Flâner à Paris en compagnie de Walter Benjamin et Yannick Haenel

Abstract

A new way of interacting with the city in the 19^th century was the « flânerie »: the flaneur is the one who sees the urban space as the page of a book to be read in order to find its secret meaning. According to Balzac, to write thus means to transcribe what the “flaneur” sees beyond the visible. One century later, Walter Benjamin displaced this relation between the book and the city space by transforming books on Paris into a space within which signs are to be deciphered in order to make visible the capitalistic illusion. Yannick Haenel revisited Benjamin’s legacy and wrote a revolutionary fiction of Paris in Cercle and Les Renards pales. But one century after Benjamin, books no longer reflect ideology but only refer to themselves. Yet Haenel’s purpose is to modify reality but thanks to the energy conveyed by the book.