Benjaminian Memory in the Contemporary Work of Art
In: Cultural and Ethical Turns: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Culture, Politics and EthicsSearch for other papers by Paula Kuffer in
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Starting from the Benjaminian sentence that asserts ‘the historical facts happen to be what strike us right now: To state them is a task of memory’, that supposes a Copernican turning point into the historiographical field because the historical is not about the reconstruction of the past anymore but about its construction in the present, the current chapter deals with the role of the contemporary work of art in the writing of history. The work of art of certain authors that endorse the Benjaminian premises by paying special attention to the voices of the oppressed that have been left outside the hegemonic discourse of progress is established as a privileged space at the crossroad of ethics and aesthetics. Authors from several disciplines - such as the writer Sebald, the film director Godard or the painter Kiefer - have introduced a public discourse of memory that can be seen as a calling for justice of these silenced voices. The interpretation of these works will be approached from the idea of the ‘dialectical image’, an aesthetical category that determines the political perception of history, where now and then unite as a lightning in a constellation generating a collision between past and present.