Walter Benjamin:Language, Memory, History

Benjamin engaged throughout his work with the deepest philosophical questions, from the nature of language to the structure of experience and the meaning of history. Eli Friedlander traces a path through his most important writings, showing how they form a coherent philosophical vision.

The course begins with Benjamin's early essay "On Language as Such and on the Language of Man," a dense and extraordinary text that presents language as the medium of convergence of God, Nature, and Man. Elucidating Benjamin's reading of Genesis, Friedlander shows how its different moments, from creation to the fall are reinterpreted as dimensions of language. Naming and judgment come to be viewed in relation to to man’s struggles to fulfill the task of giving expression to created nature.

From there, the course turns to "The Task of the Translator," presenting that essay as extending Benjamin’s vision of language. Translation, while secondary to the original, does not serve merely to communicate its sense in another language, but rather reveals the kinship between languages and presents what he calls the "pure language." This emphasis on the power of the secondary, on criticism and translation rather than original genius, becomes a recurring theme. From the consideration of the literary work, its translation and critique, Friedlander turns to the dialectic of significance in the space of human life. Examining the essay "Fate and Character," he distinguishes the life unfulfilled in meaning, the guilt of mere life and the entanglements of fate and opposes to it the liberating simplicity of character. Friedlander draws on Greek tragedy as well as on comic figures like Charlie Chaplin to illustrate Benjamin's vision.

The lectures then shift to questions of time and memory by considering Benjamin's autobiographical work Berlin Childhood around 1900. This work is not seeking a nostalgic retrieval of longed for childhood, but rather innoculates by way of “small” memory-images against the onslaught of longing, allowing to “realize” the irretrievability of the past. Friedlander unpacks the logic of recollection, the unity of remembering and forgetting that structures these short, luminous prose pieces.

Finally, the course moves from individual memory to collective experience and the writing of history. Through the essay "Experience and Poverty," Benjamin diagnoses modernity as a crisis in our relation to tradition, to the experience of the past. Conditions of existence are so transformed, for instance by technology that the accumulated wisdom of the past that once passed between generations is of no value for the present. Rather than lamenting this new barbarism, Benjamin seeks ways to re-evaluate all values, so as to affirm the new. This diagnosis sets the stage for understanding The Arcades Project Benjamin's unfinished masterwork on nineteenth-century Paris—as a philosophical attempt to actualize meaning in history and make it bear upon the political present. No prior familiarity with Benjamin's work is required.