Overview
Parisian arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann's renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire (ca. 1850–1870). Benjamin linked them to the city's distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the flâneur (i.e., a person strolling in a locale to experience it). [2]
Benjamin first mentioned the Arcades Project in a 1927 letter to his friend Gershom Scholem, describing it as his attempt to use collage techniques in literature. [3] Initially, Benjamin saw the Arcades as a small article he would finish within a few weeks. [4]
However, Benjamin's vision of the Arcades Project grew increasingly ambitious in scope until he perceived it as representing his most important creative accomplishment. On several occasions Benjamin altered his overall scheme of the Arcades Project, due in part to the influence of Theodor Adorno, who gave Benjamin a stipend and who expected Benjamin to make the Arcades project more explicitly political and Marxist in its analysis. [3]
It contains sections (convolutes) on arcades, fashion, catacombs, iron constructions, exhibitions, advertising, interior design, Baudelaire, The streets of Paris, panoramas and dioramas, mirrors, painting, modes of lighting, railroads, Charles Fourier, Marx, photography, mannequins, social movements, Daumier's caricatures, literary history, the stock exchange, lithography, and the Paris Commune.
It influenced Marshal McLuhan's studies in media theory. [5]
Structure
The project's structure is idiosyncratic. The convolutes correspond to letters of the alphabet; the individual sections of text— sometimes individual lines, sometimes multi-paragraph analyses —are ordered with square brackets, starting from [A1,1]. This numbering system comes from the pieces of folded paper that Benjamin wrote on, with [A1a,1] denoting the third page of his 'folio.' [6] Additionally, Benjamin included cross-references at the end of some sections. These were denoted by small boxes enclosing the word (e.g., ■ Fashion ■). [7]
The sections of text are at times Benjamin's own thoughts, and at other times consecutive quotations. These two types of textual sections are differentiated in their typography, with a large typeface for his writing and a smaller one for citations. This convention comes from the German version, but has no basis in Benjamin's manuscript. The convolutes also make extensive use of epigraphs from obscure publications.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Louis Auguste Blanqui was a French socialist, political philosopher and political activist, notable for his revolutionary theory of Blanquism.
Gershom Scholem was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Harvard University Press (HUP) is a academic publishing house established on January 13, 1913, as a division of Harvard University. It is a member of the Association of University Presses. Its director since 2017 is George Andreou.
Flâneur is a French term popularized in the nineteenth-century for a type of urban male "stroller", "lounger", "saunterer", or "loafer". The word has some nuanced additional meanings. Traditionally depicted as male, a flâneur is an ambivalent figure of urban affluence and modernity, representing the ability to wander detached from society, for an entertainment from the observation of the urban life. Flânerie is the act of strolling, with all of its accompanying associations. A near-synonym of the noun is boulevardier.
Péter Szondi was a celebrated literary scholar and philologist, originally from Hungary.
The Gran Hotel Manzana Kempinski La Habana is a luxury hotel in Havana, Cuba. It is located in the historic Manzana de Gómez building, an early-20th-century building that was Cuba's first shopping mall. The Kempinski Hotel chain, belongs to the oldest hotel groups in Europe, Kempinski Aktiengesellschaft.
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History" is an essay written in early 1940 by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. It is one of Benjamin's best-known, and most controversial works.
Franz Hessel was a German writer and translator. With Walter Benjamin, he produced a German translation of three volumes of Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 work À la recherche du temps perdu in the late 1920s.
Susan Buck-Morss (1942) is an American philosopher, visual theorist, and intellectual historian.
Abraham Rovigo was a Jewish scholar, rabbi and kabbalist.
The badaud is an important urban type from 18th and 19th-century French literature, one that has been adapted to explain aspects of mass culture and modern experience.
Gretel Adorno was a German chemist and intellectual figure within the Frankfurt School of critical theory.
"The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire" is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. "Paris, Capital of 19th Century" is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmanization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.
"Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" is one of a diptych of completed essays that was composed during the preparatory outlining and drafting phase of Walter Benjamin's uncompleted composition of the Arcades Project. The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire is its sister essay. The major themes of The Arcades Project—the construction of the Parisian arcades in the early 19th century, their blossoming as a habitat for the flâneur, their demolition during Haussmannization—appear as leitmotifs in both essays.
Werner Kraft was a German-Israeli literary scholar, writer and librarian.
Ilit Ferber is an associate professor of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
"On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" is the first of an uncompleted trilogy of essays articulating a metaphysics or post-metaphysics of language in and as the name of God, written by Walter Benjamin, in response to a series of questions raised by Gershom Scholem in a conversation that began at a villa in the German countryside at the end of the summer in 1916. The second fragment in this trilogy is "On the Mimetic Faculty," written from exile in 1932–1933. The piece "On Language" constitutes the earliest major artifact of Benjamin's thought, preceded only by a few speeches that he'd given in the debating society of Berlin's Jewish Youth Movement, and some articles he'd written for the banned antiwar student journal Der Anfäng.
"On the Mimetic Faculty" is the second of an uncompleted trilogy of essays articulating a metaphysics or post-metaphysics of language, written by Walter Benjamin in the months leading up to and immediately following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag Fire, and the inauguration of the Third Reich. It was sent as the postscript of a letter to his best friend, a Librarian of Ancient Manuscripts at Hebrew University and Master of Kabbalah in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem.
Berlin Childhood around 1900 is a work by Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) written between 1932 and 1938. The text consists of thirty fragments that have features of autobiography, prose poetry, and socio-critical historical study. Benjamin recalls various places, objects, and events in Berlin, creating, in his words, "images that reflect the perception of the big city as a child from a bourgeois family. The book is an artistic record of the historical and social upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century: the First World War, the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the destruction of the old bourgeois world with the rise of National Socialism. The presentation of the cultural topography of the city at the turn of the century is combined with a poetic presentation of the theory of memory and reflections on individual and collective history in modernity. The identification of the main motifs is complicated by the fragmentary form and the lack of a coherent narrative. The commentators highlight the following themes: the relationship between autobiography and historical research, the city as a mythical labyrinth, the spatialization of memory and threshold spaces, visual images and photography, the child's mimetic experience and the semiotics of resemblance, the disintegration of the subject, and the problem of identity and self-identification.
