NOTES ON METHOD AS A DETOUR IN WALTER BENJAMIN

Abstract

From the Prologue of The Origin of German Tragic Drama, we intend to approach Walter Benjamin’s critical-epistemological theory under the focus given by the author to the problems that come from the more geometrico method, which is proposed as a propaedeutic for the investigation of philosophical objects. By resorting to logic and mathematics, and not to the language in which philosophy was historically codified, such methodology presents itself as a universal condition for clear and distinct knowledge, although it reveals, at the same time, a gesture of giving up the truth, whether because it intends to its capture in a previous conceptual network, either by taking it as a mere product of an equation. Benjamin, faced with this impasse, evokes the form of the scholastic-medieval treatise as a way of philosophical exposition that does justice to objects in their irrevocably plurivocal form. By the expositive form of the treatise, the objects are placed in relation to the whole in which they are inscribed, just as the whole is referred to the objects, in a dialectical movement which, according to him, makes possible the emergence or the glimmer of its truth content. In Benjamin’s project, therefore, the alliance between philosophical thought and its form of exposition is evident through the conception of method as a detour or indirect path (Umweg), which can be understood as a contemplative exercise of reflexive comings, goings and pauses about the phenomena and questions that emerge from its uniqueness.