Experience, narration and justice in Walter Benjamin's thought

Abstract

This article investigates the ways of approaching the analytical core constituted by experience and narration in Walter Benjamin’s work, as a social praxis and a critical theory of modernity where a way of understanding justice is outlined, based on the communicable experience of narration. We will develop these notions present in Benjamin in order to consider the different vanishing points that the links of these concepts propitiated for the study of his time and that were key in their current receptions in relation to memory studies. We consider the importance of communication as a binding element between narration and experience, carrying out a critical analysis of narration and experience as conceptual and political vectors that constitute the commons and intersubjectivity. We will also inquire into the notion of justice coined by Benjamin and its link with experience, narration and testimony, within the framework of the critique of modernity carried out by the so called “post-war philosophers” in a tradition of “disenchantment of the world” and within the framework of Critical Theory.