Epigraff

"[His] ideal of producing a work consisting entirely of quotations, one that was mounted so masterfully that it could dispense with any accompanying text, may strike one as whimsical in the extreme and self-destructive to boot, but it was not, any more than were contemporaneous surrealistic experiments which arose from similar impulses. To the extent that an accompanying text by the author proved unavoidable, it was a matter of fashioning it in such a way as to preserve 'the intention of such investigations', namely, 'to plum the depths of language and thought...by drilling rather than excavating' so as not to ruin everything with explanations that seek to provide a causal or systematic connection" -Hannah Arendt, on Walter Benjamin, 1968. (Illuminations. Walter Benjamin. Hannah Arendt (ed). New York NY: Schoken)