Walter Benjamin as a Reader of Dune: Messianism, History, and Utopia in Popular Culture

Abstract

Nowhere, it would appear, is Walter Benjamin’s conceptuology of history more visible in a ‘popular culture’ item than in Denis Villeneuve’s film Dune (2021), based upon a faithful adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel of the same title (1965). Dune, followed by its second part (2024), is already a Hollywood blockbuster, and not even the first film adaptation of Herbert’s work: the first such attempt was by David Lynch in 1984 but he disowned his film. One can speculate that Lynch’s creation was doomed to fail not only for artistic reasons but also because it was ahead of its time: it is only in the twenty-first century that Dune comes across as zeitgeist – Hegel’s name for the spirit of time. The very much actualized climate crisis, the confused geopolitical situation with no clear collective agenda for emancipation and the new modes of governance which resonate with the world of Herbert’s novel are much clearer in the present context than they were perhaps in 1980s when Lynch’s film came out. The purpose of this essay is to ‘short-circuit’ the apocalyptic vision of Dune with the grim philosophical insights (and even personal history) of the German writer Walter Benjamin, who sought to rethink a politics of emancipation during the rise of fascism in Europe. The method adopted here is to reread Benjamin’s enigmatic Theses on the Philosophy of History with Dune in mind. What is expected is not simply a literal reading of Benjamin’s text in the mirror of the film, as if rendering the film in a kind of a pedagogical tool, but also to see if today’s zeitgeist can transform (Benjamin’s) philosophy itself.