Inventory of a Century

This chapter looks at the dialogue between Prof. Dr. Burkhardt Lindner, editor of the Benjamin Handbook, and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1982). According to his exposé of 1939, Walter Benjamin divided Arcades Project into six parts and called the first “Arcades,” the second “Panoramas,” and the next “World Expositions.” And then came “Interiors,” “Streets,” and then finally “Barricades.” He wrote his exposé incidentally in the present tense such that it did not appear like a story from the past, but rather as if he were an eyewitness of something taking place now. He then assigned a figure to each of these six keywords such that there was within Benjamin's imagination one person who did, planned, or achieved something, on the one hand, and an object world naturally far more powerful, on the other. Lindner and Kluge also considers Benjamin's anthropological materialism.