Omission

Omission

"Omissions, denials, deflections, deceptions, diversions and humility—all aimed at provoking this second state, the secret of true seduction. Vulgar seduction might proceed by persistence, but true seduction proceeds by absence; or better it invents a kind of curved space, where the signs are deflected from their trajectory and returned to their source. This state of suspense is essential: it is the moment of the girl's disarray before what awaits her, even as she knows--and this is something new and already fatal--that something awaits her. A moment of high intensity, a 'spiritual' moment (in Kierkegaard's sense), similar to that in games of chance between the throw and the moment when the dice stop rolling" (Baudrillard Seduction 108).

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There's an article on Dostoevsky's The Gamblerabout the use of omission in setting up the story. It seems that, while something must always be omitted from any narrative--that in the case of this particular novel, what the omission of past experienincs, confrontations, etc. reflects is Alexi, the gambler's, presence of mind--present mind--demonstrating his fixation on the present, the threshold moment which connects so many of the obsessions Benjamin's readers encounter in The Arcades Project. 

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All gambling is involves the omission of information.

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"Omitted from our volume are some 100 pages of excerpts from letters to and from Benjamin, documenting the growth of the project (the majority of these letters appear elsewhere in English); a partial bibliography, compiled by Tiedemann, of 850 works cited in the "Convolutes"; and, finally, precise descriptions of Benjamin's manuscripts and manuscripts variants (see translator's initial note to the "Convolutes"). In an effort to respect the unique constitution of these manuscripts, we have adopted Tiedemann's practice of using angle brackets to indicate editorial insertions into the text." (AP xiii)

Why leave out the letters surrounding the production of this text? Mightn't the conversations' inclusion in Batailles manuscript indicate that Benjamin's inner circle, if not Benjamin himself, regarded the discussionsurrounding The Arcades Project as one of its many appendages? Omission, in this case, privileges a mode of scholarship that objectifies its subjects of study by invisioning them as being somehow "complete" or whole and separate or distinguishable from those things that are not bound between the covers of the book object--that a work of art is only "pure" and "authentic" when it is presented free of its tethers to the "outside" world from which it has emerged. Much more manageable, it is, to embrace the cold body of the stiff unchanging contained book, the ouevre, the corpse, than to trace the living network in which it has arisen as a collected display of possible constellations. Like the " . . . " omissions addressed in "The Arcades Project," the editorialdecision to exclude those letters is certainly both disappointing and interesting for readersinterested in Benjamin's experiments with the concept of the book.