Many had accommodated themselves to it, adhering to truth or whatever they regarded as truth at any given time and, with a more or less heavy heart, forgoing its transmissibility. Kafka’s real genius was that he tried something entirely new: he sacrificed truth for the sake of clinging to the transmissibility’ (Briefe II, 763). He did so by making decisive changes in traditional parables or inventing new ones in traditional style;27 however, these ‘do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine,’ as do the haggadic tales in the Talmud, but ‘unexpectedly raise a heavy claw’ against it. Even Kafka’s reaching down to the sea bottom of the past had this peculiar duality of wanting to preserve and wanting to destroy. He wanted to preserve it even though it was not truth, if only for the sake of this ‘new beauty in what is vanishing’ (see Benjamin’s essay on Leskov); and he knew, on the other hand, that there is no more effective way to break the spell of tradition than to cut out the ‘rich and strange,’ coral and pearls, from what had been handed down in one solid piece.

Benjamin exemplified this ambiguity of gesture in regard to the past by analyzing the collector’s passion which was his own. Collecting springs from a variety of motives which are not easily understood. 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. In this they must of necessity discover the beautiful, which needs ‘disinterested delight’ (Kant) to be recognized. At any rate, a collected object possesses only an amateur value and no use value whatsoever. (Benjamin was not yet aware of the fact that collecting can also be an eminently sound and often highly profitable form of investment.) And inasmuch as collecting can fasten on any category of objects (not just art objects, which are in any case removed from the everyday world of use objects because they are ‘good’ for nothing) and thus, as it were, redeem the object as a thing since it now is no longer a means to an end but has its intrinsic worth, Benjamin could understand the collector’s passion as an attitude akin to that of the revolutionary. 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. Even the reading of his books is something questionable to a true bibliophile: ‘“And you have read all these?” Anatole France is said to have been asked by an admirer of his library. “Not one-tenth of them. I don’t suppose you use your Sèvres china every day?”’ (‘Unpacking My Library’). (In Benjamin’s library there were collections of rare children’s books and of books by mentally deranged authors; since he was interested neither in child psychology nor in psychiatry, these books, like many others among his treasures, literally were not good for anything, serving neither to divert nor to instruct.) Closely connected with this is the fetish character which Benjamin explicitly claimed for collected objects. The value of genuineness which is decisive for the collector as well as for the market determined by him has replaced the ‘cult value’ and is its secularization.

These reflections, like so much else in Benjamin, have something of the ingeniously brilliant which is not characteristic of his essential insights, which are, for the most part, quite down-to-earth. Still, they are striking examples of the flânerie in his thinking, of the way his mind worked, when he, like the flâneur in the city, entrusted himself to chance as a guide on his intellectual journeys of exploration. Just as strolling through the treasures of the past is the inheritor’s luxurious privilege, so is the ‘collector’s attitude, in the highest sense, the attitude of the heir’ (‘Unpacking My Library’) who, by taking possession of things – and ‘ownership is the most profound relationship that one can have to objects’ (ibid.) – establishes himself in the past, so as to achieve, undisturbed by the present, ‘a renewal of the old world.’ And since this ‘deepest urge’ in the collector has no public significance whatsoever but results in a strictly private hobby, everything ‘that is said from the angle of the true collector’ is bound to appear as ‘whimsical’ as the typically Jean Paulian vision of one of those writers ‘who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like’ (ibid.). Upon closer examination, however, this whimsicality has some noteworthy and not so harmless peculiarities. There is, for one thing, the gesture, so significant of an era of public darkness, with which the collector not only withdraws from the public into the privacy of his four walls but takes along with him all kinds of treasures that once were public property to decorate them. (This, of course, is not today’s collector, who gets hold of whatever has or, in his estimate, will have a market value or can enhance his social status, but the collector who, like Benjamin, seeks strange things that are considered valueless.) Also, in his passion for the past for its own sake, born of his contempt for the present as such and therefore rather heedless of objective quality, there already appears a disturbing factor to announce that tradition may be the last thing to guide him and traditional values by no means be as safe in his hands as one might have assumed at first glance.

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 levelling – so that ‘the positive and the negative … predilection and rejection are here closely contiguous’ (Schriften I, 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 meagre, granted. But no matter what it is like, one must firmly take it by the horns to be able to consult the past.