A politics of images: Walter Benjamin, organizer of pessimism

Abstract

This paper explores the place and meaning of the concept of image in Walter Benjamin’s thought. For this purpose, we indentify two mayor stages in its development. At first, the image is intended as a catalyst of political action, as anarcosurrealist irruption. In a second phase, it appears as a cipher of an anamnetic act, at the same time psychoanalytic and historical-materialist. Thus, the main axes of this work is to propose the image as the point where action and memory are articulated in Benjamin’s thought. The “dialectical image” is the most important condensation of his political theory (anarcho-vitalist, mainly formulated along the twenties) and his theory of history (anti-historicist, especially formulated in the thirties).