Walter Benjamin and astrology as a weapon to overthrow fascism

Beautifully edited by Athenaica, this magnificent volume specifies the real meaning of these alleged flaws in Benjamin’s personality—his Jewish heritage, his political position—and tries to combine them with the multitude of themes, theoretical considerations, and special characters that circulate. The founder of the heterodox thinker has yet to discover a clear poetic-philosophical constellation that goes back to the 9th century and a century: de Guérin as a star figure and links to the 20th, in which Benjamin supposedly opposed the irrationalisms that prevailed in his world as well as today.

With the mime of a father who reassembles the pieces of the past, Federico Rodríguez (Jerez, 1983), professor of philosophy at the University of Seville, winner of the Premio Nacional de Ensayo de Chile, offers us in it with this work a heartbreaking compilation of data and values ​​from young Benjamin. Like the texts of Franz Boll, Aby Warburg or Ernst Cassirer, referring to how astrology in the past, as a hybrid of science and religion, helped to conceive the world as a unity, it is necessary to maintain it in a mythological atmosphere.

Beginning there, we will show how Benjamin’s work, looking at the outcome of astrology in a Europe besieged by fascism as a symptom born of intention to de-structure this reactionary discoursethe legitimizer of the challenged forces in an inevitable way and transforms it into a philosophy of liberation that reveals the reds that regenerate our life, thus giving an explicit sentiment; and make a rational decision with him whether to accept them or not.

Observing argumentative density and high levels of speculation not often found in real thought

But there is more to it. Sagittarius, the name of the zodiacal constellation that gives the book its title, from the final key that expresses the terrible reconstruction brought to her head. This work is so rich, captivating, luxurious in detailargumentative density and speculative height not often found in real thought.

For example, Federico Rodríguez revived the value of Benjamin’s early writing “The Centaur”, of which only a version written years later survived in a copy of the prose poem “The Centaur” by Maurice de Guérin, and combined it with a fragment of Pindar on centaurs, translated and commented by Hölderlin, of great inspiration to youth. The centaur, half man, half horse, who reminds us that we are not only heavenly, but also animal, before the mouth and reflection, represents the transition from nature to culture, the conflict between civilization and barbarism.

Yes, This mythological figure uses a net to capture authors and themesAt this point, Benjamin’s meditation focuses on the problem of violence in its ontological, poetic and political modulations.

Indeed: if civilized life promises to satisfy primal bestiality, how will we respond when we lose hope for sweetness and discover in the midst of wars, authoritarianism and economic crises that the order of the world is not an instrument of domination that hides further barbarism? How should I respond to this other violence? Federico Rodríguez does not look for any conclusive answers from Benjamin, but there are definite directions which help us think about sins and consider the present.