Time appears to move forward. History seems to accumulate. Memory feels personal, fragile, interior. Yet twentieth-century philosophy repeatedly unsettled these assumptions. Time may not be a line. History may not be progress. Memory may not belong to an individual consciousness at all.

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This course explores two of the most radical reconfigurations of time in contemporary thought: Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema.

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Walter Benjamin refuses the idea of history as homogeneous, empty time unfolding toward improvement. Against historicism, he proposes constellations in which past and present collide. History does not redeem itself. It must be interrupted. In his early theological fragments, in “Critique of Violence,” and above all in the Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin develops a philosophy of rupture. The past is not finished. It addresses us. Every generation possesses what he calls a weak messianic power: a fragile responsibility to respond to unrealised possibilities, to awaken the defeated, to resist the mythology of progress. Memory here is not recollection but obligation. Time is not continuity but standstill. Justice is not deferred to the future but demanded in the present.

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Gilles Deleuze approaches time from another direction. In his two cinema books, he argues that modern film does not simply represent movement within time but presents time directly. With the collapse of the classical sensory-motor schema, cinema begins to produce time-images: optical and sound situations detached from action, memory-images that fold past into present, dream-images that dissolve reality into virtuality, and crystal-images in which the actual and the virtual become indiscernible. Drawing on Bergson, Deleuze shows how cinema reveals the coexistence of multiple sheets of the past and simultaneous peaks of the present. Time ceases to be chronological sequence and becomes a layered, bifurcating field in which truth and falsity, memory and imagination, are no longer easily separable.

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If Benjamin thinks history through interruption, Deleuze thinks time through coexistence. If Benjamin seeks to shatter mythic continuity, Deleuze explores how cinema constructs crystalline circuits of actual and virtual. Together they offer two profoundly different yet complementary responses to modernity’s crises: fascism, war, technological transformation, and the fragmentation of experience.

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Throughout the course we will read Benjamin’s early fragments, “Critique of Violence,” and the Theses on the Philosophy of History alongside key sections of Deleuze’s Cinema 2: The Time-Image. We will explore how photography, montage, flashback, dream sequences, and the crystal-image reshape philosophical understandings of memory and temporality. We will ask how historical catastrophe alters the structure of time itself. We will examine how cinema becomes a site where thought encounters its own limits, where images do not merely illustrate history but produce new temporal relations.

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Time, in this course, is not a background against which events unfold. It is a force. History is not a narrative of progress but a contested field of fragments and interruptions. Memory is not private recollection but a site where the past insists on justice.

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The course invites participants to rethink what it means to inhabit the present when the past has not finished speaking and the future cannot be guaranteed.