Julian Yates on Inventories
“As inventory, my essay proceeds by counting and listing variously mediatized or backed performances of this story and the way each stages these fragments or anekdota (stories and writing not intended for publication but which, nevertheless, come to light in uncanny places). My hope is to render each fragment with an eye to the specificities of its staging—and so to offer what, along with Richard Burt, I have learned to call a close/d reading, a reading content to trace the surfaces of Walter Benjamin’s briefcase, to allow it to remain closed, and thereby resist the narratives of restitution and revelation that it sets in motion. An inventory seems an appropriate genre with which to present this case of reception—a genre specific to the parceling out of a dead person’s belongings in a probate settlement or to the experimental aesthetics of the avant garde writer, Georges Perec, who once upon a time, in 1974, kept an inventory of all the things he had “ingurgitated” that year.”
From “The Briefcase of Walter Benjamin / Benjamin Walter’s Briefcase,” in Rhizomes.
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