Revisiting the hermeneutic project of the fragment in its exigency for a digital paradigm of publication

A century ago, Walter Benjamin defined the mode of production of scholarly books as “an outdated mediation between two different filing systems”—the card index of the researcher who wrote it and that of the scholar studying it. The discursive mediation of the codex, in his opinion, no longer created any significant value, “for everything that matters” can be found in the author’s research archive. I explore the implications of this statement through the practices of the fragment in modernity, among which the research archives and notebooks of Benjamin, Giacomo Leopardi, Paul Valéry, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joseph Joubert, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Schlegel, and Novalis, and suggest that the hermeneutic project of the fragment genre could constructively inform recent initiatives towards processual, slow, and reproducible scholarship, as well as the design of digital editing and authoring workspaces. I juxtapose the compositional processes and editorial challenges of the selected fragment collections and explore their exigency for a digital publication platform that would empower their ethical epistemology, activate their relational networks, articulate their processual form, and support their aspiration towards collaborative knowledge-making. I propose that the design of such digital workspace should not only afford access to the contents of these intellectual projects but also enable the performative engagement with their methodology. The dialectical reception between the epistemic practices of the fragment genre and the theoretical visions for the future of the academic book holds promise for engendering multimodal, process-oriented, performative, and collaborative scholarly discourse.