L’esperienza storica come esperienza di immagini. Il tenore estetico del pensiero nello scritto "Scavare e ricordare" di Walter Benjamin

The paper sets out to explore one of the main questions that emerge, more or less explicitly, from Benjamin’s short essay entitled Excavation and Memory (1932), namely that concerning the way philosophical reflection is and operates. In particular, the paper shows how, in Benjamin’s perspective, what plays a key role is the awareness that what constitutes the object of philosophical work is a reality to be understood not as a set of “states of things”, but rather as a set of “images”: as a very stratification of possibilities. Thus, if it is true that each “stratum” recalled by the philosopher-archaeologist is a “treasure in the sober rooms” – if its appearance can be likened to the fragmentary and symbolic nature of those “torsos” that compose the “collector’s gallery” –, it is also true that in this rich constellation of themes, and also taking into account their correlation with the decisive notion of “historical experience” (Erfahrung), the possibility of re-understanding philosophical work in the terms of a practice that is qualified, first and foremost, by its aesthetic tenor is implicit.