“Benjamin’s ‘paper graveyard’—what I have wanted to call a photograph—tells us, if it tells us anything, that we must regard death. And it is there, in death, that Benjamin experienced what he had already experienced in life—death. The shock of his death—breaking in upon his own history and giving it, in this way, an end and a future—corresponds to the terrifying lucidity of his corpus. Death, corpse, decay, ruin, history, mourning, memory, photography—these are the words Benjamin has left for us to learn to read. These are the words that prevent his other words from being organized into a system, that prevents his writings and readings from being crystallized and frozen into a merely negative method. Words of light, they correspond to the cremation of his work, a cremation in which the form of the work—its suicidal character—reaches its most brilliant illumination, immolated in the flame of his own criticism.” Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 130.