The Trace: an Allegoric Making of History. A Reading of the Thought of Walter Benjamin

Based on Walter Benjamin's idea of History and on the diverse determinations which characterize it, this article tries to sketch the idea that reality, the world, with us included in it, far from having its own contexture, is the product of a group of cultural happenings, due to which it acquires both its ontological character and its design and concrete delimitation. We analyze then the connection between thought - knowledge - and history proposed by Benjamin, as well as some of the mechanisms due to which it is capable of doing justice to the oppressed and excluded. We also propose that in that discontinuous conception of history, elaborated as practical thought, man is no longer an "historic being" and constitutes himself as the operator of some minuscule redemption of the subject of the history.