MOURN THEORIES, PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

about the tragedy’s statute in Walter Benjamin’s thought

Abstract

This article intends to formulate the hypothesis of the political philosophy of mourning in Walter Benjamin’s thought, considering his early studies on tragedy, especially in the 1920s. The argument that supports this hypothesis is that there is something inherent to his theory of tragedy that exceeds a kind of propaedeutics that dismisses the totality of Benjamin’s thought. If there seems to exist an "epistemological rupture" in his philosophy, as Michel Lowy argues, the elements of this moment of transition are prior to the writings of the 1930s and, above all, to the consolidation of his Thesis on the concept of history. The argument, following Birnbaum (2008), is that Benjamin’s philosophy supports a sort of incompleteness inherent to tragedy and tragic characters— especially the tragic hero — that seems to reorient and construct a very particular notion of temporality. This incompleteness may be called the time of mourning — Trauerspiel, theme of his doctoral scholarship’s thesis on baroque — which seems to impregnate part of his theory and, particularly, the polemic essay Critique of Violence. Written in 1921, Benjamin’s critique of violence attends to the urgency of thinking upon and towards his own time, even when it means a risky way to think about the inauguration of the dangerous, and, still, violent establishment of life’s violations on the limits of the law. Both of the legendary characters in the Critique of Violence — Prometheus and Niobe — seem to point to these particular and distinct aspects of violence. Thus, between hope and hopelessness, tragedy oscillates in Benjamin’s thought to find in the mourning figure and the mourning mother a kind of temporality bound to the baroque representation. Finally, it’s necessary to ask who these characters are and which are the specific ways of their violent experiences, in such a way that Greek women — and no longer the heroes of Classic Antiquity — claim injustice in order to disrupt law itself.