Temps des vestiges et mémoire du passé

Over the past decade, Walter Benjamin’s revolutionary understanding of history and art history has been acknowledged, but, curiously enough, very few comment on his work in relation to archaeology. Since it is based on the materiality of history, Benjamin’s approach to the past is fundamentally archaeological. But what deeply challenges the conventional understanding of the past —what Benjamin calls historicism —is that, being based on the material evidence of the past, the specific object of this new approach of history is not the vanished past, but the present itself. What constitutes the materiality of the present is, indeed, nothing other than the superimposition of all the duration(s) of the past which are preserved in the present, and Benjamin’s “materialistic history” is basically an “archaeology of the present”. This challenging approach to the past within the present stresses the crucial importance of the survival of the past and draws some surprising links between contemporary philosophy and history (Nietzsche, the late Heiddeger), history and art history (Walter Benjamin), art history and anthropology (Aby Warburg) that, together, are woven into this new archaeology of the present