BENJAMIN (Walter).
The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Prepared on the Basis of the German Volume edited by Rolf Tiedemann.
The first English translation of Walter Benjamin’s tragically incomplete yet enduringly influential work of social and cultural theory. Entrusted to his friend Georges Bataille shortly before Benjamin’s suicide as the Nazis advanced upon Catalonia, The Arcades Project existed as an enormous, brilliantly disparate array of writings, notes, cuttings and quotations that Benjamin had assembled over the previous decade, largely concerned with city life in nineteenth century France and especially with the iron-and-glass ‘arcades’ of Hausman’s Paris. Seeing in them a ‘dialectical image’ within which the currents of modern life were embedded, Benjamin organised his work into a series of 36 ‘convolutes’, folders with organisational labels such as ‘Fashion’, ‘Baudelaire’, and ‘Modes of Lighting’.
The present English translation was a landmark: there is almost no other work comparable in the philosophical canon to its sheer scale of semi-organised fragmentation.
