{"product_id":"the-arcades-project","title":"The Arcades Project","description":"\u003cp\u003eBy Walter Benjamin\u003cbr\u003eTranslated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e“The Arcades Project was a legend before it became a book...This large volume reproduces every relevant scrap in the Benjamin archives, reprinting, verbatim, every entry in the more than 30 notebooks that Benjamin had meticulously maintained to organize his observations and pertinent passages from books pertaining to a variety of different topics and themes, from 'Fashion' and 'Boredom' to 'Barricade Fighting' and 'the Seine.'” ―James Miller, \u003cem\u003eNew York Times Book Review\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e“The force of [Walter Benjamin's] ideas in The Arcades Project is cumulative. You are pulled in and overwhelmed. True, it's a work of cultural history, but it can also be thought of as the greatest epic poem written in the 20th century: fragmented, contradictory, and profoundly suggestive.” ―André Alexis, \u003cem\u003eGlobe and Mail\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"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, \u003cem\u003eDas Passagen-Werk\u003c\/em\u003e) 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.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eFocusing 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Arcades Project\u003c\/em\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePaperback\u003cbr\u003e1088 pages\u003cbr\u003eBelknap Press, 2002 \u003cbr\u003e6.5 x 1.75 x 10 inches\u003cbr\u003eISBN 9780674008021\u003cbr\u003eTheory\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"vendor-unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":67592218050728,"sku":"9780674008021","price":31.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0175\/8594\/files\/The-Arcades-Project_Walter-Benjamin.jpg?v=1791063251","url":"https:\/\/neue-galerie-design-shop.myshopify.com\/products\/the-arcades-project","provider":"Neue Galerie Design Shop \u0026 Book Store","version":"1.0","type":"link"}