Intersubjectivity and Commodification:Benjamin's Critical Adaptation of Husserlian Empathy

Walter Benjamin addressed the extent to which our dreams, desires, and relationships are modeled on mass-marketed images. Central to what he called the “commodification of things” is our daily encouragement to identify with the staged enjoyments and unapproachable icons of films, ad campaigns, and popular culture. Benjamin refers to this tendency of the collective imagination as an “empathy with inorganic things,” or “empathy with the commodity-soul.” In fact, he reserves the term “empathy” (Einfühlung) exclusively in this critical capacity.<br/><br/>This talk situates Benjamin's project in relation to the phenomenological tradition. For Husserl, empathy is the primordial act that opens onto intersubjective objectivity, i.e., onto a world of agreed-upon objects and common-sense meanings. Benjamin, by contrast, employs the concept to account for representations of quite a different sort: images of longing, fantasy, and projection. If 'others' anchor intentionality, then the manners I have of interpreting my world will be refracted through their attitudes, gestures, and intentions: this, without regard to their reality as ‘people' or the reality of the desirable contexts and experiences they apparently envelop. Motivating this encounter with phenomenology, I argue, is Benjamin's consistent rejection of the notion that the ‘abstract' nature of concepts stems from their being generalities.