It is the bull whose blood must fill the pit if the shades of the departed are to appear at its edge’ (Schriften II, 314). Out of this present when it has been sacrificed for the invocation of the past arises then ‘the deadly impact of thought’ which is directed against tradition and the authority of the past.

Thus the heir and preserver unexpectedly turns into a destroyer. ‘The true, greatly misunderstood passion of the collector is always anarchistic, destructive. For this is its dialectics: to combine with loyalty to an object, to individual items, to things sheltered in his care, a stubborn subversive protest against the typical, the classifiable.’28 The collector destroys the context in which his object once was only part of a greater, living entity, and since only the uniquely genuine will do for him he must cleanse the chosen object of everything that is typical about it. The figure of the collector, as old-fashioned as that of the flâneur, could assume such eminently modern features in Benjamin because history itself – that is, the break in tradition which took place at the beginning of this century – had already relieved him of this task of destruction and he only needed to bend down, as it were, to select his precious fragments from the pile of debris. In other words, the things themselves offered, particularly to a man who firmly faced the present, an aspect which had previously been discoverable only from the collector’s whimsical perspective.

I do not know when Benjamin discovered the remarkable coincidence of his old-fashioned inclinations with the realities of the times; it must have been in the mid-twenties, when he began the serious study of Kafka, only to discover shortly thereafter in Brecht the poet who was most at home in this century. I do not mean to assert that Benjamin shifted his emphasis from the collecting of books to the collecting of quotations (exclusive with him) overnight or even within one year, although there is some evidence in the letters of a conscious shifting of emphasis. At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of ‘pearls’ and ‘coral.’ On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection. And in this collection, which by then was anything but whimsical, it was easy to find next to an obscure love poem from the eighteenth century the latest newspaper item, next to Goecking’s ‘Der erste Schnee’ a report from Vienna dated summer 1939, saying that the local gas company had ‘stopped supplying gas to Jews. The gas consumption of the Jewish population involved a loss for the gas company, since the biggest consumers were the ones who did not pay their bills. The Jews used the gas especially for committing suicide’ (Briefe II, 820). Here indeed the shades of the departed were invoked only from the sacrificial pit of the present.

The close affinity between the break in tradition and the seemingly whimsical figure of the collector who gathers his fragments and scraps from the debris of the past is perhaps best illustrated by the fact, astonishing only at first glance, that there probably was no period before ours in which old and ancient things, many of them long forgotten by tradition, have become general educational material which is handed to schoolboys everywhere in hundreds of thousands of copies. This amazing revival, particularly of classical culture, which since the forties has been especially noticeable in relatively traditionless America, began in Europe in the twenties. There it was initiated by those who were most aware of the irreparability of the break in tradition – thus in Germany, and not only there, first and foremost by Martin Heidegger, whose extraordinary, and extraordinarily early, success in the twenties was essentially due to a ‘listening to the tradition that does not give itself up to the past but thinks of the present.’29 Without realizing it, Benjamin actually had more in common with Heidegger’s remarkable sense for living eyes and living bones that had sea-changed into pearls and coral, and as such could be saved and lifted into the present only by doing violence to their context in interpreting them with ‘the deadly impact’ of new thoughts, than he did with the dialectical subtleties of his Marxist friends. For just as the above-cited closing sentence from the Goethe essay sounds as though Kafka had written it, the following words from a letter to Hofmannsthal dated 1924 make one think of some of Heidegger’s essays written in the forties and fifties: ‘The conviction which guides me in my literary attempts … [is] that each truth has its home, its ancestral palace, in language, that this palace was built with the oldest logoi, and that to a truth thus founded the insights of the sciences will remain inferior for as long as they make do here and there in the area of language like nomads, as it were, in the conviction of the sign character of language which produces the irresponsible arbitrariness of their terminology’ (Briefe I, 329). In the spirit of Benjamin’s early work on the philosophy of language, words are ‘the opposite of all communication directed toward the outside,’ just as truth is ‘the death of intention.’ Anyone who seeks truth fares like the man in the fable about the veiled picture at Saïs; ‘this is caused not by some mysterious monstrousness of the content to be unveiled but by the nature of truth before which even the purest fire of searching is extinguished as though under water’ (Schriften I, 151, 152).

From the Goethe essay on, quotations are at the centre of every work of Benjamin’s. This very fact distinguishes his writings from scholarly works of all kinds in which it is the function of quotations to verify and document opinions, wherefore they can safely be relegated to the Notes. This is out of the question in Benjamin. When he was working on his study of German tragedy, he boasted of a collection of ‘over 600 quotations very systematically and clearly arranged’ (Briefe I, 339); like the later notebooks, this collection was not an accumulation of excerpts intended to facilitate the writing of the study but constituted the main work, with the writing as something secondary. The main work consisted in tearing fragments out of their context and arranging them afresh in such a way that they illustrated one another and were able to prove their raison d’être in a free-floating state, as it were. It definitely was a sort of surrealistic montage. Benjamin’s ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were the contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses. To the extent that an accompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it in such a way as to preserve ‘the intention of such investigations,’ namely, ‘to plumb the depths of language and thought … by drilling rather than excavating’ (Briefe I, 329), so as not to ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection. In so doing Benjamin was quite aware that this new method of ‘drilling’ resulted in a certain ‘forcing of insights … whose inelegant pedantry, however, is preferable to today’s almost universal habit of falsifying them’; it was equally clear to him that this method was bound to be ‘the cause of certain obscurities’ (Briefe I, 330). What mattered to him above all was to avoid anything that might be reminiscent of empathy, as though a given subject of investigation had a message in readiness which easily communicated itself, or could be communicated, to the reader or spectator: ‘No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener’ (‘The Task of the Translator’; italics added).

This sentence, written quite early, could serve as motto for all of Benjamin’s literary criticism. It should not be misunderstood as another dadaist affront of an audience that even then had already become quite used to all sorts of merely capricious shock effects and ‘put-ons.’ Benjamin deals here with thought things, particularly those of a linguistic nature, which, according to him, ‘retain their meaning, possibly their best significance, if they are not a priori applied exclusively to man. For example, one could speak of an unforgettable life or moment even if all men had forgotten them. If the nature of such a life or moment required that it not be forgotten, that predicate would not contain a falsehood but merely a claim that is not being fulfilled by men, and perhaps also a reference to a realm in which it is fulfilled: God’s remembrance’ (ibid.). Benjamin later gave up this theological background but not the theory and not his method of drilling to obtain the esential in the form of quotations – as one obtains water by drilling for it from a source concealed in the depths of the earth. This method is like the modern equivalent of ritual invocations, and the spirits that now arise invariably are those spiritual essences from a past that have suffered the Shakespearean ‘sea-change’ from living eyes to pearls, from living bones to coral.