Walter Benjamin

Spring Term 2012, ten weeks starting Thursday 19th January, 5pm-7pm.

For details of venue etc go to the London School of Philosophy website.

Course description

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most fascinating intellectual figures of the twentieth century. Philosopher, literary critic, journalist, historian, his writings have attracted the interest of Marxists, theologians, urbanists and artists, just to mention a few. The course will take a chronological and textual approach, starting with Benjamin’s writings from the mid/late 1920s and ending with his final text from 1940. The course will seek to situate and understand Benjamin’s ideas in relation to two main poles: (i) the Marxism he espoused from the mid-1920s onwards; (ii) the theological ideas which brought with him from his earlier writings. One particular focus will be Benjamin’s Arcades Project – his huge and unfinished investigation into the emergence of high capitalist modernity in nineteenth-century Paris.

Students will need to be able to use the internet in order to access the materials which will be provided for this course.

Week-by-week breakdown

1. introduction and early writings
2. One-Way Street (1928)
3. Benjamin’s encounter with Marxism
4. ‘Surrealism’ (1929)
5. The Arcades Project (1927-40)
6. The Arcades Project (1927-40)
7. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ (1935-39)
8. ‘On the Concept of History’ (1940)
9. Benjamin’s theology?
10. Benjamin’s autobiographies

Bibliography

A fuller bibliography, with recommendations relating to particular topics, will be made available on-line in due course.

Excerpts from the main texts will be provided electronically (in some cases the whole text). However, it would be useful for participants to have at least one book to hand. I would recommend getting either of the collections called One-Way Street and Other Writings:

• One-Way Street and Other Writings, Penguin (2009)
• One-Way Street and Other Writings, Verso (1997) - preferable; no longer in print, but still available in libraries and second-hand

• Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, Random House, New York, 1995