발터 베냐민과 기억

Abstract

This article attempts to integrate Walter Benjamin’s literary criticism and historical interpretation focusing on his concept of memory. First, it examines Proust’s involuntary memory as the prototype of Benjamin’s memory. Unlike memory we commonly think of, Proust’s memory uniquely alludes to remembering the forgetting inherent in the past. Secondly, it argues that Benjamin’s originality lies in the discovery that historical memory shares the same structure as Proust’s individual memory. Though Parisians in the 19th century seemed to be completely enthralled by the phantasmagorias of arcades, the World Exhibition, and the crowd, there were also people who found the traces of utopian aspiration in the depth of phantasmagoria and remembers them: Fourier and Robespierre. Finally, this article concludes that Benjamin regards history as a discontinuous repetition of the moments remembering utopian aspiration at its origin. When the past, the present, and the future are condensed into one at the moment of memory, a new historical totality is constituted.