The Ethics of Study: Walter Benjamin’s Counter-Pedagogy and the Communicability of Historical Violence

I will investigate some ways in which the ethical practice of study, the use of language, and the critique of force, authority, or violence (Gewalt) come together in Walter Benjamin’s reflections on pedagogical strategies in the research seminar. Deeply concerned with the histories of violence that state power perpetuates and occludes in the civic institutions that structure social life, Benjamin was even more attuned to the modalities of this historical violence inscribed in the languages of cultural texts. His concept of history will bring out both the emancipatory and the counter-revolutionary power of certain practices of study that enter into relation with the irreconcilable ambiguity of these archives in which “there is no document of culture that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Reading some key publications from Benjamin’s participation in the student movement in conjunction with his early writings on language and translation, I will focus particularly on the ethical significance of silence and listening for the construction of a linguistic medium of study that is capable of letting itself be addressed by and perhaps in turn redressing the semiotic effects of structural violence. The guiding purpose of this talk will be to elucidate the ethical stakes of the communicability of histories of violence that is resistant to and can radically alter the paradigms in which the research seminar functions as a privileged site for knowing mastery over objects of reference and as an ‘ideal speech situation’ for intersubjective discourse.

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Natasha Hay
University of Toronto
Comparative Literature

Wed, Nov 20, 2019
12:30 PM - 02:00 PM
Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto
200 Larkin