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boundary 2 30.1 (2003) 191-197



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Benjamin Now:
Afterthoughts on The Arcades Project

Kevin McLaughlin

Now might be an opportune moment for a reconsideration of the critical work of Walter Benjamin—an opportune moment now that a first generation of translations is giving way to the new and much more extensive English Benjamin of Harvard University Press's Selected Writings, an opportune moment above all, however, now that Benjamin's Passagen-Werk has appeared in English as The Arcades Project. Though they are by now familiar, let me quote Rolf Tiedemann's remarks on his original two-volume 1982 edition:

There are some books whose fate has been settled long before they even exist as books. Benjamin's unfinished Passagen-Werk is just such a case. Many legends have been woven around it since Adorno first mentioned it in an essay published in 1950. Those legends became even more complexly embroidered after a two-volume selection of Benjamin's letters appeared, which abounded in statements [End Page 191] about his intentions for the project. But these statements were neither complete nor coherent. As a result, the most contradictory rumors spread about a book that competing Benjamin interpreters persistently referred to in the hope that it would solve the puzzle raised by his intellectual physiognomy. That hope has remained unrealized. 1

As might been have anticipated from Tiedemann's comments, among the many critical reactions that have greeted the publication of the Passagen-Werk in German in 1982 and then the English Arcades Project in 1999, none has been more prominent than a questioning of what exactly the Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project is: Does Benjamin's text appear to us as a collection of research notes for what was in fact to have been one or a number of "unrealized" projects, or as, say, a great modernist work in its own right?

What has not been sufficiently appreciated is that such reactions point to a philosophical question that is fundamental to The Arcades Project and to Benjamin's work as a whole. For Benjamin's far-flung Paris project raises what is, in Aristotelian terms, the philosophical and yet uncategorizable question of potentiality and actuality. Reflecting on this matter in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Martin Heidegger has noted that "to ask about potentiality and actuality is essential philosophizing" [nach Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit fragen . . . ist eigentliches Philosophieren]. 2 In other words, philosophy is a matter of looking into, and looking after, potentiality and actuality. If looking into and looking after The Arcades Project involve a question, and a questioning, of potentiality and actuality, then Benjamin's work may be said to incite philosophical reflection on an issue that was, as Heidegger suggests, incompletely explored in ancient metaphysics. Benjamin took up the issue of potentiality and actuality in a number of contexts—contexts indicated by the array of key terms inflected by potentiality that make up Benjamin's critical vocabulary—translatability, legibility, reproducibility, cognizability, and so on. 3 These terms are part of a discourse of potentiality, or, as Benjamin called it, virtuality, that can be traced from the early writings on language to the literary critical essays on Goethe and the baroque [End Page 192] Trauerspiel, to the later cultural criticism and The Arcades Project. Virtuality is also the subject of critical reflections on the aesthetic concept of "the work." These surface in Benjamin's study of German Romanticism and, in particular, of the Romantics' understanding of the work as a medium of potentiality. Benjamin's rethinking, with the Romantics, of the category of the work as medium and his questioning of traditional views of this concept might be relevant to what confronts us now as his Arcades Project. As a way of reflecting back on the essays presented here, let me try to indicate briefly how the handling of the concept of work (Werk) in Benjamin's early study of the Romantics might be applicable to the judgments of his last work, Das Passagen-Werk, offered by the contributions to this symposium and by all future commentaries on this work.

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