%0 Journal Article
%T Eurydice at Euston?: Walter Benjamin and Marc Aug¨¦ Go Underground
%A Graeme Gilloch
%J Societies
%D 2014
%I MDPI AG
%R 10.3390/soc4010016
%X Taking as its point of departure Walter Benjamin¡¯s repeatedly unsuccessful attempt to give spatial form to his past, this paper suggests that it is perhaps the contemporary French anthropologist, Marc Aug¨¦, who provides the most appropriate envisioning of a ¡®map of memories¡¯ in his brief writings on the Parisian m¨¦tro system. For Aug¨¦, the labyrinthine subway network constitutes nothing less than a ¡®memory machine¡¯ in which lines and station names serve as mnemonics, recalling long-forgotten childhood encounters and experiences. Mirroring the cityscape above, places themselves unexplored, unknown, the serried toponyms of the m¨¦tro become an incantation summoning forth the shades of the past. As Aug¨¦ points out, those stations that provide opportunities to change lines are felicitously termed ¡®correspondences¡¯, a Baudelairean term that fascinated Benjamin and informed his key historiographical notion of the ¡®dialectical image,¡¯ the intersection and mutual illumination of past and present moments. For me, Aug¨¦¡¯s highly suggestive reflections bring to mind my own memories of a London childhood around 1970. Looking at the London underground map today, I cannot but see the sites of many past meetings and partings, dots connected by lines forming complex figures, constellations of memory.
%K Critical Theory
%K memory
%K Parisian metro
%K city
%U http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/4/1/16