Walter Benjamin

“Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions” (Schriften I, 571).

This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair—not the despair of a past that refuses “to throw its light on the future” and lets the human mind “wander in darkness” as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is “not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy” (Schriften II, 192).

Still, the discoverers and lovers of this destructive power originally were inspired by an entirely different intention, the intention to preserve; and only because they did not let themselves be fooled by the professional “preservers” all around them did they finally discover that the destructive power of quotations was “the only one which still contains the hope that something from this period will survive—for no other reason than that it was torn out of it.” In this form of “thought fragments,” quotations have the double task of interrupting the flow of the presentation with “transcendent force” (Schriften I, 142–43) and at the same time of concentrating within themselves that which is presented. As to their weight in Benjamin’s writings, quotations are comparable only to the very dissimilar Biblical citations which so often replace the immanent consistency of argumentation in medieval treatises.

As Benjamin was probably the first to emphasize, collecting is the passion of children, for whom things are not yet commodities and are not valued according to their usefulness, and it is also the hobby of the rich, who own enough not to need anything useful and hence can afford to make “the transfiguration of objects” (Schriften I, 416) their business.

Like the revolutionary, the collector “dreams his way not only into a remote or bygone world, but at the same time into a better one in which, to be sure, people are not provided with what they need any more than they are in the everyday world, but in which things are liberated from the drudgery of usefulness” (Schriften I, 416). Collecting is the redemption of things which is to complement the redemption of man.

For tradition puts the past in order, not just chronologically but first of all systematically in that it separates the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical, and which is obligatory and relevant from the mass of irrelevant or merely interesting opinions and data. The collector’s passion, on the other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not so much because it is a passion as because it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object—something that is classifiable—but is inflamed by its “genuineness,” its uniqueness, something that defies any systematic classification. Therefore, while tradition discriminates, the collector levels all differences; and this leveling—so that “the positive and the negative . . . predilection and rejection are here closely contiguous” (Schriften II, 313)—takes place even if the collector has made tradition itself his special field and carefully eliminated everything not recognized by it. Against tradition the collector pits the criterion of genuineness; to the authoritative he opposes the sign of origin. To express this way of thinking in theoretical terms: he replaces content with pure originality or authenticity, something that only French Existentialism established as a quality per se detached from all specific characteristics. If one carries this way of thinking to its logical conclusion, the result is a strange inversion of the original collector’s drive: “The genuine picture may be old, but the genuine thought is new. It is of the present. This present may be meager, granted. But no matter what it is like, one must firmly take it by the horns to be able to consult the past. It is the bull whose blood must fill the pit if the shades of the departed are to appear at its edge” (Schriften II, 314). Out of this present when it has been sacrificed for the invocation of the past arises then “the deadly impact of thought” which is directed against tradition and the authority of the past.

For what else is this collection but a disorder to which habit has accommodated itself to such an extent that it can appear as order?

For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of figures, the application of decals—the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

If my experience may serve as evidence, a man is more likely to return a borrowed book upon occasion than to read it.