Escovar a história a contrapelo: messianismo e materialismo histórico em Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This study aims to present the philosophical and cultural construction of Walter Benjamin, whose analyzes are based on the conception of History in the author's view. We present in general lines the historical socio-political context in Germany in the interwar period (the Weimar Republic) and the rise of the Third Reich, a political theme that occupied a place of reference in the writings and reflections of the Germanic thinker of Jewish origin and victim of persecution Nazi. Benjamin's assimilation with central European Jewish thinkers and intellectuals such as Freud, Marx, Engels, Kafka and Lukács, served as a basis for Benjamin in formulating his criticism against modernity. These intellectuals and thinkers served as references for the basis of their discursive rhetoric about language and their conception of History, once the need to keep alive the memory of the populations exploited by the capitalist system has radically changed the way this knowledge is practiced. Walter Benjamin's conception of History (elaborated from the interlocutions between historical materialism and Jewish mystical thought) presents itself as a new approach to temporal conception and its relationship with the notion of History in the field of attraction of historical materialism. By articulating the resources of theology (redemption and remembrance) as the concepts of historical materialism, Benjamin develops a redemptive dialectic whose focus is on the socially marginalized, oppressed and forgotten individual in the pages of history books. The relevance of historical materialism in the set of ideas is the foundation for historical reality that is seen as concrete, and material, and no longer an arrangement of traditional historicity. Benjamin indicates the practical realization that it is up to the materialist historian to adopt and establish as a social reality