Walter Benjamin, la crítica a la modernidad: el arte de la desconfianza

Abstract

“Walter Benjamin, la crítica de la modernidad: el arte de la desconfianza” (Helena Chávez Mac Gregor). This text explores Walter Benjamin’s critique to modernity from his work on the poverty of experience and on the revolutionary possibilities he found on some artist practices. This research proposes to interpret Benjamin’s approach to Baudelaire, surrealism and kitsch as a politicization of aesthetics that allows a rupture with modern subject. Here, the Copernican turn, as the author asserts, is to awake from the mythic forces of the prehistory to unchain temporality from progress. The aim of the critique of modernity is to open the critical possibilities of history. There is in Benjamin’s an art of mistrust that is at the same time emancipatory and revolutionary.