Ricostruire tramite la manipolazione. Il montaggio tra immagine dialettica e détournement.

Editing certainly acquires a central role within Banjamin’s musings on history. Since "The Word of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" it is possible to detect Benjamin’s interest towards cinema’s most groundbreaking and characteristic element, i.e. the editing process. The yet-unseen and revolutionary possibilities introduced by this newmethod of exposition of reality lead Benjamin to imagine a renewed use outside the cinematic and visual field. Deep contents of reality emerge through the application of editing to historical reconstruction, transforming it into an innovative cognitive tool. In fact, inside many fragments of Passagenwerk Benjamin suggests possible implications and innovations by means of introducing the usage of editing for the reconstruction of an era and he announces the possibility of renewing the entire historical materialist approach through the acquisition of the «principio del montaggio nella storia». This idea of reconfiguration of the past which, on several levels, accompanied Benjamin throughout his whole theoretical production, unexpectedly appears twenty years later. We’re nearing the end of the fifties and the world, the society, the cities described by Benjamin are unrecognizable, yet the same moving principle forcibly asserts itself, this time in the field which originally inspired its birth, i.e. cinema. Practicing a détournement means to take possession of preexistent works, subtracting them from their usual context, and to modify them in order to then insert them in a new juxtaposition of meaning, thus creating a new relation of meaning. In order to establish the aforementioned parallelism, this article intends to be articulated on different levels; in particular, it will focus on the role assumed firstly by citation and secondly by the editing process in the works of Walter Benjamin and Guy Debord. The first paragraph will analyze the citation practice as a deconstructing element, of subtraction of the past to the past, particularlyreferring to the construction of dialectical images and to the play fields opened by said practice in the present.I will therefore concentrate on détournement, its birth, its operating principle, and especially its political anti-spectacle usage within Debord’s works. In the second and last paragraph it will be attempted to underline the importance of the usage of editing to imbue the cited elements with a second emerging meaning, it is as a result shown, in their relation, the necessity of a positive editing work that reinforces both Benjamin’s philosophy and Debord’s works. In particular, I will outline the essential correlation between the two authors, which reveals itself in the notion that historical editing is capable of creating an historiographic narration, allowing to return to the past the usage of the present through dialectical image on one hand and détournment on the other.