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What Does the Rainbow Tell?

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2016

Abstract

Seeking to establish a theory of experience overcoming the horizon of the Enlightenment, in some of his earlier texts Benjamin reflects on phantasy. These reflections establish a logics or language of the world besides the (Neo-Kantian) duality of intuition and reason, or receptivity and spontaneity.

This language, instantiated especially by the rainbow, discloses the truth without application of rational categories. The truth, however, does not disclose itself, and cannot be conceived of, simply as a continuum of one medium.

Rather, it appears in a discontinuity transcending this medium without disturbing it.