On September 18,  Garris Rogonyan gave a talk at the international conference “Southern Benjamin: Mourning, Play, and Revolution,” held in Rome on September 17–20, 2025. The paper was titled “Childhood and Homesickness: Walter Benjamin and Stanley Cavell on Language and Forms of Life.”

The main focus of the talk was the image of childhood in Benjamin’s late writings. This image serves as an analogue to the “homesickness” Cavell speaks of when describing the project of late Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a return of words to their “native” language games. At the same time, Benjamin, in his own works, offers a more precise description of the “home” to which our words are meant to return. This description, as a continuation of Benjamin’s early concept of language, in many ways complements Wittgenstein’s understanding of language games and forms of life.