História e memória no pensamento de Walter Benjamin: Marxismo e messianismo a serviço da emancipação

Abstract

This work has as main objective to elucidate the concepts of History and Memoria in Benjamin's work in the light of Jewish messianism and historical materialism. In this order of ideas, it will be essential to go through the Benjaminian works of youth and maturity from which the ideology of progress develops, which constitutes the central point from which criticisms of history begin and, later, from where its premise of “stopping the continuum of history ”and brush the story against the counter, coming to the memory of the victims. Benjamin introduces a new way of understanding history, it is not a simple chain of petrified reports from the past, history manifests itself as an open, undetermined process, as a latent possibility. According to Benjamin, the task of interpreting history from the perspective of the vanquished corresponds to a new historian, "the historical materialist" who understands history as the struggle between oppressors and the oppressed, as the continuation of a process of class domination that is transmitted from generation to generation through a hegemonic discourse of the past in which progress is mystified to the victims erased from historical memory. A messianic Marxism that proposes a chance for redemption and the understanding of history as open, as a possibility that calls for collective praxis and that rebels against this reality established and determined by capital. Its profane messianism is the poetic desire for reconstruction, the utopia of a break with historical fatality.