Presentation of Experience and Experience of Presentation: An Introductory Reading of the “Epistemo-Critical Foreword” to the Origin of the German Trauerspiel

The “Epistemo-Critical Foreword” opening Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German Trauerspiel is one of those texts in the history of philosophy which resists the reader’s attempts to make sense of it. The resistance the text exerts on its audience is not a contingent effect of Benjamin’s writing; I suggest that one of the aims of the text is to put the reader through an experience of estrangement. This chapter attempts to shed light on its performance of estrangement as an effect and an example of the type of philosophical presentation (Darstellung) Benjamin wishes to ground. More precisely, this chapter unfolds the dialectic relation of presentation and experience in the “Epistemo-Critical Foreword.” This dialectic will be understood as both a presentation of experience and an experience of presentation. By focusing on such a dialectic of presentation and experience, this chapter aims to produce an alternative approach—one that invites the reader to surrender to the feeling of estrangement that the text seeks to evoke. This approach invites the reader to find enjoyment, if possible, in the enigmatic character of Benjamin’s writing as it takes possession of all certainty and exposes the rifts and fractures in what we perceive as the coherent unity of our experience.