In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

x USER'S MANUAL
material phenomena, and dominant world views as they were produced
by certain concepts during the year 1926. Each entry refrains
as far as possible from "expressing" the author's individual "voice,"
from in-depth interpretations, and from diachronic contextualizations
through the evocation of phenomena and world views that
occurred "before" and "after" 1926. Each entry is thus supposed to
reach maximum surface-focus and concreteness. If possible at all, the
style and the structure of the entries would be determined by the
individual phenomena that each of them thematizes. In their convergence
and divergence, finally, the entries do not seek to produce any
specific "mood" (or Stimmung). Should some readers discover, for
example, a certain "Heideggerian temper" in this book, such an
impression would have to be explained as a symptom of the impact
that the year 1926 had on Heidegger, rather than as a symptom of
the author's ambition to imitate Heidegger's style. In contrast to the
fifty-one entries, "After Learning from History" and "Being-in-the­
Worlds of 1926" are written in the author's current academic prose
(which he did not take as a license for trying to frustrate nonspecialized
readers).
Stakes
To make at least some readers forget, during the reading process, that
they are not living in 1926. In other words: to conjure some of the
worlds of 1926, to re-present them, in the sense of making them
present again. To do this with the greatest possible immediacy
achievable through a historiographic text (as opposed to, say, photographs,
sound-documents, or material objects). Although the author
had to invent a specific textual form for each entry, the success of this
book as a whole depends on the claim that it was not "invented"
(i.e., on the claim that its content is completely referential). The effect
of conjuring the past is based on this more or less "ontological"