Thinking about the Present and Dreaming about the Past: The Politics and History in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project
Pensando el presente y soñando el pasado: la política y la historia en el Proyecto de los pasajes de Walter Benjamin
Show authors biography
This article explores Walter Benjamin’s political and historical proposals that emerge from his Arcades Project. The essay outlines Benjamin’s criticism of historicism and presents his proposal of historical interpretation as a dream taking into account the dialectic relationship between the past and the political possibilities of the future. It is argued that the element of urgency, which implies a Benjaminian vision attached to a democratic ethos, provides us with a progressive political proposal and vision, without falling into historicist teleologies.
Article visits 85 | PDF visits 53
Downloads
Adorno, Theodor W. y Walter Benjamin. 1999. The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. California: Stanford University Press.
Beiner, Ronald. 1984. “Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history”, Political Theory, 12(3):423-434.
Benjamin, Walter. 2000. One-Way Street. Londres: Verso.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Berman, Marshall. 1999. Adventures in Marxism. Nueva York: Verso.
Bernstein, Michael André. 2000. Five Portraits: Modernity and the Imagination in Twentieth-Century German Writing. Illinois: Northwestern University Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 2000. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1991. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Chisholm, Dianne. 2005. Queer Constellations: Subcultural Space in the Wake of the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Eagleton, Terry. 2003. After Theory. Nueva York: Basic Books.
Eagleton, Terry. 1981. Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism Londres: Verso.
Freud, Sigmund. 1981. “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”, en: The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. IX, ed. James Strachey. Londres: The Hogarth Press.
Mayer, Arno J. 1981. The Persistence of the Old Regime; Europe to the Great War. Nueva York: Pantheon Books.
Schwartz, Vanessa R. 2001. “Walter Benjamin for Historians”. American Historical Review. 105(5):1721-1743.
Taylor, Charles. 2002. “Modern Social Imaginaries”, Public Culture. 14(1):91-124.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press.
Zournazi, Mary. 2002. Hope: New Philosophies for Change. Nueva York: Routledge
