Walter Benjamin's Concept of Philosophical Critique

Walter Benjamin is widely recognized as one of the twentieth century's great social, cultural, and literary critics. Despite his wide recognition and influence, the philosophical commitments and mechanics of his critical procedures remain poorly understood. Efforts to translate his concept of critique into Hegelian or Marxist vernaculars tend to produce more problems than they solve, while the various proposals to see Benjamin as a deconstructive thinker avant la lettre usually founder on his explicit social commitments. To remedy these problems, my dissertation offers a systematic reconstruction of Benjamin's concept of critique, which advances three major claims. First, Benjamin's 'critique' is not a version of 'immanent criticism' (i.e. continental philosophy's default strategy of identifying an object's supervening conceptual or normative framework and evaluating both content and scheme in light of a specific experience of failure). Second, Benjamin's basic critical orientation is informed by Southwestern Neo-Kantianism's theories of concept formation and historical research (as initially developed by Heinrich Rickert, later refined and implemented by Max Weber); Benjamin inherits this program, but externalizes ('ontologizes') its reflective practices of value-recognition and presentation to show how the constitutive and regulative registers of value (and of related notions like 'necessity' and 'possibility') come apart. Finally, Benjamin's 'ontologization' of the Neo-Kantian concept of value results in an affordance-like metaphysics of meaning that informs what I call (following Howard Caygill) a transcendental, but speculative critical practice, which proceeds by showing not only that a given experience is schematized by a constitutive value, but also that this value is but one among many other possible speculative orientations. The raw and unmediated juxtaposition of incommensurable values motivates a transformative critical praxis, which leads to the collective constitution of new contexts of action and understanding. My systematic reconstruction makes two philosophical contributions. From a historical perspective, it finds Benjamin a home in a philosophical tradition, and prepares the way for a better understanding of his highly original approaches to historiography and social analysis. From a methodological perspective, it shows that immanent criticism suffers from deep internal tensions and proposes an alternative approach to philosophical critique.