Walter Benjamin is one of the most enigmatic thinkers of the 20th-century - a philosopher, critic, and writer whose reflections on history, art, and Judaism resist easy categorisations.
His work moves between Marxism and messianic thought, critical theory, the study of language and poetry.
At the heart of his work are bold and unsettling questions. What if history is not simply a narrative we inherit but something that can be interrupted? What if justice is different to law and power? And how can Judaism be a critical force that can help navigate modern life?
In this short introduction, we will trace how these questions emerge in Benjamin’s thought, and how they invite us to think differently about history, justice and the possibility of change. These questions matter today more than ever.
Daniel Weizman is a philosophy lecturer at City Lit and the Mary Ward Centre in London, and the founder of the London School of Continental Philosophy. He holds a PhD from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), with a focus on philosopher Gilles Deleuze. His teaching spans twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek, with connections to politics, culture, and aesthetics.