Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in Benjamin's Origin of the German Mourning Play

Abstract

One of the most pressing questions opened, or reopened, by the Poststructuralist problematization of representation concerns the concept of history. Ever since Claude Levi-Strauss gave prominence to Structuralism as a movement of thought by attacking Sartre's notion of historicity as uncritically ethnocentric and teleological, the status of history-whether as object, discipline or method of investigation-has been a primary focus of attention, debate and controversy. temper of this controversy is reflected in the title of one of the articles purporting to give a general theoretical assessment of the movement of thought it called The Structuralist Attack upon History. If Alfred Schmidt's study, published in 1968,2 articulated the position of the first Frankfurt School, its self-proclaimed successor, the second Frankfurt School of Jirgen Habermas, has added some nuances to this position, but in the end hardly altered it. In his lectures on Philosophical Discourse of Modernity3, Habermas

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