The Arcades Project - Operi
The Arcades Project - Operi The Arcades Project - Operi
identity, we can transport ourselves into even the purest of all regions-into death:' Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Buck der Freunde (Leipzig, 1929), p. 111.' [S2,2] Very striking how Hofmarmsthal calls this "somehow one being" a being in the sphere of death. Hence the inmlOrtality of his "religious novice;' that fictional character of whom he spoke during his last meeting with me, and who was supposed to make his way through changing religions down the centuries, as through the suite of rooms of one grand apartment.' How it is that, within the narrowly confined space of a single life, this "being somehow one" with what has been leads into the sphere of death-this dawned on me for the first tinle in Paris, during a conversation about Proust, in 1930. To be sure, Proust never heightened but rather analyzed humanity. His moral greatness, though, lies in quite another direction. With a passion unknown to any Wliter before him, he took as his subject the fidelity to things that have crossed our path in life. Fidelity to an afternoon, to a tree, a spot of sun on the carpet; fidelily to garnlents, pieces of furniture, to perfumes or landscapes. (The discovery he ultinlately makes on the road to Meseglise is the highest "moral teaching" Proust has to offer: a sort of spatial transposition of the semper idem.) I grant that Proust, in the deepest sense, "perhaps ranges himself on the side of death:' His cosmos has its sun, perhaps, in death, around which orbit the lived moments, the gathered things. "Beyond the pleasure principle" is probably the best commentary there is on Proust's works. In order to understand Proust, generally speaking, it is perhaps necessary to begin with the fact that his subject is the obverse side, Ie revers, "not so mnch of the world but of life itself." [S2,3] The eternity of the operetta, says Wiesengrund in his essay on this form,!! is the eternity of yesterday. [S2,4] 'Perhaps no simulacrum has provided us with an ensemble of ohJects more precisely attuned to the eoncept of "ideal' than that great simulacrum whi(h eonstitutes the revolutionary ornamental architecture of Jugendstil. No eollective effort has sueeeeded in ereating a dream world as pure, and as disturhing, as these Jugendstil buildings. Situated, as they are, on the margins of architecture, they alone constitute the realization of desires in which an exeessively violent and eruel aut.omatism painfully betrays the sort of hatred for reality and need for refuge in an ideal world that we fmel in childhood neurosis." Salvador Dall, '''L'Ane pourri," Le Surrealisme au. service de La revolution, 1, no. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. 12. o Industry 0 Advertising 0 [S2,5] "Here is what we can still love: the inlposing block of those rapturous and frigid structures scattered across all of Europe, scorned and neglected by anthologies and studies." Salvador Dali, "VAne pourri;' Le Surreafisme au service de fa revolution, 1, no. 1 (Paris, 1930), p. 12. Perhaps no city contains more perfect examples
of this Jugendstil than Barcelona, in the works of the architect who designed the Church of the Sagrada Familia.' [S2a,l] Wiesengrund cites and comments on a passage from Kierkegaard ' 8 Repetition: ··One climhs the stairs to the first floor in a gas-illuminated building, opens a little door, and stands in the entry. To the left is a glass door leading to a room. One continues directly ahead into an anteroom. Beyond are two entirely identical rooms, identically furnished, as though one were the mirror reflection of the other." Apropos of tins passage (Kierkegaard, Werke, vol. 3 , p. 138), which he cites at greater length, Wiesengrund remarks: "The duplication of the room is unfathomable, seeming to be a reflection without being so. Like these rooms, perhaps all semblance in history resembles itself, so long as it itself, obedient to nature, persists as semblance." Wiesengrund-Adorno, Kierkegaard (Tiibingen, 1933), p. 50.10 0 Mirror 0 Interior 0 [S2a,2] On the motif of the heathscapes in Kafka's Del' Prozej3: in the time of hell, the new (the pendant) is always the eternally selfsame. [S2a,3] Mter the Commune: " England welcomed the exiles and did everything it could to keep them. At the exhibition of 1878, it became clear that she had risen above France and Paris to take the premier position in the applied arts. If the modern style returned to France in 1900, this is perhaps a distant consequence of the barbarous manner in which the Commune was repressed." Dubech and d'Espezel, Histoire de Puris (Paris, 1926), p. 437. [S2a,4] "The desire was to create a style out of thin air. Foreign influences favored the 'modern style,' which was almost entirely inspired by floral decor. The English Pre-Raphaelites and the Munich urbanists provided the model. Iron construction was succeeded by reinforced concrete. This was the nadir for architecture, one which coincided with the deepest political depression. It was at this moment that Paris acquired those buildings and monuments which were so very strange and so little in accord with the older city: the building in composite style designed by M. Bouwens at 27 Quai d'Orsay; the subway shelters ; the Samaritaine department store, erected by Frantz Jourdain in the middle of the historic landscape of the Quartier Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois." Dubech and d'Espezel, IIistoire de Paris, p. 465. [S2a,5] "What M. Arsene Alexandre, then, calls 'the profound charm of streamers blowing in the wind'-this serpentine effect is that of the octopus style, of green, poorly fired ceramics, of lines forced and stretched into tentacular ligaments, of matter tortured for no good reason . ... Gourds, pumpkins, hibiscus roots, and volutes are the inspiration for an illogical furniture upon which appear hydrangeas, bats, polianthes, and peacock feathers-creations of artists in the grip of an unfortunate passion for symbols and 'poetry. ' ... In an era of light and electricity, what
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of this Jugendstil than Barcelona, in the works of the architect who designed the<br />
Church of the Sagrada Familia.' [S2a,l]<br />
Wiesengrund cites and comments on a passage from Kierkegaard ' 8 Repetition:<br />
··One climhs the stairs to the first floor in a gas-illuminated building, opens a little<br />
door, and stands in the entry. To the left is a glass door leading to a room. One<br />
continues directly ahead into an anteroom. Beyond are two entirely identical<br />
rooms, identically furnished, as though one were the mirror reflection of the<br />
other." Apropos of tins passage (Kierkegaard, Werke, vol. 3 , p. 138), which he cites at greater length, Wiesengrund remarks: "<strong>The</strong> duplication<br />
of the room is unfathomable, seeming to be a reflection without being so.<br />
Like these rooms, perhaps all semblance in history resembles itself, so long as it<br />
itself, obedient to nature, persists as semblance." Wiesengrund-Adorno, Kierkegaard<br />
(Tiibingen, 1933), p. 50.10 0 Mirror 0 Interior 0 [S2a,2]<br />
On the motif of the heathscapes in Kafka's Del' Prozej3: in the time of hell, the new<br />
(the pendant) is always the eternally selfsame. [S2a,3]<br />
Mter the Commune: " England welcomed the exiles and did everything it could to<br />
keep them. At the exhibition of 1878, it became clear that she had risen above<br />
France and Paris to take the premier position in the applied arts. If the modern<br />
style returned to France in 1900, this is perhaps a distant consequence of the<br />
barbarous manner in which the Commune was repressed." Dubech and d'Espezel,<br />
Histoire de Puris (Paris, 1926), p. 437. [S2a,4]<br />
"<strong>The</strong> desire was to create a style out of thin air. Foreign influences favored the<br />
'modern style,' which was almost entirely inspired by floral decor. <strong>The</strong> English<br />
Pre-Raphaelites and the Munich urbanists provided the model. Iron construction<br />
was succeeded by reinforced concrete. This was the nadir for architecture, one<br />
which coincided with the deepest political depression. It was at this moment that<br />
Paris acquired those buildings and monuments which were so very strange and so<br />
little in accord with the older city: the building in composite style designed by<br />
M. Bouwens at 27 Quai d'Orsay; the subway shelters ; the Samaritaine department<br />
store, erected by Frantz Jourdain in the middle of the historic landscape of the<br />
Quartier Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois." Dubech and d'Espezel, IIistoire de Paris,<br />
p. 465. [S2a,5]<br />
"What M. Arsene Alexandre, then, calls 'the profound charm of streamers blowing<br />
in the wind'-this serpentine effect is that of the octopus style, of green, poorly<br />
fired ceramics, of lines forced and stretched into tentacular ligaments, of matter<br />
tortured for no good reason . ... Gourds, pumpkins, hibiscus roots, and volutes<br />
are the inspiration for an illogical furniture upon which appear hydrangeas, bats,<br />
polianthes, and peacock feathers-creations of artists in the grip of an unfortunate<br />
passion for symbols and 'poetry. ' ... In an era of light and electricity, what
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