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Title
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Walter Benjamin's 'Capitalism as religion' : is there any chance for freedom?
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Author
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Abstract
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| Walter Benjamin’s fragment Capitalism as Religion has stand out in philosophical and political left especially with the outburst of the current global economic crisis. According to his hypothesis, capitalism was not only made possible through the development of political economy, which draw back into the rise of protestant ethics, as observed by Max Weber, but it emerged as religion itself. Having not dogma, and consisting in pure cult, capitalism would be the first religion to induce guilt instead of guaranteeing atonement. The acknowledgment of capitalism as a religion may help to understand the political task of the left in the twenty-first century by pointing how capitalism has advanced, reaching out for a new sphere of human life. In this sense, the hypothesis can be seen as a continuity within Benjamin scholarship, that links the study of nineteenth-century capitalism in the Arcades Project, to the cultural analysis of the twentieth-century in texts like The Work of art and The Storyteller, to twenty-first-century socioeconomic life. By exploring the text and the unfolding of his ideas especially via Giorgio Agamben’s work, this essay aims at describing the features of capitalism as religion. Furthermore, the essay focuses on pointing out for possibilities out of the retroactive spiral created by capitalist dynamics, claiming the need for the merging between theology, history and politics, as indicated in the enigmatic opening image of Benjamin’s Thesis on the Concept of History. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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Heathwood journal of critical theory
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Publication
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2016
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Volume/pages
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1
:3
(2016)
, p. 84-96
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