Antiquitopia

I have been tagged by Daniel and Tonya at Hebrew and Greek Reader . In this meme, I will give the five books or authors who have shaped my thought the most, whether I like them or not, whether through agreement or opposition, etc. And they can be enduringly or immediately influential. This meme started not too long ago with Ken Brown at COrthodoxy . So, here are my five. For those who read my blog regularly, there probably will not be too many surprises. 1. M.M. Bakhtin . Most immediately, this Russian has profoundly influenced not only the way I approach my work--although he does that--but how I view day-to-day interactions. I was introduced to his thought through his essay on the "Chronotope" in the collected volume, The Dialogic Imagination . I use the Chronotope extensively in my dissertation. Since then, I have branched out to his other works and others' use of him. But even his concepts of the "utterance" from simple day-to-day speech-units to co...

Translation attains its full meaning in the realization that every evolved language (with the exception of the word of God) can be considered a translation of all the others.... Translation is removal from one language into another through a continuum of transformations. Translation passes through continua of transformation, not abstract areas of identity and similarity. (Walter Benjamin, "On Language as Such and the Language of Man," in Reflections ; trans. Edmund Jephcott)

CAUTION: STEPS Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven. (Walter Benjamin, "One-Way Street," in Reflections ; trans. Edmund Jephcott) So..are you composing, building, or weaving at the moment?

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for quite a schooling. Then, signboards and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance, like teh sudden stillness of a clearing with a lily standing erect at the center. Paris taught me this art of straying; it fulfilled a dream that had shown its first traces in the labyrinths on the blotting pages of my school exercise books. (Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle" in Reflections ; trans. Edmund Jephcott)

A Klee painting named "Angelus Novus" shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. 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, awaken the dead, 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, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History")

As I continue to dawdle through Walter Benjamin's essays, I am often struck at some details. In fact, as Benjamin reads, he writes. He reads for details, the obscure, buried detail the perspective from which brings new light upon the rest of the writing, or the world. To read this way, to see this way--which for Benjamin is the same, since he was one of the foremost proponents, if not the catalyst, for reading the world as a text--one must dawdle. Not necessarily with a great deal of concentration, although that is sometimes required, but more like someone walking, browsing without urgency. It is not skimming, for that suggests that one is in a hurry. Just as Benjamin read the world as a text, he strolls through texts. It is only appropriate that one of his footnotes best captures this attitude: A pedestrian knew how to display his nonchalance provocatively on certain occasions. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs ...

From Walter Benjamin's "What is Epic Theater?" One can go even further and remember that interruption is one of the fundamental devices of all structuring. It goes far beyond the sphere of art. To give only one example, it is the basis of quotation. To quote a text involves the interruption of its context. In a way, by quoting this text about quotation, I have interrupted Benjamin's context, his discussion of the "quotable gesture" in epic theater. As my quote stands, you may not even realize that this is about gestures or even theater, except that I have told you so. Yet this violence of extraction allows the quotation to take wing; it reinvigorates it with new life as I place it in a new context. Yet to quote also interrupts the context of placement. When I quote something, it interrupts my own prose, creating a cacophany of voices, or, to put in M. M. Bakhtin's terms, heteroglossia. I often find in reading other people's work that I find ...

I just read Walter Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire's Tableaux Parisiens ," and I thought I would give some choice morsels for your eyes' delight: No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener. One might...speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten it. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it be unforgotten, taht predicate would not imply a falsehood but merely a claim not fulfilled by men, and probably also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God's remembrance. Translation...ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic form or intensive form.

I think I will just quote from the master of quotes without commentary (or little commentary outside of this sentence), itself Walter Benjamin's ultimate goal, from his own "Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting": Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories. For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order? ...the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth. To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves. Make your own order of my chaos of quotation, my poaching of words.

For some diversion and pleasure as I am furiously busy, I am reading Michael Wood's The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles . In it he quotes Walter Benjamin: A philosophy which does not include and cannot explain the possibility of prophecy by means of coffee grounds cannot be a true philosophy. (Walter Benjamin, Letters in Michael Wood, Road to Delphi , 20). Maybe he used the "Christ the Magician" coffee mug!