Diotto, Caterina
Junior Fellow: October 2023–September 2024
Research Project: Sceptical Foundations in Walter Benjamin’s Reflections on Experience, Language, and Literature
The main hypothesis of this study is that scepticism—the impossibility of knowledge—lies at the core of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on experience, language, and literature, starting from his early writings in 1913 to 1916. This impossibility does not represent a dead end. On the contrary, it is the critical precondition for a developing theory that sees constant change and the obliqueness of concepts and aesthetic forms—such as translation, allegory, and literary montage—as the only way to remain truthful to reality, both theoretically and politically.
This project’s second hypothesis is that this dialectic finds its structure thanks to the intensive exchange between Benjamin and the Jewish cultural milieu that began in 1913, and especially that with Gershom Scholem regarding Jewish mysticism from 1915 on. Its philosophical consequences, however, extended up to the 1930s and can be recognised in several works, such as Crisis of the Novel, Berliner Kindheit, The Storyteller, and even in the methodology chosen for the Arcades Project.
Caterina Diotto is a postdoctoral researcher. She has a PhD in philosophy from the Università degli Studi di Verona.