Day 1:
From the archaeologist’s dream to the allegory of excavation: introduction to the research + reading and discussion of the text “Excavate and Remember” (c. 1935) and other excerpts from the author.
Class Description:
*This class will be taught in Portuguese.
The metaphor of archaeology as a metaphor for a [philosophical] method of analysis dates back to Kant and was later used by Freud, Benjamin, Husserl, Foucault, Agamben, among others. In the course “Walter Benjamin as Archaeologist,” we propose to go beyond — or perhaps fall short of! — this metaphor by articulating the motif of archaeology in the work of the German-Jewish philosopher, seeking to align it with the discipline of archaeology itself. Among other things, throughout the course, we question: if there is a Benjaminian archaeology, what would be the specificity of this archaeology?
We start from the central hypothesis that the program for a new writing of history, as outlined by Benjamin in “On the Concept of History” (1940), can only be carried out if we are first able to confront, as Archaeology does, the material remnants of the past — and in this case, those remnants left behind by the defeated. That is, a writing of history that does not rely exclusively on written documents — the primary object of History — since writing has historically [almost] always served the purpose of legitimizing and maintaining power and, therefore, the history of the victors.
The course is an initiative of the Graduate Program in Literature and Culture at UFBA, the Center for Studies in Criticism and Contemporary Culture of the same institution, the Visual Arts Program at UFRGS, and the Comparative Literature Research Group of the National Association of Postgraduate Programs in Literature and Linguistics.
Bio:
Maykson Cardoso (Divinópolis, MG, 1988) has been living in Berlin since 2018. He is a doctoral candidate in Visual Arts/Art History at UFRJ. His research focuses on the articulation of the motif of archaeology throughout the work of Walter Benjamin, from which he proposes an "archaeological" reading of the so-called "theses" from On the Concept of History (1940), as well as what he refers to as an “archaeology of violence/Gewalt”: a method of writing history based on the premise that the history of the defeated can only be written if the writer first dedicates themselves to analyzing the material remnants that testify to their existence, considering that historically, writing has always been a tool for legitimizing and maintaining the power of the victors.