new formations a journal of culture/theory/politics

54: Readings Benjamin's Arcades

Merrick Burrow, Gary Farnell and Mick Jardine (guest editors)

Editorial

Reading Benjamin's Arcades offers a contribution to the English-language reception of Walter Benjamin's Das Passagen-Werk, rendered in translation as The Arcades Project and published in 1999. Taken as a whole, this special issue of new formations offers an opportunity to establish the new resonance of the Arcades within Benjamin studies. In addition, it furnishes (in light of the compendious nature of the Arcades project itself) a snapshot of developing trends of theoretical analysis in cultural studies today. Issues engaged by contributors to this collection include the following: extraterrestriality; redemptive politics; the dialectical image; Judaism; the futures of technology; the physiognomy of the modern unconscious; cosmic advertising; childhood; commodity culture; prostitution. The collection demonstrates that the activity of reading Benjamin's Arcades Project generates discussion in relation to what appears both changing and unchanging about the face of politics in the post-Benjamin period.

Contributors: Derek Bunyard, Merrick Burrow, Adam W. Chalmers, Tim Dant, Graeme Gilloch, Esther Leslie, Virginia Liberatore, Graham MacPhee, Janet McCabe, Bram Mertens, Maeve Pearson

Cover image: Passage de L'Opéra, courtesy of the Musée Carnevalet, Paris. © Phototèque des Musées de la Ville de Paris

CONTENTS
Merrick Burrow, Gary Farnell and Mick Jardine Editorial
Esther Leslie Stars, Phosphor and Chemical Colours: Extraterrestriality in The Arcades
Derek Bunyard Benjamin's Redemptive Politics: Ruins or Debris in the Sacred Jungle?
Adam W. Chalmers The Aporias of Theory: Negotiating the Dialectical Image in Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project
Bram Mertens The Arcades Project: A Talmud for our Times
Graham MacPhee Glass Before its Time, Premature Iron: the Unforeseeable Futures of Technology in Benjamin's Arcades Project
Virginia Liberatore Iron Construction: the Physiognomy of the Modern Unconscious in Benjamin's Arcades Project
Merrick Burrow Dialectical Fairyland, Cosmic Advertising and the Mimetic Faculty in The Arcades Project
Maeve Pearson Arcadian Children: Benjamin, Fourier and the Child of The Arcades
Graeme Gilloch and Tim Dant From 'Passage' to 'Parly 2': Commodity Culture in Benjamin and Baudrillard
Janet McCabe Textual Debaucheries and the Flâneur: Prostitution as Critique of Bourgeois Discourse in Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project
REVIEWS
Matt ffytche Real Absences
Tiziana Terranova After the Cyborg
Alasdair Pettinger Towards Vertical Travel

Paperback, back issues £14.99 individuals £34.99 institutions
All rights L&W
ISBN 1905007132