  However, to reduce the project to its own, restricted de facto trajectory, rich as it is, does too much violence to the historical and philosophical framework it embodies, from which the material on Baudelaire gains its broader significance. The overarching historical framework is that of capitalist modernity as a ‘crisis of experience’. (The two terms, capitalism and modernity, are inextricable for Benjamin in the context of 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.) The founding problematic of Benjamin’s thought—the expansion of the Kantian concept of experience, to infinity—is thus here provided with a concretely historical context, in which the notion of infinity/absoluteness becomes associated with the concept of history itself. The problem: to dialectically redeem the concept of experience [Erfahrung] by finding an appropriate way of experiencing the crisis of experience itself. In classically ‘modern’ terms, the present is defined as a time of crisis and transition, and philosophical experience (truth) is associated with the glimpse within the present, via the past, of a utopian political future that would bring history to an end. More immediately, the crisis is given political meaning by two possible resolutions: the one destructive; the other constructive/ emancipatory—fascism and communism, respectively. In this respect, for all his theoretical heterodoxy as a ‘Marxist’ and his philosophical affinities with Adorno, Benjamin was in search of, and in solidarity with, new forms of collectivity connected to a communist future. Herein lay the basis of his friendship with Brecht. Unlike Brecht, however, he conceived them within the terms of a speculative cultural history (Caygill 2004).  