Research: Towards a Political Aesthetics of Historical Transmissibility: Arendt and Benjamin between Heritage and Revolution
This research examines the relationship between Revolution and Tradition, starting from the constellation of thought connecting Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. By retracing the points of divergence and contact between their biographical experiences, reflections and references (from Kafka and Brecht to the Spartacus League), this work aims to illustrate the problem of the historical “transmissibility” of revolutionary political action through an analysis of the theoretical and political meaning of the concepts of Inheritance, Heritage, Testament, and Testimony. Combining Benjamin's critique of dominant historiography and recovery of a ‘Tradition of the Oppressed’ with Arendt's political conception of the ‘Lost Treasures’ of revolutionary tradition, the work will address the problem of the uses of historical representations of revolutions and the aesthetic and political conditions of their historical transmissibility. Through the various articulations of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, it will consider how collective processes of sense-making allow us to break with epistemological blocks related to differentiated relations of domination. Benjamin's materialism can critically inform certain aspects of Arendt's thought, which, despite her distance from material conditions, positively bring into play the problem of matter – from the materialization of the world to the materiality of appearance. The plural temporalities inherent in their respective concepts of revolution and tradition will be examined in light of the difficult relationship between revolutionary rupture and the durability of political change, highlighting the most critical aspects of the relationship with those of institution and constitution, from the conflicting examples of radical democracy to the counter-revolutionary drifts of the “foundational” paradigm. The relationship between revolutionary discontinuity and its historical symbolization will be considered in light of the role that the concepts of world, earth, and planet have assumed in the “planetary” historical perspective and in the french debate on ‘cosmopolitics’, which in both cases allow us to trace in Arendt's political conception the terms for a shared material and symbolic space which, traversed by conflicts, borders, passages and differentiated times of climate crisis, hosts both the intergenerational repository of stories, memories and traumas, and the possibility of political transformations.