New Considerations on the Political Actuality of Walter Benjamin’s Late Philosophy: Dialectical Image and Elegiac Friendship

Abstract

This article works on a text of Reyes Mate on the actuality of Walter Benjamin published in the second issue of Constelaciones about, and aims at distancing itself from any attempt to actualize Banjamin’s late theory of expe-rience, which was explained in universal terms, as a positive ethical universal, as supported by Habermas, or as a negative political universal, as defended by Reyes Mate. This article puts forward a model of actualization based on the strange concept of elegiac friendship, as Benjamin uses it in his text Critique of Violence. It is argued that this critical friendship, which doesn't exclude deception and enmity, has an eminent political significance which brings the latest dialectical image up to date, since it proposes an exceptional possibility of opening the systemic logic of power through fields of experience as the past, the damage, the most singular, which are, in principle, forbidden.