HISTORY AS COLLAGE IN WALTER BENJAMIN'S THESES ON HISTORY

Abstract

The present work derives from a broader research entitled "Nexus between Teacher Training and Digital Culture: Actualities of the Critical Theory of Society" which has as one of the objectives to investigate the contributions of Walter Benjamin (WB) to the understanding of the crisis of contemporary education. In this excerpt, we address one of the author's most enigmatic and hermetic essays, the Theses on the concept of history, from 1940. Such hermeticism, by dialectical contradiction, aims at and opens up to the unknown, above all due to the author's dissatisfaction with naturalistic and evolutionist interpretations of history, hostages to the notion of progress of historicism and vulgar materialism. In place of closed visions of the human odyssey in the world, WB shuffles cards of dialectical materialism and arcane of Jewish theology to advocate a history of the unknown, of the details, of the shards and the remains of human production as pieces of the composition of historical time. In the wake of Freud, he argues that the function of the researcher is to bring to light what is submerged in the iceberg of the consciousness of being in itself and of history, patiently gluing each piece of the mosaic in order to assemble a dialectical image of history, "which flies by". Like Freud, from whom he was inspired on several occasions, he is concerned with the crumbs of meaning of each 'minor' and 'insignificant' event, especially with the manifestation of commonly stolen and neglected voices of history. In this approach, there is a sensitive ethical and reparative concern of the individual and collective remembrance process that values the unsaid, the strange, the oppressed and silenced voices, and it is up to the Angel of History to collect them, despite the storm that blows from paradise.