Memória ética e reparação nas teses sobre o conceito da história de Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This paper discusses the concept of Walter Benjamin’s ethical memory based on the theses On the concept of history. We argue that, based on this author, it is possible to attribute an ethical and repairer role to the investigations on human phenomena by removing them from the common place of “social facts” and claiming an ethical memory in their interpretation considering that right from the beginning we are committed to “brushing history against the grain”. This means to dig the ruins of cultural monuments and documents in order to extract from them the contents of barbaric documents. Based on the allegory of Angelus Novus presented by the author in Thesis IX, we suggest that the duty of a historical investigation method is to awaken the voices that were silenced by the official version of history, illuminating the present with recollections full of ethical commitment and with a notion of history that has no end in itself, which was however made up based on the domination and oppression of overcomers. We suggest that the Angel allegory refers to the social duty of the materialistic investigator, whose goal is to fill the “homogeneous empty time” with “now-time” (Jetztzeit), which is full of histories and memories of the forgotten.