Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Drama barroco: topografias do tempo

2009; Associação Brasileira de História Oral (ABHO); Volume: 1; Linguagem: Inglês

10.51880/ho.v1i0.93

2358-1654

Olgária Chain Féres Matos,

Cultural, Media, and Literary Studies

The aim of this article is to demonstrate how Walter Benjamin deals with the concept of allegory as applied to the 18th century as well as to its modern substitute - the fetichism of merchancy. If Hamlet is the emblematicrepresentative of melancholy, Baudelaire does the same for the mal-du-siecle. In order to understand historic time, Benjamin proposes to interpret it in the core of the cultural process of mourning, in its extreme form of expression: the ruins. History and Nature, or Hazard and Necessity become nature morte and mourning silence of men in history: necessitarism excludes contingency (in nature) and fortune (in history). In place of the mechanized time of watches, Benjamin puts a form of time experience which expresses itself through deja vu, a temporality that hesitates between the already happened and what is due to happen. One may understand history at the same time as a landscape of rememberings and the experience of a threshold.