Reviving Walter Benjamin, rethinking New York.
Crack the spine on David Kishik’s The Manhattan Project and one of the first things you will discover is the timeline at the book’s beginning recounting the life of German philosopher and cultural critic, Walter Benjamin. The chronology plods predictably enough beginning with Benjamin’s birth in 1892 and skimming through the first half of the twentieth century, during which time we see Benjamin study, marry, flounder as an academic, and begin work on his magnum opus, The Arcades Project, also known as Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century.
The philosopher fakes his death and departs for New York under a pseudonym borrowed from a Kafka novel.
Around 1940, however—an ill-fated year for Benjamin—Kishik’s history veers off course, teetering into what the author describes as a counterfactual trajectory of the philosopher’s life. Benjamin’s death by suicide at the French border is reimagined as a clever ruse, in which the philosopher fakes his death and departs for New York under a pseudonym borrowed from a Kafka novel. Walter Benjamin-cum-Carl Roseman (à la Karl Rossman of Amerika) finds himself stateside, where he retreats into anonymity and begins composing a sequel to his Arcades Project. This manuscript—lost in the annals of the New York Public Library until 2008—applies the same sweeping analytical lens Benjamin applied to Paris to New York, heralding the city as the successor to Paris—capital of the twentieth century. It is this hypothetical manuscript that is Kishik’s chief object of analysis in The Manhattan Project.
Dizzying though the premise may be, it is this “subverting counterfactual” that kicks off the book Kirkus describes as a “beguiling work of literary and social criticism.” After conjuring Benjamin’s New York manuscript, Kishik plays on the many cultural and historical correlations between the two cities to examine the confluences and disparities which distinguish 20th-century New York from its Parisian precursor as a global cultural capital. Along the way he touches on a sweeping array of aesthetic, philosophical, political, and social peculiarities idiosyncratic to the century, to the city, and to the cultural zeitgeist.
Early on, the narrator warns us not to dismiss the fictitious New York manuscript as the “senescent afterthought” of the venerated cultural critic. To this end, Kishik’s project ambitiously runs the gamut of critical inquiry. In the process, a parade of 20th century NYC intelligentsia and culture-makers march across these pages, from Jane Jacobs, to Warhol, to Henry Miller (each paralleling a Parisian counterpart from The Arcades Project—specifically in these cases, Charles Fourier, Baudelaire, and Honoré de Balzac, respectively).
Parallels such as these allow Kishik to spin an analytical yarn that, while pivoted around an invented text, nonetheless follows a logic analogous to Benjamin’s in The Arcades Project. The result is a book at once playful and serious, academic and provocative; a love letter in equal measure to its two chief inspirations—Walter Benjamin, and New York City.
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