Politics of catastropher: melancholy and depolitization of history in W. G. Sebald’s work

Abstract

Symptoms of the melancholic inflection that dominates memory arts in the late twentieth century, German writer W. G Sebald’s narratives are similar to an inexhaustible record of devastation caused or endured by the human race. No progress, but improvement of the tools of destruction; no sense, except in eternal return of the disaster that makes misfortune the characteristic of a “desperate species.” But why exhumethe traces of history victims if it is impossible to hope put an end to the violence they endured? Why resuscitate the oppressed whose history only repeats their irreparable defeat? Looking at the continuous dialogue between Sebald’s work and Walter Benjamin’s theses “On the concept of history” (1940), this article demonstrates the risks of depoliticization of a philosophy rooted on the revolutionary value of the memory of the vanquished, and thus attempts to clarify the tension between ethics and politics that underlies a great number of contemporary memorial productions.

keywords: Sebald; melancholia; depoliticization.