Book description
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed…
Why read it?
2 authors picked The Arcades Project as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
There are numerous reasons why this text should be read. Personally, Benjamin's reflections on progress and history are crucial to a critique of capitalist modernity.
From a methodological perspective, this text allows the reader to enter Benjamin's laboratory and grasp the essential aspects of his groundbreaking methodology that merged cultural analysis, historical research, and philosophical reflection. Benjamin's unique approach combined elements of sociology, anthropology, and literary critique, creating a multidisciplinary work that defied conventional boundaries.
From Massimiliano's list on a Marxist’s conception of time, history, and politics.
The exiled German critic Walter Benjamin committed suicide after he was detained on the Spanish border when fleeing from Nazi-occupied France in September 1940.
Published only in 1986 (and translated only in 1999), his Arcades Project explores the "dreamworlds" of 19th-century Paris, the "city of lights," through "the smallest and most precisely cut components"—"its arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railroad stations, and the more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love, and conflagrations."
Benjamin's masterwork has profoundly influenced my books…
From Derek's list on imaginative histories.
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German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
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