Walter Benjamin, Antifascism and Mimetic Education

There has a been a growing scholarly interest in Walter Benjamin’s writings on education over the last decade, much of which has sought to recover its renewed political relevance not only with the consolidation and neoliberal transformation of the mass expansion of education but also the rise of right-wing extremism, along with the consequent attacks on liberal aspects of education. If there is a temptation to turn to the critical analyses of fascism and authoritarianism from the mid-twentieth century to attempt to comprehend such crises, Benjamin’s and Adorno’s critical theories also provide an important anthropological attention to the mimetic structure of such movements as well our potential to resist them. This chapter reconstructs the philosophical groundwork of Benjamin’s mimetic faculty as a potentially messianic, revolutionary and utopian force by exploring the time, meaning and force of mimesis. It proposes that the attempt to theorize and practice an antifascist education must recognize, confront and liberate this mimetic element of education. In doing so, my argument seeks to connect contemporary scholarship on Benjamin’s critical theory of education with what has been termed a recent “mimetic turn or re-turn” in theory in response to our moment of “mimetic excess” or our “hypermimetic condition.”