“If [Walter] Benjamin, whose death remains inseparable from the Holocaust, inhabited the age of mechanical reproduction, an age in which art and writing were becoming less esoteric and ritualistic and more political and available to a larger public, but simultaneously ever more endangered by fascist co-opting, I embody the age of virtual reproduction, an age not so different from Benjamin’s, except that today’s dissemination of cultural products happens more rapidly and is more far-reaching, and the language that must be wrested back from military and capitalist co-opting is no longer German, but English. Mine is an age in which, arguably, it is more responsible to birth neither book nor baby. It is an age in which we are alienated not just from our work, but from almost everything, not excluding the environment around us, our friends, families, and selves.”
“What’s a quote of a quote? a friend’s son asked me at one of my Benjamin’s Spectacles readings, after I’d spoken about how I quote from Walter Benjamin’s book of quotes, The Arcades, in my book. I didn’t know enough then to say what I’ve since determined would have been the best reply: Why, a quote of a quote is a twice intensified return to words that have been broken from their original contexts! Pulled that far out from where they originally belonged, a quote of a quote is a kind of stretch-marked language. Have you see those lines on your mother’s stomach? It is like that certain proof of passage.
Instead, I fumbled about on stage, taken aback by such a real question.”
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