Modernity and the Destruction of Experience

This lecture moves from Walter Benjamin's reflections on individual memory to the historical remembrance and its political stakes. Eli Friedlander offers a close reading of Benjamin's essay "Experience and Poverty," exploring how modernity is characterized by a crisis in our relation of the past, the sickening of tradition and correlative with it a destruction of experience. Rather than mourning the poverty of modern existence, Benjamin seeks a transformation of value that would affirm the new “barbarism”. The lecture traces this theme through a rich constellation of figures and phenomena: Paul Klee's art, glass architecture's utopia of transparency, the bourgeois interior and its "etui man," the flâneur's experience of the city, and the detective story's preoccupation with traces. Throughout, Friedlander shows how these cultural “symptoms” point to a radical transformation in the significance of the categories of inner and outer.