Dev Punaini '22

Walter Benjamin's work on incredibly diverse fields—aesthetics, literary theory, philosophy of history, and so on—has been significant to me in both content and form. I owe him both as a thinker and as a writer, and borrow from him not just ideas but also the words in which he expresses them. Benjamin died of suicide at 48 while attempting to flee the Nazis. and the only reason we have as much of his work available for posthumous publishing is because he was obsessed with recording everything on paper, papers that he would later send to friends in different countries. In this edition of his archive (if a haphazard hoarding by a collector can be called an archive in the traditional sense), his intellectual process becomes clear: he kept records of every book he read, every idea he wanted to explore, and the models and signs he drew while analyzing connections. The fragmented nature of his archive makes his intellectual work a constellation: an interconnected set of ideas, any and all of which may be useful points of departure for the future. I am deeply indebted to him and return to his archive quite often for inspiration.