N I G H T L I G H T # 3 — E D I T E D B Y F R E D C AV E , W E R K P L A AT S T Y P O G R A F I E — J U N E 2 0 14
G H O S T DA N C E – E X T R AC T S
KEN MCCULLEN
WOMAN NARRATOR: When two people have intercourse, there are always four people watching. For
it is at moments of great intimacy and vulnerability
that the internalised figures from the past become
present. But these four ghosts bring along their
internalised ghosts and so on, and so on. And this
is how the generations going back to the sea-shore,
and perhaps before, make their presence known
beside us.
MAN NARRATOR #1: Long before memory
In a past without form
They began to appear
In the darkness of the night
Then as memory began
To screen them out
They slipped into language
Hiding between letters and jumping out between words
1 – R I T UA L S O F R AG E
R I T UA L S O F D E S I R E
MAN NARRATOR #1: In an age of darkness, long ago
and far away, during periods of mourning, the living
would attack the dead, throwing stones at them, hurling
abuse at them, spitting and screaming with rage. For they
felt they’d been abandoned to the terrors of the night.
At first, it was thought that ghosts
would be forgotten in this new electronic age, but as
things turned out, they began to use electronic gadgets
for their own purpose. Now they often jump on radio
waves. There are many recorded cases of ghosts appearing
in electrical shops.
WOMAN NARRATOR: I dreamt that I was talking to
myself. Then something happened, and ‘I’ and ‘me’
became different people. We were walking through
a city. Night was falling and the sky was becoming
radiant with electric lights. We started to walk
towards the ocean. Suddenly, people were rushing
in the opposite direction. There was terrible panic.
But the people that were rushing towards us were
the dead of centuries that had gone before. Their
crushing weight turned into a tidal wave. It hit us.
And only one of us survived.
JACQUES DERRIDA (voice over): To be haunted by a
ghost is to remember something you’ve never lived
through, to have the memory of what has essentially
never been present.
MAN NARRATOR #1: She met him many times. She
asked him about Kafka, Heidegger, Marx and Freud.
When she left, she was never sure who she’d been speaking
to. She was left with an after image that seemed to be
drawing her own phantoms out of herself.
PASCALE: I’d like to ask you something. Do you believe in
ghosts?
JACQUES DERRIDA: I don’t know, that’s a difficult
question. Firstly, would you ask a ghost whether he
believes in ghosts? Here, the ghost is me. Given that
I’ve been asked to play myself in a film which is
more or less improvised, I feel as if I’m letting a
ghost speak for me. Paradoxically, instead of playing
myself, I let a ghost ventriloquize my words, speak in
my place. And it’s that that is maybe most amusing.
The cinema is the art of ghosts. And I believe that the
cinema, when it’s not boring, it’s the art of allowing
ghosts to come back. That’s what we’re doing right
here. Therefore, if I’m a ghost, meaning if right now,
believing that I’m speaking with my own voice, it is
precisely because I believe that it’s my own voice
that I allow it to be taken over by another’s. Not
just any other voice, but that of my own ghosts. So
ghosts do exist. And it’s they who will answer you.
Perhaps they already have. All this, it seems to me,
has to be treated in an exchange between the art of
the cinema in its most original, unedited form and
an aspect of psychoanalysis. Cinema plus psychoanalysis equals the Science of Ghosts. You know that
Freud, all his life, had to deal with ghosts.
(Interrupted by a telephone call.)
So, that was the phantom voice of someone I don’t
know. He could’ve told me any old story. That he’s
arrived from the USA and says he knows a friend of
mine… Well, what Kafka says about correspondence,
about letters, about epistolary communication, also
applies to telephonic communication. And I believe
that modern developments in telecommunication,
instead of diminishing the realm of ghosts, as we
might believe, that any scientific or technical thought
leaves behind the age of ghosts, the feudal age with
its somewhat primitive technology as a certain perinatal age. Whereas I believe that the future belongs
to ghosts and that the modern technology of images,
cinematography and telecommunication, enhances
the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us. In
fact, it’s because I wished to tempt the ghosts out
that I agreed to appear in a film, saying to myself that
maybe, maybe we will all have the chance to evoke
the ghosts: the ghost of Marx, the ghost of Freud,
the ghost of Kafka, the ghost of that American, even
yours! I only met you this morning, but to me you’re
already permeated by all sorts of phantom figures.
So, I don’t know if I believe in ghosts or not, but I
say: “Long live the ghosts”. And you, do you believe
in ghosts?
PASCALE: Yes, certainly...
Yes, absolutely...
Now I do, absolutely...
Now, certainly.
WOMAN NARRATOR: History’s gone and can never
be relived.
MAN NARRATOR #1: History’s just a point of view,
like anything else. It changes according to where you
happen to be standing.
2 – MYTH
T H E VO I C E O F D E S T RU C T I O N
T H E VO I C E O F D E L I V E R A N C E
WOMAN NARRATOR: I was walking through a desert
when I came across the ruins of an ancient seaport.
But the sea had dried up many centuries before. At
first, I could see myself clearly as if I was standing
in front of a mirror. Then I vanished and all I could
see was the grey-black sand which was beginning
to cover everything. Then the voices started. At first,
they seemed like the insects that were crawling in
the sand. Then they seemed to be coming from me.
They were living inside me, but they were watching
me at the same time. Then they took me out of
myself and I could see myself clearly walking away
on the horizon.
MAN NARRATOR #1: She thought of herself as ‘I’, but
the more she encountered the decay around her, the more
she moved into a gap, between ‘I’ and ‘Me’. For it’s well
known that the social decay produces psychic fragmentation. The more things break up, the more myths flourish.
Attempting to make historical sense out of historical
chaos. She began to feel the presence of so many others
inside her, as if they were clawing away at her flesh from
the inside.
MAN NARRATOR #2: Masuda was an extraordinary
woman. I met her on a film set, when she was advising on
native costume, on a film about ‘cargo cults’ of the Far-East.
she was able to move with ease between two completely different cultures, as if part of her was at home in the rich world
and part of her was at home in the poor. She told me about
a village by a river that had been periodically invaded by an
army of rats. The villagers were afraid of them, but they also
worshipped them.
WOMAN NARRATOR: I wouldn’t close my eyes if I
were her. They can still see you, even if you can’t
see them. Trying to pretend that they’re not there
won’t help her.
MAN NARRATOR #2: They believed that the rats embodied
the ghosts of their ancestors. By their speed and guile they had
been able to run through time to visit their homeland. Years
before, when their land and wealth had been taken from
them, a strange event had taken place there.
MAN NARRATOR #1: You cannot sleep forever. Even
though to wake is to fall, its better to fall once and get it
over with, than to stay fast asleep forever. You’re on the
point of waking. You’re standing on the edge of a division
that may never be healed. To fall is to pass between. To
fall is to touch but never make contact. To fall is to fail
and succeed at the same time. To fall is to enter a darkness,
darker than all the places in your dreams. To fall is to be
real. For a moment. Forever.
MAN NARRATOR #2: One night, the rats had eaten the
woman who was lying asleep by the river. They had ripped
off her clothes, and by the time she’d woke up, it was too
late. They had entered her body by every possible opening.
She began to shout and scream. But the voices that came out
of her were the voices of the dead.
MAN NARRATOR #1: To be inside and outside at the
same time. To be the one who sees, and the one who is
seen. To enter the place where space becomes time and
time stops still. To escape from time forever.
All rituals are an expression of this
wish. But it is a wish you cannot succomb to, for if you
don’t wake soon, all your choices will diminish, and
you’ll return to the place you came from, without even a
moment of knowing.
MAN NARRATOR #2: She began to shout and scream. But
the voices that came out of her were the voices of the dead.
The rats ate all her flesh from the inside, until all that was
left was a clean, white skeleton. Then the dogs came out and
ripped the bones apart. But the rats returned, and set upon
the dogs, leaving nothing of them remaining except their tails.
Suddenly, a big black bird flew out of the sky.
The bird swept down and ate up all the
rats. Then the bird changed and assumed the form of two
women, both of whom were beautiful. And when they were
together, they had magical powers. They told the villagers that
the new era was to begin and they would be joined by all
their ancestors. But some of the villagers who had commited
crimes and bad deeds with the wives of the dead were so
afraid of their return that they tricked the women into going
down to the sea where a great wave took them away.
She told me myths have the same qualities as radio waves. When they arrive in a village, they seem
to have come from nowhere. Thats why, so often, they are
credited with supernatural origins.
Masuda told me not to scoff at her story.
It contained more truth than might at first appear. For things
are not always what they seem. They also have an inner life
of their own.
3 – HISTORY
G H O S T S T H AT E M E R G E I N DAY D R E A M S
JACQUES DERRIDA: Freud, we were talking about
the ghost of Freud earlier. You know, ghosts don’t
just appear, they come back. In French, they are
the ‘ones that returned’. So that presupposes a
memory of the past that has never taken the form
of the present. But I’ve been intrigued by a particular theory which some psychoanalyst friends
of mine, Nicolas Abraham, who’s now dead, and
Maria Torok, developed from Freud. Their theory
of ghosts is based on a theory of mourning. In
normal mourning, Freud says one internalises the
dead. One takes the dead into oneself and assimilates it. This internalisation which is at the same
time an idealisation accepts the dead. Whereas
during a process of mourning that doesn’t develop
normally, that is to say, a mourning that doesn’t
work well, there is no true internalisation. There is
what Abraham and Torok call ‘incorporation’. That
is to say, the dead are taken within us, but don’t
become us. They occupy a particular place in our
bodies. They can speak for themselves. They can
haunt and ventriloquise our speech. So, the ghost is
enclosed in a crypt, which is our body. We become a
sort of graveyard for ghosts. A ghost can be not only
our unconscious, but more precisely, its someone
else’s unconscious. Its someone else’s unconscious
that speaks in our place. It is not our unconscious,
it is the unconscious of the other which plays tricks
on us. It can be terrifying. But that’s when things
start to happen.
MARIANNE: How can it be that in this age of electric
buildings, prude beliefs of the Middle Ages are poking their
heads out of the gutters of time?
5 – WITNESS
T H E O N E W H O B E C O M E S W H AT H E H E A R S
WOMAN NARRATOR: When two people have intercourse, there is always one other present. But this
other takes on a form that cannot be described, it is
the trauma itself. The witness.
It is between and it is excluded. A
noise that breaks the enigma of the night. A mirror
that refuses to confirm existence. An encounter with
a form of sexuality that signifies death.
6 – TRIAL
POWER THROUGH ABSENCE
JACQUES DERRIDA: A year ago. Exactly a year ago.
I went to Prague to take part in a private seminar
with some dissident Czech philosophers who
were banned from the universities. I was followed
the whole time by the Czech secret police, who
by the way, made no secret about it. So, after the
seminar, I went for a walk round the home town of
Kafka as if I was in pursuit of Kafka’s ghost, who
was in fact himself, pursuing me. I went in front
of Kafka’s houses, there are two in Prague. And I
went to his grave. I found out the next day, when I
was arrested for smuggling drugs supposedly, that
it was at the exact time that I was at Kafka’s grave,
and so preoccupied with Kafka’s ghost, that the
Czech secret police entered into my hotel room
and planted a small packet of drugs in my briefcase as a pretext for my arrest the next day. When
I was interrogated by the police as to why I was in
Prague, I answered that I was preparing a paper on
Kafka, which was the truth, on an extract from ‘The
Trial’ called ‘Before the Court’. And so throughout
my short interrogation and imprisonment, Kafka’s
ghost was effectively present. And the script written
by Kafka was manipulating the scene, which was a
scene from ‘The Trial’ in a way, as if we were all
acting in a film controlled by Kafka’s ghost.
MAN NARRATOR #1: A sea of electric eels. Sea of
unknown movements far below the surface. Sea of primitive desires. Sea of endless triangles. Sea of ritualistic
murder. Sea of history. Sea of greed. Sea of guilt. Sea of
eight million false faces. Sea of lost hopes. Sea of despair.
Sea of occasional reason. Sea without time.
MARIANNE: Do I have any choice but to suffer my own
history? It feels like some mysterious figure is directing everything I do. Someone who hasn’t been present for a very long
time.
MAN NARRATOR #1: They’re coming closer. I’ve been
expecting them. They really don’t know what’s happening.
They don’t know the end. There’s not much time left. The
wish to stop time is a deathly wish. They’re going to see
an image of their own struggle with their own persona,
they’ll be left with that. I’ll leave them that at least.
SPECTROGRAPHIES
A N I N T E RV I E W B E T W E E N B E R N A R D
S T I E G L E R A N D JAC Q U E S D E R R I DA
BS: We have talked a lot about Barthes, whom I
would like to cite so that I may then cite you, not
from a book, but from a film in which you played
yourself — Ghostdance — and in which you say a
number of things about film and ghosts. There is a
thematic of the ghost and of the specter which is
at the very heart of your book on Marx, but which
has been insistent in your work for a very long time,
which incessantly comes back there. Barthes writes,
in Camera Lucida: ‘’From a real body which was
there proceed radiations that come to touch me,
I who am here. The duration of the transmission
doesn’t matter. The photo of the departed being
comes to touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
A kind of umbilical cord ties the body of the photographic thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable,
is really a carnal medium here, a skin that I share
with the one who was photographed... The bygone
thing has really touched, with its immediate radiations (its luminances), the surface that is in turn
touched by my gaze.” Commenting on these lines,
you have written that “the modern possibility of the
photograph joins, in a single system, death and the
referent.“ Already in this commentary, you spoke of
the “phantomatic effect”, which Barthes himself had
put forth. In the film, in which you play yourself, you
say to Pascale Ogier, your partner: “To be haunted
by a ghost is to remember what one has never lived
in the present, to remember what, in essence, has
never had the form of presence. Film is a ‘phantomachia’. Let the ghosts come back. Film plus
psychoanalysis equals a science of ghosts. Modern
technology, contrary to appearances, although it
is scientific, increases tenfold the power of ghosts.
The future belongs to ghosts.” Might you elaborate
on this statement: “The future belongs to ghosts”?
JD: When Barthes grants such importance to touch in
the photographic experience, it is insofar as the very
thing one is deprived of, as much in spectrality as in the
gaze which looks at images or watches film and television, is indeed tactile sensitivity. The desire to touch, the
tactile effect or affect, is violently summoned by its very
frustration, summoned to come back, like a ghost [un
revenant], in the places haunted by its absence. In the
series of more or less equivalent words that accurately designate haunting, specter, as distinct from ghost, speaks of
the spectacle. The specter is first and foremost something
visible. It is of the visible, but of the invisible visible, it is
the visibility of a body which is not present in flesh and
blood. It resists the intuition to which it presents itself, it
is not tangible. Phantom preserves the same reference to
phainesthai, to appearing for vision, to the brightness of
day, to phenomenality. And what happens with spectrality,
with phantomality — and not necessarily with comingback [revenance] is that something becomes almost visible
which is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and
blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in
a night body, it radiates a night light. At this moment,
in this room, night is falling over us. Even if it weren’t
falling, we are already in night, as soon as we are captured
by optical instruments which don’t even need the light of
day. We are already specters of a ‘televised’. In the nocturnal space in which this image of us, this picture we are
in the process of having ‘taken’, is described, it is already
night. Furthermore, because we know that, once it has
been taken, captured, this image will be reproducible in
our absence, because we know this already, we are already
haunted by this future, which brings our death. Our disappearance is already here. We are already transfixed by
a disappearance [une disparition] which promises and
conceals in advance another magic ‘apparition’, a ghostly
‘re-apparition’ which is in truth properly miraculous,
something to see, as admirable as it is incredible [incroyable], believable [croyable] only by the grace of an act of
faith. Faith which is summoned by technics itself, by our
relation of essential incompetence to technical operation.
(For even if we know how something works, our knowledge is incommensurable with the immediate perception
that attunes us to technical efficacy, to the fact that ‘it
works’: we see that ‘it works’, but even if we know this, we
don’t see how ‘it works’; seeing and knowing are incommensurable here.) And this is what makes our experience
so strange. We are spectralized by the shot, captured or
possessed by spectrality in advance.
What has, dare I say, constantly
haunted me in this logic of the specter is that it regularly
exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible. A specter is both visible and
invisible, both phenomenal and nonphenomenal: a trace
that marks the present with its absence in advance. The
spectral logic is de facto a deconstructive logic. It is in the
element of haunting that deconstruction finds the place
most hospitable to it, at the heart of the living present, in
the quickest heartbeat of the philosophical. Like the work
of mourning, in a sense, which produces spectrality, and
like all work produces spectrality.
To come back to the Ghostdance experience, I regret the expression that came to me while
improvising (the scene you cited was improvised) from
start to finish. I remember it from this one sentence
because it was a rather singular experience with Ken
McMullen, the English filmmaker: we had studied that
morning, in the bar of the Select, for an hour, a scene
which lasted a minute, and which we repeated, repeated,
repeated to the point of exhaustion. Then, that afternoon,
in my office, conversely, we improvised from beginning to
end a completely different scene, it was very long, which
Ken McMullen kept almost in its entirety and in which
tbe exchange you mentioned was shot. Thus I improvised this sentence, “Psychoanalysis plus film equals... a
science of ghosts.” Of course, upon reflection, beyond the
improvisation, I’m not sure I’d keep the word ‘science’;
for at the same time, there is something which, as soon
as one is dealing with ghosts, exceeds, if not scientificity in general, at least what, for a very long time, has
modeled scientificity on the real, the objective, which
is not or should not be, precisely, phantomatic. It is in
the name of the scientificity of science that one conjures
ghosts or condemns obscurantism, spiritualism, in short,
everything that has to do with haunting and with specters.
There would be much to say about this.
With regard to emanations and the
very beautiful text by Barthes which you cited, rather
than problematize what he says, I would like to tell
you what happened wirh this film, Ghostdance. Having
invented this scene wirh Pascale Ogier, who was sitting
across from me, in my office, and who had taught me,
in the intervals between shots, what in cinematic terms
is called the eye-line, that is to say, the fact of looking
eye to eye (we spent long minutes, if not hours, at the
request of the filmmaker, looking into one another’s eyes,
which is an experience of strange and unreal imensity:
you can imagine what this experience of the eye-line
can be when it is prolonged and passionately repeated
between two actors, even if it is only fictional and ‘professional’), and after she had taught me that, then, after
I had said roughly what you repeated, I had to ask her:
“And what about you, do you believe in ghosts?” This is
the only thing the filmmaker dictated to me. At the end
of my improvisation, I was to say to her: “And what about
you, do you believe in ghosts?” And, repeating it over and
over, at least thirty times, at the request of the filmmaker,
she says this little sentence: “Yes, now I do, yes”. And
so, already during shooting, she repeated this sentence at
least thirty times. Already this was a little strange, a little
spectral, our of sync, outside itself; this was happening
several times in one. But imagine the experience I had
when, two or three years later, after Pascale Ogier had
died, I watched the film again in the United States, at
the request of students who wanted to discuss it with me.
Suddenly I saw Pascale’s face, which I knew was a dead
woman’s face, come onto the screen. She answered my
question: “Do you believe in ghosts?” Practically looking
me in the eye, she said to me again, on the big screen:
“Yes, now I do, yes”. Which now? Years later in Texas. I
had the unnerving sense of the return of her specter, the
specter of her specter coming back to say to me — to me
here, now: “Now... now... now, that is to say, in this dark
room on another continent, in another world, here, now,
yes, believe me, I believe in ghosts”.
But at the same time, I know that the
first time Pascale said this, already, when she repeated
this in my office, already, this spectrality was at work. It
was already there, she was already saying this, and she
knew, just as we know, that even if she hadn’t died in the
interval, one day, it would be a dead woman who said, “I
am dead,” or “I am dead, I know what I’m talking about
from where I am, and I’m watching you”, and this gaze
remained dissymmetrical, exchanged beyond all possible
exchange, eye-line without eye-line, the eye-line of a gaze
that fixes and looks for the other, its other, its counterpart
[vis-a-vis], the other gaze met, in an infinite night.
BS: History itself is an effect of spectrality. The
return of the Romans in the French Revolution
would belong to a mode of spectral transmission
which overdetermines all historical events, and this
in an irreducible way. Perhaps one should say, furthermore, that this spectrality belongs to what could
be called a history in deferred time, a history in the
play of writing, which has the structure, it seems to
me, with the exception of a few very particular cases
(such as signatures on contracts or events of the
clearly performative type), of an irreducible distension between the event and its recording. It seems
to me that, in an essential way, orthographic writing
constitutes a deferred time. Today, we are living
a number of events ‘live’, ‘in real time’. To what
extent — this is yet another extremely complicated
question — is the spectrality at work in this kind of
transmission incommensurable with this spectrality
in deferred time? In other words, what is the problematic of eventization that is taking shape around
this today?
JD: In principle, every event is experienced or lived, as
one says and as one believes, in ‘real time’. What we are
living ‘in real time’, and what we find remarkable, is
access precisely to what we are not living: we are ‘there’
where we are not, in real time, through images or through
technical relation. There happen to us, in real time, events
that aren’t happening to us, that is to say, that we aren’t
experiencing immediately around us. We are there, in
real time where bombs are exploding in Kuwait or in
Iraq. We record and believe that we are perceiving in an
immediate mode events at which we are not present. But
the recording of an event, from the moment that there
is a technical interposition, is always deferred, that is to
say that this ‘différance’ is inscribed in the very heart of
supposed synchrony, in the living present. Past events,
for example a sequence in Roman history such as it is
mimicked, reconstituted in simulacrum during the 1789
Revolution, are clearly something else, but something
else which tells us that what happened there, in Rome,
is the object of new recordings. We record again, this
happens to us again, and through historical reading, historical interpretation, even through mimicry, the mimetic,
or simulation, we record what is past. The imprint, in
essence continues to be printed. The shortening of the
intervals is only a shrinking in the space of this ‘différance’
and of this temporality. As soon as we are able — this is an
effect of modernity, an effect of the twentieth century —
to see spectacles or hear voices that were recorded at the
beginning of the century, the experience we have of them
today is a form of presentification, which, although it was
impossible and even unthinkable before, is nonetheless
inscribed in the possibility of this delay or of this interval
which ensures that there is historical experience in general, memory in general. Which means that there is never
an absolutely real time. What we call real time, and it is
easy to understand how it can be opposed to deferred
time in everyday language, is in fact never pure. What we
call real time is simply an extremely reduced ‘différance’,
but there is no purely real time because temporalization
itself is structured by a play of retention or of protention
and, consequently, of traces: the condition of possibility
of the living, absolutely real present is already memory,
anticipation, in other words, a play of traces. The realtime effect is itself a particular effect of ‘différance’. This
should not lead us to efface or minimize the extraordinary
gulf separating what today we call real-time transmission
from what had been impossible before. I do not want to
try to reduce all of technical modernity to a condition of
possibility that it shares with much more ancient times.
However, if we are going to understand the originality
and the specificity of this technical modernity, we must
not forget that there is no such thing as purely real time,
that this does not exist in a full and pure state. Only on
this condition will we understand how technics alone can
bring about the real-time ‘effect’. Otherwise we wouldn’t
talk about real time. We don’t talk about real time when
we have the impression that there are no technical
instruments.
"He is dead and he is going to die . . ”
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