This article compares affinities in Walter Benjamin and Rosi Braidotti’s historiographical methodologies, focusing on a monadic/nomadic perception of history. For Benjamin and Braidotti questions on how we remember, write and represent history are critical. Benjamin develops a non-linear representation of history in relation to the microscopic perception of Leibniz monad. Braidotti, in turn, develops a critical nomadic theory in relation to Deleuze’s re-reading of Leibniz’s monad. Can a link be established between these two adaptations of the concept of the monad? (...) Can Benjamin’s historico-philosophical thinking be actualized in relation to the contemporary critical theory, such as post-humanism, queer and feminist theory? (shrink)

Channeling affinities with certain motifs of Daoism, Walter Benjamin renews a form of dialectical thought that diffuses ideological notions of progress and grants minimal weight to the ontological distinction of the Subject. In fleeting yet pivotal moments of contact with Chinese aesthetics, Benjamin moves attention toward the practice of ‘thinking by way of resemblance’ – a phenomenon he variously enacts. Calling forth resonances within late-capitalist modernity, he retrieves from Daoist literature a notion of dialectical reversal freed from progressive synthesis, as (...) well as image-repertoires of self-forgetting, which he understands to be irreducible to reification. The Daoist imaginary offers Benjamin resources for breaking open the anthropocentric closure of Hellenic accounts of mimesis. He theorizes similitude more capaciously as something that can flash up across temporally discontinuous phenomena – without deferring to predetermined categories of Being. Benjamin thus recasts resemblance – regarded by Enlightenment rationality as an impoverished mode of cognition – as a medium of historical apprehension that resists the occlusion of transience by the ontology of the victors. (shrink)

Many considerations of Walter Benjamin's oeuvre refer to the central role of the image and of the visual. Much has been written on terms such as the “optical uncon...

O presente artigo apresenta a distinta teoria do conhecimento proposta por Walter Benjamin em seu projeto das Passagens. Tal proposta já encontra suas origens em seus textos de juventude, principalmente em seu Sobre o programa de uma filosofia vindoura. Levando isso em conta, articulamos os dois momentos da obra de Benjamin para demonstrar que esta nova teoria materialista, dialética e imagética do conhecimento pressupõe um conceito mais alto de experiência, assim como uma crítica contundente ao sujeito do conhecimento que se (...) encontra em vias de desagregação. Para nos aprofundarmos na proposição benjaminiana, adentramos a importante topografia conceitual presente nas Passagens, passando pelos temas da linguagem, do sonho, do despertar e das imagens dialéticas. (shrink)

This text was delivered as the laudatory speech on the occasion of Didi-Huberman’s receipt of the Adorno prize in 2015. The influence of Adorno’s work on Didi-Huberman’s methodology is clarified, especially Adorno’s reflections on montage, the essayistic style and the anachronism of time. Didi-Huberman thematizes and analyses anachronism as a specific time structure of images. His works stress the similarity of images with the literary montage technique to develop a comprehensive theory of the readability of images – a practice in (...) which we approach images, based on the combination of voir and savoir, of looking and knowing. Two books, dealing with images and the Holocaust, are specifically exemplary of this approach: Images in Spite of All and Bark. Images in Spite of All calls a halt to one of the crudest erroneous readings of Adorno’s work, since the theorem of the Unspeakable or Unrepresentable always referred to Theodor W. Adorno ; and it is remarkably resistant to nuanced philological–philosophical studies of Adorno’s writings. By attentively considering the conditions in which the four photographs taken in Auschwitz-Birkenau were produced, Didi-Huberman dares to imagine the unimaginable. In this and in his more personal work of Bark, he successfully avoids an impossible reconstruction but instead asks what happened in that other place, in the cultural and our personal and memory. This is the work of ‘readability’ in the Benjaminian sense. (shrink)