The World of Striving. Walter Benjamin’s ‘Notes to a Study on the Category of Justice’

There are clear affinities between the project that can be identified in Walter Benjamin’s short text “Notes to a Study on the Category of Justice” and the philosophy of Kant. The aim of this paper is to show that despite possible affinities there is a fundamental divide concerning how the ‘world’ is thought. Both link justice to the world and yet the world as it appears in each instance is radically distinct. It is in terms of this distinction that the specific philosophical force of Benjamin's work emerges.