Walter Benjamins »Arcades Project« as Theory of the Social Imaginary

The dissertation project pursues two interrelated goals. First, it develops a socio-philosophical reading of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project as a theory of the social imaginary, thereby closing a gap in the research on Benjamin. It argues that Benjamin, although he does not use the term, operates with a concept of the social imaginary in the sense of an unconscious, collective, reflexive and constitutive image of society as well as the faculty of its production. Second, the dissertation project positions Benjamin in current debates about the social imaginary. It focuses on the question how the materiality of the imaginary, in the sense of its technical-medial mediation, can be conceived without denying the fundamental indeterminacy of social imagination and thus the possibility of social renewal. In this way, the close correspondence between imagination and the forces of production, and thus at the same time the historicity of the imaginary itself, becomes comprehensible.