Street, Life, and Other Signs: Heine in the Rue Laffitte WILLI GOETSCHEL University of Toronto Abstract In a dream sequence that Heine describes in Ludwig Börne: A Memorial (1840), the narrator finds himself at night on a street corner exposed to the pulsating street life of nocturnal Paris. Read with recourse to the notion of Derrida’s voyou (rogue), the paper examines the significance of street life in the 19th century and the critical issues and concern Heine’s text poses. A unique view of the experience of modern city life, the narrator’s observations from the corner stone at the intersection of Rue Laffitte and the Boulevard des Italiens articulate a visionary critique of the complex of the socio- economico-political and esthetic issues that define modern urban experience. [Key- words: Paris, Heine, Derrida, street life, nightlife, boulevard] A s contemporary culture has taken to the streets as the site of postmodern, transcultural, and transnational negotiations, this turn to the street, or if you will the “turn on the go,” has become a signal challenge for current theory. Celebrated for its utopian qualities, the street has also become the marker of the very distopian elements that define our current situation. The place of mobility and interchange where every social, political, and also cultural interaction and movement begins and ends is at one and the same time, the site of gridlock, congestion, traffic jam, paralysis, and dead end: a locus where petrifica- tion recognizes no exemption as its auratic spell commodifies the street and the hope it so stirringly expresses. That street is no neutral place or space but a socially, culturally, politically, legally, and geographically overdetermined meeting point that both connects and divides. As the 18th century German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing observed, what connects society is also what divides it. The very connecting elements are those that also divide and this tension is constitutive for the fabric of civil society. Division—Lessing recognized with the sharp-eyed vision that so strikingly anticipated Georg Simmel’s deepest insights—provides the necessary structure to unify society in a way that preserves freedom and individuality in critically different fashion: a bulwark against a unity that cancels particularity, subjecting it to the mass produced experience of identity that betrays the universalism it so seductively promises. 1 Ownership of this same street has been traditionally disputed: is it public, is it private, who claims the street, who owns it, and who actually runs it? And if it is the place of interchange between private and public City & Society, Vol. 21, Issue 2, pp. 230–244, ISSN 0893-0465, eISSN 1548-744X. © 2009 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-744X.2009.01023.x.