Class notes: Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin

Modern aesthetic + non-modern myths = fascism (see Leni Riefensthal)
That satisfies the disenfranchised men, masses
"organic totality" under fascism: reinscribe totality of masses

Fascism leads to war
- movement that turns technology to war-making
- to avoid "revolution" by channeling "change" toward war: Imperialism outward so that "society" will be preserved: nationalism

Imperialism: a revolt of technology, a fetish for destruction

On History
Published posthumously?

Tragic, revolutionary hopes
a cry against complacency
rejects linearity of history: its separate pieces of toughts
greater projects
- arguing concept of history as progressive consequence of history ... woah i dont make sense

against "determinism" & necessary laws without human agency

subjectivity of visions

method:
- looking at details
- be verrrry empirical

non-developed future not separate from present
a discontinuous model

against all-encompassing answers

through remebrance you can make away with complete incompletedness of history

messianism: it can be at any time, no need for an utopian end-time paradise

wrong use of past: corrupted present
past should be remebered in its entirety, piously
directly connected to the present

"nothing that has ever happenned should be regarded as lost for history

every day is judgement day

"progress" = destruction and wreckage
present is a perpetual catastrophy

totalitarianism = he who controls the present controls the future and control the past (from Orwell "1984")

rewritting past is rewritting who we are