Freud’s Somatic Paris: The Benjaminian Thesis

  • Dušan I. Bjelić
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Abstract

Nineteenth-century Paris much like cocaine represented a double colonial conquest. As the metropolis of the second largest Empire in the world and the largest in Africa, Paris represented the center of the primal colonialism, but in Benjamin’s extensive analysis of the city, the Parisian phantasmagoria as an industrially produced culture of the commodity fetish worked as a toxin colonizing urban nerves. The city’s urban renewal, mixing arts and industry, created a collective shock of illusion casting the city into a dreamlike reality to which the epidemic of hysteria became just one of its psychological expressions. Freud’s studies of hysteria with Charcot resulted in Freud’s psychological turn, but he never accounted for the extent to which Paris as a “toxin” influenced his studies of hysteria. He encountered hysteria in the city of collective dreams and of an infrastructural unconscious from which he never woke up.

Keywords

Urban Space Urban Renewal Traumatic Shock Architectural Space Agent Provocateur 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dušan I. Bjelić
    • 1
  1. 1.Department of CriminologyUniversity of Southern MainePortlandUSA

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