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NP 122 (Passagenwerk 4)
And I’ll start right away by saying I’ve already engaged the opening passages (though not this one specifically) of this letter in another longer piece. But of course that doesn’t matter at all. I’m a...
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NP 123 (Passagenwerk 5)
The experience of typing—and shouldn’t it be handwriting? an absolute requirement of handwriting? is there anything that has (or would have) fallen away more than handwriting, in the digital?—a...
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NP 124 (Passagenwerk 6)
Here what’s felt is primarily two things: the distance of Saint Simon, and the need and interest in devoting another day, at least, to this passage. The sense in which everything that needed to be said...
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NP 125 (Passagenwerk 7)
Class formation happens as an offshoot of industrial and technological (or those are in the wrong order) change or advance. At the point of U1,6 this letter has clearly and obviously been concerned to...
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NP 126 (Passagenwerk 8)
Still here. You’re coming back at this. With a collaboration? That’s every time we mention UP or NP. Back to the text that was cited but that was a fruition of argument, case made overwhelmingly...
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NP 127 (Passagenwerk 9)
But you know, and this is all all right, that the text here needs to consider how the “Suez Canal” is a passage, in every sense, so that the most productive way, which is also the jouissance, of...
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NP 128 (Passagenwerk 10)
There’s another preliminary—the contrast with “poems” being between trying to speak to something that’s actually happening versus trying to speak to what’s in fact not happening, or as they say...
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NP 129 (Passagenwerk 11)
The canal, constructed on the “grand scale” through the heart of Egypt. The passage poeticizes that digging, as much as it also describes big business. But to talk about this passage you need to talk...
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NP 130 (Passagenwerk 12)
The upended nature of this text and any other both here and everywhere. What will be is what is not. What was Saint-Simonianism to begin with? At what point does the random selection of another passage...
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NP 131 (Passagenwerk 13)
What is the “Geheimbunde”? The secret society? Of course the behind-the-scenes Saint-Simonians, the oligarchy, the priesthood. Status as “secret society” enhances what’s esoteric. But then too we...
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NP 132 (Passagenwerk 14)
And this modality is exactly the way in which cited historical texts are co-opted, so to speak (co-optation implying some sort of ownership, somewhere), into being texts that are themselves quite...
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NP 133 (Passagenwerk 15)
There’s a potentially book-length aside here, starting from the quite verifiable premise that most all of the passages in the Passagenwerk are in some sense about the Passagenwerk itself. I'm not sure...
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NP 134 (Passagenwerk 16)
But the translation was too simple. The German text needed to be there. The German was nearly a poem, or was of the poetic world, not so much the translation.There's much to say about the "Copernican...
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NP 135 (Passagenwerk 17)
I finally want to get to the "Gewesene," the "was." There's much to say about the Copernican revolution/turn in historical perception but again it's important to first get the terms right. What is...
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NP 136 (Passagenwerk 18)
It's a motion of time. What's being asked is that we in some way confront this motion. What is it? How do we describe it? What are some examples? For instance, it is 6:36. Now it's 6:37. The 6:36 is...
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NP 137 (Passagenwerk 19)
Again the translation helps but it's misleading as to what's crucial. What a pity. The German is mostly pretty simple. The translation's maneuvers to affirm a past tense are suspiciously overwrought,...
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NP 138 (Passagenwerk 20)
Another translation difference: den or the fixed point, becomes "a" fixed point, as if it was one among many, when the German seems to indicate that there would only be one. So as with heliocentrism...
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NP 139, What is the relationship of np: to an "arcade"?
(photo credit Sandra Ruiz)But contemporaneity. What is the relationship of np: to an "arcade," or more specifically to what's referred to in French and German as a "Passage," finally to that place or...
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NP 140, np: lines up with that behavior.
But that relation is the organizing question. This is the most compelling question of "the project." Since certainly np: is going to reserve itself and keep a distance from too-direct description,...
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NP 141, Nadar's Duval
So that all we can do is pass through. That we would pass through. That status. That "by virtue of" being here at all, of being a being in breathing or whatever it is, we're passing, passing by, both...
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NP 142, constantly the two steps or leaps
But there's an aspect, a vantage point, a way in, a perspective, a looking (and the layering here seems equal parts intentional and real, mimetic) at the Arcades that's both central, part of the basic...
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NP 143, the poet
Cenotaph of Charles Baudelaire, Montparnasse CemeteryBut it's true you have everything sitting right there. I think we could make the case that any of these passages are going to instantiate that...
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NP 144, the temple
Let's call this an invisible citation—Bakhtin talking about the same thing in the first chapter of The Dialogic Imagination—a book, here in the Arcades, not or beyond any book we can hold in our hands,...
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np:, 145, physiognomy of an entrance
In that we're speaking of physiognomy. Of the face. Of character. Of "ethnic origin." Of the physiognomy of the arcade, the in/out look, of the passages, in this case under investigation, so to speak,...
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np:, 146, world of amateurs
And then one has a certain status of asking this question as a "publisher." Is that not possible? Or how would it be possible? Again, to turn back to the text, clearly here, typical you could say of...
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