Capitalism, collective dream: the political dimension of the "oneiric" element in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

Abstract

If the "oneiric" element may be considered recurrent in Walter Benjamin's texts, the long and troubled process of writting The Arcades Project (1927-1940) indicates a real turn at the way the motive of dream has been treated in his work since then. Influenced by marxist studies, Benjamin conceives the thesis of modernity as a oneiric space-time, caracterizing capitalism as a "sleep full of dreams". Polemic, his ideas find a harsh reception by the Institute of Social Research - what leads its scholar to modify and even remove them. To understand the reason and true implication beneath the theorical and political divergences among Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin turns out to be critical to revaluate the historical dimension of the "collective dream", specially in the book of Passages.