CHAIANNE MARIA DA SILVA FARIA

It is about examining the concept of monad in Walter Benjamin, from Origin of German tragic drama to Passages. In the first work, the monad synthesizes the theory of ideas presented in the "Preface"; in the second, it is a constructive principle of Benjamin's materialist historiography, intertwined with a theory of image and presence of mind. I investigate the conceptual contexts in which it engages, the course of its transformation from theory of ideas into a concrete monadological object and the general place it occupies in the elaboration of Benjamin's thought. For this, I use a methodological approach that finds its most fundamental stratum in the principle of the primacy of the object. Thus, I understand that Benjamin's monad is neither the product of a total invention nor of Leibniz's influence on Benjamin, but of Benjamin's citation of Leibniz, above all in the context of Origin, and then, in the texts of the 1930s, of a Benjamin's self-citation organized from the 1925 book. If the object is a citation, which involves both resemblance and saving destruction, the most apt method to capture it is the constellar arrangement of elements from Leibniz's and Benjamin's monadologies