Thursday, March 01, 2018

Chance Encounters


Chance Encounters: For a moment we are distracted from the task [see--task of the translator as a sort of filter--benjamin] at hand. We want to explore a small piece--go deeper in a nonlinear way. The footnote or a stranger with new information--whetting our appetite for novelty [see Edmund burke for novelty and its connection to childhood inexperience…see too situationist/transcendentalist/expatriate method—or does every one do this, as Benjamin implies—all of life is a translation (see Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking")]
Walter Benjamin spent the last 13 years of his life compiling The Arcades Project, in which he explored many of the types that had obsessedboth Charles Baudelaire as well as himself in the course of his scholarship. I encountered Benjamin for the first time in 1997 when I first began researching the flâneur. At that time, Benjamin was one of only a handful of scholars who had even addressed this character and was only rarely discussed in the undergraduate classroom, and usually only in the context of his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (check title). The Arcades Project, which contains the lion’s share of his flâneurresearch, had not yet been translated into English and I was turned toward Charles Baudelaire: Poet in the Age of High Capitalism (check title) as the richest source of Benjamin’s thoughts on the flâneur.

One of the more cogent explications of the chance encounter can be found in Baudrillard's Les Fleurs du Mal. The poem is entitled "À une passante".



FLASH GEN ROULETTE WHEEL takes you to random pages.

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