The Arcades Project - Operi

The particular difficulty of doing historical research on the period following
the close of the eighteenth century will be displayed. With the rise of the masscircnlation
press, the sources become irmumerable. [N4a,6]
Michelet is perfectly willing to let the people he known as (."barharians." ""Barbarians.'
I like the word, and I accept the term." And he says of their writers:
"Their love is boundless and sometimes too great, for they may devote themselves
to details with the delightful awkwardness of Albrecht Durer, or with the excessive
polish of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who does not conceal his art enough; and by this
minute detail they compromise the whole. We must not blame them too much. It is
... the luxuriance of their sap and vigor . ... This sap wants to give everything at
once-leaves, fruit, and flowers; it bends and twists the branches. These defects of
many great workers are often found in my books, which lack their good qualities.
No matter!" J. Michelet, Le Peuple (Paris, 1846), Pl'. xxxvi-xxxvii." [NS,l]
Letter from Wiesengrund of August 5, 1935: "The attempt to reconcile your
'dream' momentum-as the subjective element in the dialectical image-with the
conception of the latter as model has led me to some formulations ... : With the
vitiation of their use value, the alienated things are hollowed out and, as ciphers,
they draw in meanings. Subjectivity takes possession of them insofar as it invests
them with intentions of desire and feat: And insofar as defunct things stand in as
images of subjective intentions, these latter present themselves as immemorial
and eternal. Dialectical images are constellated between alienated things and
incoming and disappearing meaning, are instantiated in the moment of indiffer­
ence between death and meaning. WIllie things in appearance are awakened to
what is newest, death transfonns the meanings to what is most ancient." With
regard to these reflections, it should be kept in mind that, in the nineteenth
century, the number of "hollowedout" things increases at a rate and on a scale
that was previously unknown, for technical progress is continually withdrawing
newly introduced objects from circulation. [NS,2]
"The critic can start from any fonn of theoretical or practical consciousness, and
develop out of the actual forms of existing reality the true reality as what it ought
to be, that which is its airo." Karl Marx, Der historische Materialismus: Die Frtihschriften,
ed. Landshut and Mayer (Leipzig