WALTER BENJAMIN Y GEORGES SOREL: ENTRE EL MITO DE LA HUELGA GENERAL Y UNA POLÍTICA DE MEDIOS PUROS

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Trans/Form/Ação

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2015-04

RESUMO

In his Critique of violence, Walter Benjamin claimed that the social phenomenon of the revolutionary general strike (theorized on by Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence) was an example of what would be a “pure political mean” (outside any legitimate form of power). In this context, not many contemporary commentators note an important conceptual incoherence between those two philosophers: for Sorel the revolutionary general strike is a social myth, while in Benjamin the category of myth, essentially negative, describes the violence that imprisons life and crystallizes it in a higher form of political power. In this article, we demonstrate this conceptual discrepancy in order to examine the way it has been approached by other philosophers. The philosophy of history, the possibility of an ethical political action, and messianic temporality, all appear on the theoretical horizon linking these philosophers, and through these ideas a conceptual impasse can be decoded. Moreover, this horizon can be confirmed if we follow the idea of a “pure political means” that Benjamin proposes and which moves forward to the thought of an unexplored philosopher mentioned by him: Erich Unger. In the last part of this article we will develop the keys given by Unger, which fall right in line with the notion of the general strike as a pure political mean.

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