Abstract
Walter Benjamin refers to the “idea of revolution as an innervation of the technical organs of the collective” as one article of his politics. Drawing on some of the debates and tensions generated by the work of Miriam Bratu Hansen, the article analyzes lesser-known intellectual sources that influenced Benjamin’s theory of innervation. Rather than reconcile or integrate these sources with dominant philosophical reconstructions of what is sometimes characterized as Benjamin’s “Western Marxism” and elaborated, in the more familiar context of surrealist innervation, as a synthesis of Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx, the article attempts to reveal an alternative constellation of Soviet biomechanics and reactionary anticapitalist Lebensphilosophie, united in their shared rejection of Freudian psychoanalysis.
