Reassembling Subjectivity: Motifs of Collecting (W. Benjamin, K. Vaginov, A. Platonov)

In the considered sample of literature of the 1920s-1930s (K. Vaginov, A. Platonov, V. Benjamin), the practices of collecting are reflected. Those practices can be conceptually reinterpreted as the practical implementation of those models of thinking and ethical manifestos that will find full–fledged theoretical expression only a century later (material and anthropological turns in the social sciences). It seems that usage of their theoretical apparatus will allows us to consider collecting as a political gesture, an action aimed not only at (re)constructing the subjectivity of the collector, but also at creating models of previously (non-) existing worlds that were destroyed by the course of history at the beginning of the century, and then buried under the pressure of the power of the discourse of total writing (Stalin's) culture.