1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910787251403321

Autore

Gelley Alexander

Titolo

Benjamin's passages : dreaming, awakening / / Alexander Gelley

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2015

ISBN

0-8232-6257-X

0-8232-6656-7

0-8232-6259-6

0-8232-6416-5

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (226 p.)

Disciplina

838/.91209

Soggetti

LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Introduction -- Contexts of the aesthetic -- Epigones in the house of language: Benjamin and Kraus -- Benjamin on atget: empty streets and the fading of aura -- Entering the passagen -- Citation as incitation: the political agenda of the passagenarbeit -- Messianism, "weak" and otherwise -- Forgetting, dreaming, awakening.

Sommario/riassunto

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” Benjamin’s effort to transpose the dream phenomenon to the history of a collective remained fragmentary, though it underlies the principle of retrograde temporality, which, it is argued, is central to his idea of history.The “passages” are not just the Paris arcades: They refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamin’s later works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.For Benjamin, memory is not only antiquarian; it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. Gelley reads this call in the motif of awakening, which conveys a qualified but crucial performative intention of Benjamin’s



undertaking.