Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Walter Benjamin

that this knowledge that determines action leads to silence. Therefore, as such, it is not teachable. This determining knowledge is closely related to the concept of Tao. This is in direct contradiction to knowledge in Socrates’ Doctrine of Virtue. While this is motivating for action, it does not determine those who act.VKnowledge from insight or perceptionThis type is highly enigmatic. In the region of knowledge, it is something that resembles the present in the region of time. It exists only as an ungraspable transition. From what to what? Between foreboding and the knowledge of truth.

      Fig. 2.2

      Fig. 2.2

      I

      Sheet of paper has gone missing; must look for it at home. It contained:

      1.The discussion of the concept of “system” and the doctrine of the extinguishing of intention in the truth, explained in terms of the veiled image of Sais.

      2.Discussion of the concept of “essence” as the mark of truth.

      Fig. 2.3

      Fig. 2.4

      Fig. 2.3

      The Potemkin Story

      The anecdote from Hamsun

      The childhood photograph of Kafka

      The little hunchback

      The truth about Sancho Panza

      Picture from the illustrated History of the Jews

      Hasidic beggar story

      The Next Village

      Fig. 2.4

      Dr Fritz Fränkel

      Medical Specialist for

      Nervous and Mental

      Illnesses

      207 Kaiserallee,

      West Berlin 15

      Telephone: B5

      Barbarossa 5312

      Fig. 2.5

      Fig. 2.5

      Proust and Kafka

      There is something that Proust has in common with Kafka and who knows whether this can be found anywhere else. It is a matter of how they use “I.” When Proust, in his Recherche du temps perdu, and Kafka, in his diaries, use I, for both of them it is equally transparent, glassy. Its chambers have no local coloring; every reader can occupy it today and move out tomorrow. You can survey them and get to know them without having to be in the least attached to them. In these authors the subject adopts the protective coloring of the planet, which will turn grey in the coming catastrophes.

      Fig. 2.6

      Fig. 2.6

La vie antérieureLes années profondesRecueillement

J’ai plus de souvenirs que

      Redonnée [?] The année profonde as seat of mystical experience and of spleen

      Fig. 2.7

      Fig. 2.7

      What is Aura?

      The experience of aura rests on the transposition of a form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature to people. The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen [glances up] answers with a glance. To experience the aura of an appearance or a being means becoming aware of its ability [to pitch] to respond to a glance. This ability is full of poetry. When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is dreaming, draws us after its dream. Aura is the appearance of a distance however close it might be. Words themselves have an aura; Kraus described this in particularly exact terms: “The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it returns the gaze.”

      As much aura in the world as there is still dream in it. But the awakened eye does not lose the power of the glance, once the dream is totally extinguished in it. On the contrary: it is only then that the glance really penetrates. It ceases to resemble the glance of the loved one, whose eye, under the glance of the lover

      Fig. 2.8

      Fig. 2.9

      Fig. 2.10

      Fig. 2.11

¹“Disjointed scribbling” is the Jacobsons’ translation of verzettelter Schreiberei, heading of this chapter. I have chosen “scrappy paperwork” instead.

²Translation amended (from “frustrated book projects”) to convey sense in this context.

       3

       From Small to Smallest Details

       Micrographies

      Walter’s teeninesses do not allow my ambition to rest. I can do it too […]. As you see my writing is getting bigger again, a sign, I suppose, that I should stop writing such nonsense.

      Dora Sophie Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, GB II, p. 198

      I’ll bring with me a new manuscript—one, tiny, book—that will surprise you.

      GB IV, p. 144

      He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside—that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.

      SW 2:2, p. 597

      Memory does this: lets the things appear small, compresses them. Land of the sailor.

      Ms. 863v

      For Benjamin, writing was