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Walter Benjamin:Language, Memory, History

Eli Friedlander

Every chapter in the course, with links to the moment it begins in the video and in the transcript. For topics across all courses, see the Topic Index.

Intro The Necessity of The Contingent

Introduction to Walter Benjamin's Philosophy
▶︎ 0:00 transcript ↗︎
Why Philosophy Departments Ignore Benjamin
▶︎ 0:43 transcript ↗︎
From Mickey Mouse to Kafka: Benjamin's Range
▶︎ 2:15 transcript ↗︎
The Pearl Fisher: Brilliant but Rigorous?
▶︎ 3:26 transcript ↗︎
Tension Between the Fundamental and the Banal
▶︎ 4:20 transcript ↗︎
The Riddle of the Arcades Project
▶︎ 5:14 transcript ↗︎
What Are the Arcades? Glass, Iron, and Shops
▶︎ 6:49 transcript ↗︎
The Convolutes: Fashion, Flaneurs, and Gamblers
▶︎ 8:57 transcript ↗︎
Can This Be Philosophy? Comparison with Hegel
▶︎ 10:05 transcript ↗︎
Not Marxist History Either: Superstructure Focus
▶︎ 12:16 transcript ↗︎
No Critical Standpoint: The Method of Quotation
▶︎ 13:50 transcript ↗︎
Adorno's Critique: Positivism Meets Magic
▶︎ 16:10 transcript ↗︎
Expression as the Key to Philosophy
▶︎ 17:52 transcript ↗︎
What's Next: Language, Art, and Expression
▶︎ 19:28 transcript ↗︎

Lecture 1 From the Creative Word to the Fall of Language

On Language as Such and the Language of Man
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The Divine Standpoint and Threefold Creation
▶︎ 4:17 transcript ↗︎
The Creation of Man and the Gift of Language
▶︎ 7:15 transcript ↗︎
Actualizing Nature Through Human Language
▶︎ 10:14 transcript ↗︎
The Fall: From Naming to Judgment
▶︎ 12:20 transcript ↗︎
The Tree of Knowledge and Emptiness of Language
▶︎ 18:04 transcript ↗︎
Judgment as Guilt and the Mythical Origin of Law
▶︎ 22:44 transcript ↗︎
Nature as Hierarchy and Translation
▶︎ 26:50 transcript ↗︎
Goethe's Theory of Color as Natural Model
▶︎ 31:12 transcript ↗︎
Human Language as the Highest Language
▶︎ 33:42 transcript ↗︎
Art and Literature as Natural Expression
▶︎ 38:26 transcript ↗︎
Originality, Genius, and Nature in Art
▶︎ 41:13 transcript ↗︎
Criticism as Reflective Judgment
▶︎ 44:04 transcript ↗︎
Sadness, Muteness, and the Mourning Play
▶︎ 47:13 transcript ↗︎

Lecture 2 Translation and the Kinship of Languages

Introducing The Task of the Translator
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The Fall, Babel, and the Multiplicity of Languages
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Translation as Showing Kinship Between Languages
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Pure Language and Its Philosophical Context
▶︎ 3:55 transcript ↗︎
The Small Refracting the Whole
▶︎ 5:21 transcript ↗︎
Life and Afterlife of the Work of Art
▶︎ 7:34 transcript ↗︎
Translation as Destruction and Afterlife
▶︎ 10:20 transcript ↗︎
Ways of Meaning vs. What Is Meant
▶︎ 11:44 transcript ↗︎
Morning Star and Evening Star: An Example
▶︎ 14:36 transcript ↗︎
Echo, Royal Robe, and the Broken Vessel
▶︎ 18:02 transcript ↗︎
Fidelity and Freedom in Translation
▶︎ 20:27 transcript ↗︎
Transparency, Literalness, and the Arcade
▶︎ 23:40 transcript ↗︎
Light, Refraction, and Pure Language
▶︎ 26:26 transcript ↗︎
Recovering the Flow of Revelation
▶︎ 29:11 transcript ↗︎
The Turn to the Secondary
▶︎ 30:23 transcript ↗︎
Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility
▶︎ 32:14 transcript ↗︎
The Arcades Project and Quotations
▶︎ 33:59 transcript ↗︎
The Secondary in Kafka, Proust, and Beyond
▶︎ 35:05 transcript ↗︎
Against the Cult of Originality and Fascism
▶︎ 37:38 transcript ↗︎

Lecture 3 Tragic Fate and Comic Character

Recap: Language, Genesis, and the Fall
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Art as a Locus of Higher Meaning
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From Literary Critique to Reading the Real
▶︎ 3:52 transcript ↗︎
Nature in the Human: Fulfillment and Its Absence
▶︎ 5:52 transcript ↗︎
Natural Guilt and Natural Innocence
▶︎ 9:35 transcript ↗︎
The Modern View of Fate and Character
▶︎ 11:35 transcript ↗︎
Character as Non-Psychological Unity
▶︎ 15:06 transcript ↗︎
Kant and Schopenhauer on Character
▶︎ 18:13 transcript ↗︎
Intensity of Character and the Inner-Outer Blur
▶︎ 19:12 transcript ↗︎
Fate as Suffering and the Question of Guilt
▶︎ 21:22 transcript ↗︎
Fate as the Guilt of Mere Life
▶︎ 25:00 transcript ↗︎
Tragedy and the Hero's Confrontation with Fate
▶︎ 27:41 transcript ↗︎
Fate, Law, and Mythical Power in Modern Life
▶︎ 34:20 transcript ↗︎
Natural Innocence and Comic Characters
▶︎ 40:42 transcript ↗︎
Character as Freedom from Fate
▶︎ 45:25 transcript ↗︎
Dissolving Inner and Outer: Chaplin as Example
▶︎ 47:55 transcript ↗︎

Lecture 4 Realizing the Irretrievability of the Past in Memory

Temporality of Meaning and Memory
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The Berlin Childhood: Historical Context
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Memory as Inoculation Against Nostalgia
▶︎ 3:53 transcript ↗︎
Irretrievability of the Past and Proust
▶︎ 6:12 transcript ↗︎
Personal to Collective: The Monadological Method
▶︎ 7:42 transcript ↗︎
Depth of Experience Through Images
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Images as Condensation of Environment
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Precipitation as a Model for Memory
▶︎ 15:11 transcript ↗︎
The Otter: Rainy Days and Condensation
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The Butterfly Hunt: Mimetic Identification
▶︎ 20:43 transcript ↗︎
Memory Images as Dreamlike Condensations
▶︎ 25:26 transcript ↗︎
Color and Mimetic Absorption
▶︎ 27:20 transcript ↗︎
Discoloration, Loss of World, and The Moon
▶︎ 32:25 transcript ↗︎
The Sock: Unveiling and the Structure of Memory
▶︎ 38:43 transcript ↗︎

Lecture 5 Modernity and the Destruction of Experience

From Individual Memory to Collective History
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What Is Experience? Knowledge, Wisdom, and Value
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Experience as Tradition and Storytelling
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The Fable of the Old Man and the Vineyard
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The Decline of Storytelling and Tradition
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World War I and the Contradiction of Experience
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Poverty as the Loss of the Past's Treasure
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Affirming Barbarism as a New Beginning
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Inner and Outer as a Category in Crisis
▶︎ 15:12 transcript ↗︎
Paul Klee and the Devaluation of Inwardness
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Technology Transforms the Very Idea of Art
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Glass Architecture and the Utopia of Openness
▶︎ 24:07 transcript ↗︎
The Bourgeois Interior and the Etui Man
▶︎ 27:12 transcript ↗︎
The Flâneur and the City as Nature
▶︎ 35:05 transcript ↗︎
The Detective and the Problem of Traces
▶︎ 39:53 transcript ↗︎
Material Symptoms of Modernity's Crisis
▶︎ 41:55 transcript ↗︎

Lecture 6 Every Epoch Dreams the One to Follow

The Riddle of the Arcades Project
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Refracting Broad Meaning from the Small
▶︎ 3:44 transcript ↗︎
The Arcades as Miniature
▶︎ 5:50 transcript ↗︎
The Monad and Leibniz's Monadology
▶︎ 7:38 transcript ↗︎
Temporality and the Concept of the Immature
▶︎ 11:41 transcript ↗︎
Technology and Radical Transformation Today
▶︎ 13:47 transcript ↗︎
Shifting Fundamental Categories
▶︎ 17:16 transcript ↗︎
Imagination and Wish Images
▶︎ 20:09 transcript ↗︎
Material Traces of the Collective Unconscious
▶︎ 23:16 transcript ↗︎
Primal Past, Fate, and Myth
▶︎ 24:43 transcript ↗︎
Paris Capital of the 19th Century
▶︎ 26:52 transcript ↗︎
Blanqui and Eternal Return
▶︎ 29:59 transcript ↗︎
The Concept of the Outmoded
▶︎ 33:29 transcript ↗︎
The Collector and Transformed Significance
▶︎ 37:10 transcript ↗︎
Childhood of the Collective
▶︎ 39:58 transcript ↗︎
Awakening and the Copernican Revolution
▶︎ 46:15 transcript ↗︎
The Work of Art as Vanishing Point
▶︎ 52:41 transcript ↗︎