Name: The Arcades Project
SKU: 1632653
Price: 37.86 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Walter Benjamin

Type

Physical Book

Author

Translated by

Publisher

Year

2002

Language

English

Pages

1088

Format

Paperback

Dimensions

26.2x16x4.7 cm

Weight

1.54 kg.

ISBN

0674008022

ISBN13

9780674008021

Edition No.

Synopsis "The Arcades Project "

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 over the course of thirteen years--the theater, as Benjamin called it, of all my struggles and all my ideas. Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in thirty-six categories with descriptive rubrics such as Fashion, Boredom, Dream City, Photography, Catacombs, Advertising, Prostitution, Baudelaire, and Theory of Progress. His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things--a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age. The Arcades Project is Benjamin's effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed true history that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by progress, Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

Walter Benjamin

(Author)

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Walter Benjamin was a prominent philosopher, literary critic, and art and history theorist born in Berlin, Germany. His work and critical thinking have had a profound influence on 20th century cultural studies.
Benjamin was born into a wealthy Jewish family and grew up in an intellectually stimulating environment. From an early age, he showed an interest in literature, music, and art.
In the 1920s, after serving in the German army during World War I, he joined the Frankfurt School, a circle of German intellectuals and social critics interested in transforming Marxist ideas. There, he met other thinkers like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer who were major influences on his work and worldview.
Throughout his life, Benjamin was also deeply interested in politics and social issues. During the years of the Weimar Republic, he actively participated in the cultural and literary field. However, the rise of Nazism to power in 1933 forced him to leave Germany. He first went into exile in Paris and after the French occupation, Benjamin tried to escape to Spain to embark towards the United States, but was detained at the French-Spanish border. Faced with the imminent threat of being handed over to the German authorities, the author decided to end his life.

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