Revolutionary Form: Benjamin, Fourier, and the Necessity of the Cosmic Imagination

Abstract

With his invocation of anti-lions, tails covered in eyes, and oceans turned to lemonade, Charles Fourier’s radical visions of planetary harmony are certainly startling, but what is perhaps more curious about Fourier is Walter Benjamin’s use of his work in the Arcades Project. Benjamin dedicates—in addition to a full convolute—a prominent section to Fourier in each of the 1935 and 1939 prefatory exposés, making explicit a connection between the revolutionary potential of Fourier’s project with the arcades as a symbol of both the city in miniature and the technological progress that made them possible. Benjamin’s resistance to domesticating Fourier’s ideas speaks to the way in which Benjamin sees them as operating in concert with Fourier’s more rational, but still utopian, project to reform humankind with his phalansteries. Through a reading of Benjamin’s writing on Fourier, principally in the Arcades Project, and touching on relevant sections of One Way Street, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, and Berlin Childhood, this essay demonstrates that Fourier represents for Benjamin the figure of the child, the allegorist, and the collector, and becomes an exemplar of the “cosmic,” a kind of mystical embodiment of the dialectical image, which allows Benjamin to work “theologically” without being explicitly “theological” as he seeks and sketches the time of revolution.