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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.
Alexander Gelley’s book offers an extremely subtle and persuasive reading of Benjamin’s later work, fully attentive to its fragmentary nature but also deftly linking it to all of the writer’s continuing philosophical preoccupations. The study does not situate Benjamin narrowly within his own historical time, but neither does it fold him into a single later view. What Gelley traces for us are the work’s own invitations to its afterlife, and in this context he writes strikingly of Benjamin’s dream of ‘situating phenomena in the light of their historical lapse’. Benjamin speaks of ‘the whole contradictory foundation’ of his convictions, and this book allows us to begin to grasp that foundation without betraying any of its contradictions.---—Michael Wood, Princeton University
A major achievement, 'Benjamin’s Passages’ is an invaluable contribution to Benjamin studies and all the fields connected with it.---—Michael G. Levine, Rutgers University
. . . Benjamin’s Passages is an exegetical masterwork, emphasizing conceptual constants and swerves over the too-short arc of Benjamin’s writing life. . . Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.---Choice Reviews