Passages and the Meaning of History. Form, Figuration and the Signification of Wandering

Abstract

During his life, Walter Benjamin sketched a vast project of a
work of writing that would embody the whole spectrum of his
intellectual concerns, the path of his reflections, his explorations
and his efforts to articulate, into a vast web of crossed references
and allusions, the sum of his epiphanies. That work, necessarily
unfinished and fragmentary, bears a name full of echoes: the work
of the passages. It takes as a guiding thread a reflection on space,
orientation and rhythms of bodies and gazes on the spatial
arrangements of the city, architectonic inventions offered by
modernity and which create a dense composition of the
transitions of sensibility, techniques of expression, changes of
perception, comprehension of time and the metamorphoses
of the interpretation of history. The text here offered seeks to
explore some of the facets of these inexhaustible passages and
there significance for the meditation on contemporary aesthetics
and for our conceptions of meaning.