This course will be devoted to a close reading of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin's unfinished and posthumously published montage of fragments, quotations, and aphorisms on the urban culture of Second Empire Paris — "capital of the nineteenth century." Both the birthplace of consumer capitalism and the site of numerous failed revolutions, nineteenth-century Paris crystallized, for Benjamin (writing during the rise of European fascism) the numerous ambiguities of modernity itself. Many of these ambiguities were registered in disorienting new experiences of space and time. While exploring Benjamin’s reading of the various strands of nineteenth century visual, literary and architectural culture — fashion, photography, advertising, lighting, furniture, railways, exhibitions, department stores, catacombs, museums, etc. — we will consider the implications of his approach for thinking about history, memory, and politics today. Our reading of the Arcades will be supplemented with readings from Baudelaire, Blanqui, Fourier, Marx, Adorno, Brecht, Aragon, Simmel, and Freud as well as contemporary critical theorists. No specific background is required, but it would be helpful to have read Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire beforehand.