Previously, I have tried to explain the simultaneity of presence/absence in desire, and have tried to demonstrate how both Benjamin’s understanding of aura and his definition of translation relate to that understanding of desire. Here, I will try to explore that interrelation of aura and translation even further, to explain why the search for an aura may be more than a search for one’s other half.
To do this, I will explore how the practice of history relates to moments where “one’s desire is a void, a lack, whose contours perfectly match that of the desired complement, as a piece might complete a puzzle,” and how the terms “trace” and “aura” relate to such moments. Then, as part of this endeavor, I will use recent philosophical essays on photography to explore how one can generate such puzzle pieces. All this to explain the relationship between Benjamin’s theories of translation and of aura, and how they relate to this strange task of finding the contours of one’s desire.
In an article titled “Footprints: The Xenophilia of a European Medievalist,” Caroline Bynum, a scholar whom I wish to be my friend (and how am I to explain this desire?), wrote: “A footprint…is not only a trace of something human that has been present; it is, as itself, still present physically. Yet it points beyond, toward something not present any longer—something of which it is, as a modern theorist might say, a trace, or as a medieval theologian would put it, a vestige.…It is, in itself, both absence and presence…[T]he human footprint is the best image I can find for xenos [Greek for other/stranger/alien]: the object of xenophilia. As itself, the footprint is familiar, yet tantalizingly partial, hence strange. But it points beyond itself to something that is foreign, dissimilar, and hence even stranger.” Bynum acknowledges her philia, her pleasure in the strangeness, her proclivity for images that are present/absent, and how this desire motivates her practice as a historian–so we’re still on the right track of desire and puzzle-pieces.
Though Bynum may not know it, her description of historical methodology is remarkably similar to that of R.G. Collingwood’s “Historical Evidence.” In that essay, Collingwood takes issue with what he perceives to be the common “scissors-and-paste” method of history, whereby historians act as if all historical data were already existing in some out-there, an out-there mostly comprising linguistic artifacts in archives, such that one need only cut key moments from the archives and paste them into a well-designed collage of narrative. (One might note a similarity between Collingwood’s frustrations and Ankersmit’s distaste for the symbolists’ ‘hermetic idealism.’) To contest this scissors-and-paste historian, Collingwood writes his own detective story, where the detective is motivated by the historical question: whodunnit?
Collingwood uses his detective story to argue that the proper, “scientific historian” does not rely on a specific form of evidence, while the scissors-and-paste historian has already-given forms of evidence that can be accepted, evidence that is mostly linguistic. And, because one cannot rule-out in advance what can count as evidence, the “scientific historian” must rule-out what are impertinent questions, must determine what are meaningful inquiries.
As he explains it: “In my fable there is only one obvious characteristic common to all the pieces of evidence used by the Detective-Inspector in his argument: they are all things observed by himself. If we ask what kind of things, it is not easy to give an answer. They include such things as the existence of certain footprints in certain mud, their number, position, and direction, their resemblance to prints produced by a certain pair of shoes, and the absence of any others; the absence of mud on the floor of a certain room; the position of a dead body, the position of a dagger in its back, and the shape of the chair in which it is sitting; and so on, a most variegated collection…Anything is evidence which enabled you to answer your question—the question you are asking now.”
It is worth noting the appearance of footprints in both Collingwood’s and Bynum’s analysis. For Collingwood, the footprints matter because their form indicates the shape of the past, “a certain pair of shoes”; or, as Bynum says, the footprint “is not only a trace of something human that has been present; it is, as itself, still present physically.” And the detective is one whose questioning remains on the same path, the same trail, such that the various forms of evidence in his crime scene display not just position but “direction”; or, as Bynum says, the footprint “points beyond itself to something that is foreign, dissimilar, and hence even stranger.”
It is worth noting how these historians, despite experiencing a career’s worth of evidence, both fail to describe the moment of inquiry as something other than an enigmatic trail, a track, a trace (or a vestige). Bynum tries to define this “trace” in a footnote, which states “Walter Benjamin conceptualized trace as the opposite of aura. See his classic essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936) and Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura.’ Jacques Derrida used the term trace for the simulacrum of a presence that invariably refers beyond itself. See Derrida, Of Grammatology, 61, and Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface,’ xvii.” To try to offer my own improvement on Collingwood’s and Bynum’s attempts, I will here follow the foot-note as a way of defining the “trace.” I hope that this line of inquiry will also demonstrate that the linguistic method of collage deserves more credit than Collingwood has given it, and that this configurational reading may partake in the detective’s search for clues.
(I share Collingwood’s distaste for scissors-and-paste history, insofar as I think that there is an improper form of “writing by citing”; however, I believe that there are forms of the scissors-and-paste method, forms of citation, that still achieve meaningful results.)
First, I will try to find Bynum’s evidence for the claim that “Benjamin conceptualized trace as the opposite of aura,” using her citation of Hansen’s ‘Benjamin’s Aura.’ In Hansen’s article, there is another footnote which states: “Trace (Spur) is one of those concepts in Benjamin that have antithetical meanings depending on the constellation in which they are deployed; it is rejected as the fetishizing signature of the bourgeois interior in his advocacy of the new ‘culture of glass’ in ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), trans. Livingstone, SW, 2:734 (and quoting Brecht, ‘Erase the traces!’), but valorized as a mark of an epic culture—and its implied renewal in modern literature and film—that links art with material production and tactical, habitual perception; see Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’ (1936), trans. Zohn, SW, 3:149. While in some contexts aura and trace are overlapping terms, in both negative and positive senses, a relatively late entry in the Arcades Project puts them in stark opposition: ‘Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it behind may be. The aura is the appearance of a distance, however close the thing that calls it forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing; in the aura, it takes possession of us’ (AP, p. 447).”
Part 1: The original German term for Benjamin’s “trace”–Spur, which retains associations with feet and horses–might be translated also as “track,” thereby meaning both a foot/hoof/paw-print and a trail. So, in this respect, Bynum’s translation displays great fidelity. Yet, Bynum may be mistranslating Hansen’s argument, insofar as Hansen argues that “trace” is not a static term but has “antithetical meanings depending on the constellation in which [it is] deployed.” Importantly, both Benjamin’s and Bynum’s loose uses of “trace” indicate the fragmented partiality of language, how messages can easily get lost in translation.
Part 2: I have decided to cross-out those aspects of the footnote that I frankly do not care about. After all, one can use as evidence only those pieces which are worthy of one’s task as a detective. However, I find it important to note how this method of crossing-out gives you access to the text beyond my use of it, while also providing you the opportunity to ignore the original text.
Crossing-out therefore demonstrates the difference between what I would consider the useful deployment of citation and its abuse in what I call “write-by-citing.” I think that one could very well write a meaningful article that does not use any words of one’s own (for one rarely invents words of one’s own), but concatenates passages of previous authors–so long as one cuts and intersperses sources effectively. Unfortunately, the common use of “write-by-citing” does not intend to replace the originals, but to require a familiarity with the originals prior to one’s accessing the present text.
The footnote is supposed to provide an aside. E.G. We could paraphrase Bynum’s footnote as saying “Readers familiar with Benjamin may notice a similarity between my use of the term ‘trace’ and his; I, too, have read Benjamin, and wish to tell you that your idea of Benjamin’s term will be constructive in your understanding of my text. No worries, though, if you are as yet unfamiliar.” But, one finds that citations are often a requisite part of reading a historical text. E.G. The crossed-out section of Hansen’s essay is so laden with citation as to become, for me, illegible, and for that reason I have chosen to ignore it.
Part 3: Bynum sides with the later definition of trace and aura as opposed concepts; she does not want to suggest that there are other possible definitions, as Hansen does, and Bynum therefore does not include what would be her own crossed-out text. Collating the language of Bynum’s text with Benjamin’s, we might say that the “trace,” the “nearness,” “is, as itself, still present physically.” The “aura,” the “distance,” is that “something not present” to which the trace “points.” This version of trace/aura splits up the moment of presence/absence into constitutive aspects where “we gain possession of” the “trace,” because it is present; whereas, the “aura,” because it is absent, because it exceeds our frame of perception, “takes possession of us.”
All this to explain only the first half of Bynum’s footnote on the “trace.” The second comes from Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s De la grammatologie as Of Grammatology [lit. “On the Study of Writing”]. I believe that this is the part of the cited page–of Spivak’s translation of Derrida’s text–to which Bynum intends to direct us:
“We would wish rather to suggest that the alleged derivativeness of writing, however real and massive, was possible only on one condition: that the ‘original,’ ‘natural,’ etc. [spoken] language [langue] had never existed, that it had never been intact, untouched by writing, that it had itself always been a writing. Arche-writing whose necessity we wish to indicate and whose new concept we wish to outline here…was that which, threatened the desire from the closest proximity, for the living speech, what breached living speech from within and from the very beginning. [If this sentence is difficult to read, that may demonstrate Spivak’s faults. The “original” French is: ‘Elle était ce qui, au plus proche, menaçait le désir de la parole vive, ce qui du dedans et dès son commencement, l’entamait.’ I do not speak French, but I would render the sentence as: “It was that [arche-writing] which, at its most proximal, threatened the desire for living speech, that which, starting from within and from itself, began.“] And difference we ascertain progressively cannot be thought without the trace.”
In his definition of trace as arche-writing, Derrida seeks to evoke the continuous movement of difference, where meaning is always evoked through an act of generating meaning, an act of writing[/reading] whereby meaning is a “difference we ascertain progressively” which “cannot be thought without the trace.” We could also posit this as an argument for how the elements of a letter/word/sentence are constructed in the mind as a single image, but this image itself comprises a series of movements “as one’s eyes unconsciously shuttle across the pixels of a picture, like a loom generating a textile, such that there is a ‘weave of space and time.'”
Spivak herself, in the portion of the “Translator’s Preface” suggested by Bynum’s footnote, glosses Derrida’s argument on arche-writing/trace, as “a more generalized claim,” a claim “about language, namely, that writing in some sense precedes speech, and that speech is dependent on a form of writing, which means that the biblical God may well have uttered some first words, but that they only come to us through a dictation that covers over and challenges the primacy of that speech.” This passage might very well make one wonder, then, if “the biblical God may well have uttered some first words,” how are these first words translated to “come to us through a dictation?”
Spivak writes in her “translator’s preface” that she will not launch her own theory of translation, but will rely on Derrida’s own (though she translates this theory): “Within the limits to which it is possible, or at least appears possible, translation practices the difference between signified and signifier. But, if this difference is never pure, translation is even less so, and for the notion of translation must be substituted a notion of transformation: a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another. We will never have, and in fact have never had to do with some ‘transport’ of pure signifieds that the signifying instrument—or ‘vehicle’—would leave virgin and intact…” The similarity with Benjamin seems, to me, undeniable; the idea that translation is “a regulated transformation of one language by another, of one text by another,” because there are no pure signifieds that are left “virgin and intact,” recalls Benjamin’s claim that translation should “make both [languages] recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language, just as fragments are the broken parts of a vessel.” Judith Butler herself, in a footnote to her introduction to Spivak’s “Translator’s Preface,” puts Benjamin’s definition of translation and Spivak’s citation of Derrida’s definition on the same page.
And Spivak herself reinforces the fragmentary nature of translation when she chooses to translate De la grammatologie as Of Grammatology. As she puts it: “The translation of the title, suggesting ‘a piece of’ as well as ‘about,’ I have retained against expert counsel.”
But if we investigate this notion of “intact,” present within Derrida’s definition of arche-writing whereby language “had never been intact, untouched by writing,” and whereby translation cannot leave a “pure signified” “virgin and intact,” we might see an intersection between Benjamin’s theory of fragments, Derrida’s theory of language, and Ankersmit’s theory of touch. In-tact is literally in-touch, such that a device which is intact still has each of its pieces touching each other as intended. But Derrida’s original French is actually inentamé, where entamer is to start on, to touch on an object or a subject. So inentamé could be translated as “undisturbed” or “untouched,” such that if arche-writing cannot leave language inentamé, then language–rather than obstructing one’s access to touch–is always-already touching us. And this entamer which Spivak renders as breach, and which I want to suggest carries a notion of “touching on,” also has the connotation of starting on something in French, in the sense of starting on a dish, a plate, a bottle, i.e. beginning to consume it. And with this consumption we evoke hunger, desire, as well as a cyclical process of digestion–trace, not stasis; hunger, present/absent.
But it is worth noting that Derrida’s text itself moves beyond a linguistic definition of translation towards a physical one, a transformation in terms of space, an alteration of position, whereby the instrument of translation, its “vehicle,” is really a means of “transport.” There is the linguistic event of choosing between words, but there is also the physical scissors-and-paste event of placing a text in a new location, new context. This scissors-and-paste effect always alters the text, always “transforms” it, insofar as texts never mean what they mean in isolation. We might see this alteration in a different way when we think of photography rather than translation, and remember Ankersmit’s/Benjamin’s claim that there is an aura that the photograph loses, when the image of a face is separated from its three-dimensional presence.
So, if we are to understand Benjamin’s concept of aura as a sentiment of well-defined incompletion (a silhouetted desire), and if we understand the trace as the inherent partiality of any perspective (the silhouette of desire), then photography, I would argue, serves naturally as a point of intersection between the two.
Let me explain.
In a recent work on the political use of photography, Frames of War, Butler cites Benjamin’s essay on photography, in a way that will recall our earlier discussion of translation: “Benjamin’s argument about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction can be adapted for the present moment. The technical conditions of reproduction and reproducibility themselves produce a critical shifting, if not a full deterioration of context, in relation to the frames deployed by dominant media sources during times of war.” Both translations and photographs are therefore prone to the loss of “context,” which is “a greater language” that could house one’s translation, and which therefore renders photographs and translations fragmentary.
To explain this “context,” in Frames of War, Butler uses another reader of Benjamin, Susan Sontag, as a jumping-off point for her own argument about photography. As Butler notes, Sontag has written on the political use of photographs for decades. “Sontag argued that although photographs have the capacity momentarily to move us, they do not allow the building up of an interpretation. If a photograph becomes effective in informing or moving us politically, it is, in her view, only because the image is received within the context of a relevant political consciousness.” In the next sentence, Butler explains why Sontag considers photographs only “momentarily” and not very “politically” effective, by comparing Sontag’s ideas to Benjamin’s: “For Sontag, photographs render truths in a dissociated moment; they ‘flash up’ in a Benjaminian sense, and so provide only fragmented or dissociated imprints of reality. As a result, they are always atomic, punctual, and discrete. What photographs lack is narrative coherence…”
In the sentence “For Sontag, photographs…; ‘flash up’ in a Benjaminian sense,” it is unclear whether Butler is making the claim that Sontag’s views on photographs derive from Benjamin’s, or if Butler is saying that her (Butler’s) understanding of Sontag is similar to her (Butler’s) understanding of Benjamin. Given that Sontag does not cite Benjamin in her (later) essay, it seems that the latter case is at work. The conjunctive semi-colon between Sontag and Benjamin might not serve as an equals sign, but is rather Butler’s attempt at translating by articulating these “fragments of a vessel,” such that they are “both recognizable as the broken parts of a greater language”.
Additionally, it is unclear whether Butler’s understanding of Benjamin might match how Benjamin would understand Benjamin. The phrase “flash up” does not occur in the essay on photography, but does appear in Benjamin’s theses on history, specifically the sixth thesis, which states that “to articulate the past” “means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.” According to this definition, the warning that “flashes up at a moment of danger” should therefore remind us of Hansen’s claim that there exists “the notion of aura as a premonition of future catastrophe [which] harks back to medical theories since antiquity that use the term to describe symptoms of anxiety and unease preceding and foreboding epileptic or hysterical attacks.” So, for Butler, photographs are meaningful in a moment of “dissociation,” perhaps similar to Ankersmit’s de-realization, where we experience the trace of an incomplete image, the auratic premonition of what the complete image may entail.
We might better understand the relationships among Butler, Benjamin and Sontag by investigating the following quote from Sontag: “Ordinary language fixes the difference between hand-made images like Goya’s and photographs by the convention that artists ‘make’ drawings and paintings while photographers ‘take’ photographs. But the photographic image, even to the extent that it is a trace (not a construction made out of disparate photographic traces), cannot be simply a transparency of something that happened.” It is possible that we might understand the term “trace” in the previous sense that we have ascribed to Benjamin, where traces are the contours of an incomplete fragment, give an intimation of the larger vessel. However, this reading would make little sense given the context of the sentence. Sontag is saying that “even to the extent that [a photograph] is a trace,” which might mean (in my words) ‘even though [a photograph] is a line-by-line rendering of an original image with great fidelity,’ it is still not “simply a transparency of something that happened.”
So, photographs “trace,” here, just as a child in art class might take a thin piece of wax paper and stencil over an image. The idea of the trace as a stencil, a form of copying, is present throughout Sontag’s reading of Benjamin. In On Photography, Sontag writes, “Benjamin’s own ideal project reads like a sublimated version of the photographer’s activity. This project was a work of literary criticism that was to consist entirely of quotations.” Similarly, in her introduction to Benjamin’s One-Way Street, Sontag uses two key quotations from Benjamin: “The most praiseworthy way of acquiring books is by writing them,” and “one never really understands a book unless one copies it.”
Sontag therefore sees an ambivalence in Benjamin insofar as he desires to make miniatures and models of the world, even though the “criterion” of great art, “the defining characteristic of the work of art,” in painting or photography, “is the quality of presence.” Sontag refers to this “quality of presence” with Benjamin’s concept of aura, where “a Giotto can still be said to possess an aura in the situation of museum display,” but, because “it too has been wrenched from its original context,” “in the strictest sense of Benjamin’s aura, [the museum display] does not have [one].” But, we might go beyond Benjamin, or Sontag’s Benjamin, by remembering that languages are always broken fragments of a larger vessel, and that aura is therefore something that nothing ever “has,” but is rather that which “takes possession of us.”
We might also see an affinity here between Sontag’s use of “trace” and that of Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida; Sontag herself wrote the introduction to Barthes’s reader, which includes the essay Camera Lucida. In that essay, Barthes writes that “in these photographs of my mother there was always a place set apart, reserved and preserved: the brightness of her eyes. For the moment it was a quite physical [emphasis mine] luminosity, the photographic trace of a color, the blue-green of her pupils.” Barthes admires the photograph because it has a loyal rendering, “the photographic trace,” of “the blue-green of her pupils”; the child has used the right colored pencils for his stencils.
Though this trace might be accurate, and though it might even capture the same colors as the original, it ultimately is not “simply a transparency of something that happened.” To explain how these images still fail to be loyal to the original, Sontag introduces the concept of the “frame,” which clearly influenced Butler’s Frames of War. “[A photograph] is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” It is Sontag’s idea of the frame that more closely assimilates (my understanding of) Benjamin’s trace, where one wonders what lies beyond the boundaries of a frame, just as a trace, like a footprint, makes one wonder what could fill the silhouette, where one is going.
Sontag adds, to her claim that frames are always partial, a caveat about the images themselves: “moreover, fiddling with pictures long antedates the era of digital photography and Photoshop manipulations: it has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent.” We might read this as a sly contestation of Barthes’s Camera Lucida, because, in that work, Barthes writes that “Photography’s Referent is not the same as the referent of other systems of representation. I call ‘photographic referent’ not the optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. Painting can feign reality without having seen it…[but c]ontrary to these imitations, in Photography I cannot deny that the thing has been here…The name of Photography’s noeme will therefore be: ‘That-has-been.'”
So, by saying that photography and painting are not so distinct, that ‘taking’ a photograph is still a form of ‘making’ a portrait, Sontag is really saying: “Barthes, you idiot, I can retroactively place an object into a photographed setting, that doesn’t mean that ‘the thing has been here.‘” We might be more charitable to Barthes, though, if we remember that Barthes is motivated to write Camera Lucida by the loss of his mother, after looking at a picture of her; through Photography’s noeme, he wants to feel connected to her by a “physical luminosity.” Interestingly, in his account of this connection, Barthes cites Sontag herself (in On Photography): “From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.” Photography therefore helps Barthes feel connected to his mother, literally at the navel.
The passage Barthes cites from Sontag about “the delayed rays of a star” is more complicated than he gives it credit. In Barthes’s cited passage, Sontag begins with a quote from the French painter Delacroix about the use of photographs in astronomy: “Since the light of the star which was daguerreotyped took twenty years to traverse the space separating it from the earth, the ray which was fixed on the plate had consequently left the celestial sphere a long time before Daguerre had discovered the process by means of which we have just gained control of this light.” Admittedly, Sontag, like Barthes, then argues for the triumph of photography: “Leaving behind such puny notions of control as Delacroix’s, photography’s progress has made ever more literal the senses in which a photograph gives control over [to] the thing photographed… Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image-maker. [N.B.: the gap between ‘maker’ and ‘taker’ here.] However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one, the workings of which are automatic, the machinery for which will inevitably be modified to provide still more detailed and, therefore, more useful maps of the real.”
Clearly, by the time of writing Regarding the Pain of Others, the later Sontag has separated herself from this earlier position, and what we earlier read as a critique of Barthes may therefore also be a critique of herself. In acknowledging the danger of photographs, insofar as “it has always been possible for a photograph to misrepresent,” we can see a change in Sontag’s attitudes towards photography, which she once credited as “inevitably” able to “provide still more detailed and, therefore, more useful maps of the real [emphasis mine].”
Butler glosses this change as serving a political function, contrary to what we would expect: “[Sontag] claimed in On Photography that the visual representation of suffering had become clichéd, and that as a result of being bombarded with sensationalist photography our capacity for ethical responsiveness had been diminished. In her reconsideration of this thesis twenty-six years later, in Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag is more ambivalent about the status of the photograph which, she concedes, can and must represent human suffering, establishing through the visual frame a proximity that keeps us alert to the human cost of war, famine, and destruction in places that may be distant both geographically and culturally.”
We might therefore wonder if a newfound doubt in photography’s capacity to grant “more detailed,” more direct access to “the real,” made sharing atrocity photographs more permissible to Sontag. Or, it may be that the late Sontag grew more nuanced in her opinions more broadly, simultaneously trusting/mistrusting the accuracy of photographs and accepting/refusing the display of atrocity photographs.
As Butler tells us, Sontag wants to “let the photographs haunt us.” Instead of a “[mis]representation of suffering [that] had become clichéd,” she wants to find the potential of photographs to be effective and affective, cause a political-insofar-as-personal impact. Butler even tries to find early versions of an advocacy for political photography in Sontag’s On Photography, citing Sontag’s claim that “[p]hotographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people.”
Butler sees an affinity between this early Sontag and Barthes’s Camera Lucida. Importantly, Butler reverses the chronology by claiming: “perhaps Sontag is influenced by Roland Barthes at such a moment, since it was Barthes, in Camera Lucida, who argued that the photographic image has a particular capacity to cast a face, a life, in the tense of the future anterior.” We have already seen that Barthes is directly influenced by Sontag, and not the other way around. Though Butler may not know it, she is here referring to Barthes’s idea of Photography’s noeme, an idea that owes much to Sontag’s gloss on stars.
Butler explains this “tense of the future anterior” by claiming that “[t]he photograph relays less the present moment than the perspective, the pathos, of a time in which ‘this will have been.’” Butler claims that, because of this simultaneous futurity/anteriority, “every photographic portrait speaks in at least two modes, both a chronicle of what has been and protentive certainty about what will have been.” These chronicles are related because a photograph (and this is Butler citing Barthes) “does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been.” A photograph cannot capture loss, what is no longer, which amounts to saying that it cannot capture temporal movement itself. Instead, even when looking at the image of a man about to be hanged, one cannot help but fully enter into its frame, such that “by giving me the absolute past of the pose,” the photograph takes me to the moment where “he is going to die.”
We can better understand this phenomenon that Butler refers to as “the tense of the future anterior,” by looking at Barthes’s use of “Japanese No masks.” After discussing these masks, Barthes writes: “however ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it…Photography is a kind of primitive [sic] theater, a kind of Tableau vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.” In one sense, the stillness of the photograph reminds us of the stillness of death. In another sense, photographs are “motionless” and therefore–like actors wearing masks, like members of a Tableau vivant holding a “pose,” or like clowns made-up into smiles/frowns–cannot convey changes in expression. Photographs are therefore always in media res, such that we have to anticipate what happens next. This insight into masks might thereby explicate Barthes’s claim that “Since every photograph is contingent (and thereby outside of meaning), Photography cannot signify (aim at a generality) except by assuming a mask.” Masks do not merely make photographs deceptive; rather, they force us to imagine the temporal qualities of predecessor and successor.
In the same passage where he describes a man-to-be-hanged, Barthes describes another moment where “[i]n front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred.” There is a remarkable similarity here between Barthes’s photographs that give intimations of death and Benjamin’s own writing. Benjamin tells us: “No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency [Zufall], of the here and now, with which reality has (so to speak) seared the character of the image, to find the inconspicuous spot where in the thusness [Sosein] of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it. [SW, 2:510; GS, 2:371]” Barthes contemplates his dead mother, and a man about to be hanged; Benjamin looks at the photograph of a woman who, though the photographer(s) did not know it, was about to end her life (Hansen even claims that Benjamin was contemplating ending his own life at the time).
Hansen deploys this passage from Benjamin to support the claim that “[t]he indexical dimension of aura’s relation to the past is not necessarily a matter of continuity or tradition; more often than not, it is a past whose ghostly apparition projects into the present and (to invoke Roland Barthes) ‘wounds’ the beholder.” Following this passage is the excerpt we have already seen from Hansen, “the notion of aura as a premonition of future catastrophe harks back to medical theories since antiquity that use the term to describe symptoms of anxiety and unease preceding and foreboding epileptic or hysterical attacks.” The bodily “symptoms of anxiety” are similarly present when Barthes “shudder[s], like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred.” [The reference to Winnicott, a researcher on mothering, indicates Barthes’s fascination with his lost mother, as well as the more general trend among theorists to make vague use of object-relations psychology.] We have at work an experience of a trace/aura, where a moment reveals itself as being partial, particular, such that one receives intimations of a past/future, such that one has access to the silhouette of desire.
What ‘wounds’ the beholder, and why does Hansen say that this language is typical of Roland Barthes? Well, we can explain this concept of “wounding” by referring to Barthes’s concepts of studium and punctum. When looking at the man-to-be-hanged, Barthes writes: “The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die.” As indicated by his pleasure in the man’s appearance, “[t]he studium is that very wide field of unconcerned desire, of various interest, of inconsequential taste.” This lack of concern is disrupted by the punctum, “which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” “[P]unctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole–and also a cast of the dice. A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me [because poignant carries with it pugnare, to punch]).” Later, this idea of “accident” (similar to Benjamin’s Zufall) is clarified to include the anticipation of death, when Barthes re-defines the punctum: “At the time (at the beginning of this book: already far away) when I was inquiring into my attachment to certain photographs, I thought I could distinguish a field of cultural interest (the studium) from that unexpected flash [emphasis mine] which sometimes crosses this field and which I called the punctum. I now know that there exists another punctum (another ‘stigmatum’) than the ‘detail.’ This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of intensity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”
Neither Butler nor Sontag accounts for the studium and punctum in their essays on photography. Sontag herself writes, in her introduction to the Barthes reader, that “[t]he aim of [Barthes’s] implacable categorizing is not just to map the intellectual territory: Barthes’s taxonomies are never static. Often the point is precisely for one category to subvert the other, as do the two forms, which he calls punctum and studium, of his interest in photographs.” Admittedly, Barthes’s taxonomy was not “static,” as he does update the category of punctum towards the end of the essay; but, because the two categories do seem reliably distinct, I have a hard time seeing how it is possible for “one category to subvert the other” here. So I therefore take it for granted that, despite their respective intellectual prowess, neither Butler nor Sontag have full understanding of Barthes’s categories, even if they have read Camera Lucida.
At work in the concept of studium is an understanding of what “narrative” is. Because neither author uses the definition of studium, nor the same definition of narrative, Butler’s and Sontag’s languages move past each other. As Barthes puts it, “[t]o recognize the studium is inevitably to encounter the photographer’s intentions.” Because the studium conveys a kind of flat communication between photographer and audience, where the photographer already knows what his image “says,” and where the audience already knows what the photographer is going to “say,” there is the continuation of the same narrative, with no opportunity for surprise.
We might remember, here, Ankersmit’s division between impression and sensation, where an impression “submit[s] to the subject’s mental makeup,” while a sensation comprises an embrace between subject and object such that the subject might be touched by the object. We might also remember Gadamer in relation to this hermeneutic/symbolic (re)uniting of subject and object. As I said already, combining Gadamer and Ankersmit, “‘fore-projection’ may account for impression’s censure, where phenomena ‘submit to the subject’s mental makeup,’ whereas sensation occurs in the moments of sharp surprise [punctum], when ‘the text can present itself in all its otherness and thus assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.'”
Barthes explains that the definitive feature of punctum is surprise, insofar as surprise comprises a form of non-knowledge, such that “what I can name cannot really prick me,” and “the incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.” Defined by ignorance, the punctum requires a kind of “blind field.” Barthes gives an example of the blind field by distinguishing eroticism from mere pornography, where “there is no punctum in the pornographic image” because it “ordinarily represents the sexual organs.” “The erotic photograph, on the contrary,” because it hides the sexual organs, “takes the spectator outside its frame” and by “that it animates me.” Barthes uses this example to give a final description, where “[t]he punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond.” And so here we see the resonances between the punctum and Benjamin’s fragment, his trace, that points to an aura, a larger vessel.
We might therefore say that the studium relates to what is typically understood by narrative, where narrative is the non-disjunctive flow from one stimulus to the next, whereas the punctum is a sudden irruption, a befuddlement, which prevents this flow. Something similar is at play when Butler wrestles with Sontag’s ideas about narrative: “[Sontag:] ‘The pathos conveyed by narrative forms, by contrast [to photographs], does not wear out. Narratives can make us understand: photographs do something else. They haunt us.’ [Butler:] Is she right?” Butler wants to suggest, against Sontag, that photographs may be useful without narratives, while (partially) accepting Sontag’s distinction between narratives and photographs; in other words, Butler argues against Sontag that haunting is better than understanding.
But what does haunting mean for Butler? Well, Benjamin might be of use here.
Elsewhere in Frames of War, Butler returns to Benjamin’s theses on history, which was prefigured in her use of the phrase “flashes up.” Butler repeats Benjamin’s claim that “the concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time.” We might say that this “empty time,” comprises a period of un-interruption, a perfectly conjunctive narrative, no alarms, no surprises: a studium. As a punctum to counter this studium, Butler argues for a practice of history [which includes documentary photographs] that disrupts this “homogenous, empty time,” by using Benjamin’s Jewish mysticism.
That phrase “flashes up” is central to her argument, insofar as “[t]he historian who understands how the past flashes up, how the past is not past, but continues in the present, is one who understands ‘the time of the now’ as ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time.’” We might understand how ‘the time of the now’ is ‘shot through with chips of Messianic time’ by remembering that “there are particulate moments [perhaps Erlebnis] that coalesce into a single memory-image [perhaps Erfahrung]”; or, that “moments concatenate themselves into a single image, just as one’s eyes unconsciously shuttle across the pixels of a picture, like a loom generating a textile, such that there is a ‘weave of space and time.'” In an argument that follows Benjamin’s Critique of Non-Violence, Butler cites: “perhaps revolutions are nothing other than human beings on the train of progress reaching for the emergency brake.” It therefore seems fair to suggest that Butler privileges the disjunction, the pause, of uncertainty, prefers being haunted to understanding.
How do we achieve this disjunction of uncertainty? Well, for Barthes it was in the frozenness of the photograph, its incompletion in media res, which forces us to imagine what is not conveyed in its spatial borders, or what is not conveyed in its temporal borders, i.e. what precedes or proceeds the image’s capture. For Butler, it is important to have an image that “flashes up,” and indicates an only partial temporality, “a time of the now” “shot through with chips of Messianic time,” instead of a “homogeneous,” linear one. In supporting photographs for this purpose, Butler claims that “Sontag’s position misunderstands the way that non-verbal or non-linguistic media make their ‘arguments.’ Even the most transparent of documentary images is framed, and framed for a purpose, carrying that purpose within its frame and implementing it through the frame.” Butler advocates for a kind of seeing that allows us to visualize “the framing of the frame,” such that “our inability to see what we see that is also of critical concern.” What Barthes called the “blind field” is important to Butler’s argument, where the real task is “to learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see,” though this “is no easy matter.”
It should be obvious that Butler is mis-characterizing Sontag’s argument. We have already seen in Sontag’s text: “[A photograph] is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” Importantly, Butler ignores the specific examples of Sontag’s argument. To use Barthes’s language as a way of comparing the two, we can say that Butler takes for granted that photographs can act as a punctum. She is writing from a perspective where the American government plays an active role in censuring images of torture, and where “the state works on the field of perception and, more generally, the field of representability, in order to control affect.” Sontag, on the other hand, is more interested in how photographs can be absorbed into a studium.
Sontag describes a relationship where “photographs objectify: they turn an event or a person into something that can be possessed.” Sontag claims that “[b]eautifying is one classic operation of the camera,” while “uglifying” is a rarer function. Because photographs “must shock” in order “to accuse, and possibly to alter conduct,” beautifying “tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown.” (This echoes David Shields’s argument in War is Beautiful, which claims that the commonly aestheticized war-imagery in the news has a numbing effect.) After all, the handsomeness of the man-to-be-hanged was Barthes’s own studium.
Sontag then gives “An example: A few years ago, the public health authorities in Canada, where it had been estimated that smoking kills forty-five thousand people a year, decided to supplement the warning printed on every pack of cigarettes with a shock-photograph—of cancerous lungs, or a stroke-clotted brain, or a damaged heart, or a bloody mouth in acute periodontal distress. A pack with such a picture accompanying the warning about the deleterious effects of smoking would be sixty times more likely to inspire smokers to quit, a research study had somehow calculated, than a pack with only the verbal warning.” But Sontag wonders how long this effect could last on smokers, as she asks: “Does shock have term limits?”
Ultimately, one must understand Sontag’s argument about imagery in a context where television has created an “image-glut” which “keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content.” The issue is that “consumers” do not give themselves over to a single thought: “Image-flow precludes a privileged image. The whole point of television is that one can switch channels…A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness…” And with that intensity of awareness we might be reminded again of Barthes’s punctum, which has the effect of surprise and therefore alarm.
In this moment of frustration with “image-glut,” Sontag issues a diatribe against the novelist W.G. Sebald, famous for, among others, his novel Austerlitz. “To remember is, more and more, not to recall a story but to be able to call up a picture. Even a writer as steeped in nineteenth-century and early modern literary solemnities as W.G. Sebald was moved to seed his lamentation-narratives of lost lives, lost nature, lost cityscapes with photographs.” I think Sontag is disappointed that Sebald gives images to his audience, that they can’t have traces of the unseen aura, that they can’t imagine the narrative for themselves. There is therefore no moment of coming up short, no disjunctive punctum which forces one to think for oneself.
(Interestingly, Sontag’s close friend Michael Silverblatt interviewed W.G. Sebald just before the author’s death; the interview was later included in The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with Sebald. In that interview, Silverblatt suggests to Sebald: “I think that your radical contribution to prose is to bring the sensibility of tininess, miniaturization, to the enormity of the post-concentration camp world.” Sebald responds: “Well, I think [Walter] Benjamin at one point says that there is no point in exaggerating that which is already horrific.” Obscuring horror through matter-of-fact language, by using “tininess” to demonstrate monstrous “enormity,” is here licensed by Benjamin as an effective form of communication, and we might think again of fragments which are able to convey their partiality.)
Though she clearly privileges language to photographs in her criticism of Sebald, Sontag still gives more credit to “non-verbal,” “non-linguistic” media than Butler gives her credit. Sontag writes that “[a] narrative seems likely to be more effective than an image,” because “of the length of time one is obliged to look, to feel”; but, she thinks that the most successful examples of narratives are two films: Larisa Shepitko’s The Ascent (1977) and Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987).
Sontag isn’t claiming that people shouldn’t be exposed to images of horror. In a pivotal moment, she calls her own prior position, “that our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence is being sapped by the relentless diffusion of vulgar and appalling images,” “conservative.” We might say that it is “conservative” in the twenty-first century American sense of the word, evoking a kind of white imperialist Christian, a moralist of politeness who censures the capacity for protest, for “vulgar and appalling images.” [And this kind of hypocritical moralism is what Butler is responding to in Frames of War.] These (neo)liberal imperialists are in denial about what is going on, such that, by preventing access to these images, “it is the sense of reality that is eroded.”
Sontag then issues a shift, where leftists such as herself are also culpable of the same crime as conservatives, such that “the sense of reality is eroded.” In constantly fretting over how an image is received, intellectuals have forgotten that “there is still a reality that exists independent of the attempts to weaken its authority.” As examples, Sontag associates the Marxist/leftist intellectuals Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard with the view that “there are only representations: media,” and even claims that “to believe that images, simulated realities, are all that exist now” “seems something of a French specialty.” In Sontag, we see a political version of Ankersmit’s frustration with philosophy after the linguistic turn, because “it is common to say that war, like everything else that appears to be real, is mediatique.” Why does everything have to be always-already mediated by language?
We might hear echoes of Ankersmit when Sontag writes that “[s]ome of the reproaches made against images of atrocity are not different from characterizations of sight itself. Sight is effortless; sight requires spatial distance; sight can be turned off (we have lids on our eyes, we do not have doors on our ears.) The very qualities that made the ancient Greek philosophers consider sight the most excellent, the noblest of the senses are now associated with a deficit.” While Ankersmit would cite Aristotle to contest Sontag’s claim that “the ancient Greek philosophers consider sight the most excellent,” he, too, demonstrates that there is a common feeling among intellectuals that observation fails to allow for meaningful lives in the way that sensation, or engagement, does.
Although, Sontag ultimately defends one’s right to sight, which amounts to a right to sit still and think a while: “It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract reality offered by photography…the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.” Butler evokes a philosophy of non-violence by citing Benjamin’s claim that “perhaps revolutions are nothing other than human beings on the train of progress reaching for the emergency brake.” Sontag: “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: ‘Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time.’”
It is worth noting the relentless repetition here, as intellectuals claim that their insights are new, even as they often misjudge the contributions of their predecessors. At work, also, is a kind of ambivalent loathing among intellectuals (which might explain their cannibalistic criticism), who feel the need to decry indolence, while also struggling to justify their own inactivity.
(I should note that I am not using “cannibal” with a negative connotation towards the cultural practice of eating the bodies of the dead as a way of maintaining connection with them. Rather, I have in mind the murderous Hannibal Lecter kind of cannibal–who cuts a life short for the sake of consumption, of personal gain. This second type of cannibal does not achieve continuity/communication with the Other.)
The important thing in both Sontag’s and Butler’s philosophies of non-violence is to develop a critique that does not resort to creating villains. Sontag begins her book on the political use of photography by describing an interaction between Virginia Woolf and a lawyer, where Woolf responds to photographs sent by the lawyer: “You sir, call [your responses to these images] ‘horror and disgust.’ We also call them horror and disgust…War you say, is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped at whatever cost. And we echo your words. War is an abomination; a barbarity; war must be stopped.” But Sontag wants to distance herself from statements like Woolf’s, because “the agreement between Woolf and the lawyer seems entirely presumptive,” insofar as “these photographs documenting the slaughter of noncombatants” could “foster greater militancy on behalf of the Republic.”
At work is the logic: “People are terrible; they kill people–we ought to kill them for that.” To avoid this logic, we have to believe that (Sontag cited by Butler) “photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of [all] people.” Sontag and Butler are therefore operating from the common assumption that we share a profound “innocence” as mortal beings “heading towards their own destruction,” and that this warrants peace. (Butler takes this for granted, much like Woolf does not hesitate to say that photographs of suffering protest the possibility of war.)
Butler is responding to a profound indifference, where people do not care about the suffering of others, perhaps even presume them to be deserving of it. For that reason, she critiques the mentality where “for Sontag, there is something of a persistent split between being affected and being able to think and understand, a split represented in the differing effects of photography and prose.” Butler is preoccupied with the fact that a flat affect cannot effect change.
Sontag, reading Woolf’s letter, is responding to a situation where people can be misled, enraged, perhaps even enraged enough to presume that others deserve suffering. For that reason, she critiques the “presumptive” mentality where indignation could lead to militancy. Sontag is therefore cautious, insofar as, if affect supplies energy, she wants to work on developing the thinking/understanding/narrative that will direct it.
In discussing visual media, Butler is working through an intellectual dilemma that, it turns out, has little to do with Sontag’s own essays. We can better understand Butler’s dilemma in her appeal to Levinas’s idea of “the face.” “If, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas claims, it is the face of the other that demands from us an ethical response, then it would seem that the norms that would allocate who is and is not human arrive in visual form. These norms work to give face and to efface.” We find the influence of Levinas on Butler again, in another essay, this time in Precarious Lives, when Butler responds to the question: “Have the humanities undermined themselves, with all their relativism and questioning and ‘critique,’ or have the humanities been undermined by all those who oppose all that relativism and questioning and ‘critique’?” To answer this claim, Butler “would like to consider the ‘face,’ the notion introduced by Emmanuel Levinas, to explain how it is that others make moral claims on us, address moral demands on us, ones that we do not ask for, ones that we are not free to refuse.”
Butler then uses two different quotes from Levinas which each refer to the commandment not to kill: “[T]he face is the other who asks me not to let him die alone, as if to do so were to become an accomplice to death. Thus, the face says to me: you shall not kill.” “The face is what one cannot kill, or at least it is that whose meaning consists in saying, ‘thou shalt not kill.'” In both quotes, it is a specific visual stimulus, the outline of a face which I am impossibly always-already able to recognize as a face, that awakens me to the needs of another person, that makes me unable to, murderously, ignore those needs.
But, as Butler notes, citing Levinas, “the face is not always a face,” because even “the human back [can] be so expressive.” Through “a particular way of craning [one’s] neck,” or through one’s “raised shoulders with shoulder blades like springs,” one can seem to “cry, sob and scream.” In a footnote, Butler explains that “Levinas distinguishes sometimes between the ‘countenance’ understood as the face within perceptual experience, and the ‘face’ whose coordinates are understood to transcend the perceptual field.” So, a back which is not a “‘countenance’ understood as the face within perceptual experience” can still be a conceptual ‘face,’ because this concept is “understood to transcend the perceptual field.”
But this same footnote features the addition, “[Levinas] also speaks on occasion about ‘plastic’ representations of the face that efface the face.” In this term ‘plastic’ I assume that there is at work the alteration of images, such that I do not confuse Warhol’s diptych with Marilyn Monroe. So while the “face” is intended to evoke a space beyond “relativism,” where one finally finds the unquestionable reality of the other person, I remain in a world where I am uncertain of the distinction between representation and reality.
Butler even draws attention to Levinas’s language, how the face says ‘Thou shall not kill.” She even cites a claim from Levinas that the “face and discourse are tied,” because the face “speaks,” thereby “it renders possible and begins all discourse.” And Butler herself renounces the primacy of visual signifiers in a later essay, in Frames of War. She makes the argument that “it is not enough to say, in a Levinasian vein, that the claim [of responsibility for other people] is made upon me prior to my knowing,” because, while that is “formally true,” its “truth is of no use.” One has to acknowledge that “the claim of the other upon me takes place, when it takes place, through the senses, which are crafted in part through various forms of media: the social organization of sound and voice, of image and text, of tactility and smell.”
As I hope is clear, there are multiple ambivalences at work in Butler’s text(s). First, it might be helpful to remember that Levinas was a Jewish man persecuted by Nazis, and that his former philosophy teacher, Martin Heidegger, was himself a Nazi. So Levinas’s concept of “the face” comes from a man who–as a result of his experiences of persecution, and of this authoritative philosopher’s failings—is skeptical of the powers of (secular/philosophical) language. Levinas therefore wants to return to an engagement with worldly affairs, and achieves this with the idea of a face-to-face encounter (an encounter that has resonances with his and Martin Buber’s Judaism) that precedes in chronology and importance any fanciful constructions of language. Butler is affected by Levinas’s ideas in a similar way, when she wants to argue that visual media is necessary, when she wants to answer the question of endless relativizing in the humanities, and when she is cautious of Sontag’s (supposed) over-reliance on linguistic narratives.
At the same time, Levinas himself is attached to philosophy, because he deems it important that sense data are not taken for granted, that the face-ness of the face doesn’t get effaced, that we are capable of registering the “‘face’ whose coordinates are understood to transcend the perceptual field.” Generalizing from the “transcendental” aspects of his writing, that “Levinasian vein,” Butler constructs/critiques a version of Levinas’s ethics that is totally transcendental/discursive, has lost its roots in the sense-data of a face. We might therefore say that she experiences that same “ambivalent loathing among intellectuals (which might explain their cannibalistic criticism), who feel the need to decry indolence, while also struggling to justify their own inactivity.”
Ultimately, Butler’s use of Levinas brings us back to Ankersmit’s/Benjamin’s question of photographs and faces, of how one is able to generate that auratic experience of being-with someone else, and how this experience may become mediated in such a way as to lose its aura. For Barthes, the image becomes powerful when it is incomplete, thereby having sharp edges, a punctum. Something similar is at work in Levinas’s understanding of the human visage; Butler cites his idea of “a rupture of being,” where “[m]urder, it is true, is a banal fact…[b]ut to speak truly…the humanity of man…is a rupture of being.” So we are dealing again with a feeling of disjunction, a punctum or a rupture. Butler herself thinks it important to stay with Levinas and the idea of disruption/incompletion, because “[t]he critical image,” “in the same way as the Levinasian image [of the face],” “must not only fail to capture its referent, but show this failing.”
Frankly, I don’t think that Butler succeeds in explaining how human-ness is tied up with this “rupture of being,” and what it has to do with the “banal[ity]” of “murder.” (Hello, my fellow Arendtians!) In Totality and Infinity, which Butler purposefully ignores, Levinas explains that there is an important “unforeseeableness” characteristic of one’s interactions with “the face.”
“The Other who can sovereignly say no to me is exposed to the point of the sword or the revolver’s bullet, and the whole unshakeable firmness of his ‘for itself’ with that intransigent no he opposes is obliterated because the sword or the bullet has touched the ventricles or auricles of his heart. In the contexture of the world he is quasi-nothing. But he can oppose to me a struggle, that is, oppose to the force that strikes him not a force of resistance, but the very unforeseeableness of his reaction…This infinity, stronger than murder, already resists us in his face, is his face, is the primordial expression, is the first word: ‘you shall not commit murder.’ ”
We might summarize/explicate this passage with the story [I am making up] where Levinas witnesses torturers trying to control a fellow prisoner-of-war, perhaps coercing this prisoner to commit an act of sacrilege against his religion. But, this prisoner-of-war refuses to say the lines he is fed; instead, before he is killed, he smiles defiantly, so that his face resists in its primordial expression. In the failure of such torturers to control their prisoners, Levinas sees an ultimate dignity in humanity, a dignity that does not extend only to such dire circumstances, but to the entire world of human relations, where we are always at the (sometimes delightful) risk of being surprised.
The continuous appearance of surprise–in Gadamer’s moment where a text resists our interpretation, in Ankersmit’s fantasy of a sudden embrace, in Barthes’s punctum, in Sontag’s advocacy for moral “shock,” in Butler’s version of Benjamin’s disjointed history, or in Levinas’s face–can explain why these intellectuals display such deep ambivalences. We are being presented with knowledge’s desire to seize non-knowledge; but, since this desire will be dried up as soon as the seizure is successful, knowledge also wants to leave room for non-knowledge. We might express this dilemma in a more succinct fashion, by stating that one cannot rush surprises. We have at present an intellectual class with a wonderful energy for making plans, who are unfortunately disappointed when looking at their calendars, realizing that one cannot schedule surprises.
The impossibility at hand is one where one has to translate in such a way that one’s language reveals the fragmentariness of experience, where one has intimations of a greater vessel. We are struggling to find a desire that is sufficiently absent as to stave off boredom, but remains sufficiently present as to be well-defined. We want to live in a way where every frame evokes its own framey-ness, where we are able simultaneously encounter objects and be struck with wonder by them. One wants a silhouette: not pornography, but eroticism.
To be continued…