Everything around us, dead or alive, in the eyes of a crazy photographer mysteriously takes on many variations, so that a seemingly dead object comes to life through light…
--Josef Sudek, on lyricism
Wednesday, April 11, 2007
Hugo, misunderstood
Mis-quoted in my notes on Hugo’s chapter, “This Will Destroy That,” from Notre Dame de Paris:
“Art machines on with ardent strides.”
“History of knowledge transfers into a flock of birds.”
“Collecting is the redemption of things which is to complement the redemption of man...The collector’s passion, on the other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object--something that is classifiable--but is inflamed by its “genuineness,” its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification. (Arendt, Illuminations: Walter Benjamin Essays and Reflections, 44)
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project; Illuminations;
Hannah Arendt, ed. New York: Schocken Books, 1969;
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981);
Anna Farova, Josef Sudek, Poet of Prague: a photographer's life / biographical profile. New York: Aperature Books, c 1992;
Susan A. Handelman, (f)ragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem and Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001;
Stephen Mitchell, ed. and Robert Hass, transl. Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke;
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989;
Marianne Hirsch, Family frames : photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997;
Walker Percy, The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has To Do with the Other. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1954;
Adam Zachary Newton. The Elsewhere: On Belonging at a Near Distance: Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005;
Susan Brind Morrow, The Names of Things: Life, Language and Beginnings in the Egyptian Desert. New York: Riverside Books, 1997;
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought. Translations and introd. by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper and Rowe, 1971;
Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel. translated from the French by Linda Asher. New York: Grove Press, 1988;
Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New York: World Pub., 1956, 1972 printing;
Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge. London, Tavistock Publications, 1972;
Donald Lyndon and Charles Moore, “Axes that Reach/Paths that Wander, in Chambers for a Memory Place. MIT Press, 1994; John Broomfield, Other Ways of Knowing, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions Press;
M. Christine Boyer, The City of Collective Memory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.