Memoria y sensibilidad en Walter Benjamin

Abstract

In many of his writings, particularly those of a more autobiographical character, Benjamin deploys a whole poetics of remembrance and of memory, a poetics in which sensitivity, in all of its dimensions, plays a crucial role. Benjamin evokes and recalls particular and apparently unimportant details, merely subjective and incidental ones; and in doing so, he does not address the usually prevailing ways of visibility and of concept, but he rescues instead the forgotten or fantasized image or word, along with a whole realm of noises, sounds, scents and flavours. In such a practice, the influence of the French masters whose works Benjamin studied and translated (such as Baudelaire or Proust) has been clearly traced. The practice of this poetics of remembrance, rooted in a pluralistic and elusive sensitivity, with all its diverse possible sources of influence, demands an indispensable and required congruence with Benjamin?s own conception of history and with its critical and political implications, though this coherency sometimes remains unattained. Benjamin, in a way few other thinkers did, provides us with the necessary tools for preserving the memory of that which, like a fugitive scent, strikes us like a sudden flash, but which, because of its apparently lack of significance, we would scarcely dare to remember as a substantial part of the chronicle of what we are and of what we used to be.