By Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken, Bertrand Taithe
The Arcades undertaking, Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece, is a superb yet maddening ebook. This e-book seems for the strategy in the back of the insanity, rigorously reconstructing the highbrow and political context of the paintings and unpacking its a variety of analogies, metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by means of 3 literary students and one historian, this article is either a interpreting better half and a energetic interpretation of 1 of crucial humanistic texts of the 20th century.
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Additional info for Benjamin's Arcades: An unGuided Tour
Sample text
The idler has relationships with Benjamin's other urban types: the gambler, the flaneur, the collector, the brooder and the student, but these types are not distinct. Gamblers, flaneurs and students are all idle, but idlers have tendencies towards gam bling, flanerie and studiousness. Idleness, like gambling, is a dialectical concept, which cannot be understood except in ter;ms of this broader arrangement or constellation. Coll ecting One of the most potent, because most practical, of Benjamin's offered methods of reconfiguration is collecting.
Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in remembrance we have an ex:perjence that forbids us to con ceive of history as fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with immediately theological concepts. (N8, 1 ) This have-your-cake-and-eat-it argument depends, in the final instance, on the practice and experience of remembrance, which makes no sense if the past is truly dead and buried.
Much of this behaviour now eludes us: the cafes and public baths are in decline and the transient pleasures of the arcades where only a handful of sources of entertainment subsist tend to be nostalgic rather than futuristic. Even though they have lost their Utopian lustre, the fact that the arcades hinted at a different sort of society is still palpable. Arcad ian d reams The reformatory dimensions of the arcades did not elude Benjamin, who noted repeatedly how congruent this architecture of leisure and life, shel tered from the elements and the forces of history, was with the Utopian architectures of Fourierist communities.