Éloge du garçon manqué

Abstract

This article attempts to show how certain figures of the feminine in Walter Benjamin’s work sketch out a critique of established morality and questions the prevailing models of “feminine” and “masculine”. Walter Benjamin’s analysis of Goethe’s novel, the Elective Affinities, illustrates this claim, and that by means of the structuring opposition between, on the one side, the novel’s four main characters, examples of decency and obedience to bourgeois conventions, and on the other, the young couple of the “short story” Goethe placed at the center of his novel, who preferred to risk their lives rather than live according to imposed paradigms. As background to this interpretation we delineate a major opposition, which plays a significant role in Benjamin’s early writings, namely the opposition between the dominion of the mythical and that of the historic – the last one understood not only as the fruit of aleatoric choice, but also as the space of human decisions, with all the risks resulting thereof.