"The great Rift of the World". Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Debates about the Figure of the Intellectual

Abstract

The article examines a set of works of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin with the intention of reconstructing the contributions of both authors to a critical theory of the intellectuals. Placed between the fronts, both essayists tried to bring together the social and political commitment and the search of a politicization of the intellectuals with the reluctance to accept and reproduce the dictations of an dogmatic party organization. Term of comparison for the context of production of both authors is considered the Paris of the Restaurationszeit, in which a group of exiled German thinkers and writers constituted themselves as the first modern intellectuals, identified with the figure of the lacerated consciousness (zerrissenes Bewußtsein), as it was formulated by Hegel.