The Paris Review

The Ragpicker: Frédéric Pajak’s Uncertain Manifesto

In his monthly column Archive of Longing, Dustin Illingworth examines recently released books, with a focus on the small presses, the reissues, the esoteric, and the newly translated. Read an excerpt of the book discussed below, Uncertain Manifesto, here

Is collage a fantasy of wholeness or a revolt against its possibility? Walter Benjamin, eclectic aesthete, commodity historian, theorist of shards, often wrote in fragmentary forms—most notably the or “thought-image”—in order to forgo the possibility of finished work, which he considered the death mask of conception. The representative figure of modernity for Benjamin was the ragpicker, who “early in the morning, bad tempered and a tad tipsy, spears remnants of discourse and fragments of language with his stick and throws them, grumbling, into his cart.” A

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Paris Review

The Paris Review35 min read
An Eye In The Throat
My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
The Paris Review1 min read
Trollope
What a sad day,full of black, blue,red, and yellow umbrellas.Everyone in the world,whatever their disposition,seemed to be crying at once,while I hit upon readingTrollope, and so remained a weekamong the grouse. That was mydisposition. Sometimes Iwou
The Paris Review1 min read
Haptographic Interface
I’m a Keats botso are youour living handsheld toward each otheron the internetsolution sweetI stood on a peakin Darien, googledmy errorI am so colonialI am tubercularmy alveoli a-swellmy actual bloodyour actual bloodwe made loveI planted basilI plant

Related