The Arcades Project - Operi

The writings of the Surrealists treat words like trade names and form texts that in reality
act as prospectus for enterprises not yet off the ground. Nesting in the trade names are
qualities that in earlier ages were looked for in the oldest words.
Daumier , Grandville-Wiertz-
F. TI,. Vischer, Mode und qnismus (Stuttgart, 1879).
Uprising of the anecdotes. The epochs, currents, cultures, movements always concern the
bodily life in one and the same, identical fashion. TIlere has never been an epoch that did
not feel itself to be "modem" in the sense of most eccentric, and suppose itself to be
standing directly before an abyss. A desperately clear consciousness of gathering crisis is
something chronic in humanity. Every age llllavoidably seems to itself a new age. But the
"modernity" that concenlS men with respect to the bodily is as varied in its meaning as
the different aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope. -The constructions of history are
comparable to instructions that commandeer the hue life and confine it to barracks. On
the other hand: the street insurgence of the anecdote. 'The anecdote brings things near to
us spatially, lets them enter our life. It represents the strict antithesis to the sort of history
which demands "empathy:' which makes everything abstract. "Ernpatll)! ": this is what
newspaper reading terminates in. The true method of making things present is: to represent
them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space). Only anecdotes can do this
for us. Thus represented, the dungs allow no mediating construction from out of "large
contexts."-It is, in essence, the same with the aspect of great things from the past-the
cathedral of Charh'es, the temple of Paestum: to receive them into our space (not to feel
empathy with their builders or their priests). We don't displace our being into theirs: they
step into our life.-The same technique of nearness may be observed, calendrically, with
regard to epochs. Let us imagine that a man dies on the very day he turns fifty, which is
the day on which his son is born, to whom the same thing happens, and so on. The result
would be: since the birth of Christ, not forty men have lived. Purpose of this fiction: to
apply a standard to historical times that would be adequate and comprehensible to human
life. TIlls pathos of nearness, the hatred of the abstract configuration of human life in
epochs, has animated the great skeptics. A good example is Anatole France. On the
opposition between empathy and actualization: jubilees, Leopardi 13.33
Benda reports on a German visitor's amazement when, sitting at a table d'h6te in Paris
fourteen days after the stonning of the Bastille, he heard no one speak of politics. Anatole
France's anecdote about Pontius Pilate, who, in Rome, while washing his feet, no longer
quite recalls the name of the cnlcifiedjew.34.
Masks for orgies. Pompeian tiles. Gateway arches. Greaves. Gloves.
Very important: bull's·eye windows in cabinet doors. But was there such a thing in France
as well?
To make a truly palpable presentation of human beings-doesn't that mean
bringing to light our memory of them?