Benjamin, Fourier, Barthes

This is the revised version of a paper first gi ven at a conference to celebrate thecentenary of the birth of Walter Benjamin (1892-1990), which was held at theGoethe Institut in Sydney in July 1992. Given the rather specialised audience it initally addressed, it may be useful to append here some introductory remarks aimed at readers who may be less familiar with Benjamin's work, especially since the main focus here, the famous 'Arcades' project, remains untranslated. The Arcades project was the main focus of Benjamin 's work during the period of his exile from Nazi Germany, from 1933 until his suicide on the Franco-Spanish border at Port Bou. It began life in 1928 as an essay he intended to write in collaboration with his friend Franz Hessel (the 'Jules' ofTruffault' s Jules et Jim) on the historical and dialectical significance of the Paris arcades, a subject that seized his imagination in part through an impassioned reading of Aragon's surrealist portrayal, in 1£ Paysan de Paris, of a particular arcade that was about to be demolished: the Passage de I'Opera. Like many modernist projects, creative as well as intellectual -compare Musil's The Man Without Qualities, for instance-the subject just grew and grew, and perhaps could never have been brought to a conclusion. For its aim was to provide not only a complete historical and philosophical analysis of nineteenth-century capitalism through a method of microscopic focus upon empirical detail but also a psychological and political programme for 'waking up' outofthedream state of the consumer society

Art · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Philosophy · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

• Charles Fourier

  Jonathan Beecher•Charles Fourier•1986

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