Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience

The writings of the Weimar philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin continue to provoke controversy in the fields of philosophy, critical theory and cultural history. In this major reinterpretation, Howard Caygill argues that all of Benjamin’s work is characterised 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 analyses 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 Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction in a new light.