Programming note

This week's issue is brought to you by the repetition compulsion

Theses on the Philosophy of History is a little quilted-together assemblage of criticism by Walter Benjamin, and when I first read it I knew I would have to keep reading it for the rest of my life. That’s the kind of reader I am, unfortunately: Jewish. Not a Talmud scholar, but also not someone who can just fucking leave something alone. Always picking.

Today I was wrecked. I was a wreck of a woman. I considered the difference between the angel who regards history and the humans who have to pick our way through it. Watching disaster and being the disaster-makers. It is impossible to live among the wreckage, impossible to keep living in the knowledge that our neighbors are wreckers. And then as soon as it’s over, we dive back into the wreck.

What all of this made clear to me is I’m going to have to write about the frankly evil Israel Museum and its hoard of papers, Judith Butler sifting through that archive, Kafka’s letters and Paul Klee’s drawings, Adrienne Rich sending us back in to find ourselves, and Benjamin dead on the French-Spanish border, which means next week’s paragraph will have to answer the question: what is a serial settler.