The Question of Awakening in Postdictatorship Times: Reading Walter Benjamin with Diamela Eltit

Sarlo's "Forgetting Benjamin" reacts to the way in which Benjamin became "fashionable" in cultural studies, more specifically in the study of cities, arguing that his name was transformed into a mold "applied" acritically to the description of cities and their characters as an empty quotation.5 In addition, a problem of the "emptying" of the Benjaminian quotation is that he has been converted into a kind of measure, applied in order to describe a certain state of things (urban life, characters), without engaging the conditions of historicity for the figures in question.