Benjamin e o problema da experiência

Abstract

The present paper constitutes a study on the relationship between the experience (Erfahrung) of the past and the present within the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. At first, we aim to understand the meaning and roots of the concept of experience. Then, we analyze its implications for the past and the present, within the Benjaminian critical theory. In this horizon, we then verify the importance of the dimension of the past and of memory in the understanding of the present. In this way, our study seeks to underline the issue of experience from texts from his youth to those of the Berlin philosopher's maturity, nuclearly analyzing the fall of Erfahrung in modernity and the rise of new forms of knowledge transmission. To bring this claim to success, this research is organized into two chapters. In the first chapter, “Experience and transmission”, we consider the masks of adults when they try to impose a way of life on young people and the neglect of collective sharing that makes them chorus, that is, we scrutinize the

fall of orality that ended up making the inexpressive, non-communicative and/or pseudo- communicative beings. In turn, in the second chapter, “Experience and construction”, we chose

to point out an alternative way out and a means of “returning” the narratives, not as they were in the past, but starting from a conscious process about history and past generations and present, in an act of (re)construction of the now-time. Roughly speaking, we believe that beyond the context of the works, a common knowledge relates the experience of the past to the experience of the present and this can become a more productive way of interpretation/intervention for contemporary life.