The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project

"The Dialectics of Seeing" is an absolutely *superb* book -- possibly the best book on philosophy I have ever read. Not yet having read the Harvard U Press edition of the Arcades Project, I don't really have any basis for comparing the two works, but it seems to me that Buck-Morss' astonishing (incandescent) use of self-deconstructive and poetic literary techniques in this tour de force of an "invention" of the Arcades Project entitles it to rank as at least as dazzling and eye-opening (deep assumption-challenging) as anything else Benjamin himself wrote. Sources aren't important; spelling isn't important; pedantry is misleading as a criterion of value. All that matters is that the experience of reading the book be a dialectical one -- and the experience of reading *this* book *is*. An absolutely incomparable work.

I have to agree with the reader from Los Angeles, and the review of November 28, 1999. This book is a lot of fun! Yes, a peculiar judgement, I know.I'm not usually a reader of literary scholarship and excavation. (Hey, I'm in the Army and very busy and I don't have much time to read). But there is something about this book which is fascinating and very intriguing.Now that "The Arcades Project," Harvard Belknap Press: 1999, has just been published I have been trying to resist buying this rather expensive work. But I must say that because of this book I'm "reviewing" here by Susan Buck-Morss , I'm going to have to succumb and buy it soon. Ok, this is not a fancy or insightful examination of the "why's" and "wherefore's" on my part. But I encourage any and all readers to trust their guts on this...what at first seem opaque and in-accessible, gradually unveils something crucial about Benjamin's project for ourselves and our cultural, our History. I'm thinking now of what it would be like to find out that we have been missing something all along. I mean our Western Culture and its great wonders. Perhaps missing something crucial about ourselves. Maybe this is one way to think of it, reader: and ask yourself this question perhaps. What if what has been shown to us as our history or culture, something we both admire and love, but are at times horrified by could be like a movie that holds us in its grip.But imagine this movie has been worked on over many years, and various editors and directors have changed hands in the creation of the final, definitive print which will be shown to the rest of us.Now, imagine that each director, based on his/her own sense of things, decided what part of the original film he might keep and which parts he'd destroy.But some of the editors hated to let all the spliced out frames be destroyed. And put some of them away in a drawer let's say. Its kind of like Benjamin was searching the arcades, the hidden passage-ways between buildings and looking in the drawers for the missing frames and was then trying to figure out where to splice the frames back into the original. Now, would the reconstructed film of ourselves, our History and Culture make sense to us? If the original sequence is still inexplicable to us,or long forgotten, then what else is too late for us...amidst this century's human rubble? Maybe this is one thing to value about Susan Buck-Morss' book. Any reader, knowledgeable or not about this century's intellectual landscape, knows that there is something missing in this story about ourselves. Something more intolerable and heartbreaking than a few missing frames from a 2 hour movie. There has been a terrible human cost. We know that not all of the story has been shown. It will be terrible to forget that we have forgotten. Thus, Benjamin was trying to un-cover something we have all lost. This seems astounding in some way.

Buck-Morss is very likely the most insightful and best informed scholar writing on Benjamin (or Adorno) in English today. If there are typos, misspellings, etc., they are more a sign of the declining standards in editing, even at university presses, than any reflection on Buck-Morss' scholarship. She knows the primary and secondary literature and has clearly spent much time with Benjamin's papers and in various archives. Morevoer, having written the best book I know on the philosophical relationship between Adorno and Benjamin, she is clearly well placed to provide insightful analysis the latter's unfinished masterwork. Since the Passagen-Werk is recently available in English ("The Arcades Project," Harvard Belknap Press: 1999), one can judge for oneself the worth of Buck-Morss' reading.