Ebook: The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering

Article published in the «New German Critique» — 1986. — No. 39 (Second Special Issue on Walter Benjamin, Autumn) — pp. 99-140In the Passagen- Werk, Benjamin has left us his note boxes. That is, he has left us "everything essential." Lamentations over the work's incompleteness are thus irrelevant. Had he lived, the notes would not have become superfluous by entering into a closed and finished text. And surely, the card file would have been thicker. The Passagen-Werk is as it would have been: a historical lexicon of the capitalist origins of modernity, a collection of concrete, factual images of urban experience. Benjamin handled these facts as if they were politically charged, capable of transmitting revolutionary energy across generations. His method was to create from them, through the formal principle of montage, constructions of print which had the power to awaken political consciousness among present-day readers. The Baudelaire essays (1938, 1939) were two such constructions. Had Benjamin lived, the PassagenWerk notes would have been the source of others.