In the strange landscape of critical theory, collecting is no innocent pastime. Celebrated theorist Jean Baudrillard’s first book, The System Of Objects, identifies the urge to collect as a symptom of the capitalist disease that makes the possession and accumulation of objects so appeal to us. In addition, collecting might be a substitute for sexual activity, and is certainly ‘an illusion, a trick, a process of abstraction and regression’. And yet, whatever the possible motivations that lie behind our compulsion to collect, Baudrillard doesn’t forget the simple harmony of a completed collection, harmony that allows the objects of our everyday life to be ‘transformed into poetry’. Call it a guilty pleasure.

Verso Books | Paperback 224 pp. |ISBN: 9781844670536