The loss of tradition and the angel of History: a discussion between Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin

Abstract

According to Hannah Arendt, today the common world is threatened by the usurpation of the public sphere by private interests, making biological life the supreme good. The man of action has lost space to the man of work and consumption, the animal laborans. Totalitarian threat has proven that the process of de-worlding is possible to its ultimate consequences. This theoretical trace of Arendtian thought has driven us to seek to understand how this collapse of the common world occurred and whether there are still ways to preserve and renew it in full modernity. Therefore, faced with a society born out of the rupture with tradition, we choose to undertake, based on the thought of our author, a reflection between Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. Both thinkers engage in a reflective and critical dialogue regarding tradition; they believe that even without a tradition to support and guide us, there is the possibility, akin to the Angel of History, to enter the field of ruins, look to the past, and extract some luminous marks from it. And, as our author tells us, to “plunge into the depths of the sea” and see “pearls and corals” in it, moments in history where we can give new meaning and thus convince ourselves that we cannot “turn our backs” on the world.