The workshop of fragments Method and historiographical process in Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This article proposes a journey inside Walter Benjamin’s work from the perspective of its peculiar constructive fragmentarism. We set out to identify the methodological and epistemological principles that underpin Benjamin’s radically experimental brand of historiography, while relating them to the author’s existential status as an archivist-researcher or “operative writer” and to his own fateful destiny. The analysis focuses on a method grounded in the particular and based on the discontinuity and “concreteness” of material contents; the formation of a “monadological”, reticular and “constellational” type of historical knowledge that blasts images of the past out of the continuum of universal history; the collision between benjaminian “craft” and the theoretical demands of dialectical materialism espoused by his friends and contemporaries; the assemblage of a limitless intertextual mechanism and, finally, his advocacy of the author-producer figure, herald of an age to come where the text would become a “common good”.