Benjamin Now (boundary 2: issue 30:1)

Critical Encounters with The Arcades Project

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Edited by Kevin Mclaughlin and Philip Rosen

Duke University Press

Due/Published April 2003, 220 pages, paper

ISBN 0822365782

A special issue of boundary 2

The Arcades Project is the unfinished, final work of influential cultural theorist, critic, and historian Walter Benjamin. Until 1999, this huge, unruly manuscript, which provides a more complete picture of the diversity of Benjamin's work than formerly available, had not been fully translated into English. Benjamin Now is a collection of essays that focuses specifically on The Arcades Project.

While this text's title refers to its ostensible subject--the nineteenth-century shopping arcades of Paris--The Arcades Project is a mass of cultural, political, and social material presented in the form of a vast montage. Benjamin Now reconsiders the significance of his theories and writings in light of this final project. The contributors gathered in this special issue--several of whom participated in the translation of The Arcades Project--include leading scholars from modern culture and media studies, comparative literature and literary studies, art history, philosophy, cultural studies, and film studies.

Contributors: T. J. Clark, Howard Eiland, Peter Fenves, Tom Gunning, Michael Jennings, Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Kevin McLaughlin, Philip Rosen, Henry Sussman, Lindsay Waters, Samuel Weber, Peter Wollen

Review

In recent years readers have been treated to an influx of newly translated Benjamin titles. Beyond the multivolume set of Selected Writings, there was the highly anticipated Arcades Project, finally published in English in 1999. Given the depth, richness, and complexity of that monumental and endlessly enticing work, readers can expect a slew of critical works to follow. This collection, a special issue of Boundary 2, is an excellent beginning to the process of decoding and appreciating the Arcades Project. Benjamin Now presents a spectrum of approaches and perspectives on the Arcades Project, a fitting strategy given the proliferation of ideas found in the montage-like structure of that work. Thus, we find an essay that approaches Benjamin’s understanding of Paris from a poststructuralist perspective alongside one that explores how Baudelaire and Marx formed Benjamin's view of commodity fetishism alongside another that examines the influence of the Talmud on Benjamin’s thought. The ambitious and thoughtful essays in Benjamin Now share Benjamin’s spirit of intellectual curiosity, delving into the breadth and depth of his work to unearth its influences, ideas, and relevance to the present. The essays, written by scholars from a variety of disciplines, include:

• “‘Streets, Squares, Theaters:’” A City on the Move – Walter Benjamin’s Paris," Samuel Weber
• “Should Benjamin Have Read Marx?,” T. J. Clark
• “Reception in Distraction,” Howard Eiland
• “Of Philosophical Style – from Leibniz to Benjamin,” Peter Fenves
• “On the Banks of a New Lethe: Commodification and Experience in Benjamin’s Baudelaire Book,” Michael Jennings
• “The Exterior as Intérieur: Benjamin’s Optical Detective,” Tom Gunning
• “The Concept of Fashion in The Arcades Project,” Peter Wollen
• “Architectural History: Benjamin and Hölderlin,” Claudia Brodsky Lacour
• “Between the Registers: The Allegory of Space in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project,” Henry Sussman
• “Benjamin Now: Afterthoughts on the Arcades Project,” Kevin McLaughlin
• “Come Softly, Darling, Hear What I Say: Listening in a State of Distraction – A Tribute to the Work of Walter Benjamin, Elvis Presley, and Robert Christgau,” Lindsay Waters.

  Also of interest: The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project by Susan Buck-Morss