International Walter Benjamin Conference 2025, “Southern Benjamin. Mourning, Play, Revolution”, International Walter Benjamin Society, Società italiana Walter Benjamin, 17th-20th September 2025.
Benjamin’s relationship with women colours his philosophy from his earliest writings to the end of his life, reflected in the many – often crucial and usually subversive – roles that different images of the feminine play in his architectures of thought. Women are interlocutors and companions in the Jugendbewegung. They are the symbol of what lies outside the dominant symbolic order of language in the Metafisik der Jugend. They are the starting point of the dialectic of the veil in Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften. They are the checkmate of bourgeois morality.They are the spark that generated the concept of threshold. They are his revolutionary inspirers.
Despite this, the women in Benjamin’s life have very often been relegated to ancillary, instrumental roles if not to academic gossip. Correspondingly, except for a very few contributions, the feminine in the author’s work has rarely been the focus of studies that highlighted the role it played in his philosophy and political interpretation of reality.
This paper presents the first results of a research in fieri, analysing the conceptual and political significance of three images of a subversive feminine in Benjamin’s writings from 1913 to 1925.
Caterina Diotto 