„Избачен из календара“: искуство и приповедање
„Dropped from the Calendar“: Experience and Storytelling

Summary/Abstract: The topic of the paper is Walter Benjamin’s theory of storytelling. Understanding stories, storyteller and storytelling in terms of the historically changeable structure of experience, W. Benjamin made several hypotheses about modern crises of storytelling as a symptom of the crises of experience, caused by industrialisation, rapid urbanisation and new technologies of communication and information. In his essays, sketches and fragments, both published and posthumously discovered, he argued that the storytelling, as he understood it, is the most pertinent and complete way of expressing experiences, endangered by prevailing characteristics of modern life, such as the constant exposure to psychologically unmanageable sensations and stimulus, which could not be “translated” into experiences. As modern consciousness struggles to block shocking sensation, preventing them to leave deep and long-lasting impressions and traces in one’s memory, the ability of gaining valuable, memorable and communicable experiences decrees and gradually vanishes, so as the art of authentic storytelling as a means of community-making. Instead of stories, based on communal, transmissible, and common experiences, the subjective, individualistic, detached novel and the fragmented, decontextualized, meaningless information (in the form of the news) have occupied all the attention and awareness. In order to further clarify these and other Benjamin’s theses connected with the sociopsychological and cultural functions and significance of the lost art of storytelling, some points of Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy of language are introduced in the last part of the paper. As experience has become unavailable and inaccessible, the silence, as a means of temporal getting back in the pre-subjective, and pre-linguistic state of existence, is becoming new utopian horizon and ideal.

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