Life on Game: Aesthetics and History in Walter Benjamin

Abstract

This paper tries to approach the concept of reading developed by Benjamin in its particular application to things and the meaning that this reading has for the historian's task. Here we attempt to investigate the modus operandi of Benjamin on things from the concepts of “translation” and from what he called “the mimetic faculty”. At the intersection of both concepts applied to things as historical documents, we will try to understand the revolutionary bias of Benjamin's work.