The gesture of collecting: Walter Benjamin and contemporary aesthetics

This dissertation explicates the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin's theory of collecting. I argue that one of the primary aesthetic figures of Benjamin's philosophy is the "genuine collector," a debased figure who is nevertheless charged with the redemptive task of a critical historian and an allegorist. Through this "genuine collector" Benjamin posits a theory of memory premised on the very language of things. From the kitsch and cast-off detritus of nineteenth-century capitalist modernity he desires "to read what was never written" in what he calls the "scorned and apocryphal." This is the wager of Benjamin's work: through a critical philology of the material world, there appears potentiality, another narration of experience, another re-collection of redemption or happiness: the "as-yet unlived" that remains immanent in the present.