800 Literatur und Rhetorik
Refine
Year of publication
- 2022 (1) (remove)
Document Type
- Part of a Book (1)
Language
- English (1)
Has Fulltext
- yes (1)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (1)
Keywords
- Benjamin, Walter: Pergamentheft (1) (remove)
Through various cases and instances, this essay opens with the question of biography and the demands of its form: that is, biography's attempt to reduce historical totalities to the page in moments of sudden condensation. It then introduces the figure of Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986), a doctor and later hand reader and sexologist, who appears on a diagram, constructed by Walter Benjamin in 1932, to map his life through his 'Urbekanntschaften' (primal acquaintances). It then seeks to transpose Benjamin's diagram into other linear forms, such as a family tree, a diagram of chemical affinity, and an astral chart, to add one: the diagram as a map of the hand. This opens up a number of temporal, historical, and epistemic reductions, or cases of reduction, in Wolff's work and beyond. It concludes with a particular moment in Wolff's biography - her arrest in 1933 and her escape to Paris - as a final instance of the line, as border.