Saturday, November 20, 2004
(5:28 AM) | The Young Hegelian:
Frontispiece
It's hard to read Walter Benjamin's 'Unpacking My Library' today without a little embarrasment. Embarassment at the guilty pleasure of recognising in Benjamin the diagnosis of one's own bibliophilia. In Benjamin's frank admissions of his compulsive desire for acquiring books one recognises a love not just of literature but a need for the physical object which is literature's sensuous substratum, some concrete manifestation of the intellect's labour. As Benjamin lovingly handles each book being moved to its new home, the reader is bound to look at his own bookshelf, considering like Benjamin the individual meaning of each one. One's library is not just a resource, nor is it just a display (though it can easily become this - the bookshelves of the vanities) but something of one's self as an intellectual - these things after all have shaped you, half made you what you are. Benjamin sees this already, tells us that this object may have its meaning not just in its content, its an sich, but in the particular reminiscences bound up with it, its für uns. How much, for example, are some books treasured for the memory of coming by them?I have such books, and reading Benjamin today strangely made me think of two in particular. They are both signed by philosophers who have since passed away. Each reminds me of the awkward event of asking someone for an autograph when both of you know philosophy to be above such things. The philosopher recognises your embarrasment but is familiar with it and obliges with a smile. He asks me if I would like any message; she tells me I will first need a pen.
The collector of books recognises in what Benjamin calls "the thrill of acquisition" that their bibliophilia is often just a hair's breadth away from something compulsive, pathological. Hermann Broch it was who wrote, "Every collector hopes with the never-attained, never attainable and yet inexorably striven-for absolute completeness of his collection to pass beyond the assembled things themselves, to pass over into infinity, and, entirely subsumed in his collection, to attain his own consummation and the suspension of death." A quite Benjaminian reflection this, though it perhaps indicts Benjamin himself. The individual who stores up objects in the form of mementos may hope that one day the fullness of the experience they point to will be granted to him in rejuvenated memory, but finds more often that they are rendered opaque: lifeless allegories.
"How many cities," writes Benjamin, "have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books?" I have books that are forever associated with the place I bought them. For me Paris, Amsterdam, Dresden, Chicago, each form a mnemonic grid around their labyrinthine bookshops and the books I bought there. From the last I have Broch himself - The Unknown Quantity, though as I read it now I find many of the pages left unprinted.
Broch is right of course: the book above almost any exchange-value has an element that resists thinghood even in the acquisition, and which passes into something greater, less finite than a lifetime, like the signature of a philosopher. We want only to be part of the knowledge which is passed from generation to generation, and even in reading it to give some meaning to it, and when our own writing pales in comparison, to make some small contribution, even in only handing something on.
