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"This paper reconstructs Walter Benjamin's last work, The Arcades Project, as the work of a ""chiffonier"" thus going against the trend of treating this as a finished book, written by an ambiguous ""flâneur,"" proposing instead to approach it as a systematic collection of scraps of history, habitually underrated by historians, waiting for their classification. The definitive form has to come from a new dialectic of past and present, which starts from Benjamin's historical and political position. The Arcades Project documents a method and a technique of writing that can still be taken up again today."