For a history of "nobodies": crossing thresholds and borders with Walter Benjamin and Achille Mbembe
The present study, which encompasses the intertwining and conceptual consonances between Mbembe and Benjamin, aims to reflect on the temporal conception underlying modernity and colonialism, in view of the work method and the philosophies of history of both authors, which imply a rupture and an opening of history. The first chapter is dedicated to Walter Benjamin and the interpretation of notions extracted from texts that bring important contributions to his configuration of history, such as threshold, destiny, guilt, phantasmagoria and revolutionary violence. The second chapter is dedicated to Achille Mbembe and his anti-racist and decolonial reflections based on the concepts of Black reason, border, Black time, archive and necropolitics. Starting from a cross-reading of Critique of Black Reason (Mbembe) and “On the concept of history” (Benjamin), the third and final chapter intends to carry out a kind of synthesis between the first two, aiming to read the presence and traces of violence colonialism in current capitalism, also indicating how this multilateral violence implies abuse and physical exploitation, historical erasure, silencing and denial of the vanquished, relegating them to the condition of “nobody”.