(Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture) Rolf J

150
ERIC JAROSINSKI
Sinn” (GS IV.1:395; “the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning
when it loses its subject,” SW 2:491), Benjamin cautions; that is, when
collecting becomes a tangible, yet fixed collection — perhaps one on display
in the gallery or sober room of contemplation invoked in “Berliner
Chronik” — the collection can no longer be transformed and must await
a renewed dispersal at the hands of yet another collector.
While Benjamin cherishes his objects and feels responsible for their
care, it is not the loss of his collection that he fears most, but of collecting
itself. Indeed, he would have to forsake his own library in Berlin in order
to collect material in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris for his massive,
and incomplete, Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project). Written less than
two years before going into exile, Benjamin’s meditation on collecting
comes at a time when this activity’s end is on the horizon, a demise that
allows Benjamin to fully grasp its significance for the first time: “Erst im
Aussterben wird der Sammler begriffen” (GS IV.1:395; “Only in extinction
is the collector comprehended,” SW 3:492). Indeed, continually
drawn to outmoded objects or practices, Benjamin found things most
legible when they disintegrated, just as the frayed pages of his childhood
books reveal their woven strands, the web or textum that is the material,
yet forgotten, metaphorical, text in the reader’s hands.
As a collector, Benjamin has invited us into his study as if fellow collectors,
which as Leser, or gatherers, we literally are; he wants to talk to
us about collecting, but also about reading. Even if threatened by those
stormy volumes of the cinematic Wunder kabinett of his dream, Benjamin
would cling to the book — and a fixation on paper, bindings, and writing
implements fine enough to render his miniscule handwriting — in attempting
to make his own memories, words, and images habhaft. Yet no matter
how palpable, this haben (having) always anticipates its escape from Haft
(arrest); Benjamin challenges the readers to activate the figures of his text,
setting Haft in motion as haften, as they themselves “cling to” or “adhere”
to the something else of allegory, with its “petrified unrest” taking shape as
a momentary suffix appended to another potential activation.
Haften, of course, also means “to be liable.” Certainly the attempt to
follow the motion of Benjamin’s tropes in this essay has much to answer
for, as do all readings and rereadings of his texts, no less for what they latch
onto as for what they lay aside. Still, it is remarkable that for all of their
handling in past decades, Benjamin’s writings are anything but threadbare.
If I have unraveled anything here, I hope to have also added something
to this resiliency. We will now leave Benjamin where he leaves us,
in his study, well past midnight, with the last crate of books broken open
but not yet fully unpacked. Books do not come alive in the collector, Benjamin
tells us in bidding farewell, but he who takes up residence in them
does. This essay is another of the dwellings that Benjamin has erected out
of books and “nun verschwindet er drinnen, wie recht und billig” (GS