Benjamin's Passages by Alexander Gelley - 9780823262564

Benjamin's PassagesDreaming, Awakening\nAuthor(s): Alexander Gelley\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Fordham University Press, United States\nImprint: Fordham University Press\nISBN-13: 9780823262564, 978-0823262564\nSynopsis\nIn 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.\n 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 Ar.