Benjamin and Surrealism: ‘By smashing any remaining illusion of the continuum of history (another pernicious doctrine, according to Benjamin) Surrealism freed the mind into a simultaneity of revelations. All that ever was is here now, or it has already vanished for ever into the black hole of oblivion. That is the law of the jungle, the truth of dialectics, the inexorable procedure of capitalist development, and it is also the law of art: we either make it new, or we might as well forget it. In fact, we are already forgetting it. We retain what we retain of history in a flash of present perception, a luminous manifold, or it has disappeared into the strata of the unconscionable, which is to say, the pious stacks of archived amnesia. ‘

Baudelaire, Allegory and the Aura: ‘Now Baudelaire is endlessly aware that New Paris stands on the grave of the Old Paris buried beneath it. Baudelaire’s poetry at times takes the form of a prosodic archaeology. Haussmann is merely the latest conqueror of its urban topography. If his boulevards are designed to permit speedy transit, they are also intended to prevent revolution. And in the buildings, the streets, the passers-by, the prostitutes, Baudelaire constantly finds parallels with antiquity. The ancient flashes up and meets the new in a single and unique image of illumination, which must be seized now or lost for ever. ‘

Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg – Photographs of Heaven, Photographs of Hell: ‘From the beginning, we have called upon photography to prove our realities to us. If in doubt, we demand to see the photograph. During the heyday of the Society for Psychical Research, photographic evidence was seen as one of the key elements needed to establish the truth or otherwise of the goings-on in séances. There are many photographs of séances, with ectoplasm appearing out of the medium’s mouth. All that is needed here is a certain slickness with the optical equipment together with some notion of the potency of phosphorus, and a winning way with cotton wool. A great many were convinced, all the same, some of them of considerable intellectual eminence.’

Bad Reading Habits: ‘Sacred scripture has a mythic resonance for Walter Benjamin. It bespeaks a world prior to the fracture of word and meaning which is the condition of modernity. He is of course reverting here to a long-standing myth: the idea that the original language, the language spoken by our first philosopher Adam, was Hebrew. It is only relatively recently that Indo-European has displaced that originating language in our schemas. The sacred is constantly under threat from scientific analysis.’

Preface to the series: ‘The essays that follow are part of a sequence. The aim is to use some of the key concepts of Walter Benjamin, that remarkable critic and cultural analyst, in order to describe aspects of contemporary culture and politics.’