The Brazilian First Republic read through Benjamin's category of origin. Ler em português
How the imperial project of the Port of Torres was dismantled by the nascent Republic and diverted by the oligarchies.
02São Paulo agriculture turned into a machine of state, and the state into an instrument of agriculture.
03The university credential as a customs house: a filter that turned social mobility into hereditary privilege.
04The urban reforms read with Benjamin: no document of culture that is not also one of barbarism.
05Between 1891 and 1897 the Republic mobilised army, navy and police against its own population.
06Benjamin's Origin as dialectical image: the fractal, the eddy, and history's emergency brake.
07The nineteenth-century mania for the single cause, the error of taking a totality for a cause, and why origin is read the way an eddy is read.
0815 November 1889, the hundred years between 1789 and 1889, and a picture that held us captive.
09Why the single cause is so strong: principles that lost their floor and go on demanding obedience on the floor below.
10Brazilian culture stood accused of aping the foreign while politics followed a French script line by line.
11The elite took its costumes from the France of 1789, the people took theirs from the salons of 1889, and both were looking at a court.
12The colonel who allowed the sacking of Bagé in 1892 commanded at Canudos in 1897, and the Pacifier of 1895 ordered it.
13An Origin is not exhausted in its own moment: it becomes legible by what comes afterwards.
14How the concepts of Benjamin, Spinoza and Wittgenstein were reified, and why the form of a whirlpool is the dynamic grammar assumes at an instant.