The eternal return under the Benjaminian view

M. LUCILA SVAMPA

Workshop; Workshop Reading Benjamin today: talks with Daniel Weidner; 2018

One of the elements that allow us to get closer to the vision of history offered by Walter Benjamin is the ewige Wiederkehr (eternal return). This idea works as a counterpart to the homogeneous time of progress, with which the author so much discusses. Although this notion has strong precedents in theoreticians such as Blanqui and Nietzsche, who develop it respectively in L'éternité par les astres (1871) and in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), the Benjaminian perspective manages to print on it a particularity, distancing itself from them. In the future writing we will seek to characterize this approach based on two developments, namely, that of the inheritance that he emphasizes in these thinkers and, on the other hand, as opposed to dominant confidence towards an alleged improvement produced in the historical unfolding.