![]() The talk presents a Benjaminian take on and in the library in Paris where Walter Benjamin. Discipline, Ensayos, and MADA Monash University are pleased to present a public lecture by Michael Taussig, titled ‘Unpacking my Library’. As the author recently moved to Manhattan, he fulfilled a lifelong dream: to write his own version of Walter Benjamins Unpacking My Library while. “Unpacking My Library: A Talk About Collecting” is in One-Way Street, London: Penguin Books Ltd. Monday, 25th February 2019, 6:30pm The Institute of Postcolonial Studies 7880 Curzon St, North Melbourne VIC 3051 Free to attend. The essay was first published in 1931 in Literarische Welt. Each time I move offices, I read Walter Benjamin’s essay Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting. As a sociological and cultural critic, Benjamin combined ideas drawn from historical materialism, German idealism, and Jewish mysticism in a body of work which. Like a photograph, it can still be emotionally charged – it’s not as if the collector herself has turned to stone. The biggest part of moving offices for me is always packing and unpacking my hundreds of books acquired over the past 25 or so years. ![]() It’s frozen in time now, maybe a bit like a photograph. It seems like buying books became the new fad, while we could be supporting communal spaces for reading and enjoying books of all genres that are present in libraries, and then maybe purchase the ones we really liked. He says that for the collector, “ownership is the very deepest relationship a person can have with things.”īenjamin also says that the collector turns the item to stone, which I read as an act of petrification of the object’s previous life (or lives). I'm yet to see a famous booktuber that reccomends using the library (physical or digital) to borrow books. The biggest difference, though, is the compulsion to possess – even conquer – itself that Benjamin alludes to. Then there is the act of acquisition itself, which is obviously more deliberate for a collector and, as described by Benjamin, sounds a lot more exciting too. On the other hand, the differences between collecting and acquiring are many – for one thing, objects in a collection must, for the collector, exist in relation to each other by their very nature. Of course, I would never describe the sum of random possessions to which I am emotionally attached as a “collection” but maybe I could, based on Benjamin’s definition – at least the bit about the object’s original use or usefulness no longer having relevance for its owner. He claims that collecting is a passion that “verges on…a chaos of memories,” and I’m sure that anyone who has undergone the process of packing/unpacking a box or two of personal possessions will recall the meandering of nostalgia that that entails. I enjoyed this essay – originally delivered over the radio in 1931 – because, as Benjamin describes the process of unpacking from boxes the thousands of books that he owned, he conveys a very intimate relationship with his collection.
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