Abstract
This essay charts the evolution of colportage in Walter Benjamin's body of writing. Originally referring to a form of popular literature peddled by travelling salesmen, Benjamin morphed the term into the ‘colportage phenomenon of space’, where he endowed it with a more abstract connotation referring to a form of embodied perception that could bridge distinctions between near and far and past and present, giving one access to ‘the whole of world history’. By holding a magnifying glass to this term, this essay elucidates the relevance of colportage in its historical context and unpacks its manifestations in Benjamin's essays, with iterations that often confuse boundaries between the material and the phenomenological. This essay further clarifies how Benjamin's handling of colportage exists alongside his studies of surrealism and his explorations into experience in modernity.
Published Version
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