Utopi och fetisch : Modets repressiva och utopiska dimensioner hos den sene Walter Benjamin med utgångspunkt i hans historiefilosofi

Sammanfattning: ”Fashion is the eternal recurrence of the new. Are there nevertheless motifs of redemption precisely in fashion?” This question, left unanswered in Walter Benjamin’s late text “Central Park”, is the point of departure for this thesis. Benjamin is both adamant and explicit in his critique of fashion’s alienating influence on the collective, but despite this he seems at times to ascribe to it some kind of revolutionary potential. The most well-known instance of this is the 14th thesis of “Theses on the Concept of History”. There, Benjamin compares the ”tiger’s leap” of sartorial citation to the historical leap of the Marxist revolution. Employing Benjamin’s philosophy of history as a theoretical framework, this thesis examines the roles ascribed to fashion in The Arcades Project, in order to elaborate on its political potential in Benjamin’s late thinking, as well as to understand this potential in light of Benjamin’s critique of fashion as fetishism and phantasmagoria.