Charles Baudelaire, Capital Project by Walter Benjamin

Abstract

The “Parisian Passages (I)”, a series of notes by Walter Benjamin, dating from 1927-1930. Benjamin's unfinished work, Passages, would have constituted nothing less than a material philosophy of 19th-century history. In this text, Benjamin set out to indicate where, in the present, “the exact place to which [his] historical construction will relate as to its vanishing point” (letter to Horkheimer, October 16, 1935) is located. Among Walter Benjamin's critical interests, Baudelaire's work occupies a privileged place. His important, albeit fragmentary, work on Baudelaire, undertaken between 1937 and 1939, should be considered a “miniature model” of The Arcades Project. Through the figure of Baudelaire, Benjamin analyzes 19th-century Paris and identifies certain phenomena of great significance, such as flâneurie, collecting, prostitution, fashion, etc.