The Arcades Project

Benjamin worked on mountainous piles of notes,for about thirteen years beginning around 1928 for his infatuation with les passages, those passageways,girded with black iron canopes where we buy umbrellas,tobacco,shoes,books,and women. It was a microcosm of the most important city in the world, the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It was the only city Benjamin preferred to live in despite the economic hardships of a struggling writer to do that. He found Paris at the edge of technology,much like our Silicon Valley is today,it was the beginning of progress so to speak,but with Washington and New York thrown in, all mixed in a fantastic quagmire of innovation,invention,excitement,and where the old preserves the new. Layers of cultural artifact, burdened with the scraps of histoy,all to be explained. Iron,for instance,a building material is a focus, on architecture and the Eiffel Tower, the feathery like weightlessness of the mammoth black innovative girders seen just about from anywhere in Paris. It was a step backwards for no one knew how to deveop it,simply display conceit for the colossolness of it,much like Victorian England,its bridges with giant sized rivits, thousands of them. Architecture, technology, photography were all items for Benjamin to spend his imagination here, discovering the ends of things, the values of the old. You learn French history in great detail,with notes copied as well from 1878, The Paris Commune is a chapter, one of revolution, as seen from a reader of Marx,rather than a staunch Marxist. Still Benjamin drew on the the progress of capitalism and where it fell down profoundly resulting in World Wars, and the emergence of some of the darkest pages in European history. Prostitutes and gambling are spoken of in one chapter, I found this boring and just idle passage work.Literature is visited as well with profile-like chapters on Baudelaire,the theory of knowledge, and Benjamin always inscribes a profundity, one of those items that is a recepticle a conduit for millions of thoughts preserved in one place."At no poin in time, no matter how utopian, will anyone win the masses over to a higher art, they can be won over only to one nearer to them". Something E trade practices everyday

I bought this book wanting to read the author in digital format on kindle. Unfortunately the purchased item is just pictures of the pages of the original book. It is not in digital format. The pages were completely illegible on the kindle, and they did not even load on my iPad. On the Kindle, the pictures were of two pages as if you would open a book, lay it down, and take a picture of both pages at the same time. This makes it very small and it only took up half the readable kindle page. Also there was no way to adjust it since it is not digital but a picture, and on top of it all it was upside down. I was unaware that this was even done. I thought that anything sold on Kindle was in a digital format that was legible. Sorry I returned it before I took a picture of it.

This is well-worth the money. There is no better philosophical dissection of a city

Herbert Muschamp, the NY Times architectural critic, has written an interesting article about Benjamin and his Paris project which appears in the Arts & Leisure section on January 16, 2000. While not strictly speaking a book review it nevertheless offers some observations as to the cultural importance of Benjamin's chef d'oevre. Another book on the Arcades Project is Susan Buck-Morss's 'The Dialectics of Seeing' (MIT 1989, 1991, 1997).

I have elsewhere written a review of Benjamin. One of the finest, most original thinkers --- philosopher-critics.From a reader/writer who celebrates the printed page. Some writers simply cry out to be part of a literary library.

Excekent book

Essential reading for academics studying 19th century Paris. The Project contains Benjamin's notes assembled as coherently as possible; but since they are notes, reading can be complicated at times.

Quick ship & book as described.

This is a weighty tome which I found impossible to plough through at my usual brisk pace, so I put it aside after my initial attempts. However I keep returning to it and fitfully progressing. I have little idea what I am getting from it and yet I still come back months after starting. It sits on my bedside table as other books come and go and it still sits in my mind. Odd.

Fascinating testimony for our fragmented and voyeuristic times, full of original and transformative insights. Indispensable reading for those involved in the creative arts.

Makes a great text available in English. The book is produced well. To be read in conjunction with Benjamin's contemporary Bloch, The Principle of Hope. Two books about everything.

Quick shipping. Item as described.

missing pages