The Revolution is the emergency brake: Essays about Walter Benjamin

Abstract

In thesis VI “On the concept of history”, Walter Benjamin says it is up to each era to wrest tradition from the conformism to which it is on the verge of being subjugated. Little did the philosopher know that, eighty years after his death, his work would be a constitutive part of the tradition of Western thought and, like the entire tradition, it would be at risk. Taking into account a certain emptying of the dialectical component, in some cases, and messianic, in others, there is no shortage of examples of interpreters aligned with a post-modern and anti-materialist theoretical constellation who have been subverting the work of one of the main Marxist critics and transforming it. precisely what he feared most: an instrument of the ruling class. Faced with this scenario, Michael Löwy seems to take upon himself the historical materialist's task of ridding tradition of conformism, rescuing the revolutionary and critical power of the German philosopher.