This work studies the dialectical images - history, time, allegory and melancholy, weaved by Walter Benjamin. We propose that they are a way of rethinking history as interruption and fragmentation, and not anymore under a linear and positivist perception of the evolution of time. The article also takes into consideration their inter-relationships, which allows us to focus on them as fundamental categories to provide a new philosophical approach of the links between art and society.
allegory; dialectical images; history; melancholy; modernity; Walter Benjamin