Benjamin's Arcades

<p>The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin's unfinished masterpiece is a brilliant but maddening book. Benjamin's Arcades: an unGuided Tour looks for the method behind the madness carefully reconstructing the intellectual and political context of the work and unpacking its numerous analogies metaphors and conceptual gambits. Written by three literary scholars and one historian this text is both a reading companion and a vigorous interpretation of one of the most important humanistic texts of the twentieth century.<br><br>Benjamin's Arcades is composed of 16 entries and a specially designed 'convoluted' index. Some of the entries confront Benjamin with a different reading of his own historical sources (Blanqui Marx Giedion) others look intensively at key themes obsessions and images (the gambler commodity fetishism the Angel of History magic). Throughout there is discussion of the relationship of Benjamin's work to current and past debate on topics such as modernity Judaism fascism and psychoanalysis. Benjamin's Arcades opens up Benjamin's texts to a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives and will be an essential text for those seeking to better understand this extraordinary work.</p>