Infrachapter

Deader than Dead: The Camp as Storage Archive

We must continually remind ourselves that

some part of responsibility insinuates itself

wherever one demands responsibility

without sufficiently conceptualizing and

thematizing what “responsibility” means.

--Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death 25-26.

In framing the concept of bare life through a cultural graphology of the storage unit

and archive, the case of the briefcase, we have indirectly called into question Agamben’s

claim that the concentration camp is the figure for the universalization of a sovereignty of

biopolitics and homo sacralization—“we are all homo sacrii”-- in modernity. What is

stake in our shift from camp to storage unit and archivalization? Why turn to films about

World II that engage the holocaust indirectly through the work of art, counterfeiting,

misdirection, and transportation? Why not turn directly to documentary films about the

holocaust such as Night and Fog (Alain Renais, 1951), Marcel Ophul’s The Sorrow and

the Pity (197), and Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (198), or to Jean-Luc Godard’s use of

archival footage in Histoire(s) du cinema as do, for example, Jacques Ranciere and

Georges Didi-Huberman, among others? How does the medium of film relate to the

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briefcase as box? And what would it mean to figure the camp to be figured as a box and

making sense of it in terms of reading reshelving (as resistance) rather than refiling?

To address these questions, we need first to take a detour, step back and reframe

Agamben’s universalization of the camp (which leads him to make a controversial

equation between the victims of the holocaust and people killed in car accidents) as a

question of its unread -ability. Agamben divides the victims of the camp into

increasingly fine distinctions until he reaches the limit case, the Musselman or the

witness who cannot witness, being the weakest of the weak, hence representing the

central paradox of homo sacer. According to Agamben, “the empty space at the center of

the camp that, in separating all life from itself, marks the point at which the citizen passes

into the Staatsangegehoringe of non-Aryan descent, the on-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew

into the deportee and, finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into the Musselman, that

is, into a “bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life” (156-57), the barest of bare life, as

it were. The remnants of Auschwitz are a matter of testimonials, which Agamben locates,

in structuralist fashion, outside a Foucauldian conception of the archive drawn from The

Archaeology of Knowledge. The authority of the witness consists in his capacity to speak

solely in the name of an incapacity to speak—that is, in her or her being a subject.

Testimony thus guarantees not the factual truth of the statement safeguarded in the

archive, but rather it s unarchivability, its exteriority with respect to the archive” (158).

Agamben misses, then, the way in which the camp is also a future archive / museum but

how the musealization and archivalization of the camp also invovles an arche-

archivology.

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In this infrachapter, we reconceputalize the camp as an arche-archive, as that which is

written to be found archived later, by attending to the concrete storage boxes and notes

left by victims buried in the camps themselves, some of which have been recovered and

now known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz. Our reconceptualization of the camp as an

archive containing an arche-archive of writings in boxes will mean extending the concept

of bare life into a concept bare life, something we began to do in our discussion of Walter

Benjamin’s briefcase and the epilogue of Derrida’s Archive Fever. In theorize the camp

as an arche-archive within the archive, we will also elaborate our concept of unread –

ability in relation (un)repeatability and (ir)replaceabilty by turning Derrida’s readings in

Demeure: Fiction and Testimony of two lost manuscripts in Maurice Blanchot’s The

Instant of My Death, in which he writes the endnote on Walter Benjamin’s briefcase we

discussed in the earlier chapter, and Derrida’s reliance on the metaphor of cinema. In

our account of the Scrolls, the camp arche-archivalization literally has no center, as an

reconstruction a necessarily uncanny temporality of reassemblage, an after word not only

of records produced and destroyed as much as was possible by the Nazis, but more

crucially, by the victims themselves. We juxtapose the Scrolls and Demeures in order

explore the mediation of the archive, to understand better what the unread –ability of the

arche-archiving of the camps has to do with the importance scholars universally grant to

film and filmmaking, the frequent use of film and photography as metaphors, as film and

filmmaking have become the central media in debates of archival reconstruction and

reuse.

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The Camp within the Camp: An Arch-anarchivology

Before we turn to the Scrolls, we need to first explain further what we mean by

calling them an arche-archive. Critical attention to concrete specific fragments of the

Scrolls, notes written by victims with instructions regarding the contents of these

containers, will throw into relief the extent to which reading the camp as an archive

means that what is read has been posted in a relay system, deferred. Immediately

conflating these documents with documents of political resistance by the victims, as

when was the case of the uprising that destroyed crematorium IV, offers for us an intense

moment of reading as the resistance to reading, an evasion of problems posed by the

archaeology and archiving of a past that is arche-archival. The camp is defined for us by

the unread –ability of documents stored and written as yet to be read, not, as it is for

Agamben, by the witness who speaks paradoxically only of not being able to speak. Our

conception of the “arche-archive” is indebted to Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A

Freudian Impression. Whereas Agamben defines the archive in Remnants of Auschwitz as

a secured place that opposes memory to forgetting, Derrida ends Archive Fever by

redividing the archive without spatializing it as a safeguarded inside and an unsafe

outside: what he calls the “ash of the archive” is a remainder within the archive that is

not archivable, but what has been burned. What Derrida calls “anarchivology” of archive

fever is driven in part by the necessity of burning and containing the unarchivable ash.

We maintain that archive fever is generated by this constitutive split that enables and

disables the archive, adding that the remaining ash remains always waiting to be stored in

an urn already under construction. The arche-archive sheds light on the sacrificial

economy required for the camp’s archivalization to work: what is destroyed has to be

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boxed and locked in the box of the archive. Reconstructing the camp as a storage archive

in general necessarily means that a camp will have to be created within the camp in order

to establish a serviceable library and set of research and exhibition practices

differentiated as normal and pathological.

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.”1 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’s eruption.2

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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.3 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, for example, 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

6

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

1 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.

2 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.

3 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

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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

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 a more serious danger, in our view in going straight to what would

characterize as the responsibility patch to cover up a panic attack that prematurely and

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)

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unethically closes down thought in the name of the ethical. Let us be clear about our

purposes, then.4 A certain allegorical 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

4 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.

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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.5 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.

5 (not limited to Foucault’s account, that Agamben relies on in Remnants of Auschwitz)

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Writing Near Death: The Camp in the Camp as Notes Surfaced from Underground

of the Yet to Be Exhumed

In the films we will examine in the following two chapters, issues of fakery,

counterfeiting, misdirection, the work of art, and Judaism get relayed through transport in

cinema, differently, all interested in an epistemic reversibility that links the work of art to

the body of the victim, that poses a problem of salvaging and arching, of what goes

missing, and of ending itself figured as a posting to the future to come. Before turning to

the films, we want to make clearer the issue of reversibility, distraction, and ending by

staying a bit longer with Didi-Hubermann. The ethical focus on four photos and the

broader focus on the visual distract Didi-Huberman and his many antagonists from

reading supplementary notes that have been written by victims “near” death to a future

reader and left for that reader near the remains of the recently dead and the full written

records recorded by the victims. Here four notes, all cited by Didi-Hubermann:

I have buried, in the terrain of the Birkenau camp near the crematoria, a

camera, the remains of the gas in a metal box, and notes in Yiddish on the

number of people who had arrived in convoys and were sent to be gassed.

I remember the exact location of these objects and I can them at any

moment. (110)

A message to the world must be addressed to the world from here.

Whether it be found soon or in several years, it will always be a terrible

accusation. His message will be signed by two hundred men of the

Sonderkommando of Crematorium I, fully conscious of their imminent

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death [ . . ] The message has been carefully prepared. It describes in great

detail the horror that have been committed here these last two years. The

names of the executioners of the camps appear. We publish the

approximate number of people exterminated, describing the manner

methods, and the instruments used in their extermination. The message

has been written on three large parchment pages. The writer-editor of the

Sonderkomommnado—a former artist form Paris—has copied it in a

beautiful calligraphy according to the style of the old parchments, in India

ink so that the writing does not fade. The fourth page contains the

signatures of the two hundred men of the Sonderkomnado. The parchment

pages have been attached with a silk thread, rolled, enclosed in a

cylindrical zinc box, specially made by one of our smiths, and finally

sealed and welded to be protected from the air and humidity. This box has

been left by the carpenters between the springs if the ottoman in the

padding. 6

The notebook and other texts remained in the pits soaked with blood as

well as the bones and flesh often not fully burned. These we could

recognize from the smell. Dear finder, look everywhere in every parcel of

earth. Underneath are buried dozens of documents, mine and those of

other people, which cast light on what happened here. Numerous teeth

have been buried, it was we, the workers of the Kommando, who

6 “(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.

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deliberately dispersed them around the terrain as much as we could so that

the world might find tangible evidence of the millions of murdered human

beings. As for us, we have lost all hope of surviving until the Liberation.

(D-H, 108)

We must, as we have until to know . . . make all known to the world by

means of a historical chronicle. From now on, we will hide everything in

the ground. I ask that all these various description and notes, buried and in

their time signed Y.A.R.A., be collected. They are found in different

containers and boxes, in the yard of the crematorium I: one, entitled

Deportation, is founding the bone pits of crematorium I; the other entitled

Aushchwitz, is found under a pile of bones, southwest of the same yard.

After that, I rewrote it completed it, and reinterred it separately among the

ashes of the crematorium II. I wish them to be put in order and printed

together under the title In the Horror of the Atrocities. We, the 170 men

remaining, are about to leave for the sauna. We are sure that we are being

brought to our deaths. They have chosen thirty men to remain at

crematorium IV. (DH, 109)

Reading these notes backwards as an arrhe-archive that has gone unread because

prematurely unified and even sanctified as a set of single documents, means attending to

a strange supplementary logic in the recording of the deaths of the victims that uncannily

unsettles a distinction between the living and the dead: writing themselves into death (by

murder, not suicide), the authors substitute the note for themselves and the records the

notes identify stand in the for lives of the victims, but their relative importance gets

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entangled rather than neatly boxed up: unlike Walter Benjamin’s distinction between his

manuscript and his life, the records are deliberately scattered, left to be exhumed later,

collected, reordered, titled and published. Some records are sealed to be preserved,

others are soaked in blood. Some are rewritten and reinterred. The records, one might

say are to be resurrected but the body parts are presumed to be unidentifiable and not in

need of care (paper becomes a contact sheet for human remains). Like Freud’s account

of the uncanny as the mixing of the organic and inorganic, the living and the dead,

“sowing” the body parts and boxes in the mass graves is connected to the sewing of the

parchment. Mixed signals mean missed signals, the repetition compulsion uncannily

existing on a continuum with witnessing.

What happens in the camp, then, is not only that people are made to survive beyond

death which is not death, as do the Musselmanner in Agamben’s account in Remnants of

Auschwitz, but that those neither people who survive nor those who die are not able to

determine when the dead are dead, or distinguish less the dead from the living (about to

be) dead but singling the dead from the deader than dead. The death of the victim is not

reducible to time noted on a coroner’s report. As the Scrolls of Auschwitz already make

apparent as a testimony of testimony, as a record of witnessing a record located

elsewhere.

In elucidating the aporias what he calls the “testimonial condition” (Demeures, 41),

Derrida notes that testimony in a legal sense has to be live: “For to testify . . . the witness

must be present at the stand himself, without technical interposition. In the law, the

testimonial tends, without being able to succeed in this altogether, to exclude all technical

agency. One cannot send a cassette to testify in one’s place. One must be present, raise

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one’s hand, speak in the first person and in the present, and one must do this to testify to

a present, to an indivisible moment, that is at a certain point to moment assembled at the

tip of an instanteousness which must resist division.” (32-33). Testimony excludes

technical agency in order to testify to a temporality of the present to a indivisible instant.

Derrida goes on to explain why this legal view of testimonial is unable able “to succeed

in this altogether.” Testimony requires the possibility of repetition and “quasi-technical

reproducibility” (33) hence of grammatology: even if an illiterate witness must

nevertheless be “capable of inscribing, tracing, repeating, remembering, performing the

acts of synthesis that writing is. Thus he needs some writing power, at the very least,

some possibility of tracing or imprinting in a given element . . . What I say for the first

time, if it is a testimony, is already a repetition, at least a repeatability; it is already an

iterability, more than once at once, more than an instant in one instant; and that being the

case the instant is always divide at this very point, at the point of its writing. (40;41).

Consequently, testimony admits techne even before the invention of particular recording

media:

The root of the testimonial problem of techne is to be found here. The

technical reproducibility is excluded form testimony, which always calls

for a presence of the live voice in the first person. But from the moment

that testimony must be able to be repeated, techne is admitted; it is

introduced where it is excluded. For this, one not need wait for cameras,

videos, typewriters, and computers. As soon as the sentence is repeatable,

that is, from its origin, the instant it is pronounceable and intelligible, thus

15

idealizable, it is already instrumentalizable and affected by technology.

And virtuality. (42)

The temporality of testimony is thus similar to what Derrida calls, in Archive Fever, “the

moment of archivization strictly speaking” this moment “is not . . . [a] so-called live or

spontaneous memory but rather a certain hypomnesic and prosthetic experience of the

technical substrate” (25). Yet Derrida’s critique of archeological hallucination of he

7 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

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moment of contact provides with another kind of temporality, that which cannot be

repeated. The “matter” of the substrate’s techne is a surface, a contact sheet, like

Gradiva’s footprint in the ash of Vesuvius, the moment of its impression never capable of

being retraced, only hallucinated by the archivist turned archeologist.7

Before turning back to the Scrolls, we may grasp more clearly the way the

temporalities of testimony and archivalization, of the impression, link up media to an

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

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uncanny and contradictory temporality and placelessness (Unheimlichkeit). Derrida

introduces a cinematic metaphor—the screenplay—when commenting on a passage in

Maurice Blanchot's The Instant of My Death in which a young French man is “prevented

from dying by death itself”: as the Nazi officer in charge organizes a firing squad, the

man’s family silently and slowly goes back inside the chateau, “as if everything had

already been done.” This last phrase leads Derrida to comment:

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

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He is the only man and thus the last man, this man already less young.

The Last Man is not only the title of another of Blanchot's books. The

eschatology of the last man is marked in the phrase that states in the mode

of fiction ("as if") that the end has already taken place before the end: "as

if everything had already been done." Death has already taken place,

however unexperienced [sic] its experience may remain in the absolute

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 ,

19

acceleration of a time infinitely contracted into the point of an instant.

The screenplay is so clear, and it describes the action so explicitly in two

lines, that the program is exhausted in advance. We know everything with

an absolute knowledge. Everything, all of it, has already happened

because we know what is going to happen. We know the screenplay; we

know what is going to happen. It is over; it is already over from instant of

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)

20

the credits. It begins with the end: as in The Madness of the Day, it begins

with the end. We know it happened. "As if everything were already done,"

it already happened. The end of time. What will happen now will sink

into what was done, as it were backward, into what has already arrived,

that is to day, death. (Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony,

62)

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)

21

The temporality of the narrative is uncanny not because the repressed returns but because

it places testimony and the archive backward in a non-place where death precedes death,

becoming metaphorical visible as a movie screenplay, specifically, a last man scenario.

We are now in a position to turn to the Scrolls left by members of Sonderkommando

to be exhumed later. We find yet again in these Scrolls a black box trope left in the

exhumed notes themselves, the fantasy that the accusations will always stand, will always

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.

In a certain sense, one can see how this section could have been set apart as an appendix,

a superadded supplement. And despite all that calls for it in the preceding steps, it is true

that Plato offers it somewhat as am amusement a superadded supplement. (73)

22

be transparent, will be found by the right reader (any reader who finds them is presumed

to be right). The Scrolls stand as testimony beyond a legal sense. They are not offered

as legal evidence. Indeed, the notes titled collectively as Scrolls become operative as a

theological model of reading as re-cognition, in other words, a total recall and retrieval

guidance system that transmits the recording of the present to the future intact. Yet

listening at the receiving end of the transmitted notes becomes a problem of reading

because taking it necessarily involves, long after evidence has to used in trials, a

The entire hearing of the trial of writing should some day cease to appear as an

extraneous mythological fantasy, an appendix the organism could easily, with no loss

have done without. In truth, it is rigorously called for from one end of the Phaedrus to

the other. (67)

Spectral analysis

Overture as over-ture and overt-ure.

Hors-d’ourvre—Derida’s movement istypically one of exteriorization—separation,

framing, goinginbut coming backform what unseen outside? Like the lace in van Goh’s

shoes—back of the shoes or back of the painitng. The utside is what is

hidden.Interiroirzation is like minturization and magnification aat the same time—a zoom

effect.

Hover ture

Neither quite overt nor over.

23

philological and archaeological reconstruction of records of an event that are not

reducible to an absolute moment or single place: they retrace an impression of what

cannot be retraced.

For this reason, gas chambers (when in operation) have become a hot black box,

regarded both as the epicenter of the catastrophe, the heart of darkness, the dark room, the

“eye of the cyclone, the eye of history,” (106) but also the most inaccessible space, the

Temporality, temporaization gets subordinated, erased by spatial metaphors. No first or

before, except under erasure.

Sous—rature.

But there is a fix here, a hit of deconstructive delivery that involves a reattachment

disorder, a skipping over repair, re-storation as re-storing—in the archive.

.

Quand il ecrit: “A Guest + a host + a Ghost”, il nous parle strictement—et

dialectiquement—d’une operation visuelle, pusique recevoir plus etre recu donnet en

cette logigue apparaitre (tel un fantome). Cela pourrait etre une defintion de l’aura.

Mais Duchamp, comme on le sait, nommait l’apparaition un moule, “natif,” et “negatif”:

l’aphorisme nous parliat donc de la reversibilite et de l’empreiente.

Les deux duchampiens sure le langage possodent une incontestable valeur heuristique:

ilsont le plus souvent des hypotheses topiques lancees en vue d’une transformation

perceptuelle du lieu and et du corps. Come si juer a “retourner” les mots permettait de

saisir quelque chose de la reversibiltie du lieu. Et, lorsque Duchamp aborde cette

reversibilite, c’est le motif du contact qui, immanquablement, apparait: par exemple dans

l’expression “haut-relief et bas-fonds, Inc” or semble posee la question de ‘l’entreprise

24

reader / viewer locked out by self-appointed guardians of the archives. Imagining the

place and time of the gas chambers in operation is paradoxically viewed as pornographic

(not evidence but the source of sadistic, perverse pleasure, so that Spielberg’s averted gas

chamber turned shower scene in Schindler’s List is regarded by all parties to the debate as

porn) yet also the most authentic, the best evidence and refutation of revisionists. In the

1980s, filmmakers have split over the question of the use value of the archive. Whereas

Alain Renais’s Night and Fog (1955) alternates between color photography of Auschwitz

d’incoporation” par quoi l’artiste prend en charge la mise en reversibilite du haut et du

bas, du relief et du fond, come on le bot dans tant de ses propres ouevres.

Didi-Herman, La resemblance par contact, 255

Impressions of auras and of death masks.

Carlo Ginzburg ignores the singularity of impressions(318) see dicsusion of Anemci

Cinema, pp. 317

She never considers book as spirits in her model of power, which is just the same old,

Greenblattian colonialism—mastery—without even the writing lesson—just the burning

of the manuscript. Power is instrumental, the book is instrumental (theatrical

illusionism), and spirits are unrelated to texts. Vanished into air thin air

Spirits as actors, but actors unrelated to texts

L’empreinte redouble.(239)

25

in the present and black and white archival footage of the camps and Marcel Ophüls’

The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) confronted interviewees with documents from the

archive about their collaboration with the Nazis and inserting archival footage, Claude

Lanzman decided to film Shoah ( 198) without using any archival footage, just filming in

color interviews with survivors. By contrast, Jean-Luc Godard included archival footage

in his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988), though the film is not a documentary about the

Mais on peut teneter un cheminement a travers quelques exexmples, qui nous feront tres

vite osciller entre diverses manieres, pour ’empreinte, de reproduire, mais aussie d’alterer

et de deconstuire tout ce qu’elle touché: par dedoublement, pare redoublement, par

renversementL’empreinte dedouble. D’une part, elle cree un double, un semblable;

d’autre part, elle cree un dedoublement, un duplicity, un symmetrie dans la representation

(pensons seulement aux planches du test de Roschach, definies comme “formes

fortuites,”maid done le processus deformation, ces taches dupliquees par pliage et part

contact, cree la souveraine pregnance d’une symmetrie (230)

Derrida’s almost self-reference to The Factor of truth in restitutions (264) linking

divisibility of the letter to the pair of shoes, but he doesn’t explicitly give the reference.

His inconsistent practice of self-citation, of not giving references in his lectures to

other texts, is a way of dealing with detachment, attachment in his own oeuvre.

His tropological substitution of a term like arche-writing fails to cognize or recognize the

death of metaphor through which he arrives at a meta-phor-writing exteriority as

deconstructive deconstructor.

26

holocaust as is Shoah. Despite this split, the anti-archivist Claude Lanzmann and

archivist Jean-Luc Godard share a similarly phantasmatic view of the archive, both

imagining the existence of film footage of the camp in operation. Lanzmann says that if

he had found a Nazi snuff film of gas chambers in operation, he would have destroyed it:

Spielberg chose to reconstruct. To reconstruct, in a sense, means to

manufacture archives. And if I had found an existing film—a secret film

Derrida does not quite thematize this process whereby division and detachment crate

layers that connect, dropping of top of each other (not necessarily in an ordered manner,

as if in a specular doubling or mirror stage but in a manner like the bar of cinema which

must exist between frames for the projected image to be viewed). But Did-Humeberan

hasa very Catholic notion of the symmetrical, the pregnancy, the aura, the scared, the

tactile—the impression yokes the work of art ot he sacred, even if htat work is modernist.

Hence he frames Duchamp with prehistoric cave paintings, hten Catholic Renaissance

(Otalian) castings auras, death masks, and so on.

He leaves out Batailles base materialism, anyreistance to form in formlessness.

Attachment becomes tactility of the unseen image—like having a missing limb you still

feel.

Note for Anemci Cinema shows the title written backwards.

27

that showed how three thousand Jews, men, women, children, died

together in a gas chamber at a crematorium II at Auschwitz, if I had found

that, not would I have shown it, I would have destroyed it. I am unable to

say why. It is obvious. (95)

Godard says something similar about the actual existence of Nazi film footage of the

camp, arriving, however, the inverse conclusion that the footage should be shown

Dominic reading is just like the Bibliomaniac. What does using mean? Spitzer uses the

word “user” in Linguistics and Literary History: drug use and utillatarian—doesn’t

undersand its own addiction ot the hit.

Follow out Derrida’s call for a spectral analysis in Restitutions.”? The restoration of

internal purity must thus reconstitute, recite . . . that to which which the pharmakon

should not have had to be [added and attached] like a literal parasite: a letter installing

itself inside a living organism to rob it of its nourishment and to distort [like static, =

bruit paratiste] the pure audibility of a voice. Such are the relations between the writing

supplement and the logos-zoon. In order to cure the latter of the pharmakon and get rid of

the parasite, it is thus necessary to put the outside back in its place. To keep the outside

out. This is the inaugural gesture of logic itself, of ‘good sense’ insofar as it accords with

the self-identity of that which is: being what it its, the outside is outside and the inside.

Writing must thus returns being what should have ceased to be: an accessory, an

accident, an excess. (128)

And we might put related pressure on Derrida’s real and virtual (in Demeures) as well as

on subjectile as virtual in Paper Machine. He leaves the real too quickly. A variety of

attachment disorders that haunt the book’s physical materiality as well as sits

28

(destroying it does not occur to him): “We always discover archives a long time

afterward. [. . .] I have no proof whatsoever of what I am claiming, but I think that if I

worked with an investigative journalist on this, I would find the images of the gas

chambers after about twenty years. We would see the prisoners entering, and we would

see in what state they come out” (cited byDidi-Huberman, p. 216, n. 73). We perhaps

somewhat precipitously hazard from these two quotations the following generalization:

immateriality. So hauntology gets one into a bidding war with Derrida and historians of

the book—who can be more material and at the same most able to theorize consequent

issues of unread -ability.

What holds for the vanishing of the book holds as well for painting. Latour essay on

digital image—where is the painting? But that was already a question about the real

painting for Richard Wollheim.

Where is the book?

Discourse of discursive enclosure, subjectivity, intellectual property, copyright and so on

that emerges in the 18th century is accompanied by recoil effects—forgery, new

Shakespeares (Bacon), new family romances). Include Shakespeare’s deaths as well as

his lives.

The frame, ales a world of supplementary desoeurverement. It cuts out but also sews back

together. By an invisible lace which passes thorugh the canvass, passes ouinto it and hten

out of it. Hors-doeuvre in the oueuvre, as oeuvre (here the deadmetpahor allows for the

equation “as” and placement within—a mise-en-abyme or Chinese boxes structure). The

laces go through the eyelets [which also go in pairs] and pass on to the insviisble side.

And when they come back form it, do they emerge from the other side of the leather or

the other side of the canvass? (304) Truth in Painting

29

both the archivist and anti-archivist Lanzman creates a camp with a camp, the two camps

being early mirror opposites: the anti-archivist imagines the archive as the contents of

which are to be burned, a crematorium, as it were; the archivist imagines this

crematorium within the camp (for burning pornographic, “bad” images) while creating

another space, an unmarked urn, for not yet ashed remnants rendered readable. As Didi-

Huberman puts it, “Something—very little, a film—remains of a process of

annihilation . . . it is neither full presence or absolute silence. It is neither resurrection,

“Restitutions”

A similar illogic at work in B Johnson’s addition and typographic miniature of synoyms

for Outwork: prefacing in her translation.

Extends to graphic design, graphic layout

Where shall we stop? What is it to stop?

Restitutions, 132

I should likke to have a spectral analysis made of the pair, and of its always being

detached . . . 360

Commenting on Shapiro’s title “The Still Life as Personal Object,” Derrida writes:

Here it would be visibly detached personal object (having to do with the ear), like a

picture of shoes, in an exhibiton, detached form the body of a dead subject. But coming

back [as a ghost]/ Coming back alive to the dead man, who from then on is living,

himself [a ghost] returning. Causing to come back. Here is this “personal object,”

detachable and coming back t the ghost. 360

But did this spectral analysis concern the real shoes or the shoes in the painting?

376

30

nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains. It is a world

proliferating with lacunae, with singular images which placed together in a montage, will

encourage readability, an effect of knowledge” (167).

We have singled out Didi-Huberman’s Images of Auschwitz and the heated debate it

has provoked for attention because of its indirect impact of the question of the archive

when its use value has to do with the ethics of remembering rather than refuation. Did-

truth as reattachment (279) which takes one underneath, to the other side, reversible side

of the canvass as well as what is on its surface.

The “strange loop . . . of the undone lace. The loop is open, more so still than the united

shoes, but after a sort of sketched out knot—it forma a circle at ts end, an open circle, as

though provisionally, ready to close like pincers or a key ring. A leash. In the bottom

right-hand corner where it faces, symmetrically, the signature “Vincent,” inread and

underlined. It occupies there a place very commonly reserved for the artist’s signature.

As though, on the other side, n the other corner, on the other edge, but symetrically,

(almost) ona level with it, it stood in place of the signature, as it took the (empty, open)

place of it.

(277)

If , as Shapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, in an important nuance, the wearer

of the shoes, shall we say that the half-open circle of the lace calls for a reattachment: of

the painting to the signature .. of the shoes to the owner, or even of Vincent to Van Goh,

in short a complement, a general reattachment as truth in painting (279)

See my essay, Backing Up the Virtual Bayeux Tapestries:

Attachment Disorders, or Turning Over the Other Side of the Underneath

31

Hubermans interest is saving a legitimate use value for visual media sheds helps explain

the paradoxical ways opponents occupy the same ground for the same purpose by

enabling us to the uncanny effect of the mediatization of the holocaust in its arche-

archivalization. Didi-Huberman observes acutely the difficulty of reading images,

including their reverse sides: “All this cries out the need for ‘a genuine archaeology of

photographic documents,’ as Clement Cheroux suggests. It could only be done by

‘examining the conditions of their creation, by studying the documentary content, and by

Detachment is intolerable. 283

If, as Shapiro suggests, the signatory is the owner, or, an important nuance, the wearer of

the shoes, shall we say that the half-open circle of the lace calls for a reattachment: of the

painting to the signature (to the sharpness, the pointure, that the pierces the canvas), of

the shoes to their owner, or even of Vincent to Van Gogh, in short a complement, a

general reattachment as truth in painting? . . . . No more detachment: the shoes are no

longer attached-to-Van-Gogh, they are Vincent himself, who is undetachable from

himself. They do not even figure one of his parts but his whole presence gathered, pulled

tight, contracted into itself, with itself, in proximity with itself: a parousia. --Jacques

Derrida, “Restitutions,” The Truth in Painting, 279; 369

A kind of indivisibility remains in the concept of attachment—he assumes that the lace is

unbroken. But its overuse means that it will break, the knot cannot be tied, the loop

formed, the signature signed. The lace is divisible (potentially) like the letter—but

empirically—it breaks, has to be retied, eventually replaced. Bu the broken lace acan be

fixed—can break even several times before it becomes too short to function. One could

even not use all the eyelets.

32

questioning their use.’ It is a tough program. It would require, for example, access to the

reverse side of images—which recent digitalization projects often forget about—in order

to glean the slightest sign, the slightest inscription that might better situate the image and

identity, as far as possible, of the person who took the photograph: the question of

viewpoint (undoubtedly, Nazi, for the most part) is capital in this domain” (67).

Contrary to our account of Walter Benjamin’s briefcase, Didi-Huberman’s model of the

archive is one of reassembly: We know that in 1940, just before committing suicide,

Walter Benjamin was able to reformulate, to retrace and reassemble all of his sources,

from the Kabala to Kafka, from Karl Marx to Rosenzweig, in a notion of Erlosung

[redemption] understood from the point of view of the catastrophe and in the absence of

any “salvation” either historical (definitive victory over the forces of totalitarianism) or

religious (resurrection, definitive victory over the forces of death)” (169). Didi-

Huberman cites no evidence about Benjamin here, and he has to miss the briefcase in

order to conceptualize Benjamin’s self-archivalization as a total retracing and

So the attachment of the lace could be become, if one were really poor or cheap, more

and more fragile, at risk of breaking again.

We have remained in these uncanny halls, where they we try to transform their profound

emotion into artistic creation; not to find a solution to the puzzle of human essence, but

rather to a new formulation of the eternal question, why the fate of creative men lies in

the region of eternal, everlasting unrest, whether they find their reflected image in Hell,

Purgatory, or Paradise.

O (k)no(w)

33

reassemblage, as a redemption that redeems the dialectic of enlightenment (“’redemption’

is . . . that which enlightens us regarding the dialectical manner in which both of these

states exist on the foundation or possibility of the other” (170).8

Retracing and reassemblage is less a matter of readability, however, as it is a map of

the archive made geographically specific. The central point of the debate over the four

Sonderkommando photographs taken in Auschwitz turns out not to be the veracity of the

photos (everyone agres they are not fakes) but the place from where they were taken.

Didi-Huberman says they were taken from within a gas chamber, looking out from a

door. His critics wonder if that is the case; one critic says the photographer looks through

a window, not a door. This positivist debate is of less interest to us, however, than the

fact that the photos are doubles. Did-Huberman astutely notes that “we are not dealing

with one image. In each case of his locations, the clandestine photographer of Birkenau

pressed the shutter release twice, the minimal condition for his testimony to account,

from two angles at least, for the time that he took to observe. (123).” Rather than

critically examine this uncanny doubling, Didi-Huberman reproduces and manufactures it

in the way it reproduces the four photos on two pages, in opposite and reverse orders:

“To maintain the chronology of the testimony [of David Szmulewski] would suppose the

contact prints from the Auschwitz museum were produced from an inverted negative, a

lack of technical attention all the more banal since the films in this format carry no single

permanent inscription allowing us to distinguish the between the obverse and the inverse

of the negative. If such were the case, it would be necessary—while keeping the

chronology—to reverse the shots that we are shown in the prints conserved at Auschwitz.

The question then remains open” (110). Yet right after acknowledging that we are left

8 Presumably Didi-Huberman has in mind WB’s letter to GS.

34

with an open question, Didi-Huberman labels the four photos as he thinks they were

taken (117), not the ways they may be. The captions the four photos on page

immediately following showing says they are “reversed” (118). Retracing,

reassemblage, rethinking and turn out to be slightly different instances, then, of the sheer

repetition.

One Step Not Beyond . . . the Grave

The problems for both sides of the debate over the four Sonderkommando

photographs may be summarized as follows. Didi-Huberman can use the photographs

effectively against the prohibition on imaging the unimaginable in that its doubleness is,

as it were, more real than a single photo: “the phantasm of one image is supported by a

phantasm of the absolute instant: in the history of photography, which is true for the

very notion of the snapshot; it is even truer in the memory of the Shoah, where a “secret

film”—Claude Lanzmann’s hypothesis—about the “absolute moment,” the death of three

thousand Jews by asphyxiation in a gas chamber—can be dreamed of ().” However, by

clinging to positivism rather than the uncanniness of the photos, defaulting to the photo

as indexical position, Didi-Huberman ends up having to devalue them: “While they are

singular, the images are not unique for all that, and are even less absolute.” He goes

further in conceding that “it is clear that of the exhausting mass of visible things [here

oddly conflated with images of things] that surround us, not all deserve the time that it

would take us to decipher their dynamics.” Didi-Huberman discovers not the sequential

move from monad (photographic still) to montage but the uncanny film loop. Just as the

Nazi snuff film functions, as Didi-Huberman insightfully, as a phantasm for Lanzmann,

35

so the door functions as a phantasm for Didi-Huberman, a means of connecting a series

of double images he then mistakes for a montage. Didi-Huberman thus does not

acknowledge his own role in playing the sovereign, he who decides the exception.

Having said that there most images (in general) do not deserve the time it would take to

decipher them, he is unable to establish any criteria for deciding which images (of the

Holocaust in particular) are deserving of our time. Moreover, Didi-Huberman

substitutes choice for decision, describing a “formal mechanism” for viewing that

guarantees the "opening sight itself to a start up of knowledge and to an orientation of

ethical choice" (`(179).9   Decision in the visual archive is arguably ethical, however, only

because cannot know in advance or provide a proper distance and orientation.

The intellectual differences between Didi-Huberman and his antagonists turns out to

be surprisingly slight: both sides agree that “it is impossible, indeed, to bear witness from

the inside of death” (105); while his critics want to put an end to all images, Didi-

Huberman merely wants to preserve—that is, read-- a select few, and these few,

moreover, do not require any rethinking of what he calls the dual system of reading

images as veils that cover and torn veils that reveal Didi-Huberman uses to read all

images deserving of our attention. In place of optical unconscious, we get a “torn

9 He avoids the moment of decision, of taking

responsibility for the decision (which is not a more choice

ceaseless struggle ethos against the powers [of] monstra, the monster

of savagery.

Didi-Huberman wants an operable machine that guarantees its ethics

from the start but ends up bankrupting the archive, melting down, if

not burning up, the images that remain.

36

consciousness; in place of the four photographs, we get a generalized account of the way

images appeal to “the incessant desire to show what cannot be seen” (133).

Didi-Huberman’s category of the legitimate because inadequate “in spite of all”

image / testimony has as much conceptual integrity in his eyes as the exaggerated and

distorting “all” image have for his critics. The category enables to Didi-Huberman to

form a new way of classifying the dead: “Between the healthy victims who did not want

to speak and the victims to weak to speak if they wanted, Didi-Huberman says there is “a

third position. It is no less extreme, such is its incomparable force. It is the testimony

formulated and transmitted in spite of all by the members of the Sonderkommando”

(105). He assigns a different kind of box to testimonies, imagining that the sending,

transmission, and reception of these notes and photos is a closed matter, the last word.

Didi-Huberman even acceding to their theological title for the notes:

They form what is called—with reference to the megliot of the Hebrew

Bible, the scrolls of the “Lamentations of Jeremiah” in particular—the

Scrolls of Auschwitz. Writing of the disaster, writing of the epicenter, the

Scrolls of Aushwitz constitutes the testimonies of the drowned who were

not yet reduced to silence, who were still capable of observing and

describing. Their authors ‘lived closer to the epicenter of the catastrophe

than any other prisoner. They were present, day after day, at the

destruction of their own people, and were aware, in the global scale, of the

process to which the victims were doomed.’ Their whole effort was to

transmit the knowledge of such a process as far as they possibly could. A

knowledge that would have to be searched for in the blood soaked earth, in

37

the ashes, and in the heaps of bones in which the members of the

Sonderkommando disseminated their testimonies in order to give them

some chance of surviving” (108).

The closure of the category of testimony, enfolded into the concept of the archive as a

box, is all that matters to Didi-Huberman, apparently, since it allows for a narrative

sequencing of death and life, a topography of transmission of, even if that means that

testimony becomes a homogenous category, regardless of the medium specificity of its

contents and their fragmentary nature. Didi-Huberman’s “third position” amounts to a

stabilizer, a tranquilizer, and stands as the non-paradoxical inversion of Agamben’s no

man’s border land paradoxes of homo sacer.

The singularity of what Didi-Huberman singles out as a “not all” image (and the

endlessly revisable narrative it generates) is really not singular at all, just a repetition, like

his many insistent repetitions of the phrase “in spite of all,” like his repetitive

characterization of the not image as a rethinking of history. Like his critics, Didi-

Huberman does not interrogate want it means to construct the camp within the camp, to

represent death from the “outside” of death, and so remain stuck in a stop and go loop—a

live wire with a dead end, so to speak.

Beginning, Ending, Over Again.

Blanchot, or. . . the narrator is complaining

about, bringing an accusation . . against his

having been saved . . for an impure,

unavowable, socially suspect reason that

38

calls all the more for an urgent

confession. . . But through the . . .

confession another accusation , , , can be

heard . . . : that everything was saved except

the manuscript.

Demeure, 85

Before we can address the relation between un(repeatability) and (un)readability in

order to return once again to the Scrolls of Auschwitz, we first address a question

demanded by Derrida’s own text: how readable or unreadable is it? By addressing this

question through a close reading of the macro-structure of Demeure, we will link

(un)readability in relatin to (un)repeatability) and to (ir)replacebability. We begin by

consider Derrida’s an implicit demand to read the text as a remainder outside a remainder

generated by parallels between the ending of the text and the beginning of the postscript.

A problem of knowing when and how to end arises in the last pages of Derrida’s text and,

conversely, a dictum to read beyond the beginning emerges in Derrida’s post-script,

specifically, as a citation, entitled “Reading ‘beyond the beginning’; or, On the Venom in

Letters, Postscript and ‘Literary Supplement’” (104). Derrida ends his essay rather self-

consciously by dealing his own ending with series of directions toward the future made in

the present in the form of citations on endings by Corneille, La Fontaine, and Plutrach.

In order to as your pardon for having made things go on so long, in order to end

without ending in great haste . . here are several desmormais’s with which both

the French language and French literature have distinguished themselves. These

desmormais [henceforths] all say--it is certainly not insignificant--something

39

about the compassion and the "complaining" to which, as with remainders, as

with a talk, one must know how to put an end."(102)

Derrida finally ends his overlong text at slow speed with a quotation from a French

translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives: "He knew to write this: henceforth, enough has

been said on this point" (105).

Yet Derrida does not the work end there. He adds a seemingly unrelated and

irrelevant postscript about attacks on him made in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS)

that followed his being awarded a Ph.D. by Cambridge University over a period of years.

And Derrida links them formally by ending both with a citation. By asking what the

relation between the text and post-script is, we may more fully understand its unread –

ability and how it bears on reading the Scrolls as storage units that structure the

reconstruction of the camp. Derrida’s text and postscript may be linked by Derrida

comments on Blanchot’s readability in the text and his comments on reading beyond the

beginning in the post script, his characterization of the last page of The Instant of My

Death as a (sort of) postscript (even though neither the word “post-script” nor “p.s.” on

the last page of Blanchot’s text), and his mention of E. R. Curtius’s European Literature

in the Latin Middle Ages in the text of Demeure (23) and the postscript (105).10 The

postscript begins in its very title with two citations, the first one from a critical TLS

review of Derrida for Beginners, namely “beyond the beginning,” and the second one

from two words of the newspaper weekly’s title, “Literary Supplement.” Derrida’s

postscript is a “sort of” postscript, a specifically “literary supplement” to his text, rather

like those “sort of” postscripts he finds in Blanchot. Derrida paraphrases the quotation

10 Similarly, endnote 16 (113) links Walter Bnejmain’s briefcase manuscript ot the lost manuscripts in The Instant of My Death.

40

from TLS before giving it italicized, in full: “’beginners’ . . . are not be tempted to

venture beyond the beginning of their reading . . . : ‘The worst fate in store for beginners

here be that they might be tempted to venture beyond the beginning’” (105). The phrase

“Venture beyond the beginning” recurs three times in the last two pages of Derrida’s

postscript: "I really think--if they want to understand--that they must "venture beyond the

beginning" (107); "But for this, yes, the reader will indeed have to "venture beyond the

beginning" (107); "In order to escape obscurantism, one must, on the contrary, I repeat

my advice, always, always "venture beyond the beginning" (108). That last sentence with

the citation italicized is the last sentence of the book Derrida is taking his critic’s phrase,

also occurring in the last sentence of the TLS review, to turning it against him, ending by

making the repeated riposte typographically emphatic.11

In the excessive repetition of this citation, in the recourse to a citation, Derrida and by

calling it a “literary supplement,” Derrida opens up a way of reading his text analogous to

the way he describes how Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death is to be read:

This last narrative [The Instant of My Death] also marks the repetition of

what will always already have been said in Blanchot’s earlier texts, giving

them to us to be read again, confirming and thereby relaunching the

singular achrony of time of which we of which we are speaking, and of

which the text speaks in the first place . . . . Every sentence of [The

Instant of My Death] gives us, let us not say a key, but at least a

prescription for reading Blanchot’s entire work” (50; 70)

The divided macrostructure of Derrida’s text redoubles the doubleness he sees in

11 As I said, I think he is creating a link between himself, de Man, and Blanchot even Derrida has stood in the line of fire from very different firing squads. Hence the postscript and division of textual territories.

41

Blanchot (Blanchot doubles himself in The Instant of My Death—he is the narrator and

the young man), in Blanchot’s two lost manuscripts, both of which are misrecognized,

and in Blanchot’s letter to Derrida, both of which Derrida reads together, yoking non-

fictional testimony with fiction in the mode of testimony. In Demeures, Derrida does

similar to what Derrida says Blanchot is doing, yoking a commentary on fiction (and

non-fiction) within which he addresses autobiography with a seemingly conventional

autobiographical post-script that is also literary. The postscript reads as an invitation to

read Derrida’s book that makes us consider whether reading it is not reading it, as if to

say, the end of the book is only a beginning, you not only have read past the beginning

but in doing so will have to read past the end because you will never have really gotten

past the beginning. The divide between the text and postscript of Demeure marks the

death and survival of the text, inscribing / performing / calling on the reader to perform

an uncanny temporality of reading beyond reading and not-reading, beginning and ending

reading. Out this “passion” suffered by the reader of a complaint made by a reader of

philosophical fiction (and vice versa) can there be a compassion for the singular

generality of testifying writers to come.

Later, (de) Man

Another name for this compassion might be mourning.  Derrida pointedly mentions

Paul de Man in the second paragraph of the first page, just after he returns in his talk to

“the context of the relations between fiction and autobiographical truth. Which is also to

say, between literature and death. Speaking, then, shortly after his death, of my friend

Paul de Man, whose memory I salute since we are here in his country” (15). Along

42

similar lines Derrida, describes Blanchot’s letter to Derrida as having been written the

late in life, fore he died.  Moreover, Derrida implicitly links de Man, or calls up his

memory, when defending Blanchot at length against prosecutors wish to indict his

politics (which Derrida does not specify, though he does concede an element of

calculation in the publication of The Instant of My Death.  Derrida refuses a narrowly

autobiographical reading of Blanchot which allegorizes Blanchot’s writing as an evasion

of a more direct testimonial of his past experience in the Resistance. Derrida invites a

similar misreading, a failure to read, the postscript to Demeure in similarly

autobiographical terms since he writes in the first person about actual documents and

experiences. A suspicious reader might then read Derrida as exonerating de Man by

exonerating Blanchot and then by literal ex-onerating himself in post-script; that is,

Derrida would be comparing himself to both other writers as the victim of unjust

persecutions.  The divide of the text into text and paratext might then be taken as

Derrida's irresponsible evasion of distinguishing critics of writers Nazi sympathies during

Wolrd War II with critics of his philosophy in the 1990s. Derrida entitles his postscript a

“literary supplement” to divert such readings, however, to put the thought police on a

false trial. Instead Derrida routes mourning through complaint and compassion in order

to make mourning unrecognizable as such, to operate by being inoperable.   Derrida’s

division of Demeure marks the achronic time it takes (not) to read, so that Derrida ends

his postscript with a goodbye advising the reader to read past the beginning, always.  it's

a reading that cannot stop, The post-script has a specifically literary autobiographical

element, then, by means of which Derrida can address a phrase in the first line of

Blanchot's text: perhaps an error of injustice."  Derrida notes the oddity of the phrase--

43

injustice ordinarily is by definition error.  Errors cannot be corrected by a just mot, or

only by lots “mo” mots, by reading, by reading while knowing that the testament or

testimonial one reads is "haunted" by the phantasm and spectre of fiction.12

We may further elucidate an understanding of (un)readability, (un)repeatability, and

(ir)placeability if we turn back to the references of postscripts and readability in the text

of Demeure. Derrida first mentions postscript to The Instant of My Death in relation to

Blanchot’s work is being both readable and unreadable:

We can only judge [Blanchot’s attestation] to be readable, if it is, insofar

as a reader can understand it. . . . We can speak, we can read this because

this experience . . . remains universal and exemplary. Conversely, this

thing here, this sequence of events—having almost been shot to death,

having escaped it, etc., --it is not enough for this to have happened, to be

able to read this text, and to understand it in the absolute secret of its

singularity. (93)

Derrida proceeds to stress the conjunction of universalization with readability, not

unreadability:

One understands, everyone understands this narrative in his own way,

there are as many readings as there are readers, and yet there remains a

certain manner of being in agreement with the text, if one speaks in its

language, provided certain conditions are met. This is testimonial

exemplarity. Because this singularity is universalizable, it is able to give

rise—for example, in Blanchot—to a work that depends without

depending on this very event, a readable and translatable work a work that

12 "This haunting is the passion itself." (72)

44

is more and more widely translated into all the languages of the world, or

less well, etc., more or less well read in France . . . (94)

The rather muted paradoxical characterization of a work that depends without depending”

does not give rise, however, to an account of Blanchot’s unreadability but a

characterization of a line from Blanchot’s text-- “What there remains there for him of

existence” that is “described,” according to Derrida, “as a sort of tomorrow, a sort of

postscript—fifty years—this remainder that remains, the demourance of this remainder

will have been but a short sequel of sorts a fall out, a consequence. Nothing has truly

begun. . . What remains for him of existence, more than this race to death, is this race of

death in view of death not to see death coming. In order not to see it coming (94; 95).

When Derrida asserts that “There is a post script. A sort of parergonal hors-d’oeuvre”

(97), he has already framed the postscript as “sort of” remainder in a remainder, a

metaphor or supplemented by a metaphor, with different amounts and kinds of time—

fifty years, tomorrow, not yet begun and “Later . . . the first word to the epilogue” (97).

Unread –ability apparently cannot be theorized as such in part because textual places are

themselves double (a paratext is a parergon; an “afterword” is called an “hors-d’oeuvre”

the word writes Derrida as the single word on the first page Dissemination; the postscript

is an epilogue). The yet to be read is a remainder within a remainder that, like death, that

one which cannot see coming. The never to arrive unreadable and never written

remainder, or remainder “written” as the paratextual spacing between text and post-script,

guarantees a kind of readability because reading means not being able ever to read what’s

coming, what is yet to be (un)read.

It should come as no surprise that Derrida introduces his fourth and final film reference

45

the moment he begins discuss the second lost manuscript, placed by Derrida in an

epilogue to Blanchot’s text, and comments on the first word of the first sentence of the

last page (where): “The epilogue already refers to an anterior later, a later immediately

following the war: ‘Later, having returned to Paris . . .’ (Was he thus not in Paris during

the war?) Behind this first epilogical sentence an entire film passes by: the end of the

war, liberation, the purges, etc. Gallimard, NRF, Paulhan, Drieu La Rochelle, etc. The

whole entanglement of a very questionable history . . . ." (8).13

Derrida reads the second lost manuscript (mentioned on the very last page of The

Instant of My Death) as a question the readability of the story as testimony. (The first

manuscript Derrida reads as having been confiscated by the Nazi lieutenant who mistook

them for war plans.) It has to readable to everyone in order to be universalizable

(replaceable--the reader can place himself in Blanchot's / the young man's place). Yet it

is also, he says, has a singular generality (it is irreplaceable). Here is the line from the

story: “Later, having returned to Paris, he met Malraux, who told him that he had been

taken prisoner (without being recognized) and that he had succeeded in escaping, losing a

manuscript in the process. It was only reflections on art, easy to reconstitute, whereas a

manuscript would not be" (Derrida cited p. 99). Derrida comments:

Subtle and interesting distinction--as if reflections on art were not a

manuscript. Could never be confused with the writing of a manuscript. . .

13 In addition to the screenplay reference, Derrida writes: "(One can imagine someone

showing a photograph:  look at me at this age, when I was a young man: I still remember

it, the young man I will have been)" (58) and “Freeze-frame in the unfolding of a film in

a movie camera: the soldiers are there, they no longer move, neither does the young man,

an eternal instant, another eternal instant" (74).

46

What is a manuscript if it cannot be reconstituted? it is a mortal text, a text

insofar as it is exposed to a death without survivance. One can re-write

Malraux's books, they are but reflections on art whose content is not

bound to the unique event and trace of writing. It is not very serious; one

can say even that these things are immortal, like a certain kind of truth.

But a manuscript--and this would be its definition, a definition via the

end--is something whose end cannot be repeated and to which one can

only testify where the testimony only testifies to the absence of attestation,

namely, where nothing can testify any longer, with supporting evidence, to

what has been. Pure testimony as impossible testimony. (99; 100)

The second manuscript is singular in having been lost without remainder: “Unlike the

witness–narrator, the manuscript has disappeared without remainder. . . . Nothing of it

remains [demeure]” (100). Yet, Derrida adds: “Unless one could say: without remainder

other than The Instant of My Death, the narrative entitled The Instant of My Death, its last

witness, a supplementary substitute which, by recalling its disappearance, replaces it

without replacing it. The absolute loss, perdition without salvation and without repetition,

would have been that of a piece of writing. To which one can but testify, beyond all

present attestation, however” (100-01).

Reading Demeure is not reading in the ordinary sense of the word in that we are

retracing as we reread an experience that did happened but, as Derrida points out, that

may not be relived. We are on the surface, reading the impression of Derrida’s text as

were, literalized by the non-space between text and paratext (no blank page separates

them), figured as a cinematic screen on which a film is projected.

47

ROUGH INCOMPLETE DRAFT OF ENDING:

My impulse is to characterize the Scrolls of Auschwitz as having been made unreadable

by its preservers (in the same kind of way Derrida says Blanchot's would be prosecutors

have not read The Instant, or Blanchot's other writings, many of which, he says, are

repeated in The Instant--see p. 50) by being singularized (even though the title repeats

Jeremiah and thereby characterizes the notes in advance as jeremiads, prophetic

indictments and calls for justice). But the notes are really fragments of a collection of

lost and found manuscripts that are meant to be universally readable, translatable. There's

a doubleness in them kind of like the doubleness in Blanchot's story (the story witness of

the last manuscript as its unrepeatable repetition) and the doubleness of the already self-

repeating notes and records (multiplied in the hope their chances of being found would

increase). They are dead and buried survivors. Their philological recovery and

sanctification does not read their readability and unreadability, tries to put an end to

repetition by seeing them collectively as the repetition of a single Jewish prophet's

lamentations that do not involve the prophet's relation to death.

No Ending of Death

Agamben 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

48

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.

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

49

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)

50

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."

51

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.)

52

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.

53