The Camp within the Camp: An Arch-anarchivology

The Camp within the Camp: An Arch-anarchivology

Yet the setting of norms requires endless selection of what needs to be tr/ashed. Agamben attempts to make an end run around the archive by defining remnants not in terms of media or records but negatively: “the remnants of Auschwitz—the witnesses—are neither the dead nor the survivors, neither the drowned nor the saved. They are what remains between them.” (164). Even these negative remnants have to be archived, however, in order to become readable: they have to filed, classified, labeled, organized. Given the endlessness of the production of unarchivable ashes within the archive that are nevertheless exterior to it precisely because they are unarchivable, the very drive to classify and establish norms for archival use paradoxically makes the archival fever of pathologization rise even higher as resistance among the resisters multiplies.

Consider, for example, the continuing controversy of the place of photography and film in archiving the holocaust: images of the dead victims or their exhibition are frequently equated with pornography and Hell. For example, the title of the first section Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz is “Images Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell.”³ The tendency to pathologize and demonize certain remaining images, unintentionally echoes the topological construction “L’Enfer” (hell) section of the Bibilotheque Nationale in Paris, reserved for pornographic books and images, or even earlier, the restricted library reserved for pornographic images of the library for ancient Roman from the remains of Pompeii in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption.⁴

Yet this sacrificial economy of processing documents by selecting only some of the for survival, either to be accessed in archives or displayed in museums, hasn’t worked out very well, or, to put it another, has worked only too well. Fierce internecine polemics among scholars and filmmakers of the holocaust have become more heated, not less, over time, as ethical questions about how to memorialize the holocaust have largely overtaken juridical questions about what happened and who should be held responsible and punished.⁵ An earlier question of what can be admitted to have happened (the Holocaust) has more recently turned into a question of what can be admitted in a different sense, allowed to enter the archive or even allowed to construct an archive that has any use value at all. In other words, we have now a problem of sovereignty in the archive, with disagreement focused on exceptions to norms as to what is considered a “good” image and a “bad” image, what is considered a legitimate use of photographic and film images and an illegitimate abuse of them, and even whether any images may be used at all.

Consider a specific case of the controversy, namely, the reception of the French exhibition catalogue Memoires des camps (Memories of the camps) in 2001, four photographs taken in August, 1944 from inside of Auschwitz. After his contribution to the catalogue was fiercely attacked at length, Georges Didi-Huberman reprinting it with an extended response to his attackers in his book, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz. And in Did’Hubermann’s self-defense, the problem of the sovereignty of the camp archivist and filmmaker who uses it emerges. While his critics regard the images as the equivalent of pornography (which they pathologize), Didi-Huberman justifies attention to them in terms of heir exceptionalism: “The four photographs taken in August 1944 by the Sonderkommando of crematorium V are the exception that asks us to rethink the rule, the fact that asks us to rethink history” (61). Defending Godard’s montage editing practice in “Toutes les histories,” Didi-Huberman writes that “in the form is Godard’s free choice. Here the artist—according to western tradition—gives himself the sovereign freedom of reuse: he chooses two photograms of Dachau and associates them with Hollywood shot” (145). Legitimate images for Didi-Huberman not only entail a postal system of sovereignty as rethinking and reusing, always coming after a delay, but, more specifically, after the operation of the camps ceases, after the moment of their liberation. The spacing of the archive as a library within a library paradoxically blacks out the moment one would think is most in need of archivalization, namely, the moment the camps were working.
Boxing Up the Disaster and the Question of Sovereigntyand Survial in the Film and Media Archive

"The dying of Others is not something that we experience in an authentic sense; at most we are always just 'there-alongside.' . . . By its very essence, death is in every case mine."

--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, paragraph 47.

By speaking of a death that, in order to be irreplaceable and because it is unique, is not even individual—“never individual,” he says—Blanchot puts forward a statement that would appear troublesome even to the Jemeinigkeit, the “mine every time,” which according to Heidegger essentially characterizes a Dasein that a announces itself to itself in its own being-for-death.”

--Jacques Derrida, Demeures, 51

To understand the relations between bare life, sovereignty, the camp as storage unit, and the importance of photography and film in the archive and what we men by its unread -ability, we need to perform a deconstructive reshelving operation, one that risks more than self-embarrassment given the heated controversy around what do with deeply disturbing materials. We may find that we have written ourselves into a book on a library shelf where the internal “library of the pathological” is not a given or decisive discovery but is being contested by participants in the debate, possibly by readers of the present book. Yet there is an even more serious danger, in our view, in going straight to a responsibility patch to calm a panic attack that prematurely (and unethically) closes down thought in the name of the ethical. Let us be clear about our purposes, then.⁶ A certain allegorical and rhetorical diversion or distraction, a kind of play has to be put into play, to cite Derrida, if we are understand the dimensions of bare life and unread-ability for the archive and self-storage that precede and follow the camp, that require the camp be read as the reconstruction of a camp within the camp. There is a constitutive problem of historicism. Because determining (over)determinations only temporarily may be read as such, there comes a moment when the determination as such is no longer visible and has to be reconstructed. And the necessity of reconstruction involves puts immense pressure on distinctions between what is narratable and not, what is hallucination and imagination, what is fiction and what is testimony; which media, if any, are indexical and which are not: even narratives that tell the truth cannot tell the whole truth; a living person may be mistaken for a ghost; testimony may be perjury; photos may be staged). The debate over the four photographs taken in August 1944 is of interest to us because it foregrounds the problem of unread –ability in relation to a problem of uncanny reversibility, a problem that requires the thinking of sovereignty not only in terms of bare life but in terms of bare death, as it were, of determining both the dead are dead, of differentiating annihilation into obliteration and of determining, the importance or irrelevance of visual media and writing to determining death once it is acknowledge that the time of death is not the end of death.

Cultural graphology here means reading Derrida’s Freudian impression of the archive together with his commentary in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. How Derrida calls the “anarchivological” drive in the archive, his critique of an archaeological desire to reconstruct the past, the ash of the archive that remains impossible to archive may be productively reread through a problem Derrida identifies of determining once and for all the distinction between fiction and testimony, in order to show that the camp (Agamben) both calls and blocks a call to read as a problem of archivalization, sovereignty, and the burial and exhumation of documents, media, and bodily remains.⁷ We take this blacking out, this prohibition of imaging what happens in the camp when it was in operation, as the necessity of extending the concept of bare life to bare death, of conceptualizing testimony in terms of a reverse apostrophe, an address to the living from the dead but unburied.