Arcades Project



The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was Walter Benjamin's lifelong project, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered "arcades" (known in French as Passages couverts de Paris). These arcades came into being as a result of the Haussmannisation of Paris which fostered the city's emerging and distinctive street life and provided a backdrop for the practice of flânerie. Benjamin's Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances during WWII. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections.

Publication history
The notes and manuscript for the Arcades Project and much of Benjamin's correspondence had been entrusted to his friend Georges Bataille before Benjamin fled Paris under Nazi occupation. Bataille, who worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale hid the manuscript in a closed archive at the library where it was eventually discovered after the war. The full text of Benjamin's unfinished magnum opus was printed in the 1980s after years of difficult editorial work. The book is hailed as one of the milestones of 20th-century literary criticism, history and theory. Nevertheless its publication has given rise to controversy over the methods employed by the editors and their decisions involving the ordering of the fragments. Critics argue that this reconstruction makes the book akin to a multi-layered palimpsest. The Arcades Project, as it stands, is often claimed and as a forerunner to postmodernism.