The Flâneur's Ruins: From Bourgeois Idleness to the Sandwich-Man

Abstract

This article examines the transformations of the flâneur in Walter Benjamin’s essays, from his portrayal as a rentier and idle observer in mid-19th century Paris to his salaried and precarious incarnation as a sandwich man, also addressing the return of Hessel’s Berlin flâneur in the 20th century (already under the sign of hostility). It proposes a cartography of the early, middle, and late phases of the flâneur, articulating the conceptual image of this philosophical type with its historical trace. In modernity, under the pressures of an emerging capitalist structure, both poet and poetry are compelled to seek a new place after the fall of art’s Edenic paradise. Common labor and poetic labor come into tension, as do individual subjectivity and collective spirit within the crowd.