Monday, December 12, 2005

It's Always Something Else (Walter Benjamin)

"It is an error to search Benjamin's work for stability in terminology. Nothing works devoid of context, performance. These are texts that must always be read anew, less for the referents they seem to preserve than for their Darstellung: here lives, works, theories, terms, are saved only like phenomena in ideas, only like stars in a constellation. Almost to the point, as Benjamin says of allegory, that all that is used to signify, 'the signifying props' in his writing, inevitably point 'to something else.' 'Any person, any thing, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else.'

Carol Jacobs, In the Language of Walter Benjamin, 7.