colbert

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

Phantasmagoria is the intentional correlate of immediate experience. M3a, 4

Experience is the outcome of work; immediate experience is the phantasmagoria of the idler. M1a,3




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choiseul

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin


Boredom began to be experienced in epidemic proportions during the 1840's. Lamartine is said to be the first to have given expression to the malady. It plays a role in a little story about the famous comic Deburau. A distinguished Paris neurologist was consulted one day by a patient whom he had not seen before. The patient complained of the typical illness of the times: weariness of life, deep depressions, boredom. "There's nothing wrong with you," said the doctor after a thorough examination. "Just try to relax-find something to entertain you. Go see Deburau some evening and life will look different to you." "Ah, dear sir," answered the patient, "I am Dedrau." D3a, 4

vivienne

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

The father of Surrealism was Dada; its mother was an arcade. Dada, when the two first met, was already old. At the end of 1919, Aragon and Breton, out of antipathy to Montparnasse and Montmarte, transferred the site of their meeting with friends to a café in the Passage de l'Opéra. Construction of the Boulevard Haussman brought about the demise of the Passage de l'Opéra. Louis Aragon devoted 135 pages to this arcade; in the sum of three digits rides the number nine- the number of muses who bestowed their gifts on the newborn Surrealism. C1, 3

verdeau

The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

Arcades are houses or passages having no outside-like the dream. L1a, 1

The street conducts the flâneur into a vanished time. For him, every street is precipitous. It leads downward--if not to the mythical mothers, then into a past that can be all the more spellbinding because it is not his own, not private. Nevertheless, it always remains the time of a childhood. But why that of the life he has lived? In the asphalt over which he passes, his steps awaken a surprising resonance. The gaslight that streams down on the paving stones throws an equivocal light on this double ground. M1, 2

panoramas

From The Arcades Project Walter Benjamin

The interest if the panorama is in seeing the true city- the city indoors. What stands within the windowless house is the true. Morever, the arcade, too, is a windowless house. The windows that look down on it are like loges from which one gazes into its interior, but one cannot see out these windows to anything outside. (what is true has no windows; nowhere does the true look out to the universe.) Q2a, 7