ABSTRACT
As the library itself furnished all the materials for the internal critique of its workings, the collages offer an autotelic rendition of abrupt failures or aporetic over-circulation of images, where unlike meets unlike. In this sense, and in the way in which the covers served to counter the marketing and distribution of the books, the library trolls made possible unlikely juxtapositions that were argumentative in nature. The “database animal” is one for whom access to the proliferating field of interest is modelled on the database, rather than through recourse to liberal humanism’s rendering of textual history in terms of taste culture, and rather than to the experience of an original and its inferior copies. Substituting the figure of the database animal for the figure of the troll makes clearer the ways in which the attachments to queer objects were not subject to the kind of negativity persistently attributed to them as acts of alteration when the men were prosecuted.
