Awakening: A Politico-Existential Understanding of Messianism; On Walter Benjamin’s Project for a New Humankind

This article explores the notion of awakening that Walter Benjamin constructed throughout his work. While this concept has been continuously examined, this article shows how key articulations have remained out of sight, and how these become crucial elements to reread and revitalize Benjamin’s analyses. The article presents the thrust of awakening as the apex of a form of profane messianism, a reconfiguration of inner forces and perceptions through the work of memory as remembrance that could produce novel subjective reconfigurations. In that path, the analysis focuses on specific Benjaminian readings of Jung and Nietzsche that shed light on a critical project that had a clear aim, even if it remained unachieved. By the end, the text also suggests how Benjamin’s conceptual framework could be repurposed to read our own epoch, specially by contrasting it to the work of Gilbert Simondon, garnering thus a conceptual arsenal to apply critical interpretations within ongoing capitalist relations of production.