French Literature Reviews - 2026

V. Fabbri, L'Enfance de la ville. Essai sur Walter Benjamin
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas

Véronique Fabbri, L'Enfance de la ville. Essai sur Walter Benjamin

Paris: Hermann, coll. "Philosophie", 2013.

240 p.

EAN 9782705684082

28.00 EUR

Publisher's Overview:

The childhood of the city is the interplay produced within the urban space by the unexpected resurgence of matrix-like figures: village fragments, the dust of places, games of mirrors—everything from which the new takes shape and signals to passersby, inscribing within itself the form of desire. It is the interworld spoken of by Kafka, a figure of passage and metamorphosis, a primitive landscape that continually reshapes the bedrock of drives. It is within this interworld that the city becomes familiar to strangers, to transients, to those for whom the city's precariousness mirrors their own: "Of these cities there will remain what passes through them: the wind" (Brecht).
The city is the milieu where technology reveals itself as a Heraclitean game with nature, where prehistory intertwines with history. Destructions, constructions, building sites, and excavations endlessly produce spaces of passage, interstices, and thresholds where the new is not yet distinguishable from the old, bordering on the archaic—an interworld.
Childhood is what grasps the life of this interworld best: caught between a heritage it does not know how to receive and the difficulty of grasping what is taking shape, it performs a symbolic labor that outlines the face of what is coming while turning its gaze toward what is disappearing. Culture can no longer be thought of as something simply transmitted, nor as the construct of a single epoch, but rather as the capacity to welcome what arrives.

Véronique Fabbri teaches philosophy at the École Nationale d'Architecture de Paris-La Villette and in preparatory classes. Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophie from 2001 to 2007, she has authored several books and articles on dance and focuses more broadly on bodily space.

This volume contributes to the rich tradition of philosophical and critical commentary surrounding the works of Walter Benjamin, whose writings on urban space, modernity, and historical time have profoundly influenced modern aesthetics and cultural studies. Readers interested in twentieth-century continental philosophy and urban aesthetics may find this study relevant.