An unreliable synopsis: notes toward a contextual reading of Robert Musil and Walter Benjamin

This essay proposes a contextual analysis of Walter Benjamin and Robert Musil and is organized in two parts. The first part shows that the two writers were interested in the French anthropologist Levy-Bruhl’s theories about primitive mentality and argues ´ that, for both of them, this theme belongs to a more complex strategy of going beyond Kantian gnoseology. The elaboration of a theory of intense experience (Erfahrung) in Musil and Benjamin connects the first with the second part of the essay. This, on the basis of Passagen-Werk and The Man without Qualities, explores the potential of a contextual reading around the theme of the flaneur ˆ .