The Arcades Project Paperback | Pages: 1088 pages

Point Based On Books The Arcades Project

Title	:	The Arcades Project
Author	:	Walter Benjamin
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 1088 pages
Published	:	March 30th 2002 by Belknap Press (first published 1982)
Categories	:	Philosophy. Nonfiction. History. Theory. Architecture. Art

Relation In Pursuance Of Books 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.

Identify Books As The Arcades Project

Original Title:	Das Passagen-Werk
ISBN:	0674008022 (ISBN13: 9780674008021)
Edition Language:	English

Rating Based On Books The Arcades Project

Ratings: 4.45 From 2633 Users | 107 Reviews

Write Up Based On Books The Arcades Project

Two members of my family are currently obsessed with this book, so I think I'd better at least flip through it before I try to have dinner with both of them again.Great story behind it, according to my dad: George Bataille had to stash this one in the medieval section of the Bibliothèque Nationale where he worked, when Benjamin fled the Nazis. Then, many many years later, way after that whole Nazi thing had blown over, a bunch of people were sitting around one day scratching their heads

I've been reading this book forever...

Of course... I haven't read the entire book yet. This book is full of quotes and little pieces of thoughts and complex ideas... Is like an enormous puzzle! That's why I love it... I love to "solve" things, to travel through words and concepts... I love when I know that I'm another piece of that puzzle.This is not an "easy" book (I'm not going to define "easy" for me... that's not so easy)... but it is really advisable to all the people who want to get lost for a while into one of the greatest

"Even the automobiles have an air of antiquity here." Guillaume Apollinaire A monumental work! Makes you wonder how even greater the work would have been had Walter Benjamin lived to finish it. As it stands, it's a tour de force. He quotes a great deal from French primary sources and well-known artists and writers. In this case, I'm glad I had the French edition at hand.

This is the kind of book you are always currently reading, because this is the kind of book that is almost impossible to read entirely, and once you've read it you need to start reading again. Fragmented and brilliant, sometimes confusing but always worthwhile, this book will come back to you again and again. It's supposedly a history of bourgeois Paris in the 1800s, but really it's a history of people, of culture and consumerism, of replication and lights, of wandering the city and modernity



The Arcades Project. What can be said of a work that defies classic narrative, criticism, philosophy, structuralism, modernism, studies in architecture, thinking, walking, gazing into, and it is a work so vast and inclusive I keep it close and just open up anywhere in the book, read a few passages and grapple with them or absorb in the moment as if right there next to Benjamin in conversation on just why is it that he Arcades of Paris bring about such near religious observations on sign,