The Arcades Project - Operi

Telescoping of the past through the present. [N7a,3]
The reception of great, much admired works of art is an ad plures ire." [N7a,4]
The materialist presentation of history leads the past to bring the present into a
critical state. [N7a,S]
It is my intention to withstand what Va lery calls "a reading slowed by and
bristling with the resistances of a refined and fastidious reader." Charles Baude­
laire, Les Fleurs du mal, Introduction by Paul Va lery (Paris, 1928), p. xiii."
[N7a,6]
My thinking is related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated
with it. Were one to go by the blotter, howeve,; nothing of what is written would
remam. [N7a,7]
It is the present that polarizes the event into fore- and after-history. [N7a,8]
On the question of the incompleteness of history, Horkheimer's letter of March
16, 1937: "The determination of incompleteness is idealistic if completeness is
not comprised within it. Past injustice has occurred and is completed. The slain
are really slain . . . . If one takes tlle lack of closure entirely seriously, one must
believe in the LastJudgment . ... Perhaps, with regard to incompleteness, there is
a difference between the positive and the negative, so that only the injustice, the
horror, the sufferings of the past are irreparable. The justice practiced, the joys,
the works, have a different relation to time, for their positive character is largely
negated by the transience of things. This holds first and foremost for individual
existence, in which it is not the happiness but the unllappiness that is sealed by
death." The corrective to this line of thinking may be found in the consideration
that history is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance
. VVhat science has "determined;' remembrance can modify. Such
mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and
the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. That is theology; but in
remembrance we bave an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as
fundamentally atheological, little as it may be granted us to try to write it with
inm1ediately theological concepts. [N8,1]
The unequivocally regressive function which the doctrine of archaic images has
for Jung comes to light in the following passage from the essay "Uber die Bezie­
hungen der analytischen Psychologie zum dichterischen Kunstwerk": "The crea­
tive process ... consists in an unconscious activation of the archetype and in an
... elaboration of this original inlage into tlle finished work. By giving it shape,
the artist in some measure translates this image into the language of the pre­
sent . ... Therein lies the social significance of art: ... it conjures up the forms in
which the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning