Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Walter Benjamin
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Walter Benjamin’s Archive
“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously: he collects like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.” This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practised it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin’s Archive
IMAGES, TEXTS, SIGNS
Translated by Esther Leslie
Edited by
Ursula Marx
Gudrun Schwarz
Michael Schwarz
Erdmut Wizisla
The Walter Benjamin Archive
is an Institute of the Hamburg Foundation
for the promotion of knowledge and culture
based in the Academy of Arts Berlin.
First published in paperback by Verso 2015
First published in English by Verso 2007
Translation © Esther Leslie 2007, 2015
First published as Walter Benjamins Archive: Bilder, Texte und Zeichen by Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 2006 © Suhrkamp Verlag 2006; “Expose of Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “Draft of the Arcades of Paris,” “Fragments of the General Layout, Layout for the Expose of Paris, The Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” and “Notes and Materials for the Arcades Project,” all reprinted by permission of the publisher from The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, pp. 3, 349–50, 873–76, 915–16, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Originally published as Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedeman © 1982 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Language and Logic” and “Language and Logic II,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, reprinted by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, pp. 272–73, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press © 1996 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; “Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism,” trans. Howard Eiland, “Spain, 1932,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, and “Little History of Photography,” trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, reprinted by permission of the publisher from Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934, trans. Rodney Livingstone and others, eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith, pp. 3–5, 638–39, 514–15, Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press © 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; “A Berlin Chronicle,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings by Walter Benjamin, English translation © 1978 by Harcourt, Inc., reprinted by permission of the Publisher.
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author, editors and translators have been asserted
Photos
Gisèle Freund © Estate Gisèle Freund, Paris
Germaine Krull © Museum Folkwang, Essen
Sasha Stone © Serge Stone, Blaricum
Photos supplied courtesy of Friedrich Forssman
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Verso
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US: 20 Jay Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-203-0
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-204-7 (UK)
eISBN-13: 978-1-78478-205-4 (US)
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Typeset in Gill Sans Light by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in the UK by CPI Colour
CONTENTS
Preface
1Tree of Conscientiousness Benjamin as Archivist
2Scrappy Paperwork Collecting and Dispersal
3From Small to Smallest Details Micrographies
4Physiognomy of the Thingworld Russian Toys
5Opinions et Pensées His Son’s Words and Turns of Phrase
6Daintiest Quarters Notebooks
7Travel Scenes Picture Postcards
8A Bow Being Bent Composing, Building, Weaving
9Constellations Graphic Forms
10Rag Picking The Arcades Project
11Past Turned Space Arcades and Interiors
12Hard Nuts to Crack Riddles, Brainteasers, Word Games
13Sibyls Mosaics in Siena
Bibliography and Abbreviations
About the book
Excavation and Memory
Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically. Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives