FERNANDO ARAUJO DEL LAMA

This thesis proposes an interpretation of the late, materialist phase of Walter Benjamin’s thought, grounded in a triadic perspective, which is based on the coexistence of three distinct and irreconcilable tendencies of thought – heterodox Marxism, a certain Jewish messianism and anti-capitalist romanticism – as an alternative to the most common dichotomous interpretations, which usually opt for Marxism as opposed to messianism. After (i) a poetic-biographical presentation of this hypothesis and a conceptual translation of it, the argument is built on (ii) a discussion about the characterization of the object of the research’s investigation, by expanding the sense of the Arcades project, which concerns the core of texts constituted by the exposés, the Konvolute with the “notes and materials” and the early sketches, to the Arcades complex, which would come to consider all sorts of texts related to it, from One-Way Street to the writings on Baudelaire and the theses “On the Concept of History”, passing through the key essays written in the 1930s. Then, (iii) we follow Benjamin’s material examination of reality through a cross-sectional reading of some of these texts, pointing out the