Alveo-auto-bio-thanato-photo-graphies1

Michael ORourke

Black Books
My viewings of Dragan Kujundis film Frozen Time, Liquid Memories, 1942-2012
always seem to coincide with controversies. Not long after watching the film for the first time
in the summer of 2013 I read an announcement for a new biography by Evelyn Barish called
The Double Life of Paul de Man. Here is the publishers blurb:
Thirty years after his death in 1983, Yale University professor Paul de Man remains a
haunting figure [my emphasis]. The Nazi collaborator and chameleon-like intellectual
created with Deconstruction a literary movement so pervasive that it threatened to
topple the very foundations of literature and history itself. The revelation in 1988 that
de Man had written a collaborationist and anti-Semitic article led to his intellectual
downfall, yet biographer Evelyn Barish apprehended that nothing appeared to
1

This text began as a presentation entitled Whowhat survives? Response to Dragan Kujundis Frozen Time,

Liquid Memories at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth on June 14, 2013. On that occasion Tina
Kinsella and I organized a screening of Dragans film followed by short responses from myself, Tina, amonn
Dunne, Carol Owens, and Steven Shaviro. Dragan was characteristically generous in allowing us to screen his
film and in his own responses to our remarks. Before meeting Dragan I always wondered why Jacques Derrida
held him in such high esteem. I can now say that I, like Derrida, have been lucky to have been gifted Dragans
friendship and the many kindnesses he has done me would be too numerous to list. This essay is a small token
of my appreciation and love for Dragan the man and for his work. My debts to him, the phantom friend
returning are, in the end, however, unrestitutable.

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

and hundreds of interviews, Barish evokes figures such as Mary McCarthy, Elizabeth
Hardwick, and Jacques Derrida. Reexamining de Mans life, particularly in prewar
Europe and his reincarnation [my emphasis] in postwar America, she reveals, among
other things, his embezzlement schemes, his lack of an undergraduate degree, and his
bigamous marriage. The man who despised narrative, particularly biography, finally
gets his due in this chilling portrait [my emphasis] of a man and his era2.
With the emergence of Barishs biography yet again we have the attempted killing off of
deconstructionand even theory tout courtplayed out over the body of Paul de Man3. The
significance of this turn of events for Dragans film is precisely to do with the question of
haunting and reincarnation and of the non-biodegradable, of what remains, of what or who
survives, is nameable, mournable, grievable, commemoratable and so on. In the first part of
the film on the racija/pogrom in Novi Sad, Dragan interpolates a scene from the film The
Ister a film about Martin Heidegger. As I re-watched Frozen Time, Liquid Memories in early
2015 we are witnessing the fallout (I use the language of nuclear catastrophe deliberately)
from the recent publication of Heideggers Black Notebooks4. Heidegger is another figure
whom the repeated deaths and disappearances of deconstruction (and of theory tout court) is
also often routinely played out over and the Black Notebooks provide critics with yet another

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

The posthumous publication of a manuscript by de Man entitled Notes on the Task of the Translator
appeared in a book with the telling title Theory and the Disappearing Future: On de Man, on Benjamin edited
by Tom Cohen, Claire Colebrook and J. Hillis Miller (London: Routledge, 2012). Particularly relevant to the
present essay are Millers Paul de Man at Work: In These Bad Days, What Good is an Archive? (55-88) and
Cohens Toxic Assets: de Mans Remains and the Ecocatastrophic Imaginary (An American Fable) (89-129).
4

The Black Notebooks, edited by Peter Trawny, are volume 97 of the Gesamtausgabe. For a discussion of the
content see: http://www.corriere.it/english/15_febbraio_09/heidegger-jews-self-destructed-47cd3930-b03b11e4-8615-d0fd07eabd28.shtml. For a response from Jean-Luc Nancy see
http://strassdelaphilosophie.blogspot.ca/2014/06/heidegger-et-nous-jean-luc-nancy.html

reason not to read Heidegger (and by extension and by implication not to read Derrida or de
Man)5. The archive is, as Derrida warns us, never ideologically innocent:
The archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general, is
not the only place for stocking [stockage] and for conserving an archivable content of
the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes
it was or it will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also
determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into
existence and in relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it
records the event6.
Hillis Miller notes that we tend to assume that an archive is a self-evident good in itself but,
as the quote from Derridas Mal dArchive above suggests, the archive is never neutral, it is
performative (rather than constative, a place for stocking [stockage]), bringing about certain
effects and events, for good or for ill7. What good, Miller asks, will it do to read the archive
of de Mans writings today (and we might add what good will it do to read Heidegger or
Derrida in these bad days?)? The affirmative answer Miller gives to this question is that
reading de Man can help us as we face into and face up to the looming catastrophes and
meltdowns of our time (economic, financial, pedagogical, climactic). Miller recounts a
possibly fictive passage in a mystery story his wife Dorothy has read in which Mayan
hieroglyphs translate Christs words on the cross My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken
me as Sinking. Sinking. Black Ink over nose (88). As the waters of catastrophe rise up to
and above our noses Miller writes all the ink we have spilt will only add to the flood, but it
5

See Jacques Derrida, Heidegger, the Philosophers Hell (181-190) and The Work of the Intellectuals and
the Press (The Bad Example: How the New York Review of Books and Company Do Business) (422-454) in
Points Interviews, 1974-1994, (ed) Elisabeth Weber, (trans) Peggy Kamuf & others (California: Stanford
University Press, 1995).
6

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

Hillis Miller, Paul de Man at work, 56.

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

surprised by the rising waters. Paul de Mans writings are a great help with that, though not at
all a reassuring help (88)8.
Khral Transhumance
Dragans film, too, is a great help with reading the catastrophes of the past as well as
the catastrophes of our time. The Ister is also a film, like Frozen Time, Liquid Memories,
about the Danube, where the body of water is figured as a khora, a placeless place of love,
life, affirmation and survival9. The Danube/Khora is a receptacle, an alveole, a bearer of
imprints10 and watery traces. Rather than black ink in Dragans filmic narrative it is white
ink which is inscribed, scribbled on the watery surface of the film11. He explains what we are
seeing: at the beginning of the movie [The Ister] about the Danube, refuse, nonbiodegradable flotsam of plastic garbage carried by the river is visible but the location of
the garbage is not immediately clear. However, as the film progresses techno-refuse carried
by the river towards its divided, phantasmatic origin repeats itself several times without
geographical designation. Dragan goes on: the plastic garbage thus becomes the nonlocatable, silent, pre-symbolic, uncanny, visual other dispersed through the narrative about
the river. The techno-refuge that floats along the Danube and throughout the film is, we
might say, transhumant, topologically and tropologically (not to mention politropologically)
on the move:

See also Millers Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2012).
9

Jacques Derrida, Khra in Julian Wolfreys, The Derrida Reader: Writing Performances (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 231-262.
10

11

Derrida, Khra, 233.

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

Tropes are tours, changes of place, from somewhere to somewhere else: displacement,
voyage, transfer or transposition, metonymy or metaphor, translation or
transhumance. The quotation as such [and Frozen Time, Liquid Memories is quoting,
translating, receiving, recycling The Ister] as such, like transhumance, and more than
ever the translated quotation, is, according to etymology, equivalent to setting in
motion to transfer, deport, and export from one place to another. Always promising
some return to the origin. A transhumance consists in migrating, changing land or
terrain, going from one land to another, beyond (trans) one terrestrial or earthly
(humus) place toward another12.
The Danube as silent, transhumant khora is anywhere:
it is as if place floated in spaceand, moreover, had always done so in order to be
and to take place. Floating indeterminacy, indefinition, in-finity or pluralizing
indifference, un-limitation, the apeiron of any inscribes, in effect, in the very interior
of place, inside the where, a sort of abyss Indefinite, at the same time
undetermining and pluralizing, the epochal suspense of any de-nominates (dnomme), for it is especially not a name, a gaping opening, an outside of the inside, a
borderline [a place of living on] that drives mad the very inside of the place, at the
same time hiatus or chaos (chaino, from which chaos or chasm, which is what I make
when I open my mouthhio in Latin, from which comes hiatuswhen I ask or call,
when I scream or I name, sometimes in silence, my hunger, my thirst, or my desire
[the alveolar is where the tongue touches the teeth and one of the clustered cells at the
termination of the bronchiole in the lungs]). In thus opening space in its inside, any
spaces space, it de-nominates the very spacing of space13.
12

Jacques Derrida, Faxitexture, trans. Laura Bourland in Anywhere (ed) Cynthia Davidson (New York:
Rizzoli, 1992).
13

Derrida, Faxitexture, 23.

The refuse, too, is anywhere: Any does not supervene (survient) where: as soon as there
is where, there is any, a possibility of substitution [the refuse substitutes for the bodies of
the dead] and of repetition [the logophantasmatic origin divides and repeats itself several
times without geographical designation or destination]; and as soon as there is a possibility of
replacement, of substitution, and of possible repetition, there is spacing and place, there is
room Place is nothing other than the possibility, chance, or threat of replacement [couldnt
we say the same about the archive?] It is, in a word, perhaps, this khora, this Greek name that
suddenly begins to resonate in these places14. Danube is spacing, khora, placing and replacing, a place open to what is coming (chance or threat), welcome to the other within itself,
to all who might come [tout arrivant]. The Danube is a tympanum, alveolar, having the form
of a hollow in the ear15, like a shell or conch16.
One could say something about Catherine Malabous notion of plasticity and the
films techno and human garbage; about Slavoj ieks aestheticisation of trash as true love
of the world; about whether Frozen Time, Liquid Memories is a deconstructive film or a film
about deconstruction; about whether film or the film itself is biodegradable or not. However,
what I want to note here is the connection to be made between the many deaths of
deconstruction and its hauntological non-biodegradability.
Non-biodegradables
But before we get to that, I should, perhaps, say something about Jewishness, Derrida
and deconstruction (although the repeated attempts at the expulsion of both Derrida and
deconstruction should make that point clearly enough). And this is related to the question of
14

Derrida, Faxitexture, 23-24.

15

This is how Derrida describes Amsterdam in Tympan (xviii). See Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
16

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

temporality (and revenance and arrivance) too. In an essay entitled Whowhat Gives?!
Dragan explains this nexus and how Jewishness is intimately related to the technology and
temporality of film. He writes there:
In the essay Abraham, the Other, a reflection on Emmanuel Levinass essay Being
Jewish, Jacques Derrida reflects on Judaism and time, not quite unlike the lines of
analysis followed in Aporias. It is from that place given over only in the future to
arrive, or as Jacques Derrida liked to say, in the to-come, -venir, that the meaning of
this identity will have been determined. Including the endurance of Jacques Derridas
own experience of being a Franco-Algerian Jew: the to-come, which is to say, the
other, will decide what Jew, Judaism or Jewishness will have signified. And
although this to come is not the property of anyone, it will necessarily depend, as tocome, on an experience of invention that is both prophetic and poetic. In Specters of
Marx, the very structure of the event hesitates between the singular who of the
ghost and the general what of the simulacrum. The teletechnoscientific revolution
organizes a space that is haunted by delayed images, ghosts of technological
displacement, hesitating between the who of their apparition and the what of their
simulation17.
Frozen Time, Liquid Memories itself organizes a space [khora] that is haunted by
delayed [or stilled, frozen] images, ghosts of [tele]technological displacement hesitating
between revenance and arrivance, ghosts from the past and from the future. As Dragan also
writes in Whowhat Gives?!: this arrivant is also always already both a sur-vivant and a
revenant, a spectre or a ghost of a shared but nonsynchronous, countertemporal mortality
surviving in the very heart of the living (15). The arrivants are the non-biodegradables, the

17

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

bio-techno-refuse, the still (delayed) remains that are carried along by the river on its
divagatory and dilatory paths [another two meanings of alveolar] and by this film18.
Derridas long essay in Critical Inquiry responding to the first wave of appalling
attacks on Paul de Man is, of course, called Biodegradables, an essay which attends to
many of the themes of this film: who or what remains, survival, what floats on the surface,
who or what is saved, what is and is not archivizable, the best and the worst, and so on19.
Although one should read every word of Derridas essay (and the arguments made for the
necessity of reading De Man) I want to single out one paragraph which, for me, strikingly
resonates with Dragans film. Derrida writes:
Those who have sought to exploit these revelations [about de Man], those who have
given in to the temptation to annihilate, along with the work of a whole life, all that
which, from near or far, came to be associated with it (Deconstruction, they say),
have produced, in spite of themselves, a premium of seduction. In spite of
themselves? Perhaps, I am not sure of that. In any case, too bad for them. One had to
have a lot of ingenuousness and inexperience not to have foreseen it. Many of those
who had taken part in this crusade against de Man and against Deconstruction are
getting more and more irritated: now it turns out that, in part thanks to them, people
are talking more and more about what the crusaders wanted, without delay, to reduce
to silence by denouncing the alleged hegemony that seems to cause them so much
suffering. They should have thought of that. Things dont biodegrade as one might
wish or believe. Some were saying that Deconstruction has been in the process, for
the last twenty years, of extinguishing itself (waning as I read more than once) like
18

This is a reference to Derridas book Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-Franois Bonhomme,
trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010).
19

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

the flame of a pilot light, in sum, the thing being almost all used up. Well, here they
go and think they see, at the bottom of the little bit of oil remaining, a black stain (the
spectre of 1940-1942 [note the dates of Dragans film], the diabolical Paul de Man!).
Certain this time that they will be able to get rid of it, without further delay and thus
without any other precaution, they rush forward like children in order to wield the
final blow and destroy the idol. And, of course, the flaming oil spreads everywhere,
and now here they are crying even louder, angry with their own anger, frightened by
their own fear and the fear they wanted to cause. Without them, would it have
consumed itself: would the thing have been degraded on its own? (818-819)
We might note that cinematic film itself (and the photograph) is non-biodegradable and its
support (its pellicule, its very skin) depends on the little bit of oil remaining. The film is
that which bears witness, which sur-vives, remains, lives on. Film is like an alveolar crystal
of breath, your irreversible witness to quote Paul Celans Breathturn the cinepigraph (or
cinepitaph) to Frozen Time, Liquid Memories. The essay Biodegradables continues
Derridas reflections on Paul de Mans war, which refers to the war in the 1940s during
which de Man published his infamous writings, the war around the name and work of de Man
in the 1980s and the war Derrida speculates must have endured within de Man himself20:
Paul de Mans war is finally the one that this man must have lived and endured in
himself. He was this war. And for almost a half century, this ordeal was a war because
it could not remain a merely private torment. It has to have marked his public gesture,
his teaching and writing. It remains a secret, a hive [an alveary is also a beehive] but
no one can seriously imagine, today, that in the course of such a history, this man

20

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

would not have been torn apart by the tragedies, ruptures, dissociations,
disjunctions21.
This internal war, to be at war with oneself, is to live and it is what keeps Derrida and de Man
alive, what allows them to survive. Survival does not supervene (survient); it opens the
possibility of substitution, repetition, replacement. Like the techno-refuse which survives on
the Danube river, survival indicates a structural non-closure of the phantasmatic origin which
divides and repeats:
As I recalled earlier, already from the beginning, and well before the experiences of
surviving [survivance] that are at the moment mine, I maintained that survival is an
originary concept that constitutes the very structure of what we call existence, Dasein,
if you will. We are structurally survivors, marked by this structure of the trace and of
the testament. But having said that, I would not want to encourage an interpretation
that situates surviving on the side of death and the past rather than life and the future.
No, deconstruction is always on the side of the yes, on the side of the affirmation of
life. Everything I sayat least from Pas (in Parages) onabout survival as a
complication of the opposition life/death proceeds in me from an unconditional
affirmation of life22.
In Dragans film survival structures existence (Dasein) and bearing witness to the technorefuse is (at)testamentary, without delay (demeure). Derrida writes that the moment one is a
witness and the moment one attests, bears witness, the instant one gives testimony, must also
be a temporal sequencesentences for example [or film stills]and above all, these
sentences must promise their own repetition and thus their own quasi-technical
21

22

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

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

reproducibility23. Survival as the structure of existence and the demand for testimony means
that the Danube is open to, hospitable to the other, anachronistic awaiting (at) the arrival24,
for the other at the threshold of death25. Novi Sad must accept the axiom of
incompleteness. A city is a set which must remain indefinitely and structurally non-saturable,
open to its own transformation, to the augmentations which alter and displace as little as
possible the memory of its patrimony. A city must remain open to what it knows about what it
doesnt yet know about what it will be26. Novi Sad too is living at a threshold:
I am one, but I am only the threshold of myself, guard me, protect me, save me, save
therefore the order which I give you, heed my law, it is one, but for this construct me,
thus de- and re-construct me, you are at the threshold, expand me, transform me,
multiply me, dont leave me intact, take the risk of deconstructing me. If you leave me
intact, and one, you will lose me. It is necessary both to protect me and break and
enter me, both to safeguard me and to transfigure me, to transform me precisely in
order to save me: it is necessary both to love me and to violate mebut in a certain
manner and not in another. It is necessary to affirm me as I affirm myself and, in order
for this, to invent the impossible, which consists in respecting my past body, in telling
my age, but also, and out of respect, in giving me enough life so as not to confuse me
with a conservatory of archives, a library of lithographic legends, a museum, a
temple, a tower, a center of administrative and political decisions, a parliamentary
enclosure, a tourist hotel, a chamber of commerce, an investment centre, a hub of
23

Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2000), 33.
24

Jacques Derrida, Aporias: Dyingawaiting (one another at) the limits of truth, trans. Thomas Dutoit
(Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993), 43.
25

26

Kujundi, Whowhat Gives?! 14.

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

railway or information connections, a computerized stock exchange, or even a

habitable, laborious, and productive hive [my emphasis]. I include all these within me,
in my great, moving body [transhumance again], but you must never reduce me to
this, I am the threshold of something else again: I have never been, and a city will
never have been, simply that27.
Novi Sad/Danube as khora are ana-chronistic, belong to an ageless contemporaneity28, the
wholly other of what arrives or derives. As Malabou understands it this is what explains its
capacity to appear or reappear [like the techno-refuse], phantomatically, in our era, threatened
as it is by a radical event, namely nuclear catastrophe, an event that is itself an-archivable.
Khora, which originally referred to place and earth without occupying place or being found
on earth, calls for thinking of and in this very moment when the danger of destruction of
every single place has spread across the earth29.
Forgetting Well
To not remember, or to erase the trace of the human waste or garbage from
history, archive or memory here takes on a vocabulary of eco-catastrophe: we have flotsam,
garbage, nucleo-historico-filmico-literary waste. Derrida in Biodegrabables points to the
impossibility of erasing the trace(s) of De Man and his very non-biodegradability (de Man as
well as his writing is characterized as a thing). He writes:
Yes, to condemn the dead man to death: they would like him not to be dead yet so
they could put him to death (preferably along with a few of the most intolerable
27

Derrida, Generations of a City, 23-24.

28

Jacques Derrida, No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives in Psyche:
Inventions of the Other, Volume 1 (eds) Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 2007), 387-409.
29

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

among the living). To put him to death this time without remainder. Since that is
difficult, they would want him to be already dead without remainder, so that they can
put him to death without remainder. Well, the fact is he is dead (they will no longer be
able to do anything in order to kill him), and there are remains, something surviving
that bears his name. Difficult to decipher, translate, assimilate. Not only can they do
nothing against that which survives, but they cannot keep themselves from taking the
noisiest part in that survival. Plus there are other survivors [note the language here],
arent there, who are interested in survival, who talk, respond, discuss, analyze
endlessly. Well never have done with it. Its as if something nonbiodegradable had
been submerged at the bottom of the sea. It irradiates30
As Milena Kujundi, the Theorists Mother (the title of a wonderful recent book by
Andrew Parker31) puts it the project of archivization is one of not deleting and not
forgetting. The process of forgetting well is irreversible and as Dragan explains in The
Non-Biodegradable (2007): the irreversible is therefore what cannot be forgotten, the nonbiodegradable, the caesura that ruptures the flow of European history32. The events of
January 1942 in Novi Sad are unerasable, inextinguishable. At the foot of the monument to
the racija the tons of garbage that wash up are made into a monster from the Danube. This
monsterthis monstrous arrivant from the past and the futurefashioned from plastic, nonbiodegradable refuse, is what floats, survives, carries on, irradiates. The possibility of a
catastrophe without remainders is a threat but also a chance: the absolute effacement of any
possible trace is thus the only ineffaceable trace, it is so as the trace of what is entirely
30

Derrida, Biodegradables, 861.

31

Andrew Parker, The Theorists Mother (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012). Although I only obliquely
refer to gender in this essay it is noteworthy that a 1987 seminar with Derrida has the alveolar title Women in
the Beehive.
32

Dragan Kujundi, The Non-Biodegradable, http://www.artmargins.com/index.php/film-a-screenmedia/571-nonbiodegradable. For an updated version of this essay see Dragans contribution to the present
volume.

other, trace du tout autre33. That which remains unreadable or unarchivable is what
survives, what lives on, only or already its living on, its life after life, its life after death34.

Phantasmo-cine-taphs35
There are so many photographs in this film (and photographs of photographs), so
many monuments in a film made by Cinetaph Productions: of the racija outside the
Schosberg home; of Paula Schosberg, the mother; of Adela/Della; of the racija on the icy
Danube; of the French children; of Jacqueline and Marcel Weltman and their parents; the
slide show on the computer screen at the CERCIL archive and museum; the cenotaph
photographs of the children. We will never have all the photographs we are told. But, as
Hillis Miller reminds us in The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After
Auschwitz photographs are a form of testimony, of bearing witness36. They might also be
thought of, Miller says, as embodiments of Toni Morrisons claim that nothing ever dies,
that once something has happened it goes on happening (xv). The photographs are, in Elissa

33

Derrida, No Apocalypse, Not Now, 403.

34

Jacques Derrida, Living On: Borderlines, trans. James Hulbert in Deconstruction and Criticism (New York:
Continuum, 1979), 103. See also Sara Guyer, The Rhetoric of Survival and the Possibility of Romanticism,
Studies in Romanticism 46.2 (2007): 247-263.
35

One keeps the archive of some thing (of someone as some thing) which took place once and is lost, that
one keeps as such, as the unkept, in short, a sort of cenotaph: an empty tomb. But are there any tombs that are
not cenotaphs? And is there anything photographic [de la photographie] without kenosis? Derrida, Copy,
Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, trans. Jeff Fort (Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press, 2010), 19.
36

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

Marders terms prosthetic37. In some ways Frozen Time, Liquid Memories could be read as
a photo-novel, the genre which Derrida assigns Marie-Franoise Plissarts images in Right of
Inspection. I like the word medium here, Derrida says, because it speaks to me of spectres,
of ghosts and phantoms, like these images themselves. From the first apparition, its all
about the return of the departed. It is there in black and white, it can be verified after the fact.
The spectral is the essence of photography. Therefore it remarks (upon) photography. At once
immobile and cursive, the question of genre takes bodily form, becomes a body that moves
[transhumance again] other bodies about, moves the bodies of others38. For Andr Bazin, in
The Ontology of the Photographic Image (1945) the photograph has the fleeting presence
of a shadow which is captured and saved. In the moment of photographing time is suspended,
frozen, stilled, embalmed39. The Weltman family photograph in which Jacqueline admits we
all look sad is, in Bazins terms, shadowy, phantomlike and almost indecipherable the
disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their
destiny40. Photography for Bazin embalms time and this is what allows time to persist,
carrying the past across the caesura or rupture to innumerable futures. The photographs
in the film frame what Lacoue-Labarthe calls hyperbological loss. We write he says, we

37

Elissa Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography,
Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012). In terms of prosthetics we might also think about
cycling and re-cycling in the film.
38

Jacques Derrida, Right of Inspection, trans. David Wills (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1998), n.p. On the
apparition and the photographic apparatus see Dragan Kujundi, Passing the Image: Jacques Derrida Ten
Years After, Oxford Literary Review 36.2 (2014): 230-233.
39

Andr Bazin, The Ontology of the Photographic Image in What is Cinema? (ed and trans) Hugh Gray
(Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1967) 15. See also Laura Mulvey, Death 24 x a Second:
Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006).
40

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

are disposessed, something is ceaselessly fleeing, outside of us, slowly deteriorating41. The
Lacoue-Labarthian hyperbological subject-in-deconstitution is always in movement, a
transhumant dsistant subject: the placing of parentheses of the de in (de)constitution
signifies that one must not hear it (any more than in the case of desistance) as a negativity
affecting an originary and positive constitution42.
For Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida the presence of (or being-toward) death in the
photograph is a lingering, phantomal recurrence43. His engagement with photography,
presence and absence, with the time and tense of the photograph, is a response to his mothers
recent death but also his own future death44. What Dragans own very personal filmhis
auto-bio-thanatographyhighlights is the uncanny and the return of the dead, the link
between trauma, the work of mourning and the photograph. In his book of essays mourning
his friend de Man Derrida speaks of mourning the other as an interiorization of their image,
an interiorization which would be a dsistance insofar as the interiorization of the other can
never be fully complete if the irreducible alterity of the one being mourned is to be respected.
We keep within us in the form of images the life, thought, body, voice, look or soul of the
other45. What we within us is the spectre, ghost, phantom, living-dead other and each
photographic image makes the other reappear, return as revenant. As Kas Saghafi explains
this trace or image of the other in us marks

41

John Martis, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe: Representation and the Loss of the Subject (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2005). Martis is quoting from Lacoue-Labarthes The Fable (12), 127.
42

Jacques Derrida, Introduction: Desistance, trans. Christopher Fynsk in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe,

Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (ed) Christopher Fynsk (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1989), 17. Transhumance, dsisistance, diffrance and khora are all substitutable for each other here.
43

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

44

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

45

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

the intertwining of the nonliving, absence, and reference to the other, the image, the
specter of the nonpresent, living-dead other, has the tangible intangibility of a body
without flesh. Its mode of appearance is that of appearing in disappearing,
disappearing in appearance. Making the disappeared appear or making reappear, all
images partake of a spectral structure. This spectrality, no stranger to technics and
technology, allows for the revenant or image of the disappeared to be interiorized, to
remain in me, as other, living-dead, inside, yet outside, while at the same time making
possible the appearance of visual images outside, in us46.
Saghafi calls this ghostly effect of the other looking in us phantasmaphotography47. In all
images there is revenance and survivance, ghostly return and spectral sur-vival in life, even
before death: an absolute affirmation of life, life beyond life, therefore a certain thought of
death, a life that does not go without death48. Khora is photographic too in that it can appear
and re-appear phantomatically in our time. It is formless, fantomatic and phantasmatic:
Khora receives, so as to give place to them, all the determinations, but she/it does not
possess any of them as her/its own. She possesses them, she has them, since she
receives them, but she does not possess them as properties, she does not possess
anything as her own. She is nothing other than the sum or process of what has just
been inscribed on her, on the subject of her, on the subject, right up against her
subject, but she is not the subject or the present support of all these interpretations,
even though, nevertheless, she is not reducible to them49.

46

Kas Saghafi, Apparitionsof Derridas Other (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 76.

47

See also my Ghost Card, A Pixel or Digit? (London: Croydon School of Art, 2015) and Jacques Derrida
and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television trans. Jennifer Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002)
especially Spectrographies (113-134).
48

Saghafi, Apparitions, 82.

49

Derrida, Khora, 239.

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

nothing (no being, no present)50. This, again, is not a catastrophism. On the contrary, it
always remains what it is, unanticipatable and what never fails to happen happens only in
the trace of what would happen otherwise and thus also happens, like a specter, in that which
does not happen51. In anachronizing being and disjoining time khora opens the future:
It is there that diffrance, if it remains irreducible, irreducibly required by the spacing
of any promise and by the future to-come that comes to open it, does not mean only
(as some people have too often believed and so naively) deferral, lateness, delay,
postponement. In the incoercible difference the here-now unfurls. Without lateness,
without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity,
singular because differing, precisely [justement], and always other, binding itself
necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency: even if it moves
toward what remains to come, there is the pledge [gage] (promise, engagement,
injunction and response to the injunction and so forth). The pledge is given here and
now, even before, perhaps, a decision confirms it. It thus responds without delay to
the demand of justice. The latter by definition is impatient, uncompromising and
unconditional52
Breathreturn
In the instant of the photograph or the film still we have the suspension of time and
the conflation of life and death, living and dead, Barthess punctum:
50

Jacques Derrida, Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone.
Trans. Samuel Weber in Religion (eds) Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 21. See also Peggy Kamuf on the ear and khora in The Ear, Who? Discourse 30.1/2
(2008): 177-190.
51

Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning and the New International,
trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge: 1994), 28-29.
52

Derrida, Specters of Marx, 31.

In 1865, young Lewis Payne attempted to assassinate Secretary of State W.H. Seward.
Alexander Gardner photographed him in his cell where he was waiting to be hanged.
The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he
is going to die. I read at the same time: this will be and this has been; I observe with
horror an anterior future of which death is the stakeIn front of the photograph of my
mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicotts
psychotic patient, over a catastrophe that has already occurred. Whether or not the
subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe53.
The still photographs in the film are, in one sense, puncta. They do index death,
mortality and traumatic experience. Yet, Marcel and Jacqueline sur-vive and in the film they
move, smiling, as they were unable to in the family portrait, across the final frame like
running water, an immemorial current, our irreversible witnesses. To paraphrase Dragan: they
are arrivants, both sur-vivants and revenants, spectres or ghosts of a shared but nonsynchronous, counter-temporal mortality surviving in the very heart of the living, irradiating
in the alveolar suspension of a breath54.

53

54

Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96.

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