Pubblicato 2016-05-18
Parole chiave
- dream,
- awakening,
- modernity,
- time,
- metropolis
Abstract
The dreams and images of an age are mythical transfigurations of its contradictions, conflicts and lacerations: Baudelaire’s Paris, the Nineteenth Century capital, is the dream of modernity.
The text illustrates how Walter Benjamin interprets the dream in order to awaken consciousness: awakening the present time means saving that potential of destruction and redemption hidden under the ruins of modernity. The awakening that enlightens a new conception of history is not a reference to the past but rather a unique way to access to the present, a time that Benjamin calls Jetztzeit.