Alveo-auto-bio-thanato-photo-graphies1

Michael O’Rourke

Black Books

My viewings of Dragan Kujundžić’s film Frozen Time, Liquid Memories, 1942-2012

always seem to coincide with controversies. Not long after watching the film for the first time

in the summer of 2013 I read an announcement for a new biography by Evelyn Barish called

The Double Life of Paul de Man. Here is the publishers’ blurb:

Thirty years after his death in 1983, Yale University professor Paul de Man remains a

haunting figure [my emphasis]. The Nazi collaborator and chameleon-like intellectual

created with Deconstruction a literary movement so pervasive that it threatened to

topple the very foundations of literature and history itself. The revelation in 1988 that

de Man had written a collaborationist and anti-Semitic article led to his intellectual

downfall, yet biographer Evelyn Barish apprehended that nothing appeared to

1 This text began as a presentation entitled “Whowhat survives? Response to Dragan Kujundžić’s Frozen Time,

Liquid Memories” at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth on June 14, 2013. On that occasion Tina

Kinsella and I organized a screening of Dragan’s film followed by short responses from myself, Tina, Éamonn

Dunne, Carol Owens, and Steven Shaviro. Dragan was characteristically generous in allowing us to screen his

film and in his own responses to our remarks. Before meeting Dragan I always wondered why Jacques Derrida

held him in such high esteem. I can now say that I, like Derrida, have been lucky to have been gifted Dragan’s

friendship and the many kindnesses he has done me would be too numerous to list. This essay is a small token

of my appreciation and love for Dragan the man and for his work. My debts to him, the “phantom friend

returning” are, in the end, however, unrestitutable.

contextualize the life he assiduously sought to conceal. Relying on archival research

and hundreds of interviews, Barish evokes figures such as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth

Hardwick, and Jacques Derrida. Reexamining de Man’s life, particularly in prewar

Europe and his reincarnation [my emphasis] in postwar America, she reveals, among

other things, his embezzlement schemes, his lack of an undergraduate degree, and his

bigamous marriage. The man who despised narrative, particularly biography, finally

gets his due in this chilling portrait [my emphasis] of a man and his era2.

With the emergence of Barish’s biography yet again we have the attempted killing off of

deconstruction—and even theory tout court—played out over the body of Paul de Man3. The

significance of this turn of events for Dragan’s film is precisely to do with the question of

haunting and reincarnation and of the non-biodegradable, of what remains, of what or who

survives, is nameable, mournable, grievable, commemoratable and so on. In the first part of

the film on the racija/pogrom in Novi Sad, Dragan interpolates a scene from the film The

Ister a film about Martin Heidegger. As I re-watched Frozen Time, Liquid Memories in early

2015 we are witnessing the fallout (I use the language of nuclear catastrophe deliberately)

from the recent publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks4. Heidegger is another figure

whom the repeated deaths and disappearances of deconstruction (and of theory tout court) is

also often routinely played out over and the Black Notebooks provide critics with yet another

2 Evelyn Barish, The Double Life of Paul de Man (New York: WW Norton/Liveright, 2013).

3 The posthumous publication of a manuscript by de Man entitled “Notes on the Task of the Translator” appeared in a book with the telling title Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, on Benjamin edited by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller (London: Routledge, 2012). Particularly relevant to the present essay are Miller’s “Paul de Man at Work: In These Bad Days, What Good is an Archive?” (55-88) and Cohen’s “Toxic Assets: de Man’s Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary (An American Fable)” (89-129).

4 The Black Notebooks, edited by Peter Trawny, are volume 97 of the Gesamtausgabe. For a discussion of the content see: http://www.corriere.it/english/15_febbraio_09/heidegger-jews-self-destructed-47cd3930-b03b-11e4-8615-d0fd07eabd28.shtml. For a response from Jean-Luc Nancy see http://strassdelaphilosophie.blogspot.ca/2014/06/heidegger-et-nous-jean-luc-nancy.html

reason not to read Heidegger (and by extension and by implication not to read Derrida or de

Man)5. The archive is, as Derrida warns us, never ideologically innocent:

The archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general, is

not the only place for stocking [stockage] and for conserving an archivable content of

the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes

it was or it will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also

determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into

existence and in relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it

records the event6.

Hillis Miller notes that we “tend to assume that an archive is a self-evident good in itself” but,

as the quote from Derrida’s Mal d’Archive above suggests, the archive is never neutral, it is

performative (rather than constative, a place for stocking [stockage]), bringing about certain

effects and events, for good or for ill7. What good, Miller asks, will it do to read the archive

of de Man’s writings today (and we might add what good will it do to read Heidegger or

Derrida in these bad days?)? The affirmative answer Miller gives to this question is that

reading de Man can help us as we face into and face up to the looming catastrophes and

meltdowns of our time (economic, financial, pedagogical, climactic). Miller recounts a

“possibly fictive passage in a mystery story” his wife Dorothy has read in which Mayan

hieroglyphs translate Christ’s words on the cross “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken

me” as “Sinking. Sinking. Black Ink over nose” (88). As the waters of catastrophe rise up to

and above our noses Miller writes “all the ink we have spilt will only add to the flood, but it

5 See Jacques Derrida, “Heidegger, the Philosopher’s Hell” (181-190) and “The Work of the Intellectuals and the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company Do Business”) (422-454) in Points… Interviews, 1974-1994, (ed) Elisabeth Weber, (trans) Peggy Kamuf & others (California: Stanford University Press, 1995).

6 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 16-17.

7 Hillis Miller, “Paul de Man at work”, 56.

is better, I claim, more human-inhuman, to know what is happening than to be naïvely

surprised by the rising waters. Paul de Man’s writings are a great help with that, though not at

all a reassuring help” (88)8.

Khōral Transhumance

Dragan’s film, too, is a great help with reading the catastrophes of the past as well as

the catastrophes of our time. The Ister is also a film, like Frozen Time, Liquid Memories,

about the Danube, where the body of water is figured as a khora, a placeless place of love,

life, affirmation and survival9. The Danube/Khora is a receptacle, an alveole, a “bearer of

imprints”10 and watery traces. Rather than “black ink” in Dragan’s filmic narrative it is “white

ink” which is inscribed, scribbled on the watery surface of the film11. He explains what we

are seeing: “at the beginning of the movie [The Ister] about the Danube, refuse, non-

biodegradable flotsam of plastic garbage carried by the river” is visible but the “location of

the garbage is not immediately clear”. However, as the film progresses “techno-refuse carried

by the river towards its divided, phantasmatic origin repeats itself several times without

geographical designation”. Dragan goes on: “the plastic garbage thus becomes the non-

locatable, silent, pre-symbolic, uncanny, visual ‘other’ dispersed through the narrative about

the river”. The techno-refuge that floats along the Danube and throughout the film is, we

might say, transhumant, topologically and tropologically (not to mention politropologically)

on the move:

8 See also Miller’s Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

9 Jacques Derrida, “Khōra” in Julian Wolfreys, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 231-262.

10 Derrida, “Khōra”, 233.

11 Derrida’s essay “Scribble (writing-power)” begins by asking “Who can write? What can writing do?” trans. Cary Plotkin, Yale French Studies 58 (1979): 117-147.

Tropes are tours, changes of place, from somewhere to somewhere else: displacement,

voyage, transfer or transposition, metonymy or metaphor, translation or

transhumance. The quotation as such [and Frozen Time, Liquid Memories is quoting,

translating, receiving, recycling The Ister] as such, like transhumance, and more than

ever the translated quotation, is, according to etymology, equivalent to setting in

motion to transfer, deport, and export from one place to another. Always promising

some return to the origin. A transhumance consists in migrating, changing land or

terrain, going from one land to another, beyond (trans) one terrestrial or earthly

(humus) place toward another12.

The Danube as silent, transhumant khora is anywhere:

it is as if place floated in space—and, moreover, had always done so in order to be

and to take place. Floating indeterminacy, indefinition, in-finity or pluralizing

indifference, un-limitation, the apeiron of ‘any’ inscribes, in effect, in the very

interior of place, inside the ‘where’, a sort of abyss …Indefinite, at the same time

undetermining and pluralizing, the epochal suspense of ‘any’ de-nominates (dé-

nomme), for it is especially not a name, a gaping opening, an outside of the inside, a

‘borderline’ [a place of living on] that drives mad the very inside of the place, at the

same time hiatus or chaos (chaino, from which chaos or chasm, which is what I make

when I open my mouth—hio in Latin, from which comes hiatus—when I ask or call,

when I scream or I name, sometimes in silence, my hunger, my thirst, or my desire

[the alveolar is where the tongue touches the teeth and one of the clustered cells at the

termination of the bronchiole in the lungs]). In thus opening space in its inside, ‘any’

spaces space, it de-nominates the very spacing of space13. 12 Jacques Derrida, “Faxitexture”, trans. Laura Bourland in Anywhere (ed) Cynthia Davidson (New York: Rizzoli, 1992).

13 Derrida, “Faxitexture”, 23.

The refuse, too, is anywhere: “’Any’ does not supervene (survient) ‘where’: as soon as there

is ‘where’, there is ‘any’, a possibility of substitution [the refuse substitutes for the bodies of

the dead] and of repetition [the logophantasmatic origin divides and repeats itself several

times without geographical designation or destination]; and as soon as there is a possibility of

replacement, of substitution, and of possible repetition, there is spacing and place, there is

room … Place is nothing other than the possibility, chance, or threat of replacement [couldn’t

we say the same about the archive?] It is, in a word, perhaps, this khora, this Greek name that

suddenly begins to resonate in these places”14. Danube is spacing, khora, placing and re-

placing, a place open to what is coming (chance or threat), welcome to the other within itself,

to all who might come [tout arrivant]. The Danube is a tympanum, alveolar, having the form

of a hollow in the ear15, like a shell or conch16.

One could say something about Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity and the

film’s techno and human garbage; about Slavoj Žižek’s aestheticisation of trash as true love

of the world; about whether Frozen Time, Liquid Memories is a deconstructive film or a film

about deconstruction; about whether film or the film itself is biodegradable or not. However,

what I want to note here is the connection to be made between the many deaths of

deconstruction and its hauntological non-biodegradability.

Non-biodegradables

But before we get to that, I should, perhaps, say something about Jewishness, Derrida

and deconstruction (although the repeated attempts at the expulsion of both Derrida and

deconstruction should make that point clearly enough). And this is related to the question of

14 Derrida, “Faxitexture”, 23-24.

15 This is how Derrida describes Amsterdam in “Tympan” (xviii). See Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

16 Derrida entitles one of his essays on de Man “Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man’s War”, Critical Inquiry 14 (1988): 590-652.

temporality (and revenance and arrivance) too. In an essay entitled “Whowhat Gives?!”

Dragan explains this nexus and how Jewishness is intimately related to the technology and

temporality of film. He writes there:

In the essay ‘Abraham, the Other’, a reflection on Emmanuel Levinas’s essay ‘Being

Jewish’, Jacques Derrida reflects on Judaism and time, not quite unlike the lines of

analysis followed in Aporias. It is from that ‘place’ given over only in the future to

arrive, or as Jacques Derrida liked to say, in the to-come, à-venir, that the meaning of

this identity will have been determined. Including the endurance of Jacques Derrida’s

own experience of being a Franco-Algerian Jew: “the to-come, which is to say, the

other, will decide what ‘Jew’, ‘Judaism’ or ‘Jewishness’ will have signified. And

although this to come is not the property of anyone, it will necessarily depend, as to-

come, on an experience of invention that is both prophetic and poetic”. In Specters of

Marx, the very structure of the event ‘hesitates between the singular ‘who’ of the

ghost and the general ‘what’ of the simulacrum. The teletechnoscientific revolution

organizes a space that is haunted by delayed images, ghosts of technological

displacement, hesitating between the who of their apparition and the what of their

simulation17.

Frozen Time, Liquid Memories itself “organizes a space [khora] that is haunted by

delayed [or stilled, frozen] images, ghosts of [tele]technological displacement” hesitating

between revenance and arrivance, ghosts from the past and from the future. As Dragan also

writes in “Whowhat Gives?!”: “this arrivant is also always already both a sur-vivant and a

revenant, a spectre or a ghost of a shared but nonsynchronous, countertemporal mortality

surviving in the very heart of the living” (15). The arrivants are the non-biodegradables, the

17 Dragan Kujundžić, “Whowhat Gives?!” in Kujundžić (ed) “Who?” or “What?”—Jacques Derrida”, special issue of Discourse 30.1/2 (Winter & Spring 2008): 3-20, at 15.

bio-techno-refuse, the still (delayed) remains that are carried along by the river on its

divagatory and dilatory paths [another two meanings of alveolar] and by this film18.

Derrida’s long essay in Critical Inquiry responding to the first wave of appalling

attacks on Paul de Man is, of course, called “Biodegradables”, an essay which attends to

many of the themes of this film: who or what remains, survival, what floats on the surface,

who or what is saved, what is and is not archivizable, the best and the worst, and so on19.

Although one should read every word of Derrida’s essay (and the arguments made for the

necessity of reading De Man) I want to single out one paragraph which, for me, strikingly

resonates with Dragan’s film. Derrida writes:

Those who have sought to exploit these revelations [about de Man], those who have

given in to the temptation to annihilate, along with the work of a whole life, all that

which, from near or far, came to be associated with it (‘Deconstruction’, they say),

have produced, in spite of themselves, a premium of seduction. In spite of

themselves? Perhaps, I am not sure of that. In any case, too bad for them. One had to

have a lot of ingenuousness and inexperience not to have foreseen it. Many of those

who had taken part in this crusade against de Man and against ‘Deconstruction’ are

getting more and more irritated: now it turns out that, in part thanks to them, people

are talking more and more about what the crusaders wanted, without delay, to reduce

to silence by denouncing the alleged hegemony that seems to cause them so much

suffering. They should have thought of that. ‘Things’ don’t ‘biodegrade’ as one might

wish or believe. Some were saying that ‘Deconstruction’ has been in the process, for

the last twenty years, of extinguishing itself (‘waning’ as I read more than once) like

18 This is a reference to Derrida’s book Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).

19 Jacques Derrida, “Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments”, trans. Peggy Kamuf, Critical Inquiry 15 (Summer 1989): 812-873.

the flame of a pilot light, in sum, the thing being almost all used up. Well, here they

go and think they see, at the bottom of the little bit of oil remaining, a black stain (the

spectre of 1940-1942 [note the dates of Dragan’s film], the diabolical Paul de Man!).

Certain this time that they will be able to get rid of it, without further delay and thus

without any other precaution, they rush forward like children in order to wield the

final blow and destroy the idol. And, of course, the flaming oil spreads everywhere,

and now here they are crying even louder, angry with their own anger, frightened by

their own fear and the fear they wanted to cause. Without them, would it have

consumed itself: would the thing have been degraded on its own? (818-819)

We might note that cinematic film itself (and the photograph) is non-biodegradable and its

support (its pellicule, its very skin) depends on the “little bit of oil remaining”. The film is

that which bears witness, which sur-vives, remains, lives on. Film is like an alveolar “crystal

of breath, your irreversible witness” to quote Paul Celan’s “Breathturn” the cinepigraph (or

cinepitaph) to Frozen Time, Liquid Memories. The essay “Biodegradables” continues

Derrida’s reflections on Paul de Man’s “war”, which refers to the war in the 1940s during

which de Man published his infamous writings, the war around the name and work of de Man

in the 1980s and the war Derrida speculates must have endured within de Man himself20:

Paul de Man’s war is finally … the one that this man must have lived and endured in

himself. He was this war. And for almost a half century, this ordeal was a war because

it could not remain a merely private torment. It has to have marked his public gesture,

his teaching and writing. It remains a secret, a hive [an alveary is also a beehive] but

no one can seriously imagine, today, that in the course of such a history, this man

20 We should recall here that Derrida’s final interview which is all about survival, life and death, the archive, democracy and the (im)possibility of living on is entitled “I am at war with myself”.

would not have been torn apart by the tragedies, ruptures, dissociations,

‘disjunctions’21.

This internal war, to be at war with oneself, is to live and it is what keeps Derrida and de Man

alive, what allows them to survive. Survival does not supervene (survient); it opens the

possibility of substitution, repetition, replacement. Like the techno-refuse which survives on

the Danube river, survival indicates a structural non-closure of the phantasmatic origin which

divides and repeats:

As I recalled earlier, already from the beginning, and well before the experiences of

surviving [survivance] that are at the moment mine, I maintained that survival is an

originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence, Dasein,

if you will. We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of

the testament. But having said that, I would not want to encourage an interpretation

that situates surviving on the side of death and the past rather than life and the future.

No, deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of

life. Everything I say—at least from “Pas” (in Parages) on—about survival as a

complication of the opposition life/death proceeds in me from an unconditional

affirmation of life22.

In Dragan’s film survival structures existence (Dasein) and bearing witness to the techno-

refuse is (at)testamentary, without delay (demeure). Derrida writes that “the moment one is a

witness and the moment one attests, bears witness, the instant one gives testimony, must also

be a temporal sequence—sentences for example [or film stills]—and above all, these

sentences must promise their own repetition and thus their own quasi-technical

21 Derrida, “Like the Sound of the Sea Within a Shell”, 163.

22 Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007), 51-52.

reproducibility”23. Survival as the structure of existence and the demand for testimony means

that the Danube is open to, hospitable to the other, anachronistic “awaiting (at) the arrival”24,

for the other at the “threshold of death”25. Novi Sad must accept “the axiom of

incompleteness. A city is a set which must remain indefinitely and structurally non-saturable,

open to its own transformation, to the augmentations which alter and displace as little as

possible the memory of its patrimony. A city must remain open to what it knows about what

it doesn’t yet know about what it will be”26. Novi Sad too is living at a “threshold”:

I am one, but I am only the threshold of myself, guard me, protect me, save me, save

therefore the order which I give you, heed my law, it is one, but for this construct me,

thus de- and re-construct me, you are at the threshold, expand me, transform me,

multiply me, don’t leave me intact, take the risk of deconstructing me. If you leave me

intact, and one, you will lose me. It is necessary both to protect me and break and

enter me, both to safeguard me and to transfigure me, to transform me precisely in

order to save me: it is necessary both to love me and to violate me—but in a certain

manner and not in another. It is necessary to affirm me as I affirm myself and, in

order for this, to invent the impossible, which consists in respecting my past body, in

telling my age, but also, and out of respect, in giving me enough life so as not to

confuse me with a conservatory of archives, a library of lithographic legends, a

museum, a temple, a tower, a center of administrative and political decisions, a

parliamentary enclosure, a tourist hotel, a chamber of commerce, an investment

23 Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 33.

24 Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dying—awaiting (one another at) the ‘limits of truth’, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 43.

25 Kujundžić, “Whowhat Gives?!” 14.

26 Jacques Derrida, “Generations of a City: Memory, Prophecy, Responsibilities” trans. Rebecca Comay in Open City (Alphabet City 6), (ed) John Knechtel (Toronto: Alphabet City, 1998), 26.

centre, a hub of railway or information connections, a computerized stock exchange,

or even a habitable, laborious, and productive hive [my emphasis]. I include all these

within me, in my great, moving body [transhumance again], but you must never

reduce me to this, I am the threshold of something else again: I have never been, and a

city will never have been, simply that27.

Novi Sad/Danube as khora are ana-chronistic, belong to an “ageless contemporaneity”28, the

wholly other of what arrives or derives. As Malabou understands it “this is what explains its

capacity to appear or reappear [like the techno-refuse], phantomatically, in our era, threatened

as it is by a radical event, namely nuclear catastrophe, an event that is itself an-archivable.

Khora, which originally referred to place and earth without occupying place or being found

on earth, calls for thinking of and in this very moment when the danger of destruction of

every single place has spread across the earth”29.

Forgetting Well

To not remember, or to erase the trace of the human “waste” or “garbage” from

history, archive or memory here takes on a vocabulary of eco-catastrophe: we have flotsam,

garbage, nucleo-historico-filmico-literary waste. Derrida in “Biodegrabables” points to the

impossibility of erasing the trace(s) of De Man and his very non-biodegradability (de Man as

well as his writing is characterized as a “thing”). He writes:

Yes, to condemn the dead man to death: they would like him not to be dead yet so

they could put him to death (preferably along with a few of the most intolerable

27 Derrida, “Generations of a City”, 23-24.

28 Jacques Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives” in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, Volume 1 (eds) Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 387-409.

29 Catherine Malabou and Jacques Derrida, Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida, trans. David Wills (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2004), 143.

among the living). To put him to death this time without remainder. Since that is

difficult, they would want him to be already dead without remainder, so that they can

put him to death without remainder. Well, the fact is he is dead (they will no longer be

able to do anything in order to kill him), and there are remains, something surviving

that bears his name. Difficult to decipher, translate, assimilate. Not only can they do

nothing against that which survives, but they cannot keep themselves from taking the

noisiest part in that survival. Plus there are other survivors [note the language here],

aren’t there, who are interested in survival, who talk, respond, discuss, analyze

endlessly. We’ll never have done with it. It’s as if something nonbiodegradable had

been submerged at the bottom of the sea. It irradiates…30

As Milena Kujundžić, the Theorist’s Mother (the title of a wonderful recent book by

Andrew Parker31) puts it the project of archivization is one of “not deleting and not

forgetting”. The process of forgetting well is irreversible and as Dragan explains in “The

Non-Biodegradable” (2007): “the irreversible is therefore what cannot be forgotten, the non-

biodegradable, the caesura that ruptures the flow of European history”32. The events of

January 1942 in Novi Sad are unerasable, inextinguishable. At the foot of the monument to

the racija the tons of garbage that wash up are made into a “monster from the Danube”. This

monster—this monstrous arrivant from the past and the future—fashioned from plastic, non-

biodegradable refuse, is what floats, survives, carries on, irradiates…. The possibility of a

catastrophe without remainders is a threat but also a chance: “the absolute effacement of any

possible trace … is thus the only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely

30 Derrida, “Biodegradables”, 861.

31 Andrew Parker, The Theorist’s Mother (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Although I only obliquely refer to gender in this essay it is noteworthy that a 1987 seminar with Derrida has the alveolar title “Women in the Beehive”.

32 Dragan Kujundžić, “The Non-Biodegradable”, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/film-a-screen-media/571-nonbiodegradable. For an updated version of this essay see Dragan’s contribution to the present volume.

other, ‘trace du tout autre’”33. That which remains unreadable or unarchivable is what

survives, what lives on, “only or already its living on, its life after life, its life after death”34.

Phantasmo-cine-taphs35

There are so many photographs in this film (and photographs of photographs), so

many monuments in a film made by “Cinetaph Productions”: of the racija outside the

Schosberg home; of Paula Schosberg, the mother; of Adela/Della; of the racija on the icy

Danube; of the French children; of Jacqueline and Marcel Weltman and their parents; the

slide show on the computer screen at the CERCIL archive and museum; the cenotaph

photographs of the children. “We will never have all the photographs” we are told. But, as

Hillis Miller reminds us in The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After

Auschwitz photographs are a form of testimony, of bearing witness36. They might also be

thought of, Miller says, as embodiments of Toni Morrison’s claim that “nothing ever dies,

that once something has happened it goes on happening” (xv). The photographs are, in Elissa

33 Derrida, “No Apocalypse, Not Now”, 403.

34 Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Borderlines”, trans. James Hulbert in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), 103. See also Sara Guyer, “The Rhetoric of Survival and the Possibility of Romanticism”, Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (2007): 247-263.

35 “One keeps the archive of ‘some thing’ (of someone as some thing) which took place once and is lost, that one keeps as such, as the unkept, in short, a sort of cenotaph: an empty tomb. But are there any tombs that are not cenotaphs? And is there anything photographic [de la photographie] without kenosis?” Derrida, Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2010), 19.

36 J. Hillis Miller, The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), xv.

Marder’s terms “prosthetic”37. In some ways Frozen Time, Liquid Memories could be read as

a photo-novel, the genre which Derrida assigns Marie-Françoise Plissart’s images in Right of

Inspection. “I like the word medium here”, Derrida says, because “it speaks to me of spectres,

of ghosts and phantoms, like these images themselves. From the first ‘apparition’, it’s all

about the return of the departed. It is there in black and white, it can be verified after the fact.

The spectral is the essence of photography. Therefore it remarks (upon) photography. At once

immobile and cursive, the question of genre takes bodily form, becomes a body that moves

[transhumance again] other bodies about, moves the bodies of others”38. For André Bazin, in

“The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (1945) the photograph has the fleeting presence

of a shadow which is captured and saved. In the moment of photographing time is suspended,

frozen, stilled, embalmed39. The Weltman family photograph in which Jacqueline admits “we

all look sad” is, in Bazin’s terms, shadowy, “phantomlike and almost indecipherable … the

disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their

destiny”40. Photography for Bazin “embalms” time and this is what allows time to persist,

carrying the past across the “caesura” or “rupture” to innumerable futures. The photographs

in the film frame what Lacoue-Labarthe calls “hyperbological loss”. “We write” he says, “we

37 Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). In terms of prosthetics we might also think about cycling and re-cycling in the film.

38 Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), n.p. On the apparition and the photographic apparatus see Dragan Kujundžić, “Passing the Image: Jacques Derrida Ten Years After”, Oxford Literary Review 36.2 (2014): 230-233.

39 André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” in What is Cinema? (ed and trans) Hugh Gray (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1967) 15. See also Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).

40 Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”, 14. In “Whowhat Gives?!” Dragan writes that “this relation to the other, to a who or what that waits for me or for whom I am waiting at the threshold of death, introduces a ‘bereaved apprehension’ that, as Brigitte Weltman-Aron’s [the daughter of Marcel in the film] essay alerts, limits the ‘relevance of the question of knowing whether it is from one’s own proper death or from the other’s death that the relation to death or the certitude of death is instituted” (15). See Brigitte Weltman-Aron, “Derrida’s Biography (Derrida, Who?)”, Discourse 30.1.2 (2008): 255-272.

are disposessed, something is ceaselessly fleeing, outside of us, slowly deteriorating”41. The

Lacoue-Labarthian hyperbological subject-in-deconstitution is always in movement, a

transhumant désistant subject: “the placing of parentheses of the ‘de’ in ‘(de)constitution’

signifies that one must not hear it (any more than in the case of desistance) as a negativity

affecting an originary and positive constitution”42.

For Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida the presence of (or being-toward) death in the

photograph is a lingering, phantomal recurrence43. His engagement with photography,

presence and absence, with the time and tense of the photograph, is a response to his mother’s

recent death but also his own future death44. What Dragan’s own very personal film—his

auto-bio-thanatography—highlights is the uncanny and the return of the dead, the link

between trauma, the work of mourning and the photograph. In his book of essays mourning

his friend de Man Derrida speaks of mourning the other as an interiorization of their image,

an interiorization which would be a désistance insofar as the interiorization of the other can

never be fully complete if the irreducible alterity of the one being mourned is to be respected.

We keep “within us in the form of images” the “life, thought, body, voice, look or soul of the

other”45. What we within us is the spectre, ghost, phantom, living-dead other and each

photographic image makes the other reappear, return as revenant. As Kas Saghafi explains

this trace or image of the other in us marks

41 John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). Martis is quoting from Lacoue-Labarthe’s “The Fable” (12), 127.

42 Jacques Derrida, “Introduction: Desistance”, trans. Christopher Fynsk in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (ed) Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 17. Transhumance, désisistance, différance and khora are all substitutable for each other here.

43 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, trans. Richard Howard (London: Vintage Books, 2000).

44 See also Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary, trans. Richard Howard (London: Notting Hill Editions, 2011).

45 Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)

the intertwining of the nonliving, absence, and reference to the other, the image, the

specter of the nonpresent, living-dead other, has the tangible intangibility of a body

without flesh. Its mode of appearance is that of appearing in disappearing,

disappearing in appearance. Making the disappeared appear or ‘making reappear’, all

images partake of a spectral structure. This spectrality, no stranger to technics and

technology, allows for the revenant or image of the disappeared to be interiorized, to

remain in me, as other, living-dead, inside, yet outside, while at the same time making

possible the appearance of ‘visual’ images outside, in us46.

Saghafi calls this ghostly effect of the other looking “in us” phantasmaphotography47. In all

images “there is revenance and survivance, ghostly return and spectral sur-vival in life, even

before death: an absolute affirmation of life, life beyond life, therefore a certain thought of

death, a life that does not go without death”48. Khora is photographic too in that it can appear

and re-appear phantomatically in our time. It is formless, fantomatic and phantasmatic:

Khora receives, so as to give place to them, all the determinations, but she/it does not

possess any of them as her/its own. She possesses them, she has them, since she

receives them, but she does not possess them as properties, she does not possess

anything as her own. She ‘is’ nothing other than the sum or process of what has just

been inscribed ‘on’ her, on the subject of her, on the subject, right up against her

subject, but she is not the subject or the present support of all these interpretations,

even though, nevertheless, she is not reducible to them”49.

46 Kas Saghafi, Apparitions—of Derrida’s Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 76.

47 See also my “Ghost Card”, A Pixel or Digit? (London: Croydon School of Art, 2015) and Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002) especially “Spectrographies” (113-134).

48 Saghafi, Apparitions, 82.

49 Derrida, “Khora”, 239.

Khora disturbs and dislodges all polarities: self/other, living/dead, inside/outside: it is

“nothing (no being, no present)50. This, again, is not a catastrophism. On the contrary, it

always remains what it is, unanticipatable and “what never fails to happen … happens only in

the trace of what would happen otherwise and thus also happens, like a specter, in that which

does not happen”51. In anachronizing being and disjoining time khora opens the future:

It is there that différance, if it remains irreducible, irreducibly required by the spacing

of any promise and by the future to-come that comes to open it, does not mean only

(as some people have too often believed and so naively) deferral, lateness, delay,

postponement. In the incoercible difference the here-now unfurls. Without lateness,

without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity,

singular because differing, precisely [justement], and always other, binding itself

necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency: even if it moves

toward what remains to come, there is the pledge [gage] (promise, engagement,

injunction and response to the injunction and so forth). The pledge is given here and

now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to

the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising and

unconditional52

Breathreturn

In the instant of the photograph or the film still we have the suspension of time and

the conflation of life and death, living and dead, Barthes’s punctum:

50 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone”. Trans. Samuel Weber in Religion (eds) Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998), 21. See also Peggy Kamuf on the ear and khora in “The Ear, Who?” Discourse 30.1/2 (2008): 177-190.

51 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge: 1994), 28-29.

52 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 31.

In 1865, young Lewis Payne attempted to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward.

Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell where he was waiting to be hanged.

The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he

is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with

horror an anterior future of which death is the stake…In front of the photograph of my

mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s

psychotic patient, over a catastrophe that has already occurred. Whether or not the

subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe”53.

The still photographs in the film are, in one sense, puncta. They do index death,

mortality and traumatic experience. Yet, Marcel and Jacqueline sur-vive and in the film they

move, smiling, as they were unable to in the family portrait, across the final frame like

running water, an immemorial current, our irreversible witnesses. To paraphrase Dragan: they

are arrivants, both sur-vivants and revenants, spectres or ghosts of a shared but non-

synchronous, counter-temporal mortality surviving in the very heart of the living, irradiating

in the alveolar “suspension of a breath”54.

53 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

54 Jacques Derrida, “Aletheia”, trans. Pleshette de Armitt and Kas Saghafi, Oxford Literary Review 32.2 (2010): 169-188, at 176. In “The Deaths of Roland Barthes” Derrida writes, “The Winter Garden Photograph, which he neither shows nor hides, which he speaks, is the punctum of the entire book. The mark of this unique wound is nowhere visible as such, but its unlocatable brightness or clarity (that of his mother’s eyes) irradiates [my emphasis] the entire study”, The Work of Mourning, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 58.