The paper approaches Celan’s Atemkristall as a joint work between poet and graphic artist, in this case the wife of the poet, Giselle Celan-Lestrange.  It begins by showing how the philosophical readings that focused on Atemkristall – Bevilacqua, Gadamer, Poggeler and to lesser extent Derrida – obliterate the graphic dimension of the work.  It is suggested that in complex ways this obliteration repeats the act by which the poems that emerged in proximity with the graphic works were separated from them when published in the canonical collection Atemwende.  This obliteration is related to the issues of censorship and the archive and the tension between visual and verbal archives.  It is shown that the philosophical and art-historical readings of Atemkristall are dependent upon and continue this originary act of archival censorship.  The proposed readings of the poems and images return to the performances of the poems in the presence of the graphic work and show the mutual implication between the visual and verbal registers and the difficult place each occupies with respect to their respective archives – post-war poetry in German and modernist engraving.

Conference Timetable – Wednesday 23^rd of June

9.00 – 9.30 Registration / Coffee

9.30 – 10.00 Introduction: Sas Mays (Westminster), Leena Petersen (Sussex)

10.00 – 12.00 Panel 1: Modern Crisis and the History of the Present – Part 1

Chair: Sas Mays (Westminster)

Nicholas Lambrianou (Birkbeck): ‘Figures of Interruption: Philosophical Dramas of Temporality and History in Benjamin and Rosenzweig’

Sami Khatib (FU Berlin): ‘The Messianic and the Archive: Walter Benjamin’s ‘Politics of Time’’

Leena Petersen (Sussex): ‘Messianic Libertarianism and Linguistic Philosophies of History in Benjamin and Related Writings of His Time’

12.00 – 1.00 Lunch Break

1.00 – 3.00 Panel 2: Poetics of Temporality

Chair: Keston Sutherland (Sussex)

Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths): ‘Word and Image in Celan’s Atemkristall’

Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv / Sussex): ‘Paul Celan: Language of Loss at the Heart of  Time’

Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths): ‘The Wounded Archive: Derrida Reading Celan’

3.00 – 3.30 Coffee Break

3.30 – 5.30 Panel 3: The Temporality of Archives – Part 1

Chair:  John Roberts (University of Wolverhampton)

Elina Staikou (Goldsmiths): ‘Vigil of the Archive: On Derrida Dreaming Benjamin’

Rebecca Dolgoy (Montreal / FU Berlin): ‘The Work of Art as Archive: Examining Adorno’s Zeitkern as Time Capsule’

Wesley Phillips (Independent): ‘On the Concept of Counter-Tradition’

 5.30 – 6.00 Closing Discussion

Conference Timetable – Thursday 24^th of June

10.00 – 10.30 Coffee

10.30 – 12.00 Panel 4: Modern Crisis and the History of the Present – Part 2

Chair: Leena Petersen (Sussex)

Reut Paz (Humboldt University Berlin): ‘The Legal Transcendentalism of Hans Kelsen as a Hole in Time’

Dan Smith (Chelsea School of Art and Design): ‘Overlooking Bloch: Contemporary Art and Utopia’

12.00 – 1.00 Lunch

1.00 – 3.00 Panel 5: The External Archive

Chair: Esther Leslie (Birkbeck)

Tommaso Speccher (FU Berlin): ‘The Hole in Space: Fragmenting and Re-piecing the Archive between Walter Benjamin and Daniel Libeskind’

Manu Luksch (London): ‘Moonwalking in Real Time’

3.00 – 3.30 Coffee Break

3.30 – 5.00 Panel 6: The Temporality of Archives – Part 2

Chair: Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv, Sussex) 

David Cunningham (Westminster): ‘Abstract Times: Benjamin, Kafka and the Modernism of Tradition’

Matt Charles (Middlesex): ‘The Snow Line of the Archive: Walter Benjamin On the Trail of Old Letters’

 5.00 – 5.30 Closing Discussion

Walter Benjamin’s unique spatial (urban/geographical) and temporal (messianic/interruptive) understanding of history emerges out of a dense network of critical philosophical forebears – romanticism, Goethe, neo-Kantianism, Nietzsche – prior to his explicit engagement with Marx in the 1930s. I want to argue that it was Franz Rosenzweig’s work that provided Benjamin with a specific model of how these precursors, once read as a series of ‘philosophical dramas’, may be concentrated into the question of temporal and historical orientation. For Rosenzweig orientation is an experiential event which relies on a figurative image of disorientation or caesura, and is indebted to a specifically theatrical conception of ‘life’ interrupting ‘illusion’. At one key point, Rosenzweig took as his model a drama by 19^th C parodist WD Grabbe (who, by 1916 had been rediscovered by German Expressionism after a century of obscurity) as well as the expressionist dramatisations of agonised individualism which are prevalent in the war years (Rosenzweig’s ‘new thinking’ was at times described as ‘philosophical expressionism’ or even ‘a philosophy and theology of hyper-inflation’).

Despite his own interest in theatre as a source of historico-philosophical orientiation, Benjamin’s work is profoundly transformed via the prism of capital and technology and in particular his later engagement with Marx, Brecht and the avant-garde. And yet the question remains, particularly with regard to Benjamin’s late work, to what extent are the tensions between a materialist understanding of socio-historical transformation and a messianic concept of experienced time (interruption, memory, orientation) successfully resolved? Connecting materialism and messianism for Benjamin is constructed time, the models for which may be found in the spaces of mediated cultural memory (archives, museums, libraries) but which is also presented to experience by the spaces of modernity more generally: the urban, the arcade, cinema, the feuilleton and so on. It is these endlessly reconstructed and transient cultural phenomena that present the physiognomy of modernity itself, as that which repeatedly turns away from its disastrous present. And so for Benjamin, the ‘archive’ must be inverted to become, ironically, an archive of the present – or else it doomed to be nothing other than (lost) experience chasing its own tail, or a disastrous ‘infinite task’, the disaster disguised as ‘progress’.

Starting with Giorgio Agamben’s (2006) distinction between messianic time (Judeo-Christian monotheism) and eschatological end-time visions (Mysticism, Gnosticism, Manichaeism), my paper examines the temporal structure of Benjamin’s messianic Marxism. As is well known, Benjamin’s notion of ‘now-time’ [Jetztzeit] introduces a theologico-political temporality different from scientific-philosophical concepts such as absolute Newtonian, relativist Aristotelian, or transcendental Kantian time. But how are we to conceive of the specificity of this messianic time?

Benjamin’s version of the ‘messianic idea in Judaism’ has to be differentiated from other influential understandings of the messianic such as an impotent ‘life lived in deferment’ (Gershom Scholem) or a ‘waiting without horizon of expectation’ (Jacques Derrida) as well as from contemporary radical leftist concepts which de-temporalize history (Alain Badiou’s ‘Event’). Rather, for Benjamin the messianic works in two opposite directions: it indicates the ultimately achieved interruption/cessation of history by virtue of ‘political action [which], however destructive, reveals itself as messianic;’ and it maintains a never irrevocably accomplished historical happening which can be retroactively changed by the experience of remembrance [Eingedenken].

According to this reading, messianic politics (the ‘real’ state of exception) and messianic historiography (retroactive redemption of the past) involuntarily coincide at the point of the ‘now of recognisability’ which irreducibly links political acting, temporality and epistemology. For Benjamin, an authentic revolutionary act does not merely open a ‘hole in time’ (Paul Celan) but introduces an inner loop of time, a ‘time differential’, a time of an epistemologico-political operation unearthing a hidden potentiality of the past. Following Agamben, we might call this time the ‘time of the end’ – ‘the time that time takes to come to an end’ – in contrast to the eschatological ‘end of time’.

The operational time which is encapsulated in the ‘now of recognisability’ allows for an alternative position between the contemplative-idealist standpoint of official historiography, which collects historical events/facts/texts, and the meta-historicist stance of a Foucauldian Archeology of Knowledge. Benjamin’s concept of history is neither about archived history in the positivist sense nor about Foucault’s idea of a ‘general system of the formation and transformation of statements.’ Following Agamben’s instructive differentiation between the archive and the ‘testimony’, I finally argue that the messianic introduces a pure potentiality of the unwritten/unsaid which precedes the archival ‘system of relations between the unsaid and the said’. In other words: the Benjaminian ‘time of truth’ as the ‘now of recognisability’ concerns the past in its unarchivability – it does not designate the factual positivity of the relations of the historically enunciated but accounts for the structural condition of the (im)possibility of a true historical enunciation.

The double approach of libertarian and utopian revolutionary thought characterises several Jewish thinkers from Central Europe. Even though they constitute an extremely heterogeneous group, they were nevertheless unified by this common problem. Within a cultural neo-romantic background and in a relationship of elective affinity, it is not surprising that a certain number of Jewish thinkers of German culture, close to anti-capitalist romanticism, simultaneously chose these two roads under the form of the (re)discovery of the Jewish religion and of sympathy or identification with revolutionary utopias heavily charged with nostalgia for the past. For some, this constellation was a transient episode of their intellectual itinerary (Lukács); for others it was the central axis of all their work (Benjamin). The paper will investigate the relation between messianic libertarianism and those philosophies of history focusing language; in particular, Benjamin’s and related writings will be considered and brought into context with the potential archival dimensions of their approach.

As a short, hand-written inscription proposes in late 1967, Paul Celan constructed a poem that summarized long archival research. ‘Nah im Aortenbogen’ (‘Near, in the Aorta’s Arch’) brought a long and a fruitful symbiosis to completion. But is this symbiosis—a poetic fusion of the German and the Hebrew—a true one? The last line of the poem, ‘Ziw, that light’ offers a different option. As my paper proposes, the poem represents a whole poetic archive, constructed from a long dialogue with both German and Jewish thought, which are present in the poem via systems formed by Martin Heidegger and Gershom Scholem. Still further, as the poem and the inscription suggest, relate to a Yiddish poem by Moishe-Leib Halpern and a sermon by the German mystic Meister Eckhart. Celan’s poem pulls all these different voices to the present, and demostrates how an archive of lost voices is trasnformed, through ‘a whole in time’, to the present moment. It is, one should not forget, grounded and anchored in a hole, in the ‘not-is’, in the absence located where ‘nothingness’ lies. ‘Near, in the Aorta’s Arch’ proposes all this in three short stanzas: a whole world is to be found, sometimes, where nothingness offers more than the material ‘is’.

Drawing from Jacques Derrida’s readings of both the poetry and writings on the subject of poetry of Paul Celan, this paper argues that a thinking of poetry is indispensable for a productive thinking of the archive, insofar as the archive and the poem are constituted by signatures, proper names, dates, anniversaries and testimony; all of which present a paradox in terms of the singularity of the present-now and the unrepeatable event. Whilst an unceasing attempt to think the singular event underlies Derrida’s entire oeuvre, the focus here lies, firstly, on the consequences, for Derrida’s thinking, of Celan’s poetic mise-en-oeuvre of the date (a setting to work and experience of the date that is rooted in a ‘today’), leading Derrida to propose that the paradox of the necessarily singular, yet repeatable, self-exposing and self-effacing date announces something like the essence of the poem, today, and that the date can only be poetic.

Secondly, having outlined Derrida’s reading of the poetic date in Celan’s work, and the manner in which Celan’s poetry displaces the limit between the supposedly ‘external’ date (the calendrical, archivable, historical date) and the more essential incorporation of the non-conventional date within the poetic text, the date is subsequently addressed in terms of what Derrida names ‘the law of caesura,’ with caesura here being understood in terms of wounding, incision, interruption and discretion in the body of both the word, the poetic text and the archive (as generalised text). For Derrida, wherever a date takes place, there is, a priori, the experience of a wound. Just as the date must be effaced in order to be preserved and to commemorate, all experience of singularity (including the concept of the archive in general) must necessarily undergo the pain of this self-wounding; an experience that is exemplary in the poetic of Celan. In terms of the archive, it is demonstrated that it is only through the ageless dating, wounding and self-effacement of the body of the word or (poetic) text, as mark or trace, that the possibility of the historical, archivable inscription is opened.

Finally, the paper moves to a consideration of Celan’s 1960 ‘Meridian’ address, in which Celan’s ‘effort of trumping sovereignty,’ in Derrida’s words, is aligned with ‘the poetic act’ –or simply ‘poetry’ itself – as an act of freedom. Here a consideration of Celan’s re-conceptualisation of sovereignty (what Derrida calls the ‘hyper-majesty of poetry), through his thinking of the punctual present-now of the poem, is woven back into Derrida’s prioritisation of the caesura in Celan’s poetry, and presented alongside Derrida’s own deconstruction of sovereignty and mastery through a generalised thinking of the caesura, demonstrating how the caesura at work in Celan’s poetry informs the caesura of the Derridean event.

Waking dreams are for Walter Benjamin hiding places for a world of things seeking what he calls “profane illumination”. In the Arcades Project awakening from a dream is one of the privileged ways of describing a new, dialectical method of doing history. “Dialectical image” is a “dream image” and “dialectical reversal” is the “flash of awakened consciousness.” The awakened consciousness, however, is not that which has interrupted dreaming but what preserves the dream’s interruption. The transformative, thus revolutionary force of dreams, the “dream wave”, is only unleashed as remembrance: dreams keep watch over awaking and it is this intermediate world, the threshold (which is also a methodological one) between dream and waking that reactivates what is lost and forgotten in the concrete historical situation of objects. “The history of dream remains to be written”, claims Benjamin in “Dream Kitsch”. How would such history be delimited? And what of its archive or archivability? Could there be a “politics of dreaming”, asks Jacques Derrida in “Fichus”, that “did not yield to the imaginary or the utopian?” How is dreaming related to the political question of the archive? This paper will address these questions by bringing into contact some of Benjamin and Derrida’s reflections on the politics, topology and temporality of dreaming and the archive and will situate them within the wider scope of these two thinkers’ encounter and the themes of law, genre, justice, messianicity and spectrality.

If etymologically archive is both arkhe (origin) and arkheia (repository of public records), then it is simultaneously the theory of new beginnings and the praxis of maintaining the already existing. In response to this tension, my essay will examine Adorno’s concept of the Zeitkern (literally: time seed). In Adorno’s work, the Zeitkern takes the form of a work of art. I will argue that: the work of art, first of all, is incarnated temporality, and furthermore, when read as an archive, the work of art both conserves and transforms the historical moment, thereby, in Adorno’s terms, rupturing the temporal continuum.

This rupture is neither a simple tear nor an open hole because it has content. Through this rupture, the historical moment expels a seed, the Zeitkern, containing its genealogy as well as its negative imprint in the form of social critique. This dual character, also exemplified in the simultaneous workings of the archive, is demonstrated in Adorno’s work wherein the Zeitkern is the sublation (Aufhebung: the simultaneous preservation, negation and transcendence) of moments within temporality. As such, Adorno’s Zeitkern also challenges Benjamin’s notion of dialectics at a standstill.

 Though my paper will largely draw from Adorno’s work on art, memory and temporality, I will call upon other thinkers of the 19^th and 20^th centuries notably Marx, Hegel, and Benjamin (particularly in the context of his dialectical images) in order to establish a clear notion of the Zeitkern as archive.

This research is motivated by what I take to constitute the antinomy of contemporary radical thought: panlogicism and exceptionism. Each conceives of the philosophical possibility for social change in a divergent way to the other. The former, Hegelian-Marxist position, has the disadvantage of presenting a progressive view of history from the standpoint of its incomplete or even catastrophic standpoint. It has the advantage of grounding social change within human, self-conscious activity. Conversely, much post-war French and Italian radical thought articulates the possibility of change through a concept of extra-historical event (as versus intra-historical mediation). Philosophies of the event identify the problem of panlogicism, but at a price: exceptionism threatens to exceed the critical standpoint of historical experience, requiring a dogmatic intervention at odds with the critical humanist project. It lapses into the position of its opposite, panlogicism.
 
Walter Benjamin’s messianism constitutes a philosophy of the exception. Yet his distinctive historical materialism makes him uniquely placed for an understanding of the antinomy. I seek to draw out his affinities to the ‘programme’ of German Idealism, Hegel included. Specifically, a reconstructed debate rather than antinomy between Hegel and the middle Schelling (historically, the parting of ways between not just friends, but panlogicism and exceptionism), forms a part of the ‘philosophical foundations’ of Marxism (Gillian Rose). Schelling’s ‘system of freedom’ can be brought to bear upon Hegel’s ‘speculative science’, in light of both the collaborative ‘System Programme’ fragment and several of Benjamin’s texts. Hypothetically, the system of freedom would correspond to a logic of the exception.
 
One of my philological justifications for connecting Schelling to Benjamin comes from Franz Joseph Molitor, a student of Schelling’s. Bram Mertens has recently claimed that Molitor’s The Philosophy of History, or, On Tradition had a profound influence upon Benjamin, by way of the concepts of tradition and Lehre. The spatial-simultaneous understanding of tradition, which continues into the Arcades Project, opposes the linear-progressive understanding of history, as represented by historicism and, allegedly, Hegelianism.
 
The concept of tradition oscillates between catastrophe and redemption. Capitalism is a ‘cynical’ tradition of its own, based upon exchange-based forms of repetition. But it is the shared, mythic structure of the opposed temporalities that opens up the possibility of a ‘countering [Umkehr]’, from ‘Zeitalter’ to ‘Weltalter’, and from tradition to counter-tradition. I connect this to Schelling’s understanding of myth as future intimation, in his own Weltalter. Such countering has as much to do with mediation as with exception, since the countering is already underway.

The political crises of the 20th century influenced Hans Kelsen (1881-1973) both on an individual and a professional level.1 Kelsen, one of the preeminent jurists of his time, constructed the Pure Theory of Law (1934), before securing his escape from the burning ambers of Europe’s violence. Through this theory, Kelsen attempted to discover the nature of law itself, to determine its structure and its typical forms, independent of the changing content which it exhibits at different times and among different people. Kelsen wanted to obliterate the profession of its limiting duality between the concrete ‘is’ and the normative ‘ought’. This way, his pure theory creates a new path where the fundamental antinomy between realism and idealism is dissolved.

The beauty (and vulnerability) of Kelsen’s theory is that it does not depend on the subordination of men to men, but to legal rules that have been created accurately and in accordance to “higher” valid norms. It is through this “chain of valid norms” that culminates within the Grundnorm, an a priori presupposition, that he erected his eternal and transcendental scientific law as the embodiment of an ethical goal. Turning into scientific and logical investigations as a reaction to the growing social irrationality and anarchy was a common denominator to many Jewish intellectuals of the Habsburg Empire. Earlier religious desires that during the age of Enlightenment, the Aufklärung and Jewish Haskalah, were directed towards to making Judaism a rational and modern religious practice, were now transformed into new secular scientific tools in the hands of Sigmund Freud, Karl Popper, Arthur Schnitzler, Erwin Schrödinger, Stefan Zweig, Gustav Mahler, etc. It was in the world of “rational illusions” that they sought to find the reality of life.

Despite Kelsen’s insistence on the purity of the law, it was not, as Martti Koskenniemi articulates, ‘a politically innocent jurisprudence. At the stroke of a pen it redefined as ideology all the nineteenth-century historical and sociological theories that had sought to answer the question of the real nature of (Austrian/German) statehood as well as the attempt to derive international law from humanitarian morality or the sociology of interdependence’.

I would like to explicate Kelsen’s transcendental aspirations for the Pure Theory of Law. I wish to present how his theory corresponded the political instabilities of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, the insecurities of the German Weimar Republic as well as those of its Jewish author. Additionally, I would like to emphasize the importance of Pure Theory of Law as a “hole in time”: a path away from needing a historical point of reference, let alone the archive.

Within Hal Foster’s article ‘An Archival Impulse’ can be found a compelling yet tentative manifestation of utopia in contemporary art. It is upon this that the very force of argument pivots, towards a critical engagement in the present with unrealised futures and their remains in the past. Utopian and archival forces are bound by wishful, perhaps paranoiac, responses to failure and a wish to recoup what has been lost, to move beyond pure nostalgia towards something that may be future orientated in its temporality. However, there is a fixed emphasis on ‘failed futuristic visions’—it still seems necessary to orientate utopia around failure and an inability to be realised. Whereas it seems that Ernst Bloch offers concrete examples of how best to navigate away from such  preconceptions, his presence within this particular text is limited to a single footnote referencing  Heritage of Our Times, a collection of early essays, and the statement ‘Bloch might also be an instructive reference here for his concepts of the nonsynchronous and the utopian’. The absence of a substantial engagement with Bloch, particularly the failure to address The Principle of Hope, is a lacuna within ‘An Archival Impulse’, but one that can be attributed to a general inconspicuousness of Bloch within discussions around contemporary art, which needs to be re-addressed. Just as Foster emphasises the archival impulse of his article as something that moves beyond notions of traumatic failure and winsome nostalgia, Bloch’s Principle of Hope is founded upon a complex and eruptive temporality: the past holds both what is to be avoided, and what must be redeemed­—a three dimensional temporality, in which analysis of the past illuminates the present in order to direct the future.

The archival dimensions of German-Jewish conceptions of temporality, history, catastrophe and crisis has recently found a new declension in a diverse array of architectural projects which came into being in different cities of Central Europe. The Jewish Museum in Berlin by Architect Daniel Libeskind offers a crucial representation of this spatial revisiting of the concept of archive in contemporary German-Jewish culture. This paper sets out to read the main features of this architectural work against Benjamin’s notion of the archive as spatiality and harking back to the relationship between archive and writing, as in the deconstructionist tradition.

Benjamin’s concept of the archive is often understood as related to the idea historical temporality as Messianic interruption (Messianische Unterbrechung) and therefore against the grain of the classic Hegelian universalistic notion of archive. While this take on Benjamian’s archive is extracted by his thesis on the concept of history, and righteously so, I would like to suggest that in those same theses the ideal of Archive as spatiality can also be encountered. In particular, the (contro)revolutionary force of the archive resides in a topographic actualization of this Messianic interruption, both in the topographies of the cities and in the topography of writing. The idea of a relationship between the archive and writing resonates as the core of Benjamin’s legacy and its particular understanding positions itself in opposition to other classic positions in German-Jewish culture (Rosenzweig, Buber). The writing of the Archive in contemporary cityscapes thus represents a topographic determination of specific organic relationships between political, historical and philosophical plans. My endeavor will be to interpret the mutuality of the dialectics between Archive and Writing in German-Jewish culture in the urban material manifestation of the Jewish Museum in Berlin.

The presentation “Moonwalking in RealTime” will draw from the research for sci-fi docu FACELESS, an experimental film made using preexisting surveillance cameras installed around London. It discusses the derivation of the film’s scenario from the legal and material properties of the constituent images and summarizes the project’s critical position by focusing on a key element of the narrative setting – the system of ‘RealTime’.

FACELESS treats CCTV images as an example of ‘legal readymades’: they were obtained under the UK Data Protection Act 1998, and under Human Rights legislation, to protect the privacy of third parties ,the faces of other people in the images were erased by the CCTV operators. The film, an overt hommage to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, interprets the faceless world as a society under the reformed ‘Real-Time’ Calendar, without history nor future. What is promised instead is the perfection of each moment, devoid of temporal depth in which emotion can develop. Faceless comprises documentary footage rearranged to construct a fiction that continually points back to the real world.

In his published essay on Kafka and later letters to Scholem about the author, Benjamin struggles with the significance of Kafka’s distinctive ‘failure’ as a modern writer. For Benjamin, Kafka’s work is marked by the tensions it instantiates between the properly modern, the theological and the (literary) forms of folk tradition (‘the German as well as the Jewish’, as Benjamin puts it), and of their respective modes of temporality. The singularity of Kafka’s writings lies in the ways in which they render legible the negation of the ‘tradition’ as a viable form of historical temporalization via the repetition of the literary forms of that tradition itself (the story or fable). In doing so, Kafka ‘sacrificed [the ‘content’ of] truth for the sake of clinging to [‘the form of’] transmissibility’. This paper will consider Benjamin’s analysis of Kafka’s ‘clinging’ to the form of tradition, as a mode of transmissibility, in light of his readings of Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel, and, in particular, of the latter’s analysis of the novel’s tendency to abstraction in that work. In doing so, it will explore the ‘archival ramifications’ of the intersection of such early twentieth-century debates around the novel as a (distinctively modern) form with a range of conceptions drawn from German Hegelian-Marxist philosophies of time.

My paper is concerned with exploring Benjamin’s practice of what he calls literary-historical pragmatism in relation to the archive, and how this is informed by a messianic humanism. The critic Gundolf describes the archival material of literary criticism as a mountain, stratified into the foothills of conversations, the lower slopes of correspondences, and the peaks of the creative works themselves. In line with his theory of criticism, Benjamin subverts Gundolf’s metaphor by describing those glacial peaks as problematically frozen and fixed by the dominant historical method of contemporary interpretation. To resist such historical reification, Benjamin turns to what he calls the “snow line” of the archive, the letters and correspondences in which the dominant cultural reception begins to thaw and is amenable to new modes of cultural reception. Such an approach is put into practice in Benjamin’s subversive collection of letters from 19th century German Classicism, German Men and Women. Its aim is to enact what, in the Arcades Project, he calls the “Copernican turn” in historical remembrance, by subjugating the past to the pragmatic interests of present and future human suffering. I want to develop this idea of the archive’s ’snow line’ by considering it in relation to the place of translations in the archive. Indeed Benjamin’s theory of translation allows us to begin to philosophically articulate his pragmatic conception of archival criticism. This will be illustrated through consideration of Gerard de Nerval’s French prose translation of Goethe’s Faust, and its place in what should be understood as the messianic humanism of Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Arcades Project.