| Notes | '131 texts & traces\n\nJakob Burckhardt elaborated the distinction between texts, which encode memories, and traces, which provide indirect information. While the text preserve the conscious articulations and intentions of the age, the traces, according to Burckhardt, preserve its involuntary memories.\n'
'130 - antiquarians, historical novelists, historian\n\nWhile the text had extended memory into the past as well as into the future, traces provided a memory of the past alone. The concern with the past became purely retrospective. It was the domain of the antiquarian to recreate a past that was not elucidated by a textual tradition but preserved more or less accidentally in isolated documents and unconnected fragments. The two souls living together in the antiquarian, the imaginative and the historical, were separated during the nineteenth century into two different discourses that were henceforth divided by institutions and genres. The poet of historical fiction aspired to restore a lost past to life by an act of imagination; the other inheritor was the historian, who restored a past by acts of methodical reconstruction. While the former was interested in creating the illusion of a past somehow recalled to life, the latter acknowledged its distance and difference.\n'
'126 word love\n\nThe \"word-love\" of philology is not so much logocentrism as graphocentrism and bibliolatry. With the support of printing, the threat of another dark age and \"the alarms about the loss of mankind\'s memory\" were considerably reduced and the way as clear for a progressive accumulation of knowledge, for a linear advancement of learning. By the seventeenth century, the conviction that printed texts outlast all other cultural traces had become a fixed topos.\n'
'124 aliiance btw writing and memory\n\nYet letters alone are not sufficient. The antidote \"gainst death and all oblivious enmity\" is incomplete without \"the living record of your memory\": living because of its alliance with living memories. Only in alliance with memory can writing stand against ruin and death. Writing prolongs life and ensures remembrance only if planted in the memories of future generations.\n \n'
'123-124 Speaking w/ dead\n\nWhat indeed makes possible a dialogue with the dead across periods of time? In this paper, I want to return to this question, focusing neither on the social transformations nor on the hidden potential of images but on the text in its written and printed form. I hope to show how the {124} Renaissance myth of reviving the dead is literally rooted in letters, that is, an an epistemology of writing as a medium able to transcend time as well as space.\n\n \n '
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