From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Dec 13 2006 - 15:26:22 EST
>Joan Jara, the british wife to the great chilean composer Victor Jara, >assassinated I think in the very National Stadium, wrote a beautifull book >called Canção Inacabada (I guess in English it >might be Unfininished Song) which >portrays the cultural revolution that was going >on in the poblaciones (=barrios >in Venezuela, favelas in Brasil) among other things. Worth reading. Also there >is a wonderful movie trilogy about the period >under Salvador Allende all the way >to the coup de etat. But the name escapes me right now. Worth seeing and >learning from experience! >Paulo Thank you for these recommendations. I was just talking with someone about the word experience, and your sentence made me think about Walter Benjamin who tried to understand why experience so often finds itself eroded in modernity while our experiences seem to be shock like, titillating, exciting outside of any kind of narrative. Benjamin tried to understand this dichotomy of experience which he marked as the difference between Erfahrung and Erlebnis. Michael Eldred surely knows much about Benjamin's critique of Ernst Junger's celebration of Kriegserlebnis. In his Songs of Experience Martin Jay (I am being told) relates how Benjamin was once deeply troubled and hopeful about the erosion of Erfahrung. But one question we have is what traumatic authoritarian dictatorships have meant for the erosion of Erfahrung. Rakesh
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