the Arendt Papers include letters to and from Hanan J. Ayalti (pen name of Hanan Klenbort), Walter Benjamin, Rosalie Littell Colie, Robert and Elke Gilbert, J. Glenn Gray, Waldemar Gurian, Rolf Hochhuth, Hans Jonas, Lotte Kohler, Judah Leon Magnes, Mary McCarthy, Ruth H. Rosenau, Gershom Gerhard Scholem, Paul Tillich, Eric Voegelin, Ernst Vollrath, Anne Weil, Helen and Kurt Wolff, and many others.

Pevear, especially, has read some of the theory about translation: Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Roman Jakobson, and, of course, Nabokov.

Card indexes were a tool to manage information overloadand enabled one to move and recombine letters, words and ideas – which led WalterBenjamin to describe the explosion of the book into its fundamental components,recorded on cards, so that they could be recombined (Benjamin, 2016[1986]: 43).

What is propelling humankind into this nightmare, as Benjamin sees it, is not the force of evil or fate. Instead, it is one of modernity’s prized ideals and constitutive achievements: progress.

“This is how one pictures the angel of history,” Benjamin writes. “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay . . . and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned. . . . This storm is what we call progress.”

Walter Benjamin termed the book ‘an outdated mediationbetween two filing systems’

Famously, Luswig Wittgenstein organized his thoughts this way. Also famously, he never completed his 'big book' - almost all of his books (On Certainty, Philosophical Investigations, Zettel, etc.) were compiled by his students in the years after his death.

Thus, the sensitive seismographer of avant-garde develop-ments, Walter Benjamin, logically conceived of this scenario in 1928, of communicationwith card indices rather than books: “And even today, as the current scientific methodteaches us, the book is an archaic intermediate between two different card indexsystems. For everything substantial is found in the slip box of the researcher who wroteit and the scholar who studies in it, assimilated into its own card index.” 47

The project's structure is idiosyncratic. The convolutes correspond to letters of the alphabet; the individual sections of text— sometimes individual lines, sometimes multi-paragraph analyses —are ordered with square brackets, starting from [A1,1]. This numbering system comes from the pieces of folded paper that Benjamin wrote on, with [A1a,1] denoting the third page of his 'folio.'[3] Additionally, Benjamin included cross-references at the end of some sections. These were denoted by small boxes enclosing the word (e.g., ■ Fashion ■).[4]

Such radical compositional approaches arecontemporaneous with the Surrealist use of montage, but predateBurrough’s cut-up-fold-in technique, and ‘put[...] the avant-gardeclaims of hyperfiction to shame’ (Krapp, 2006: 362).

Walter Benjamin employed a similar technique (Benjamin, 2006,2007).

What Iam alluding to here is well drawn out in Walter Benjamin’s reflectionin his Moscow Diary on how we ‘grasp’ a visual image. ‘One does notin any way enter into its space’, he writes. Rather, ‘It opens up to usin corners and angles in which we believe we can localise crucialexperiences of the past; there is something inexplicably familiarabout these spots’ (Benjamin, 1985: 42).

Walter Benjamin From wikibase-docker

the flâneur

Dafür spricht das Credo des Literaten Walter Benjamin: Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der's verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek.

Not to sound like an English professor or anything, but as a professor of English, I can’t help thinking of Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Benjamin suggests that fascistic governments aim to maintain the status quo by providing citizens with the means to express themselves aesthetically without reforming their lives materially.

El autor como productor

La naturaleza de esta tristeza se esclarece cuando se pregunta con quién empatiza el historiador historicista. La respuesta resulta inevitable: con el vencedor. Y quienes dominan en cada caso son los herederos de todos aquellos que vencieron alguna vez. Por consiguiente, la empatía con el vencedor resulta en cada caso favorable para el dominador del momento. El materialista histórico tiene suficiente con esto. Todos aquellos que se hicieron de la victoria hasta nuestros días marchan en el cortejo triunfal de los dominadores de hoy, que avanza por encima de aquellos que hoy yacen en el suelo

The hupomnemata contribute one of the means by which one detaches the soul from concern for the future and redirects it toward contemplation of the past.

In the ebb and flow of its changing rhythms—additions, revisions, reformulations and retrievals—Benjamin's Arcades Project provides an extraordinary case study in the labour of conceptual construction via the configuration and reconfiguration of archival materials. The voluminous ‘Notes and Materials’ that make up the Arcades as it has come down to us remained unpublished until 1982, finally appearing in English only in 1999 (GS V; AP). Only since their publication has it been possible to get a clear sense of the overall trajectory of Benjamin's thought during this period—rendering redundant, or at least displacing, many of the polemics associated with previous cycles of reception. The notes and materials are organized into twenty-six alphabetically designated ‘convolutes’ (literally ‘bundles’) or folders, thematically defined by various objects (arcades, catacombs, barricades, iron constructions, mirrors, modes of lighting…), topics (fashion, boredom, theory of knowledge, theory of progress, painting, conspiracies…), figures (the collector, the flaneur, the automaton…), authors (Baudelaire, Fourier, Jung, Marx, Saint-Simon…) and their combinations.

The Arcades was a vast and ambitious project, not simply in terms of the mass and breadth of its archival sources (sought out by Benjamin in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris), but also—indeed, primarily—with respect to its philosophical and historical intent, and the methodological and representational challenges it posed. Its sprawling, yet minutely investigated historical object was to act as the point of entry into the philosophically comprehended experience of metropolitan capitalism—not some past experience, or the experience of a past phase of capitalist development, but the experience of the capitalist metropolis in Benjamin's own day—through the construction of a specific series of relations between its elements ‘then’ and ‘now’. The practice of research, conceptual organization and presentation that it involved was self-consciously conceived as a working model for a new, philosophically oriented, materialist historiography with political intent.

One-Way Street, a quasi-constructivist collection of fragments written between 1923–1926 and dedicated to Lacis on its publication in 1928, and the unfinished Arcades Project, begun in the late 1920s, both exhibit a modernist experimentation with form that can in part be attributed to Lacis' influence