Spät/Back

 

WALTER BENJAMIN, THE PHILOSOPHER OF URBANISM

Miroslav Marcelli


The contribution focuses on two significant motifs of Benjamin’s philosophy of urbanism, developed especially in connection with his considerations of the 19th century Paris: the city scene and the world of notions of urbanism, unified into metaphysics. It turns out that Benjamin as a “city-thinker” can be considered a follower of F. Nietzsche, and his follower, on the other hand, can be considered M. Foucault: all three of them stage for their philosophical utterances urban environments (Benjamin particularly as a thinker of luxury and urban “landscape”), for which the arrangement not resulting in general philosophical notions but in intentions of “metaphysics of locality” turning the city back to itself is characteristic. The author shows how it is possible to follow this Benjaminian metaphysics of locality graphically in the example of his description of Paris panoramas of the 19th century


Keywords: Benjamin, urbanism


Spät/Back