Abstract:
Walter Benjamin, the most eclectic thinker of the Frankfurt Institute, was concerned, throughout his rich and varied production, about the rescue of historical materialism as a tool for the proletariat to carry out a revolutionary praxis. Using materialist dialectics as a logic of destruction-construction, he turns to the so-called dialectic images to discuss the historical continuity imposed by the dominants, and to retrieve thus, the images of the past which, after being resignified and put in new constellations would illuminate a revolutionary present. To that end, he recovers the potential of the surrealist movement for the production of experiences, and at the same time, he attempts in his most ambitious work –The Book of passages– to carry out a history of the culture in a revolutionary sense, resorting to the dialectic images. As a good Frankfurtian, he questions the positivist conception of progress. In his Theses on Philosophy of the History, he resorts to theology, besides Marxism, to revise the past in a revolutionary sense, retrieving the proletariat as a historical subject of future changes. It is necessary that this subject, biased by the materialist culture, combines theoretical knowledge with a transforming political praxis.