Ethical Anachronism. History, Space-Time and Image in the Thought of Didi-Huberman and Benjamin

Abstract

Using as an excuse one of the sentences elaborated by Heraclitus of Ephesus, the essay problematizes the link between ethics and history; this by implanting in the disjunction between such notions, the concept of anachronism. The introduction of the
concept of anachronism urges to refer to two thinkers who differentially thoughted and mapped this aporetic landscape: Walter Benjamin and Georges Didi-Huberman. In this sense, throughout the paragraphs, we will walk alongside the conceptual characters that Benjamin and Didi-Huberman craft (the man with the rosary between his fingers, the man in the brothel, the man of  beliefs, the ragpicker, the splinters, among others), in order to position ourselves in that problem that implicates the structure of the dialectical images, and with this, we will think in the ethical-historical horizons that are at stake in the notion of ethical anachronism.