Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies’ Internal Workshop, 8-9th November 2023
The concept of experience (Erfahrung) was one of the first theoretical efforts made by the young Walter Benjamin during his years of cultural activism in the German Youth Movement. In 1913, he started his reflections with a Platonic distinction between “experience” and the ideal dimension, which is “grounded within itself”: “the true, the good, the beautiful” are “inexperienceable.” His position softened over time, and the concept of Unerfahrbare transformed into Ausdruckslose, shifting the problem from the denial of experience in toto to the connection between the (im)possibility of expressing experience and communication, language, and literature. How one can maintain an “authentic” connection becomes one of the most fertile points of his philosophical
development.
The main hypothesis of this study is that scepticism—the impossibility of knowledge—lies at the core of Benjamin’s reflections, aiming to analyse how the negation of the possibility of generating knowledge directly from experience allows the creation of a different theoretical structure based on the expression of indirect, oblique access to the core of reality. My second hypothesis is that this dialectic finds its structure thanks to the intensive exchange between Benjamin and the Jewish cultural milieu from 1913 on.
Caterina Diotto 