Ombrosi, Orietta

The Dialectic of the Idea of Catastrophe in the Thought of W. Benjamin - 2006.


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Placing Benjamin on the threshold of the historical Catastrophe and considering this theme as a background or as a desolate landscape, the subject of this text focuses on the idea of catastrophe, considered from three perspectives through which Benjamin seems to see it, that is to say in relation to the technical progress, to the historical continuum and to redemption. This text shows how, in each one of these different perspectives, a double meaning, a dialectic within the idea of catastrophe is unveiled and how this idea is itself a threshold because, in its double movement, in its double meaning that proceed between a time of destruction and a counter-time of ransom, it moves between the end and the salvation, it passes from the end to the salvation.