Freud’s Somatic Paris: The Benjaminian Thesis

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.

Paris is simply one long confusing dream, and I shall be very glad to wake up.—Freud (Letter to Minna Bernays, December 3, 1885)

Attempt do develop Giedion’s thesis. “In the nineteenth century,” he writes, “construction plays the role of the subconscious.” Wouldn’t it be better to say “the role of bodily process”-around which “artistic” architectures gather, like dreams around the framework of physiological process?—Benjamin (1999, 391)