Walter Benjamin and childhood: impressionist notes on his narrative(s) from diverse narratives

Abstract

This article deals with childhood as an object of philosophical reflection on WB suggesting, since his outcome was long before Philippe Aries, being him a precursor author of the current social studies on children which see the child as social actor and as a producer of culture,. The experience of childhood in WB emerges through the work of his childhood memory of toys, children’s books and emotions, but also through his reflections on pedagogy. In his writings on childhood, in the early twentieth century, the present view of the specificity of children’s cultures is affirmed, in which the child is not the miniature of an adult, but the possessor of a very reason, even if it is irrational to our eyes. Thus, in WB, as in Baudelaire, the child is an individual, able to discover or create the ‘new’ opposed to ‘always-equal’, the new as the constant and fascinating (re) discovery of life itself. That aspect which, paradoxically, is also the ‘eternal and immutable’. This article consists of reflections in the light of WB’s texts, by readers and scholars of his work and authors from other areas of knowledge, with whom a dialogue is established from Benjamin’s texts.