Sadness, cholera and the question of the empathy with the victor: Walter Benjamin and the diruptive written of history

Abstract

In this article I study an affective mood tackled by Walter Benjamin in the Thesis on the Philosophy of History, more precisely, I study the empathy (Einfühlung). This affect would be presented in the kind of historiography rejected by Benjamin, once it could be an “empathy with the victor”. I work in the present study with an “or-or” hypothesis. Benjamin differentiates two kinds of history writing, one that is inauthentic, and other that is authentic: or the historiographer starts from the inherent horror (Grauen) of the historical events, or he elects some pasts and feel empathy (Einfühlung) for the spoils of cultural transmission. Also, in other Benjamin´s writings we found a pejorative attribution to the empathy, and the reason for that, I suggest, it is that the historiographer must “blast out” the continuity line of the history, emphasizing not a conciliator affect or even a reliever and conformist affect, but a choleric affect regarding the oppressive events and, therefore, a “destructive”, disruptive, aspect of the history.