Weak Messianism: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

Alexander Gelley, Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, talks about his book on Walter Benjamin, with particular focus on Benjamin's conception of history and urban culture. Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish thinker of the Weimar period, left his Arcades Project unfinished when he died in 1940. Its aim was to awaken a collective subject, heir of the Marxist proletariat, a collective not yet actual and still under the spell of the "phantasmagoria" of the nineteenth-century. Benjamin's "weak messianism" is best conceived as a form of writing designed to incite a readership by means of image, example, anecdote, citation. Series: Humanitas [9/2008] [Humanities] [Show ID: 14864]

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Marxism
• Weimar
• Walter
• Benjamin
• Philosophy
• Gelly
• Arcades

[faizevon]

this is a very important lecture in terms of what it wishes to say; but frankly professor gelley could have shared his essay online and just left it at that; his speaking style is so colorless, passive, unenthusiastic, and distracted that it offends me to hear it; benjamin deserved and deserves more focus and passion than this; i am grateful for hearing the essay i just wish someone else had read it out

[jazzmunky]

@thebloads ooh we are not amused are we...why don't you improve your manners instead?!

[gperice]

This is boring and obvious. Was that Benjamin was getting at?

[emoskater1212]

needs to look more professional. good info!

[yehudayannay]

Excellent lecture, especially on the Judaic aspect of his thinking. Science fiction with a moral message is a form of Hagada too

[thebloads]

improve your english, and after that, your panegyric

[odiemarshhen]

This was very helpful. I wish there had been more time to discuss the arcades project, but I will look for Prof Gelley's writing about Benjamin.

thanks for this.