![]() In part these obsessions are the obsessions of materialism. Galerie des Arcades des Champs Elysées, Paris via Wikimedia Commons World exhibitions, snatches of Apollinaire, Fourier’s impossible dreams of conquering nature, and the Parisian prostitute are all woven into the maximalist dreamscape of the arcades. Whatever dazzling, distracting quality Benjamin finds in objects on display in the arcades is also found in certain quotes and ideas, drawing him back. The structure of the text lets us in on the nature of these obsessions, scattered notes seem to repeat names, phrases, and images despite different contexts and headings. Poets and philosophers crop up again and again (Fourier, Marx, Baudelaire) and seem to congeal into a single thread of commerce and fetishes, materials and theology. It is hard to identify the edges between obsessions Benjamin is fascinated by commodities – combs, scarves, hats, artworks, sex – and their mass production, but he is also very specifically fascinated by Paris’s arcades, their iron and glass canopies. Obsessions that run through Benjamin’s writings, seeming at times to be closely connected to one another, at others to merely be drifting in the same expansive mind. The Arcades Project is a cluster of obsessions. Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project: Obsession and Materialism Photograph of Walter Benjamin, 1929 via Wikimedia Commons
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