Weak Messianism: Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project

Alexander Gelley, Professor of Comparative Literature at UC Irvine, talks about his book on Walter Benjamin, with particular focus on Benjamin's conception of history and urban culture. Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish thinker of the Weimar period, left his Arcades Project unfinished when he died in 1940. Its aim was to awaken a collective subject, heir of the Marxist proletariat, a collective not yet actual and still under the spell of the "phantasmagoria" of the nineteenth-century. Benjamin's "weak messianism" is best conceived as a form of writing designed to incite a readership by means of image, example, anecdote, citation. [9/2008] [Show ID: 14864]
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[@SeekersofUnity]

Brilliant lecture. Thank you

[@ChelseaMcMillen]

I just want to know why the lecture's title includes "Arcades Project" and then proceeds to barely mention the work.

[@oraelizabethg.304]

actually, the talk is about the Arcades Project, even if it doesn't necessarily mention it in every sentence.

[@Orpheuslament]

The comments to this video are a disgrace. Thank you for uploading this video, it has been a help to me in my discovery of Benjamin.

[@thaddaeustekell1721]

First encountered Walter Benjamin's writing in 1987 fall my first semester at school of the art institute of Chicago. Was handed a photocopy of , art in the age of mechanical reproduction, the first time that I entered the building to actually take a class and just hang around and smoke clove sigarets. While am still a bit turned off by some of the Marxist language in this essay ,this essay is spot on about someone who makes any non mass produced thing.

[@Jacksirrom]

marx deflated thad's chubbie huh

[@melanieconroy1597]

Very interesting

[@lilyrobinson2350]

Still relevant, if not more so. Underscores my relationship with my Jewishness but not Zionism, and happiness as freedom from anxiety.

[@kulturindustrie5361]

Great!!!

[@aelvonus]

I have no idea how to spell the name of "Scherbart"

[@karolinajesien1888]

Scheerbart

[@tatumennis]

Paul scheerbart

[@dylant528]

what the hell is up with these awful & anti-semitic comments? this video is a gem.

[@jazzmunky]

@thebloads ooh we are not amused are we...why don't you improve your manners instead?!

[@faizevon]

this is a very important lecture in terms of what it wishes to say; but frankly professor gelley could have shared his essay online and just left it at that; his speaking style is so colorless, passive, unenthusiastic, and distracted that it offends me to hear it; benjamin deserved and deserves more focus and passion than this; i am grateful for hearing the essay i just wish someone else had read it out

[@sinisterbotanist]

who the hell has these kinds of expectations lol

[@g-r-a-e-m-e-]

I like his style.

[@czarquetzal8344]

Any exegesis of Benjamin's ideas necessitates clear explication possible only through manuscript reading of tye digested and original work of the professor. If you disagree with such lecture style, you better shut up.

[@chantalderementeria]

So intolerant to criticism!

[@diafragm]

so interesting. i went to sleep after 9 mins

[@andreashenatsch42]

The funny thing about Benjamin is that on the one hand deplores the reification of man in capitalism, on the other hand he embraces historic materialism, a crude and , by the way, false theoriy of the development of human societies, that degrades human beings to victims of economic conditions.

[@CaneofLoxley]

That is literally the opposite of the point of historic materialism. Acknowledging the influence of social relations and the manner in which people live ( I.e how they produce, consume and relate to society and the world) is not the same as being a 'slave' to these things. The whole philosophy of Marxism is based on the view that mankind has to free itself from being controlled by these factors.

[@Zaicoinim]

You clearly have never read Benjamin

[@czarquetzal8344]

Messianism as applied in historical materialism is in direct opposition to your false simplistic reading of Benjam, if you really read him.

[@jakobson219]

A pity professor Gelley is so supremely uninterested in his audience, he has a lot of knowledge but it comes across as a series of unrelated notes.

[@gperice]

This is boring and obvious. Was that Benjamin was getting at?