What distinguishes images from the “essences” of phenomenology is their historical index. (Heidegger seeks in vain to rescue history for phenomenology abstractly trhough “historicity.”) These images are to be thought of entirely apart from the categories of the “human sciences,” from so-called habitus, from style, and the like. For the historical index of the images not only says that they belong to a particular time; it says, above all, that they attain to legibility only at a particular time. And, indeed, this acceding “to legibility”constitutes a specific critical point in the movement at their interior. Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is the now of a particular recognizability. In it, truth is charged to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which thus coincides with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural (bildlich). Only dialectical images are genuinely historical—that is, not archaic—images. The image that is read—which is to say, the image in the now of its recognizability—bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.
—Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (via sonofapritch)
![bellswithin:
Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I. 1512. Engraving, 239 x 189 mm.
[T]he concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks any natural, creative relationship to us, was set in an incomparably productive context. It accords with this that in the proximity of Albrecht Dürer’s figure, Melencolia I, the utensils of active life are lying around unused on the floor, as objects of contemplation.[…] There is one symbol that seems to have been passed over in the rediscovery of the older symbols of melancholy embodied in this engraving…This is the stone…It may be that all that is to be seen in the emblem of the stone are the most obvious features of the cold, dry earth. But it is quite conceivable…[and] by no means improbable, that in this inert mass there is a reference to the genuinely theological conception of the melancholic, which is to be found in one of the seven deadly sins. This is acedia, dullness of the heart, or sloth.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne. (London: Verso, 2003). 140, 155.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lu7zlhE3ya1qfoeqbo1_500.jpg)
