Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Small amount of light pencil annotation which could be erased. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Comments Walter Benjamin: “This quotation is the locus classicus for the representation of the arcades [Passagen]”2 which lent their name to his most daring intellectual project. The Passagen-Werk was to be a “materialist philosophy of history” constructed with “the utmost concreteness”3 out of the historical material itself the outdated remains of those nineteenth-century buildings technol- ogies and commodities that were the precursors of his own era. As the “ur-phenomena” of modernity they were to provide the material necessary for an interpretation of history’s most recent configurations. The Paris Passages built in the early nineteenth century were the origin of the modern commercial arcade. Surely these earliest ur-shopping malls would seem a pitifully mundane site for philo- sophical inspiration. But it was precisely Benjamin’s point to bridge the gap between everyday experience and traditional academic concerns actually to achieve that phenomenological her- meneutics of the profane world which Heidegger only pretended.+ Benjamin’s goal was to take materialism so seriously that the his- (SP)