The city was the seedbed of Benjamin’s ‘gothic’ Marxism (Cohen 1993); Paris its testing ground. All of Benjamin’s writings from the autumn of 1927 until his death in 1940 relate in one way or other to his great unfinished study ‘Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, otherwise known as The Arcades Project (Das Passagen-Werk), after its founding image, taken by Benjamin from the 1926 novel, Le Paysan de Paris, by the French surrealist Louis Aragon. This was a book of which Benjamin wrote: “I could never read more than two or three pages in bed at night before my heart started to beat so strongly that I had to lay the book aside.” (BA, 88) The arcades would become just one of five or six archetypal images of the psychosocial space of 19th-century Paris around which the project was organized—each paired with a particular, thematically representative individual. But it provided the model for the others, and its surrealist origin and liminal utopian impulse, neither quite inside nor out, established the wish-image and the dream-image—on the threshold of sleeping and waking—at the heart of a work that was initially conceived as a kind of ‘dialectical fairytale’. (The figure with whom ‘the arcades’ was paired was the utopian socialist Charles Fourier.) All of Benjamin’s major essays of the 1930s derived their impetus and orientation from his Arcades work, and served to defer its completion in the act of elaborating its elements. 