Restance, not resistance
Not departing from protocol, but going above and beyond the protocall of duty
In “The Rigorous Study of Art,” Benjamin begins by discussing Heinrich Wolfflin in the
first paragraph and then goes on to contrast him to” Alois Riegel, whom he prefers.
Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring
the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the
earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own
buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to
return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over
as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their
long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield
those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober
rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful
to plan excavations in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his
findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the
ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for
authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that
he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic
in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who
remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the
strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first
had to be broken through.
“Excavation and Memory,” Selected Writings 2 (2), 576
“Painting, or Signs and Marks” in Selected Writings Vol. 1, 84-85
The sign is printed on something, whereas the mark emerges from it. This makes it clear
that the realm of the mark is a medium. Whereas the absolute sign does not for the most
part appear on living beings but can be impressed or appear on lifeless buildings, trees,
and so on, the mark appears principally on living beings (Christ’s stigmata, blushes,
perhaps leprosy and both marks). The contrast between mark and absolute mark does not
exist, for the mark is always absolute and resembles nothing else in its manifestation.
Seriality of prisoner tattooed numbers like serial numbers on the currency bills they print;
the number is not singular; they are one in a series] and is related to the question of who
1
decides who will live, and live what kind of life: shitty life versus a martyr’s death?
The antithesis of the absolute sign and the absolute mark. . . the sign appears to be more
of a spatial relation and to have more reference to persons; the mark . . . us more
temporal, and tends to exclude persons.
What is striking is that, because it appears on living beings, the mark is so often linked to
guilt (blushing) or innocence (Christ’s stigmata); indeed, even where the mark appears in
the form of something lifeless . . . it is often a warning sign of guilt. In that sense,
however, it coincides with the sign (as in Balshezzar’s Feast), and awful nature of the
apparition is based in large part on uniting these two phenomena, which of which only
God is capable.
The tattooed numbers tend to exclude the personal (except for the hooker who identifies
him in bed), and so resemble the Mark, the German Mark, the Christian mark.
No surprise that the Pieta scene follows. Yet not a symbol, more an alleogircal ruin.
The flip side of counterfeit is copyright, a different kind of seriality.
The easel painting evolved for display in a collector's private home
Takin It Easely
The Easal Painting literally becomes an easal painting when viewed. It is not hung on a
wall the way it usually would be.
There’s something uneaslyabout the frame, the detachment.
“The self-portrait is the one form of easel painting that resists being owned.”
Philip Fisher, Art and the Future’s past
Museum studies: an anthology of contexts
By Bettina Messias Carbonell
Contributor Bettina Messias Carbonell
Published by Blackwell Pub., 2004
Come Closer / Stay Back
2
Put computer on first page of powerpoint play unforgettable on computer
One get on the train and it leaves on time, arrives on time, everything is on track
In the other you get on the train, but there may be delays, luggage may be lost, items
stolen, but the good thing is htat we may we get sidetracked, f even go off track./ There
may be a trainwreck. Bu thte upside htat it'll be a bullet train.
Not a difference between electric and magnetic—both cases pollution. But the first is
diluted. The second is almost purely pollution.
Tell Nina, have a seat.
Endwith Faites vos jeux,and get up and go over to the computer.
Get up
Iis Italk like this.
And 2 is I present, wearing my beret.
Can you stand for it ? Stehen Sie aus?
Just because I don’t work, doesn’t mean I’m out of whack. I’m always in whack beause
I’mnever out of whack. Whackey.
Hans Makart25
Portrait of a Lady with Red Plumed Hat c.1873 Oil on canvas 59 3/8 x 39 1/8 inches (151
3
x 99.6 cm)
Goering gives Hitler Marhart painting
We go on track, train will run on time
We can get sidetracked, may be delays, but it’ll be a bullet train.
Magnetic, eco friendly. But polluted, neverthelsss.Dilution versus pollustion (poluuted
in voth cases
Bo pure solution
10precentsolution
Painting as an Art by Richard Wollheim
Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim (Paperback - Sep 30, 1980)
Or as Itell my stdudnets Just because oyou;re out of work doesn't mean yuore out of
qhack. I say that after they graudate.
Final solutions are never a good idea
reuniting paintings medieval renaissance diptych ehbit
reunting Germany
Reuinted and it doesn't feel so good
I had to over do it, undermachine, over do, redo, go beyond, because of my topic. I mean
to begin a tlak about extermination, well, it just can’t be done.
I conclude. Tonight. .
4
I am going to fastrack my paper because we got off to a late start tonight. It couldn’t be
helped.
Reunion---Non-Jewish painters painting s bought by Jews. So there is a strange
impossibility of restitution in Derrida’s terms, or of retribution
No redistribution of guilt and debt.
I begin. Thank you Nina, for inviting me and all of you for coming. It’s very nice
to have this occasion to present work in progress that will never be progress to
publication. Seriously. The thoughts will remain, but remain only as something
unfinished that only saw the light of night. Tonight.
I begin. I am here to present—to alert you to some films and related texts I think
you may want to see or re/ read rather than give you my full blown readings. We
won’t have time. (I will stay to 30 minutes).
To try to explain myself a bit more fully, let me tell you a story about my relation
to secularism and Judaism. My Story about secular Jews has now turned out to
be about Jewish secularism. And let me tell you one more story. Quickly.
Berlin—“Nehmen Sie Platz” Stranger there. here. Already occupied. I am alien,
foreign, strange, out of place. Here I am a strange goy. There’s always a place
for me here, or a dis-place. I am happy here to feel out of place. It’s always nice
to be with people who like me are pre-occupied, even if I can’t sit down.
5
In any case, I’m very happy to be here. So is me. And so is myself. We have
achieved weness, more or less. We get along pretty well most of the time.
Let me begin, then. Oh,first let me ask foryou, on your behalf, What does it
mean for me to say that I appear tonight before you as a strange goy? It means
to suspend certain discourses, to say the unexpected and possibly the
unaccepted—you may be pleasantly surprised but you may be unpleasantly
surprised and want to use media mail to return the package to sender, or you
may even want to refuse delivery. You won’t be delivered by refusal to accept,
however. Don’t worry. I will bounce it back to you. Those charges will remain,
however, and you will keep being contacted by my Bill collector or Burt collector.
I insist.
Please do forgive me for going on like this. I know that my talk is now long
overdue. I am now in my anecdotage. It’s a real word. I didn’t make that word
up. I thought I had made it up, but then I checked, and It’s in the O.ED.
Ancedotage means “a garroulous old man.” O.E.D. gives the first see as in1835.
So please realize that I am not to blame for this long delay in getting started
tonight. Me is. Myself was egging me on. They refuse to take responsibility,
however. So I have to offer their apologies to you on their behalf. So you see I
already feel strangely left out. But I am always by myself. But really, I had to be
careful because I am setting up a lot of fuses, and I don’t want them to blow, and
they are highly explosive. But don’t worry. There’s no bomb attached to them.
Sparks may fly.
6
I conclude. Really. I begin. Tonight, I develop some of the interests in the left and
right hand in Freud’s Moses here in I relation to ways of reading paintings in
reverse related to European art and WW II, one I want to characterize initially as
anti-Semitic and the other as Anti-anti-Semitic.
The first kind of reversal involves seeing a painting backwards, as in a mirror
image. Essay by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolflin. First examples Raphael’s
drawings. He left Germany went back to Switzerland.
•
Reading from left to right as natural, reading right to left as unnatural (perverse):
the political as theological and erotic
• The double meaning is not a hidden, secret code in the work of art or historical
document (that is just a variation of genetic criticism and mistakenly reduces the
polysemous work to a single meaning) but arises in the drama of reading the work
of art and criticism of the image.
As an example, let me turn to the essay I had Michael mention earlier,
[next slide] the essay by Heinrich Woelfflin entitled “Ueber das Rechts und das Links
im Bilde,” that is “On the Right and Left of Images.”
[next slide]
As you can see here, Wolfflin reproduced in his essay examples of Renaissance
paintings and drawings in order to think about what happens when a slide is put in
backwards during a lecture. Wolfflin begins by noting that the response is panic
expressed as “Turn it around! You’ve got it backwards!” Quite brilliantly, Wolfflin
wants to pause and ask what this panic is about. His answer is that viewing a painting
is like reading a book—our gaze is directed from left to right, up from the man on the
left looking at to the baby Jesus, then over to the Virgin Mary, and then down to
Johanna, whose eyes look down. If the painting of the Virgin, and here we may begin
to grasp the extent to which direction, theology, and erotics are connected, is viewed
backwards, we do not know where to look and the image becomes incomprehensible.
His other point is that the work of art only becomes irreversible when it is completed.
The possibility of perversion when the work of art has been perfected.
Wolfflin’s text as itself to be read doubly, however, if we are to grasp the political
stakes of. Written in 1924 just after left Munich but published in 1940 when Wolfflin
was a professor at the University of Basel, the title itself presents us now, even if
Wollflin did not intend it, with two puns in its title on the words “right” and “left.”
Both sides of an image are also political sides, and how one side, fascist or
Communist can turn an image around to distort it or clarify ir. There are similarly
charged words and phrases in the essay. The German word Wollflin uses for the slide
put in “backwards” is “umkerht,” a word employed frequently by the Nazis.
Similarly, when Wolfflin compares viewing a painting to reading a book, he writes
7
“unser shrift,” or “our script,” which is to say without saying, our Christian script, not
a Jewish one (Hebrew is written from right to left). Finally, when he concludes that
the work is the German word he uses at the very beginning of his sentence is “Das
Enschiede,” or “the decision,” a word used by Carl Schmitt and others in writings on
the state of emergency and the power of the sovereign. So the language of the essay
itself present us now, knowing as we do what was happening between 1924 and 1940
with a question: how do are we to read Wolfflin’s essay between the lines to grasp
his decision to read one way rather than another?
2. Anti-anti-Semitic kind of reading, this is reading not just backwards but from
the backside. Politics of restitution exhibition—the back of the frame—European
art looted by the Nazi from Jews who owned it. Display is symmetrical-or the
photos shows us asymmetry. Back and front.
Back to back
So here the exhibition turns on the information about the owner on the backside
rather than on the painting itself.
I say that the first, mirror reversal is anti-Semitic because it is Messianic—
perfection has been achieved, first in the birth of Jesus and then in the painting.
So it’s about looking toward a past I which incarnation is already fulfillment—it’s a
revelation—all in the open.
In the second, one side of the painting is hidden,
8
So to put it somewhat crudely, let’s call the first reversal by inversion (a specular
relation) and the second reversal by backside. In the first you can see the front
from both sides; The first way is not uncanny, in that it sees one version as
inferior of the other, the means by which its perfection may be furthered revealed,
in the second you can see only the backside. uncanny, reversal that conceals as
it unconceals. Or the front side, at the a time, one side usually being hidden
given the way paintings are hung (with their backsides hidden). The other is. I
want to think about two kinds of incredulity here as well (Spectral Evidence).
the binary opposition I am setting up between two kinds of reversal—it’s always
already self-deconstructing.
Both look back to an unbelievable event, as in can you believe that Jesus . . . is
the messiah? O my G! And as in and looks back to an unbelievable event—can
you believe that holocaust? Incredulity that precedes it as well as postdates it.
Incredulity shared by Jews and non-Jews—we knew, we didn’t know, we heard
but we didn’t know, we should have known, but we didn’t.
And in terms of posing not only the question of who is a Jew but also who has
defined who is a Jew, for what purposes, and by what criteria. So that reversal
by inversion of backside involves a question of recognition and revelation as well
as restitution in Judaism—a problem within Judeities and outside them.
And specifically, there’s a shared discourse of the damage and restitution, of
perfection and imperfection, of inversion and backside, of closure—like perfection
of Raphael——may not be so different. Need to think through the value of art
9
and owners—here a discourse of identity kicks in necessarily—and is hence
vulnerable to the critique, however stated it may be, of the Holocaust industry,
which I, even if it is an anti-Semitic critique of anti-Semitism, shows the
impossibility of restoring the paintings without reinscribing in some ways the antiSemitic terms of the arts expropriation. So there is no simply chronology taking
us fro purchase and provenance through looting and restoration, partly because
the original owners are dead, mostly murdered. The ID papers for the camps
and he ID papers for the museum tours, and the ID tattoos for the camps. in
terms of the incalculable—and here I would follow Derrida’s chapter entitled
“Restitutions” in The Truth of Painting on Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro on Van
Gogh’s shoe paintings, and Derrida on the shoelace, in which restitution is not
linked to identity. He interrogates the idea of restitution in terms of attribution and
retribution, a desire to return, in the case of Heidegger’s shoes, the contents of
the painting to its painter, to regard to the shoes as a pair and owned by a city
dweller or a peasant. Potential problem here is suits like one against the SNCF
is the vulnerability to Norman G. Finkelstein’s scathing and intemperate critique
of the Hollow-cast in his The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation
of Jewish Suffering. The problem of incredulity is that it can’t be divided, that it
preexists the Holocaust and follows it; and it, follows, like cars in a train, that
Holocaust deniability cannot be limited either to quacks like Mr. Death but also
precedes and follows the Holocaust within and without Jewish populations. IS
there a limit to ex-termination—or is there a terminus? Or are we talking
Extermination Terminable and Interminable? Problem of settling, of settling
10
differences, accounts, of occupying, resettling. People will always take sides, but
the problem that requires them to take sides is far deeper and impossible to
resolve than those who take sides will ever know.
Judaism is not a discourse of identity but is that which exceeds identity, not the
her and now, not the incarnation and revelation, but the now here and not yet, of
the yet to be perfected, of justice, , not reducible to the roman legal discourse of
ownership, provenance, signature, proper name, authorship, and so on, as well
as family genealogy and state census. Judaism is before the law and within the
law. It is Judeities. But the law is not universal and yet the heritage of Judaism is
universal—from Kant—Greek Jew, Christian Jew, Jew Christian, German Jew,
strange Jew. Tonight I want to introduce another opposition, the Jew Jew. Not
Jew jew b. Also the Jew non Jew non Jew Jew.
So I want to purse this deconstruction of the reversal by turning to two films, Mr
Klein and the Train, both of which concern European paintings, the train, World
War II, and misrecognizing or missing the Jewish body.
Both films have circular structures in which their endings reconnect with their
beginnings. I am tempted to set up a new binary opposition between them,
ranking them in relation to their historical proximity to World War II, hence Mr.
Klein is not as good as the Train because it is more open. By the time we get to
Europa, we have a terrible film because now the Jew is no longer missing but
present, divided into characters by the director writer and actor Lars van Trier,
11
into the bad jew who collaborates and then the good Jew who refuses to
collaborate in the future.
In any case, I’ll go backwards chronologically, starting with the more recent Mr.
Klein and then taking up the Train.
Questions—relation between Jewish identity and sale of artworks in order to be
able to escape the Nazis.
The film begins with a women being seen by Doctors who determine whether or
not she is a Jewish. Jewish body aligned with woman body and grotesque body,
contrasted to the beautiful woman in bed (she is a prostitute) in Klein’s
apartment. But she wounds herself.
. The main character is an art dealer who buys paintings from Jews, and is , he
beliefs mistaken for another r Klein who happens to be a Jew. He buys a Dutch
painting in the film.
Now this painting is seen in reverse.
I should add here that there was a Danish painter who painted trompe l’oeils, one
he called reverse side of a framed painting. I will return to it if there is time.
So the painting is confiscated from him, he chases after a man he thinks is his
double, arrives at the train station and gets on a train with Jews being deported.
In voice-over, the and here the circle closes, the man he sold the paintings to
now speaks to him, So there is a certain kind of avoidance, guilt, and
12
punishment kind of reading possible here. Mr. Klein should have recognized his
Jewish identity and not bout the paintings and tried to help Jews escape. Or
recognized his non-Jewish identity and tried to help Jews escape. But the train
of the film is not limited to the deportation cars at the end. The film is unclear
about Klein’s identity. Is he a Jew or not? Relation of painting and his family
medallions. The provenance of the painting is aligned with the genealogy of
Klein’s family—Dutch art, Dutch Jews. . . ?
Does he end up doing what the Nazis want him to do without them ever ordering
or telling him to do it, namely, get on the train? Does he recognize or
misrecognize himself as a Jew. Does being a Jew mean in the film that you have
to give the art, or same difference, have it taken from you?
What happens to good Jew selling his painting versus bad Jew or bad when the
bad non Jew becomes a Jew and replays the scene of stealing? So here is
another reading: Not a sort with a moral but a Kafkaesque parable. Here the Jew
is he who is hidden form other Jews.
He is a Jew ebcuase he is not a Jew, he is, in other words, the Jew as the
missing Jew, the Jew as missing body., the doppelganger one sees and doesn’t.
The good Jew won’t take a bag for the money—no protection or envelope, no
aesthetic. Because the money already is aesthetic. Nice looking gold coins.
Problem of calculation—theworht of the paintings, the worth of the lives of their
owners and the lives of the woner’s relatives. Questions of guilt and
13
punishment—jew non jew, are all suspended of jewish identity—or due to the
uncaniess of Juewishidentity—Freudian double here in which cognition can
never be sorted out from isrecognition, whencognitoin depends on re-cognition
(repetiion) and whenwhois a Jew is never fully decided or decidable by anyone,
Jew of anti-jew.
So the film’s ethics / politics lies in its refusal to settle—to settle accounts, to
divide setters from the unsettled, the squatters from the evacuated. But to use
the train as a continuum—departing but a return to the beginning, to the arrival,
which was a departure about a departure. Backwards reversal is not strictly antianti-Semitic—or anti and anti does not equal philo.
The Train
The Expressionist shot of von Waldheim—he becomes a kind of work of art. He
calls out to Labiche (Burt Lancaster) from behind the way the curator called out
to von Waldheim from behind; Labiche guns down von Waldheim just as the
Nazis gunned down the civilians. In both cases, machine gun guns were used.
Is the z shape a cartographic shape—depending on perspective a Z tht looks like
a S of the SS.
End of The Train—corpses without coffins and crates without bodies—names of
the painter stand for the contents.
Waldheim occupies this same peripheral or I would say paratextual and
parergonal space.
Now we return to the backside of the frame.
You may have already been thinking about Schlegel’s fragment “
14
The historian is a prophet turned backwards” or Benjamin’s “angel of history”
Benjamin’s famous gloss on a painting by Paul Klee, in Philosophy Theses of
History
'There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel about to
move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open,
his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is
turned towards the past.i
Derrida’s differntial contamination interirozied and exteriorized in ways that lead
to keeping tally, settling score, cashing it and gambling it away by chice
Making more—more money and more jews—the joke temporarily defuses the
bomb of anti-Semitism, the charge made by the Nazis that jews are all about
tricks and deception. Their identity is a non-identity.
This differential contamination—the Nazis identify the jews as Jews not through
the bodies but through the tattoos—German inscription allows Jews to read other
Jews as Jews. So to make more Jews is to continue to produce the Jew as a
reproduction, a fake, a mimetic of the real, a contamination of the real by the
fake. Doubling your bets. Rien va plus.
Also a game—he scores—first the really hot woman is not a whore (whore not
spoken) and also the woman who stays to have sex with him twice because he is
an artist.
15
Question of sovereignty among the Jews—who decides who will live and who will
not.
He takes the train to Sachsenhausen. Gets a double berth, with another
Russian, also an artist.
Shittm, shit, shit,bad paper dollar, followed by shitty life confrontation scene.
In additon to the reversal is that we see parergon in one case and not in the
other. In Raphael, the frame diappears. In The Train the crates have paratext—
but none in the museum. Exreissionist shot makes von Wladheim into a
modernist—he does’t think the art is degenenrate
The Train is better than Mr Klein becase now the Jewish body is entirely missing.
Butthis means that resistance fighter and Nazi are in a faux pause, a kind of Z, a
loop that goesback and forth between SNCF, tetrain that deported the French
Jews, and SS.
Deconstruct this second opposition, however, because Mr Klein rings into view
the way money itself is a problematic form of exchange in addition to paintings
that has two sides—front and back, and that is linked with Christianity, the halo,
and ant-semitism. See Marc Shell book. Coins, script, medallions.
Derriderailed
16
End with return to Derrida on Heidegger and Shapiro. Turn to Derrida’s failure to
analyze his dream. Derrida as Holy jew. Holy Jew cannot be wholly Jew. There
are holes in the Jew.
In an interview with Ferrais, Derrida tells the following story:
When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my
mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the
enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the
explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which
translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by
deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayedaction mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission,
making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have
to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.
Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52
Derrida’s life as a film metaphor here leads to an account of a dream, a dream of
deconstruction. But it’s something of a bad dream.
Ferrais then quotes from Levinas, who views Derrida’s deconstruction in a
negative light. Levinas says that
“This is, beyond the philosophical scope of propositions, a purely literary effect,
the new frisson, the poetry of Derrida. When I read him, I always recall the
exodus of 1940. A retreating military unit arrives in an as yet unsuspecting
locality, where cafes are open, where the ladies visit the ‘ladies fashion store’,
where the hairdressers dress hair and bakers bake; where viscounts meet other
17
viscounts and tell each other stories of viscounts, and where, an hour later,
everything is deconstructed and devastated, Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names,
Wholly Otherwise, trans Simon Critchlety, p. 4
Derrida responds to Ferrais on Levinas:
A few weeks ago a friend of mine . . [said]: “Doesn’t it bother you? Look at what
they’re accusing you of now. You’re like the enemy army!” At that point I reread
Levinas’s text. . . he says, . . . that I passed through it was as if the German army
had hit town, there was nothing left . . . It makes you wonder. It’s bizarre, I’d
never looked at the text from that angle.. What is the unconscious of that image?
And then the Nazi invader . . . it’s sort of like the Resistance dream we spoke of,
but turned upside down.
(51-52)
Derrida is stunned by his own devastation, his experience of the deconstruction
of his dream as a devastation. He pauses, can’t analysis or read Levinas.
Weber in fact exaggerates what Levinas “is saying” (Levinas makes no mention
of Germans or Nazis). Weber is a good or a bad analyst, a good or bad reader
of Levinas, but in any case his reading proceeds by way of trnslation from what
Levinas says to what he is saying.
A strange kind of dialogue here, where only people like themselves talk to each other, as
if stuck in mirror stages. That is the idea of peace here. The real is purely external to this
mirroring. / , which is then given a response that Derrida terms an unconscious
18
image that turns his dream upside down, reversing the binary. How do the train
and film figure in this dream dialogue, this dream of dialogue, or bad dream of
dialogue, or dialogue as a bad dream, dreamt by the Other.?
A totally different case here from Circumfession—here the circaanalysis breaks
down into a faux pause. Train not on or off, not forward, backwards or stopped,
not just a detour, or return but not a step, a false step, or misstep which is also
nota step, not a standing in place but a pause.
I never write or produce anything other than this destinearrancy of desire, the
unassignable trajectories and the unfindable subjects, but also the only sign of
love, the one gaged on this bet (rather AIDS than lose you) and you try to
calculate the itinerary of texts which do not explode immediately, being basically
nothing but fuse, intermittently you see the flame running without knowing where
or when the explosion will come, when the trance, anguish, and desire of the
reader, quick let’s be done with it Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida, Geoff
Bennington and Jacques Derrida, . 199-200.
We come back to final destination interminable disterinerrance.
Two points.
1. About cash and paintings
Frarom tattoo to failed pieta—to full house
19
Four aces, folds.
holy men and saints with halos painted in the margins. (1995, 38)ii
That opposition is further interiorized and doubled I the film Die Falscher, the
Counterfeiters where the Jews having arrived in a camp have their death
sentence suspended if they will forge bank notes for the Nazis—so resistance
becomes not forging, slowing the process down, as in The Train, but again we
have the two sided piece of paper, the collusion of Nazi and Jew around forgery
and art—forger as artist—as in Orson Welles’ last film F for Fake—Clifford Irving
wryly observes that the crucial distinction is not between a forgery and the real
thing but between a good forgery and a bad forgery. So that the camp itself is
not a final destination—forgery is a means of escaping the camp outside, or of
finding unbelievable life, a life both more than life and less than life, suspended
while in the camp—still in transit as it were.
It’s an outside inside the inside job. It's a sort of bunker inside the camp.
It’s about work stalling rather than work stoppage. Or gelatin—letting it jell.
Marc Shell links the dematerialization of monetary inscription to what he regards
as a parallel dematerialization of visual aesthetics:
The trend toward dematerialization as been a telling hallmark of twentiethcentury economics as well as visual aesthetics. . . the relation between face
value (or intellectual / metaphysical currency) and substantial value (material /
physical currency) . . .The difference between inscription and thing grew greater
with the introduction of paper money. Paper, the material substance the
engravings were printed on, was supposed to make no difference to exchange . .
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. With the advent of electronic fund transfers the link between inscription and
substance was broken. The matter of electronic money does not matter. (1995,
107-08)
The link between the halo and coins has a long history. As Marc Shell writes in
Art and Money:
Just as aureole, or corona, means “halo,” so aurum, or corona, indicates “coin,”
generally a coin of Byzantium or Spain. In this philological context, the visual
resemblance between certain coins and nimbi … makes sense. Moreover, the
colors of halo and coin are the same, the shapes (circles, triangles, and squares)
are alike, and the various methods of denomination are similar. Further, halos
appearing on coins frequently draw attention to themselves as numismatic
objects. . . . some coinlike medals represent halos or partial coins. Many
manuscripts include coinlike medals depicting holy men and saints with halos
painted in the margins. (1995, 38)iii
Any future is a future you will in one way or another have to back on.
A life beyond life involves an internal and external calculation of what is life and
what is bare life. Accounts, accounting, settling up, settling scores, are
inescapable. Reveral reveals that we are not so much between two deaths, as in
Lacan and Zizek, but between two lifes or between life and bare life.
No end of extermination—except in the terminal itself—in the interval, maybe not
even much hope, but still a drifting away from destination you are also hurtling
toward, looking in a rearview mirror or backwards sitting on a train.
In Dutch painting, we are talking about “still lifes”
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2. Reversal is not just about the mirror and the backside, the hidden and the
revealed, the inverted, the perfected versus the perverted. It’s also abut
the frame.
And the backside, the going invisible of the frame and its non return—in the
restitution exhibit as well as the lack of paratext in the Train, packing them in their
frames. Inside the coffins, they are already inside. The possibility of
deception—The Danish painter’s trompe l’oeil as a deception. It’ the only that
actually deceives. Thereverse side.
The frame or paregon becomes invisible for Kant, according to Derrida, an
aesthetic supplement outside reason but without which reason cannot be
reasonable, separate from the aesthetic, the imagination, and so on. We may
returns to Cornelius the trompe –framed painting—title—paratext here is the
frame, the paregon. Or is always invisible as it frames, Heidegger’s neologism
Ge-Stell in, a kind of pre-framing that never appears as such but which discloses
a field of being.. This unframing is forgotten in the German restitution exhibition.
This invisible remainder of loss goes unnoticed. Not a failure, an impossibility of
avoiding the unavoidable. Restitution is not a matter of reversal, or reversal is a
returning far more complicated than a backside and mirror inversion ora negative
and print would suggest.
22
Valesquez painting—the mirror and the back of the painting—impossible
perspective of the mirror, and the man in the doorway as well. So frame,
unframed, doorway (blocked by a man who is leaving but who is looking back at
us). If The truth in Painting is not in a painting, not in a singular painting; the truth
and the false are both in and out of painting as a universal.
So there is something embarrassing here—the backside has to be left behind,
forgotten—memory here works like Christian fundamentalist future.
As I said at the beginning, there is a relation to Freud and the hand, but perhaps
now it’s left and right than off hand and on hand, not hands up and hands down,
or hands on and hands off (all controlled or controlling), orders. I hope you can
better understand why I just can’t grip on myself. Or me. Or I.
As well as the steps he takes and does not take in Beyond the Pleasure, what
Derrida calls paralysis in Freud’s Legacy in The Post-Card , p. 337.Principle,
So we returnto the future, the promise, and the incalculable—the uncanny as s
the suspension of settlement and resettlement now and in the future.
Also question about deniability and its limits Finkelstein versus Harvard
Dershowitz, Deborah Libschitz, and Elie Wiesel. Any criticism is not only antiSemitic but Holocaust denial-whereas for Finekselstein, insistence on singularity
of Holocaust is the means by which Jews can cash in on the suffering of other
Jews like his own parents , both of whom were in camps.
23
No question of "immoral equivalencies" or moral equivalences or singularity of
the Holocaust—because it is already heterogeneous-the Jew Jew / non-Jew nonJew.
Gijsbrechts, Cornelius: The Reverse Side of a Painting (1670)
Cornelius Gijsbrechts is little known and seems to have worked mainly
in trompe l'oeil. (His 'Still-Life with Self-Portrait' is seen left). Dutch;
second half of the 17th-century: that's about it. He worked for two
successive Danish kings, who had a taste for pictorial tricks. He does
his best but when you see them, they don't really deceive you. Only
one does the business flawlessly...
1670
Oil on canvas, 66,6 x 86,5 cm
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen
The scrap of paper with the number 36 on it gives the impression that this deceptive
illusionist painting is actually meant for sale. It is therefore likely that the painting was
originally put up at a sales exhibition as a practical joke.
Image displayed at its actual size of 26.2 by 34.1 in.:
“It’s always a strange, rather suspicious feeling when one thinks such and such
is going to happen. And yet it is really quite as strange that we should ever
bearable to know that such and such is as it is—which no one ever notices
because it always happens.”
Friedrich Schlegel, Athanaeum Fragments, 218
24
Freud letter to Fliess about his disvocery of the concept of repression.
Faux Pa(u)s(e)iv
And in Mr Klein a Dutch painting (Renaissance) of a man looking at the viewer
holding up a book, open, with a magnifying glass over a page.
This painting is sold by a Jew to an art dealer who becomes a Jew, and the
painting first appears in reverse when sold. It again alter appears in reverse,
Then Klein will not let it be confiscated,
And when it finally shows up it is gain seen in reverse and finally in close up
when we can see the magnifying glass clearly.
The Kleins’saccording to the father in a wheelchair go back to Louis XIV and are
Catholics, but he says that there was a Holland branch of the Kleins and his
expression suggests he may be lying when he says they weren’t Jewish.
There I plaque of gold medallions to the Kleins in the father’s room.
The medallions are like the currency—francs or not—used to sell and buy
paintings in the film.
25
Fake passport, and so on.
Lots of repetitions—the close up of the girlfriend near the beginning of her mouth
in a mirror as she puts on lipstick—recalls the earlier scene of the doctor
examining a woman.
She is also seen in mirrors, and Klein’s exchange with the selling the Araiedne
van Ostden painting is all off screen.
So female body versus Jewish body
Returns in the anti-Semitic Caberet scene with the transvestites singing (sound
seems diegetic—no evidence of lip-synching, as castrato).
Some repetitions become odd clues, like gfriend mentioning Moby Dick in their
apartment, and then Klein finding a copy of Moby Dick in the other Klein’s
apartment, and filching an add or receipt for photos at a Photo shop.
Also the single white boot at the apartment and the white boots worn by women
chorus girls in the cabaret.
Or repetitions of shots of Klein in mirrors, like in the bar where he sees the other
Klein when it is really his own image.
But other repetitions are bizarre—like J Moreau ripping up the letter she pulls out
of Klein’s hand and then puts it in the fire.
Later Francoise tears up the photo Klein had developed but he doesn’t mind
because “I have the negative.”
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The negative is reproduced when a guy on a motorcycle, meets Jeanne Moreau
at night outside and Klein watches, his face reflecting in the window.
The negative itself is an image of doubleness and reversal—the print is the
opposite of the negative.
Question of recognizing Klein, also of his other, and also of recognizing the Jew.
Stars worn by some, including the guy who sold Klein the painting as they are
rounded up to be deported.
The voice-over at the end repeats and inverts the voice over at the beginning of
the film.
Also repetition of moment when Klein asks seller of the painting if he’s not going
to count the money and then he asks his lawyer Pierre if Pierre will ask to count
the money and he doesn’t (“I don’t want to give you that pleasure”)
I conclude—the uncanny is not one thing—even the uncanny of the uncanny
proliferates—so form incredulity—never one, but two in Spectral Evidence
Or we might add, along with incredulity, the incomprehensible—the perfect is in
Christianity what cannot be comprehended by sight—faith in things unseen
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And in Schlegel, two kinds of incomprehension, which quickly and from the start
is a serious joke about irony impaired judgment.
And so we come to Faith and Knowledge
After the frightful labor painsofhte last few weeks, igaev birth to a new piece of
knowledge. Not entirelynew, to tell the truth; it had repeatedly shown itself and
withdrawn again; but this time it stayrd and looked upon the light of day. Strangly
enough, I had a presentiment of such events a good while beforehand. For
instance, I wrote to you once in the summer that I was going to find the source of
mormalsexual repression (morality, shame, and so forth) and hten for a longtime
failed to find it. Before the vacation trip Itold you that the most important patient
for me was myself;and ten , after I came back fromvacation, my self-analysis, of
which there was at the time so sign, suddenly started. A few weeks ago came my
wish that repression might be replaced by my new knowledge of the essential
thing lying behind it; and that is what I cam concerned with now
“Letter to Fliess, November 14; 1897; 278-79.
Derrida says restitutions is a ghost story—but the ghost is not the former person,
he woner. The ghost is the missing frame, the detachment of front and back.
28
You see the Merkel fron of the back and the Merkel front of the front. But you
don’t see the back of the back or the back of the front, which would be
indisngtuishable as such, in any case.
So the revannt doesn’t quite return, or a ghostly remainder is all that’s left of the
ghost that might otherwise haunt—turns haunting into haunting
otherwisehauntology—hauntology of the missing body—work of art and owner.
As well as painter.
i
Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe,
which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel
would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so
strong that the angel can no longer close them.'
ii Marc Shell, Art and Money, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
iii
Marc Shell, Art and Money, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
iv
On the double meaning of “faux pas” in French as a both a blunder in speaking and a
misstep, see the translator’s note in Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (Stanford, AC: Stanford,
UP, 2001), xi. Serrida on the step backward in Restitutions in Truth in Painting.
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