Walter Benjamin And the Arcades Project (Walter Benjamin Studies)

315 Pages·2006·2.06 MB·English

by  Hanssen

Walter Benjamin and
The Arcades Project
Beatrice Hanssen,
Editor
Continuum
Walter Benjamin and the arcades project
WALTER BENJAMIN STUDIES SERIES
Series Editors: andrew Benjamin, monash University, and Beatrice Hanssen,
University of Georgia.
Consultant Board: Stanley Cavell, Sander Gilman, miriam Hansen, Carol
jacobs, martin jay, Gertrud Koch, Peter Osborne, Sigrid Weigel and
anthony Phelan.
a series devoted to the writings of Walter Benjamin – each volume will focus
on a theme central to contemporary work on Benjamin. the series aims to
set new standards for scholarship on Benjamin for students and researchers
in Philosophy, Cultural Studies and literary Studies.
Walter Benjamin and romanticism, edited by Beatrice Hanssen and andrew
Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin and art, edited by andrew Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin and history, edited by andrew Benjamin.
Walter Benjamin and the arcades Project
edited by Beatrice Hanssen
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© Beatrice Hanssen and Contributors 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.
Beatrice Hanssen and Contributors have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 082646386X (hardback) 0826463878 (paperback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Photosetting, Fakenham, Norfolk
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall.
contents
acknowledgements vi
abbreviations vii
Illustrations viii
1 Introduction: Physiognomy of a Flâneur: Walter Benjamin’s
Peregrinations through Paris in Search of a New Imaginary
Beatrice Hanssen 1
2 Et Cetera? The Historian as Chiffonnier irving WoHlfartH 12
3 The Flâneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of
Loitering susan Buck-Morss 33
4 Passage Work BarBara JoHnson 66
5 Ruin and Rubble in the Arcades estHer leslie 87
6 Geheimmittel: Advertising and Dialectical Images in Benjamin’s
Arcades Project Max Pensky 113
7 A Matter of Distance: Benjamin’s One-Way Street through The
Arcades gerHard ricHter 132
8 ‘The Colportage Phenomenon of Space’ and the Place of
Montage in The Arcades Project Brigid doHerty 157
9 Walter Benjamin’s Dream of ‘Happiness’ elissa Marder 184
10 The Dream-Reality of the Ruin statHis gourgouris 201
11 The Enticing and Threatening Face of Prehistory:
Walter Benjamin and the Utopia of Glass detlef Mertins 225
12 ‘Glass before Its Time, Premature Iron’: Architecture,
Temporality and Dream in Benjamin’s Arcades Project
tyrus Miller 240
13 Remains to be Seen stanley cavell 259
Notes 265
contributors 299
Index 302
acknowledgements
irving Wohlfarth’s and Susan Buck-morss’s essays originally appeared in
New German critique (number 39, Fall 1986) and are here reprinted by kind
permission of the authors and nGC. Commissioned for the present volume,
Barbara johnson’s essay appeared in her Mother tongues: sexuality, trials,
Motherhood, translation (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 2003)
and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author. Stathis Gourgouris’s
essay was commissioned by the editor of the present volume and included in
his does Literature think? (Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2003).
it is here reprinted by kind permission of the author and Stanford University
Press. detlef mertins’s essay originally appeared in assemblage (no. 29,
1996, pp. 6–23) and is here reprinted by kind permission of the author and
assemblage. Stanley Cavell’s essay is reprinted by kind permission of the
author and artforum (april 2000).
abbreviations
all references to the Convolutes of the arcades project are given parentheti-
cally, according to each Convolute’s letter, without further specification.
ap Walter Benjamin, the arcades project, (trans. Howard eiland and
Kevin mclaughlin; Cambridge, ma: Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1999).
c the correspondence of Walter Benjamin 1910–1940, (ed. Gershom
Scholem and theodor W. adorno; trans. manfred r. jakobson and
evelyn m. jakobson; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
ca theodor W. adorno and Walter Benjamin, the complete correspondence
1920–1940, (ed. Henri lonitz; trans. nicholas Walker; Cambridge,
ma: Harvard University Press, 1999).
cB Walter Benjamin, charles Baudelaire: a Lyric poet in the era of high
capitalism, (trans. Harry Zohn; london: new left Books, 1973).
cs the correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom scholem, (ed.
Gershom Scholem; trans. Gary Smith and andré lefevere; Cambridge,
ma: Harvard University Press, 1992).
GB Gesammelte Briefe, (ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri lonitz; Frankfurt
am main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000).
Gs Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte schriften, (ed. rolf tiedemann and
Hermann Schweppenhäuser; Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89).
oWs Walter Benjamin, one-Way street and other Writings, (trans. edmund
jephcott and Kinsley Shorter; london: new left Books, 1979).
pW Walter Benjamin, passagen-Werk, (ed. rolf tiedemann and Herman
Schweppenhäuser; Frankfurt am main: Suhrkamp, 1982) = Gs 5.
sW Walter Benjamin, selected Writings, (ed. michael W. jennings; Cambridge,
ma: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1997–2003).
UB Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, (trans. anna Bostock; london:
new left Books, 1973).
List of Illustrations
Chapter 3
3:1 l’homme-sandwich. (Miroir du Monde, nr. 316, 21 march 1936, p.45)
3:2 German street scene, 1933. escorted by armed guards a jew stripped
of his shoes and trousers carries a ‘humorous’ legend: ‘i am a jew, but
i have no complaints about the nazis’. (archiv Gerstenberg)
3:3 M annequin vivant installed in a display window. (Miroir du Monde,
1936)
3:4 Street hawkers, wind-up toys, and children. (Miroir du Monde,
1936)
3:5 Woman adjusting her stocking garter. (musée Grévin. Photo: Buck-
morss)
presentation de quelques nouveautés. Fashion: mr. death, mr. death!
(pW 110)
Magasin de nouveauté.
Chapter 8
8:1 Walter Benjamin, dienstmädchen romane des vorigen jahrhunderts’,
das illustrierte Blatt (april 1929). (Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek
/ Senckenbergische Bibliothek, Frankfurt am main.)
8:2 antoine Wiertz, La Liseuse de romans (1853). (royal museum of
Fine arts, Brussels, Belgium.)
8:3 antoine Wiertz, Le soufflet d’une dame belge (1861). (royal museum
of Fine arts, Brussels, Belgium.)
8:4 Photograph of Paul delaroche, Édouard V, roi mineur d’angleterre,
et richard, duc d’Yorck, son frère puîné, ou Les enfants d’Édouard
(1830). (Gustav Schauer Verlag, Berlin, 1861. British library,
london.)
1
IntroductIon: PhysIognomy
of a flâneur: Walter
BenjamIn’s PeregrInatIons
through ParIs In search of a
neW ImagInary
Beatrice Hanssen
an anecdote in which Kant captures himself in pithy fashion:
[Kant’s] famulus, a theologian who was unable to connect philosophy to the-
ology, once asked Kant for advice as to what he should read on the subject.
Kant: read travel literature.
famulus: In dogmatic philosophy, there are things I do not understand.
Kant: read travel literature.
Walter Benjamin, ‘Unknown anecdotes about Kant’, gs 4:809
could one think of Benjamin as a peripatetic philosopher, a philosopher in
motion, a critic on the go, whose cultural theory reflected the position of
the nomadic intellectual in modernity? surely it is well known that national
socialism forced Benjamin into exile, into an enforced nomadic existence in
Paris, where he would wander from one borrowed room and apartment to
the next. Less a topic of consideration, however, is the fact that during the
Weimar years, Benjamin practised the fine art of travel, gravitating to Paris
like his affluent intellectual friends. Unlike Kant, who never left Königsberg,
Benjamin crisscrossed europe, visiting numerous cities and places about
which he dispatched literary postcards, denkbilder, thought-images, full
of moving physiognomical details about the urban topographies of cities
such as Berlin, Paris, Moscow, naples or Marseilles. Unlike the reclusive
nietzsche, Benjamin stayed at a distance from the mountains and the green
pastures, evoking nature only in its auratic capacity, as he wandered through
the streets of urban europe, developing a method of cultural analysis that
was honed on the activity, the profane illumination, of the flâneur. these lit-
erary postcards were to become the seeds of the cultural theory of modernity
and the metropolis on which Benjamin was at work in the late 1920s and
30s, and which would be consecrated in his unfinished magnum opus, the