The fragments and the crystal of the event

scintillations of Anna Csillag’s image in Walter Benjamin and Bruno Schulz

Abstract

This paper seeks to interpret the image of Anna Csillag, a popular figure in hair tonic ads in 19th century and early 20th century in Central and Eastern-Central Europe, who became the object of a poetic experiment. The analysis starts from an apparently obscure allusion to this character in The Arcades Project (1982), by Walter Benjamin, and focuses on its figurations in the short story “The Book”, from Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass (1937), by Bruno Schulz.  To do so, we will approach, in the first part of the text, the Benjaminian conceptual figures of collection and montage and, in the second part, the work Schulz carries out with the image. By following this path, we will make it clear that the use of images allows us to establish an illuminating poetical-philosophical reflection on the relation between fragments and events in contemporary thought.