Arcades Project

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You could spend years trying to read Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project--after all, he spent much of the last 13 years of his life doing the research. When he committed suicide in 1940, he destroyed his copy of the manuscript, and so for decades the work was believed lost. But another copy turned up, and Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin have translated it into English. It is a complex, fragmentary work--more a series of notes for a book than a book itself--which probes the culture of the Paris arcades (a cross between covered streets and shopping malls) of the mid-19th century and the flaneur ("the man who walks long and aimlessly through the streets" in an "anamnestic intoxication [that] ... feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes but often possesses itself of abstract knowledge--indeed, of dead facts--as something experienced and lived through"). The Arcades Project is, frankly, so dense a work that one hardly has enough time to glimpse fleetingly at its sections--over 100 pages of notes on Baudelaire alone!--before mentioning it to you, though one certainly looks forward to the opportunity to peruse it at leisure.

From Publishers Weekly
Because he was Jewish and a Marxist in Nazi Germany, history was against the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). His writings were left scattered in ephemeral publications, went unpublished or were simply left unfinished when, in 1940, the critic committed suicide because he believed that the Gestapo was about to seize him. In Germany, his works have been compiled and scrupulously edited, and now, at last, American readers too have access to his final, great unfinished work in an edition that is both well translated and helpfully annotated by the editor of the German edition, Rolf Tiedemann. In 1927, Benjamin began taking notes for a book that would critique the cultural, public, artistic and commercial life of Paris, a city Benjamin thought of as the "capital of the nineteenth century." The arcades of the title are the city's glass-covered shopping malls dating from that era. This edition is comprised of the fastidious notes he made for this never-completed study. Essentially, Benjamin was planning to write a prehistory of the 20th century. The lively arcades--colorful scenes of public mixing, modern shopping and quotidian activities of all sorts--figure as a focusing device. His ambition was to integrate a picture including advertising, architecture, department store shopping, fashion, prostitution, city planning, literature, bourgeois luxuries, slums, public transit, photography and much more. His perspective is largely Marxist, but not in any conventional or dogmatic sense. Benjamin's chief virtue is an uncanny originality of vision and insight that transcends the constraints of ideology. (Dec.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
The Arcades Project, which Benjamin worked on for 13 years before his death, was an attempt to capture the reality that he believed underlay the political, economic, and technological world of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the phenomenon of the Paris arcades, Benjamin saw a turning away from a communal society based on mutual concern to one based on material well-being and economic gain. To fortify his argument, Benjamin used quotations from a variety of published literary, philosophical, and artistic sources and added his own reflections and commentary. Because of Benjamin's untimely and tragic death, this is not a finished work, but, nonetheless, the architectonic of the whole is impressive in its breadth and as an attempt at historical comprehension. Also included is a poignant, beautifully written eyewitness account of Benjamin's last days and hours. The Complete Correspondence 1928-1940 is an excellent accompaniment to The Arcades Project since a considerable portion of the correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin included here concerns the work that Benjamin called "the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas." Originally published in Germany in 1994, the 121 letters included begin in 1928 and allow an intimate look at the two men's personalities, their philosophical thinking, and their attitudes toward the events, persons, and ideologies of the contemporary world. The last letter is from Benjamin, shortly after he was denied entry into Spain in a futile attempt to flee the Nazis and, thus, shortly before his suicide. Recommended for academic collections.-Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, DC Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A heavy book, to say the least, from one of the exiting centurys greatest thinkers, Walter Benjamin (Selected Writings, Vol. I: 1913-1926, 1996, etc.). Heavy because of its 960 pages, and heavy because of its standing as Benjamins final, and unfinished, work, this tome will prove a curious blessing for those wearing the right equipment. Begun in 1927 as a planned collaboration for a newspaper article on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris, the project soon bloomed in Benjamins mind (appearing in different incarnations in his essays and articles), and would continue to bloom until his suicide in 1940. The arcade came to represent, for Benjamin, the architectural idiom for the liberation of 19th-century bourgeois history. This kaleidoscopic work is arranged in 36 categories with such loosely descriptive headings as Prostitution, Boredom, Catacombs, Dream City, and Theory of Progress. It makes sense why Benjamin would refer to this work as the theater of all of my struggles and ideas. Everything seems to be in there, making it at once awe-inspiring and inscrutable in its present form. Had the war not kept it from its final flower, this theater might have been one of the greatest intellectual works of the century. As it stands, it is merely brilliant. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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Benjamin's work is the most advanced, most complex, and most comprehensive study of the dominant motifs and unresolved tendencies of the nineteenth century that continue to be of critical importance for us today. No other study has measured up to its methodological inventiveness, or so exemplarily met its demand that history writing be reinvented for every topic and on every occasion. — Werner Hamacher


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