Against the Desire for Totality
There is a particular violence in systems that pretend to be whole. Grand histories, unified archives, and institutional canons often announce themselves as neutral containers of knowledge, while quietly deciding what counts as real, valuable, or worthy of preservation. What is excluded is not always destroyed — more often it is simply never allowed to appear. In the process, the world is flattened into narratives that reduce human experience to a sequence of events, concepts, or milestones, and the essential pulsation of life, desire, and suffering disappears into abstraction.
Partial Objects emerges from a refusal of this gesture. It does not aspire to construct a total image of the world, nor to replace one canonical history with another. Instead, it works with fragments: artworks, texts, images, sounds, gestures, marginal documents — anything that carries a charge of lived intensity. These fragments are residues of Will, traces of the human striving that Schopenhauer identifies as the core of existence.
Recognition precedes explanation. Objects are archived both physically and digitally to keep them alive for reinterpretation, connection, and reflection. What emerges is an archaeology of the Will — a mapping of human desire, suffering, and creativity that resists finality.