Anatomies of Melancholy: Acedia and Alienation in Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer

Abstract

The article compares the considerations on melancholy in two theoretically, ideologically and biographically related thinkers: Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. In the case of Kracauer, there is an elaboration of melancholy in early essays and in the novels Ginster and Georg. These considerations are taken up in a new light in the late Theory of Film and History. The Last Things before the Last. In Benjamin, acedia runs through all the early works, and finds a point of crystallization in the Trauerspiel study, but also has a capital presence in the studies on Baudelaire, in The Arcades Project and in the theses “On the Concept of History”.

Translation from the Spanish by Cecilia E. Lasa.