<i>The big sleep</i>: la sinfonía ideológica de la gran ciudad en S. Kracauer y el diagnóstico sobre el totalitarismo de H. Arendt

Abstract

The paper aims at connecting the leisure activities of the working classes during the Weimar period in Germany with the emergence of totalitarian ideology. I focus on S. Kracauer’s and H. Arendt’s main essays on urban life and the formation of the mob. The central purpose of the paper is to contribute to the recognition of the mechanisms by which a population resigns unconscious, but voluntarily, to its political potential, so that it becomes a blind material for the totalitarian legislator. Among the policy instruments which disarm the political potential of workers in large European cities during the interwar years, I tackle the torpor of consciousness, the emotional discharge of the crowd and the fragmentation of subject’s activities. I claim to confront and bring near, also from a methodological point of view, Arendt’s reading of the oblivion and decay of the political condition of man to Critical Theory’s tenets, which S. Kracauer is closer to.