Ebbrezza e distruzione, rivolta e festa: Walter Benjamin e Furio Jesi

In several places in his work, Furio Jesi discusses Walter Benjamin. Yet such a reference is lacking in Spartakus, the posthumously published work that seems to share themes, contexts and conceptions with Benjamin. I tend to believe that this is because it is precisely here, where the difference between revolt and revolution, also found in Benjamin, is thematised, that Jesi’s difference with respect to the relationship between myth and history, which runs substantially through the whole of Benjamin’s work, is most apparent. While analysing the differences, the most significant of which concerns Benjamin’s conception of the messianic as historical time that intervenes to interrupt the continuum of a history reduced to myth, it is on a basic affinity between Benjamin and Jesi that I insist: the «self-destructive character» of bourgeois culture, which emerges as much in revolt as, as seductive terror, in the feast.