Abstract

MIER, Raymundo. Passages and the Meaning of History. Form, Figuration and the Signification of Wandering. Tóp. Sem [online]. 2007, n.17, pp.89-117. ISSN 2594-0619.

During his life, Walter Benjamin sketched a vast project of a work of writing that would embody the whole spectrum of his intellectual concerns, the path of his reflections, his explorations and his efforts to articulate, into a vast web of crossed references and allusions, the sum of his epiphanies. That work, necessarily unfinished and fragmentary, bears a name full of echoes: the work of the passages. It takes as a guiding thread a reflection on space, orientation and rhythms of bodies and gazes on the spatial arrangements of the city, architectonic inventions offered by modernity and which create a dense composition of the transitions of sensibility, techniques of expression, changes of perception, comprehension of time and the metamorphoses of the interpretation of history. The text here offered seeks to explore some of the facets of these inexhaustible passages and there significance for the meditation on contemporary aesthetics and for our conceptions of meaning.