Benjamin's Passages Dreaming, Awakening [Hardcover]

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. Benjamins 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 Benjamins effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his work and thought. Gelley works through many of Benjamins 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 Benjamins undertaking.

Alex Gelleys interpretation of the Passagenwerk is the work of a lifetime concentrated as a gem. While commentaries were multiplying at exponential rate, he kept meditating and researching. The result is a unique resurrection of Benjamins practice of puzzling the world together, around the antithetic themes of liberating the powers of dream and anticipating the day of awakening. Whoever thought to have understood Benjamin should pause and read Gelley first.Alexander Gelleys book offers an extremely subtle and persuasive reading of Benjamins later work, fully attentive to its fragmentary nature but also deftly linking it to all of the writers 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 al3æ