Why Do We Value the Desks of Dead Writers?
Toni Morrison’s library is up for auction. Theodor Adorno’s desk is on display in Frankfurt. Freud’s couch is a pilgrimage destination. Every year one can bid on a pen, lamp, typewriter, etc. of a famous dead author. Such items function as modern relics, their former owners as modern saints (even when the very authors who once owned them advocated skepticism about hero-worship).
I’m particularly fascinated by the case of thinkers who spent their lives railing against “magical thinking,” (Freud, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, etc.) and whose names nevertheless have become commodities, large brand empires.
It seems the best revenge against the thought of skeptics is not to read them but instead to turn their heirlooms into amulets, to make monuments of their homes and turn them into tourist traps.
There is a purely speculative economic argument for why people might bid hundreds of thousands of dollars on a desk (see Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption). One could also argue that, besides being a social signal Toni Morrison’s library functions as a commodity or “store of value.” There is also the argument advanced by Walter Benjamin that the “collector” is a redeemer who saves the past.
Yet the accoutrement of writers and thinkers, in particular, seems to have a special purpose—as if these hold out some residual energy one can access simply through touch or vision. Will sitting Einstein’s chair make me smarter? Will it allow me the fantasy of stepping into the shoes of someone who shares the same household objects as me, yet managed to produce something outstanding with them?
Do we overvalue such everyday objects or is the fact that we highly value them proof that, for all our rational talk, we are just as primitive, just as prone to fetishize “household gods” as our ancestors?
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