Walter Benjamin: Thinking In a Damaged W

In this seminar we will examine the thought of the early 20th-century German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin in light of his commitment to the task of philosophy (broadly understood) as a form of Erkenntniskritik, epistemological critique, that takes up questions of experience, history, culture, and politics in a damaged world. Paying special attention to Benjamin’s deployment and reshaping of theological tropes and figures, our considerations will be shaped around the following thematics: (1) the transformations of theorizing experience in relation to philosophies of history; (2) the critique of culture and modernity; and (3) the aesthetics of rhetoric and affect in relation to social criticism.