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A Pious Work of Salvage
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Quotes collected over time to construct a full and singular portrait.

Walter Benjamin collected quotes in little black notebooks that he carried everywhere. Hannah Arendt said he “read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.”

According to Susan Sontag, Walter’s ideal project was “a work of literary criticism that was to consist entirely of quotation, and would thereby be devoid of anything that might betray empathy.”

On Photography ends with an homage to Walter, a quotes-only piece, explaining that “though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.”

In The Moving Body, Jacques Lecoq believed that “to mime is literally to embody and therefore to understand better,” that miming becomes a form of knowledge.

See also: https://archive.org/details/mail-blog-oct-31-2021/mode/1up

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