The arcades represented kind of architectural manifestation of the ephemerality of modernity that benamin had become interested in through his readingsf of charles boudlair and boudlar's theory of modernity. They emerged in the 18 twenties and thirties, and most of them were demolished by the early 18 fifties. So not only did they contain things that were fading away, the old paris that was fading away, but as architecturalsu s, they themselves were sort of antiquated from the beginning. But at the same time, he says, this is also the coming of a dream. We're going to succumb, in a way, to the
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most celebrated thinkers of the twentieth century. Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) was a German Jewish philosopher, critic, historian, an investigator of culture, a maker of radio programmes and more. Notably, in his Arcades Project, he looked into the past of Paris to understand the modern age and, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, examined how the new media of film and photography enabled art to be politicised, and politics to become a form of art. The rise of the Nazis in Germany forced him into exile, and he worked in Paris in dread of what was to come; when his escape from France in 1940 was blocked at the Spanish border, he took his own life.
With
Esther Leslie
Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London
Kevin McLaughlin
Dean of the Faculty and Professor of English, Comparative Literature and German Studies at Brown University
And
Carolin Duttlinger
Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson