1. “Jedes vollkommene Werk ist die Totenmaske seiner Intuition.” Walter Benjamin: Briefe, ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), I: 327; The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, 1910–1940, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, tr. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 227. “Jedes vollkommene Werk” suggests the sense of perfection more as a “making whole” than as an aesthetic absolute.

“Das Werk ist die Totenmaske der Konzeption.” Einbahnstraße, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, IV/1, ed. Tillman Rexroth (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), 538; and Walter Benjamin, Selected Writing, I: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 459, in which the aphorism is the thirteenth entry in the section “The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses.” I have altered their rendering “of its conception” (my emphasis), which seems not quite what Benjamin intends.