Every Epoch Dreams the One to Follow

In this concluding lecture, Eli Friedlander returns to the central puzzle of Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project: how can a work so narrowly focused on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris qualify as philosophy? Drawing on the concept of the monad from Leibniz Friedlander traces Benjamin's method of refracting a constellation of weighty and essential contents, from small, contigent and concrete historical details. The lecture moves through Benjamin's ideas about myth and wish images, the collective unconscious, and the concept of the outmoded, showing how each illuminates the relationship between technology, imagination, and historical transformation. Friedlander elucidates Benjamin's “Copernican revolution in historical thinking”, how in awakening from the dream of the past history opens to the present political moment.