The problem of subjectivity: interior spaces as the limit of the individual and the collective in Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The individual/collective opposition is the one of the key oppositions that organise Benjamin’s thinking. In his unfinished work “The Arcades Project”, Benjamin applies the methods of conceptualising of history he has developed before by addressing his individual experience in “One-Way Street” and “Berlin Childhood around 1900” to the political and social sphere. He actualises the experience of the historical which is opposed to the prehistoric reality of myth. In contrast to Jung’s supposedly reductionist and anti-historical theory of collective unconsciousness, Benjamin develops his original concept of dialectical image and the related concept of collective experience, describing the subject of history in connection with the latter. The paper examines the collective and the individual aspects of subjectivity which Benjamin demonstrates on the example of interior spaces.