Yet to Be Read: Exhuming the Camp as the Arche-Archive to Come
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No Ending of DeathAgamben wants to render the machine inoperable, put it in neutral as a way of stopping it. Issue of him is the degradation of death, of the Musselmann as those who cannot die because a industrialized and bureaucratic machine of extermination has striped the victims of the possibility of dying an authentic death. Although Agamben points, it makes little sense to distinguish between proper and improper deaths, her deserves the Musselmann as the figure of a ridge that divides: the figure serves as a structuralist conception of life and death. For us, homo sacralization has its own uncanny temporality, enabling “false” endings, as it were that override medical, juridical, and coroner determinations of birth and death. Use the uncanny media loop to link unreadability to reversibility, a resistance reading to a problem of taking sides in Hitchcock’s Lifeboat. Then the briefcase as the boxcars with boxes of paintings that resemble coffins; then the double in Mr. Klein and the reverse side of paintings; then counterfeiting passports, and art in The Counterfeiters. TO BE CUT OR Incorporated: The scrolls are juridical and theological—they are last wills and testaments (legal in that sense, directing the disposition of property and its housing and access, like one might leave a work of art to a museum. I want to read the so-called scrolls in relation to a Catholic notion of the Shroud (as in Turin) as offering a different conception of a contact zone, surface, and revelation in order to better articulate debates over the theology of Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema (image as resurrection or secular? Is the film Catholic? or not?) as well as Agamben's secularization of the history of the camp, of history in general, and his turning its poteentiallyJewish theology into a Catholic one: "We must cease to look toward . . . historical processes as if they had an apocalyptic or profane telos in which the living being and the speaking being, the human and the inhuman--or any terms of a historical process--are joined in an established, completed humanity and reconciled in a realized identity. This does not mean that, in lacking an end, they are condemned to meaningless or the vanity of an infinite, disenchanted drifting. They have not an end, but a remnant . . . The messianic Kingdom is neither the future (the millennium) nor the past (the golden age): it is, instead a remaining time"
See the conflation of WB with Saint Paul in the last chapter of Agamben’s The Time That Remains. It’s all about reading the text as an image, overcoming the Jewish Bildverbot. The secret is that WB was really a Catholic. This way I can link the briefcase to film by making reading a question of relating text and image, word and image—the film image falls under the larger category of the image and all the theological baggage that comes with it. Maybe we should think abut baggage and bagging, as in bagging it, in order to texture the temporality of boxing and the aesthetic value (or lack thereof) of its “to be found” contents, perhaps. Duchamp’s suitcase (though that can’t fit). Joseph Cornell. A disturbance in he measure of time and a paradoxy of these instants, which are so many heterogeneous times. Neither synchrony nor diachrony, an anchrony of all instants. .. because of the cause of death there can be no chronology or chronometry. (81) All testimony essentially appeals to a certain system of belief, to faith without proof, to the act of faith summoned by a kind of transcendental oath, well, faith in a temporal order, in a certain commonsense ordering of time, is what guarantees the everyday concept. Especially the juridical concept and the dominant concept of attestation in European culture (49) For Derrida, experiencing an encounter of death with death opens up the possibility of passion as compassion and friendship (non-Christian). It is precisely "complaining" that Derrida addresses at the end of Demeures: One cannot testify for the witness who testifies to his own death, but, inversely, only to te imminence of my death, to its instance as deferred imminence. i can testify to the imminence of my death. And . . . instance . . [can] signify more than thing: not only, in the place of administrative or juridical authority, the palace of a verdict, such as a magistrates' court or the proceedings of a court of justice, but also imminence and deferral, he added delay preceding the "thing" that is pending . . . because it cannot be long in coming, to the point of being on the point of arriving. (46) Death happened to him-them-, it arrived to divide the subject of this story in some sense; it arrive as this division, but it did not arrive except insofar as it arrived (managed) to divide the subject." (54) Such an instant does not follow in the temporal sequence of instants: this instant is another eternity, the stance or station of another present." (73) Not a Platonic or Christian immortality in the moment of death or the passion . . . in the instant of death, when death arrives, where one is not yet dead in order to be already dead, at the same instant. At the same instant, but the tip of the instant is divided here: I am not dead and I am dead." (67-68) Perhaps it is the encounter of death, which is only ever an imminence, only ever a suspension, an anticipation, the encounter of death as anticipation with death itself, with a death that has already arrived according to the inescapable: an encounter between what is going to arrive and what has already arrived. Between what is going to come (va venir) and what just finished coming [vient de venir], been what goes and comes. But as the same. Both virtual and real, real as virtual. . . Death has just come from the instant it is going to come (64; 65) The hospitality of death itself. . .an autobiography, a hostobiography which, under circumstances (the surviving in suicide) advances in the maner of a work of art. 44 Is the witness not always a surviror? (45) The really amazing move (on p. 52) is to read a letter Derrida got from Blanchot about almost being shot by Nazis and the story itself (non-fictional testimony with testimony in a fictional mode). So he advances a new kind of autobiographical reading largely in order to defend Blanchot from professorial political prosecution (on grounds that Blanchot has already written in such prosecutors as police and doctors in his work as incompetent in their competence because naive when it comes to understanding testimony). Blanchot seems to be operating as a stand in for de Man (Derrida doesn't say what the charges against Blanchot are, only that when he wrote the Instant of My Death various charges about his politics were in play). The essay begins with Derrida talking about the conference title and mentioning de Man because the conference is in Belgium. The title of the conference is The Passions of Literature." He comes back to passion on p. 56 in relation to Blanchot and then on p. 63, distinguishes a Christological / Hegelian account of resurrection from Blanchot's "auto-bi-ography" of surviving (survivance) as "life without life." Derrida's remark that "He can no longer relive what he lived" (p. 66) offers an indirectly deeper account of archaeological hallucination (Archive Fever) in that the person who actually was there cannot repeat what happened because of the divided subject and divided temporality death introduces in Blanchot's split non-fictional fictional autobiography (the young man about to be executed by Nazis and the narrator of The Instant of My Death are both "Blanchot”.) I was thinking we might bring it into the conclusion in terms of the de Man and Blanchot relation since it bears on a notion of irreplaceability The one who says and undersigns "I" today, now, cannot replace the other; he can no longer, therefore, replace himself, that is, the young man he has been. He can no longer replace him, substitute himself for him, a condition that nonetheless stipulated for any normal and non-fictional testimony. He can no longer relive what he lived. (66). There is a curiously elliptical defense of de Man at work here that occurs not by substituting the clearer case of resistance in Blanchot for de Man but by linking in order to put distance between the two figures (who cannot be substituted for one another). Or we could not bring it in. In any case, I think is worth reading. There's a lot of insistence in the first twenty pages or so on speaking in French ("I am speaking in French" becomes an example) and the assumed translatability of testimony, and later Derrida reads very closely the references to language in Blanchot's story (which is really amazingly good). The space between de Man and Blanchot seems to offer Derrida a way of abiding (demeure) with de Man and of not abiding certain kinds of extra-legal, academic prosecutions (he includes a postscript about answering charges leveled against him, so he more openly reveals that he is also a third target, along with Blanchot and de Man, of such prosecutions. (Derrida also mentions Kafka's the Castle.) I find it also helps clarify the specificity of the notes written by Sonnderkommando. They write from the same place Blanchot's narrator writes, namely, knowing that are about to die. They differ in this respect crucially from the victims they were forced to execute, who did not know they were about to die. NOTES
1 Jacques Rançiere, The Future of the Image; Jacques Rançiere, Film Fables; Georges Didi-Huberman Image in Spite of All (Chicago, Chicago UP, 2008 trans. Shane B. Lillis). 2 Agamben wants to relocate Foucault's distinction in Archeology of Knowledge between langue and acts of speech "in the difference between language (langue) and archive: that is, not between discourse and its taking place, between what is said and the enunciation that exerts itself in it, but rather between langue and its taking place, between a pure possibility of speaking and its existence as such. (144) The Archaeology of Knowledge is Agam on Foucualt's Lives of Infamous Men: What momentarily shines through these laconic statements are not the biographical events of personal histories, as suggested by the pathos-laden emphasis of a certain oral history, bur rather the luminous trail of a different history. What suddenly comes to light is not the memory of an oppressed existence, but rather the disjunction between the living being and the being that marks its empty place. Here life subsists only in the infamy in which it existed; here a name lives solely in the disgrace that covered it. And something in this disgrace bears witness to life beyond all biography." 143 “On the Lives of infamous Men,” 3 Georges Didi-Huberman Image in Spite of All (Chicago, Chicago UP, 2008 trans. Shane B. Lillis). Didi-Huberman draws on the many comparisons made by many victims between the camps and Dante’s Hell. Yet the Hell to which he refers must also include the archive from which they are stored and (some would say “snatched”) allowed to be exhibited in 2001. Once archival reconstruction and exhibition begins, the referent of Hell, itself a literary metaphor, may no longer confined to the camps themselves. 4 In speaking of the Rudolf hoess’s presentation of an of photographs taken at Auschwitz to otto Thiernick, the Nazi Minister of Justice, Didi-Huberman, writes that “this use of photography verged on a pornography of killing” (24). See also Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Holocauste ordinaire: Histoires d'usurpation : “Dans cet essai poignant, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat dénonce avec une précision implacable la pornographie de la mort et du massacre ainsi que cette volonté destructrice de toujours vouloir "parler à la place de l'autre" afin de mieux l'exclure. In Image in Spite of All, Didi-Huberman notes that Godard had shown in 1968 images of totalitarianism and pornography together but does not discuss Godard’s use of pornographic images in Histoire(s) du cinema. 5 Errol Morris’s Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Letucher (1996) and Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz (1994) mark watershed transitions: Agamben divorces ethics from legal questions in the first chapter and turns to Foucault’s conception of the archive in his last chapter to best refute revisionists, and Morris focusing on both a trial of a Canadian revisionist tried for hate speech after he claimed in print that the holocaust didn’t happen as well as evidence Fred Leutcher surreptitiously gathered from the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau to support the defendant. Morris interviews the Auschwitz archivist and Nazi documents to refute Leuchter. On the doubling legal and buereuacratic archive as hisotircal research archive in the nineteenth century, see Sven Spieker, the Big Archive: Art from Bureacracy (MIT, 2008) 6 As Rudolf Gasche writes, “if knowledge remains on the threshold of a responsible decision, if a decision is a decision, on the condition that it exceeds simple consciousness and simple theoretical determination, the responsible self must, in principle, be unable—that run the risk of not being able –to fully account for the singular act constitutive of a responsible decision. It follows from this that responsibility is necessarily linked to the secret—not, of course, in the form of withholding knowledge regarding a specific decision but in the form of an essential inability to ultimately make the reasons for one’s actions fully transparent. . . . But, while a decision that that is based merely on knowledge annuls responsibility, a decision that forgoes knowledge and defies the demand to give reasons is not without problems that threaten responsibility as well.” “European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques Derrida on Responsibility,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007), 307. 7 (not limited to Foucault’s account, that Agamben relies on in Remnants of Auschwitz) 8 “(The calligraphy parchments that Miklos Nyiszli mentions have not been found.)”107 Another identical message has been buried in the yard of Crematorium II (108-09). Another version of the uncanny—two notes, but no box. 9 The bound book Derrida discusses Freud’s father gave to him from “an ark with fragments” suggests that the book and its container, the ark, are two different things. But, following Derrida, we know that the archivist sometimes confuses herself with the archeologist, such that the archive is an “anarchive,” the archivist’s desire to find the moment of impression prior to division leads him to enact what she mistakenly thinks she is reenact( the instant the body or writing machine made contact with the support, whether paper or volcanic ash, never existed). But if being an archivist always means recovering even missing data, then the archive begins to resemble the book. all framed what I will call Derrida's dead metaphors that signal his never articulated as such hauntology of the book: there's a tension in Derrida's writing between articulating a concept that is not a concept (arche-writing) through metaphors taken from "writing" that are nearly always taken from printed books. The supplement becomes an appendix, for example. Sometimes he puts the metaphor is scare quotes. The signature is not necessarily the name of the artist, the name being outside language and outside print. Derrida never thematized the relation between his metaphors from empirical kinds of writing for his non-phenomenal writing. Deconstruction is indifferent to empirical differences between writing systems since arche-writing in not reducible to any of them. Yet the hauntology of Derrida's arche-writing can be read precisely in these dead metaphors that mark the limit of his interest in the history of writing, even though he says he wants to go there (at the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing”). The signature as image. Signature attached See Derrida "restitutions" piece of paper—Duchamp painting with paper clip Jan van Huyns--signature etched on the table trompe l'oeil He doesn't because the book has become spectral. He ends Freud's writing pad to be empirical in order to trash Freud for failing to, not doing etc. Derrida is anti-apparatus (mystic writing pad) even though he draws on metaphors for various kinds of instrumental apparatuses. It's a weird very judgmental long paragraph about Freud's failings near the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” But the book, like the archive is spectral, hence is never closed. But it isn’t open either. Authority both increased and decreased by the addition and endless of the archive. If the same holds true of the library (as one kind of archive), it may hold true for the book as well. Derrida discusses the text and the substrate or subjectile (artaud book; Archive Fever; Paper machine) but never puts any pressure on a distinction between the texts ands it protection or storage device. Open is strictly a metaphor for the archive—never closed. Of the secret itself, there can be no archive. The secret is the very ash of the archive, the place where it no longer makes any sense to say “the very ash” . . . That is what this literature attests. (100) We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive, he [Freud] may have burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what may have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or his ‘life.’ Burned without him, without remains and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not short of or beyond a suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash. (101) Derrida’s ashole of the archive as his “meta-phor-writing” of the arche-writing that “precedes” speech and (empirical) writing. “an incompleteness and a future that belong to the normal time of scientific progress but a specifically Jewish archive is not of the order such a relative incompletemess. It is nolonger only the provisional indetermination that opens the ordinary field of a scientific work in progress and always unfinished, in particular because new archives can stul be discovered, cout of secrecy or the pritvate sphere, so as to undergo new interpretations. It is no longer a question of the same time of the same field, and the relationship to the archive. (994, 52) The truth is spectral, and this is its part of truth which is irreducible by explanation. (87) The chain of substitutions (even the metaphor of chain) that allows deconstruciton to crate a non-binary structuring of binary structures and hteir exclusions Archive “There is no metaarchive.” (67) Archive fever, a be sick but to be in need of archives Archive fever means “to burn with a passion. It is never put to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsively repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (91) There is an incessant tension . . . between the archive and archaeology. They will always be close to the other, resembling each other, hardly discernible in their co-implication , and yet radically incompatible, heterogeneous, than say, different with regard to the origin, in divorce with regard to the arkhe/ (92) In his essay on Jensen’s novel Gradiva, about an archeologist who hallucinates the ghost of a young woman named Gradiva an ancient Roman who died when Mt Vseussius erted in Pompeii, Freud wants “explain the haunting of the archaeologist with a logic of repression . . . claims again to bring to light a more originary origin that that of the specter. In the outbidding he wants to be an archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist . . . He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint than the one the other archaeologists of all kinds bustle around, those of literature and those of classical objective science . . . an impression that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is yet to be detached from the primary impression. . . . In its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is to be left, abandoned by the pressure of the impression. . . . An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible form the impression of hits imprint, Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself! (97-98) Derrida implicitly ties this desire for no detachment to Shaprio’s desire for total attachment in “Restitutions.” But attention to books on their scenes of (un)reading, figuration, like Annuciation of Master Flamelle—reading by heart—fisting the text—open and closed window casements. Is the page covering her fingers, protecting her, linking their mystery and placement to her other hand over her heart—the inwardness of text and heart match. Or is are the fingers penetrating the page, holding it between her fingers so that the page is hidden behind her fingers, in which case penetration of reading, and heart is linked to the mystery of concept. Mary not entirely covered or protected but has to penetrate , do violence, as she too is “raped” by God through the word, the ear. What is being opened and shut in this story of messianic announcement? What kind of narrative is being told here? What is the relation between the holy spirit and the book, reading the fold over? Derrida talks about the way the metaphor of writing keeps returning in Plato (and Rousseau and Saussure) at key moments to keep the outside outside and the inside inside. “The scriptural ‘metaphor’ thus crops every time difference and relation are irreducible” (163) But the metaphor is not single—letters emerge in the quotation from Socrates on p. 163 in relation to division (three classes) and affixing (that results in a unified collection) “in the end he found a number of the things, and affixed to the whole collection, as to each single member of it, the name “letters.” It was because he realized that none of s could get to know one of the collection all by itself, in isolation from all the rest, that he conceived of the “letter” as a kind of bond of unity uniting as it were all these sounds into one ad he gave utterance to the expression ‘art of letters,’ implying that there was one art tat dealt with sounds. So there are two moments of “writing” as metaphor, not only letters but affixing (letters become names). Things become members. The collection establishes property, boundaries of a physical space and a human body.
Directory: burt burt -> - burt -> I spent this week once again finding Robotic heads. I found a few more interesting models. Here are a few examples burt -> Read After Burning, I pray You, or la carte posthume Download 156.27 Kb. Share with your friends:
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