The Arcades Project

“Benjamin’s crowning achievement…The Harvard University Press edition of Benjamin now in monumental progress is an admirably generous undertaking.”―George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement

“Arcades is an assemblage of quotations, notes and theses that wrestle with themselves to extraordinary effect. In his lifetime, Benjamin saw published only the fragmentary collection One-Way Street, and he initially conceived The Arcades Project as a continuation of that book…It is a privilege, through this collection, to gain access to the workings of such a distinctive mind.”―Guy Mannes Abbott, New Statesman

“Some of us don’t read fiction. We live on history, biography, criticism, reporting and what used to be called belles-lettres. We will be feasting on Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for years to come. Just published in its first full English edition, The Arcades Project should also win readers with broader tastes. By any standard, the appearance of this long-awaited work is a towering literary event. A sprawling, fragmented meditation on the ethos of 19th-century Paris, The Arcades Project was left incomplete on Benjamin’s death in 1940. In recent decades, as portions of the book have appeared in English, the unfinished opus has acquired legendary status. The Arcades Project surpasses its legend. It captures the relationship between a writer and a city in a form as richly developed as those presented in the great cosmopolitan novels of Proust, Joyce, Musil and Isherwood. Those who fall under Benjamin’s spell may find themselves less willing to suspend their disbelief in fiction. The city will offer sufficient fantasy to meet most needs.”―Herbert Muschamp, New York Times

“At last, we can glimpse Benjamin’s avowed masterpiece, The Arcades Project, and pay homage to this strange, vulnerable man, for whom letters and thought and books were everything. It was thirteen years in the making, and scribbled beneath the ‘painted sky of summer’–the huge ceiling mural of Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale…Benjamin claimed The Arcades Project was ‘the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.’ This struggle, and those ideas, aimed to chronicle the whole history of the nineteenth century, over which Paris, majestically, presided, whose arcades symbolized the city’s heart laid bare…Harvard’s Belknap [Press] is brave to publish such an esoteric and pricey specimen. Along with its two recent volumes of Benjamin’s Selected Writings, and with a concluding collection in its way soon, we are now much better able to assess the man–foibles and all–and his legacy as a creative whole.”―Andy Merrifield, The Nation

“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, New York Times Book Review

“Benjamin is important because of his insight into the cultural consequences of capitalism, an insight that gives us a style of thinking about the now inescapable culture of consumerism. We can read Benjamin’s enormous fragment on the Paris arcades not so much to gather information about nineteenth-century Paris, of which it is an abundant and pleasurable resource, as to inform our own experience of everyday life. With Benjamin as a guide, one can begin to glimpse a way of reflecting on capitalism that promises to stave off the despair threatening to overwhelm those who choose not to celebrate this age of trademarked emotions, patented identities, and ready-made souls in plastic bags. And if today one is fortunate enough to walk the streets of Paris with his massive book in hand, as I recently was, Benjamin’s vision of that city’s past begins to haunt the contemporary Parisian streetscape, with phantoms of long-dead dandies and flaneurs, prostitutes and decadents, the ghosts of Baudelaire and Mallarmé appearing and disappearing amid the neon signs and garish billboards advertising American hamburgers and Finnish digital telephones.”―Mark Kingwell, Harper’s Magazine

“[Benjamin’s] style of writing has a narcotic effect that soon envelops the reader in Parisian ambiance. Picking up The Arcades Project is like visiting a ghostly city. One becomes familiar with its thematic streets and alleys, its peculiar cultural constructs, its architecture, and its literatures…The Arcades Project is indeed a sort of magic encyclopedia, freeing its subject from traditional historical and literary interpretations and re-inventing it as a living, breathing picture. It is a maze of small revelations, its pages as seductive and confused as the streets, dreams, and arcades of Paris.”―Jason Cons, Boston Book Review

“A painstaking act of literary reconstruction has fleshed out Walter Benjamin’s lost masterpiece…We may consider here Benjamin’s wonderful remark that ‘knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.’ The Arcades Project is the reverberation of that thunder in a thousand different directions…This posthumous volume suggests that, in its incomplete and fissiparous state, his reflections are themselves an unflawed mirror for the world which he was attempting to explore. He seems to have retrieved everything, and anticipated everything.”―Peter Ackroyd, The Times

“[Benjamin’s] magnum opus, The Arcades Project, has finally been translated into English…If the low price for such a large academic volume is anything to go by, the publishers expect this to be a major event.”―Julian Roberts, The Guardian

“Benjamin was a vital member of what cultural and art historian Robert Hughes has called the ‘modernist laboratory’ of the early part of the 20th century, and, like Virginia Woolf or Paul Cezanne or any other modernist worth her salt, his masterwork presents its own form as worthy of as much interest as its content…Fragment or not, The Arcades Project is a vast creative work that is one part realist novel, one part cultural anthropology, and one part social history and critique.”―Matt Weiland, National and Financial Post

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) was the author of many works of literary and cultural analysis.

Howard Eiland is an editor and translator of Benjamin’s writings.

Kevin McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of English at Brown University and the author of Writing in Parts: Imitation and Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Literature.