0% found this document useful (0 votes)
213 views27 pages

Buck-morss-Jacir-The Gift of The Past

Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
0% found this document useful (0 votes)
213 views27 pages

Buck-morss-Jacir-The Gift of The Past

Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 27

Nº004

Emily
Jacir
& Susan
Buck-
Morss
100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken | Nº004

Emily Jacir
& Susan Buck-Morss
Das
The Gift of the Past
der
Vergangenheit
1.
History is layered. But the layers are not stacked neatly. The disrupt-
ing force of the present puts pressure on the past, scattering pieces
of it forward into unanticipated locations. No one owns these pieces.
To think so is to allow categories of private property to intrude into
a commonly shared terrain wherein the laws of exclusionary inheri-
tance do not apply. The history of humanity demands a communist
mode of reception.

2.
The goal is nothing short of a different world order. It will require
rescuing the past based on a de-privatized, de-nationalized structure
“History breaks down into images, not into stories.” of collective memory. There is little danger of a new triumphalism in
Walter Benjamin this task. Human universality is a scarred idea, and the sources of the
scarring must be remembered along with its moments of inspiration.
Extreme inhumanities are part of a communist transmission of the
past. The human disaster in Gaza cannot be made the legacy of Israel
any more than the Holocaust belongs solely to the Germans. Neither
historical role, of victim or oppressor, is encoded in our DNA. Past
injury is not a license to kill.

3.
Art teaches us to see things. It is Anschauungsunterricht—training in
observation.

26 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 27
Draw a New Angel that matches Benjamin’s description.
Separating the Image of the
Angelus Novus from the
Caption That Captured It
Long ago, before the name Walter Benjamin was globally famous, I
asked students in a seminar to consider the ninth thesis in his late
text “On the Concept of History” (1940) and draw an image that
matched his description. I read it to them:

There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel


who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His
eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how
the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past.
Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catas-
trophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at
his feet (SW 4, p. 392; GS I:2, p. 697).

My students drew mature angels, Christmas-card angels, and subtle-


bodied angels from medieval art.

None of these resembled the Angelus Novus painted by Paul Klee in


1920 and purchased by Benjamin shortly thereafter.

28 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 29
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, Klee’s picture hangs in the Israel Museum, indelibly linked to Benjamin’s
1920
suicide while escaping Nazi-occupied France, as a permanent monu-
India ink, color chalks, and
brown wash on paper ment to the Holocaust. How did the painting get there? Carl Djerassi
32.2 × 24.2 cm tells us in dramatic form:
Gift of Fania and Gershom
Scholem, Jerusalem, John
Herring, Marlene and Paul Benjamin: But what happened to my Angelus Novus?
Herring, Jo-Carole and Scholem: I’m getting to that. At the reception in Siegfried Unseld’s
Ronald Lauder, New York
Collection The Israel
home [Unseld was head of the Suhrkamp publishing company;
Museum, Jerusalem this reception followed Adorno’s funeral in 1969], I met your son
[Stefan]. (Pause.)
Benjamin: And?
Scholem: I raised the question of the Angelus. (Pause.)
Adorno: (impatiently): What does raising the question mean?
Scholem: I told him it was really mine . . . after all, by that time
I’d read Walter’s 1932 will, where he’d left it to me . . . and I asked
Stefan to instruct your wife [Gretel Adorno] to hand it over to me.
I thought that I could personally take it back to Jerusalem.
Benjamin: And Stefan agreed?
Scholem: He most certainly did not!
Benjamin (surprised): What?
Scholem: He felt that since you had not killed yourself in 1932—
...
Adorno: (even more impatient): Come on, Gerhard! So what hap-
pened? Tell us.
Scholem:Your wife Gretel wrote to the famous Kornfeld and Klip-
stein auction house in Bern for an estimate, and when she received
it, it was clear to everyone that by 1969 we were talking about the
most valuable item in Walter’s estate. We all argued for nearly three
years . . . during which the Klee remained in Gretel’s home . . . until
Stefan died in 1972. So the poor man never really could enjoy that
drawing.
Today the Klee drawing has become famous through Benjamin’s re- ...
ception of it—indeed, too famous, the words so thickly applied that Scholem: I persuaded Siegfried Unseld . . . to be the middle man.
we cannot see the Klee image without the overlay of Benjamin’s com- He went to London, settled with Stefan’s widow, and got the pic-
ments on it. The elements reverse: the image is a caption for the text, ture from Gretel. . . . I took it with me to Jerusalem.
rather than vice versa. —From Carl Djerassi, Four Jews on Parnassus—A Conversation:
Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Schönberg, pp. 82–84.
Benjamin wrote his comments in a particular historical situation.
Today, the object is pinned down by the caption; pinned down by Unseld unilaterally reduced the royalties from Benjamin’s published
the determinations of a particular catastrophe as if it extended end- works to be paid to Stefan’s widow and her two young daughters.
lessly into the future. Historical philosophy (Geschichtsphilosophie) Scholem kept the painting in his Jerusalem home until his death, when
hardens into ontology. The world, without distinctions, is called a his widow was persuaded to donate it to the Israel Museum.
prison camp.

30 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 31
Transitoriness Paul Klee, too, envisioned multiple, topical angels. In 1905, his angel
was a modern-day Icarus whose one wing signaled the earliest me-
chanical flights. Klee drew at least fifty different angels in his lifetime,
Benjamin’s own reading of Klee’s painting kept changing. Angels more than half of them in the last year. (Both men died in 1940.)
were for him ephemeral creatures. In 1922, he planned a topical
journal under the name Angelus Novus, wherein theology and current Paul Klee, Der Held mit dem
commentary were to be one and the same. Flügel (The Hero with the
Wing), 1905
Etching, plate 25.4 × 15.9 cm;
In 1931, Benjamin bestowed the mantle of the New Angel on the sheet 40 × 30.7 cm
irreverent journalist Karl Kraus, a “poetic, martial angel” fiercely The Museum of Modern
critical of the latest news. “The very term ‘public opinion’ outrages Art, New York

Kraus”; his satire cleans the linguistic clutter from “journalistically


processed” news. Benjamin calls Kraus a monster “sprung from the
child and the cannibal,” his writing “barbaric,” like Paul Klee’s paint-
ing, in that it starts “from the very beginning” (SW 2, pp. 432–57;
GS II:1, pp. 335–55).

In old engravings, there is a messenger who rushes toward us


crying aloud, his hair on end, brandishing a sheet of paper in his
hands—a sheet full of war and pestilence, of cries of murder and
pain, of danger from fire and flood—spreading everywhere the
Latest News. . . . Full of betrayal, earthquakes, poison, and fire
from the mundus intelligibilis (SW 2, pp. 432–33; GS II:1, p. 367).

Perhaps one of those [angels] who, according to the Talmud, are


at each moment created anew in countless throngs, and who, once
they have raised their voices before God, cease and pass into noth-
ingness. Lamenting, chastising, or rejoicing? No matter—on this
evanescent voice the ephemeral work of Kraus is modeled. Ange-
lus—that is the messenger in the old engravings (SW 2, p. 447;
GS II:1, p. 367).

Two years later, Benjamin described the Angelus as a woman, the fe-
male counterpart of himself, or indeed, himself in pursuit of a woman,
a particular woman, Anna Maria (Toet) Blaupott ten Cate, whom he
met in Ibiza in 1933. Benjamin is the suspended, if voracious, angel,
ready to pounce on this woman he desires. Receding as time takes
him forward, he hovers with persistence: “In short, nothing could
overcome the man’s patience” (SW 2, p. 715; GS VI, p. 522).

This is how he understood the relationship between image and cap- The caption, bottom right, reads: “Especially endowed by nature with
tion. The latter was erasable, replaceable, and ephemeral, like the one wing, he has therefore formed the idea of being destined to fly,
songs of Talmudic angels. whereby he perishes.”

32 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 33
Politics and love, autobiography and transcendent truth—these were
thought together by Benjamin, pace the loss of this polyvalence in the Collective Memory
museum context.
Legenda: That which is to be read.
For Benjamin, art is just one form of human creation, no more or dif- Creenda: That which is to be believed.
ferently to be evaluated than any other—building type, technological
invention, social institution, or object of child’s play. All of these forms The remembered past is preserved in stories. As part of the collective
consist of the human shaping of matter that is itself not humanly cre- imagination, it becomes legend. (What is too terrible in an individual’s
ated. The material world is God’s creation. Its distinguishing sign is experience cannot be remembered.)
transitoriness. It manifests its divine origins by eternally passing away.
In legend, individually lived experience is whitewashed in the pro-
Transitoriness is the order of human happiness, which does not mas- cess of collectivizing it, cleansing it of that which is truly terrifying:
ter nature, but speaks its name. Humans transform the “residue” of ambiguity.
God’s “creative word” by bringing the natural world to speech in the
secular language of human happiness (SW 2, p. 717; GS VII, p. 795). When legends are appropriated by power and fixed to objects, lift-
These two processes, secular and divine, face in opposing directions, ing these objects out of history and preserving them within a nim-
like two parallel arrows simultaneously in play. Despite antithetical bus of absoluteness—good and evil, right and wrong, redeemed and
positioning, secular happiness and divine creation are in synergy, each damned—legends become orthodoxy, setting the parameters of right
augmenting the other in time—“just as a force, by virtue of the path belief.
it is moving along, can augment another force on the opposite path”
(SW 3, p. 305; GS II, pp. 203–04). Such legends are formed out of irreducible, unchanging elements that
refer to mythic constructs: “the nation,” “the West,” “the terrorist,”
This simultaneously personal-political and theological-mystical idea “the Muslim,” “the Jew.” These constructs, reassembled in various
of truth is the natural kernel of Benjamin’s Marxist and messianic ways, police how the past is to be read.
convictions. It remains so constant in his lifetime of writing that dat-
ing the “Theological-Political Fragment,” a text that deals with this Securing the borders of orthodoxy violates the historical fundament
theme directly (and contains the image of the counter-facing arrows), of transitoriness. When the past is constrained in a timeless medium,
is the object of irresolvable philological dispute as to whether it was its rescue becomes a mode of entrapment. Once the sense of the world
written in the early 1920s or in the winter of 1937–38. The passing is formulated in this way, history enters the magic circle of political
presence of the material world and of human happiness in it leaves theology: right belief legitimates power, which legitimates right belief.
us with the metaphysical necessity of affirming transitoriness because
only in passing is truth available to us. Its image is time-sensitive. Orthodox remembrance is capable of performing murder on the ma-
terial world—not only what has been in history, but what exists today.
It is not that truth changes. We do. Collective memory becomes conformism. Anyone who remembers
differently is suspect.

Doors lock from the outside.

34 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 35
Control of how the past is read is therefore no small matter.
Ephemeral Archives
Archives, museums, libraries, legal traditions, institutional records—
all of these are storehouses of the past. Their benefactors supervise That which survives in the archives does so by chance. Disappearance
the production of orthodoxy—although religious and secular ruling is the rule. Annihilation is the fate of whole cities, obliterating far more
groups are often in competition with (and among) another in deter- of the human record than is preserved. Wars and disasters of nature
mining just what that is. are indifferent destroyers. Human intention is at work as well. Heresy,
degeneracy, blasphemy, treason, disbelief—these are just some of the
But even a book, or an image, can be threatening if it escapes the par- threats to orthodoxy that call for destruction of the historical record.
ticular manner of reading that is affirmed by power.
Texts and images are both vulnerable to attack. Precisely which ob-
Archivists and scribes, artists and academics, find their patrons within jects are available from the past, whose written and visual sources
this ruling milieu. Indeed, learning is the passion of the powerful. The are saved, is astoundingly arbitrary. Only a confirmed believer can be
symbiotic relationship between knowledge and power is critical for sanguine about their providential arrangement.
maintaining order. Rulers cannot survive its loss for long.
Great libraries disappear. More than half a million manuscripts, both
But orthodoxy is in constant danger of being undermined by the secular and religious, were produced, collected, and later lost at each
knowledge process itself. Storehouses of the past harbor evidence of of these imperial centers:
errors, ambiguities, and complexities (not to speak of outright lies)
that discredit official belief and threaten to topple collective legends. Library of Alexandria, founded in Ptolemaic Egypt, 3rd century
BCE, disappeared by 5th century CE.
The production of knowledge without a patron has been described House of Wisdom in Baghdad under the Abbasid Caliphate, 9th–13th
as apocalyptic in its historical implications (Smith, p. 81). In times of centuries.
struggle between the guardians of power and the guardians of truth, Library of Córdoba under the Andalusian Umayyads, 9th–10th cen-
historical evidence becomes a prophetic weapon. If the rulers claim turies.
the role of the restrainer (katechon) who holds apocalyptic disorder at House of Wisdom in Fustat (now Cairo) under the Fatimid Caliphate,
bay, the prophets protest against the given order in the name of hu- 11th–12th centuries.
man happiness, social justice, or God’s will.
Europe was late to assemble a major collection (the Vatican Library
History writing is the place of this struggle between the need to pre- held only 1,160 volumes when formally established in 1475), but in-
serve the present order and the desire to preserve truth. But here is tentional destruction was common. Two cases connected with reli-
the irony. If the preserved past is entrusted with the task of bearing gious and imperial expansion resulted in irretrievable loss:
witness to truth, if the producers of meaning treat the artifacts of the
transient, material world with a reverent care close to worship, then The public burning of thousands of Arabic/Andalusian manuscripts
how is this painstaking effort to be reconciled with the fact that the by the Spanish Inquisition, Granada, 1499.
past is never given to us whole? The obliteration of Maya sacred books by the Spanish bishop of colo-
nial Yucatán, 1562, along with 5,000 “diabolical” cult images.

Wikipedia lists eighty-seven historical instances of book burning. But


the act itself is not the issue. Historical contexts and consequences
change. There is no direct continuity between past and present in
these instances, at least not for the point being made.

36 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 37
We are concerned with the political connection between knowledge
and power that leads to the partial and arbitrary silencing of the past,
and here secular modernity has added something new.

If earlier, false belief was under attack, now the enemy takes on eth-
nic and racial tones. Modern states establish libraries and archives
as guardians of the imagined national community, those who claim
rights to the land by birth (natio). Patriotism appropriates the aura of
religion. It purifies present acts of violence against perceived enemies,
whose own past is first defiled, and then destroyed. Ethnic archives are
obliterated. National libraries come under fire.

Recent casualties include:

The Irish National Archives, containing one thousand years of his-


torical documentation, destroyed in the civil war, 1922.
The Catalonian library founded by Pompeu Fabra, destroyed by
Franco’s troops, 1939.
The Judaica Collection at Birobidzhan, capital of the Soviet Jewish
autonomous national zone, established as a socialist alternative to Zi-
onism, destroyed in the anti-Semitic climate of Stalin’s last years.
The Załuski Library, Warsaw, founded in the 18th century as one of
Europe’s first public libraries, destroyed in the burning of the city as There is a less violent, more common form of erasure. It is the prac- Roger M. Richards,
destroyed interior of the
punishment for Warsaw’s anti-Nazi uprising, 1944. tice of preserving only “our” past that provides a continuous, linear
Bosnian National Library,
The Jaffna Public Library in Tamil-dominated northern Sri Lanka, trajectory for imagining “our” future. February 1996
97,000 volumes, including rare palm-leaf volumes, destroyed by Sin-
halese paramilitary, 1981. Statues of Tamil cultural and religious fig- Archaeologists dig quickly through layers of history to find what is
ures were destroyed or defaced. of interest to present power. Attention to mythic origins—the stuff of
Bosnia’s National and University Library in Sarajevo, shelled and national legend that shores up the dominance of those who rule—dis-
burned by Bosnian Serb gunners in 1992. The library held 1.5 million misses the recent past as refuse. Its ground is a mere construction site
volumes, including more than 155,000 rare books and manuscripts. for future growth. In the process, material evidence of crimes against
The National Museum and Library of Iraq in central Baghdad, de- living human beings is destroyed. Their records, declared of no value,
stroyed in the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 2003. Statues and other ancient disappear, and with them the possibility of imagining any community
artifacts were looted or destroyed. at all.

Excavating the earth in search of the cultural heritage of a particular


people while bulldozing the counter-evidence poisons present con-
sciousness by shrouding it in myth. One finds only what has already
been determined to be there.

For it is an irretrievable image of the past which threatens to disap-


pear in any present that does not recognize itself as intended in that
image (SW 4, p. 391; GS I:1, p. 695).

38 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 39
But go deeper into the historical evidence, below the level of official
legend, and it becomes clear that “our” past is not, and never has Revolutionary Patience
been, our own. Objects survive through trading hands. Books move
and thrive in diaspora; scholarship flourishes through cosmopolitan In a time when Europe’s imperial nations were engaged in unprec-
exchange. Texts and artifacts follow the lines of pilgrimages, troops, edented human destruction in the name of partial, political identities,
and trade. Walter Benjamin had cause to hover, like Klee’s Angelus Novus, reject-
ing all existing alternatives.
Empires monopolize knowledge through linguistic appropriation,
supporting the Great Translation Movements that have marked the This hovering prophet of the apocalypse, who could find no patron in
rise of their power. Ptolemy’s astronomy, Galen’s medicine, Plato and power, was not one to take the moral categories of good and evil and
Aristotle’s philosophy—all of these human achievements owe their reverse their referents, whereby past victims in history are glorified
survival to a series of imperial languages. This heritage of ancient as present conquerors. He wrote in 1938: “Wrongs that are endured
Greece, lauded by Europe as its own, passed from Greek into Persian are apt to foster self-righteousness. This has been true for the scholars
translations (under the Sassanids), into Arabic (under the Abbasids), who have emigrated” (SW 3, p. 310; GS III, p. 522).
and ultimately into Latin (in Toledo and Sicily), as the precondition
for the European Renaissance. When vernaculars of Europe replaced Benjamin desired a home in Europe, which gave him no refuge—not
Latin as the languages of power, translations became a strategy of Germany, not France, and not Spain. He distinguished the Zionist
intra-European imperial competition. movement as a political organization from his own spiritual identifica-
tion with certain ideas that, even if they were “expressed by a German
The last Great Translation Movement after Europe’s decline is into ten times over,” he defined as Jewish: “First and foremost, I must af-
English (the language of this text). firm what in me is valuable, and should someone say to me that this
valuable aspect of myself and other ‘Jews’ is not Jewish, I cannot regret
We face an uncomfortable fact: Without empires, no cultural heri- that for a moment” (GS II:3, pp. 837–38).
tage. Without diasporas, no national past. The Iraqi National Museum
was founded under the imperialist mandate of the British (who are For him, a weak messianic power belongs to the living generation,
spearheading its present restoration). Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute, de- those human beings who share this moment in time, not to any par-
stroyed in the civil war, housed a “Bosnian” past that included ancient ticular ethnic, religious, or national collective.
manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew—not only Adzamijski
(Bosnian Slavic in Arabic script). He did not choose Central Park in New York, where Adorno and the
Institute for Social Research awaited him, or Israel to join Gershom
So, “our” past is possible precisely because of those who are not con- Scholem, or Moscow where his early love Asja Lacis was politically
sidered part of our story. engaged, or an ultimate return from exile to Communist East Berlin,
where his friend Bertolt Brecht lived out his natural life.
Today, microfilmed replicas of manuscripts lost in wartime allow the
restoration of centers of learning. Electronic collections promise to Because of his indecision (or was it revolutionary patience?), Benja-
prevent effective obliteration. Has global communication, then, made min’s legacy is open to us today.
imperialism’s appropriation of knowledge obsolete?

Eighty percent of the material on the Internet is in English.

40 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 41
Constellations Benjamin speaks of “smashing” the continuum of history. This pro-
cess entails violence. He uses “militant terminology” and “terrorist
metaphors” in order to blast apart the dominant historical narrative
The temporal matrix in which truth is embedded, essentially tran- (Werckmeister, Icons, p. 24).
sient, is the criterion for critical judgment—a difficult idea, because it
goes against conventional procedures that narrate history sequentially The past ricochets off the present and scatters into enemy territory.
and at a distance. In view of the fleeting nature of truth, any attempt Historical fragments are the remains of an explosion.
at permanence of historical interpretation leads to error.
Blasted free of official memory, the fragments of history are preserved
Our situation demands a new form of exegesis, one that rescues the in images. They retain the nearness of original experience, and with
legibility of the past against the conventions of official memory. it, ambiguity. Their meaning is released only in a constellation with
the present.
If “progress” yields a constant heap of debris, this is due to the con-
tinuation of the same—war’s destruction, economic exploitation, and They harbor a warning. The gift of the past is a Trojan horse. One
turning the other of one’s own collective identity into a scapegoat as thinks one knows whence it comes and to whom it belongs. But the
the political enemy to be exterminated. Interrupting the interminable gift is to others, those the so-called rightful heirs are presently de-
repetition of the same necessitates remembering the past through stroying.
those present inhumanities of which one is at this very moment an
accomplice. There is nothing in human history that is foreign to us.

Here it is someone else’s past, or someone else’s present, that needs to


come into the picture.

Past events cannot provide a key to the present unless they are radi-
cally separated from a direct lineage of inheritance.

When the layers of history are superimposed in a way that only one’s
own history can be read through them, the horrors of the past are
repeated precisely in the process of paying them infinite due.

Never again ends up being always the same.

42 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 43
Eyad Albaba/Associated
Press, New York Times,
June 20, 2007

What if you cannot read what is written by the image? Emily Jacir João Silva, New York Times,
stazione, 2008–09 October 10, 2007
Proposal for public
installation located on Line 1
vaporetto stops
Digital photograph

Whom will you trust to tell you what it says?

44 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 45
Bibliography
Political philosopher Susan Buck-Morss lives in the United States and is Professor of Political
Science at the City University of New York.

Emily Jacir is an artist who lives around the Mediterranean.

Abu El-Haj, Nadia. Facts on Gutas, Dimitri. Greek


the Ground: Archaeological Thought, Arabic Culture. New
Practice and Territorial Self- York: Routledge, 1998.
Fashioning in Israeli Society.
Chicago: University of Muchawsky-Schnapper,
Chicago Press, 2001. Ester. “Paul Klee’s Angelus
Novus.” Israel Museum
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Journal 8 (Spring 1989),
Sacer: Sovereign Power and pp. 47–52.
Bare Life. Trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Smith, Jonathan Z. Map Is
Stanford University Press, Not Territory: Studies in the
1995. History of Religions. Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1978.
Benjamin, Walter.
·· Gesammelte Schriften. 7 Spies, Werner. “Nightmare
vols. in 14 parts. Ed. Rolf and Deliverance.” In Max
Tiedemann and Hermann Ernst: A Retrospective, ed.
Schweppenhäuser. Frank- Werner Spies and Sabine
furt/Main: Suhrkamp, Rewald. New Haven: Yale
1972–89. University Press, 2005.
·· Selected Writings. 4 vols.
Ed. Michael W. Jennings, Tiedemann, Rolf. Die
Howard Eiland et al. Abrechnung: Walter Benjamin
Cambridge, Mass.: und sein Verleger. Hamburg:
Harvard University Press, Kellner, 1989.
1996–2003.
·· The Work of Art in the Werckmeister, Otto Karl.
Age of Its Technological ·· Icons of the Left: Benjamin
Reproducibility, and Other and Eisenstein, Picasso
Writings on Media. Ed. and Kafka after the Fall
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid of Communism. Chicago:
Doherty, and Thomas Y. University of Chicago
Levin. Cambridge, Mass.: Press, 1999. First pub-
Harvard University Press, lished in German as Linke
2008. Ikonen. Munich: Carl
Hanser Verlag, 1997.
“Book burning,” http:// ·· The Making of Paul Klee’s
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Career, 1914–1920. Chica-
Book_burning. Accessed go: University of Chicago
September 14, 2010. Press, 1984.

Djerassi, Carl. Four Jews on


Parnassus—A Conversation:
Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem,
Schönberg. Illust.
Gabriele Seethaler. New
York: Columbia University
Press, 2008.

46 | 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken Nº004 | Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss 47
100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken
Nº004: Emily Jacir & Susan Buck-Morss

dOCUMENTA (13), 9/6/2012 – 16/9/2012


Artistic Director / Künstlerische Leiterin: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev
Agent, Member of Core Group, Head of Department /
Agentin, Mitglied der Kerngruppe, Leiterin der Abteilung: Chus Martínez
Head of Publications / Leiterin der Publikationsabteilung: Bettina Funcke
Managing Editor / Redaktion und Lektorat: Katrin Sauerländer
English Copyediting / Englisches Lektorat: Philomena Mariani
Proofreading / Korrektorat: Sam Frank, Cordelia Marten
Graphic Design and Typesetting / Grafische Gestaltung und Satz: Leftloft
Typeface / Schrift: Glypha, Plantin
Production / Verlagsherstellung: Stefanie Langner
Reproductions / Reproduktionen: weyhing digital, Ostfildern
Paper / Papier: Pop’Set, 240 g/m2, Munken Print Cream 15, 90 g/m2
Printing / Druck: Dr. Cantz’sche Druckerei, Ostfildern
Binding / Buchbinderei: Gerhard Klein GmbH, Sindelfingen
© 2011 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, Kassel;
Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern; Susan Buck-Morss; Emily Jacir
Illustrations / Abbildungen: p. / S. 1: Fridericianum, September 1941 (detail / Detail),
Photohaus C. Eberth, Waldkappel; Universitätsbibliothek Kassel, Landesbibliothek und
Murhardsche Bibliothek der Stadt Kassel; p. / S. 30: © The Israel Museum/David Harris;
p. / S. 33: © 2011 Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence;
p. / S. 39: © Roger M. Richards/rogermrichards.com; p. / S. 44: © 2009 Emily Jacir;
p. / S. 45 top / oben: © Eyad Albaba/ddp images; bottom / unten: © João Silva/PictureNet

documenta und Museum Fridericianum


Veranstaltungs-GmbH
Friedrichsplatz 18, 34117 Kassel
Germany / Deutschland
Tel. +49 561 70727-0
Fax +49 561 70727-39
www.documenta.de
Chief Executive Officer / Geschäftsführer: Bernd Leifeld

Published by / Erschienen im
Hatje Cantz Verlag
Zeppelinstrasse 32, 73760 Ostfildern
Germany / Deutschland
Tel. +49 711 4405-200
Fax +49 711 4405-220
www.hatjecantz.com

ISBN 978-3-7757-2853-9 (Print)


ISBN 978-3-7757-3033-4 (E-Book)

Printed in Germany

Gefördert durch die

funded by the German Federal


Cultural Foundation
100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken | Nº004

Emily
Jacir
& Susan
Buck-
Morss

You might also like