The Question of Awakening in Postdictatorship Times: Reading Walter Benjamin with Diamela Eltit

How can we approach the title “Benjamin in Latin America” if we take the “in” to be the act of a translation, without implying the acritical fantasy of the imprinting of a conceptual form (in this case the authority of the name “Benjamin”) into a somehow amorphous matter that receives it (Latin America)? How can we read the singularity of the proper name in connection with the possibility of a differential repetition, implied every time the name “Benjamin” is reinscribed in various places, fields of study, and historical times? How does the process of differential repetition create the possibility of analyzing multiple reading “acts,” in which Benjamin’s name becomes a stage for enacting, struggling with, and transforming different reading practices (as well as the traditions embodied within each of them)? We can say that an interest in Benjamin within Latin American studies is emblematic of the transition period from the military dictatorships to neoliberal dominance. Amidst the change in social order, his work provided a critical language that allowed for new perspectives from which to consider both the cultural and the political dimensions of the recent past.

Benjamin has thus become a key figure in recent decades, in the development of both cultural studies and postdictatorship studies, two prominent areas of Latin American studies. To provide a brief cartography of critical gestures demonstrative of Benjamin’s relevance, I would like to cite Beatriz Sarlo’s “Forgetting Benjamin,” ¹ Nelly Richard’s “Homage to Walter Benjamin,” ² Alberto Moreiras’s “Post-dictadura y reforma del pensamiento” (Postdictatorship and the reform of thought) ³ and Idelber Avelar’s Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning. ⁴ All are critical interventions in which Benjamin became a strategic site for the problematization and/or opening of discursive fields. In this vein, it is important to understand the ways in which certain readings of Benjamin’s work became dominant in the decade following the end of the military regime, and to raise a series of questions regarding other acts of reading that did not take place. This requires looking for the traces of what remains truncated, where the dramatization of other ways of reading Benjamin’s work would depart from a certain consensus surrounding the dominant practices of reading his works.

Sarlo’s “Forgetting Benjamin” reacts to the way in which Benjamin became “fashionable” in cultural studies, more specifically in the study of cities, arguing that his name was transformed into a mold “applied” acritically to the description of cities and their characters as an empty quotation. ⁵ In addition, a problem of the “emptying” of the Benjaminian quotation is that he has been converted into a kind of measure, applied in order to describe a certain state of things (urban life, characters), without engaging the conditions of historicity for the figures in question. This aspect of cultural studies reduces any urban manifestation to the empirical data or to the form of a sociological fact.

Two Benjaminian tropes par excellence—citing and historicity— find a key role in Richard’s homage to Benjamin, “Ruptures, Memory, and Discontinuities (Homage to Walter Benjamin),” published a year after Sarlo’s call for forgetting. Her homage testifies to Benjamin’s relevance in so-called postdictatorship studies and to the development of a postdictatorship cultural critique. ⁶ Richard also references the relevance of the relation between historicity and citation to the Chilean avant-garde group CADA (Art Action Collective, which she nicknamed “Escena de Avanzada”), ⁷ and perceives Benjamin’s role in the formation of an artistic resistance to the military dictatorship as a “force for critical intervention.” ⁸ Within this context, the Chilean critic refers to the act of citing “Benjamin” as a way of listening to the “echoes” of his work, effectively deemphasizing the idea of a proper and/or authorized reading and revealing the potential space for different acts of rereading his work. ⁹

In “Post-dictadura y reforma del pensamiento,” a formative article in the creation of a postdictatorship cultural critique, Moreiras connects the possibility of a transformation of...