Walter Benjamin’s romantic Marxism

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s writings lie at the margins of the main Marxist currents of modern culture. The particularity of his messianic and dialectical, theological and Marxist thought lies in his critical and romantic analyses of the ideology of progress. His observations on modern bourgeois civilization are at once an erratic, Marxist and romantic condensation and a dialectical and negative deconstruction of the concepts inscribed in the paradigms of capital. By recovering the social and cultural values of the past, discordant time, experiences and places of memory, Benjamin, as a “messianic sentinel”, opens the possibilities of a better world.