Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience

by Caygill,Howard

• ISBN13: 9780415089586
• ISBN10: 0415089581
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-01-16
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

In this major reinterpretation, Howard Caygill argues that all of Benjamin's work is characterized by its focus on a concept of experience derived from Kant but applied by Benjamin to objects as diverse as urban experience, visual art, literature and philosophy. The book analyzes the development of Benjamin's concept of experience in his early writings showing that it emerges from an engagement with visual experience, and in particular the experience of colour. By representing Benjamin as primarily a thinker of the visual field, Caygill is able to bring forward previously neglected texts on inscription and the visual field and to cast many of his more familiar texts, for instance theWork of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproductionin a new light.

Table of Contents

Preface and acknowledgements	ix	(1)
References and abbreviations	x	(1)
Introduction	xi
1 The programme of the coming philosophy	1	(33)
The concept of experience	1	(4)
A transcendental but speculative philosophy	5	(8)
Language and the infinities	13	(10)
Philosophising beyond philosophy	23	(6)
The experience of modernity	29	(5)
2 Speculative critique	34	(46)
Experience and immanent critique	34	(1)
The development of immanent critique	35	(17)
Mourning and tragedy	52	(9)
Modernism: from immanent to strategic critique	61	(11)
The modern epic	72	(8)
3 The work of art	80	(38)
Image and experience	80	(2)
The speculative image	82	(7)
The critique of art	89	(4)
Technology and the work of art	93	(4)
The work of art in the epoch of its technical reproducibility	97	(21)
4 The experience of the city	118	(31)
Speculative cities	118	(2)
Philosophy in the cities	120	(14)
Urban poetics	134	(9)
The image of the city	143	(6)
Afterword: the colour of experience	149	(4)
Notes	153	(7)
Biliography	160	(3)
Index	163