Judith Butler. Benjamin and The Philosophy of History. 2011

www.egs.edu/ Judith Butler, philosopher and author, talking about Walter Benjamin's Theses On The Philosophy of History. In this lecture, Judith Butler discusses historical materialism crossed with the messianic, crystallization as the imagistic form of the past, homogenous time, the loss of remembrance and the singularity of catastrophe in relationship to Franz Kafka, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Michel Foucault focusing on memory, progress, empty time, the relation of the past and present, happening versus action and dialectics. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe. 2011. Judith Butler.
Judith Butler, Ph.D., Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, attended Bennington College and then Yale University, where she received her B.A., and her Ph.D. in philosophy in 1984. Her first training in philosophy took place at the synagogue in her hometown of Cleveland. She taught at Wesleyan and Johns Hopkins universities before becoming Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 2012 she will join Columbia University's English and Comparative Literature departments.
Judith Butler is the author of Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (Columbia University Press, 1987), Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge, 1990), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (Routledge, 1993), The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection (Stanford University Press, 1997), Excitable Speech (Routledge, 1997), Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (Columbia University Press, 2000), Precarious Life: Powers of Violence and Mourning (Verso Press, 2004), Giving an Account of Oneself (Fordham University Press, 2005), Frames of War (Verso, 2009) and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia University Press, 2011).

[@mpbonner]

Among the monuments in Trafalgar Square, London, there is an empty plinth. This plinth could provide a Benjaminian moment in the fight for the oppressed past if it were left empty and had a small plaque attached which read 'In Remembrance of the Disappeared.' Thankyou for posting these wonderful lectures.

[@MrJhmw01]

The monad or the monadic idea, both in Leibniz and Benjamin, does reflect, through what benjamin names in the "theory of ideas" section in the Trauerspiel book (e36-44) as the 'constellation' of ideas, the truth content of the world. Benjamin is quite explict in his reference to Leibniz.

[@MrJhmw01]

'The Benjamin that wrote these theses was rather late.' It was the last thing he ever wrote before fleeing to Spain.

[@Vikt0rEremita]

ahah what, the past doesnt extend itself into its future, the present?