Chapter Three:
Biblio-polis: Passport Perish the Thought (of Sorts): Reading Missing
Manuscripts / Lost Lives from the Archives; Xenos and Bios, Musselman and Marrano 1
Cover of YFS Bataille issue has his identity card on the cover.
In the third chapter, I discuss a number of autobiographical essays on the boundaries of posthumous publication by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Aby
Warburg, and Derrida to show that the archive paradoxically becomes readable insofar as it is resistant or “closed”: reading is more about various kinds of reshelving, refiling, and storage of persons on paper, the passport being perhaps the best example of the paper person. Walter Benjamin concludes his essay, “Books by the Mentally Ill,” with a cryptic reference to a “manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever,” despite these enlightened times, “to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house.” In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin equates publication with obtaining a passport:
The mere existence of such works has something disconcerting about it, so long as we habitually regard writing as—despite everything—part of a higher, safer realm, the appearance of insanity, especially when it enters less noisily from elsewhere, is all the more terrifying. How could this happen? How did it manage to slip past the passport control of the city of books, this Thebes with a hundred doors? The writings of the insane would have no trouble obtaining a valid passport today. Yet I know of a manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house. ( Selected Writing 2: 1, 13)
Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports become less restrictive.
Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and others like it might thereby slip by the passport controls of the biblio-polis. Reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living bare life virtually as the archive allows for new kinds of self-storage (reading yourself in what you and how you store and are stored).
Fichus and BA and TA's correspondence Cool (supposed to hear
Correspondent’s school) c an go in this chapter, largely because it would bring Derrida into direct connection with TA
1

and WB, connect in mentally ill issue WB raises to Derrida kind of waking versus sleeping, sane versus delirious in Fichus, and also connect reshelving to addressing and corresp onding in terms of Derrida’s not reading WB becomes as a papered person but reading the letters, of the dreams and letters in letters, in relation to a dream of a book he won’t write and in which he encrypts or represses the echo of his own statement that he no longer has time to write the book with seven chapters but can only deliver as a TV guide to the chapters of the virtual books he won’t write and Benjamin’s last letter in French not addressed to Adorno but readdressed by the editor of the Correspondence in which WB says he no longer has time to write the letters he would have loved to write. So Derrida refuses to play either the librarian, to say that the text belongs here and is a property, a set of papers —the editor calls the letters papers and says they are part of the Walter Benjamin Papers in the BF. ) or the editor, or the philologist for that matter. He refuses to paper over Derrida. He reads his letters as disseminated, as letters, but unaddressed or readdressed. He doesn’t go as far with his non-reading non-writing of the book as he could in terms of reading the correspondence as a question of rendering WB and TA papered or paperless persons, the transformation of the letters into papers in order to be rendered readable (or unreadable in our terms) or even thematize them the way he does at the start (this will be about paperless persons).
Derrida is reading the letter in the letter as his waking dream of writing and reading.
A private remark of his leads us to the secret of Benjamin’s
2

letters: I am not interested in people, he said: I am interested only in things. The force of negation emanating from that statement is one and the same as the force of his productivity.
-Theodor Adorno, Benjamin the Letter Writer,” in Notes to Literature Vol. 2, (236)
Walter Benjamin's Archive yesterday. Spent almost the entire class on the latter. It's a book we should probably add to the second chapter. I looked back at and realized that The Ring section at the start now no longer fits and has to bee cut. WB's Archive might be a useful closer for the chapter. For us, the most interesting thing is the way the editor, at the end of the intro, "saves" the archive by depathologizing it ("care" or "careful"" are the crucial words--nothing OCD here), and"use" and"productive" are terms of use--the archive is not there to be stored and safeguarded but to be used.
3

So there’s no reading of WB as archivist )or not much of one) and no reading of the book as a reproduction of the archive, offering its classifications and groupings rather than trying to approximate WB's own. the pun implies a a double reading of "archive" as in the archive of documents we now have that WB had dispersed around the world and also WB's own archive of his own works and correspondence with others (and photos, newspaper clippings, postcards, etc).
So there is are shelving operation happening in the table of contents. The editor also notes that WB made photographs or transcripts of various mss thathe then sent to friends to store safely. So he turned people into external hard drives.
The postal system allowed for multi-media reproductions of the "auratic" mss, which really doesn't exist. It's like he has already gone digital. But the main thing is that he sends the copies to be stored, not to be read, and he stores his own scraps, papers, proofs, etc in cardboard boxes, in desk drawers, in cupboards, and son. So the spaces of the home, whether designed to store writing or not, all nearly all turned into shelves. The editor doesn't "read" WB's own writing process involves storing his mss as he wrote them, turning friends into archivists who store his mss for him. Writing becomes a strange sort of auto-archiving in which one gets to catalogue one's own works in eccentric, personal ways. I 'm thinking the Saxl essay on Warburg's library would be a nice bookend to this book (opposite material circumstances--Warburg is rich while WB is poor), yet same bizarre end result. Warburg's library is not of immediate use to researchers because he organized it so idiosyncratically. What Agamben says
4

about Holderlin's poetry becoming a-poetic (late Holderlin) could apply toAW aswell, givenhis nervous breakdown and his unreadable Msynome Atlas.-reshevling becomes a collage. Psychological classifications would be as undecidable as other kinds of classifications (we could make this point as we transition into "Books by the Mentally Ill." In that esay, reshelving is a proves of division (some books belong, others don't) and redivision that leads to a new unity, a library within the library. Yet that division itself may be readable only to
Benjamin since the shelves do not have labels attached to them. Some of he documents in WB's Archive are also inventories, perhaps readable as constellations of a sort (or as just lists)--to which extent can we read WB in
Benjamin terms?. This in addition to the way the editor reads and doesn't read the document, sometimes attempting to produce a print version that looks like the facsimile, and other times not crossing out words or lines, never putting "X" in, never comparing directly front and back sides of a page.
This intro would also expand on the archive fever of the previous discussion in chapter one, madness being a symptom of the breakdown between mechanical auto-archiving and personal auto-archiving as well as other archiving), and the breakdown between being an archivist and being an archive--WB being the archivist who archives himself as his writings. This would make Arendt view of
WB as "unclassifiable" more concrete and more sophisticated since the resistance to classification comes out of manifold ways of (self)classifying his collection / archive of writings.
5

The other thing the title covers up is that the documents are not in fact in WB' s archive (the title implies a unity of place , person, and property). Some of the documents are stamped Th. Adornno archive. We could also pit it against
Agamben's last chapter in The Time That Remains and Agamben's use of a facsimile of a WB manuscript page to turn a text into an image, which he then doesn't read--he turns into a detective and follows the clues to Paul.
He gets all Saint Paul code on WB.
This chapter starts with Night and Fog and toute la memoire
—then goes to WB and Buck Morss on the passport / postcard thing.
Then reads the U.S. passport as bibliopolis
Then goes to selfg-archivalization and arhcivalization, opening up the lost manuscript.
DO the WB monument, reutnr of the work of art
Finish out with Aporias and the musselamnaversus the Mararno
Biblio-polis: Passport: Detection Reading Missing Manuscripts / Lost Lives from the Archives; Xenos and Bios, Musselman 2
6

In the remainder of Books by the Mentally Ill, WB cites examples from his collection in order to establish the viability and value of the phenomenon in aesthetic and psychological terms, concluding with a cryptic reference to a
“manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever,” despite these enlightened times,
“to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house, even though it is as least the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary terms.”
In the course of his championing of this un-named manuscript, Benjamin links publication with obtaining a passport:
The mere existence of such works has something disconcerting about it, so long as we habitually regard writing as —despite everything—part of a higher, safer realm, the appearance of insanity, especially when it enters less noisily form elsewhere, is all the more terrifying. How could this happen? How did it manage to slip past the passport control of the city of books, this Thebes with a hundred doors? The publishing history of such works must often be as bizarre as their contents. Nowadays, one would like to think, the situation is different. Interest in the manifestations of madness is as universal as ever, but it has become more fruitful and legitimate. The writings of the insane, so we might suppose, would have no trouble obtaining a valid passport today. Yet I know of a manuscript that is finding it as difficult as ever to obtain the approval of a respected publishing house, even though it is the equal of Schreber’s in both human and literary form, and far superior in intelligibility. Selected Writing 2: 1, 13.
7

Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports become less restrictive. Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and others like it might thereby slip by passport controls of the biblio-polis.
3
Obviously, Benjamin’s semi-serious, semi-jocular reach for the passport
(“papers please!”) in order to make apparent the ideological underpinnings of the biblio-polis anticipates, desperately, heart-wrenchingly, the fate of so many
Europeans, himself included, who found themselves, stateless, niche-less, slotless, without papers, literally “fatherless,” or “ apatrides ,” as they fled the Nazis in
1940. While the passport analogy might play differently now than it did in the today of Benjamin’s essay, it indicates that Benjamin’s neurotic re-shelving become “motley order” recovers is what, in “The Book to Come,” Derrida elaborates as the status of the book or biblion as backing, the material support or guarantee which, in purely physical terms permits portability, linearity, enables a manuscript or a person to travel into the hands of readers, find a slot or niche in the physical and ideological or semiotic world of its today, having passed muster at border control. For biblion we may also read person, the “book” now the backing of a particular way of configuring an identity, a mode of citizenship, belonging, and the privileges it affords.
As Derrida observes, “the Greek word biblion
…has not always meant
‘book’ or even ‘work’,” instead biblion could designate a support for ‘writing’ (so derived from biblios , which in Greek names the internal bark of the papyrus and
8

thus of paper, like the Latin word liber , which first designated the living part of the bark before it me ant ‘book’). Biblion , then, would only mean ‘writing paper,’ and not book, nor oeuvre or opus, only the substance of a particular support —bark.
But biblion can also, by metonymy, mean any writing support, tablets for instance or even letters: post (5-6). The extension of biblion as book, then, represents the development of one particular metonymy, that equates the backing of writing, the underpinning of writing by a physical substance with the figure of the “book,” collating, if you like, writing and book, text and material support and linearizing the biblion as book. For Derrida, the “book to come” signals not something new, so much as something held in abeyance by the repetition and so adoption of one particular metonymy. That repetition made a world. L ikewise, as Benjamin’s reshelving discovers, other infraworlds, other forms of writing, a whole “library of pathology,” for example, inhere within the order provided by the book.
As Derrida turns to the figure of the library —he is giving this lecture at the
Bibliothèque nationale de France—he arrives at the question of the slot or niche, the shelf, as it were, “already in Greek, bibliotheque means the slot for a book, book’s place of deposit , the place where books are put ( poser ), deposited , laid down ( reposer ), the entrepôt , where they are stored” (6). And such places of deposit constitute for Derrida a “setting down, laying down, depositing, storing, warehousing —this is also receiving, collecting together, gathering together, consigning (like baggage), binding together, collecting, totalizing, electing, and reading by binding” (7). “So the idea of gathering together , as much as that of the immobility of the statutory and even state deposit,” he writes, “seems as essential
9

to the idea of the book as to th at of the library.” Within this question of gathering, depositing, and so of sorting by gathering, of generating the polis via or in relation to the biblio polis , he arrives at the “question of the title .” “Can we imagine a book,” asks Derrida, “without a title?” “We can,” he answers, “but only up to the point when we will have to name it and thus also classify it, deposit it in an order, put it into a catalog, or a series, or a taxonomy.” He ends this thinking of the title with the contention that “it is difficult to imagine, or at any rate to deal with, with a book that is neither placed nor collected together under a title bearing its name, an identity, the condition of its legitimacy and of its copyright.” “Sure,” we may say, “yes it is”—for such books, which exist, and which are not properly speaking books at all, or not books quite yet, sit uneasily on their shelves, as
Benjamin might tell him, until, of course, the day when those books without titles, such as the manuscript whose title Benjamin withholds from us, reveal their own encrypted infra-titles to us. And in such moments, we may, as did Benjamin, find ourselves, the slightly embarrassed recipients of s/h/elf-help.
Susan BuckMorss, “Researching Walter Benjamin's Passgen Werk,” in Deep
Storage: Collecting, Storing and Archiving in Art , Ed. Ingrid Schaffner, Ingrid
Shaffner, Matthias Winzen (P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, 1989), 222-25.
4
Buck-Morss has two photos of the Bibliotheque Nationale, one of the “work room” that is also shot in the end of Renais’
Toute la memoire du monde . Her essay is a perfect work to use to critique the thinging of the archive, the art thing of the archive. She takes about a postcard from Hitler’s mother as a thing.
10

“things mater.” Storage is naively about protecting (the card could be become a neoNazi fetish!!!” OMG!!!!) like raiders of the lost arc(hive). So we would be inverting her argument about documents / research as things rather than words, sowing that the thinginess of texts has to be read. That matter does not matter as such but only insofar as it is read. He also engages the kinds of paper that WB used. Here we can stalk about the paper as itself not just a matter of material, anymore than his microscript is indifferent versus Goethe’s flourishes in his calligraphy. The paper already is an artistic material. WB , like an artist, is already making selections, decisions, exercising sovereignty over the subjectile of his writings, using handwriting and typewriting, experimenting, playing.
Contr ast her account of the archive to the book Walter B’s Archive, it’s WBian disorganization, it’s use of facsimiles that render the text readable without turning it into an image, as does Agamben in TheTime that Remains but turn it into a work of art. Compa re his postcards in the WB’s Archive to Hitler postcard mentioned by Buck-Morss.
The Stammer und Drang of Materiality: Staging, Stuttering, and Sticking
Our close(d) reading of things is not closed off, either from history or from politics; rather, closed reading rethinks not as open resistance or of opening up as resistance but as reading readers as resistors. our preferred metaphors for the resistance of things and their readings in that the thing comes together and apart, more or less securely and reliably attached, wrapped, tied, locked or
11

sealed in a box or envelope of some sort. We are interested in the relation between storage and story. As Walter Benjamin, observes while discussing in
“Demonic Berlin” the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann,” there is a relation between finding things and telling stories: “For what purpose did Hoffman write histories?
Needless to say, he did not have deliberate aims in mind. But we can doubtless read the tales as if he did have some. And these aims can be none other than physiognomic ones: the desire to show that this dull, sober, enlightened, commonsensical Berlin was full of things calculated to stimulate a storyteller--things that were to be found lurking not only in its medieval corners, remote streets, and dreary houses, but also its active citizens of all classes and districts, if only you knew how to track down such things and look for them in the right ways.” 5 In this genetic criticism of Hoffmann’s Tales , there is no direct link between story and thing: indeed, we move from calculation to a strategy of detection (tracking down) that cannot be programmed or taught: you have to know how to look in the right ways, not just know the right places where valuable things can be found.
So the thing operates here like the document or papers —it is what you are looking for, detecting., looking for in the right way. Reading is a matter of recognition.
Robert Walser, The Microscripts Susan Bernofsky (Translator), Walter Benjamin
(Contributor)
12

“Benjamin gehoert zu den Papiersarbeitern. Die Arbeit am Manuskript war ihm koeperlich elabbares Denken.
-Ermut Wizila “’Verzetttle Schreiberi’: Walter Benjamins Archiv,” in Topographie der Erinnerug ,
The German article on WB’s archive is all about how different collections were gathered together gradually from 1940 to 1985 into one collection in the
Academy of Art.
6
Begin with Night and Fog
And Toute la Memoire in order to make the camp as archive move more clear; also add the xenonos and bios distinction.
Then go to the passport as example of closed reading of the archival thing
Then to WB and the lsot manuscript which actually takes us to WB’s correspondence about his papers, his kinds of papers, his arhchivalization and auto-archivalizaiton (following up form Fichus discussion in hcapter two) and
Agamben on facsimile; also micrographia (script as work of art) Which oges back to WB’s monument as work of art—no return –either to Palenstine or to
New York —hidden wound.
And that would go to Musselman (Pure homo sacer) versus Marrano (bios as xenos).
What remains hten is the detetive genre—reading out of Perec—reading to death. The secret in the secret becomes an exercise for Derrida in identification—with himelf—or with Marx. But it the identification is hwat prevents reading in Derrida’s cse of the failure
13

of the lapse, of the archive in relation to the novelization of autobripgraphy. Perec becomes the key case—going back to WWII.
Tee book as posthumous.
The second htreshold becomes , in relation to xenos and zoe the htreshold of publication—the link Wbmakes between publication and passports (in Chapter two).
See also his description of Manuscripts in Unpacking my library. and Marrano
Can cross reference homo sacer
—bios at the limit with Derrida on the xenos, stranger or freogner in Of Hositality. Also, the intro Aporias.
Also notonly the work of art, but the facsimle—the mircroscript online, or the pages in
WB’s Archive book. Also fasimile not read as such by Agamben
Turnagainst his critique of deconstrucitonas thwarted messianism—ignores his own
Catholic hermenutic, his own need to read by not looking, or by turning a text into an image, by dovorcicg word and image.
The time that Remainsa microredaing—one line by Paul.
Clsoed reading is not about the hidden (the lsot mss being a version of the hidden) tat can be revealed, the lost that can be found, but the secret of the secret, for Derrida,but also
14

about what Derrida does not engae—lapse, acsimile, image and text—and following chapter would be about counterfeiting and foregery and ash (assh of the archive)
It’s the lapse that is central here—the problem of title,a sof technoirony and transmission that stalls out (Concept of Irony, first paragraph) and
The crossing of borders always announces itself according to the movement of a certain step [pas]--and of the step that crosses a line. An indivisible line. And one always assumes the institution of such an indivisibility. Customs, police, visa or passport, passenger identification--all of that is established upon this institution of the indivisible, the institution therefore of the step that is related to it, whether the step crosses it or not. Jacques Derrida, “Dying—awaiting (one another at) the
“limits of truth” Aporias, p. 11
Possibly add Balzac and Rivette on The Unfisnshed Masterpiece.
Come back to the camp —with Perec—connect detective genre in this chapter to sci-fi Las t Man and hopcalypse genre in the Conlusion.
Possibly connect Derridaon the ssue of title in chapter two to de Man on the title in Concept of Irony and Kirkegaard.
Poijnt of departure for de Man essay would be the footnote on the tape recording of the lectures. The posthumous publication.
Possibly INCLUDE BELOW:
15

The Non/Sense and Im/Materiality of Security 7
The passport is not a passe-partout; some countries do not allow you to visit others; some require visas; etc.
Issuing a passport is by definition a process of selection —, a vehicle of passporting people and (no)pass-deporting people.
How to do you talk about things? Question of genre. Life writing. People write about things as if they were people.
Bios is Agamben and Bryson as zoography Overlooked
Social Life of Things second essay on biography of things.
I think we can underline the graph in bios
—biographies—that biography as a form of writing already complicates what bios is, starting from the material thing of the passport. Then we can go to Derrida and Paper Machine and complicate the notion of what a person is when being processed, and conclude in a way that sets up the intro —people processing through storage, shelf-life as a response to bare life-- and also transport(ation)
—teletopical reading.
Papers, Please
Alles ist in Ordnung
The biography is the uncritically assumed default people use when they
Lively effects of the genre produced by the medium of YouTube.
(Just) Passing Through, Passing Around (Barely) 8
16

We lead with the Youtube segment about passport as figure of processing citizenship through paper and the problems of what the passport is (thing then book) and narrating when it is what is. The passport as thing / book raises a problem of form, its materials already mediatized.
9 The passport works as a figure for a problem of form related to materiality, a problem of determining the form of the object / thing (see de Man on Ri ffaterre in “Hypogram and Inscription”). The passport as “book” offers resistance to a narrative, especially a genetic narrative of its construction and assemblage; it resists both as an open and closed book since when it is open it still hides microchips with data loaded on them; and it puts into question the difference between reading and skimming, and the corollary distinction between machines and humans as readers (Humans read and skim, but machines only read). Moreover, the passport is a hybrid, both a printed book and yet also a kind of Kindle that doesn’t function (you can’t read the digital data or subtract from it, add to it / alter it).
Cover Stories
The cover of the passport book is foreign, an import, and the entire media story occludes the foreigner.
It was as if the guy were saying that the passport protects you from non-Americans entering the U.S., as if it were not about being away from the U.S. but being safe from foreign nationals" while residing in the U.S.
17

It's the security of the object that matters, not the security of the citizens (which is never mentioned). And it is spoken of only in terms of entering the U.S. as if the only way anyone could enter the U.S. is with a U.S. passport (as if foreigners never visited or resided as aliens in the U.S. legally).
Somehow the narrative of the thing starts playing out inadvertently (because of the narrowly nationalistic focus on the U.S. passport rather than on passports in general) in all sorts of weird ways about human rights versus rights as citizens
(“We, the people,” not “we, the citizen”)
How A US Passport Is Made (VIDEO) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/13/how-a-us-passport-ismade_n_215287.html
Note that the passport has a “life”: it is first a “thing,” then a “book” with fine print and microprint, first made of a foreign, imported cover (thing) with three blank but formatted memory chips, then becomes American (book) when assembled (the paper covering over the foreign chips, which were loaded and locked), and finally a “personalized” book (sort of like on demand publishing). Only machines “read” the passports (officers “skim” them). This narrative of passport production reveals and hide its own double Un/American construction (the side of the inside
(chip) being covered by the paper laminated onto the plastic cover): the made in
America for Americans book metaphor of assemblage beginning and ending in
America (printing, stitching, lamination) competes with a global industrial model
18

of assemblage in which non-American digital parts and cover get imported and data then gets “loaded on” to the imports and covered up without Americans even knowing (unless they watch this video).
“There’s nothing there. You can buy these chips all over the world simply because they’re memory chips.”
“So it is not until this piece of plastic (waves the cover around) arrives in the
United States that you actually, really, in my opinion, start producing a passport.
This piece of plastic will arrive at a secure U.S. government facility, the
Government printing offices clinic in Washington, D.C. and they then begin the work on it. They then print the cover. They then print . . . the fine detail printing in the passport that makes it clear that not just anybody made it,
Interview:
There’s lots of security embedded measures, like in a five dollar bill
Yes, there’s microprinting, fine printing . . . then laminates it all together, stitches it into a book, and the only thing they do in the process of it to the chip is format it.
Interviewer: put the operating system into it.
Right. . . But after they put the format on it, they lock the chip. And then they load a load of passport books into an armored car, and the armored cars takes these to one of the sixteen facilities around the United States to take the next step. we have in this country.
But as I mentioned they lock the chip; they ship the key in effect to these chips .
. . via separate means.
19

There's no passport, raw book, until after it hits the United States. But even if someone were to get hold of the se things, they wouldn’t be able to do anything with these books.
Then they are what is called “personalized.” The personal data is put onto the passport, typed on here, and then they’re also at the point loaded onto the chip.
And then is when it really becomes an American passport book.
There's an anti-skimming feature, if the book is closed.
So let me ask you a crazy question. These chips can’t be used to track people when they are carrying them, can they?
No.
The only time it can be read is when it is opened--scanned by the officer at the point of entry, as he or she skims this, the machine reads the chip. if you tried to cut out the chip and sew another one, the chip will give the officer different information [from what the passport has printed on it].
What about using the covers to fabricate a passport?
Or if you were to order similar plastic covers to fabricate a passport?
Because of the material that we load onto this chip and how that chip lines up with the material here and what the computer at the customs border, what that machine is taught to read, if you have a phony passport with the chip, that chip will go tilt.
People claim they can hack these chips?
Is that possible?
20

No because we have what we call PKI, public key infrastructure, a type of security algorithm loaded on the chip. We believe that that algorithm cannot be compromised.
The passport can't be skimmed because it is closed.
Me:
So, like any (transnational) commodity, American passports alienate American citizens from their own identity papers, covering up the foreign, protective cover, literally secreting the chips that fully functionalize the identity papers from their
"owners."
Technopoly
By attending to sediment, we link question about the polis, citizenship, who can travel legally where, what they can travel with and carry on or not, in relation to materials by rephrasing the question of biopolitics and citizenship, on the one hand, and the storage of materials , on he other, as a question of what happens when the State becomes a Host and turns its citizens into parasites. The question of biopolitics is thus also a question of thantopolitics, of the ways in which citizens are alienated from their own data
— the printed pages of the passport as book become a cover, literally and metaphorically, for the storage of citizens as data, their reduction to microchips.
And the question of “reading” and skimming” the book is all the more bizarre since there is no narrative to read, just a profile reduced to one’s life span and home. (Gaining a passport is thus already a process of people into persons in
21

that you have to have a home
—you have to reside in your property or someone else’s—before you can become a person who can reenter the U.S. without a passport, you always a potentially illegal alien. And you have to know English to apply and you have to be literate or know someone who is. The Youtube does not say what is stored on the chips (the word information is not used) whether it is the same as the information on the passport or in excess of it. It is information about us, however. That much is clear. But we are alienated through our data processing, we are booked by the State even, just into persons through personalization. But we are only informed by change of how our passports are made. Their making would usually seem to fall under state secrets, so the of effect of the ideas hat we are learning seeing something that we are not supposed to see, know. I think that’s how the Huff Post links—like posting info on how to make a bomb. The video is itself a threat because it gives forgers information they could use to forge. But the issue is that persons are stored as data) when they are turned form persons into citizens. Citizenship passes though the person in enabling him or her to pass through customs, unsettling distinctions between guest and host, alien and host, and the inhuman outside citizenship (equated with aliens as animals, vermin, threats, viruses, flus, and so on) hostage and hostage taker. Citizenship not as securing of human rights but as Host-age taking. 10 occurrence” or Jacques what Derrida calls an “event.” 11 close/d reading of the passport as thing.
The thing requires a double reading even as it becomes units.
22

Renais's Night and Fog again. It has a passport sequence that is perfect for us.
Also has a photo of notes written by Jewish prisoners. I remembered I wanted to juxtapose it with the book as prisoner in Toute la memoire du monde .
Bare Life and Adorno’s
Damaged Life (aphorism, fragment
—taken from
Nietzsche —almost a direct rip-off formally).
In the epilogue to Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry ,
Lacoue-Labarthe talks about "appropriating the means of identification" being more important than the means of production.
An image of one of Robert Walser’s microscripts (see The Microscripts, to be released soon by New Directions: http://www.amazon.com/Microscripts-Robert-
Walser/dp/0811218805 ).
Susan Bernofsky writes:
The microscripts, now housed in the Robert Walser-Archiv in Zurich, were tiny, densely pencil-jotted manuscripts in which Walser composed the rough drafts of his texts starting as early as 1917. The paper he used for this was an assortment of small sheets of art-print paper, halved calendar pages, envelopes, correspondence cards (often he wrote between the lines of the notes he’d received), and even single-sided advertisements cut from magazines and books.
The microscript texts are so difficult to read that when this collection of 526 diminutive pages was first discovered after Walser’s death, they were thought to
23

be written in a sort of secret code. In fact the microscripts were written in Sütterlin script, then the standard style of German handwriting, but in a script that varied in height from one to two millimeters, executed with an often none-too-sharp pencil.
These drafts seem to have been primarily an aid to composition: Walser generally recopied his texts within a few days of having written them, and it is not clear whether he himself would have been able to read his own writing had he waited too long.
The microscripts in Walser’s literary estate, which were painstakingly deciphered in over a decade of labor by Bernhard Echte and Werner Morlang after the first transcriptions by Jochen Greven appeared in 1972, proved to contain a full six volumes of previously unknown texts (as well as drafts of various pieces published elsewhere). Since Walser left a number of his late prose works uncopied - being largely unable to get them published - the microscripts are a rich source of new material for hungry readers of Walser’s work.
The Robber in manuscript occupies a mere twenty-four pages of octavio-sized sheets (Susan
Bernofsky’s introduction to
The Robber , (Nebraska: University of Nebraska
Press, 2000), p xii). http://beetleinabox.tumblr.com/post/538315142/an-image-of-one-of-robertwalsers-microscripts
24

Chapter Three:
Perish the Thought (of Sorts): Detecting Missing Micro/Manuscripts / Lost
Lives
Post-Humous versus Post-Human
Work in Blacnhot line about the posthumous being inexhaustible; his essays on
Kafka.
Derrida’s story about his trumped up drug bust in Prague near the end of "Before the Law," as if identifying with Kafka
—his attorney says his case is Kafkaesque.”
"P.S. Roger Laporte has reminded me of a stormy encounter which took place five years ago. During this encounter (although I am unable to recount the occasion for it here) we found ourselves, for other reasons, in disagreement with a certain hermeneut who in passing had resumed to ridicule the publication of Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts. "They will end up," he said, "publishing his laundry notes and scraps like 'I have forgotten my umbrella'". We discussed the incident again; those who were present confirm this. Thus I am assured of the story's veracity, as well as the authenticity of h the facts which otherwise I have no reason to doubt. Nevertheless I have no recollection of the incident. Not even today. (I.4. 1973), Spurs, pp 139; 141
Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin: Correspondence 1930-1940
for your Walter B briefcase chapter?
25

“Throughout the volume’s 180 letters, the editors’ scrupulous referencing and the extensive footnotes help us to decode the hermetic web of enquiries about close friends, in-jokes and mutual favours spun by the correspondents. The English translation skilfully navigates Benjamin’s effusive idiosyncrasies and softens the clipped directness of both authors to reveal the comfortable familiarity beneath.”
Times Literary Supplement
“The correspondence between Gretel Karplus Adorno and Walter Benjamin documents a remarkable friendship. Benjamin valued “Felizitas” as a critic who was at once acute and sympathetic, and these letters bristle with some of the most challenging formulations of his thought in the 1930s. Yet their relationship also enabled Benjamin to reveal aspects of his life that remained hidden from even his closest male friends, including Adorno himself and Scholem. The letters thus offer a moving and surprisingly intimate account of the fate of a great intellectual struggling to survive – and to write – in exile.”
Michael Jennings, Princeton University
Product Description
We must see to it that we put the best of ourselves in our letters; for there is nothing to suggest that we shall see each other again soon. So wrote Walter
Benjamin to Gretel Adorno in spring 1940 from the south of France, shortly before he took his own life.
26

DOESN"T THAT SOUND LIKE SHELF-LIFE ALREADY, A SELF ARCHIVING
AS WRITING UNTO DEATH THROUGH LETTERS?
The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, published here in its complete form for the first time, is the document of a great friendship that existed independently of Benjamin's relationship with Theodor W. Adorno.
While Benjamin, alongside his everyday worries, writes especially about those projects on which he worked so intensively in the last years of his life, it was
Gretel Karplus-Adorno who did everything in her power to keep Benjamin in the world.
She urged him to emigrate and told him about Adorno's plans and Bloch's movements, thus maintaining the connection between the old Berlin friends and acquaintances. She helped him through the most difficult times with regular money transfers, and organized financial support from the Saar region, which was initially still independent from the Third Reich. Once in New York, she attempted to entice Benjamin to America with her descriptions of the city and the new arrivals from Europe though ultimately to no avail. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0745636691/ref=s9_simp_gw_s0_p14_t1?pf
_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-
2&pf_rd_r=06WGYMXV9H2EXK96KC0T&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=470938631&pf_
27

rd_i=507846
Text and signature are specters, and Benjamin knows it, so well that the event of the text "Zur Kritik der Gewalt" consists of this strange ex-position ; before your eyes a demonstration ruins the distinction it proposes. It exhibits and archives the very movement of its implosion, leaving in place what one calls a text, the ghost of a text that, itself in ruins, at once foundation and preservation, accomplishes neither, occurs to and reaches neither one nor the other and remains there, up to a certain point, for a certain amount of time, readable and unreadable, like the exemplary ruin that singularly warns us of the fate of all texts and all signatures in their relation to law--that is, necessarily (alas), in their relation to a certain police force.
Derrida, "Force of Law," 277 12
Connect Derrida on the “marionette, the dead machine” and “the theological machine” in “Faith and Knowledge” (86-87) to the machine in Typewriter writer
Connect the account of the cut and the machine and Oedipalization in Typewriter
Ribbon, Inc to Derrida’s discussion of the cut and castration in “Restitutions” in
The Truth of painting. 339-340
Also “where to stop?” 352; you hae to now ho w to stop. 277Out of service” spectral analysis (360, 376) Derrida quotes himself from the purveyor of truth
364 , like letter, a pair is divisible. Unconscious p. 367 projection 366-68
The title of the picture, its legend: Hoc est corpus meum . 369 “Nobody’s being accused or above all condemned, or even suspected” (371) uncanny p. 373;
28

379returns alte to the opening, 379
—to p. 256
“to render onself in painting and to red=ndrsomething to oneself, to pay onself
Connect Adorno Bibliograph ical musings with Benjamin’s “Unpacking my Library” in terms of the hidden collector who disappears in his books at the end of WB and the various personifications of books in Adorno’s essay, especially the crucial final section of the essay.
Note 1 Benja min’s source was either a lost letter form Gretel Karplus, a telephone conversation or a common acquaintance.” (86)
Put all the WB and Brecht detective fiction stuff in the conclusion, perhaps in relation to Perec’s
53 Days ? Or maybe in chapter three with Fittkow? Or return to chapter three in the conclusion?
13
Baudelaire wrote no detective story because, given the structure of his instincts
[ Triebsstruktur ], it was impossible for him to identify with the detective. In him, the calculating, constructive element was on the side of the asocial and had an integral part of cruelty [ Grasaumkeit ]. Baudelaire was too food a reader of the
Marquis de Sade to be able to compete with Poe.”
WB, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet (Verso, 1973), 43; Cited by Derrida,
GivenTime ,166
If now one considers seriously what Benjamin presumes about the “structure” of
Baudelaire’s “drives” that would have prevented him from identifying with a detective, if one judged it were possible never to identify with a detective (which, of course, is open to doubt), if one took the figure of the detective to be
29

determinable, determined, one figure among others to be established, judgment to be formed, account to be rendered, story to be continued, inquisition, search, interrogation, inquiry, or investigation to be conducted to its term, in a word, knowledge , then in fact one must recall that on two occasions an identification must be suspended: the identification, which in a certain manner is structural, of
Baudelaire with the narrator or with th e friend (both of them seem to “play” at detective); then the identification of these characters with the detective they seem to play. They are not literally detectives, in particular because one of them, the narrator, seeks above all to reach a moral judgment, however non-moral may be his investment in it; and because the other, the friend, is now more concerned with deceiving justice or in any case with never permitting a truth, conclusion, and a judgment to be established.
Derrida Given Time , 166-67, same footnote
Fittkow’s book has “Jewish Lives” as a subject heading on the copyright page, and the back cover description says that she and her husband were both Jewish even though her husband was a Protestant. There is a classification and canonization o f certain accounts here, just as the “scrolls of Auschwitz” canonize more or less legible fragments. Is the document’s fragmentation, its resistance to being read in whole (because part of it is missing or left untold) a condition of its canonization?
Fittkow’s book is novel and a document and is composed of various documents that generate narratives that can turn out well or badly. The book is written with
30

a discontinuous way that insists on the local links between papers and stories and the heterogeneity of the stories she tells, often as transcriptions/ dictations.
She refuses to classify her story, subject it to archivalization, to order. Instead chronology is just one order among others. The “Case” she tells is only “based on the reports of Varia n Fry and ?” It’s a second hand account. She does not include a facsimile of the document or a transcription of it as an appendix (as at the end of Mark Bernhard’s Scrolls of Auschwitz . She does not list her sources — she does not offer any documentary kinds of corroboration (that give her testimony more evidentiary value —it is not written as a legal brief). She does not giver her birth history. She is not really telling ”her” story but the story of her experiences with problems attached to the state’s auto-archivalzation (forgery, counterfeit, bribing, errors, bad paper quality, and so on) to delay to resist, knowing always that a list can perilous in one case and life saving in another; that an exit visa can be of value then of no value when the date of expiration is reached. She navigates but does not control the process of her auto-archivo-biobiblio-graphization. There is no way to predict or to tell when is a good time or a bad time. Even forms may be filled out with intended error to be read as unintended error. Transportation, translation, language (expand on langue versus parole in Agamben) as a medium (W Benjamin) and uncanny. There is a kind of tracking system (chip passport; cell phones; dates on passports that are stamped and scanned). The camp includes selection, processing, photography (initially) tattooing, ordering, and so on. Fittkow offers various kinds of formal resistance to being read as a coherent person, in terms of ego psychology or anthropology.
31

She refuses to be classified (l ike Arendt’s account of WB as unclassifiable), processed, read. Her life is a series of fragments akin to Adorno’s aphorisms in
Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life that are not metynyms for a whole but have the unlimited space (a fragment can be infinitely small and infinitely large) Blanchot discuses in The Writing of the Disaster.
Looking at Fittkow’s book as being in dialogue with WB not as an instrument to get to WB.
Fittkow begins with a telephone call to an individual, not an agency, and the recipient; listener mishears it as a call about WB, when it is calls her beginning of her story. So the story begins as a salvific narrative about WB which then fails to deliver that salvific narrative
—becoming a curious involution.Here is Blanchot on the book and on the fragment in The Writing of the Disaster :
I return to the fragment: while it is never unique, still it has no external limit —the outside toward which it falls is not its edge
—and at the same time no internal limitation (it is no hedgehog, rolled up and closed upon itself). And yet it is something strict, not because of its brevity (it can be prolonged, like agony), but through the tautness, the tightness that chokes to the breaking point: there are always some links that have sprung (they are not missing). No fullness, no void.
(46)
Fittkow’s book has “Jewish Lives” as a subject heading on the copyright page, and the back cover description says that she and her husband were both Jewish
32

even though her husband was a Protestant. There is a classification and canonization of certain accounts here, just as the “scrolls of Auschwitz” canonize more or less legible fragments. Is the document’s fragmentation, its resistance to being read in whole (because part of it is missing or left untold) a condition of its canonization? the book Jewrassic Park and noticed that it begins by talking about the Jewish
Museum (by Liebeskind) in Berlin as a comedy, then as a procedural ("Krimi"), then as a mystery novel.
Maybe do the detection fiction then with Perec in this chapter.
Foreword to Scrolls of Auschwitz the author, Ber Mark’s, wife “And yet he was not given the time to complete his task due to his untimely death. It was I, therefore, who was entrusted with its completion.” (xiii) “
Some of the Auschwitz-related material found in any or all of the archives is liable to lead researchers astray.” (20)
French translation Des voixs des camps (scrolls of Auschwitz) ends with a facsimile of a text by Zalamn L). The English translation includes a facsimile of the book manuscript by Ber Mark, however. It also has the foreword by his wife.
So his manuscript becomes a kind of scroll as well.
[More Berlin CHildhood:
Mentions Robison Crusoe p. 145
Book as magic carpet, p. 147
33

Snowflake metaphor letters in “A Child Reading” Selected Writings , 1, 463
The typical work of modern scholarship is intended to be read like a catalogue.
When shall we actually write books like catalogues?
Vol 1, 457
The typewriter will alienate the hand of the man of letters from the pen only when the precision of typographic forms has directly entered the conception of his books. One might suppose that new systems with more variable typefaces would then be needed. They will replace the pliancy of the hand with the innervation of com manding fingers.”
Vol. 1, 457
The card index marks the conquest of three dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation.
“Attested Auitor Books” in One-Way Street,
Selected Writings , Vol 1, 456
“
Hoa
, the Chinese word for “painting,” is much like kua
, meaning “attach”: you attach five colors to the object.”
“A Glimpse into the Forgotten World of Children’s Books,” Selected Writings, vol
1, 435]
Link ash in Archive Fever to ash of Given Time
Paper Trails
34

Could mention correspondence between W Ben and Gretel over his papers, his self-archiving, relate that all to Ray Johnson and Marina Abramovic as well as to posthumous publication. revise / reframe the WB chapter in terms of the work of art that commemorates
WB —the missing body / corpus/ manuscript returns as a work of art—uncanny theology
—Jewish and not Jewish. Self-archiving is the issue—papers , correspondence to Gretel, and so on. WB’s Archive (the book). Then missing corpus, telephone, and so on.
To set up chapter four.
Even though chronology place regularity above permanence, it cannot prevent heterogeneous, conspicuous fragments form remaining with in it.
Walter Benjamin, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in
Charles Baudelaire A lyric Poet in the era of High Capitalism , 144
The invention of the match around the middle of the nineteenth century brought forth a number of innovations which have one thing in common: one abrupt movement of the hand triggers a process of many steps. This development is taking place in many areas. One case in point is the telephone, where lifting of a receiver has taken the place of the steady movement that used to be required to crank the older models. Of the countless movements of switching, inserting, pressing, and the like, the ‘snapping’ of the photographer has had the greatest consequences, A touch of the finger now sufficed to fix an event for an unlimited
35

period of time. The camera gave the moment a posthumous shock, as it were.
Walter Benjamin, Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire A lyric Poet in the era of High Capitalism , (131-132)
Also the posthuman
—the posthumous precedes the posthuman.
Include in place of the WB manuscript chapter a chapter on the threshold of publications: Lost manuscripts, lost lives —from asylums, to art books, to performance art. That will set up art in the train. Pose the art in the train chapter as both a question of boxing but also of reversible reading.
Montaigne begins “Of Friendship” by taking about being bequeathed the library and papers of la Boetie, who published only an early work entitled Servitude
Voluntaire
“rebaptized” (135)
Le Contre Un
. He ends by explaining why he won’t publish his friends works, because of religious controversies have led to their publication of or inflammatory purposes. Since la Boetie would have been opposed to this use of his works, Montaigne says he will publish in exchange something else by la Boetie that is light. The next essay i s an intro to la Boetie’s
29 sonnets, but he says they can be found elsewhere and does not include them, nor does nay supposed edition to have been printed ever been found according to a footnote by Donald Frame. (145)
36

“now in exchange for this serious work, I shall substitute another, produced in that same season of his life, gayer and more lusty.” (144) this friendship possesses the soul and rules it with absolute sovereignty cannot be doubled.” (141)
Still, it is far from being the best that he could do; and if at the more mature age when I knew him, he had adopted a plan such as mine, of putting his ideas in writing, we should see many rare things which would bring us very close to the glory of antiquity; for particularly in the matter of natural gifts, I know of no one who can be compared with him. But nothing of his has remained except this treatise —and that by chance, and I think he never saw it after it left his hands— and some observations on that Edict of January, made famous by our civil wars, and which will perhaps yet find their place elsewhere. That was all I could recover of what he left —I, to whom in his will, with such loving recommendation, with death in his throat, he bequeathed his library and his papers,--except for the little volume of his works which I have published. (135-36)
Because I have found his work has since been brought to light, and with evil intent, b those who seek to disturb and change the state of our government
37

without worrying whether they will improve it , and because they have mixed up his work with some of their own concoctions, I have changed my mind about putting it in her. And so that the memory of he author may not be damaged in the eyes of those who could not knows his opinions and actions close at hand, only by way of an exercise, as a common themes hashed over in a thousand places in books.” (144)
But he had another maxim sovereignty imprinted in his soul, to obey and submit most religiously to the laws under which he was born. There never was a better citizen, or one more devoted the tranquility of his country, or more hostile to the commotions and innovations of his time. He would much rather had used his ability to suppress them than to give them material that would excite them further” (144)
Detecting / Narrating the Archive: (Not) Reading Books as Things, Storing
Persons as Archivists
WB's Archive might be a useful closer. For us, the most interesting thing is the way the editor, at the end of the intro, "saves" the archive by depathologizing it
("care" or "careful"" are the crucial words--nothing OCD here), and "use" and
"productive" are terms of use--the archive is not there to be stored and safeguarded but to be used. Was thinking we should read "The Storyteller" too to talk about the relation between media and narrative in relation to the archiving of documents as stored things. So there’s no reading of WB as archivist (or not much of one) and no reading of the book as a reproduction of the archive,
38

offering its classifications and groupings rather than trying to approximate WB's own. the pun implies a a double reading of "archive" as in the archive of documents we now have that WB had dispersed around the world and also WB's own archive of his own works and correspondence with others (and photos, newspaper clippings, postcards, etc). So there is are shelving operation happening in the table of contents. The editor also notes that WB made photographs or transcripts of various mss that he then sent to friends to store safely. So he turned people into external hard drives. The postal system allowed for multi-media reproductions of the "auratic" mss, which really doesn't exist. It's like he has already gone digital. But the main thing is that he sends the copies to be stored, not to be read, and he stores his own scraps, papers, proofs, etc in cardboard boxes, in desk drawers, in cupboards, and son. So the spaces of the home, whether designed to store writing or not, all nearly all turned into shelves. The editor doesn't "read" WB's own writing process involves storing his mss as he wrote them, turning friends into archivists who store his mss for him.
Writing becomes a strange sort of auto-archiving in which one gets to catalogue one's own works in eccentric, personal ways. I 'm thinking the Saxl essay on
Warburg's library would be a nice bookend to this book (opposite material circumstances--Warburg is rich while WB is poor), yet same bizarre end result.
Warburg's library is not of immediate use to researchers because he organized it so idiosyncratically. What Agamben says about Holderlin's poetry becoming apoetic (late Holderlin) could apply to Aby Warburg as well, given his nervous breakdown and his unreadable Msynome Atlas.--reshevling becomes a collage.
39

Psychological classifications would be as undecidable as other kinds of classifications (we could make this point as we transition into "Books by the
Mentally Ill." In that esay, reshelving is a proves of division (some books belong, others don't) and redivision that leads to a new unity, a library within the library.
Yet that division itself may be readable only to Benjamin since the shelves do not have labels attached to them. Some of the documents in WB's Archive are also inventories, perhaps readable as constellations of a sort (or as just lists)--to which extent can we read WB in Benjamin terms?. This in addition to the way the editor reads and doesn't read the document, sometimes attempting to produce a print version that looks like the facsimile, and other times not crossing out words or lines, never putting "X" in, never comparing directly front and back sides of a page.
This intro would also expand on the archive fever of the previous discussion in chapter one, madness being a symptom of the breakdown between mechanical auto-archiving and personal auto-archiving as well as other archiving), and the breakdown between being an archivist and being an archive--WB being the
40

archivist who archives himself as his writings. This would make Arendt view of
WB as "unclassifiable" more concrete and more sophisticated since the resistance to classification comes out of manifold ways of (self)classifying his collection / archive of writings.
The other thing the title covers up is that the documents are not in fact in WB' s archive (the title implies a unity of place , person, and property). Some of the documents are stamped Th. Adornno archive. We could also pit it against
Agamben's last chapter in The Time That Remains and Agamben's use of a facsimile of a WB manuscript page to turn a text into an image, which he then doesn't read--he turns into a detective and follows the clues to Paul.
He gets all Saint Paul code on WB. Versus the editor’s references to Wb as detective and WB’s own comments on detective fiction and collaborating with
Brecht.
Self-storage as a rewinding mechanism, a return to the moment of failure to make for new microadjustments that have macro-implications for theory (of reading). we can work Weber in, just before the toys, to use him as support (something good rhetorically)
In other words, you have given us not only a breakthrough connection between infrastructures of memory and infrastrategies of reading by connecting the camp and the storage unit as you did but some very nice cards to lay down in order
41

clarify the importance of the toy--and also to elucidate WB perhaps even better than does Weber as well as a totally brilliant de Man card to play (the
Uboat, which we can turn into a U-Turn Boat)-. Sorry about that last one.
Addressing the S/helf
Have you encountered Martin Gumpert over there? He is someone whom I knew during my internment. Since he is going to publish his autobiography, I asked myself whether I will by any chance appear in it.2
2 In his autobiography, Hoelle im Paradies [Hell in Paradie] (Stockholm.1939), p.
54, Gumpert write the following about Benjamin while describing his friends from the time of the youth movement” ‘One of us, the most gifted, is an émigré philosopher in Paris and has become a Marxist.’ (276; 277; 278
Notes and dossier , p. 28
Letter July 10, 1933
One the pictures enclosed you see me –thirty five years later—in front of a palm tree. And even if it is not a house palm, the photo on which you now see it was taken for no less external reasons than the masquerade of the childhood picture, for it is a passport photo that I had taken in Mallorca.
Note 3, “The passport for which the photograph was taken has not survived.
Letter 12, 21-25
“The only project worth mentioning is a detective novel, 8 which I shall only write, howeve r, if I can be sure that it will turn out well. “23
42

“8. Sketched in GS, 7 [2], pp. 846-50. It is likely that the document entitled
“Materialien zu einem Kriminalroman’ [Materials for a Detective novel] was written around that time (see also letter no. 34, note 11),” 25.
Letter 34, 63-65
I have been speaking to Bertold about the theory of the detective novel, and perhaps these reflections will be followed by an experimental project at some point.11 p. 64
11. Brecht and Benjamin were planning to write a detective novel or a series of them. The notes and sketches towards a series of detective novels found after
Brecht’s death and published under the title
Tatsachenreihe [Series of Facts]
(see Brecht, Werke , vol. 17: Prosa 2: Romanfraggente und Romanentwuerfe
[Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, 1989], p. 443-45) contain two longer episodes from a novel, for which a scheme of chapters was found written in Benjamin’s hand (see GS 7 [2], pp. 847 ff). The scheme and the following list of motifs (see ibid., pp. 848-50) were probably written in Paris in the autumn of 1933. p. 65
Mentions taking mescaline p. 106 (Mexican Indians)
WB’s “bare life”:
My wish for you is that you might settle down in the not-too-distant future, without this constant tormenting worry about your bare existence, without a few pleasant friends nearby, who could certainly include me, and the true success and recognition of your work.
43

p.42 the begins noting that WB forget to give GA his new address.
Lost letter:
It would be a shame
—though no tragedy—if it {WB’s letter to GA] had been lost.
For it also contained a description of my first impressions after arriving”
(198)
Constant references to books —requested to be sent, acknowledgements of books that have arrived, frustration at not being able to get the books he needs, etc, 22, 61, 63, 66, 77, 84, 99, 107, 134, 164, 170, 213, 215 and to libraries
“the library he is said to have here makes him gain prestige quite considerably”
(24); 57 working in the Biblotechque Nationale (71) request for a pad of “white MK paper” (he’s run of it and wants to “preserve the external uniformity of the extensive, meticulous manuscript”” of his Passagen-
Werk
/ Arcades project so he asks Gretel for a pad, “only the pad, no envelopes.
I will send you a sample page with this delivery.” (71).
“Gretel Karplus’s reply of 15 January, in which she complains that Benjamin failed to enclose the promised sample of MK paper, proves that the letter reached her.” (72)
WB’s notes in the margins of GA’s letter:
“Cardboard boxes . . Treatment of the library . . . Cleaning the library” (57) and to WB’s archive:
44

“Your archive1 has meanwhile landed in the Prinzenallee . . . . p. 26
1. Benjamin’s collection of his own manuscripts, typescripts and printed essays. p. 27
“I would long since have answered your letter, but I was hoping daily for the sample of M-K paper, which was unfortunately not enclosed in your last letter. I want to get to to you as quickly as possible, as this is after al the only thing I can do at the moment to support the writing of the arcades study.” (72)
WB describes his own letter as a model
“You can feel what ‘an island’ means, and let this greeting of mine glide into your hands like a small model of it.”
You can imagine that current events are prompting me to seek naturalization most vigorously. As ever with such matters, one is suddenly faced with difficulties one had not reckoned with; at the moment they consist in acquiring a vast number of papers. All this is consuming a great deal of time. . . . even if ere simply to contribute a further dossier to the files to the Ministry of Justice.
(212)
GA on secrecy and names:
“I, at least, love a trace of secrecy, and I find it marvelous to hide in the names reserved almost only for us.” p. 41
Adorno published an essay under th e pseudonym “Hektor Rottweiler” and Ernest
Bloch wrote telling him he hated it (without knowing that Adorno wrote it!).
45

p. 134 GA calls Bloch’s letter “a bare-faced letter” (134)
Note 3. Benjamin published an essay “under the name C. Conrad . . . The fact that Benjamin refers to this pseudonym suggests a veiled request for Greta
Karplus to procure the manuscript of ‘Berliner Kindheit” as well as the proofs of his own publications . . . the only authentic texts.” (53)
WB and GA regularly refer to people usi ng one initial. “ask B” (112)
This is just after she says “we should always stick to ‘Du’ in our private letters” (p.
40). They addressed their letters to pseudonyms: “Detlef” for WB and “Felizitas” for GA.
“I am still without a passport” (77) letter by GA
“Wahl reported that according to [Henri] Bergson, the railways are to blame for everything.” 219
Letter from G about NYC: “let us hope that this hiding-place will remain for awhile yet” (215)
GA as storage unit, hand holder / signature as I.D.:
And I will not have peace of mind until I know that the rest of the journals with things of mine, which I might require at any moment during my work, are in your hands. But this should not make you fear that you will often be pestered with requests for deliveries. There seems to be a possibility, rather, of having an acquaintance of mine who is coming here send me the things you listed for me as well as the journals, which my girl will hopefully soon bring you. His proof of identity will consist in the other half of my signature, one of which I enclose.6
46

p.22
6. Unknown. The note with one half of the signature has not survived. p. 25 (written while WB lived in Ibiza).
GA as distributor (by hand):
Is there really no possibility of producing an extended German version of the reproduction study? I would be very happy to copy it out, so that I could at least make some contribution to its dissemination if it is only in the form of hand copies passed from reader to reader” (214)
WB describes a “precious fountain pen” he is using to write his letter as “the relic of a great romance with a chamberlain of the Pope. (63)
“my Nansen passport” (58)
“Archive” as a keyword, p. 62
“constitute his entire archive. He remains a fool.” (52) teddy “does not know about our ‘DU.’” (62) guardian spirit 63
“you would know it is not lost” (63)
I have tried, through a number of official papers, to keep the option of a withdrawal to my asylum here
—which is becoming increasingly difficult for
Germans to enter —open at all costs.” (52)
“I am certainly not one for exaggerated secrecy” (142) in reference to GAs
“sending joint letters” to WB
“ I ask you very urgently to destroy this letter immediately , it is intended purely for you and it would be a disaster if anyone else laid hands on it. P. 142
47

GA also worked in a bookshop and tried to sell WB’s books, but not one sold.
“Nor have I sold any of your books yet” (62) p. 62, 64
My sister, 4 who has been released from the camp, is here-in a rather precarious state.” (289)
4. Dora Benjamin had been a prisoner in the camp at Gurs. p. 290
Apparently Lisa Fittkow ever knew this.
GA as trash collector / archivist of TA, living a bare life:
Your books will be sent off soon the next few days; I enclose a copy of the list.1
Please send the Kierkegaard book back soon. . . . We have to find a space for furniture from two different cities, as well as vast numbers of books, sheet music and gramophone records in what is ultimately a rather small apartment. And then worst of all: Teddie’s unsorted papers, 4 boxes of rubbish.” (240)
This passage could go in chapter one, if only as a footnote.
1. It does appear to have survived. (241)
2. The Adornos had moved into the apartment at 290 Riverside Drive on 15
August. (241)
The carbon copy had slipped while Adorno was writing on the back of the paper, so that the mirror image of the text on the back imprinted itself between some of the lines on the front.” (234)
3. this letter has not survived.” (230)
4. 14 These have not survived. (226
48

5.
“My books” as keyword (216)
. . . in a future that is hopefully not too distant, flow into the bed of our shared presence” (154) (Strange ménage a trois metaphor)
“the duty of the book as a whole
.” (15)
The dialectical image does not replicate the dream . .. . a connection still needs to be developed, a dialectic conquered: that between the image and awakening.” (155)
Book publication (96) and the Chamber of Literature (run by the Nazis).
“I do not have my papers yet” (97)
John B. Thompson, Printing in the Digital Age
49

Buzz Spector: Unpacking My Library (1995), MOCA Installation
One of the more interesting show publications in MOCA's history, Unpacking My
Library's catalog is a 12 foot, accordion folded book showing an installation view of Spector's piece. This installation consists of: All the books in the artist's library, arranged in order of the height of spine, from tallest to shortest on a single shelf in a room large enough to hold them. While short on text, a brief quote from
Walter Benjamin and the artist's biography, it is still long, quite literally, on content. we can get to Perec’s
53 Days by turning to Benjamin’s “Unpacking My Library.”
Given our interest in WB and our interest in boxes, it would seem that we have to deal with “Unpacking.”
I think the essay makes a really interesti ng comparison with Perec’s novel
53
Days , which turns a novel into a serial sequence (days) and ends short. WB starts his essay as a story “I am unpacking my books is the first sentence, written the first person and present tense, already impossible since he is writing about unpacking, not writing and unpacking at the same time, and then ends, or nearly ends by saying he “ I am down to the last half of the last box.” The essay linearizes itself by novelizing itself, turning the essay into a story that ends at a time later than when it began. But the temporality of the unpacking story is marked only by the emptying of boxes, and the number of boxes and books is unspecified. We don’t know how far into the unpacking is when WB begins. So
50

there is a sequ ence, but it’s times are unspecified and measured in terms of the non-serialized number of books, which he says earlier he measures in inches
(the number of books he has on his book are measured not by the number of books but by their physical dimensions after being shelved together. Collecting involves an abstraction of he books from space and time in terms of their measurement. Anti-linear achronic kinds of time keep pulling against the linear time in the way that WB describes collecting as begin about order and disorder.
Some of the dialectical sentences also enact time reversals, like the one about irreplaceable books he has that were once acquirable. The logical sequence would be that they were once available when he bough them but not have become even more valuable because they are irreplaceable. But the meaning of
“irreplaceable” only becomes clear after you read the sentence a second time.
In addition to the weirdness already present in the story frame (which seems deceptively clear and reassuring),
Property and possessions belong to the tactical sphere. Collectors are people with a tactical instinct; their experience teaches them that when they capture a strange city, the smallest antique shop can be a fortress, the most remote stationary store a key position. How many cities have revealed themselves to me in the marches I undertook in the pursuit of books!
This was a militant age, when no book was allowed to enter without the certification that I had not read it. Thus I might never have acquired a library extensive enough to be worthy of the name we, if there had not been an inflation.
51

Suddenly the emphasis shifted; books acquired real value, or, at any rate, were difficult to obtain. At least this is how it looked in Switzerland. At the eleventh hour I sent my first major book orders from there and in this way was able to secure such irreplaceable items as Der Blaue Ritter and Bachofen’s
Sage von
Tanaquil , which could still be obtained from the publishers at that time.
I have made my most memorable purchases on trips, as a transient.
So here travel links to the transient to transience (sentience as disappearance).
A real library . . . is always somewhat impenetrable and at the same time uniquely itself.
One of the finest memories of a collector is the moment when he rescued a book to which might never have given a thought, much less a wishful look because he found it lonely and abandoned on the marketplace and bought it to give it its freedom
—the way a prince bought a beautiful slave girl in The Arabian Nights.
To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on the shelves.
A perfect line for us to return to reshelving
—acquisition is liberation form enslavement, but freedom in turn becomes a kind of incarceration ( as in Renais’s
Toute la memoire du monde ).
The story of the purchase of Balzac’s le peau de chagrin and Ritter’s Fragmente are a stories within the story of unpacking that become linear, following one after the other. So the essay moves between novelization (linearization), conceptual
52

abstraction of time of this novelization, and novelization (a fairly straightforward linear anecdotes) working I against the abstract toward the concrete.
WB’s description of the second book he bought .
After this had been repeated several times, I gave up all hope of acquiring the book which I was most interested in that day. It was the rare Fragmenete aus dem Nachlass eines Jungen Physikers [ Posthumous Fragments of a Young
Physicist ] which Johann Wilhelm Ritter published in two volumes at Heidelberg in1810. This work has never been reprinted, but I have always considered its preface, in which the author-editor tells the story of his life in the guise of an obituary for his supposedly deceased unnamed friend —with whom he is really identical
—as the most important sample of personal prose of German
Romanticism.
The book he wants most is a book with an uncanny narrative structure, the live author doubling himself as a dead object.
This kind of doubling is implicit in WB’s description of books: they are not singular, but plural.
WB’s discussion of the fringe areas of libraries, the stuff on the shelves that is not made up of books, is central to WB’s way of metaphorical animation of the library:
There is no living library that does not harbor a number of book like creations from fringe areas of the library, which become images through metaphor
(“prismatic”). They need not be stick-in albums or family albums, autograph
53

books or portfolios containing pamphlets or religious tracts; some people become attached to leaflets and prospectuses, others to handwriting facsimiles or typewritten copies of unobtainable books; and certainly periodicals can form the prismatic fringes of a library.
So the “living library” “harbors” a kind of bare life zone of documents within to which the collector has become attached. But the library needs a fringe, a prismatic fringe, a division between books and sort of books, in order to live.
These documents are reproductions but not copies. He writes earlier about the fate of the books that takes him back to where we see him in “Books by the
Mentally Ill”:
Habent sua fata libelli : these words may have been intended as a general statement about books. So books like the Divine Comedy, Spinoza’s Ethics, and
The Origin of Species have their fates. A collector, however, interprets this Latin saying differently. For him, not only books but also copies of books have their fates. And in this sense, the most important fate of a copy is its encounter with him, with his own collection.
Here we find an early moment of the library as uncanny space (as we discuss it in the first chapter). The difference between the earlier Mentally Ill essay and this one is now that it’s not the books that are encountered that matter but he copies, the doubles of the boo (as if the book had only one copy). This division is later subdivided between copies and reproductions in other media (transcriptions), facsimiles).
54

Along with the military metaphors, we can connect WB’s comments on children in
“Unpacking” to his essays on toys, the way children renew what they collect and also destroy it:
I am not exaggerating when I say that to a true collector the acquisition of an book is its rebirth. This is the childlike element which in a collector mingles wit the element of old age. For children can accomplish the renewal of existence in a hundred unfailing ways. Among children, collecting is only one process of renewal; other processes are the painting of objects, the cutting out of details [I call this destruction, like he toy train] —the whole range of childlike modes of acquisition, from touching things to giving them names. To renew the old world — that is the collector’s deepest desire when he is driven to acquire new things, and that is why a collector of older books is closer to the wellsprings of collecting than the acquirer of luxury editions.
There is a kind of salvific aspect of WB’s take on collecting—old age renews, like childhood, the new renews the old —but it’s not a Christian mode of redemption, for sure. It’s not a preservation fantasy. The last lines seem especially “Jewish”
(mystical) in that the library becomes a hidden hiding place out side of which WB remains out of plain sight.
For inside him there are spirits, or at least little genii, which have seen to it that for a collector —and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought to be— ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects, Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them. So I have erected one of his
55

dwellings with books as building stones, before you, and now he is going to disappear inside, as if only fitting.
“the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it it loses its personal owner.”
It follows that collecting is a process not only of personalization but of its loss, hence of depersonalization since collecting is on its way out, “this passion is behind the times”
Attachment isles to books than to the extra book / book like documents on the fringes of the library.
F inally, WB’ mixes childhood and old age (the collector is like a child and like an old person) and also fights a kind of non-violent war. Military metaphors start coming thick and fast
—acquiring is a tactical sphere” etc.
In disappearing, WB / collector does exactly what Arendt describes as being as a person
—he evades classification. You can’t reshelve him—he resists being read.
No society can properly function without classification, without an arrangement of things and men classes and prescribed typos. This necessary classification is the basis for all discrimination, and discrimination, present opinion to the contrary notwithstanding the trouble with everything Benjamin wrote was that it always turned out to be sui generis . Posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lost of the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to further classification. The point is that in society everybody must answer the question of who he is —which his role is and his function, and the answer of course can never be: I am unique, not
56

because of the implicit arrogance but because the answer would be meaningless. . . .
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations , 3
Thanks to the recent publica tion of his letters, the story of Benjamin’s life may now be sketched in broad outline; and it would be tempting indeed to tell as a sequence of such piles of debris since there is hardly any question that be himself viewed it in that way.
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations , 7
Insofar as the past has been transmitted as tradition, it possesses authority; insofar as authority presents itself historically, it becomes tradition. Walter
Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority that occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master. . .
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s
Illuminations , 38
The archive and tradition: “For tradition puts the past in order, not just chronologically but first of all systematically in that it separates the positive from the negative, the orthodox from the heretical, and which is obligatory and relevant from the mass of opinions and data. The collectors passion, on the other hand, is not only unsystematic but borders on the chaotic, not such because it is a passion as it is not primarily kindled by the quality of the object
— something that is classifiable —but is inflamed by its ‘genuineness’, its
57

uniqueness something that defies systematic classification. Therefore, while tradition discriminates, the collector levels all differences.”
Hannah Arendt, Introduction to WB’s Illuminations , 44
Recalled that the book Le Corbusier and the Occult and a chapter on he index card and generally wanted to look at it because I suspected Spieker caricatures
Le C. Yes, i was right, but, more useful for us than my being right (happy as I am to be, or think I am) is that the author of Le Corbusier and the Occult talks about
Le C archiving himself at the end of his career (business dried up). The argument is that Le C was into occult symbology that became recognizable to
Masons (as Le C derived it from eighteenth ct stuff) and was then proscribed by
Vichy. Le C rebranded his work patriotic and then got recognition by the
Gaullists after II and by the Resistance even during the Occupation.
Kind of a weird French version of National Treasure (or vice versa)--in National
Treasure, the U.S. Constitution (the actual document) has the code to the treasure in the film (the code is written on the back and all the Founding Fathers were Masons).
Jo Steffens, Ed.), Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books (2009)
What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture?
Unpacking My Library provides an intimate look at the personal libraries of twelve
58

of the world’s leading architects, alongside conversations about the significance of books to their careers and lives.
Photographs of bookshelves
—displaying well-loved and rare volumes, eclectic organizational schemes, and the individual touche s that make a bookshelf one’s own
—provide an evocative glimpse of their owner’s personal life. Each architect also presents a reading list of top ten influential titles, from architectural history to theory to fiction and nonfiction, that serves as a personal philosophy of literature and history, and advice on what every young architect, scholar, and lover of architecture should read.
An inspiring cross-section of notable libraries, this beautiful book celebrates the arts of reading and collecting.
Unpacking My Library: Architects and Their Books features the libraries of:
Stan Allen
Henry Cobb
Liz Diller & Ric Scofidio
Peter Eisenman
Michael Graves
Steven Holl
Toshiko Mori
59

Michael Sorkin
Bernard Tschumi
Todd Williams & Billie Tsien
The Dis/Appearance of Reading
the Dream of Book-Keeping
Peter Eisenman’s Recommended Titles:
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture
Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Andrea Palladio, The Four Books on Architecture
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake
William Faulkner, Light in August
About the Author
Jo Steffens is director of Urban Center Books and editor of Block by Block: Jane
Jacobs and the Future of New York City.
Product Details
60

Hardcover: 192 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (November 30, 2009) http://www.amazon.com/Unpacking-My-Library-Architects-
Their/dp/0300158939/ref=pd_sim_b_4
We are not taking about (pseudo)autobiography as a personal pathology of a particular author, then, but an effect or, more precisely, a “de/f/fect” in narrative when using the library or other archive as a database to process scattered materials through a filing system and then assemble them into a unified, linear form. In her book Files: Law and Media Technology , Cornelia Visman comments on problems German citizens faced gaining access to their the Stasi files (the
East German secret police) when these files were released shortly after the reunification of Germany in 1989. “The right of access to one’s records,” she writes, allows one to use the St asi files “for purposes of self-enlightenment in much the same way as keeping and reading a diary.” But, she quickly adds, this apparently neat equivalence between a autobiographical diary one writes and a biography written and recorded by the state creates an insurmountable problem of producing the complete story: because a clerk reads one’s file and decides which parts may be read or not by the person who requested the file, effectively tampering with it, the German Government, Viswan writes, fueled “the suspicion that the legible file is nothing but an inferior secondary text lacking the truly important pages. It does not contain the whole life. . . . one’s own story turns out to be illegible, something that can only be found in the complete file.” The file became, in the view of the person reading her of his possibly redacted file, an
61

envelope that “attract[ed] all kinds of phantasms” (156).
14
The Irony Thing
[I’m thinking one thing to sort out for us and also to motivate this turn to unreading and even to irony is to think through how negative our critique is, how insisting on the aporias of the archive [close to final section of the essay] produces a stronger historicism for being a resistant strain of historicism. The
Habeas Corpus section and perhaps even a bit on the passport would close out our intro by showing what our negative dialectics can deliver (by not delivering)
TO BE CUT OR Incorporated: the ending fits our notion of the book as being about metaphorology since at the end books become metaphorical, stones for the building in which the collector dwells. The last lines enact a split in Benjamin implicit in his impossible narration
(writing and unpacking at the same time, becoming only more clearly impossible at the en
—how could he have been unpacking as he wrote the essay?), WB splits the collector into a third person and a first person. In the last sentence,
62

about the collector disappearing, e WB becomes a displaced person through his collecting.
Although He and yet someone else dwell in the collection WB collects. WB does not himself live in his collection, like the collector. He builds the dwelling for the collector to dwell. The shift from “I to “he” in the last sentence is really quite awkward even as the disappearing act is elegantly performed.
The disappearance of the collector is also posed in the oft-cited line about the collector being comprehended only in his extinction.
I do know that I am running out for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio . But, as Hegel put, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.
The end of collecting is posed in terms of a metaphor of species extinction. But it’s a very dialectally tense sentence, traversed by acid irony that is really
Schleglian rather than Hegelian
—comprehension (knowledge of x when x has been completed but also over, lost, hence non-knowledge). This dialectical follows from the assertion that “collecting loses its meaning a it loses its personal owner.” The phrase seem to assert straightforward analogy, a corollary between collecting meaning, and personal ownership), when it really is about the selfnegating temporality of collecting, its drive toward loss of meaning and depersonalization even as it becomes increasingly personal. The dialectical tension is made more explicit in the following sentence: “Even though public
63

collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than p rivate collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.” Private collections have no use and no use value: objects (It’s interesting how WB shifts from books in particular to objects in general] get the way they do because they are totally private, without any exchange value either (though potentially it would seem they could be sold or traded). Ownership turns into a state of being: some things can be more deeply owned than others, and the more deeply they are owned, the less value they have, the more they tend to move toward disappearance.
It’s as if the entire essay were setting up the last lines starting with “O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure!”
The final turn to books as stones involves a kind of escape hatch for the writer / collector —he displaces himself through metaphor and is thereby able to disappear into his books, or perhaps almost literally into the book in which his essay appears —perhaps we can now read the line differently because the essay is in a book; the essay has taken on a self-referential function being now part of a book series (complete works) on shelves in various libraries. In any case, the collector, WB, can disappear only by building and welling for another collector to disappear in
—so WB remains outside the life and the collector lives in books. He lives barely outside the box, the dwelling, in a position of extimacy (to him own collection). In this sense, he survives, perhaps.
This kind of exteriorization and interiorization of the collector (WB and not WB, I and he, inside dwelling and outside the dwelling) operates as a kind of spectralization or virtualization of WB
64

The Reckoning
Restliness in Peace (R.I.P.)
How Do we Reckon with Benjamin’s Last Things?
Homo Sacer pp. 112-13 when Benjamin to distance Benjamin, give him a send off, by turning Bataille into a fascist. Schmitt
Irrational, absurd, expenditure, Surrealism; Bataille is a double figure —he presents one story about sovereignty and in Agamben’s hands a crypto-fascist aesthetic, but on the other, he has this role as a repository, as a collector, and as
Benjamin’s for the archives and Perec as another librarian. Bataille becomes a revolving door for these kids of issues he ends being a sort a not unproblematic figure but we don’t need to dirty him in order to clean up Benjamin. Bataille is indeed a weird figure, but Schmitt is even more so, and so the Critique of
Violence and Schmitt Political Theology both seem so problematic. A real
Marxist would say that the real problem with capitalism is that there is a rational impulse within its tools of rationalization when in fact there ‘s another model of the complete irrationality of capitalism.
Fittkow’s account of surviving bare life, what you bank on this is the absurdity and rationality of your situation; acts of complete charity, the confusion that is
65

generated permits survival for some at the expense of others. Fittkow and her husband give themselves to but WB resists, as a simply to exist, so an emphatic exaggerated politeness towards things. Doubleness of WB in angel and WB looking away from the audience; Klee’s angel looking over the viewer’s shoulder —end of “Song and Glance” in Sam Weber, Fittkow misrecognizes as
WB being out of it, distracted. Fittkow sees him as disabled (as he were crosseyed) while Weber sees him as abled (as if hwere a visionary) because he can see double, whereas for us is the doubleness enables another revolving door toward resistance and redemption, an ability to seeing sideways (even on one way street s) that necessarily has limitations, since he couldn’t see straight
(always getting high).
Benjamin and Bataille are both revolving doors. The revolving door has intervals, or breaks (it’s actually four doors, right?), and it may get stuck, especially if people enter it too quickly. But it never just stops; like the carousel, which speeds up slows down, kids get off and other kids get on, the revolving door keeps turning.
Redeeming for us is a getting things out of hoc, like a pawnshop —get out of hoc, getting ad hoc. Ad hoc reading; it should not be systematic.
Bataille on prehistoric returns us to Benjamin (rescue operation of mss from library) as Surrealist / Benjamin as Surrealist, and we may, if only in an endnote, point out the importance of library research to Surrealism and of Surrealism to
WB and to GB.
66

The final box in an endnote would be the document dossier e/f/fect of “base materialism” that informs the “formless” debate between Bois and Did-Huberman.
That would be the last endnote.
Being friends with the librarian in the Bibliothèque National
July 13, 2007
Lorcan Dempsey
Categories: Books, movies and reading ... • The cultural and scholarly record
There is a passage in a letter from Walter Benjamin to Theodor Adorno where he suggests removing a reference to Georges Bataille from a document. Bataille, in addition to his other accomplishments, was a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Benjamin writes:
And in this way my own relationship with Georges Bataille will not be adversely affected either, something I would like to maintain, both because of his assistance at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and because of my plans for naturalization. - The fragment would not escape his attention since the Institute journal is openly displayed in the reading room where he often works; and he is hardly the type of person to react serenely to its contents. [Theodor W Adorno and Walter
Benjamin. The complete correspondence, 1928-1940. p. 276]
I was reminded of this passage as I read Jeremy Harding's discussion in the current London Review of Books of Walter Benjamin's 'last day' before his death in 1940 while trying to flee to the US.
67

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n14/hard01_.html
Benjamin had left various papers, including the manuscript of his
Arcades Project, with Bataille for safe-keeping. Bataille hid them in the library. The Arcades Project is a massive unfinished work, a weaving of quotations and Benjamin's own text.
So the library comes in at three levels. At one, it is important for the scholar to keep in with the librarian ;-) At a second, the librarian receives a manuscript on the eve of flight and keeps it safely in the library from where it is retrieved and published. At a third, is it possible to imagine a book which rests so much on quotations without the libraries which preserve the scholarly and cultural record the quotations point to and make it available to readers?
Through the Trapdoor
Jeremy Harding
The Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman
Most of the expatriates in France who had to run for their lives in
1940 made for Marseille, which had working consulates, maritime companies and smuggling networks. The people in the greatest danger were anti-Fascist Germans and Jews of any political persuasion, followed by assorted individuals who had blotted their copybooks in a
68

manner the Gestapo was sure to ascertain or invent. ‘Human trafficking’ had become the order of the day and remained so, long after the hope of leaving by boat had turned out, for most, to be illusory.
The Narrow Foothold, a 16-page memoir, opens in Marseille, where
Carina Birman was waiting in September 1940 to get out of the country.
Birman had been the legal adviser at the Austrian Embassy in Paris until the Anschluss, when it was shut down. She seems to have remained in Paris and become involved in a human trafficking scam of her own, helping ‘undesirables’ out of Europe on visas obtained from the
Mexican Consulate.
When she heard from some new arrivals in Marseille that her name featured high on a list of people wanted by the Germans, Birman prepared to leave immediately. That evening, she and her sister Dele, accompanied by two friends, Grete Freund and Sophie Lippmann, caught a train along the coast to Perpignan and an overnight connection that brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’ who said the y were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her friends followed suit and met someone in the mairie
– she doesn’t say whether it was the mayor – who offered to show them a safe way over the mountains to Spain. If Birman’s memory is reliable, this would
69

have been 24 or 25 September. In the afternoon, Birman and one of her party made a two-hour reconnaissance trip with their guide. He pointed out the route and advised them to take a bearing on a large cross which they would see a little further along, when they made the journey in earnest. It all seemed straightforward, if a little nerve-racking, and Birman returned to Banyuls. The four women left the following morning at first light.
Lisa Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day.
Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist, born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the 1930s, more or less on the run with her husband, Hans. They had been in Switzerland, France and Holland before returning once more to France. The Fittkos had both been victims of
French internment policy, which was alread y ‘concentrating’ Spanish
Republican refugees in camps early in 1939. With the Hitler-Stalin
Pact and the onset of the Phoney War in the autumn, they were among many thousands of German-speaking non-nationals detained by the authorities. Hans was in central France at a camp in Vernuche; Lisa was near the Pyrenees in a ‘women’s camp’ in Gurs, which had been holding refugees from Spain. (Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora were also interned at Gurs, while Benjamin had spent
70

several weeks in Vernuche.) As the Germans advanced deeper into France and the administration reeled, evasion or negotiated exit became a brief possibility: many people, including the Fittkos, got out of the camps. Hans and Lisa Fittko were to remain in France until the end of
1941, in contact though separated for much of the time. In their year of clandestinity, they worked as successful agents enabling refugees to escape through Spain. Both were in contact with the Emergency
Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young
American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including
Chagall, Ernst and Arendt.
Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in
Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly impossible, but she also understood the uses of the city. Here, prospective refugees could assemble the paperwork to get them through
Spain and from there to Portugal, which no one could enter without proof of an onward-bound journey: a boat ticket from Lisbon or a visa issued by a third country. Varian Fry had a friendly US vice-consul who granted hundreds of visas breaching State Department norms. Thomas
Cook, Fittko remembers, were issuing bogus transatlantic tickets to help people on their way – at 200 francs a shot – and the Chinese were selling entry permits at 100 francs. Birman and her friends had visas for Mexico. What nobody who needed to get out of France could lay hands on was an exit permit; whence the necessity of a stealthy
71

departure and therefore of a Pyrenean route.
Fittko had already been to the mayor’s office in Banyuls by the time
Birman looked in. She had met the mayor himself, a man called Azéma, who was well disposed to the refugees: he’d given her some provisions and a map of the route over the mountains. That evening, walking back to Port Vendres, her new base about four miles from Banyuls, Fittko was in high spirits: ‘Milk and vegetables, and above all a new, safe border route. I remember . . . the incredibly blue sea and the mountain chain, on its slopes green vineyards with a hint of gold between them, and a sky as blue as the sea.’ It was France as she’d not had occasion to see it before. It extended south beyond the bays and on to the shores of the Maghreb, over the Rif mountains, across the desert and down into sub-Saharan Africa, as far as the northern banks of the Congo: the westerly edge of a grand imperium, already undermined by one world war and destined to crumble under the pressure of another.
The passage Azéma favoured was known as the ‘Lister route’. Recoiling from the Phalangist victory, Enrique Lister, one of the Republic’s senior military officials – also a committed Stalinist – had fled up this defile in 1939 on his way into exile in the Soviet Union. (Twenty years later he was in Cuba, advising Fidel on the formation of his
Revolutionary Defence Committees.) The advantage of the route, as
Azéma explained to Fittko, was that for large parts of the way, it was
72

secluded by canopies of rock. Fittko had done well to establish such a dependable lead so quickly. A few days later, Walter Benjamin arrived on her doorstep in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US
Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted her to help him escape through Spain.
Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not, but it includes the most recent of many last words about Benjamin’s death, a death on which, for his admirers, so much seems to hang that it, too, seems suspended: symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christian messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture. In a ritual sense, Benjamin
’s death is closer to
Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice. Yet in the likeness of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not with the misdemeanours of his people on his head – ‘all their iniquities in all their sins’ – but their innocence. At the same time, he is tagged with a prophetic forecast of the impending cataclysm in
Europe and the terrible numbers of dead that few could really foresee
(probably not even Fittko, who claimed never to have kept count of the people she led to safety in those early days, still less how many were
Jewish). As for Birman, she was deeply preoccupied with her own small
73

contingent. Her memoir elides a lot of detail; it can be infuriatingly opaque; it is published with a wealth of footling apparatus, including a photo of the publisher pottering around on the road overlooking the town where Benjamin died. Nevertheless, it is an authentic, pre-mythological fragment from a site strewn with the litter of interested pilgrims and dunned to the substrate by regiments of
Benjamin archaeologists. What it amounts to, and where it fits in, depends on what we make of other sources, Fittko in particular, and our readiness to go over this dreadful story yet again.
Benjamin would set out for the border with two other people, Henny
Gurland and her teenage son, Joseph (or José), on what was, according to Fittko, 26 September 1940, though others have it as the 25th. There was an orientation t rip the day before, like Birman’s, which involved a visit to the mayor’s office in Banyuls followed by a walk up through the vineyards in the direction of the frontier. Even this reconnaissance was trying for Benjamin, and when the time came to turn back, he refused, preferring to remain up in a clearing overnight. It was obvious to Fittko that he didn’t mean to exhaust himself by doing the first leg of the journey three times instead of once; despite her apprehensions she left him. Early the next morning Fittko and the
Gurlands set out again, making their way with the grape-pickers. When they reached the clearing, ‘Old Benjamin’, as Fittko called him, ‘sat up and looked at us amiably’. She was alarmed by the dark red spots
74

around his eyes and took them to indicate the onset of something fatal, ‘a heart attack perhaps’. In fact the dew had caused the dye to run from the rims of his spectacles. ‘The colour rubs off when they get wet,’ he explained, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Old
Benjamin was a very advanced 48, with a promising future behind him and a number of medical problems, including lung trouble and a heart condition.
Fittko describes the little party striking out at a steady pace, she and Joseph taking turns to carry Benjamin’s black briefcase. Much later, when people asked her if she knew, or he’d said, what it contained, she was impatient. He was carrying a very important manuscript, worth more in his eyes than his own life, as he’d intimated, but that was as far as it went. Fittko was a militant people-smuggler on her first run, not a scholar or literary hanger-on.
‘For better or worse,’ she said of Benjamin’s luggage, ‘we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.’ She also called it ‘his ballast’. It’s likely, given the importance attached to it, that she embellished her memoir
– and indeed her memory – to make more of the mysterious briefcase. Rolf Tiedemann, co-editor of the Suhrkamp seven-volume Gesammelte Schriften, speculated that its contents might have included a copy of the Theses on the Philosophy of History; the
Harvard editors of the Selected Writings say the same. In any event, the manuscript, along with the bag and whatever else it contained,
75

crossed the frontier and promptly disappeared.
On the journey, Benjamin kept up a r outine of several minutes’ walking followed by a minute’s rest. ‘I can go all the way to the end using this method,’ he told Fittko. The trick, he added, was to pause
‘before I’m exhausted’. The going was tough and Fittko was struck by
Benjamin’s will power and courtesy. He was a model compared with some of the fusspots she’d later deliver to safety. She remembers resting up, eating ‘a piece of bread I’d bought with bogus food stamps’ and pushing the tomatoes across to Benjamin, who’d asked: ‘By your leave, gnädige Frau, may I serve myself?’ That’s how it was, she says, with
‘Old Benjamin and his Spanish court etiquette’.
In Fittko’s account there is no mention of Birman’s group. Fittko gets her party to the high point of the climb, surveys the coast and feels sure they’re inside Spain: the moment has come for her to retrace her steps but instead she decides to continue a little longer and only turns back when she’s seen the village of Portbou below in the distance. During this first attempt to lead people across she was naturally keen to take a look around. Fittko’s group, it seems, must have caught up with the other party at – or near – the summit, where
Birman was in deep dejection. Recalling her guide’s instruction to steer by a large hilltop cross, she was sitting on the ground, trying in vain to match her hand-drawn map to a landscape of hilltops dotted with crosses.
76

‘In the meantime,’ she remembered, ‘we were joined by an elderly gentleman, a younger female and her son.’ She describes her new acquaintance, who had failed so brilliantly to impress the German academy, as ‘a university professor named Walter Benjamin’. Perhaps it was Benjamin’s admirable unworldliness and civility that evoked the faculty gown: a figure alert in mind and spirit, even if his physique was no match for this crossing. He was, Birman says, ‘on the point of having a heart attack. The strain of mountain climbing on an extremely hot September day . . . was too much for him . . . We ran in all directions in search of some water to help the sick man.’
While the Birman party and the university professor’s trio aimed for what they took to be the nearest customs post, Fittko was retracing her steps. She had taken ten hours to climb from Banyuls to the
Spanish border with the Gurlands – it was fewer for Benjamin, who’d slept up in the clearing – but she made it back in two. She was basking in her first triumph, delighted with the route and
– this has an air of embellishment – gratified to think that ‘Old Benjamin and his manuscript are safe n ow . . . on the other side of the mountains.’
Had Portbou remained a quiet fishing community it might never have been bombed by Italian aircraft during the Civil War, but it became a strategic railway station at the end of the 1920s and was still badly damaged when the refugees arrived. On announcing themselves to the authorities, they were told they’d be returned to France the following
77

day. Birman was mortified: evidently they should have gone through the formalities at an earlier point of entry, which they must have missed; their contact in Banyuls had warned against this eventuality. Birman’s neck ‘was seized by a big male hand’. She was ‘turned around and commanded by a stocky man to follow him closely’. Her destination was the Fonda de Francia, a hotel in Portbou where she and the others were placed under garde à vue. It was a watering hole for special services, including the Gestapo (in those days undercover as shipping agents), informers and spooks from both sides of the border.
Birman says that they all had to double up except for Benjamin, who got ‘a room for himself: his companion with son another place, Sophie and I a room, and my sister and Grete Freund a small cell’. The situation could not have been worse, yet there was a trapdoor somewhere in this despair and Birman fell through it when she and
Sophie Lippmann decided that the gold coins they’d brought with them should now be used to pay someone
– anyone – to intercede on their behalf with the authorities. Lippmann felt the ‘hotel warden’ might be biddable and predictably enough, when she went to look for him, he was ready to help.
On her return she told Birman that she’d heard a ‘loud rattling from one of the neighbouring rooms’. Birman went to investigate and found
Benjamin ‘in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition’. He told her he could not go back to the border
78

and would not move out of the hotel. She said there was no alternative and he disagreed: ‘He hinted that he had some very effective poisonous pills with him. He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him, observing the time constantly.’ This ‘big golden grandfather watch’ was perhaps a pocket watch; and if so, surely the one he’d consulted earlier in the day to ration the pauses during his heroic, debilitating ascent. Birman told him about the attempted bribe and urged him to hold off. ‘He was very pessimistic’ and thought the odds were way too long. A little later, Henny Gurland came into the room and Birman left. There were several visits by a local doctor who bled the patient and administered injections, but if Birman was aware of this, she doesn’t say so. She takes it to be a clear case of suicide. ‘The next morning,’ she writes, ‘we heard that he had succeeded and was no more amongst us.’
Birman committed her story to paper in 1975. She was by then a successful lawyer in New York. Published now, 11 years after her death, it is in a slightly dubious sense the breaking news about events in Portbou on the night of 26 September 1940. It leaves a few odds and ends to consider. First, the reminders: Benjamin, who had probably linked up with Gurland in Marseille, left her a note before he lost consciousness. She memorised it, destroyed it as a precaution and relayed its contents to Adorno once she’d got through Spain. ‘In a
79

situation presenting no way out,’ she remembers it saying, ‘I have no other choice but to make an end of it.’ She also wrote to her husband around the same time, mentioning the Birman party and describing the journey to Portbou as ‘an absolutely horrible ordeal’. Later, at various points in their lives, she and her son – and Greta Freund – commented to the best of their abilities on the circumstances of
Benjamin’s death, but none could really explain the anomalies, to do with timings mostly, that arose from the doctor’s notes, the death certificate and the burial, recorded on one day in the church register and another in the municipal file.
The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who
Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil empire, suggested that Benjamin may have been murdered by agents of Stalin. It’s an opportunistic long shot, based on the premise of
Fascist-Stalinist co-operation in the mopping-up of Catalonia for the duration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. If there must be a hidden hand, it’s likelier to be the Gestapo’s. In several published essays
Benjamin had advertised his contempt for National Socialist culture and ideology (‘the fusion of the nationalist idea with racial madness’) far more widely than his misgivings about the Soviet Union.
80

Neither partisan view of Benjamin as the object of a specific hatred gets us through the mire of old animosities onto the dependable ground of record.
Mauas’s cagey, unsensational film depicts a little town with more than its share of Phalangist satisfaction in the wake of the Civil War, inimical to the sans nationalités coming over from France and infiltrated by German intelligence. Worrying obscurities cloud the medical record and even the identity of the doctor in attendance. Two doctors were practising in Portbou, according to the residents interviewed by Mauas, and somewhere in the disputatious memory of these local elders is the suggestion that a Fascist sympathiser ministered to Benjamin but that another – allegiance less clear – later completed and signed off the paperwork in his colleague’s absence. Sinister as it seems, this may simply be a function of the duty roster in a small town. In any case Mauas steadfastly refuses to assert that Benjamin was eliminated.
The Narrow Foothold is yet more anecdotal evidence in favour of
Gurland’s testimony, the only intimate testimony until now that Walter
Benjamin committed suicide. It also enables us to look more coldly at the notion that Benjamin had been specially targeted by the Nazis and that this fact was connected with the detention of the refugees in
Portbou: simply, once Benjamin was out of the picture, killed perhaps, dead in any case, there was no longer a reason to return the others to
81

France. But if so, why was Birman, who tells us her name was ‘nearly topping’ a German hit list, permitted to go on her way? Conspiracy theory gets one large truth more or less right, but only inadvertently: what happened to Walter Benjamin was essentially a kind of execution, even if he’d decided to serve as delegate executioner.
Cloak and dagger plots in which low-level killers administer lethal doses of contingency detract from this point.
Birman was misled about the importance of finding the ‘first’ customs post: first, second or third was of no consequence. If there’s anything as famous about Benjamin’s death as the briefcase, it’s the fact that at the time he crossed, Spanish officials had been ordered to turn back refugees – anyone sans nationalité, as Henny explained it in her letter to her husband
– and that this order was enforced for a day or so, then set aside, or ignored, immediately afterwards. It was
Benjamin’s timing that was fatal: Arendt called it ‘an uncommon stroke of bad luck’. Much has been said about this, but Momme Brodersen’s remark, in his 1996 biography of Benjamin, is the one that lingers in the mind: ‘It is hard not to ask whether . . . Benjamin’s death was
“preventable”, “unnecessary”, though these are unanswerable, pointless questions. Hundreds of others were dying, unnecessarily, anonymously, on the borders; millions were to die with no border in sight.’
The following day was probably more distressing to Birman than the night before. News of Benjamin’s death, she implies, reached her in
82

the morning, though if the medical record is halfway true he may have been lying in a coma. She recalls a bustle of activity around the hotel telephone: ‘All kinds of personalities were reached and asked for assistance.’ (Research done in Portbou and Figueres by Ingrid and
Konrad Scheurmann in the 1990s turned up evidence of four billed phone calls, totalling 8.80 pesetas. They think it likely that the exchange would have tried the number of the US consul in Barcelona.) The warden was serving coffee to Birman, her sister Dele, Sophie Lippmann and
Greta Freund when two policemen arrived and announced that they’d all have to return to the border and pick up entry visas. They left under escort and made the ascent in a couple of hours. The only sign of a customs point was a weather-beaten phone booth. The frontier itself consisted of a rope and beyond the rope an ominous, bored assortment of goons, French and German. The Spanish gendarmes turned back, pointing out how honourably th ey’d refrained from untying the rope and delivering them back into Vichy. They even left some coins for the refugees to use in the phone booth: they should phone through, they advised, to the police at Portbou, requesting permission to set foot on the Span ish soil they’d been pacing in such desolation for the better part of 24 hours.
There we were sitting on rocks and burnt-out slopes. We were so depressed that we did not even notice that the sky was becoming darker and darker, although it was early in the afternoon. A thunderstorm!
83

No, a rainstorm . . . We weighed our possibilities. There was only one direction with uncertain issue, all the others meant death. So we decided to return to Spain. There was no hope of walking down. There were no passable tracks any more, one could only sit on stones and try to glide down.
They slithered back to Portbou under driving rain and arrived at the police station around six in the evening. The captain of the guard thrust some papers in Birman’s pocket, told her their visas were in order and advised them to leave before dark. He waved them on for a baggage inspection, which they survived with their gold intact. The
‘hotel-keeper’, presumably the guardian Sophie had met the night before, was watching eagerly, and once they were through he demanded the promised reward. ‘Her offer had worked,’ Birman says, ‘even in our absence . . . he must have communicated with the police captain to rescind his previous order,’ but too late to stop them being marched back to the frontier. Once the gold was handed over, everything changed. The refugees were escorted to the Fonda de Francia as guests, rather than prisoners, and a lavish spread was prepared.
Before they began the meal the lights went off and a priest led a procession of monks through the dining room, carrying candles and chanting a mass. They climbed the staircase to the first floor.
We were told they had come from a neighbouring monastery to say a requiem at the death bed of Prof. Benjamin and to bury him. We had
84

quite forgotten this most unfortunate occurrence during last night, and although we knew Mr Benjamin to have been Jewish, we made no remark and left this declaration to his lady companion. She never said anything of the kind and let them take the body of the defunct.
The refugees’ clothes were set out to dry, they retired for a brief rest, and well after dark in a pummelling thunderstorm they were taken to catch the night train to Barcelona.
‘Benjamin Walter’, dead not from a morphine overdose but from a
‘cerebral haemorrhage’, was buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery at Portbou, Roman anathema regarding Jews and suicides having been neatly circumvented by the reversal of names on the death certificate and by the given cause of death. The body lay in a niche with a five-year lease. On her way through Portbou not long afterwards, Arendt failed to identify the niche with any certainty.
The gold probably tipped the scales in Birman’s favour, notwithstanding her all-round resourcefulness. If her story is true, it migh t have held out hope for Benjamin too. But Birman’s ‘professor’ was not a believer. Early in life he’d got out of gold – turning away from the path indicated by his family’s wealth – and into a pure, non-remunerative form of work, perhaps best thought of as the investigation of modernity: a cornucopia of social production and, as he envisaged it, a nearly miraculous condition of the kind you might come to understand after long study of an infant prodigy capable of
85

grand engineering schemes, precocious feats of reasoning, high poetic utterance, generosity of spirit and a cruelty that knew no bounds. The
European culture that Benjamin loved had the infernal vigour of the child genius, even though, in his reflections on the Second Empire, he could also discern the outlines of the ageing hag. Living on modest means, he did as much in his century for the discursive essay as
Montaigne had done in his, though he was better placed, historically, not just to think about the world, but to try to say how the world thought back. Unlike his father, an auctioneer, rentier and speculator, Benjamin at 48 had a universe to offer but very little to transact, in life or on the point of dying, and so on his last journey he took the cash he could muster and the few articles he rightly considered essential: an obscure manuscript, a pocket watch and enough morphine ‘to kill a horse’, as Koestler had described it after their meeting in Marseille. Gold was not part of this crude survival kit, which provided for dispatch rather more than salvation. Benjamin may have been devoted to memory and posterity, but he had very little intellectual or moral interest in the road ahead
– his or anybody else’s. ‘We know,’ he wrote in the last of his aphorisms on ‘Messianic time’ in the Theses, ‘that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.’
Birman and her sister were shocked by Madrid, ‘a city half destroyed
86

by the Civil War’, but they were able to look in at the Prado, ‘the one luxury on our flight’. The group reached Lisbon on 1 October and in due course they all left on visas, separately, for the Americas.
Birman travelled on the Nyassa, an old and overcrowded schooner, formerly German and now Portuguese, in a state of anxiety about the possibility of being hailed and searched by a Uboat, ‘as an examination of papers and a selection of passengers to be taken off was unavoidable’. The ship’s engines stopped and for several days there was no movement. Finally, on 4 December 1940, the Nyassa entered
New York harbour. ‘We were all on deck,’ Birman wrote, ‘with tears of emotion in our eyes.’
Italian horror / science fiction film based upon the Richar d novel http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000627.html
Indeed, many curators will feel about their collections the way that
Benjamin felt about his.
O'Toole talked of the fate of library books, of how they create a shared experience:
Books, like their authors, have biographies, they have passed through other hands. The private experience you are having is one that is also shared.
87

Books live in the lives of their readers. Readers also live in the lives of their books. And, in the libraries that he is talking about,
I always thought that the mark of very good library staff was that they understood their collections based on the readers in the life of the book, but also understood their readers based on the books in the life of the reader.
So books, and copies of books, have an aura. They bear testimony to their lives and the lives of their users and owners. They may assume significance as part of a collection. They may be annotated or otherwise significantly marked.
However, to come back to my original point. For many books the aura of the copy is low and the ability to transmit the content in new forms may be welcome. That does not mean, of course, that for some books, the user will be drawn back to the artifact, even when it itself is a mechanical reproduction. http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/000623.html
Some books get left behind in manuscript, even if passports
88

89 become less restrictive. Benjamin records the loss by failing to give the author or title of the unpublished manuscript that is not yet a book, instead tabling its contents as if he were hoping it and others like it might thereby slip by the passport controls of the biblio-polis. Reading as refiling / reshelving becomes a way of living bare life virtually as the archive allows for new kinds of self-storage (reading yourself in what you and how you store and are stored).
Burning
--Walter Benjamin, “The
Storyteller”
Understanding the objective conditions of his fate gave him the strength to rise above it; the strength permitted him, even in

1940 and doubtless thinking of his death, to formulate his theses on the concept of history. Only by sacrificing life did Benjamin become the spirit that lived the idea of a way of life without victims.
--Theodor Adorno, Benjamin the Letter Writer,” in
Notes to
Literature Vol. 2, (239) 15
Every book of value plays with its readers.
--Theodor Adorno, “Bibliographical Musings,” Notes to Literature, vol. 2 (25) 16
Juxtapose with WB on the story teller burning.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/05/
10/100510crat_atlarge_gladwell
90

In Preface (dated Novemerb 1842 and signed Editor, p. 15)to Either / Or,
Kierkegaard acts out a writing desk fantasy of Kittler’s.
91

92

93

The Good European writing des tour book is like a Typerwriter Ribbing essay.
Retracing (like Raul hilbergs contact withhe paper, or Robert Darnton on conact with papers int eh archive or Carolyn Steadman Nad Bill Serhman on dust in teharchive.
Writing desk Kittler on the desk and the double
For the sake of order, it Is probably best to tell first how I happened to ocme into possession of these appers It is now about seven years since I spotted ina a secondhand shop here in the city a writing desk that immediatelyatracted my attention. It was nto a modern piece of wor, had beenused considerably, and yet it captivated me. It is
94

impossible for me to explain the basis of this impression, but most people presumably have had a similar experience during their lives. .. . . My heart pounded when I wenrt into the shop. I bought it and paid for it. This is the last time you are going to be so produigal, I thought. In fact, it is really lucky that you did buy it, for every time you look at it you will be remnded of how prodigal you were; witht this desk commencesa new period in your ife, Ah, desire is very eloquent, and good intentions are always on hand.
The writing desk was set up in my apartment, and just as in the first phase of my infatuation I had my pleasure in gazing at it from the street, so now Iwalked by it her at home. Graually I learned howto know its numerous features, its many drawers and compartments, and in ever respect I was happy with my desk (4; 5
Iopened thedesk to pull out the money drawer and take what happened to be at ahdn. But the drawer would not budge. Every expedient was futile. It was a most calamitous situation. To run into such difficulties at te very moment when the coachman’s enticing tomes were still rnging inmy ears! . . I was furious. . . . A hatchet was fetched. I gave the desk a terrible blow with it. Whether in my rage I aimed wrong or the drawer was just as stubborn as I, the result was not what was intended. The drawer was shut. And the drawer stayed shut. But something else happened. . . a secret door that I haad never noticed before sprung open. Hthis door closed offa compartment that I obviously had not disocovered. Here, to my great amazement, I founda mass of papers, the papers that constitute the contents of the present pulication. . . . In he greteest haste,a mahongony box that usually contained a pair of pistols was emptied and the papers deposited in it. ..
My servant accompanied me with the mahaghonybox. (6)
The seocndhad dealer did nto keep records, which , as is commonly known, is rarely case with secondhand dealers; he did not know from whom he had purchased that piece of furniture. (11-12)
Kierkegaard on the lost manuscript in the desk that is about another lost manuscript.
Comes to decide to write a review based on a reshelving, assembly method
Tells the story of how he came to write the review of a play by the “Scribe” entitled The
First Love , how it remained in his head, but an editor of a journal approached him and asked him to provide him with an article. Kierkegaard promised he would deliver.
This promise, then, was also an occasion, but it was an occasion in general and therefore had only a slightly enabling effect upon me. I found myself in the awkward situation like that in which a theological candidate would find himself if he were given the whole Bible form which to choose his own text. But I thought I was committed by my promise. With many other thoughts also the thought of my promise, I took a little excursion in Sjaelland.
When I arrived at the post house where I had planned to spend the night, I did what I never fail to fo—had the servant belong whatever books the innkeeper could assemble. I was observe this custom and have often benefited from by it, because quite accidentally one comes upon things that otherwise might escape one’s attention. But that was not the case here, for the first book brought to me was— The First Love . This amazed me , since out in the country the Theater Repetoire is seldom found. But I had lose faith in the first love and believe no more I the first. In the next town, I visited one of my friends. He was
95

out when I arrived. Walking over to his desk, I found the book lying open—it was
Scribe’s plays, opened to Les Premieres amours . Now the die seemed cast. I decided to write a review of this play. Either / Or vol. 1 243-44
The sophistry consists in this, that the category of the first is supposed to be a qualitative and a numerical category simultaneously. Either / Or vol. 1 254
Now, having seen through the contriving heart of that corrupt man, when I recall the situation now, with my eyes opened to all the cunning, so to speak, when I approach that drawer, I feel the same way a policeman must feel when he enters a forger’s room, goes trough his things, and finds a mass of loose papers in a drawer, specimens of handwriting; on one there is a little decorative design, on another monogram, on a third a line of reversed writing. It readily sows him that he is on the right track, and his delight over this is mixed with a certain admiration for the effort and diligence obvious here.
Since I am less accustomed to detecting crimes and a, not armed with a policeman’s badge, I would have reacted differently. I would have felt the double weight of the truth that I was on an unlawful path. At that time I lacked ideas as much as I lacked words, which is usually the case. One is awestruck by an impression until reflection once again breaks loose with multifarious deft movements talks and insinuates its way to terms with the unknown stranger. The more developed reflection is, the more quickly it can collect itself; like a passport officer checking foreign travelers, it comes to be so familiar with the sight of the most fabulous characteristics that it is not easily taken aback.
Either / Or Vol. 1 The Seducer’s Diary, 303-04
In the same sense it could be said that his journey through life was undetectable (for his feet were formed in such a way that he retained the footprint und them—that is how I best picture to myself his infinite reflectedness into himself), in the same sense no victim fell before him. He lived too intellectually to be a seducer n the ordinary sense. (307)
Even his affair with Cordelia was so intricate that it was possible for him to appear as the one seduced—indeed, even the unhappy girl can at times be perplexed on this score; and then, too, his footprints here are so indistinct that any proof is impossible. Either / Or vol. 1 (308)
All that remained was only to give these papers a title. I could call them Papers,
Posthumous Papers, Found Papers, Lost Papers, etc. There is, of course, a multiplicity of variations, but none of these titles satisfied me.
Either / Or Vol. 1 Preface, 13
96

The last of A’s papers is a narrative titled “The Seducer’s Diary.” Here we meet new difficulties, inasmuch as A does not declare himself the author but only the editor. This is an old literary device to which I would not have much to object of it did not further complicate my own position, since one author becomes enclosed within the other like the boxes in a Chinese puzzle. (8-9)
But what my barber could not recall without emotion was that through untimely death Denmark should lose the most gifted philosopher it had. The man is now forgotten. Many people perhaps do not know he ever lived. His name is Niels
Rasmussen, and he was a contemporary of the three great philosophers. He had conceived the eminent idea that all European philosophy might unite around the Danish, and this again around philosophy. To that end he worked energetically on a subscription plan: but the work took all of his strength to the extent that he died of overexhaustion. If, said my barber, if his subscription plan had been finished, if the work it heralded had been finished, if it had been read, if it had been translated, if it had had been understood by the European philosophers, then without any doubt the hopeful Niels Rasmussen would have brought Denmark to the heights it does not occupy even in this moment. But — he died.
Either / Or , 506-07I got to know Erich Auerbach rather intimately about three or four years after his death in 1957. . . . Auerbach did not seem to possess many manuscripts of his scholarship; we never found that one unpublished article or note that I fantasized turning up late on a winter’s afternoon just before our ritual coffee. In my imagination it would have been unfinished and Mrs. Auerbach
97

would naturally ask me to complete and publish it--The Yale Review ? The
Kenyon Review ? In the way of oneric musings I never contemplated the problem of language. Would I have translated it into English first? But there was nothing.
What he had left were offprints carefully labeled Handexemplar and filled with notes in the margins, between lines, sometimes with interleaved passages in the margins, between lines, sometimes with interleaved ages of writing. These he obviously intended to republish as reworked articles. Others he would label emphatically: Nicht wiederzuveroeffentilichchen ! It appeared that he spent a good deal of time reviewing his publications, less in order to modify the theoretical or methodological postulates than to argue particular points more subtly or, more often, to bring in new supporting examples.
Stephen G. Nichols, “Philology in Auerbach’s Drama of (Literary) History,” in
Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach , ed Seth Lerer (Stanford UP, 1996, 63; 64)
Perhaps put Kierkegaard in.
17
Won’t do fiction, The Aspern papers, Charterhouse of Parma (19 th century novel).
Chapter Four:
Dead On: Unfinished: Detection, Posthumography, the Books One Would not Write
“The strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible."
98

99
--Maurice Blanchot, "The Last
Word"
"P.S. Roger Laporte has reminded me of a stormy encounter which took place five years ago. During this encounter (although I am unable to recount the occasion for it here) we found ourselves, for other reasons, in disagreement with a certain hermeneut who in passing had resumed to ridicule the publication of Nietzsche's unpublished manuscripts. "They will end up," he said, "publishing his laundry notes and scraps like 'I have forgotten my umbrella'". We discussed the incident again; those who were present confirm this. Thus I

am assured of the story's veracity, as well as the authenticity of the facts which otherwise I have no reason to doubt. Nevertheless I have no recollection of the incident.
Not even today. (I.4. 1973),
Spurs, pp 139; 141
Reshelving as Philosophical Operation necessitating an autobiographical writing / re-diting at some point?
Kant's Prolegomena (written because readers couldn't get the Critique of Pure
Reason)
Kierkegaard, The Point of View (he directed it be published posthumously)
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Schopenhauer, Paralegomena and Paralimpoma
What one might call a taking stock of his work by the writer, but with a push away
100

from publication and archivalization (explanations aren't apologia)
Something more than Derrida's supplement is happening in the way that the writer does not publish a paratext f/or a definitive set of works, necessarily
(though Schopenhauer tried and cut some stuff, late in his life, as did
Kierkegaard--cut his first two works, including The Concept of Irony , his dissertation, from his corpus) becomes autobiographical in writing about his own philosophical works (as not works--complete, total, summed up, perfected).
Kant's letter explaining how he will write the Critique of Pure Reason is another example.
Nietzsche's Notebooks (unpublished)
L'Enfer has a 15 page chapter on Bataille and then several pages annotations on each of the holdings (The Story of the Eye, Ma Mere, Le
Petit and various books he wrote prefaces to (Le Petit), or used pseudonyms for (Madame Edwarda; three editions),
Except for Story of the Eye, all the texts postdate WB's death.
Still, the lack of perfect fit works for us. The book also l some porno / art drawings from GB.
101

Lacan bought a copy of La Mort in 1955.
See the note heading p “Force of Law,” a narrative of the essay’s self-processing in translation, conferences, and this “final” version, as well as the added italicized intro remarks to part II.
Link this up to our reading of the amber insect anecdote in Typewriter
Ribbon?
Reshevling as Philosophical Operation necessitating an autobiographical writing / re-diting at some point?
Kant's Prolegomena (written because readers couldn't get the Critique of Pure
Reason)
Kierkegaard, The Point of View (he directed it be published posthumously)
Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
Schopenhauer, Paralegomena and Paralimpoma
What one might call a taking stock of his work by the writer, but with a push away from publication and archivalization (explanations aren't apologia)
102

Something more than Derrida's supplement is happening in the way that the writer does not publish a paratext f/or a definitive set of works, necessarily
(though Schopenhauer tried and cut some stuff, late in his life, as did
Kierkegaard--cut his first two works, including The Concept of Irony, his dissertation, from his corpus) becomes autobiographical in writing about his own philosophical works (as not works--complete, total, summed up, perfected).
Kant's letter explaining how he will write the Critique of Pure Reason is another example.
Nietzsche's Notebooks (unpublished)
Books continued to arrive to be shelved in L'Efer even after it was closed in 1968.
If we had world and time enough (and maybe we do) we could juxtapose the
Ister and Mnesomenye and the Ister as ways of thinking about the double encryption of mourning but not mourning in Derrida and de Man (who is kind of like Antigone's unburied dead brother Haemon lying outside the polis; I guess that would make us Antigones to Derrideans' Chreons). The other move would be to "associate" freely Mnesomenye with Aby Warburg's final insane project and equally insane library organization. If we want to pursue
WB and GB at the Paris
Bibliothèque Nationale we could arrive via the 4
103

Jews at Parnassus at the porn room of the Biblio thèque Nationale, skipped over by Renais in his documentary (which is an extra on the just released
Criterion Last year at Marienbad). I take it that GB's Tears of Eros made their
(post WB) way to the L'Enfer room when the book was banned in 1961.
Maybe Story of the Eye was there. I will have to check the L'Enfer exhibition catalog, itself an interesting document as a reconstruction of a room that no longer exists via an index in the form of an illustrated book (like a book for auctions of rare books). In other words, the encounter of WB and GB would involve not only Surrealism but Surrealism and / as porn. Bunuel's risque and hilarious Virdiana (Spain kicked him out after its release) 18 might make a nice contrast to Angels and Demons since Buneul's films struck Catholics (in the
Vatican) as being sometimes heretical and blasphemous (L'Age d'Or) and sometimes orthodox (Nazarin won some Catholic award for being best
Catholic film of the year).
If the originally political element is sacred life, it becomes understandable how
Bataille could have sought the fulfilled figure of sovereignty in life experienced in the extreme dimension of death, eroticism, excess, and the sacred, and yet also how Bataille could have failed to consider the link that binds life to sovereign power. “The sovereignty of which I speak, “ he writes in the bearing that name, which was conceived as the third section of The Accursed Share , “has little to do with that of states”(
La souverainete , p. 247). What Bataille is attempting to think here is clearly the very bare life (or sacred life) that, in the relation of ban, constitutes the immediate referent of sovereignty. . . . In the case of both ritual
104

sacrifice and individual excess, sovereign life is defined for Bataille through the instanta neous transgression of the prohibition on killing. . . . If Bataille’s merit is to have brought to light the hidden link between bare life and sovereignty, albeit unknowingly, in his thought still remains entirely bewitched in the ambiguous circle of the sacred. Bataille’s work could offer only a real or farcical repletion of the sovereign ban, and it is understandable that Benjamin (according to Pierre
Klossowski’s account) stigmatized the Acephale group’s research with the preemptory phrase “You are working for fascism.” . . . Yet what Bataille is unable to master is precisely (as is shown by his interest in the pictures of the young
Chinese torture victim, which he discusses n tears of Eros) the bare life of homo sacer , which the conceptual apparatus of sacrifice and eroticism cannot grasp.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and bare Life, 112-13.
Agamben then proceeds to criticize JeanLuc Nancy’s criticism of Bataille, setting up his “unsacrificable” life as the inversion of Bataille’s sacrificable life, and proceeds from a comment about deaths by car accident being higher than deaths by war to the “sacrificial aura” lent by some “to the extermination of the Jews by means of the term “Holocaust” being “an irresponsible historiographical blindness. The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the bew biopolitical sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life that may be killed but not sacrificed. His killing constitutes. .. neither capital punishment nor a sacrifice, but simply the actualization of a mere
105

“capacity to be killed” inherent in the condition of the Jew as such. The truth— which is difficult for the victims to face, but which we must have the courage not to cover with sacrificial veils —is that the Jews were exterminated not in a mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, “as lice,” which is to say, as bare life. . . . The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor law, but biopolitics. . . . (114) If today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually hominess sacri . (115)
I think it is interesting that the insect here (or Hitler’s use of it as a metaphor, along with rats and other “pests”) is equated (without comment on it being a trope) with the zoological as bare life. Agamben in some ways is sounding worse that Bataille, who after all, was not a Fascist. What does Agamben mean by simply the actualization of a mere “capacity to be killed”? or by “inherent in the condition of the Jew as such”?
It’s clear that Agamben wants to univeralize the condition of homo sacer —but he pointedly does not want to say “we are all Jews” (not that he should say that, of course).
Look at pp. 151-53 where he uses Levinas to save Heidegger from Nazism after in the intervening pages deconstructed liberal parliamentary democracies and
Totalitarisan regimes in very Schmittian fashion (as biopolitics collapses into thanatopolitics). It’s as if Agamben were making himself neoSchmittian but immunizing himself at the same time, or containing Schmitt’s resistance to being read as a Nazi (kook) or to being deNazified by hooking Schmitt onto Foucault.
106

Could add posthumous assemblage of Bataille’sUnfiinished System of Non-
Knowledge.
Thematizing of unfinished in Bataille in Denis Hollier’s Against Arcchitecture.
Geoffrey Hartman Critical Inquiry 33 (Winer 2007), 344-61 "Though all biography for
Derrida is thantography, shadowed even in joy by mutability and death, here [in Glas ] he makes adout of life writings survive in pages that rebel against the book as borderline tomb." (253)
Raymond Roussel -- had a machine -- involved interlocking texts -- in a surrealist exhibition in 1937 a "Roussel Reading Machine" was shown ....cards mounted on the axis of a drum that the reader can turn with the right hand using a handle, while holding the desired text card by a protruding colored marking with the left, so that the text cards that belong together (on a certain nesting level) can be turned one after another.
Ashberry did not finish his disseration on Roussel.
107

Alain Resnais, Toute la m é moire du monde (1956)
108

It’s about processing books as people, during which the library becomes personified and readers turn into paper crunching insects pursuing a future happiness.
It begins in the basement, with a microphone coming down and a voice-over apparently comes form it and addresses the spectator. The stuff in this basement has an unclear status. Is it duplicates? Trash? Waiting to be catalogued? Not worthy of being catalogued? The content of the value of that which is catalogued is impossible to determine —what seems to be of little value today, or is even closed up in a box that cannot be opened until 1974, can only be temporarily determined in the future, or by a future consisting of always already undecidable moments —the future deprives the archivist of sovereignty— so every book has to be collected as spare / bare life. The value of the contents of the library remains unknowable even as its contents are thoroughly catalogued.
The model of the library as totality is Hegel’s pyramid (see Donato on Hegel and the pyramid), but more a pyramid being built during the pharaoh’s lifetime—it is expanded to make room both underground and above ground.
We cut from underground to the overhead outside shot and the library is described as a fortress. But the library’s personification is clearly to death—we see statues of men who presumably had an important role in making the library,
109

but they are not identified. The distinction between living makers and dead made is deconstructed, partly by the eerie music.
Within the crypt of the pyramid is essentially another crypt, or camp, in which the book also becomes personified, made a prisoner, identified by the state (every book is like every citizen), so the book with the cover of a woman’s face, becomes singular
—the books nearby it are do not have images, and there is an accelerated tracking shot of a series of volumes of a book, with different numbers. Serialization of books is their imprisonment.
Also, the documents are preserved, inoculated, embalmed.
Checking them out for reading is damaging to them —paper crunching readers.
Renais made Night and Fog the same year as All the Memory of the World ,
1956, with, apparently, the same guy for the voice-over narration. The Hans
Esiler score (and htecontroversy that surrounds it for Night and Fog has no colloary for the music inAll the Memory. Both films have a rhetorical structure thatends with a peroration, an exhortation not to repeat the Holocaust (that it could happen again anywhere
—it’s kind of a quick and easy univeralism that evades the specificity of the European, not just German, crime, and All the
Memory ends with quasi-sarcastic remarks about how one day the efforts of readers will achieve some kind of total knowledge that will lead with them to happiness. Yet the overhead (or early overhead shot of the readers) and the
“paper crunching insects” metaphor call up the Ferris wheel scene in
The Third
Man (1949) where Harry Lime (Orson Welles) compares the people below on the
110

ground to insects (ants, I think) and asks Holly Martins (joseph Cotton) if he realy would mind if a few them disappeared.
I would read the latter as an appendix to the former, detached, lost (Readings of ight and Fog never connect it to the other documentary). So bringing to light the connection is about making visible not only the reading of one film in relation to the other (dialogical and dialectical) but to read the gap between them in their juxtaposition. The gap remarks without making the visible the missing French-
Jewish body, serves as a disconnect between the French state and its deportation of Jews sublimated as its Nazi like administration of knowledge, processing books as prisoners, identification papers, archive, and so on. There is no adequate totalization of knowledge or representation of it (documentary footage of the Nazis versus contemporary color footage of the camps); rather, knowledge arises through division and displacement, juxtapositions that allow for phantom, deferred reconnections (mass murder the problem in one; the archive in the other).
Could read in relation to Heel on the appendix. (derrida the Pit and the Pyramid,
71; 83)
Detachment of Chinese writing (Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid,” 102) and the problem of negation for Hegel, the need for alphabetic writing to connect voice to spirit to recuperate negation itself. Whereas for Resnais, the very division of topics and films involves a negative dialectics, anti-Hegelian or perhaps a
111

negative that is merely an impediment to Errinerung , to interioirzation and sublation, as the lost reminder, as it were, of loss.
“The sign-the monument of –life-in-death, the monument of death-in-life, the sepulcher of a soul or embalmed proper body, the height conserving in its depths the hegemony of the soul, resisting time, the hard text of stones covered with inscription —is the pyramid. Hegel, then, uses the word pyramid to designate the sign. The pyramid becomes the semaphore of the sign, the signifier of signification, Which is not an indifferent fact. Notably as concerns the Egyptian connotation: further on, the Egyptian hieroglyphic will furnish the example of that which resists the movement of dialectics, history and logos.” (Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid,” 83
Derrida quotes Hegel “The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different import from what naturally belongs to it; it is the pyramid . . . into which a foreign soul . . . has been conveyed [transposed, transplanted, translated: versetzt ; versetzten is also to place on deposit; im Leihause verstetzten : to place in the pawnshop], and where it is conserved ( aufbewahrt : consigned, stored, put in storage
)” (Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid,” 83-84)
Derrida:
By means of Erinnerung the content of sensible intuition becomes an image, freeing itself from immediacy and singularity in order to permit the passage to conceptuality. The image is thus interiorized in memory ( erinnert ) is no longer there, no longer existent or present, but preserved in an unconscious dwelling,
112

conserved without consciousness ( bewusstlos, aufbewahrt ). Intelligence keeps these images in reserve, submerged at the bottom of a very dark shelter, like the water in a nightlike or unconscious pit ( naelicliche Schacht, bewusstlose
Schacht
), or rather like a precious vein at the bottom of a mine. (Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid,” 77)
So memory ( erinnert ) becomes inert, inertia when the negative cannot be contained, encircled, and salvaged; knowledge / spirit has to die before it can resurrected.
On Resnais’s film as Hegel’s pyramid meets the dialectic of enlightenment (the library as concentration camp within the pyramid —the processing of books as people being the mortification of memory), see Renais’ later documentary about the holocaust Night and Fog and also compare to Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1963)
(also about Germans and memory). See Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the
Pyramid: Introdu ction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in
Margins of Philosophy trans Alan bass, (Chicago 1982) 69-108
And Eugenio Donato, “The Idioms of the text: Note son the Language of
Philosophy and the Fictions of Literature” Glyph 2 (1977) 1-13
On the monumentalization of the face (statues seen in close up), see De Man.
See the last line of Bataille’s “Extinct America” about insects; that essay also recalls his disaster film treatment.
113

Derrida's “Outwork: Prefacing” cites from Hegel on p. 24.
What results from this method of labeling all . . . is a synoptic table like a skeleton with scraps of paper stuck all over it, or like the rows of closed and labeled boxes in a grocer's stall. It is as easy to read off as either of these; and just as all the flesh and blood has been stripped from this skeleton, and the no longer living
'essence' [Sache] has been packed away in boxes (Buechsen), so in the report the living essence of the matter [Wesen der Sache] has been stripped away or boxed up dead. . . . . this traditional material . .
. must be regarded as an extremely important source . . to be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offers is only here and there a a meagre shred or a disordered heap of dead bones. Logic,
Preface to the Second edition, p. 31).
The last image reminded me of WB on Golgatha in the Trauerspiel book.
Anyway, we can use the Hegel passage somewhere. Derrida introduces it with reference to "a museum of natural history where one can find collected, classed, and exhibited all manner of dead limbs and cold bones, skins dried like parchments, anatomical plates, and other tableaux and displays that pin down the living to death" (24)
114

There's a great footnote quoting Mao on pp. 23-24.
We could play off the title of Undercover Surrealism —the title is trying to place
Bataille and DOCUMENTS in relation to Surrealism (Bataille as enemy from within, enemy of Andre Breton). But the book really shows, and Hollier explicitly questions, this kind of spatialization of GB (in order to characterize him and pigeon hole him).
Also Undercover Surrealism has a lot of stuff on prehistory and the primitive that marks itself off, partly, from colonial exoticism even as saves the primitive, as
Hollier points out via LeviStrauss, by defining itself as “entropology,” the study of a culture at the moment of its disappearance, or the moment just before it disappears, the moment of its “being on its way to disappearing.”
The editors of Undercover Surrealism also connect Warburg’s Memory Atlas to
Bataille’s DOCUMENTS , p. 16. in a footnote. They do so in terms of influence, which is pretty dumb. But I was happy to see they connection then as I was already thinking of the connection, especially about the disorganization of
Warburg’s own library (see the essay on Fritz Saxl) and the Bibliotechque’s order as well as the common use of collage and montage and interest in modernist painting (cubism, dada, and surrealism). So it’s a note we can use to back up a more interesting discussion of Warburg in relation to WB and GB if want to get into that.
I checked out the special issue on Carl Einstein of October 2004. Einstein, the one German member of Documents, was “negrophilic” and laments that African cultures are so easily and quickly corrupted, the evidence being their inclusion of
115

references to guns even in their myths. It’s a strangely racist critique of the noble savage (already a racist construction) even as it perpetuates the noble savage.
We may want to footnote District 9 as it is about the treatment of aliens (here lit erally) and their relocation in to what the main character calls “concentration camps.” Part of the film is taken up by humans trying to get the aliens to sign their eviction notices (turns out that if the alien hits the paper, that counts as a signature).
One of the essays in Undercover Surrealism (from which the pdf Hollier essay comes) is quite hilarious. The author tries to contain Bataille by contrasting him negatively to Agamben (twice) is held up as the "nowadays people think this way about the sacred" good guy. The author even essays that rumor had Bataille wanted to stage a real human sacrifice with the Acephale group! It's really screamingly hysterical reading. So I think we can really use Bataille at the end, not just on the cave paintings, but as you were saying as another way of shelving the WB briefcase story (our own chapter) and making of their relationship something of a recurring scandal starting with WB's hand off of his papers to GB) that keeps recurring because scholars want to be Fittkow as you said, they want to have been WB's friend and to have been there to save his life. Bataille does not work in this sentimental way. He's just too plain weird, too base. So someone like Weingrad cuts GB in two, the librarian and the theorist. One good
116

thing about Undercover Surrealism is that it shows how such a redemptive move is merely a magic trick (cutting the lady in half). He wrote about coins even as he worked in the coin collection of the Bibliotechque. So if people have to keep making up stories about WB because he has no grave, because they want the judgment day to arrive so that WB will get his body back, as you said, people want to cut Btaille down, or cut something off to redeem him. Both reading strategies are flip sides of the same coin, though: WB is idealized; GB is demonized; and both strategies can't deal with the problem, as you said, that
WB's mss was, to him, worth more than his life. GB is already, as Hollier says, unable to encrypt his writings. So there's a similar spill over (and under). The connection between them is a scandal because people can't deal with the hand off but instead have to resort to a sort of hands off response, don't touch the
(unmarked) grave; don't stop me not mourning by making up stories, going on a pilgrimage to Port bou; don't stop me from monumentalizing WB, or from trying flushing the backed up toilet full of GB's crap. Our ex-humanization metaphor would mean that infrareading, in this case, creates interference, static, noise that blocks this pseudo sentimental, anti-intellectual, moralizing attempt to connect to the real by dividing (the) death (of the author) in two (works versus body; metaphor of works as food versus excrement; memorial symbol grave marker on top of the ground versus rotting, even missing corpse underground). The body of the (missing) author is already remarked by the (missing) works, divided to excess. In effect, the standard fantasy is mummify the missing without acknowledging it--like cryogenics. The works are imagined to be in deep freeze
117

and in fact they must remain missing so that they may be regarded as an invaluable treasure--the recovery of which would be the resurrection of WB's body.
And that reminds me. I picked up some of our clothes at the local dry cleaner the other day, and there were three posters on one wall and an actual display box of part of a wedding dress all for a company that will "preserve" a woman's wedding dress, "museum style." I will take a photo. Two posters say you can preserve it forever. One invites you to preserve it for the next generation (who can then, one imagines, can represerve it). It's a strange take on weddings-bride=death. Only women work at this dry cleaner's.
Weinhard is very stuffy and get away with making comments about Freud's "death instinct" without a single citation. At his worst he is very dogmatic and reductive in characterizing the relation between the Frankfurt Institute and the
College of Sociology: The Institute, in this cornah, and, in this cornah, the College. Come out swinging boys! But he does have this one great paragraph about things not fitting with respect to Adorno.
He is intolerant of inconsistencies, everything has to be bi-polar .
The problem he sets up at the start is good; his solution is laughable--WB gave the manuscript to "GB the librarian, not the theorist." Still, it is a useful cite for us.
118

I was reading Hollier's intro to the College of Sociology collection after reading Wienhard's essay (Weinhard relies heavily on it and cites it constantly). Hollier is so great. What a mind and what a stylist (I knew him a little when he was U.C. Berkeley.) The Weinhard article did help me make sense of Hollier's collection, and I plan to read some of the essays he discusses. The other useful point Weinhard made me see is that the kinds of strange dialogues between opposites like Schmitt and WB is echoed in other dialogues of the time (WB and
GB, most notably) and has its counter-point in Franco-German
(non)Jewish sectarianism with everyone raising in simplistic form
Derrida's question about WB's divine violence at the end of Force of
Law, but offering it as a judgment--they are into prefascist aesthetics--or he's a fascist (Callois, even though Callois explicitly repudiated Hitler). So the urgency of the moment created unexpected dialogues as well as expected,I suppose ( as to be expected) non-readings and misreadings of leftists by leftists. He also observes some important contradictions between Adorno's views of GB and WB he finds partly in the footnotes ot the Dialecticof
Enlightenment, which I will read to find today.
Jacques Derrida est mort
Strange nature of posthumous publication is to be inexhaustible
O I am dead Hortaio, Horatio, I am dead
119

Can one hear a translingual pun in “mort” as more—that death is not the end, for a wrter, but the contiuation of death already lived?
Include in place of the WB manuscript chapter a chapter on the threshold of publications:
Lost manuscripts, lost lives—from asylums, to art books, to performance art. That will set up art in the train. Pose the art in the train chapter as both a question of boxing but also of reversible reading.
Could mention correspondence between W Ben and Gretel over his papers, his selfarchiving, relate that all to Ray Johnson and Marina Abramovic as well as to posthumous publication.
Every Man Dies Laone as using the archives—a fiction published with archives;
Vismann on alienation from stories by those who go t their files. Probe=lem of assembly.
No directions for use.
Lives of Others—howthe gift is sold, no encounter—good Gremans (fraternity). The gift that is not given but dedicated. Not addressed. The guy opening envelopes at the end is the guy who told the joke about the German Honekier Prime Minister.
Dead On (as opposed to Derrida’s Living On)
Perish the Thought (of Sorts)
The untimliness of death and autobiography. You can’t say I am dead according to Derrida
This chapter wil cover Demeure and Instant of My death as death as not reducible to moment of inorganic matter. Misisng mss in Instant fo my Death replicates the missing manuscript of WB. Instead of talking at length about the quest for that missing mss, go to Perec as fiction about the posthumous, incomplete, unfinished, Paper Trails (following WB on his escape —retracing his spes). Boundaries oflife and death vers boundaries of life and death of publication. At the boundary of what can be archived, or reading with the archive
(in the cases of WB and even more, Perec).
Also, “Maurice Blacnhot est mort.
120

Return to WB as collector whose favorite is aposthumous piece
—arhitetectonics of the essay at odds with eh architecticonics of book shelf, a library, an office, a store, an auction. He pulls offa magic trick, escapes into his books.irony and
Ronell. With the Promise of Paul de Man part.
Would not write (bothe because author couldn’t and also because he didn’t wish to)
Then it’s about posthumous publication—Perec—which continues the detective fiction of the previous chapter
(or maybe this chapter should be more focused on detection, not the previous one.
Beginning, Ending, Over Again.
But whoever does not try to think and read the part of the fiction and thus of literature that is ushered in by such a phrase in even the most authentic testimony will not have begun to read or hear Blanchot. This holds for the majority of his political prosecutors, among others. (47)
--Jacques Derrida, Demeures
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
121

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 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
122

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).
19
The postscript begins in its very title with two citations, the first one from a TLS review critical 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’s
The Instant of My Death . In the text of the postscript, Derrida paraphrases the quotation 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 negative TLS review, to turning it against him, ending by making the repeated riposte typographically emphatic.
20
In the excessive repetition of this citation, in the recourse to a citation, Derrida and by
123

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
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 nonfictional 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
124

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 complaining writers to come.
Later, (de) Man
Blanchot, or. . . the narrator is complaining about, bringing an accusation . . against his having been saved . . . for an impure, unavowable, socially suspect reason that calls all the more for an urgent confession. .
. But through the . . . confession another accusation , , , can be heard . . . : that everything was saved except the manuscript .
--Jacques Derrida, Demeure , 85
Another name for this complaint as 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 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
125

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-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.
21
We may further elucidate an understanding of (un)readability, (un)repeatability, and
126

(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 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
127

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 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
128

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).
22
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. . .
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,
129

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.
"The dying of Others is not something that we experience in an authentic sense; at most we are always just 'there-alongside.' . . . By its very essence, death is in every case mine."
--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time , paragraph 47.
130

By speaking of a death that, in order to be irreplaceable and because it is unique, is not even individual—“never individual,” he says—Blanchot puts forward a statement that would appear troublesome even to the
Jemeinigkeit
, the “mine every time,” which according to Heidegger essentially characterizes a Dasein that a announces itself to itself in its own being-for-death.”
--Jacques Derrida, Demeures , 51
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 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 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.
131

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 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
132

technical substrate” (25). Yet Derrida’s critique of archeological hallucination of he 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.
23
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 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:
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 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
133

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 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)
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.
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
134

order, in a certain commonsense ordering of time, is what guarantees the everyday concept. Especially the juridical concept and the dominant concept of attestation in
European culture (49)
For Derrida, experiencing an encounter of death with death opens up the possibility of passion as compassion and friendship (non-Christian).
It is precisely "complaining" that Derrida addresses at the end of Demeures:
One cannot testify for the witness who testifies to his own death, but, inversely, only to the 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
135

am not dead and I am dead." (67-68)
Perhaps it is the encounter of death, which is only ever an imminence, only ever a suspension, an anticipation, the encounter of death as anticipation with death itself, with a death that has already arrived according to the inescapable: an encounter between what is going to arrive and what has already arrived. Between what is going to come ( va venir ) and what just finished coming [ vient de venir ], been what goes and comes. But as the same. Both virtual and real, real as virtual. . . Death has just come from the instant it is going to come (64; 65)
The hospitality of death itself. . .an autobiography, a hostobiography which, under circumstances (the surviving in suicide) advances in the maner of a work of art. 44
Is the witness not always a surviror? (45)
The really amazing move (on p. 52) is to read a letter Derrida got from Blanchot about almost being shot by Nazis and the story itself (non-fictional testimony with testimony in a fictional mode). So he advances a new kind of autobiographical reading largely in order to defend Blanchot from professorial political prosecution (on grounds that Blanchot has already written in such prosecutors as police and doctors in his work as incompetent in their competence because naive when it comes to understanding testimony). Blanchot seems to be operating as a stand in for de Man (Derrida doesn't say what the charges against Blanchot are, only that when he wrote the Instant of My Death various charges about his politics were in play). The essay begins with Derrida talking about the conference title and mentioning de Man because the conference is in
Belgium. The title of the conference is The Passions of Literature." He comes back to passion on p. 56 in relation to Blanchot and then on p. 63, distinguishes a Christological /
Hegelian account of resurrection from Blanchot's "auto-bi-ography" of surviving
(survivance) as "life without life."
136

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
137

Blanchot and de Man, of such prosecutions. (Derrida also mentions Kafka's the Castle.)
I find it also helps clarify the specificity of the notes written by Sonnderkommando . They write from the same place Blanchot's narrator writes, namely, knowing that are about to die. They differ in this respect crucially from the victims they were forced to execute, who did not know they were about to die.
The bizarre description on the back cover of the book Of Hospitality Anne
Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond (Stanford, UP, 2000).
“’Hospitality’ is viewed as a question of what arrives at the borders, in the initial surprise of contact with an other, a stranger, a foreigner. For example, Antigone is revisited in light of the question of impossible mourning: Oedipus at Colon us is read via concerns that also apply to teletechnology; the trial of Socrates is brought into conjunction with the televised funeral of Fr ancois Mitterrand.”
But there is no mention of the Mitterrand funeral in the book. I read it the book over to find the discussion of the Mitterrand funeral, and then, after I didn’t find it, did an Amazon search confirming my conclusion that there is no such discussion.
I’ll have to check out the original French to see if something was lost in translation or added.
138

In her book Stupidity , Avial Ronell interrupts her discussion about de Man’s
“The Concept of Irony” to tell a personal anecdote about writing her dissertation with de Man. In this case, the anecdote itself, bracketed by marks on the page, turns into a block, that lets us understand the resistant reading proceeds through writing (Wunder)blocks:
But I have strayed from my intention of revealing an autobiographical ordeal, something that would help you understand my own avoidance of de Man, which was never absolute or even remotely successful. I had avoided de Man even before he told me that he thought Goethe was stupid. Actually, the scene of that utterance went a little differently, with more nuance than I have internalized. It took place in Paris. I remarked on him, in the projective manner of upstarts, that he had avoided “my” authors; I remember naming Goethe among them. His response was swift:
That’s because Goethe could be so stupid
.” My bewilderment. “—
Theoretically, I mean, in his theory.” That could stop a girl in her
139

tenure tracks. Not that I had a job at the time. I ended up owing him a great deal, as he had helped me when I was fairly destitute and unhirable, having in fact been fired unceremoniously , no doubt illegally, but nonetheless thankfully by the University of Virginia
—I am glad that destiny had spit me out of the university at that time, for what was I, if I may invoke a hapless figure from Hellenic comedy, an alazon in wonderland, doing in the South? After Paris and Berlin, he sent me to California, to a system, he said, whose digestive tract would not be able to eliminate me easily. That is how he put it. In any case, I started in Riverside and ended up at
Berkeley, playing to the end a politics of the foreign body that was neither thrown up nor excrete. (What was I, if I may borrow my identity from Lacan, a petite alazon , doing out West?) I don’t know why, but Paul de Man had taken an interest in helping me, and it was only under his prodding that I crossed over from German departments (which had succeeded in throwing me up) to what he called the safer shores of comparative literature. (I had explained to him that being in a German department exposed me to endless reruns of World War II. With all sorts of phantoms surfacing and attacking me. He understood those phantasms immediately, offering safety in the less primitively Germanics precincts of comparative literature.) He was sympathetic, strong, nonsexist; he spontaneously offered me protection upon seeing how I was
140

slammed by one institution of higher learning after another. But now I am getting ahead of myself, telling what happened later in the c.v. Nonetheless, in purely empirical and historical terms, prior to the inevitable hiring and firing squads, before I knew him and before he became a counselor, my compass and friend, I chose not to go to Yale when the opportunity arose but opted instead for distance —for mediation and mediocrity, as it turned out—by choosing a graduate school in New Jersey. I do not hesitate to say in any case, when deciding to pursue graduate studies, I avoided working in close proximity to de Man for fear that he would crush my already nonexistent balls. And yet there was no one else to work with. My relation to de Man would remain, for the most part, teletopical.
24
Ronell’s hyperaware account of her avoidant relation to de Man and the various narrative he spun around her is a non(auto)biographical moment that blocks us out, letting everything and nothing slip. She still stopped in her tenure tracks.
Ronell helps us to understand Benjamin’s toy train even more fully. Reading things involves a question of distance.
25 Our practice of transforming a thing into a topos always means that we are defining the topos as a teletopos ; troping on
Ronell, we may add that it is a techno-teletopos , technology being that which both draws closer and keeps apart the human and inhuman, inside the loop and out of it.
26
Ronell’s ironization of de Man’s irony, her “tell all that tells nothing” delayed, straying autobiography that delivers diversion does not derail of history or politics
141

but gives a track to return to them through a (non)story of resistance and, as in the case of Ronell, mourning for de(ad) Man (walking). Walter Benjamin and even more radical case of an out of the way, prefatorial autothantography as pseudoobituary: “
Posthumous Fragments by a Young Physician ], which Johann
Wilhelm Ritter had published in two volumes at Heidelberg in 1810. This work has never been reprinted, but I have always considered its preface, in which the author-editor tells the story of his life in the guise of an obituary for a supposedly deceased unknown friend
—with whom he is really identical—as the most important example of personal prose in German Romanticism.” p. 491
Text in Venice: Perec and Mathews essay on Roussel and Venice
Perec had a memory of a visit to Venice and wrote a novel using htat memory asa point departure. See Geroge Pererec A Life in Words . reading it as a kind of allegory of the protocols of reading attached to publication of the complete works of an author, with his life attached as well, and the way that reading depends on a the production of a lost volume, a hidden--possibly complete, possibly yet to be completed project--waiting to be found in the archives. Reading as revelation (the protocol) and assemblage requires the fantasy of an ash. The Aspern Papers works out somewhat similarly in that the rejected woman burns the letters souhgt by hte critic who wants to read and publish them. Perec and Mathews are writing a literary critical short story, or a short story that is a work of literary criticism. in which the hidden is not reducible to a lost manuscript, which in the case of their story, turns out to be only partly legible in any case, already haunted by revision and repeated returns to it,
142

by the author who already cut a book open to hide it, leaving behind a wound that would never close. James delivers a coup de theater at the end of his story (incidentally set in Venice) whereas Perec and
Mathews give a coup de grace to the protocols of reading that
Roussel's own writings have already shot down. Text in Venice arrives d.o.a. even before Gustave Aschenbach does, already reduced by narrative to unpublished and unpublishable ash of the archive.
In any case, the essay seems like an odd rehearsal of what is done with Perec’s own “53 Days.”
Dead Perec/koning
Pewrecked
Different kinds of linearization in the novel that pull against its recursive structure.
Chapters 128,28 being the epilogue. But there’s the division after chapter 13 with fourteen beginning with a French phrase.
The novel is not exactly symmetrical, divided between 1-14 and 15-28. instead it is divided 1-13 and 14-28.
The three boxes on p. 242are out of sequence: 2 nd , 3 rd , then 1 st story detective is in a box in 2 and 1, but not in 3, and arrows point up and down from detective and victim only in .
Then the drafts are not organized chronologically but according to color; each ring file repeats parts of the novel and the pages in the ring file do not follow
143

linear order. The drafts have a recursive pull. Taking you back in order to move you forward, but doing that repeatedly.
Some of the repetitions in the notes of passages in the “novel” so as to continue a pattern of repetition (mirroring, doubling) already at wok in the “novel”
Take passage F11 on p. 250 as a way of reading the novel, a metacritical commentary “What do you know when you’ve read the novel to the end? Nothing
. .” repeats pp. 115-16 in the novel.
See also “swallowed in cloak of citation” p. 241 repeats the same passage on p.
125; p. 250 repeats p. 112
There’s even repetitions within the drafts. Passage on p. 119 is repeated on p.
234, a passage which comments on the opening lines “also France under the
Occupation”
Becomes a kind of principle of reading —or one can collate passages to assemble a practice of reading n relation to repletion as reading in a mirror and reading in reverse order. So there is Story A and Story B, and Story B repeats and reverses Story A so that Salini is framed by Serval, who becomes guilty. See p. 97, 112, 161, 164, and police reading p. 147 as calling attention to the joke of
Salini’s logic (about him being incriminated by reading a novel)
144

“ dead line: 15 May” p. 251
But in addition to making repetition into a redundancy, an excess that cannot be integrated except insofar as it read as a comment from the outside on the inside , as it were of the “novel,” what does emerge in the drafts specifically is a historical referent for the novel
—namely the Nazi Occupation of France and the
Resistance, and more specifically , Klaus Barbie (who must have been tried around the time Perecwas writing this novel). Barbie is mentioned on p. 253along with 125 members of the Resistance, five of whom were turned by the Gestapo
(252)
Body of a member of the resistance never found (252) (a missing corpse which repeats the missing corpse of Serval in the novel.
And “state of emergency” (252)
Boxes with words inside “Circumstances of disappearance in context of State of emergency” (251)
But “History” in the form of the liberation of Grenoble (Sept 44)see p. 228
But here we see how different the earlier version on p. 112 where there is no mention of the Resistance, on chapter 19, and then comment on chapter 19 on p.
227
“19 th chapter
At the heart of this story 1942
145

is a disturbing episode which perhaps forms the cornerstone of the whole affair
4 Sept: STO introduced” and the rest the page outlines the liberation of Grenoble ending with “4 Oct
Tribunal against collaborators”
“Barbie” mentioned on . 229
“Write Story A in the first person” (151)is itself a figure of turning, of repeated escapes(230-31, the guy escapes twice from the Gestapo)
“the mirror reversal[?]” p. 247 “mirror book” (147) “theme of the mirror” 213; see pp. 216-17 for multiple mentions of mirrors.
Mirror held aloft . . Mirr or, glass, Miroir, Speigel, 1 per page! (or per 2 pages)!”
(150)
53 Days is the inverted mirror of reality” (151)
“what else is here in the suitcase?” (152)
French Resistance is mentioned in chapter fourteen ring file p. 105, then again on p. 106
“it uncovers elements of story 1” (247)
Passage on p. 99 repeated on p. 203
Passage on p. 97 repeated on p. 207
146

Passage on page 180 repeated on p. 18 (the box with the
“to rework” (204) name in caps), then p. 188
“hooked by that missing chapter” (204) repeats p. 100
“a different sequence should
“lead towards “truth”=treason” (247)
“What happens when Serval receives the novel” (255) play on the word “receive here —most clearly, it means that Serval got the mss from the Consul—the
Consul gave it to him. But it also calls up Serval as a receiver, like he understands , like on a telephone
—he is getting a transmission.
Reception as reading.
Serval’s status in the Resistance is unclear (246)
Barbier mentioned by last name p. 244
Even “THE END” is put inside two rectangles and followed by a colon “THE
END:” p. 239. It is boxed, nested.
“dead end” 211
Perec becomes a character in the novel, p. 239
See Perec’s book about himself Perec/rinations
147

Serval’s enquiry parallel to the police 256. As in Kafka, there is no escaping the law.
Self interview on p. 255 “What is the function of 53 Days? BUT: . . .”
The editors of 53 Days assemble it in order to publish and uncritically make certain assumptions as they organize and assemble it. They present the text as incomplete, linearize and divide it into three parts in order to make the whole novel readable:
1. Chapters 1-12 are complete (publishable)
2. Plans for chapters 13-28 and epilogue (incomplete and unpublishable because unreadable)
3. drafts, notes, ring files, and so on listed without rhyme or reason of parts of he book, each linearized and sporadically readable).
4. Note on the text, not on translation, page with intellectual bios of the author , editors, and translator. We also get the liner notes on the inside flaps of the book cover and blurb and Perec’s bio on the back cover
Why is the book organized this way?
148

1. Assumption: the materials are divided up in order of their readability, into intelligible segments (chapters), then semi-intelligible plans for segments
(chapters), then fragments.
2. Assumption: One can edit the text just like any other text (without regard to its author or genre).
3. Perec wanted to complete the novel and publish it. He left it unfinished.
His death does not affect the publication of the book nor its ordering.
4.
A complete novel is the same as a finished novel, and Perec didn’t publish the novel in the form the editors did because he hadn’t finished it.
What can we conclude from these everyday editorial assumptions about how to read “53 Days?” Is it in fact readable in its published form?
The book’s editing attempts to normalize the book, to suggest that we have all the extant pieces that enable us to get an idea, at least, of what the completed novel would look like. What we actually get, however, is what would never have been published had Perec finished the novel (parts 2 and 3).
The novel as published inadvertently thus opens some speculative questions about how to read it. What if Perec left it unpublished on purpose but nevertheless wanted it to be read, but only in typescript and handwritten drafts and notes? What if the published novel is the complete novel disguised as an incomplete novel? What if the very conditions of posthumous publication are part
149

of Perec’s planned resistance to reading his text after his death? What if he gambled that someone would read the papers, at least, if not publish them?
What if the novel in its incomplete state is Perec’s last will and testament, unstated as such? His final legacy? These questions carry some weight because the novel is not just any unpublished text found after its author’s death.
It is a self-consciously modernist detective novel about detective novels. Some further speculative questions. Can the incomplete chapters (13-28 and epilogue) be read as a key to chapters 1-12. In other words, does the novel inter /encrypt its first twelve chapters in is remaining 16? And does it further present such a project as a ruin, with part three being a key inside a key, a key made of fragments that cannot be reconstructed and recognized as a key. Is the novel then D.O.A. when it is published? Did Perec write himself to death, or into death by not completing the novel? Did he leave the relation between his life and work open in such a way that we can’t close the coffin / book, close the case, as it were? If Perec a sort of Ray Johnson of the modernist novel?
To be sure, none of these questions can be answered, but would you agree that they are nevertheless preliminary to any critical reading of “53 Days”?
Or not? Is a critical reading of the published edition possible ? Would a better edition have published everything without any subdivisions as if it were all part of one manuscript on the basis of the assumption that such an edition would be more
“Perecian” (what Perec’s “ghost” would want)? Or would that be irresponsible?
How is responsibility to be determined when the author’s wishes are not known?
150

Should the author’s wishes be respected (Kafka wanted his editor to burn all his manuscripts.)
As you read the novel, keep these two broad questions about the novel’s
(un)readability in mind and read it looking for evidence to support one case or the other.
Perec does include diagrams, one of which is a diagram of a nested narratives.
Also the initial search for Serval includes not only the author but a briefcase containing his last manuscript, which is apparently encrypted (echoing WB’s lost manuscript). It has to be deciphered. The narrator is advised to “read between the lines.” This seems like self-reflexive advice to the reader of 53 Days —the manuscript is partly missing, the author is dead, no crime scene can be reconstructed; the editing will clean up and destroy the crime scene (of Perec’s suicide), photos of the manuscripts as they were found, in what condition, how organized or disorganized, and so on. The edition represses / cleans up the process of editing itself.
Has Perec, however, sporadically abjected his book that it cannot be (properly) published, or published only in ways that deny its self-abjection or reproduce its abjection inadvertently?
David Bellos. Georges Perec : a life in words
London : Harvill, 1993.
151

LIBRARY WEST General Collection
PQ2676.E67 Z531 1993
53 Days as a dead end
“He allows the latter to know it, by showing him his book without an ending , the denouement would show the Consul’s guilt (96, repeats 95: Serval encrypts this manifestly dangerous truth in an unfinished detective story which he gets the
Consul himself to read. The Consul quickly grasps that he is being blackmailed directly: unless he complies, the book’s ending will be so cast as to put the only too obvious culprit RouardMirouet, in he clear.”)
“None of these elements allows me to go any further or to try to imagine who else could have pulled it off.” P. 96 other kinds of doubling in the novel
—“the frequency of the word mirror and its cognates” (111) distorting mirrors (119)
152

Salini finds himself in the same position as the narrator of 53 Days (18) author and narrator are doubled, just as the title of the novel is a citation of a novel in the novel.
(121) resistance leaders take their name Chabert from the film adaptation of the Balzac novel 1943 by Rene le Henaff121
A plot summary is provided on p. 94 after the typescript has ended —summarizes from chapter ten through 12 pp. 96, 97
“a comedy scripted by the Consul also as to murder Serval and steal his manuscript, which proves that the Consul did it.
He destroys the ending, the “real proof.” Pp. 97
Missing corpse —Serval never found—faked his own death? P. 108
Consul’s corpse found where narrator expects to find Serval’s. (p. 97)
The book as a diary (101)
Why is the formula in French at the head of part II not translated? It is the title
Perec assigned it.
“Gave up listing them all” p. 110
153

I'm finding it resonates very well with Derrida's Archive Fever
Are the drafts ostentatiously self-titled as filed or editorial descriptors.
Is 53 Days Perec’s suicide note?
The drafts are not drafts but files. Within the files, there are numbered pages — it’s a book that comes with an archive, but the archive is already dis/ordered, pre-edited. p. 215 story o Don Carlos –like an encyclopedia history becomes ironic it’ too is recursive—footnote about the Roman emperor being poisoned keeps circulating and attached to different historical figures.
It’s not ars moriendi it’s not a bibobiblio move that we are making. It is aobut about the fact that he’s dying but it isn’t at all.
It doesn’t matter for us.
We can assume that this is the novel. The relationship to his death is not operative, even if it is remarkable.
154

The novel makes that biblio move available to the reader but resists it. Then we could think back form the briefcase of 53 Days to the briefcsase of WB —a trope for figuring the archive in terms of the arbitrary start and end date for a human life.
“Serval would have killed himself” p. 144
Son of survivors living in Paris and he’s at the Sorbonne in the 50s and then he’s an archivist.
Drafts are linearized, sequenced) order of composition) so therefore the reader is free to do what done skip around, treat it as random access files. The nondeterminative order of the which the material appears
The orange exercise book
—“found on the study desk” puts us in the object world of shelf-life —the paratextual becomes a way of setting up a hierarchy of significance for the files; there’s a lure that the physical description will yield something of significance? Why an orange notebook? that enacts the protocols of detective fiction —you search the world for unmotivated details that actually bear significance
—like a fetishist with no fetish. You can’t find the right object for
155

your fetish.
“Mirror-book” 144
The key to the novel (the Resistance, Grenoble) is in the files, then it was never operative.
as well as with WB's missing mss as well as the description of Fittkow's Escape as a suspense novel.
The novel proceeds by way of plot summaries of books, their summary execution, and then a book review or philological practice of reconstructing a text to read it between the lines or between the book using the sources the writer used. Each decoding leads not to a solution, but a solution that produces nothing except for more enigmas that in turn recircle the philological / detective / spy fiction / genres.
By the end of chapter eleven, I ended up with a reading of the novel as an allegory of the impossibility of writing legible history. The second part (drafts) makes it clear that the novel is about the Occupation of France (Granita also seems to be Algeria). But the "Real has to be "smuggled" into the text. History
156

involves illicit trafficking, danger, but what happened historically is not reducible to the above genres and the closure they provide. Ditto for archeology and for the history of ancient Rome. There's a fantastic note on an anecdote that the narrator says has to be false because it has been reused by so many other authors). Fiction keeps overtaking history, even as fiction address the real through nested narratives about books read by authors of books. At the same time, the conspiracy plot becomes more credible--the BH change form seeing to spread rumors about their crimes to actually committing all kinds of atrocities.
But this history, tied into art theft, then seems to reproduce an already excessively reproduced ancient Roman history.
The unfinished manuscript (missing the last page) and destroyed (shredded dictated notes from unreadable notes--readable only to their author) become a way of allegorizing the unarchiv -ability / unread -ability of French history, of occupying its desire to pre-occupy (forget / repress) the history of its Occupation.
Occupying is amounts to copious recopying, multiple versions, even editions.
So the very form of the novel I do think reads as finished if read as an allegory about the unpublishability of unwritable and unreadable French history: the allegory requires the literal death of the author.
I wonder if much has been written on the novel. There does seem to be a clear, if loose, parallel between Perec and the narrator. Similarly, the "complete" part
157

plays with handwriting and typing, while the incomplete parts contain both typed work and handwritten work as well as diagrams.
The novel then includes in its "unpublished form" all the reader need to read it as the narrator reads Serval's mss in the completed part. See p. 119 "It's all there in the opening lines." The incomplete parts are not layers, strata to be excavated to figure out but boxes in boxes (see diagrams on pp. 145, 198, 199 that spatialize both what the novel was / is / and would have been, assuming it was unfinished.
The multi-temporality of reading this in/complete novel force on the reader by the novel's posthumous publication that announces but ignores the author's death or its consequences of reediting or for reading the novel makes 53 Days a pretty literally case of the not yet read as the not yet "unreadable" as writing between the lines (p. 12, 56) and writing between the books (66). 53 Days is not a book.
It is and is not a complete book. It is several books, one ready to be published, one to come that will never arrive, one that would never have been published had the book been completed (part three--all the notes). It is a sort of parabook book that allegorizes the conditions of its own posthumous publication, its editing as
"a book" like any other published book, that makes its reading a never to be completed task, indeed makes it difficult to recognize how to read the book at all, to determine whether it is finished or not, whether Perec suicided it, made reading always a practice of suicitation, and also made reading it a question of desire and ethics. How should we read it knowing its writing inscribes its own author's writing himself to death? How do we want to read it? Do we want to
158

read it? Are we to read by assembling the parts? Should we reverse what the editors have done? Should we decompose the book? Insist on reading it in its prepublished, scattered form, on its enabling and blocking of its own dissemination?
See "What do you know when you've read the novel to the end Nothing, except that for quite unknown reasons Serval has been given the manuscript of a detective story one of whose protagonists . . . has the same name as he does. .. .
53 Days is conducted on the basis of clues provided by the manuscript entitled
The Crypt . But when you see that, you see nothing" (250). The passage repeats the same one on pp. 115-16. In that sense it is ideal as a point of departure to read the book since it is a repetition. See also p. 97 and p. 112 for similar remarks.
The title of the novel is in quotation marks because it cites a title in the novel that refers to the time it took Stendahl to write The Charterhouse of Parma , 53 Days.
See the diagram on P. 154.
The list of titles in descending order or increasingly inner order is
“
53 Days
” by Perec”
53 Days by Serval
The Crypt
159

Le juge et l’assasin
Kca (Koala Code)
Thenarrator is redoubled
Truth swallowed by the cloak of fiction, p. 125
Some boxes have question marks in them.
We’re talking about a figural politics, an archival politics as opposed to producing a positive discourse about what happened (which is what Vismann
—you have to have complete faith in treason, and you have to ignore the fact that the means of production doesn’t conserve its encryption, and therefore opacity. It’s a sort of domesticated Luhmann
—conserving the enlightenment—Deconstruction is second order —both god and bad..
Blank name p. 123
Unfinished sentencep. 120 p. 112 reconstituion repeats p. 106
“The investigation makes no headway.
The investigation makes no headway.” P. 107 These lines are also repeated.
Chapter twelve (cont)and Thirteen seem to be out of place. They are notes from files, just like in part two. The typescript has ended. Yet the are not marked with a separate title.
160

“I would be hooked by that missing chapter.” P. 100 repeated p. 204 narrator incriminates himself by taking the case —becomes the wrong man— guilty , as in Kafka. p. 98
Book as a decoy to set up the narrator as the wrong man (98) p. 170 White Exercise
Found on the Study Desk
—this is the only file in “Drafts” that has a subtitle and that relates information about the file, where it was found.
The editors also resist reading the text by normalizing it.
They supply a page of closure of their own. "The typescript ends here." (93) not clear if this is from the French original or supplied by the translator.
Their list of additional documents is rather hilarious--either intentionally Perecian
(or Borgesian) or just unself-conscious listing of materials that really make little sense. See the editor's commentary on pp. 129-30. The documents are presented in "what appears to be their order of composition." (129)
The editors altered "the layout to allow for continuous reading" (130)
The French edition has six different facsimile pages
161

"In nearly all other respects this edition . . is a translation of the text published by
. . (130)
What does "nearly" mean? See the translator’s note on p. 26 where he explains that he standardized the titles, took out brackets from the French edition while adding his own, and supplied a few footnotes of his own.
This commentary has no title and is not listed in the book's table of contents.
That itself is not unusual, I suppose. What's odd is that this commentary is really an intro and should go at the front of the novel (or so one might think). What difference does it make to wait until the third part to talk about the text's status in philological terms?
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
162

were in play). The essay begins with Derrida talking about the conference title and mentioning de Man because the conference is in Belgium. The title of the conference is The Passions of Literature." He comes back to passion on p. 56 in relation to Blanchot and then on p. 63, distinguishes a Christological / Hegelian account of resurrection from Blanchot's "auto-bi-ography" of surviving
(survivance) as "life without life."
Derrida's remark that "He can no longer relive what he lived" (p. 66) offers an indirectly deeper account of archaeological hallucination ( Archive Fever ) in that the person who actually was there cannot repeat what happened because of the divided subject and divided temporality death introduces in Blanchot's split nonfictional 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
163

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 .)
A disturbance in the measure of time and a paradox of these instants, which are so many heterogeneous times. Neither synchrony nor diachrony, an achrony of all instants . . . because of the cause of death there can be no chronology or chronometry. (81)
All testimony essentially appeals to a certain system of belief, to faith without proof, to the act of faith summoned by a kind of transcendental oath, well, faith in a temporal order, in a certain commonsense ordering of time, is what guarantees the everyday concept. Especially the juridical concept and the dominant concept of attestation in European culture (49)
For Derrida, experiencing an encounter of death with death opens up the possibility of passion as compassion and friendship (non-Christian).
It is precisely "complaining" that Derrida addresses at the end of Demeures :
164

One cannot testify for the witness who testifies to his own death, but, inversely, only to the 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)
Beginning, Ending, Over Again
But whoever does not try to think and read the part of the fiction and thus of literature that is ushered in by such a phrase in even the most authentic testiomony will not have begun to read
165

or hear Blanchot. This holds for the majority of his political prosecutors, among others. (47)
--Jacques Derrida, Demeures
NOTES
NOTES
1
We should reference Antonioni's The Passenger . In the African desert, Jack
Nicholson finds a dead guy who turns out to be a weapons dealer in a hotel room, takes his passport, and impersonates him (and finally dies / is murdered), revealed through an amazing 11 minute long shot that tracks in and outside the hotel room where JN lies dead, through bars on the room's window. The opening sequence is weirdly edited with a flashback in voice-over, partly, and moves from
JN inside the room to him outside it, seen through a window with eh weapons dealer when he was alive (He says he has a bad heart and shouldn’t drink, and apparently died of a heart attack due to alcohol poisoning.)
166

Also, the passport photo as narrative, magical transition akin to the Stereopticon in Nicholas Roeg’s Performance .
2
Agamben's secularization of the history of the camp, of history in general, and his turning its potentially Jewish theology into a Catholic one: "We must cease to look toward . . . historical processes as if they had an apocalyptic or profane telos in which the living being and the speaking being, the human and the inhuman--or any terms of a historical process--are joined in an established, completed humanity and reconciled in a realized identity. This does not mean that, in lacking an end, they are condemned to meaningless or the vanity of an infinite, disenchanted drifting. They have not an end , but a remnant . . . The messianic Kingdom is neither the future (the millennium) nor the past
(the golden age): it is, instead a remaining time "
Remnants , 159.
See the conflation of WB with Saint Paul in the last chapter of Agamben’s The Time That
Remains .
It’s all about reading the text as an image, overcoming the Jewish
Bildverbot . The secret is that WB was really a Catholic.we need first to 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
167

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 to what cannot be testified to: “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). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s
Archaeology of Knowledge , Agamben regards the archive as a recording device for the unrecordable, defining the archive is "the system of relations between the said and the unsaid" (145) located in opposition to langue as parole is opposed to parole (144): between the obsessive memory of tradition, which knows only what has been said, and the exaggerated thoughtlessness of oblivion, the archive is the unsaid or sayable inscribed in everything that is always forgotten in the act of saying" (140).
2
Agamben’s neoFoucauldian conception of the archive misses, however, the way in which the camp is also a future archive / museum to be read but how the musealization and archivalization of the camp also involves an arche-archivology of storage and shelving. Rather than being exterior, the archive produces an exterioirty within in which that which is to be read is continually subject to divisions. The problem of the archive’s internal extiroity is
168

not that certain documents remain invisible(lost, stolen, faded) but that they are divisibile.
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 archearchive sheds light on the sacrificial economy required for the camp’s archivalization to work: what is destroyed has to be 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
169

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.
3 This loss of the mss in order to make it possible to find it later in published form would, in any case, only be a temporary solution since Benjamin sees the collector as an endangered species: “But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning when it loses its subject. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter. I do know that night is coming for the type that I am discussing here and have been representing before you a bit ex officio . But, as Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehended.” In “Unpacking my Library.”
4 Deep Storage
BOOKS
On the art of archiving
Precedents for this art, as with so many others, lie stowed in a
170

suitcase. Marcel Duchamp casually dismissed his project of the
Boîtes-en-valise as mere financial enterprise - ‘small business, I assure you’ 1 - an attempt to drum up a little cash. More recent val uations acknowledge the Boîtes as the first critique of museum practice: it ‘parodies the museum as an enclosed space for displaying art...mocks [its] archival activity...[and] satirically suggests that the artist is a travelling salesman whose concerns ar e as promotional as they are aesthetic.’ 2 But the project seems to have been more self-consciously motivated than either claim recognises.
It was 1938; the war was encroaching, and Duchamp’s art had already proved vulnerable to accident. The Large Glass was cracked in transit between Brooklyn and Katherine Dreier’s home in 1926, though this was not revealed until the crate was opened several years later. What better place to preserve the past than a museum? And so Duchamp devised one small enough to fit into a suitcase. He consigned printers and light manufacturers throughout Paris to make 300 copies of miniature versions of each of his artworks, customised a briefcase to store and display them, hastily packed the rest of his bags and came to America. 3
The task of assembling and editioning the Valises stretched beyond Duchamp’s death in 1964. In the end, the project was not only autobiographical, a life-long summation, but anticipatory as
171

well. As an artwork designed to be unpacked, the viewing of a
Valise carries the same sense of expectation and event as the opening of a crate.
The crate is, of course, a carapace and a coffin. In an increasingly international art world, works are routinely sealed up into protective bins and cartons to be jetted off to exhibitions and salerooms all over the world. Entering the collection or returned to the studio, they are consigned to storage in this same secreted state, sometimes never to be opened again. Over time, the crate supplants its contents as the object under consideration, the thing which is monitored, moved, and maintained.
Accelerating this eventuality are Richard Artschwager’s recent crate sculptures: empty wooden boxes that deviate only slightly from true art shipping form. An unlikely corner, sly angle, or jog in the silhouette embody the gestalt of Artschwager’s furniture-like sculptures and, resting in their chamfered frames, his sculptural paintings. Collectively, these funereal objects transform the gallery into a crypt, subjecting the history of Artschwag er’s achievements to the crudest form of encapsulation. They adjudicate the assessment of art as so much cultural furniture.
Haunting the storage spaces of galleries, museums, and auction houses, Louise Lawler photographs the object-inmates as they
172

move from racks and rooms, wheel past conservation studios, pause in corridors, wearily stand on view, step up to auction blocks and shuffle back into the storeroom. A dormant pall hangs over these transactions, turning the bustle of the marketplace and the dynamism of history into equally mythic properties. To watch the digital counters affixed to Ashley Bickerton’s sculptures, set during the ago-go 80s, and ticking away the seconds of a presumably ever-increasing worth, today seems only wistful.
The sense of loss which is intrinsic to these critiques depends on a consensus on what’s at stake. (You cannot mourn what you don’t care for.) To this extent, the crate becomes a figurative presence. Magritte made light of this potential in his pastiches of
David’s Madame de Recamier and Manet’s Le Balcon, in which the subjects of the original paintings are encrypted into craftily customised coffins. Artschwager’s self-reflexive crates confront the viewer with the immediate presence of totems. With their plain pine facades, they recall something Magritte once wrote about trees:
‘Pushed from the earth toward the sun, a tree is an image of certain happiness. To perceive this image, we must be immobile like a tree. When we are moving, it is the tree that becomes the
173

spectator. It is witness, equally, in the shape of chairs, tables and doors to the more or less agitated spectacle of our life.
The tree having become a coffin, disappears into the earth.
And when it is transformed into fire, it vanishes into air.’ 4
Marcel Broodthaers brings this imagery of identification to its most intimate disclosure, writing of a ‘deep storage’-style installation he created for his own Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des
Aigles, Section XIXème Siècle, located in his Brussels apartment:
‘My crates are empty. We are on the brink of the abyss. Proof: when I’m not here, there’s nobody.’ 5
Other artists seem more resigned to the ephemeral nature of representation. Rirkrit Tiravanija, for example, makes works as temporary as camp sites. Like Samuel Be ckett’s Molloy, who systematically moved stones from pocket to pocket, Tiravanija moved the contents of 303 gallery’s storeroom out into its exhibition space. In the back room, he set up a small stove to cook and serve meals to itinerant gallery-goers. During his absence, dishes and pans indicated the artist’s imminent return.
In the meantime, the space afforded by Untitled (Free) (1992) generously envisioned a world without storage problems.
174

In many cases, the storage of fine art has become practically an art in its own right: crates and conservation measures sometimes seem more elaborate than the very works they are designed to protect. Captivated by its symbols, labels, and materials, as well as the mysterious forms it engenders, Martin Kippenberger has c ultivated the beauty of fine arts handling. It’s a far-ranging aesthetic. Bins of the artist’s own canvases, shown as if jettisoned from the warehouse, are as romantic as ruined temples. The crates Kippenberger exhibits alongside his sculptures are so intricately absurd that, in the manner of the best gothic art, they defy common sense. Striped cardboard boxes, exhibited like
Donald Judd wall-sculptures, are smooth icons of minimalism.
And a series of mummified works, wrapped in Kippenberger’s own customised packing tape, becomes archaeological treasure, mysterious fetishes of some marginal sect.
Taking this Egyptian preoccupation one step further, Jason
Rhoades fashioned an entire installation of his artworks and possessions as if entombed in a suburban family garage. While
Kippenberger elevates wrappers to the status of artworks,
Rhoades intimates that it’s all - art and sepulchre alike - so much trash. With Suitcase with Past Financial Endeavours (1993), a shabby version of Duchamp’s Valise, Rhoades conjures up a comic image in which the suitcase takes advantage of the first-
175

class luxury of the contemporary art circuit. Packed meticulously by professional handlers, fawned over by devoted registrars, expensively insured and gingerly installed, this slacker suitcase filled with rolls of cellophane tape, magic markers, balled-up aluminium foil, and vials of ‘wee-wee’ will travel from gallery, to museum, to collection, taking an occasional time-out to relax in climate-controlled storerooms - a Beverley Hillbilly come to high culture.
Occasionally an artist is invited to infiltrate the sanctum sanctorum. Museum exhibitions that feature artists as curators seem to have made their debut in 1970 with Andy Warhol’s ‘Raid the Icebox’ at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design.
6 David Bourdon describes Warhol’s tour of the vaults:
‘Warhol wanted the entire shoe collection. Did he mean the cabinet as well? “Oh yes, just like that.” But what about the doors?
Would he allow people to open and close them? “Spectator participation,” Warhol murmured… One of the biggest surprises for Warhol was finding one of his own works...sharing a rack with two Charles Hawthorns and one Zoltan Sepeschy. “Doesn’t it make you sad to see all these forgotten artists?” Robbins asked
War hol. “...uh...”’ 7
A work’s fate once it leaves the studio domain can prove the
176

source of some anxiety. Contemplating the unknown, Franz
Erhard Walther took precautions against the possible mishandling of his First Work Series (1963-69). This multi-faceted sculpture consists of a suite of ‘before’ drawings, the realised fabric sculptures, ‘after’ photographs documenting these in performative use, and a shelving-unit for storing the entire ensemble.
Altogether the piece serves as both museum and archive: a pragmatic minimalist structure that attempts to control its own physical and interpretative destinies. On a similarly hermetic note are On Kawara’s date paintings, which come housed in their own cardboard boxes. Inside the lid of each box is affixed a newspaper page for the date situating the day’s work into a world of external events.
Reifying a stored work’s existence through a paper trail of photographs, sales records, loan forms, and letters is the archive.
The archive was Walter Benjamin’s great unfinished project: an attempt to organise the tidal waves of an ensuing modernity into a cohesive architecture of information and imagery. The inherent futility of this attempt, as each fragile structure slips beneath the crushing weight of the next oncoming wave, makes for an appropriately unstable paradigm in an age of reproduction that is itself giving way to the juggernaut of the information superhighway.
177

For artists working from mediated imagery, as opposed to firsthand experience, archives are invaluable studio references.
Eugene Atget, whose work was once primarily purchased by other artists and engravers as reference tools, referred to himself not as a photographer, but as an archivist. (Duchamp decided to give up painting to become a freelance librarian at the Bibliothèque
SainteGenevieve in Paris.) Among Joseph Cornell’s papers are neatly titled dossiers - whose subjects include ‘Claire Bloom’,
‘Clouds’, ‘Patty Duke’, and ‘Peter Engels’ - from which he culled for his collages. Likewise, Karen Kilimnik maintains files on everything from ‘Andy Warhol’ to ‘Waterbabies’ as possible fodder for her scatter-style drawings and installations. 8 For both artists, personal obsessions sustain collecting impulses that give way to assemblage by way of the archive. For the collaborative team of
Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, whose perfume Êtes-vous servis?
(1992) reproduces the scent of the National Archives in Paris, the repository is its own obsession.
Working an undefined interstice between archivist and artist, collector and curator, Douglas Blau maintains a vast accumulation of film stills, postcards, photographs and magazine clippings for use in his picture shows: installations of cycles of uniformly framed images lined up in neat rows on the wall. This format resul ts in a deceptively simple narrative. It’s easy enough to follow
178

the logic of this idiosyncratic flow of imagery when taken one picture at a time, but almost impossible to reconstruct in terms of a whole. Thrown back on the curatorial project in general, B lau’s selections point out a fictive fallacy whereby every exhibition is an essay reflecting arbitrary predilections and biases, what’s at hand, and what someone remembered to dig out of storage.
Sometimes the collecting impulse overwhelms the archival process. Instead of throwing things away, Warhol crammed his unopened mail and other casually-acquired ephemera into cardboard boxes, which he shipped off to storage in New Jersey.
Currently being opened and catalogued at The Andy Warhol
Museum, the Time Caps ules’ contents would seem a historian’s dream - a postmarked paper backdrop to the famous artist’s daily life. Except that the staggering volume of the capsules reveals
Warhol’s revenge, drowning the speculator in details of little or no importance.
The a rtist’s life is a grand archive, in which every discarded receipt, marginal note, or studio scrap might someday be deemed tremendously significant. Besides Warhol, consider the Robert
Mapplethorpe and Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner Foundations, dedicated to compounding interest in their subjects through the availability and upkeep of archives. These archives spawn those
179

other great testaments of worth, catalogue raisonnés, such as the giant tome just published in conjunction with the Bruce Nauman exhibition. Jockeying for control of the raw material are institutions like the Getty Museum, which offer to pay living artists large sums of money for their dead papers. While these activities maintain and minister to a flourishing art market, the resultant accumulations of documents are also telling memory banks, demonstrating the ways in which historic figures are valued.
The issue looms measurably in Meg Cranston’s Who’s Who by
Size, University of California Sample (1993). These blank stelae portray the relative importance of a panoply of cultural figures, from Emily Dickinson to Mohammed Ali, according to the number of inches of shelf space they occupy within the stacks of the library at the University of California. With individual merit counting for little - Nikola Tesla is dwarfed by Thomas Edison, despite his substantial contribution to engineering - it’s the adage of the art review come true: when it comes to securing a place in history, perhaps it’s not so much what gets written as the number of inches racked up in print.
When Sarah Seager approached the Smithsonian Institute’s
Archives of American Art with Excuse My Dust (1992-93), she implicitly challenged the archival system of inclusion. Her donation
180

of found correspondence written or received by the former archivist of the Huntington Library, was subtitled, Why do we circulate all these papers when everyone says it will make no difference? It tells of ‘...the archivist’s coming to terms with his wife’s nearly fatal bout with pneumonia’ and in itself, serves no more or less a purpose than documenting a fragment of a facet of an otherwise untold story. However, housed in the Archives of
American Art under ‘The Sarah Seager Papers’, it speaks of a historical process that only selectively chooses its evidence from a vast arena of information, while the rest falls away into an ocean of insignificance. 9
Anxiety and dust provoke the archiving impulse. In the museum - the mausoleum most artists still aim to enter through their work - the recesses of the storeroom simultaneously beckon and bar access to history. Art that assumes the storeroom’s cladding and demeanour of the stores displays a desire to repose within the museum’s collection. At the same time, these works also elude the museum’s authority by inventing alternative systems of selfcontainment outside of its ordination. These systems might be seen as individual struggles against time, or as simply autobiographical.
The process of storing is always one of mirroring and self-
181

evaluation. Whether that self be a cultural body, squirrelish individual, or Citizen Kane, ‘you are what you keep.’ When these dual modes of internal and external assessment intersect in an art of impenetrable closure or inexhaustible accumulation, they attain an ongoing afterlife within deep storage.
1. Marcel Duchamp quoted in Calvin Tomkins, ‘The Bride and the
Bachelors’ , New York: The Viking Press, 1965, p.60
2. Jackie McAllister and Benjamin Weil, exhibition catalogue essay ‘The Museum under Analysis’ in The Desire of the
Museum, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989, p.10
3. The task of assembling and editioning the Boîtes-en-valise multiples progressed at a rate of about 30% per year and involved a whole history of hired hands, including at one point, Joseph
Cornell.
4. Magritte quoted in Harry Torozyner, Magritte: Ideas and
Images, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.,1977, p.109
5. Marcel Broodthaers’ open letter (dated 29 September 1968) quoted in Birgit Pelzer, ‘Recourse to the letter’, Broodthaers:
Writings, Interviews, Photographs, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ed.
(Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988), p. 170. The installation of an
182

arrangement of crates and postcards of 19th century paintings, placed under the sign of the eagle, remained in place for exactly a year. Broodthaers’ open letters document the opening and activities of the museum on ‘official’ letterhead, comprising its
‘Section Littérature.’
6. The show was part of a series conceived by John and
Dominique de Menil, ‘who wanted to bring out into the open some of the unfamiliar and often unsuspected treasures mouldering in museum basements, inaccessible to the general public.’ c.f. exhibition catalogue essay by David Bourdon, ‘Andy’s Dish’, Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol, Providence: Museum of Modern
Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 1970, p.17
7. ibid. pp.17 & 24. Bourdon continues, ‘Back in his office,
Robbins informed the curator of the costume collection that
Warhol wanted to borrow the entire shoe collection. ‘Well, you don’t want it all,’ she told Warhol in a rather disciplinarian tone,
‘because there’s some duplication.’ Warhol raised his eyebrows and blinked.’, p.20
8. Other topics include anorexics, ballet/bows, god’s little creatures, murders, overbites, and pajama parties. c.f. Melissa E.
Feldman, ‘Karen Kilimnik: A Material Girl,’ Karen Kilimnik: Escape in Time, Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992, p.1.
9. In a letter dated September 14, 1992, the artist describes:
183

‘These letters were recently sent to my mother by a woman who found them in the basement of a Santa Cruz home. How the letters turned up in Santa Cruz remans a mystery, but it is in this unusual manner that I have become the custodian of the correspondence.’ c.f., Sarah Seager, Excuse My Dust, ed.
Cornelia Lauf, Gent: Imschoot, Uitgevers, 1994
Ingrid Schaffner frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com. Freize , Issue 23, June-August 1995. http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/deep_storage/
Dalton, Jennifer. Dream trash/trash dream: the artist as collector, historian, and archivist PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 62 (Volume 21, Number 2), May
1999, pp. 63-70/
5 "Demonic Berlin," in Selected Writings 2:1, 326
6
Can also bring in r footnote Kirkegaard book of fascmilies of his notes.
Possilby link back to Foucault on Nietzsche in Archaeology of Knowledge —not only what goes into the archive (what is regarded as significant enough to read) but also how it goes into the archive, how the archive gets reproduced in book forms. Facsimile raises word and image issue in new ways when the writing of a text is its illumination / illuminated manuscript, as it were, like historiated letters.
7 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7634744.stm
Analysis: The first ID cards
By Dominic Casciani
184

BBC News Home Affairs reporter Biometric technology uses computerised methods to identify a person by their unique physical or behavioural characteristics.
Developments and uses have increased with demand to match concerns over international, business and personal security.
Biometrics is more personal than a passport photo or Pin, using traits such as fingerprints, face or eye "maps" as key identifying features.
Uses range from building access and laptop security to identity cards and passports.
However, there are concerns about the storing of biometric data and its possible misuse. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456993/html/
8 I thought we could also do a redo of Lacan via Derrida around Dupin / Poe and detective fiction or Derrida versus Shapiro (around the issue of Derrida feeling policed in "Restitution") as Derrida and de Man in terms of researching as a kind of policing (Interpol) but in our case it's all about the interval separated the polis and the police, or the intersection (or interval between) of literature and philosophy as more than the use of the paratext as clues (a sort of parodic version of what I was doing in m last book). It would be closer to Derrida's
“Before the Law,” where the paratext, the title, and the text itself (part of
The Trial or fragment?) become the inescapable entry with no way out into reading.
185

Philosophical discourse , because it is also literary, can't rightly be separated out from detective work (reading text against paratext and vice versa).
Reading is not entrapment, in that sense, but parapolitcal, if you will, as well as paralinear.
(Maybe reading is a mouse(en)trapment.)
Subtitle of yesterday for discussion of Renoir's La Grande Illusion in The Train chapter:
La regle du juif
Maybe (for today)
Policing the Valise or
Polising the Valise or Po-lease-ing the Valise
9
10 This is from an article about a recent and quite ridiculous military
186

policy in Israel:
[Asharq Al-Awsat] Who are the groups harmed by these decisions?
[Al-Ahmad] There are Palestinians in the West Bank who still do not have identity cards. They have entered on the basis of visas they obtained from the Israeli embassy in Amman, and have not left the West
Bank since then.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What is the number of such people?
[Al-Ahmad] No one knows their precise number. However, there are those who assess the number as around 10,000 or slightly more. There are the foreign activists who are sympathetic toward the Palestinian cause, and participate in the demonstrations and protest rallies against the separation wall; some of these are Palestinians with foreign nationalities.
[Asharq Al-Awsat] What about the Gazans? http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=1&id=20638
11 reconceptualizing the symptomatic reading as well as deconstructive /psychoanalytic notions of resistance, a kind of synthesis of Althuser / Macherey and de Man. [ introduce unread –ability here —that our delay is not a matter only of our will but of an interpretive problem involving the archive that the self-storage unit makes visible. Develop the concept of linearization as a certain of historicism, construction of a timeline, a connect the dots, understand cause and effect
—it’s also a juridical notion and detective fiction notion of reading (Ginzburg on Holmes, Moretti, and Freud). But we are pausing over the resistance to linearization the self-storage unit generates
—not a symptomatic reading—just a gap , spaces between the dots not filed in. But unreading is also a problem of narrative and historicism, narratives that do not take linear form but are produced through a linearization
187

that is itself a kind of resistance]
I will just expand on it to introduce "unreada -abilitiy." Thought I would cite Weber on Benjamin's -abilities as a kind of support, though we can stress a sort of "inability" in the "unread."
12 Making Sense of “Force of Law’
Why does Derrida publish what were originally two lectures together as one article with a new title rather than as two separate articles with their original titles? Why does he call attention to this fact in the headnote to the essay? Why doesn’t he integrate the two but instead mark their difference and also mark the addition of a new prologue to the second essay? Why does he add this part?
Why does he want / need to publish the one lecture with the other, the first on deconstruction as a method, the second on WB’s “Critique of Violence”, while offering no explanation as to why he is dong so? What kind of reading of his essay is Derrida demanding of his reader? Is he implicitly asking that we read each part both with and against the other? There are some tensions between the two
—only one aporia in part one, but plural "deconstructions" in part two.
Are we supposed to reread the first part in light of the second? Or is the first part there so he can say what he says in the second part? That is, is the first part is preparatory and to be burned after reading? Why does he add the post scriptum but not say anything about it in the headnote? Why is the post scriptum section entirely italicized?
Is Derrida right or wrong in Agamben’s sense of understand or misunderstand?
Or is the question whether what JD is doing is right or wrong? Is he being just to
WB? He talks about anger being key to WB’s text and hten explodes at WB in the post-scriptum.
Derrida’s essay on Foucault called “To Do Justice to Freud.”
Is Derrida’s essay a failure? A loss of composure, composition, a failure to compose his thoughts, himself?
In part one, Derrida says there are two styles of deconstruction, one abstract and one close reading. The distinction kind of maps on to the essay itself (the first part is abstract, the second part if a close reading). Bu where then does the P.S. fit?
188

In part one, Derrida says deconstruction is oblique, that justice cannot be addressed directly, but requires detours; in part two, he says he says that WB’s text is “strange, enigmatic, and obscure.” WB is not a deconstructive thinker, for
Derrida, but someone whose text requires deconstruction.
Does Derrida do violence to WB? He certainly forces his reading, forces WB into a deconstructive harness (iterability), but reading a 1921 essay without regard to its chronology in WB’s life (dies 1940) and to The Concept of History (1940) nor with respect to the chronology of WB’s life and the Final Solution. Moreover, the
Greek (myth) Jew opposition (divine) violence is much more pronounced by
Derrida thatn it is by WB. WB keeps the tensionhidden; Derrida reveals it inorder to criticize it.
Yet Derrida’s own text is strange, even by his own standards of eccentricity.
Unusual headnote (see above). Moreover, why is the answer to part two in the post scriptum? And why is it a post scriptum, a singular post-script, as if no other postscript (P.P.S) could follow, instead of Post Script? Why the Latin to mark the singular “scriptum” after going on about addressing the audience in English in part one?
Is Derrida going post-scriptal? Or post-scriptural?
Is the p.s. a collapse a philosophical discourse “ I don't like this text. It’s too this and its to that.”
Or is Derrida setting up the p.s. as an exception, as a discursive space in which he can decide that WB’s text is faulty, but make that decision from a paratextual, relatively but not quite extratextual position that is itself ruptured? The p.s. marks a failure of the essay to synthesize and integrate the two lectures. The second requires a prologue, and one wonders if the p.s. was part of the original, and if so, why it was required to be a p.s.? Is the p.s. singular as a way of deciding not decide? It’s an end, but not the end, a supplement that is “the” supplement.
Is Derrida excepting his blow up and blow out at WB’s divine violence equals the
Final Solution as a collapse of philosophical discourse by way of excusing his essay for its failure, its obscuring through seeming clarity the essay’s inability to do justice to WB, to decide on the merits of his account of (Jewish) divine violence??
Why doesn’t Derrida sign off, as he does at the end of “Signature, Event,
Context?” Why iterability the key program for Derrida’s deconstruction of WB’s text?
In part two, he lets WB sign last and first. He relegates the play of Waltende and
Walter to a footnote. Why? What is the relation between the footnote and the postscriptum? Similarly, in WB’s text, how should we read the space between the text and WB’s name? As a space between the concept and the name, between the text and Walter as God, giving the name and placing it outside of the concept, outside philosophical discourse, exterior in the way Derrida’s p.s. is?
189

Is the P.S. a explosion of the implosion, a kind of underground nuclear bomb text, as “Did you hear something” Does Derrida want to show that justice cannot be done or not done to WB? That the justice of his reading is undecidable, especially at the moment it seems, paradoxically, the most decisive? Is this a veiling / hiding of the true or central aporia of the essay, an indecisive space being the only space in which a decision may (not) be taken?
Is Derrida archiving his own failure the way he says WB does? Is he mdoelling his essay on WB’s?
13
...see more
PQ2663.I9 V6513 2001
14 Max Payne is indeed a terrible action / vigilante movie. Max Payne is a cop and widower whose wife and baby were murdered in his own home by, it turns out, a despicable pharmaceutical corporation tied to the military industrial complex. I cannot recommend it to you without warning you that finding the few interesting parts means having to endure the incredibly awful parts that constitute nearly the entire film. However, there is a quite interesting scene in it when Max
190

visits a self-storage unit. To save time, let me show you some image captures of the scene.
Now in terms of the plot, there is something silly here in the assumption that the corporate security / thieves would leave the file folders but steal their contents.
Indeed, why would they use first names only much less keep these files at all.
But it does make sense in psychoanalytic terms. The file is missing. The film fills in that story
—the wife turns out to have been murdered by the corporation’s security agents with the knowledge of the CEO. Like any number of detectives in films, Max Payne’s is able to fill in what is missing. But in this case, there’s a pun on self-storage. You do it yourself, but you store yourself —or you are stored, to use the passive voice. You store more than you know, more than can be stored.
And we also have an example of Freud’s uncanny: the home / office. The home and office spaces are connected by a slash, differentiated yet linked. In Max
Payne , a similar fantasmatic logic about the file and its tampering is at work.
Though the missing contents of the file become evidence in a chain that leads to
Payne’s finding and killing his wife’s murderers, the last scene of the film is shown after the end credit sequence is over, when most viewers will have left the theater. This scene is titled on the DVD edition “unfinished business.”
15
In chapter five, I want to take up theology and the work of art (in relation of the train the double, the uncanny).
“But I cannot help feeling that Mr. Auerbach’s extreme reluctance to define his terms and to make his suppositions clear from the outset, has impaired the effectiveness of his book. It has certainly given rise, judging from the reviews I
191

have seen, to an interminable series of misunderstandings. . . Given the scope and enormous multiplicity of his materials, his results are peculiarly shifting and disconcertingly vague.”
Rene Wellek, review of Mimesis in The Kenyon Review 16 (2) 1954, 299-307; to
304-05.
A poetics of scholarship: The fluke, or the stumble (as opposed to the jump or spring).
For example, searching on Jstor for reviews of Auerbach’s
Mimesis and saw the last part of a review just above the review of Auerbach’s Mimesis (by Leo Ulrich,
Comparative Lit ,1: (1), 1949, 92-95) of a book by Carre entitled Les Ecrivains francais et le mirage allemagne , that turns out to be a critique of the nationalist imaginary construction of German writers by Frech writes. The reviewer, Stuart
Pratt Atkins (Harvard University), ends his review by quoting the dedication of the book to three of Carre students, all of whom were killed in the war for various reasons:
Brilliantly clear, though deceptively so, [the book] raises questions not merely intellectually tantalizing but also of grave concern to all of us as humane human beings. For the reader of Les Ecrivains francaise et le mirage allemand cannot easily forget, however dispassionately he may want to be, that it is dedicated “A la memoire de mes etudiants morts pour la France; Albert Piat, fusille par les
Allemands en 1944; Gilles Chaine, tue dans le maquis en 1944; Michel Cabos, deporte a Mauthausen et mort en 1945.”
While all three students died “for France,” the cause of death becomes less clear with each student: Whereas the first students has a clear cause of death —blown up by the Germans, the death of the second, in the Resistance, is less clear (who caught him? The Germans? Or the Germans with the aid of the French?). And though the third and last student clearly died in a German concentration camp
Carre does not say exactly how the student died (starvation? execution?) nor does he say, more crucially, who deported him to Mauthausen, the French or the
Germans or both. Carre’s own nationalism subsumes various kinds of deaths, various kinds of students, and gives their death a cause, namely, “France” in order to avoid a full explanation of the causes of their death.
This is one or the reasons wee always set out from texts for the elaboration of this problematic, texts in the ordinary and traditional sense of written letters, or even literature, or texts in the sense of differential traces according to the concept we have elaborated elsewhere. And we are unable to do otherwise than take our departure in texts in as they depart . . . at the departure . We could not do otherwise even if we wished to do so or thought to do so. We are no longer credulous enough to believe we are setting out from things themselves by avoiding ‘texts” simply by avoiding quotation or the appearance of “commentary.”
The most apparently direct writing, the most directly concrete, personal writing which is supposedly in direct contact with the “thing itself,” this writing is “on
192

credit”: subjected to the authority of a commentary or a re-editing that is not even capable of reading.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , (100)
As an identifiable, bordered, posed subject, the one writes and his or her writing never gives anything without calculating, consciously or unconsciously, its reappropriation, its exchange, or its circular return
—and by definition this means reappropriation with surplus value, a certain capitalization. We will even venture to say that this is the very definition of he subject as such. One cannot discern the subject except as the subject of this operation of capital.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , (101)
Tobacco symbolizes the symbolic: It seems to consist at once in a consumption
(ingestion) and a purely sumptuary expenditure of which nothing natural remains.
But the fact that nothing natural remains does not man, on the contrary, that nothing symbolic remains. The annihilation of the remainder, as ashes can sometimes testify, recalls a pact and performs the role of memory. One is never sure that this annihilation does not partake of offering and of sacrifice.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , 112
Derrida cites the chapters ‘The Unsacrifiable” and ‘The Offering” in Jean-Luc
Nancy’s A Finite Thinking Trans. Simon Spark s, (Stanford UP,2003). “The
Unsacrificeable” chapter begins with Lascaux Man. “It is, no doubt, reasonable enough to attribute the practice of sacrifice to Lascaux man at the very latest”
(51)
The line that resonates for me here is “One is never sure that this annihilation does not partake of offering and of sacrifice.
”
Since Agamben is desacralizing homo sacer , we are then dealing with the sacrality of the archive (or the uncanny return of the theological in the archive).
One question for us might be: can one escape the kind of sacrificial economy at the heart of the homo sacer through the archive, through the ash of the archive, through circulation that circles, delinearizes what it stores and seems always already to have put in order. Does spare life get us out of bare life? Or is
Derrida’s suspension of a certain reading of psychoanalysis and the Ark-ive as
Jewish (Yersuhalmi’s question, posed with irony) as far as one can go?
How might we synthesis ash in Given Time with ash in Archive Fever ?
So the storage unit another way of rendering an account of oneself that is life lived as pure expenditure rather than as the capitalization of the self
(accumulation of assets), McPherson’s “private property person?”
The text by Baudelaire deals, in effect, with the relations among fiction in general, literary fiction and capitalism, such as they might be photographed acting out a scene in the heart of the modern capital. Let us return to the place of this scene,
193

we could say to the scene of the crime. Throughout, this narration is in fact deployed as a discourse of incrimination and recrimination. A crime must have taken place.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , (124-125)
Connect this passage to WB “On Photography” and the crime scene.
Footnote on Buadelaire’s anti-Semitism and WB (130-131, n. 14)
The beggar represents a purely receptive, expending, and consuming agency, an apparently useless mouth. One must indeed say, as always, apparently, for in fact he can play a role of the symbolic mediation in a sacrificial structure and thereby assure an indispensable efficacity. In any case, he has no role of productive work in the creation and circulation of wealth. He consumes and destroys surplus values.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , (134)
The regularity of this social irregularity each time reinscribes begging and alms in a sacrificial structure. Sacrifice will always be distinguished from the pure gift (if there is any any). The sacrifice proposes an offering but only in the form of a destruction against which it exchanges, hopes for, counts on a benefit, namely, a surplus
–value or at least or at least an amortization, a protection, and a security.
Jacques Derrida, Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money , (137)
According to a structure analogous to the that of the pharmakos , of incorporation without introjection and assimilation, the expulsion of the beggar keeps the outside within and assures an identity by exclusion, the exception made ( fors ) for an interior closure or cleft.
Connect Derrida’s account of the beggar and also misforture (142), destinerrance
(143), the destiny to be wrong (156), stray dogs (143), beaten dog (153) to his account of democracy in “The Pharmakon.”
“liberal democracy” (131)
We will not pause over this folding back and its reduplication, but one may constantly draw out the relation between these kinds of folded back relations, related them to each other or fold them back on each other. (145)
But what are we saying when we say that a character in fiction forever takes a secret with him? And that the possibility of this secret is readable without the secret ever being accessible? That ht readability of the text is structured by the unreadability of the secret, that is, by the inaccessibility of a certain intentional meaning or a wanting-to-say in the conscious of the characters and a fortiori in that of the author who remains, in this regard , analogous to that of the reader? . .
194

. The interest of “Counterfeit Money,” like any analogous text in general, comes form the enigma constructed out of this crypt which gives to read that which will remain eternally unreadable, absolutely indecipherable, even refusing itself to any promise of deciphering or hermeneutic. (152)
Perhaps we could pun on refuse as in refuse to turn itself into refuse, trash, ash.
Derrida almost too simply opposes readable to unreadable here, as if unreadability where perfectly readable.
But he adds that “If the secret remains undetectable, unbreakable, in this case . . the essential inviolability of the secret they carry depends first of all on the essential superficiality of their phenomenality, on the too-obvious of that which they present to view. (153)
The thing and the event. . . the occurrence (159); The event is in sum what urges the “I” to ask himself . . . What is an event? ”What does ‘to happen’ mean?
What is an event?” (120); The gift like the event, as event, must remain unforeseeable, but remains so without keeping itself. It must let itself be structured by the aleatory. . . . which already appears phenomenological impossible. Whatever the case may be with this phenomenological impossibility, a gift or event that would be foreseeable, necessary, conditioned, programmed, expected, counted on would not be lived as either a gift or as an event, as required by a necessity that is both semantic and phenomenological. That is they the condition common to the gift and the event is a certain unconditionality. .
. The event and the gift, the event as gift, the gift as event must be irruptive, unmotivated —for example, disinterested. They are decisive and must tear the fabric, interrupt the continuum of a narrative that they nevertheless call for, they must perturb the order of causalities: in an instant. (122-23); The gift and the event obey nothing, except perhaps, as principles of disorder, that is principles without principles . . . gift effects (123); the event of the gift must always keep its status of incalculable or unforeseeable exception (without general rule, without program, and even without concept)” (129); and which means “with the exception of”, “except.” (130)
I think we need to spend some time in the intro clarifying what we mean (what de
Man and Derrida mean) by these terms and why are making use of them.
“Quasi-automaticity” (158)
Given and denied, time will have be killed, and what we are talking about in this transfer of credit is a murder. (154)
195

This place is the non-place of a frame (the four-sided border, the spacing out of a given moment), but it is the dislocated frame of a triptych, a scene of three plus or minus an excluded fourth term, and all the positions being exchangeable there to infinity, n an endless circulation . . . The counterfeit money is the purloined letter. (151)
Apocalypse of the gift
—revealed only when “there is time no more.” (148)
An intoxicating pleasure, like tobacco or drugs, to be as close as possible to the auto-affective causa sui . (146)
This violence appears to be irreducible, within the circle or outside it, whether it repeats the circle or interrupts it . (147)
“a sacrificial calculation” (142) money and “dematerilaization (110)
“such as they are readable on this very surface itself” (149)
This is the phenomenon without phenomenality of counterfeit money (149)
From the first approach, as we have begun to see and beginning with the title, the border which seems to slip away, to divide or to multiply, to delinearize itself.
The delinearization affects, to be sure, the rectilinear or circular continuality of a line but it also compromises the identity and indivisibility of the linear trait, it its very consistency as a trait contracted with itself, its unity as trait. Now what is a border or an approach one the indivisibility of the trait is no longer secure? The gift, if there is any, will always be without border. (91)
There’s a weak but detectable Rousseau (66) to “excuse” (149), “make excusable that which” (157) and “confession” (121; 168; 170) thread running through the book (the argument seems very de Manian at moments).
“text . . is . . a machine” (96); sounds like de Man on irony (98); especially 94-95 on rhetoric and metonymy; and also “destines the text to depart in ashes or go up in smoke” (102); and 153
“sacrificial calculation” (142)
Footnote on living speech versus dead letter, Christian versus Jew (101, n. 18)
The passage below sounds quite de Manian, but Derridean is doing a kind of structuralist take on deconstruction, insisting that the structure is reducible:
196

Framed, embedded, bordered, de-bordered, overrun, the smaller becomes metonymically, larger than the larger —that borders and frames it. Such a frame fixes the space and time given, that is, instituted by a convention, a convention which is, by convention, irremovable. But this structure is rather a movement that also overruns and de-borders the coded language of rhetoric, her of metonymy as identifiable figure. For the very identity of figures supposes stable relations between the part and the whole. This relative stabilization always appears possible, to be sure, and it allows for rhetoric and the discourse on rhetoric. But as no natural stability is ever given, as there is only stabilization in process , that is, essentially precarious, one must presuppose “older” structures, let us not say originary structures, but more complicated and more unstable ones. We propose to call them structures, and even to study them as such in literary processes, because they are not necessarily chaotic. Their relative “anteriority” or their greater complexity does not signify pure disorder. (94-95)
These are the structural paradoxes, the stigmata of the impossibility with which we began: so as not take over the other, the overtaking by surprise of the pure gift should have the generosity to give nothing that surprises and appears as gift, nothing that presents itself as present , nothing it is; it should therefore be surprising enough and thoroughly made up of a surprise surprising enough to let itself be forgotten without delay . . The secret of that about which one cannot speak, but which one can no longer silence. (147)
Such a secret enters literature, it is constituted by the possibility of the literary institution and revealed by that institution in its possibility of secret only to the extent to which it loses all interiority, all thickness, all depth. It is absolutely unbreakable, inviolate only to the extent to which it is formed by a nonpsychological structure. This structure is not subjective or subjectile, infinitely private because public through and through. It is spread on the surface of the page, as obvious as a purloined letter, a post card, a bank note, a check , a
“letter of credit”—or “a sliver two-franc piece.” (170) turn to gift of intelligence (versus stupidity), if capacity to interpret (as opposed to a transgression, comprehension being the condition of remorse). Genetic “biohermeneutics” p. 160 engender 161; genetic cptial (168); birth of literature (169)
Paralipsis (164)
----------------------------------------
197

Is De rrida punning on Curtius’s name in the Postscript to Demeures , as in courteous —TLS has been discourteous with respect to Derrida’s courteous treatment of Curtius?
16 Sovereign is he who decides on the exception. --Carl Schmitt, Political
Theology , (5)
The strange nature of posthumous publications is to be inexhaustible.--Maurice
Blanchot, "The Last Word,” in Friendship , (252)
17
Derrida Beast and Sovereign editorial notes
De Man archive
Sent this to Tom Kennan:
De Man's “evasion" of Kierkegaard. I know, thanks to you, that de
Man was planning to write on Kirkegaard. Are there any of de Man's extant notes on Kirkegaard and / or marginalia in de Man's copies of any of Kierkegaard’s texts? I ask because my reading of de Man's "Concept of
Irony" takes as its point of departure de Man's opening reference to
Kierkegaard’s book of the same title and de Man's declarative sentence in his first paragraph that his title is ironic (de Man spends the rest of the essay saying that irony cannot be defined, stopped, ended, nor can its threat be defused). De Man immediately veers away from K and cites Schlegel at the end of the first paragraph. De Man returns to K only in the third to last paragraph for some very cursory comments.
198

I'm reading de Man's essay as a self-ruination, a hidden call to return to K and reread him after reading de Man (a call de Man may be hiding from himself--or the text hides it from itself). Schlegel is a kind of fall guy (almost a kind of Fichte) in de Man's essay, a distraction (whose work de Man implies we should read but then tells us not to--Lucinde will be disappointing, etc) or blows (in the last paragraph after citing him with seeming approval in the paragraph before). Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony is all about the curious link between history and irony de Man ends by observing. Socrates is a "pause" and a "dash" and so cannot be historicized (except through negation and idealization). Even more interestingly, Kierkegaard’s concept of irony is all about beginnings (that collapse into endings). If the resistance to theory is theory, then de Man's (of his essay's) resistance is to Kierkegaard’s book, which de Man never reads (Schlegel, by contrast, is wonderful and readable). If de Man puts Kierkegaard on the line and then disconnects him in order for us to place a new call to Kierkegaard, de Man also drops his connection to us, leaving us to reread Kierkegaard in de Man's wake but entitling us, as it were, to do so. Irony, it then turns out, is all about the duplicity of the title
. Reference to Kierkegaard’s title is the one “prefartory” place de Man can say what irony is positively, initiating a repetition that is also a recalling that does not call
Kierkegaard up but puts Kierkegaard on hold. Irony is most threatening
(easiest to name and easiest to ignore) in the
199

paratextual space both dividing title from text and (con)fusing two works with the same title (Kierkegaard’s and de Man's).
I am wondering if the resistance to Kierkegaard continued after the lectures in the form of "I'll get to Kierkegaard" without ever doing so (that is, de Man would never have gotten to Kierkegaard even if he had lived longer--the deferral is a call, not a promise, or a promise that can only be kept by the reader of de Man, not by de Man himself).
How does Paul de Man’s provocative assertion that “nothing can overcome the resistance to theory since theory is itself this resistance” (19) in
The Resistance to Theory play out in de Man’s corrosively ironic essay “The Concept of Irony,” lectures recorded and transcribed, and edited in the posthumously published
Aesthetic Ideology . Attempts to recuperate deconstruction after de Man after his pro-Nazi Belgian journalism came to light in 1987 have tended to bypass de
Man’s resistance to being read in favor of preserving a seemingly more palatable and accessible Derridean form of deconstruction. When discussing Carl
Schmitt’s concept of the political and the state of exception,Giorgio Agamben,
Samuel Weber, and Victoria Kahn all engage Derrida or use Derridean idioms, and ignore de Man.
17 In my view, however, both Derrida and de Man are engaged, however, in similar kids of textual self-ruination. I will consider only de
Man’s case here, taking his essay “The Concept of Irony” as my example.
17 De
Man begins his es say “The Concept of Irony” by noting that his title is ironic since it is taken from Soren Kierkegaard’s book of the same title. The irony of de Man’s
200

essay’s may lie most corrosively in its declaration that its title is taken form the title of a book de Man does not read but to which he may be reinitiating us, sending us back to reread in light of de Man’s essay. One cannot decide whether de Man is giving his reader indirect directions (stop reading me, don’t bother with Schlegel, just go to Kierkegaard) or doesn’t know what he is doing, just playing out the logic of the buffoon he (through Schlegel) identifies with the ironist to the end, which then turns serious or perhaps into gallows humor
(Schlegel’s acceptance and even desire for incomprehension will not stop error, madness or stupidity).
At the end of the first paragraph, de Man wittily laughs off Kierkegaard and does not return to him again until the third to last paragraph, to which de Man confines him. De Man spends the essay on American critic s (who don’t understand irony) and German ones (who do), especially Friedrich Schlegel. De Man refers several times early on to the “threat” (169) irony poses and then surveys three ways of “defusing” (169) it, aligning his own reading with the second. Yet de
Man’s essay bombs, in both senses of the word, by declaring (with more serious than one would expect) that the reader will learn nothing from it and by ending by detonating Schlegel, whose writings he seems to invite his readers to read or reread, but which he confines to three fragments (de Man mentions but does not read Schlegel’s philosophical novel, Lucinde ).
At stake here is a concept of philosophical history —of the beginning and ending —of the event and the occurrence, of when to stop or beginreading. De
Man begins by stopping and thengoes back. In contrast to de Man, who is
201

concerned with the desire to stop irony by understanding (something that will never happen), Kierkegaard is concerned with irony and beginnings.
Kierkegaard’s Concept of Irony is all about the curious link between history and irony de Man ends by observing. Socrates is a "pause" and a "dash" (199) and so cannot be historicized (except through negation and idealization). Even more interestingly, Kierkegaard’s concept of irony is all about beginnings (that collapse into endings). For some examples, see the following (ironic?) passages from
Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony : “irony is the beginning, and yet no more than the beginning; it is and it is not, and its polemic is a beginning that is just as much an ending, for the destruction of the earlier development is just as much the ending of this as it is the beginning of the new development, since the destruction is possible only because the new principle is already present as a possibility. We now proceed to show in Socrates the other side of the bifrontic character implicit in every historical beginning: we must look at his relation to the development that traces its beginning back to him” (214); “Since Socrates commence s most of his inquiries not at the center but at the periphery. . . . “ (32);
“To know that one is ignorant is the beginning of coming to know but if one does not know more, it is merely a beginning. This knowledge kept Socrates ironically afloat" (269);
“. . . the salient feature of irony is that at all times has in its power the possibility of a beginning and its not handicapped by earlier situations. There is something seductive about all beginnings, because the subject is still free, and this is the enjoyment the ironist craves" (253). De Man begins by ending (“You will never understand —so we can stop now and all go home” (164) is the last
202

sentence, a joke, of the first paragraph), sending us back to the earlier work his title cites in order to understand how irony is a problem of beginning and ending the determination of what irony is, something de Man spends the rest of the essay maintaining can never be defined. Is de Man, like the rather dashing Dane he ignores, on the outs with the Germans, who "I of course understand," (165) de
Man says in a mock serious maybe ironic manner--certainly not in total seriousness)? If the resistance to theory is theory, then de Man's (of his essay's) resistance is to Kierkegaard’s book, which de Man never reads (Schlegel, by contrast, is wonderful and readable). If de Man puts Kierkegaard on the line and then disconnects him in order for us to place a new call to Kierkegaard, de Man also drops his connection to us, leaving us to reread Kierkegaard in de Man's wake but entitling us, as it were, to do so. Irony, it then turns out, is all about the duplicity of the title. Reference to Kierkegaard’s title is the one
“prefatory” place de Man can say what irony is positively, initiating a repetition that is also a recalling that does not call Kierkegaard up but puts Kierkegaard on hold. Irony is most threatening (easiest to name and easiest to ignore) in the paratextual space both dividing title from text and (con)fusing two works with the same title (Kierkegaard’s and de Man's). Perhaps de Man’s resistance to
Kierkegaard continued after the lectures in the form of de Man saying "I'll get to
Kierkegaard" without ever doing so (that is, de Man would never have gotten to
Kierkegaard even if he had lived longer--the deferral is a call, not a promise, or a promise that can only be kept by de Man’s now indebted reader, not by de Man
203

himself).
I was rereading Ronell's chapter on de Man in Stupidity as well as her
Kierkegaard" satellite. Funny how wrong she goes because she wants to finger de
Man for not writing about stupidity, not being as smart as Avital.
Kinda stoopid.
I would want to shift away from her (s and m) scene of reading to an unseen of reading, a promise that is not fulfilled by de Man (who is still promising more to come even as he writes that he was nowhere else to go) yet not broken either since the double reading de Man demands involves reading de Man (with(out) de Man. The published essay has to be read in relation to a text that is not there (and that de
Man write--his essay was a lecture). The phantom essay (on the way, maybe) puts you on a call back to SK, a call AR tries to place but totally goes missing (it's Schlegel--smart one-- versus
Kierkegaard--dumb one). The example of de Man would then be a way of further complicating the relation between history and irony (Socrates is just a dash) de Man is already (not) delivering. Irony is not a postal system but about the promise of publication in obth senses of promise (as what is fulfilled and as in what is published is all there, all there is, complete). Editors always assume, especially in the case of posthumous publication, some kind of bio-teleology--the lectures would have been published eventually, rewritten along the
204

way. The Derrida editors make the same assumption but mark the lectures as "pre"written, a complement to he published canon, but not a publication in the now canonical (in their view) of Derrida's oeuvre
(as only his written published texts, not his written lectures). The editors also classify Derrida's lectures according to medium and chronology: handwriting; typewriting; computer processing.
It's like they have a total philological panic attack. All this rage for order kicks, presented as caring (when really the corpse is only being embalmed and mummified; no room for anarchivalization in the
Derrida archive) in order to clarify and purify the boundary between published and unpublished even as this project fails
(self-deconstructs) since the division itself requires a phantasmatic supplement--what Derrida would have done if he had not died when he did-- "Derrida always said that . . . " They use this sentence, as if
Derrida had dictated a will about his posthumous publication even though they are speaking of a general wish they think Derrida expressed but assume he never acted on because, oh, well, you see he just died and so never got around to it).
18 In 1955, Spain finally was willing to allow Bunuel to direct a film in Spain, after he had been banished from his home country for many years. From Baxter, pages 3-4:
205

[Bunuel] already had an idea for the plot. he often fantasized about using drugs or hypnotism to render [women] helpless. A beautiful Englishwoman in the street reminded him of Victoria Eugenia, Spain's beautiful English-born blonde queen during the 1910s... The idea of making love to her as she lay in a trance led him, he wrote in his autobiographical My Last Breath [My Last Sigh] , to the story of 'a young woman... drugged by an old man.... It struck me that the woman should be pure, and I made her a novice [nun].' His resentment of the [Catholic] Church triggered a vision of the nun becoming the mistress of a rowdy household which turned on its head the pious exactitude of the convent. Perhaps the nun would throw the house open to beggars...'
This became Bunuel's film Viridiana , in which beggars sacrilegiously reeanct the scene from Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper . Franco's regime had such confidence in Bunuel that they sent the film to the Cannes Film Festival without ever screening it. The film won the Palme d'Or for Best Film at the festival, and it was only afterward that word was sent to the Franco regime and Catholic leaders that they were harshly targeted by the film. From Baxter, page 8:
It took a day for the scandal to explode, but when it did, the world knew about it.
In L'Osservatore Romano , the Vatican's mouthpiece, a Spanish Dominican named Fierro excoriated Viridiana as 'sacrilegious and blasphemous'. Munoz-
Fontan saw it for the first time and realized that, apart from accepting his suggestion of the card game, Luis had made none of the promised changes.
Franco did not see it at the time; the Vatican's fury was enough. He disciplined all twenty members of the Cannes delegation [from Spain]... Viridiana and Bunuel
206

were comprehensivly condemned. Any negatives and prints of the film in Spain were seized or burned, UNINCI was liquidated and all Bunuel films suppressed.
Baxter, pages 255-256:
Viridiana repositioned Bunuel at the cenre of the cinema world. He never said so, but this had probably been his plan fro the moment the film was proposed.
Scandal, after all, had worked well with Un Chien Andalou ...
Since Viridiana was a Mexican production, Spain could not stop its distribution. It did the next best thing, sequestering the original negative and banning all Bunuel films. However, all the copies needed of Viridiana culd be generated from the duplicate negative smuggled to Paris by Juan Luis. Inevitably the scandal sharpened interest...
Franco, who responded to the Church's anger rather than the film's content, did not himself see Viridiana for years. Afterwards he is said to have remarked, 'I can't understand the fuss.' But, as Bunuel commented, how can you shock a man who has committed so many atrocities? Meanwhile, tour operators in
Barcelona offered day trips to cities in southern France like Perpignan and
Biarritz. The fare included a morning's shopping and an afternoon screening of
Viridiana . But it would not open publicly in Spain until 1977.
The General's mild reaction suggests the respect in which, despite the fact that he had hoodwinked the nation, Bunuel was still held. Even after Viridiana , it would have been delighted to have him back -- on its terms. 'The main problem with Bunuel for Franco's regime,' say John Hopwell, '... was that he had the personality and the genius to found a school of film-making in Spain. A country
207

whose moral standards were set by the Church could hardly have its film standards set by its most famous atheist.'...
Viridiana continued to encounter problems in Catholic countries. Italy, still smarting over Fellini's La Dolce Vita , did not show it until 1963, wheen it was banned and Bunuel sentenced in abstentia to a year in prison. In Belgium, where the Union of Film Critics awarded it their Grand Prix, copies were seized and mutilated. Even the Swiss loathed it. At the same time, more thouhtful Catholic critics were finding much to praise.
Bunuel, begging the question of whether the depiction of the damage wrought on the will by belief can properly be called 'religious', always argued that the film was essentially devout, 'because in every scnee there is an underlying sense of sin. The old man cannot violate his niece because of this.' Gabriel Figueroa too believed taht Bunuel was only 'irreverent; not against Catholicism. The irony is that even though his films are labelled anti-religious and anti-Catholic, Bunuel is actually preparing for his next life, trying to come nearer to God all the time. He is one of the most religious of men.' Luis would have his final satisfaction in 1977, when an aged Dominican approached him during the shooting of That Obscure
Object of Desire.
He introduced himself as Father Fierro, who had begun the antiViridiana furore, and asked forgiveness. Bunuel threw him off the set.
19 Similarly, endnote 16 (113) links Walter Bnejmain’s briefcase manuscript ot the lost manuscripts in The Instant of My Death .
208

20
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.
21
22
"This haunting is the passion itself." (72)
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).
23
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.
209

Derrida never thematized the relation between his metaphors from empirical kinds of writing for his non-phenomenal writing. Deconstruction is indifferent to empirical differences between writing systems since arche-writing in not reducible to any of them.
Yet the hauntology of Derrida's arche-writing can be read precisely in these dead metaphors that mark the limit of his interest in the history of writing, even though he says he wants to go there (at the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing”). The signature as image.
23
Signature attached
See Derrida "restitutions" piece of paper—Duchamp painting with paper clip
Jan van Huyns--signature etched on the table trompe l'oeil
He doesn't because the book has become spectral. He ends Freud's writing pad to be empirical in order to trash Freud for failing to, not doing etc. Derrida is anti-apparatus
(mystic writing pad) even though he draws on metaphors for various kinds of instrumental apparatuses. It's a weird very judgmental long paragraph about Freud's failings near the end of “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” But the book, like the archive is spectral, hence is never closed. But it isn’t open either. Authority both increased and decreased by the addition and endless of the archive. If the same holds true of the library
(as one kind of archive), it may hold true for the book as well. Derrida discusses the text and the substrate or subjectile (artaud book; Archive Fever; Paper machine) but never puts any pressure on a distinction between the texts ands it protection or storage device. Open is strictly a metaphor for the archive—never closed.
23
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)
210

We will always wonder what, in this mal d’archive
, he [Freud] may have burned. We will always wonder, sharing with compassion in this archive fever, what may have burned of his secret passions, of his correspondence, or his ‘life.’ Burned without him, without remains and without knowledge. With no possible response, be it spectral or not short of or beyond a suppression, on the other edge of repression, originary or secondary, without a name, without the least symptom, and without even an ash. (101)
Derrida’s ashole of the archive as his “meta-phor-writing” of the arche-writing that
“precedes” speech and (empirical) writing.
“an incompleteness and a future that belong to the normal time of scientific progress but a specifically Jewish archive is not of the order such a relative incompletemess. It is nolonger only the provisional indetermination that opens the ordinary field of a scientific work in progress and always unfinished, in particular because new archives can stul be discovered, cout of secrecy or the pritvate sphere, so as to undergo new interpretations. It is no longer a question of the same time of the same field, and the relationship to the archive. (994, 52)
The truth is spectral, and this is its part of truth which is irreducible by explanation. (87)
The chain of substitutions (even the metaphor of chain) that allows deconstruciton to crate a non-binary structuring of binary structures and hteir exclusions
Archive
211

“There is no metaarchive.” (67)
Archive fever, a be sick but to be in need of archives
Archive fever means “to burn with a passion. It is never put to rest, interminably, from searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there’s too much of it, right where something anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsively repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return of the most archaic place of absolute commencement. (91)
There is an incessant tension . . . between the archive and archaeology. They will always be close to the other, resembling each other, hardly discernible in their co-implication , and yet radically incompatible, heterogeneous , than say, different with regard to the origin , in divorce with regard to the arkhe / (92)
In his essay on Jensen’s novel
Gradiva , about an archeologist who hallucinates the ghost of a young woman named Gradiva an ancient Roman who died when Mt Vseussius erted in Pompeii, Freud wants “explain the haunting of the archaeologist with a logic of repression . . . claims again to bring to light a more originary origin that that of the specter. In the outbidding he wants to be an archivist who is more of an archaeologist than the archaeologist . . . He wants to exhume a more archaic impression, he wants to exhibit a more archaic imprint than the one the other archaeologists of all kinds bustle around, those of literature and those of classical objective science . . . an impression that is almost no longer an archive but almost confuses itself with the pressure of the footstep that leaves its still-living mark on a substrate, a surface, a place of origin. When the step is still one with the subjectile. In the instant when the printed archive is yet to be
212

detached from the primary impression. . . . In its singular, irreproducible, and archaic origin. In the instant when the imprint is to be left, abandoned by the pressure of the impression. . . . An archive without archive, where, suddenly indiscernible form the impression of hits imprint, Gradiva’s footstep speaks by itself! (97-98)
Derrida implicitly ties this desire for no detachment to Shaprio’s desire for total attachment in “Restitutions.” But attention to books on their scenes of (un)reading, figuration, like Annuciation of Master Flamelle—reading by heart—fisting the text— open and closed window casements. Is the page covering her fingers, protecting her, linking their mystery and placement to her other hand over her heart—the inwardness of text and heart match. Or is are the fingers penetrating the page, holding it between her fingers so that the page is hidden behind her fingers, in which case penetration of reading, and heart is linked to the mystery of concept. Mary not entirely covered or protected but has to penetrate , do violence, as she too is “raped” by God through the word, the ear.
What is being opened and shut in this story of messianic announcement? What kind of narrative is being told here? What is the relation between the holy spirit and the book, reading the fold over?
Derrida talks about the way the metaphor of writing keeps returning in Plato (and
Rousseau and Saussure) at key moments to keep the outside outside and the inside inside.
“The scriptural ‘metaphor’ thus crops every time difference and relation are irreducible”
(163)
213

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)
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)
214

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.
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 .
215

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 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
216

L’empreinte redouble .(239)
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.
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,
217

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.
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.” 23 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, =
218

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 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 18 th
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
219

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
“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
220

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
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
221

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.
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)
24 Avital Ronell, “The Rhetoric of Testing,” in Stupidity , 95-164; to pp. 119-21
222

25 See Walter Benjamin, “Outline of the Psychological Problem,” sections VI and
VII on “Nearness and Distance.” SW, 1, 393-401; to 397-401
26 Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
Technology is not equivalent to the essence of technology. . . Likewise, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological.” P. 4 (technology understand as instrumental and anthropological, p. 5)
Because the essence of technology is nothing technological, essential reflection upon technology and decisive confrontation with it must happen in a realm that is, on the one hand, akin to the essence of technology and, on the other, fundamentally different from it. Such a realm is art. But certainly only if reflection on art, for its part, does not shut its eyes to the constellation of truth after which we are questioning . . . the closer we come to danger, the more brightly do the ways into the saving power begin to shine and the more questioning we become.
For questioning is the piety of thought.”
The Question Concerning Technology, p. 35
Where do we find ourselves brought to, if now we think one step further regarding Enframing itself actually is? It is nothing technological, nothing on the order of a machine. It is the way in which the real reveals itself as standing reserve.”
The Charterhouse of Parma is really interesting and could be our literary default liter ary text (as opposed to Bartleby and the parable “before the law” from
223

Kafka’s The Trial for Visman) as well as theorizing literature and law (something
Visman does not do).
. There are romantic conversations between the prisoner hero and a woman he loves who is the jailer's daughter and a woman who loves him (a Duchess) by alphabet, one using an old alphabet as a code. In the former case, the lovers communicate by using letters one by one by day and exchange full-length
"regular" postal letters at night. In the other case, the loved and lover communicate by using lights, resorting to abbreviations. The Chancellery also sends a letter stating the sentence of the prisoner without the sovereign's knowledge. Another character has the sovereign store all kinds of records (that he has signed) in a separate castle for security but really so the character can blackmail the sovereign if need be (for the good purpose of saving the hero's life). Another character never burns letters and yet has letters forged to damage her rival, the woman who loves the hero but whom the hero does not love.
Another character, a chancellor of sorts, excuses himself at one point by saying he couldn't get away form court because the sovereign had effectly imprisoned him to his writing desk, making him copy out a bunch of documents in an old calligraphic style that is laborious and therefore time consuming. Letters are copied out and dictated (and copied after being dictated); handwriting is viewed as potentially incriminating. It seems very proto-modern in calling attention to its own medium, letters. The foreword also sets the novel up as a found manuscript the author says he has merely recorded and transcribed. But the narrator now and then intrudes, addresses the reader, and also says he has
224

omitted parts of the record. It's as if Stendahl allegorized the way the a novelist renders the archive (un)readable as "historical" fiction. The nineteenth-century novel's discourse network is premised on the fantasy not only of a lost manuscript but of a lost archive in which the manuscript is presumed to have been stored, fully intact.
The other noticeably bizarre aspect of The Charterhouse of Parma is that the narrator pronounces negative judgments on his characters very severely and then narrates the story on which he has passed judgment. Something going on about first and lasting impressions, about the weakness of reason. Perhaps read the prison as a self-storage unit that requires new ways of communicating, new alphabets, new scripts, even microscripts, new kinds of lighting signals.
225