Revisiting the Arcades Project

Deep diving into Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project”/“Passagen-werk” again after many years and it’s almost like reading an entirely different book. It has always felt almost like a work of art, but after serious encounters with Fernand Braudel, Deleuze/Guattari and further studies in anarchism, marxism and history in general the connections I now make in my head while reading are much more rewarding. Materialist culture and positioning is not the same as a materialistic culture y’all. I’m also using the fantastic footnotes and list of important people to a higher degree. I’m interested in the possible links between Benjamin and Deleuze on time and history, both are critical of teleological models of history, but there is also something else bubbling under the surface: The marginalized and lost stories/histories of Benjamin has an affinity with Deleuze’s view that the past is virtual and coexists with the present, lies dormant so to say and can be re-actualized under certain conditions and with caveats (though there are differences for sure). Fascism is for instance never “dead” and “left behind”, nothing is really lost, it is a virtual idea that can be re-actualized (as we can see today), same with socialist revolutionary movement/becoming.