Walter Benjamin’s “Utopia of the Body”: Mystical Experience and Political Thought

In an enigmatic note of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin insists on the importance, for the Communist party, to not just rely on rational organization, but also to take into account the “mystical elements” pertaining to “corporeality.” In order to explain why Benjamin identifies corporeality as the point where mystical experience can foster the revolutionary dynamic toward which the communist movement is working, this chapter reconstructs the evolution of Benjamin’s conception of corporeality in connection with the reworking of mystical leitmotivs present since the first critique of domination formulated in the early 1920s and progressively intertwined with a materialist perspective on political emancipation. Critique of Violence, “Outline of the Psychophysical Problem” and Experience and Poverty are presented here as crucial steps in the development of Benjamin’s proposition for the emancipation from domination, which relies on a radical revaluation of bodily vulnerability and affectability.