Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies’ Internal Workshop, 20-22nd February 2024
The concept of experience (Erfahrung) was one of the focal points of the young Walter Benjamin’s first theoretical efforts 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 dimension of the ideal, which is “grounded within itself”: “the true, the good, the beautiful” are “inexperienceable.” His position softens over time, and the concept of unerfahrbare is 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.
The main hypothesis of this study is that scepticism lies at the core of Benjamin’s reflections and theories in the years 1913 to 1919. However, what kind of scepticism? In this second internal workshop, I will consider different authors who shaped the history of this approach in order to compare them to Benjamin’s text.
Caterina Diotto 