Outside of Place and Other than Optical: Walter Benjamin and the Geography of Critical Thought

Walter Benjamin’s belief in the radical materiality of perception is fundamental to the Arcades Project, his unfinished history of modern urban experience in 19th-century Paris. Renouncing the presumptions of traditional historicism, Benjamin presents a view of the metropolis in which circuitous space and fractured sight opposes the logic ofterritoriality and specularity that underpins the Western philosophic tradition. If such critical inversions arise from Benjamin’s explicitly materialist intentions, this article suggests that they relate in profound, if unexpected, ways to certain key themes in a Judaic theology. Inparticular, it argues that not only does Judaism’s distinctive understanding of the spatial and the visual bear upon the historical analyses of the Arcades Project, but more generally it has relevance for themaking of critical thought itself.