Benjamin'S Arcades : An Unguided Tour Paperback / softback

by Professor Peter Buse, Ken Hirschkop, Scott McCracken, Bertrand Taithe

Part of the Encounters: Cultural Histories series

Paperback / softback

Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks

Description

The Arcades Project, Walter Benjaminâ€™s unfinished masterpiece, is a brilliant but maddening book.

Benjaminâ€™s Arcades: an unGuided Tour looks for the method behind the madness, carefully reconstructing the intellectual and political context of the work and unpacking its numerous analogies, metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by three literary scholars and one historian, this text is both a reading companion and a vigorous interpretation of one of the most important humanistic texts of the twentieth century. Benjaminâ€™s Arcades is composed of 16 entries and a specially designed 'convoluted' index. Some of the entries confront Benjamin with a different reading of his own historical sources (Blanqui, Marx, Giedion), others look intensively at key themes, obsessions, and images (the gambler, commodity fetishism, the Angel of History, magic). Throughout there is discussion of the relationship of Benjaminâ€™s work to current and past debate on topics such as modernity, Judaism, fascism, and psychoanalysis. Benjaminâ€™s Arcades opens up Benjaminâ€™s texts to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and will be an essential text for those seeking to better understand this extraordinary work. -- .