Walter Benjamin: 100 Notes, 100 Thoughts: Documenta Series 045

Walter Benjamin began taking notes on Paris' arcades in 1927, commencing an ambitious book project which sadly remained incomplete at the time of his suicide in Portbou in 1940. It was published posthumously as The Arcades Project. In her introduction to this facsimile selection of Benjamin's handwritten notes, art historian Nikola Doll describes how the author attempted "to integrate the principle of the montage as an epistemological technique." Color charts, schemata and diagrams act as guiding principles to navigate the thicket of excerpts and quotations.