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Dominik Finkelde

Vergebliches Sammeln. Walter Benjamins Analyse eines Unbehagens im Fin de Siècle und der europäischen Moderne

Walter Benjamin's “Unpacking my Library – A Talk about Collecting” occasions reflections on the meaning of fin-de-siècle and contemporary collecting and memory. In late nineteenth-century bourgeois culture collecting lost its traditional sense because desiring a totality could no longer serve as the basis of collecting. Solitary individuals had to face a universe of unstable signs in which the accumulated objects no longer possessed an original purpose or religious meaning. For Benjamin, collecting opens “above an abyss”. The absence of a purpose or order in the collected objects turns collecting into an irrational passion, a work of hermeneutics.

Arcadia International Journal for Literary Studies, Walter de Gruyter

Print ISSN: 0003-7982
Volume: 41, 07/2006
Pages: 187 - 202

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