Benjamin's Arcades: An unGuided tour

by Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken

The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s unfinished masterpiece, is a brilliant but maddening book. Benjamin’s an unGuided Tour looks for the method behind the madness, carefully reconstructing the intellectual and political context of the work and unpacking its numerous analogies, metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by three literary scholars and one historian, this text is both a reading companion and a vigorous interpretation of one of the most important humanistic texts of the twentieth century.

Benjamin’s Arcades is composed of 16 entries and a specially designed 'convoluted' index. Some of the entries confront Benjamin with a different reading of his own historical sources (Blanqui, Marx, Giedion), others look intensively at key themes, obsessions, and images (the gambler, commodity fetishism, the Angel of History, magic). Throughout there is discussion of the relationship of Benjamin’s work to current and past debate on topics such as modernity, Judaism, fascism, and psychoanalysis. Benjamin’s Arcades opens up Benjamin’s texts to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and will be an essential text for those seeking to better understand this extraordinary work.

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Peter Buse is Professor in Visual Culture at the University of Salford

Reviews

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A competent engagement with the most indispensable unfinished historiography of the 20th century. Rather ably unpacks those themes for which some work is required to distinguish well from the complete text--flanerie; commodity fetishism; erlebnis/erfahrung, and half-successfully challenges Benjamin on several readings of Marx, Blanqui and Giedion. I'd write much more were it not so late, but if you've already read through the Arcades Project you've no reason to stop there, and if you haven't yet you should be attending to that immediately rather than considering its analysis.

Also see: The Arcades Project Project--
http://www.thelemming.com/lemming/dis...