Walter Benjamin is often regarded as the thinker who liberated Marxism from the ideology of progress, and opposed, at least according to Bensaïd’s reading, the category of utopia in favour of that of messianic time, an immediate flashpoint in which the atrocities of the present are denounced and the suppressed hopes of the past reaffirmed. Yet, in many texts, Benjamin adopts a somehow millenarian stance, evoking the possibility of a proper mobilisation of technology, especially in the fields of architecture and urbanism, which would dispel reactionary phantasmagoria and make a new humanity come to being, through notably the generalized use of glass and iron in construction. The possibility of these revolutionary cities appears, Benjamin writes repeatedly, in the work of Le Corbusier. This is all the more curious given that Le Corbusier flirted with fascism, a doctrine to which Benjamin was fiercely opposed. On the basis of this apparent contradiction between scepticism towards progress and modernist utopianism, I want to confront Benjamin’s thought with that of Le Corbusier in order to answer three questions: (1) How does Benjamin's philosophy of architecture and urbanism overlap with that of Le Corbusier? (2) How can this common denominator inform us about what a Benjaminian technological utopia would look like? (3) In what way can Le Corbusier’s fascist leanings shed light on the aporias of Benjamin’s hopes with regard to modernist architecture? Given that Benjamin never detailed his views on Le Corbusier’s thought, this presentation is intended as a speculative experiment to fill this void, and elucidate the concrete content of Benjamin’s expectations about technology.
Ghins et al. (Fri,) studied this question.