
Contents
A Note on Citations
Get accessAssistant Professor of German Studies
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Published:September 2012
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The bulk of Nietzsche's posthumous papers are housed at the Nietzsche Archive in the Klassik Stiftung Weimar in Germany. Walter Benjamin's posthumous papers, dispersed across continents by wars hot and cold, now reside largely in the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Among these papers in both Nietzsche's and Benjamin's cases are the fragments of an uncompleted magnum opus: Nietzsche's Will to Power and Benjamin's Arcades Project. The status of these virtual books, ontologically situated in a nimbus of possibility, brings to a point the larger interpretive question of archival remains as such and their relation to published work. These private and preliminary writings both enjoy the authority of immediate candor and suffer the defect of unconsidered approximation; they reside in history differently from finished works. A sensitivity to the historical contrast between completed works and fragmentary documents was fundamental to Benjamin's historical philosophy, whereas Nietzsche's reception has wrestled persistently with the significance of his voluminous notebooks for an accurate understanding of his thought. The less than self-evident historical status of the archival materials surviving from these thinkers is ultimately a consequence of the fact that each of them conceptualized matters of philosophical generality by reflecting on philological practice. This common philological orientation is a central object of the present study. In a citational practice derived from Benjamin's German editors, I mark visibly in the text this historical difference by rendering in italics quotations from Nietzsche's notebooks (volumes 7 through 15 of the Kritische Studienausgabe) and Benjamin's notes on the Parisian arcades (volume 5 of the Gesammelte Schriften) as well as fragmentary paralipomena, with their idiosyncratic punctuation reproduced as scrupulously as translation permits. This visualization is meant to remind the reader that here in these preliminary texts the public authority of the writers' signatures is not yet fully vested. Quotations from the finished works of both philosophers are given in the traditional way, between quotation marks or as block quotations in roman type. Though translations have in many places been adjusted from published versions for contextual accuracy, emphases within quotations have never been altered from the original German.
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