ABSTRACT

Two grains of wheat Walter Benjamin combined awkwardness in practical matters with perceptual acuity in

intellectual analysis. He analyzed everything with precision. In a letter to Siegfried Kracauer

in 1928, Benjamin describes his inability to deal with anything else when focused on

his works, or on a particular intellectual problem.1 His examination liberates the thing

or encoded object from its meaning to become an item of contemplation and reverie.2