After Robert Badinter, Toni Morrison, Anselm Kiefer, and Pierre Boulez, Umberto Eco is the Louvre's Special Guest in November 2009.

Accumulation, enumeration, litany, inventory, census, nomenclature, catalog, collection, repertory... the history of art and literature is full of collections, suggesting that certain things can be neither expressed nor represented, that a language needs inventing to "write silences, write the night, record the inexpressible, fix frenzies in their flight" (Rimbaud, The Alchemy of the Word).

Umberto Eco's collection of all kinds of chaotic, clumsy, and disordered lists introduces us to a language with no clear intent or goal which nonetheless informs us of the history of civilizations. In the Iliad, for example, the list of Trojan warriors, weapons, ships and their rigging, and armies leaving for war gives a precise view of Achaean society.

Some original iconographic parallels with famous artists such as Carpaccio, Uccello , Brueghel, Warhol and lesser known ones including Hendrick de Clerck, Pellizza da Volpedo, Stephan Lochner, and Roman Opalka accompany a literary anthology of 75 texts (Dante, Whitman, Kilpling, Calvino, Pérec, Rimbaud...) An essay by Umberto Eco introduces each of the 21 chapters.