On Walter Benjamin’s Speculative Construction of History
(2012) Jaarlijks congres van het Nederlands Genootschap voor Esthetica — Location: Leuven (2.March.2012)
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- Abstract
- Walter Benjamin’s whole philosophy is characterized by the effort to answer the dichotomy between empirism and idealism. From his very first writings, Benjamin tries to overcome Kant’s metaphysics by the introduction of a creative notion of history. More deeply, we could say that all his theory of the critique is an effort to construct a theory of creation articulated on the aesthetic critique. In fact, Benjamin’s conception of aesthetic - he inherits from the Romantics - isn’t a conception of the beautiful but a theory of the relation between the subject and the object (This is what is at stake in our paper). This relation, as a historical one, is always inhabited by its possible transformation. Benjamin’s effort is thus to construct this potential relation between the subject and the object. He achieves this aim in his theory of the critique. Critique is not the destruction of what was; it is the supplement in the present of what it could become and what it hasn’t became. This tension inside the object is theorized in both Benjamin’s thesis and his commentary on two poems by Hölderlin. In these texts, Benjamin explains that critique is an operation of construction of history within the aesthetic.
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Derroitte, E. (2012). On Walter Benjamin’s Speculative Construction of History. Jaarlijks congres van het Nederlands Genootschap voor Esthetica, Leuven. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/229463