Walter Benjamin The Colour of Experience

This book analyzes the development of Walter 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. It represents Benjamin as primarily a thinker of the visual field.

Preface and acknowledgements -- References and abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1 The programme of the coming philosophy -- The concept of experience -- A transcendental but speculative philosophy -- Language and the infinities -- Philosophising beyond philosophy -- The experience of modernity -- 2 Speculative critique -- Experience and immanent critique -- The development of immanent critique -- Mourning and tragedy -- Modernism: ftom immanent to strategic critique -- The modern epic -- 3 The work of art -- Image and experience -- The speculative image -- The critique of art -- Technology and the work of art -- The work of art in the epoch of its technical reproducibility -- 4 The experience of the city -- Speculative cities -- Philosophy in the cities -- Urban poetics -- The image of the ciry -- Afterword: the colour of experience -- Notes -- Biliography -- Index.

Postgraduate

Howard Caygill is Professor of Cultural History at Goldsmiths College, University of London.