Propedêutica à categoria do despertar histórico nas passagens de Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk, 1927-1940), an unfinished study conducted by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), composed of a series of fragments and quotations, is related to the unfolding – in the conditions of the high capitalism – of the concept of the good’s fetish character, in order to debate a critical social theory. The basis of his research is the interpretation of the visible phenomenon of Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century: passageways, iron buildings, the kinds of illumination, sceneries, the interior of bourgeois abodes, fashion and the Jugendstil, feuilletons, stockade fights deriving from the social movements, the Haussmann urban reforms, social types as flâneur, the collector and the player, the technical productions of Saint-Simon and Fourier’s utopian socialism, also Baudelaire’s poetics in particular, and etc. The German Author focuses especially on the contradiction between the development of the production forces and the use of these forces by the society in the capitalistic relations of production. This contradiction expresses itself in the symbolic space of oniric images, which interpenetrates the old and the new, and configures all buildings in modern society. The methodological picture sketched in the paper on the Parisian commercial galleries has as a basis the analogy proposed between the psychoanalytical interpretation of dreams and the interpretation of collective phenomena seen as oniric forms. The problem of the reified social appearance acquires whole elaboration in the constitution of the methodological statute of the dialectical image, based on the suspension of ambiguous elements in the fetish cultural phenomena. We present in this paper the master lines of historical awakening’s political category that, while interpretation process and history critique, operates a conceptual summary (constellation) that dialectically interrelates the complex group of theoretical categories: the good’s fetish character, the expression concept, the distinction between oniric and dialectic image, as well as the awakening itself. Thus, Benjamin sets the basis for a critical social theory and of a new understanding of the historical knowledge in the landmarks of a materialistic historiography.