This text was read in honor of Bolívar Echeverría FFyL organized by the UNAM. The text comes from my article "Reading Benjamin in Mexico. Bolívar Echeverría and the tasks of Latin American Philosophy," to be published the journal Discourse within weeks. I want to dedicate the text Serur Raquel, who was generous enough to invite me to the event, and whose luminosity comes the memory of Bolivar. I want to thank Isaac Garcia Venegas, Carlos Oliva, Diana Fuentes, for his excellent work in organizing the Congress and for their hospitality.
The history of Latin American philosophy is in some way, a path marked by the development of alternative and critical Occidentalism, intersecting forms of Latin America with the folds and crevices of Western philosophy, despite his denial of the historical foundation of the continent, has provided the thinkers of the region with critical tools to overcome epistemic status of our colonial and postcolonial development of our languages. Bolívar Echeverría's philosophy is perhaps one of the most extensive and elaborate this critical task, crucial for the ever-ending task of creating a thought from America. In what follows, I present to you an excerpt from a larger item on dialogue with Walter Benjamin Bolívar Echeverría, focusing on a particular moment of development of the concept of "baroque." With this, I hope to convey, in the brevity of these minutes, not just one example of the enormous intellectual debt we have with the work of Bolivar, but also a tribute to a philosopher irreplaceable.
In a provocative headline "The angel of history and historical materialism," Echeverría proposes a reading of the most controversial figure of the angelus novus ", from Benjamin's ninth thesis on the concept of history ". Its text begins by noting that Benjamin's metaphor has little resemblance to the angel of Paul Klee: "When [...] confront [both images] find however that there is no similarity between the two: the dramatic scene, dramatically dynamic, which gives Benjamin news does not resemble the two-dimensional drawing, while charming and enigmatic angel hovering quietly presented Klee box. In my opinion, this mismatch seems to indicate that Benjamin was with the angel of Klee was not really just rename it, but much more: replaced by another, a new angel, invented by him. It could even be said that what Benjamin had before his eyes [...] was not actually in the box Klee but rather an old picture of the eighteenth century. "
Echeverría here refers to an icon extracted from the two figures of Gravelot Iconologia and Cochin, in 1791, which, according to this reading, Benjamin was familiar from their studies on the German Baroque drama . As noted by Echeverria, we see an angelic figure looking back on the image represented by a village in flames in the background, as interpreted by iconologist a joy to the destruction of empires. In this picture, the angel of history being written on the back of Saturn, who represents both the time and the death of the baroque landmark. Also, the two articles that lie ahead are specific meanings: the trumpet, a symbol of the glorious actions of the past, and the book of Thucydides, this semiotic system recognized as the founder of historiography. Beyond the explanation given by Gravelot and Cochin, Echeverria note two key points that Benjamin presumably erased from this representation: first, the distance between the angel and historical events is removed from the description of the wind Benjamin pulls the angel, and second, while the past (the angel) and time (Saturn) appear in the print as two different images, including Benjamin's angel, in a gesture that could be called Baroque both dialectical both in the same allegory.
What interests me about this reading (or misreading) of Benjamin is the way the metaphor of the Angelus Novus articulates the philosophical project of Echeverría. The first point is that Echeverria holds a key shift in the genealogy of the image. While Benjamin Klee tied to Surrealism and the avant-garde, the eighteenth-century icon puts him in a baroque system of cultural significance. Under this, Benjamin Echeverria expropriated not only for its own system of thought but also to shape a number of references directly related to the problem of Latin American modernity. In their work on the Baroque, Benjamin Echeverria subject to an operation he calls "codigofagia" the absorption of various cultural codes a system of thought. Moreover, it is important to remember the central role of the Baroque in the ontology of modernity posed by Echeverría. As we know, the modern theory of Echeverría is based on the conflict between the social-natural history of the use value and exchange value forms of capital accumulation. Within this critical context, subjectivity is constructed through a subject fomras that mediates the contradiction through four historical ethe identified by Echeverria which the Baroque is the main project. The baroque ethos in the model Echeverria, who support the greatest potential for improvement of capitalist modernity, precisely because their codigofagia allows integration of both use value and exchange value to within the same system of life without deleting or concealing its inherent contradictions. Or, to put it in the terminology developed by Deleuze Baroque from Leibniz, Baroque creates the crease where the two practices of value can be part of the same monad without obscuring their internal inconsistencies.
historiography Returning to Benjamin, this argument would mean the baroque forms of knowledge are, within the framework of modernity, we can more effectively the articulation of a practice of reading history against the grain. Echeverría's task is to understand the work of Benjamin and the development of methodologies in the cultural paradigm, but the formulation of an ontology specifically modern Latin America. By privileging the Baroque Benjamin at the expense of the surreal tone of his work, Echeverria emphasizes the uses of Benjamin's thinking on this project.
Another important issue here is the opportunity to read this part of the work as a counterpoint Echeverría the predominance of postmodern readings of Benjamin. To put it in the words of Beatriz Sarlo, Echeverria always have in mind the fact that Benjamin theorizes the historical and epistemological crisis of our times, but does not consider an apologist for this crisis. Therefore, Echeverria argues: "The theoretical transformation [Benjamin] would like to achieve with his criticism of the idea of \u200b\u200bprogress is the transformation in the theory as a field of indefinite theorems and indifferent, but the transformation of a configuration or a specific historical episode that field theory, constituted precisely by the presence of the revolutionary socialist project in the realm of theory. " In other words, to find the angel of history in the Baroque, Echeverria implicitly criticizes the appropriations made by the paradigm of cultural studies as a methodological guide to Benjamin's work. The main complaint here is that Echeverría postmodern approaches do not take into consideration the notions of dialectic Benjamin and historical materialism. Therefore, the image invoked by Echeverría Baroque introduces an element crucial to the thesis IX Klee's painting does not contain: a dialectic of de-fold (in the Deleuzian sense of baroque fold) of time and history, Benjamin, presumably re-folded (or synthesized) in allegory of the angel.
In these terms, Echeverria read another icon, the dwarf of theology, in an equally provocative: "In theology, Benjamin does not seem to understand a treatise on God, but a use of discourse which seeks an explanation sound of the happenings in the world. " This striking presentation of the notion of theology Benjamin, which leaves pending all mystical connotations of thought, points to similar reassessment of the thesis I. Early in his book The Puppet and the Dwarf, Slavoj Zizek suggests a reversal of the terms of the thesis, in which theology becomes the puppet who enlists the services of the dwarf of historical materialism. Following this line of thinking, Zizek defines modernity as "the social order in which religion is not fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural form of life, but takes autonomy to be able to survive as a religion itself different culture. " In the language of Echeverria, the description of the modernity of Zizek implies that an element of life "social-natural" (religion) loses its value in use and folds to the value (the resulting process of "autonomy") which, in turn, enables the integration of religion sphere of life of any culture. Consider, for example, how this structure operated in the founding of the modern Catholic religion was integrated into the lifestyles of indigenous cultures in the sixteenth century. By investing the terms of the thesis I, and identifying this investment with the fact that science and rationality are esoteric speeches, while religion capture the "imagination of the masses", Zizek makes visible the same strain identified by Echeverría. When Zizek suggests that "the subversive core of Christianity is accessible only through a materialistic approach, and vice versa: to be truly dialectical materialist one must go through the Christian experience "is actually building an argument similar to the idea of \u200b\u200bemergency Echeverría natural social world. However, as the purpose of Echeverría is ontological rather than critical, rather than directly identifying the theology and religion, as Zizek does, his argument rests on a radically materialist perspective in which theology and dialectical materialism are two coexisting modes of discourse structure "techno of the means of production" and their equivalents "techno-mage," presented by the modern capitalist contradictory. In this sense, what we find in Benjamin Echeverria is no validation zizekiana subversive kernel of Christianity as a means of recovery from the social-natural DIMENSION political, but an even more radical, and more clearly Benjaminian, des-fold both discursive field of experience. Thus, Benjamin Echeverria builds a registered strongly in his own version of modernity: Baroque in allegorical language, secular and unrelentingly committed to the task of supporting the socialist utopia. Through this redefinition, Echeverria Benjamin appropriate for an understanding of modern baroque looking for a new space to the political.
As Bolívar Echeverría was his theory of modernity in the nineties, the idea of \u200b\u200b"Barroco" enabled Benjamin reconociliar his critique of capital with one of the central legacies of Latin American critical thought. In reporting the tension between use value and value, Baroque encompasses both the contradictory nature of experiential impact of the commodity in the modern and the historical legacy of Latin American thinking specifically address this contradiction. As a way of thinking the contradiction between use value and value, Baroque is a central part of the puzzle modernity because of its ability to fold the arbitrary relationship between the domain of the natural social and capitalism, if you will, a cultural monad. In one of the more precise definitions and least known of Benjamin's work with the baroque, the South African writer JM Coetzee argues:
"Under the reign of the market, the objects relate to their real value in the same arbitrary in which, for example, a head of death is related to man's subjection to time in the baroque landmark. Consequently, the emblems unexpectedly returned to the stage of history as a commodity under capitalism are not what they seem, but as Marx warned, they begin to abound in metaphysical subtleties and theological exquisitecez. Allegory, according to Benjamin, is exactly the proper way for an age of commodities. "
This commentary not only illuminates how significant is raised by Echeverría connection between the angel of history and Gravelot icon and Cochin but also, and perhaps even more significantly, why Echeverria is in the baroque epistemological perspective more appropriate to describe the more critical ethos within capitalist modernity. Its goal of building an ontology of a "Modernity actually existing, rather than prescribing a utopian landscape, contains the allegorical potential of the Baroque, allowing you to defend a teoríaa of modernity, which, following Leibniz," combines philosophical theory with the hermeneutic wisdom. " In other words, the philosophy of Echeverría realize the ontological nature of capitalism and subjectivity epistemological confrontations with capital and merchandise. In defining the "historical ethos" as "the beginning of construction of the lifeworld" and to understand the baroque as one of four possible "principles of construction" in the domain of capitalist modernity, the idea Echeverría used as Baroque aesthetic training in cultural history to negotiate together with the ontological hermeneutics. Thus, Echeverría understand the baroque as "will to form" that reconciles the critical life and aesthetic in the same gesture, to register two ways of narrating modernity (a "victorious" and "expired" as defined Echeverría from another thesis of Benjamin) in the same great shape. It is important to note here that the baroque emblems are des-fold to different forms of encounter between Benjamin Echeverria. Therefore, in thinking Echeverria Baroque form ultimately becomes the ethos with the greatest potential to transcend capitalist modernity from within in two ways. First, it preserves the natural-social dimension of use value in his allegory of the good. In addition, following the terminology used by Benjamin defeated in the argument and deliberately adopted by Echeverría here, their willingness to form allows the preservation and potential redemption of the dimensions of life and history beyond the hegemonic formations. In short, Baroque is to Echeverría, a figure that expresses ontologically contradictory nature of capitalist modernity and simultaneously provides an aesthetics of life that preserves its dimensions even more repressed for a hermeneutic encounter.
In conclusion, I echo the words of Zygmunt Bauman about Benjamin, since, in my opinion, the work described Echeverria fitness.
"Benjamin's strategy, the intellectual, not a strategy of redemption. It is, rather, a strategy to handle the territory ready for redemption, if it arrives. Contrary to many opinions, this strategy does not detract the importance of intellectual work, or deny their sense of urgency. If anything, it is the opposite. In a story without telos, without guide, without a deterministic chain crawl and maintained by its still invisible, but quite definite end, without a pragmatic program is right for what should be done to assist in their efforts to that end, in that history, every moment, every "now" is pregnant with meaning, a meaning or contrived or borrowed, a new meaning. "
In their fidelity to this position, the Echeverría Baroque represents a livelihood strategy capable of folding and display the significance of each "now." The baroque and Benjamin posture are partesde a new thinking process in Latin America shifts old assumptions about our relationship with colonialism and modernity. Ontological task given by Echeverria is an attempt to overcome an impasse, to move beyond the theories of colonialism to a world without colonialism, a history of conflict and alienation to redemption sphere of life. Although never articulated his vision Echeverría specific nature and process of this redemption, given its commitment to analysis rather than really modern utopia, his work offers the Baroque as the only open land to its potential execution. In a world and a continent emerging from the hangover of post-communist nostalgia, this path ontological may be the only way left for the articulation of the political.
