Aproximación a Walter Benjamin a través de Baudelaire

The works of Walter Benjamin (fragmentary and experimental, midway between erudition and poetry) can be read today like a cubist encyclopedia or a never-ending bazaar, a tantalising collage of heterodox materials which was on the verge of crystalizing —methodologically— in a prodigious and impossible project: Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project), without doubt one of the most extraordinary and monumental dreams conceived by the human mind. Baudelaire —who played cicerone on those walks through the parisian arcades (or, more to the point, in his attempt to critically reconstruct the history of the nineteenth century capitalist society)— can help us untangle the interdisciplinar thicket of Benjamin´s essays, and understand the meanderings of his method as well as the riddled complexity of his reflexions on history, word, and image.