Abstract

The revival of interest in Walter Benjamin's writings, many of which are now appearing in English for the first time, has generated a fairly large body of scholarship devoted to the question: How does Benjamin stand with respect to philosophy? Since Benjamin rarely engages in anything resembling traditional philosophical argumentation, this question has received a bewildering variety of responses, many of which have reflected the principal concerns of the commentators as much as Benjamin's own. This is particularly true of the response given by Theodor Adorno, who made the first attempt to develop something like a philosophical position from Benjamin's writings. Adorno criticized some of Benjamin's later work for its lack of mediation, which, in essence, meant its failure to come to terms with Hegelian dialectics as Adorno conceived it. Howard Caygill rarely mentions Adorno in his recent book, but the overall trajectory of his interpretation of Benjamin's converges with that of Adorno: in both cases Benjamin's antipathy to Hegel serves as a defining feature of his thought.