Author(s): Walter Benjamin

Literature

An absorbing selection of Walter Benjamin's personal manuscripts, images, and documents

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday life, art, and dreams. Throughout his life, Benjamin gathered together all kinds of artifacts, assortments of images, texts, and signs, themselves representing experiences, ideas, and hopes, each of which was enthusiastically logged, systematized, and analyzed by their author. In this way, Benjamin laid the groundwork for the salvaging of his own legacy.

Intricate and intimate, Walter Benjamin's Archive leads readers to the heart of his intellectual world, yielding a rich and detailed portrait of its author.

Many of Walter Benjamin’s most important works, from ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ to The Arcades Project, have had their greatest relevance decades after when they were written, and it is sometimes easy to forget that they were brought into being out of what Benjamin saw as piles of cultural waste and intellectual decay. Benjamin regarded the world as a shattered and fragmented thing, not even a thing but a mass of shards and fragments that could only be assembled into something coherent, meaningful or (even) beautiful by careful collecting, by a picking-over of detritus, a cataloguing of disjecta which bear the indelible history of destruction or neglect, of the slippery transience of their identity. For Benjamin, this practice and burden of collecting, of cataloguing, was necessary (for him personally and for us all) in all areas of life: personal, practical, cultural and intellectual. Identity could be no more than a bundling of associated elements. When Benjamin committed suicide in frustration at being unable to cross the Pyrenees to escape Nazi-occupied France, he was carrying a suitcase bearing manuscripts now (presumably) lost – a collecting-and-cataloguing burden synonymous with himself. This remarkable book is another portrait of (another/the same) Benjamin. It reproduces, translates and annotates collections made by Benjamin: of his notes, notebooks and microscripts (he shared with Robert Walser, whose work he championed, the obsession with trying to write smaller than it was possible to write, and on all manner of found paper), of children’s toys, of his son’s ways of saying things, of postcards and photographs, of puzzles and word games, of forms which give shape to ideas. It is (only) on this level that life can be lived, with all its difficulties, and it is on this level that the only meaningful work can be done: “Rag-picker and poet – both are concerned with refuse.”

{THOMAS}