep faith with my relativism only if it is able to solve
all the problems posed by absolutist theories” (Landmann and Gassen
1958, p. 94). By “absolutist theories of value” Simmel means all those
theories that indicate value as an intrinsic quality of goods, as a common
attribute measurable on the basis of some unit of measurement. From this
perspective, both the labor-value theory and the marginal utility theory
are absolutist. Simmel’s attempt is precisely to transcend them on the level
of a relativistic solution, which attributes to the exchange the function of
producing value, which in this view no longer becomes a quality of
“being,” but only expresses the relationships of reciprocity that occur in
the exchange. Therefore—beyond many attempts at unilateral interpreta-
tion—it is possible to interpret the sense of his conception as an attempt
to overcome and mediate between the classical and neoclassical tradition
of economics.
This mediation remained largely unfinished. However, it would be
unfair to criticize Simmel for not doing what he did not intend to do: he
had no intention of (and no specialized expertise for) delving into the
analytical problems of economic theory. “Not a line of this work should be
understood as being about political economy,” he made clear in the pref-
ace. His analysis is therefore intended to be mainly philosophical, and it
was for its philosophical implications that the theory of work value was
interesting in his eyes. It is also necessary to observe his characteristic way
of proceeding, that is, to identify a specific problem, not necessarily indi-
cating its solution in a superior synthesis, but showing the interrelation
between the apparently opposite points of view treated.
The central point of Simmel’s critique of Marx concerns the assump-
tion that it is possible to define a concept of work that unites all types of
work, one which presents the average social degree of skill and intensity
and which Marx identifies as socially necessary labor time. Simmel high-
lights the difficulties encountered on the empirical level in maintaining to
the end the hypothesis that it is possible to express the value of each job as
a multiple of a unit of measurement of average unskilled labor. One might
perhaps think of finding a unit of measurement common to all kinds of
work, whether manual or intellectual, in the amount of energy consumed
in a unit of time that must be replenished and reproduced, but we are far
from being able to determine the energy accumulated in the brain in
quantitative terms. Rather than reducing mental energy in terms of
physical energy (or in terms of the subsistence goods needed to reproduce

the labor force), one might perhaps instead consider reducing physical
energy to the mental energy needed to produce the physical labor. Actually,
Simmel argues that it is not so much the physical energies expended in
labor that are compensated in order to replenish them, but rather the
mental energy expended to overcome the human inclination to idleness,
pleasure, and relaxation. “What is actually rewarded for work, the legal
title on the basis of which one demands a reward for it, is the mental
expenditure of energy that is required in order to discipline oneself and
overcome the internal feelings of constraint and aversion” (Simmel 2004
[1900], p. 427). Echoes of the minor essays on the Metaphysik der Faulheit.
Ein Satyrspiel zur Tragödie der Philosophie (“Metaphysics of Laziness. A
Satyr Play on the Tragedy of Philosophy,” Simmel 2005 [1900]), based in
turn on the Darwinian and Spencerian principle of energy conservation as
an evolutionary engine of organisms and societies, resurface here. This
reference to the conception of labor as disutility perfectly illustrates the
figure of the “third” or paradox that is always present in Simmel’s thought.
In fact, it not only recoups the good arguments of the subjectivist concep-
tion of value, but—with the paradoxical movement typical of his thought—
allows Simmel to recover in a heuristic sense the theoretical perspective of
materialism. In fact, Simmel argues that if every form of work involves an
exercise in self-discipline, an act of volition that counteracts the tendency
to idleness, then there is an element of a moral nature that is common to
both manual and intellectual labor. But it is precisely the presence of this
common element that makes the distinction between physical and mental
labor relative and allows the mutual reduction of one in terms of the other
to be considered legitimate. From this point of view, Simmel argues that if
one considers “matter” not as an autonomous essence that is absolutely
opposed to “spirit” on an ontological level, but as a relative concept con-
structed on the basis of the formal categories of our thought, then a mate-
rialistic conception also becomes legitimate. In fact, Simmel, near the
conclusion of his critique of Marx, writes: “From this standpoint, on the
basis of which the basic distinction between material and mental phenom-
ena becomes a relative instead of an absolute one, the claim to search for
the explanation of mental phenomena in the restricted sense in their
reduction to material phenomena is much less unacceptable ” (Simmel
2004 [1900], pp. 428–429). Therefore, it seems clear that Simmel
attempts to eclectically reconcile objectivist and subjectivist theories of
value by relativizing the viewpoints behind their elaboration. This
146 V. MELE
attempt—which is not a “dialectical” synthesis, but rather a paradoxical

coexistence of the two points of view—leads to a conception of value that
is no longer either subjectivistic or objectivistic: value is no longer an
intrinsic quality of things, but a pure relationship between them. Value
arises from subjective evaluations and becomes objectivist in a relationship
that becomes autonomous from the evaluations themselves. It is the rela-
tionship of exchange, real or imaginary, that produces value, and the con-
cept of value itself takes on meaning only in the context of a radical
relativism, where value is resolved—but not dissolved—in a pure relation-
ship. The consequence of this attempt to excavate a plane below historical
materialism anticipates the efforts of postmodern culture (the aestheticiza-
tion of everyday life) to deconstruct the material foundation of capitalist
society in material needs. Benjamin was most impressed with Simmel’s
critique of labor theory of value in that it emphasized the importance of a
“third realm” between objective and subjective theories of value—even if
he critiques it from Karl Korsch’s point of view (Benjamin 2002, p. 664).
This “third realm” hypothesized a cultural and aesthetic value of products
beyond use value and exchange value As he wrote in the 1935 exposé of
The Arcades Project:
World exhibitions glorify the exchange value of the commodity. They create
a framework in which its use value recedes into the background. They open
a phantasmagoria which a person enters in order to be distracted. (Benjamin
2002, p. 7)
There is no doubt that the “phantasmagorical world” of which

Benjamin speaks when he evokes universal commodity exhibitions is
inspired by Simmel’s insight into the autonomy of forms over the content
of objects as well as social relations in the context of modernity. Here,
however, their paths diverge, as the tragic autonomy of forms for Simmel
becomes the world of the “semblances” of the modern Trauerspiel.
Whereas Simmel’s relational critique merely points to the existence of this
problematic space and investigates its phenomenology and configurations
in the various forms of the aestheticization of everyday life (sociability,
lifestyle, fashion, object culture, ornaments, etc.), Benjamin seeks to “res-
cue” the desires provoked by the dream of the commodity toward a world
no longer dominated by it. In other words, Simmel and Benjamin propose
two different and competing forms of aestheticization of everyday life: one
becomes the very paradigm of social and individual reality, the other seeks
to build against it, and thus represents an irreducible, utopian escape route
from the existing state of affairs.
3 The Two Forms of Individualism

In Simmel’s conception of the metropolis, as well as in The Philosophy of
Money, one question, which he formulates at the beginning of the 1903
essay, is foremost:
The most deep-seated problems of modern life stem from the individual’s
aspiration to defend the autonomy and individuality of his or her existence
against overpowering social forces, the historical heritage, the external cul-
ture, and the technique of life. This is the latest stage in the struggle with
nature that humankind had to wage in prehistoric times to ensure its bodily
existence. (Simmel 2021 [1903], p. 192)6
The problem of individuality, “concern over the survival of a differen-

tial subjectivity in modern society” (Lichtblau 1997, p. 83), represented a
constant source of concern for Simmel since his earliest works. It is impor-
tant to analyze and break down this precise definition of Simmel’s because
it encompasses all the problems of the metropolis and its connection to
modern monetary culture. Firstly, it embraces the problem of “auton-
omy” and what would best be translated as the individual’s “particularity”
(Eigenart), which describes the main aspects of the individuation process
as conceived by Simmel—that which he would call the “two forms of indi-
vidualism.” Secondly, we must delve into the so-called overwhelming
forces that impede the individuation process. These forces (society, his-
tory, objective culture and technology) are summarized by Simmel
through his conception of “money.” How does money behave as a force
that threatens the individuation process, and how does the individual react
to these forces through his or her social behaviors and relationships?
Simmel considers the metropolis to be the culmination of the process
of “differentiation,” to which he devoted his first study in 1890. In this
work he adopted Herbert Spencer’s “fundamental theorem” of the law of
evolution: in nature, just as in human societies (even at the level of the
6
On this issue, which represented the question for Simmel over the course of his reflec-
tions, see also Rammstedt 2003 and more recently Podoksik 2010.
148 V. MELE
individual personality), a process of differentiation occurs from the

“homogeneous to the heterogeneous,” from a simple unit of homologous
elements to a multitude of functionally diversified elements. Functionally
diversified organisms manage to attain their goals, among which the pri-
mary one of survival, with lower energy consumption, and therefore rep-
resent a superior stage of evolution.7 Money is the most representative
symbol of this process: it is pure energy (Kraft). At the same time, it is also
a symbol of energy saving, which enables reducing friction and conserving
strength. Indeed, the sole fact that all economic transactions are made in
money affords energy saving with respect to the traditional practice of
exchanging goods. Nevertheless, for Simmel this process is neither wholly
positive nor wholly painless, but involves that which he defines the “trag-
edy of modern culture,” for which, once again, the metropolis is the pre-
ferred setting. In the essay considered here he describes it as the
“preponderance of the objective spirit over the subjective spirit,” that is to
say, the greater perfection and efficiency deriving from the process of dif-
ferentiation does not translate into an equally great increase in the differ-
entiation and refinement of individual culture. Simmel formulated a
concept that can be considered key for the sociological analysis of indi-
viduality: “social circle” (sozialer Kreis). In its native state every social for-
mation is set up as a relatively narrow circle, strictly closed against other
nearby circles, but with such tight internal cohesion as to grant individuals
only a very limited range of action with regard to both the development
of their particular qualities and their free, responsible movements.
Beginning with this stage, social evolution moves simultaneously in two
different, though nonetheless complementary, directions. As the social
group grows—in number, size, importance, and life contents—its internal
unity is promptly loosened; the clarity of its original borders is mitigated
by relations and connections with other groups. At the same time, indi-
viduals gain freedom of movement that goes well beyond the ties initially
7
According to Spencer, the fundamental characteristics of the process of evolution, which
affect all living organisms, including societies and individuals, are the increase in mass, the
differentiation of structures, the specialization of functions, the interdependence of organs and
the division of labor (Toscano 1990, pp. 143–171). With the 1857 essay Progress: its Law and
Cause and immediately following works, Spencer added to this conception the thesis of the
instability of the homogeneous and the dissolution that represents the complementary des-
tiny of all evolution (Toscano 1980, pp. 61 ff.).
set by strict affiliation with the group and develop a specificity and a pecu-
liarity that are made possible and necessary by the social division of work
within the extended social group. A particularly emblematic case of this
developmental scheme of individuality is represented by urban life. Life in
small cities, in antiquity as in the Middle Ages, imposed such limitations of
movement and relationships with the outside on individuals that modern
man would feel suffocated. On the other hand, thanks to the expansive-
ness of its territory and the size of its population, the metropolis offers
incomparably greater space for development of the personality. It is in
these social spaces that we can properly speak of individuality: “the deter-
minateness of the personality becomes greater when the circles determin-
ing it are found near each other than when they are concentric” [Simmel
1989c [1890], p. 241). In the metropolis it is in fact possible that the
circles to which an individual belongs are relatively or completely indepen-
dent, also with the possibility of their being in competition or in contrast
with each other, thereby furnishing the maximum space for realization of
personal peculiarities.
At the same time, this process of social differentiation—which consti-
tutes the sociological premise of modern subjectivity—also turns out to be
disorienting for the individual. Modern society presents itself to the indi-
vidual in a profoundly ambivalent way: on the one hand, it offers room to
grow, on the other, it takes away centeredness and “character” from the
individual, fragmenting the personality among various spaces for its real-
ization. Multiple groups of affiliation seem to create a situation in which
none becomes truly binding or influential, making social life more and
more attenuated—a pure game in which to participate for the hedonistic
and play purposes of distinction. As we will see in the following, Simmel
delved into the aesthetical mechanisms that individuals use in the difficult
art of distinguishing themselves and (at the same time) imitating others,
above all through the analysis of phenomena such as fashion, style, orna-
ment, and in general all his writings on the issue of the defense of personal
intimacy. In the social circle, individuals both recognize and lose themselves.
Recognition because it provides a way to differentiate oneself, to affirm
one’s own identity; loss, nonetheless, because those symbolic means of
differentiation are not individual, but rather common to a wide circle of
individuals.
150 V. MELE
In his essay on the metropolis Simmel mentions that which elsewhere

he calls the two forms of individualism. The metropolis is in fact the arena,
the birthplace of both the contrast and the attempts at reconciliation
between these two patterns. They can be defined as the individualism of
independence (or of equality) and individualism in the development of
originality and personal peculiarity (or of difference). The individualism of
equality stems from the assumption that all individuals are by nature equal
and have equal right to liberty. This harks back to the tradition of natural
law and its victory against the political inequalities imposed by nature. The
individualism of difference instead has its roots in romanticism and Goethe,
and maintains the value of the uniqueness of the individual and the right
to be distinctive and not confused with others. While the foundations of
the individualism of equality lie in “the universal man” present in every
single individual, in the case of the individualism of difference it is the
“qualitative irreplaceably of the individual” that is at its basis. The origi-
nality and the importance of Simmel’s conceptions consist precisely in
having introduced and analyzed this second type of individualism. Far
from being romantic nostalgia or a problem specific to the “absolutely
great” figures, such as Goethe, Rembrandt, or other exceptional artistic
personalities, the philosophical and sociological problem of distinction
and the upholding of individual peculiarity is established as one of the
essential characteristics in the cultural setting of modernity.8 Such concep-
tions reveal the profound affinity between the cultural climate of Simmel’s
time and our own. The spread of mass individualism seems to be a funda-
mental trait of contemporary society. It is manifest and analyzed in
extremely different and heterogeneous ways: the obsessive search for dis-
tinction through extremely stylized consumer goods; the trying out of
new lifestyles inspired by particular (aesthetic, ethical, religious) principles;
and more in general through “excessive” manifestations of personality,
that can be traced to the psychological matrix of narcissism. In his “met-
ropolitan scene,” Simmel seems to have observed an aspect that was later
8
As Axel Honneth has argued: “like no other author of the generation of sociology’s
founding fathers, he was aware of the difference in principle between the mere fact of an
increase in the number of social qualities, in other words, the fact of a pluralization of life-
styles made possible by the modern money economy, on the one hand, and the strengthen-
ing of individual autonomy, on the other” (Honneth 2004, pp. 464–465).
to become a characteristic trait of our highly diversified society: individual

personality and social personality can no longer coincide entirely with
“work.” If we wanted to apply Simmel’s categories of metropolitan indi-
vidualism creatively to the current cultural setting, it could be said that
concerns over how individuals can manage to preserve the independence
and the peculiarity of their individuality are the same as those confronting
today’s sociologists—faced with the transformations of production prac-
tices and the ever more important role of consumption in building an
individual identity, they question the problematic link between work (and
therefore social role, which falls within the sphere of the individualism of
equality, that is, that which quantitatively and universally unites all indi-
viduals) and the development of individual personality (the need to distin-
guish oneself and establish a distinct identity).
Therefore, viewing the problems of the metropolis in terms of the con-
trast and reconciliation between quantitative individualism and qualitative
individualism is a current, fundamental aspect of Simmel’s experience of the
metropolis in a setting such as contemporary culture—one that can be
defined as the “metropolitization of society” (Jonas 1995), that is, the
extension to the entire social structure of the peculiar cultural characteris-
tics of the large city. Obviously, Simmel never proposed a specific, unequiv-
ocal solution to such problems. Faced with the tragedy that necessarily
arises for the individual—torn between being like everybody else and at
the same time being above all and incomparably one’s own self—he did
not find any arrangement, whether ideological or utopian, to achieve in a
future socialist societal order. Nor did he view the irreversible individual-
ism of his time with particular optimism or peace of mind. Especially in the
final phase of his thought, Simmel seems to have given up on this contra-
diction as insoluble and to entrust the solitary, detached construction of
an individual lifestyle to the realization of a Self that can also have general
value and social recognizability. In this sense, the blasé, the dandy, or the
individual who looks for peace of mind in the aesthetics of detachment are
the variants or the possibilities of an individual who is above all philosophi-
cal, in short, someone in whom even Simmel can recognize himself.
152 V. MELE
4 Fashion and Sociability
The concept and the “issue” of style constitute a fundamental element in
Simmel’s aesthetic and social analysis, one with which he foresees some
contemporary sociological trends in the cultural processes of urban
phenomena.9
The specifically modern need for a personal individual “lifestyle,” which
Simmel placed at the center of his diagnosis of the time, stemmed from
the ever-increasing manifestations of subjectivism, which at the turn of the
century was fed by the loss of meaning of tradition, the waning strength
of conviction in the world’s great conceptions, and in the manifold offer-
ings of new cultural models for self-realization. It was precisely this “mul-
titude of styles” that gave “style,” as an external formal principle, its
impelling strength over the behavior of individual life (Simmel 2004
[1900], pp. 467–468). This limitation of possibilities due to the predomi-
nance of a formal principle however represents the consequence of the fact
that individuals in modern society do not feel capable of adequately shap-
ing their own personalities to the possibilities offered them to create a
unique, distinct way of life. Modern culture is perceived by the individual
as something “excessive” in its offerings of possible paths to self-realization,
so much so as to prompt a search for “support” in shaping their behavior
according to a rigorous formal principle. It is here that we see the true
“dictatorship” that style exerts over modern life: it is the objective
9
Among contemporary authors, the research conducted by Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu
1984) can be considered akin to Simmel’s. Bourdieu himself, albeit with some criticisms, has
admitted this penchant (see the collection of interviews published in Italian: P. Bourdieu, La
responsabilità degli intellettuali, Laterza, Bari 1991). The greatest affinity concerns the paral-
lels between Simmel’s concept of “lifestyle” and that of habitus. The different conceptual
origins of the two phenomena cannot obscure the fact that both (albeit with different func-
tions in the two authors’ thought) are conceptual constructs that aim to posit subjectivity at
the center of the complex dynamics of culture and aesthetics (of distinction) and not solely
of “instrumental” ones (such as that of work). The most significance difference between
these two key concepts is Bourdieu’s nearly exclusive focus on the role habitus plays in the
reproduction of social and power hierarchies. Simmel’s epochal concept of style instead
downplays this dimension, placing more emphasis on the free dynamics of individual forms,
in terms of the fundamental categories of rhythm, time, and distance. Common to both is a
sociologically oriented scrutiny of Kant’s “critique of judgment.” The aim of Bourdieu’s
distinction was “to offer a scientific response to the old questions of Kant’s critique of judg-
ment, seeking in the structure of social classes the basis for the classification systems that
organize the perception of the social world and designate the objects of esthetic pleasure”
(Bourdieu 1984, p. XI).
principle governing the most varied circles of daily life, from furnishings,
to table manners, to attire. In modern settings, the greater possibilities for
choosing how to shape one’s personality according to a principle requires
an explicit “counterweight,” which is expressed through the need to shape
oneself according to a formal aesthetic principle:
What drives modern man so strongly to style is the unburdening and con-
cealment of the personal, which is the essence of style. Subjectivism and
individuality have intensified to the breaking–point, and in the stylized
designs, from those of behaviour to those of home furnishing, there is a
mitigation and a toning down of this acute personality to a generality and its
law. It is as if the ego could really no longer carry itself, or at least no longer
wished to show itself and thus put on a more general, a more typical, in
short, a stylized costume. […] Stylized expression, form of life, taste—all
these are limitations and ways of creating a distance, in which the exagger-
ated subjectivism of the times finds a counterweight and concealment.
(Simmel 1997c [1908], p. 216)
The increasing importance of the external aesthetic aspect in one’s own

life conduct is also a consequence of the waning influence of the ethical
and moral values transmitted by the community, which were characteristic
of pre-industrial society. Simmel devoted himself to analyzing the day-to-
day forms of “stylization” in one of the more typical manifestations of
modern metropolitan life—fashion. Fashion, one of Simmel’s “master-
piece” essays, offers a rare view of the essential feature of modernity: “the
modification and opposition of life forms,” on the one hand, satisfy the
fundamental need for social distinction, and on the other, foster the egali-
tarian trend toward the need for belonging.
Fashion combines a tendency toward “distinction” together with a pro-
pensity for “imitation,” expressing the fundamental opposition of “indi-
vidualization” and “association” (Vergesellschaftung) that characterizes
modernity through a form of stylization of daily life. Moreover, because it
incorporates the unconditional search for and fascination with novelty,
together with the tendency to refer to re-actualized past forms, it is set at
the midpoint between past and future precisely by virtue of its character-
istic dynamics, by which the spread of a new fashion to the masses auto-
matically leads to its becoming outdated and hence its replacement with a
“new” fashion, initially for the few, but in reality destined to suffer the
same fate. This internal self-contradictory mechanism is also the real
154 V. MELE
reason why fashion succeeds, as few other phenomena can, in communi-

cating a feeling of “currency.”
As compared to the true dynamics of historical processes, fashion rep-
resents a “movement without time,” a sort of “eternal return of the same,”
mythical timeliness that turns up in the heart of the most modern phe-
nomena and that embeds its deepest roots in the workings of the economy
based upon the production of goods10:
Changes in fashion reflect the dullness of nervous impulses: the more ner-
vous the age, the more rapidly its fashions change, simply because the desire
for differentiation, one of the most important elements of all fashion, goes
hand in hand with the weakening of nervous energy. This fact in itself is one
of the reasons why the real seat of fashion is found among the upper strata.
(Simmel 1997b [1905], pp. 191–192)
This unreconciled form of opposition between the individual and the

general, which finds its eminent expression in the phenomenon of fashion,
provides the arena for the struggle between “being for oneself” and “being
for others,” in which the objectivity of lifestyle is made valid and percep-
tible for individuals. It is therefore impossible to shape one’s own behav-
iors and attitudes toward the world according to subjective desires. The
“intensification of nervous life,” a particular consequence of urban life, is
likewise the foundation for another phenomenon of modern lifestyle that
is equally worthy of observation: modern man tends to distance himself
more and more, not only from other men, but also from the objects that
fill everyday life. In this regard, Simmel observed a true “hyperaesthesia”
10
This idea of fashion as the “eternal return of the same,” with its parallels to Nietzsche’s
conception, was later extensively taken up by Walter Benjamin and formed the focus not only
of his work on the Paris Arcades, but also of his spiritual testament, Theses on the concept of
History (1940, Thesis XIV), in which he wholly identifies modernity with history and fashion
(as we will see extensively in Chap. 8): “History is the subject of a construction whose site is
not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled full by now-time (Jetztzeit). Thus, to
Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out of
the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It cited
ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a by-gone mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for
the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the
past. Such a leap, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands.
The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood as revolution”
(Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4 1938–1940, The
Belknap Press, Cambridge (MA) and London, 1997, p. 395).
in the attitudes of people of his time, one which was expressed through
“the present vividly felt charm of the fragment, the mere allusion, the
aphorism, the symbol, the undeveloped artistic style” (Simmel 2004
[1990], p. 480).
Also from this perspective, Simmel regarded the monetary economy as
the most representative paradigm of modernity, in that money allows men
to interpose a distance between themselves and their own environment,
which serves as protection against the overly intense traffic of human rela-
tionships experienced in urban milieus. What moderns lose in closeness
and intimacy, they try to make up for from afar, through contact with the
world of the exotic. The allure of the faraway and unattainable—which in
the meantime has grown to an excess with the development of the “cul-
ture industry” and the “society of lived experience” (Erlebnisgesellschaft)—
is simply a consequence of the fact that the present is becoming ever more
unbearable, thus leading to ever greater recourse to escapism.
In this regard, Simmel also mentions the typically “romantic” relation
with nature, which appears as one of numerous attempts to humanize the
inhuman. The more city life uproots its own inhabitants, the more they
tend to project idyllic, paradisiacal meanings onto nature—which in the
meantime has actually become completely foreign to their daily experi-
ence—as can be clearly seen in modern landscape painting.
The modern-day proliferation and spread of all forms of museums, as
well as the multitude of public and private art exhibitions and the consid-
erable success of archeology as a modern discipline (together with all
philology-related fields), which could already be witnessed in the early
twentieth century, are by no means in contradiction with the “timeless”
nature of modernity. Instead, they provide confirmation of the (already
completed) process of decentralization of the individual, who has lost his
reference points and is ever on the lookout for a possible integration or
compromise between the objective possibilities the world offers and his
own subjective needs and desires.
Simmel regards such ferment, which takes place below the surface of
daily life—this constant drive toward new dynamic content, as well as the
continual unrest and incessant inner movement—as the distinctive feature
of the “modern soul,” which faced with constantly changing, ever more
heterogeneous impressions, can no longer “return to itself,” but loses
itself in the luxuriant offerings of the cultural forms at its disposal. The
manifest ferment in the objective forms of culture is therefore a sign of a
fundamentally unresolved tension in the depths of the human mind, which
156 V. MELE
needs to express itself through these forms of extreme exaltation in order

to find some sort of liberation, precarious as it may be.
Simmel invests analogous importance to other “social games,” such as
shame, discretion, tact, and especially, sociability [Simmel 1983]. Sociability
represents a “play form of association” (Spielform der Vergesellschaftung),
in that it represents a “social game” with no immediate stakes or specifi-
cally defined purpose if not the simple pleasure of being together. The
main feature of sociability is its autonomy from reality, in the sense of both
the objective position that individuals have within the social framework
and their independence from the interests and the material motivations
that they come to express. According to Simmel, the essential characteris-
tic of any form of sociable “association” is that
[i]n sociability, whatever the personality has of objective importance, of fea-

tures which have their orientation toward something outside the circle,
must not interfere. Riches and social position, learning and fame, excep-
tional capacities and merits of the individual have no role in sociability or, at
most, as a slight nuance of that immateriality with which alone reality dares
penetrate into the artificial structure of sociability. […]. The only dominant
reason is represented by reciprocity as a pure and simple action. (Simmel
1997d [1910], p. 122)
All this, however, is not enough to define the importance of

sociability”, as such, and of “sociable” (or ludic, which in this case may
“
be synonymous) forms of association. If it were only because of their
playful, disinterested or emotional character, they could also be seen as
something empty and insubstantial, as separate from real life. And this is
a rather recurrent criticism.11 However, precisely because of their auton-
omy from real life, they lend themselves to summarizing within
11
For example, on the subject of sociability, A. Dal Lago observes: “The category of
Geselligkeit is certainly the pure form par excellence of sociality; but it is precisely the form
devoid of content, the shell of social relations that have now disappeared. Simmel’s analysis
here touches the acme of ambiguity. The figures of sociability, tact, courtesy, conversation,
are ideal frames of games without stakes, in which the individual (one would say the blasé, the
victim of metropolitan excitability) finds residual possibilities for engagement. Sociability is
an occasion for purely ritualistic participation, and at the same time an artistic game in which
the individual indulges in the pleasure of a separate reality” (Simmel 1983, pp. 24–25).
P. Watier sees it differently (Watier 1986), namely that the multiplication of social circles and
the consequent possibility of playful and disinterested sociability constitutes for Simmel an
antidote to despotism (similarly to what Tocqueville observed).
themselves “all the finest and most highly sublimated dynamics of social
existence and its riches” (ibid., p. 129). This is why the most sensitive
individuals feel these forms as liberating and playful, since they “possess a
relation to the depth and wholeness of life, which, although often not
easy to formulate, makes such a part the bearer and the representative of
the fundamental reality” (ibid.).
For Simmel, meals, social games and all forms of “sociable” interaction,
in general, can be considered the frames for subjectivity, forms of the styl-
ization of individuality, through which the tragic weight that bears on it is
lightened and alleviated. Style and such forms exonerate the individual
from that which, faced with the increasing anonymity inherent in moder-
nity, paradoxically seems to have become a performance principle: be orig-
inal at all costs. For the individual, these are not “superficial” phenomena:
Simmel views “the surface” as constantly in contact with the depths of life
and the personality. Therefore, participating in social games (sociability
first and foremost) frees the individual from the obligation to differentiate,
to be serious, from the tragedy of modernity, which is expressed by the fact
that the individual, according to the terminology adopted various times by
Simmel, though being entirely a social part, aspires just the same to be an
all. In other terms, the individual gets caught up in the differentiating
gears of the division of labor, and at the same time (tragically) aspires to
realize himself as a totality, that is, to develop his own personality in a non-
unilateral manner.
Sociability, which in its broad sense can be considered within the sphere
of leisure—the variegated potential sphere of social interactions lacking
any immediate practical goal, which can occur within the context of hedo-
nistic and consumer practices in the narrow sense, but also in social “asso-
ciationism,” disinterested volunteerism, as well as in the practice of
sport—, offers the aesthetic possibility of lightening, generalization, and
stylization of the personality.
Simmel’s reflections on sociability and play as forms of social bonding
also enable analyzing some aspects of contemporary society, with particu-
lar reference to the relation between the public sphere and the private
sphere. In a by now classic study, Richard Sennett (1992) implicitly con-
nected Simmel’s reflections on sociability—without ever actually mention-
ing him, thereby adding to the growing list of authors that have drawn
freely on Simmel’s intuitions without citing him (Dal Lago 1994,
p. 150)—with the increasing difficulty that contemporary “narcissistic cul-
ture” experiences in expressing “passions” in the public sphere. Sennett
158 V. MELE
observes that, contrary to common belief, the ability to perform and enact
roles, personal characteristics and emotions in public has always repre-
sented a positive factor in human history. Although the concept of “soci-
ety as a theater” has taken on many meanings over time, its aim has always
been to perform a fundamental ethical function: to separate human
“nature”—that is, the authentic essence of the individual—from social
action. The theater separates the alleged “natural identity” from the
“role,” because an actor’s performance in another work or in another
scene appears to us under a completely different guise and thus reveals a
completely different personality.
Capitalistic mass-consumption society—which Sennett, like Simmel
and Walter Benjamin, identifies with the metropolis of the late nineteenth
century—values the experience of the spectator over that of the actor. The
consequent fundamental imbalance between public and private life causes
the former to whither and the latter to close himself ever more within
himself. The metropolitan space becomes the venue for a show of com-
modities and narcissistic exhibition of the self, which—as we have seen—
“must exaggerate the personal element for it to remain audible even to
oneself” (Simmel 2021 [1903], p. 2019). Under the impetus of such
change, urban social spaces undergo a dichotomic transformation: on the
one hand, public space is functionalized and commodified, while on the
other, the private one is delegated to “authentic” realization of the self. In
Sennett’s opinion, such a state of affairs tends to eliminate the artistic
dimension from daily life, which makes the individual “an actor deprived
of his art,” subject to the “tyranny of intimacy.” Such intimist tyranny
manifests itself in contemporary culture through the substantial atrophy of
the public sphere and its roles, together with an ever-spreading culture of
narcissism. With an emphasis on psychological authenticity, people become
inartistic in daily life because they are unable to tap the fundamental cre-
ative strength of the actor, the ability to play with and invest feeling in
external images of self. We thus arrive at the hypothesis that while theatri-
cality has a special, hostile relation to intimacy, it also has an equally spe-
cial, friendly relation to a strong public life (Sennett 1972, p. 37).
It can thus be seen that theatricality has a particular, hostile relation
with intimacy, as well as an equally particular affinity to a solid public life.
Simmel’s essays on the actor (published posthumously) reveal that he was
well aware of the special “social” importance of theatrical art, so much so
that he dedicated to it a specific study, which upon close inspection can be
seen to enhance and complete his analyses of sociability and “play-forms
of association.” Above and beyond the opposition between reality and

appearance, Simmel expressed great praise for the actor who, “like the
painter of a portrait, is not the imitator of the real world, but the creator
of a new one” (Simmel 2020, pp. 273–274). Where all the other arts
“transport the reality of life into an objective formation that is beyond life
itself, the actor does the opposite”: that is, he brings back to “life” (reliv-
ing it) the ideality and spirituality of the written drama, “portraying it into
an expression of the real” (ibid., p. 273). Translating these observations of
art philosophy into “sociological language,” the true actor—whether on
the stage of the theater or the stage of life—can be said to have the ability
to bring “social forms” to life, not in a slavish, repetitive way, but with
creativity and originality. Such conception clearly reveals—perhaps even
more clearly than Simmel’s große Soziologie—a fundamental question in
Simmel’s social thought: that of the relations between the individual and
the forms of sociation, or in the language of scientific sociology: the rela-
tions between actor and structure. Therefore, while it may be true that in
such forms the individual finds something akin to Durkheim’s “social
facts”—external and constrictive—this relation is mediated by Erlebnis,
that is, the individual’s lived experience, which brings to life pre-existing
social forms, again and again, each time in an original and creative way,
just as an actor with a script. Linking these observations with what has
been stated above regarding sociability leads to the conclusion that the
actor, just like anyone who acts “sociably,” is not an imitator or a cham-
pion of inauthenticity simply because his object is not reality:
The actor, however, like the painter of a portrait, is not the imitator of the
real world, but the creator of a new one. This artistic world, of course, is
related to the phenomenon of reality, since both the real and artistic worlds
are built on the accumulated content of all being. Reality, however, repre-
sents the first impression received of these contents. This stimulates the illu-
sion, as though reality was the true subject of art (Simmel 2020, pp. 273–74).
What is freeing about the actor’s art is the same as that which the
“thoughtful man” feels in sociability, that is, just as art and play are pre-
tenses, so is sociability, but it is nevertheless an expression of life to the
fullest. It sublimates life and distills it into an extract endowed with greater
wealth and autonomy than “true life” itself. To translate Simmel’s obser-
vations into psychoanalytical language, the actor projects his own drives
160 V. MELE
into the public sphere of interactions with others, into social forms and
conviviality; he practices the necessary art of living in society.
There is nevertheless a substantial difference between Simmel’s actor’s
ability to engage in “sociability” and “the actor deprived of his art,” a state
which has become prevalent in contemporary culture and its “culture of
narcissism.” Paradoxically, the narcissism that appears more and more an
important trait of our public culture is not synonymous with the ability to
perform in public; nor is it particularly inclined to forms of conviviality.
Narcissists—by basing themselves on the presumed authenticity and
uniqueness of their own interiority, conceived of as an absolute and deter-
mining reality—are actually inimical to the expressive forms codified by
rituals and game-play, including those of sociability. Currently both a psy-
chological pathology and a prevailing cultural trait, narcissism consists
essentially of the Ego becoming absorbed in itself, so that it cannot man-
age to invest feelings into anything other than images of itself. The myth
of Narcissus should actually be read, not so much in terms of a caution
against the dangers of falling in love with oneself (Narcissus ends up
drowning while straining to look at himself mirrored in the lake), but
rather against the dangers of over-projecting oneself onto the world, as if
the world could be contained entirely within the bounds of one’s own self.
“As a character disorder − observes Sennett − narcissism is the very oppo-
site of strong self-love. Self-absorption does not produce gratification, it
produces injury to the self; erasing the line between self and the Other
means that nothing new, nothing “other,” ever enters the self; it is
devoured and transformed until one thinks one can see oneself in the
other—and then it becomes meaningless” (Sennett 1992, pp. 324–325).
It now seems a simple matter to grasp the incompatibility of such a per-
sonality with exchange and any form of sociability and conviviality. The
practices that Simmel defines as sociable (Gesellig), such as conversation,
tact, courtesy, and social games in all the variegated meanings of the term,
involve investment in a pure form of a behavior, which the narcissist,
obsessed with finding an authentic image of himself in objects, cannot but
reject. The narcissist is interested in reality and the world only insofar as it
promises to somehow mirror his deepest needs for recognition and self-
esteem. What interests him in games are the stakes, the aim being to obtain
ulterior confirmation (never enough) of the greatness of his Ego.
5 Women and Socialism
When analyzing his reflections on the fate of individuality, few commen-
tators on Simmel think to mention his writings on women’s culture.
Simmel’s writings on the female condition bridge a historical span of 21
years, from 1890 to 1911. They are therefore set in the historical context
of the founding years (Gründerjahre) of the German nation and attest to
the originality and modernity of his position. It is clear from reading
these writings how the problem of individuality in a complex society is
also central to his reflections on the female condition. While bemoaning
that “the style of modern life led directly to an unheard of leveling pre-
cisely of the personality-form of life” (Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 663)—a
consequence of the dominance of money that reduces qualitative differ-
ences into quantitative differences—Simmel also recognizes the undeni-
able positive contribution of the modern industrialization process to
women’s emancipation. Indeed, the overcoming of the narrow confines
of the home domain, the widening of social circles, and the development
of the mutual action that necessarily follows fostered the “development
of the feeling of the personal ‘I’” and a “greater heightened conscious-
ness of personhood” (ibid.).
For Simmel the relationship between the sexes is marked by the domi-
nance of the objective culture of men. In his 1911 essay on The Relative
and the Absolute in the Problem of the Sexes, which summarizes more than
two decades of reflections on the masculine and feminine, he writes:
The fundamental relativity in the life of our species lies in the relationship
between masculinity and femininity; this relationship also exhibits the typi-
cal process whereby one of a pair of relative elements becomes absolute. We
assess the achievements and commitments, the intensity and structural
forms of the male and female nature by reference to certain norms. But
these norms are not neutral and detached from the opposition between the
sexes. On the contrary, they themselves are of a male nature. […] Consider
patriotism and the demands of art, general morality and specific social ideas:
the equitability of practical judgment and the objectivity of theoretical
knowledge, the power and the profundity of life. As regards their form and
their claim, there is a sense in which these categories are generally human.
As regards their actual historical formation, however, they are thoroughly
male. If we call those ideas which appear as absolute the objective simplic-
iter, then the following equation holds in the historical life of our species:
the objective= the male. Consider the general human tendency, probably
162 V. MELE
anchored in profound metaphysical grounds, for one member of a pair of

dichotomous concepts, the meaning and value of which are conjointly
determined, to acquire preeminence. As a result, this member, which now
has an absolute significance, comprehends and dominates the entire inter-
play of reciprocity or equilibrium. In the fundamental relationship of human
sexuality, this tendency has created a historical paradigm for itself. (Simmel
1984 [1911], pp. 102–103)
Simmel viewed the disparity between the sexes as based on an internal

imbalance in the natural relation between the sexes. Accordingly, it is not
the relationship between man and woman on which the institution of the
family is based, but rather on the relationship between mother and chil-
dren. In primitive societies, woman is aboriginally the being capable of
procreation, and this forever establishes her role in the family, both nuclear
and extended, as well as in society. Since newborns constitute the supremely
valuable resource of any primitive community, woman is the sole agent or
means that enables the maintenance of this collective wealth. The evolu-
tion of the nuclear family can be conceived of as an individualization of
this fundamental property relation. The father as individual breadwinner
appears only later as a distinct figure. Whether the woman is the property
of the collective or the individual, it is the role of procreatrix that deter-
mines her value and at the same time her subordination. In the 1895 essay
On the Sociology of the Family Simmel writes:
The purchase of a woman first of all indicates her low position within the
marriage. In most cases, the mere fact of being sold implies that she has no
will of her own, but is instead handled by her relatives like an object, and
under this aspect she enters into marriage. In this context, the man’s objec-
tive is to work her as much as possible in order to recover the purchase price.
But that is only the superficial side of marriage arranged by purchase. I own
what I have acquired with money absolutely and unconditionally, more
completely than a possession that comes to me as a result of free will; in all
respects, there is less obligation and less consideration attached to such an
object. […] Of all the values that practical life has developed, money is the
most impersonal. Because it serves as an equivalent for the most contrary
things, it is itself completely colourless. All personal values, all individualiza-
tions of life end with money, which is why people say that geniality ceases
where monetary transactions commence. Money possesses no qualities
other than its quantity, and its incomparable significance for all the external
things in life therefore corresponds to its complete lack of any relation to all
inner, personal values of life. Now this nature of money influences the evalu-
ation of all those things that can be acquired with it. We call something very
special and noble that cannot be acquired by just anyone ‘priceless’. If a
woman sells herself, be it in marriage to a man to whom she is indifferent or
in more transient forms, then it seems particularly repulsive to us because
the most personal thing a person has to give is being exchanged for such an
impersonal value as money. (Simmel 1998 [1895], pp. 292–293)
On the other hand, feelings of love other than the purely marital sort
are not lacking in this evolution, although they cannot be reduced to their
social meanings. Simmel notes how the ideal of supreme love develops on
the terrain of the uniqueness and pricelessness of women within the family.
This does not mean that specific feelings such as maternal love do not also
arise in this terrain, nor that love in general can be conceived of as a mask
of naked relations of sexual subordination and ownership. But in fact, the
development of objective relations between the sexes, in which masculine
norms or definitions have always had the upper hand over feminine iden-
tity, has profoundly marked the mutual play between men and women and
thus the very private and public feeling of love. For Simmel the subordina-
tion of the feminine to the male objective culture symbolized by money is
manifested in the two somewhat parallel and complementary institutions
of arranged marriage for interest and prostitution, in which only men can
assume the role of purchasers. As long as the figure of woman on a par
with that of man is still tied to the community and thus not yet individual-
ized, female prostitution is not yet particularly stigmatized (as in many
primitive societies or in classical culture). On the other hand, in the devel-
opment of the money economy—and thus in the process of reducing val-
ues to exchange values—woman becomes a substantial commodity in
objective male culture and “prostitution” becomes generalized in the legal
form of arranged marriage, as well as in the illegal, stigmatized form of
street prostitution. According to Simmel, even though modern culture
has abolished the role of women as mere “work animals,” modern mar-
riage bears the traces of absolute inequality determined through the devel-
opment of family relations: while the woman brings into play the totality
of her self, the man, on the one hand, appropriates her by virtue of his
wealth or social position, and on the other hand, as purchaser brings into
play only a negligible part of his self:
164 V. MELE
In prostitution, as in arranged marriages, neither the notion that the sex act
is something generic and anonymous, nor the fact that the man participates
in it outwardly in the same way as the woman, can change the fact of the
matter that the woman’s commitment is infinitely more personal, more
essential, more globally demanding of the self than the man’s, and that
therefore the monetary equivalent is the least appropriate, the least adequate
imaginable, and the offer of money and its acceptance the most degrading
lowering of the female personality. (Simmel 1985 [1898], p. 149)
This relationship between money and sex results in an opposition

between the male and the female being, between male and female culture.
Women for Simmel are historically victims of male objective culture. This
inequality is rooted in an ontological difference: while men’s nature fea-
tures a propensity to calculation, strategic thinking, division of labor and
the development of objective culture, at the price of the fragmentation of
their personality, women, on the other hand, appear as unitary beings. A
famous passage of the essay Female culture, first published in 1902 and
then republished in slightly modified version in Philosophiche Kultur in
1911—states:
For if there is any sense in which the distinctive psychic quality of woman’s
nature can be expressed symbolically, it is this: Its periphery is more closely
connected with its centre and its aspects are more completely integrated into
the whole than holds true for the male nature. Here the authentication of
the single individual does not lie in a distinctive development and a differen-
tiation from the self with its emotive and affective centres; a process shifts
the performance into the domain of the objective, with the result that its
lifeless specialization becomes compatible with a complete and animated
personal existence. (Simmel 1984 [1902], p. 73)
Women thus represent an essence opposed to the rationalization of the

world and its cultural consequences, not only because they are naturally
unitary—Simmel extols their role in maintaining the family as the primary
social unit—, but also because they are historically refractory to modern
intellectualism. As Alessandro Dal Lago has argued, “for Simmel, women
represent the possibility of a different outcome of modernity itself” (Dal
Lago 1994, p. 129). The feminine thus represents a concept of individual-
ity different from that dominant in modern culture and in most known
cultures.
Nowadays Simmel’s reflections may very well seem like a rather singular
combination of insights into gender differences and ingrained sexual ste-
reotypes. However, the consequences Simmel draws from this differentia-
tion are quite original and relevant. He viewed the development of an
autonomous women’s culture as having the potential to effectively coun-
ter the tendency toward the objectification of culture in the traditionally
masculine fields of science, medicine, art, and law. He came to believe in
the full legitimacy a of a true women’s history. In particular, this path
toward autonomization would have been reconciled with the attainment
of full legal equality for men and women. As Simmel put it in Women
Culture:
The ideal of the women’s movement cannot be an “independent human-

ity”—as it has been characterized from another standpoint—but rather an
“independent femininity.” […] As regards this ideal, we could, of course, go
so far as to suppose that its polar antithesis is the most immediate condition
for its realization: the mechanical leveling of education, rights, occupations,
and conduct. Consider the fact that the achievement and the position of
women vis-a-vis men have remained in a relationship of gross inequality for
so long, with the result that the development of a distinctively female objec-
tivity has been obstructed. In view of this consideration, we might suppose
that it is first necessary to pass through the opposite extreme of extravagant
equality before the new synthesis—an objective culture enriched with the
nuance of the female—could develop beyond this state. In the same way,
there are extreme individualists today who advocate socialism because they
think that a truly natural ranking and a new aristocracy that would really
qualify as the rule of the best is to be expected only as a result of the transi-
tion through a leveling process produced by socialism. (Simmel 1984
[1902], pp. 98–99)
On the occasion of the1896 craft exhibition held in Berlin, to which, as

we have seen, Simmel dedicated an essay, an international women’s con-
gress was organized, the first of its kind in Germany. During the proceed-
ings, a lively clash took place, provoked mainly by the speech of Clara
Zetkin, ideologist and leader of the proletarian feminist movement, who
declared that she rejected any compromise with capitalist society and reit-
erated the fundamental difference in political position between the femi-
nist movement of the bourgeoisie, on the one hand, and the social
democratic and proletariat movement, on the other. Georg Simmel, tak-
ing his cue precisely from this heated controversy collected some
166 V. MELE
reflections in a short essay on The Women’s Congress and Social Democracy

(Simmel 1997e). The sharp diversity of political positions that emerged at
the women’s congress provided Simmel with an opportunity to express his
personal opinion on a neuralgic issue, hotly disputed at the time and still
the focus of debate on the left to this day: the question of precisely of how
to realize the ideals of socialism. He writes that it would have been simply
a mistake for the bourgeois feminist movement to seek any connection
with the social democratic movement if the latter had continued “obsti-
nately” to insist on the idea that it was only through a “profound revolu-
tion” that all forms of injustice and oppression could be removed. Simmel
argues instead that it would have been possible to achieve an improvement
in general social conditions, not so much through the radical instrument
of revolutionary change, but rather by intervening “gradually” and in a
concrete way on particular individual aspects of social relations. He asks,
for example, whether or not it would have been possible to achieve a
“socialization of the means of production” and a gradual reduction in
social differences simply through relentless strengthening of worker pro-
tection and security, through more generalized and free education,
through the gradual reduction of working hours and the guarantee of a
minimum wage. Such a “methodical conviction,” Simmel points out,
“would not need to transform either the starting point or the endpoint of
socialist efforts ” (ibid., p. 271). In this regard, he explicitly warns against
a religious, utopian expectation of the ideals of socialism:
For the misery of the proletariat can be felt in its entire depth and its ame-
lioration can be conceived as the highest and most noble task of the times,
whereas one can no more be able to believe in the radical means of a revo-
lutionary change of the entire social situation than, say, in a sudden miracle
from heaven […] But even those for whom it is necessary to believe in that
absolute goal, in the complete elimination of class distinctions and the pri-
vate ownership of capital, do not betray themselves by considering the goal
achievable only through reforms to be introduced gradually, as it were from
the bottom up. (Ibid.)
He reiterates his rejection of a miraculous conception of modern social-

ism, which, because of its subordinate genetic link with philosophical
speculation, intends to solve all problems and difficulties with one for-
mula, at one stroke:
Yet just as the shibboleth of Hegelian philosophy has been replaced by the
patient work of garnering knowledge from the individual elements of the
world, whose gradual constellation can first solve the riddle of the totality,
so the unitary formula of socialism can be replaced by practical work upon
the individual aspects of social conditions as if it were deduction replaced by
induction in order that, in this way, the whole might grow together from the
sum of the parts. (Ibid.)
To this tendency, in his opinion perceptible, toward revolution, which

had already taken root in many socialist circles, he instead preferred “a
slowly progressing evolution,” which, without betraying ideals, “does not
call for the improvement of individual conditions out of radically changed
overall circumstances, but conversely for the radical change of the overall
circumstances as the sum of improved individual conditions” (ibid.,
p. 272). Simmel was entirely convinced that, however divergent they may
appear, the problems that emerged in the feminist movement of the bour-
geoisie and the feminist movement of the proletariat were “only aspects of
the same general social phenomenon,” and while harshly criticizing Clara
Zetkin’s breakaway position, nevertheless shares with her—albeit without
naming her—an understanding of the women’s question as a social issue.
She considered the Berlin International Women’s Congress further confir-
mation of how important the conception of socialism was in her time, as
it was held to be the hidden soul of the solution to all social problems,
including those raised by women.
Simmel’s earliest references to socialism are to be found in his Review
of his teacher Steinhal’s book on ethics in 1886 (Simmel 2000). There
Simmel is critical of Steinthal’s optimistic and idealistic socialism regarding
two main aspects: the impossibility of establishing an objective common
“inner value” of menial and intellectual labor (which would remain in The
Philosophy of Money, as well); the impossibility of attaining unhindered
development of culture since culture only arises on the basis of the work
of a minority (Nietzsche’s pathos of distance). This indicates that Simmel’s
path to socialism was not that of the idealist socialism of the neo-Kantian
tradition. As Köhnke suggests, “Georg Simmel’s draws exactly contrary
conclusions from Stainthal’s socialism: after his fundamental critique of all
basic ethical concepts, he will find his way to social democracy and socialist
positions precisely because these ideal notions were untenable and the
problems and grievance of the real world required active intervention”
(Köhnke 1984, p. 397).
168 V. MELE
In a way that differed from other Neo-Kantian academic colleagues

who participated in the Society for Ethical Culture, Simmel made no appeal
for class brotherhood or social integration. Rather, he stated the follow-
ing: “There are extreme individualists today who are nevertheless practical
adherents of socialism because they regard it as indispensable preparation
and school, however hard, for a purified and just individualism” (Simmel
1992, p. 247). This passage can be put in reference to three specific pas-
sages in the Einleitung in die Moralwissenschaft, namely, to three sections
dealing with “socialism as a regulative principle,” with “the continuity of
situations,” and with “the moral principle of freedom” (Köhnke 1996,
p 303 ff.).
The early critique of socialism made in the 1886 review of Steinthal’s
book loses its abstruseness when placed in relation to the following pas-
sage from the Einleitung: “For the necessity that with our insufficient
knowledge of existing talents before their development, a sufficient num-
ber of people must be granted that leisure and joy of life which is suitable
to bring any existing talents among them to that development which soci-
ety needs for its progress; the rest, however, remain social ballast, useless
fellow eaters, whose external conditions of happiness stand in no relation
to their merit for society and who nevertheless cannot be dispensed with;
if one wants to have pure gold, then one must dig out the dross as well”
(Simmel 1989a, p. 400). From these reflections comes the formulation of
socialism as a “regulative principle” that distinguishes the above concept
of socialism which allows extreme individualists to be practical socialists.
Socialism then becomes a mere means to an end, which is no longer the
realization of a truly realized socialist society. Simmel’s social philosophy is
thus based on this critique of all utopian ideals and is found in the context
of the Einleitung particularly in the critique of practical utilitarianism.
These passages also reveal Simmel’s political stance toward socialism,
which would remain essentially unchanged until the maturity of his
thought (the critique of socialism in the last chapter on the two forms of
individualism in Grundfragen der Soziologie is the same as the 1886
Steinhal review; see Simmel 1999). Paradoxically, Simmel held that
Nietzschean extreme individualism and reformist socialism could coexist.
Simmel is the only “founding father” of modern sociology who set the
problem of individuality within an increasingly complex society at the cen-
ter of his sociological interest. In the nineteenth century the constitutive
problem for the history of sociology of the relationship between the indi-
vidual and society is still present in him, although conceived and resolved
in a different way. Placing individuality at the center of the metropolis in
the ambivalent game of interaction constitutes an undoubtedly topical ele-
ment for Simmel. The culture of individualism is the fundamental trait of
the metropolis. However, Simmel, unlike many of the early twentieth-
century sociologists and Kulturkritiker, does not limit himself to propos-
ing the umpteenth lament over the end of the individual or the dominion
of the techné, but curiously analyzes what individuals do to face the pos-
sibilities offered by the “luxuriant development of objective culture.”
Simmel, in contrast to the other classic sociologists (Weber, Durkheim,
Marx), understood that it is not possible to come to terms with modernity
without considering the dialectic between work and play, between the
realm of necessity and that of leisure. Simmel’s conception moreover
allows for the possibility of a non-individualistic reading of the founda-
tions of the social bond. Sociability and conviviality aim to create contexts
in which one interacts with the other for non-utilitarian purposes and can
create the basis for the revitalization of public space. Social processes do
not necessarily follow univocal, irreversible paths, as Simmel himself was
fully aware: metropolitan social differentiation does not represent a “phi-
losophy of history”—as some contemporary commentators tend to
believe—but simply a process of continuous becoming toward higher
forms of social complexity and therefore also of relations with the cultural
forms in which subjects find themselves acting.
From a reading of Simmel’s writings on culture and the women’s ques-
tion, it is clear how the problem of individuality, in a society that becomes
increasingly complex and massified, is at the center of his reflections,
including those relating to the female condition. Woman and female cul-
ture represent for him, in a sense, a different outcome for the objectifica-
tion of modern culture. Simmel’s solution to the over-objectification of
modern culture and its damaging consequences on the fragmentation of
personality is the reintegration of female resistance to this division. In his
perspective, this would address the problems raised by the feminist move-
ment and make possible the participation of women in the public life of
170 V. MELE
work and politics in a newly constituted social sphere. His interest in

socialism also revolves around the theme of individualism. Socialism and
individualism are epochal trends that sometimes stand in contradiction,
sometimes in paradoxical oscillation. Therefore, even though an evolu-
tionary and reforming path toward more just social conditions and
renewed individualism seemed to be a difficult path to follow, the young
Simmel stands right within those extreme individualists who are practical
advocates of socialism, because he sees this as the indispensable prepara-
tion and school, however hard, for a purified and just individualism.
The untapped possibilities that the metropolis opens up to individuals
are released by the same forces that can destroy or empty them. These are
only apparently opposing tendencies, which need not be praised or con-
demned. One can—as Simmel did more than a century ago—limit oneself
to at least understanding them.
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———. 1992. GSG 5: Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1894–1900 (Ed. D. Frisby and
H.-J. Dahme). Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
———. 1997a. The Concept and Tragedy of Culture. In Simmel on Culture, ed.
———. 1997b. The Philosophy of Fashion. In Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby
and M. Featherstone, 187–206. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
———. 1997c. The Problem of Style. In Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby and
M. Featherstone, 211–218. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
———. 1997d. The Sociology of Sociability. In Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby
and M. Featherstone, 120–129. London/New York: SAGE Publications Ltd.
———. 1997e. The Women’s Congress and Social Democracy. In Simmel on
Culture, 270–274. London, Thousand Oaks, New Dehli: SAGE
Publications Ltd.
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———. 1999. Grundfragen der Soziologie. Individuum und Gesellschaft. In GSG

16: Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen. Grundfragen der Soziologie. Vom
Wesen des historischen Verstehens. Der Konflikt der modernen Kultur.
Lebensanschauung, ed. O. Rammstedt and G. Fitzi, 59–149. Frankfurt a.M.:
Suhrkamp.
———. 2000. Steinthal, H.: Allgemeine Ethik, 1885. In GSG 1: Das Wesen der
Materie nach Kant’s Physischer Monadologie. Abhandlungen 1882–1884.
Rezensionen 1883–1901, ed. K.C. Köhnke. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
———. 2004. The Philosophy of Money. Second Enlarged Edition, ed. T. Bottomore,
D. Frisby. New York and London: Routledge.
———. 2005. Metaphysik der Faulheit. Ein Satyrspiel zur Tragödie der
Philosophie. In GSG 17: Miszellen, Glossen, Stellungnahmen, Umfrageantworten,
Leserbriefe, Diskussionsbeiträge 1889–1918, Anonyme und pseudonyme
Veröffentlichungen 1888–1920. Beiträge aus der ‘Jugend’ 1897–1916, ed.
K.C. Köhnke, E. Schullerus, and C. Jaenichen, 392–397. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
———. 2009. Sociology. Inquiry into the Construction of Social Forms (Ed.
A.J. Blasi, A.K. Jacobs, and M. Kanjirathinkal). Leiden, Boston: Brill. http://
www.ghbook.ir/index.php?name=‫نوین‬ ‫های‬ ‫رسانه‬ ‫و‬ ‫&فرهنگ‬option=com_
dbook&task=readonline&book_id=13650&page=73&chkhashk=ED9C949
1B4&Itemid=218&lang=fa&tmpl=component.
———. 2020. Theatre and the Dramatic Actor III. In Essays on Art and Aesthetics,
ed. A. Harrington, 271–278. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 2021. “The metropolis and the life of spirit” by Georg Simmel: A New
Translation. Journal of Classical Sociology 21 (2): 188–202. https://doi.org/1
0.1177/1468795X20980638.
Toscano, M.A. 1980. Malgrado la storia. Per una lettura critica di Herbert Spencer.
Milano: Franco Angeli.
———. 1990. Divenire, dover essere. Lessico della sociologia positivista. Milano:
Franco Angeli.
Watier, P. 1986. Individualisme et sociabilité. In Georg Simmel, la sociologie et
l’espérience du monde moderne, 235–253. Paris.
CHAPTER 6
The Metropolization of Social Life
1 Sociological and Metropolitan Spirit

Given that the metropolis is the place par excellence of the monetary
economy, the consequences analyzed by Simmel of money on individual
psychology are important, giving us the well-known figure of the blasé
personality, but also the less analyzed essays on women culture. In addi-
tion to these, the topics of life style, fashion, and sociability have an explicit
or implicit connection—not always established by Simmel—with metro-
politan modernity. It is now time to turn to his sociological approach
and see how this can be read in the context of metropolitan culture. The
fact that the fundamental question of Simmel’s 1908 Sociology is precisely
How is society possible? is linked to the metropolitan character of his sociol-
ogy. Indeed, the simple fact that he felt compelled to ask this question
meant that the object of the question itself was a problem, that is, society:
in the context of the “transience,” the “fleetingness” the “contingency”
(Baudelaire) of the relations between the inhabitants of the metropolis,
society had ceased to be something taken for granted. As already described
in Chap. 2, moreover, the question of “how is society possible?”—consid-
ered as the epistemological problem of sociology—is closely linked to soci-
ology as an analysis of the present and to the loss of confidence in the
positive force of “progress” as a solution to the problems that stem from
society’s development. In other words, the loss of optimism about

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174 V. MELE
progress, in a sense also translates into greater insecurity about the very
resilience and consistency of the phenomenon of society, and hence “the
question ‘how is society possible?’ becomes virulent” (Dahme and
Rammstedt 1984, p. 461).1 Simmel’s sociology has often been labeled and
interpreted in textbooks of the discipline as “formal sociology.” In fact,
this definition, apart from being based on a philosophically poor concep-
tion of the concept of “form” (Silver and Brocic 2019; Simons 2019),
neglects the contribution that Simmel’s thought as a whole can make to
the understanding of modern society. As Otthein Rammstedt has argued:
As long as this perspective dominated, it was impossible to recognize

Simmel’s real sociological contribution. His theory of culture and his com-
plex concept of individuality, which constitute an essential part of his con-
ception of sociology, could not be recognized and understood under the
label of “formal sociology”. Simmel is the only “founding father” of mod-
ern sociology in whom the problem of individuality within an increasingly
complex society lies at the center of sociological interest. The constitutive
problem for the history of sociology in the nineteenth century of the rela-
tionship between the individual and society is still present in him, although
conceived and resolved in a different way. (Dahme and Rammstedt
1984, p. 464)
1
Simmel’s answer to this question, however, does not go in the same direction as Kant’s:
he does not enter the debate on the issue of the sciences of nature contraposed to the sci-
ences of spirit, which was peculiar to the end of the century. “Simmel’s social a priori is not
a doctrine of categories as opposed to the guide of knowledge of nature according to Kant’s
transcendental philosophy. […] Rather, Simmel’s doctrine of sociological a priori is to be
understood as a lineament of a social ontology in which the material distinguishing features
of the relations between the individual and society, the fundamental theme of Simmelian
sociology, are fixed and described. It is about what lies behind the concrete forms of associa-
tion and their historical realization of the essence of social being” (Rammstedt and Dahme
1995, p. 32). The Italian editor of the 1908 edition of Sociologie also noted “the philosophi-
cal and non-empirical nature” of such a priori. “The very fact that Simmel uses the term a
priori already clearly indicates that he is not moving on the plane of empirically verifiable
statements, but on the plane of reflection on the philosophical presuppositions of society at
large at the most abstract level. It is well true that the Simmelian a priori are themselves the
product of historical-evolutionary processes and therefore cannot be considered in the same
way as anthropological preconditions of society; however, they precede the stricto sensu sci-
entific moment of sociological analysis” (Cavalli and Simmel 1998, pp. XXIII–XXIV).
6 THE METROPOLIZATION OF SOCIAL LIFE 175
This reflection suggests a twofold approach to Simmel’s sociology,

from two distinct points of view: method and content. As for the former,
Simmel’s contribution to the understanding of society can best be appreci-
ated from a necessarily broader perspective than that which seeks to frame
his 1908 work as a mere attempt to establish “sociology” as a specific
academic discipline. In the course of his acceptance into the Pantheon of
sociology’s founding fathers, Simmel suffered various attempts at “nor-
malization,” which consisted in trying to cleanse his sociology of any sort
of “metaphysical encrustation” and to fit it into a canon of scientificalized
or “normal” “social theory” (Dal Lago 1994, p. 93). Now, this attempt
turned out to be, at the very least, reductive. Instead, it seems that the
most appropriate approach is to consider the sociological value of aes-
thetic, philosophical, and metaphysical texts as well, rather than “carving
out” the spaces dedicated to sociology from the complexity of his thought.
Only by addressing his thought without regard to forms of disciplinary
compartmentalization between philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, and so
on—in fact non-existent, or largely disregarded in his time—is it possible
to understand the scope and significance of Simmel as a founding father of
sociology and as an original interpreter of the relationship between the
individual and society. By following this path, it can be seen that Simmel’s
thought, precisely because of the heterogeneity and openness that charac-
terize it, could constitute an almost ideal model for rediscussing the
increasingly uncertain perspectives of sociological theory (Goodstein
2019). From the point of view of content, it is equally important to
emphasize the importance of Simmel’s reflection on the fate of intersub-
jectivity in modern society. As has been noted, “the problem of intersub-
jectivity and its solution [are] necessarily presupposed by any classical
problematics of the social” (Muzzetto 1998, p. 18). This problem “con-
stitutes not only an important philosophical and epistemological problem,
but also a very relevant theoretical knot for the social sciences: it calls up
the assumptions essential to the construction of the sharing of experience,
to the construction of the social” (Muzzetto 1997, p. 201). Simmel’s
approach to the construction of intersubjectivity has a peculiar feature:
throughout his work, theoretical constructions are developed that allow
the problem of identity to be described from more than the philosophical
and psychological perspectives. The construction of personal identity (its
defense, its confirmation, its destruction) implies the relationship to the
Other (Cotesta and Simmel 1996, p. 48). As we will see, for Simmel the
176 V. MELE
problem of existence and interaction with the Other is at the heart of the
foundation of sociology as an autonomous discipline.
This chapter aims to systematically reconstruct some of the fundamental
junctures of Simmel’s social thought that help do justice to the whole of his
approach, which in fact, instead of being divided into watertight compart-
ments (philosophy, aesthetics, sociology, theory of art and culture), can be
understood in a unitary way for the contribution it can provide to the
“sociological spirit” (Toscano 2002), Comte’s holist approach. We will also
see how his conception of sociology is inseparable from that process of
“metropolization of society” (Jonas 1995), which is the background to all
his thought. There are a number of dimensions of modern metropolitan
life that Simmel does not explore in his 1903 essay The Metropolises and the
Life of the Spirit. Since some of the essay’s more obvious aspects have
already been presented and are covered briefly later, the intention here is to
highlight some aspects of metropolitan life that are either briefly mentioned
in the 1903 essay or absent but developed elsewhere.
First we will consider Simmel’s attempt to ground sociology as the study
of forms of association, differentiating it from the sociology of Durkheim,
with whom he collaborated and had at times even polemical exchanges.
Second, we will analyze the fundamental epistemological approach of the
große Soziologie of 1908 (to be distinguished from the “little” one of
1917—Grundfragen der Soziologie. Individuum und Gesellschaft) and con-
ceptually develop the three a priori of association in connection with some
emblematic aspects of metropolitan social interaction: we take up the ways
in which people represent and reveal themselves to others and, therefore,
how we are able to read others in relation to the bodily and not just the
psychological. Special attention will be dedicted to the “sociology of the
senses,” one of the most important and original excursuses in the entire
work, showing how we draw real experience of the metropolis from sen-
sory perception. Finally, we will make some general remarks on the image
of society that emerges from Simmel’s analysis of sociology.
2 The Problem of Sociology

As described in Chap. 3, Simmel’s first writing explicitly dedicated to the
problem of sociology is undoubtedly his 1890 On Social Differentiation.
Despite the work’s ambiguous subtitle (Psychological and Sociological
Research), the work is indeed dedicated to establishing sociology as a dis-
cipline in its own right. In it Simmel posits that what must be at the center
of the concept of society is interaction: “I have no doubt that there is only

one foundation that provides an objectivity at least relative to unification:
the interaction (Wechselwirkung) of the parts. We designate an object as
unitary precisely insofar as there are dynamic mutual relations between its
parts” (Simmel 1989 [1890], p. 129). Society is thus composed of inces-
sant interactions between its constituent elements—groups as well as indi-
viduals—, a conception which directs Simmel’s sociology definitively
toward the study of social relations. Simmel’s sociological proposal is sum-
marized in a short, but important 1894 essay, published in several lan-
guages, including English, French, and Italian, with the title The Problem
of Sociology. As David Frisby has suggested, the titles of Simmel’s research
papers often reflect the problematic status of the phenomena under inves-
tigation (Frisby 2002, p. xxvii). Neither Durkheim, Weber, or Tonnies
would likely have written a paper entitled The Problem of Sociology (which
echoes many of Simmel’s titles such as The Problems of the Philosophy of
History, The Problem of Style, The Problem of Historical Time, and The
Fundamental Problems of Philosophy). This happened probably because
Durkheim was confident of knowing the answers, while Weber could at
times regard his conceptual apparatus as basic (the Grundbegriffe that
open his Economy and Society). The hypothetical, fragmentary nature of
metropolitan experience manifests itself in several ways, including the
forms of his approach to reality. What is of extreme significance is often
located in an aside, an intermediate reflection, an excursus or an essay. This
is the case for The Problem of Sociology: As he himself stated, “I consider
this short article the most fruitful I have ever written”: it “contains my
whole program of work.”2 It is therefore worth analyzing it in detail.
At the beginning of this paper Simmel declares that he had been
prompted by the need for conceptual clarification: sociology at that time
was making its way in the academic and intellectual world, but had not yet
managed to find an unambiguous definition of its scope and object of
study. The shared observation that “all human activity takes place in soci-
ety and no one can escape the influence of it,” is not, in itself, sufficient to
identify a specific field of research within the competence of a new science
distinct from those already existing: history, political economy, demogra-
phy, ethnology, and so on.
2
As Simmel reveals in a letter of November 27, 1895 to the French philosopher and soci-
ologist Célestin Bouglé, quoted in Rammstedt, Editorischer Bericht (Simmel 1992 [1908],
p. 880).
178 V. MELE
Simmel therefore believed that sociology could still establish itself as a

specific scientific discipline, even if it renounced having a new object of
study not already dealt with by one of the many existing human sciences.
However, it would need to develop a new point of view that draws a “new
line through the historical facts,” such as to bring out within them some
specific determinations that are not taken into account by other sciences.
According to Simmel, “sociology would be a new method, a heuristic
principle in order to penetrate into the phenomena of all those fields by a
new way.” Such a point of view is attained when the concept of society is
differentiated so as to distinguish between its form and its content. In this
regard, the “motives” that drive individuals to form a society can be
defined as its “content,” on the basis of which individuals exercise a “recip-
rocal action” on each other of a very different order, which can, in turn,
take on various forms, from the most transitory to the most stable and
lasting:
There is society, in the broadest sense of the word, wherever there is recipro-
cal action among several individuals; this reciprocity of action always arises
from certain impulses and for certain purposes. Erotic, religious or purely
sociable impulses, purposes of defense or attack, of play or of gain, of rescue
or of instruction, and countless others, cause a man to participate with oth-
ers in a unity of being, of acting and of suffering, that is, to exercise over
them and to receive from them influences, by virtue of which a unity is
constituted of them, since unity (there being metaphysical unity, the abso-
lute, unknown atom) is nothing but the reciprocal action of the elements; a
unity that can be manifold, depending on the form and scope of such recip-
rocal action, from the ephemeral union for a walk to the family, from the
fleeting hotel society, to the intimate unity of a medieval guild. (Simmel
2002 [1899], pp. 109–110)
Domination and subordination, competition and cooperation, imita-

tion, division of labor, and the formation of parties are only a few of the
infinite forms that reciprocal action among men can take when it meets
and consolidates into a unity. The individual forms of reciprocal action
constitute what can generally be called an “association” (Vergesellschaftung):
The “association” is thus the form that crystallizes around those sensible or
ideal interests, momentary or permanent, conscious or unconscious, and
within which these are realized. In every actual social phenomenon, content
and form constitute a unitary reality; a social form cannot have an existence
separate from any content, in the same way that a spatial form cannot exist
without a matter of which it is the form. (Ibid., p. 110)
Sociology for Simmel is thus—as revealed by the subtitle of his major

sociological work, Sociology. Inquiries into the construction of social forms3
(1908)—the study of the forms that the association between individuals
can take. The term Vergesellschaftung designates the process by which
individuals associate with each other, giving rise to specific social forma-
tions. The novelty of this conception is that it shifts the object of sociology
away from “society” and the search for its laws—as was the case for Comte
and Spencer—and focuses more modestly on the individual forms of reci-
procity that make it up. Society as such does not exist, it is judged as a
“mystical” entity: it is nothing but the product of the relations of mutual
influence between human beings. In his own words: “society is the name
with which we indicate a circle of individuals, linked to each other by vari-
ous forms of reciprocity” (Simmel 1999 [1917], p. 70). In addition, the
forms of reciprocity tend to settle down over time and to assume, for a
certain period of time, a stable character: the large systems and organiza-
tions we think of when we speak of “society” (the State in the first place)
can be the ones to which we refer. States can be thought of as “forms of
reciprocity between individuals, protracted in time and transformed into
stable formations, self-sufficient and provided with a well-defined physiog-
nomy” (ibid., pp. 69-70).
3 Form and Content in Simmel and Durkheim

Simmel’s attempt to find a specific sociological point of view immediately
found an illustrious commentator, Émile Durkheim, who dedicated an
extensive article to Simmel’s essay entitled La sociologia e il suo dominio
scientifico (Sociology and its scientific domain), originally published in “La
Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia.” Durkheim, in fact, had already had the
opportunity to learn about Simmel’s work and had not concealed his
appreciation for his sociological thought. Writing to his colleague Bouglé,
he explicitly praised the German philosopher’s “sense for the specificity of
3
As Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung has been trans-
lated (more literally it would be Studies on the forms of associations).
180 V. MELE
social facts.”4 In fact, he believed that he had found in Simmel an “ally”

within the German academic environment with whom to share the attempt
to lay the foundations for a scientific study of the specificity of the social.
However, when Durkheim was faced with the explicit attempt to establish
the scope of sociology, he felt the need to distance himself unequivocally,
expressing clear criticism with no possibility of appeal. He deemed the
alleged separation between the “form” and the “content” of social rela-
tions, central to Simmel’s approach, a mere “metaphysical ideology”
(Durkheim 1900, p. 140):
To justify the method set forth by Simmel, it is not enough to recall those
sciences that proceed by abstraction, but it is necessary to prove that the
abstraction to which it is made is made according to the principles to which
every scientific abstraction must conform. Now, by what right does one
separate, and so radically, the container from the content of society? It is
asserted that only the content is of a social nature, and that the content has
no such character except indirectly. But there is no evidence to confirm an
assertion which, although far from being an obvious axiom, can catch the
scholar off guard. (Ibid., p. 141)
Durkheim expresses appreciation for “the finesse and ingenuity” of

Simmel’s method, but he does not believe that it is possible to “trace
objectively the main divisions of our science, as he understands it” (ibid.).
His criticism is basically one of genericism: social forms, forms of associa-
tion is too generic a concept. It includes phenomena such as division of
labor, competition, imitation, the state of freedom or dependence of the
individual in relation to the group, which are the most general forms of
social relations. But it also encompasses more special relations, such as the
4
Letter to Bouglé, autumn 1897, cited in Lukes 1977, p. 404. Durkheim had translated
Simmel’s essay Über die Selbsterhaltung der sozialen Gruppe for the first issue of the Année
Sociologique and, although he found Simmel’s prose unnecessarily complicated, he was cer-
tain that the essay was “in the general spirit of the Année” (ibid., p. 405). Donald Levine
(Levine 1984, p. 324) observes how Durkheim’s initial sympathies for Simmel gradually fade
away to give way to an unconditionally critical attitude, thereby following a well-established
pattern of “negation’ also followed by other authors who had to deal directly with his work:
Weber, Lukács, Park, Parsons. He observes that, as far as Durkheim’s ambivalent attitude is
concerned, most critics have interpreted it as a form of cultural “imperialism” that the French
intellectual intended to exert over the newborn discipline. This, however, sheds no light on
the differences in their respective approaches to sociology, which must be sought in the dif-
ferent ways of conceptualizing and researching the specificity of social facts.
way in which individuals are placed in relation to one another in the con-
text of the association, the size of the association, its density: in a word,
the static condition of the association. Durkheim emphasizes again, “the
most general aspect of social life is not, for that reason alone, content or
form, any more than the special aspects that it can offer. There are not two
kinds of reality, which, although they are united, would be distinctly dis-
sociable, but facts of the same nature examined at different stages of gen-
erality” (ibid., p. 143). According to the French sociologist therefore:
[T]there is no rule, which decides, in an impersonal way, where the circle of

sociological facts begins and where it ends; not only the boundaries are
mobile, which would be legitimate, but it is not clear why they should be
placed in such a point rather than another” (ibid., p. 144). In conclusion,
Durkheim dismisses Simmel’s attempt as “philosophical variations on cer-
tain aspects of social life, chosen more or less at random. (ibid.)5
To understand the reasons for such a drastic judgment, it is necessary

to consider a variety of factors, both of a historical-political nature and of
a strictly theoretical one.6 Focusing, for reasons of space, on an analysis of
the latter alone, they revolve mainly around the fact that Simmel did not
view “social facts” (to use Durkheim’s terminology) as something histori-
cally concrete, truly existing entities, but as mere analytical variables, iden-
tifiable through a process of conceptual abstraction and synthesis carried
out by the knowing subject. On the contrary, Durkheim’s program for
sociology—as set forth in his Rules of sociological method (1895)—is based
on the famous assumption les faits sociaux sont des choses (“social facts are
things”), which must be investigated as measurable and empirical realities.
For this reason, in the reality of social things there is no room for the ana-
lytical distinction made by Simmel, because both the “content” and the
“form” are equally elements of social life and as such must be investigated.
Durkheim did not find it useful to distinguish between two elements of
5
In a later review devoted to Simmel’s Philosophy of Money, published in “L’année socio-
logiche,” 5, 1900–1901, p. 145, Durkheim defined Simmel’s approach in similar terms as a
speculation bâtarde: as philosophical variations on society not adequately grounded on
empirical details and facts (Lukes 1977, p. 404).
6
On the questions of a political nature that were at the basis of the differences between
Simmel and Durkheim, in particular concerning the “Dreyfus affair,” see Rammstedt 1998.
For a comparison of Simmel’s and Durkheim’s theories, in addition to the aforementioned
Levine (1984), see Maffesoli 1988, Moscovici 1988, and Fitzi 2019, pp. 78–88.
182 V. MELE
social life in order to delimit sociology as an autonomous discipline, but

rather elaborated a dichotomous distinction to distinguish two branches
within sociology itself. Instead of the distinction between “form” and
“content,” Durkheim suggested the distinction between “form” and
“function,” which corresponded to the subdisciplines of “social morphol-
ogy” and “social physiology.” Social morphology, developed by Durkheim
in 1899, the year of his criticism of Simmel’s essay, was to represent a
subdivision of sociology that dealt with ecological and demographic issues:
population number and density, territorial boundaries and communica-
tion within the society under study. Social morphology was to have, in
Durkheim’s intentions “to grasp the material, perceptible forms of society,
that is, the determination of its substratum” (Durkheim 1899, p. 520).7
Dealing with this conception in his article on Sociology and its Scientific
Domain, Durkheim writes: “we suggest that we call social morphology the
science which has as its object of research the material forms of society.
The concept of form, which Simmel uses only metaphorically, is employed
here in its proper sense. According to this conception, every morphologi-
cal phenomenon originates from material facts that are materialized in a
form” (ibid.). The concept of social morphology allowed Durkheim to
overcome Simmel’s conception and at the same time demonstrate that his
own way of understanding form was the scientifically correct one, since
territory or population are categories of social phenomena based on
empirically accessible natural distinctions. In nature, Durkheim continues,
we find not only the material forms of society, but also the social life that
flows from them, or is contained in them. Side by side with morphological
phenomena, there are therefore functional phenomena, which are the sub-
ject of social physiology. In the context of his criticism of Simmel,
Durkheim expresses himself rather generically on this area, emphasizing
only the constrictive aspects of conventions and social needs, which pen-
etrate into the lives of individuals. As a conclusive consequence he states:
“social life is nothing more than the moral environment surrounding the
individual” (ibid.). A further decisive point of disagreement between
Simmel and Durhkeim emerges here. Although both agreed on the onto-
logical specificity of social facts, they had different ways of delimiting and
researching them. For Simmel, social facts are morally indifferent: they
consist of the characteristics of the structures and processes that shape the
relationships between individuals. The element of normative regulation
English translation Durkheim 1982.

7
constitutes only a part of these relationships, but not its constitutive char-
acteristic. For Durkheim, on the other hand, society is the origin of man’s
morality, and the normative dimension constitutes its distinctive
characteristic.
It appears that Simmel’s research on the possible forms of association,
rather than Durkheim’s social morphology, likely represents the most
appropriate approach to an analysis of the social reality of the metropolis.
Simmel, instead of extending Kantian philosophy of morality to the
domain of society, prefers to extend his theory of knowledge. From this
point of view, the focus of investigation becomes the forms of conscious-
ness that make possible the existence of a specific domain of experience
that we can call “society,” rather than the values and motivations of social
actors. As we shall see, in the first chapter of his 1908 Sociology, the cul-
tural and epistemological reason for excluding individual and collective
values, motivations, and purposes from the object of investigation of asso-
ciation processes is that they are too variable to explain the persistence of
social forms. As Fitzi stated, “unlike Durkheim’s inquiry into the ascer-
tainment of ‘collective representations with constraint character’, Simmel’s
foundation of social science in chapter I of Sociology takes the shape of a
‘sociological theory of validity’, focusing on the issue of the ‘bearers of
social forms’” (Fitzi 2019, p. 84). Simmel’s approach thus provides a sig-
nificant alternative to the assumption that a science of society is possible
only as a moral science. As Serge Moscovici has noted, Simmel’s social
analysis, as opposed to Durkheim’s, and Weber’s, which, according to the
author are “in a very real sense, the essence of contemporary sociology”
(R. Nisbet, in Moscovici 1988, p. 34) would represent a “third way”
between theories that place the individual at the center of their attention
and those that place collectivity instead. Here he refers to a current dis-
tinction (quite simplistic, but not without elements of truth), which sees
sociological theory divided into two basic tendencies: one that assumes
society as an objective and determining reality; and another for which
society itself becomes an open and insoluble problem. The first current of
sociological theory (the one that emphasizes collective phenomena) in the
search for the explanation of social facts goes from the individual to the
collective. In this view the great impersonal sets of religion, state, social
class, peoples’ souls, and collective consciousness of which the notion of
society is composed constitute enduring and autonomous connections.
One refrains, as far as possible, from associating them with some psychol-
ogy or deducing them from it. Beyond specific differences, according to
184 V. MELE
this current of thought the main thing is always to explain one collective
phenomenon by another. The pioneers of this current were beginning
with the French Revolution, L. de Bonald and J. De Maistre (Comte was
its renewer and Durkheim the one who definitely crystallized it). The sec-
ond current (which Moscovici implicitly or explicitly included Weber,
Freud, and Parsons), on the other hand, seeks to express the properties of
the social whole according to that of its component elements. Just as phys-
icists break down matter into atoms, so it is a matter of fragmenting soci-
ety into individuals. Thus, the same laws of behavior and intelligence are
found at all levels; it is just that the facts of collective life are more compli-
cated. This position is justified on the basis of a widespread belief.
Psychology grasps elementary phenomena—reflections, desires, cogni-
tions, and so on—and rises to complex phenomena formed on the basis of
the former. A direct conclusion follows: a sociological theory must express
the properties of the group from those of the individuals composing it.
Simmel in Moscovici’s view rejects both approaches to take another path.
In lieu of wanting to break down the complex to reduce it to the simple,
he attempts to explain how the simple generates the complex. Society
develops simultaneously with individuals. Men pursue it and generate the
social forms common to them. The collective structures or functions that
seem autonomous to us are, in fact, reciprocal actions between men that
have succeeded in objectifying themselves.
4 How Is Society Possible in the Metropolis?

The first chapter of Sociology contains an excursus with an expressly Kantian
title: How is society possible? Simmel was not satisfied to simply shift the
focus of his interests to the “sociation” (Vergesellschaftung) among indi-
viduals and study its manifold forms, but sought to delve into its transcen-
dental conditions of existence. As has been stated (Fitzi 2002), the
question that Simmel poses is a phenomenological one concerning the
make up in individuals of that particular subject that is the world of others.
An essential point of Simmel’s epistemological approach is certainly the
“critique of the psychological method.” Since at its center lies the micro-
dynamics of association, explaining it requires an explanation of its “atomic
form,” that is, the relationship of “me” to “you” in social interactions.
Here then arises the problem of understanding the “other,” or rather, of
understanding the “image of the other” in the context of the process of
association. While, as seen in Chap. 3, Simmel refers to Dilthey for the
centrality of the psychological understanding of the “other” in the meth-

odology of the social-historical sciences, it should be noted that he differs
with regard to the specificity of “sociological analysis.” The conclusion
reached by Simmel is that sociology cannot rely on psychology, since social
interaction is based on the problem of a limited knowledge of “the other”
by the social actor and the need to integrate this knowledge into a unitary
image of “you” in order to maintain social ties with him. This is why the
understanding of social interaction requires the development of a method-
ology capable of taking into account these kinds of problems and cannot
be, as Diltheian expounds, descriptive psychology. The development of a
theory of the structure of individual consciousness that allows the forma-
tion of social relations occupies the last part of Simmel’s argument in the
first chapter of Sociology. Here Simmel presents the outlines of a theory of
social experience as akin to the concept of experience in the context of
Kantian Erkenntnistheorie, but with the intention of adapting it to the
issue of “intersubjectivity” (Fitzi 2002, p. 121).
However, it is again necessary to differentiate Simmel’s use of the con-
cept of a priori from Kant’s. As Köhnke has argued, “Simmel’s concept of
priori is not a concept in itself, but denotes in each case that empty space,
which cannot be specified, which is made out as a precondition of some-
thing” (Köhnke 1996, p. 426). Therefore, it is first of all an answer to the
question about the conditions of possibility of a given phenomenon, and
can be applied—as we have seen—to both history and society, as well as to
poetry.8 Simmel takes the question regarding the possibility of a phenom-
enon as much from Kant as from the Völkerpsychologie (“psychology of
people”). Simmel’s sociology has in common with Lazarus’ Völkerpsychologie
the fact that it is a “science of objective culture.” Lazarus’—and thus
Simmel’s—concept of the objective spirit, which is not to be confused
with that of Hegel and Dilthey, includes artworks and tools, as well as
skills, forms of thought and institutions of all kinds, even the general
means of exchange, so that it is immediately obvious the wide-ranging way
that the individual—the subjective spirit—in turn enters into relations
with this supra-individual (Köhnke 1996, p. 349). From a theoretical-
systematic point of view the relationship between the sociology of Simmel
8
“When two duties collide, one of them is usually especially close to the mind and heart,
while the other represents more of an objective, cool demand; it is to a certain extent the a
priori of poetry to understand the former as the inwardly justified, the other as an external,
as it were mechanical commandment” (Simmel 1991, p. 358).
186 V. MELE
and Lazarus’ Völkerpsychologie is represented by the issue of the formation

of individuality. However, in a way different from Kant, Simmel exercises
a heuristic principle according to which the world of objective culture is
questioned about its conditions of possibility (“how is society possible”),
which is then followed by an attempt to take into account the need for
acquisition of objective culture through the subjective spirit: in this
sense, the formation of individuality (individualization) in Simmel no lon-
ger means “inner formation” (Bildung) in the eighteenth-century sense,
but rather the acquisition of objective culture, even material, which goes
to “enrich” less and less subjective culture. Questioning the conditions of
possibility (“how is society possible”) of everyday social things and phe-
nomena means not only moving outside established disciplinary boundar-
ies, but also asking questions and bringing up issues—where the answers
that are given are far less important than the very posing of these questions
to the phenomena of everyday life. As “the question “how is it possible to
X—where X is a manifestation of the objective spirit—makes possible a
specific discipline called the Science of Culture” (Köhnke 1996, p. 353).
In fact, the questions Simmel is trying to answer are: “what are the presup-
positions for conscious beings to be a sociological entity? […] How are
the empirically emerging particular forms possible, which fall under the
general idea of society, and how can society generally be an objective form
of subjective souls?” (Simmel 2009 [1908], pp. 39–40). In his große
Soziologie (the “big sociology,” to be distinguished from the “little sociol-
ogy” of 1917) Simmel explains the “deepest problem of social interac-
tion” (Vergesellschaftung):
For the general basis of representation, the feeling of being an “I,” has an
unconditionality and imperturbability that is obtained by no single repre-
sentation of a material exterior. Indeed, even this certainty has for us, war-
ranted or not, the facticity of the “you”; and whether as source or effect of
this certainty, we feel the “you” as something independent of our represen-
tation of it, something precisely for itself, as our own existence. That the
for-itself of others still does not prevent us from representing them to our-
selves, so that something, never entirely captured by our representation,
becomes nevertheless the contents and thus the product of this re-
presentation—this is the deepest psychological-epistemological schema and
problem of social interaction (Vergesellschaftung). (Ibid., pp. 41–42)
The “for-itself of others” and the forms by which we “sociate” with it

is therefore the most important problem of objective culture to be inves-
tigated by sociology as a specific discipline. According to Simmel the point
of departure for the theory of social experience is the relation of the “me”
with the “you” in social interaction; herein lies the fundamental epistemo-
logical problem of the process of association. Given that individuals are
faced with the presence of the “you” in social reality, they must equip
themselves with a clear and constant “image” (Bild) in the context of
three fundamental elements of their associative bonds. First of all, an
image of the other must be formed, that is, an image associated with the
“you.” Then, one must understand the image that the other has of one-
self. Lastly, one must develop an image regarding one’s own position in
the objective structure of society. For Simmel these represent the three a
priori of social experience based on which all the social relations are
structured.
The foregoing describes how Simmel’s fundamental sociological prob-
lem concerns precisely the constitution of intersubjectivity and the I-Other
relationship. The Simmelian theory of society, more than other classical
theories, because of its relational and formal character, evokes the presence
of the Other. For Simmel, in fact, society is composed of countless molec-
ular interactions, of which sociology must study the various, ever-changing
forms (conflict, cooperation, love, etc.), as well as the conditions that
make them possible. It is thus understood that the relationship between
the ego and the Other constitutes the fundamental unit of analysis of
Simmel’s social science. In The Philosophy of Money he clearly states: “The
interaction between individuals is the starting point of all social forma-
tions. The real historical origins of social life are still obscure, but whatever
they were, a systematic genetic analysis must begin from this most simple
and immediate relationship, which even today is the source of innumera-
ble new social formations” (Simmel 2004, p. 173). This is the focus of his
sociology, which, unlike his contemporaries’ theories, does not intend to
limit itself to those social phenomena in which the forces in reciprocal
action are already “crystallized.” Simmel’s sociology, therefore, is rela-
tional in the sense that it focuses its attention on analysis of the forms of
person-to-person relationships,9 in that it studies the configurations that
9
Dal Lago states that “the object of Simmel’s research is not society and culture as histori-
cally determined objects, but social interactions as forms of human life” (Dal Lago 1994,
p. 167).
188 V. MELE
association between individuals can take on in different historical and

social contexts. It is important to add, however, that for Simmel “the pri-
mordial datum is not a Robinson Crusoe, it is not solitary organisms that
must enter into relationship with others, propose common goals that bind
them together; it is, instead, the mutual action of a couple under the gaze
of a third party” (Moscovici 1988, p. 351). This statement brings to mind
the fact (sometimes overlooked by critics) that Simmel’s conception of
intersubjectivity is a variant of the reflections on the existence of the Other
that took place during the twentieth century,10 in that it takes into consid-
eration the existence of the third party (in addition to the I and the you).
As Simmel points out in the second chapter of Sociology, devoted to The
quantitative conditioning of the group, if “the two present, as the first syn-
thesis and unification, thus also the first disunity and antithesis, […] The
triad as such seems to me to result in three kinds of typical group forma-
tions that on the one hand are not possible with just two elements, on the
other hand are with a number greater than three either likewise excluded
or expand only quantitatively without changing their type of form”
(Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 101). Simmel first analyzes the different possi-
bilities of coalition, alliance, and conflict in a triad and then discusses the
three types of conflict resolution in small groups, the impartial or media-
tor, the tertius gaudens, and the divide and conquer. Precisely because
decision-making is the climax of any political situation (at the micro level,
in a small group, as well as at the macropolitical scale), Simmel’s typology
acquires the sense of a universal reflection on the dynamics of the social
and the political. As the category of the Other includes a series of aspects
and functions that serve to exemplify the overall social dynamics, even
10
In general, the notion of the other has been thematized in various aspects and in various
currents of thought within the framework of a critique of the Cartesian cogito understood as
a subject closed in on itself and heedless of the world and the other man. To give just a few
influential examples in the social sciences, such a problem was posed by Husserl in the fifth
of his Cartesian Meditations (1929–1931) as the experience of the outsider in opposition to
the accusation of “solipsism” levelled at transcendental phenomenology. This research pro-
gram, which aimed to arrive at a kind of pure philosophy of consciousness, found a decisive
obstacle precisely in the problem of intersubjectivity. Among the fundamental experiences, in
addition to Husserl’s reflections, M. Heidegger, J.P. Sartre, H.G. Gadamer, E. Levinas,
C. Lévi-Strauss, and M. Foucault are also noteworthy. The problem of the other in relation
to the superpower of the subjective cogito was urged by Heidegger in Being and Time (1927)
and developed into reflections on language as the site of intersubjectivity both in Heidegger’s
own later work and in the philosophy of H.G. Gadamer, giving rise to the so-called linguistic
turn in philosophy and the social sciences. On this see the seminal study by Theunissen 1981.
beyond the micro-interaction I-you (cooperation, domination and ser-

vice, exchange, care), the category of the third highlights as many univer-
sal functions (the observer, representative, mediator, referee, ally, hybrid)
that distinguish Simmel’s theory from that of symbolic interactionism.
The figure of the third not only characterizes the entry into the sphere of
the political (understood as the sphere of conflict and its decidability), but
also structurally incorporates the possibility of presence/absence, leading
to the constitution of the fundamental place where the transition from a
form of self-directed interaction from those present in the interaction
itself, to the form of institutionalization, is decided. The third party’s gaze
establishes a difference between ego and alter, and places them in a posi-
tion that would not be possible from their own simple interaction. The
triadic position is fundamental for the establishment and perception of
inequality, but also to expectations for justice (neutrality of the law, of the
judge). Analysis of the third as well as the other is therefore fraught with
consequences for social theory.11
5 The Other as a Social Type

The first of the sociological a priori stem from the realization that in social
relations the “you” can, by definition, only be knowable partially. “The
image of others that a person acquires from personal contact is occasioned
by real fluctuations that are not simple illusions in incomplete experience,
faulty focus, and sympathetic or hostile biases, but important alterations in
the character of real objects” (Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 43).
Simmel notes that we are denied perfect knowledge about the individu-
ation of the other, and that all relationships between men are conditioned
by the different degree of this defect. The social actor must therefore con-
struct the unity of his representation of the other, and this occurs primarily
11
On this topic, as a development of Simmel’s theory, Joachim Fischer’s contribution is
crucial. Fischer (Bedorf et al. 2019, p. 132). Fischer argues that “in a different way from the
‘same’ (identity) and the ‘other’ (otherness) the third has not yet found its place in the social
philosophy of the twentieth century,” although elements for a theorization in this regard can
be found in J. Freund (with reference to Simmel), M. Theunissen (with reference to Simmel
and Sartre), as well as in Lacan and Levinas (Theunissen 1981). For a an interesting multi-
disciplinary discussion on the topic see Goodstein 2012.
190 V. MELE
in two ways. On the one hand, in social interaction, the image of “you” is
subjected to a process of generalization depending on the social distance
that separates “me” from “you.” What we have here is that the fragmentary
nature of the “you” can be integrated into a coherent image that develops
on the basis of the ways in which the other presents itself in the interaction.
A second endowment of form of the “you” can be derived from constitu-
tion of the typical forms of the other that associate individuals with the
roles they play in social interaction. “In order to take cognizance of people,
we view them not according to their pure individuality but framed, high-
lighted, or even reduced by means of a general type by which we recognize
them” (ibid., p. 44). In this way, a perceptual strategy of “me” takes place
in the process of association that adapts the individual contingency of
“you” to the need to structure social reality in an objective manner so that
social ties can be maintained over time.
It is only the formation of “type images” of the other that enables the
existence of society as an “objective representation of several subjective
consciences.” Through his analysis of this first a priori Simmel introduces
a concept of “social type” that recalls the famous notion of the “ideal
type” formulated by Max Weber. As with this latter concept, here we are
also dealing with a “necessary pretense” to aid understanding, which
comes through an exaggeration of some features present in reality to the
detriment of others, and which, in its totality, would otherwise remain
unfathomable. The other therefore always remains an incomplete, some-
what “virtual” representation, as does our own Ego: “We are all fragments,
not only of humanity in general but also of ourselves. We are amalgama-
tions not only of the human type in general, not only of types of good and
evil and the like, but we are also amalgamations of our own individuality
and uniqueness—no longer distinguishable in principle—which envelops
our visible reality as if drawn with ideal lines” (ibid.). Here, the echoes of
Nietzsche’s conception of personality make themselves felt, as an unstable
compound, a series of heterogeneous representations. As we have seen, for
Simmel the individual is a fictitious unit, a conventional conceptual cre-
ation, as are the concepts of “society” and “history.”
For our purposes what should be noted about this a priori is that in the
metropolis, more than in any other social dimension, a process of typifica-
tion—or as we would put it in the most up-to-date language of sociology,
“labeling”—of the other is necessary. We can only know others through
typifications, which express general concepts of belonging, to a social stra-
tum, to a race or nationality, to a religion, and so on. These observations
of Simmel’s turn out to be of extraordinary relevance in the context of

contemporary society, where image becomes increasingly decisive and
where, given the fleetingness and precariousness of encounters, the
“impress,” the imprinting of the attention of others through the confor-
mation of an especially eccentric and particular type has become the norm.
After all, in his essay The Metropolises and the Life of the Spirit [1903]
Simmel had already noted “the temptation to appear ‘to the point’, to
appear concentrated and strikingly characteristic, lies much closer to the
individual in brief metropolitan contacts than in an atmosphere in which
frequent and prolonged association assures the personality of an unam-
biguous image of himself in the eyes of the other” (Simmel 1997b [1903],
p. 183). This also explains the attention Simmel dedicated in his essays to
the analysis of the “reciprocity” (Wechselwirkung) between the psychic life
of individuals and its visible manifestations: this is the case for the essays on
fashion [1895, 1911], on the aesthetic significance of the face [1901], on
the sociology of the senses and ornamentation [1908], and, more gener-
ally, on aspects of non-verbal communication (Squicciarino 1999,
pp. 53 ff.).
The knowledge a person possesses can be gleaned not only from one
aspect (the intellect foremost), but from the whole of the body and soul.
It is evident here how Simmel enriches his Kantianism with the “aesthetic
perspective,” already outlined in The Problems of the Philosophy of History
(see Ch. III, par. 4). Here, dealing with the psychological understanding
of historical facts, Simmel emphasizes the “connection” between the psy-
chic life of individuals and its visible manifestations, and regards it as “an a
priori of all practical and theoretical relations between one subject and
another” (Simmel 1977 [1905], p. 45). Unlike the Kantian transcenden-
tal logical a priori, it is rather psychological-empirical knowledge. In this
regard, Simmel refers to “a circle” between the internal aspect and the
external—a “comingling” between man’s interiority and his external
aspect—and to the “necessity” that his mediation be able “to cast a bridge
over the abyss that separates the self from the not-self” (ibid.). Every rela-
tion between one individual and another is premised by the relation
between the individual’s psychic life and its external manifestations, such
as gestures, facial expressions, but obviously also attire, body language and
192 V. MELE
the senses in general.12 In this, as in other aspects of his social analysis,

Simmel’s contribution to a realist theory of interaction comes to the fore,
meaning by this his adherence and “seismographic sensitivity” to the
actual dynamics of the social world as a lived reality (both bodily and spiri-
tual) and not merely rational.13
12
According to Simmel—who as we have seen senses the problem of the autonomy of
female culture, albeit in a still male chauvinist social and cultural context (see the previous
chapter)—it is especially the female sex that is endowed with this particular form of expres-
sion of the ego. In fact, women tend to move in space in a more expressive and meaningful
way than men. Their gestures, which for anatomical and physiological reasons are more
harmonious than those of men, enable women to better express their psychic life through the
body and objectify it in a more meaningful way in space. This explains, among other things,
why female interiority has always been expressed in a privileged way through dance and why
it is particularly women who instinctively resort to clothing or coquetry as forms of social
communication (see the essay commented on in the previous chapter).
13
The notions of meaning and purpose, central to Weberian sociology, play a secondary role
in Simmel: “Simmel’s approach is not oriented toward an analysis of action for which the point
of view of the actor is constitutive. His intent is rather to analyze the forms or configurations
(Gebilde) that are produced in the course of the process of reciprocal action and that do not
result directly from the intentions of the actors and from the sense that they attribute to their
actions” (Cavalli and Simmel 1998, p. XXIV). Cavalli further states “many have seen in the
Simmelian doctrine of a priori an opening toward consideration of the “meaning” that actors
attribute to the relationships in which they participate, and thus a shift from an empirical-
analytic sociology of a naturalistic kind toward a hermeneutic-understanding sociology.
However, the possibility of understanding remains for Simmel a psychological premise that
makes association, Vergesellschaftung, possible, since the bearers of such a process are individu-
als endowed with the capacity to construct representations of the situation and to direct their
actions on the basis of these representations; but it does not become a methodical criterion for
the analysis of social relations” […] “Those who adopt an inclusive perspective of analyzing
social interaction (such as modern symbolic interactionism), or those who operate in the terms
of a theory of social action will certainly find in Simmel a wealth of stimuli and insights.
Simmel’s sociological approach, however, is much more directed toward the study of social
forms, which assume their own, objective existence, tending almost to contrast with the social
actors who also ceaselessly produce, reproduce and transform them. It is no accident that
Simmel’s reflection on money and exchange occupies such a prominent position in Simmel;
money and exchange appear as pure, objective forms that lead an existence of their own beyond
the intentions of social actors and their attributions of meaning” (ibid., pp. XXIV–XXV).
5.1 The Eye

As Murray S. Davis stated, “Simmel’s conception of society is not based
on all sensory modalities in the different aesthetic genres, but only on an
art that is essentially visual” (Davis 1973, p. 320). Simmel in his Excursus
on the Sociology of the Senses, one of the most fascinating of his 1908
Soziologie, provides a very convincing analysis of the “prince” of senses of
metropolitan modernity—sight:
[T]he person who sees without hearing is much more confused, more at a
loss, more disquieted than the person who hears without seeing. Herein
necessarily lies a significant factor for the sociology of the metropolis. Going
about in it, compared with the small city, manifests an immeasurable pre-
dominance of seeing over the hearing of others; and certainly not only
because the chance meetings on the street in the small city concern a rela-
tively large quota of acquaintances with whom one exchanges a word or
whose sight reproduces for us the entire personality rather than just the
visible—but above all through the means of public transportation. Before
the development of buses, trains, and streetcars in the nineteenth century,
people were not at all in a position to be able or to have to view one other
for minutes or hours at a time without speaking to one another. Modern
traffic, which involves by far the overwhelming portion of all perceptible
relations between person and person, leaves people to an ever greater extent
with the mere perception of the face and must thereby leave universal socio-
logical feelings to fully altered presuppositions. (Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 573)
The metropolis is the kingdom of the visible and the triumph of images.
In cafés, among the crowds along streets, on public transport, the rela-
tionships between people are subject to the lordship of the gaze. The sur-
rounding milieu, its glittering shop windows, its luminous signs, the
dreamlike world of the “Passages” offers itself to the untiring activity of
the eye as a kaleidoscope of ever-changing and iridescent images that
Baudelaire designated with the name of modernité. The eye, Simmel
explains in The Aesthetic Significance of the Face [1901], plays a very impor-
tant formal function:
[L]ike the face generally, gives us the intimation, indeed the guarantee, that
the artistic problems of pure perception and of the pure, sensory image of
things—if perfectly solved—would lead to the solution of those other prob-
lems which involve soul and appearance. Appearance would then become
the veiling and unveiling of the soul. (Simmel 2020b, p. 235)
194 V. MELE
In the field of figurative art, the sense of sight succeeds in resolving the
world of man in its pure visibility, where soul and phenomenon, visible
and invisible merge together. What makes a painter truly great is in fact
being able to represent, starting from the “pure optical phenomenon of
man,” that unity of the person in which soul and body are indivisible
(Simmel 2000, p. 377). This is The problem of the portrait [1918].14 And
it is the problem that Rembrandt seems to solve constantly in his paint-
ings, allowing us the intense visual Erlebnis of his characters (Simmel 2005
[1914]). The possibility of grasping this unity arises in the human world
because there are privileged symbolic structures that connect expression
and meaning, unifying them in the dimension of the visible. One of these
is certainly the face, which an ancient metaphor establishes as the mirror
of the soul.
The relationships between individuals in the metropolis run on the
thread of gazes. And the eye, according to Simmel, “is made to offer an
absolutely unique sociological performance: the mutual connection and
action (Wechselwirkung) between individuals, which consists in looking at
one another. Perhaps this is the most immediate and purest mutual rela-
tion that exists in general.” Indeed, “one cannot take with the eye without
giving at the same time: the eye reveals to the other the soul that seeks to
reveal it” (Simmel 2009 [1908], pp. 550–551).
The intensity and purity of this relationship is unparalleled in human
relationships. Yet the force that the gaze brings into being is almost fatally
destined to fade away, leaving no trace. “This bond so strong and fine that
it is sustained only by the shortest line, the straight line between the eyes,
and the slightest deviation from this, the lightest glance to the side,
destroys altogether the characteristic element of that bond” (Simmel 2009
[1908], p. 551). This is the destiny that the fleeting and mysterious rela-
tionships of the metropolis follow, swept away by the current of the crowd
or interrupted in the space of a streetcar stop. Benjamin would be very
attracted by this passage of Simmel’s sociology of the senses and analyzing
Baudelaire’s verses To a Passer-by, he comments: “the delight of the city
dweller is not so much love at first sight as love at last sight” (Benjamin
2006b [1938], p. 25). This very vivid reciprocal action established by the
14
Translated in English with Aesthetics of Portrait (Simmel 2020a). I prefer to maintain
Simmel’s title Das Problem des Portraits, since as we have seen earlier, referring to a “prob-
lem” for Simmel is a typical way of posing fundamental philosophical, aesthetical, and socio-
logical questions.
gaze is the most contingent, but also the freest: the Vergesellschaftung that
comes into being between men is resolved in the happening, “it does not
crystallize in any objective formation,” as happens for all types of relation-
ships mediated by the word. As such, it is a relationship that has no mem-
ory, it is immediately resolved in the happening without “settling” in the
experience of individuals. For this reason, it is the most “modern” in the
sense that “all that is solid melts into the air” (Berman 1982).
5.2 The Face

Another aspect dominates the life of the citizen of the metropolis: the face.
It tells the story of man’s personality in the language of the visible. It is the
most spiritual part of the body, the first to which the gaze turns. As an
image of man, the face, thanks to its extraordinary mobility and malleabil-
ity, whereby every slight movement of a feature, such as the trembling of
the lips or the wrinkling of the forehead, has an enhanced impact on the
meaning of the whole, expresses to the full the internal movement of the
soul, the unstoppable flow of interiority.
As we have seen, in one of his rare explicit definitions of modernity,
Simmel, speaking of the sculptor Rodin, states that
the essence of Modernity is generally psychologism, living (das Erleben) and

interpreting the world in accordance with the reactions of our interior and
just as if it were an interior world, the dissolution of solid contents in the
fluctuating element of the soul, from which all substance is detached and
whose forms are only forms of movements … In the sphere of the human
body modernity privileges the face, antiquity the whole body, because the
former shows man in the flow of his interior life, the latter privileges his
permanent substance. (Simmel 1996 [1911], p. 346)
Among the various elements of the face, however, “the height of this
extraordinarily dynamic effect is achieved with a minimal movement by
the eye,” constituting the culmination of the capacity of the human body
to move and of the face’s ability to reflect the soul:
There is no other thing which, staying so absolutely in place, seems to reach

beyond it to such an extent; the eye penetrates, it withdraws, it circles a
room, it wanders, it reaches as though behind the wanted object and pulls it
toward itself. (Simmel 2020b [1901], p. 235)
196 V. MELE
The face is the mirror of the inner flow of the individual, but at the same
time “it is the symbol of all that accompanies the individual as the prior
condition of one’s life, all that is stored up in a person, what from the past
has descended to the foundation of one’s life and become one’s enduring
traits”(Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 572). Here emerges something that
is completely unique in the sphere of all that is human: “that the universal,
supra-singular nature of the individual presents itself always in the particu-
lar coloring of a momentary disposition, fulfillment, impulsiveness; that
the unitary stability and the fluid multiplicity of our souls is, as it were,
visible as an absolute concurrence” (ibid., p. 573). This contemporaneity,
however, can become enigmatic and disturbing. The face contributes in a
fundamental way to the feeling of the Heimlich, of the “familiar.” Being
surrounded by friendly, familiar faces is part of the vital context, of feeling
at home. The feeling of being foreigners, far from the “sensual ease” of
one’s own Heimat, is definitely contributed to by not being able to under-
stand the identity and intentions of those around us, even before the word,
the face. The vision of the unknown face in the crowd violates the thin
threshold between the “familiar” and the “uncanny,” between the
Heimlich and the Unheimlich (Freud 2003 [1919]). This aspect perceived
by those who see without hearing is spared to those who hear without
seeing, that is, for the blind:
for the blind the other is present actually only in the succession, in the
sequence of that person’s utterances. The restless, disturbing concurrence of
characteristic traits, of the traces from all of one’s past, as it lies outspread in
the face of a person, escapes the blind, and that might be the reason for the
peaceful and calm, uniformly friendly disposition toward the surroundings
that is so often observed among the blind. Precisely the variegation in that
concurrence, which the face can reveal, often renders it enigmatic. (Simmel
2009 [1908], p. 573)
To the sense of sight alone man offers, by means of the face, the whole
duraé of his existence. “We see, as it were, the succession of his life in a
contemporaneity.” This restlessness goes to constitute one of the charac-
teristic features of modern metropolitan life:
On account of the mentioned shift, the just mentioned greater incompre-

hensibility of people being only seen over that of people being heard con-
tributes to the problematic of the modern feel of life, to the feeling of
disorientation in collective living, of the isolation, and that one is surrounded
on all sides by closed doors. (Ibid., pp. 573–574)
“That the eye of the city dweller is overburdened with protective functions
is obvious” (Benjamin 2006a [1940], p. 341), Benjamin argued, com-
menting on this quotation from Simmel.15 The prevalence of sight over
hearing contributes to metropolitan neurasthenia. Where the ear tends to
perceive the surrounding world in temporal “succession,” it is put out of
action by the chaos and traffic of the city, which instead produces events
in “simultaneity.” The intensification of nervous life—according to
Simmel, the true “psychological basis” of metropolitan life—is in fact
“brought on by the rapid and constant change of external and internal
sensations,” by the “the rapid succession of changing images, the gruff
distance of what one perceives at a single glance” (Simmel 2021 [1903],
p. 193). The simultanéité des étatas d’âme16 thus comes forcibly to be the
“rhythm” of the inner life of the citizen. And this change of the “apper-
ceptive complex” of man engendered by daily metropolitan life would find
its highest artistic expression in cinema. As Benjamin states emblematically
in the essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility
[1939]: “Film is the art form corresponding to the increased threat to life
that faces people today ” (Benjamin 2006c, p. 281).17
5.3 The Ear

Compared to the “miracle of the look,” to the pure and immediate reci-
procity established between eye and eye, the ear is undoubtedly an “ego-
istic” organ: it receives without giving anything back at the same time. It
redeems itself in some way by being “supra-individualistic in its nature”:
15
As we shall see in the next part (Chap. 9, para. 4), Benjamin’s citation of this passage
from Simmel’s sociology of the senses in his essay The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire
[1939] would result—along with other disagreements of a theoretical nature—in Adorno’s
rejection of the publication.
16
“The Bergsonian conception of time, which is characteristic of film, is found, though not
always so evident, in all genres and currents of today’s art world. The simultanéité des étatas
d’âme is the fundamental experience common to the various currents of modern painting,
Italian futurism and Chagall’s expressionism, Picasso’s cubism and Giorgio de Chirico’s sur-
realism” (Hauser 2005, p. 238).
17
On the analogies between Simmel’s theory of metropolitan perception (with special regard to
the essay On Art Exhibitions [1890]) and Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility, see Harrington 2015. However, “analogies” should not be confused
with “similes”, as each that “thrives on different centers” (see Chap. 1, par. 3).
198 V. MELE
“all those who are in a room must hear what transpires in it, and the fact
that one picks it up does not take it away from another” (Simmel 2009
[1908], p. 575). Vice versa, the eye, although more altruistic, proves to be
rather exclusive in practical life, modifying “what is seen through the dif-
ference of viewpoint at the same time for each” (ibid., p. 576). This has
significant sociological consequences:
Under normal circumstances generally not too many people can have one
and the same facial expression at all, but by contrast extraordinarily many
can have the same impression from hearing. One may compare a museum
audience with a concert audience; for the determination of the hearing
impression to communicate itself uniformly and in the same way to a crowd
of people—a determination by no means simply external-quantitative but
bound up deeply with its innermost nature—sociologically brings together
a concert audience in an incomparably closer union and collective feeling
than occurs with the visitors to a museum. (ibid.)
Even if we consider the contemporary artistic manifestation that realizes

the common vision more so than any other, that is, cinema, we must
observe that compared to the collective audition of the concert, movie-
going does not involve an equal “unity and commonality of state of mind.”
The experience of the film viewer realizes the dream of the flâneur: “to see
the world, to be at its center and to remain hidden from it” (Baudelaire
1964 [1863], p. 67). The vision of images, however collective, is always an
individual phantasmagoria, which retains something of the religious
apparition.18
Simmel identifies another interesting element in the relationship
between sight and the life of the metropolis, which makes the eye the
privileged organ of the age of the great masses. This resides in the co-
presence between the “subjectivism” of visual perception, mentioned
above, and its tendency, so to speak, “to stylize,” which makes it suitable
for “very abstract social formations.”
In fact:
18
This “archetypal” aspect of viewing images was noted by W. Benjamin, regarding the
ancestor of cinema, the Kaiserpanorama: “Shortly before film turned the viewing of images
into a collective activity, image viewing by the individual, through the stereoscopes of these
soon outmoded establishments, was briefly intensified, as it had been once before in the
isolated contemplation of the divine image by the priest in the cella” (Benjamin 2006c
[1939], p. 280).
The eye shows, in addition to what is individual in the human being who is
involved in the appearance, what is also the same in all to a greater degree
than the ear does … one evidently sees in a person in a much higher degree
what that person has in common with another than one hears this common-
ality in that person. The immediate production of very abstract, unspecific
social structure is thus favored the most, to the extent that the technique of
the senses works by the proximity of sight, in the absence of the proximity
of conversation. (Simmel 2009 [1908], pp. 576–577)
The eye performs an “abstraction” of what is common to all individu-

als, while the ear mediates to us “what is concrete, individual, variable” in
each. “Visual culture” therefore is coessential to the abstract and func-
tional social relations of the Gesellschaft, while hearing prevails in the per-
sonal and oral relations of the Gemeinschaft. This fundamental sociological
performance provided by sight, which allows man to be separated from his
function, would underlie the “birth of the modern concept of the worker”:
This strange, effective concept, the idea that unites the generality of all wage
laborers, regardless of what they do, was not found in previous centuries,
when associations of fellow workers were often much narrower and more
intimate, since they often depended essentially on personal interaction by
word of mouth, which the factory hall and the mass rally lack. Here, where
one saw countless things without seeing them, that high level abstraction
was first made of all that is common to them, and it is often hindered in their
development by all the individual, concrete, variable things as the ear trans-
mits them to us. (Simmel 2009 [1908], pp. 577)
With some approximation, it can be said that between the sense of hearing
and that of sight there is a “movement” from the “individual’ to the “gen-
eral” that proceeds in reverse. On the one hand, the eye provides a more
“subjective” perception (characterized differently from individual to indi-
vidual) which, however, is able to “generalize” by being able to grasp in
the object that which transcends its singularity. In this case, the eye
200 V. MELE
performs a “stylization” that makes it capable of orienting the multitude

and representing it conceptually.19
On the other hand, the ear is a “supra-individualistic” and more objec-
tive organ—there is little discordance about what is heard by all those
present in the same space. At the same time, it is attentive only to what is
“individual, concrete, variable” in individuals.
These observations enable verifying the difference in “sociological”
performance of the two organs by referring to two typical manifestations
of the era of totalitarianism, namely the “oceanic rally” and the regime
“parade.”20 In the first case, hearing the leader’s speech all together plays
a fundamental role, attaining that “unity and commonality of mood” nec-
essary to obtain the “organic” union between the individual and the
Whole. In the military parade, on the other hand, the effect of
“generalization-abstraction” is certainly at work, as is the “seeing” that
stylizes the multitudes. Hence also the importance of the geometric “fig-
ures” typical of these events, whose visual effect is precisely that of making
19
The relationship between the eye and the crowd was not peaceful, as Benjamin wrote,
starting with an observation by Gogol: ““So many people were on their way there that it
made one’s eyes swim. “ The daily sight o f a lively crowd may once have constituted a spec-
tacle to which one’s eyes needed to adapt. On the basis of this supposition, one may assume
that once the eyes had mastered this task, they welcomed opportunities to test their newly
acquired ability. This would mean that the technique of Impressionist painting, whereby the
image is construed from a riot of dabs of color, would be a reflection of experiences to which
the eyes of a big-city dweller have become accustomed. A picture like Monet’s Cathedral of
Chartres, which looks like an image of an ant-hill of stone, would be an illustration of this
hypothesis” (Benjamin 2006a [1940], pp. 349–350).
20
Benjamin perspicaciously pointed out that the advent of film technique brought about a
“quantum leap” in propaganda techniques: “A technological factor is important here, espe-
cially with regard to the newsreel, whose significance for propaganda purposes can hardly be
overstated. Mass reproduction is especially favored by the reproduction of the masses. In
great ceremonial processions, giant rallies, and mass sporting events, and in war, all of which
are now fed into the camera, the masses come face to face with themselves. This process,
whose significance need not be emphasized, is closely bound up with the development of
reproduction and recording technologies. In general, mass movements are more clearly
apprehended by the camera than by the eye. A bird’s-eye view best captures assemblies of
hundreds of thousands. And even when this perspective is no less accessible to the human eye
than to the camera, the image formed by the eye cannot be enlarged in the same way as a
photograph. This is to say that mass movements, including war, are a form of human behav-
ior especially suited to the camera” (Benjamin 2006c [1939], p. 282).
the individual as such disappear. The result for the spectator, in this second
case, is atomization: the individual, closed in the interiority of his own
vision, witnesses the “geometric” power of the whole that dominates him.21
6 Partial Knowledge of the Other

The second a priori can be summed up by the seemingly banal assertion
that “every member of a group is not only a part of society but also some-
thing else besides” (Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 45):
To the extent that the part of the individual not facing society or not
absorbed in it is not simply disconnected from its socially significant part, i.e.
entirely external to society, this functions as a social a priori to accommodate
that external part, willingly or unwillingly; however, the fact that the indi-
vidual is in certain respects not a member of society creates the positive
condition for it being just such a member in other respects. What kind a
person’s socialized being is, is determined or co-determined by the kind of
one’s unsocialized being. (Ibid.)
This a priori concerns the relation of the individual to the “type”

images that others make of him, or to apply terms that Simmel never used,
the individual’s relation to social “expectations” or “roles.” In particular,
as Simmel observed, every one of us is something more than the role that
society has assigned us, and this “something more” does not remain inert
while we are being socialized, but is equally determinant in our socializa-
tion. This a priori is also at the basis of his analyses of the forms of social
exclusion set forth in his Sociology, as well as those described in The Poor
Person, and especially the Stranger. Indeed, all these figures have in com-
mon the fact that their position in society is inexorably determined by that
which is in no way socializable in them. The stranger (like the poor, the
alienated and in general all those who have, for various reasons, been
excluded from social relations) is one of the most interesting cases of
human relationships with others. Indeed, the stranger is to a certain degree
the other par excellence, that is to say, someone who for objective reasons
(geographical origins, belonging to a different culture) eludes relations,
21
It is clear that in neither example does the provision of a “unique” sense take place. Nor
that this effect would in any way be consciously provoked; one need only recall the Nazi use
of the Gesamtkunstwerk for propaganda.
202 V. MELE
but is necessarily situated within them (we necessarily associate with

strangers, and they are strangers only by virtue of their relation to us).
“The stranger is a member of the group itself, not different from the poor
and the various ‘inner enemies’—an element whose immanent presence
and membership include at the same time an externality and opposition”
(Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 601).
The basic definition that Simmel gives of the foreigner is simple, but
suggestive:
[T]he stranger is not understood here as wanderer, the sense in which the
term was used many times up to now, one who arrives today and leaves
tomorrow, but as one who comes today and stays tomorrow—the potential
wanderer, so to speak, who has not completely overcome the loosening of
coming and going, though not moving on. (Ibid.)
Such a definition confirms the liminal nature of the foreigner’s situa-

tion, his being a borderline figure, or in other terms, his situation of ambi-
guity: he is not a social type that has totally eluded bonds (as in the case of
the pilgrim, who sociologically would seem inert, in that he is indifferent
to the social group), nor is he a stable element, organic to the group. The
social type of the foreigner therefore involves both spatial and temporal
uncertainty: he is someone who is nearby, and at the same time, far, pres-
ent bodily, but absent in his social and cultural determinateness. The for-
eigner is therefore a cognitive category, necessary for the identity of any
social group.
An analogous problem in cognitive sociology is the focus of the chapter
on The secret and the secret society, whose underlying assumption is pre-
cisely the incomplete (ultimately, impossible) knowability of the other,
together with the possibility that he can lie: “If human interaction is con-
ditioned by the ability to speak, it is shaped by the ability to keep silent”
(Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 340). In the sphere of human communication,
secrecy, although often ignored within the sociological and philosophical
discourse of modernity based on the paradigm of understanding and com-
municative transparency, actually performs the function of regulating the
quantity and quality of information. The communicative value of social
action and especially of its omission is well exemplified by the absence of
the form of courtesy par excellence, the greeting: “the greeting in the
street does not yet show any kind of respect; its omission shows very
definitely the opposite” (ibid.). Therefore, a social analysis that does with-
out the important communicative modality represented by furtive behav-
ior would be a sort of “arithmetic without the zero.”
In the essay The Metropolises and the Life of the Spirit Simmel had already
addressed the importance of confidentiality in metropolitan social life, as
one of the essential aspects of Blasé psychology and the defense of the
stimuli of which it is a consequence:
If the continuous contact with countless people were to result in as many

internal responses as in a small town, whose inhabitants are almost all
acquainted and in positive relationships with one another, one would be
completely atomised on the inside and one’s soul would end up in an
unimaginable state. Partly this psychological fact, partly the right to distrust
which men have in the face of the touch-and-go elements of metropolitan
life, necessitates our reserve. (Simmel 2021 [1903], p. 196 trans. mod.)
In the pages on secrecy Simmel expands this reflection and dwells on that
form of social conduct, essential in human coexistence, which is called
“discretion” (to which he also devoted a specific essay, along with modesty
and shame). The function of this social practice, widespread in various
forms in all cultures, is to create a sphere to which any other partner in the
interaction does not have access. In fact, it means to “abstain from know-
ing about all that the other does not freely reveal to us.” However, “it is
extraordinarily difficult to point to the limit of the right to this breach of
private mental property” (Simmel 2009 [1908], p. 319), which is there-
fore rather regulated by customs and informal social practices. In fact, it is
often not possible to put any restraint on the interpretation of the other,
since those who are psychologically sensitive inevitably go beyond the
boundary of external discretion through the work of their intellect:
To those who are especially psychologically sensitive, people betray their

most secret thoughts and characteristics countless times, though not only
but often precisely because they are anxiously straining to guard them. The
greedy, spying gathering of every indiscreet word, the penetrating reflec-
tion—what this intonation probably would mean, what those expressions
allow one to conclude, what the blushing at the mention of a certain name
perhaps betrayed—all this does not overstep the boundary of outward dis-
cretion; it is entirely the work of one’s own intellect and for that reason an
204 V. MELE
apparently undisputed right of the subject; and this often occurs completely
involuntarily, so much more than the misuse of psychological superiority—
we cannot at all often put a stop to our interpretations of the other, to the
construals of another’s inner life. (Ibid.)
Confidentiality understood as non-access to knowledge about the

interaction partner is also expressed by the physical and spatial boundaries
in which interpersonal relationships take place. In this sense, architectural
elements obviously play a key role. In the essay Bridge and Door [1909],
Simmel speaks of the “richer and livelier” (Simmel 1997a, p. 173) mean-
ing of the door compared to the bridge and the wall. The bridge primarily
symbolizes connection rather than separateness, while the door clearly
shows how connecting and separating are only “two sides of the same and
the same act” (ibid.). With the construction of the first door, as well as the
first road, human beings, “cutting out of the continuity and infinity of
space a part and conforming it into a certain unity according to a sense”
(ibid.), extended the typically human power over nature. “A fragment of
space was thereby in itself unified and separated from the rest of the world”
(ibid.). As a “hinge” between human space and all that is beyond it, the
door can also be opened, but “precisely because it can also be opened, its
closure provides the feeling of a stronger isolation against everything out-
side this space than the mere unstructured wall. The latter is mute, but the
door speaks” (ibid., p. 172). In his highly symbolic and metaphorical lan-
guage Simmel seeks here to emphasize once again the ambivalence of
human and social interaction that goes beyond the binary logic of con-
nected/disconnected, open/closed but emphasizes with his aesthetic per-
spective that even the most common architectural elements express the
fundamental ambiguity of the unveiling and the veil that is necessarily
established in the relationship between the self and the other. Here Simmel
highlights an essential factor on which contemporary society is based:
trust. It is in fact a social practice founded on the uncertainty and incom-
pleteness of the information available about partners in any interaction.
Moreover, the advancement of rationality and knowledge does not neces-
sarily involve a reduction in uncertainty; it instead stems from trust (and
faith), which the surrounding world bases on knowledge and competence.
In other words, through his sociology of the secret, Simmel lays the bases
for a sociology of common sense/consensus that accounts for the necessary
opacity of social forms.
7 The Universality of the Individual

With the third, and last a priori Simmel describes the teleological dimen-
sion of modern man’s social life. Although the individual holds a dual
position in society (in the sense that he is included in it, yet simultaneously
opposed to it), for Simmel the social fabric is configured as “a coordina-
tion of objectively and, in its social significance, meaningfully, although
not always valuable, functions and functional centers” (Simmel 2009
[1908], p. 50). In this sense, the modern individual needs social fulfill-
ment for his individuality to be charged with meaning. In a paradoxical
logic—which is peculiar to Simmel’s way of thinking—individual identity
is such only to the extent that its social recognition is fully realized. Simmel
maintains that individuals only establish social interaction because they are
to some extent aware that the very society whose existence they foster
provides the possibility of finding a place where their individuality can
adapt most harmoniously: “that every individual is directed according to
one’s own rank in a definite position inside of one’s social milieu: that this
appropriate position is hypothetically available to one, actually throughout
the social whole for that matter—that is the presumption under which the
individual lives out a social life and which one can point to as the universal
value of individuality” (ibid.). Therefore, from the individual’s perspec-
tive, society takes on a teleological role and is viewed as a sensible goal for
expression of his possibilities.
Various interpretations have been offered of this last statement—and
more generally of the passages in Sociology that Simmel devotes to discus-
sion of his third a priori—in order to insert it within the framework of
functionalism. In this regard, it is worthwhile stressing that Simmel’s a
priori does not necessarily seek to claim that society has certain positions
and roles, essential for its proper functioning, which individuals are called
upon to take on, and that the duty of the individual would therefore be
exclusively to answer this “calling” (Beruf ), slavishly conforming to soci-
ety’s functional and reproductive needs. In this sense, the focus would
be slanted to only one side of the Durkheiminan Homo duplex—namely
the social roles beyond the single individual. Simmel considers the fact
that the objective structure of society made of anonymous roles comes
into tension with the individual desire for uniqueness. As Fitzi has observed
(Fitzi et al. 2018), the challenge of the third a priori of his sociology is to
find a cultural synthesis between social role and personality, between the
creativity of social action and the logic of social structure. In complex
206 V. MELE
societies we have to face not just qualitative social differentiation, but also
the conflict of culture that for Simmel ontologically regards modernity.
Highly differentiated societies tend to develop different domains that fol-
low an autonomous logic. The result is fragmentation of the personalities
of social actors, whose different domains are led by the autonomous logic
of the social circles with which they are linked. Even if there is no escape
from the modern fragmentation of life, the social actor can choose a “pre-
dominant logic” to govern their own social action, so that the fragmented
contents of social reality are reordered under a particular perspective,
which can regard politics, religion, economy, art, and so on. What Fitzi
highlights here is the possibility of an individual law, a paradoxical personal
form, resulting from the creative assembly and re-ordering of the different
social circles in which social actors are active. In this context—following
Simmel—“the task of sociology is therefore to reconstruct how social
action produces its different logics, and how these become autonomous
by constituting objective domains of social structure” (ibid., p. 152). The
third a priori echoes the topics also evoked by Weber’s reflections on
Beruf, the professional “vocation” or “calling” that characterizes the biog-
raphy of modern man as if it were an inalterable fate. It interesting there-
fore to examine what Simmel envisions as the role of work in shaping the
modern self, as compared to this other classical sociologist. Simmel—simi-
larly to Weber—makes reference to a common theoretical background
that views the human being as a creature with originally rational potential,
who is faced with the task of becoming a personality by means of con-
sciously chosen life behavior. That similarity is evident in the parallelism
between Simmel’s interest in the concept of the “style of life” (Der Stil des
Lebens) and Weber’s research on the “life conduct” (Lebensführung) that
arose in Western rationalistic culture, which he laid out mainly in The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–1905). This implies a
lasting transcending of the “self” from life and from natural experience
through a responsible decision based on values and meanings. In this con-
text, work, as a “fixed ideal line uniting the person to a life content”
(Simmel 2004 [1900], p. 436) can carry out a decisive role. Working life
can become the major instrument to forge a consistent personality, as
shown by the sociological reconstruction of the historical development of
ascetic Protestantism (Weber 2001 [1903–1905], p. 51 ff.). Simmel
believes that work still represents one of the major factors determining
modern individuals’ ability (or inability) to formulate personal, stable
identities that enable them to become fully socialized. However, we can
find here a difference between Simmel and Weber on the diagnosis of the
contemporary cultural crisis. Weber—in his famous lectures on Politics as
vocation and Science as vocation—remained convinced that the only way
to overcome the cultural crisis of his time was to re-establish an under-
standing of work as service and, consequently, resolve the problem of
identity and inner strength by shaping the self into the kind of personality
made possible by service in the spiritual discipline of the calling. For
Weber, work, in the sense of a methodical, rational “life conduct” inspired
by the “demon” of inner vocation, represents the final attempt to save the
self from modernity’s inherent drive toward dissolution of the individual.
Simmel, on the contrary, was aware that the modern subject is too frag-
mented and that the creativity of social life is no longer able to coagulate
in a dominant social form. In his many investigations of the “metropolitan
scene”—on sociability, fashion, eroticism, love, adventure—Simmel seems
to have observed an aspect that was later to become a characteristic trait of
our highly diversified society: individual personality and social personality
can no longer coincide entirely with “work.”
Intimately connected to the third sociological a priori that Simmel
envisioned as emphasizing the “vertical dimension of commitment”
between individuals and society (Kemple 2007, p. 5), there is another,
albeit less well-known one, that is to say, that which considers that the
social actor can also be a non-actor. Twentieth-century sociology (Max
Weber above all) was characterized by the loss of trust in progress and
rejection of the idea that the aim of sociology is to study “society.” Simmel
realized that focusing study on the “actions of man” serves to maintain a
“progressive” perspective, because the tacit assumption underlying the
fact that people act is that they do so because they believe in a future dif-
ferent from the present.22 In this sense, sociology, conceived of as a theory
of action, precludes access to what is instead, in a certain sense, the very
opposite of the idea of action (necessarily directed toward the future): pes-
simism, which manifests itself through the “suffering” (leiden) of society.
Leiden: literally to suffer, endure, passively bear—this term is as present in
Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as it is in Max Weber. Simmel describes it in
terms of its consequences for social action as well as for its importance to
the affirmation of the ideal of “social justice”:
22
“Simmel is, however, the only sociologist who gradually becomes aware that the trans-
formation of the theory of society into a theory of action does not necessarily also involve
overcoming optimism about Progress” (Dahme and Rammstedt 1984, p. 467).
208 V. MELE
The lack of a sufficiently definite and surely attainable final goal, the paucity
of satisfactions, the empty drifting of illusions—all these are not worth the
effort of life, the employment of all forces, the total investment of the self.
Moreover, there is in fact no enhancement and improvement of life content
that can compensate for it. The assumption of pessimism so highly evaluates
the costs, pains and labors of life that any optimistic attempt to bring the
purpose and gain of life to the same level fails inexorably.
For Simmel “suffering” is the individual’s balance sheet, which shows

that life’s expenses vs. its earnings are just not worth it. Pessimism is a
reflex response to social alienation and is manifested through suffering,
the counter-concept to acting. Pessimistic suffering, the feeling of being
estranged by one’s own self, is inaccessible to the theory of action: it only
becomes comprehensible as “actions” (albeit desperate ones), and hence
as suicide, aggression, violence, and so on, and is thus deemed dysfunc-
tional. The sociological importance of this intuition is vast and highly rel-
evant. It can help understand the deep motivations for “negative actions,”
or more properly, “non-action” (such as, for instance, willful unemploy-
ment, not having children, not being committed politically to changing
society’s power relations, etc.) from a sociological point of view as social
situations determined by the lack of trust that the future holds the promise
of a social condition different from the present: all present actions are
influenced and determined by expectations for the future. As Simmel
states in his important essay Tendencies in German Life and Thought since
1870 [1902, published only in English], the spread of this sentiment in
post-1870 Germany contributed in no small measure to the spread of
socialism. Here Simmel provides the source of what was probably his own
interest in socialism, one which is an extension of his theory of the nature
of society. Relaying on Schopenhauer’s notion that there is no final end in
life, only the human will, Simmel maintains that “the lack that men felt of
a final object, and consequently of an ideal that should dominate the
whole of life, was supplied in the eighties by almost instantaneous rise of
the ideal of social justice” (Simmel 2010, p. 175).
8 A Virtual Society?

This chapter has attempted to provide an analysis of some key features of
the Simmelian conception of society. Beginning with his 1908 Sociology,
the main question, the actual “paradigm” toward which Simmel’s sociol-
ogy is oriented, becomes: “how is society possible?” Within the
metropolitan context, the fundamental question of sociology

thus shifts from “what is society?” to “how is society possible?” Society
ceases to be a foregone conclusion and becomes rather a more or less com-
mon event, the disappearance of which is also possible. It is there, but it
can also not be there3. As we have seen, Simmel formulates this question
in the wake of the Kantian “how is nature possible?” His answer, however,
is radically different: while for Kant nature is possible because the subject
observes it and synthesizes it with his a priori categories, for Simmel soci-
ety is possible only because there is the “you,” the “other.” Unlike the
relationship with natural objects, in social relationships I am faced with
another “ego” that, just as I am for him, is partly known to me and partly
obscure. For this reason the main problem of “association”
(Vergesellschaftung) becomes a game of “representations of the other”: the
image that I make of the other interacts with the image that the other
makes of me, in a game of references that extends out to infinity. Society
moves in this way in interiore homine and its “problem” becomes above all
a problem of the theory of knowledge. It is evident that this type of sociol-
ogy is possible only when the encounter with the “other” becomes a daily
experience and not only reserved for exceptional moments, as could hap-
pen in a traditional context. In the metropolis the inhabitants are all daily
strangers, “foreigners” to each other. It can be deduced that the metropo-
lis, understood as a historical formation as well as a “paradigm” of moder-
nity, represents the image of society that Simmel sought to analyze in his
work. Although Simmel’s view of society obviously evolved over the
course of his work, the key principle of his theory always remains that of
the “fundamental interconnectivity (Wesenszusammengehörigkeit) between
the most disparate phenomena” (Kracauer 1995 [1963], p. 232, trans.
mod.). Thusly represented, the metropolis resembles a veritable social net-
work of mutual relations (a concept obviously unknown to Simmel, but
which makes the point very well). Social dynamics can be described as
“Brownian motion”—like that which drives particles of matter or pollen
in a fluid—an ““infinite game of associations and dissociations,” without
preordained purpose. If we consider social reality’s undergoing uninter-
rupted flux to be one of the fundamental characteristics of modernity,
then the concepts that can best express and interpret this fluid reality are
relational concepts: “reciprocal interaction” (Wechselwirkung) and “asso-
ciation” (Vergesellschaftung) are the key concepts in this context. Society
(if one can still use such a concept) constitutes a social labyrinth within
which individuals and groups interact. In this conception, the question of
how society is possible represents Simmel’s peculiar way of posing the
210 V. MELE
epistemological issue of sociology. Such an approach characterizes

Simmel’s sociology as a peculiar “science of culture” that intends to
explain how the simple (the I-you interaction) generates the complex
(society as a whole).
Such a vision of society is very suggestive, although questions must
be asked about its ability to explain/describe its actual dynamics. Simmel
assumes interaction (or rather, Wechselwirkung) as the object of analysis, but
this involves in principle understanding very different forms of “association”
(Vergesellschaftung), such as the friendship or enmity between individuals,
the authority exercised by a father over his children, or the sovereignty of a
state over citizens in a given society. These processes of interaction cannot
be reduced to the free play of reciprocity between individuals and actors; it
is necessary from time to time to identify the contrainte (Durkheim), that
is, the constraints that influence them: there seems to be no determinism in
Simmel’s metropolis—not the State, Bureaucracy, Capital, or integrated sys-
tem of production and consumption, as per Weber and Sombart. “A certain
methodological underestimation of this aspect (entirely understandable and
justifiable, if we consider that at Simmel’s time sociology was in its infancy)
makes the brilliant observations and analyses of Sociology something less than
a true theory of society” (Dal Lago 1994, p. 190). Where Marx, Durkheim,
or Weber saw above all the “objectivations,” processes and institutions that
are determined in both an historical and a morphological sense, that stood
out against the background of everyday sociality (classes, forms of solidar-
ity, symbolic, or ideological systems such as religion), Simmel sees above all
an incessant movement of forms articulated around certain a priori. Such a
sociology sometimes risks appearing (to use an intentionally technological
metaphor) more the sociology of a virtual world than a real one. Certainly,
the image of society that Simmel proposes does not suffer so much from an
excess as from a deficiency of “reification”: the social processes that attract
it are extremely fluid, dynamic, frictionless, just as monetary movements.23
This point of view characterizes Simmel’s metropolis in a peculiar way. It
23
T. Kemple, on the contrary, maintains: “The common criticism that he [Simmel] does
not adequately address structural relations of power and inequality often overlooks the man-
ner in which he grounds such overarching dynamics in the richness of mundane perceptual
and cognitive experience. […] Simmel’s distinctive social theory is a resource for responding
to today’s imperative “to develop a global politics of flux versus flow” (Lash 2005, p. 17) in
the sense that it points to ways of understanding or even interrupting the relentless fluidity
of (post)modernity by imagining barriers, obstacles and countercurrents which do not simply
displace what already exists along continuum of the same, but may also transform limits into
possibilities for living and thinking otherwise” (Kemple 2007, pp. 13–15, 16).
is viewed in terms of possibility: new encounters, new forms of interaction

are possible. Everything is fluid, even if the subjects actually run the risk of
being emptied by the metropolis and its “social-technological mechanism”
(Simmel 2021 [1903], p. 192). As will be taken up in the next chapter,
while maneuvering within the infinite possibility of potential relations, sub-
jects must struggle to live up to the possibilities unleashed by the metropo-
lis, which instead of raising them to a higher level of wealth and spiritual
complexity, risk imprisoning and emptying them. Money and the monetary
economy now represent the metaphor that best describes this phenomenon
of both excessive individualization and depersonalization. The subsequent
generation of Kulturkritiker would regard Simmel’s conception of an “aim-
less accretion of life” as unsatisfactory. To them, society seemed to stiffen
in “the mass ornament” (Kracauer 1995), in the reification of life caused
by commodity fetishism. Benjamin, in particular, offers up an image of the
metropolis that inherits some of Simmel’s sociological intuitions (the central-
ity of fashion, the fragmentary style of sociological flânerie), while distancing
himself from the basic analysis of the destiny of modernity.
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PART II
City and Modernity in Walter

Benjamin
CHAPTER 7
What Is The Arcades Project?
1 Premise
“To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on
which they work throughout their lives” (Benjamin 1996c [1928],
p. 446), Walter Benjamin stated with extraordinary prescience as early as
1928. And few fragments have attracted more attention from critics and
readers than those of the great unfinished work on the Parisian arcades,
The Arcades Project. Numerous “legends” preceded the publication of this
book even before the manuscript was composed and reconstructed. The
most significant of these concerned the fact that the text was to be com-
posed exclusively of a montage of quotations which, according to the
technique of the avant-garde, was intended to shock the reader and induce
him to a critical awareness of reality. This legend was nourished above all
by one of the first and most illustrious readers of The Arcades Project,
Theodor Adorno, who after World War II came into possession of the
manuscript and made a first perusal of the materials. He gained the double
impression that Benjamin intended to make exclusive use of the technique
of editing and, for this reason, his philosophy became “surrealistic.” This
hypothesis, which had the effect of further increasing interest and curiosity
about this work, turned out to be nothing more than a myth. Not only do
the unfinished drafts already compiled in the materials show that Benjamin

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9_7
218 V. MELE
actually had more than just a collection of quotations in mind, but also
other writings on the metropolis contemporaneous with The Arcades
Project show that his descriptive style was quite different. In this regard,
Rolf Tiedemann, a student of Adorno and editor of The Arcades Project,
appropriately spoke of a distinction between a “montage of quotations”
and “literary montage.”1 In this light, we must warn that The Arcades
Project is anything but a text in the proper sense of the term. Whoever
approaches the mighty volume published in English under the title The
Arcades Project cannot help but be bewildered by an immense mass of
notes, quotations, partial drafts, exposés, and so on, all of which have been
written in the form of a book. As a preliminary measure to understand the
work, it is therefore necessary to reconstruct the stages that have charac-
terized its conception and the drafting of a work that, in reality, was never
realized.
1
Indeed, Tiedemann states, “In his last remarks, Adorno had taken the idea of montage
extremely literally and claimed that Benjamin had thought of nothing more than mounting
quotations side by side. In many discussions with Adorno the editor however was unable to
convince himself that literary montage as conceived by Benjamin as a method was identical
with a simple montage of quotations” (Tiedemann 1982, p. 1073; author’s italics). Tiedemann
refers to Benjamin’s peremptory statement in the materials, the cause of Adorno’s convic-
tions: “Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show”
(Benjamin 2002 [1982], p. 460). Giorgio Agamben on the topic observes: “It is not so
much a matter, as Adorno maintains, of ‘allowing meanings to appear solely by means of a
shocking montage [schokhafte Montage] of the materials’ and of writing a work ‘composed
only of citations,’ so much as rather—by means of making dispositio the center of the com-
positional process—of allowing the forms of development and the internal bond contained
in the philological materials to lead to the draft solely through their construction … There
is, in Benjamin’s method, something like a renewal of the medieval doctrine according to
which the material already contains the forms within itself, is already full of form in an
“inchoative” and potential state, and knowledge consists in nothing other than in bringing
to light (eductio) these forms hidden (inditae) in the material. What to Adorno up to the end
seemed like an adialectical residue is instead a profound constructive adherence to this “form
that flows” (forma fluens, as the medievals said) in the material itself. The vanishing point
toward which the constructive becoming of this form-material is converging is not, however,
as in the medieval theologians, the divine intellect, but “our own historical experience”
(Agamben 2016, pp. 227–228).
7 WHAT IS THE ARCADES PROJECT? 219
2 Content and Chronology of the Work2

The volume first published in German as Das Arcades Project (English
translation The Arcades Project) brings together writings and notes accu-
mulated over the thirteen years (1927–1940) that it took Walter Benjamin
to write the work, which remained unfinished. This edition is a fairly faith-
ful reproduction of the original German text, published in 1982 by Rolf
Tiedemann, under the title Das Passagen-Werk.3
A first reading of the volume suggests that what remains of this work is
little more than an immense mass of quotations, glosses, and sketches that
are difficult to decipher.
The writings contained in the volume, listed in chronological order, are
as follows:
Arcades (summer–autumn 1927)

Early Notes. Parisian Passages I (mid-1927–end 1929)
Parisian Passages II (1928–1929)
The Ring of Saturn or On Iron Constructions (1928 or 1929)
Notes and Materials (1928–1940)
Paris, Capital of the 19th Century (May 1935)
Paris, Capitale du XIX siècle (March 1939)
Before entering into a more detailed description of these writings, we

can rely on Benjamin’s own testimony to recall the origin and develop-
ment of the work on The Arcades, as recounted in a letter written to
Theodor Adorno in May 1935, a crucial date for the composition of the
book itself:
It opens with Aragon—the paysan de Paris. Evenings, lying in bed, I could

never read more than two to three pages by him because my heart started to
pound so hard that I had to put the book down. What a warning! What an
2
For the history and reconstruction of the work in relation to Benjamin’s intellectual
and political biography, we make constant reference to G. Gilloch (Gilloch 1996, 2001),
and to Rolf Tiedemann’s introduction to the German edition of Arcades Project (Benjamin
1982, pp. 9–41), republished in Tiedemann (1983, pp. 9–41) as well as the Zeugnisse zur
Entstehungsgeschichte (Tiedemann 1982, pp. 1081–1205) edited by Rolf Tiedemann,
in which all the fundamental materials (letters, texts, list of books consulted by Benjamin,
etc.) are compiled that are an indispensable frame for the work.
3
Das Passagen_Werk, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982, in the GS in vols. V, 1, 2
(English trans. Benjamin 2002).
220 V. MELE
indication of the years and years that had to be put between me and that
kind of reading. And yet the first preliminary sketches for the Arcades origi-
nated at that time. Then came the Berlin years, in which the best part of my
friendship with Hessel was nourished by many conversations initiated by the
Arcades project. At the time, the subtitle—no longer in use today—origi-
nated: A Dialectical Fairy Play. This subtitle points to the rhapsodic charac-
ter of what I had in mind to present at that time and whose relics—as I
recognize today—did not contain any adequate guarantees whatsoever, in
formal or linguistic terms. This epoch was also, however, that of a carefree,
archaic philosophizing, which was engrossed in nature. What brought about
the end of this epoch were the conversations I had with you in Frankfurt,
and especially the “historical” conversation in the little Swiss house and,
after that, the definitely historical one held around the table with you, Asja,
Felizitas, and Horkheimer. It was the end of rhapsodic naïveté. (Benjamin
1994, p. 489)
This letter implicitly outlines the stages and fundamental events that
marked the conception and writing of the book. A first phase of the work
emerges (1927–1929), belonging to the project called Pariser Passagen.
Eine dialektische Feerie; a second phase opens up following the Swiss col-
loquium with Horkheimer and Adorno, which will lead to a global
rethinking of the project as evidenced by the new exposé of the work, titled
Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century (1935) and accompanied by the
aforementioned letter. Of this new project, a further development will be
the essays on the poet Charles Baudelaire. However, these are not pub-
lished in the volume—based on a questionable criterion.4
It should be noted, however, that between the various stages of draft-
ing the work there was to remain a thematic continuity and almost none
of the initial reasons will be permanently abandoned, but only reworked in
a different way. All writings dated before 1929 are part of the initial proj-
ect (Passages, Parisian Passages I and II, The Ring of Saturn). These
arcades, which are fragmentary, incomplete, and unpublished, date back
to the period in which Benjamin intended to write with his friend Franz
Hessel a short article for the Berlin magazine Querschnitt; they appear
clearly inspired by his reading of The Parisian Peasant by Luis Aragon. For
the surrealists, Louis Aragon and André Breton, the metropolis is an
enchanted place. With its kaleidoscope of lights and perspectives, its
cacophony of sounds and noises, its masses of stimuli and distractions, the
great city is the place of modern “intoxication.” It is the dreamlike setting
of a magical and mysterious world. Surrendering to its enticements, wan-
dering through the enchanted city in pursuit of desire and distraction—
these and other motifs inspired the Parisian and Nadia. “I walked
therefore intoxicated among a thousand divine concretions,” Louis
Aragon recounts:
4
Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (Espagne and Werner 1994) even denied the auton-
omous value of the manuscript that Rolf Tiedemann called Aufzeichnungen und Materialen,
which constitutes 9/10 of the Arcades Project, on the basis of the argument that these mate-
rials would be nothing more than a “reservoir” from which Benjamin drew for the writings
that were actually completed in the last period of his production, such as the essay on the
work of art, the Theses on the Concept of History and, above all, the book on Baudelaire. The
essays referring to the latter project, therefore, could not be separated from the bulk of the
materials either logically or editorially. This thesis, even in its excessive devaluation of the
documentary material collected by Tiedemann in the Arcades Project, raises the real problem
of the advisability of publishing these materials autonomously. The situation changed radi-
cally in 1981 when Giorgio Agamben, looking through the papers of Georges Bataille at the
Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, happened to find a huge set of Benjamin manuscripts left there
by Bataille’s widow. One of the envelopes (catalogued by the discoverer as the fifth) con-
tained a set of cards and notes referring in various ways to the work on Baudelaire. Combined
with a few other manuscripts found immediately afterward thanks to that first trace, these not
only allowed an adequate reconstruction of the book’s structure, they also shed un-hoped-
for light on the development both of the work and more generally on Benjamin’s whole final
working practice. In 2012 Neri Pozza published an Italian translation of the “missing” parts
of Benjamin’s unfinished Baudelaire book, edited by Giorgio Agamben, Clemens-Carl Härle,
and Barbara Chitussi.
222 V. MELE
It became clear to me that humankind is full of gods, like a sponge immersed

in the open sky. These gods live, attain the apogee of their power, then die,
leaving to other gods their perfumed altars. They are the very principles of
any total transformation. They are the necessity of movement. I was, then,
strolling with intoxication among thousands of divine concretions. I began
to conceive a mythology in motion. It rightly merited the name of modern
mythology. I imagined it by this name. (Aragon 1987, p. 143)
This ecstasy, this mythology, has its own idols, rites, and altars, which
are neither the gods of the past nor natural phenomena. Modern myths do
not arise to deal with the threats of nature, but rather pay homage to the
creations of humanity: goods, buildings, and machines. This is how
Aragon describes one of these modern myths, the oil pump:
Painted brightly with English or invented names, possessing just one long,
supple arm, a luminous faceless head, a single foot and a numbered wheel in
the belly, the petrol pumps sometimes take on the appearance of the divini-
ties of Egypt or of those cannibal tribes which worship war and war alone.
O Texaco motor oil, Esso, Shell, great inscriptions of human potentiality,
soon shall we cross ourselves before your fountains, and the youngest among
us will perish from having contemplated their nymphs in naphtha.
(Ibid., p. 132)
Aragon’s book takes its cue from the imminent disappearance of the
famous Passage de l’Opéra, threatened by Baron Haussmann’s pickax, to
evoke these places as the secret repositories of modern mythology. In his
study of the history of the arcade as an architectural form, Johann
Geist writes:
From antiquity to the eighteenth century there was a wide variety of struc-
tures seemingly related to the arcade. However, one must not conclude that
they were its immediate predecessors. The arcade remains as an invention
which responded to the specific needs and desires of a society in a specific era
of its cultural and industrial development—namely, the need for a public
space protected from traffic and weather and the search for new means of
marketing the products of a blossoming luxury goods industry. (Geist
1985, p. 12)
While the arcade’s appeal to customers was rapidly diminishing, its

appeal to surrealists was growing. Weakly illuminated, with “sunless
corridors,” the arcade took on a somber, mysterious quality for Aragon.

The arcades form “human aquariums,” illuminated by “a glaucous gleam
filtered through deep water” (Aragon 1987, p. 28). As a memory of a lost
era, this twilight world is the perfect setting for Aragon’s mythologie mod-
erne. Aragon’s description:
Although the life that originally quickened them has drained away, they
deserve, nevertheless, to be regarded as the secret repositories of several
modern myths: it is only today, when the pick-axe menaces them, that they
have at last become the true sanctuaries of a cult of the ephemeral, the
ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions. Places that were
incomprehensible yesterday, and that tomorrow will never know. (Ibid.,
pp. 28–29)
Inspired by the work of the Surrealist writer, Benjamin wanted to tell a

“fairy tale” (translation of the German Feerie)5 materialistically inspired in
which the century that had just passed appeared as if immersed in an
atmosphere of dream and desire; this fairy tale, however, had to be “dia-
lectical” in that it was historically based and permeated with a critical-
negative intent toward the kitsch of the city that he intended to represent
in this way. Benjamin wanted to accomplish this by obeying the most
intimate imperative of his thought: namely, to renounce any abstract cat-
egory or theorization. The stated purpose of this surrealistic fable was, as
revealed in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, “to attain the most
extreme concreteness for an era, as it occasionally manifested itself in chil-
dren’s games, a building, or a real-life situation” (Benjamin 1994 [1929],
p. 348). However, Benjamin perceived as a threat the excessive proximity
of his own work with that of Aragon. In his Notes and Materials he states:
Delimitation of the tendency of this project with respect to Aragon: whereas

Aragon persists within the realm of dream, here the concern is to find the
constellation of awakening. While in Aragon there remains an impressionis-
tic element namely the “mythology”, […] here it is a question of the
5
The word Feerie in French can mean both a marvelous spectacle and a fairy tale. In the
context of nineteenth-century Paris, as has been observed, it designated a particular type of
theatrical performance in which, by virtue of rudimentary technical devices, supernatural
agents seemed to intervene (see Cohen 1993, p. 255). Cohen’s study is certainly one of the
most detailed dedicated to the “surrealist” face of the Arcades Project.
224 V. MELE
issolution of “mythology” into the space of history. (Benjamin 2002

d
[1982], p. 458)
In the dream world of the metropolis, Benjamin thus conceptualizes

the overcoming of the mythology of modernity by introducing the motif
of “awakening” as an actualization of the critical potential of myth in the
field of history. The meeting with Adorno and Horkheimer in September–
October 1929 in Königstein, Switzerland, proved decisive in rethinking
his original perspective. According to Gretel Adorno’s testimony, Benjamin
read to them excerpts of the work he had already completed, and the dis-
cussion that followed with his enthusiastic interlocutors contributed to
broadening and transforming the theoretical horizons of the project.
A letter to Scholem from January 1930 provides a clear glimpse of the
character of this transformation:
Let me therefore limit myself to noting that I intend to pursue the project
on a different level than I had previously planned. Up till now, I have been
held back, on the one hand, by the problem of documentation and, on the
other hand, by that of metaphysics. I now see that I will at least need to
study [some aspects of Hegel and some parts of Marx’s Capital to get any-
where and to provide a solid scaffolding for my work. It now seems a cer-
tainty that, for this book as well as for the Trauerspiel book, an introduction
that discusses epistemology is necessary—especially for this book, a discus-
sion of the theory of historical knowledge. (Benjamin 1994 [1930], p. 358)
We then enter the second phase of the work. In Benjamin’s words, “the
rhapsodic naivety” that characterized the early writings seemed to be over
once and for all. The declared intention was therefore to endow the work
with a well-founded and autonomous “theory of historical knowledge”
with respect to the rest of the work, according to the model of the
“Gnoseological premise” (Erkenntniskritische Vorrede) that opens the
book on Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928).
However, at the very moment when the internal difficulties seemed to
have been put aside, the external ones became pressing and negative. We
are in the years of the consolidation and rise of National Socialism in
Germany, which for Benjamin, a Jewish intellectual and Marxist, could
certainly not be favorable. In addition, he led a precarious existence due to
the failure of his academic career plan and was forced to earn a living as a
journalist and radio collaborator.
Between 1931 and 1934 Benjamin spent most of his life abroad (in
Spain, Italy, Denmark with Bertolt Brecht), and the work on the book
marks a definite slowdown. But it is at the beginning of 1934 that the
external event occurs that gives a further turning point for the project:
Benjamin is forced into exile in Paris:
Here he found himself for the first time, after the long enforced hiatus,
alone in front of his work, with the possibility of drawing on the endless
archives of the Bibliothèque Nationale. The intense research on the social
history materials, however, allowed him to give a “new sense” to the project,
which turned out to be animated by “new and incisive sociological
perspectives”.6 As he states in a letter of the same year to Horkheimer, at this
stage for the first time he begins to have a “clear vision of the book’s struc-
ture.” (Benjamin 1994 [1934], p. 461)
Thus it was that in May 1935, at the request of Friedrich Pollock, dep-
uty director of the Institute, the exposé of the work titled Paris, the Capital
of the Nineteenth Century,7 was published in the “Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung” of the Frankfurt School (then in exile in New York). It
is divided into six chapters, each of which is dedicated to a historical figure
and a particularly significant architectural product of the time: (1) Fourier
or the Arcades; (2) Daguerre or the panoramas; (3) Grandeville or the uni-
versal expositions; (4) Louis-Philippe or the “intérieur”; (5) Baudelaire or
the streets of Paris; (6) Haussmann or the barricades.
As you can see, now the arcades are only one theme among others.
However, they are approached in a new and original way to the specula-
tions of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier. The “impressionism” that
accompanied the early sketches seems effectively overcome, in favor of a
socio-historical framing of the cultural phenomena that Benjamin intended
to investigate. At the center of the research now seems to be a more cir-
cumstantial investigation of the connections between art,8 culture, and
technique in the context of the urban transformations of the nineteenth
6
Respectively, letter to Gretel Adorno of March 1934 and to Theodor Adorno of May
1935 (Benjamin 1994, p. 435 and p. 490).
7
The exposé figured from then on in the Institute’s official program under the title The
Social History of the City of Paris in the 19th Century, providing Benjamin with some form of
economic security, which was nonetheless accompanied by a certain intellectual awe of his
patrons (Tiedemann 1982, p. 1097).
8
The focus of the research was to be the “fate of art in the eighteenth century” (Tiedemann
1982, p. 1151).
226 V. MELE
century. In fact, it was in this period that the first iron and glass construc-
tion materials, photographic techniques, and feuilleton literature came to
light: these products were the “monuments of the bourgeoisie,” on which
Surrealism released its gaze before they were overwhelmed by the inces-
sant change of productive forces. These products, Benjamin asserts, “are
the leftovers of a dream world. The utilization of dream elements in wak-
ing is the exemplary case of dialectical thinking.” The Surrealists’ intuition
of reality as a dream world was thus to be transposed by Benjamin into the
space of history. “Thus, dialectical thinking is the organ of historical awak-
ening” (Benjamin 2002, p. 13): to awaken from the dream of the
nineteenth-century bourgeoisie by bringing its dreamlike contents to con-
sciousness, this was to be the fundamental informing principle of the proj-
ect on Paris as Capital of the 19th Century. The coordinates of this
epistemological turn were to be derived at least in part from Marx, so
much so that in the letter to Adorno accompanying the exposé, Benjamin
manifested his intention to regroup the entire mass of his thought “origi-
nally metaphysically animated” in a space where it would be safe from the
interference of metaphysics itself. As he himself states:
At this stage of things (and, to be sure, at this stage for the first time), I can
calmly look at what may be brought to bear against the work’s method from
the side of orthodox Marxism, for example. Conversely, I believe to be on
solid footing with it in the Marxist discussion à la longue, if only because the
crucial question of the historical image is treated here for the first time in its
full breadth. (Benjamin 1994 [1935], p. 489)
In this affirmation we can also find in nuce the contradictions that

Benjamin’s method would meet, which would later provoke Adorno’s
contestations. In fact, it is not enough to specify the historical framework
so that the “dialectic images,” which were to constitute the fulcrum of
Benjamin’s theory, can be married without contradictions to a conception
that was intended to be close to historical materialism. Adorno will never
fail to point out these shortcomings of Benjamin’s approach and, on sev-
eral occasions, will criticize the excessive “immediacy” of this method with
regard to both literary works subject to criticism and social reality itself.
This criticism will be condensed, in the context of the exchange of letters
about the essay on Baudelaire, in the suggestive and cutting definition of
“wide-eyed presentation of the bare facts” (Benjamin 1994, p. 582).
2.1 The Baudelaire

On the basis of the 1935 exposé, Horkheimer sent Benjamin a letter on
April 3, 1937, in which he asked him to start writing the book from the
chapter on Baudelaire. While it is difficult to reconstruct the textual fabric
of Benjamin’s book on Paris, the chapter devoted to the French poet has
reached us in an almost definitive draft and was partly published in the
“Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.” The overall title of the work (which
would soon turn into a real autonomous book) should have been, in all
probability, Sociological Studies of Baudelaire (Benjamin 1994, p. 574).
Benjamin composed three parts: 1. Das Paris des Second Empire bei
Baudelaire (The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire); 2. Über einige
Motive bei Baudelaire (On Some Motifs in Baudelaire); 3. Zentralpark
(Central Park). The first and second of these were written by Benjamin
and sent to New York between 1938 and 1939. Due to Adorno’s criti-
cism, however, only Some Motifs in Baudelaire was published in the
“Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.” Zentralpark, on the other hand,
remained at a fragmentary stage. The section on Baudelaire is accom-
plished both in terms of its structure and from a stylistic point of view.
There is no doubt that it was to constitute the center of the entire work,
so much so that in a letter Benjamin defines it as a “miniature” (Benjamin
1994, p. 556) of the work on The Arcades. The pages on Baudelaire can
therefore serve as a model for understanding how he would have used the
great mass of notes and quotations of the preparatory materials. During
his work on Baudelaire, Benjamin wrote a second version of the 1935
exposé in French, again at the request of Horkheimer, who hoped to obtain
some funding for the project on arcades from a New York banker.
Compared to the previous version, an Introduction and a Conclusion
appear to be written in a much more lucid style, as well as some thematic
variations. Among the most significant are, on the one hand, the abandon-
ment of the doctrine of “dream images,” which gives way to phantasma-
goria as a key concept; on the other hand, the appearance of the character
of Auguste Blanqui, with his extremely significant work L’éternité par les
astres, which Benjamin had discovered almost by accident. This 1939
report is also important in another respect, namely as evidence of the fact
that Benjamin, even so late in life and struggling with the book on
Baudelaire, continued to devote himself to and extend his outline of work
on the arcades. This seems to disprove the thesis of the two researchers
Michel Espagne and M. Werner about a failed Arcades Project totally
228 V. MELE
absorbed by the work on Baudelaire (see the note 4), also authoritatively
supported by Agamben (Agamben 2016).
2.2 Sad Epilogue

In extremely precarious economic conditions, which denied him a stable
home in Paris, Benjamin continued to work on the book of the Parisian
arcades until 1940.
At the outbreak of war in September 1939, as a foreign citizen of an
enemy country, Benjamin is interned at the Camp des travailleurs volon-
taires near Nevers. At the end of November, it was only thanks to the
intervention of his friends that he was able to leave Paris and due to the
interest of Max Horkheimer from New York, he returned to Paris and
resumed work.
Following the capitulation of France and the Nazi threat at the city’s
gates, Benjamin left Paris and, together with his sister, fled to the south.
In August 1940, he reached Marseille, where, like many other German
emigrants, he tried to leave France (where he met Siegfried Kracauer,
among others, for the last time).9 Having finally obtained a transit visa for
Spain and Portugal, but no exit visa for France, he and a group of refugees
decided to join a clandestine organization in order to illegally cross the
French border into the eastern Pyrenees between Banyuls and Portbou.
But the expedition had a very sad epilogue. After crossing the border
on September 26 and, having reached Portbou, faced with the threat of
the Spanish police to be returned with his companions to the French
authorities, Benjamin took his own life by ingesting a strong dose of
morphine.
The border guards, shocked by the episode, let the rest of the group
pass. They were the last European refugees to pass through Portbou. In
1980, the unexpected testimony of Lisa Fittko, the woman who had
guided Benjamin and his group across the Pyrenees to Spain, not only
made it possible to reconstruct Benjamin’s last journey in detail, but also
revealed a detail of great importance for the book on the arcades. Until
then, it had been thought that the manuscript forming the basis of the
9
The condition of these emigrants, among whom were Jews, writers, and anti-fascists, who
wandered between consulates and shipping companies in the hope of obtaining a visa to get
to safety overseas, is masterfully described by Anna Seghers in her novel Transit (1943), set
in Marseilles in 1940 (Seghers 2013).
published German edition—and that was among those entrusted by

Benjamin to his friend Georges Bataille before his flight from Paris, so that
he could hide them from the Nazis—was the only manuscript of The
Arcades Project. According to Fittko, however, Benjamin carried with him
a large bag containing a manuscript to which he seemed to attach extreme
importance—(“This is my new manuscript. I cannot risk losing it. It is the
manuscript that must be saved. It is more important than I am.”)10 These
statements suggest that it was indeed a further draft, albeit unfinished, of
the work on the arcades. For decades, scholars have tried in vain to recover
these writings, which have probably been irretrievably lost in the confu-
sion of the drama that unfolded among the group of refugees.
3 Dialectics of Seeing?
How to stand in front of a text that is not a text, given its ambiguous and
protean nature of a huge mass of notes?
The most evocative interpretation that can be shared in the context of
this research is that of Susan Buck-Morss, who suggests considering it as a
“map” for the study of the origins of the civilization of mass consumption.
Referring to an aphorism from One-Way Street11 Buck-Morss affirms that,
in The Arcades Project, Benjamin has left us nothing but his “files,” and
this constitutes for us “all the essentials”:
Complaints about the incompleteness of the work are therefore irrelevant. If

he had lived, the notes would not have become superfluous due to the fact
10
From the testimony of Lisa Fittko, reported in Benjamin (2002, p. 984).
11
In One-Way Street, in fact, Benjamin developed some decisive reflections on the transfor-
mation of writing in the modern metropolitan context: “Script—having found, in the book,
a refuge in which it can lead an autonomous existence—is pitilessly dragged out into the
street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic chaos […].
The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an aston-
ishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot
notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production dem-
onstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that
matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar study-
ing it assimilates it into his own card index.)” (SW 1, p. 456). Adorno had also called One-
Way Street “the physiognomic archive of Passagenarbeit” (Adorno 1990, pp. 58–59), and
Benjamin himself spoke of the Arcades project as a continuation of the method inaugurated
there (cf. Tiedemann 1982, p. 1083, letter to Scholem, January 30, 1928, English trans.
Benjamin 1994, p. 322).
230 V. MELE
that they became part of a concluded and complete text. And certainly the
file would have been more substantial. The Arcades Project is what it would
have been: a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collec-
tion of concrete, factual images of urban experience. (Buck-Morss 1986,
p. 99; italics mine)
This interpretation is perhaps excessively hasty with regard to philologi-

cal polemics on the text, but it certainly highlights an essential and
neglected dimension of The Arcades Project: that is, that thanks to
Benjamin’s very accurate study of the most disparate12 sources—ranging
from the history of architecture to the social history of secret sects—its
materials also constitute an original and significant attempt in the direc-
tion of a “social history” of mass culture, which proceeds precisely from
the phenomena that are apparently insignificant or banned from the great
historical “narratives.” In her most important study on The Arcades
Project, which until today represents the most comprehensive study in the
specialist literature on this work, Susan Buck-Morss further develops this
interpretation. She argues that the significance of Benjamin’s work con-
sists of a “critical theory of modernity” which, because it is essentially
grounded in visual experience, can be called a “visual dialectic.”13 The
author’s interpretation focuses on the concept that, on the basis of a read-
ing of the central exposés and Konvolutes of the work, soon appears as the
fulcrum of Benjaminian theory, that of “dialectical image” (dialektisches
Bild). If one considers these chapters carefully, the dialectical image comes
under the guise of a multiplicity of meanings. These will be investigated in
12
The editor reports 850 titles of books, essays, and other sources, including only those
cited in the Aufzeichnungen und Materialen, see Benjamin (1982, pp. 1277–1323).
13
This is perhaps how the title of the book by S. Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing:
Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1989, can be trans-
lated. The interpretative key of the book seems plausible, as well as extremely well founded
on Benjamin’s texts. However, it is necessary to clarify the concept of “image” and “visual
dialectics.” The term Bild, frequently used by Benjamin, in current language can mean both
“metaphor” and “visual representation” in the proper sense. Moreover, as Margaret Cohen
has observed, for Surrealism, “‘image’ designates a form of representation in which the dis-
tinction between verbal and visual, between word and image, tends to disappear: In the
image, Surrealism attempts to approximate representations where unconscious processes are
expressed, even if it understands these processes in psychoanalytically less orthodox terms”
(Cohen 1993, p. 194). It is also clear that the “visual dialectic” or “imaginal” takes on a
complexity that goes beyond the mere “optical” meaning, which is also fundamental in
Benjamin’s texts. On this, see also Pezzella (1986, pp. 517–528) and Baumann (2002).
subsequent chapters. Here we can anticipate that its salient characteristic

is being an image of the past not yet pacified and concluded, still murmur-
ing on in correspondences to the present. Given Benjamin’s interest in
photography, one is inclined to imagine the dialectical image as a snapshot
of the past, capable of grasping exactly the “secret index” (to borrow an
expression of Benjamin’s) that leads it back to the present. Buck-Morss,
further characterizing this concept, then states that: “As an immediate,
quasi-mystical apprehension, the dialectical image was intuitive. As a phil-
osophical “construction,” it was not. Benjamin’s laborious and detailed
study of past texts, his careful inventory of the fragmentary parts he
gleaned from them, and the planned use of these in deliberately con-
structed “constellations” were all sober, self-reflective procedures, which,
he believed, were necessary in order to make visible a picture of truth that
the fictions of conventional history writing covered over” (Buck-Morss
1989, p. 220). From Buck-Morss’s careful study it appears that Benjamin
even wanted to accompany his work with real “images” consisting of
period photos, urban plans, newspaper clippings, caricatures, and so on,
and that in this regard he had collected a substantial album. Hence Buck-
Morss’s politically inspired main thesis: “The Passagen-Werk is a double
text. Ostensibly a social and cultural history of Paris in the nineteenth
century, it is in fact intended to provide a political education for Benjamin’s
own generation. It is an “ur-history,” a history of the origins of that pres-
ent historical moment which, while remaining largely invisible, is the
determining motivation for Benjamin’s interest in the past” (Buck-Morss
1989, p. 47). What Benjamin intended to write was a history of the ori-
gins of his own epoch—the twentieth century—in the moment when he
saw it properly facing the “catastrophe” of Stalinism and Nazism. It there-
fore becomes clear that The Arcades Project should have been a text on
social and cultural history of the nineteenth century conceived “surrealis-
tically,” as a mime of metropolitan reality. Chocs, collisions, intense and
fleeting images should have assailed the reader in the same way as they are
absorbed by the passer-by crossing the crowded streets of a city. But if it is
true that, as Benjamin himself stated, “The description of confusion is not
the same as a confused description” (SW 4, p. 169), then the meaning of
these images was anything but accidental: the aim was a circumstantial
reconnaissance of the “origins” of mass society, at the moment when it
was plunging into the nightmare of fascism. The Arcades Project is there-
fore a metropolis made text: the only way to penetrate it is to cross it with
the same curiosity and lack of a precise destination as the flâneur. The
232 V. MELE
character of this work is that of a collection of objects, of singular images,

of quotations from which the sense of the entire era can be drawn.
4 “Prehistory” of The Arcades Project: Naples,

Moscow, Berlin
The Paris of the Arcades, the Surrealists and Baudelaire is not Benjamin’s
only form of experience of the metropolis. In his other metropolitan writ-
ings—before the late essays on Baudelaire—Benjamin considers the city in
a quite different way. In 1929 in a review of Franz Hessel’s book Spazieren
in Berlin (On Foot in Berlin) Benjamin makes a very insightful reflection
on the difference between the city portraits of foreigners and those of
natives. Trying to explain why the latter are much less common than the
former he writes: “the superficial pretext—the exotic and the pictur-
esque—appeals only to the outsider. To depict a city as a native would calls
for other, deeper motives—the motives of the person who journeys into
the past, rather than to foreign parts” (SW 2, p. 262). As Peter Szondi
suggests, it is therefore natural to read Benjamin’s city portraits in light of
this statement (Szondi 1986, p. 133). However, on a first reading of the
essays on Naples (1925), Moscow (1927) and in view of his planned book
on Berlin childhood, two things become immediately clear. While
Benjamin’s consideration fully captures the book on Berlin he intended to
write at that time, his assessment of foreign cities hardly applies to the
essays he had already produced. The motives found in the latter differ little
from those found in the memoir. Rather, it appears that in his portraits of
foreign cities Benjamin intends to demonstrate the shallowness of the dis-
tinction made on the basis of the author’s place of birth. In both cases,
therefore, it is a search—in the style of Proust—for an individual as well as
a collective lost time. The city, be it the Berlin of his childhood or foreign
cities, becomes the locus of the search for the experience that for Baudelaire
presented itself as inexorably lost. As Cacciari has observed, “Benjamin’s
Recherche is entirely aimed at asserting the value of the synthesis between
Erleben and Gemeinschaft—at demonstrating that true Erleben is possible
only where the values of community assert themselves in the city as an
organism. […] Moscow, Naples, Marseilles are unaware of Baudelaire, just
as Simmel’s Rome and Florence are unaware of the Metropolitan Geist”
(Cacciari 1993, pp. 91–92). The Recherche, albeit in a different sense from
that intended by Marcel Proust, constitutes the main feature of Benjamin’s
City Portraits (in German more expressively Städtebilder, “City Images”).

The metropolis becomes in them “childhood,” the source of a regimented
experience, as opposed to the “poor,” intellect-dominated experience that
Simmel had so effectively described.
As Susan Buck-Morss has rightly pointed out, Benjamin’s metropolitan
writings can be placed in a spatial pattern, symbolically arranged at each of
the four cardinal points:
To the West is Paris, the origin of bourgeois society in the political-

revolutionary sense; to the East, Moscow in the same sense marks its end.
To the South, Naples locates the Mediterranean origins, the myth-
enshrouded childhood of Western civilization; to the North, Berlin locates
the myth-enshrouded childhood of the author himself. (Buck-Morss
1989, p. 25)
4.1 Naples
The brief portrait of the Italian city, which arose in the context of the
author’s stay in Capri in the summer of 1924, is particularly significant for
understanding the significance of Benjamin’s Recherche. As Peter Szondi
has penetratingly affirmed in his afterword to the edition of the Städtebilder,
the fundamental intention of Benjamin’s Neapolitan essay is of an essen-
tially historical-sociological nature: “he is seeking a way out of sclerotic
late bourgeois society, enslaved to the principle of individualization, back
to the lost origin of the social itself” (Szondi 1986, p. 4, English trans.
modif.). Naples in Benjamin’s eyes reveals precisely what in Baudelaire’s
Paris and in the metropolis of the blasé has “atrophied”: the exuberance in
the streets, the chaos of commerce, the playful instinct of the inhabitants,
the exchange between private and collective dimensions, the “rich” dimen-
sion of time as opposed to the spleen and boredom that characterizes
metropolitan life. Naples constitutes the antithesis of the metropolitan
spirit; it is properly an anti-metropolis.
Strange as it may seem, the place where Benjamin discovered The
Arcades as an extremely significant architectural form was not Paris, but
Naples. In fact, in the summer of 1924 Benjamin was on Capri, as the
guest of Berlin friends, with the intention of finding an environment con-
ducive to the writing of his teaching qualification work on “German
Baroque Drama” (Trauerspiel). However, Benjamin’s stay on Capri did
not provide him with the “bourgeois routine so indispensable to the
234 V. MELE
completion of any work,” as he revealed to his friend Gershom Scholem,

but with the opportunity to meet a decisive figure in the course of his life:
the Russian communist actress Asja Lacis. It was with Asja, with whom he
fell madly in love, that Benjamin visited the cities of Naples and Moscow,
to which the two splendid essays we will now examine are dedicated. As
we have already mentioned at the beginning, the article on Naples is
important for The Arcades Project not only because it is dedicated to the
description of a metropolis, but also because of a series of themes and
ideas that will be literally taken up in the writings on Paris, as well as for
the particular literary style (very much in keeping with the metropolitan
reality) that Benjamin inaugurates. It was precisely in Naples that Benjamin
first experienced the arcade, as a “phantasmagorical” exhibition of goods
in a place of transit in the very heart of the metropolis. This happens pre-
cisely in the gallery of Via Toledo:
Blissful confusion in the storehouses! For here they are still one with the
vendors’ stalls: they are bazaars. The long passageway is favored. In a glass—
roofed one, there is a toyshop (in which perfume and liqueur glasses are also
on sale) that would hold its own beside fairy-tale galleries. Like a gallery,
too, is the main street of Naples, the Toledo. Its traffic is among the densest
on earth. On either side of this narrow alley, all that has come together in
the harbor city lies insolently, crudely, seductively displayed. (Benjamin
1996b [1924], p. 419)
Here we find a series of motifs that also constitute the central inspira-
tion of The Arcades Project. The passage is a tunnel through which the
underground, visceral part of the city comes to light. In it, merchandise is
the mistress, which contrary to common sense presents itself in anything
but a cold and rational guise: rather, it assumes the seductive, mythical
characters that are appropriate to the place. Moreover, it is necessary to
note that the market of Via Toledo assumes the allegorical meaning of an
interpretative key of the whole city of Naples, because in it the tensions
and the characteristics of the city take shape, characterized by the mixture
of old and new, of archaic and modern. All of this, however, is expressed
in the central image of Benjamin’s portrait of Naples: the porosity14 that

pervades the life of the city, its cultural forms as well as its social life:
In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theater of new, unfore-

seen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided. No situation
appears intended forever, no figure asserts it “thus and not otherwise.”
(ibid., p. 416)
In the Mediterranean city, the traditional boundaries of modern bour-

geois Zivilisation have not yet been established: the distinction between
work and leisure, personal and collective still lie at a stage of indistinction,
of indefiniteness. In it, the sharp boundaries between public and private
space proper to the Nordic metropolitan spirit, described by Simmel
through the figure of “reserve,” are not yet drawn:
Just as the living room reappears on the street, with chairs, hearth, and altar,
so—only much more loudly—the street migrates into the living room. Even
the poorest one is as full of wax candles, biscuit saints, sheaves of photos on
the wall, and iron bedsteads as the street is of carts, people, and lights.
Poverty has brought about a stretching of frontiers that mirrors the most
radiant freedom of thought. There is no hour, often no place, for sleeping
and eating. (ibid., p. 420)
The very relationship with the city cannot be rational, Cartesian, geo-
metric. It automatically invites one to get lost; it naturally arises as a form
of labyrinth. To orient oneself in it one must rediscover faculties that the
modern metropolitan citizen seemed to have forgotten: the ability to insti-
tute similarities, touch, even sniffing. Maps and guidebooks are of no use.:
“no one orients himself by house numbers. Shops, wells, and churches are
the reference points—and not always simple ones” (ibid., p. 416).
The spatial anarchy of the city is exemplarily illustrated by the Neapolitan
bedroom. It seems to be tailor-made to contradict the privacy on which
the division of urban spaces proper to the Western city model is based:
14
Porosity is “the inexhaustible law of this city’s life, reappearing in every place” (Gilloch
1996, p. 189). With this term Benjamin describes a characteristic form of social, spatial, and
temporal organization. Porosity refers to a lack of clear boundaries between phenomena, to
the permeability of each thing with the other: old and new, public and private, sacred and
profane, are concepts that cannot be clearly distinguished in Naples.
236 V. MELE
How could anyone sleep in such rooms? To be sure, there are beds—as
many as the room will hold. But even if there are six or seven, there are often
more than twice as many occupants. For this reason, one sees children late
at–night at twelve, even at two—still in the streets. At midday they then lie
sleeping behind a shop counter or on a stairway. This sleep, which men and
women also snatch in shady corners, is thus not the protected northern
sleep. Here, too, there is interpenetration of day and night, noise and peace,
outer light and inner darkness, street and home. (ibid., p. 420)
The Mediterranean forms of Naples, unlike the northern ones, do not

know tragedy. Life flows through them without finding an obstacle to it.
Porosity is for Benjamin the exact opposite of the formal rationality repre-
sented, in Simmel, by the forms of the monetary economy. Benjamin’s
portrait might appear naïve and ultimately sketchy.15 However, if we were
to stop at the problem of its actual correspondence with the historical and
social reality it is intended to represent, we would end up failing to under-
stand its meaning in the context of the Recherche that its author wanted
to carry out. Indeed, it is important to grasp the utopian significance that
the Neapolitan “forms” assume in the overall economy of Benjamin’s
thought. The porosity of that urban life, its exuberance and chaotic variety
become for Benjamin the characteristics of socialism, of revolution.
4.2 Moscow
This becomes evident in another metropolitan portrait, a little later and
closely related to the Neapolitan one: the account of the trip to Moscow
(1927). Here, too, Benjamin is accompanied by Asja Lacis, who acts as his
guide in the heroic experience of NEP (New Economic Policy), in the
Russia that has passed from revolution to wartime communism. And the
portrait of Moscow is exactly a “Neapolitan” portrait. The Mediterranean
origin of Western civilization and its (possible) revolutionary future are
reunited, according to what will be icastically stated in an epigraph to
Theses on the Concept of History, Benjamin’s 1940 philosophical-political
testament: “the origin is the goal.” The experiment begun in Naples, of
15
Gilloch observes: “an incisive, sustained critical engagement with the socio-economic
and political forces at work is conspicuously lacking. Benjamin’s analysis severs the city from
its wider context. Naples appears as an island, a separate, disconnected entity. At the time of
Benjamin’s visit, Mussolini was in power in Italy, and the Fascist state was in the process of
construction; yet these factors are completely overlooked” (Gilloch 1996, p. 35).
giving literary form to urban experience, is continued and developed in

Moscow. In particular, the methodological prescriptions experimented
with in the first essay are explicitly formulated in several letters following
Benjamin’s visit to Moscow. In a letter to Siegfried Kracauer, dated
February 23, 1927, Benjamin wrote about his planned essay: “I intend to
write something ‘comprehensive’ about Moscow. But as is often the case
with me, this will be broken down into small, disparate notes and for the
most part, the reader will be left alone with himself” (Benjamin 1966
[1927], p. 213). On the same day he wrote to his friend Martin Buber,
who had partially financed his trip by commissioning him to write an
account of his impressions of post-revolutionary Moscow for his newspa-
per Die Kreatur:
My presentation will be devoid of all theory. I hope I will succeed in allow-

ing what is “creatural” to speak for itself, to the extent that I will have suc-
ceeded in comprehending and seizing this very new and disorienting
language that loudly echoes through the acoustic mask of an entirely trans-
formed environment. I intend to present a picture of the city of Moscow as
it is at this very moment. In this picture, “all factuality is already theory” and
therefore it refrains from any deductive abstraction, any prognostication,
and, within certain bounds, even any judgment. (Benjamin 1994
[1927], p. 313)
Here in Moscow, as in Naples, the absence of objective temporality and

spatiality fundamentally characterizes the spirit of the city:
A feeling for the value of time, notwithstanding all “rationalization,” is not

met with even in the capital of Russia. Trud, the trade-union institute for the
study of work, under its director, Gastiev, launched a poster campaign for
punctuality. From earliest times a large number of clockmakers have been
settled in Moscow. Like medieval guilds, they are crowded in particular
streets, on the Kuznetsky Bridge, on Ulitsa Gertsena. One wonders who
actually needs them. “Time is money”-for this astonishing statement posters
claim the authority of Lenin, so alien is the idea to the Russians. (Benjamin
1996a [1927], p. 31)
Benjamin tells a tasty anecdote to describe the Muscovites’ conception

of the lived experience of the time:
238 V. MELE
This elicited from the Schweizar—as hotel porters are called here—the fol-
lowing Shakespearean monologue: “If we think of it we shall wake you, but
if we do not think of it we shall not wake you. Actually we usually do think
of it, and then we wake people. But to be sure, we also forget sometimes
when we do not think of it. Then we do not wake people. We are under no
obligation, of course, but if it crosses our mind, we do it. When do you want
to be wakened? At seven? Then we shall write that down. You see, I am put-
ting the message there where he will find it. Of course, if he does not find it,
then he will not wake you. But usually we do wake people.” (ibid., p. 32)
Time for Muscovites living in that continuous state of urban intoxica-

tion is rendered truly duration, according to what was the metaphysical
conception of Simmel and Bergson: “each hour superabundant, each day
exhausting, each life a moment” (ibid.). It is the social situation itself that
makes time totally subjective: barter in place of monetary economy, the
organizational mishaps of bureaucracy, the games and performances in the
streets. Indeed, the city is very frequently the site of film sets. It may hap-
pen then, Benjamin recounts, that the inhabitants find themselves involved
in the role of extras and arrive at work dazed and excited. Art and life
mingle in a dynamic and intoxicating mixture:
Each thought, each day, each life lies here as on a laboratory table. And as if
it were a metal from which an unknown substance is by every means to be
extracted, it must endure experimentation to the point of exhaustion. No
organism, no organization, can escape this process. Employees in their fac-
tories, offices in buildings, pieces of furniture in apartments are rearranged,
transferred, and shoved about. New ceremonies for christening and mar-
riage are presented in the clubs, as if the clubs were research institutes.
Regulations are changed from day to day, but streetcar stops migrate, too.
Shops turn into restaurants and a few weeks later into offices. (ibid.,
pp. 28–29)
While this conception of time that Benjamin calls Asian prevails in

Moscow, the lived experience of space is as “porous” as in Naples, albeit
because of different social and natural factors. The snowy city is dazzling,
a space in which it is difficult to orient oneself. Like Naples, Moscow pres-
ents itself as a labyrinth, a mythological symbol that is ubiquitous in the
fragments on the Paris Galleries Project:
[T]he city turns into a labyrinth for the newcomer. Streets that he had
located far apart are yoked together by a corner, like a pair of horses reined
in a coachman’s fist. The whole exciting sequence of topographical decep-
tions to which he falls prey could be shown only by a film: the city is on its
guard against him, masks itself, flees, intrigues, lures him to wander its cir-
cles to the point of exhaustion. (ibid., p. 24)
The face of the city is chaotic, amorphous, and dispersive. Moscow is an

architectural thicket, indistinct, devoid of monuments and memorable
buildings. The typical feature of Moscow is that it does not appear to be a
large metropolis. Instead of monumental buildings, the typical architec-
ture is represented by one- or two-story buildings. Instead of a concen-
trated and distinguishable urban center Moscow consists rather of a vast
and amorphous conglomerate compressed of rather low structures. These
rural rather than urban peculiarities represent the key element in Benjamin’s
physiognomic reading of Moscow. It is the paradox that reveals the
authentic character of the city. Moscow remained in reality a “gigantic vil-
lage” (ibid., p. 33) inhabited by a “peasant population” (ibid.). Benjamin
observes: “in the streets of Moscow there is a curious state of affairs: the
Russian village is playing hide-and-seek in them” (ibid., p. 41). In a similar
way that in Naples, the archaic coexists with the modern but rather than a
hybridization in this case there is a juxtaposition: “in the suburban streets
leading off the broad avenues, peasant huts alternate with Art Nouveau
villas or with sober façades of eight-story blocks” (ibid., p. 42). Peasant
dwellings and bourgeois modernist architecture coexist side by side.
Tradition, the avant-garde and collectivist architecture cohabit in this
strange coexistence of archaic and revolutionary represented by Moscow.
Similarly in Naples, here too the foreigner is immediately placed in a
“childish” condition: he must learn to walk again, for as soon as he leaves
the station he is faced with the city paved with ice.
The city seems already to deliver itself at the train station. Kiosks, arc lamps,
buildings crystallize into figures that will never return. Yet this impression is
dispelled as soon as I seek words. I must be on my way …. At first there is
nothing to be seen but snow, the dirty snow that has already installed itself,
and the clean slowly moving up behind. The instant you arrive, the child-
hood stage begins. On the thick sheet ice of the streets, walking has to be
relearned. The jungle of houses is so impenetrable that only brilliance strikes
the eye. (ibid., p. 23)
240 V. MELE
“Childish” is also the perspective from which Muscovites generally

observe their city, which has none of the fixity and predictability of Western
traffic chaos: they move mostly on snow sleds:
Moscow in winter is a quiet city. The immense bustle on the streets takes
place softly. This is because of the snow, but also because the traffic is behind
the times. Car horns dominate the orchestra of great cities. But in Moscow
there are only a few cars. They are used only for weddings and funerals and
for accelerated governing. True, in the evening they switch on brighter
lights than are permitted in any other great city. And the cones of light they
project are so dazzling that anyone caught in them stands helplessly rooted
to the spot. In the blinding light before the Kremlin gate, the guards stand
in their brazen ocher furs. Above them shines the red signal that regulates
the traffic passing through the gate. All the colors of Moscow converge
prismatically here, at the center of Russian power. Beams of excessive bril-
liance from the car headlights race through the darkness. The horses of the
cavalry, which has a large drill ground in the Kremlin, shy in their light.
Pedestrians force their way between cars and unruly horses. Long rows of
sleighs haul snow away. Single horsemen. Silent swarms of ravens have set-
tled in the snow. The eye is infinitely busier than the ear. (ibid., p. 24)
Neapolitan are the ubiquitous children in the streets, the chaotic nature
of commerce, the exuberance of the inhabitants:
In the street scene of any proletarian neighborhood, the children are impor-
tant. They are more numerous there than in other districts, and move more
purposefully and busily. Moscow swarms with children everywhere. Even
among them there is a Communist hierarchy. The “Komsomoltsy,” as the
eldest, are at the top. They have their clubs in every town and are really
trained as the next generation of the party. The younger children become-at
six-“Pioneers.” They, too, are united in clubs, and wear a red tie as a proud
distinction. Last, “Octobrists” (Oktyabr)—or “Wolves”—is the name given
to little babies from the moment they are able to point to the picture of
Lenin. (ibid., p. 26)
Moscow’s “Neapolitan” summer, however, does not last forever. The

revolutionary “game” comes to an end with Nep. Already Benjamin,
reporting the omnipresence of Lenin’s portraits in the city, seems to fore-
shadow the shadow of Stalinist bureaucratization. Chronologically then,
the city images of Naples and Moscow prepare for the autobiographical
essays of Berlin and, above all, nineteenth-century Paris Capital and
Baudelaire’s allegorical metropolis. Here this “childhood” that character-

izes urban life can only be the subject of Recherche in the inexorably
lost past.
Benjamin’s collection of metropolitan texts is not coincidentally titled
Denkbilder. In fact, they constitute neither simple urban descriptions nor
merely collections of aphorisms. The basic principles of Denkbilder find
their formal expression in the following two excerpts. In particular,
Adorno pointed out that the Denkbild—a neologism that comes from
Dutch—is not really a goddess (a term that is synonymous with it), a men-
tal representation, but rather a “figurative enigma,” an “allegorical exor-
cism of the inexpressible” (Adorno 1990, p. 56). What Benjamin intended
to put into practice, in a completely changed context, was thus a re-
actualization of the allegorical practice he had studied in his work on
German Baroque drama. In the dramas of the time, natural images—the
dog, the stone, the cypress—were to represent ideas emblematically. In a
similar way Benjamin turns to the objects and images of the modern
metropole. Thus, the Denkbild that goes by the title Filling Station
expresses important considerations about the necessary political role of
the letter. Gloves, on the other hand, become the emblem of the (problem-
atic) relationship of Western humanity with its own animality. Some of the
titles refer directly to store signs (Optician, Hardware, Stamp Shop,
Watchmaker and Jeweler, Antiques); others, instead, to typically urban
signs and notices (This Space for Rent, Construction Site, Caution: Steps,
Closed for Alterations, Fire Alarm). The form of allegorical expression,
through enigmatic objects and images, extrapolated from their natural
context, spectral, allows Benjamin to represent in a tangible way the expe-
rience of a world, that of Berlin in the twenties, which appeared to him in
fragments, destined toward an inexorable decline. The Denkbilder, Adorno
rightly affirms, “do not so much want to put a brake on conceptual
thought as to shock through their enigmatic form and thereby set thought
in motion, given that, in its traditional conceptual form, it seems to have
shrunk, become conventional and aged” (ibid.). Susan Buck-Morss sharply
notes that in the essay on Naples, “Rather, hardly noticeable to the reader,
an experiment is underway, how images, gathered by a person walking the
streets of a city, can be interpreted against the grain of idealist literary
style” (Buck-Morss 1989, p. 27). This experiment in representing the city
would culminate in The Arcades Project. The effect of technology on both
work and idleness in the modern metropolis has been one of fragmenta-
tion of experience, and this “journalistic” style reflects this fragmentation.
242 V. MELE
Naples is thus an attempt to capture the fleeting, contingent character of

social life in a series of images. Gilloch defines Denkbilder in this way:
Denkbilder (literally, “thought pictures,” ed.) are a form of “snapshots, liter-

ary snapshots,” the purpose of which is to freeze and capture the momen-
tary, fragmentary minutiae of mundane urban existence. Their shortcoming
lies in their theme-less “factuality” and lack of historical context. (Gilloch
1996, p. 35)
In later urban representations, this fascination with the ephemeral and

marginal would be replaced by the concept of the “monad” (in which the
universal is discernible in the context of the particular) and the “dialectical
image” (in which the historical object comes to be in the momentary
intersection of past and present). The Denkbilder are therefore “snap-
shots” of urban life, which allow the phenomena to reveal themselves
without overwhelming theoretical construction. The “mute (metropoli-
tan) nature” comes to speak “for itself” in the silence granted by the
absence of commentary. From this aspect they clearly prefigure the collec-
tion and use of quotations in The Arcades Project.
4.3 Berlin
Berlin Childhood Around 1900 (written after 1930) differs in one crucial
respect from the book it most closely resembles (Szondi 1986) and which
Benjamin had translated into German: Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of
Things Past. Benjamin’s book is not so much devoted to memory as such
but to a special feature of it that is expressed by the author in One-Way
Street: “Like ultraviolet rays, memory shows to each man in the book of
life a script that invisibly and prophetically glosses the text” (Benjamin
1996c [1928], p. 487). The gaze of the adult does not wish to merge with
that of the child. It is directed toward those moments when the future first
announced itself to the child. In Berlin Childhood Benjamin describes this
experience:
[T]he shock with which a word makes us pull up short, like a muff that
someone has forgotten in our room. Just as the latter points us to a stranger
who was on the premises, so there are words or pauses pointing us to that
invisible stranger-the future-which forgot them at our place. (Benjamin
2006 [1930], p. 390)
Everywhere in the city, in the streets as in the parks, the book on Berlin
deals with this shock, whose memory is preserved by the child as long as
the adult can decipher it. Therefore, the Tiergarten is not only a play-
ground but also the place where the child “first grasped, never to forget it,
what only later came [to him] as a word: love.” Unlike Proust, Benjamin
does not escape the future. On the contrary he seeks it in the emotional
resonance of some childhood experiences than if he were hibernating.
“His ‘lost time’ is not the past but the future” (Szondi 1986, p. 135). The
Berlin of Benjamin’s childhood thus has its commercial galleries, its flâ-
neurs, prostitutes, phantasmagorical goods, and sandwich men. As Susan
Buck-Morss has noted (Buck-Morss 1986, p. 134), all the elements that
are central to the project on the arcades are contained in a passage from
Benjamin’s Berlin memoirs, titled Beggars and Whores:
During my childhood I was a prisoner of Berlin’s Old West and New West.
My clan, in those days, inhabited these two districts. They dwelt there in a
frame of mind compounded of obstinacy and self-satisfaction, an attitude
that transformed these neighborhoods into a ghetto (which they regarded
as their fiefdom). I was enclosed within this well-to-do quarter without
knowing of any other. The poor-as far as wealthy children my age were
concerned-existed only as beggars. And it was a great advance in knowledge
when, for the first time, I recognized poverty in the ignominy of poorly paid
work. I’m thinking here of a little piece of writing, perhaps the first I com
posed entirely for myself. It had to do with a man who distributes leaflets,
and with the humiliations he suffers on encountering a public that has no
interest in his literature. So the poor man (this was how I ended it) secretly
jettisons the whole pack of leaflets. Certainly the least promising solution to
the problem. But at that time, I could imagine no other form of revolt than
sabotage-something rooted, naturally, in my own personal experience, and
to which I had recourse whenever I sought escape from my mother. Usually,
it was on those occasions when she was out “running errands,” and when
my impenitent self-will would often drive her to the edge of despair. I had,
in fact, formed the habit of always lagging a half-step behind her. It was as if
I were determined never to form a united front with anyone, not even my
own mother. How much, after all, I owed to this dreamy recalcitrance-
which came to the fore during our walks together through the city-was
something I became aware of only later, when the urban labyrinth opened
up to the sex drive. The latter, however, with its first fumbling stabs, sought
out not so much the body as the whole abandoned psyche, whose wings
shimmered dully in the dubious light of a gas lamp or, not yet unfolded,
slept beneath the downy covering that enveloped the psyche like a cocoon.
244 V. MELE
It was then that I would benefit from a gaze which seemed to register
scarcely a third of what it actually took in. Yet even in those far-off days,
when my mother used to scold me for my contrariness and my indolent
dawdling, I obscurely sensed the possibility of eventually escaping her con-
trol with the help of these streets, in which I seemed to have such difficulty
finding my way. At any rate, there could be no doubt that an idea (unfortu-
nately, an illusory idea) of repudiating my mother, those like her, and the
social class to which we both belonged was at the bottom of that unparal-
leled excitement which drove me to accost a whore in the street. It could
take hours before I made my move. The horror I felt in doing so was no
different from that which would have filled me in the presence of an autom-
aton requiring merely a question to be set in motion. And so I cast my voice
into the slot. The blood was singing in my ears at that point, and I could not
catch the words that fell from the thickly painted lips. I fled the scene. But
how many times that night did I repeat the mad routine? When I finally
came to a halt beneath an entranceway, sometimes practically at dawn, I had
hopelessly ensnared myself in the asphalt meshes of the street, and it was not
the cleanest of hands that disentangled me. (Benjamin 2006, pp. 404–405)16
For Benjamin, the bourgeois child experiences the city as a strictly

demarcated and limited space. The city is divided by invisible walls, imper-
ceptible boundaries and thresholds into permitted and forbidden zones
that the child does not know but would like to cross but is not allowed to.
The primary experience of the bourgeois child in the city is that of being
confined to a territory determined by class and in particular to the dreary
family apartment, the bourgeois interior. The critique of the interior is thus
a fundamental theme in Benjamin’s various writings on Berlin as it will be
in The Arcades Project. In The Arcades Project the interior emerges as the
intérieur of Louis-Philippe, the bourgeois king; in Berlin Childhood the
interior emerges the prison-place of the erotic, where sexuality is confined
and transposed on to objects. Therefore, it seems to Benjamin a partially
subversive act to emancipate himself from his mother’s domination and
approach a prostitute in public space. The “dialectical images” that consti-
tutes the urban world of The Arcades Project can be read in two ways: “as
the childhood of the bourgeois culture, and as the culture of the bour-
geois child” (ibid., p. 135).
This passage is from the 1932–1934 version.

16
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CHAPTER 8
Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Knowledge
[A] mode of historical science which fashions its object not out of a
tangle of mere facticities but out of the numbered group of threads
representing the woof of a past fed into the warp of the present.
—Benjamin 2006a [1937], p. 269
1 Critique as Mortification

Benjamin takes his first steps in the same academic environment where
Simmel was an influential and well-known intellectual, albeit with a noto-
riously unfortunate academic career that only made him a professor in
1918 (the same year as his death). Benjamin’s direct involvement with
Simmel’s writings is well documented by Mičko’s study (Mičko 2010,
pp. 23–50), and it is certain that he attended Simmel’s courses in Berlin
(L. Ludwig, Erinnerung an Simmel, in Gassen and Landmann 1958,
p. 151; Eiland and Jennings 2014, p. 49). However, this is relatively inci-
dental for understanding the similitudes of their thoughts (in
Schopenhauer’s sense). A valid basis for a comparison is offered by the
unique way in which Benjamin—similar to Simmel but with an unprece-
dented radicalism—firstly absorbed and later reacted to the hegemony of

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248 V. MELE
neo-Kantianism.1 More specifically, for the young Benjamin philosophy is

of crucial importance as a “theory of knowledge” (Erkenntnistheorie)
and—consequently—to elaborate a new concept of experience. In the
important writing that testifies to his philosophical research for the future
“On the Program of the Coming Philosophy” (1917), Benjamin stated
that “philosophy always inquires about knowledge” (Benjamin 1996a
[1917], p. 109). On this basis, he went so far as to declare that “all phi-
losophy is thus theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie), but just that—a
theory, critical and dogmatic, of all knowledge” (ibid., p. 108). As in
Simmel’s early works, there is a considerable insistence on the
Erkenntnistheorie theme that characterizes Benjamin’s programmatic
statements, whether explicitly like the “Epistemo-Critical Foreword”
(Erkenntniskritische Vorrede), which is the foreword to his study on
“German Baroque Drama” (Trauerspiel) published in 1928, or implicitly
in provisional titles, such as the Konvolut “N” of The Arcades Project, “On
the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress” (Erkenntnistheoretisches,
Theorie des Fortschritts, dated after 1924). More than a particular philo-
sophical discipline, therefore, Erkenntnistheorie was a way of understand-
ing the task and destination of philosophy as a whole. However, as a way
of understanding philosophy, in reality during the years of Benjamin’s
writing, it turns out to be strongly discredited. A new urgency to find a
more immediate access to reality, or in any case different from that indi-
cated by the “abstract” analysis of concepts and principles of knowledge,
now made philosophy substantially intolerant of the precautions of a dis-
cipline such as Erkenntnistheorie that were all aimed at identifying the
conditions and assumptions of such access. Benjamin’s writings, whether
dedicated to literature, art history, or the study of urban culture, may be
read as a radical transformation of the concept of experience in Kant’s
critical philosophy. In his works, Benjamin distanced himself from the tra-
dition of academic neo-Kantianism in which he had been trained at the
1
Benjamin began his university studies in April 1912 at the Albert Ludwig University in
Breisgau, one of the oldest and most renowned German universities. He matriculated in the
department of philology and in the summer semester attended a variety of lecture courses.
Among them was “Introduction to Epistemology and Metaphysics” taught by the promi-
nent neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert. In fact, Benjamin’s philosophical and aes-
thetic research of the following decade can be considered as significant moments of adherence
to and estrangement from the orbit of neo-Kantianism of Rickert and Hermann Cohen,
professor of philosophy in Marburg (Eiland and Jennings 2014, pp. 32–33).
8 WALTER BENJAMIN’S THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE 249
universities of Freiburg, Berlin, Munich, and Bern.2 The subsequent

development of his thought may be understood in terms of such a “com-
prehension and recasting” of Kant’s transcendental concept of experience
into a speculative one (Caygill 1998, pp. 33–78).3 In the essay “On the
Program of the Coming Philosophy” he intended to rectify the “decisive
mistakes of the Kantian epistemology.” Echoing Simmel’s lectures on
Kant, which Benjamin probably followed in Berlin, these mistakes are due
to the “relatively empty Enlightenment concept of experience,” to the
one-sidedly mathematical-mechanical concept of knowledge inspired by
Newtonian physics.4 This had as a consequence the “religious and histori-
cal blindness of the Enlightenment” that persisted in the modern era. In a
similar way to Simmel, who saw Kant and Goethe as two opposite and
competing views of modernity, Benjamin was dissatisfied with the Kantian
(and Aristotelian) distinction of intellectual knowledge and sensuous
experience, invoking a “higher” concept of experience to be developed
from the structure of knowledge.
2
Benjamin’s intention was, in the words of a letter to Gerhard Scholem, dated October 22,
1917, to “comprehend [Kant] with the utmost reverence, looking on the least letter as a
tradendum to be transmitted (however much it is necessary to recast him afterwards)”
(Adorno and Scholem 1994, pp. 97–98).
3
In a short juvenile essay published under a pseudonym in 1913 in the Berlin journal Der
Anfang, titled “Experience” (Erfahrung) and showing his lifelong concern with this theme,
Benjamin attacks the philistine “bourgeois” notion of experience, understood as the out-
growing of youth, in the name of a higher, more immediate experience of the “inexperien-
cable” (EW, 117). This importance of the not-yet cognitive experience will be attested by
Benjamin’s enduring concern with dreams and waking, as well as with myth, surrealism,
hashish, the world of childhood.
4
Simmel’s critique of Kant’s concept of experience was inspired by Hermann Cohen’s
influential book, Kants Theorie der Erfahrung, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1885 (on Simmel’s original
relationship with neo-Kantianianism see Podoksik 2016). Scholem and Benjamin attended
Cohen’s lessons in Berlin and read Kants Theorie der Erfahrung: “We were full of respect and
indeed reverence for this figure; thus we approached our reading with great expectations …
But Cohen’s deductions and interpretations seemed highly questionable to us.” Benjamin
complained about the “transcendental confusion” of his presentation and termed the book
“a philosophical vespiary” (Scholem and Benjamin 1982, pp. 58–60, quot. in Eiland and
Jennings 2014, p. 102). Although Cohen’s rigid rationalism, dualism, and optimism seemed
disputable for Benjamin, he would soon find many inspirations for the development of his
own way to criticism from Cohen’s philosophical interpretation of biblical messianism in his
Religion of Reason: Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) (ibid.).
250 V. MELE
It is undoubtedly in the inseparable nexus between destruction,

“redemption” (Erlösung) and “salvation” (Rettung)5 of life that the real
junction of Benjamin’s philosophy lies, whether it be his philosophy of
history or his philosophy of language. Although it varies in form and man-
ifestation, it remains the most solid element of continuity in the itinerary
of Benjamin’s thought, from his first manifestly exoteric works to his tor-
mented and controversial approach to historical materialism. This repre-
sents a decisive difference with Simmel’s “monistic way of thinking”
(monistischen Denkweise). For the young as well as for the late Simmel “the
stage of the spiritual life is only a further development of the organic life,
in relation to which it does not receive a special and extraordinary meta-
physical value” (Frischeisen-Köhler 1920, pp. 47–48). The most signifi-
cant consequence regarding the difference between Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s Erkenntnistheorie is that, for Benjamin, criticism does not have
a primarily epistemological value, as we have seen in the case of Simmel’s
relationism.
Ever since his youthful dissertation on the Concept of Art Criticism in
German Romanticism, it can be said that the “salvific” function par excel-
lence is assigned by Benjamin precisely to art and literary criticism. In the
great study on the German Trauerspiel (Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels), which represents Benjamin’s major attempt to put this kind
of criticism to work, we find formulated a fairly precise exposition of his
conception:
Criticism is the mortification of works. The essence of these works is more

receptive to this than is any other production. Mortification of works: not
therefore—as the Romantics have it—the awakening of consciousness in
living works, but the unsettlement of knowledge in those that have died
away. […] It is the object of philosophical criticism to show that the func-
tion of artistic form is precisely this: to make historical material contents,
such as lie at the basis of every significant work, into philosophical truth
contents. This transforming of material contents into truth content entails
5
Adorno had described these essential features of Benjamin’s thought in the fundamental
Profile dedicated to him: “the core of Benjamin’s philosophy is the idea of the salvation of the
dead as the restitution of distorted life through the consummation of its own reification
down to the inorganic level. ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless are we given hope’, is the
conclusion of the study of Goethe’s Elective Affinities paradox of the impossible possibility,
mysticism and enlightenment are joined for the last time in him. (Adorno 1981 [1967],
p. 240).
the weakening of effect whereby the attractiveness of earlier charms dimin-

ishes decade by decade, providing the basis for a rebirth in which all ephem-
eral beauty completely falls away and the work asserts itself as ruin. (Benjamin
2019 [1928], pp. 193–194)
In this dense passage, full of theological allusions, a number of funda-

mental motifs are exposed in Benjamin’s approach to cultural history and
the work of art.
Criticism must behave towards its object in a destructive manner: only
when the work is “mortified,” deprived of its apparent harmony, is all that
is transitory and ephemeral in it diluted; and from its position as “ruin,”
“torso of a symbol,” a “tenor of truth” can radiate that transcends its radi-
cal condition of finiteness. The distinction between “material contents”
(Sachgehalt) and “truth content” (Wahrheitsgehalt)6 refers to the essential
characteristic of the work of art according to Benjamin: as a human cre-
ation it originates in a determined and transitory moment in time which
by definition tends to be transcended in order to reveal something that
goes beyond the very condition of “transience,” namely an eternal image
of truth. The historical relationship constantly oscillating between these
two moments constitutes the enigma of every work with which the critic
must always be confronted anew: in the words of the important essay on
Goethe’s Elective Affinities (1922) this constitutes the Ausdruckslose,
“expressionless” (Benjamin 1996a [1922], p. 340),7 or the emergence of
something infinite and eternal, the truth, which springs from a human
creation, finite and transitory as the work of art. The task of the critic is to
6
With the German word Gehalt, Benjamin seems to mean something other than the cur-
rent meaning of “content.” An important confirmation of this is provided by a series of
aphorisms that appear in One-Way Street, where he states: “In the artwork, content and form
are one: meaning [Gehalt]”; and immediately afterwards: “Meaning is the outcome of expe-
rience” (SW 1, p. 459). Given the originality of meaning that Benjamin assigns to this termi-
nology, which is directly related to his theory of experience (as we will see later), this’ choice
seems the most appropriate.
7
In On Semblance Benjamin expressed the same conception of criticism as “mortification”
in another way: “No work of art may appear completely alive without becoming mere sem-
blance, and ceasing to be a work of art. The life quivering in it must appear petrified and as
if spellbound in a single moment. The life quivering within it is beauty, the harmony that
flows through chaos and—that only appears to tremble. What arrests this semblance, what
holds life spellbound and disrupts the harmony, is the expressionless [das Ausdruckslose].
That quivering is what constitutes the beauty of the work; the paralysis is what denies its
truth” (Benjamin 1996c [1919–20], p. 224).
252 V. MELE
“mortify,” and to stop the apparent harmony of the work, thus making the
moment of this passage eternal. The work can only be said to be complete
only if it is reduced to a “ruin,” a fragment of a totality which it is not
allowed to draw upon.
This mortification is not conceived as an “abstract negation” but has an
immanent and a completion goal. For Benjamin destruction is the basis of
a “redemption” (Rettung) of the work of art, for it prepares its transfigu-
ration and resurrection in the realm of philosophical truth. He believed
that art criticism doesn’t consist in judging or evaluating the work of art
by means of some external criterion, but rather by relying on elements it
contains in itself. Benjamin’s concept of critique has the goal to “illumi-
nate a work entirely through itself.” The critic’s opinion or judgment is
irrelevant in this conception that draws from early German Romanticism,
namely Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis. Art criticism for the Romantics is
not so much a matter of judgment, but rather aims at the “completion” of
a work of art. Thus, while earlier generations considered art criticism as
inferior to the work of art itself, the Romantics granted it a status equal or
even superior to the criticized artwork. Moreover, from the epistemologi-
cal point of view knowledge doesn’t belong primarily to the subject—as by
Kant and, conversely, by Simmel. This differentiates in a very decisive
manner Benjamin from Simmel: the epistemological, aesthetic, cultural
and normative importance of the subject. As Stephane Symons argues per-
suasively: “the category of the individual, of such importance to Simmel,
is no longer of primary importance to Benjamin” (Symons 2017, p. 96).
This is true at every level: epistemological, aesthetical and normative. The
centrality that the differentiating individual has in Simmel’s conception of
modernity is not to be found anymore in Benjamin’s theory of modernity,
from the epistemological point of view (as the Kantian transcendental sub-
ject), from the aesthetical (the importance of the Narrating subject and
the portrait) and from the normative (the bourgeois individuality will be
gradually dismissed from Benjamin). Benjamin writes that, according to
the Romantics, “all knowledge is self-knowledge of a thinking being,
which does not need to be an ‘I’” (Benjamin 1996b [1920], 145).
Consequently, art criticism concerns not merely or primarily the con-
sciousness of the observer, but rather considers a work of art as something
that can become conscious of itself. If Benjamin’s own concept of criticism
is strongly influenced by the Romantics, there are some importance differ-
ences too. Both classicist and romantic German aesthetics considered the
work of art as a mediator between nature and freedom, since it is a
material object which nevertheless seems to be governed by its own rules.

The work of art is the semblance (Schein) of a self-sufficient, organic, and
independent whole. In his Origin of German Tragic Drama this tradition
again turns to expressing serious reservations about their idealist episte-
mology and about their neglect of the content of the work of art. Most
importantly, Benjamin modifies their notion of completion-through-criti-
cism. While the Romantics understood criticism as moving the work of art
in the direction of the idea of art, he sees it rather as the radical interrup-
tion of the work’s own movement. In this way Benjamin intends to oppose
both classicist and romantic German aesthetics that considers the work of
art as the semblance (Schein) of a self-sufficient, organic, and independent
totality. In his Origin of the German Trauerspiel (1928) Benjamin expresses
the opposition to this tradition by defining art criticism as the “mortifica-
tion of the work of art,” that is, as the destruction of its illusion, the exca-
vation if its historical roots, and the exposition of the traces of its
production. Benjamin writes: “Mortification of the works: not therefore—
as the romantics have it—the awakening of consciousness in living works,
but the ensettlement of knowledge in those that have died away” (Benjamin
2019, p. 193). The moment of mortification is very important for
Benjamin, as it will be for Adorno in his negative dialectics as form of criti-
cism. It doesn’t have the sense of a nihilistic destruction, but it contains
the basis of a “rebirth” of the work of art, for it prepares its transfiguration
and resurrection in the realm of philosophical truth. As has been persua-
sively stated (Lijester 2012), Benjamin’s concept of critique is immanent
in the sense that it takes the foundation of the critique from the object
itself. Unlike Hegelian immanent critique, however, it does not concern
the reconciliation and elimination of contradictory moments. Benjamin’s
immanent critique rather fixates a contradiction only to evoke the negative
image of something radically different. Therefore, it does not rely on a
teleological concept of progress. Secondly, it is a critique of myth as
opposed to history as human and conscious construction: social and his-
torical phenomena are mythic, in his view, when they appear as necessary
and rigid as laws of nature. Finally, Benjamin’s critique is violent, in the
sense that it creates an interruption in which a new different meaning
can happen.
The highly original and creative character of Benjamin’s concept of
critique and—above all—its re-functionalization for a social and political
critique of capitalism as a mythical historical-natural formation has been
discussed by an acute observer, Jürgen Habermas, in a famous speech for
254 V. MELE
Benjamin’ eightieth anniversary in 1972.8 Habermas underlines with pre-

cision the difference between Benjamin’s approach and that of other
authors close to the Frankfurt School, such as Herbert Marcuse or Adorno
himself, with whom Benjamin will have an intense exchange of letters—
not lacking in conflicts, even bitter ones—throughout the writing of
Passagenwerk. What these authors share in common—and in various ways
characteristic of so-called “Western Marxism”—is the “critique of ideol-
ogy” (Ideologiekritik), which is directed primarily at works of classical
bourgeois art. The aim of this critique, exemplarily represented by
Marcuse’s essay The Affirmative Character of Culture (1937), is precisely
the “overcoming” (in the sense of Hegel’s Aufhebung) of the “beautiful
semblance” (schöner Schein) of bourgeois Kultur. By describing a com-
pleted, autonomous world beyond the everyday sphere of material repro-
duction, such culture “lies” insofar as it transfigures the unhappiness of life
subject to the abstract domination of the law of value, yet at the same time
“affirms” the true in as much as it preserves the desire for a life in har-
mony; a reconciled life, for a happiness that transcends the existing state of
things (das Bestehende, in Marcuse’s terms).
In this sense, according to Habermas, “the critique of art as ideology
leads to the demand for the dialectical abolition (aufheben) of autono-
mous art, a demand to reintegrate culture per se into the material process
of life in civil society (bürgherliche Gesellschaft). Revolutionizing the rela-
tions of life in civil society means the dialectical abolition of culture” (ibid.,
p. 33). This form of critique is defined by Habermas as critique that “raises
to consciousness” (bewußtmachende Kritik), whereas Benjamin stands
precisely in a different relation. He “dispences with the form of self-
reflection,” and his form of criticism can be called “criticism that saves”
(rettende Kritik) (ibid., p. 37).
8
This observation first appeared in the collective volume Zur Aktualität Walter Benjamins,
edited by S. Unseld, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972, which takes its title from the
article by Habermas himself (Bewußtmachende oder rettende Kritik—die Aktualität Walter
Benjamins, pp. 175–223. English trans. Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The
Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin, in «New German Critique», Spring, 1979, No. 17,
pp. 30–59). This essay has had a certain resonance in criticism, as evidenced by the works of
Tiedemann, Dialektik im Stillstand, R. Wolin, Walter Benjamin. An Aesthetic of Redemption,
New York, Columbia University Press, 1982, S. Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing and (even
in polemical terms) in the works of M. Löwy.
Habermas’ conclusion leaves no doubt as to the judgment on the dif-

ferent cultural validity and political relevance between the two models of
criticism:
Marcuse, by undermining objective illusions analytically, would like to pre-

pare for a change in the material conditions of life thus unveiled: he would
like to usher in the dialectical abolition (Aufhebung) of the culture in which
these relations are stabilized. Benjamin however cannot view his task as an
attack on an art already approaching its end. His critique of art approaches
its objects in conservative fashion, whether dealing with the Baroque
Trauerspiel, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, Baudelaire’s Fleur du Mal, or the
Soviet film of the early twenties. It aims, it is true, at “the mortification of
the works” (0., 182), but critique commits such destruction only in order to
transpose what is worth knowing from the medium of the beautiful into that
of the truth – and thereby to rescue and redeem [retten] it. (Ibid., p. 37)
This is a very important point of difference not only between Marcuse

and Benjamin but also between Simmel and Benjamin. Simmel, like ideal-
ist aesthetics in general, limits himself to those periods and authors which
idealistic aesthetics acknowledges as classical: Dante, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Goethe, Böcklin, Rodin. Even when he consid-
ers modern art—Rodin, naturalism, expressionism, l’art pour l’art—and
the everyday creations of modern applied art (Kunstgewerbe), his orienta-
tion depends on a concept of aesthetic beauty in which essence appears to
be what Benjamin in his Trauerspiel study defines as symbolically.
Benjamin’s interest, however, concerns—in Marcuse’s terms—non-
affirmative forms of art. While investigating the baroque Trauerspiel he
found a counter-concept to the individual totality of the transfiguring art-
work in the allegorical. Allegory expresses an experience of negativity—an
experience of suffering, suppression, the unreconciled and the unfortu-
nate. Therefore, it represents an implicit criticism of symbolic art which
promises happiness, freedom, reconciliation and fulfilment. “Whereas the
critique of ideology is necessary to decipher and surmount symbolic art,
allegory is critique itself—or rather it refers to critique” (Habermas
1979, p. 36)
Habermas’ interpretation, which we have reported here in its essential
features, although clarifying some aspects of Benjamin’s concept of art and
criticism, is excessively devaluing. In particular, there are two questionable
aspects of Habermas’ interpretation. The first, the renunciation of
Benjamin’s form of reflection and—thus rational and conceptual
256 V. MELE
thinking—form of critique. As we saw in the previous chapter, Susan

Buck-Morss takes the opposite view and argues that the value of the work
on the Paris passages (at the time of Habermas’ speech not yet published)
is precisely as a philosophical construction. The second concerns the aspect
of “salvation” and “redemption” in exclusively restorative and conserva-
tive terms. On this second point, Habermas himself will change his opin-
ion, including Benjamin in his philosophical discourse of modernity as a
critic of the flattening of the modern temporal orientation exclusively
toward the future. In any case, to adequately discuss Habermas’ theses, we
still need to delve into the new historical methodology based on the con-
cept of “origin” (Ursprung) that Benjamin had been trying to elaborate
since his study of German Baroque drama (Trauerspiel).
2 The Science of “Origin”

A preparatory note to the Trauerspiel expresses Benjamin’s closeness to
Simmel but—if analyzed deeply in its philosophical sense—also reveals a
clear distance:
In studying Simmel’s presentation of Goethe’s concept of truth, I came to

see very clearly that my concept of origin in the Trauerspiel book is a rigor-
ous and decisive transposition of this basic Goethean concept from the
domain of nature to that of history. Origin (Ursprung)—it is, in effect, the
concept of Ur-phenomenon extracted from the pagan context of nature and
brought into the Jewish contexts of history. (Benjamin 2002, p. 462)9
This relationship of Benjamin to Simmel through Goethe should not be

misunderstood. It may be considered an elective affinity between the “ana-
logical reasoning” (as Dodd 2008 observed) of the two thinkers only if we
are able to see the philosophical differences. Benjamin’s intention was to
transfer the concept of “origin” (Ursprung) from the “pagan contest of
nature” to the Jewish-Christian contest of “history.” Benjamin feared that
the focus on “bare life” would overlook precisely the historic dimension
that creates and re-creates the conditions of life domination and culpabil-
ity. There is no life as such in Benjamin’s view. History has a “natural”
dimension (the eternal always-the-same), yet it has an historical one (in
9
This quotation from the Arcades Project actually comes from the preparatory notes to the
Trauerspiel book (GS I: 953–954). In these notes Benjamin added: “Only for this reason can
it fulfil the concept of authenticity” (ibid., p. 954).
Benjamin’s view related to redemption) as well. He coined the term

Natural History (Natur-Geschichte) to describe this conception. The main
reason for the philosophical and historical nature of Benjamin’s refusal of
philosophy of life was that he thought the naturalistic, life-philosophical
approach too “natural,” or—to borrow his own term—“mythical.” As we
have seen in Chap. 3, Simmel’s investigations into the philosophy of his-
tory and historical time move from the question of the conditions of pos-
sibility of history, so his approach to religion is not ontological, but
epistemological—and this also clearly and practically indicates how differ-
ent the influence of Judaism is on his thought. From a transcendental
point of view, history as well as religion appears as a process of conscious-
ness and nothing else. And they are strictly separated: history is neither
“the march of God in history” (like in Hegel’s dialectical conception), nor
the expulsion from earthly paradise and the expectation of the Messiah (as
in Benjamin’s radical Jewish messianic thought). History is conceived for
Simmel in strictly neo-Kantian terms and is not the realization of any truth
principle, but fundamentally a cognitive process. Simmel asks the ques-
tion, “how is history possible?” And he basically answers by trying to iden-
tify the processes of consciousness on the basis of which history is possible
as a mental construct.
Benjamin’s recasting of Goethe’s concept of Origin—even if inter-
preted through Simmel—was trying to delineate a privileged sphere of
experience in which classical ideas of time and space give way to a “spatio-
temporal order” (cit.) involving the reverberation of past in present,
underlying the concept of origin and that of “dialectical image,” the cor-
nerstone of the late uncompleted work of The Arcades Project. Echoing
Nietzsche’s critique of nineteenth century historicism—as exposed in the
essay On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life—Benjamin
intended to develop a metaphysical conception of history and historiogra-
phy that gives epistemological priority to the present. Instead of viewing
history in the context of an infinite extension of time, a homogeneous
continuum of events are considered as causes and effects. Benjamin treats
history as collected and concentrated in a particular moment, as the “ori-
gin” of the present. The historical-critical task is neither the search for
progress nor the restitution of the past, but the excavation of this historical
moment, the liberation of its hidden energies that reach the present.
Because deeply rooted in every historical moment is a “weak messianic
force” that expresses itself in the most neglected and threatened thoughts
and works; it is precisely these profound deformations that escape the eye
of the conventional historiographer.
258 V. MELE
The most comprehensive treatment of the theme of origin is carried

out by Benjamin in his habilitation work, in which the term itself appears
right from the title-theme (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, often mis-
translated as “The Origin of the German Tragedy”). This work is not, as
the title might lead one to believe, a study of the history of literature, but
rather a “treatise on the philosophy of art.” The aim is not to trace,
through its history, the birth of a specific literary genre—as Benjamin is
careful to point out in the Epistemo-Critical Foreword (the English transla-
tion of the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede, which obscures the relationship
with Neo-Kantianism). Nor does the category of Ursprung have anything
in common with “genesis” (Entstehung) in the chronological sense of the
term (as the emergence of a given phenomenon at a given moment in
time). Moreover, nor can the Trauerspiel be considered a mere concept of
classification, which is derived by induction from the various historical
examples of the genre.
The emphatically metaphysical task that Benjamin sets himself is no less
than “a representation of the world of ideas.” In this sense the Trauerspiel,
in the eyes of the critic who “saves,” becomes an “idea.” The concept of
“origin” (Ursprung), in Benjamin’s intentions, must serve to establish a
historiographical practice governed by a temporality that is different from
that of linear causality, and so external to the event.
As the dense Erkenntniskritische Vorrede makes clear, “origin” is
opposed to “genesis” just as “natural history” is opposed to History as a
globalizing process of development.
Benjamin in this conception refers in a counterintuitive way to the clas-
sical notion of historia naturalis (Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 27), which
tends rather to be based on a practice of information gathering, separa-
tion, and exposition of the elements. Such practice is much closer to that
of the collector—a key figure in Benjamin’s philosophy and life—than that
of the historian in the modern sense of the term, as someone who tries to
establish a causal relationship between the events of the past.
The objects of this collection, in fact, are not subjected to an external
logical causality, but rather are presented in their uniqueness and eccen-
tricity, in analogy to the finds in a museum. This anomalous way of con-
sidering the past, when it can avoid the obstacle of a naively positional
description, aims to restore the “mere” object, preserving it from any
manipulation—of which explanations based on the model of the causal
chain are the most usual form.
Ur-sprung10 therefore designates precisely the “leap” that the historical

object makes in situating itself outside the all-encompassing temporal suc-
cession, which would otherwise condemn it to oblivion and destruction.
Not that history and temporality are denied, but they are, as Benjamin
observes, concentrated, as it were, in the object. Both the methodical-
logical considerations of the future Theses on the Concept of History (1940)
and the statements of the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede take care to set forth
this concept precisely:
As a result of this method, the lifework is both preserved and sublated in the
work, the era in the lifework, and the entire course of history in the era. The
nourishing fruit of what is historically understood contains time in its inte-
rior as a precious but tasteless seed. (Benjamin 2006b [1940], p. 396)
He also elaborates:
For what is grasped in the idea of origin has history still only as content, no
longer as an event that would have befallen it. What is grasped in the idea of
origin knows history only from within, and to be sure, no longer in the sense
of something boundless but in the sense of a relatedness to essential being,
which means that history can be characterized as the fore- and after-history
of that essential being. (Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 26)
What Benjamin means by this extremely hermetic and abstract lan-

guage becomes clear if we consider the object of his research: the
Trauerspiel, the Baroque, German declination of modern drama that cul-
minates in Calderon and Shakespeare.
The moment the Trauerspiel is recognized as an “idea” and understood
according to the category of origin, it condenses the history that has pre-
ceded it—(the “prehistory” of the genre itself)—and what has been con-
ditioned by it (one could say the history of its reception, its “future
history”).
Hence, Benjamin sarcastically state: “An important work either founds
the genre or dissolves it; and in perfect works the two functions unite”
(ibid., p. 23). Therefore, the work of art understood as “origin” performs
exactly an action of rupture with respect to tradition and anticipation of
the works that will follow it.
10
“Original leap” is in fact the etymological meaning of the German word for “origin.”
260 V. MELE
The philosopher’s task, intermediate between that of the researcher and

the artist, is to recognize precisely these “authentic” works (this is the
“mark of originality of phenomena”), “in the most ridiculous and naive
experiments as in the most mature manifestations of an epoch at its height”
that are distinguished from mere historical-empirical multiplicity and to
show them as “origin” in the etymological sense of the word, that is, to
seize the moment in which they leap out of the merely chronological con-
tinuum of history to become idea, totality.11
When Benjamin wrote his essay on the Origin of the German Baroque
Drama in 1924–1925, his reflections on the philosophy of language and
on literary criticism had already reached such a level of completeness that
he was able to cast a new and original glance over a field of study that had
been little analyzed and was almost unknown until then, such as the
German Trauerspiel.
The most important novelty of Benjamin’s study is not only in the rel-
evant results in the field of philosophy and art history, but, from a more
strictly theoretical point of view, in the new image of history that is
reflected through the Trauerspiel. Benjamin places, as is well known, alle-
gory at its basis. As a critical and careful reader of this work, György
Lukács, noted in his book on The Meaning of Contemporary Realism it can
only be fully understood if one considers that it has allegory as its “object,”
“method,” and “content” (Lukács 1962, p. 40 ff.). As “object,” because
the Trauerspiel, or Baroque drama, is itself a remarkable example of alle-
gorical art. Indeed, one of the fundamental goals of Benjamin’s study was
to demonstrate that the “tenor of truth” of this mundane literary genre
can only be grasped within the allegorical worldview. As “method” in that
Benjamin’s philosophical technique, his conception of criticism, is
11
As Wolin accurately states: “The work of art as origin: therein lies the telos of Benjamin’s
conception of criticism. If it is grasped as authentic, it will contain, represented as if in fore-
shortening, the entire past and subsequent history of an art form within it, magically col-
lected as if it were a totality, a focal point” (Wolin 1994, p. 98). Or a “monad,” we could also
say, using the Leibnizian concept that Benjamin himself takes up in the Erkenntniskritische
Vorrede.
eminently allegorical.12 Finally, as “content” because, as Lukács saw it and

as announced in the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede, the work itself is an alle-
gory: an allegory of the modernist avant-garde art of the early twentieth
century that is carried out under the masks and appearances of Trauerspiel.
However, in the Erkenntniskritische Vorrede that opens the essay, there are
only a few hints about it, since Benjamin’s main concern is precisely that
of introducing a new critical methodology and a different “representa-
tion” (Darstellung) of history. And all his lines of programmatic research
are gathered precisely around the concept of “origin” (Ursprung). So let
us try to walk the paths of Benjaminian speculation again that revolve
around the concept of origin, in order to better clarify its meaning for his
conception of history.
Philosophy, Benjamin argues in the Foreword, is undoubtedly “presen-
tation of truth” (ibid., p. 2) and truth is “actualized in the round dance of
presented ideas … as something self-presenting” (ibid., p. 4). Manifestly
platonic, Benjamin holds that the task of philosophy is the representation
of such ideas as self-representing. Moreover, if his overall project is to
include the “salvation of phenomena comes about by means of ideas”
(ibid., p. 10) then the specific task of philosophy in the face of beauty—the
task of Kunstphilosophie, at the center of the research—will be to move
from the forms of art to the representation of their ideas.
This movement from things and their phenomenal appearance to their
“salvation” in ideas is in itself mediated primarily by concepts (Begriffe).
For they break down phenomena into their “elements,” and only as such
do phenomena enter, “saved” into ideas.
But how are these ideas configured, apart from being something that
“self-presents” and that performs a still vaguely defined “salvation of phe-
nomena”? It is here that a second degree of mediation enters between
phenomena and ideas. For the phenomena, though dissolved by the
12
Especially in the second part of the book, titled Allegorie und Trauerspiel, Benjamin
makes ostentatious use of allegorical technique, which is manifested especially in the “surpris-
ing” use of quotations, constructed according to the model of allegorical images. By means
of the “mortification” of the original context in which they are found, individual phrases or
sentence fragments are extracted and rearranged so that, like the signifying images of alle-
gory, they gather around a center; finally, his own thought is added to them, without, how-
ever, forcing the individual elements into a continuum. The quotations stand in place of the
images, they are pictura, to which the meaning is attributed by means of a sentence placed as
a subscripto. Benjamin himself therefore operates as an allegorical writer, the figure of the sage
par excellence in the Baroque era.
262 V. MELE
conceptual grasp into elements, are “saved” as the concrete matter of

which the ideas are constituted and through which they represent
themselves:
As the salvation of phenomena comes about by means of ideas, the presenta-

tion of ideas comes about in the medium of the empirical. For ideas present
themselves not in themselves but solely in a correlation of the elements of
things in the concept—indeed, as the configuration of these elements. (ibid.)
Immediately thereafter Benjamin takes care to further clarify that phe-

nomena are not “incorporated” (einverbleibt) or “contained” (enthalten)
in ideas, but that these are rather the “objective virtual arrangement” of
phenomena, “their objective interpretation” (ibid.)
And it is here that Benjamin illustrates this relationship with an image
of rare suggestion, which will always remain a focal point of his thought:
“the idea belongs to a realm fundamentally different from the realm of
that which it grasps … Ideas are to things as constellations to stars”
(Benjamin 2019, p. 10). As stars, things are what they are; however, from
the moment they become constellations, they are representations.
Benjamin adds that “ideas are eternal constellations, and inasmuch as the
elements are grasped as points in such constellations, the phenomena are
simultaneously divided out and saved” (ibid., pp. 10–11).
Shattered and saved: these elements offer the most characteristic returns
of the Benjaminian rettende Kritik. We may therefore conclude that the
task of philosophy in relation to objects implies precisely two sides of the
same project: “the salvation of phenomena and the presentation of ideas”
(ibid., p. 11). This Platonic and idealistic vocabulary begins to take on a
valency and a special interest as soon as it opens up to the discourse of
history.
Relying on the etymological sense of the word, Benjamin states: “By
‘origin’ is meant not the coming-to-be of what has originated but rather
what originates in the becoming and passing away” (ibid., p. 24). This
decisive sentence pinpoints precisely the essential characteristic of the ori-
gin: it is not what begins a process, but rather what ends it—it leaps from
it, leaves it forever. The process that is brought to completion is that of
temporal development, both the coming into being of something and its
passing away. But the history we are talking about is at the antipodes of
the “mere” passage of time: the relation that Benjamin places at the basis
of the constellation of the origin is not that of the causal chain, based on
chronological succession, but that—apparently counterintuitive—of dis-

crete, individual elements that cluster around the “vortices” that form the
origin. In this sense, the origin not only comes after but is what finishes,
completes, and perfects:
On one hand, it demands to be recognized as restoration, restitution, and

on the other hand—and precisely on account of this—as something incom-
plete and unclosed. Determining itself in every origin-phenomenon is the
formation in which, again and again, an idea confronts the historical world,
until it lies there complete in the totality of its history. (Ibid., pp. 24–25)
If the origin restores, and thus returns to something past, by this very
action it determines that past as not yet “finished” and completely closed:
the historical world, not yet complete by virtue of its mere factuality,
becomes complete in its totality as an idea. When an idea is completely
represented in its history, its history is equally complete in its totality, and
the relation of the idea to history is the coming forth of the “origin.”
This is the dialectic of the origin: the idea, already present to itself from
time immemorial, always re-presents itself again in time, that is, following
its own expressive tension, it represents itself in it, looking for its own
fulfillment. However, it is more than a dialectic in the traditional sense.
Rather, it is a dynamic paradox, a circular polarity (the “vortex,” in fact)
that simultaneously connects repetition and unrepeatability: “singularity
and repetition prove to be reciprocally determined” (ibid., p. 25). An idea,
this one, whose “experimentation,” for Benjamin, “the doctrine of the
eternal return of the equal was perhaps able to evoke, but to which it was
unable to provide a solution.”13
13
GS I, 3, pp. 935–936, a statement present in the original unpublished draft of the
Erkenntniskritische Vorrede, which contains some clarifications and repetitions useful for
understanding the final version.
Benjamin’s judgment on Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return will become even more
drastic and liquidating. In his Notes and Materials of the Passagenwerk, it is assimilated to the
various “phantasms” in which the nineteenth century represented historical temporality. In
an era in which the greatest instability and uncertainty of the productive system was affirmed,
due to its cyclical crises, the idea of happiness as prefigured in the conception of the eternal
return seemed to be the mere wishful thinking of a bourgeoisie that was losing control of the
social system it had created: “The idea of the eternal recurrence conjures the phantasmagoria
of happiness from the misery of the Founders Years” (Benjamin 2002, p. 116).
264 V. MELE
The Passagenwerk, like the book on the German Baroque Trauerspiel,

was to be a work of the “science of origin.” In fact, in a fragment present
in Konvolut “N,” dedicated to Erkenntinistheorie, we read:
“Primal history of the nineteenth century”—this would be of no interest if

it were understood to mean that forms of primal history are to be recovered
among the inventory of the nineteenth century. Only where the nineteenth
century would be represented as originary form of primal history—in a
form, that is to say, in which the whole of primal history groups itself anew
in images appropriate to that century—only there does the concept of a
primal history of the nineteenth century have meaning. (Benjamin
2002, p. 463)
Benjamin therefore conceives his work on the Paris arcades in a quite

different manner from a social history of culture in the traditional sense of
the word. The far more arduous task that he assigns himself is to find,
among the political, social, and cultural phenomena of the past century,
those elements that are configured as “original phenomena” and that
therefore—according to the rhythmic characteristic of origin—reveal their
prehistory and future history.
From this perspective, for example, Baudelaire’s poetic work, under-
stood as an “original phenomenon,” as a rupture within the continuous
temporal order, contains its own prehistory within itself—the Baroque
allegory—and its own subsequent “fortuna,” which will be revealed in the
Jugendstil of the end of the century.14
This allegorical conception of criticism, which in the Trauerspiel essay
is theorized with decidedly esoteric and neo-platonic accents, will remain
substantially unaltered in the subsequent phase of Benjamin’s thought and
in particular is of central importance in the Passagenwerk. Here, too, the
focus of the research is on “ruins”: those constituted by the “monuments”
of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, which the materialistically
inspired critic must grasp in their transience, using them critically, “morti-
fying” the dreams and ideals of the previous century even before the mon-
uments that represented them had collapsed.
14
Benjamin in fact stated: “If the object of history is to be blasted out of the continuum of
historical succession, that is because its monadological structure demands it. […] It is owing
to this monadological structure that the historical object finds represented in its interior its
own fore-history and after-history. (Thus, for example, the fore-history of Baudelaire, as
educed by current scholarship, resides in allegory; his after-history, in Jugendstil.)”.
In the light of these considerations one can grasp the originality of

Benjamin’s proceeding as a historical materialist. In place of the “cosal
tenor” of the work of art, the Passagenwerk deals with the solid Marxian
“structure,” a term with which Benjamin tends to include not only the
traditional “economic base,” but, without renouncing his cosmological
and historical-natural inclinations, the whole “new Physis” put into being
by humanity with the new means of production provided by capitalism.
The Wahrheitsgehalt, the “unexpressed”—also on the basis of the influ-
ence of Proust and certain of Kracauer’s theories on mass culture—
becomes the content of dreams and ideals embodied in mass culture and
in the new technical potentialities, which the “dreaming collective” (as
Benjamin calls it) never ceases to produce and which, as Benjamin asserts
by quoting the historian Michelet,15 never ceases in a dream to transcend
its own epoch.
The esoteric “salvation” (Rettung) of the work of art theorized in the
work of the Baroque drama is transformed into the exoteric salvation, thus
fully historical and political, of the utopian potentials of the century just
ended, which leave their traces “in a thousand configurations of life, from
enduring edifices to passing fashions” (Benjamin 2002, p. 5).
Here we enter into the heart of the theory that Benjamin wanted to
develop in The Arcades Project, which has been acutely defined as a “mate-
rialist physiognomy” or, similarly, a “physiognomic sociology.”16 Like a
flâneur who strolls through the streets of the metropolis, wandering
through its neighborhoods and its most hidden monuments, Benjamin
wanted to capture in his research “the expressive character”
(Ausdruckscharakter) of the first products and the first industrial
15
Benjamin (2002, p. 4) quotes the motto “Each epoch dreams the one to follow. [Chaque
époque rêve la suivante]” in the 1935 exposé.
16
In fact, Rolf Tiedemann states that “the prolegomena to a materialist physiognomy that
must be drawn from the Passagenwerk are among Benjamin’s most significant conceptions.
[…] If its realization would have been sufficient for the purpose, that is what the program
promised; if physiognomics would have fulfilled its materialist tasks, only the realization of
the Passagenwerk could have confirmed it” (Tiedemann 1983, p. 29). Of the same tenor are
the affirmations of W. Menninghaus: “the greater innovative force of the thought benjamin-
ian on the myth consists in his late physiognomic sociology, in his aesthetics of the world-
social life. In it … [one has] the anticipation of the foundation of a new form of social theory
and of the utilization of the (mediated) immediacy of the everyday” (Menninghaus 1986,
p. 113).
266 V. MELE
a rchitecture, the first cars, but also the first department stores, advertise-
ments, and so on.17
For Benjamin allegorical conception of art, not only bourgeois autono-
mous art but also popular art—architecture, caricature as well as kitsch—
can contain a promesse du bonheur, which must be recognized and saved by
the critic: “the utopia … has left its trace in a thousand configurations of
life, from enduring edifices to passing fashion” (Benjamin 2002 [1935],
pp. 4–5). Habermas interpretation previously discussed tends to devalue
Benjamin’s approach as a “renunciation of the form of self-reflection,”
neglecting one of the most original aspects of his thought: the sensitivity
to all that is forgotten and inessential, to what falls outside of the grand
course of History and thus also of dialectical thought. Both in his polemic
against “historicism” in his Theses on the Concept of History—which we will
see in detail below—and in his attempt to outline a materialistically
inspired history of culture in the essay Eduard Fuchs, the Collector and the
Historian (1937), Benjamin explicitly intends to address what has not
reached the level of the “concept,”18 be it forgotten and misunderstood
literary genres such as the Trauerspiel, or trying to make history on the
side of the “vanquished,” that is, to give voice to the “anonymous servi-
tudes” beneath the cultural heritage that each present esteems as “tradi-
tion.” By implicitly taking the side of the “critique of ideology,” Habermas
renounces to consider what is outside “universal history” and bourgeois
concept of Kultur.19 On the contrary, Benjamin with his physiognomic
17
Ibid., p. 595.
18
Particularly significant in this regard is the famous letter (dated July 1916) to his friend,
the philosopher Martin Buber, in which Benjamin, in order to justify his refusal to collabo-
rate with the political journal “Der Jude,” enunciates in this way his own conception of the
relationship between politics, language, and history: “My concept of objective and, at the
same time, highly political style and writing is this: to awaken the interest in what is denied to
the word; only where this sphere of speechlessness reveals itself in unutterably pure power can the
magic spark leap between the word and the motivating deed, where the unity of these two equally
real entities resides” (Benjamin 1994, p. 80; author’s italics). On the relationship between
language and history in Benjamin, which we have left in the background of our analysis, see
the fundamental work of G. Agamben, Language and History in Benjamin (Agamben 1988).
19
Habermas’ judgement is harsher than that of his teacher Adorno. Although he was never
admiring of Benjamin’s “immediacy,” Adorno stated in the aphorism of Minima moralia
titled Legacy: “Benjamin’s writings are an attempt in ever new ways to make philosophically
fruitful what has not yet been foreclosed by great intentions. The task he bequeathed was not
to abandon such an attempt to the estranging enigmas of thought alone, but to bring the
intentionless within the realm of concepts: the obligation to think at the same time dialecti-
cally and undialectically” (Adorno 2005, pp. 151–152).
approach instead dwells on the reality not behind the façade of bourgeois
life, on kitsch, on those apparently marginal aspects of everyday life that are
not caught by the gaze educated in the “critique of ideology.” In other
words, Benjamin seems to develop a sort of “evidential paradigm”
(Ginzburg 1989; Mele 2015) that from the forgotten and insignificant
fragment goes back to the social totality. This is what Benjamin means by
the enigmatic formulation of the existing “expressive” relationship
between structure and superstructure: just as a wrinkle on the face is sad-
ness, so too must the material products of nineteenth-century culture be
read as in a physiognomy the utopian contents hidden in their essential
forms. In fact, physiognomy is the discipline that aims to identify the psy-
chological and moral characters of a person from his physical appearance,
especially from facial features and expressions. As such, it stands as a para-
scientific and naively positive discipline. However, in Benjamin’s inten-
tions—shared with Goethe—the fundamental conception of the
Passagenwerk was to be a social physiognomy that, in analogy to what physi-
ognomy does for the character of the individual, would aim at identifying
the fundamental characteristics of the age starting from its material physi-
cal traits. What Benjamin proposes (and what he puts into practice in his
writings on Naples, Moscow, Berlin, and Paris) is therefore a fascinating
and controversial “aesthetic semantics of the urban text.” It is an “aes-
thetic method of analysis of urban social reality,” which proposes to read
and interpret the city in its physical and material characters (architecture,
spaces, etc.) as a “dreamlike” text in which latent dreams and desires can
be read.20
3 The Tiger Leap’s into the Past

The need to give his work on the Paris arcades a theoretical structure leads
Benjamin to a more comprehensive reflection on the concept of history
itself and on the influence that its conception had on the tragic events that
20
This relationship between art, utopia, and politics, demonstrating the solid link between
Benjamin’s early reflections on art and The Arcades Project is beautifully expressed in a frag-
ment from Notes and Materials: “In every true work of art there is a place where, for one
who removes there, it blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that
art, which has often been considered refractory to every relation with progress, provides its
true definition. Progress has its seat not in the continuity of elapsing time but in its interfer-
ences—where the truly new makes itself felt for the first time, with the sobriety of dawn”
(Benjamin 2002, p. 474).
268 V. MELE
were to accompany the first half of the twentieth century. Benjamin

intended the Passagenwerk to be preceded by a foreword on the “theory
of the knowledge of history.” An entire Konvolut of his Notes and
Materials, titled Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress, is explicitly dedi-
cated to this topic. Alongside this unfinished collection of notes, the essay
on Eduard Fuchs, the Collector and the Historian, published in the journal
of the Institute for Social Research in 1937, and what can be considered
Benjamin’s great theoretical testament, the Theses on the Concept of History
(1940), are equally significant.21
Among the motifs that run through these writings, Benjamin’s critique
of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century conception of history referred to
as “historicism” is of particular relevance in this context. In fact,
Benjamin—just as Simmel did in The Problems of the Philosophy of History—
feels the need to reflect on the epistemology of history starting from a
common problematic, namely the critique of the conception of progress
on the one hand and, on the other, the de-construction of the concept of
history itself, with its inevitable characteristics of realism and universalism.
Both Simmel and Benjamin move from the second inactual consideration
of Nietzsche towards outcomes that will be radically different. In his 1874
essay Nietzsche tried to elaborate a new way of reading history that would
be based not on a vision of knowledge as a value in itself but as something
that should be useful to life. In this essay Nietzsche criticizes the precepts
of classical humanism that he sees also realized in contemporary German
historicism, primarily the objective and universal concept of “humanity”
that would be understood through history. The polemical goal is similar
from a historical epistemology standpoint, but with radically different
political outcomes. Simmel—as we saw in the previous section—funda-
mentally polemicized against the historical realism of Leopold von Ranke
on the one hand and, on the other, against the positivism of Comte and
the historical materialism of Marx. From a political point of view (as seen
in Chap. 5, Sect. 5). Simmel explicitly warns against a religious, utopian
expectation of the ideals of socialism.
21
The Theses on the Concept of History were not meant for publication as separate essay. In
an April 1940 letter to Gretel Karplus Adorno Benjamin affirmed that they can “leave the
door wide open for enthusiastic misunderstandings” (GS I, p. 1227). Whether the now
extensive international literature on Walter Benjamin has avoided these “misunderstandings”
is obviously a matter of debate—especially political debate—as we shall see in the next
section.
If this was the position of the socialist reformist Simmel in 1896, it

couldn’t be Benjamin’s position in 1940. Historical conditions, after a first
world war and facing the outbreak of the second, were radically different.
However, Benjamin had an ambivalent attitude toward Simmel’s theory of
history and culture. In December 1917 Benjamin writes to Gershom
Scholem about Simmel’s essay Das Problem der historischen Zeit (1916)
(“The Problem of Historical Time”) and adds a very aggressive remark:
the essay is “an extremely wretched concoction that goes through contor-
tions of reasoning, incomprehensibly uttering the silliest things” (Benjamin
1994 [1917]: 106). This testifies—if necessary—that Benjamin’s theo-
logical concept of history was very distant to Simmel’s dissolution of every
possible philosophy of history. On the other side, in The Arcades Project.
Benjamin describes the concept of culture that also underlies Simmel’s
philosophy as something that “has preserved … from the concept of cul-
ture that has so favored the cause of barbarism.”
Simmel touches on a very important matter with the distinction between

the concept of culture and the spheres of autonomy in classical Idealism.
The separation of three autonomous domains from one another preserved
classical Idealism from the concept of culture that has so favored the cause
of barbarism. Simmel says of the cultural ideal: “It is essential that the inde-
pendent values of aesthetic, scientific, ethical … and even religious achieve-
ments be transcended, so that they can all be integrated as elements in the
development of human nature.” Georg Simmel, Philosophie des Geldes
(Leipzig, 1900), pp. 476–477. (Benjamin 2002, p. 480)
Benjamin is quoting the last chapter of The Philosophy of Money that

Simmel dedicated to The Style of Life and, inside this, from the paragraph
dedicated to The Concept of Culture. Benjamin seems to appreciate
Simmel’s as well as classic idealistic concept of culture as something that
preserved from barbarism. Benjamin has in mind here clearly the concept
of Universal Cultural History that he criticized so vehemently in his essay
on Eduard Fuchs. In other words, Benjamin appreciates the separation of
the aesthetic, scientific, and ethical spheres of value and sees in the model
of aesthetic and physiognomic philosophy an alternative to universalist
and progressive cultural history that levels the whole of humanity. In fact
if we look at a previous quote in the same chapter of The Arcades Project is
dedicated to the Positivist concept of Cultural history as developed out of
the positivism of Comte. Positivist historiography, notes the German
270 V. MELE
historian Ernst Bernheim, “disregarded … the state and political pro-

cesses, and saw in the collective intellectual development of society the
sole content of history” (quot. in AP, pp. 479–480). A later quote from
Herman Lotze clarify even better Benjamin’s polemic object: “There has
never been a period of history in which the culture peculiar to it has leav-
ened the whole humanity, or even the whole of that one nation which was
specially distinguished by it.” This means that Benjamin wants to save
Simmel’s concept of culture from the levelling universalistic “Cultural
History”: Benjamin found in Simmel an “ideal of culture” that goes
beyond naturalistic positivism.22
In his polemic against “historicism” Benjamin grouped together both
the doctrines of academic philosophers and historians such as Wilhelm
Dilthey and—exactly like Simmel—Leopold von Ranke, and the positivist
and evolutionary conception of history that was to be appropriated by the
Second International and the theorists of German Social Democracy
(Benjamin mentions in particular Josef Dietzgen, but also Schmidt,
Stadler, Natorp, and Vorländer).
An important goal of Benjamin’s reflection on history was to elaborate
a materialistic conception that inherently contained an immanent critique
of the concept of “progress” (Fortschritt). As we read in fact in a fragment
of Konvolut “N”:
It may be considered one of the methodological objectives of this work to

demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the
idea of progress. (Benjamin 2002, p. 460)
In the essay on Eduard Fuchs,23 a historian and collector of caricatures,

Benjamin outlines some of the features of the revision to which he intended
22
Symons confuses this significant quote by Benjamin in the Arcades Project when he
states: “In The Arcades Project … Benjamin describes the concept of culture that also under-
lies Simmel’s philosophy as something that ‘has … favored the cause of barbarism’” (Symons
2017, p. 153). As seen, Benjamin’s actual quote says actually the opposite. This misunder-
standing—which nevertheless continues the tradition of critical theory’s preconceived hostil-
ity toward Simmel as a “scapegoat” (Landmann 1967)—doesn’t invalidate Symons’ insightful
comparative interpretation: it may just attenuate his negative judgment over “unity” and
“continuity” in Simmel’s view of life (that was not shared by Benjamin).
23
With regard to this essay, published as an anticipation of the work on the Passagenwerk
at the urgent request of Max Horkheimer and the Institute for Social Research, Benjamin
stated that it contained “a certain number of important considerations on dialectical materi-
alism that are in tune with my work” (Benjamin 1994 [1937], p. 240).
to subject the conception of historic materialism exposed as precepts

towards the historian of culture. The latter must “abandon the calm, con-
templative attitude toward his object in order to become conscious of the
critical constellation in which precisely this fragment of the past finds itself
with precisely this present” (Benjamin 2006a [1937], p. 262).
The present and the past thus become two focal points of an original
historical constellation, which is charged with the possibility of discontinu-
ity with respect to the homogeneous course of history. The historian
therefore “must abandon the epic element in history,” whereby events
follow one another on the basis of the slender thread of chronological
progression, in favor of a “constructive” criterion, which sets itself the task
of taking out a given epoch “of its reified historical continuity” (ibid.).
In the Theses Benjamin had defined this particular experience of time, in
which present and past come together in a configuration that has the
potential to break historical continuity, by the name of Jetzt-zeit, translat-
able as “now-time.” As we read in the fourteenth Thesis, probably the
most famous and quoted:
History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous,

empty time, but time filled full by now-time [Jetzt-zeit]. Thus, to Robespierre
ancient Rome was a past charged with now-time, a past which he blasted out
of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome
reincarnate. It cited ancient Rome exactly the way fashion cites a bygone
mode of dress. Fashion has a nose for the topical, no matter where it stirs in
the thickets of long ago; it is the tiger’s leap into the past. Such a leap, how-
ever, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The
same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical leap Marx understood
as revolution. (Benjamin 2006b [1940], p. 395)
In Thesis XVIII, on the other hand, the Jetzt-zeit is defined “as a model
of messianic time” that “comprises the entire history of mankind in a tre-
mendous abbreviation” (ibid., p. 396).
It is therefore clear that we are not in the presence of simple consider-
ations concerning a materialistic history of culture, but of a radically inno-
vative conception of temporality with which Benjamin intended to
confront historical materialism, in order to cure it of what was mechanistic
and dogmatic in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, namely the con-
cept of progress in a “homogeneous and empty” (ibid., p. 396) time.
Giorgio Agamben was particularly concerned with this aspect in what is
272 V. MELE
now regarded as classic research in the secondary literature on Benjamin

(Agamben 2007).
In an evocative—though perhaps overly simplifying—synthesis,24
Agamben identifies the characteristic trait of the Western conception of
temporality in its representation through the “spatial” image of a “punc-
tual, infinite and quantified continuum” (ibid., p. 93), consisting of punc-
tual instants that are incessantly fleeting and elusive. This conception
remains substantially unchanged in the transition from Greco-Roman
antiquity to Christianity and survives in a secularized form even in the
modern conception of time. The “progressive historicism” of the nine-
teenth century therefore represents only a pro-secession of this conception
in a radically secularized context. However, whereas in Christianity this
infinite succession of punctual instants had a direction and sense as a “pro-
gressive” realization of redemption, in the modern context it is emptied of
any sense other than that of a process structured according to a “before”
and “after.” “The before and the after, these notions which were so uncer-
tain and vacuous for antiquity, and which, for Christianity, made sense
only in view of the end of time, now become in and of themselves the
sense, and this sense is presented as truly historical” (ibid., p. 97). It is this
conception, with which historical materialism also appears to be imbued,
that Benjamin intended to criticize when he argued that “classless society
is not the final goal of historical progress,” but that, precisely in the inter-
est of the proletariat and the anti-fascist forces “a genuinely messianic face
must be restored” (Benjamin 2006b [1940], pp. 402–403).
He contrasts the idea, specific to social democracy and historicism, of
an evolutionary and automatically progressive historical course, with the
concept of “now-time” (Jetzt-zeit) or the “messianic arrest of the happen-
ing” which “comprises the entire history of mankind in a tremendous
abbreviation” (ibid., p. 396).
This model of temporality, which is antithetical to the elusive and objec-
tive model of the instant in flight that is dominant in the Western
24
One of the simplifications of Agamben’s synthesis consists in basing his analysis on the
deep-rooted prejudice that attributes to the Greeks exclusively a cyclical conception of time
and to Christianity an exclusively linear conception. More careful historiographic analyses
have shown that this is not the case at all: one cannot extend what philosophers thought to
what ordinary people thought at the time of the Greeks and early Christians. But for these
clarifications see A.M. Iacono, “Modernità, Progresso, Futuro,” pp. 18–20, introduction to
the Italian translation of B. de Fontenelle, Digressione sugli antichi e sui moderni, Pisa, ETS,
2019 (English edition, de Fontenelle [1688] 1970).
tradition, is the kairòs that springs from the decision and conscious action of
man to free himself from the as-servitude to an extraneous and elusive tem-
porality, which prevents him from conceiving himself as something unique
and complete. It is defined as an “abrupt and sudden coincidence in which
the decision seizes the opportunity and fulfills in the moment its own life.
Infinite and quantified time is thus suddenly delimited and presentified.”25
Benjamin’s critique of the progressive “historicism” of the nineteenth cen-
tury also affected German Social Democracy in its uncritical adoption of
the conception of “homogeneous and empty time,” which translated into
a vision of history as an unstoppable continuum towards progress.
Benjamin wrote:
The conformism which has marked the Social Democrats from the begin-
ning […] is one reason for the eventual breakdown of their party. Nothing
has so corrupted the German working class as the notion that it was moving
with the current. It regarded technological development as the driving force
of the stream with which it thought it was moving. (ibid., p. 393)
At the basis of the fallacious assimilation of technical progress and social

and political progress tout court was, according to Benjamin, the real “the
bungled reception of technology” (Benjamin 2006a [1937], p. 266).
In fact, Social Democracy seems to “recognize[s] only the progress in
mastering nature, not the retrogression of society” (Benjamin 2006b
[1940], p. 393) (Thesis XI). Thus, it had not foreseen the political and
destructive use of technology, which at the beginning of the twentieth
century would manifest itself both in the new destructiveness of war tech-
nology and in the formative propaganda apparatus that accompanied it.
The optimism that Social Democracy shared with nineteenth-century
positivist culture turned out to be utterly unfounded when tested against
real facts, since, as Benjamin observes, it concerned “the conditions under
which the class operates” rather than its “active strength” (Benjamin
2006a [1937], p. 273). Benjamin mentions in the essay on Fuchs, albeit
in passing, the “cultural” causes of this erroneous reception of technology:
the fact of separating a-dialectically the natural sciences and the spiritual
25
It remains to be defined whether to Agamben’s suggestive reconstruction we should not
add a further investigation on the concept of Jetzt-zeit, which seems to be analyzed in a key
too close to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, from which Benjamin, as revealed in a fragment
of the Passagenwerk, took care to clearly distinguish himself (see Benjamin 2002,
pp. 462–463).
274 V. MELE
sciences, and of considering the former as the sciences simply by virtue of

their practical successes, so forming the basis for obscuring the “historical”
and “political” aspects of the problematic of the technological domination
of nature. “The questions that humanity brings to nature are in part con-
ditioned by the level of production” (ibid., p. 266), Benjamin observed in
this regard. It was a short step from not grasping this essential “aspect” of
technique, seeing it exclusively as the fruit of a fetishist science, to the
conclusion that the progress of the productive forces should be assimilated
to the progress of the relations of production. According to Benjamin, this
led to the intertwining of Darwinism and neo-Kantianism in the concep-
tion of history, between the deterministic vision for which the victory of
the proletariat could not fail, and for classless society as a Kantian “ideal,”
then “infinite task.” In this way, the historical process, emptied of any
imaginable contradiction, was transformed “into an anteroom, so to
speak, in which one could wait for the emergence of the revolutionary
situation with more or less equanimity” (Benjamin 2006b [1940], p. 402).
Whereas, as we have already noted, for Benjamin “there is not a moment
that would not carry with it its revolutionary chance.” And this is the case
not in a generic way, so as to slip into the form of an impotent “volun-
tarism.” In fact, according to Benjamin, this “chance” “is defined in a
specific way, namely as the chance for a completely new resolution of a
completely new problem” in such a way that “for the revolutionary
thinker, the peculiar revolutionary chance offered by every historical
moment gets its warrant from the political situation” (ibid., p. 402).
4 Historical Materialism or
Materialist Historiography?
As might be expected, Benjamin’s attempt to reformulate a conception of
historical materialism that dispensed with the category of progress has
provoked great and conflicting discussions. Many interpretations have fol-
lowed, giving rise to veritable “Benjaminian schools,” of which the Italian
one is certainly significant. It should again be emphasized that the Theses
on the Concept of History was not written with the intent of publication,
because, as its author pointed out, it could have given rise to vigorous
“misunderstandings.” However, the idea of reformulating a new concept
of revolution as an “emergency brake” against a world that seemed to be
heading toward catastrophe could not go unnoticed not only in the intel-
lectual world but also in the world of political and social movements.
With great precision, Michael Löwy described the situation, from the
1950s onwards, followed the publication of the Theses, as characterized by
three main school of interpretation:
1. The materialist school: Walter Benjamin is a Marxist, a coherent material-

ist. His theological formulations have to be regarded as metaphors, as an
exotic form in which materialist truths are clothed. This was the position
adopted by Brecht as early as his “Working Journal”.
2. The theological school: Walter Benjamin is, first and foremost, a Jewish
theologian, a messianic thinker. His Marxism is merely a terminology and
he falsely appropriates such concepts as “historical materialism”. This was
the view of his friend Gershom Scholem.
3. The school of contradiction: Walter Benjamin tries to reconcile Marxism
with Jewish theology, materialism with messianism. Now, as everyone
knows, the two are incompatible. Hence the failure of his endeavour. This
is the reading shared by Jürgen Habermas and Rolf Tiedemann.
In my view, these three schools of thought are simultaneously right and

wrong. I should like, modestly, to propose a fourth approach. (Löwy
2005, p. 20)
We would like here to discuss in detail the “third” and “fourth” posi-
tions, that is, Habermas’ thesis by comparing it with that of M. Löwy
himself.
It is still worthwhile to discuss Habermas’ interpretation of fifty years
ago because—clear of some misunderstandings and omissions—it seems
to us to be the less “literary” and more “literal” one, an operation that is
even more necessary in relation to Walter Benjamin, a thinker who made
poetic thought and allegory his form of expression. Habermas takes seri-
ously—as did his master Adorno—Benjamin and performs an “immanent
critique” of him by showing the aporias of his critical position without
performing an “abstract negation” of his positions, and by spotting some
inconsistencies between his critique of progress and materialist political
praxis. As seen previously, Habermas’ Hegelian and excessively rationalist
approach, devalued the sociological potential of Benjamin’s “redemptive
critique” (rettende Kritik). Secondly, Habermas’ interpretation, in addi-
tion to being excessively devaluing, is misleading when he sustains the
eminently “conservative” function of Benjaminian criticism. This
276 V. MELE
assumption is based on a rather drastic impoverishment of the meanings

that gather around the concept of Rettung.26 This fundamental term of
Benjamin’s philosophy, which has its roots in the thought of Jewish mysti-
cism (the Kabbalah),27 cannot be reduced to a mere “restoration” of a lost
state of affairs. “Salvation” of the works that have been mistreated by the
dominant cultural tradition, redemption of phenomena from their “dazed
facticity,”28 “recollection” (Erinnerung), “awakening,” are all articula-
tions of the same concept (that of Rettung) that are encountered through-
out all phases of Benjamin’s intellectual production and that, even in their
common reference to a return to a disturbed original order, are charged
with a meaning that goes beyond the merely nostalgic and restorative
aspect. Richard Wolin—who can be considered an Habermasian scholar—
has observed in this regard:
Although this idea [of Rettung] can sometimes take the form of a static,
purely restorative conception of redemption, it is just as often found mixed
in with utopian and radical elements: it does not necessarily imply the rees-
tablishment of an intact, original state of things; but, according to a more
dynamic reading, redemption means a return to a condition held merely
26
The term in German means salvation and is conceptually related to the notion of
“redemption” (Erlösung). In Jewish apocalyptic and in the Gnostic-Neoplatonic traditions,
to which Benjamin seems to refer, redemption refers to the restoration of an original paradi-
siacal state in conjunction with the coming of the Messiah. In this restoration, things reas-
sume their proper and original mutual relations, and the distortion caused by the “dream
condition of the world” is overcome. The phenomenal world is thus “saved” from the condi-
tion of “guilt” in which it finds itself after the original sin and the consequent “fall” from
earthly paradise (on this see B. Witte, Paris—Berlin—Paris: Personal, Literary and Social
Experience in Walter Benjamin’s Late Works, in “New German Critique,” 39, Fall,
1986, p. 57).
27
The Kabbalah (which literally means “reception” or “tradition”) is the set of exoteric
and mystical doctrines that were born within Judaism by elaborating original interpretations
of canonical texts and over the centuries, also through the influence of external religious
worlds, developing a symbolic and doctrinal universe of great complexity. For the importance
of this tradition of thought in Benjamin, especially with regard to his theory of knowledge
and his conception of history, we refer to Wolin, An Aesthetic of Redemption, cit. (especially
pp. 31–63), M. Löwy, Redemption and Utopia. Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central
Europe, Verso Books, New York 2017, as well as Buck-Morss, Dialectics of Seeing, quot., in
particular pp. 228–252, where the relevance of Kabbalistic theory for the theory of dialectical
images, central to the Passagenwerk, is precisely traced.
28
We use here a famous expression of Adorno’s, referring to the essay Das Paris des Second
Empire bei Baudelaire, which Adorno refused to publish in the “Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung” because it lacked theoretical mediation.
implicit in the original paradisiacal state, whose ultimate eschatological

meaning can only fully unfold after the profane realm of history has been
surmounted and the will of the Messiah realized. (Wolin 1994, pp. 38–39)
Thus if the interpretation of “redemption” or “salvation” in terms of

“restoration” can be encouraged by the occasionally nostalgic nature of its
reflections, nonetheless, this upsets an essential point of his thought,
which is also present in all the Arcades work: the duty of the Rettung in
the face of the past does not imply its mere restoration, but its immission
into the present such as to lead to its radical transformation. It seems to
us, therefore, that Habermas interprets the concept of “origin” previously
analyzed in a decidedly restrictive way.
If this is the part of the Habermasian critique that must be rejected,
there is a part that we feel can be “redempted.” The basic thesis of
Habermas’ article that it is still worth to discuss consists in a refined dia-
lectical reversal of Benjamin’s position vis-à-vis historical materialism. As
the latter intended to place the latter “in the service” of his theological
conception of experience, Habermas dialectically believes that its actuality
would consist in placing that theory of experience in the service of histori-
cal materialism itself. Thus Benjamin’s actuality would consist not so much
in a “theology of revolution” that liberates semantic contents oppressed in
the cultural tradition as in a critical and “differentiated theory of prog-
ress,” which must be considered at least under the three dimensions of
increasing well-being, expanding freedom and promoting happiness. His
critique of the Kautskian conception of progress hits the mark when it is
directed at a “joyless reformism” that has forgotten the difference between
an “improved reproduction of life” and a “fulfilled life,” “or perhaps we
should say, a life that is not a failure” (Habermas 1979, p. 58).
Ernst Bloch in Natural Law and Human Dignity had already intro-
duced the distinction between emancipation from political “starvation”
and “oppression”: the development of productive forces under capitalism
taught that “in developed societies there exists the possibility that repres-
sions can become reconciled with a high standard of living, that is, that
demands directed at the economic system may be fulfilled without neces-
sarily realizing genuinely political demands. The more this possibility
becomes noticeable, the more the accent shifts here from the elimination
of hunger to emancipation” (ibid., pp. 56–57). In line with this tradition
starting with Marx, Benjamin was the first to highlight a further moment
in the concept of exploitation and progress: “along with hunger and
278 V. MELE
oppression he emphasized failure, along with living standard and free-

dom—happiness. Benjamin saw the experience of happiness, which he called
profane illumination, as being bound to the redemption of tradition” (ibid.;
my italics, trans. mod.). However, this critique becomes acute only when
the difference between well-being and happiness can be made visible in
appreciable improvements in life. Put another way, Benjamin’s critique is
one that hits the mark in affluent societies, otherwise first things first
(Brechtianly).
In complex, differentiated societies, it is possible, Habermas argues, for
gradual reformism not to produce happiness. However, Habermas asks: in
this context, can we rule out the possibility of emancipation without hap-
piness (meaning or fulfillment)? “In complex societies, emancipation
means a participatory remodeling of administrative decision-making struc-
tures” (ibid., p. 58). Could an emancipated humanity one day recognize
itself in the expanded fields of action of a discursive formation of will and
yet be robbed of the light (read: profane illumination) by which it is able
to interpret its life as a good life? In this situation Benjamin’s “semantic
materialism” would reveal all its importance and significance from the
standpoint of critical theory. In this situation, according to Habermas we
would witness a paradoxical “revenge” of culture exploited for millennia
that at the moment of overcoming ancient repressions would no longer be
able to give content (read: meaning) to its own emancipation. Without
the contribution of Benjamin’s redemptive critique, the structures of prac-
tical discourse would necessarily have to become sterile.
Habermas will reiterate this interpretation of Benjamin by including it
fully in his Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. The importance of
Benjamin’s critique in this context is precisely to correct “the degenera-
tion of the modern consciousness of time” (which is structurally turned
toward the future) and “renew this consciousness.” The importance of
Benjamin’s critique therefore is semantic-cultural and not practical-
political. Habermas is quite clear on this: the “times now”—those authen-
tic instants that interrupt the continuum of history—are inspired by a
mixture of surrealist experiences and motifs of Jewish mysticism: “the
experience of shock is not an action, and secular enlightenment is not a
revolutionary act.”
An opposite and certainly much more radical reading in some ways is
that proposed by Michael Löwy throughout his work and particularly in
Fire Alarm. Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On The Concept of History”
(2005). In contrast to Habermas, who recovered some aspects of
Benjamin’s critique to “renew the modern consciousness of time” ori-

ented exclusively toward the future, Löwy’s intention is to integrate
Benjamin’s central concepts, including that of “time now”—the authentic
instant that interrupts the continuum of history—into the “philosophical
discourse of modernity.” For Löwy “Walter Benjamin’s ‘Theses “On the
Concept of History”’ (1940) constitutes one of the most important philo-
sophical and political texts of the twentieth century. In revolutionary
thought, it is perhaps the most significant document since Marx’s ‘Theses
on Feuerbach’” (Löwy 2005, p. 4). In Löwy’s opinion “Benjamin’s con-
ception of history … consists rather in a modern critique of (capitalist/
industrial) modernity, inspired by pre-capitalist cultural and historical ref-
erences” (ibid., p. 3). However, how does Benjamin manage to stay within
the framework of the immanent critique of capitalist and bourgeois
modernity of historical materialism, whose foundations are those of the
“determinate negation” of capitalism, that is, in the reversal of its emanci-
patory possibilities and not in the abstract and ahistorical rejection of its
potentialities? In other words, where is the foundation of the Benjaminian
critique? According to Löwy “Benjamin’s philosophy of history draws on
three very different sources: German Romanticism, Jewish messianism
and Marxism” (ibid., p. 4). The Romantic moment in particular has been
central to Benjamin’s interests since his graduate dissertation:
One might define the Romantic Weltanschauung as a cultural critique of

modern (capitalist) civilization in the name of pre-modern (pre-capitalist)
values—a critique or protest that bears upon aspects which are felt to be
unbearable and degrading: the quantification and mechanization of life, the
reification of social relations, the dissolution of the community and the dis-
enchantment of the world. Its nostalgia for the past does not mean it is
necessarily retrograde: the Romantic view of the world may assume both
reactionary and revolutionary forms. For revolutionary Romanticism the
aim is not a return to the past, but a detour through the past on the way to
a utopian future. (ibid., p. 5)
Löwy is fiercely convinced that Benjamin stands at the center of a con-

stellation of Jewish thought that breaks with the model of philosophy of
history common to Christian theodicy, the Progressive Enlightenment
and Hegelian philosophy. “By abandoning the Western teleological model,
we pass from a time of necessity to a time of possibilities, a random time,
open at any moment to the unforeseeable irruption of the new. But, from
280 V. MELE
the political standpoint, we are also on the central strategic axis of the
reconstruction of Marxism attempted by Benjamin” (ibid., 102):
The result is a reworking, a critical reformulation of Marxism, integrating

messianic, romantic, Blanquist, libertarian and Fourierist ‘splinters’ into the
body of historical materialism. This form of Marxism is above all, a Marxism
of unpredictability: if history is open, if the ‘the new’ is possible, this is
because the future is not known in advance; the future is not the ineluctable
result of a given historical evolution, the necessary and predictable outcome
of the ‘natural’ laws of social transformation, the inevitable fruit of eco-
nomic, technical or scientific progress—or, worse still, the c ontinuation, in
ever more perfected forms, of the same, of what already exists, of actually
existing modernity, of the current economic and social structures. […] If no
one in June 1789 foresaw the fall of the Bastille—or, even less, the execution
of the king and the proclamation of the Republic—this is not because con-
temporaries lacked adequate instruments of scientific knowledge, as a par-
ticularly dogmatic positivism might claim, but because these events were, as
innovative historical acts, essentially unpredictable. (Ibid., pp. 109–110)
Löwy’s reflection did not mature in a vacuum, but—according to

him—from concrete historical experiences. Since “Benjamin’s concepts
are not metaphysical abstractions, but relate to concrete historical experi-
ences” (ibid., p. 21), Löwy examines some experiences that he believes
would demonstrate the relevance of Benjamin’s messianic-revolutionary
thought. He mentions a number of “now times” experiences posited by
the discontinuous series of moments when the chain of domination
appears to break down: the FAI_CNT anarchists and the POUM Marxists
in Catalonia (in the summer of 1936, an example that Benjamin actually
ignores). However, a topical example would best illustrate Benjamin’s
ideas: the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in January 1994: here the EZLN
fighters allegedly made the legendary “tiger leap into the past,” releasing
the explosive energies of Emiliano Zapata’s historical experience into the
present, thus breaking with the pull of official history represented by the
PRI, the supposedly corrupt and authoritarian heir to the Mexican
Revolution of 1911–1917. Indeed, Löwy—in his passionate reinterpreta-
tion of Benjamin’s theory of revolution—seems to bypass the problem of
the “after revolution” in a complex society: how to reconcile democracy in
an industrial society and communitarian thinking of FARC or Zapatism?
Where in all this are the historical experiences of Bachofen’s matriarchy or
happy pre-capitalist communities integrated with nature, that constitutes
some of the sources of Benjamin’s romantic anti-capitalism? Adorno had

rightly stated that “the golden age at the origin of history” from a theo-
logical and sociological point of view would rather resemble “the age of
hell” (Benjamin 1994 [1938], p. 500) in which the space for the affirma-
tion of free and autonomous individuals in the context of these organic
communities would probably have been impossible. Every attempt to con-
struct a new utopian synthesis out of the fragments of social life must
come to terms with the quantitative and qualitative complexity of the
objectified social forms and cultural contents highlighted by Simmel.
However, just as we tried to carry out a “critique of Habermas’ cri-
tique,” discarding the unconvincing parts so we would like to indicate the
aspect of Löwy’s approach that in our judgment is fruitful to recover.
According to Löwy, Benjamin proposes “a kind of philosophical mani-
festo … for the opening-up of history” (ibid., p. 107). Rather than affirming
the relevance of Walter Benjamin for the Marxist theory of revolution, it
is possible to recover the yearning for the opening of history toward open-
ness to forms of production, consumption and socialization other than
those currently dominant, of the kind of the post-industrial “convivial
society” envisioned by Ivan Illich (Illich 1973) or A. Gorz’s “non-reformist
reforms” toward an after-work society (Gorz 2011). Rather than being
revolutionary thinking in the sense of classic historical materialism these
kinds of provocations are those of “social movements” that naturally live
in the “now times,” where social systems (political parties, trade unions,
complex organizations such as political systems of constitutional type with
democratic legitimacy) naturally tend to live in the inertia of cumulative
and evolutionary time. Social movements can and should shake up political
systems with their “now times” by posing “inadmissible” questions that
force it to change and evolve toward ever greater forms of complexity. In
this sense, they not only shake and renew the future-oriented “modern
time consciousness” but also force the political system to confront what
exceeds “discursive rationality” in that the “times now” feed on the
repressed and oppressed needs of the dominant discourse and suddenly
bring them to light. They represent the unreasonableness that opposes
dominant discursive rationality. Benjamin’s view of history must be deeply
and fruitfully confronted with the Habermasian “system/life-world”
schema (Habermas 1984) instead of classical Marxism, which—even with
its unconvincing theory of rational consent—it is more useful to interpret
mature capitalist societies that are better represented as complex systems
integrated through the media “money” and “power.” Habermas’ caution
282 V. MELE
in this regard—which goes so far as to integrate “semantic materialism”

into his “philosophical discourse of modernity” as “critique of joyless
reformism”—does not appear to have aged.
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Gassen, K., and M. Landmann, eds. 1958. Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel.
Duncker & Humblot.
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Hopkins University Press.
Gorz, A. 2011. Critique of Economic Reason. New York: Verso Books.
Habermas, J. 1979. Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The
Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin. New German Critique 17: 30–59.
———. 1984. The Theory of Communicative Action. Reason and the Rationalization
of Society. Boston: Bacon Press.
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sugli antichi e sui moderni, 7–16. Roma: Manifestolibri.
Illich, I. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row.
Landmann, M. 1967. Georg Simmel als Prügelknabe (Erwiderung auf Delius und
Adorno). Philosophische Rundschau 14: 258–274.
Lijester, T. 2012. Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Critique. In Conceptions of
Critique in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, ed. K. de Boer and
R. Soderegger, 156–174. London: Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.
org/10.1057/9780230357006_10.
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History’. New York: Verso Books.
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Mele, V. 2015. “At the crossroad of Magic and Positivism”. Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm through Benjamin and Adorno. Journal of Classical Sociology 15
(2): 139–153.
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Podoksik, E. 2016. Neo-kantianism and Georg Simmel’s interpretation of Kant.
Modern Intellectual History 13 (3): 597–622.
Scholem, G., and W. Benjamin. 1982. The Story of a Friendship. London: Faber.
Symons, S. 2017. More than life. Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin on Art.
Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Tiedemann, R. 1983. Dialektik im Stillstand. Versuche zum Spätwerk Walter
Benjamins. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.
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Angeles: University of California Press.
CHAPTER 9
The Phantasmagoria of Modernity:

On Commodity Fetishism
Seek for food and clothing first, then

shall the Kingdom of God be granted to you. (Hegel, 1807)1
1 Fetishism as the Keystone of The

Arcades Project
In the new phase of the work on the Parisian Passages, beginning in 1934,
the interpretive key to analyze the object of the book—the cultural “phan-
tasmagoria” of the nineteenth century—was to be provided by the Marxian
concept of commodity fetishism. In a letter of May 1935 to his friend
Gershom Scholem, Benjamin clarifies the theoretical background of
his work:
I periodically succumb to the temptations of visualizing analogies with the

baroque book in the book’s inner construction, although its external con-
struction decidedly diverges from that of the former. And I want to give you
this much of a hint: Here as well the focus will be on the unfolding of a
handed-down concept. Whereas in the former it was the concept of
1
From a letter of Hegel to K. L. von Knebel, August 30, 1807, in K. L. van Knebel’s lit-
erarischer Nachlass und Briefwechsel, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1 840), p. 446, quot. by Benjamin in
the IV thesis on the concept of history Benjamin (2006b, p. 390).

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9_9
286 V. MELE
Trauerspiel, here it is likely to be the fetish character of commodities. Whereas

the baroque book mobilized its own theory of knowledge, this will be the
case for Arcades at least to the same extent, though I can foresee neither
whether it will find a form of representation of its own, nor to what extent I
may succeed in such a representation. The title “Paris Arcades” has finally
been discarded and the draft is entitled “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth
Century.” Privately I call it “Paris, capital du XIXe siècle,” implying a further
analogy: just as the baroque book dealt with the seventeenth century from
the perspective of Germany, this book will unravel the nineteenth century
from France’s perspective. (Benjamin 1994 [1935], p. 482)
From these statements we derive a series of very important elements to

understand the conceptual construction of the work. First of all, Benjamin
intended to put at the center of the Passagenwerk, the concept of commod-
ity fetishism. This conception of Marx should have been the fundamental
interpretative key of the work on the Parisian passages and, with all evi-
dence, Benjamin saw an affinity between modernity and baroque, between
fetishism and Trauerspiel. A second fundamental indication concerns the
theory of knowledge that must have been at the basis of the Passagenwerk.
This work too, like the work on the Origin of German Trauerspiel, was
probably to be preceded by a gnoseological premise that in the remaining
fragments is still only sketched out. It seems clear that Benjamin therefore
placed at the center of his research on Paris the classic problem of fetishism:
the problem of the relationship between consciousness and appearances,
that is, the gap between social being and the nebulous and fantastic images
through which social being is seen and conceived by men. These questions
can also be found in Benjamin’s thought and in his attempt to write the
Passagenwerk at the center of which was—as we have seen from the letter
cited above—the “unfolding” of the same concept. Benjamin therefore
faced the same questions of theory of knowledge and philosophy of history,
to which he dedicated his last famous work, published posthumously after
his death: the theses On the Concept of History (1940). Let’s analyze some
of the interpretative problems he faced, in particular that of commodity as
“dialectical image,” in which we will find re-interpreted in an original way
all the questions also posed by Marx.
In the first section of Das Kapital titled The Fetishism of Commodities
and the Secret Thereof, Marx deals with the relation between the material
character of social production and its imaginary transposition. In Marx’s
view, commodity fetishism is a phenomenon which comes about in the
9 THE PHANTASMAGORIA OF MODERNITY: ON COMMODITY… 287
context of capitalist economy according to which a “a definite social rela-

tion between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a rela-
tion between things” (Marx 1976, p. 88). The commodity form operates
as a distorting “mirror”: it reflects to men the image of their relationships
as a relation between things. Once the social relations of production are
mediated by it, a double inversion takes place: a real inversion, since
human tasks among themselves relate in the form of things, and a sym-
bolic inversion, in that men tend to see these relations precisely as relations
among things. In Marx’s words, they become “natural social properties”
of things. Here lies the “fantastic” nature of the commodity form; it has
the almost magical property of being able to operate an inversion between
society and nature both in the reality of material production and in the
consciousness picturing such a reality. If this is how the fetishist phenom-
enon is described, then there are at least two instances in Marx’s theoreti-
cal procedure that are difficult to interpret, both very important for the
issues we are dealing with here: the comparative question between the
different types of society that have existed, whether historically or imagi-
natively; and the question of the relationship between the observer and the
observation, dealing with the issue of how such a phenomenon can be
observed (Iacono 2016). From the historical-comparative viewpoint, the
fetishism concept postulates a comparison between a capitalist society in
which the inversion phenomenon exists with other types of society where
such a phenomenon does not exist. In Marx’s work at least five cases are
to be found of non-fetishist means of production: of these five, three are
historical (the primitive hunter–gatherer community, feudal society and
the patriarchal–peasant industry) and two imaginary (Robinson’s island
and the association of free men2). The instance of the relationship between
observer and observation refers to the problem of how to grasp—from the
2
Robinson’s island is the famous metaphor used by classical political economy (Smith and
Ricardo) to describe the starting point of political economy, that is, the situation of man as
“a single, isolated hunter and fisherman.” In the Introduction to the Grundrisse Marx criti-
cizes these “imaginings lacking fantasy” as undue historical and conceptual abstractions,
“which in no way constitute, as the historians of civilization presume, simply a reaction to
excessive refinement and a return to a misconceived natural life” (Marx 1973, pp. 5–6),
postulating the categories of “bourgeois society” (bürgerliche Gesellschaft), possessive owner-
ship individualism in a world short of resources) as the hypothetical origin of society. Hence
his criticism toward the “Robinsonisms” of bourgeois economy. The association of free men
is communism. On the various images used by Marx to describe communism, see Musto
(2018, pp. 228–252).
288 V. MELE
viewpoint of “knowledge theory” (Erkenntnistheorie)—the phenomenon

of fetishism: how is it possible to observe such a phenomenon of inversion,
from both inside and outside the phenomenon itself? This is to a certain
extent the key problem of all the “caves,” from Plato’s to the Lascaux
Cave, in that it poses the problem between being social and its symbolical,
fantastic projections (Blumemberg 1989).
It is now essential to clear up this point in terms of the observer’s the-
ory in order to see how Marx in particular—and other authors after him—
frame the question of symbolical representation of the material condition.
As we know, in German Ideology Marx uses the metaphor of the eye and
the inversion produced on the retina to indicate the phenomenon of inver-
sion between ideological consciousness and reality (Kofman 1998). In Das
Kapital this metaphor is abandoned and explicitly replaced by the analogy
between fetishism as a religious phenomenon and fetishism as a social phe-
nomenon determined by commodities. In this way Marx appears to be
seeking to avoid a form of naturalization of this type of inversion, such as
that involved in the use of the metaphor of the retina and the camera
obscura. In other words, Marx appears to avoid the problem of the “abso-
lutization of the observer’s role”: if the observer is within the context
under observation, he himself becomes a victim of the inversion and there-
fore is unable to describe the phenomenon under discussion. Inserting
into a certain context an image taken from other historical and cultural
contexts, an analogical comparison with other cultures and productions
modes—fetishism as a form of primitive religion and non-capitalist pro-
duction modes—would make it possible, theoretically, to uncover the spe-
cific inversion of the observed context without thereby being influenced
by historical philosophy or teleology. However, the anthropological route
between the material and the symbolic would not yet be sufficiently the-
matized as the moment when material is “transposed” and represented. As
we have seen, Georg Simmel set out from this point. For Simmel, “com-
modity fetishism” is only one instance of the process of objectification to
which all forms of culture are subjected. They are created by and for indi-
viduals but once they attain the form of objectivity they follow an imma-
nent evolutionary logic and become estranged from their origin and end.
For Simmel, it is not possible to eliminate the phenomenon of objectifica-
tion, the most obvious manifestation of which in modernity is money. This
was the sense of his investigation “a storey below historical materialism” as
we have seen in the previous chapters.
These questions can also be found in Benjamin’s thought and in his

attempt to write the Passagenwerk at the center of which was—as we have
seen from the letter cited above—the “unfolding” of the same concept.
Benjamin therefore faced the same questions of theory of knowledge and
philosophy of history, to which he dedicated his last famous work, pub-
lished posthumously after his death: Theses on the Concept of History
(1940). Let’s analyze some of the interpretative problems he faced, in
particular that of commodity as “dialectical image,” in which we will find
re-interpreted in an original way all the questions posed also by Marx.
2 The Dialectical Image

In addition to the aforementioned concept of commodity fetishism,
among the “new and penetrating sociological perspectives,” we should
mention the stimuli coming from the Parisian cultural environment—in
particular the frequentation of Georges Bataille, at that time librarian at
the Bibliothèque Nationale—and the discovery of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s
theories. If the influence of Bataille is difficult to reconstruct (Ciantelli
2017), it is Benjamin himself who speaks of the acquaintance with
Bachofen; that same year he had written an essay on the Swiss historian
and anthropologist.3 His influence in this phase is very clear and is con-
nected to Benjamin’s re-reading of the topic of commodity fetishism, that
is the relationship between the historical-social being and the hazy, fantas-
tic images through which the social being is seen and conceived by men.
In the exposé of 1935 this issue is thus expressed:
Corresponding to the form of the new means of production, which in the

beginning is still ruled by the form of the old (Marx), are images in the col-
lective consciousness in which the new is permeated with the old. These
images are wish images (Wunschbilder); in them the collective seeks both to
overcome or transfigure the imperfection of the social product and the
defects of the social organization of production. At the same time, what
emerges in these wish images is the resolute effort to distance oneself from
3
In this essay (intended for the “Nouvelle Revue Française” which refused it) Benjamin
criticizes Klages’ conservative interpretation and praises Erich Fromm’s Freudian-Marxist
reading. In his study Significato psicologico-sociale delle teorie matriarcali, Fromm denounces
the serious alteration that threatens relations between mother and child in present-day soci-
ety, no minor cause of the multiple derivations between Bachofen’s renaissance and fascism.
On Benjamin’s reading of Bachofen, see Pezzella (1988).
290 V. MELE
all that is antiquated—which includes, however, the recent past. These ten-
dencies deflect the imagination (which is given impetus by the new) back
upon the primal past (Urvergangne). (Benjamin 2002, p. 4)
Besides Marx’s traditional vocabulary (“means of production”) the

“wish images” (Wunschbilder) appear, stimulated by the appearance of the
new technological productive apparatus in which they arose. However,
these images return fantasy to the “primal past” (Urvergangne). Benjamin
details this mixture of images of the future and the fantasy of an immemo-
rial past:
In the dream in which each epoch entertains images of its successor, the lat-
ter appears wedded to elements of primal history (Urgeschichte)—that is, to
elements of a classless society. And the experiences of such a society—as
stored in the unconscious of the collective—engender through interpenetra-
tion with what is new, the utopia that has left its trace in a thousand configu-
rations of life, from enduring edifices to passing fashions. (Ibid., pp. 4–5)
In the citations above we find Benjamin’s conception of the “dialectic

image” which summarizes the theory of history and knowledge underly-
ing Passagenwerk. The “new” of techno-capitalist modernity interpene-
trates the “old,” the “primal history (Urgeschichte).” This interpenetration
of the “new” and “archaic” produces the dream of the future, Utopia. It
is no easy matter to follow the philosophy of circular history proposed by
Benjamin, since it is founded on the concept of a dialect unlike Hegel’s,
present in Marx as well. If this “regarding every historically developed
social form as in fluid movement” (Marx 1976, p. 45), Benjamin tried to
stop the fluid movement, to grasp the “being” of every historical becom-
ing. So he went forward through images, trying to read historical-social
phenomena as historic-natural phenomena. The “dialectic image” is there-
fore a contradictory construction of myth and history, of the wish for the
future and immemorial past. For Benjamin:
But precisely modernity is always citing primal history. Here, this occurs
through the ambiguity peculiar to the social relations and products of this
epoch. Ambiguity is the appearance of dialectic in images, the law of dialec-
tics at a standstill. This standstill is utopia and the dialectical image, there-
fore, dream image. Such an image is afforded by the commodity per se: as
fetish. (Benjamin 2002, p. 10)
To better understand the reference to the concept of “primal history”

(Urgeschichte) we need to see Benjamin’s interest in Bachofen. The work
of the Swiss anthropologist had attracted the interest of Marx, Engels, and
socialist and anarchic thinkers through its evocation of a communist soci-
ety at the dawn of history. The interest of Engels and Paul Lafargue was
awoken by the study of matriarchal societies, with their high level of
democracy and equality as well as forms of primitive communism that
showed a complete overturn of the concept of authority. The archaic soci-
eties of Urgeschichte were those of harmony between man and nature
upset by “progress” and were to be re-established in the emancipated soci-
ety of the future. As Michael Löwy so well expressed it, the procedure of
Benjamin’s thought is characteristic of “revolutionary romanticism” which
consists in weaving dialectic relationships between the pre-capitalist past
and the post-capitalist future, archaic harmony and Utopic harmony,
ancient experience lost, and future experience liberated (Löwy 2017,
p. 127).
In Passagenwerk, Benjamin closely links the abolition of man’s exploita-
tion of man to an end to man’s exploitation of nature, referring both to
Fourier and to Bachofen as emblematic figures of harmony, both new and
old. It is no coincidence that the first chapter of the ground plan of the
work is on Fourier or the Arcades. Benjamin stated: “Fourier saw, in the
passages, the architectural canon of the phalanstery” (Benjamin 2002,
p. 5). The passage as an architectural form, made technologically feasible
by building technology using iron and glass, concretely embodied
Benjamin’s concept of the “dialectic image.” On the one hand, the passage
was a construction built to house the luxury goods that capitalism had
started to mass-produce. On the other, it stimulates the opposite fantasy,
that of a socialist society that replaces the mediated relationship between
things with the relationship between free men. The phalanstery, literally
representing an ideal city made of passages, in Fourier’s vision was to rep-
resent the basic unit of the new structure of socialist-based society, capable
of guaranteeing that everyone would share the profit in proportion to their
contribution to common property. Each one was to be self-sufficient from
the point of view of services and production; through the co-ordination of
activities among several buildings it would be possible to resolve defini-
tively the relations between town and country, between man and nature.
The phalanstery arose from a mechanical sort of fantasy in which men co-
operated according to precise “passion mechanics” rather than on the basis
of their morality. “This human machinery produces the land of milk and
292 V. MELE
honey, the primeval wish symbol that Fourier’s Utopia has filled with new
life” (ibid.). Benjamin was greatly fascinated by Fourier’s concept of “pas-
sionate work,” which by transforming play into employment, neither
exploited nor exploiting, appeared to him capable of creating a new world
where “action would at last be sister to the dream” (Baudelaire, quot. by
Benjamin 2006e [1938], p. 62). The ancestral image of this reconciliation
is that of Nature as the “donating mother,” discovered by Bachofen in the
prehistorical matriarchal constitution. In his “On the Concept of History”
Benjamin would expressly criticize gross Marxism, counteracting it with
the fantastic imaginations of Fourier, which he interprets as examples of a
work which “far from exploiting nature, would help her give birth to the
creations that now lie dormant in her womb” (Benjamin 2006c, p. 394).
This was possible, not through a simple return to a primitive community
time—he stated clearly in Passagenwerk—but implied “highly-developed
forces of production, such as only today stand at disposal of humanity”
(Benjamin 2002, p. 361).
So at this stage Benjamin refers to the classless society of the Urgeschichte
to pose one of the problems implicit in the concept of fetishism, that of
the comparative historical reference to a situation in which the phenome-
non is not present, something that also interested Marx in his ethnological
notebooks. In this case, the supposed existence of a communist commu-
nity at the origin of history that is “rememorized” (Eingedacht)4 in the
present was to resolve and furnish a historical foundation for that “associa-
tion of free men” imagined by Marx for the future. Within the collective
consciousness of capitalist society, the images would remain of a primal
classless society which it is the critic’s task to decipher and translate in
historical space: “the use of oneiric elements on awakening is the exem-
plary case of dialectic thought,” observed Benjamin at the end of the
exposé. However, it is not solely the element of philosophy of history (or
4
The concept of “remembrance” (Eingedenken) is one of the key concepts of Benjamin’s
philosophy of history and expresses the act of remembering with heartfelt participation in
important subjective or collective moments experienced, apart from official commemora-
tions. “Rememorizing” is, for Benjamin, a revolutionary act, the “tiger’s leap into the past”
from which inspiration and energy is gained to break with the continuum of history (Benjamin
2002, p. 395, see also par. 4 of the previous chapter).
of comparative history) that is of interest in re-reading the phenomenon

of fetishism in Benjamin. In spite of the appreciation of Engels and—in a
different way—of Marx for Bachofen, the Marxist theoreticians for the
most part denied that the myth had any autonomous cognitive meaning,
while the theoreticians on the right saw in it an extra-temporal source of
primal revelations. Benjamin’s interpretation sought a way out of this
alternative. Through Bachofen, Benjamin looked for a relationship
between nature and culture, the world of myth and that of Logos, within
the historical time in which it was found. The “dialectic image” was the
attempt to understand and represent the extremes which, with their ten-
sion, compose the discourse of capitalist modernity: spirit and nature, the
world of myth, and that of reason. In other words, Benjamin was con-
vinced that capitalism was itself a religious phenomenon: unlike Max
Weber’s idea, it was however a “purely cultic religion, perhaps the most
extreme that ever existed,” without dogmatism and theology (Benjamin
1996 [1921], p. 288). In this lies its significant aspect in the revaluation
of the “phantasmagoric” thought on which Benjamin would continue to
reflect up until his death.
3 From the Dark Room to Phantasmagoria

The concept of the “dialectical image” as a collective “dream image” that
refers to the utopia of the future society by bringing back to life elements
of “original history” met with Adorno’s strong perplexity, who replied to
the reading of the exposé of August 2, 1935 with a letter full of criticism.
Adorno was skeptical about the use of the concept of “dialectical image as
consciential content—even if collective,” which he saw as lacking from a
materialistic point of view: “the fetish character of the commodity is not a
fact of consciousness but is dialectical in the preeminent sense of produc-
ing consciousness” (Benjamin 1994, p. 495). In other words, he accused
Benjamin of idealism, that is, of neglecting the real inversion between men
and things that occurs—as we have seen—in the phenomenon of fetishism
in order to focus solely on the symbolic projections of this inversion.
Moreover, Adorno also believed that the whole exposé was guilty of an
294 V. MELE
overestimation of the emancipatory potential coming from the “archaic,”

in a manner quite similar to the thinking on myth of Klages and Jung.5
Benjamin took these considerations seriously and in fact in the 1939
exposé (written in French at Horkheimer’s suggestion in order to find
finance) the reference to the images of desire and to original history as a
classless society disappeared. What remains is the reference to the concept
of “phantasmagoria” which at this point is central and to which the intro-
duction of the exposé is dedicated:
Notre enquête se propose de montrer comment par suite de cette représen-

tation chosiste de la civilisation, les formes de vie nouvelle et les nouvelles
créations à base économique et technique que nous devons au siècle dernier
entrent dans l’univers d’une fantasmagorie. Ces créations subissent cette
«illumination» non pas seulement de manière théorique, par une transposi-
tion idéologique, ma bien dans l’immédiateté de la présence sensible. Elles
se manifestent en tant que fantasmagories. (GS V, 1, p. 60)
Phantasmagoria is described as an “illumination” that occurs not only

in a theoretical way as “ideological transposition,” but “in the immediacy
of its sensitive presence.” The problem is still the same as the relationship
between capitalist society and its “chosist” representation of culture and
forms of life. However, the reference to Bachofen’s theory of the collec-
tive dream, images of desire, and model of original history disappears.
How did the elaboration of “phantasmagoria” change in his thought? As
we have seen, Benjamin had been very impressed by the analogy between
capitalism and the religious world implicit in the Marxian concept of com-
modity fetishism in the first place but equally by phantasmagoria as “magic
lantern.” Benjamin has always been interested in visual technologies (pho-
tography and cinema in the first place, to which he dedicated the famous
essays Little History of Photography, 1931 and above all The Work of Art in
the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, 1935–36 and 1939) and in the
5
“Thus the category in which the archaic merges into the modern seems to me much less
that of the Golden Age than of catastrophe. […] If eliminating the magical aspect of the
dialectical image by representing it as “dream” psychologizes it, by the same token this
attempt falls under the spell of bourgeois psychology. For who is the subject of the dream?
In the nineteenth century, certainly only the individual; as unmediated replica, however,
neither the fetish character nor its monuments can be extrapolated from the individual’s
dreams. Therefore the collective consciousness is invoked and, indeed, I fear that in the pres-
ent version it cannot be distinguished from the Jungian one” (Benjamin 1994 [1938],
pp. 496–497).
Passagenwerk fragments we find several notes that relate the visual tech-
nologies of a given era to the structures of knowledge. For example, in the
Pariser Passagen I notes (which date back to around 1928) he observed:
“Careful research on the relationship between the optics of the myorama
and the era of modernity, of the latest novelty. The two are certainly
arranged as the fundamental coordinates of this world.” Here Benjamin’s
concern in historicizing the traditional epistemological analogy between
“vision” and “knowledge” becomes apparent. As we have seen, in the
index to the 1935 exposé a chapter was devoted to the “panoramas”
invented by Daguerre, which was a popular form of visual spectacle in the
nineteenth century. Panoramas were tools for the three-dimensional rep-
resentation of places, people, and objects. In their attempt at perfect imi-
tation of nature, they represented a theory of knowledge and a new feeling
of the world, which extended to representations of history as well as litera-
ture. In Konvolut Q, where materials on panoramas were collected, the
following quote is found expressing the century’s passion for visual
perceptions:
There were panoramas, dioramas, cosmoramas, diaphanoramas, naval-

oramas, plenoramas (pleō, “I sail”, “I go by water”), fantascope<s>,
fantasma-parastases, expériences fantasmagoriques et fantasmaparastatiques,
picturesque journeys in a room, georamas; optical picturesques, cinéramas,
phanoramas, steroramas, cycloramas, panorama dramatique. (Benjamin
2002, p. 527)
Among these spectacles, the expériences fantasmagoriques or “phantas-

magorias” were types of magic lanterns used to project images of ghosts
on the walls by means of plays of light. Phantasmagoria had been invented
around 1790 by the Belgian Etienne-Gaspard Robertson. Marx had there-
fore intentionally used an “optical” metaphor in Capital, as indeed he had
done in The German Ideology, where the well-known image of ideology
appears as a camera obscura that operates in a distorting way, reversing the
real relationships between men. The metaphor of the “phantasmagoria” is
undoubtedly more complex and intriguing than the camera obscura: the
latter, in fact, suggests a certain underestimation of the problem of the
symbolic representation of human relations—a suspicion that nevertheless
remains even in Capital, where it is suggested (on the basis of Feuerbach’s
critique of religion) that the capitalist world operates like the religious
world and that communist society would therefore give men back a
296 V. MELE
transparent image of their relations. Where in the metaphor of the camera

obscura the real world is mechanically inverted by ideological representa-
tion, the magic lantern of phantasmagoria inverts painted images that are
themselves artistically produced fictions. In other words, phantasmagoria
as a form of representation would show us that the problem of fetishism,
that is, the gap between social being and the nebulous and fantastic images
through which social being is seen and conceived by men, cannot be
solved through the simple metaphor of the camera obscura that reverses
images. Phantasmagoria, unlike the camera obscura, produces not so
much a reflection of the objective world as an expression of this world,
that is, a representation mediated through symbolic imagery. According to
Margaret Cohen, in describing “ideological transposition” as the projec-
tion of the spectacle of a magic lantern, Benjamin finds a metaphor that
simultaneously binds and distances him from the metaphor of the camera
obscura (Cohen 1993, p. 239 ff.). Robertson’s technology of phantasma-
goria modifies the Renaissance technology of the camera obscura in a way
that is adequate to challenge the ideological representation proper to vul-
gar Marxism. Benjamin, in other words, would conceptualize the concept
of criticism as itself “phantasmagoric”: the critic does not have privileged
access to objective reality that is ideologically turned upside down, but can
only discern what he considers to be appearances, comparing them with
other appearances. He tries to combat illusions with other illusions in
turn. A form of rational demystification can no longer be the mere task of
the critic. It thus seems clear that Benjamin intended to take up and
develop in an original way the fundamental theme of Marx’s commodity
fetishism—especially with regard to the problem of the symbolic inversion
that the commodity form entails in the way society represents itself—inter-
preting it, however, in a key that would go beyond what Marx himself
theorized. Benjamin tries to go beyond the binary opposition reality/illu-
sion, taking seriously the metaphor of phantasmagoria developed by Marx
and going beyond his intentions. By transforming the 1935 opposition
between dream image and dialectical image into the difference between a
mystifying phantasmagoria and a “critical” phantasmagoria Benjamin
seems to suggest that only in the “phantasmagorical” space produced by
the dream image can the energies be found to overcome the fetishistic
power of the commodity.
4 At the Crossroad Between Magic and Positivism?

The first complete study that Benjamin intended to extract from the proj-
ect on the Paris Arcades and publish as an independent piece centered
precisely on the figure of the French poet. It was a study that required
Benjamin to put his methodological reflections into practice and to utilize
at least part of the immense quantity of historiographic materials he had
been amassing for over a decade. The product of this effort was a long
essay, almost an independent book, titled The Paris of the Second Empire in
Baudelaire. However, this study was destined never to be published in the
journal of the Institute for Social Research6 that had commissioned it, and
was subjected to a barrage of particularly harsh criticism by Adorno.
Nevertheless, this allows interesting insight into the methodological dif-
ferences between the two approaches to the theory of culture, with the
Adornian strand of thought constituting an undeniably more traditional
development of Marx’s method of the “critique of ideology.”
On reading the text of The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire one
is imbued with a sensation akin to what might derive from a “description
of confusion:7 a bulky mass of facts concerning social, political, literary,
psychological, even statistical history, all assembled in a rather appealing
manner but shunning any form of explicit theoretical links. Adorno’s
reaction, upon receiving this text, was one of utter dismay, as he expressed
to Benjamin in a letter that was to become famous, and his profound dis-
appointment was intensified by the great hopes the entire Institut für
Sozialforschung had cherished for this manuscript, which constituted the
first attempt to publish a work—The Arcades of Paris—which had been in
progress for over ten years.8 Adorno’s reservations with regard to
Benjamin’s essay were expressed in a lengthy letter written in November
1938, and can be summarized as a charge of naive sociologism, arguing
6
Except in the collection titled Charles Baudelaire. Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus. Zwei Fragmente., Frankfurt a. M. 1969, published many years after
Benjamin’s death.
7
“The description of confusion is not the same as a confused description” (Benjamin
2006a [1939], p. 169). The expression is by Benjamin himself, taken from the fragments of
Central Park, testifying to his conscious use of his method.
8
Adorno was deeply in agreement with the project of a materialistically oriented “refunc-
tionalisation” of the philosophical method inaugurated in the Epistemo-Critical Foreword of
the book on Baroque, which Benjamin had announced to him during a meeting defined as
“memorable,” held in Königstein in Switzerland in 1929 (cf. the introduction by Rolf
Tiedeman 1983).
298 V. MELE
that Benjamin tended to derive facts belonging to the cultural “super-

structure” directly from phenomena of an economic nature:
Let me express myself here in as simple and Hegelian manner as possible. If I

am not mistaken, this dialectic lacks one thing: mediation. The primary ten-
dency is always to relate the pragmatic content of Baudelaire’s work directly
to proximate characteristics of the social history of his time, and preferably
economic characteristics when possible. (Benjamin 1994 [1938], p. 581)
Adorno then provides further details, pointing the finger more directly
at Georg Simmel,9 whom Benjamin had cited explicitly. Adorno particularly
objected to The Arcades in which “in-depth theoretical arguments” were
replaced by “metaphor,” based on simple analogical associations among
phenomena: in other words, the most harshly criticized elements were
precisely those that Benjamin shared with Simmel’s style of thought and
research and which he had promptly espoused. In fact, the phrase Adorno
frowned upon was indeed a citation from Simmel’s The Sociology of the
Senses10 (one of the most brilliant excursus of the whole of the Sociology, as
we have seen), where Simmel dwells on the issue of seeing and hearing in
the city. What is of significance here is not so much Simmel’s brilliant and
innovative flashes of intuition, as rather the fact that Adorno—unlike
9
“I have a sense of such artificiality whenever you put things metaphorically rather than
categorically. This is particularly the case in the passage about the transformation of the city
into an interior for the flaneur. I think that one of the most powerful conceptions in your
study is here presented as a mere “as if.” There is an extremely close relationship between the
appeal to concrete modes of behavior, like that of the flaneur or the later passage about the
relationship between seeing and hearing in the city, which, not entirely as a matter of coinci-
dence, enlists a quotation from Simmel, and the kind of materialistic excursuses in which one
never completely sheds the anxiety anybody would feel for a swimmer who dives into cold
water when covered with the most terrible goose bumps. All of this me quite uneasy”
(Benjamin 1994, p. 581). Adorno is comparing Benjamin with the contemporary ideology
of the “concrete”—under this concept he understands Husserl’s phenomenology and
Heidegger’s ontological existentialism mainly, but also Simmel’s philosophy. Adorno sustains
the superiority of Benjamin’s concept of history and historiographical practice because this
was directed “at the construction of constellations of historical entities which do not remain
simply interchangeable examples for ideas but which in their uniqueness constitute the ideas
themselves as historical” (Adorno 1997, p. 231) What Adorno criticizes as deriving from
Simmel is the ideology of the “concrete,” which in his view characterize Simmel as well as
other philosophical tendencies of his time (see note 6, ch. 1).
10
It should be noted that Benjamin was to maintain this citation even in the subsequent
version of the essay on Baudelaire (On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, Benjamin 2006b [1940]).
Benjamin—did not appreciate what can be considered as the innovative

aspect of Simmelian sociological aesthetics, which resided in laying the
groundwork for a general theory on society by starting out from elemen-
tary aspects of everyday life, often elements of an aesthetic and sensory
nature.11 Adorno expressed in the following terms his deep-seated con-
cern with regard to this mode of proceeding:
This basis, however, is nothing other than that I consider methodologically

unfortunate to give conspicuous individual characteristics from the realm of
the superstructure a “materialistic” twist by relating them to corresponding
characteristics of the substructure in an unmediated and even causal manner.
The materialistic determination of cultural characteristics is possible only
when mediated by the total process. (Benjamin 1994 [1938], pp. 581–582)
In Adorno’s vision the interpretation of cultural phenomena (and thus

also the attempt at a “materialistic” formulation of the metropolitan lyri-
cism of a poet) can be undertaken only through the mediation of the
global historical-social process. Any “immediate inference” as regards a
link between economic and spiritual phenomena endows phenomena with
precisely the type of spontaneity, concreteness, and compactness they have
lost in the capitalist context.12 Adorno also furnishes a synthesis of his criti-
cisms with a definition of Benjamin’s method, which, notwithstanding its
stinging criticism, is undoubtedly insightful:
This can also be expressed as follows: the theological motif of calling things
by their proper name reverts tendentially to a wide-eyed presentation of the
bare facts. If you wanted to express it in drastic terms, you might say that
11
In this regard, Dal Lago has aptly remarked: “It is in this philosophical space [of the
description, at once metaphorical and empirical, of the modern experience, ed. note] that
Benjamin met Simmel. Just as is the case in The Philosophy of Money, in Benjamin the shift
from one sphere of experience to another occurs by metaphorical leaps, which shed a con-
stantly new light on reality. And it is for this reason that while Adorno’s sociological work
becomes trite if it is shorn of its dialectical pathos, the works by Simmel and Benjamin are
still full of life” (Dal Lago 1994, p. 150).
12
Adorno was to remain faithful to this opinion until the time of the celebrated Positivist
Dispute in German Sociology, held in the 1960s in Germany. Here, defending his dialectical
vision of society vis-à-vis positivism—which demands greater “micrological” attention to
individual concrete elements—Adorno asserts: “the old controversy with Benjamin on the
dialectical interpretation of social phenomena centered around the same problem: Benjamin’s
social physiognomics was criticized as too immediate, lacking reflection on the mediation of
society in general” (Adorno 1976, p. 52).
300 V. MELE
your work settled the crossroads of magic and positivism. This location is
bewitched. Only theory could break the spell: your own, ruthless, quite
speculative theory. (Benjamin 1994 [1938], p. 582)
What Adorno neglected to consider is that Benjamin was not so much

focusing on Hegelian dialectics as, rather, on the idea of re-actualizing his
mimetic theory of language in the light of his reflection that the new rela-
tionship between world and representation held in the age of new visual
technologies, including “phantasmagorias” and the new avant-garde cin-
ema.13 Indeed, Benjamin’s intention was to take “materialism” so seri-
ously as to endeavor to lead social and historical phenomena to language.
Corsets, old, tattered photos of the Venus of Milo, prostheses, and paper
holders: these and other debris of industrial culture that appeared in the
“dim, almost abyssal light” of The Arcades as “a universe of mysterious
affinities” were philosophical ideas in their own right, constructed like
constellations of concrete empirical phenomena, material and historical.
The method—or better, the “style”—of the “critical phantasmagoria”
Benjamin sought to achieve in the Paris Arcades and in the first essay on
Baudelaire (which represented a “model in miniature” of the entire work)
was therefore substantially different from the “dialectic mediation” that
forged Adorno’s line of reasoning. Only by referring to the technique of
cinematographic montage could Benjamin’s approach be put into effect.14
In this perspective, Benjamin’s work was to be read as a city-as-text, which
seeks to transfer into words the fragmentary and discontinuous character
of the metropolitan experience, composed of chocs, collision, sudden
changes of direction.
Curiously, one writer who did comprehend the “concrete” aspect of
Benjamin’s critical style, with its close links to experience, was a thinker
13
In his profile of Benjamin, Adorno had observed: “fragmentary philosophy remained but
a fragment, perhaps the victim of a method, concerning which one can by no means be cer-
tain that it will allow itself to be carried out in the framework of thought” (Adorno 1990,
p. 245).
14
On the link between cinema and metropolitan reality, Benjamin had pointed out: “Film
corresponds to profound changes in the apparatus of apperception-changes that are experi-
enced on the scale of private existence by each passerby in big-city traffic, and on a historical
scale by every present-day citizen” (Benjamin 2006d [1939], p. 281). Furthermore, on the
role of cinema, including an epistemological role, Benjamin stated: “Film: unfolding
<result?> of all the forms of perception, the tempos and rhythms, which lie preformed in
today’s machines, such that all problems of contemporary art find their definitive formula-
tion only in the context of film” (Benjamin 2002, [1982], p. 394).
who had very little connection with this tradition of thought: Hannah
Arendt.15 In her portrait of Walter Benjamin, certainly one of the most
penetrating appraisals of this author, she dwells with particularly sharp
insight on the characteristics of his “materialism.” Arendt notes that when
Benjamin eagerly seeks to uncover concrete facts, events, and happenings
whose meaning was designed to stand out in an exemplary and evident
manner, he by no means inclines toward binding or generically valid state-
ments, but instead shapes his wording in such a manner that statements of
this kind are replaced by metaphoric observations. The well-known
Marxian “architectural metaphor” of structure/superstructure does not
fall within a relational framework that can in some sense be traced back to
the “dialectic mediation” to which Adorno was referring; rather, in
Arendt’s view it acquires a metaphoric character, for metaphor sets up a
connection that is perceived by the senses in its immediacy and does not
require an interpretation, so that its utilization tends to fix correspondences
between objects that may be physically quite remote from one another.
This concept,16 highly familiar to Benjamin, can be recognized in a famous
poem by Baudelaire (in Les fleurs du Mal), where it designates precisely
the system of reciprocal analogies that pervade the universe, “the intimate
and secret relations of things.” The metropolis was pervaded with just
such a web of secret analogies that reveal themselves only to the eye of the
flâneur. As noted earlier, the eye of the flâneur coincides with that of the
urban photographer: “The flâneur is not attracted by the official aspect of
the city but by its sordid dark street-corners, its neglected population: an
15
This is the depiction by Hannah Arendt (Arendt 1968). this essay forms part of a series
devoted to some significant intellectual figures of the period between the two world wars,
titled Men in Dark Times. It also includes portraits of Kafka and other thinkers. Arendt was
a friend and correspondent of Benjamin, and had in-depth knowledge of his work. Among
the Benjamin commentators, she was the first to emphasize the importance (also from the
point of view of the theory of knowledge) of the influence of Goethe on Benjamin (as
acknowledged by Tiedemann 2002, pp. 78–85).
16
The theory of correspondences was formulated systematically for the first time in the
mystical doctrine of Swedenborg, a scientist and mystic of Swedish origin who—ironically
criticized by Kant—postulated the existence of a biunique correspondence between heaven
and earth and between spiritual and natural things. Baudelaire refers to Swedenborg as the
one who had taught him “that everything, form, movement, name, color, fragrance, in the
spiritual as in the natural realm, is significant, reciprocal, converse, corresponding.” But
Baudelaire’s concept loses its original mystical connotation, designating instead the system of
reciprocal analogies that pervade the universe, “the intimate and secret relations of things”
(Löwy 2017, p. 19).
302 V. MELE
unofficial aspect that lies behind the façade of the bourgeois life-style and
is ‘captured’ by the photographer in the same way that a policeman cap-
tures a criminal” (Sontag 1977, p. 49).
Benjamin’s thought was thus fairly remote from dialectical materialism,
which claims to chart a route from the concrete fact of experience to the
abstract element of thought, by means of the complex mediation of
thought processes. On the contrary, it was precisely the much-scorned
concrete aspects of life that interested Benjamin. The doctrine of the
superstructure, Arendt continues, was in his interpretation of the concept
something describable as the last “doctrine of metaphorical thought” and,
eschewing all mediation, it brought the structure into direct relation with
the so-called material structure, which took on a sensorial, perceptive
character, like the “totality of the data experienced by the senses”:
If, for example—and this would have been perfectly in tune with the spirit
of Benjamin’s thought—the abstract concept of Vernunft (reason) were to
be traced back to an origin deriving from the verb vernehmen (to perceive,
hear), then one might think that a term belonging to the sphere of the
superstructure had had its sensorial structure restored or, on the contrary,
that a concept had been transformed into a metaphor. (Arendt 1968, p. 24)
In this sense the meeting with what his “dialectical” friends Horkheimer
and Adorno called “vulgar Marxism”—that is to say, with Bertolt Brecht,
who was certainly not any more dialectical than Benjamin himself, but
whose intelligence was amazingly close to reality—could actually be
described as beneficial. Therefore, it is reductive to assert, as Adorno does,
that Benjamin’s materialistic categories fail to coincide in any way with the
Marxist categories because he had set up a correlation, in his essay on
Baudelaire, linking certain predominant elements of the superstructure
directly, and perhaps even causally, with the corresponding elements of the
real base structure. There was nothing causal at all in these correlations.
Instead, there was a conception of the logos that was different from the
dialectical approach, but this does not imply that it was merely poetic, that
is, devoid of objective claims. In fact, the flâneur’s gaze can be likened to
the scrutinizing eye of the photographer, or better still, of the cinemato-
graphic operator, who chooses the succession of his shots based on a spe-
cific montage criterion, the specific aim of which is, precisely, to say
something about the external world, in a way that is definitely different
from the rational logos of dialectics. Benjamin’s quest is thus the search
for a different logos, seeking to give voice even to that which refuses to
belong to the world of words. He therefore sets structure and superstruc-
ture in relation with each other but—as it were—in a cinematographic
manner. The flâneur’s gaze is that of the photographer and the cinemato-
graphic operator, which succeeds in keeping together, in a paradoxical
fashion, logos and poetry, the poetry-making word and the cognizant word.
Physiognomics moves in the realm of hidden details, of the “cracks” that
open in the façade of social order, of the real situation neglected by the
great theoretical constructs.17
That the uncovering of correspondences between the “structure”18 and
the “superstructure”—which would undoubtedly have been far more
extensive in The Arcades Project, had it been completed—was no vaguely
poetic and romantic flight of fancy but could indeed fulfill a philosophical
and explanatory function is made clear by an episode from the later essay
on Baudelaire published in 1939, this time with Adorno’s unreserved
approval.19 For here not only is the celebrated theory of the “atrophy of
experience” (Verkümmerung der Erfahrung) expounded in greater detail,
but there also appears a sequence of figures that are quite unusual for a
17
Literally, physiognomics is the parascientific discipline that aims to identify people’s psy-
chological and moral characters from their physical appearance, above all their facial features
and expression. At the end of the following century, the Swiss thinker J. K. Lavater sought
to transform physiognomics into a rigorous science, with the collaboration, among others, of
Goethe. The main criticism that has always been levelled against physiognomics is that it
remains in the field of common sense or of pseudoscience. However, important thinkers such
as Goethe, Dilthey, Simmel, Cassirer have developed a number of new approaches to the
problem of physiognomics, in which they see it as a possible key for an understanding of the
complexity of many cultural phenomena. In its immediatistic naïveté—that is, in the belief
that an immediate access to the truth of a phenomenon can be gained by starting out from
the pure sensory data, excluding any form of historical-cultural interpretation—physiognom-
ics offers an original proposal as compared to the tradition of Western thought. As has been
stated with precision by Rolf Tiedemann, “physiognomics deduces the internal from the
external, from the corporeal this-here, it operates inductively by starting out from the sphere
of visibility (Anschaulichkeit)” (Tiedemann 1983, pp. 27–28).
18
For Benjamin, “structure” was always more than the “productive forces,” as has been
rightly underlined by Witte 1986, inasmuch as it extended so far as to embrace the whole of
the human and object-related “new nature” produced by techne.
19
Adorno wrote after On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (letter of February 29, 1940, in
Benjamin 1966, p. 844): “With what enthusiasm I read your Baudelaire … this is analo-
gously true for Max [Horkheimer]. I believe it would hardly be an exaggeration to define it
as the most notable work you have published since the book on Baroque and the study
on Kraus.”
304 V. MELE
literary essay, and which instead call to mind the rapid alternation of cin-
ematographic sequences typical of 1920s Russian films (a classic case is
Eisenstein’s October, where the figures of the Bolsheviks shooting with
machine-guns are superimposed on the images of the tumultuous crowd
fleeing from the winter palace, all at the same breakneck speed.) In a brief
but striking succession of paragraphs in Benjamin’s essay (§6, 7, 8, and 9)
the fast-paced scenario swings from a description of crowds thronging in
the city to segments taken from Marx’s Capital to the assembly line to
intimations of the “art of the eccentric” that the idle soul indulges in while
roaming through the luna park. What these images, these urban scenes,
have in common is the experience of the choc, of the impact and collision,
which to Benjamin’s eyes is the quintessence of the metropolitan experi-
ence. But this idea is not presented exclusively through abstract theoriza-
tion: it is instead “represented” by incorporating actual aspects of the
situation that embody the idea—performing a sort of “citation” of the real
situation within the text itself, similarly to the procedure adopted in the
study on Baroque, which incorporated parts of the various dramas so that
these would “represent” the Platonic idea of the Trauerspiel.
Special insight into this manner of writing is the section where Benjamin
refers to the gambling motif in Baudelaire. In the Fleurs du Mal more than
one poem is dedicated to this “process” where, according to Benjamin,
“the reflected mechanism that the machine sets in motion in the worker
can be studied in the idle person as if in a mirror.” Hardly could an associa-
tion seem more paradoxical and bizarre than that between the sumptuous
gambling dens where the bourgeoisie of the Second Empire sought to
dispel ennui by frittering away the sums gained on stock market invest-
ments, and the assembly line factories peopled by unskilled workers. And
yet, a correspondence between the “superstructural” idleness of gambling
and the harsh material nature of wage labor can indeed be detected (and
it does not escape the perceptive gaze of the urban physiognomist):
Where could one find a starker contrast than the one between work and
gambling? […] The latter, to be sure, lacks any touch of adventure, of the
mirage that lures the gambler. But it certainly does not lack futility, empti-
ness, an inability to complete something-qualities inherent in the activity of
a wage slave in a factory. Even the worker’s gesture produced by the auto-
mated work process appears in gambling, for there can be no game with out
the quick movement of the hand by which the stake is put down or a card is
picked up. The jolt in the movement of a machine is like the so-called coup
in a game of chance. The hand movement of the worker at the machine has
no connection with the preceding gesture for the very reason that it repeats
that gesture exactly. Since each operation at the machine is just as screened
off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the
one that preceded it, the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a coun-
terpart to the drudgery of the gambler. Both types of work are equally
devoid of substance. (Benjamin 2006b [1940], pp. 329–330)
What comes to the fore in these phrases is precisely the immediate asso-
ciation between structure and superstructure, in such a manner that the
“spirit” and its “material manifestation” are mutually illuminating, with-
out the need for any further interpretive or explanatory comment. This
occurs in such a way as to induce a choc and sudden critical awareness in
the reader, to whom the concept—in this case the reification of the experi-
ence which assigns a common fate to the idle bourgeois and the worker
within the capitalist metropolis—appears immediately evident. A similar
critical parallel is described by Benjamin in a 1927 article On the Situation
of Cinematographic Art in Russia (which formed part of a series on
Moscow he had been commissioned by his friend Martin Buber to write
for the journal Die Kreatur). Here the film director Vertov, in the film
Sixth Continent, aimed to illustrate to the Russian masses the transforma-
tion achieved by the new social order as compared to bourgeois Europe:
This is how the film starts: in fractions of a second, there is a flow of images
from workplaces (pistons in motion, laborers bringing in the harvest, trans-
port works) and from capitalist places of entertainment (bars, dance halls,
and clubs). Social films of recent years have been plundered for fleeting
individual excerpts (often just details of a caressing hand or dancing feet, a
woman’s hairdo or a glimpse of her bejeweled throat), and these have been
assembled so as to alternate with images of toiling workers. (Benjamin 2005
[1927], p. 13)
It thus seems clear that the montage performed by Benjamin as well as

by the surrealists derived from cinema. This new art, as Benjamin points
out in the essay on The Work of Art, written shortly before the article on
Baudelaire, is the metropolitan art par excellence. The fragmentation of
the metropolitan experience communicated by this art allows no scope for
the “dialectical mediation” demanded by Adorno. Photography, and
above all cinema, provide the most appropriate logos for the representation
of the metropolis as the new social form of modernity.
306 V. MELE
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———. 2006d. The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibilty (Third Version). In
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CHAPTER 10
Baudelaire as the Lyric Poet in the Age

of Mature Capitalism
Round about him, this century, which in other respects seems so flourishing
and multifarious, takes on the terrible aspect of a desert. (Edmond Jaloux)
(Benjamin 1999, p. 287)
“No matter what party one may belong to”, wrote Baudelaire in 1851, “it
is impossible not to be gripped by the spectacle of this sickly population,
which swallows the dust of the factories, breathes in particles of cotton, and
lets its tissues be permeated by white lead, mercury, and all the poisons
needed for the production of master pieces …; the spectacle of this languish-
ing and pining population to whom the earth owes its wonders, who feel
hot, crimson blood coursing through their veins, and who cast a long, sor-
rowful look at the sunlight and shadows of the great parks.” This population
is the background which casts the outlines of the hero into bold relief.
Baudelaire supplied his own caption for the image he presents. Beneath it he
wrote the words: “La Modernité.” (Benjamin 2006b [1938], p. 44)
1 The Commodity as Aesthetic Object

As Benjamin asserted in a preparatory fragment to Passagenwerk, the social
experiences on which Baudelaire’s poetics are based are not
derived from the process of production—and even less so from the industrial
process in its most advanced form—but all arise in it according to extensive

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310 V. MELE
indirect modes […] The most important of these are the experience of the
neurasthenic, of the inhabitant of the big city, and of the consumer. (GS I,
3, p. 1169)
The purpose of this chapter is to try to develop this insight: to show

how Baudelaire’s lyric, illuminated by Benjamin’s critique, represents the
experience of the great metropolis in mature capitalism. The relationship
between Baudelaire and Simmel’s blasé is also apparent from this quote: it
is clear that Benjamin needed Simmel’s sociology and metropolitan psy-
chology for his “materialist” interpretation of Baudelaire’s lyric. However,
as we shall see, there is a substantial difference between the two concep-
tions. Baudelaire is the poet of the metropolis of mature capitalism, the
one who represents the “heroes” of the modern Trauerspiel and at the
same time is a hero himself. The heroism of the Trauerspiel is, however, a
very different heroism from that of classical Tragedy. Two radically differ-
ent interpretations of the modern and of metropolitan subjectivity in its
context thus emerge. The sources to be analyzed here are Benjamin’s main
writings on Baudelaire, which revolve around The Arcades Project. They
are the essay Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire (of 1938, unpub-
lished during Benjamin’s lifetime), Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire
(1938), the fragments published under the title Zentral Park, the Konvolut
“K” of Passagenwerk (the longest of the book, with over three hun-
dred pages).
How do you go from the project on the Parisian arcades to the work on
Baudelaire, which initially was only meant to be a chapter? It is important
to note that the essays on Baudelaire, and especially the essay Of Some
Motifs in Baudelaire, are absolutely central to Benjamin’s research. As he
revealed to Adorno in a letter, the essay on Baudelaire which he intended
to anticipate could be considered a Miniaturmodell of the entire work on
the Parisian arcades. Therefore, it is interesting to briefly reconstruct how
Benjamin came to conceive the only part of the work on arcades that was
actually completed and published, the one on the Parisian poet Charles
Baudelaire.
The initial stimulus to anticipate some of the motives of the long work
on The Arcades, which had been going on for about ten years, came to
Benjamin from Max Horkheimer, as is clear from a letter dated March 28,
1937. Benjamin had not planned to write this section of the work on The
Arcades first, but changed his mind at the request of the Institute for
10 BAUDELAIRE AS THE LYRIC POET IN THE AGE OF MATURE CAPITALISM 311
Social Research, then in exile in New York. During the summer of 1938

Benjamin worked intensively on the subject and realized that a short essay
on Baudelaire, as requested by Horkheimer, “did not repudiate its respon-
sibility to the Arcades” (Benjamin 1994 [1938], p. 573) could only take
shape as part of a book on Baudelaire himself. The study that was to be
written at the institute in the autumn, under the title Das Paris des Second
Empire bei Baudelaire (still unpublished in Italian), would therefore only
constitute the second part of the entire book, to be entitled in all likeli-
hood Sociological Studies of Baudelaire (ibid., p. 574).
As can be deduced from the project outlined in the letter, the book on
Baudelaire would have assumed a structure not dissimilar to that of the
study on Origin of German Trauerspiel (“Ursprung des deutschen
Trauerspiels,” [1928]): the first part, entitled Baudelaire as allegorical
poet, poses the theoretical problem, namely why allegorical elements enter
Baudelaire’s creative activity; the third, the commodity as poetic object,
resolves it, referring to the “metaphysical subtleties and theological vaga-
ries” described by Marx regarding the commodity form (Benjamin 1994
[1938], p. 573). The second part, then, sent later to New York, should
have been composed—according to Benjamin’s critical habit—only of
philological material necessary to address properly the interpretation of
the poet in a critical-social key.
Two interesting elements emerge from this that should be emphasized.
The first is that the allegorical character of Baudelairean poetics is related
to the phenomenon of the commodification of mature capitalism. In a
fragment of the Notes and Materials, in fact, one can read: “Broken-down
matter: the elevation of the commodity to the status of allegory. Allegory
and the fetish character of the commodity” (Benjamin 2002 [1982],
p. 207). There is an elective affinity between this poetic form and, as we
have seen in the previous chapter, “the elementary form” of the capitalist
system (Marx).
The second element to emphasize is that Benjamin closely related
Baudelaire’s lyricism to metropolitan social experience. This interpretative
choice of Benjamin’s is announced in the very title of the first essay: The
Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire. It is decidedly opposed to other
current interpretations (the Gundolf School) that emphasized Baudelaire’s
esoteric and solipsistic character. Benjamin’s choice is to relate Baudelaire’s
lyric poetry to the social experiences of his time, especially the metropoli-
tan one (not directly but, according to his own style, allegorically).
312 V. MELE
The link between the world of allegory and the world of merchandise
becomes explicit if one considers in more detail the second part of Origin
of German Trauerspiel, which is devoted to a historical-philosophical anal-
ysis of allegory.
In the Trauerspiel, Benjamin had identified baroque allegory as the
characteristic mode of expression of an era of social destruction and pro-
longed warfare, in which human suffering and material ruin constituted
the essence of historical experience. This led to a new relevance of the
allegorical form of expression in Germany immediately after the First
World War, which had experienced the terrible destructiveness of the new
war techniques. It had as its example Werfel’s German expressionist drama,
which developed after the war and which had been the source of Benjamin’s
interest in the forgotten and little-known Baroque poetry. A literary histo-
rian of the time wrote: “It seems to me … that in the last two hundred
years there has basically been no feeling for art so closely related to the
Baroque literature of the seventeenth century, with its constant search for
a style, as the feeling for art in our own day. Inwardly empty or else deeply
agitated, while outwardly occupied with formal technical problems that, at
first sight, seem to have little bearing on the existential issues of the age—
such were the Baroque writers by and large, and, so far as one can see,
such are the writers of our time, at least those who put a distinctive stamp
on their production.”1 Baudelaire, however, had matured his aesthetic
experience in a completely different context. He wondered about the
Flowers of Evil: “How is it possible that a stance seemingly so ‘untimely’ as
allegory should have taken such a prominent place in the poetic work of
the century?” (Benjamin 2003 [1939], p. 179). What could the Paris of
the Second Empire have in common, with its glittering department stores
of goods, the ladies strolling along the great boulevards, the muffled world
of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta (Kracauer 2002 [1937]), with the gloomy
and melancholy atmosphere of the German Baroque Trauerspiel? Benjamin
captures in Baudelaire’s allegorical ingenuity the lucidity of those who had
been able to see behind the glittering phantasmagoria of the times, the
dark shadow of the capital’s permanent domination. The splendor of
urban phantasmagoria with its premises of progress and well-being caused
in him the typical response of allegorical melancholy. Benjamin had
1

Victor Manheimer, (1877–1942) German literary historian, cited in Benjamin
(2019, p. 36).
captured in Baudelaire’s allegorical genius2 the lucidity of someone who

had been able to see behind the glittering phantasmagoria of the times,
the dark shadow of the permanent domination of capital. The splendor of
urban phantasmagoria with their promises of progress and prosperity pro-
voked in him the typical response of allegorical melancholy.
In order to clarify Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poetics in
relation to the metropolis of the Second Empire, it is necessary to make a
foray into the esoteric realm of German Trauerspiel, where Benjamin first
formulated his concept of allegory. This is the expressive form appropriate
to the genre of the Trauerspiel, but, as stated in a 1934 review of a book
about the poet Jean Paul,3 it becomes almost a kind of “ideal type” to be
translated into contexts and epochs other than the seventeenth century.
2 Trauerspiel and Allegory

As has been pointed out, one of the elements of Benjaminian interest in
the Trauerspiel concerns the attempt to read the seventeenth century as a
“response to the problematic condition of a disjointed self” (Weber 2004,
p. 168) and to see how precisely the Baroque era constituted the “prehis-
tory” of nineteenth- and twentieth-century modernity. This condition of
cultural disintegration was at the center of an era thrown into chaos by the
growing weight of the Protestant Reformation in Europe and the responses
that religious and political powers sought to provide during the Wars of
Religion. The Trauerspiel stages these cultural and political dilemmas. The
enigma of the Trauerspiel’s expressive form arises from the overall inter-
weaving of the doctrines of grace, legal-publicistic theories, and experi-
mental theatrical solutions, which are rather unsuccessful in terms of
historical-theatrical effectiveness. A form whose best examples are not to
be found in Germany, but elsewhere (in Elizabethan England, in the Spain
of Calderón de la Barca). And yet, according to Benjamin, it is in Germany
2
As an allegorist, however, Baudelaire remained isolated from the prevailing trends and
styles of his time. Benjamin did not fail to point this out: “Baudelaire’s allegorical mode of
vision was not understood by any of his contemporaries, and was thus, in the end, completely
overlooked” (Benjamin 1999, p. 338). For an analysis of artistic and literary currents in the
context of Louis Napoleon’s Paris, see Hauser (2005, pp. 60–103).
3
Der eingetunkte Zauberstab. Zu Max Kommerells “Jean Paul” (“The Wet Wand. About
Max Kommerell’s Jean Paul”), p. 416, review held in GS III, pp. 409–417 (Benjamin 1972
[1934], p. 416). Here Benjamin reasoned about the affinity between the Baroque spirit of
Jean Paul and that of the Baroque era of German poetry.
314 V. MELE
that we find the best representation of the “idea” of Trauerspiel, that is to

say, the expressive models that best represent the traits of the Trauerspiel
form. The most famous names are those of Martin Opitz (1597–1639),
Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664), Daniel Casper von Lohenstein
(1635–1683), Johann Christian Hallmann (1639/40–1704), August
Adolph von Haugwitz (1647–1706). Literates and thespians who were
often not originally from Silesia, but who found in the Silesian courts the
material sources and favorable environmental conditions for their works—
often reinterpretations of Latin tragedies—Seneca in particular, or histori-
cal dramas with a strong emphasis on martyrology of the royal figures.
Trauerspiel is not simply a Germanization of the genre “tragedy” but an
autonomous form of expression whose fundamental concepts are “play”
(Spiel), “sovereignty” (Souveränität), “guilt” (Schuld), and “empathy”
(Einfühlung) (see Palma 2020). Finally, the Trauerspiel finds its funda-
mental form of expression in allegory, which is not merely a stylistic device
but its language. Let us analyze these characterizing elements of the
Trauerspiel in detail and then understand how these will become the
essential elements through which Benjamin will interpret Baudelaire and
modernity.
2.1 Play
Indeed, in the first section Trauerspiel und Tragödie Benjamin emphasizes
the dialectic between mourning and play to identify the discriminating
feature with respect to tragedy. Regarding the theme of play, in his main
work Homo ludens—a decade older than Benjamin’s Habilitation—Johan
Huizinga had also observed about the connection of Baroque with play.
In his book Huizinga had defined precisely the Baroque according to its
“need to pass the limits, explainable by the intensely playful value of the
“creative impulse” (Huizinga 1956, pp. 174–175). The essence of the
Baroque would therefore be playful, where the excessive, exuberant, orna-
mental, fictitious element is central. In addition to the element of play, the
element of mourning (Trauer) is also worth mentioning. The role of
mourning in the determination of the concept of Trauerspiel can be
framed precisely in a historical-political key. Benjamin identifies the cen-
trality of the mourning factor to understand the difference between trag-
edy and Trauerspiel. The mere equating of the two theatrical forms in
common language as well as by some treatises does not consider the
absence of mourning in Aristotelian theory of tragedy. Benjamin—in the
wake of the jurist Florens Christian Rang (1864–1924)—claims the con-

stitutively impure character of mourning. The Trauerspiel would therefore
not be a “For they are not so much plays that make one mournful as plays
through which mourning finds satisfaction: plays for the mournful” (ibid.,
p. 115) which cannot be interpreted in a purely psychological key, but
rather in a historical key. As noted by the jurist Carl Schmitt in the essay
Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel (1956, in late
dialogue with Benjamin4), “there are two sources of the tragic happening:
one is the myth in ancient tragedy, which communicates the tragic events;
the other—as in Hamlet—is the historically effective present, which
involves poets, actors and spectators.”5 The events of the mournful drama
are therefore drawn without mediation from history: the spectators are
already shaken by it, they are historically “sad” individuals who feel guilty
for their misfortune, for their sadness. And they are uncertain about
whether they should do anything, whether their actions count, in an age
of supreme confessional, doctrinal, and political confusion.
2.2 Sovereignty
In the Trauerspiel, in fact, there is no acting hero. There is no victim.
There is a sovereign—or someone who resembles him, bearing his orna-
ments and robes—who progressively assumes the traits of the martyr.
“Free to pursue his own subjectivity to the extreme, the sovereign is ready
to play the part of tyrant or martyr,” sometimes both in the same drama.
Because of this ambivalence of the subject, “sovereignty” is one of the
most controversial concepts in Benjamin’s monograph. The first chapter
of the Origin of the German Trauerspiel takes its cue precisely from the
discussion of this political theological topic raised in 1922 by Carl Schmitt.6
The sovereign can only cling to the world, but without capacity for effec-
tive grasping. He may be a prince, but he will have no sovereign qualities.
In this sense there is a contrast between Schmitt and Benjamin: the prince,
the sovereign, has no power to decide. His archetype is Hamlet with his
4
Carl Schmitt had received a copy of the Benjaminian writing, accompanied by a letter and
dedication, as early as December 1930, but he had never responded to Benjamin living (see
W. Benjamin, “On Carl Schmitt,” in Id., Gesammelte Briefe, 6 vols., Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.
M. 1995–2000: vol. III, p. 558).
5
C. Schmitt, Hamlet oder Hekuba. Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel, Diederichs,
Düsseldorf-Köln 1956, p. 51.
6
On the differences between Benjamin and Carl Schmidt see (Gentili 2019).
316 V. MELE
indecision. Consciously or unconsciously, Benjamin outlines a figure con-

trary to that evoked by Carl Schmitt—a sovereign endowed with executive
power, but tending to melancholy, or madness. A lord, therefore, who can
be a tyrant, insane, and endowed with executive power insanely applied,
but not sovereign except in his title, and so who puts into question the
entire conceptual apparatus of sovereignty in the modern sense. Because
in the historical juncture that interests Benjamin, it is the entire human
race that sees itself as a creature. And the sovereign is no exception.
Creaturality is revealed as the decisive concept that marks the difference
between tragedy and mournful drama.
The subject staged by the Trauerspiel is thus different from the tragic
subject:
Leaving aside the dubious optimism of this conception of history, in the

sense of the martyr drama it is not moral transgression but the creaturely
estate of the human being that is the cause of the downfall. It was this typical
downfall, so different from the extraordinary downfall of the tragic hero,
that the writers had in mind when—with a word that the dramatic literature
used more coherently than the criticism did—they described a work as a
“trauerspiel.” (Benjamin 2019 [1928], pp. 77–78)
Thus: the ruler meets his doom not because he transgresses the laws of
ethics (e.g., Oedipus sleeping with his mother) but as a creature, that is,
precisely because he came into the world in a certain way (“bare life”),
that is, “guilty” (the state of the world after the fall from earthly paradise,
in theological terms).
2.3 Guilt
At the beginning of the third section of Origin of German Trauerspiel
Benjamin delves into the concept of guilt and mourning of the “crea-
turely” condition as an implication of the Lutheran doctrine of grace for
different classes of society:
The great German dramatists of the Baroque were Lutherans. Whereas in

the decades of the Counter-Reformation Catholicism pervaded secular life
with the concerted power of its discipline, Lutheranism had from the begin-
ning stood in an antinomian relation to the everyday. Its rejection of “good
works” stood opposed to the rigorous morality it taught in the conduct of
bourgeois life. Insofar as it denied special spiritual and miraculous effectual-

ness to any such works, making the soul dependent on the grace of faith
while making the worldly realm, the realm of the state, into the proving
ground of an only indirectly religious life, a life oriented to the demonstra-
tion of bourgeois virtues, it served to establish in the people, to be sure,
strict obedience to duty, but in its great ones only melancholy. (Ibid., p. 140)
The problem approached by Benjamin in this beginning of the section

is that of the Protestant devaluation of intra-mundane action on the basis
of the sola fide principle, also discussed by Max Weber in his study on The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. If the world does not bear in
itself an immanent meaning, mourning (Trauer) arises, which can be
defined as “the disposition in which feeling, as though masked, reanimates
the emptied-out world, so as to have an enigmatic satisfaction at the sight
of it” (ibid., p. 141). It should also be noted that the Trauer in question
here is not a subjective feeling (neither of the characters nor of the audi-
ence), “but rather to a feeling loosed from the empirical subject and inti-
mately bound to the fullness of an object” (ibid., p. 142). The mourning
of the Trauerspiel according to Benjamin is rather an attitude, a conviction
(Gesinnung, precisely the same concept used by Max Weber to designate
the inner ascetic ethics that is opposed to the ethics of responsibility), that
constructs the world, not a feeling that reflects it. In reference to this con-
structive attitude Benjamin quotes Hamlet, particularly his theory of the
animalization of the human in the emptied world:
What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time/Be but to sleep
and feed? A beast, no more./Sure he that made us with such large dis-
course,/Looking before and after, gave us not/That capability and godlike
reason/To fust in us unused. (Ibid., p. 140)
Benjamin notes how this Shakespearean passage is both close to the

“Wittenbergian philosophy” and “a revolt against it” (ibid.). What hap-
pens to the moral subject in this context? Can he call himself free, even if
guilty? In the theory of Baroque subjectivity, which Benjamin outlines in
his monograph, the concept of “guilt” (Schuld) is in fact a second, decisive
theoretical tool to fully understand the image of an ethical subject who
holds the “play” in his hands. Guilt appears here as a further key to distin-
guish the mournful drama from tragedy, and to empty sovereignty of its
central element—decision.
318 V. MELE
According to Benjamin, the Trauerspiel illustrates this question best in

the “dramas of fate” (Schicksalsdramen). If history is a terrain both with
and without grace, depending on the election of creatures, “in the spirit of
the restorative theology of the Counter-Reformation,” fate becomes
properly a natural history, that is, in Benjamin’s words, “the elemental
natural force in historical occurrence, an occurrence that is itself not
entirely nature because the state of Creation still reflects the sun of grace.
Mirrored, however, in the slough of adamic guilt” (ibid., p. 128). If his-
tory is the territory where grace appears and does not appear, depending
on the different regions and their confessions, if it is the “natural history”
of a single fall, the meaningless theater of the fruitless dialectic between
grace and the echo of guilt, then guilt empties the moral subject and its
political representative, the sovereign-tiranno, who should hold the
“machination” in his hands. It forces the sovereign among wastelands,
strips him of all tragic garb.
Differently, the protagonist of the Trauerspiel is neither ruler nor hero:
Hence the trauerspiel knows no heroes, only constellations. The plurality of

main characters, as found in so many Baroque dramas—Leo and Balbus in
Leo Armenius, Catharina and Chach Abas in Catharina of Georgia, Cardenio
and Celinde in the drama bearing those names, Nero and Agrippina,
Masinissa and Sophonisbe with Lohenstein—is untragic, although appropri-
ate to the play of mourning. (Ibid., p. 132)
It is within this framework that the consciousness of guilt creeps in. In

other words, the question of guilt can be interpreted as a backlash in refer-
ence to this epochal change in ethical demeanor brought about by reli-
gious factors, which through the devaluation of works opens the time of
life to boredom and melancholy in different social strata. The saturnine
nobleman, the bourgeois who repeats his duty every day, repeatedly won-
der about the origin of the static condition in which they find themselves,
the original sin.
2.4 Empathy
If the allegory-signature-accessory (scenic, verbal) triangulation desig-
nates the space in which the spectator has an experience with the author,
with the character, of his or her own creaturely mourning, it is
nevertheless necessary to clarify how the procedure enacted by the mourn-

ing drama does not coincide with a quest for the audience’s empathy with
the characters. Although the theme of empathy/immedesimation is almost
absent in Benjamin’s book on the Trauerspiel, some of the assumptions of
the critique of empathy present in the project on passages and in general
in Benjamin’s reflection on the theater together with Brecht can be found
in this text. The foundations of this critique are to be found in the emo-
tional attitude of the prince and the scheming courtier, two figures char-
acterized by the emotional tone of the sour. As has been noted (Massimo
Palma) the acedia emotionally structures not only the main characters of
the Trauerspiel but also the spectators who are to be distinguished accord-
ing to Benjamin from the audience of tragedy:
Whereas the spectator at the tragedy is precisely in this way necessitated and
justified, the trauerspiel is to be understood from the perspective of the
onlooker. The latter experiences the way in which, on the stage as an inner
space of emotion without any relation to the cosmos, situations are pre-
sented to him compellingly. (Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 116)
Thus, it is not a particular psychological quality that distinguishes the

spectator of the Trauerspiel from the spectator of tragedy, but rather the
ability of the mournful scene to penetrate and dominate the world of its
spectators through stage technique, words, and the mechanical repetition
of “situations.” Such repetition is precisely what restrains any readiness for
action. Its emotional condition is acedia, or contemplative fidelity to the
world of things, a world known in mute because it is invested with the
creaturely mourning of guilt. Thanks to the theoretical reflection accumu-
lated in the book on the Trauerspiel, Benjamin lays the groundwork for
thinking at the level of theatrical technique a disruption of the Aristotelian
model, of the mechanisms of identification, empathy, and identification, in
an attempt to foster an active and critical stance on the part of the specta-
tor. In plays conceived by the epic theater, intervals are functional in estab-
lishing a conflict with acedia and empathy in order to gain space for
reflection and political action. It is about thinking about a transformation
of the mourning with which theatrical modernity is inaugurated into a
radically different feeling that accompanies the critique of passivity and
oppression.
320 V. MELE
2.5 Allegory
Benjamin begins the second section of the book, entitled Allegorie und
Trauerspiel, with a passionate defense of the allegorical form of expression
against the misunderstandings made against it by Classical aesthetics.
These were exemplarily expressed by a formulation of Goethe’s, which
is quoted in full:
It makes a great difference whether the poet seeks the particular in the gen-
eral or sees the general in the particular. Allegory stems from the former,
where the particular functions only as instance, as example of the general.
The latter, however, is truly the nature of poetry: it gives expression to a
particular without thinking of the general or referring to it. Whoever vividly
grasps this particular receives at the same time the general along with it,
though without becoming aware of it, or becoming aware only later.
(Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 167)
In the case of the symbol, the poet “sees” the universal in the particu-
lar; in the case of the allegory, he “seeks” the particular in function of the
universal. This opposition (in the original: schaut, sucht) implies a differ-
ence in both perception and reflection. The symbol is in fact presented as
a “coincidence” of the sensitive and the non-sensitive, the allegory as a
“significant reference” of the sensitive to the non-sensitive. In the first case
we are immediately faced with a unity of appearance and essence; in the
case of allegory, on the other hand, we are faced with their separation, and
therefore awareness and rational detachment are necessary.
From what has just been said, it is clear that this distinction is presented
in Goethe as an implicit distinction of value, so that ultimately the differ-
ence between symbol and allegory comes to be that between art and non-
art, thus paving the way for the devaluation of the latter as a “mere mode
of signification (Beziehung)” (ibid., p. 169) a gratuitous and playful tech-
nique of producing images in comparison with which, in the symbolic
work of art, the idea appears in its shining immediacy.
Benjamin resolutely opposes this purely “conceptual” and idealistic dis-
tinction between forms of expression. Just as the Trauerspiel is not a
degraded version of classical tragedy, as the neo-Aristotelian critics held, so
the allegorical form in which it finds expression is the form adapted to the
historical-theological situation of the Baroque era, in which the immedi-
ate, symbolic “fullness of being” pursued by classicism was inadequate.
What is fundamental in the Baroque drama is that in it “is not so much a
corrective to classicism as a corrective to art itself” (ibid., p. 185): “To
become aware of the lack of freedom, the imperfection and brokenness of

the sensuous, of the beautiful physis, was something forbidden to classi-
cism by its very nature. But this is precisely what Baroque allegory, beneath
its mad pomp, proclaims with unprecedented insistence” (ibid., p. 186).7
Therefore, according to Benjamin, what is decisive in the distinction
between symbolism and allegory is not the abstract opposition of idea and
concept, but the different conception of temporality that they imply. The
temporal unit of measure for symbolic experience is the mystical moment
(the Nu), in whose fullness the sacred, the relationship of the living with the
divine, is made experienceable. With the term “aura” Benjamin has often
indicated in his late writings the occurrence of such an experience; in the
essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire (1939), for example, it is stated: “To
experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability
to look back at us” (Benjamin 2006a [1939], p. 338). The moment it is
invested by the experience of the “aura,” the object is no longer reducible to
an inert object of use, but seems to lose its extraneousness to the human gaze.
This is not the case in allegorical representation. In allegorical represen-
tation, it is not so much nature that is spiritualized, but rather the spirit
itself that is represented in its eminently natural characteristics: its being
“transient,” meaningless, voted ineluctably to decline and death. The tem-
porality underlying this form of representation is therefore that of an infi-
nite and unfinished progression, of temporal instants that do not
qualitatively differ from one another. The relationship between allegory
and symbol is described by Benjamin in the second part of the book in a
dense formulation:
Whereas in the symbol, with the sublimation of downfall, the transfigured

countenance of nature reveals itself fleetingly in the light of salvation, in
allegory there lies before the eyes of the observer the facies hippocratica of
history as petrified primal landscape. History, in everything untimely, sor-
rowful, and miscarried that belongs to it from the beginning, is inscribed in
a face—no, in a death’s head. And though it is true that to such a thing all
“symbolic” freedom of expression, all classical harmony of form, and every-
thing human is lacking, nevertheless in this figure, the most fallen in nature,
is expressed meaningfully as enigma not only the nature of human existence
in general but the biographical historicity of an individual. This is the core
7
An essential characteristic of allegorical representation is the fact that it captures physis in
its extreme transience: “the insight into the transience of things, and the concern to save
them and render them eternal, is one of the strongest motives in the allegorical” (Benjamin
2019 [1928], p. 243).
322 V. MELE
of the allegorical vision, of the Baroque profane exposition of history as the

Passion of the world—meaningful only in the stations of its decline.
(Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 174)
What appears in symbolic representation is the transfiguration of the

“fallenness” (Vergänglichkeit) of natural physis in the light of redemption.
Greek art was the symbolic art par excellence: in the epic poem the rivers,
the hills, the sky were represented as the real residence of the gods. In the
symbol, therefore, temporality becomes that of an instantaneous present
(the mystical Nu), in which the empirical and the transcendent, the human
and the divine, appear momentarily merged in the context of a natural and
transitory form.
In the allegory, however, both the historical condition of human exis-
tence and that of the individual are represented as nature in decay, whose
most typical symbols are the skull and the ruin. The story, given the
Baroque vanity of every being temporal, it is Natural History
(Naturgeschichte) or destiny, allegory of the precariousness of every
worldly endeavor, negation of history as an imaginary progressive
conquest.
The allegorical physiognomy of natural history, which is brought
onstage in the Trauerspiel, is actually present as ruin. In the ruin, history
has passed perceptibly into the setting. And so configured, history finds
expression not as process of an eternal life but as process of incessant
decline. Allegory thereby positions itself beyond beauty. Allegories, in the
realm of thought, are what ruins are in the realm of things. Hence, the
Baroque cult of the ruin (ibid., p. 188).
The “fluid and changing” nature is the matter of the symbol, while in
the allegory time finds expression in the mortified nature, “not in the bud
and blossom but in the over-ripeness and decay of its creations.”8
Benjamin’s analysis of the “extreme” literary examples of Baroque
drama reveals the radical worldliness of the world represented in it: there
is no hope of redemption. This reflects the theoretical and logical situation
8
Benjamin, in fact, with regard to the Baroque, stated: “Thus for the writers of this period
too, one can say, nature has remained the great teacher. Yet nature appears to them not in the
bud and blossom but in the overripeness and decay of its creations. Nature looms before
them as eternal transience: in that alone did the saturnine gaze of those generations recog-
nize history […]. With decay, and with it alone, historical occurrence shrinks and withdraws
into the setting. The quintessence [Inbegriff] of those decaying things is the extreme oppo-
site of the concept [Begriff] of transfigured nature held in the early Renaissance” (Benjamin
2019 [1928], pp. 190–191). History and nature for the Baroque poet therefore penetrate
each other under the sole sign of “eternal transience.”
of the Counter-Reformation era in which Christianity, divided into the

various European Christians, no longer saw the historical actions of indi-
vidual states as part of salvation history. Indeed,
[w]here the Middle Ages exhibits the precariousness of worldly events and
the transitoriness of the creature as stations on the path to salvation, the
German Trauerspiel wholly buries itself in the desolation of the earthly
estate. Such redemption as it knows will lie more in the depths of these vicis-
situdes themselves than in the fulfillment of a divine plan of salvation.
(Benjamin 2019[1928], pp. 67–68)
The Trauerspiel therefore sees the historical world constantly from the
perspective of “nature-history,” whose destiny of death cannot be escaped.
The sadness of its characters and the mourning of the spectators are thus
due to the lack of metaphysical consolation, in which the catastrophe of
one’s own history and that of the world is represented.
Allegory, as we can see from these considerations, is not a mere aes-
thetic device but rather, in Benjamin’s words, an “expression” (Ausdruck)
(ibid., p. 169), like language and writing. It is certain historical experi-
ences—and therefore certain epochs—that are allegorical, not only certain
poets. In the Middle Ages, the ruins of pagan antiquity provided an
“awareness of mutability sprang from an ineluctable perception, just as
several centuries later, at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, the same aware-
ness impressed itself upon European humanity” (ibid., p. 243). Extremely
significant of the “epochal” character of the allegorical form of expression
was the fact that, “Like the term ‘tragic’ today, and with greater justifica-
tion, the word ‘Trauerspiel’ in the seventeenth century referred equally to
the dramatic form and to historical events” (ibid., p. 47).
Baroque allegory inspires in the spectator not just “insight into the
transience of things” but a “concern to redeem them for the eternity”
(Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 223).
3 From Baroque Allegory to Modern Allegory

If the characters of Baroque allegory are clearly represented by the emblem
of the skull, which is essentially human nature in decay, then the affinity
that Benjamin establishes between allegory and commodity form becomes
clear. In fact, in the preparatory notes to the 1935 exposé, we find a signifi-
cant observation in this regard: “fetish and death’s head” (Benjamin 2002,
p. 910). Just as the skull is an allegory of the most painful aspect of human
324 V. MELE
history, namely its inescapable condemnation to death and decline, so the

fetishistic character of the commodity becomes the petrified emblem of
life in the modern context of the capitalist metropolis. This conception of
Benjamin is clearly inspired by G. Lukács’ famous theory of reification in
History and Class Consciousness. Published in 1923, this collection of
essays laid the groundwork for what in now commonly referred to as
Western Marxism. Benjamin was introduced to this work by Ernst Bloch’s
review which appeared in Der neue Merkur while Benjamin was in Capri.
The intense reaction to his book is the remarkable consonance between
the central ideas of Lukács’ book and the concepts that had emerged in
the writing of the book on the Trauerspiel. In its focus on the “thing-
character” of the plays of mourning, the book prepares the ground for
Benjamin’s later investigation of the fetishized commodity and its global
effect, phantasmagoria. Thus, looking back in a letter of 1931, he can say
that Trauerspiel book is “already dialectical, if not yet materialist” (quot.
in Eiland and Jennings 2014, p. 226).
However, there is a fundamental difference between the concept of
“Natural History” (Naturgeschichte), which we have seen to be central to
the allegorical worldview, and the theory elaborated by Lukács, which was
highlighted in an important essay by Adorno in 1932, entitled precisely
The Idea of Natural History.
Here Adorno, who at the University of Frankfurt had just held a semi-
nar on the Origin of German Trauerspiel, points out how Benjamin had
actually accomplished something essentially different and original from
the Hegelian Lukács: he had brought the idea of history back from “an
infinite distance to an infinite nearness.” If common to both thinkers was
the attention to the Hegelian concept of “second nature,” representing
the moribund condition of the spirit in the modern age, in Benjamin this
process was presented in a different way:
If Lukacs demonstrates the retransformation of the historical, as that which

has been, into nature, then here is the other side of the phenomenon: nature
itself is seen as transitory nature, as history. (Adorno 1984, p. 119)9
9
Here we can also see a decisive difference between Simmel and Benjamin that has often
been underestimated by critics (Mičko 2010). Simmel has a totally “pagan” and anthropologi-
cal concept of “nature” as “objective culture” that comes from the “psychology of peoples”
(Völkerpsychologie). Although Simmel uses the same category of alienation and tragedy, objec-
tive culture does not enter into historical dialectics with subjective culture in the sense of a
possible reconciliation between nature and spirit. On this see Köhnke 1996, p. 350 and par.
4 in ch. 6. In this book. On the relationship between Benjamin’s thought and that of Adorno,
also with reference to the concept of “Natural History,” see Wolin, 1982, pp. 163–212.
The decay of bodies, the mute and inert objects of daily life, directly
represent the Baroque spirit of history in what is most painful, wrong,
and deadly.
In Baudelaire’s capitalist metropolis, the artificial nature of buildings
and constructions, as well as the “inorganic” nature of fashion, becomes
the expression of the commodification of the world, of its becoming
increasingly transient and transitory in the context of mature capitalism,
with the intention, like the Baroque poets, of saving this decline of the
phenomenal world from eternity.
In the metropolis, degraded “nature” appears everywhere, at the
moment when man’s environment comes to assume the character of a
commodity.
The shift from Baroque allegory to modern allegory10 is thus effectively
expressed by Benjamin in two fragments of the materials on “Baudelaire.”
In Zentralpark Benjamin stated, “More and more relentlessly, the objec-
tive environment of human beings is coming to wear the expression of the
commodity” (Benjamin 2006c [1939], p. 173). And further:
The gaze of the allegorical is always based on a devaluation of the phenom-

enal world. The specific devaluation of the world of things that takes place
in the commodity is the foundation of the allegorical intention in
Baudelaire.11
But Benjamin introduces in his theory of modern allegory a further

specification. Just as in the Baroque the supremely degraded nature was
the exterior, in Baudelaire’s modern metropolis this process is also trans-
ferred to the interiority of metropolitan man:
Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside. Baudelaire sees it
also from within … The key figure in early allegory is the corpse. In late
allegory, it is the “souvenir’ [Andenken]. The “souvenir” is the schema of
the commodity’s transformation into an object for the collector. (Ibid.,
pp. 186, 190)
10
On this see Gilloch (1996, p. 134 ff.), Markus (2001) and Luperini (1989).
11
From the plan of the article Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire, GS I, p. 1151.
326 V. MELE
And it is here that Benjamin’s theory of experience unfolds its full

capacity for interpreting the changing nature of aesthetic perception in the
moderate context.
The essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, the only one published in the
Passages as a whole, opens with an explicit theorization on modern experi-
ence that consolidates the reflections on the social foundation of allegori-
cal poetry in Baudelaire, which come to acquire the depth of a true
“materialist theory of experience” (Raulet 1996). The whole essay is in
fact based on the opposition of Erlebnis and Erfahrung,12 terms that in the
German language both mean “experience” but that Benjamin charges
with original meanings compared to the philosophical tradition: Erfahrung
comes from the German verb “fahren,” which means to travel; it carries
with it the meaning of traveling, learning, coming to know. It’s the term
used in the Classic German Idealism, from Kant to Hegel. As we have seen
in Chap. 3, it is also the term used by Simmel in his neo-Kantian phase
(par. 2).
Erlebnis, on the other hand, derives from the verb “leben,” which prop-
erly means “to live,” “to be alive.”13 It thus indicates immediate “present-
ness,” being alive while something happens, hence the Italian translation
into “lived experience.” In the current German language an Erlebnis is
also a “sensational fact,” an extraordinary and shocking event out of the
everyday. Simmel himself however criticizing the logicism and mechani-
cism of Kant’s concept of Erfahrung moved to the use of the term Erlebnis,
following Dilthey and arriving at his own concept of Erlebnis as adventure
and as a central concept of his aesthetics and his theory of historical knowl-
edge. Therefore, we can read the criticisms Benjamin addresses to Bergson
as also addressed to Simmel, even if there are some consistent differences
between the two concepts of “life” and “intuition of life.”
12
For interesting insights on this topic see Bodei (1991). Implicitly taking up Benjamin’s
reflection, Bodei states: “Erfahrung is possible only when there is an accumulable experi-
ence, which settles slowly with time, which helps in the journey of life. When this experience
is crushed on the pre-hearing, because the past no longer teaches anything or because the
widening of the horizon of expectations narrows the space of experience, then one aims at
the Erlebnis, at the immediate enjoyment of meaning, at the consummation of experience in
a sort of rapid flash, then one is hungry for experience” (Bodei 1991, p. 117). An interesting
sociological reading of Benjamin’s theory, in relation to the concept of everyday life, is pro-
posed by Jedlowski (1989).
13
Gadamer states that Erleben means first of all “to be still alive when a certain thing hap-
pens” (Gadamer 1975, p. 56). For a comprehensive history of the term Erlebnis see
pp. 55–72.
Erfahrung, according to Benjamin, is proper to traditional and com-

munity contexts. In his theorization in the essay On Some Motifs in
Baudelaire he doesn’t mention Simmel in this regard, but he explicitly
refers to the work of the philosopher Bergson, Matière et mémoire, deriv-
ing from it the centrality of the function of memory in determining the
very structure of “experience” (Erfahrung):
Experience is indeed a matter of tradition, in collective existence as well as

private life. It is the product less of facts firmly anchored in memory
[Erinnerung] than of accumulated and frequently unconscious data that
flow together in memory [Gedächtnis]. (Benjamin 2006a [1939], p. 314)
When there is experience in the “emphatic” sense of the term, the con-
tents of the individual past come into conjunction with those of the col-
lective past through the continuity of tradition. “Experience” comes to
take the form of the possibility for man to draw spontaneously on his own
past and make it vital in the present. In the traits of Erfahrung are the
characters of what Benjamin had described in Trauerspiel as the symbolic
experience of the world return, albeit in a changed context: the “transfigu-
ration” of the transience of the human condition, its being ineluctably
linked to a destiny of death and decay.
Therefore, if Bergson has effectively identified the essence of the struc-
ture of experience, he has not proposed to specify it historically. If the
conditions for having “experience” in the proper sense of the term seem
to be linked to a context of substantial continuity of tradition, then in the
“hostile, blinding world of the age of big industry” it must be admitted
that only the poet will be granted such a possibility. And in fact it was one
writer, Proust, who put such a conception to the test.
“Proust’s work A la Recherche du temps perdu may be regarded as an
attempt to produce experience, as Bergson imagines it” (ibid., p. 315),
Benjamin states. Significant differences from Bergson are found in Proust,
which make his reflection ultimately superior. What the latter defines as
mémoire pure becomes in the author of the recherche the mémoire involon-
taire, to signify the fact that in the modern context it has become casual
for the individual to acquire possession of his own experience. Benjamin
further articulates his theory by referring to Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. Baudelaire’s lyric cannot be understood without considering the
transformations that experience has undergone in the modern metropoli-
tan context. Indeed, “only what has not been experienced explicitly and
consciously, what has not happened to the subject as an isolated
328 V. MELE
experience [Erlebnis], can become a component of memoire involontaire”

(ibid., 317). Metropolitan social reality, because it is composed of abrupt
gestures, bursts, perceptive shocks, is not immediately assimilable by the
individual. The “lived experience” that can occur in this context “steril-
izes” the event to which it refers, depriving it of its relationship with the
past. The Erlebnis, in this way, appears in the experience of the individual
as an isolated “monad,” a dead collector’s item, unrelated to what follows
and precedes it. The Erlebnis, the “reified” experience that takes place in
the metropolitan context thus becomes the foundation of modern alle-
gory. For the allegorist, the past becomes a “dead possession,” a “souvenir
object” (das Andenken), incapable of murmuring correspondences to the
present. The essence, the value, the greatness of Baudelaire therefore con-
sists in putting the shock at the center of his artistic work, that is, in lyrically
representing the “lived experience” of the modern, suffering the inevita-
ble failure as impotence and anguish.
4 The Crowd

As we have seen in Chap. 1, Baudelaire would trace his conception of
modernity in the essay The Painter of Modern Life (1860). The new urban
aesthetic, this valorization of the ephemeral and the transitory, is what
Baudelaire calls modernité. It is, in his words, “the transitory, the fugitive,
the contingent, half of art, the other half of which is the eternal and the
immutable” (Baudelaire 1964, p. 77). There is, therefore, a lasting, eter-
nal beauty, which survives as such through the different epochs, and there
is modernity, which is the way in which it presents itself from time to time
under a different temporal disguise. It is essentially comparable to “fash-
ion,” which is situated at the intersection between the “actual” and the
“eternal”: it is actuality that eternally consumes itself.14 Here we find
14
The link between fashion and modernity is stated in similar tones by G. Simmel in his
1905 essay on Fashion. Fashion is the condensation of the dominant psychological trait of the
time, namely the desire for rapid change, for coming and going. It synthesizes this form to
the extreme and thus holds “fashion possesses the peculiar attraction of limitation, the attrac-
tion of a simultaneous beginning and end, the charm of newness and simultaneously of
transitoriness. Fashion’s question is not that of being, but rather it is simultaneously being
and non-being; it always stands on the watershed of the past and the future and, as a result,
conveys to us, at least while it is at its height, a stronger sense of the present than do most
other phenomena” (Simmel 1997, p. 192). As we have already noted (Chaps. 6 and 8) fash-
ion’s pronounced sense of what is current, that is, its acute historical sense, is taken up by
Benjamin in his conception of history.
again, in a different context, the characters of symbolic and allegorical

experience as they have been described and analyzed in the previous para-
graph. Baudelaire’s modernité is the essentially allegorical experience of
“transience,” of the vain passing of all that exists, of perpetual change
without purpose toward the end and death. For Baudelaire this “allegori-
cal” aspect is denoted as “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent” and
constitutes only one half of art. The other fundamental component of the
experience of modernité is that of “the eternal and the immutable,” that is,
the experience that we defined earlier as symbolic. The character of
Baudelaire as an allegorist is thus clear: he, like the Baroque, “sinks into
the anguish” of allegorical experience (without hope), to poetically extract
its symbolic ecstasy. He must seek to extract the eternal in the transient
and transitory forms of the modern, of fashion, of the shocking and reified
experience of the metropolis. For this reason, as G. Agamben has clearly
expressed, “Baudelaire’s greatness in the face of the invasion of the com-
modity was that he responded to this invasion by transforming the work
of art itself into a commodity and a fetish. […] Baudelaire understood that
if art was to survive in industrial society, the artist had to try to reproduce
in his work the destruction of use value and traditional intelligibility that
was at the origin of the experience of shock” (Agamben 1992, pp. 42–43).
It seems clear, then, that the experiences of the allegorical all recurred
in the world of metropolitan modernity: experience became more and
more like a discontinuous series of chocs: chocs concerning the extreme
poverty that came to light in the neighborhoods torn apart by Baron
Haussman’s restructuring, mingling with the wealth circulating on the
great boulevards; but also chocs resulting from contact with the crowd and
metropolitan traffic. In Benjamin’s terms, Baudelaire was trying to recon-
struct Erfahrung in a world where Erlebnis had become the rule.
The painter of modern life of whom Baudelaire speaks has this specific
task: “it is a question, for him, of extracting from fashion all that it can
contain of the poetic in the historical, of drawing the eternal from the
transitory” (Baudelaire 1964, p. 75). He must therefore immerse himself
in his epoch, drawing his inspiration not from the confines of the studio
but from the turbulence of the streets: he must be at once “man of the
world, man of the crowds and child,” as Baudelaire says in the chapter of
the same name.
Constantin Guys, flâneur and painter of modern life portrayed by
Baudelaire, moves in the crowd as his ideal environment. It arouses in him
above all an irresistible curiosity. In his lap, he feels like a “spiritual citizen
330 V. MELE
of the universe” (ibid., p. 283), a man at the center of the world and not
an artist attached to his table and his specialist studio. The inebriation of
the flâneur going through the crowd, according to Baudelaire is well
described by E.A. Poe in his famous short story The Man in the Crowd:
Behind the glass of a café, a convalescent man, while joyfully contemplating

the crowd, merges his thoughts with all the thoughts that stir around him.
Drawn from the shadows of death, he inhales with delight all the germs and
effluvia of life; and since he has been on the verge of total oblivion, he now
remembers and intends to remember everything. (Ibid., p. 284)15
Here the spectacle of the crowd is sublime, intoxicating, a spectacle in

which the whole of life is concentrated in a very intense experience. For
this reason it arouses a morbid curiosity, a fatal and irresistible passion.
The flâneur always finds himself in the perceptive state of the convalescent
(or of the child), capable of taking a lively interest in things, even the most
apparently banal ones, which arouse in him the liveliest enthusiasm.
Flâneur is Baudelaire himself, who for Benjamin is the lens through which
to exhaust the fate of the individual within the mythological topography
of nineteenth-century Paris. Benjamin sees Baudelaire as the figure who
manages to give poetic form to the shock and intoxication of the modern.
He is the lyrical poet of the metropolis.
In the first notes and annotations in the Passagenwerk, the metropolitan
population appears in the enigmatic and suggestive form of the “dreaming
collectivity” (Traumkollektiv). In the essay, as well as in the fragments
devoted to his book on Baudelaire, however, this potentially benign vision
of a sleeping, dreaming urban collectivity vanishes, and is replaced by two
other equally problematic but surely more pessimistic formulations: those
of the crowd and the mass. In his essay On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,
Benjamin writes: “the crowd: no subject was more worthy of attention
from nineteenth-century writers” (Benjamin 2006a [1940], p. 321) His
analysis of this subject fills many pages of the essay and fragments devoted
to Baudelaire, in which Benjamin completes a detailed review of how it
appears not only in the writings of the Parisian poet, but also in those of
the most significant nineteenth-century French, English, and German
writers, including Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, and E.T.A. Hoffmann.
A key passage for understanding Benjamin’s analysis of the crowd can be
Ibid., p. 284.
15
found in the following fragment from Konvolut “M,” devoted to the flâ-
neur: “There is an effort to master the new experiences of the city within
the framework of the old traditional experiences (Erfahrungen) of nature”
(Benjamin 2002 [1982], p. 447). According to Benjamin’s famous theory
of experience, Erfahrung was the traditional community setting. So when
“experience” in the sense of Erfahrung is transmitted, the contents of an
individual’s past enter in conjunction with those of the collective past
through the passing on of traditions, legends, and myths. Technological
progress and metropolitan modernization do not exhaust man’s mytho-
poeic ability. The experience of the crowd is thus an absolutely new and
original phenomenon for the inhabitants of the nineteenth-century
metropolis, arousing the same responses as legend and myth. Faced with
such experience, the collectivity reacts as it would to the powers and enti-
ties of organic nature, creating a modern mythology in order to relate to the
otherness of this “new” nature in which mankind finds itself absorbed.
Benjamin sometimes interprets this mythology as strictly linked to the
dynamics of capitalist society as phantasmagoria, following the Marxian
theory of commodity fetishism. Before the advent of the modern metrop-
olis, mankind’s sensory apparatus had never been subjected to such com-
plex training as it was in such close proximity to masses of individuals,
constantly stimulated by encounters, contacts, and clashes. This qualita-
tive change in human experience provoked vacillating responses in the
literature of the time. The images of the crowd that Benjamin gathers and
highlights vacillate between the individual’s primordial fear of being reab-
sorbed into an undiversified mass, and at the same time, an exaltation of
the new fusion between individual and mass. Benjamin writes: “fear, revul-
sion, and horror were the emotions which the big-city crowd aroused in
those who first observed it” (ibid., p. 327). To illustrate the reaction that
the appearance of the crowd prompted in nineteenth-century observers,
Benjamin quotes two important authors: Friedrich Engels and Edgar
Allan Poe. As a critic of society, Engels’ reaction was indignant and “patri-
archal”: “the very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive about it,
something against which human nature rebels” (ibid., p. 322).” Hundreds
of thousands of people, of all classes and walks of life, cross each other in
the crowd “while it occurs to no man to honor another with so much as a
glance (ibid.).” No less negative is the description offered by Edgar Allan
Poe; in his short story The Man of the Crowd the crowd is pictured as a
group of individuals could be taken to be automata. Although most of
332 V. MELE
them had “had a satisfied, business-like demeanor,” their behavior none-

theless suggested “something barbaric” (ibid., p. 327):
By far the greater number of those who went by … seemed to be thinking

only of making their way through the press. Their brows were knit, and their
eyes rolled quickly; when pushed against by fellow-wayfarers they evinced
no symptom of impatience, but adjusted their clothes and hurried on. […].
If jostled, they bowed profusely to the jostlers, and appeared overwhelmed
with confusion. (Ibid., p. 325)
Benjamin, however, affirms that “the man of the crowd is not a flaneur
(ibid., p. 326).” Although the urban crowd is the milieu in which the flâ-
neur moves about the city, in Benjamin’s view, this character cannot be
likened to that of Poe’s The Man of the Crowd. This man “exemplifies,
rather, what had to become of the flâneur after the latter was deprived of
the milieu to which he belonged” (ibid.), that is, a colorful, lively crowd
from which to draw pleasure and inspiration. Poe’s story is in fact set in
London, where the crowd had already undergone the transformation of
the bourgeois crowd into one of outcasts and asocials. The Parisian flâ-
neur can therefore still walk with aristocratic demeanor, before being
crushed by the standardization of the industrial metropolis and ensuing
crime. According to Benjamin, it is in Baudelaire’s work that the presence
of the crowd in the metropolis finds its most meaningful expression. In
fact, his “masses” are not so much the direct object of representation as
the fundamental perspective through which the city of Paris is viewed.16
His poetic work would be inconceivable without his having encountered
the great city masses. Despite the inhuman nature of the crowd also pres-
ent in his work, Baudelaire was magnetically attracted to it. Or rather, as
underscored by Benjamin, the poetic “productivity” of this eminently
metropolitan presence was linked to an extremely contradictory attitude:
“he becomes their accomplice even as he dissociates himself from them.
He becomes deeply involved with them, only to relegate them to oblivion
with a single glance of contempt (ibid., p. 326).” This ambivalence can be
explained by the fact that it is the experience of the crowd alone that can
give the metropolitan flâneur the type of mystic “inebriation” afforded by
16
“This crowd, whose existence Baudelaire is always aware of, does not serve as the model
for any of his works; but it is imprinted on his creativity as a hidden figure,” ibid., p. 321.
“The masses had become so much part of Baudelaire that it is rare to find a description of
them in his works,” ibid., p. 322.
the external spaces of the great metropolis. In the heart of the crowd, he
feels the shock-Erlebnis, which provides the weight of Erfahrung: that is,
the still enchanted experience of myth and the inebriation of the feast in
which the principium individuationis allows him to melt into the experi-
ence of the collectivity. The experience of the crowd, in other words, rein-
troduces into the very core of modernity the collective effervescence that
Durkheim found at the origins of humanity when he described the rituals
of totemism and feasts with the stacking of bodies.17 It is a primal
experience of fusion with the collectivity, in which the individual feels not
only wholly part of the collective, but also feels this collective flow within
himself, thereby becoming a truly omnipotent communal body. This type
of archaic experience is possible in the modern metropolis thanks to the
crowd. The ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) of the crowd experience that
Benjamin sought to highlight—and whose maximum expression came
from Baudelaire—lies in the fact that the crowd is a return to the archaic,
where the original, lost categories of the social are still present.18 The indi-
vidual may be swallowed up by the primordial horde, but he can also be
reborn on new technological and collectivist grounds. In the crowd, the
flâneur feels like he is in the center of the world. The entire life of the
metropolis pulsates in his veins, offering an intoxication that leads to a
state of infantile narcissism. Every choice is reversible, the sacrificial con-
stitution of the adult Self has not yet developed, the identical practical Self
has not yet formed, and the thin barrier between desire and the reality
principle is annulled, so that every drive for happiness seems realizable. To
assume the identity of all the people that you meet, to love and have all the
men and the women in the world, is in other words to break the “iron
cage” of the bourgeois principium individuationis:
The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the
fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd. For the
perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer it becomes an immense source
of enjoyment to establish his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the
17
É. Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence” to indicate how communal
gatherings intensify, electrify, and enlarge religious experience. Bringing people together in
close physical proximity “generates a kind of electricity that quickly transports them to an
extraordinary degree of exaltation” (Durkheim 2001, p. 162).
18
“Beyond its rich, but negative lessons and personal magnetism, this oeuvre offers some-
thing more, and more positive, to the present: his idea of a dialectic of ambiguity” (Markus
2001, p. 41).
334 V. MELE
bustle, the fleeting and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel at
home anywhere; to see the world, to be at the very center of the world, and
yet to be unseen of the world […]. The observer is a prince enjoying his
incognito wherever he goes. […] Thus the lover of universal life moves into
the crowd as though into an enormous reservoir of electricity. He, the lover
of life, may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleido-
scope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements
presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity, and the flowing grace of all
the elements that go to compose life. It is an ego, a thirst for the non-ego,
and reflecting it at every moment in energies more vivid than life itself,
always inconstant and fleeting. (Baudelaire 2010, pp. 27–28)
The crowd becomes the physical medium through which the flâneur
experiences the metropolis; it is the means and basis for his expression.
The metropolis comes to be “innervated” by the crowd, and thereby
becomes the “physical” body of the flâneur, the sensory and bodily exten-
sion of the collective individual. The urban crowd therefore represents the
antecedent of the cinematic crowd, and the “tactile” cinematic experience
that Benjamin maintained would turn out to be fundamental in creating
that fusion of man and machine able to transcend nineteenth-century
individuality and bourgeois art. In a very important essay dedicated on
Surrealism [1927] Benjamin theorizes this concept of a “new collective
technoid body” as the basis of a new “technological cosmopolitics”
(Caygill 2005, p. 225):
The collective is a body, too. And the physis that is being organized for it in
technology can, through all its political and factual reality, only be produced
in that image sphere to which profane illumination initiates us. Only when
in technology and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension
becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the
collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to
the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. (Benjamin 1999 [1927],
pp. 217–218)
Art—in particular cinema, an art from and for the masses—can be in

this contest the educative mechanism through which the crowd as “new
collective technoid body” can begin to appropriate its own political and
technological potential.
The ambivalence and potential that Baudelaire sees in the crowd, and
which Benjamin celebrates, seems to be discarded in an unequivocally
negative judgment found in the notes to the Passagenwerk. The crowd,

which evoked the poet’s exultation and excitement, contemporaneously
mixed with terror and anguish, seems to definitely reveal its archaic aspect.
In Benjamin’s time, it would reveal itself to represent the fabric in which
fascist domination was woven. This becomes evident in this fragment from
the Convolutes:
A theater audience, an army, the population of a city comprise masses which

in themselves belong to no particular class. The free market multiplies these
masses, rapidly and on a colossal scale, insofar as each piece of merchandise
now gathers around it the mass of its potential buyers. The totalitarian states
have taken this mass as their model. The Volksgemeinschaft (People’s
Community) aims to root out from single individuals everything that stands
in the way of their wholesale fusion into a mass of consumers. (Benjamin
2002, p. 484)
The “crowd” that made its first appearance in the metropolis of the
Second Empire became the increasingly homogeneous, brutal, and indis-
tinct “mass.” This transformation, facilitated by the spread of large-scale
consumption, was shrewdly exploited by totalitarian regimes, which
instrumentalized the so-called solitary crowd made up of atomistically iso-
lated individuals. Thus, in another fragment Benjamin can affirm that
“this ‘crowd’ in which the flâneur takes delight, is just the empty mold
with which, seventy years later, the Volksgemeinschaft (People’s
Community) was cast” (ibid.). These considerations seem consistent with
Benjamin’s growing pessimism in the last years of his life, apparent in his
last essay in 1939, as well as in his Theses on the Concept of History. The
concept of the “mass” therefore seems to have tempered his earlier opti-
mism regarding the nineteenth-century collective, described as a “dream-
ing collective” (Traumkollektiv), which Benjamin hoped to “reawaken.”
These depictions instead present a return to the inhuman, coercive aspect
of “myth,” which European fascism deftly appropriated.
5 An Urban Allegory: The Gambler

“Flaneur, apache, dandy, and ragpicker were so many roles to him. For the
modern hero is no hero; he is a portrayer of heroes. Heroic modernity
turns out to be a Trauerspiel in which the hero’s part is available” (SW 4
336 V. MELE
[1938], p. 60), Benjamin wrote in Das Paris des Second Empire bei
Baudelaire.
Among the first notes of the materials on the Parisian Passages was:
“Parallelism between this work and the Trauerspiel book. Common to
both the theme: theology of hell. Allegory <,> advertisement, types: mar-
tyr, tyrant—whore, speculator” (Benjamin 2002 [1982], p. 854).
From these two quotations, it is clear that the construction of the social
“types” that one encounters in the Passagenwerk’s notes (as well as in the
essays on Baudelaire) were conceived by Benjamin from the beginning in
analogy to the recurring characters in the German Trauerspiel (the Tyrant,
the Martyr). The “representation” (Spiel) that is staged in Paris, Capital
of the Nineteenth Century is no longer the Trauerspiel but the Marxian
concept of commodity fetishism. Instead of the Baroque poets (Lohenstein,
Gryphius, Opitz), the melancholic genius destined to describe the modern
metropolitan drama is Baudelaire.
It is also important to note that the Marxian concept of commodity
fetishism is conceived by Benjamin in the same way as the Trauerspiel in
his book on the Baroque, as the “entelechy of occurrence in the field of
guilt” (Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 129).
The capitalist cycle of commodity production is interpreted as a “dia-
lectic of new and ever-equal,” as a “mythical” condition of humanity still
immersed in the cyclical temporality of “primal history”—a theme that
will be taken up and developed later in the Dialectics of Enlightenment by
Horkheimer and Adorno. Mythic destiny can only ever be immobilized
for a fleeting instant. The fragments of experience that in those moments
are torn from destiny, from the continuity of empty time, for the actuality
of the time-now (Jetzt-zeit) form the heritage of the endangered tradition;
the history of art belongs to it. This is what Benjamin means when in the
fragments of Central Park he states that “for Baudelaire modern life is the
reservoir of dialectical images” (Benjamin 2006c [1939], p. 161). In his
poetry, as in every true work of art, there are instants, fragments, “truly
new” images that escape mythical destiny, or rather the continuity of dom-
ination under the sign of the commodity. And it is the critic’s task to find
them. As Benjamin splendidly affirmed in the notes of Passagenwerk:
In every true work of art there is a place where, for one who removes there,
it blows cool like the wind of a coming dawn. From this it follows that art,
which has often been considered refractory to any relation with progress,
can provide its true definition. Progress has its seat not in the continuity of
elapsing time but in its interferences—where the truly new makes itself felt
for the first time with the sobriety of dawn. (Benjamin 2002, p. 474)
The concept of historical “continuity” grounds the concept of the his-

tory of the dominators; the tradition of the oppressed, on the other hand,
must be sought in discontinuity. Benjamin, extending the Baudelairean
concept of “the heroism of modern life,” considers the types portrayed in
his poems as emblematic figures, allegories reflecting within themselves
the dominant features of Parisian society at the time of Louis Bonaparte’s
Second Empire. They are neither simply victims nor heroes in the sense of
“classical” tragedy; rather, they are actors in the modern Trauerspiel (the
fetishism of the commodity), fatally condemned to suffer its consequences
but at the same time engaged in the mute attempt to resist them. To the
physiognomic eye of the flâneur, the boulevards appear to be populated by
recognizable social “types.”19 A prominent place among them is certainly
held by the gambler. His activity has such a profound allegorical signifi-
cance that this figure can be seen as a keystone of Benjaminian reflection
on modernity and the metropolis. The phenomenon of gambling, seem-
ingly secondary and insignificant, surprisingly reflects the psychological,
historical, and social characteristics of the era of Paris of the Second
Empire. Baudelaire’s poetry is the kaleidoscope through which Benjamin
glimpses social life in the metropolis. The gambler and the prostitute,
along with the flâneur, the dandy, and the “thousands of marginal exis-
tences eked out in the basements of a big city” represent “the spectacle in
which he [Baudelaire] saw our heroism” (Benjamin 2006b [1938], p. 47).
Baudelaire felt connected to these déracinées figures, and elevated them as
allegories against the appearances of Bonapartist phantasmagoria.
These figures, and Baudelaire himself, were part of that social stratum
identified by Marx as the bohême of the Second Empire, that is, that class
of spoiled, unsociable, professional conspirators who oscillated between
the army and the petit-bourgeoisie. The most significant exponent of this
19
The flâneur, the gambler, and the prostitute are “types” in the sense of the “physiolo-
gies” of nineteenth-century positionalist and naturalist literature. In Benjamin’s dialectical
view, the “excess of individuality” that characterizes the metropolitan type—according to
Simmel’s definition—is reversed into the phantasmagoria of the ever-equal: “This individual,
presented as always the same in his multiplicity, testifies to the anguish of the city dweller who
is unable to break the magic circle of the type even though he cultivates the most eccentric
peculiarities” (Benjamin 2002 [1939], p. 22).
338 V. MELE
category was Auguste Blanqui. The rebellion of these asocial individuals

was therefore without way out, fatally destined to defeat.
“Baudelaire’s poetry draws its strength from the rebellious pathos of
this group. He sides with the asocial. He realizes his only sexual commu-
nion with a whore” (Benjamin 2002, p. 10).
These figures, which constitute the social background of his poetry, are
re-interpreted by Benjamin as monad-figures in which the contrasting
characteristics and tendencies of the modern era are incorporated. It is to
them that we must pay attention, more than to the great abstract historical
constructions, if we want to return to an “original history.” Benjamin
noted: “From the perspective of spleen, the buried man is the ‘transcen-
dental subject of history’” (ibid., p. 332).
From the nineteenth century the phenomenon of gambling is no lon-
ger exclusive to the aristocracy but becomes an activity also practiced by
the bourgeoisie. Later, with the coming to power of Louis-Philippe and
with the hegemony exercised by capital the stock exchange became the
driving force of the economy and its spirit began to penetrate the inner-
most recesses of social life. Benjamin notes: “Toward the end of the
Second Empire, this attitude was widespread.” On the boulevards it was
customary to attribute everything to chance. “This way of thinking is for-
tified by betting, which is a device for giving events the character of a
shock, detaching them from the contexts of experience. For the bourgeoi-
sie, even political events were apt to assume the form of incidents at a
gambling table” (Benjamin 2006a [1939], p. 351). The hegemony of this
class thus begins to crack: it loses control of the productive forces it has
unleashed and its imagination ceases to project itself into the future.
Benjamin entrusts this reflection to a quote from Paul Lafargue:
It is useless to expect that a bourgeois could ever succeed in comprehending

the phenomena of the distribution of wealth. For, with the development of
mechanical production, property is depersonalized and arrayed in the imper-
sonal collective form of the joint stock company, whose shares are finally
caught up in the whirlpool of the Stock Exchange … They are … lost by
one, won by another—indeed, in a manner so reminiscent of gambling that
the buying and selling of stocks is actually known as “playing” the market.
Modern economic development has as a whole tends more and more to
transform capitalistic society into a giant international gambling house,
where the bourgeoisie wins and loses capital in consequence of events which
remain unknown to him … The “inexplicable” is enthroned in bourgeois
society as in a gambling hall. […] The capitalist, whose fortune is tied up in
stocks and bonds, which are subjects in variations in market value and yield
for which he doesn’t understand the causes, is a professional gambler. The

gambler, however, … is a supremely superstitious being. […] The inexpli-
cable in society envelops the bourgeois, as the inexplicable in nature the
savage. (Benjamin 2002, p. 497)
With the dominance of the abstract power of finance and money, bour-
geois society seems to be plunged into a prehistoric, mythical state of
“second nature.” The entire socio-historical reality becomes more and
more “fetishistic,” as a cosmo-creatural entity endowed with power over
men. History, rather than being the immanent path and consequence of
conscious humanity, is natural history or “destiny.”20 The modern metrop-
olis becomes inscrutable and superstitious, like a giant gambling house.
“Betting is a means of giving events their character of the shock and
detaching them from the contexts of experience. It is not by chance that
people bet on the outcome of votes, on the outbreak of war and so on.
Political events, especially for the bourgeoisie, easily take the form of
events at the gambling table.
For the proletariat this is not the case. It is better prepared to recognize
the constants in political events. If modernity becomes “inscrutable,” the
gambler, in the words of Anatole France, heroically establishes “a hand-to-
hand encounter with Fate” (ibid., p. 498).
It is not only the inscrutability of the social events of the bourgeoisie
that is reflected in the phenomenon of gambling, but also the intrinsically
revolutionary and self-destructive character of its productive process,
according to which the world appears to us in a perpetual state of uncer-
tainty and constant movement. This was already evident in Marx’s
Manifesto. It reads in fact:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instru-

ments of production, and with them the relations of production, and with
them all the relations of society …. Constant revolutionizing of production,
uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and
agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. (Marx
[1848], quot. in Berman 1982, p. 22)
20
A dialectical reversal between money and destiny thus takes place (a “sacralization” of
the profane and a “desecularization” of the sacred, reminiscent of the young Marx’s religious
critique of capitalism in the Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, as well as certain consider-
ations of Georg Simmel in his Philosophy of Money, 1900)—laconically expressed by Benjamin
in this way: “isn’t there a certain structure of money that can be recognized only in fate, and
a certain structure of fate that can be recognized only in money?” (Benjamin 1999, p. 496).
340 V. MELE
A nihilistic element is intrinsic to the capitalist mode of production:

what is already produced must be destroyed must be destroyed in order to
continue producing. The eminently dynamic and progressive character of
the bourgeoisie thus carries within itself a negative and dissolving corre-
spondent. What Benjamin will call in one of his essays from 1931 The
Destructive Character. All the salient characters of the modern are reflected
in the experience of the gambler: self-destructiveness, destiny, the dialectic
of novelty, and repetition. The most complete portrait of the type of the
player Benjamin provides in the essay Of Some Motifs in Baudelaire, com-
menting on the poem Le jeu. Here the player is the protagonist of the
atrophy of experience (Erfahrung). He is in search of the Sensation that
will free him from the gray cloak of ennui, the background of all the
dreams and phantasmagoria of the commodity. But the “homogeneous
and empty” flow of the idle man’s time postpones, “corresponds” to the
Sisyphean work of the unskilled worker. The connection that Benjamin
establishes is therefore much more than a causal connection: it is a
“mimetic” relationship. Indeed, as we read in his essay On the Mimetic
Faculty, “Children’s play is everywhere permeated by mimetic modes of
behavior, and its realm is by no means limited to what one person can
imitate in another. The child plays at being not only a shopkeeper or
teacher, but also a windmill and a train” (SW 2, p. 720). Like the child,
the idle dreamer—the law of resemblance applies in fact in the child, as in
the dream, as in the intoxication from hashish—establishes “correspon-
dences” between his imaginary and the environment around him, which is
that, “It was the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale
industrialism” (Benjamin 2006a [1939], p. 314). All of this can only be
grasped in the infantile and dream world: not in the intellectualistic experi-
ence (the blasé metropolitan individual in Simmel) to which the metro-
politan chocs force the adult.
This is the only way to explain the fact that the player, in the passage
sheltered from the shocks of the subway, submits to the shocks of the game.
The world of technology and goods and the world of entertainment are in
correspondence: in both, atrophy occurs of Erfahrung; for both of them
the experience of repetition, of shock, is inaugurated and emptiness:
What the amusement park achieves with its dodgem cars and other similar
amusements is nothing but a taste of the training that the unskilled laborer
undergoes in the factory […] The jolt in the movement of a machine is like
the so-called coup in a game of chance. The hand movement of the worker
at the machine has no connection with the preceding gesture for the very
reason that it repeats that gesture exactly. Since each operation at the
machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a
game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the laborer
is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. Both types
of work are equally devoid of substance. (Ibid., pp. 329–330)
Even in its idleness, in the glittering phantasmagoria of consumption,

the capitalist metropolis dreams within the sleep of merchandise. And
even in the apparently distant and forgotten activities of material produc-
tion, the experience of emptiness is represented, of the mechanical and
obsessive repetitiveness that characterizes technology. In the worker as in
the player, therefore, there is an atrophy of traditional, accumulated, his-
torical experience. They cannot draw on the past, nor can they look toward
a future other than that of commodification. A light of hope can, however,
appear even in the obsessive and neurotic activity of gambling, apparently
without a future. In fact, it is precisely the repetitive element of this activ-
ity typically carried out by adults that recalls the fullness and magic of
childhood games. Like the latter, in fact, “gambling offers the only occa-
sion in which one does not have to renounce the pleasure principle and
the omnipotence of one’s thoughts and desires, because in it the principle
of reality offers no advantage over the principle of pleasure” (Benjamin
2002, p. 510). Both games thus carry with them a profound sense of plea-
sure. Both thus carry with them a profound tension toward the search for
happiness; a search that takes place through repetition, through the “once
again” (noch einmal) directed at every experience of profound joy.
Benjamin writes in a review of a book on the history of toys:21
the great law that presides over the rules and rhythms of the entire world of
play: the law of repetition. We know that for a child repetition is the soul of
play, that nothing gives him greater pleasure than to “Do it again!” The
obscure urge to repeat things is scarcely less powerful in play, scarcely less
cunning in its workings, than the sexual impulse in love. It is no accident
that Freud has imagined he could detect an impulse “beyond the pleasure
principle” in it. And in fact, every profound experience longs to be insatia-
ble, longs for return and repetition until the end of time, and for the rein-
statement of an original condition from which it sprang […] This is not only
21
Karl Grober, Kinderspielzeug aus alter Zeit: Eine Geschichte des Spielzeugs [Children’s
Toys from Olden Times: A History of Toys] (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1928).
342 V. MELE
the way to master frightening fundamental experiences-by deadening one’s

own response, by arbitrarily conjuring up experiences, or through parody; it
also means enjoying one’s victories and triumphs over and over again, with
total intensity. An adult relieves his heart from its terrors and doubles hap-
piness by turning it into a story. A child creates the entire event anew and
starts again right from the beginning. Here, perhaps, is the deepest explana-
tion for the two meanings of the German word Spielen: the element of
repetition is what is actually common to them. Not a “doing as if” but a
“doing the same thing over and over again,” the transformation of a shatter-
ing experience into habit-that is the essence of play. (Benjamin 1999
[1928], p. 120)
The player, through the obsessive and mechanical repetition of the

bets, looks for the hole through which the unique experience of joy can
appear again childlike. This makes him a modern hero, for whom even
Baudelaire had found words of respect. He stoically swims against the tide
in the river of “homogeneous and empty” time of exchange value, desper-
ately searching for a unique experience, the winning coup. His psychologi-
cal mechanism reflects the child’s original desire for repetition in his play:
he is the swordsman who does not resign himself to unhappiness and
“preferred Suffering to death, and hell to nothingness”22 (le jeu).
The gambler is therefore a hero of modern life, a “type” (also in a psy-
chological sense) that is very representative of the “thousands of irregular
existences that circulate in the basements of a big city.” His psychology is
particularly significant not only because it is an overall allegory of an (emi-
nently irrational) aspect of the functioning of the capitalist economy as a
whole (it is not by chance that Benjamin likens it to the activities of the
speculator), but also because it is an “allegory” of its opposite: childish
play, the playful activity that expresses the first relationship with the world
and, through its mechanism of repetition, the search for happiness.
Even in the most degraded experience, therefore, there is a hidden
(increasingly weak) tension toward happiness, which, if grasped in its
increasingly weak manifestation, can be the push toward the exit from the
“magic circle” of reification.
In the words of Baudelaire’s poem Le jeu, quoted by Benjamin 2006a [1939], p. 332.
22
6 Conclusions: Baudelaire as the Hero

of Modern Life
The social experience of the modern metropolis, from a subjective point

of view, is best read in Baudelaire’s poetic production.
Like the seventeenth-century Baroque poets, Baudelaire sees Paris as a
city of ruins, transient, in which time flows according to a homogeneous
and empty temporal rhythm, without bringing happiness. History—in
analogy to the Baroque sensibility—appears to become rigid in nature, so
it is represented by “requirements,” mute objects, ruins, in which life has
come to a standstill. In the inertia of these objects, which lie withdrawn
from use and vital circulation, the becoming of the spirit in mature capital-
ism is also revealed in the modern metropolitan context.
Modernity in Baudelaire, however, is by no means expressed in an uni-
vocal: in his work he constantly oscillates between “idyll” and “anti-idyll,”
symbolic experience and allegory, praise of the magnificence and colors of
metropolitan life and repulsion for its degraded aspects—prostitution,
poverty, corruption. His modernity is composed of both these aspects; it
is their paradoxical oscillation. For this reason a “heroic” temperament is
needed to give it form: to cross the petrified “hell” of the metropolis, to
submit to its flattery, to resist its chocs, to the anonymous and subjugating
character of the crowd in order to succeed in extracting the “modern
beauty”: these are the tasks of the “painter of modern life,” who must
be—as Baudelaire says—simultaneously “man of the world, man of crowds
and child.”
Baudelaire himself fulfilled this task and succeeded in giving form to the
contradictions of metropolitan life: the devastating and exhilarating
encounter with the crowd, the omnipresence of prostitution in his poetry,
the portrait of urban types who, like Baudelaire himself, both embody and
endure the antinomies of modernity in a silent attempt to subvert it.
All these motifs of Baudelairean poetry are characterized by a central
element that Benjamin highlights very well: the anger with which the poet
lashes out at modernity itself. It is the anger of one who perceives that he
is inexorably condemned to defeat. But it is this antisocial rage, this “secret
agent in the heart of the bourgeoisie” rage that Benjamin wanted to
“save” from oblivion and to enhance for his contemporary generation,
because it constituted a crack, a fracture in the image of a city and an era
that otherwise conceived itself as flourishing and multiform.
344 V. MELE
Benjamin was, however, aware of the insufficiency and danger into

which Baudelaire’s allegorical sensibility could fall: it could stop at an
“apologia of the negative,” at a resignation toward the experience of total
commodification, with the consequent abandonment to an impotent
melancholy.
Nonetheless, it was the destructive, unsociable, and discontented fury
toward his own time that Benjamin intended to enhance in Baudelaire. In
fact, the elimination of the illusory appearance that emanates from any
given order, whether it be that of art or of life, as an appearance of totality
or of the organic, destined to transfigure it in order to make it appear bear-
able, is characteristic of allegory. So Benjamin himself behaves like
Baudelaire: he is attracted by waste, by refuse, by the unsociable. He does
not retreat in front of the metropolitan hell, but he crosses it trying to
represent it.
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Raulet, G. 1996. Chockerlebnis, mémoire involontaire und Allegorie. Zu
Benjamins Revision seiner Massenästhetik in Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire.
Zeitschrift für kritische Theorie 2 (2): 5–28.
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Simmel, G. 1997. The Philosophy of Fashion. In Simmel on Culture, ed. D. Frisby

and M. Featherstone, 187–206. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
Weber, S. 2004. Theatrically as a Medium. New York: Fordham University Press.
Wolin, R. 1982. Walter Benjamin, an Aesthetic of Redeption. Berkeley, Los Angeles:
University of California Press.
CHAPTER 11
Conclusions: Metropolis as Tragedy,

Metropolis as Trauerspiel
1 Premise
This brings us to the close of our “pre-history” of “postmodernity.” Georg
Simmel and Walter Benjamin assume two representative standpoints on
twentieth-century thought regarding the metropolis which can be seen
emblematically as the “expressive platform of modernity” (Abruzzese and
Mancini 2011, p. 19), a socio-historical Urphenomenon where we can
read the developments of postmodernity contemporary to us. If we accept
the scheme proposed by Honneth (see Chap. 1), and consider
Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as two points of fundamental oscillation of
the cultural dialectics of the twentieth century, from both the general phil-
osophical point of view, and the sociological point of view due to its effects
on what has been defined as an “erosion” of the social (or “aestheticiza-
tion of daily life”), then our research on Simmel and Benjamin begins to
take the form of a “pre-history” of modern and postmodern culture.
This is in the sense that the blasé and the flâneur represent two indi-
vidual archetypes, two “original forms” of twentieth-century reflections
on subjectivity that oscillate between these poles. The difference between
Simmel’s metropolis and Benjamin’s can be summed up in the different
conceptions of life and therefore of experience of our two authors. For
Simmel the experience, above all, is Erlebnis that expresses the continuity
of life, the possibility of the fragment becoming totality, even if in the

Switzerland AG 2022
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348 V. MELE
tragedy of the incommensurability between part and whole; for Benjamin

the experience is Erfahrung and its poverty in modern time, which aes-
thetically is expressed by Trauerspiel. This conception of the metropolis as
Erlebnis and tragedy in Simmel, and Erfahrung and Trauerspiel in
Benjamin runs through all the themes we have tried to traverse in the
previous chapters. We aim to reiterate them again here. In order to sum up
the conclusions to this research, we have chosen some key figures and con-
cepts with which to illustrate the “similarities” (in Schopenhauer’s sense)
that thrive on different centers of their thought: the adventurer and the
hunter (on knowledge), fashion and history (on time), the blasé and the
flâneur (on individuality), aura and shock (on aesthetics), love and
metropolis (on gender and eros), and money and commodity culture (on
fetishism and poverty).
2 The Adventurer and the Hunter:

On Knowledge
The metropolis as a general form of the modern denotes a crisis in repre-
sentation, the fragmentation of knowledge, and a loss of trust in “classical
reason” and the cumulative capacity of knowledge consequent to the crisis
in the idea of progress. The analysis concentrates on the present, the cur-
rent, the modern, while questioning the historical dimension of knowledge.
The essay as a form is the privileged instrument of this theory of knowl-
edge: the analysis of the metropolis becomes a symbol of the very form of
the essay (Thouard 2019, pp. 44–50). Adorno recognized in Simmel the
paternity of this form of writing, arguing that the essay is a truly original
approach to reality, which renounces the stringent methodicality/meth-
odological aspect of the scientific treatise to be based rather on aesthetic
preferences, on “what you love and hate.” The famous aphorism by
Simmel (quoted as an epigraph in Chap. 3) says: “It is surprising how little
of the pain and happiness of men is contained in their philosophy” (Simmel
1923, p. 17). The invention and use of the essay as a form is the consistent
application of this maxim. The open structure of the essay, its being an
experimental form, an “attempt”—this is the literary meaning of the word
“essay”—make it a genre absolutely suitable to the sensibility of the twen-
tieth-century metropolis, also because of its being interdisciplinary to soci-
ology, literature, and philosophy (Goodstein 2019): the essay does not
have the task of theorizing or defining objectively, but rather of opening
to a “flight line” (Pyyhtinen 2017).
11 CONCLUSIONS: METROPOLIS AS TRAGEDY, METROPOLIS AS TRAUERSPIEL 349
As we have seen, because the adherence to this aesthetic perspective put

both Simmel and Benjamin in a very original position within (if not
beyond) the confines of neo-Kantianism. While moving from a common
philosophical root that goes back to the theory of knowledge
(Erkenntnistheorie), they move toward “similar” though not coincidental
directions. Although both consider themselves heirs of Kant’s criticism,
they work to overcome its narrow confines and in doing so they find an
ally not only in Nietzsche but especially in Goethe and his physiognomic
philosophy (Dodd 2008). However, if the affinity with Goethe’s “aes-
thetic pantheism” is without doubt an analogy (Waizbort 2000) we
mustn’t overlook the different centers of their philosophies. Simmel’s
Goethe is not Benjamin’s, as we have seen. For Simmel, Goethe is a point
of arrival: even if he does not totally espouse his positions (Simmel 2007),
Goethe is definitely the thinker that allows him to free himself—but then
again, never definitively, which is an unthinkable adjective in Simmel’s
relationist way of thinking—from Kantian logicism and mechanicism on
the way to his concept of life (Bleicher 2007). For Benjamin, it is a point
of departure in the sense of his “redemptive critique”: Goethe is the myth,
the false appearance of totality that must be dissolved in order to show the
paths that pass through it, according to the procedure of “destructive
character.” Symons (2017, p. 21) rightly observes that the difference of
Simmel and Benjamin’s views of life are illuminated by a remark that
Benjamin includes in his own essay on Goethe. Benjamin criticizes
Simmel’s book on Goethe for claiming that “beauty is truth become visi-
ble” and argues instead that “truth is not in itself visible and its becoming
visible could rest only on traits not its own” (Benjamin 1996a [1924–1925],
pp. 350–51). Since Simmel considers “more-than-life”—the absolute and
the transcendence—to be a category of life, life is considered capable of
producing on its own the beautiful forms that are supposed to bring truth
to expression. The absolute and the transcendence originate from nowhere
else than from within life itself. Benjamin, on the contrary, understand the
idea that the absolute and the transcendent are immanent to life as a
“myth,” a belief in a “false, errant totality” (ibid., p. 340). Life as “the
natural condition of the living” is always under the shadow of “guilt,” that
is exactly the incompleteness and removal from truth that need to be
“saved.”
Benjamin proceeds precisely in an “immanent” or “redemptive” man-
ner and believes that Goethe’s and Simmel’s concept of culture is exempt
from barbarism and therefore can be re-functionalized for a theory of
350 V. MELE
knowledge of history and society. The concrete instrument of this way of

thinking about culture was precisely the form of the essay which—corre-
sponding to Goethe’s concept of truth as an original phenomenon—starts
from singularity in order to elevate it to exemplary universality. A frag-
mentary style, deliberate “essayism,” and the construction of “conceptual
constellations,” rather than a “system,” are in fact characteristic of both
Simmel and Benjamin. Their cognitive approach has at various times been
defined by commentators as “sociological impressionism” (Frisby 2013),
accused of “aestheticism” (von Wiese 1910, p. 900), “bewildered repre-
sentation of pure facticity … at the crossroad between magic and positiv-
ism” (Adorno, in Benjamin 1994 [1938], p. 582), or (in one case
eulogistically) as the attempt to establish a “knowledge of the superficial”
(Vozza 1988) or a “thing-sociology” (Rammstedt 2008, p. 17). Simmel
with his “sociological aesthetics,” and Benjamin with “materialistic physi-
ognomic,” belong to a common “aesthetic paradigm of knowledge,”
which can be considered akin to the “evidential paradigm” (Ginzburg
1989; Mele 2015) that was so poorly received in the social sciences (so
attentive to their fragile scientific standing). It is not difficult to under-
stand why “official sociology” has in general disregarded it: the form of
knowing that it espouses is strictly linked to the aesthetic sphere and
diverges from the fundamental paradigms that influenced the social sci-
ences during the 1900s (mainly neo-Kantianism and Hegelian-Marxism).
In Simmel this method is clearly revealed in the “aesthetic perspective and
representation” (ästhetische Betrachtung und Darstellung) announced in
his 1896 essay (Simmel 1992b, p. 197), according to which “the typical is
to be found in what is unique, that which follows a law in that which is
fortuitous, the essence and the significance of things in the superficial and
the transitory.” In an unpublished fragment Simmel himself, looking to
take stock of the significance of his work for the general history of the
spirit, mentions the attempts made in various of his studies (above all The
Philosophy of Money, but also the essays on The Handle, The Ruin, Frame,
Bridge and Door, and many others) “to formulate the total development
of exterior and interior culture from the development of a single cultural
element,” showing that “under every small surface flows a channel,
through which it is connected to the ultimate metaphysical depths.”1 This
is a sort of “metaphysical nostalgia” (metaphysische Sehnsucht) that is
revealed in his desire to set out upon the search for “the relationship
1
Fragment of Simmel’s Nachlass, Simmel 2016 [1916], p. 71.
between part and all, surface and depth, reality and idea” (ibid.). This
nostalgia, above and beyond the scientistic pretensions of so much of con-
temporary sociology, is one of Simmel’s most fertile legacies for modern
and contemporary thought. As seen in Chap. 3, Simmel’s method is com-
parable to that of the adventurer, described in his splendid 1911 essay: the
adventurer of knowledge delves into the uncertain and manages to make
every lived experience (Erlebnis) a whole; every fragment of knowledge
becomes a light and a sign leading toward the center of existence. Through
a false move, Simmel discovers the essential in the nonessential, focusing
our interest on the periphery of routine life: on the marginal, the eccen-
tric, on the not yet saturated possibilities that come to us as gifts or as the
result of an activity not entirely our own and not entirely wished for.
Benjamin can be considered a continuer of this method which, after
Ginzburg, we have defined “evidential.” Nevertheless, as we have seen, he
explicitly criticized the conception of “lived experience” (Erlebnis) as a
source of socio-historical knowledge exemplarily represented by the con-
ception of adventure in Simmel, because he was convinced that in the
modern setting, such experience is in some way impossible to attain freely
as a whole. Rather than “adventure” as the paradigm for knowledge and
experience, Benjamin prefers the metaphor of the “hunt”:
With the trace (Spur), a new dimension accrues to “immediate experience.”

It is no longer tied to the expectation of “adventure”; the one who under-
goes an experience can follow the trace that leads there. […] In this way
there comes into play the peculiar configuration by dint of which long expe-
rience appears translated into the language of immediate experience.
Experiences can, in fact, prove invaluable to one who follows a trace—but
experiences of a particular sort. The hunt is the one type of work in which
they function intrinsically. And the hunt is, as work, very primitive. (Benjamin
2002b [1982], p. 801)
Benjamin therefore prefers the figure of the hunter over that of the
adventurer. We are not dealing with a simple stylistic choice. Instead, it is
quite clear that he intends to distinguish his own theory of knowledge
from Simmel’s. The hunter, in contrast to the adventurer, seems to put his
trust in a form (however weak) of rationality that is based upon recogniz-
ing and picking up “traces,” whereas in an adventure the cognitive process
seems to depend entirely on intuition and chance.
352 V. MELE
Hunting is a conscious human activity based on a practical form of

“cumulative,” transmissible knowledge, which can only allude to a lost
totality and represent only allusively and indirectly the truth—since we
know that, for Benjamin, remains an unbridgeable difference between
knowledge and truth. It foresees a path (even though virtually endless)
that intentionally tends toward the search for truth, whereas the search for
knowledge-seeking “adventures” may (in the eyes of those who do not
participate in them) seem devoid of rationality and the télos of truth. In
other words, while his approach is in other ways similar, Benjamin levels
veiled criticism at Simmel’s concept of the adventure and Erlebnis, not
only as both a theory of knowledge and a conception of subjectivity, but
in more general terms regarding the differences in their respective repre-
sentations of experiencing the metropolis. The figures of the adventurer
and the hunter represent the difference between symbolic and allegorical
art and the relationship between fragment and totality, particular and uni-
versal in the contest of their different conception of tragedy. In the case of
the symbol, the poet “sees” the universal in the particular; in the case of
the allegory, he “seeks” the particular in function of the universal. This
opposition (in the original: schaut, sucht) implies a difference in both per-
ception and reflection. The symbol is in fact presented as a “coincidence”
of the sensitive and the non-sensitive, the allegory as a “significant refer-
ence” of the sensitive to the non-sensitive. In the first case we are immedi-
ately faced with a unity of appearance and essence; in the case of allegory,
on the other hand, we are faced with their separation, and therefore aware-
ness and rational detachment are necessary.
The adventurer and the hunter are not at all secondary figures and rep-
resent in an extreme synthesis the idea of philosophy and theory of knowl-
edge of Simmel and Benjamin. Benjamin often uses other metaphors to
express his theory of knowledge: the flâneur, the archeologist who digs
and remembers, the one who broods, the destructive character. In the
comparison between these figures emerges—for example—how far-
fetched the comparison is between Simmel and Benjamin as flâneur,
because of the philosophy and theory of knowledge represented by this
elusive figure. In the theory of knowledge, as an adventure and as a hunt,
the difference is reflected between symbol and allegory and therefore
between a classical or classicist vision of art and allegorical art, which as we
have seen is not a simple conceptual distinction between forms of expres-
sion. The allegorical form expresses a condition both historical and natural
that appears “no longer as the unfolding of an eternal life but as the pro-
cess of an unstoppable decay” (Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 174). The truth
therefore moves away from the experience that is increasingly poor because
of the reification and alienation between subject and world. No “beautiful
sensory physis” is given, that is not given in an immediate and evident way
to the senses. Hence, the brooding figure is specific to the Baroque that,
from a point of view of the theory of knowledge, corresponds to the
hunter of traces and therefore to the detective. In other words, in the
symbolic aesthetic experience the fragment can become a whole (as in the
case of adventure) in the allegorical aesthetic experience the fragment is
destined to remain a fragment, an inorganic find, a trace, a representation
of a lack. From the point of view of the theory of knowledge, therefore,
adventure represents the chance to transform the random fragment into
totality. The hunt instead remains with the fragment. If, in fact, in the
symbolic—aesthetic pantheistic—experience of nature every detail can
represent the universal, in the allegorical experience of the world the detail
can only allude to a reconciled reality but remains an allegorical fragment
of a world that cannot be recomposed.
Would Simmel’s aesthetic method then be that of a “harmless collector
of art objects” as Adorno had written? Would Simmel’s essayism accom-
plish an undue aestheticization of reality, representing sketches of bour-
geois life, momentary images of bourgeois life passed off as eternal and
universal? Would it represent nothing more than the lazy pilgrimage of a
metropolitan aristocrat in the social worlds that are more congenial to
him? Would his sociological aesthetics therefore lack philosophical depth
as much as a critical point of view on society? This also seemed to be the
opinion of his student Siegfried Krakauer. Simmel—in Kracauer’s opin-
ion—is “a man of the analogies”:
The relatively large quantity of analogies with respect to the number of simi-
les present in Simmel’s work … shows that the thinker abstains from inter-
preting the world, that his ego does not possess that metaphysical depth that
alone could enable him to formulate a judgment in the face of phenomena.
How different Schopenhauer is! He is, down to his bone marrow, “a man of
similes”. (Kracauer 2004 [1920], p. 156)
In this view, Simmel’s conception would lack any key concept able to
bring order to the realm of specific phenomena, as they are analyzed with-
out any systematic defining cogency. Simmel’s method rambles and roams
from money to coquettishness, from the handle to sociability, just like the
adventurer driven by wide-ranging curiosity and seemingly devoid of any
354 V. MELE
discipline, without organizing the chaotic multitude of phenomenal mani-

festations into a philosophical cogent view. It is difficult to say whether
such a judgment is entirely accurate. It is certainly true that Kracauer’s and
Benjamin’s studies (as well as Adorno’s) would probably never have been
possible without Simmel’s work as precursor. The charge of skepticism
(demonstrating every truth and its contrary) is something that Simmel
denied explicitly (see Chap. 3). The incessant causerie of his writings may
sometimes give the impression of aimless digression. Nevertheless, as we
have seen, Simmel was deeply convinced of the Wechselwirkung of all phe-
nomena, that reality (just as society) is made up of a complex network of
interrelations and interdependencies. Simmel’s key concept is his relativ-
ism or relationism, that it is actually the absence of any foundation: an
“unfounded certainty,” to recall the study of Franco Cassano, the late con-
temporary Italian sociologist. Today, in an epistemological climate in
which certainty regarding the bases of rationality has grown particularly
weak, it is possible to reassess Simmel’s work as relationalist epistemology
as a form of “non-sceptical relativism that achieves a stable, solid new
notion of objective truth, which—as Nietzsche had already understood—
dissociates perspectivism from its nihilistic attribute and as establishes it as
the eminent outcome of a hermeneutics of complexity” (Vozza
2003, p. 11).
3 Fashion and the History: On Time

The metropolis, as we have seen, is also a structure of time. Zarathustra
sees time and, contemporaneously, the fate (Schicksal) of the metropolis as
eternal return, as pure meaningless happening. Simmel and Benjamin
share a position of originality within this modern conception of temporal-
ity. In fact Simmel tries to do without the conception of progress or an
exclusive orientation toward the future, orienting himself primarily on the
present seen as contingency and openness of possibilities. On the other
hand, Benjamin tries to correct the exclusive orientation (the flattening)
toward the future. Both, however, are critics of progress as a universal
historical law. If the time of the metropolis can thus be described as an
eternal present—symbolized eminently by the phenomenon of fashion,
which is both repetition and novelty, cyclicality and time now—the philo-
sophical and sociological interpretations of this phenomenon by Simmel
and Benjamin diverge radically. Simmel’s relationalist critique, i.e., his
theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie), view history quite differently

from Benjamin’s “redemptive critique” (rettende Kritik).
The fundamental philosophical concept to evaluate Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s different views on time and history comes from the most posi-
tive reference to Simmel’s work that can be found in all Benjamin’s writ-
ings: the concept of “origin” (Ursprung). Calling his own concept of
“origin” a “rigorous and decisive transformation of this basic Goethean
concept from the pagan context of nature to the Jewish context of his-
tory,” Benjamin indicates both the affinities and the differences between
his framework and Simmel’s philosophy of history. Although we can say
that Simmel’s entire oeuvre is characterized by a metaphysical longing for
totality, his position on religion is typically neo-Kantian, and this also
clearly and practically indicates to us how different the influence of Judaism
is on his thought. Just as his investigations into the philosophy of history
and historical time move from the question of the conditions of possibility
of history, so his approach to religion is not ontological, but epistemologi-
cal, not transcendental, aiming to analyze the psychological conditions of
possibility of religion. From a transcendental point of view, history as well
as religion appears as a process of consciousness and nothing else. And
they are strictly separated: history is neither “the march of God in history”
(like in Hegel’s dialectical conception), nor the expulsion from earthly
paradise and the expectation of the Messiah (as in Benjamin’s radical
Jewish messianic thought). History is conceived for Simmel in strictly neo-
Kantian terms and is not the realization of any truth principle, but funda-
mentally a cognitive process. Simmel asks the question, “how is history
possible?” And he basically answers by trying to identify the processes of
consciousness on the basis of which history is possible as a mental con-
struct. Radically different is Benjamin’s approach in the fragments “On
the Concept of History.” Here Benjamin strives to think of a critical (revo-
lutionary) concept of history that has at its heart the recovery of the unex-
pressed potentialities of the past in order to break the continuity of the
present. From the point of view of Benjamin’s redemptive critique there is
a radical difference between history and temporality. Time is the mechani-
cal time of clocks, homogeneous, and empty. History, on the other hand,
is composed of time-hours, moments of messianic actuality in which the
present can redeem the past by breaking the historical continuity of the
compulsion to repeat domination. None of this reflection is present in
Simmel’s reflection on historical time. In the essay The Problem of Historical
Time—which Benjamin had read and received a bad impression
356 V. MELE
of—Simmel essentially de-constructs the idea of chronological time as

something incommensurable with respect to life. Time is inevitably a sub-
jective category, an a priori form that we need to give meaning to the
atomistic flow of acts. From the perspective of Simmel’s relational critique,
then, “time is only a relation of the contents of history to each other, while
the totality of history is timeless” (Simmel 1980 [1916], p. 138). It seems
clear once again that Simmel’s approach to the question of historical time
is different. For the mature Simmel time in fact is—similarly with
Bergson—durée. “Life,” writes Simmel, “is immediately nothing other
than the past becoming present” (Simmel 2005 [1916], p. 34).2 Simmel
contrasts the concept of duration—which is also the essence of every great
work of art—with the principle of absolute change, which is supposed to
characterize a pure “form of transition” or “non-duration.” This “species
aeternitatis with reversed signs” (Simmel 2004 [1900], p. 516) is thereby
to be understood as an expression of a specifically modern experience of
time, which finds its most concise expression in the permanent circulation
of money and in the circularity of fashion. As the bearer of a movement in
which everything that is not pure movement is extinguished, money thus
appears, on the one hand, as an actus purus from which every definite
measure of time has disappeared. On the other hand, due to its purely
indirect character, it becomes the epitome of the relativistic character of a
world in which the objectivations of life find their meaning in the form of
a “self-sufficient union” with one another.
In Simmel’s (Bergsonian as well as Ditheyian) view, the survival of the
past becomes the very condition of possibility for change and rejuvenation
in the present: it is only because the past lives on within the present that
the present can be experienced as different from the past. On the contrary,
Benjamin’s concept of “now-time” (Jetzt-zeit) doesn’t emphasize conti-
nuity between present and past: on the contrary, it indicates an interrup-
tive power that actively brings about change and innovation. However, in
Benjamin neither this possibility of genuine change nor the subsistence of
the past can simply be assumed. For Benjamin the survival of the past in
the present is not, as Simmel puts it, “a basic given that cannot be con-
structed” (ibid., p. 6): it is rather something that one needs to create
(Symons 2017, p. 22).
2
Simmel also expounds on his conception of time in the late work The View of Life (Simmel
2010 [1918], pp. 6–9).
Benjamin’s view of history, which will be more consistently outlined

more than twenty years later (1940) in “On the Concept of History,” can
be understood as an almost complete reversal of Simmel’s conception. As
we have seen extensively in the dedicated chapters (Chaps. 8 and 10), in
Benjamin’s view the realm of history denotes a sphere of “mere life” (or
“Natural History,” Naturgeschichte) that is characterized by the dialectic
of new and ever-equal, symbolized from a cultural and aesthetic point of
view by the temporality of fashion. Fashion is in fact eminently productive
of novelty, only that these novelties do not break the cycle of life and death
of fashion itself. From the historical point of view, fashion represents the
ever-new face of the ever-changing mask of domination, which in the
metropolis takes the historical form of commodity-producing capitalism.
The fashionable commodity is eminently ever new (to attract the con-
sumer) and ever the same (as a commodity of mass consumption).
Contrary to Simmel and Nietzsche before him, Benjamin associates this
“eternal return” with a nightmarish situation, with a real absence of mean-
ing and not with a dynamic of life from which meaning can arise. The
continuity of this kind of historical experience leads him to a conclusion
that is the opposite of Simmel’s: according to Benjamin, no historical
truth can arise from the effort to “reproduce” the past. As Symons has
argued, “For Benjamin, historical understanding lies not so much in
reproducing the past but rather in interrupting it” (Symons 2017, p. 20).
For Benjamin it is not only not a matter of understanding the past “as it
really was”—according to Leopold Von Ranke’s historical realism that
Simmel also polemicizes against—but not even of entering into it.
Psychological concepts such as “empathy,” “understanding,” and in gen-
eral the desire to “relive an era” have as their only result the actual elimina-
tion of the past as a true alterity to the present and as an energy of utopian
possibilities for the future. For this reason, Benjamin introduces the afore-
mentioned concepts of “dialectical image” and “now-time” to indicate a
power of interruption of history that refuses to be absorbed by the conti-
nuity of its course. According to Benjamin, the procedure of materialist
historiography is neither inclusive (as in Dilthey, Simmel, and generally in
neo-Kantian historicism up to Weber) nor “additive” (as in generic pro-
gressivism) but “constructive”: when it is produced anew, in the form of
“an image,” the past undergoes an essential modification with respect to
the present that once was. The “weak messianic power” that Benjamin
deems capable of “interrupting” the course of history thus always also
involves a critique of the latter’s inability to interrupt itself. Benjamin’s
358 V. MELE
philosophy of history ultimately presupposes a messianic and utterly non-

Simmelian framework, as he defends the view that historical knowledge
does not merely enter into a meaningful relationship with the past by giv-
ing it form, according to Simmel’s relational critique. Rather, Benjamin’s
criticism evokes a redemptive power of an unexpected and infinitely brief
instant of historical transformation, transforming a given moment into the
occasion of the fulfillment of history itself.
In summary, the difference between Simmel’s and Benjamin’s vision of
temporality and consequently of history can be clearly seen in the different
conception of fashion. It expresses modern temporality for both of them,
only that for Simmel (who in Benjamin’s words moves in the “pagan realm
of nature”) the moment of fashion is a consuming actuality, a pure transi-
tion, a relationship between punctiform moments. For Benjamin, on the
other hand, fashion, due to its cyclical nature, represents the “tiger’s leap
into the past,” in which past and present come into tension due to the
rupture of historical continuity.
4 Between Men and Things:

On Commodity Fetishism
A fundamental aspect of the representation of the metropolis as tragedy
and as Trauerspiel concerns the problem of alienation, its representation
and its overcoming. The metropolis in fact is “the process of rationaliza-
tion of social relations” (Cacciari 1993, p. 4) and this rationalization tends
to transform, to use Marx’s words, “relations between men into relations
between things,” giving rise to the phenomenon that Marx had called
“commodity fetishism” and Lukács—on the basis of analyses of Simmel’s
Philosophy of Money—reification. This theory has an importance in Simmel
and Benjamin that is difficult to underestimate, in all its complex aspects
that we have tried to analyze in the previous chapters, which concern the
alienation between subject and object, the social-historical theory of
knowledge of this phenomenon of inversion and the historical possibility
to overcome it.
In Simmel’s tragic vision of the modern metropolis, the fetishism that
Marx assigns to the products of the economy in the age of commodity
production is only a case, with its own peculiarities, of the general fate of
the forms of modern culture, according to which these forms are created
by subjects but once created follow an immanent evolutionary logic, alien-
ating themselves from their origin and end.
In other words, tragedy would see alienation as a phenomenon that is

part of life itself while the Trauerspiel would evoke an “elsewhere” than
the capitalist and alienated metropolis: a place where the human beings are
not treated—and treat themselves—as “things.” If, for Simmel, the
metropolis is a fate—which albeit arouses nostalgia for classical and uni-
tary forms still present in historic Italian cities—Benjamin is physically
searching for the “character” of the metropolis—taking up the title of his
famous essay Fate and Character (“Schicksal und Charakter,” [1921],
Benjamin 1996a, pp. 201–206)—insofar as the former is linked to the
mythical, guilt-ridden aspect of the living while only the latter may have
natural traits of freedom and morality.
Is it nevertheless true that Simmel consistently with his metaphysics of
life eternalizes the living conditions of mature capitalism? This is Simmel’s
well-known interpretation of Lukács, taken up variously by different com-
mentators. Symons, too—albeit from a very original point of view—argues
that, for Simmel, the unstable and contradictory forms of capitalist society
are ultimately to be understood as an expression of an all-encompassing
principle of life. Therefore, in order to understand the irreducible pres-
ence of an “outside” vis-à-vis commodity society and reification, Simmel
would resort to an all-encompassing concept of unity and continuity that
is ultimately revealed as a-historical. This would be seen in the different
attitude Simmel and Benjamin have toward poverty as a social form and
phenomenon of the modern metropolis.
According to Symons, an analysis of Simmel’s essay on the Poor—
Chapter VII of his “great sociology”—would give the image that poverty
is “an official and immutable fact”—even though it is the task of every
society to try to overcome it. “The poor person,” writes Simmel, “stands
undoubtedly outside the group, inasmuch as he is a mere object of the
actions of the collectivity; but being outside, in this case, is only … a par-
ticular form of being inside.” The assistance of the poor—an obligation
for every community for Simmel—indicates an interaction with those
external elements that exist in every given collectivity: what we can indi-
cate as the “borders” or “margins” (it is not by chance that the poor are
also indicated as “marginal men”). The irreducible presence of the poor
would thus primarily indicate how life in general is marked by boundaries
that inspire the most diverse forms of interaction but will never disappear.
According to Symons, for Simmel, social boundaries are ultimately expres-
sions of boundaries that are inscribed at the very heart of the continuity of
life in general. Of a totally different tenor are Benjamin’s considerations
360 V. MELE
on the same matter. In his metropolitan writings, Benjamin addresses this

same figure of the poor described by Simmel. Benjamin’s brief remark
about the poor found, for example, in Berlin Childhood’s passage we com-
mented in Chap. 7 par. 4, revolves around the description of a sense of
social suffocation. Calling his native neighborhoods in Berlin’s Old and
New West a “ghetto” and himself a “prisoner,” he describes his first
attempt to break through the “obstinacy and complacency” of the class
into which he was born. Benjamin links this desire to emancipate himself
from his social environment to a growing attraction to the anonymity of
the big city and a desire for those who make its streets their home, primar-
ily prostitutes. “There is no doubt,” he writes, “that an idea (unfortu-
nately, an illusory idea) of repudiating my mother, those like her, and the
social class to which we both belonged was at the root of that unparalleled
excitement that drove me to approach a whore on the street” (Benjamin
2002a [1932–1934], p. 404). In Symons’ view, the main difference
between Simmel’s account of the poor and Benjamin’s is that Benjamin
renounces the explanatory value of any general principle of life: Benjamin’s
view of the poor is not at all motivated by an attempt to include even the
“outside” as an “inside” but, conversely, by the continuing task of disrupt-
ing the “inside” in such a way as to bring out something that cannot be
recovered in any way. “As long as there is still a beggar around,” Benjamin
writes in The Arcades Project, “there will still be myth” (Benjamin 2002b
[1982], p. 400). Symons’ conclusion is that Benjamin, unlike Simmel,
“does not connect the appearance of the poor to an ‘immutable fact’ but
seeks ever new ways of experiencing their own disappearance as a utopian
possibility” (Symons 2017, p. 153).
We find this conclusion untenable and sociologically disputable. In this
quote about the beggar Benjamin clearly links his conception of “Natural
History” (Natur-Geschichte) with Marx’s view of capitalism as the “pre-
history” (Urgeschichte) of humanity. The real history, understood as the
self-conscious activity of humanity as an independent collective subject,
should still begin. However, the content of this quote has quite problem-
atic implications from the perspective of theory of knowledge. It clearly
calls for “classless society” as a messianic state, but imagining such a state
as the elimination of “boundaries” seems to be a bad metaphysical image.
In terms of observer theory, Benjamin is evoking here a state in which
observation is impossible. He himself seems to fall victim to that “image
of a transparent society, hypothetically constructed on the assumption that
the end of social relations based on dependence and subordination means
the end of contradictions, and not, instead, their repositioning” (Iacono
2016, p. 116). It is not a matter of accepting poverty as an ineradicable

event of a metaphysical and a-historical concept of life-poverty that Simmel
since his adherence to the naturalist and socialist movement did not accept.
The central issue here is that there will always be a “myth” (in the plurality
of meanings this concept evokes: in-transparency, hetero-determination,
guilt) even when material poverty is eliminated. The complete elimination
of myth is bad mythology. Without forms, differences, and boundaries—
between observer and observed phenomenon, between system and con-
text, inside and outside—no observation and no critique is possible:
“absolute light has the same effect as absolute darkness” (ibid.). Of this
epistemological aspect Walter Benjamin’s “criticism that saves” was prob-
ably not aware enough. The conclusion that can be drawn from this com-
parison of Simmel’s and Benjamin’s depiction of urban poverty—using
Simmel versus Benjamin in this case—may be exactly contrary to Symons’:
it would be the autobiographical experience of a male, white intellectual
becoming aware of his privileged class status that would be dated, insofar
as it formulates the concept of reification and its overcoming on the basis
of an Old European concept of “philosophy of consciousness” (Habermas
1984) and not Simmel’s study sociology of forms and their ambivalence,
which survives instead in the critique of contemporary forms of exclusion
(Dal Lago 1999; Sayad 1999) and, more generally, in the critique of the
totalizing ambitions of the project of modernity (Bauman 1993). In fact,
it is possible to argue (Fitzi et al. 2018) that Simmel would not eternalize
capitalism in his metaphor of the dialectic between life and form. Rather,
Marx’s theory of historical development should be extended to the whole
of society and understood as an inquiry into the conflict between produc-
tive cultural forces and established cultural forms in the various qualita-
tively differentiated spheres of society.
5 The Blasé and the Flâneur: On Metropolis

and Individuality
The experience of Benjamin’s metropolis is both in continuity with and

opposition to Simmel’s. In continuity, because Benjamin owes Simmel a
series of central indications and motifs (Mičko 2010, p. 187ff.): the sociol-
ogy of metropolitan perception and acceleration (Dodd and Wajcman
2016), the theme of fashion, the sociology and culture of objects, critical
reflections on Marx’s theory of value, the metaphorical-empirical method
that comes from Goethe (Dodd 2008). In opposition, because the
362 V. MELE
analysis, diagnosis, and above all the prognosis that Benjamin produces
with regard to the process of Western individualization is radically differ-
ent from Simmel’s. With his “pre-history of modernity” (Urgeschichte der
Moderne) Benjamin intended to investigate precisely that aesthetic-cultural
modernity which Simmel interpreted so cogently. Benjamin, however—
and herein lies the fundamental difference—witnesses with his own eyes
the failure of the principium individuationis, which for Simmel consti-
tuted the distinctive mark of metropolitan social life. For Benjamin the
metropolis is above all the “mournful representation” (Trauerspiel) of the
disappearance of that model of autonomous and differentiated individual-
ity that Simmel aspired to, though in an ever more disenchanted fashion
toward the end of his reflections. It matters little in this case whether the
object were to be Paris or Berlin: Simmel is a “metaphorical” inhabitant of
this great city that Benjamin looks to find the origin (in the peculiar sense
in which he intends all of this: Ursprung) of the catastrophe toward which
bourgeois society was headed, faced with the rise of Nazism and the
Second World War. Benjamin tries to take a retrospective look at the “rub-
ble” of that era in which Simmel still had a leading, albeit late, role.
Benjamin’s scrutiny is a retrospective one. In a certain sense the flâneur as
a historical-cultural figure is the blasé, and therefore, as a historical figure
also exhibits the characteristics of dandyism, urban aristocracy, etc.
Benjamin contemplates the existence of different flâneurs: there is the
contemporary flâneur, represented by Benjamin himself, who portrays
“city images” of Naples, Moscow, Marseille, San Gimignano, the cities on
the North Sea (Buck-Morss 1989; Gilloch 1996; Mele 2011). Distinct
from these is the autobiographical portrait in Berlin, which is instead
flânerie in time, rather than in space, the forerunner of the historical-
collective flânerie of the work on the Parisian arcades. Lastly, there is the
historical-metaphysical flâneur, represented by the Angelus Novus, the
watercolor by Klee that appears in his theses on the concept of history. The
flâneur as a nineteenth-century historical-literary ideal type, the eminently
Parisian creature that Benjamin traces in nineteenth-century literature
above all in the works of Baudelaire (Benjamin 2003b [1938], Benjamin
2003a [1940]).3 This is the figure that we can liken to Simmel’s blasé: the
3
Benjamin’s interpretation of the flâneur as social figure has been criticized for lacking
historical accuracy. Benjamin’s concept would be based on incorrect readings of Baudelaire
and Poe, and conceived as a myth based on a one-sided understanding of modernity involv-
ing self-loss, alienation, and fetishization (Lauster 2007). This interpretation however
doesn’t invalidate the flâneur as a key figure of modern and postmodern forms of
individualization.
dandy, journalist, metropolitan intellectual, present in other European

capitals as well. The Paris of the second half of the nineteenth century,
“capital of the nineteenth century,” the metropolis symbol of modernity
for Benjamin, is seen above all through the gaze of Baudelaire’s allegorical
poetry. Baudelaire is “the hero of modern life” for Benjamin (Benjamin
2003b [1938], pp. 43ff.). The metropolis of Baudelaire is therefore the
first, fundamental metropolis experience we encounter in Benjamin. It
expresses Benjamin’s point of view on the modern. Benjamin’s “Baudelaire”
is the one that can most usefully be compared to Simmel’s blasé, as they are
both sons of the same metropolitan Geist. What characterizes the French
poet in a peculiar way is that he is, according to Benjamin, “a secret
agent—an agent of the secret discontent of his class with its own rule”
(Benjamin 2003c [1938], p. 92): he is an asocial, a character on the mar-
gins of his social class who expresses his latent unease. Baudelaire, unlike
the blasé and Simmel, sees the metropolis from the visual angle of death.
Benjamin saw an affinity between the presence of allegory in his poetry
and the Baroque allegory to which he had devoted himself with his study
of German Baroque drama. He wondered about the Flowers of Evil: “How
is it possible that a stance seemingly so ‘untimely’ as allegory should have
taken such a prominent place in the poetic work of the century?” (Benjamin
2003c [1939], p. 179). What could the Paris of the Second Empire have
in common, with its glittering department stores of goods, the ladies
strolling along the great boulevards, the muffled world of Jacques
Offenbach’s operetta (Kracauer 2002 [1937]), with the gloomy and mel-
ancholy atmosphere of the German Baroque Trauerspiel? Benjamin cap-
tures in Baudelaire’s allegorical ingenuity the lucidity of those who had
been able to see behind the glittering phantasmagoria of the times, the
dark shadow of the capital’s permanent domination. The splendor of
urban phantasmagoria with its premises of progress and well-being caused
him the typical response of allegorical melancholy. At the basis of
Baudelaire’s allegorical sensibility is no longer—as for the Baroque
Trauerspiel—the loss of faith in divine action in history, but, in the worldly
context of the Paris of the Second Empire, the anarchy of financial capital,
the fetishistic character of the commodity in the context of capitalist pro-
duction, which prevents men from having full control over their individual
and social destinies. Paris therefore appeared to Baudelaire, like History to
the German Baroque poets, not as “process of an eternal life,” but rather
“as process of incessant decay” (Benjamin 2019 [1928], p. 188) because
he sensed, albeit instinctively and anarchically, the injustice and precarious-
ness of the foundations of the social order.
364 V. MELE
It is in this context that allegorical sensitivity becomes “secularized,”

while maintaining—as is characteristic of the late phase of Benjamin’s
thought—its original theological meaning. “The gaze of the allegorist, as
it falls on the city, is the gaze of the alienated man” (Benjamin 1999
[1935], p. 10). The psychological basis of the allegory then becomes the
daily experience of the inhabitant of the metropolis that Simmel described
for Benjamin with exactitude. And here Benjamin, in the wake of Simmel,
develops that theory of the “atrophy of experience” (Verkümmerung der
Erfahrung) which made him famous in the following Massenästhetik
(Raulet 1996). The experience in the modern metropolitan context is
transformed from Erfahrung to Erlebnis, from cumulated and passable
“experience” (Erfahrung) to individual and fragmentary “lived experi-
ence” (Erlebnis). According to Benjamin, Erfahrung belonged to tradi-
tional and community contexts (Benjamin 2003a [1940], pp. 313–321).
When one gives “experience” in the sense of Erfahrung, the contents of
the individual past come into conjunction with those of the collective past
through the continuity of tradition. “Experience” comes to configure
itself as the possibility for man to draw spontaneously from his own past
and to make it vital in the present. Erlebnis, on the other hand, in the par-
ticular meaning that Benjamin gives to this term, is precisely the experi-
ence that is possible when the traditional and community context of the
Erfahrung is shattered. It is not only the “lived experience” of the isolated
metropolitan citizen, definitively uprooted from his past, but it is also the
fruit of the social reality that he finds himself facing at every crossing of the
street, made of sudden gestures, sudden shots, perceptive shocks. The
Erlebnis that takes place in this context “sterilizes” the event, depriving it
of its relationship with the past. It, therefore, comes to be the social foun-
dation of modern allegorical sensitivity. The past becomes for the alle-
gorist “dead possession,” “object of remembrance” (das Andenken),
incapable of muttering correspondences to the present. Here lay the
greatness and importance of Baudelaire. He was the poet who placed the
metropolitan, “intellectualistic” (Simmel) and reified experience at the
center of his artistic work. He sought to lyrically represent a form of expe-
rience that was the exact opposite of lyricism. In this sense his was a work
by Sisyphus, destined to inevitably suffer checkmate and plunge into
anguish.
There is a certain affinity between the metropolis of Baudelaire and that
of Simmel. Both see the reification of experience, the dissonance between
subjective and objective culture. A fundamental difference lies precisely in

the “anger” with which the poet hurls himself against the city and the
melancholy with which he paints it. Simmel, despite having witnessed the
tragedy that the metropolis confronts us with, still strives to maintain an
impartial attitude: “our task … is not to accuse or forgive: only to under-
stand” (Simmel 1997b [1903], p. 185). But above all, however, the
metropolis of Simmel produces a form of extreme, refined individuality. It
is always in any case a hotbed of possibilities of individuation and personal-
ity development. For Simmel, Erleben is possible as a positive synthesis of
individual experiences. “Goethe is the individual who has now conquered
his own law, perfect and closed autonomy—Erlebnis who became
Dichtung, existential multiplicity dominated by the measure and ‘rhythm’
of subjectivity” (Cacciari 1973, p. 62).4 This is not Baudelaire’s viewpoint.
He rejects the logic of the division of labor and takes the side of the aso-
cials and outcasts: “he realizes his only sexual communion with a whore”
(Benjamin 1999 [1935], p. 10). He prefers these, because they seem to
him more sincere than an order and a facade that appear to him to be
lying. Stephane Symons argues persuasively that “the category of the indi-
vidual, of such importance to Simmel, is no longer of primary importance
to Benjamin” (Symons 2017, p. 96). Benjamin’s views on Baudelaire illu-
minate his category of modern metropolitan individuality. The flâneur is
not an individual in Simmel’s sense: he doesn’t possess a singularity and it
doesn’t refer to a unique and irreplaceable, continuous unity. The flâ-
neur—in the various incarnations we can find in Benjamin’s work—
remains, on the contrary, on the surface of things and does not have a
mental life to speak of, with a deeply rooted sense of selfhood. “To indi-
cate such a non-individualized life that nevertheless comes together with a
dimension of hope, Benjamin uses the term ‘character’” (Ibid.). In this
sense, the flâneur can be related not to a beggar but a Prince, that is Prince
Myshkin (Dostoevsky’s The Idiot) of whom Benjamin wrote that he is
“completely unapproachable” and “emanates an order at whose center we
find a solitude that is almost absolute” (Benjamin 1996b [1921], p. 79).
“Any sense of a ‘deeper’ self or inner-I, that is to say, is alien to the mental
universe of characters, who cannot shake off a seeming superficiality and
4
Podoksik persuasively argues that Goethe’s individualism, for Simmel, is a true synthesis
of individuality and universality achieved through the radicalization of qualitative individual-
ism, without any recourse to quantitative individualism (Podoksik 2010, p. 139). On
Simmel’s concept of individuality see also Schwerdtfeger 1999.
366 V. MELE
shallowness. Characters do not build up a unified ego through a spontane-

ous openness to the world’s events, and their identities are not ‘continu-
ous streams of becoming’ that take shape in an intimate dialogue with
their surroundings” (Symons 2017, p. 96). If we concentrate essentially
on the flâneur as a historical figure that foreshadows the pre-history of
modern subjectivity outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno in the Dialectic
of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer 2002 [1944]), Benjamin
seems to want to delineate a recipe for going beyond—in the utopian
and/or ideological sense—the individualistic structure of contemporary
society. He witnesses the process of “bourgeois” individualization fail
definitively and fade above all before the ascendency of the “reactionary
mass regimes” of fascism and Nazism and the great technological revolu-
tions for which the metropolis is an eminent symbol: journalism, cinema,
radio, and in general the technical reproducibility of art. His hope was that
the void created by the disappearance of the Western individual could be
filled by new forms and figures of subjectivity and intellectuality made pos-
sible through the means offered by the technical reproducibility of art-
work. Art—in particular cinema, an art from and for the masses—can be
in this contest the educative mechanism through which the crowd as “new
collective technoid body” can begin to appropriate its own political and
technological potential. In this sense his diagnosis goes beyond Adorno’s
(as testified to both by the correspondence between Benjamin and Adorno
and the reflections that the latter advanced in the Dialectic of Enlightenment
and Minima Moralia, or in his years of exile from Germany immediately
prior to the war), which was equally pessimistic about the recovery and
disappearance of bourgeois subjectivity, but nonetheless gave him hope
for radical criticism of the social structure. In fact, according to Adorno
Nietzsche’s (and Schopenhauer’s) illusion of willingly breaking the “chains
of individuality,” it would only end in redelivering us defenseless to the
omnipotence of economic mechanisms.5
5
For Adorno, any criticism of the subject that does not start from the decision to save it is
reactionary. If this is not the case, criticism becomes merely symptomatic, a mimetic expres-
sion of the crisis and not its mastering: “all that remains of the criticism of bourgeois con-
sciousness is the shrug with which doctors have always signaled their secret complicity with
death” (Adorno 2005 [1951], p. 64).
Simmel instead does not stop looking, albeit with an accent on the
tragic that grew ever stronger in the last stages of his reflections (Simmel,
Simmel 1968 [1918]), at the individual and the process of individualiza-
tion from the perspective (in this case remaining faithful to Nietzsche’s
moral philosophy)—of the ever more marked differentiation and growth
of the vital possibilities of the individual. According to Simmel, the mod-
ern metropolis does not produce a deficiency of personality, but rather an
excess, a proliferation of myriad and diversified lifestyles. His judgment in
this regard is ambivalent. The metropolis leads not only to cultural trag-
edy, but also and equally to an exaggeration of the personality, in such a
way that, according to Simmel, the individual “has to exaggerate this per-
sonal element in order to remain audible even to himself” (Simmel 2021
[1903], p. 199). Moreover, “the particular modern need for a behavioral
style in personal life, which Simmel centers on in his ‘diagnosis of the time’
(Gegenwartsanalyse), brought with it increased manifestations of subjec-
tivism, which he saw around the end of the century in the loss of meaning
of historical traditions, in the disappearance of the strength of conviction
in the world’s great conceptions and in a multiplicity of offerings of new
possibilities for cultural self-realization” (Lichtblau 1997, p. 61). This
multiplicity of styles is the very fruit of the increasing possibilities for
choice in modern times and represents a chaotic, disorienting offering that
prompts a search for a life style that is formally and coherently defined. As
Simmel himself states in one of his late essays on culture (Simmel 1997a
[1911]), modernity is characterized precisely by a superabundant life that
has yet to find the ability to express itself in any form.
Within a certain approximation, we can consider the subjectivity repre-
sented by the flâneur akin to Schopenhauer’s model: Benjamin’s research
tends toward a new form of subjectivity unalienated by the recovery of
forces extraneous to identity rationality (myth, dreams, intoxication).
Simmel’s blasé individual, on the contrary, aims to increase his own par-
ticularity through distinction from the masses, remaining faithful to
Nietzsche’s pathos of distance (albeit interpreted critically, Lichtblau
1984). For Simmel, the importance of Nietzsche as “moral philosopher”
lays in his “ethic personalism” that constitutes a “Copernican revolution”
in moral philosophy (Simmel 1992a [1896]). Nietzsche goes beyond the
alternative of “egoism and altruism” in modern ethics in favor of an
“objective idealism of realizations of the human genre represented by sin-
gle persons.” In other words, what decides the values of a determined
social organization is not the happiness of the majority of its members and
368 V. MELE
neither the general wellness, but its capacity to favor the development of
objective qualities (nobility, beauty, talent) whose existence is a goal in
itself, like the work of art. If the nineteenth century introduced the social
point of view as the point of view of excellence, Nietzsche infringed the
modern identification of society and humanity, excluding that the value of
human action consists in its social effects. Simmel obviously couldn’t fore-
see the intrinsic ambiguity of this philosophical position (as Benjamin
did): from one side it represents a disfranchising from society and its utili-
taristic criteria, from the other side it requires the social production of
exceptional individuals. On this question, Nietzsche’s answer was the exal-
tation of inequality and even slavery: a very dangerous thesis rich of politi-
cal consequences for which Simmel – from his standpoint on the threshold
to the twentieth century – couldn’t be pledge for guilty. The blasé and the
flâneur thus become the necessary reference points for delineating two
models, sometimes converging, at other times diverging, regarding the
representation of the individual and its possible autonomy in the context
of the “metropolization of social life.” Therefore, even the characteristics
of current modernity, which are often included under the label of post-
modernism, can be better understood through in-depth investigation of
the modernité (or the metropolis as an aesthetic object). It is not by chance
that careful commentators and analysts of postmodernity or “liquid
modernity,” felt the need to refer to the conceptual historical period of the
turn of the twentieth century. Simmel’s blasé and Benjamin’s flâneur rep-
resent two symbolic figures of the cultural dialectics of twentieth-century
subjectivity, which focused its reflections on the problem of the conserva-
tion and development of an autonomous subjectivity in the context of
mass society, represented emblematically by the social form of the
metropolis.
6 Love and Metropolis: On Gender

As Janett Wolff has rightly pointed out, “like modernism, modernity is
gendered male” (Wolff 2000, p. 37). Most theorists of modernity have
focused on the public sphere of work, politics, and urban life, spaces where
women have always had difficulty accessing. In the “philosophical (and
sociological) discourse of modernity” there has always been little room for
an autonomous female voice.
The emblematic figures of modern subjectivity elaborated by Baudelaire,
Simmel, and Benjamin—the flâneur, the blasé in the first place, but also
the dandy, the stranger, and so on—are quintessentially male. However,

Simmel and Benjamin while moving discursively within the projection of
male desire and identity, pay attention to the theme of “gendered moder-
nity” with their analyses of the figures of “feminine culture” and erotic
culture. Linked to the theme of the feminine is in fact the theme of love.
As Lichtblau has pointed out, the cultural crisis at the beginning of the
twentieth century resulted not only in a rapprochement of classical German
sociology to “aesthetic-literary” modernity, but also in an interest in the
question of gender and the relationship between modern culture and eros,
with a consequent “rehabilitation of love” (Lichtblau 1996, p. 280).
As we have seen in the essays on women, Simmel—unique among his
contemporaries—considers the sexualized nature of the dominant male
culture. In Simmel we can find a mix of brilliant critical analyses of the
social construction of gender in modern culture and more problematic
suppositions of the metaphysical character of female culture and its nature.
As Lewis Coser aptly put it, “His diagnosis was resplendently modern, his
cure was Wilhelminian” (Coser 1984, p. 89). Woman and female culture
represents for him, in a sense, a different outcome for the objectification
of modern culture. Simmel’s solution to the over-objectification of mod-
ern culture and its damaging consequences on the fragmentation of per-
sonality is the reintegration of female resistance to this division. In his
perspective, this would address the problems raised by the feminist move-
ment and make possible the participation of women in the public life of
work and politics in a newly constituted social sphere. Such a solution may
seem rather vague to us today, “but the importance of Simmel’s percep-
tion of the gendered nature of modernity, as early as 1911, is beyond
question” (Wolff 2000, p. 40).
Although his point of view is still masculine and Wilhelmine, the incor-
poration of a feminist critique into the sociology of modernity, and specifi-
cally in relation to its foundational features of rationalization, social
division and objectification, opens the possibility for a non-essentialist
conception of “the feminine” as a contrast and challenge to the modern.6
6
We report a totally different view from this perspective. According to Anne Witz: “man,
and man alone, come to inhabit Simmel’s sociological imaginary, animating the social and
cultural forms of modernity as a masculine subject. Woman never escapes the grip of Simmel’s
philosophical imaginary and can never animate the landscape of the social as a feminine sub-
ject” (Witz 2001, p. 355). Witz believes that “Simmel’s deep ontology of gender, crafted
metaphysically within his philosophical imaginary, undergirds what is, in effect, a masculine
ontology of the social” (ibid.). In other words, “Simmel’s tremendous commitment toward
370 V. MELE
In Benjamin we can find a similar but different valorization of the femi-

nine as an alternative to the dominant masculine foundation of the mod-
ern. Buci-Glucksmann sees in Benjamin’s theory of modernity nothing
less than a “utopia of the feminine.”7
Woman’s power over images, the staging of female bodies in the imaginaries
of allegory or the protest against modernity, rediscovery of a bisexuality of
writing, radical anthropological experience in the various utopianisms and
modes of transgressing the normative division between feminine and mascu-
line: all these new territories foreign to the “historicist” reason of progress,
all these “primal historical forms” recaptured by “dialectical images” which
bridge the past and now-time. … The “utopia” of the feminine, in all its
interpretative excess, might represent this intertwining of time, images and
bodies in profane illumination. (Buci-Glucksmann 1994, pp. 113–14)
The female body would be the very allegory of modernity, where it is

represented as “mere life” or in the great Baudelairean images of the pros-
titute, the sterile woman, the lesbian, the androgynous, where the baroque
spirit of catastrophic utopia is revealed with its tendency to destroy appear-
ances and false totality. In this sense, the figures of women who appear in
Benjamin (and in his interpretation of Baudelaire) embody the modern
the counter-Enlightenment concept of an autonomous, ‘authentic’ femininity” (ibid.) invali-

dates all analyses aimed at demonstrating that women represent a “third space” outside of
dualistic thought and that, according to him, the possibility of an autonomous culture of
women could have effectively countered the tendency to objectify culture in traditionally
masculine fields, such as science, medicine, art, or law. Once again, Lukács’ interpretation of
Simmel as a “metaphysician of life” echoes in these analyses, which would overshadow his
sociological insights.
7
We also report some differing opinions here. According to Angelika Rauch, Buci-
Glucksmann “misses the point of Benjamin’s critique of representation and modernity. His
formulation of allegory, for example, contains a deconstruction of cultural and aesthetic
significance and in this case, the deconstruction of the representation of femininity. Feminine
sexuality, in the prostitute, acts as appearance, not as essence” (Rauch 1988, p. 88). Eva
Gaulen is instead convinced that “a general reconstruction of gender and gendering in
Benjamin can be derived from virtually any of his texts, for all of them are saturated with the
imagery of gendered eroticism” (Geulen 1996, p. 162). Rather than looking at the figures of
woman—allegorical or otherwise—in modernity, Geulen turns to the more fundamental
question of gender as a central and constitutive category of Benjamin’s philosophical
approach. According to Damião, finally, Benjamin’s reflection on eros overcomes the tradi-
tional gender polarity and “it is even possible to argue that, following the current theories,
Benjamin effectively announces a transgender theory. He did not fully develop a theory, as
such, but indicated it as an intuition” (Damião 2016, p. 122).
itself, especially the prostitute who is both commodity and utopia of the
giving mother. According to Benjamin’s “saving critique,” then, the image
of the feminine becomes a dialectical image that seeks to subvert the mod-
ern from its own foundations.
Simmel’s and Benjamin’s positions on love and its ability to resolve
alienation in modern society are equally different. For Simmel, love would
seem to be the absolute, primary experience, the only dimension capable
of recomposing the various cleavages of the subject. However, even love is
no exception to the tragic nature of the human condition. This is a tragedy
inherent for Simmel to the very life of the human species, the only one
that produces a movement contrary to its own deepest reasons: in the
moment in which love transcends the singularity of the subjects and real-
izes the union between the ego and the you, opens a contradiction even
deeper between the lovers and their existence. Love therefore follows the
destiny of every other form of experience and culture: it goes toward con-
tradiction, overcoming, and dissolution. Once again, however, it must be
stressed that here we are at the antipodes of the Hegelian dialectic, with its
logic of overcoming (Aufhebung) contradiction, in that Simmel never pre-
figures any final reconciliation—worldly or otherworldly—but also from
the vital movement as described by Nietzsche in that no decision or will to
power—symbolized by Zarathustra biting the head of the snake to end the
eternal return—is able to counteract this incessant movement of unifica-
tion and division, birth, and dissolution. Life in Simmel is therefore a
wave-like movement without beginning or end: the image he gives us of
culture is that of a ripple on the surface of life, while even the subject only
transiently achieves a form of unity or stillness in this flow that has no
beginning or end.
It is clear that we are at odds with metropolitan love as described by
Benjamin. One actually finds several descriptions of metropolitan love in
Benjamin. In One-Way Street, written when the author was in love with
Asja Lacis, we find a description of amorous ecstasy, clearly inspired by
Goethe. In the modern metropolis—the Berlin of his childhood, the Paris
of Baudelaire—love takes on completely different tones than in Simmel’s
tragic love. Once again, love represents a Trauerspiel, that is, the mournful
representation of tragic love. This is clearly felt in the commentary on
Baudelaire’s sonnet Une passant. This is the typically “modern” passion of
the metropolitan citizen. It is a passion in the double sense of the German
term Leiden: it implies that love can only be experienced in a painful and
negative way, as detachment and loss. Benjamin in this regard observed:
372 V. MELE
“The ecstasy of the citizen is a love not so much at first as at last glance,”
as it involves precisely the detachment.
What is therefore exemplified in the episode of the passer-by is the
definitive disappearance of the experience of the “aura” in the metropolis.
The experience of the encounter with the passer-by has nothing, accord-
ing to Benjamin, of the bliss of he who “is invaded by eros in all the rooms
of his being,” but rather something of the “sexual embarrassment” that
surprises the solitary voyeur. It is the stigmata that the metropolis inflicts
on love. The feeling of modernity can only be acquired at the price of
unhappiness, of exposure to the negative. The true life reveals itself for a
moment and sanctions itself by escaping from the grip of the false … the
authentic passion cannot but be an unhappy passion, condemned to
checkmate, impossible. But this is the inane, heroic task that Baudelaire,
the lyricist of modern life, had taken on: that of giving form to modernity
in his poetry.
7 Aura and Shock: On Aesthetics

In order to better understand the differences between Simmel’s and
Benjamin’s conceptions of individuality, it is important to consider the
differing relation between aesthetics and daily life, a relation that—as
highlighted by Honneth—forms the bases of modern metropolitan sub-
jectivity. According to Simmel, art plays a fundamental role in subjectivity:
it is through the “aestheticization” of life that individuals partially succeed
in escaping the fragmentation of the plurality of affiliations and the ano-
nymity of monetary relationships: this aestheticization takes the forms of
fashion, adventure, sociability, or all other forms of “Spielformen der
Vergesellschaftung,” to which Simmel devoted a number of essays—such as
sociability, coquetry, ornament, style, among others (Mele 2013, pp. 21–58).
This characteristic has made Simmel a “forefather of cultural Bolshevism,”
to put it in Benjamin’s words8: that is to say, a precursor of the twentieth-
century avant-garde artistic movement, which aimed to overcome the
boundary between art and daily life. However, it can be argued that as
Simmel makes art the very paradigm of social practice, it tends to lose its
critical and utopian nature. In other terms, Simmel and Benjamin propose
two different, competing forms of the aestheticization of daily life: one
becomes the very paradigm of social and individual reality, the other seeks
8
On Simmel and the early Frankfurt School see Mele 2021.
to build itself up against it, and thereby represents an irreducible, utopian

escape route from the state of existing things. In Simmel and Benjamin,
therefore, there is a face-off between Baudelaire’s “anger” and the bour-
geois detachment of the blasé, the unkept promesse de bonheur and the
work of autonomous classical art. Simmel seemed to have realized this
when he conceived of his own “sociological aesthetics” in counter position
to the traditional conception of the artwork as autonomous and complete
in and of itself. The fact that an understanding of the disruptive power of
“auratic” art depends on reference to the practice of daily life can be inter-
preted as a sign that it has the capacity to assert its own “self-sufficiency”
solely within the “mutable and contradictory form of life,” thereby
renouncing every form of transcendence (Lichtblau 1996, pp. 390–391).
In a late essay (1914) Simmel himself criticized the conception of l’art
pour l’art for its excessive rationalism, that is, because “it excludes from
that which is significant to the essence and value of the artwork all that
does not act within the sphere of art” (Simmel 2000 [1914], p. 13). He
does however try to correct the “aesthetic rigorism” of this conception via
the “new conception of the relation between life and its elements and
contents,” in other words, the Lebensanschauung—his own conception of
the philosophy of life. If one adopts such perspective, one can arrive at
“preserving the integral clarity and closure of the pure artistic point of
view—the liberation of art from all that falsifies its essence as art and in
conceiving of it, together, as a wave in the stream of life” (ibid.). In other
words, Simmel believes that the “salvific” intervention of art in existence
can occur if it establishes a paradoxical, contradictory relation with life: on
the one hand, it represents “an entirely closed whole, that does not need
the world, a sovereign, self-sufficient whole also with respect to those who
enjoy the work” (ibid., p. 12). At the same time, however, “it is situated
within the stream of life, welcoming this flow into itself as regards the
creator, and releasing this flow from the perspective of the beholder”
(ibid.). The “lived experience” (Erlebnis) of artwork, allows us to trans-
form the fragment of our life into a whole. Art is thus both more life (con-
tinuous creation, power that originates from life, a “wave” in the stream
of life) and more than life (a whole that goes beyond life itself as a sover-
eign, self-sufficient whole). Hence, the experience of art is an adventure,
one that transforms the chance fragment of existence into totality, provid-
ing it remains (precisely) an adventure, that is separate from the rest of the
course of life, just as a frame separates a picture from the rest of reality.
374 V. MELE
For Simmel the aesthetic sphere—in the Kantian sense of disinterested

pleasure—performs a significant role in settling or attenuating this conflict
within the metropolitan culture. Apparently marginal, peripheral experi-
ences become central to achieving realization of one’s own personality.
One example, among others, that Simmel offers of his conception of the
“aestheticization of life” comes once again in his essays devoted to
Adventure (Simmel 1910, 1996 [1911]). An “adventure” is experience as
Erlebnis, in which life becomes a whole, on a par with artwork. The adven-
ture must be interpreted literally, that is, as Ad-venture, to move forward
apparently unawares toward the future, with “the ‘sleepwalking certainty’
with which the adventurer leads his life” (Simmel 1996, p. 176). The
adventure thus becomes the opposite of a chance occurrence along the
path of existence. It interrupts the normal course of things, but at the
same time creates positive and meaningful bonds with the whole that the
adventure itself has interrupted. Thus, the adventure brings forth life in its
totality, in its full breadth and force herein resides its importance for indi-
vidual subjectivity. It frees us from the influences and limitations that
dominate ordinary life—we venture into the unknown. In this way the
individual can reach his own center through the unfolding of his personal-
ity. As Remo Bodei stated issue (Bodei 2019, p. 17), for Simmel “the
richness and meaning of life are to be found in virtual spaces and times, in
an ‘elsewhere’ which is unplaceable in the series of places and events in
which we find ourselves day after day.”
Benjamin takes up the considerations made in Simmel’s essay in some
fragments of the Passagenwerk devoted to “Idleness” (Müßiggang). As he
had already theorized in his essay on Baudelaire, he reveals himself entirely
skeptical about this possibility of regaining Erlebnis, authentic experience
that arises thanks to the extension of life into the field of art. He views this
tendency as dramatically similar to the aestheticization of the experience of
war carried out by the fascists during his own century. The nature of
Erlebnis, that is, the fact that life is concentrated in it, as in an instant with-
out past or future, in such way that every external content becomes rela-
tively immaterial, the shock that it represents, looming large on the opaque
background of the rest of life, refers directly to the experience that soldiers
had in the trenches of the First World War: “‘I am born German; it is for
this I die’—the trauma of birth already contains the shock that is mortal”
(Benjamin 1999, p. 801). Benjamin criticizes the conception of the adven-
ture as the very search for true “lived experience” (Erlebnis), because in his
opinion it would lead directly to the aestheticization of politics, the
exaltation of the noble gesture, the search for the authentic—all the forms
of cultural expression that led to fascism and war. Is not war itself perhaps
the most genuine and thrilling form of adventure? Is it not true that all of
life becomes focused in war, to constitute an “eternal present,” without
future or past?
In these fragments Benjamin critically summed up the consequences of
Simmel’s vision on his conception of modern individuality as expressed in
the essay on Adventure as form of Erlebnis. The aristocratic tendency in
Simmel’s thought fully embodies for Benjamin the contradictory nature of
modern bourgeois individualism, above all when it reacts to the threat of
the disappearance of the individual with the philosophy of life. The intel-
lectual aesthete penetrates the totality of the world through his fragmen-
tary interiorization: the extraordinarily intense Erlebnis of the individual
exceeds his state of disruption and restores for him in aesthetic form the
exceptionality and excellence which modernity has stripped from it. The
individual makes sense of his existence in the exceptionality and fortu-
itousness of his most intense experiences, without being able to connect
them, if not artificially, into an individual story, which in any case appears
detached from that of the collectivity and endowed with value because it
is absolutely “personal” and “original.” The experience of the individual is
attractive precisely because it is isolated—a fragment of life that solidifies
around a violent emotion without being tempered in the continuity of a
process. The individual becomes punctiform and loses all sense of dura-
tion, even if turn-of-the-century philosophy (above all Bergson) tries to
incorporate duration into a metaphysics of Being. The experience con-
tracts in an instant and can no longer be attained through Bildung—the
culture of formation; it is no longer only cumulative in nature character,
constructionistic, but condenses into fleeting, shocking experiences that
cannot be appropriated by the person experiencing it, but only under-
gone—endured—by the disaggregated individual.9
These are the “strong points” of Benjamin’s criticism of Simmel’s con-
ception of modern subjectivity. And yet there is something excessively
severe in these criticisms. Simmel’s conception of Adventure expresses an
irreversible trend of contemporary subjectivity, which is toward the real-
ization of its peculiarity and uniqueness. In today’s profoundly changed
world, we can interpret this tendency as a search for a new form of
9
For this critique of Simmel’s conception of individualism see also De Conciliis (1998,
p. 93ff).
376 V. MELE
normativity based upon the search for expression of individual authentic-

ity, the ethical need to be and express oneself in each and every social cir-
cumstance, from work to politics. We can, in other words, restore “a
strong ethical dimension to the cultural adventure of the individual: after
all, in such a perspective, the struggle to realize oneself is nearly a duty, but
in any case, an existential goal” (D’Andrea 1999, p. 59). If we follow this
interpretation, the so heavily criticized intellectual and existential “vaga-
bondage” (ad-venture, or moving toward the future) can be interpreted as
a person embarking on a clearly unique and individual journey (in the
sense of Goethe’s incommensurable “type”), whose harmony with the
individual’s unique Beruf cannot be appreciated by external observers. As
has been perceptively observed, “one possible way of viewing normative
validity in a context marked by the so-called absence of fundaments and,
therefore, by the impossibility of comprehending validity as correspond-
ing to primary principles, or even more simply to principles of rationality,
is to think of it in terms of exemplary self-consistency of an identity with
itself” (Ferrara 1998, p. 60ff). Such a perspective, which links the indi-
vidualization of behaviors to the search for authenticity, and no longer
necessarily to a process of closure in the individualism of ownership and
consumerism, provides a key to reading some tendencies of current
modernity. We must therefore distinguish—once again following Simmel’s
reflections—individualism from egoism as distinct phenomena having
entirely different characteristics. The former—named “ethic personal-
ism”—constitutes both the premise and the consequence of a highly
diversified society, in which the individual claims the right not only to
autonomy, but also to difference. The latter—egoism—instead indicates
the rejection of the other, the closing of oneself into the private sphere,
the inability to view oneself as belonging to a moral and historical com-
munity. If this constitutes a phenomenon discernible in all societies, indi-
vidualism, intended as the moral duty to assert one’s own independence
and particularity, represents an irrevocable conquest of modernity.
As Simmel had shown us, it is after all the objective dynamics of a soci-
ety characterized by extensive division of labor and profound separation
between the social spheres—family, politics, work, leisure time—to ensure
that individuals are born as separate realities, as entities that do not coin-
cide with any of the social circles to which they belong. It is this belonging
to many circles that provides the impetus to develop forms of highly “indi-
vidualized identity,” in the sense that only a highly individualistic person-
ality with a strong spirit of autonomy is able to withstand all the attractions
exerted by the single social circles. In “contemporary consumer culture”

(Featherstone 2007) there is an ongoing accentuation of this process, by
which it is precisely the individualized identities—which are expressed
through “life styles” that may appear eccentric and disengaged—that drive
toward solidarity, sharing, new forms of public spirit and active citizenry.
Naturally, the “ethics of authenticity” is not without its contradictions.
In addition to Benjamin’s critique, previously discussed, there is the one
discerned by Honneth. In a later article on Organized Self-Realization.
Some Paradoxes of Individualization (Honneth 2004) Honneth completes
his analysis of the pathologies of the “postmodern” form of social life pre-
viously exposed. Considering what the distinctive characteristics of indi-
vidualism are nowadays Honneth states that individuals seem to be
confronting the new burden of “authenticity” and compulsion to “self-
realization.” The individualism of self-realization, which Simmel traced to
Romanticism, re-emerged over the past fifty years to become an instru-
ment of economic development in the context of postmodern consumer-
oriented capitalism, spreading standardization and fictionalized lifestyles
under whose consequences individuals today seem more likely to suffer
that to prosper.10
A further contradiction could be the possible relapse in the cult of the
authentic of “sanguini et soli,” which Benjamin and Adorno had already
viewed as the hotbed of fascism11 and which today can be gleaned as the
background for identitary fundamentalism, various forms of which con-
taminate the contemporary political panorama. From an exquisitely theo-
retical point of view, nothing can guarantee a priori that the search for
authenticity not head in this regressive direction, instead of establishing a
point of departure toward new ethical and political paths. What can instead
10
Honneth arrived at the conclusion that we are currently faced with the rapid rise of what
Simmel described more than one century ago as “exaggerated individualism”: “urged from
all sides to show that they are open to authentic self-discovery and its impulses, there remains
for individuals only the alternative of simulating authenticity or of feeing into a full-blown
depression, of staging personal originality for strategic reasons or of pathologically shutting
down” (Honneth 2004. p. 475).
11
Beyond the notorious study on the authoritarian personality (Adorno 1950), Adorno
gave a 1967 lecture on the new right-wing extremism in postwar West Germany—recently
republished (Adorno 2019). The lecture addressed the general question of what fascism is
and how we should think about challenges to liberal democracy that come from the extreme
right. For Adorno, democracy is not a full-fledged reality that fascism has damaged; it is an
ideal that is yet to be realized and that, as long as it betrays its promise, will continue to
spawn movements of resentment, fundamentalism, and paranoid rebellion.
378 V. MELE
be decisively concluded is, that consumistic egoism, fundamentalism, and

narcissism are not necessarily corollaries of individualism and the “ethics
of authenticity,” but they rather represent only an inferior, problematic
form of it. The culture of modernity is thus characterized by ambivalence
that is difficult to resolve unequivocally: consumistic narcissism, “the tyr-
anny of intimacy” (Sennett 1992, p. 337ff.), fundamentalism or, on the
other hand, the search for new forms of critical individuality, endowed
with a strong spirit of autonomy and able to withstand conformism and
homologation. This seems to be a significant feature of the contemporary
social and cultural panorama, one which we have tried to shed light on
with the help of the theories of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin.
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Index1
A Aesthetics
Abruzzese, Alberto, 2, 349 aesthetization of everyday life,
Actor, 13n4, 158–160, 183, 185, 189, 6, 26, 146
192n13, 206, 207, 210, 315, 337 art and aesthetics, 92, 252, 253
Adorno, Gretel, 224, 225n6, 268n21 the sociological aesthetic, 4, 27, 40,
Adorno, Theodor, 8, 9, 13, 13n4, 16, 56, 93, 96, 98, 101–129, 352,
23, 37, 40, 65, 67, 97, 108–111, 355, 375
142, 143, 197n15, 217–220, Agamben, Giorgio, 218n1, 221n4, 228,
218n1, 224, 225n6, 226, 227, 271, 272, 272n24, 273n25, 329
229n11, 241, 249n2, 250n5, Alienation, 123, 208, 324n9, 355,
253, 254, 266n19, 275, 276n28, 360, 361, 364n3, 373
281, 293, 297–303, 297n8, and estrangement, 208
298n9, 299n11, 299n12, Allegory, 21, 111, 255, 260, 261,
300n13, 303n19, 305, 310, 324, 261n12, 264, 264n14, 275,
324n9, 336, 350, 352, 355, 356, 311–328, 335–344, 354, 365,
368, 368n5, 379, 379n11 366, 372, 372n7
Adventure, 2, 94, 95, 106, 127–129, and commodity, 311, 323–325, 373
207, 304, 326, Analogy, 12–27, 39, 65, 68, 72, 80,
353–355, 374–378 91, 96, 197n17, 258, 267, 285,
Adventurer, the, 94, 350, 286, 288, 294, 295, 301,
353–355, 376 301n16, 336, 343, 351, 355
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

Switzerland AG 2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-18184-9
384 INDEX
Année Sociologique, 180n4 Baudelaire, Charles, 2, 6, 15, 16, 18,

Anti-Semitism, 20 26, 28, 37–39, 41, 54, 55, 57,
Appadurai, Arjun, 1 63, 173, 193, 194, 198, 221,
Aragon, Louis, 219, 221–223 221n4, 226–228, 232, 233, 241,
Arcade 255, 264, 264n14, 292, 298,
’Arcades Project’ (Passagen-Werk 298n10, 300–305, 301n16,
1927–40), 11, 14, 21, 143, 303n19, 309–344, 364–367,
146, 217–244, 248, 256n9, 364n3, 370, 372–376
257, 265, 267n20, 269, as allegorist, 313n2, 328, 329, 366
270n22, 285–289, 303 ‘Central Park’ (1938–9), 227, 336
method and historiography, 218n1, and the crowd, 41, 63,
300, 300n13 328–335, 343
origins and composition, 219, 264 and heroism, 310, 337
Archaic, 67, 220, 234, 239, 290, 291, Les fleurs du Mal/fleurs du Mal,
294, 294n5, 333, 335 255, 301, 304
Architecture ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’
Baroque, 233 (1939), 227, 298n10,
of Berlin, 233, 267 303n19, 310, 321, 326, 327,
of Moscow, 239, 267 330, 340
of Naples, 233 ‘Paris of the Second Empire in
of Paris, 233, 267 Baudelaire’ (1937–8), 197n15,
vof Naples, 267 227, 297, 311
Arendt, Hannah, 5, 301, 301n15, 302 Tableaux parisiens, ‘To a Passer–by’
Art (À une passante), 194
Art Nouveau, 239 Bauman, Zygmunt, 6, 11, 55, 363
classical art, 105, 115, 254, 375 Beggar, 243, 362, 367
and fashion, 101, 105, 149, 255, Benjamin, Walter, 12–26, 65, 108,
329, 358, 374 142, 194, 217, 247–282,
As if’, the 285–305, 309–344, 349
the philosophy of, 12, 167 Bergson, Henri, 22, 23n6, 93, 238,
and religion, 206 326, 327, 358, 377
ubiquity of the ‘as if, 238 Berlin, 3, 19, 20, 28, 33, 33n1,
At first sight, 194, 312 50n10, 104, 113, 116, 117,
At last sight, 194 137n3, 165, 220, 221, 232–244,
Augé, Marc, 7, 34n3 247, 249, 249n3, 249n4, 267,
Aura and shock, 350, 374–380 362, 364, 373
Autobiography, 240, 363, 364 Berman, Marshall, 2, 3, 37–39,
195, 339
Betrayal, 166, 203, 379n11
B Bildung, 126n16, 127, 186, 377
Barbisan, Léa, 21 Biography, 3, 8, 206, 219n2
Bataille, George, 221n4, 229, 289 Blanqui, Auguste, 227, 338
INDEX 385
Blasé attitude, 6, 11, 18, 140, 151, Circle

156n11, 173, 203, 233, 310, intersection of, 25
340, 349, 350, 363–370, 375 as metaphor, 288, 296
Bleicher, Joseph, 351 and part and whole, 350
Bloch, Ernst, 56, 65, 97, 108–110, and social, 25, 90, 149, 156n11,
277, 324 161, 206, 378, 379
Bodei, Remo, 9, 10, 326n12, 376 City, 2–4, 7, 14n5, 28, 33, 34, 47–54,
Boella, Laura, 56n12, 110 50n10, 64, 65, 104, 115,
Bouglé, Celestin, 75, 177n2, 179 120–129, 149, 151, 155, 193,
Brecht, Bertolt, 15, 225, 275, 302, 319 197, 221, 223, 228, 231–235,
Breton, Andre, 221 235n14, 236n15, 237–241, 243,
Buber, Martin, 20, 237, 266n18, 305 244, 267, 291, 298, 298n9, 301,
Buck-Morss, Susan, 229–231, 304, 310, 331, 332, 335, 337,
230n13, 233, 241, 243, 256, 364 337n19, 342, 343, 361, 362,
Bureaucracy, 26, 41, 56, 210, 238 364, 366, 367
Civilization, 3, 5, 15, 34, 67, 69, 124,
229, 233, 236, 279, 287n2, 294
C Kultur and Zivilization, 43, 44
Capital and capitalism, 2, 4, 5, 8n2, Class and Class conflict, 49
15, 18, 25, 37, 40, 48, 50, 51, Cohen, Margaret, 70, 223n5,
56, 57, 118, 133, 142, 166, 210, 230n13, 296
237, 253, 265, 277, 279, 291, Collective unconscious, 290
293, 294, 309–344, 359, Collectivist, 239, 333
361–363, 365, 379 Collector, 110, 258, 270, 325, 328
Categorical imperative, 88 Commodification, 105n8, 311, 325,
Categories, 15, 22, 23n6, 33n2, 35, 341, 344
40, 41, 47, 48, 55, 69–71, 76, Commodity, 2, 13, 16, 17, 26, 28, 47,
78, 85, 88, 89, 102, 108, 110, 118, 118n15, 119, 139, 146,
125, 135, 136n2, 145, 151, 158, 163, 211, 285–305,
152n9, 156n11, 161, 174n1, 309–313, 323–325, 329, 331,
182, 188, 189, 202, 209, 223, 336, 337, 340, 350, 359–363,
252, 258, 259, 274, 287n2, 365, 373
294n5, 302, 324n9, 333, 338, and allegory, 311, 323, 325
351, 358, 367, 372n7 Commodity fetishism
Causality and determination, 81 and prostitute, 373
Centre and periphery, 376 Comte, Auguste, 1, 41–43, 84, 176,
Chaplin, Charlie, 24 179, 184, 268, 269
Child and childhood, 54, 80, 114, Configuration and constellation, 2, 12,
162, 208, 210, 223, 232, 233, 13n4, 23, 36, 51, 108, 125, 146,
236, 239–244, 249n3, 289n3, 167, 187, 192n13, 223, 231,
329, 330, 340–343, 373 235, 262, 265, 266, 271, 279,
Berlin Childhood Around, 242 290, 298n9, 300, 318, 352, 353
386 INDEX
Conflict of Modern Culture, The, see D

Dualities; Polarities Dahme, Heinz-Jürgen, 42, 102,
Conspicuous consumption, 51 136n2, 174, 174n1
Coquetry, 106, 128, 192n12, 374 Dandy, 151, 335, 337, 365, 371
Coser, Lewis, 371 Darwin, Charles, 25, 76
Critical Theory, 67, 70n3, 98, 230, Darwinism
270n22, 278 natural selection, 113
Criticism, 17, 18, 45n8, 63–68, 74, Davis, Murray, 193
86, 88–90, 95, 96, 102n2, 113, De la Barca, Calderón, 313
143, 152n9, 156, 180, 182, Denkbild
210n23, 226, 227, 249n4, ‘Marseilles’ (1928–9), 228n9, 232
250–255, 251n7, 254n8, 260, ‘Moscow’ (1927), 28, 232–244,
260n11, 264, 275, 287n2, 293, 267, 305, 364
296, 297, 299, 303n17, 316, ‘Naples’ (1924), 28, 51, 232–244,
326, 351, 354, 360, 363, 368, 267, 364
368n5, 377 ‘North Sea’ (1930), 364
Critique, 20, 35n4, 42, 43, 55, ‘San Gimignano’ (1929), 364
65–69, 70n3, 76, 80, 82, 84, 87, Weimar’ (1928), 3, 27, 33
88, 90, 94, 97, 110, 114, 117, Detective and detective story, 355
143–146, 152n9, 167, 168, 184, Diagnosis of the times, 7, 152, 369
188n10, 244, 247–257, 249n4, The Dialectical Image, 230, 231,
268, 270, 273, 275, 277–279, 289–293, 294n5
281, 282, 295, 310, 319, dialect of subjective and objective, 120
339n20, 356–360, 363, 371, dialectic and dialectical approach, 244
372n7, 379 Differentiation, 43, 55, 90, 110,
Crowd, 26, 41, 63, 193, 194, 196, 147–149, 154, 164, 165, 169,
198, 200n19, 304, 328–335, 206, 369
332n16, 343, 368 Über soziale Differenzierung, 75
Culture Dilthey, Wilhem, 82, 83, 120, 184,
cultural forms, 2, 28, 47, 185, 270, 303n17, 326, 359
120, 155, 169, 235, Distance (and proximity), 40, 78,
363, 371n6 152n9, 153–155, 167, 180, 190,
cultural theory, 21 197, 256, 289, 296
culture and objective spirit, 21, 148, See also Space and time
185, 186 Division of labour, 123
culture industries, 155 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 113
feminine culture (Weibliche Drama, 116, 159, 229, 241, 256, 259,
Kultur), 371 260, 265, 312, 315–320, 322,
Kultur and Zivilisation, 43 336, 365
material culture (see also Objective German Baroque Drama, 233, 241,
and subjective culture) 248, 256, 365
INDEX 387
Dream, 9, 28, 146, 198, 223, 224, Exchange value, 48, 118, 118n15,
226, 249n3, 264, 265, 267, 290, 136, 139, 146, 163, 342
292, 294, 294n5, 296, 340, Experience, 175
341, 369 Explanation and interpretation, 12,
Dreaming collectivity, 330 22, 39, 69, 76, 80, 81, 86, 91,
Dualism, 20, 70, 96, 110, 123, 96, 97n13, 115, 120, 142,
125, 249n4 143n5, 144, 145, 183, 184,
See also Fundamental dualism 203–205, 229, 230, 249n4, 255,
Dualities, 96, 122, 263, 372n7 258, 262, 266, 270n22, 274,
See also Polarities 275, 276n27, 277, 278, 289n3,
Durkheim, Emile, 1, 46, 47, 159, 169, 293, 299, 299n12, 301, 302,
176, 177, 179–184, 210, 303n17, 310, 311, 313, 342,
333, 333n17 356, 361, 364n3, 372,
Dyad and triad, 188 372n6, 378
Eye, the, 24, 129, 134, 144, 191,
193–195, 197–199, 200n19,
E 200n20, 233, 239, 240, 257,
Ear, the, 197–201, 240 258, 287, 288, 301, 302, 304,
Effort, 97, 102, 137, 146, 166, 208, 321, 332, 337, 354, 364
289, 297, 331, 359
Einleitung in die
Moralwissenschaft, 168 F
Emancipation and emancipatory, 56, Face, the, 36, 66, 126, 169, 191,
161, 277–279, 294 193–197, 200n20, 203, 206,
Empathy, 314, 318–319, 359 223n5, 239, 261, 267, 272, 277,
Engels, Friedrich, 38, 291, 293, 331 321, 329, 355, 359
Enlightenment, the, 36, 249, 278 Facts and values, see Value
Epistemology Fairy–tale, 223, 223n5, 234
evolutionary epistemology, 114 Fashion, 3, 14n5, 19, 26, 40, 53, 57,
relationalist epistemology, 356 101, 105, 106, 146, 149,
See also Science 152–160, 173, 191, 207, 211,
Erfahrung, 19, 94, 249n3, 249n4, 255, 265, 266, 271, 290, 303,
326, 326n12, 327, 329, 331, 325, 328, 328n14, 329, 350,
333, 340, 350, 366 356–360, 363, 364, 374
Erlebnis, 73, 91, 94, 159, 194, 326, Featherstone, Mike, see
326n12, 328, 329, 349, 350, Freud, Sigmund
353, 354, 366, 367, 375–377 Female, 40, 106, 161, 163–165, 169,
Ethics, 34n3, 39, 68n1, 77, 86, 88, 192n12, 370–372
90, 108, 111, 167, 316, 317, 369 Fetish and fetishisation, 78, 286, 290,
Evolution, 10, 41, 69, 72, 78, 80, 90, 293, 294n5, 311, 323, 329
93, 136, 147, 148, 148n7, 162, Fetishism, 17, 28, 137, 211, 285–305,
163, 167, 280 331, 336, 337, 350, 360–363
388 INDEX
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 279, 295 Friendship and acquaintanceship,

Fichte, Johann, 66 45n9, 102n4, 210, 220
Fictions, 86, 231, 296 Frisby and Featherstone, 5, 6, 17, 379
Film, 197, 197n16, 198, 198n18, Frisby, David, 12n3, 14–18, 40,
200n20, 238, 239, 255, 300n14, 56n12, 65, 101n1, 177, 352
304, 305 Function(alism), 19, 20, 27, 42, 45n8,
Finite and infinite, 9, 10, 23, 69, 72, 69, 79, 89, 90, 93, 95–97, 105,
74, 74n6, 77, 95, 209, 211, 251, 129, 135, 136, 137n3, 144,
257, 272–274, 321, 324, 334 152n9, 158, 182, 184, 188, 189,
Fitzi, Gregor, 4, 90, 183–185, 205, 193, 197, 199, 201–203, 205, 250,
206, 363 259, 275, 303, 320, 327, 353, 354
Flâneur, 6, 7, 11, 16, 18, 198, 231, Fundamental dualism (polarity
265, 301–303, 329–335, 337, as such)
337n19, 349, 350, 354, 363–370 and gender, 18, 26, 41, 165,
Form(s) and content 350, 370–374
configurations and constellations, mind-body dualism, and
125, 146, 192n13 monism, 89, 113
constitutive and contingent aspects See also Subject-object
of forms, 37, 46, 63, 195, 242, Future, 34n3, 36, 37, 42, 46, 52,
328, 329 54–56, 67, 102n2, 112, 115,
cultural forms, multiplicity of forms, 151, 153, 207, 208, 236, 242,
social forms/forms of social, 2, 3, 243, 248, 256, 259, 264,
6, 12, 26, 28, 37, 41, 47, 48, 55, 278–280, 290–293, 328n14,
56n11, 63, 101, 106, 120, 155, 338, 341, 356, 359, 376–378
157, 159, 160, 169, 179, 180,
183, 184, 192n12, 192n13, 201,
204, 207, 235, 281, 290, 305, G
361, 363, 370, 371n6 Gadamer, Hans-Georg,
Foucault, Michel, 10, 68, 188n10 188n10, 326n13
Fourier, Charles, 225, 291, 292 Gambler and gambling, 304,
Fragment, 17, 24, 27, 65, 68, 94, 305, 335–342
109, 121, 128, 134, 155, 204, Gassen, Kurt, 19, 68n1, 74, 144, 247
252, 264, 267, 267n20, 270, Geist, Johann Friedrich, 222
271, 273n25, 300n13, 309, 311, Gender, 26, 41, 165, 350, 370–374
331, 335, 349, 352–355, 352n1, George, Stefan, 15, 25, 142
375, 377 Germany
France, Anatole, 339 classical German sociology, 3, 26,
Frankfurt School (of Critical Theory), 27, 34, 41, 47, 51, 102, 371
25, 56, 104, 225, 254, 374n8 Simmel’s Germany, 1, 33, 63–98,
Fraser, Nancy, 17 101–129, 133, 173–211, 232,
Freud, Sigmund, 54, 184, 196, 247, 288, 310, 349
327, 341 Giddens, Anthony, 2
INDEX 389
Ginzburg, Carl, 267, 352, 353 Historiography

Global, 1, 119n15, 210n23, 220, and the dialectical image, 257, 359
299, 324 and historical awakening, 226
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 2, 21, Problems of the Philosophy of History,
25, 38, 71, 82n10, 96, 107, 123, 71, 81n9, 82, 177, 191, 268
134, 142, 150, 249, 251, 255–257, ’Theses on the Concept of History’
267, 301n15, 303n17, 320, 351, (1940), 154n10, 221n4, 236,
352, 363, 367, 367n4, 373, 378 259, 266, 268, 268n21, 274,
Goodstein, Elisabeth, 175, 350 278, 279, 286, 289, 335,
Groups, 8n2, 51, 64, 78, 80, 90, 123, 357, 359
135, 148, 149, 177, 180, 188, History, 3, 4, 5n1, 12, 13, 13n4,
201, 202, 209, 228, 229, 264, 14n5, 21, 23, 25–28, 35, 36, 42,
331, 338, 361 45n9, 48, 53, 55, 63–98, 102n2,
individual and, 64, 78, 80, 90, 135, 102n4, 104, 108, 109, 111, 112,
177, 180, 209, 331 120, 124, 147, 154n10, 158,
Gryphius, Andreas, 314, 336 165, 169, 174, 177, 185, 190,
Guilt, 88, 276n26, 314, 316–319, 219n2, 222, 224–226, 230, 231,
336, 351, 363 248, 250, 251, 253, 256–264,
Guys, Constantin, 39, 329 260n11, 264n14, 266–274,
266n18, 276n27, 277–281,
285n1, 286, 289–295, 292n4,
H 297, 298, 298n9, 315, 316, 318,
Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 36, 37n5, 38, 321–325, 322n8, 326n13,
56n12, 66, 67, 104, 253–256, 328n14, 336–339, 341, 343, 350,
254n8, 266, 266n19, 275, 277, 352, 357–360, 362, 364, 365
278, 281, 363 Hobsbawm, Eric, 4
Hallmann, Johann Christian, 314 Hoffman, Heinrich Heine von, 330
Harvey, David, 2, 17, 36 Honneth, Axel, 7–9, 8n2, 11, 25,
Haussmann, Georges–Eugène, Baron, 150n8, 349, 374, 379, 379n10
222, 225 Horkheimer, Max, 8, 9, 22, 37, 220,
Hegel, Georg Friedrich, 36, 65–67, 224, 225, 227, 228, 270n23,
97, 126n16, 127, 128, 138, 185, 294, 302, 303n19, 310, 311,
224, 254, 257, 285, 285n1, 290, 336, 368
326, 357 Hugo, Victor, 330
Hegelianism (and neo-Hegelianism) Hunter, the, 350–356
objective spirit, 185
Hermeneutics, 15, 16, 76, 80, 109,
192n13, 356 I
Heroism of modern life, 38, 337 Iacono, A. M., 272n24, 287, 362
Heuristic, 145, 178, 186 Ideal type, 55, 81, 313, 364
Historicism, 91, 95, 257, 266, 268, Image, 8n2, 9, 12, 35, 40, 54, 71, 73,
270, 272, 273, 359 84, 86, 92, 114, 115, 122,
390 INDEX
125–127, 134, 158, 160, 176, 249n4, 255, 262, 266, 270n22,
185, 187, 189–191, 193, 195, 274, 275, 276n27, 277, 278,
197, 198, 198n18, 200n19, 289n3, 293, 299, 299n12, 301,
200n20, 201, 209–211, 226, 302, 303n17, 310, 311, 313,
230–232, 230n13, 235, 356, 361, 364n3, 372,
240–242, 251, 253, 257, 260, 372n6, 378
261n12, 262, 264, 272, 276n27, Intoxication, 221, 222, 238, 330,
286–290, 287n2, 292–296, 304, 333, 340, 369
305, 309, 317, 320, 331, 334,
336, 343, 355, 359, 361, 362,
372, 372n7, 373 J
wish image, 289, 290 Jaeggi, Rahel, 17
Imitation, 46, 153, 178, 180, Jary, David, 97n13
295, 328n14 Jennings, Michael, 19, 247, 248n1,
Immanent, 22, 24, 66, 84, 202, 252, 249n4, 324
253, 270, 275, 279, 288, 317,
339, 351, 360
Immediacy and mediation, 15, 112, K
123, 144, 191, 226, 229n11, Kant, Immanuel, 65
261, 265n16, 266n19, 276n28, Klages, Ludwig, 289n3, 294
294, 298, 299, 299n12, 301, Knowledge
302, 315, 320 historical knowledge, 67, 81, 83,
Incommensurability, 350, 358, 378 86, 224, 326, 353, 360
Individual, the Köhnke, Klaus, 20, 21, 25, 65, 68n1,
autonomy and creativity of, 147, 86, 112, 113, 126n16, 167, 168,
150n8, 370, 378 185, 186, 324n9
dialectic of individual and society, 4, Kracauer, Siegfried, 3, 4, 12, 13,
7, 25, 27, 169, 174, 14n5, 22, 40, 56, 65, 97, 108,
174n1, 175 110, 209, 211, 228, 237, 265,
individualism, 26 312, 355, 356, 365
individual lives as forms, 205
methodological individualism, 82
psychology, 83, 137, 138, 173 L
Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt Labyrinth, 6, 209, 235, 238, 239, 243
School), 268, 270n23, 297, Lacis, Asja, 234, 236, 373
310–311, 374n8 Lafargue, Paul, 291, 338
Interior, 8, 195, 244, 259, 264n14, Lash, Scott, 17, 33n1,
298n9, 352 118n15, 210n23
Interiorization, 377 Law, 12, 35, 41, 50n10, 78, 81,
Interpretation, 22, 39, 45n8, 69, 76, 83–85, 87, 88, 95, 97, 109, 112,
80, 96, 97n13, 115, 120, 142, 125, 126, 128, 129, 147, 150,
143n5, 144, 203–205, 229, 230, 153, 165, 179, 184, 189, 206,
INDEX 391
235n14, 253, 254, 280, 290, Lukács, Georg, 16, 17, 80, 97, 101n1,
316, 340, 341, 352, 356, 180n4, 260, 261, 324, 360,
367, 372n6 361, 372n6
Lazarus, Moritz, 21, 120, 137n3, Lukes, Steven, 180n4, 181n5
185, 186
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 237, 240
Levine, Donald, 180n4, 181n6 M
Lichtblau, Klaus, 26, 41, 44n7, 45n8, Marcuse, Herbert, 254, 255
45n9, 46, 54, 102n4, 147, 369, Marginal, 9, 144, 242, 267, 337, 353,
371, 375 361, 376
Lie, the, 17, 78, 115, 121, 122, 126, Marx, Karl, 1–3, 5n1, 17, 28, 37, 38,
138, 139, 150, 161, 164, 174, 41, 42, 84, 85, 141, 143–145,
174n1, 184, 187, 191, 193, 196, 143n5, 154n10, 169, 210, 224,
234–236, 238, 242, 250, 254, 268, 271, 277, 279, 286–293,
260n11, 263, 287, 292, 293, 287n2, 295–297, 304, 311, 337,
300n14, 302, 321, 323, 333, 339, 339n20, 360, 362, 363
343, 359, 364, 367 Marxism, 9, 16, 226, 275, 279–281,
Life 292, 296, 324
forms of life, 35, 45, Materialism, 70n3, 145, 270n23, 275,
56n12, 87, 294 300, 301
inner life, 89, 93, 126, 128, historical materialism, 41, 84, 85,
197, 204 141–147, 226, 250, 268,
Lebensanschauung, 375 270–272, 274–282, 288
Lebensphilosophie, 22 Mechanical, 165, 185n8, 291, 319,
life and death, 24, 359 338, 341, 342, 357
life style (habitus), 5, 150n8, 173, Melancholy, 24, 312, 313, 316–318,
302, 369, 379 344, 365, 367
life-world, 15, 35, 56n12, 281 Mele, Vincenzo, 3, 267, 352, 364,
lived experience (Erleben), 81, 82, 374, 374n8
91, 94, 135, 155, 159, 237, Memory
238, 326, 328, 353, 366, mémoire involontaire, 24, 327
375, 376 and shock, 243
more-life and more-than-life, Menninghaus, Winfried, 265n16
22, 65, 351 Messianism, 249n4, 275, 279
philosophy of life/life-philosophy, Metaphor, 7, 12n3, 13, 16, 33, 94,
21, 22, 82n10, 93, 257, 95, 142, 194, 210, 211, 230n13,
375, 377 275, 287n2, 288, 295, 296, 298,
Love, 18, 43n6, 50, 53, 86, 94, 107, 301, 302, 353, 354, 363
108, 160, 163, 187, 194, 207, Method, 17, 28, 40, 78, 86–88, 120,
234, 243, 333, 341, 350, 370–374 136, 142, 175, 178, 180, 184,
Löwy, Michael, 254n8, 275, 276n27, 218n1, 226, 229n11, 259, 260,
278–281, 291, 301n16 267, 297, 297n7, 297n8, 299,
Luhmann, Niklas, 11, 137 300, 300n13, 352, 353, 355, 363
392 INDEX
Metropolis, 2–7, 11–13, 15, 16, Philosophie des Geldes, 19, 142, 269
26–28, 33–57, 63–68, 95, 108, Monism, 113
109, 122, 127–129, 133–170, Montage, 217, 218, 218n1, 302, 305
173, 176, 183–190, 193–195, Monuments, 226, 239, 264,
198, 209–211, 218, 221, 224, 265, 294n5
231–234, 239, 241, 265, 301, and memory, 239
305, 310, 313, 324, 325, Morality, 35, 44, 63–98, 111, 161,
329–335, 337, 339, 341, 183, 291, 316, 361
343, 349–380 Moscow, 28, 232–244, 267, 305, 364
Metropolitan spirit, 4, 133, 173–176, Museum, 155, 198, 258
233, 235 Mussolini, Benito, 236n15
Metropolization, 11, 173–211, 370 Muzzetto, Luigi, 175
Mičko, Marian, 18–22, 65, 247, Mysticism, 91, 250n5, 276, 278
324n9, 363 Myth
Model, 3, 6, 8, 11, 18, 28, 36, 37, 54, mythologie moderne, 223
56, 66, 67, 74, 89, 110, surrealism, 249n3
127–129, 152, 175, 224, 227,
235, 255, 258, 261n12, 269,
271, 272, 279, 294, 300, 314, N
319, 332n16, 335, 364, 369, 370 Naples, 28, 51, 232–244, 267, 364
Modernism, 2, 14, 15, 33n1, 38, 370 Napoleon, Louis, 313n2
Modernité, 15, 37–41, 55, 57, 193, National Socialism, 224
328, 329, 370 Natural History (Naturgeschichte),
Modernity, 1–28, 33–41, 37n5, 43, 257, 258, 318, 322, 324, 324n9,
46, 51, 54–57, 56n12, 63–67, 359, 362
70, 82n10, 95, 101–129, Nature, 7–13, 21–23, 47, 71, 76, 81,
133–141, 146, 150, 153, 82, 91, 92, 102n2, 104, 105,
154n10, 155, 157, 161, 164, 109, 111, 113, 119, 122–125,
169, 173, 193, 195, 202, 206, 128, 129, 145, 147, 150, 155,
207, 209, 211, 224, 230, 249, 158, 161, 163, 164, 174n1, 177,
252, 256, 279, 280, 282, 180–182, 181n6, 190, 196–198,
285–305, 313, 314, 319, 328, 197n15, 202, 204, 208, 209,
328n14, 329, 333, 335, 337, 220, 222, 229, 233, 240, 252,
339, 343, 349, 363–365, 364n3, 253, 256, 257, 269, 273, 274,
369–372, 371n6, 372n7, 374, 277, 280, 287, 291–293, 295,
377, 378, 380 298, 299, 304, 318, 320–326,
Monad, 10, 242, 260n11, 328, 338 322n8, 324n9, 331, 332, 339,
Money, 16, 26, 53, 102, 106, 115, 343, 355, 357, 360, 371, 373,
133–142, 137n3, 147, 148, 374, 376, 377
150n8, 155, 161–164, 173, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8–11, 22, 25, 26,
192n13, 211, 281, 288, 339, 34, 41–46, 43n6, 45n8, 52–56,
339n20, 350, 355, 358 66–68, 72, 76, 77, 84, 93, 96,
INDEX 393
102n2, 107, 108, 114, 138, 141, 188n10, 189n11, 217, 248,
154n10, 167, 190, 207, 257, 248n1, 250, 257, 258, 260–262,
263n13, 268, 349, 351, 356, 269, 270n22, 273n25, 276, 279,
359, 368–370, 373 286, 288–290, 292, 292n4,
Nisbet, Robert, 183 298n9, 300n13, 317, 350, 351,
354, 357, 360, 363, 369, 375, 377
Hauptprobleme der Philosophie, 96
O Photography, 3, 14n5, 24, 231,
Objectification, 165, 169, 288, 371 294, 305
Objective and subjective culture, 120, ‘snapshot, 231, 242
186, 324n9, 367 Physiognomy, 26, 28, 40, 179,
Obsolete, 48 265n16, 267, 322
Offenbach, Jacques, 312, 365 Plato, 288
One–Way Street (1923–6), 5, 54, 229, Play, 6, 10, 27, 37, 41, 65, 108, 116,
229n11, 242, 251n6, 373 125, 137n3, 141, 149, 152n9,
Opitz, Martin, 314, 336 156–159, 163, 169, 178, 190,
Origin, the, 23, 256–267, 277, 357 192n13, 193, 200, 204, 210,
Other, the, 160, 175, 176, 187–204 292, 295, 314–315, 317–319,
324, 340–342, 353, 374
Podoksik, Efrain, 68n1, 68n2, 69,
P 82n10, 127, 129, 367n4
Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Poe, Edgar Allen, 330–332, 364n3
Century’ (1935), 220, 225, Poetry, 28, 37, 111, 115, 120, 185,
286, 336 185n8, 303, 311, 312, 313n3,
Park, Robert, 180n4 320, 326, 336–338, 343,
Parsons, Talcott, 180n4, 184 365, 374
Past, present and future, 54 the lyric poet, 309–344
Pattern, 14n5, 150, 180n4, 233, 334 Polarities, 96, 263, 372n7
Paul, Jean, 313, 313n3 Poor, the, 201, 202, 233, 243,
Performance, 194 361, 362
Phantasmagoria, 28, 57, 118n15, 146, Popper, Karl, 67
198, 227, 263n13, 285–305, Porosity, 235, 235n14, 236
312, 313, 324, 331, 337, Positivism, 64, 75, 78, 88, 104,
337n19, 340, 341, 365 268–270, 280, 297–305, 352
Phenomenology, 13n4, 21, 40, 146, Post-modern/Postmodernity, 1–28,
188n10, 298n9 45n8, 146, 349, 364n3, 370, 379
Philosophy, 12, 13n4, 17, 21, 23, 24, Pragmatism, 72
26, 37, 42, 45n8, 45n9, 66, 67, Prehistory (Urgeschichte), 5, 232–244,
68n2, 69, 70, 72n5, 76, 80, 81, 259, 264, 290–292, 313, 362
82n10, 84, 88, 90–97, 101, 102n4, Process
104, 108–114, 120–122, 127, 159, life process, 10
167–169, 174n1, 175, 176, 183, social process, 169, 210
394 INDEX
Progress, 26, 34, 36, 38, 41–47, 54, Religion, 2, 18, 19, 21, 35, 45, 48, 69,
55, 64, 70, 84, 102, 104, 108, 70, 70n3, 102, 183, 190, 206,
112, 168, 173, 174, 207, 210, 257, 288, 293, 295, 357
207n22, 253, 257, 267, 267n20, Rembrandt, 24, 25, 70n3, 122, 129,
268, 270–275, 277, 280, 291, 150, 194, 255
297, 312, 313, 331, 336, 350, Remembrance and recollection, 24,
356, 365, 372 101n1, 276, 292n4
Prostitute and prostitution, 111, 163, Repetition, 22, 23, 263, 263n13, 319,
164, 243, 244, 337, 337n19, 340–342, 356
343, 362, 372, 372n7, 373 and eternal, 52–54, 154, 154n10,
as commodity, 163, 373 263, 263n13, 356, 359, 373
Proust, Marcel, 232, 242, 243, Rickert, Heinrich, 74, 85, 143, 248n1
265, 327 Rodin, 15, 24, 25, 129, 195, 255
Provision, 201n21 Romanticism, 150, 279, 379
Postmodern, 6–8, 11, 25, 28, 45n8, Ruin, 121, 251, 252, 264, 312, 322,
146, 349, 364n3, 379 323, 343
Pyyhtinen, Olli, 74n6, 96, 350
S
R Saint–Simon, Claude Henri de
Ragpicker, 335 Rouvroy, Comte de, 41
Railway station, 3 Sayad, A., 363
Rammstedt, Otthein, 10, 42, 46, 102, Schmoller, Gustav, 50n10
110n9, 111, 113, 128, 133, Scholem, Gershom, 20, 223, 224,
136n2, 174, 174n1, 234, 249n2, 249n4, 269,
177n2, 207n22 275, 285
Ranke, Leopold von, 83, 85, 268, Schopenhauer, Arthur, 8–11, 25, 54,
270, 359 96, 207, 208, 247, 349, 350,
Rationality, 37, 47, 204, 236, 281, 355, 368, 369
353, 354, 356, 369, 378 Science, 17, 25, 35, 40, 42, 43n6, 45,
Reciprocal effect (Wechselwirkung), 46, 48, 64, 65, 71, 75–77, 79,
73, 74n6, 79, 86, 96, 135, 81–83, 86–88, 90–92, 94, 96,
137n3, 142, 177, 191, 194, 209, 102, 103, 107, 109, 112, 114,
210, 356 165, 174n1, 177, 178, 180, 182,
Redemption, 24, 116, 250, 252, 256, 183, 185, 207, 256–267, 273,
257, 272, 276–278, 276n26, 274, 303n17, 372n6
322, 323 Secrecy
Reification, 21, 28, 210, 211, 279, and betray, 203
305, 342, 355, 360, 361, Secret, 138, 202–204, 222, 223, 230,
363, 366 301, 301n16, 343, 365, 368n5
Relativism, 72–75, 134, 144, Self
146, 356 world disclosure, 96, 97
INDEX 395
Shock, 217, 241–243, 278, 328–330, Stranger, 20, 201, 202, 209, 242
338–340, 350, 366, 374–380 Structure, 3, 25–28, 35, 40, 42, 49,
and memory, 243 51, 55, 69, 70, 86, 88, 109, 113,
Simmel, Georg, 1–7, 12–26, 63–98, 121, 127–129, 135, 142, 151,
101–129, 133, 173–211, 232, 152n9, 156, 159, 182, 184, 185,
247, 288, 310, 349, 373 187, 190, 194, 199, 205, 206,
Slavery, 43, 370 221n4, 222, 225, 227, 239, 249,
Sociability, 40, 106, 119, 146, 264n14, 265, 267, 278, 280,
152–160, 169, 173, 207, 291, 295, 302, 303, 303n18,
355, 374 305, 311, 319, 327, 339n20,
Social 350, 356, 368
social change, 36, 41, 42 Subject-object, 110
social forms, 3, 6, 12, 26, 37, 41, Surrealism, 15, 197n16, 226,
48, 55, 56n11, 63, 159, 160, 230n13, 249n3
178, 180, 183, 184, 192n13, Symons, Stéphan, 22–26, 65, 252,
204, 207, 281, 290, 305, 270n22, 351, 358, 359,
361, 370 361–363, 367, 368
social interaction, 89, 101, 105, Szondi, Peter, 232, 233, 242, 243
106, 157, 176, 184–187,
187n9, 190, 192n13, 204, 205
social life, 8n2, 11, 47, 76n8, 104, T
105, 135, 141, 149, 173–211, Teleology, 288
235, 242, 281, 337, 338, 364, Thouard, Denis, 4, 350
370, 379 Tiedemann, Rolf, 218, 218n1, 219,
social types, 11, 189–202 219n2, 221n4, 225n7, 225n8,
Socialism, 43, 113, 138, 161–168, 229n11, 254n8, 265n16, 275,
170, 208, 236, 268 301n15, 303n17
Sociation, 56n11, 71, 119, 159, 184 Time, 2, 37, 69, 103, 136, 175, 220,
Society, 4, 33, 63–98, 102, 135, 173, 289, 310, 350, 356–360
184–189, 208–211, 222, 254, Tönnies, Ferdinand, 1, 3, 26, 27, 34,
287, 316, 355 41, 42, 45–49, 45n9, 50n10, 52,
Sontag, Susan, 302 54–56, 102n4, 177
Soul, 10, 11, 13, 25, 44, 53, 81, 82, Totality, 16, 17, 21, 24, 40, 63, 64,
91, 94, 124–127, 138, 140n4, 69, 74, 91, 92, 106, 109, 115,
155, 167, 183, 186, 191, 122, 129, 133, 134, 157, 163,
193–196, 203, 304, 317, 341 167, 190, 252, 253, 255, 260,
Sovereignty, 210, 314–317 260n11, 263, 267, 302, 344,
Soziologie, 193 349, 351, 354, 355, 357, 358,
Space and time, 2, 3, 5, 9 372, 375–377
Spencer, Herbert, 25, 41–43, 43n6, Trace, 5, 40, 48, 57, 75, 77, 163, 180,
76, 147, 148n7, 179 194, 196, 221n4, 253, 258, 265,
Steinthal, Heymann, 137n3, 167, 168 266, 290, 328, 353, 355, 364
396 INDEX
Tragedy, 4, 23n6, 28, 54, 64, 90, 302, 311, 314, 315, 317, 320,
119–129, 140, 141, 148, 151, 321n7, 322n8, 323, 326–329,
157, 236, 310, 314–317, 319, 332, 333, 338–341, 344,
320, 324n9, 337, 349–380 352–356, 358–363,
Trauerspiel, 28, 146, 224, 233, 248, 368–371, 375–377
250, 255, 256, 256n9, 258–261, cultural values, 55
261n12, 264, 266, 286, 304, Veblen, Thorstein, 51
310, 312–324, 327, Virno, Paolo, 34n3
335–337, 349–380 Vitalism, 71
The Origin of German Tragic Von Haugwitz, August Adolph, 314
Drama (1923–5, published Von Lohenstein, Daniel Casper, 314
1927), 253 Von Wiese, Leapold, 101n1, 352
Truth, 13, 39, 52, 68–75, 92, 93, 95, Vozza, Marco, 40, 76, 107, 352, 356
97, 111, 115, 126, 134, 183,
231, 250–253, 251n7, 255–257,
261, 275, 303n17, 351, 352, W
354, 356, 357, 359 War
First World War, 4, 113, 269,
312, 376
U Second World War, 5, 217, 364
Utopia, 21, 51, 266, 267n20, 290, Watier, Patric, 4, 156n11
292, 293, 372, 373 Weber, Marianne, 18
Weber, Max, 1, 3, 5, 6, 15, 18, 26, 27,
34–36, 41, 42, 45–49, 45n8,
V 45n9, 50n10, 54–56, 56n12, 77,
Value, 2, 8–10, 16–21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 81, 102n4, 133, 142, 169, 177,
35, 37, 38, 43–45, 43n6, 45n9, 180n4, 183, 184, 190, 206, 207,
47–50, 55, 56n12, 63–65, 68n1, 210, 293, 313, 317, 359
70–80, 82–84, 87–89, 92, 93, 95, Witz, Anne, 371n6
96, 102n4, 105, 105n8, 107, Wolff, Janet, 370, 371
108, 112, 114, 116, 118–123, Wolin, Richard, 260n11, 276,
118n15, 125, 127, 133, 134, 276n27, 277
136–146, 143n5, 148–155, Women, 2, 18, 38, 111, 114,
150n8, 152n9, 157, 158, 161–169, 173, 192n12, 236,
162–165, 173–176, 174n1, 333, 370–372, 372n6
178–188, 180n4, 181n5, 191, World-disclosure, 96, 97
192n12, 194, 197, 198, World exhibition, 146
201–208, 217, 221n4, 226, 227, Worldview, 49, 77, 80, 134, 260, 324
229, 229n11, 231–233, 237, Wynekens, Gustav, 19
241, 243, 248n1, 250, 254, 256,
258, 259n10, 263, 264, 264n14,
265n16, 267–270, 273, 274, Y
279, 293, 294, 297–299, 301, Youth movement, 19

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MARX, ENGELS, AND MARXISMS

City and Modernity

City and Modernity

ISSN 2524-7123 ISSN 2524-7131 (electronic)

Cover illustration: © Andrew T. White / Getty Images

–– Walter Benjamin e l’esperienza della metropoli, Plus, Pisa 2003.

I am very grateful to a great number of individuals with whom I discussed

1 I ntroduction: Investigating Postmodernity Through

2 Metropolis and Modernity 33

Part I City and Modernity in Georg Simmel 61

4 The Sociological Aesthetics of Modernity101

5 Monetary Culture and the Intensification of Nervous Life133

6 The Metropolization of Social Life173

Part II City and Modernity in Walter Benjamin 215

7 What Is The Arcades Project?217

8 Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Knowledge 247

GS I–VII Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. Edited by Rolf Tiede-

When no bibliographical source in English is given, the translations

Introduction: Investigating Postmodernity

To appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of

1 Why Simmel and Benjamin Again?

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

experience. Anthony Giddens, a sociologist very attentive to the problem

There is a mode of vital experience—experience of space and time, of the self

a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contra-

This description of Berman’s experience of modernity is dynamic and

perspective on modernity, on the other hand, was cultivated in complete

Thus, in contemporary society we are all forced to become flâneurs, to

nineteenth-century individuals did for amusement and relaxation, curi-

2 On the Nature of the Present Work:

milieu,”2 which has some important consequences on the development of

While one [Schopenhauer] still remains oriented to the idea of an objective

The question is therefore formulated in terms of a conception of sub-

From the thoughts on evolution, Nietzsche, in contrast to Schopenhauer,

Simmel therefore calls attention to Nietzsche’s new concept of life,

chooses only a selection of simplified experiences, which are rendered per-

of twentieth-century subjectivity, which focused its reflections on the

3 Analogies, Similes, and Different Centers:

Comparing Simmel and Benjamin is a very rich and insightful exercise

3.1 David Frisby’s Fragments of Modernity

being that Simmel’s and Benjamin’s analyses of modernity have in com-

modernity “oscillates between asserting that the fragment is the totality

Secondly, although Frisby rightly states that Benjamin centered his

3.2 Marian Mičko’s Walter Benjamin und Georg Simmel

same academic environment where Simmel was an influential and well-­

by the essayistic style of the “youngest philosopher” of Berlin, Georg

while Marian Mičko succeeds in emphasizing the closeness of the two

3.3 Stéphan Symons, More than Life: Georg Simmel

The Frankfurt school, post-Freudian psychoanalysis, postmodern thought,

with the ideas of free personality and individual uniqueness, individualism

4 The Structure of the Present Work

particular will play an important role in the establishment of sociology as

social and cultural forms of the nineteenth century were to be understood

Scholem, G. 1997. Von Berlin nach Jerusalem. Erweiterte Ausgabe. Frankfurt

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 33

metropolis as a social and cultural “form,” which assumes significance

autonomy of the different spheres resulted in an increase in the efficiency

By way of analogy, a metropolis is not simply a vast geographical area

distance of the sociologist, who refers to abstract categories (capitalism,

3 The Crisis of Progress and German

modern society and his “critique of culture” (Kulturkritik). “As a critique

Without the pathos of distance as it grows out of the ingrained differences

The research of Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, and

1 I ntroduction: Investigating Postmodernity Through

2 Metropolis and Modernity 33

Part I City and Modernity in Georg Simmel 61

4 The Sociological Aesthetics of Modernity101

5 Monetary Culture and the Intensification of Nervous Life133

6 The Metropolization of Social Life173

Part II City and Modernity in Walter Benjamin 215

7 What Is The Arcades Project?217

8 Walter Benjamin’s Theory of Knowledge 247

same academic environment where Simmel was an influential and well-