"The house of despair": religion, modernity and capitalism in Walter Benjamin
This research analyzes the fragment Kapitalismus als Religion [Capitalism as religion], by the German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin. Written in 1921, but discovered only in 1985 by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, editors of the Benjaminian work and assets after the death of Theodor W. Adorno, the fragment resembles more like a personal commentary than an essay. First of all, a rigorous philological analysis of the text is attempted in this research. Therefore, in the first chapter, possible sources of Benjamin´s dialogue are investigated: Max Weber, Nietzsche, Simmel, Bloch. In the second chapter, important concepts of the fragment are analyzed, such as guilt and myth, throughout Benjamin's work (until 1925), in order to situate Kapitalismus als Religion within the problematic discussed by the philosopher. In the third and final chapter it is planned to observe how the discussions around capitalism as a religion are presented as an “infernal aspect and theology of modernity” in the work on the Parisian arcades, especially in the Exposé of 1939 and in the Konvolut D, intitled “Boredom and eternal return”.