Diagnostic of modernity and critical theory as montage in Walter Benjamin

• Grant number: 19/01889-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Effective date (Start): December 01, 2019
• Effective date (End): November 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Sérgio Repa
• Grantee: Lucas Melo Souza
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 14/11611-3 - Public sphere and reconstruction: on the constitution of a reconstructive paradigm within Critical Theory, AP.TEM

Abstract

The present project aims to elucidate the insertion of Walter Benjamin in the tradition of Critical Theory and its main lines of thought, having as its axis the work as "Charles Baudelaire: a poet in the epoch of advanced capitalism" and the concepts that gain prominence in it: modernity, montage and allegory . Through the concept of modernity, the author sought to apprehend the historical arch from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, conforming a social and aesthetic diagnostic. At the same time, his concept of modernity spans the emancipatory potentials of the time, as well as its blockages and impasses. In his exposition of modernity and the image of Baudelaire, the author makes use of the montage as a methodological and critical expedient. In the book on the French poet, this procedure is made explicit by the use, rare in his work, of the expression "Kritischen Theorie". In Baudelaire's poetry, the notion of montage reappears through the concept of allegory, used by Benjamin in the interpretation of the poet. Thus, a constellation arises in which the diagnosis of modernity depends on the critical-methodological procedure of the montage for its exposition at the same time that the critical theory practiced by the philosopher finds in this diagnostic his anchorage. (AU)