Ricerc@Sapienza

Starting with the case of Walter Benjamin, a forced exile from Nazi Germany and suicide on the French-Spanish border, we intend to reflect on the position of those intellectuals, especially Jewish-Germans, grappling with the political and cultural emergency of the time, such as Erich Auerbach; but also of French authors who in the same years were thinking of a literary and anthropological "flight" southwards, as a radical reformulation of their cultural positioning in the years between the wars. In this way, the project is articulated around a conceptual tripartition, between exile, flight and migration, along a geopolitical, geosymbolic, and geo-philosophical north-south axis and according to a postcolonial perspective, in a primarily historical key, but without shirking any topical instances for the actual debate. Another fundamental theoretical component in this project is represented by the religious sphere, which can be defined as `messianic¿ in the sense developed by Walter Benjamin, and which finds an original declination in Auerbach and his notion of the `figure¿: they represent different but converging forms of `realism¿ that transcends the immanent sphere of letters and reflections around the idea of the human.