Gai Farchi is a doctoral student in the School of Cultural Sciences at the University of Tel Aviv. His dissertation examines the trope of the non-human in French literature and thought. His articles about the oceanic becomings in the works of Marie Darrieussecq and the vibrant materialism of Michel Houellebecq were published in the French Forum. Gai’s recent research discusses the practice of collecting and hoarding as two distinct mental and material configurations that undermine both the logic of the commodity and the opposition between materiality and semiotics. Against representational readings in literature, this research draws on theories of reading (namely surface reading in Best and Marcus’ terms) to discuss the expressive textuality of hoarding and collecting as assemblages, under which we cannot bestow an ontological priority to humans or to any “atomic” or individual part whatsoever. Exploring the expressive nature of material assemblages, this line of thought revisits the dichotomy of matter and signs, of the material and the semiotic, exploring materiality as text and text as materiality.