The Angel of History | Walter Benjamin | Keyword

Understanding our relationship to history

In this podcast episode, the speaker discusses how our understanding of history is often problematic. We tend to erase the evils of the past and only focus on the experiences of privileged individuals who were able to write and preserve their testimonies. This limited perspective excludes the majority of people, such as working-class and racially marginalized individuals. The speaker emphasizes the need to interrogate our relationship to history and question how we can remedy the sins of the past. They highlight the risk of reducing history to trivialized facts, as illustrated by the "jeopardyification of history," where historical events are turned into mere trivia questions with monetary value. The episode explores the concept of historical materialism and raises questions about alternative approaches to engaging with the past.