The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin

The Arcades Project Reviews

• 
  Trevor

  I haven’t quite finished this. It is very long and I don’t know that it is the sort of book that you ever really finish. It is a book that is sort of written back-to-front. I mean, normally, books have a whole lot of joined up text and then, to support what is said in that text, there might be pages and pages of end-notes and references. This book does that in reverse - endless ‘notes’ and very little written text by the author. You need to know a couple of things before you start this, I think. The first is that Marxists up until and during the Second World War thought of montage as a highly effective way to come to understand and critique the world. I mean montage like in art - you know, where you get images from newspapers and so on and perhaps draw something in and around the images you have stuck to your art work. The point, I think, is to present a critique of society by the juxtaposition of these images - many of them commonplace. I really like this idea - since I think the world is made commonplace by the repetition of images in various stereotyped contexts - we tend not to view this as propaganda, we think of it as advertising, but it seems pretty much the same thing to me.
  
  The premise of this book is that the development of the use of iron and glass in the 1820s as building materials (or there about) allowed for what was effectively a new type of architecture - and one that was unquestionably capitalist. That is, it allowed for the creation in Paris of arcades - basically, nineteenth century shopping malls. These were designed to be entire worlds in themselves. And the point of them was to create a world in which the commodities that capitalism must sell to sustain itself could be best displayed and therefore sold - but also within their creation of a new normal. So, this book, in a sense, is an exploration of this new, capitalist architecture. And he doesn’t hold back. He discusses in detail just about every imaginable detail of these new worlds. Well, except he sort of doesn’t at the same time. You see, for such a long book, little of it is actually written by Benjamin.
  
  A very dear friend of mine had been an English teacher for a long time and she once told me that she suspected that many of the research papers and academic books she had read over the years have so many references that she basically doubted that anyone had ever read them all. Rather, they had worked out what they wanted to say and then perhaps grabbed some references from other books and other papers that mostly talked about the same stuff as they were wanting to talk about. This book is definitely not one of those. For the most part it is a montage of quotes and references and asides grouped according to topics that then go to make up a picture of the arcades. Except, for a lot of this book I didn’t feel I was learning really as much about the arcades as I was about Paris. This book is certainly a love song to Paris and a very large chunk of this is also an extended discussion of the life and work of Baudelaire. There must be 100 pages in the Baudelaire chapter alone and that is hardly the only time he is mentioned or discussed. There’s also a long discussion on flaneurs - basically, people (mostly men, since women doing this are treated as prostitutes) who sit and watch life go by.
  
  I don’t know the poetry of Baudelaire, I don’t speak French, and I’ve never been to Paris. As such, a lot of this went completely over my head. I can see it is a remarkable piece of work, that it is likely to present endless insights that I’m not able to identify. I also really love the idea of presenting a work in this way - even if this might not have ultimately been what he had intended for his master work. Read one or other of the other reviews to this too, they will tell you the remarkable story of how this work came to be and why it was never completed and how it was saved from the Nazis. The point is to allow the reader to make connections and to come to an understanding that is not purely didactic, that isn’t purely what the author ‘told you’ - if that makes any sense. That said, the book often left me confused and a bit lost.
  
  I need to mention one part of this that has really stayed with me. It is a story that Anatole France about been read a story at school when he was ten about a genie that gave a boy a ball of thread - the ball was the thread of his life - and the genie said that how he untangled the thread would decide how quickly his life progress. He could make it go faster or slower (or even stop entirely) depending on how fast he pulled on the thread. In the end, his entire life from this point lasts about 4 months before he dies of old age. As someone currently sitting on a plane in a cramped seat and with another 15 hours or so before I get to where I’m going, I have to say I’m pretty grateful I have never met that genie.
• 
  Jessica

  Two members of my family are currently obsessed with this book, so I think I'd better at least flip through it before I try to have dinner with both of them again.
  
  Great story behind it, according to my dad: George Bataille had to stash this one in the medieval section of the Bibliothèque Nationale where he worked, when Benjamin fled the Nazis. Then, many many years later, way after that whole Nazi thing had blown over, a bunch of people were sitting around one day scratching their heads wondering what had ever happened to that crazy thing Benjamin had been working on back when the shit hit the fan, and Bataille said, "I have it!" And then the Germans spent about twenty years editing the hell out of it, as they are wont to do, and it wasn't translated into English until like the eighties or something, but now is readily available at every respectable bookseller in America.... Anyway, it looks difficult and it's way too long for me to take on right now, but I'm definitely planning to take a look at this thing before I have to share another meal with these lunatics.
• 
  Hakan

  pasajlar tamamlanmamış, tamamlanamamış bir kitap. walter benjamin üzerinde on üç yıl çalışsa da tamamlanmaya yaklaşmamış hatta. hem içeriği hem biçimi için çalışması sürerken, eseri, hayatının eseri, yol alırken hayatı son bulmuş.
  
  tamamlanamayan, çok eksik olan bu eser "pasajlar" değil haliyle. elde sadece pasajlar projesinin malzemeleri var: tamamlanmış birkaç deneme, projeye dahil olmayacağı kesin olarak bilinmesine rağmen projeyi açıklayacak birkaç deneme, gerisi taslaklar, notlar, alıntılar. bu kitap haklı olarak "pasajlar projesi", "pasajlar çalışması" diye yayımlanmış belli başlı dillerde. daha da haklı olarak malzemenin olabildiğince geniş kısmını içine almış. bu kitap almanca aslında 1.380 sayfa, ingilizcede yaklaşık 1.100, italyancada 1.200...türkçede ise 296 sayfa. sevgili yayınevimiz "pasajlar" adında tereddüt etmediği gibi 1000 sayfa içeriği yok ettiğini belirtme gereği bile duymamamış.
  
  pasajların türkçe basısında yok edilen 1.000 sayfasının bir kısmı notlardan, taslaklardan ibaret, büyük çoğunluğu ise walter benjamin'inin biriktirdiği alıntılar. yayınevimiz lütfedip taslaklardan birkaç sayfayı örnek mahiyetinde kitabın sonuna eklemiş, alıntılara ise hiç lüzum görmemiş. yayınevinin alıntıları kitaba dahil etmemesinin anlaşılabilir sebepleri olabilir diye düşünüyor insan ama pasajların tamamlandığında bir alıntılar kitabı olacağını biliyoruz. benjamin on üç yıl boyunca bine yakın kaynaktan alıntı toplamış bu proje için, dile kolay, bunu biliyoruz. yayınevimiz böyle bir içeriği yok saymış. kitabın başında almanca baskıyı yayına hazırlayan tiedemann'ın giriş yazısı var. alıntıları, taslakları, notları birlikte okuduğumuzda pasajlar projesini biraz olsun anlayabileceğimizi ya da hissedebileceğimizi biliyoruz o yazıdan. hissedemiyoruz, bin sayfa yok ortada, ama olsa hissedebileceğimizi biliyoruz.
  
  bu 296 sayfalık kitap pasajlar değil, pasajlar projesi de değil sonuç olarak. içindeki yazıların yarısı metis'in 1993 tarihli son bakışta aşk seçkisinde var zaten. giriş yazısıyla beraber "19. yüzyılın başkenti paris" ve "paris pasajları" yazılarına ulaşabilenler için bu türkçe baskının hiçbir değeri yok. burada yayınevi eleştirisi yapmak anlamsız, farkındayım ama walter benjamin adı altında, pasajlar başlığında saygıyla verilecek sonsuz sayısız "yıldızın" zerresinin bu baskıyla ilgili olmadığını belirtme ihtiyacı hissettim.
• 
  Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

  I f**kin’ hate shopping malls.
  
  I suppose, were I to have stuck it out, and had Benjamin stay’d on a little longer and gotten this thing wrap’d up, he may have assisted me somewhat in articulating exactly why I f**kin’ hate shopping malls so much. I can scarcely utilize them for their urinal=capacity ; just duck-in duck-out. But amid 200=odd pages of stuff about Baudelaire I just quit. Just walk’d off.
  
  I don’t really do the nineteenth century. I don’t really do Paris. I don’t really even spend much time in France. Nor do I really give too many hoots about sociology unless it is worked into a universal, non=trivial kind of thing which I’m sure Benjamin would eventually have done. And I’m pretty sure that maybe something might have started to pop were I to get past this f**kin’ two hundred pages about Baudelaire, but I really just kind of doubt it.
  
  Meanwhile, The Arcades Project offers the aspiring novelist, and by novelist one must mean the innovative experimental sui generis type who finds formal clues in non-fictive genre, a whole new world of formal possibilities for that Next Great Novel.
• 
  Wes Allen

  The Arcades Project is a difficult work to review, so please bear with this inept student of history and philosophy as I struggle to compose my thoughts about this extensive literary montage.
  
  
  
  Walter Benjamin never completed The Arcades Project (Passagen Werk in German), which he worked on from 1927 until his untimely death in 1940. He was 48 years old. The book remained in the form of meticulously gathered quotes and philosophical meanderings written on hundreds of note-cards. Prominent Benjamin scholar Rolf Tiedemann posits that The Arcades Project grew beyond Benjamin’s initial scope and was far from completion when he committed suicide in Spain via morphine overdose. As with all posthumous publications, I wonder how the author would feel knowing that his unfinished thoughts are on display for the world.
  
  While unfinished, the scope of the project remains daunting and impressive. In the Passagen Werk, Benjamin seeks to capture the historical and cultural essence of Paris during the years 1830 – 1870, using the arcades as a frequent touchstone throughout. Prominent convolutes include the Arcades themselves (A), Iron Construction (F), Baudelaire (J), The Flaneur (M), and the Theory of Progress (N). Of course, any attempt to summarize The Arcades Project will fall flat, as this giant of historiography defies the literary schemata so often employed by the reading public.
  
  Nonetheless, there are recurrences in the book that help create a foundation—to use Tiedemann’s metaphor as delineated in “Dialectics at a Standstill”—essential to understanding Benjamin’s magnum opus. Here are a few of the themes that stand out:
  
  1. The idea of progress as espoused by culture at large is inane and nonexistent. See convolute N13,1:
  

  The concept of progress had to run counter to the critical theory of history from the moment it ceased to be applied as a criterion to specific historical developments and instead was required to measure the span between a legendary inception and a legendary end of history. In other words: as soon as it becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation. This latter may be recognized, in the concrete exposition of history, from the fact that it outlines regression at least as sharply as it brings any progress into view (478).

  
  2. There is a dialectic between present and past that is always occurring. Nothing is truly new, and elements of the past dominate the present.
  
  3. This dialectic between present and past ought to be apprehended (the Now of Recognizability) and remembered. The consequence is an awakening from dream by the unconscious. See K1,3:
  

  The new, dialectical method of doing history presents itself as the art of experiencing the present as waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers in truth. To pass through and carry out what has been in remembering the dream!—Therefore: remembering and awaking are most intimately related. Awakening is namely the dialectical [ . . . ] turn of remembrance (389).

  
  4. The collector annihilates the use value of whatever he collects (with a possible exception made for bibliophiles). Reference H1a,2:
  

  What is decisive in collecting is that the object is detached from all its original functions in order to enter into the closest conceivable relation to things of the same kind. This relation is the diametric opposite of any utility, and falls into the peculiar category of completeness. What is this “completeness”? It is a grand attempt to overcome the wholly irrational character of the object’s mere presence at hand through its integration into a new, expressly devised historical system: the collection (pp. 204 – 205).

  
  5. Each age precipitates its end by dreaming of the age to come. By dreaming of the subsequent era, the current era awakes to find itself transformed.
  
  Each of these themes is explored exhaustively within The Arcades Project and integrated with the arcades themselves. Of course, the arcades are far more than the amalgamation of iron and glass; rather, they embody an integral piece of cultural history that merges into the Now. While the electric lamp and wider streets that came to dominate Paris catalyzed the decay of the arcades, their influence remains in the present of Benjamin and the present of today.
• 
  بابک احمدی

  حافظه ابزار کشف گذشته نیست. خاطره همان قدر وسیله ی شناخت گذشته است که خاک ابزاری است برای شناخت شهرهای مدفون شده.
  والتر بنیامین.
• 
  Deniz Urs

  Frankfurt Okulu’nun en naif düşünürü, kültür tarihçisi Walter Benjamin’in kısacık olan yaşamı boyunca yazdığı ve tamamlanmamış olarak kalan pasajlar, döneminin kültür niteliği taşıyan her bir ayrıntısına değiniyor. Mimariden,edebiyata, sokak yaşamından, yeni kültürel icatların sosyal hayatı biçimlendirişine kadar akla gelebilecek her bir nüveyi kapsıyor. En önemsiz gibi görünen ayrıntıları bile belli bir bağlama yerleştirebilme, ayrıntılardan yola çıkarak belli bir dönemin genel görünümüne varabilme gibi özellikleri sayesinde 19yy Paris’ini harkûlade betimliyor. Ayrıntılarda gizli olan,mal ekonomisinin Paris pasajlarını bir fetiş haline getirdiğini, teknik ilerlemenin görünenin ardında doğrusal bir ilerlemenin aksine yeni bir sömürü mekanizmasının mihenk taşı durumuna gelmesini ince ince işliyor. Sinema, Fotoğraf ve dönemin tüm çoğaltılabilen sanat yapıtlarının savaşın hizmetine koşulduğunu da mimliyor. Kitabın en yarım kalan bölümü de Charles baudelaire ve şiiri üzerine olan bölümler.. Fakat bu bölümlerde bile Şairin kişiliği ve politik duruşu üzerine bir şeyler okuyor olduğunuzu düşünürken, şairin bir şiirindeki imgeden yola çıkıp Poe’nun yarım yüzyıl önce yazdığı bir hikayedeki dedektif kahramanın nasıl Paris’in 19. yy kentlisini müjdelediğini okurken buluyorsunuz kendinizi.. Benjamin yaşasaydı geride neler bırakacaktı kim bilir...
• 
  Ernie

  The Arcades Project is sprawling, unclassifiable....oneiric.
  
  Posing as an historical analysis of the Parisian arcades--the outdoor equivalent of (and precursors to) shopping malls--this book is also (among other things) a cultural history of the 19th century, an intellectual biography of Baudelaire, an essay on the philosophy of history, a meditation on industrialization, a portrait of the city of Paris, one of the best works of criticism on literary modernism, a reflection on the textual styles of the Kabbalah, and also an original contribution to both psychoanalysis and Marxism.
  
  It is also, as Benjamin himself notes, an "awakening" from the dream of the 19th century.
  
  
  This book is almost impossible to read straight through, but carefully directed perusal bears great rewards. Convolutes N and K are particularly good.
• 
  Argos

  Öncelikle bu büyük yazın insanı, edebiyat eleştirmeni, filozof, deneme yazarı Walter Benjamin’in bu kitabını okumak isteyenlere önerilerilerimi sıralamak istiyorum.
  
  1. Deneme türü sevmiyorsanız, özellikle roman ve öykü türünde okumaları yapıyorsanız bu kitabı listenizden çıkarın.
  2. Kitaba başladıysanız kitabı hazırlayan Rolf Tiedemann’ın “Giriş” bölümünü hiç okumayın, hem ürkütücü, hem de kitabın içeriğine hiç katkısı olmayan ayıp kaçacak ama bir sürü bilgi çöplüğü sizi okumanın başında kitaptan soğutur.
  3. Buna karşın mükemmel çevirisinin yanında Ahmet Cemal’in kitabın sonuna koyduğu “Açıklamalar”ı kitabı bitirdikten sonra okuyun, çok yararlı oluyor.
  4. Kolayca okunan nefis bir usluba sahip olmasına rağmen “Pasajlar”da bölüm sonlarına numaralandırılarak konulan notlar okumayı zorlaştırmakta, ancak mutlaka bu notları o anda okuyun.
  5. W. Benjamin alıntı yapmayı çok seviyor, bu ise bir çok kişi, bir çok isim (ki bunlar arasında edebiyat dünyasından tanıdık çok isim var) demek oluyor. Kitabı okurken yorulmak için bir neden daha size.
  
  Şimdi kitap hakkındaki yorumuma geleyim: Alman Walter Benjamin bu yaşıma kadar okumayarak çok şey kaybetmiş olduğumu düşündüren bir yazar, düşünür, kültür insanı. Gerçi “Tek Yön” (aforizmalar ve özlü sözleri) ile “1900’lerin Başında Berlin’de Çocukluğum” (otobiyografi sayılabilir) adlı kitaplarını okudum ancak bunlar W. Benjamin’i tam olarak tanımaya yetmedi doğal olarak. Başyapıtı kabul edilen bu kitap farklı konularda (Baudelaire ile ilgili iki metin de dahil) 6 denemeden oluşuyor. Yazdıkları da kendi gibi flanörce (flaneur). Daldan dala atlıyor, geziyor, sekiyor, oturuyor, konular arasında flanör gibi dolaşıyor.
  
  “Tarihsel materyalizm"i tanımlaması, aynalar yardımı ile içeride gizlenen bir cücenin kutudan iplerle bir kuklaya satranç hamleleri yaptırmasına benzeterek çarpıcı bir şekilde başladığı ilk bölümde diyalektik yöntemi kendine göre yorumlamış. Marksist düşüncenin bu kadar duygusal ve yumuşak, adeta bu öğretinin mekanik geleneğine karşı yazıldığını düşündürten okuduğum en en özgün metin budur diyebilirim.
  
  XIX yüzyıl kültür tarihini Paris ve Baudelaire üzerinden ince detaylarla mükemmel anlatmış. Sanat kuramı hakkında, başta sinema olmak üzere yeni ve halen geçerli birçok tez ileri sürmüş, sanat ürünlerinin çoğaltılması veya fabrikasyon üretiminin yapılmasının bu sanat eserlerinin herkesin görebilmesini böylece sanatta eşitlikçi bir anlayış oluşmasını sağladığını vurgulamış.
  
  Günümüzdeki AVM’lerin prototipi olan pasajları gelişmekte olan kapitalizm ile bağdaştırmış. Paris’in pasajlarını tarihi ve kültürel özellikleriyle anlatmış. Kısaca çok şey yazmış, zaten bu kitap anlatılmaz okunur.
  
  Ve W. Benjamin’den çok etkilendiğim bir söz ile yorumumu sonlandırıyorum :
  
  "her faşizm başarısızlığa uğramış bir devrimin kanıtıdır"
  
  Walter Benjamin okumaya devam...
• 
  Ana Anderson

  I've been reading this book forever...
• 
  Andrew Nolan

  I feel like I just speed read the Necronomicon.
• 
  Jay Sandover

  You could not say this work of scholarship is deeper than it is wide, nor could you say it is wider than it is deep. It is DEEP and WIDE. It is definitely the most ambitious thing I've ever encountered. Incomplete because Benjamin did not live long enough to finish it. In fact, the story of what happened to the manuscript at the end of his life is included in the volume, and it moved me to tears. The late 30's and early 40's were desperate times.
  
  This book covers everything from Proust and Baudelaire to the economics and politics of 19th century France. It aims to explain every day life in the 19th Century, both the personal and the political. Benjamin was a collector, and here is his greatest collection, quotations and passages from the time period of his study and later scholars that sheds brilliant light on his subject.
  
  One of my Top 5 books ever.
• 
  M

  This is the kind of book you are always currently reading, because this is the kind of book that is almost impossible to read entirely, and once you've read it you need to start reading again. Fragmented and brilliant, sometimes confusing but always worthwhile, this book will come back to you again and again. It's supposedly a history of bourgeois Paris in the 1800s, but really it's a history of people, of culture and consumerism, of replication and lights, of wandering the city and modernity and why we are now what we are now because of how they were back then.
• 
  raShit

  "Kitleler, kendilerini oyalayacak bir şeyler ararlar, oysa sanat, izleyicisinden kendini toplayıp yoğunlaştırmasını ister."
• 
  Maddy

  I don't know if I'll read a book sadder than this.
• 
  Andrew

  Where to start with this behemoth?
  
  First, let it be said that Benjamin was one of the 20th Century's most original minds, and I've been a big fan for years. My thesis advisor in college always tried to push this book off on me, but now that I've read it, I don't know how she could have expected me to use it academically. These little fragments, a great many of them quotes, are almost like a mosaic that hasn't quite come together, the grand, final, unfinished project of Benjamin's life. I doubt many people would want to pick up something like this, but I do.
• 
  Nick Grammos

  I go through this book now and then with no purpose in mind. The raw materials of a book, Benjamin planned to write, are on offer as the raw materials for others to think on. And that's all I do with it. I read, I sit, I think of Arcades. Anyone who lives in Melbourne could walk into Howey Place in the city and look up at the covered arcade and think what it meant to have that glass and steel roof above your head when shopping.
• 
  Gökalp Aral

  Walter Benjamin ile ilk karşılaşmamız, onun anılarında idi, bu ise ikinci kitabı. Adorno okurken -kendisi açıklamalar yapmayı çok sevmediği için her zaman ve her söylediğine- bazıları düşüncesinin kaynaklarını aramıştım. Şimdi diyebilirim ki, bir ölçüde buldum bunları, özellikle sinema konusundaki tavırlarının benzerliğine bakınca. Bu arada benim açımdan kitabın en ilginç bölümü de bu oldu; Tekniğin Olanaklarıyla Yeniden Üretilebildiği Çağda Sanat Yapıtı. Bana hiç yoktan getirdiği kuşku, birkaç gündür film izlemekten de alıkoyuyor beni.
  Sınıflara, ekonomiye, üretim sürecine fazlaca odaklanmış bir Marksist okuma yerine, elbette böylesine psikanalizle birlikte çalışan, kültüre ve bireye odaklanan, edebiyattan ve mimariden konuşan bir incelemeyi tercih ederim; bu nedenle müthiş keyif aldım okurken.
  Metis seçkisi, Son Bakışta Aşk'ı ve Cogito'nun Walter Benjamin sayısını da almıştım, kendisi üzerine okumaları sürdürmek için fakat Son Bakışta Aşk ile Pasajlar'ın kimi metinleri aynı, içeriğe bakmadan, benim gibi, alabilecek arkadaşları uyarmış olayım.
• 
  Mr Shahabi

  This is, truly, the greatest unfinished work in history
  
  When a man daydream and contemplate on his surrounding, hearing remedies of the past, ghosts of heroic tales, and the footprints of millions of souls in the streets of the divine city of Paris. And that man happens to be Walter Benjamin? You know that your in for a treat.
  
  I know that il reread this book again and again in the coming years, because like it's title, it's an unfinished project, maybe I can find a personal closure with Walter, and we let fate and Paris to be the judge of times to come..
  
  
  Drink Tea
• 
  Paige McLoughlin

  Some interesting pieces on nineteenth-century figures and cultural moments really a series of articles on what was of interest to Benjamin. He ranged over a broad area of topics.
• 
  michal k-c

  read this for research so i don’t feel like writing a lot here. couple quick points:
  1) Benjamin predicted capitalism won’t die a natural death, but he did not predict capitalism being resuscitated multiple times by unnatural means (2009 financial crisis, this COVID recovery)
  2) Department stores finished what Napoleon started
  3) boy can you ever tell what sections Adorno wanted Benjamin to add (like the chapter simply titled “Marx”
  4) worth reading the whole thing if not only to get to the final anecdote, “The Story of Old Benjamin”.
  
  monumental book tbh
• 
  Charles

  The Arcades Project
  
  A ragbag book. For years, Benjamin acquired quotations, anecdotes, and any sort of thing related to the covered shopping arcades to be found around Paris. As the project continued the connection with the original interest became more tenuous – the most significant part of the book is a long essay on Baudelaire. The entire collection is organized in Benjamin’s own filing system; it is a repository from which he drew the material for many of his published articles. The contents of the (virtual) file drawer itself were published in 1999. The closest literary form would perhaps by the Japanese pillow book; it is something like a dictionary arranged according to an inscrutable logic. So, for example, item T5.2 (modes of lighting) “The cashier; by gaslight, as living image – as allegory of the cash register” (p570) What does this mean? I don’t know. Benjamin was a powerful thinker, a major figure of the inter-war years. The Arcades Project is the material of that creativity. It is a pirate’s treasure, Monte Christo’s bottomless chest of loot. There’s too much of it to spend, so you needn’t be burdened with any pusillanimous warnings to spend it wisely.
  
  Take your chance to get down on the floor and play with Benjamin’s toys.
• 
  Mary E. Martin

  One doesn't so much "read" this book as refer to it. It is one massive, beautiful jumble of thoughts inspired by the arcades built in the nineteenth century in Paris. Benjamin draws greatly upon other writers and their ideas. Because it is almost entirely impossible to categorize the work which is more than one thousand pages long, in terms of literature, most people simply call it research for something else, the form of which isn't yet clear.
  
  I have turned to it as a resource as I write the next novel in The Trilogy of Remembrance. My two main characters, Alexander and Peter, are walking through the Piccadilly and Burlington Arcades in London, England. And so, since I love all manner of arcades myself, I wanted to dip into this book to get some sense of atmosphere. Benjamin looks at Arcades as almost a dream world and that serves my purpose.
  
  The fact that Benjamin escaped from the Nazis by struggling across the border between France and Spain carrying the manuscript [thousands of pages] in a sack, gives new meaning to dedication to one's work.
• 
  Akira

  Of course... I haven't read the entire book yet. This book is full of quotes and little pieces of thoughts and complex ideas... Is like an enormous puzzle! That's why I love it... I love to "solve" things, to travel through words and concepts... I love when I know that I'm another piece of that puzzle.
  
  This is not an "easy" book (I'm not going to define "easy" for me... that's not so easy)... but it is really advisable to all the people who want to get lost for a while into one of the greatest minds of the 20th Century.
• 
  saïd

  Walter Benjamin is, to me, the "makes no goddamn sense, compels me though" guy.
• 
  Katrinka

  I get the sense that had Middlemarch's Mr. Casaubon been a better and more confident person, he would have at best left us with the Arcades Project.
• 
  Flavio is reading books

  Eine Einladung zum Herauspicken, mehr nicht. Die Zerstückelung ist zu gross, der Fluss zu klein, um alles lesen zu wollen.
  
  «Die Masse bei Baudelaire. Sie legt sich als Schleier vor den Flaneur: sie ist das neueste Rauschmittel des Vereinsamten. - Sie verwischt, zweitens, alle Spuren des Einzelnen: sie ist das neueste Asyl des Geächteten.»
  
  -Walter Benjamin 1982
• 
  Sancho Panza

  Başucu kitabım. Hiç değişmez.
  
  Yolunuzu Baudelaire şiirinden tarihi Paris pasajlarlarına düşürür...
  
• 
  Ed Summers

  I'm not sure I will ever be finished with this book. It is an endless maze of the best kind, like the city and the histories it describes.
• 
  Michal Lipták

  Unfinished work cannot exist. It may have existed in some period of history, but not now. Today it can't; today, everything is finished.
  
  I’ll once again (again!) use examples from Schubert. The Eighth, “Unvollendete” , is finished as it is. The Tenth will be completed, one way or another, even by means of token buzzes in Berio’s Rendering. Were it not completed, though, it’s always finished. Sviatoslav Richter plays sketches of last two movements of Reliquie sonata – they are convoluted, abrupt, broken off, and finished as such. Were they completely abstract, they will nonetheless be finished. Scattered remnants of any lieder will be mercilessly categorized and arranged chronologically in “complete editions”, in the same way every philosophical scribble (and – decades from now on, if climate change doesn’t kill us – tweets and posts) is arranged into Gesammelte Schriften. The modern comprehension is developed to such a degree that it has no problems accommodating everything, no matter how fragmentary. It’s inherently totalizing. It’ll always be finished – it’ll always mean something.
  
  Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, though
  Buck-Morss is entirely correct when she says that it is “non-existent text, (…) it does not exist – not even a first page, let alone a draft of the whole”, is likewise finished – one way or another. The theoretical considerations are fully explored in other texts: Artwork essay,
  Baudelaire studies, On the Concept of History (these all should be read before or alongside). The methodology ties to the
  Trauerspiel study (likewise should be read before or alongside):
  
  

  Attempt to see the nineteenth century just as positively as I tried to see the seventeenth, in the work on Trauerspiel. No belief in periods of decline.

  
  
  The purpose is now explicitly political and – alongside – theological (messianistic):
  
  

  …the arcades as precursors …to have the revolutionary potential of these “precursors” explode in the present…

  
  
  This work, then, provides (was supposed to provide) matter to theory and method. Passagen-Werk is endless accumulation of munition and explosives. But no shots are actually fired, no acts of terrorism are committed.
  
  There are two ways in which one can approach this – the first way is to read this as it is, as finished text at one of the outer boundaries of literature, nonetheless fully incorporated into literary corpus by avantgardes. Benjamin himself suggests such reading:
  
  

  Method of this project: literary montage. I needn't say anything. Merely show.

  
  
  What this approach displays, however, is the ultimate impotence of the project. While there’s feeling that one’s being armed, in the end one’s not navigated anywhere.
  
  The second way is to divine the text that would be, which is what Buck-Morss does. But this all hinges on the ontology of the “non-existent text” (obvious contradictio in adiecto, of course – but this can be only a starting point); that is, whether we consider such “non-existent text” as Hegelian negation or whether we consider it in line with Heidegger’s “Nichts nichtet”, that is, something beyond the horizon of existent text, essentially unapproachable but continuously disconcerting.
  
  The line of reading in this second mode would be as following: the would-be text would make – didactically – the past present, but in a particular way. It would not re-animate the 19th century for the contemporary reader, it would not insert it into the narrative of historical progress, it would not retrospectively rationalize it. It would, rather, make the reader awaken into it:
  
  

  This genuine liberation from an epoch has the structure of awakening (...): it is entirely ruled by cunning. For awakening operates with cunning. Only with cunning, not without it, can we work free of the realm of dream. (...) Dialectical structure of awakening: remembering and awaking are most intimately related.

  
  
  The model here is beginning of
  À la recherche du temps perdu, where drowsy half-dreaming narrator feels the furniture in his room which spurs involuntary memory and reconfigures into the past. Likewise, the dissected elements of present are to be reconfigured, aligned with the likewise dissected elements of the past, and this reconfiguration makes the reader (even if we imagine the target of this “pedagogy” not as “masses”, but as Marxist theoreticians) awaken into past as present and present as past, which is the ultimate comprehension, bearing within itself the salvation/redemption. The past is, as we say, redeemed here. The method described is close to allegory – but it must be borne in mind (and this is the point of Trauerspiel study and Baudelaire essays) that Benjamin doesn’t consider allegory as establishing links between unformed present with formed past – it’s not a method of explaining unknown present through known history – but only as reconfiguration, a tool in time of crises, which can only disclose the ruin for what it is. In this it explodes the present.
  
  The problem is that in this reading we are only left with method. Benjamin’s own present is distant to us now; for us, it’s about linking past to past. And the Hegel/Heidegger dilemma is this: whether we can, on the basis of the demonstration of method in work (though not attaining the goal), whip up the dialectics further and make the method attain its goal in our own present, or whether the text must always remain non-existent but it – timelessly in such case – affects us precisely through its necessary non-existence. Which means, of course, that salvation/redemption is not possible (fellow GoodReads reviewers are indeed amorphously saddened by this book, which could be an evidence of this).
  
  To summarize, the possible results are: impotence, failure, and hopelessness. All three results are of course intimately related.
  
  Anyway, I’ll take even one step back, as announced at the beginning of the review: the issues lie mercilessness of the editorial work – which of course can’t de otherwise. So let’s propose a thesis: the power, hope and success is preconditioned on the possibility of leaving the work unfinished. When this is (no longer?) possible, there’s no clear division between totalization and fragmentation. One’s always completed against his will; one can never feel complete no matter how much one desires it.
  
  So this is the end point. We – even as puny reviewers on GoodReads – have no choice but to partake in the desecration of the ruins. Benjamin is far from being the only philosopher making this point – on the very contrary, the theme is extremely common – but he’s the one arguably making it most forcefully, by the studious, laborious, long-term effort to provide the theory with the particular body. At the end of the day, though, Benjamin can’t escape the fate of an idler which he describes, and neither can his readers:
  
  

  With the trace, a new dimension accrues to "immediate experience." It is no longer tied to the expectation of " adventure"; the one who undergoes an experience can follow the trace that leads there. Whoever follows traces must not only pay attention; above all, he must have given heed already to a great many things. (The hunter must know about the hoof of the animal whose trail he is on; he must know the hour when that animal goes to drink; he must know the course of the river to which it tums, and the location of the ford by which he himself can get across.) In this way there comes into play the peculiar configuration by dint of which long experience appears translated into the language of immediate experience. Experiences can, in fact, prove invaluable to one who follows a trace – but experiences of a particular sort. The hunt is the one type of work in which they function intrinsically. And the hunt is, as work, very primitive. The experiences [Erfahrungen] of one who attends to a trace result only very remotely from any work activity, or are cut off from such a procedure altogether. (Not for nothing do we speak of "fortune hunting.") They have no sequence and no system. They are a product of chance, and have about them the essential interminability that distinguishes the preferred obligations of the idler. The fundamentally unfinishable collection of things worth knowing, whose utility depends on chance, has its prototype in study.

  
  
  And sure, idleness is laborious – but here one must recall
  Veblen (absent in Passagen-Werk), who reminds us of the same in much less poetic and much less sublime manner.