Among Lacan and Benjamin: second death as an issue of redemption. Survival [Nachleben] and historical experience.

Abstract

In thesis VI of Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History (1940), we find the sentence of danger in which the dead are, which we can think of as a threat of a second death, or symbolic death of the oppressed tradition of which the historiographer has to be alert. Now, if there is a second death it is because there is a life after natural death, that is a survival [Nachleben] of the past in the present. This survival, in the context of the theses of 1940, is possible to weave it with the notions of historical experience [Erfahrung] and the transmission thereof. Faced with the danger of the absolute disappearance of what has been truncated, the German author exposes the need to save it, that is, to carry out a redemption, a remembrance. In this sense, redemption would operate as a second chance, or second instance, of those who have already had a natural death, and who therefore survive, are in their "over-life", which is on the verge of disappearing. Redemption, in these terms, is reconfigured as a form of resistance, then, against the possible annihilation that would bury definitively those signifiers, those memories. Here we will essay thinking this possibles intersections between the benjaminians notions of survival, historic experience and redemption, and the lacanian notion of second death, for being able to think the duality of natural and simbolic death and life, the failed of natural death -the possibiliy of redemption that allows- and the absolut and irreversible character of second death.