Yet, what of this activity of collecting per se? What of collection? Is it not, tacitly, an obsessive act of repetition, each new item acquired simply to re-open the same wound, to hack away at the stump of a tree long since felled? Or is the act of collecting—each collecting act—rather an autonomous and unrepeatable gesture? Is that which truly characterizes collecting as a practice not but the singularization, the separation of each and every object from all former contexts, imagined or confirmed, actual or ideal; not but the categorical displacement and re-placing of an object into an entirely improper space (whether trouser pocket, closet drawer, shop vitrine, gallery wall, official archive… or deep hole dug in dark, dank earth), thereby producing a wholly discrete and uniterable set of properties of relation between object and context? Is not, then, the act of collecting a productive, rather than destructive impulse, an inventive drive that seeks not so much to “commit to memory” as to liberate from recollection? (I, 3a)