The “heroic brooder”

Benjamin as a reader of Baudelaire

Abstract

In Origin of the German Trauerspiel Walter Benjamin underlines how the inclination to melancholy is a denial of the life and an affirmation of life beyond and despite what it denies and makes it devoid of meaning. Melancholy is therefore an unsatisfied gaze upon the world for which the dissatisfaction becomes an incessant boost. Since ancient times, the gaze of the melancholic person has been in fact a gaze intended on ‘drilling’ the ‘bottom of a soil’ where it seems that there is nothing to see, but for which the not seeing process becomes sight, visionary skill. Melancholy becomes then a way of thinking the emptiness of the world as a game, turning the sense of emptiness into that exercise of allegoresis which finds its highest expression in the artistic activity. Moving from the analysis of the “symptomatic complex” of melancholy theorized by Benjamin the paper intends to analyse Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire as a modern ‘melancholic genius’ which represents in an extremely effective way the disposition of the brooder.