From “Unenhanced Humanness” to “Real Humanism of the Non-Human”: Walter Benjamin’s Controversy with the Übermensch
Keywords:
Übermensch, Unenhanced humanness, Unmensch, Positive Barbarian, PosthumanismAbstract
This article shows that the idea of an “unenhanced humanness”, which defined Walter Benjamin’s concept of the political in the early 1920s, is surreptitiously continued in what, in the preparatory notes to his essay about Karl Kraus of 1931, he calls
“real humanism of the non-human”. The discrepancies that Benjamin establishes in each case with the famous Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of Übermensch will be the common thread that links both moments. From this, it is shown how a singular politics
of the (post)human emerges in Benjamin’s writings.
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