‘The thinker in Benjamin incessantly interferes with the writer and vice versa, producing an unstable fluctuation between words and concepts which the reader must walk like a tightrope. This uncertainty is productive—it makes for a tension between temporality and space which, when maintained to the breaking point, allows us to glimpse the absent center of this work, the famous Stillstand in which history and the Now are momentarily indistinguishable’ (p. 2).