Walter Benjamins Archive
Metadata
- Author: Walter Benjamin, Erdmut Wizisla, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwartz, Ursula Marx, and Esther Leslie
- ASIN: B015KDL474
- ISBN: 1784782033
- Reference: https://amazon.co.uk/dp/B015KDL474
- Kindle link
Highlights
It would be better to characterize the community of genuine collectors as those who believe in chance, are worshippers of chance. Not only because they each know that they owe the best of their possessions to chance, but also because they themselves pursue the traces of chance in their riches, for they are physiognomists, who believe that everything that befalls their items, no matter how illogical, wayward or unnoticed, leaves its traces. — location: 364
(And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. — location: 391
And it tells the story of an extraordinary writing project in which aestheticism and pragmatism are held in balance. — location: 430
And of course he knew the meaning of the concept “verzetteln” prevalent in library science or lexicography: “to excerpt,” “to — location: 442
disperse things that belong together into individual slips or into the form of a card index. — location: 443
Slips or their stronger sisters, index cards—of which the Journal for Organisation declared in 1929, “cards can do everything”—stand out because of their flexibility, and thus they represent modernity. — location: 447
Its most significant form of appearance is banality — location: 485
misread as “the most significant form”
There is knowledge that determines action. It is, however, not determining as a “motive,” but rather due to the force of its linguistic structure. — location: 487
see Wittgenstein