Abstract:
Based on an original and inventive reading of Walter Benjamin’s seventh thesis on the concept of history (1940), this article discusses the possibility and the necessity of a dialectical conception of culture. Guided by concrete examples from Latin American history, the author demonstrates the timeliness of the necessity – proclaimed by Benjamin – of “writing history against the grain,” conceiving it from the point of view of the vanquished, in opposition to the official history of “progress,” whose identification with the dominant classes hides the utopian ideas inscribed in the struggles of the oppressed, past and the present.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin. Cultural dialectic. History against the grain. Tradition of the oppressed.