Myth and critique: an interpretation of Walter Benjamin’s Critical Theory

• Grant number: 16/00441-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate
• Start date: May 01, 2016
• End date: May 31, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Marcos Severino Nobre
• Grantee: Fernando Augusto Bee Magalhães
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 14/11611-3 - Public sphere and reconstruction: on the constitution of a reconstructive paradigm within Critical Theory, AP.TEM
• Associated scholarship(s): 18/15367-0 - The change of Benjamin's diagnosis of modernity, BE.EP.DR

Abstract

It is common, in national and international secondary literature about Walter Benjamin's critical theory, interpretations which reduce the concept of myth into institutional and biopolitical forms of power existent in modern society since antiquity. These interpretations shown themselves incapable of comprehending the historical, social and material elements from the diagnostic of culture developed by Benjamin in the 30, obscuring the investigation he does about the historical characteristics which organize human perception in modernity and about the means of production and communication which condition the transmission of those characteristics. Following an alternative way, indicated by the line of interpretation from culture critique, the aim of this project is to reconstruct Walter Benjamin's critical theory upon the concept of myth. Our hypothesis is that Benjamin's critical theory construct and transform itself historically from the critique of myth, going through a transformation from the 20's to the 30's, moving away from the model of reparative critique to culture critique (AU)