ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Benjamin’s approach to revolution is modelled on the fulfilled childhood wish. The notion of wish fulfilment pertinent to Benjamin’s approach is contrasted with the treatment of analogous topics in Marx, Rousseau, and Freud. It is argued that Benjamin depicts through the child a distinctive form of experience; but, that what is relevant in it for understanding Benjamin’s thinking about revolution is the child’s capacity to wish and the notion of fulfilment. Benjamin’s ‘child’ can experience fulfilment and hence happiness in certain privileged moments of their life. The child’s experience of happiness, according to Benjamin, is inherently mnemonic. In his writing, the ‘child’ is a literary figure that evokes, not an idea otherwise unthinkable, but a feeling otherwise inaccessible; and Benjamin uses it in his theorising of the bourgeois society, specifically as a critical point of reference. This usage may be seen in his opposing the paradisiacal happiness of the child to the guilt and anxiety of bourgeois life in the thrall of demonic powers. The idea of a ‘recovery’ of the child-like happiness is thus more complicated than it first appears, and care must be taken in exploring the similarities that the ‘child’ seems to have with ‘auratic perception’ and ‘tradition.’ The ‘aura’ and ‘tradition,’ in both conception and their development (i.e., disintegration), purport to be historical, and can be accepted as such (i.e., as the component of a historical analysis) by the reader of Benjamin. This chapter shows that what they have in common with the ‘child’ is their critical role in Benjamin’s theory of modern experience.
