Customer Reviews

Walter Benjamin: The Colour of Experience

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Caygill's book is largely unilluminating and somewhat misguided. While this work tracks many of the places where Benjamin mentions experience directly (such as Experience, One-way Street, On the Program of Coming Philosophy, Surrealism, The PAris Arcades, etc.) he does not offer insight into how the material analysis would render the theological and political categories as a hightened critical ground of inquiry or revolutionary action. He does not fully think through the idea that Benjamin handles incomensurable theses as depending on one another. Although this is a good place to start for a composit of Benjamin's theory of experience it is largely unconvincing that this reading would yeild more than another focus or approach to his work (e.g. politcal, theological, philosophy of history, allegory, etc.). And while he cits many of the hard and citable passages from Benjamin's corpus, he often relies on the catchiness of the passage to explain itself. Also I found the work to lack a clear understanding of benjamins use of dialectic and attempts to read him as being a bit too close to his predecessors (especially Derrida). as an alternative I would start with Susan Buck-Morss' Dialectics of seeing--a truly wonderful study--, Gary Smith's Benjamin: Aesthetics, History and Philosphy, and John McCole's Antinomies of Tradition. I found all of these much better than Caygill's account.