Benjamin's Arcades

The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamins unfinished masterpiece, is a brilliant but maddening book. Benjamins 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. Benjamins 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 Benjamins work to current and past debate on topics such as modernity, Judaism, fascism, and psychoanalysis. Benjamins Arcades opens up Benjamins texts to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and will be an essential text for those seeking to better understand this extraordinary work. -- .