Decline of experience, memory and redemption: aspects of Walter Benjamin's model of critical theory

• Grant number: 13/16938-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: November 01, 2013
• End date: January 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Ricardo Ribeiro Terra
• Grantee: Fernando Araujo Del Lama
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated scholarship(s): 14/26558-0 - Technique, phantasmagoria, origin: deepening the Benjamin's model of Critical Theory, BE.EP.MS

Abstract

We intend to reconstitute some of the fundamental lines of Walter Benjamin's model of critical theory, as developed in the so-called materialistic period of his thought. The central axis of the research will be to examine two Benjamin's texts - "On Some Motifs in Baudelaire" (1939) and the theses "On the Concept of History" (1940) - in order to bring out some elements that allow the articulation of the concepts of diagnosis and prognosis from his work. Then will be developed one of the structural elements of diagnosis, namely the decline or crisis of experience and its modern setting as Chockerlebnis, elaborated in the essay on Baudelaire from the everyday into the crowd that inhabit the metropolis, as well as the key element of Benjamin's last prognosis, outlined in the theses, i.e., the interpretation of history "against the grain", whose emphasis on the failed hopes of the defeated allows a glimpse of redemption (Erlösung) of the oppressed ones through revolution. The notion of memory, in turn, has a decisive role in this problematic, insofar as the difficulty of conserving it accentuates the crisis of experience (Erfahrung) in its full sense, and is precisely by the rescue of memory through the remembrance (Eingedenken), albeit by its shards and remains, that the materialist historian should proceed. (AU)

Academic Publications

(References retrieved automatically from State of São Paulo Research Institutions)

LAMA, Fernando Araujo Del. Diagnosis of the times and decline of experience in Walter Benjamin: an approach to the writings of the 1930s. 2017. Master's Dissertation - Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) São Paulo.