In keeping with Stewart's claims, superimposition is one of the primary principles underlying the methods of recollection encapsulated in Benjamin's concept of similarity.
For Benjamin, the temporal and spatial dimensions of the fragments form the dialectics of past and present images, which are subject to a continual process of layering or superimposition. Not only does he focus on the derivation of the semiotics comprising the cultural fabric or on how to access the vast amounts of debris in the archive, but also on reading the circularity of past and present signs as well as interpreting their reiterations.
Fundamentally, incongruous levels of discourse and material fragments are superimposed onto the archaeology of socio-cultural transformations, which, as Benjamin himself explains in his seminal essay on Eduard Fuchs, are replete with meanings for modern subjects in their roles as collectors. In Catastrophe and Survival: Walter Benjamin and Psychoanalysis, Elizabeth Stewart argues that "psychoanalytic readings of Benjamin" and "Benjaminian readings of psychoanalysis" convey Benjamin's understanding of an "ethics of subjectivity" (6). Seen as a vast textual labyrinth limning the depths of the individual unconscious as well as a warehouse of artifacts for the collective, the archive absorbs cultural debris and transforms heterogeneous signs into the semiotics that embody Benjamin's approach to the dangers and catastrophes confronting modern individuals and cultures. Searching for the traces of socio-cultural experience, in which temporality has either been ruptured or adapted to new and changing perceptions, we, like Benjamin before us, are compelled to voice discomfort about what phylogenetic and ontogenetic processes engender our identities and where these are accumulated for future reference. Walter Benjamin's concern for "mere life" induced him to seek out phantasmagorical traces in the collective archive, particularly in light of his assumption that these represent the clearest juncture between cultural epistemologies and practical approaches to a "trans-historical temporality" measured not in chronological or historical time but in time that reveals itself instantaneously.
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