The Arcades Project - Operi

The experience of allegory, which holds fast to ruins, is properly the experience
of eternal transience. [J67,4]
Prostitution can lay claim to being considered "work" the moment work be­
comes prostitution. In fact, the lorette354 was the first to carry out a radical renun­
ciation of the costume oflover. She already arranges to be paid for her time; from
there, it is only a short distance to those who demand "wages." [J67,5]
Already at work inJugendstil is the bourgeois tendency to set nature and technol­
ogy in mutual opposition, as absolute antitheses. TIms, Futurism will later give
to technology a destructive antinatural accent; in Jugendstil, the energies des­
tined to operate in this direction are beginning to unfold. The idea of a world
bewitched and, as it were, denatured by technological development informs a
good many of its creations. [J67,6]
The prostitute does not sell her labor power; her job, however, entails the fiction
that she sells her powers of pleasure. Insofar as this represents the utmost exten­
sion attainable by the sphere of the commodity, the prostitute may be cousidered,
from early on, a precursor of commodity capitalism. But precisely because the
conmlOdity character was in other respects undeveloped, this aspect did not need
to stand out so glaringly as would subsequently be the case. As a matter of fact,
prostitution in the Middle Ages does not, for example, display the crudeness that
in the nineteenth century would become the rule. [J67a,l]
The tension between emblem and commercial logo makes it possible to measure
the changes that have taken place in the world of things since the seventeenth
century. [J67a,2]
Strong fixations of t1,e sense of smell, such as Baudelaire seems to have known,
could make fetishism likely. [J67a,3]
The new ferment that enters into the taedium vitae and turns
self-estrangement.
it to spleen is
[J67a,4]
Hollowing out of the inner life. Of the infinite regress of reflection that, in Ro­
manticism, in a spirit of play, both expanded the space of life in ever-widening
circles and reduced it within ever narrower frames, there remained to Baudelaire
only the "somber and lucid exchange" with himself, as he represents it in the
in1age of a conversation between the jack of hearts and the queen of spades in an
old pack of cards. Later, Jules Renard will say: "His heart . . . more alone than
an ace of hearts in the middle of a deck of cards:" ;; [J67a,5]
There may well be t1,e closest connection between the allegorical imagination
and the in1agination put in thrall to thiuking during hashish intoxication. At