Textual flâneurie : writing management with Walter Benjamin

Résumé En

The world's an untranslatable language without words or parts of speech. It's a language of objects Our tongues can't master, but which we are the ardent subjects of. If tree is tree in English, and albero in Italian, That's as close as we can come To divinity, the language that circles the earth and which we'll never speak. (Wright, 2010) Textual flâneurie and the Benjaminian dérive To be a flâneur means following flows and unobvious pathways, finding doors where walkways close. Textual flâneurie, for us, centres on following the poetic, dream thrust of historical texts, rather than focusing on the rational, argument-building level, while still embracing their literal, face value meaning. It is attentive yet freely wandering, as can happen in texts just as much as in physical space. Walter Benjamin (1940/1969) picked up the idea of the flâneur from Charles Baudelaire, 'the prince, who is everywhere in possession of his incognito' (Baudelaire, n.d., as quoted in Benjamin, 1940/69: 40), depicting him as a passionate spectator, moving around amongst movement, setting up house midway, following the infinite flow of the city. The flâneur is strolling freely but attentively, he is the philosopher and the chronicler of the city...