The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City

To Imagine a Form of Life #3

by David Kishik

This sharp, witty study of a book never written, a sequel to Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project , is dedicated to New York City, capital of the twentieth century. A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it analyzes an imaginary manuscript composed by a ghost. Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project offers readers New York as a landscape built of sheer life. It initiates them into a world of secret affinities between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the glass-covered arcade and the bare, concrete street. These and many other threads can all be spooled back into one for far too long, we have busied ourselves with thinking about ways to change the city; it is about time we let the city change the way we think.

Genres: Fiction, Urbanism, Cities, New York

287 pages, Hardcover

First published March 11, 2015

About the author

David Kishik is the author of To Imagine a Form of Life, a series of five paraphilosophical books. He also translated, from Italian, two of Giorgio Agamben's essay collections. Some of his shorter pieces appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Lapham's Quarterly, 3:A.M. Magazine, and Public Seminar. His work has been translated into German, Russian, Korean, Farsi, and Hebrew. Previously he was a fellow at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Currently he is a professor at Emerson College in Boston. Usually he lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Ben Russell]

So... I bought this by accident thinking it was about city infrastructure and urban renewal and whatnot. Nope! This is a philosophy book about *somebody else's* philosophy work! Well, I'm not going to not read a book just because it's the wrong genre, so I read it over the course of a few flights and one trip to a bar.

It's ... well, I'll be honest, a lot of it went over my head. It's one of those books I just "let the text was over me" as a friend recently opined about Ulysses. I think it's useful to have a working knowledge of The Manhattan Project and The Arcades Project if you really want to understand what's going on in this book - both of which were topics I knew nothing about. However, the tidbits about Warhol, various other philosophers and artists were definitely interesting, and tying them into Benjamin's (er, the 'alleged' Benjamin's) work did make it all more palatable.

Am I glad I read it? Yeah! Am I glad it's over? ...Yeah.

[James Cole]

I enjoyed reading this book quite a bit but Kishik's reading of the Arcades Project is very different from mine. TJ Clark called The Arcades Project "some kind of prose Communist Cantos to set beside the fascist one we have." For Kishik, Benjamin moves to NYC and develops into a kind of YIMBY liberal for whom Arendt and Jacobs supplant Marx and Blanqui. If all you had was Kishik's book you wouldn't ever guess that The Arcades Project was about commerce and revolution.

Still, for all of that it's a very fun book full of great anecdotes and insights. And as a counter-history it's pretty intoxicating.