“The Great Rift of the World”. Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin and the Discussions About the Character and Function of Critic-Intellectuals

Abstract

The article examines a corpus of works of Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin with the intention of reconstructing the contributions of both authors to a critical theory of the intellectual. 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 a dogmatic party organization. Term of comparison for the context of production of both authors is 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 torn consciousness (zerrissenes Bewußtsein), as it was formulated by Hegel.