"Shocks and Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and The Arcades Project"

Описание: If you want to understand and critically engage with life in twenty-first century New York, there is no better place to begin than with Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, the sprawling, ambitious, unparalleled examination of "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century."

Enroll today and and get a free copy of The Arcades Project (a truly beautiful book) and Adorno's Minima Moralia.

Walter Benjamin once wrote that The Arcades Project was "the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas." Never completed and well over a decade in the making, The Arcades Project takes on the presentation and history of an entire era and place: the Parisian Arcades of the early 19th century. Via quotations, observations, commentaries, philosophical fragments, and "literary montage," Benjamin attempts a better understanding of the conditions that fashioned both that era and, more importantly, his own. This extraordinarily unique text focuses on some of the most key questions a philosopher can ask: How should we understand the world around us? How should we interpret this world? How should we understand its time? What are social phenomena, history, philosophy, and criticism? What are they for? In this course, we will approach The Arcades Project alongside other writings by Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, and later commentators in an attempt to understand Benjamin's philosophy of historical materialism as well as the shocks and phantasmagoria of our own time.

6 Sessions over 6 Weeks www.thebrooklyninstitute.com