i c a l

ret r hive
the

he a c

o f f ilm
e m o ry at t h e e n d
d i g i ta l m

Domietta Torlasco
the heretical archive
This page intentionally left blank
The Heretical Ar-
chive
D i g i tal m em o ry at t h e en d o f fi l m

Domietta Torlasco

University of Minnesota Press

 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Against House Arrest: Digital
Memory and the Impossible Archive,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 1 (2011): 39–63. An Introduction ix
earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Digital Impressions: Writing Memory
after Agnès Varda,” Discourse 33, no. 1 (2011): 390–408.
1 Against House Arrest 1
Figures 1–6 copyright 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, 2 Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnès Varda 25
Bonn
3 Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Montage 51
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
4 Archiving Disappearance: From Michelangelo
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a Antonioni to New Media 75
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Notes 101
publisher.
Index 117
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

ISBN 978-0-8166-8109-9 (hc)

ISBN 978-0-8166-8110-5 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Acknowledgments vii
An earlier version of chapter 1 was published as “Against House Arrest: Digital
Memory and the Impossible Archive,” Camera Obscura 26, no. 1 (2011): 39–63. An Introduction ix
earlier version of chapter 2 was published as “Digital Impressions: Writing Memory
after Agnès Varda,” Discourse 33, no. 1 (2011): 390–408.
1 Against House Arrest 1
Figures 1–6 copyright 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, 2 Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after Agnès Varda 25
Bonn
3 Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Montage 51
Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
4 Archiving Disappearance: From Michelangelo
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a Antonioni to New Media 75
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the Notes 101
publisher.
Index 117
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu

ISBN 978-0-8166-8109-9 (hc)

ISBN 978-0-8166-8110-5 (pb)
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of
Congress.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.

20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13      10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This page intentionally left blank
 acknowledgments

It takes several to write, even to perceive. This book exists at the crossing
of multiple exchanges as they have occurred through the years in both for-
mal and informal settings. My gratitude goes to the friends and colleagues
who have read and commented on this project at different stages of its
production: Scott Combs (who responded to each chapter with enthusiasm
and acuity), Alessia Ricciadi (the first invaluable reader of the completed
manuscript), Brian Price, Patricia White, Homay King, Akira Mizuta Lip-
pit, James Cahill, Dudley Andrew, Nasrin Qader, Huey Copeland, Marco
Poloni, and Timothy Campbell. To Daniel Eisenberg, my teacher at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a filmmaker whom I greatly
admire, I owe what I have relearned about the image. My gratitude also
goes to the University of Minnesota Press readers, Amy Villarejo and An-
gelo Restivo, for the generosity and sharpness of their insights. Thanks
to Luke Fidler, my research assistant, for gracefully mustering the last de-
tails. The Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University,
where I was a fellow in the 2009–10 academic year, provided me with
institutional support and a forum for debate that considerably facilitated
the development of this work. Finally, I wish to thank Danielle Kasprzak,
the editor whose professionalism and intellectual determination have made
the publication of this book possible.
This book is dedicated to Diletta and Matteo.
This page intentionally left blank
 introduction

For art and philosophy together are precisely not arbitrary fabrications
in the universe of the “spiritual” (of “culture”), but contact with Being
precisely as creations. Being is what requires creation of us for us to
experience it.
  Make an analysis of literature in this sense: as inscription of Being.
—Maurice Merleau-Pont y , The Visible and the Invisible

What happens before a film starts, or after it ends, or between scenes?

What happens not only to characters, faces, and landscapes but also to
colors and lines? Where do they go? Do they continue to exist somewhere
else, in a state of repose or pulsating activity, careless about frames and
rules of narrative continuity or hopelessly bound to them? How do they
change in time, through time, under the influence of different looks and
viewing contexts? In Poetics of Cinema, Raúl Ruiz writes that “every
film is always the bearer of another, a secret film,” indeed, of several films
existing simultaneously behind or next to the official one, inhabiting its
interstices, moments of pause, and off-screen spaces.1 To uncover the hid-
den films, the viewer should exercise her capacity for “double vision,” that
is, practice a manner of viewing that plays with the incompleteness of each
film, disturbing even the most seamless scenes, until the film’s “missing
fragments” begin to emerge and gather into new audiovisual configura-
tions.2 A prolific filmmaker and writer, Ruiz advocates for a cinema that
materializes such a viewing experience (at once receptive and intrusive,
exegetic and creative), a cinema capable of rendering visible the plurality
of images and stories that each image or story in principle contains. The
rebirth of cinema, assuming that cinema has died and that it has done so
only once, would lie in the discovery (never to become exhaustive) of its
multiple, conflicting, hardly lived pasts.
ii i n t r o d u c t i o n
I first read Poetics of Cinema when I was training in film and video
production and already experimenting with the film essay as a practice
that blurs the distinction between critical discourse and poetic expression.
I realized then that I had been employing double vision for years. As I
interpreted it, this oblique or lateral vision would also enable the spectator
to shift the relation between background and foreground, protagonists
and marginal figures, male and female characters, opening up the official
film to the forgotten or yet-to-be-invented films that every film invisibly
houses. The digital video I eventually produced, Antigone’s Noir (United
States, 2008–9), looks back at classic film noir and envisions a series of
parallel, contrasting, interweaving stories with the help of scenes shot
in contemporary settings, documentary photographs, and footage from
public archives. It comprises three episodes or portraits, each performing
a formal and thematic intervention that holds a specific film as its point
of departure. In Lenox, the opening piece, I play against the catastrophic
scenario of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (United States, 1955) and
its hard-boiled sound track through slow-paced camera movements and
serene compositions, defining a domestic interior in which violence is
unavoidable yet ultimately displaced away from the female body. In the
following piece, titled Effie and inspired by the character of Sam Spade’s
secretary in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (United States, 1941), I
continue to maintain violence off-screen, as if suspended between past and
future, always on the verge of reoccurring. Now, though, the atmosphere
is one of claustrophobia—images are hyperbolically flat, and the relentless
shot–reverse shot montage fatally binds together still and moving images,
Walker Evans’s subway figures and present-day travelers. The last piece,
Judy Barton, is for me the reverse side of the first one—shot primarily out-
side in the mode of observational documentary, it plays with the rhythms
of surveillance and flânerie, setting our eye on the trail of a woman who
knows she is being followed. Judy Barton is an homage to Kim Novak’s
red-headed character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (United States, 1958)
and to the time she spends on her own in between the first and second half
of the film, a time that Hitchcock only signals through the use of an ellipsis.
Revisiting such a pivotal genre as film noir coincided with the endeavor
to show what is present and yet invisible in our cinematic past—unruly
lines of power, irreverent constellations of memory and desire. Through
detours I could not anticipate, Antigone’s Noir became the catalyst for the
book I am now introducing, The Heretical Archive, in which I investigate
the aesthetic and political implications of a vision that manifests itself in
the entanglement of past and future.
introduc tion iii
The Heretical Archive interrogates the relation between memory and
creation—between the persistence of the past and the emergence of the
new—in films and installations that adopt digital technology and simul-
taneously appropriate analog materials. It thus positions itself at a crucial
juncture in the history of our relationship to the moving image, as the pos-
sibility of playing films on TV and computer screens, halting and rewinding
them at leisure, and isolating favorite scenes has given us unprecedented
access to our audiovisual past and engendered a fresh way of watching
cinema. In Death 24× a Second, Laura Mulvey (herself a theorist and a
filmmaker) explores the effects of such a contaminated viewing expe-
rience. What she calls “delayed cinema” refers to the double temporal
displacement precipitated by electronic technologies: the actual slowing
down of the film, on one hand, and the deferred surfacing of latent or
dormant details, on the other.3 Mulvey emphasizes that cinema has always
played with the tension between stillness and movement, continuity and
discontinuity, anticipation and afterwardness, reflecting on and exposing
its own paradoxical status in a series of memorable moments, from the
frozen frames of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Soviet Union,
1929) to Mrs. Bates’s repeated vacillation between life and death in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (United States, 1960). Yet, the availability of nonlinear
editing programs has dramatically heightened the effects of sensorial and
affective deferral, enabling us to intervene directly in the time of the film
and decompose what so far has appeared largely as a continuum. Doug-
las Gordon’s celebrated video installation 24-Hour Psycho (1993) has
become paradigmatic in this respect: by slowing down the original film
from ninety minutes to twenty-four hours and exhibiting it in the public
space of the gallery, the piece addresses the conditions under which dura-
tion is experienced and narrative overshadows the materiality of light and
movement. While writing on the analogico-digital image (which he calls
“discrete”), Bernard Stiegler notices that we are now in the position of
developing a relationship to the image that is analytic as well as synthetic:
as spectators, we can learn to write by virtue of the same technological
means through which we read, upsetting the divide between production
and consumption, activity and passivity, that has long presided over the
audiovisual domain.4 In turn, this critical shift has the potential to release
“new forms of reflexivity”—not simply the extension of the accomplish-
ments of language but the articulation of novel modes of intelligibility, as
they emerge in the (equally technological) realms of movement and vision.5
The Heretical Archive aligns itself with and explores audiovisual works
that redefine the trajectory of the moving image at the edge of repetition
ii i n t r o d u c t i o n
I first read Poetics of Cinema when I was training in film and video
production and already experimenting with the film essay as a practice
that blurs the distinction between critical discourse and poetic expression.
I realized then that I had been employing double vision for years. As I
interpreted it, this oblique or lateral vision would also enable the spectator
to shift the relation between background and foreground, protagonists
and marginal figures, male and female characters, opening up the official
film to the forgotten or yet-to-be-invented films that every film invisibly
houses. The digital video I eventually produced, Antigone’s Noir (United
States, 2008–9), looks back at classic film noir and envisions a series of
parallel, contrasting, interweaving stories with the help of scenes shot
in contemporary settings, documentary photographs, and footage from
public archives. It comprises three episodes or portraits, each performing
a formal and thematic intervention that holds a specific film as its point
of departure. In Lenox, the opening piece, I play against the catastrophic
scenario of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (United States, 1955) and
its hard-boiled sound track through slow-paced camera movements and
serene compositions, defining a domestic interior in which violence is
unavoidable yet ultimately displaced away from the female body. In the
following piece, titled Effie and inspired by the character of Sam Spade’s
secretary in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (United States, 1941), I
continue to maintain violence off-screen, as if suspended between past and
future, always on the verge of reoccurring. Now, though, the atmosphere
is one of claustrophobia—images are hyperbolically flat, and the relentless
shot–reverse shot montage fatally binds together still and moving images,
Walker Evans’s subway figures and present-day travelers. The last piece,
Judy Barton, is for me the reverse side of the first one—shot primarily out-
side in the mode of observational documentary, it plays with the rhythms
of surveillance and flânerie, setting our eye on the trail of a woman who
knows she is being followed. Judy Barton is an homage to Kim Novak’s
red-headed character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (United States, 1958)
and to the time she spends on her own in between the first and second half
of the film, a time that Hitchcock only signals through the use of an ellipsis.
Revisiting such a pivotal genre as film noir coincided with the endeavor
to show what is present and yet invisible in our cinematic past—unruly
lines of power, irreverent constellations of memory and desire. Through
detours I could not anticipate, Antigone’s Noir became the catalyst for the
book I am now introducing, The Heretical Archive, in which I investigate
the aesthetic and political implications of a vision that manifests itself in
the entanglement of past and future.
introduc tion iii
The Heretical Archive interrogates the relation between memory and
creation—between the persistence of the past and the emergence of the
new—in films and installations that adopt digital technology and simul-
taneously appropriate analog materials. It thus positions itself at a crucial
juncture in the history of our relationship to the moving image, as the pos-
sibility of playing films on TV and computer screens, halting and rewinding
them at leisure, and isolating favorite scenes has given us unprecedented
access to our audiovisual past and engendered a fresh way of watching
cinema. In Death 24× a Second, Laura Mulvey (herself a theorist and a
filmmaker) explores the effects of such a contaminated viewing expe-
rience. What she calls “delayed cinema” refers to the double temporal
displacement precipitated by electronic technologies: the actual slowing
down of the film, on one hand, and the deferred surfacing of latent or
dormant details, on the other.3 Mulvey emphasizes that cinema has always
played with the tension between stillness and movement, continuity and
discontinuity, anticipation and afterwardness, reflecting on and exposing
its own paradoxical status in a series of memorable moments, from the
frozen frames of Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Soviet Union,
1929) to Mrs. Bates’s repeated vacillation between life and death in Alfred
Hitchcock’s Psycho (United States, 1960). Yet, the availability of nonlinear
editing programs has dramatically heightened the effects of sensorial and
affective deferral, enabling us to intervene directly in the time of the film
and decompose what so far has appeared largely as a continuum. Doug-
las Gordon’s celebrated video installation 24-Hour Psycho (1993) has
become paradigmatic in this respect: by slowing down the original film
from ninety minutes to twenty-four hours and exhibiting it in the public
space of the gallery, the piece addresses the conditions under which dura-
tion is experienced and narrative overshadows the materiality of light and
movement. While writing on the analogico-digital image (which he calls
“discrete”), Bernard Stiegler notices that we are now in the position of
developing a relationship to the image that is analytic as well as synthetic:
as spectators, we can learn to write by virtue of the same technological
means through which we read, upsetting the divide between production
and consumption, activity and passivity, that has long presided over the
audiovisual domain.4 In turn, this critical shift has the potential to release
“new forms of reflexivity”—not simply the extension of the accomplish-
ments of language but the articulation of novel modes of intelligibility, as
they emerge in the (equally technological) realms of movement and vision.5
The Heretical Archive aligns itself with and explores audiovisual works
that redefine the trajectory of the moving image at the edge of repetition
iv i n t r o d u c t i o n
and invention. Among the many potential examples of this practice, I will
consider a suite of five digital works, all produced in the last fifteen years
and all engaging the past of European and American cinema: Monica
Bonvicini’s video installation Destroy She Said (1998), Agnès Varda’s film
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), Pierre Huyghe’s
video installation L’ellipse (The Ellipsis, 1998), Marco Poloni’s multime-
dia installation The Desert Room (2006), and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM
Immemory (1997). Despite their stylistic differences, these multimedia
texts can be traced back to what Hal Foster has identified as the “archival
impulse” presently at work in international art, a mode of production
that, though certainly not unprecedented, has now come to assume the
distinctive and pervasive character of a tendency.6 What characterizes the
contemporary current seems to be a tangible receptivity to both the past
and the future of the archive, the fact that the possibility, indeed, the in-
evitability of alternative arrangements and further mutations, finds itself
inscribed in the very structure of the pieces. Among Foster’s examples
of archival art, many inhabit and complicate the threshold of cinematic
practice (e.g., works by Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, and Pierre Huyghe),
emerging as fundamentally incomplete projects, without a clear begin-
ning or a definitive end: Foster proposes that we look at them not only
as remakes or “postproduction pieces” but also as “promissory notes for
future elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios.”7 It is the
emphasis placed on such a constitutive openness that has intrigued me in
Foster’s definition of an archival impulse. If I later criticize him for not
questioning the distinction between institutive and destructive practices
and for anchoring archival art to the figure of the “artist-as-archivist,”
nonetheless, I find that he succeeds at delineating a field of forces that is
key to understanding the contemporary media scene and, more specifically,
the exchanges between so-called old and new media.8
The works I have selected partake of and test this immensely rich field
of audiovisual production, which would be impossible to even partially
map outside of a catalog or critical overview.9 They are linked by similari-
ties and differences that recur without forming a homogeneous pattern,
indicating instead a perturbation in the very principle of systematic ar-
chivization. With the exception of Varda’s digital film, all the pieces were
made for the gallery space—already at the level of the apparatus, they
expand cinema’s traditional framework of reception and activate the spec-
tator’s motility within, and not simply in front of, the artwork.10 (Yet The
Gleaners and I would soon engender its own nontheatrical outgrowths,
including Les veuves de Noirmoutier [The Widows of Noirmoutier, 2004],
i n t r o d u c t i o n v
a video installation on loss and mourning in the first-person plural, and Ma
cabane de l’échec [My Cabin of Failure, 2006], a mixed-media installation
that stands as nothing less than a veritable “house of cinema”: a cabin or
shack whose walls consist of the discarded reels of Varda’s unsuccessful
film Les Créatures [The Creatures, 1966], here gleaned and exhibited as the
semitranslucent remnants of a past that has not fully passed.11) However,
while mobilizing multiple screens and abolishing static seating, Bonvicini’s
and Huyghe’s installations still rely on projection—albeit of the digital
kind—as the trace of a light that is as contingent and ephemeral as it is
enduring, capable of withdrawing into invisibility without ceasing to exist.
(And Marker’s CD-ROM, which was designed for the computer screen,
could also be reassigned to the sphere of projection, further proving that
what Dominique Païni has called “the travel of luminous images” now
bypasses medium specificity.12) Finally, although it is Marker’s Immemory
that most closely resonates with Varda’s The Gleaners and I and the genre
of the film or video essay, I would nonetheless suggest that we consider the
other artworks as essays in their own right, to the extent that they, too,
violate conceptual, formal, and narrative norms, affirming a hybridization
of figures and media that further complicates the relationship between art
and theory, fiction and documentary, history and autobiography.13 Play,
chance, discontinuity, and fragmentation—all traits that T. W. Adorno long
ago recognized as essential to the written essay—return here to transgress
the “orthodoxy of thought” at the intersection of cinema and archival
practice.14
If I have decided to focus on these five multimedia works, it is be-
cause they most strongly contribute to defining a notion of “archiving”
as intervention—not the systematic preservation of film materials but the
creative reelaboration of cinema’s aesthetic and ideological complexities.
They foreground the performative value that characterizes any archival
arrangement, preventing the distinction between recorded content and
recording form from presenting itself as self-evident. In Archive Fever:
A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida reiterates the complexity of this
relationship and the role played by technology at all stages of its unfold-
ing: “the technical structure of the archiving archive,” he writes, “also
determines the structure of the archivable content even in its coming into
existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces
as much as it records the event.”15 Though it would be impossible to fix
the order of cause and effect and secure a position of anteriority for either
the process of archivization or the archived event, it is crucial to recognize
that no term in the field of forces that we call archive can be considered
iv i n t r o d u c t i o n
and invention. Among the many potential examples of this practice, I will
consider a suite of five digital works, all produced in the last fifteen years
and all engaging the past of European and American cinema: Monica
Bonvicini’s video installation Destroy She Said (1998), Agnès Varda’s film
Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and I, 2000), Pierre Huyghe’s
video installation L’ellipse (The Ellipsis, 1998), Marco Poloni’s multime-
dia installation The Desert Room (2006), and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM
Immemory (1997). Despite their stylistic differences, these multimedia
texts can be traced back to what Hal Foster has identified as the “archival
impulse” presently at work in international art, a mode of production
that, though certainly not unprecedented, has now come to assume the
distinctive and pervasive character of a tendency.6 What characterizes the
contemporary current seems to be a tangible receptivity to both the past
and the future of the archive, the fact that the possibility, indeed, the in-
evitability of alternative arrangements and further mutations, finds itself
inscribed in the very structure of the pieces. Among Foster’s examples
of archival art, many inhabit and complicate the threshold of cinematic
practice (e.g., works by Douglas Gordon, Tacita Dean, and Pierre Huyghe),
emerging as fundamentally incomplete projects, without a clear begin-
ning or a definitive end: Foster proposes that we look at them not only
as remakes or “postproduction pieces” but also as “promissory notes for
future elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios.”7 It is the
emphasis placed on such a constitutive openness that has intrigued me in
Foster’s definition of an archival impulse. If I later criticize him for not
questioning the distinction between institutive and destructive practices
and for anchoring archival art to the figure of the “artist-as-archivist,”
nonetheless, I find that he succeeds at delineating a field of forces that is
key to understanding the contemporary media scene and, more specifically,
the exchanges between so-called old and new media.8
The works I have selected partake of and test this immensely rich field
of audiovisual production, which would be impossible to even partially
map outside of a catalog or critical overview.9 They are linked by similari-
ties and differences that recur without forming a homogeneous pattern,
indicating instead a perturbation in the very principle of systematic ar-
chivization. With the exception of Varda’s digital film, all the pieces were
made for the gallery space—already at the level of the apparatus, they
expand cinema’s traditional framework of reception and activate the spec-
tator’s motility within, and not simply in front of, the artwork.10 (Yet The
Gleaners and I would soon engender its own nontheatrical outgrowths,
including Les veuves de Noirmoutier [The Widows of Noirmoutier, 2004],
i n t r o d u c t i o n v
a video installation on loss and mourning in the first-person plural, and Ma
cabane de l’échec [My Cabin of Failure, 2006], a mixed-media installation
that stands as nothing less than a veritable “house of cinema”: a cabin or
shack whose walls consist of the discarded reels of Varda’s unsuccessful
film Les Créatures [The Creatures, 1966], here gleaned and exhibited as the
semitranslucent remnants of a past that has not fully passed.11) However,
while mobilizing multiple screens and abolishing static seating, Bonvicini’s
and Huyghe’s installations still rely on projection—albeit of the digital
kind—as the trace of a light that is as contingent and ephemeral as it is
enduring, capable of withdrawing into invisibility without ceasing to exist.
(And Marker’s CD-ROM, which was designed for the computer screen,
could also be reassigned to the sphere of projection, further proving that
what Dominique Païni has called “the travel of luminous images” now
bypasses medium specificity.12) Finally, although it is Marker’s Immemory
that most closely resonates with Varda’s The Gleaners and I and the genre
of the film or video essay, I would nonetheless suggest that we consider the
other artworks as essays in their own right, to the extent that they, too,
violate conceptual, formal, and narrative norms, affirming a hybridization
of figures and media that further complicates the relationship between art
and theory, fiction and documentary, history and autobiography.13 Play,
chance, discontinuity, and fragmentation—all traits that T. W. Adorno long
ago recognized as essential to the written essay—return here to transgress
the “orthodoxy of thought” at the intersection of cinema and archival
practice.14
If I have decided to focus on these five multimedia works, it is be-
cause they most strongly contribute to defining a notion of “archiving”
as intervention—not the systematic preservation of film materials but the
creative reelaboration of cinema’s aesthetic and ideological complexities.
They foreground the performative value that characterizes any archival
arrangement, preventing the distinction between recorded content and
recording form from presenting itself as self-evident. In Archive Fever:
A Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida reiterates the complexity of this
relationship and the role played by technology at all stages of its unfold-
ing: “the technical structure of the archiving archive,” he writes, “also
determines the structure of the archivable content even in its coming into
existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces
as much as it records the event.”15 Though it would be impossible to fix
the order of cause and effect and secure a position of anteriority for either
the process of archivization or the archived event, it is crucial to recognize
that no term in the field of forces that we call archive can be considered
vi i n t r o d u c t i o n
neutral or inactive. Even “the interpretation of the archive,” Derrida will
claim later in the text, “can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its
object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to
say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it.
There is no meta-archive.”16 Any gesture of interpretation entails assum-
ing a position that is internal to and transformative of the very relational
network posited as object—it requires opening the past of the archive to
mutations that belong to the future. That the archive is always and irreduc-
ibly a question of the future is what the digital works under analysis show
without demonstrating. As gestures of reinscription rather than neutral
recording, they not only expand but also confront, disturb, and ultimately
reconstitute the memory of cinema we have inherited from the twentieth
century. Beyond the opposition between continuity and discontinuity, and
independently of any claim of medium specificity, what I propose to call
digital memory is a memory that originates from the future—one that
remembers not only what happened but also what did not happen in our
cinematic past (and yet might have, under different conditions), what “will
have happened” by virtue of these eccentric appropriations—a memory
of, and in, the future anterior.
Several contemporary scholars, both inside and outside the field of
visual arts, have explored the possibility of thinking the new through
the intermingling of past and future that the future anterior manifests. In
Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal reads multimedia works that engage Cara-
vaggio’s legacy as examples of a “preposterous history,” a way of practic-
ing art and writing art history that “perform the promise of what we will
have been,” dispossessing the past of its priority over the present.17 Like
the subject and the object in the baroque world, the past and the present
of this preposterous history exist in a relation of simultaneity and mutual
influence, implicating—enfolding—each other beyond the constraints of
chronology and causality. In Timothy Murray’s Digital Baroque, the fold
becomes the figure for understanding the labyrinth-like pattern of new
media arts and also for conceiving the relationship between the analog
and the digital outside of any clear-cut opposition.18 Whether drawing
directly or indirectly on the baroque, the works under analysis (by artists
such as Mona Hatoum, Chris Marker, and Bill Viola) implement a shift
from projection to fold—from the unidirectionality traditionally associated
with cinema to the turnings back and forth in time that make up the very
fabric of new media installations and CD-ROMs. Scott Durham’s work on
Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema specifically invites us to recon-
ceive the trajectory of twentieth-century cinema, tracing the movements
introduc tion vii
of “a virtual dimension of film that doubles film history” and allows a
metamorphosis of thought to realize itself.19 It is the power of memory
as creation that alone can confer visibility on the unactualized aspects
(forms, themes, methods) of our cinematic past. Finally, in Time Travels,
Elizabeth Grosz explicitly singles out the future anterior as the time of
political change: irreducible to the present and any autonomous temporal
dimension, the future anterior embodies the promises of temporal excess
and becoming, providing feminist theory with the possibility of envisioning
a future that does not resemble the past.20
My project, too, is committed to exploring “what will have been” in
the coiling of past and future. However, whereas the scholars mentioned
previously situate themselves in the countertradition of Gilles Deleuze’s
philosophy, I am interested in registering the expansions and contractions
of a subject that has been disappearing (from the fields of perception,
cinema, and philosophy) without having done so quite yet—a subject
that is still to reappear in unforeseeable hybrid formations at the thresh-
old of the visible world. In this work, I will thus turn to a zone between
psychoanalysis and phenomenology that is yet to be defined and that the
artworks under consideration will contribute to articulating as a site of
perceptual and political experimentation. My underlying claim is that if
the archive of both cinema and psychoanalysis has long privileged the
lineage that runs from Oedipus to Freud, the archives of the so-called
digital age—the heretical archive, as I have termed it—can help us imagine
an unruly, porous, incoherent legacy, one that undutifully appropriates
a certain history rather than attempting to negate it. In this intercon-
nected domain, marginal or overlooked figures—Antigone, Anna Freud,
the women of modernist cinema, the gleaners of the French countryside,
the ghosts of the in-between—return to speak of lost life as much as of
life that demands to be lived, subverting the order that holds sway over
the relation between intelligibility and existence. The archive, maintains
Derrida in his reading of the Freudian legacy, emerges at the intersection
of place and law, where inheritance finds a “proper” domicile, that is, a
physical and symbolic site of supervision.21 In the title of this book, the
word heretical marks a dissonance or a resistance with respect to such
an appointed residence and the conditions under which the proper has
established itself as the “domestico-familial” of both psychoanalysis and
cinema, determining how memory is to be acknowledged, preserved, and
recalled.22 Any endeavor to challenge the orthodoxy or, as the etymology
of heresy suggests, to “make one’s own choice” in the face of the proper
entails plunging into a region of indistinction and engaging with rhetorical
vi i n t r o d u c t i o n
neutral or inactive. Even “the interpretation of the archive,” Derrida will
claim later in the text, “can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its
object, namely a given inheritance, by inscribing itself into it, that is to
say by opening it and by enriching it enough to have a rightful place in it.
There is no meta-archive.”16 Any gesture of interpretation entails assum-
ing a position that is internal to and transformative of the very relational
network posited as object—it requires opening the past of the archive to
mutations that belong to the future. That the archive is always and irreduc-
ibly a question of the future is what the digital works under analysis show
without demonstrating. As gestures of reinscription rather than neutral
recording, they not only expand but also confront, disturb, and ultimately
reconstitute the memory of cinema we have inherited from the twentieth
century. Beyond the opposition between continuity and discontinuity, and
independently of any claim of medium specificity, what I propose to call
digital memory is a memory that originates from the future—one that
remembers not only what happened but also what did not happen in our
cinematic past (and yet might have, under different conditions), what “will
have happened” by virtue of these eccentric appropriations—a memory
of, and in, the future anterior.
Several contemporary scholars, both inside and outside the field of
visual arts, have explored the possibility of thinking the new through
the intermingling of past and future that the future anterior manifests. In
Quoting Caravaggio, Mieke Bal reads multimedia works that engage Cara-
vaggio’s legacy as examples of a “preposterous history,” a way of practic-
ing art and writing art history that “perform the promise of what we will
have been,” dispossessing the past of its priority over the present.17 Like
the subject and the object in the baroque world, the past and the present
of this preposterous history exist in a relation of simultaneity and mutual
influence, implicating—enfolding—each other beyond the constraints of
chronology and causality. In Timothy Murray’s Digital Baroque, the fold
becomes the figure for understanding the labyrinth-like pattern of new
media arts and also for conceiving the relationship between the analog
and the digital outside of any clear-cut opposition.18 Whether drawing
directly or indirectly on the baroque, the works under analysis (by artists
such as Mona Hatoum, Chris Marker, and Bill Viola) implement a shift
from projection to fold—from the unidirectionality traditionally associated
with cinema to the turnings back and forth in time that make up the very
fabric of new media installations and CD-ROMs. Scott Durham’s work on
Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema specifically invites us to recon-
ceive the trajectory of twentieth-century cinema, tracing the movements
introduc tion vii
of “a virtual dimension of film that doubles film history” and allows a
metamorphosis of thought to realize itself.19 It is the power of memory
as creation that alone can confer visibility on the unactualized aspects
(forms, themes, methods) of our cinematic past. Finally, in Time Travels,
Elizabeth Grosz explicitly singles out the future anterior as the time of
political change: irreducible to the present and any autonomous temporal
dimension, the future anterior embodies the promises of temporal excess
and becoming, providing feminist theory with the possibility of envisioning
a future that does not resemble the past.20
My project, too, is committed to exploring “what will have been” in
the coiling of past and future. However, whereas the scholars mentioned
previously situate themselves in the countertradition of Gilles Deleuze’s
philosophy, I am interested in registering the expansions and contractions
of a subject that has been disappearing (from the fields of perception,
cinema, and philosophy) without having done so quite yet—a subject
that is still to reappear in unforeseeable hybrid formations at the thresh-
old of the visible world. In this work, I will thus turn to a zone between
psychoanalysis and phenomenology that is yet to be defined and that the
artworks under consideration will contribute to articulating as a site of
perceptual and political experimentation. My underlying claim is that if
the archive of both cinema and psychoanalysis has long privileged the
lineage that runs from Oedipus to Freud, the archives of the so-called
digital age—the heretical archive, as I have termed it—can help us imagine
an unruly, porous, incoherent legacy, one that undutifully appropriates
a certain history rather than attempting to negate it. In this intercon-
nected domain, marginal or overlooked figures—Antigone, Anna Freud,
the women of modernist cinema, the gleaners of the French countryside,
the ghosts of the in-between—return to speak of lost life as much as of
life that demands to be lived, subverting the order that holds sway over
the relation between intelligibility and existence. The archive, maintains
Derrida in his reading of the Freudian legacy, emerges at the intersection
of place and law, where inheritance finds a “proper” domicile, that is, a
physical and symbolic site of supervision.21 In the title of this book, the
word heretical marks a dissonance or a resistance with respect to such
an appointed residence and the conditions under which the proper has
established itself as the “domestico-familial” of both psychoanalysis and
cinema, determining how memory is to be acknowledged, preserved, and
recalled.22 Any endeavor to challenge the orthodoxy or, as the etymology
of heresy suggests, to “make one’s own choice” in the face of the proper
entails plunging into a region of indistinction and engaging with rhetorical
viii i n t r o d u c t i o n
play as one engages with matters of life and death.23 If Antigone becomes
the privileged figure of this other, heretical archive, it is because she points
to the very limits of cultural transmission, to that zone where memory
stands (to borrow from Judith Butler’s subtitle to her Antigone’s Claim)
“between life and death” and symbolic structures regulate the possibility
of imagining and sustaining unorthodox forms of life. As she enters this
project, Antigone is already a self-differing, multiple figure, the index of
a laborious interpretative history, and, as such, is open to becoming what
might no longer be immediately recognizable or even traceable to any
individuated, nameable body. Up to the last chapter, where she vanishes
together with the characters of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema, her vicis-
situdes undergo a process of dispersion that is not the opposite of memory
but the paradoxical guarantee of its renewal.
With regard to its structure, The Heretical Archive is organized as
a sustained response to Archive Fever, indeed, the first response of its
kind, and to Derrida’s fundamental concerns about the archive of psy-
choanalysis and psychoanalysis as a theory of the archive—the routings
of the death drive, the definition of impression as inscription, the ex-
pansion of the unconscious into the virtual, the marking of that outside
without which the archive cannot be thought. This response develops as
I allow the artworks themselves to question and rearticulate Derrida’s
thought from the viewpoint of their own audiovisual complexity. Indeed,
my other underlying claim is that a theory of the archive ought to start
from perception and its differential texture rather than verbal language. By
positioning myself at the crossing of phenomenology and psychoanalysis,
I propose to consider archiving as a mode of writing that occurs in and
through perception—an operation that primarily mobilizes and thus also
threatens to efface the signs of the perceptual world. The violence of the
archive is first and foremost the violence pervading the threshold between
visibility and invisibility, the membrane through which colors and forms
appear and disappear, withdrawing into an invisibility that most notice-
ably becomes erasure under certain historical conditions. I was initially
moved to see the Derridean archive against this background of imperfect
and yet constitutive invisibility by Akira Mizuta Lippit’s Atomic Light
(Shadow Optics), a poetic mediation on the resistance of shadows in the
aftermath of the atomic blast. Archiving is not only the writing of light,
it is also the writing of light against itself, an experience of luminosity
that is at once produced and destroyed by exposure. Lippit’s concern with
“avisuality” as a mode of impossible visibility that finds its precursors in
three twentieth-century “phenomenologies of the inside”—psychoanalysis,
introduc tion ix
the X-ray, and cinema—alerted me once again to the dangers of forced
illumination and the complex role that a “shadow archive,” an “outlaw
or other archive,” has played within the optics of modernity.24 Yet what
happens when some of these technologies are turned inside out by newer
ones, revealing not only their limit but also their unforeseeable potential?
What will have been the destiny of psychoanalysis (or cinema) as a theory
and a practice of the outside?
The Heretical Archive is concerned with the ways in which new media
artworks disrupt and reroute received lines of transmission by enabling
what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called “a past which has never been
present” to appear, no matter how briefly, in the folds of the perceptual
world.25 I adopt the term fold from Merleau-Ponty’s late work The Visible
and the Invisible, in which the fold is yet another name for the chiasm of
perception, the intertwining of seeing and being seen, touching and being
touched—the cipher of a reversibility, a coiling or doubling back that
is in principle asymmetrical and always unfinished. By assuming such a
reversibility as both its field of inquiry and its manner of expression, the
archive of new media arts brings about a rearrangement in the order of
perception that is also a disturbance in the order of time. Antigone, the
gleaners, the ghosts of mid-day and of the in-between, are as many figures
of a light (or “flesh,” as Merleau-Ponty will say) that is irreducible to itself,
“a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source in obscurity.”26
Here memory comes into being as a folding of dimensions that cannot
be simplified or translated into one another without residue: the seen and
the unseen, the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the intelligible,
the future and the past—it is such an excess or openness with respect to
its own constitution that the heretical archive displays and affirms against
the violence of definition and the inevitability of forgetting.
Because it is concerned with the gravitational field created by the en-
counter between artworks and philosophical texts, The Heretical Archive
does not offer an overview of its key terms (most notably, archive and
fold) but rather pursues the traces of new forms of intelligibility as they
emerge in and through the contamination of critical discourse and art
practice. Throughout the book, I emphasize the role of the viewer (and
critic) as yet another co-creator of the artwork and perform close read-
ings that interlace an accurate description of the work’s formal properties
with an imaginative interpretation of its unstable, mutating effects. (In
this respect, my experience as a filmmaker has taught me never to exhaust
the materials at hand, leaving instead gaps or lines of flight where a more
systematic approach would saturate the fabric of the text.) As it weaves
viii i n t r o d u c t i o n
play as one engages with matters of life and death.23 If Antigone becomes
the privileged figure of this other, heretical archive, it is because she points
to the very limits of cultural transmission, to that zone where memory
stands (to borrow from Judith Butler’s subtitle to her Antigone’s Claim)
“between life and death” and symbolic structures regulate the possibility
of imagining and sustaining unorthodox forms of life. As she enters this
project, Antigone is already a self-differing, multiple figure, the index of
a laborious interpretative history, and, as such, is open to becoming what
might no longer be immediately recognizable or even traceable to any
individuated, nameable body. Up to the last chapter, where she vanishes
together with the characters of Michelangelo Antonioni’s cinema, her vicis-
situdes undergo a process of dispersion that is not the opposite of memory
but the paradoxical guarantee of its renewal.
With regard to its structure, The Heretical Archive is organized as
a sustained response to Archive Fever, indeed, the first response of its
kind, and to Derrida’s fundamental concerns about the archive of psy-
choanalysis and psychoanalysis as a theory of the archive—the routings
of the death drive, the definition of impression as inscription, the ex-
pansion of the unconscious into the virtual, the marking of that outside
without which the archive cannot be thought. This response develops as
I allow the artworks themselves to question and rearticulate Derrida’s
thought from the viewpoint of their own audiovisual complexity. Indeed,
my other underlying claim is that a theory of the archive ought to start
from perception and its differential texture rather than verbal language. By
positioning myself at the crossing of phenomenology and psychoanalysis,
I propose to consider archiving as a mode of writing that occurs in and
through perception—an operation that primarily mobilizes and thus also
threatens to efface the signs of the perceptual world. The violence of the
archive is first and foremost the violence pervading the threshold between
visibility and invisibility, the membrane through which colors and forms
appear and disappear, withdrawing into an invisibility that most notice-
ably becomes erasure under certain historical conditions. I was initially
moved to see the Derridean archive against this background of imperfect
and yet constitutive invisibility by Akira Mizuta Lippit’s Atomic Light
(Shadow Optics), a poetic mediation on the resistance of shadows in the
aftermath of the atomic blast. Archiving is not only the writing of light,
it is also the writing of light against itself, an experience of luminosity
that is at once produced and destroyed by exposure. Lippit’s concern with
“avisuality” as a mode of impossible visibility that finds its precursors in
three twentieth-century “phenomenologies of the inside”—psychoanalysis,
introduc tion ix
the X-ray, and cinema—alerted me once again to the dangers of forced
illumination and the complex role that a “shadow archive,” an “outlaw
or other archive,” has played within the optics of modernity.24 Yet what
happens when some of these technologies are turned inside out by newer
ones, revealing not only their limit but also their unforeseeable potential?
What will have been the destiny of psychoanalysis (or cinema) as a theory
and a practice of the outside?
The Heretical Archive is concerned with the ways in which new media
artworks disrupt and reroute received lines of transmission by enabling
what Maurice Merleau-Ponty has called “a past which has never been
present” to appear, no matter how briefly, in the folds of the perceptual
world.25 I adopt the term fold from Merleau-Ponty’s late work The Visible
and the Invisible, in which the fold is yet another name for the chiasm of
perception, the intertwining of seeing and being seen, touching and being
touched—the cipher of a reversibility, a coiling or doubling back that
is in principle asymmetrical and always unfinished. By assuming such a
reversibility as both its field of inquiry and its manner of expression, the
archive of new media arts brings about a rearrangement in the order of
perception that is also a disturbance in the order of time. Antigone, the
gleaners, the ghosts of mid-day and of the in-between, are as many figures
of a light (or “flesh,” as Merleau-Ponty will say) that is irreducible to itself,
“a light which, illuminating the rest, remains at its source in obscurity.”26
Here memory comes into being as a folding of dimensions that cannot
be simplified or translated into one another without residue: the seen and
the unseen, the visible and the invisible, the sensible and the intelligible,
the future and the past—it is such an excess or openness with respect to
its own constitution that the heretical archive displays and affirms against
the violence of definition and the inevitability of forgetting.
Because it is concerned with the gravitational field created by the en-
counter between artworks and philosophical texts, The Heretical Archive
does not offer an overview of its key terms (most notably, archive and
fold) but rather pursues the traces of new forms of intelligibility as they
emerge in and through the contamination of critical discourse and art
practice. Throughout the book, I emphasize the role of the viewer (and
critic) as yet another co-creator of the artwork and perform close read-
ings that interlace an accurate description of the work’s formal properties
with an imaginative interpretation of its unstable, mutating effects. (In
this respect, my experience as a filmmaker has taught me never to exhaust
the materials at hand, leaving instead gaps or lines of flight where a more
systematic approach would saturate the fabric of the text.) As it weaves
x i n t r o d u c t i o n
its path through the digital artworks, Digital Memory also absorbs and
engages a variety of influences: Merleau-Ponty’s final work and his course
notes on passivity and institution, the Freudian unconscious and time;
Kaja Silverman’s theorization of the perceptual signifier and of desire as
the desire to see; Lippit’s meditation on the shadows of atomic light in
Japanese cinema, where invisibility is explored as the site of both traumatic
memories and secret possibilities; Amy Villarejo’s delineation of a “lesbian
impression” in the economy of experimental film; and Butler’s reading of
Antigone’s “scandalously impure” claim. In these works, my critique of the
Derridean archive finds its own scattered yet most proximate genealogy.
Finally, there is one last prologue to this work, namely, my own previous
book, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian
Film, which ends by asking under which conditions the future anterior
can assert itself as the time of transformative repetition, instead of closing
past and future in a circle of blind, compulsive return. A brief note in the
chapter on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) informs
me of an inquiry that, unbeknownst to me, I was already pursuing: here
I mention that Pasolini has Angelo, the messenger (played by his beloved
Ninetto Davoli), accompany Oedipus in exile, not simply in place of, but
as Antigone, further troubling the order of oedipal repetition. Antigone’s
Noir and, later, The Heretical Archive started being composed as a note
at the margin of Pasolini’s luminous insight.
Each of the four chapters begins by directly addressing Derrida’s theses
on the Freudian legacy and then reorganizes itself around specific audiovi-
sual interventions. The first chapter, “Against House Arrest,” interrogates
the economy of the psychoanalytic archive that Derrida exposes without
actively betraying—a logic that remains patrilineal to the extent that its
laws control not only the gathering of signs but also their effacement.
There is no future anterior without the death drive and the demonic
force of repetition, yet we cannot ignore that this repetition seems to
methodically coincide with the reiteration of a certain domestic scene.
How radically can we play with the laws—of language and kinship—that
structure the scene in which the possibility of play first finds its forms?
The works of contemporary artists Sophie Calle and Monica Bonvicini
pursue these very queries as they take shape in the field of multimedia
installation art, bringing about a contamination of positions and players
that disrupts the scene of the proper—the familial of both psychoanaly-
sis and cinema. If Calle, in her exhibition Appointment (1999) at the
London Freud Museum, places her own personal objects and garments
in every room of this legendary house to tickle and tease the texture
introduc tion xi
of its archive, Bonvicini strikes at the very crossing of architecture and
authority. Her video installation Destroy She Said dismantles and reedits
iconic modernist films, allowing the actresses to challenge their narrative
destiny and form new libidinal alliances.27 Following Calle’s and Bonvi-
cini’s lines of performance, I revisit the house of the Freudian legacy and
attempt to expand its political potential vis-à-vis the figure of Antigone,
Oedipus’s daughter (and sister), the persistent and yet often disregarded
point of departure for another psychoanalysis as theory and practice of
the archive. That in a past to come, the archive of Freudian psychoanaly-
sis will have become “Antigonean”—other than itself through the work-
ings of digital memory—this is my stake in the investigation of finitude
and forgetfulness.
In the second chapter, “Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after
Agnès Varda,” I question the definition of impression as inscription that
sustains Derrida’s reading of the Freudian corpus. Here I turn to Varda’s
film The Gleaners and I and propose “gleaning” as the figure for a hetero-
dox mode of archiving, a play of chance and purposefulness that is all but
devoid of gravity and that not infrequently turns into a matter of life and
death. Beyond the distinction of content and form, “gleaning” delineates
itself as the gathering of what is overlooked, discarded, or destroyed:
unharvested wheat, unusually shaped fruit and vegetables, expired foods,
damaged or outdated objects, ordinary or even trivial images—gleaning
is at once what Varda films and what she does by filming. Indeed, Varda’s
digital intervention—remarkably encapsulated in the shot of her one hand
filming her other hand—points toward a notion of “impression” that not
only expands our concept of the archive but also alters our very definition
of writing. In Varda’s films, the impression is no longer an inscription left
by a writing implement (stylus) onto a writing surface, becoming instead a
“folding” of the visible onto itself, a turning inside out that occurs within
perception and its creased, uneven fabric. A number of consequences fol-
low from this modification in the angle of vision. Impression as folding
expresses the necessity for a concept of writing that rewrites (and is rewrit-
ten by) Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology, which sustains the radical
divergence of the perceptual world rather than its fullness or presence.
Impression as folding also folds the Freudian corpus onto itself, becom-
ing the impression left on Freud by those figures that psychoanalysis has
posited as either outsiders, such as Antigone, or endorsers, such as Anna
Freud. In the archive’s futural past, the term Freudian might come to name
less a certain line of inheritance than a mesh of eccentric, self-undoing
transmissions.
x i n t r o d u c t i o n
its path through the digital artworks, Digital Memory also absorbs and
engages a variety of influences: Merleau-Ponty’s final work and his course
notes on passivity and institution, the Freudian unconscious and time;
Kaja Silverman’s theorization of the perceptual signifier and of desire as
the desire to see; Lippit’s meditation on the shadows of atomic light in
Japanese cinema, where invisibility is explored as the site of both traumatic
memories and secret possibilities; Amy Villarejo’s delineation of a “lesbian
impression” in the economy of experimental film; and Butler’s reading of
Antigone’s “scandalously impure” claim. In these works, my critique of the
Derridean archive finds its own scattered yet most proximate genealogy.
Finally, there is one last prologue to this work, namely, my own previous
book, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian
Film, which ends by asking under which conditions the future anterior
can assert itself as the time of transformative repetition, instead of closing
past and future in a circle of blind, compulsive return. A brief note in the
chapter on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex, 1967) informs
me of an inquiry that, unbeknownst to me, I was already pursuing: here
I mention that Pasolini has Angelo, the messenger (played by his beloved
Ninetto Davoli), accompany Oedipus in exile, not simply in place of, but
as Antigone, further troubling the order of oedipal repetition. Antigone’s
Noir and, later, The Heretical Archive started being composed as a note
at the margin of Pasolini’s luminous insight.
Each of the four chapters begins by directly addressing Derrida’s theses
on the Freudian legacy and then reorganizes itself around specific audiovi-
sual interventions. The first chapter, “Against House Arrest,” interrogates
the economy of the psychoanalytic archive that Derrida exposes without
actively betraying—a logic that remains patrilineal to the extent that its
laws control not only the gathering of signs but also their effacement.
There is no future anterior without the death drive and the demonic
force of repetition, yet we cannot ignore that this repetition seems to
methodically coincide with the reiteration of a certain domestic scene.
How radically can we play with the laws—of language and kinship—that
structure the scene in which the possibility of play first finds its forms?
The works of contemporary artists Sophie Calle and Monica Bonvicini
pursue these very queries as they take shape in the field of multimedia
installation art, bringing about a contamination of positions and players
that disrupts the scene of the proper—the familial of both psychoanaly-
sis and cinema. If Calle, in her exhibition Appointment (1999) at the
London Freud Museum, places her own personal objects and garments
in every room of this legendary house to tickle and tease the texture
introduc tion xi
of its archive, Bonvicini strikes at the very crossing of architecture and
authority. Her video installation Destroy She Said dismantles and reedits
iconic modernist films, allowing the actresses to challenge their narrative
destiny and form new libidinal alliances.27 Following Calle’s and Bonvi-
cini’s lines of performance, I revisit the house of the Freudian legacy and
attempt to expand its political potential vis-à-vis the figure of Antigone,
Oedipus’s daughter (and sister), the persistent and yet often disregarded
point of departure for another psychoanalysis as theory and practice of
the archive. That in a past to come, the archive of Freudian psychoanaly-
sis will have become “Antigonean”—other than itself through the work-
ings of digital memory—this is my stake in the investigation of finitude
and forgetfulness.
In the second chapter, “Digital Impressions: Writing Memory after
Agnès Varda,” I question the definition of impression as inscription that
sustains Derrida’s reading of the Freudian corpus. Here I turn to Varda’s
film The Gleaners and I and propose “gleaning” as the figure for a hetero-
dox mode of archiving, a play of chance and purposefulness that is all but
devoid of gravity and that not infrequently turns into a matter of life and
death. Beyond the distinction of content and form, “gleaning” delineates
itself as the gathering of what is overlooked, discarded, or destroyed:
unharvested wheat, unusually shaped fruit and vegetables, expired foods,
damaged or outdated objects, ordinary or even trivial images—gleaning
is at once what Varda films and what she does by filming. Indeed, Varda’s
digital intervention—remarkably encapsulated in the shot of her one hand
filming her other hand—points toward a notion of “impression” that not
only expands our concept of the archive but also alters our very definition
of writing. In Varda’s films, the impression is no longer an inscription left
by a writing implement (stylus) onto a writing surface, becoming instead a
“folding” of the visible onto itself, a turning inside out that occurs within
perception and its creased, uneven fabric. A number of consequences fol-
low from this modification in the angle of vision. Impression as folding
expresses the necessity for a concept of writing that rewrites (and is rewrit-
ten by) Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology, which sustains the radical
divergence of the perceptual world rather than its fullness or presence.
Impression as folding also folds the Freudian corpus onto itself, becom-
ing the impression left on Freud by those figures that psychoanalysis has
posited as either outsiders, such as Antigone, or endorsers, such as Anna
Freud. In the archive’s futural past, the term Freudian might come to name
less a certain line of inheritance than a mesh of eccentric, self-undoing
transmissions.
xii i n t r o d u c t i o n introduc tion xiii

In the third chapter, “Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Mon- the outside of the film, the architecture of cinema and the architecture of
tage,” I elaborate on Derrida’s suggestion that the time has come to dis- the world. A scrupulous reproduction of the hotel room where, in Mi-
engage our concept of archive from a logic of actuality and attempt to chelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Italy, 1975), the character played
think the crossing of the unconscious and the virtual. But what does it by Jack Nicholson exchanges his identity for that of a dead arms dealer,
mean to archive otherwise (to borrow from Derrida’s descriptor for the The Desert Room materializes the way in which the digital archive has
operations of psychoanalysis) in the self-differing world of perception? been emerging as an archive without archivists—an involuntary memory
Can the actual images that constitute the history of cinema undergo yet apparatus of which cinema is the scattered subject and toward which we
another exposure and develop into a reservoir of virtual traces, releasing are in a position of interiority and passivity. The character played by Maria
memories that have yet to be formed? Huyghe’s video installation The Schneider, the woman with no name, anticipates this figure of the archivist
Ellipsis and Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory revive these latent images “as ‘nobody,’ in the sense of Ulysses, as the anonymous one buried in the
by specifically mobilizing the cinematic cut or edit as the bearer of a world,” the subject of an impersonal perception.28 If Antonioni’s cinema
memory in excess of repression. A deceivingly straightforward piece, The already presents us with disappearing subjects, Poloni’s installation fore-
Ellipsis plays with the missing segment, the interval not only separating grounds a differentiation of the visible that radically exceeds intentional
but also locking together two sequences of Wim Wenders’s The American consciousness, a mode of articulation that opposes the homogenizing im-
Friend (France and West Germany, 1977), while Immemory provides the pact of global media by pointing toward new configurations of the self
reader–user with a highly incomplete layout in which interstices and al- rather than resorting to obsolete or lost ones. As such, it also requires of us
lusions come to delineate an always-mutating virtual archive. Responding that we remain open to (critically) undertake what cannot be determined
to Marker’s indirect solicitation, I perform my own intervention, enter- in advance, a process of mutation that might redefine the very conditions
ing the zone opened up by a crucial edit in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which under which we now imagine its unfolding.
I had already begun to explore in my film Antigone’s Noir. In all these
cases, the edit itself—cinema’s most distinctive impression—constitutes
less an erasure than a folding of the visible upon itself, a twisting that is
transformative of the relation not only between the seen and the unseen
but also between what Merleau-Ponty calls the visible and the invisible.
As fold, the edit undoes the opposition of continuity and discontinuity,
enduring as the guarantee of a heterogeneous continuity, as the site of a
residue that is also creative potential. It is at this juncture that, drawing
on Merleau-Ponty’s late work, I propose to reconfigure the virtual as the
invisible of which the perceptual world is made—not the opposite of the
visible but its hidden and endlessly productive counterpart.
In the fourth and last chapter, “Archiving Disappearance: From Mi-
chelangelo Antonioni to New Media,” I return to consider the effacement
that inevitably accompanies archivization. If, as Derrida claims, there is
no archive without repetition and exteriority, and thus without the death
drive, we then need to ask how finitude pervades the visible world. How
is forgetfulness woven into the texture of perception? What are the conse-
quences of cinema’s simultaneous persistence and disappearance amid the
new technologies of vision? Poloni’s multimedia installation The Desert
Room displays the precarious and disorienting stratification of our current
audiovisual landscape, blurring the boundaries between the inside and
xii i n t r o d u c t i o n introduc tion xiii

In the third chapter, “Folding Time: Toward a New Theory of Mon- the outside of the film, the architecture of cinema and the architecture of
tage,” I elaborate on Derrida’s suggestion that the time has come to dis- the world. A scrupulous reproduction of the hotel room where, in Mi-
engage our concept of archive from a logic of actuality and attempt to chelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Italy, 1975), the character played
think the crossing of the unconscious and the virtual. But what does it by Jack Nicholson exchanges his identity for that of a dead arms dealer,
mean to archive otherwise (to borrow from Derrida’s descriptor for the The Desert Room materializes the way in which the digital archive has
operations of psychoanalysis) in the self-differing world of perception? been emerging as an archive without archivists—an involuntary memory
Can the actual images that constitute the history of cinema undergo yet apparatus of which cinema is the scattered subject and toward which we
another exposure and develop into a reservoir of virtual traces, releasing are in a position of interiority and passivity. The character played by Maria
memories that have yet to be formed? Huyghe’s video installation The Schneider, the woman with no name, anticipates this figure of the archivist
Ellipsis and Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory revive these latent images “as ‘nobody,’ in the sense of Ulysses, as the anonymous one buried in the
by specifically mobilizing the cinematic cut or edit as the bearer of a world,” the subject of an impersonal perception.28 If Antonioni’s cinema
memory in excess of repression. A deceivingly straightforward piece, The already presents us with disappearing subjects, Poloni’s installation fore-
Ellipsis plays with the missing segment, the interval not only separating grounds a differentiation of the visible that radically exceeds intentional
but also locking together two sequences of Wim Wenders’s The American consciousness, a mode of articulation that opposes the homogenizing im-
Friend (France and West Germany, 1977), while Immemory provides the pact of global media by pointing toward new configurations of the self
reader–user with a highly incomplete layout in which interstices and al- rather than resorting to obsolete or lost ones. As such, it also requires of us
lusions come to delineate an always-mutating virtual archive. Responding that we remain open to (critically) undertake what cannot be determined
to Marker’s indirect solicitation, I perform my own intervention, enter- in advance, a process of mutation that might redefine the very conditions
ing the zone opened up by a crucial edit in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which under which we now imagine its unfolding.
I had already begun to explore in my film Antigone’s Noir. In all these
cases, the edit itself—cinema’s most distinctive impression—constitutes
less an erasure than a folding of the visible upon itself, a twisting that is
transformative of the relation not only between the seen and the unseen
but also between what Merleau-Ponty calls the visible and the invisible.
As fold, the edit undoes the opposition of continuity and discontinuity,
enduring as the guarantee of a heterogeneous continuity, as the site of a
residue that is also creative potential. It is at this juncture that, drawing
on Merleau-Ponty’s late work, I propose to reconfigure the virtual as the
invisible of which the perceptual world is made—not the opposite of the
visible but its hidden and endlessly productive counterpart.
In the fourth and last chapter, “Archiving Disappearance: From Mi-
chelangelo Antonioni to New Media,” I return to consider the effacement
that inevitably accompanies archivization. If, as Derrida claims, there is
no archive without repetition and exteriority, and thus without the death
drive, we then need to ask how finitude pervades the visible world. How
is forgetfulness woven into the texture of perception? What are the conse-
quences of cinema’s simultaneous persistence and disappearance amid the
new technologies of vision? Poloni’s multimedia installation The Desert
Room displays the precarious and disorienting stratification of our current
audiovisual landscape, blurring the boundaries between the inside and
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter One

Against House Arrest

Landings

It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take

place.
—Jacques Derrida , Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

The name of the archive, arkhé, names both commencing and command-
ing—the necessity of beginning and the inevitability of commanding, of be-
ing submitted to and indeed formed by a commandment or injunction. Of
these two orders, the order of time (sequential) and the order of authority
(jussive), Jacques Derrida’s Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, which
was initially delivered as a lecture at the Freud Museum in London, seems
to actively question and open to radical dis-ordering only the former. For
Derrida, the archive emerges at the crossing of place and law, where the
archons, the superior magistrates responsible for both the safety of the
documents and their interpretation, have instituted a proper residence or
domicile. “The meaning of ‘archive,’ its only meaning,” he writes, “comes
to it from the Greek arkheion: initially a house, a domicile, an address,
the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who com-
manded.”1 Only under these conditions—only when entrusted to proper
guardians and preserved in an appointed location—can the documents
“speak the truth.” That the truth is here the effect of a certain architec-
ture of power seems to be as undeniable as it is politically problematic:
all archives, claims Derrida, “have to do with this topo-nomology, with
this archontic dimension of domiciliation, with this archic, in truth patri-
archic function, without which no archive would ever come into play or
appear as such.”2 Lineage, inheritance, transmission, according to family
or state law—the site that the archive needs to realize itself as such is in-
extricably physical and symbolic. The very “consignation” through which
2 against house arrest
the archive gathers its signs, organizing them into an ideal configuration,
“a system or synchrony” that controls the heterogeneous and the invisible,
is a function of archontic power.3 This also means that at the intersection
of architecture and authority, a certain flow or force comes to a halt—is
arrested, contained, and put to use by the law sanctioning the circulation
of signs. This law, we will show later in this chapter, also articulates the
relation between language and kinship, symbolic intelligibility and social
normativity.
Derrida certainly acknowledges that the archival principle, in its for-
mulation as well as institutional implementations, entails a fundamental
violence—a violence of the domestic order. To be honest, the archive is a
patriarchive. In the book’s first and longest footnote, he refers to Sonia
Combe’s Forbidden Archives as the example not only of meticulous re-
search but also of defiant questioning—under which conditions, she asks,
is history being written? What kind of power does the state exercise over
the historian? Is it by “pure chance” that the great majority of historians
in contemporary France are “masculine”?4 But if this title can be cited as
“the metonymy of all that is important here,” then the issue of the forbid-
den, the repressed, or the otherwise marginalized has to be taken up where
it touches on the law of transmission in its most drastically structuring
role—right in the house, as it pertains to language and kinship.5 Again,
Derrida acknowledges that the question of a politics of the archive per-
meates his entire lecture, noticing that “whatever one could attempt, and
in particular in Freudian psychoanalysis, to rethink the place and the law
according to which the archontic becomes instituted . . . would have grave
consequences for a theory of the archive” and the order that such theory
supports and by which it is, in turn, justified.6 But what could one attempt?
What can we attempt, after Derrida but also before him, to further erode
the boundaries, the strictures of a theory that cannot be isolated from a
series of sociosymbolic practices?
In Derrida’s reading of the Freudian corpus, the possibility, indeed,
the inevitability, of such an erosion seems to come from the workings of
the death drive—a drive of loss, destruction, or aggression that inscribes
forgetfulness in the very texture of the archive, warranting the adoption
of the phrase archive fever to describe its inextinguishable contradictions.
In fact, despite the physical and symbolic supervision through which it is
constituted, “the archive always works, and a priori, against itself,” that
is, toward its own effacement.7 To the extent that it pulverizes its own
signs, erasing the very traces of the devastation it enacts, “the death drive
is above all anarchivic,” that is, archive destroying. But what is the re-
lation between this violence and the violence of the law instituting and
against house arrest 3
preserving the archive? Derrida suggests that we think obliteration, the
supreme violence of forgetting, also as “the possibility of putting to death
the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition:
the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries
the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.”8 I am
ready to follow such a trajectory and yet wonder whether this forgetful-
ness beyond repression, this force capable of attacking and undoing the
archontic principle, does not mask the operations of the same power it
opposes. In brief, where does the death drive find its un-originary origin?
That is, in what sociosymbolic context has it been thought? My suspicion
is that until we expose the economic underpinnings of this drive that is
ostensibly antieconomic—economy standing here for “the law of the house
(oikos) as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution”—our chances to
shake the house on its foundations will remain unduly constrained9 (un-
duly, but not improperly, as they will continue to favor the reasons of the
“proper” as domestico-familial).
What interests me, as I start exploring the forms and rhythms of a
memory that articulates itself in the future anterior, is precisely the rela-
tion between domesticity and destruction. If the archive cannot be thought
independently of this interlocking, it then becomes necessary to connect
the effects that it engenders to the conditions under which it emerges.
There is no future anterior without the death drive and the demonic force
of repetition—but does this repetition need to coincide with the return
of (and to) a certain domestic scene? How much can we play with the
law—of language and kinship—that seems to structure the very possibil-
ity of play? The works of contemporary artists Sophie Calle and Monica
Bonvicini address these very questions as they take shape in the “impure”
field of multimedia installation art. While bringing to the fore the ques-
tion of the medium and its bearing on archivization, they display a con-
tamination of positions and players that radically unsettles the scene of
the proper—the familial of both psychoanalysis and cinema. Following
their lines of performance, I will revisit the house of the Freudian legacy
and attempt to think its political potential with respect to the figure of
Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter (and sister), the marginalized and yet ineras-
able point of departure for another psychoanalysis—perhaps for another
theory of the archive.10 Among the theorists who have recently turned to
Antigone in the effort to redefine the stakes of psychoanalytic inquiry,
Judith Butler stands out for the force with which she responds to a long
line of interpreters (from Hegel to Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek) and
questions the very limits of the order that frames their interpretation.11
By burying her brother and claiming the right to commemorate his death
2 against house arrest
the archive gathers its signs, organizing them into an ideal configuration,
“a system or synchrony” that controls the heterogeneous and the invisible,
is a function of archontic power.3 This also means that at the intersection
of architecture and authority, a certain flow or force comes to a halt—is
arrested, contained, and put to use by the law sanctioning the circulation
of signs. This law, we will show later in this chapter, also articulates the
relation between language and kinship, symbolic intelligibility and social
normativity.
Derrida certainly acknowledges that the archival principle, in its for-
mulation as well as institutional implementations, entails a fundamental
violence—a violence of the domestic order. To be honest, the archive is a
patriarchive. In the book’s first and longest footnote, he refers to Sonia
Combe’s Forbidden Archives as the example not only of meticulous re-
search but also of defiant questioning—under which conditions, she asks,
is history being written? What kind of power does the state exercise over
the historian? Is it by “pure chance” that the great majority of historians
in contemporary France are “masculine”?4 But if this title can be cited as
“the metonymy of all that is important here,” then the issue of the forbid-
den, the repressed, or the otherwise marginalized has to be taken up where
it touches on the law of transmission in its most drastically structuring
role—right in the house, as it pertains to language and kinship.5 Again,
Derrida acknowledges that the question of a politics of the archive per-
meates his entire lecture, noticing that “whatever one could attempt, and
in particular in Freudian psychoanalysis, to rethink the place and the law
according to which the archontic becomes instituted . . . would have grave
consequences for a theory of the archive” and the order that such theory
supports and by which it is, in turn, justified.6 But what could one attempt?
What can we attempt, after Derrida but also before him, to further erode
the boundaries, the strictures of a theory that cannot be isolated from a
series of sociosymbolic practices?
In Derrida’s reading of the Freudian corpus, the possibility, indeed,
the inevitability, of such an erosion seems to come from the workings of
the death drive—a drive of loss, destruction, or aggression that inscribes
forgetfulness in the very texture of the archive, warranting the adoption
of the phrase archive fever to describe its inextinguishable contradictions.
In fact, despite the physical and symbolic supervision through which it is
constituted, “the archive always works, and a priori, against itself,” that
is, toward its own effacement.7 To the extent that it pulverizes its own
signs, erasing the very traces of the devastation it enacts, “the death drive
is above all anarchivic,” that is, archive destroying. But what is the re-
lation between this violence and the violence of the law instituting and
against house arrest 3
preserving the archive? Derrida suggests that we think obliteration, the
supreme violence of forgetting, also as “the possibility of putting to death
the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition:
the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries
the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.”8 I am
ready to follow such a trajectory and yet wonder whether this forgetful-
ness beyond repression, this force capable of attacking and undoing the
archontic principle, does not mask the operations of the same power it
opposes. In brief, where does the death drive find its un-originary origin?
That is, in what sociosymbolic context has it been thought? My suspicion
is that until we expose the economic underpinnings of this drive that is
ostensibly antieconomic—economy standing here for “the law of the house
(oikos) as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution”—our chances to
shake the house on its foundations will remain unduly constrained9 (un-
duly, but not improperly, as they will continue to favor the reasons of the
“proper” as domestico-familial).
What interests me, as I start exploring the forms and rhythms of a
memory that articulates itself in the future anterior, is precisely the rela-
tion between domesticity and destruction. If the archive cannot be thought
independently of this interlocking, it then becomes necessary to connect
the effects that it engenders to the conditions under which it emerges.
There is no future anterior without the death drive and the demonic force
of repetition—but does this repetition need to coincide with the return
of (and to) a certain domestic scene? How much can we play with the
law—of language and kinship—that seems to structure the very possibil-
ity of play? The works of contemporary artists Sophie Calle and Monica
Bonvicini address these very questions as they take shape in the “impure”
field of multimedia installation art. While bringing to the fore the ques-
tion of the medium and its bearing on archivization, they display a con-
tamination of positions and players that radically unsettles the scene of
the proper—the familial of both psychoanalysis and cinema. Following
their lines of performance, I will revisit the house of the Freudian legacy
and attempt to think its political potential with respect to the figure of
Antigone, Oedipus’s daughter (and sister), the marginalized and yet ineras-
able point of departure for another psychoanalysis—perhaps for another
theory of the archive.10 Among the theorists who have recently turned to
Antigone in the effort to redefine the stakes of psychoanalytic inquiry,
Judith Butler stands out for the force with which she responds to a long
line of interpreters (from Hegel to Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek) and
questions the very limits of the order that frames their interpretation.11
By burying her brother and claiming the right to commemorate his death
4 against house arrest
against the injunction of the king, Antigone defies the law that sanctions
the legitimacy of certain memories and symbolic ties, while condemning
others to obscurity. The force of her claim, which Judith Butler repeats
and reaffirms, derives from the disobedience or, better, the “promiscuous
obedience” with which she unravels that of which she is part. That in a
past to come, the oedipal archive of Freudian psychoanalysis will have
become “Antigonean”—other than itself through the workings of digital
memory—this is my stake in the question of the archive.
Playgrounds I: Sophie Calle at the Freud Museum
Economic: this might already be translated, if one plays a bit (play
is not yet forbidden in this phase of the origin of everything, of
the present, the object, language, work, seriousness, etc.), but not
gratuitously, as point of view of the oikos, law of the oikos, of the
proper as domestico-familial and even, by the same token . . . as the
domestico-funerary.
—Jacques Derrida , The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud
  and Beyond
The Freud Museum stands at 20 Maresfield Gardens, in London, and
comprises the house and garden where Sigmund Freud moved in 1938
and lived until his death a year later. Its spacious rooms contain most of
Freud’s personal belongings, his collection of antiquities and art pieces,
and the analytic couch he had used since the 1890s, a sober divan covered
by cushions and an Oriental rug throw. We know that all furnishings and
objects were shipped here from Vienna and then carefully rearranged ac-
cording to photographs taken just before the departure, with the explicit
intention of replicating the scene of the apartment where Freud had lived
and worked for forty-seven years.12 Anna Freud, who for several years also
acted as her father’s nurse and secretary, and whose theoretical writings
ended up reinforcing the more conservative aspects of Freud’s thought,
would continue to occupy these premises until 1982, the year she died.13
On account of her will, the house would become a museum, thus taking
on all the “powers of economy” discussed in Archive Fever, which was
first delivered here as a lecture.14 I visited the Freud Museum in February
1999, a week after Sophie Calle’s exhibition Appointment had opened
to the public, altering the rhythm and duration of any tour I might have
had in mind for that day. I spent the afternoon there—“Pleasure is a kind
of rhythm,” says Freud in a fragment from 1884—but I would remember
against house arrest 5
what I saw (or did not see) only years later, sorting through the pages of
Calle’s book Appointment with Sigmund Freud.15 Playing with the archive,
putting the archive at play—or, rather, returning it to the play from which
it has disengaged itself—is never a question of the present, and I will never
know if I first entered Freud’s house by turning the pages of Calle’s book
or if I began the book by stepping onto the house’s landings.16
Calle’s appointment—which is also an exhibition, a self-exhibition, a
display of bodies and their simulacra—is thus with a dead man, and a
powerful one for that matter. It is also made through a man, a foreseeing
curator, who thinks that Calle and Freud might be good for each other.
But it is not a blind date: “After having a vision of my wedding dress laid
across Freud’s couch, I accepted,” writes Calle in the introductory notes.17
Barely at work, the artist already reveals herself to be a responsive patient,
a woman with a vivid “private theatre,” eager to expose her own picture
book and move (“transfer,” “carry over”) to the doctor’s house her most
personal effects: a wig, a high-heel shoe, a red shoe, a bathrobe, a wedding
dress, a wedding photograph, a slashed portrait (next to them, we find
short stories about her relationship with male lovers and various family
members, all printed on small pink cards, a humorous and idiosyncratic
dictionary of psychoanalytic notions like oedipal fantasy, transference,
deferred action, exhibitionism, fetishism). All in all, there is too little resis-
tance in the air, making the scenario feel suspicious even as the first page
is turned or the first door is opened. How does this transference work,
and whose transference will it turn out to be?
Then, in sequence, we see an external shot of the museum, a map of
the internal layout, and a black-and-white photograph of Calle posing in
front of the entrance door. She is smiling, teasingly self-conscious, wear-
ing a beret and a winter overcoat that is too large for her and decidedly
outmoded—indeed, it is Freud’s own overcoat, one of the museum’s most
valued possessions. We know this because earlier, at the beginning of this
book with no single beginning, two pictures appear next to each other:
one showing Freud in the garden of the London residence, his beret and
coat strikingly similar to Calle’s, the other presenting Calle in the same
scenery, wearing an overcoat that a caption identifies as Freud’s. By the
time we reach the front door, ready to start on our visit, it is a hybrid fig-
ure that we find greeting us. The vision of the wedding dress, as well as
its actual display at the impossible core of the exhibition, belongs to this
figure and the contaminated position it occupies—to this other Freud,
this Freud-in-drag, the subject as much as the object of the transferential
process.18 What will have this strange figure remembered?
But appointment also means “power of appointment,” namely, the
4 against house arrest
against the injunction of the king, Antigone defies the law that sanctions
the legitimacy of certain memories and symbolic ties, while condemning
others to obscurity. The force of her claim, which Judith Butler repeats
and reaffirms, derives from the disobedience or, better, the “promiscuous
obedience” with which she unravels that of which she is part. That in a
past to come, the oedipal archive of Freudian psychoanalysis will have
become “Antigonean”—other than itself through the workings of digital
memory—this is my stake in the question of the archive.
Playgrounds I: Sophie Calle at the Freud Museum
Economic: this might already be translated, if one plays a bit (play
is not yet forbidden in this phase of the origin of everything, of
the present, the object, language, work, seriousness, etc.), but not
gratuitously, as point of view of the oikos, law of the oikos, of the
proper as domestico-familial and even, by the same token . . . as the
domestico-funerary.
—Jacques Derrida , The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud
  and Beyond
The Freud Museum stands at 20 Maresfield Gardens, in London, and
comprises the house and garden where Sigmund Freud moved in 1938
and lived until his death a year later. Its spacious rooms contain most of
Freud’s personal belongings, his collection of antiquities and art pieces,
and the analytic couch he had used since the 1890s, a sober divan covered
by cushions and an Oriental rug throw. We know that all furnishings and
objects were shipped here from Vienna and then carefully rearranged ac-
cording to photographs taken just before the departure, with the explicit
intention of replicating the scene of the apartment where Freud had lived
and worked for forty-seven years.12 Anna Freud, who for several years also
acted as her father’s nurse and secretary, and whose theoretical writings
ended up reinforcing the more conservative aspects of Freud’s thought,
would continue to occupy these premises until 1982, the year she died.13
On account of her will, the house would become a museum, thus taking
on all the “powers of economy” discussed in Archive Fever, which was
first delivered here as a lecture.14 I visited the Freud Museum in February
1999, a week after Sophie Calle’s exhibition Appointment had opened
to the public, altering the rhythm and duration of any tour I might have
had in mind for that day. I spent the afternoon there—“Pleasure is a kind
of rhythm,” says Freud in a fragment from 1884—but I would remember
against house arrest 5
what I saw (or did not see) only years later, sorting through the pages of
Calle’s book Appointment with Sigmund Freud.15 Playing with the archive,
putting the archive at play—or, rather, returning it to the play from which
it has disengaged itself—is never a question of the present, and I will never
know if I first entered Freud’s house by turning the pages of Calle’s book
or if I began the book by stepping onto the house’s landings.16
Calle’s appointment—which is also an exhibition, a self-exhibition, a
display of bodies and their simulacra—is thus with a dead man, and a
powerful one for that matter. It is also made through a man, a foreseeing
curator, who thinks that Calle and Freud might be good for each other.
But it is not a blind date: “After having a vision of my wedding dress laid
across Freud’s couch, I accepted,” writes Calle in the introductory notes.17
Barely at work, the artist already reveals herself to be a responsive patient,
a woman with a vivid “private theatre,” eager to expose her own picture
book and move (“transfer,” “carry over”) to the doctor’s house her most
personal effects: a wig, a high-heel shoe, a red shoe, a bathrobe, a wedding
dress, a wedding photograph, a slashed portrait (next to them, we find
short stories about her relationship with male lovers and various family
members, all printed on small pink cards, a humorous and idiosyncratic
dictionary of psychoanalytic notions like oedipal fantasy, transference,
deferred action, exhibitionism, fetishism). All in all, there is too little resis-
tance in the air, making the scenario feel suspicious even as the first page
is turned or the first door is opened. How does this transference work,
and whose transference will it turn out to be?
Then, in sequence, we see an external shot of the museum, a map of
the internal layout, and a black-and-white photograph of Calle posing in
front of the entrance door. She is smiling, teasingly self-conscious, wear-
ing a beret and a winter overcoat that is too large for her and decidedly
outmoded—indeed, it is Freud’s own overcoat, one of the museum’s most
valued possessions. We know this because earlier, at the beginning of this
book with no single beginning, two pictures appear next to each other:
one showing Freud in the garden of the London residence, his beret and
coat strikingly similar to Calle’s, the other presenting Calle in the same
scenery, wearing an overcoat that a caption identifies as Freud’s. By the
time we reach the front door, ready to start on our visit, it is a hybrid fig-
ure that we find greeting us. The vision of the wedding dress, as well as
its actual display at the impossible core of the exhibition, belongs to this
figure and the contaminated position it occupies—to this other Freud,
this Freud-in-drag, the subject as much as the object of the transferential
process.18 What will have this strange figure remembered?
But appointment also means “power of appointment,” namely, the
6 against house arrest
ability of the person writing a testament to designate those who will have
the authority to dispose of his or her property. So it is also a question of
delegation, inheritance, or transmission, and certainly this house above
all testifies to the complex workings of the legacy—of the psychoanalytic
legacy and of legacy as psychoanalytic concept. In “To Speculate—On
‘Freud,’” Derrida emphasizes not only that there is no legacy without
transference but also that transference and legacy are bound by the very
scene in which they are written and of which they write: a domestic, fa-
milial scene. The fort/da game, the pastime of a serious child who reen-
acts his mother’s departure and return through the aid of a wooden spool
and the words fort/da, coincides with the game Freud plays at his writing
desk: “one can see that the description to follow of the fort/da (on the
side of the grandson of the house) and the description of the speculative
game, so painstaking and so repetitive also, of the grandfather writing Be-
yond . . . overlap down to the details.”19 Most important, they are played,
they can be played only by exchanging familiar and familial roles, allowing
for their superimposition and confusion: the grandson is (also) the grand-
father, the mother is (also) the daughter, the father is (also) the son . . . in
an endless series of “permutations and commutations.”20 The legacy is the
playground of repetition and the death drive. Is it then redundant to ask
who is being appointed at the Freud Museum, and at what costs?
From a certain viewpoint, the lines of inheritance could result quite
clear, if tainted by passion. In “Series Z: An Archival Fantasy,” which was
also originally delivered at the Freud Museum as a lecture, historian Yosef
Yerushalmi writes, “The Freud Archives . . . were created by Anna Freud,
Freud’s devoted daughter, and Dr. Kurt Eissler, surely the most zealous
guardian of his reputation, for the . . . express purpose of preserving Freud’s
legacy and memory for future generations.” The appointment is not (can-
not be) interest free, Yerushalmi claims against any naive expectation of
neutrality, and even its most restricted files will hardly turn out to conceal
unorthodox documents. Yet, while exposing the fantasy of an objective ar-
chive, this view continues to uphold another foundational fantasy, indeed,
the very fantasy of foundation or origin—that of chronological time. What
is most profoundly at stake here is the devotion not to a given figure of
authority but to chronology itself as guarantor of (patriarchal) authority.
In the archontic ordering of time, the past holds unmistakable priority
over the future and must be dutifully transmitted such as “it was,” as if at
some point in time, “it had been,” independently of any future that would
eventually receive it. The inheritors fulfill their crucial task by becoming
witnesses not to the past but to the future of the father: ultimately, it is
the future that they are called to inherit, in a movement of conservative
against house arrest 7
repetition that might allow for expansion and revision but not for creative
transformation. We know that Derrida is among the sharpest critics of
this foundational fantasy. But we will soon have to ask, is the groundless
repetition that he posits at the heart of the archive ultimately an orderly
or a disorderly one?
Again, Calle’s intervention promotes a confusion, a shuffling of cards,
that disturbs not only the roles of analyst and analysand, father and daugh-
ter, legator and legatee, but also the chronology of their discourse. More
than the wedding dress laid across the father’s couch in “Dr. Sigmund
Freud’s Study,” what unsettles the orderly scene of the legacy is to be
found in “Dorothy Burlingham’s Study”: the framed picture of a nose
and a slashed portrait. Presented between a red shoe and an embroidered
sheet, a story of mischievous female complicity and one of resilience, both
picture and portrait bear the traces of a certain violence (threatened or
perpetrated) against the image of the female body. In the former case (“The
Plastic Surgery”), Calle recounts that her grandparents insisted that her
nose, a scar on her left leg, and her ears needed plastic surgery and that
only the timely suicide of the appointed doctor, Doctor F, took her out of
the impasse. In the latter case (“The Razor Blade”), she remembers the
time when she posed nude as a model for a drawing class, and a man re-
peatedly made and unmade her portrait, composed and decomposed her
figure, by “compulsively” cutting, at the end of each session, the drawing
he had completed—every day for twelve days, until she stopped going to
work. On the portrait she displays, we can see long, deep slashes cutting
across her neck, knees, and calves and more superficial ones overlapping
on her genitals, right arm, and feet. (A dozen pieces of scotch tape have
been summarily applied, with the effect of highlighting rather than sutur-
ing the incisions). What is most striking for us here, in this mise-en-scène
of displaced aggressiveness, is that Calle sets the picture of her curved nose
among early family photographs of Anna Freud and hangs her slashed
portrait among an array of framed certificates—all honors and degrees
awarded to the same “devoted daughter.” What violence did the legatee
have to bear or inflict on herself to fulfill her appointed role? What vio-
lence against the legator did she have to mask?
Rather than returning the appointment letter, or looping the drive back
to destroy the sender, Calle puts this violence on display, inviting Freud
himself—or rather, the hybrid figure she has animated at the threshold
of the museum—to testify to its effects. In the study that once housed
Dorothy Burlingham, Anna Freud’s colleague and lifelong companion
(they would work and live together at 20 Maresfield Gardens for forty
years), the associations Calle is activating hint at another, subterranean or
6 against house arrest
ability of the person writing a testament to designate those who will have
the authority to dispose of his or her property. So it is also a question of
delegation, inheritance, or transmission, and certainly this house above
all testifies to the complex workings of the legacy—of the psychoanalytic
legacy and of legacy as psychoanalytic concept. In “To Speculate—On
‘Freud,’” Derrida emphasizes not only that there is no legacy without
transference but also that transference and legacy are bound by the very
scene in which they are written and of which they write: a domestic, fa-
milial scene. The fort/da game, the pastime of a serious child who reen-
acts his mother’s departure and return through the aid of a wooden spool
and the words fort/da, coincides with the game Freud plays at his writing
desk: “one can see that the description to follow of the fort/da (on the
side of the grandson of the house) and the description of the speculative
game, so painstaking and so repetitive also, of the grandfather writing Be-
yond . . . overlap down to the details.”19 Most important, they are played,
they can be played only by exchanging familiar and familial roles, allowing
for their superimposition and confusion: the grandson is (also) the grand-
father, the mother is (also) the daughter, the father is (also) the son . . . in
an endless series of “permutations and commutations.”20 The legacy is the
playground of repetition and the death drive. Is it then redundant to ask
who is being appointed at the Freud Museum, and at what costs?
From a certain viewpoint, the lines of inheritance could result quite
clear, if tainted by passion. In “Series Z: An Archival Fantasy,” which was
also originally delivered at the Freud Museum as a lecture, historian Yosef
Yerushalmi writes, “The Freud Archives . . . were created by Anna Freud,
Freud’s devoted daughter, and Dr. Kurt Eissler, surely the most zealous
guardian of his reputation, for the . . . express purpose of preserving Freud’s
legacy and memory for future generations.” The appointment is not (can-
not be) interest free, Yerushalmi claims against any naive expectation of
neutrality, and even its most restricted files will hardly turn out to conceal
unorthodox documents. Yet, while exposing the fantasy of an objective ar-
chive, this view continues to uphold another foundational fantasy, indeed,
the very fantasy of foundation or origin—that of chronological time. What
is most profoundly at stake here is the devotion not to a given figure of
authority but to chronology itself as guarantor of (patriarchal) authority.
In the archontic ordering of time, the past holds unmistakable priority
over the future and must be dutifully transmitted such as “it was,” as if at
some point in time, “it had been,” independently of any future that would
eventually receive it. The inheritors fulfill their crucial task by becoming
witnesses not to the past but to the future of the father: ultimately, it is
the future that they are called to inherit, in a movement of conservative
against house arrest 7
repetition that might allow for expansion and revision but not for creative
transformation. We know that Derrida is among the sharpest critics of
this foundational fantasy. But we will soon have to ask, is the groundless
repetition that he posits at the heart of the archive ultimately an orderly
or a disorderly one?
Again, Calle’s intervention promotes a confusion, a shuffling of cards,
that disturbs not only the roles of analyst and analysand, father and daugh-
ter, legator and legatee, but also the chronology of their discourse. More
than the wedding dress laid across the father’s couch in “Dr. Sigmund
Freud’s Study,” what unsettles the orderly scene of the legacy is to be
found in “Dorothy Burlingham’s Study”: the framed picture of a nose
and a slashed portrait. Presented between a red shoe and an embroidered
sheet, a story of mischievous female complicity and one of resilience, both
picture and portrait bear the traces of a certain violence (threatened or
perpetrated) against the image of the female body. In the former case (“The
Plastic Surgery”), Calle recounts that her grandparents insisted that her
nose, a scar on her left leg, and her ears needed plastic surgery and that
only the timely suicide of the appointed doctor, Doctor F, took her out of
the impasse. In the latter case (“The Razor Blade”), she remembers the
time when she posed nude as a model for a drawing class, and a man re-
peatedly made and unmade her portrait, composed and decomposed her
figure, by “compulsively” cutting, at the end of each session, the drawing
he had completed—every day for twelve days, until she stopped going to
work. On the portrait she displays, we can see long, deep slashes cutting
across her neck, knees, and calves and more superficial ones overlapping
on her genitals, right arm, and feet. (A dozen pieces of scotch tape have
been summarily applied, with the effect of highlighting rather than sutur-
ing the incisions). What is most striking for us here, in this mise-en-scène
of displaced aggressiveness, is that Calle sets the picture of her curved nose
among early family photographs of Anna Freud and hangs her slashed
portrait among an array of framed certificates—all honors and degrees
awarded to the same “devoted daughter.” What violence did the legatee
have to bear or inflict on herself to fulfill her appointed role? What vio-
lence against the legator did she have to mask?
Rather than returning the appointment letter, or looping the drive back
to destroy the sender, Calle puts this violence on display, inviting Freud
himself—or rather, the hybrid figure she has animated at the threshold
of the museum—to testify to its effects. In the study that once housed
Dorothy Burlingham, Anna Freud’s colleague and lifelong companion
(they would work and live together at 20 Maresfield Gardens for forty
years), the associations Calle is activating hint at another, subterranean or
8 against house arrest
oblique lineage. In Lesbian Rule, Amy Villarejo brilliantly reads Derrida’s
Archive Fever vis-à-vis Ulrike Ottinger’s film Exile Shanghai (Exil Shang-
hai, Germany and Israel, 1997)—which becomes for her the example of
a heterogeneous “lesbian impression”—teasing out the contradictions of
a theory that affirms memory’s performativity while forgetting to register
the diasporic effects that an investigation of gender and sexuality would
have on the very economy of the archive.21 Following Villarejo’s interven-
tion, I, too, will look for a genealogy in which “Freud,” the name of the
archive, the signature of the psychoanalytic corpus, stands not at the dif-
fused origin of a line that needs to be retraced with rectitude and fidelity
but at the ever-vanishing end of a network of repetitions and betrayals.
If the transference does not need to be superseded—there is nothing but
transference in Calle’s autobiographical world—it is because this trans-
ference is not one, because the legacy it enacts is no longer predicated on
a coherent and orderly domestic scene. Rather, its economy seems to be
one of dispersal (of players and toys) and impossible, self-undoing en-
counters. While visiting the Burlingham room, I thus had the sense that
my appointment was being made by and with the women of the house,
including Freud-in-drag, and my mother, whose birthday dinner that day
I almost missed when I forgot the wrapped-up box in the museum, like a
dice in the memory of a past to come.
But there are other rooms in the house, and we might have been too
hasty in recruiting the death drive at play in Dorothy Burlingham’s study
against the stability of the lineage. If Calle contaminates or at least disturbs
the figures of the Freudian legacy, producing momentary frictions and di-
gressions, can we also say that she upsets the setting of such a legacy, that
is, the conditions of its taking place and, ultimately, its long-term course?
Is it sufficient to diffuse, loop around the death drive while maintaining
it within the same domestic scene, and not question the fact that it has
been shaped by the same scene it is supposed to destabilize? Indeed, we
do not need to leave the room to find out. A few pages after “The Slashed
Portrait” and its promise of queer alliances, “The Rival” draws us back
into a normative state of affairs: on discovering that the love letter she
has been reading backward is addressed to “H” (allegedly, but not nec-
essarily, another woman), Calle crosses out the “H” and replaces it with
an “S.” Either me or you: “Go to the war!” would yell out Freud’s grand-
son, a year after playing the fort/da game, while throwing away a toy in
a fit of anger. The child knew, Freud explains, that his father had gone to
war and was thus offering his bystanders “the clearest indications that he
had no desire to be disturbed in his exclusive possession of his mother.”22
And his mother, Derrida points out, is also Freud’s daughter: Sophie, the
against house arrest 9
object of contention between “the two Freuds” and, we need to add, Anna
Freud’s rival for their father’s attention—the bystanders are indeed dis-
guised players.23 Despite the multiple exchanges between figures and roles,
the graphics of repetition delineated in Beyond and rearticulated in Calle’s
exhibition remain indissociable from the graphics of oedipal violence.24
Ultimately, rather than splintering the logic of the house, the desire for
destruction played out by Freud’s grandson (and granddaughter) maintains
it in place, serving a paradoxically conservative function. Repetition marks
here a return to the proper, if not a return of the proper: after all, the death
drive emerges in Beyond as the pleasure principle’s “domestic specter,” the
pleasure principle’s (the PP’s, the grandfather’s) “proper stranger,” a point
on which we will later elaborate.25 At this juncture, what I want to em-
phasize is the multifaceted link between repetition and oedipal violence,
a link Calle does not break but repeatedly exposes, most notably by dis-
playing items such as the rival’s love letter next to an old typewriter and
the remains of a burned mattress among Freud’s wedding ring and a lock
of Martha Freud’s hair. What does this mean for the archive and its fu-
tural past? In Archive Fever, after discussing the relation between law and
violence, Derrida writes, “In any case, there would be no future without
repetition. And thus, as Freud might say (this would be his thesis), there
is no future without the specter of the oedipal violence that inscribes the
superrepression into the archontic institution of the archive.”26 But what
is Derrida’s thesis, its “prosthesis” on Freud’s thesis? How far can it take
us toward the delineation of a libidinal landscape in which the future is
opened by something other than, something in excess of, oedipal violence?
Playgrounds II: Monica Bonvicini’s Destroy She Said
narboni: Even though at the beginning Destroy seemed to be a sort
of potential work, that might just as well have been thrown away, or
filmed, or played onstage, or read, a potential work that was made real
by the use to which it was put, so to speak . . .
duras: Yes: the use to which it was put by the reader or the spectator.
This is the only perspective I can work within now.
—Marguerite Duras , in conversation with critic Jean Narboni
  and director Jacques Rivette, in Destroy, She Said
In “An Archival Impulse,” Hal Foster discusses the works of contemporary
artists Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean as examples of
a heterogeneous practice, a mode of production at work in international
8 against house arrest
oblique lineage. In Lesbian Rule, Amy Villarejo brilliantly reads Derrida’s
Archive Fever vis-à-vis Ulrike Ottinger’s film Exile Shanghai (Exil Shang-
hai, Germany and Israel, 1997)—which becomes for her the example of
a heterogeneous “lesbian impression”—teasing out the contradictions of
a theory that affirms memory’s performativity while forgetting to register
the diasporic effects that an investigation of gender and sexuality would
have on the very economy of the archive.21 Following Villarejo’s interven-
tion, I, too, will look for a genealogy in which “Freud,” the name of the
archive, the signature of the psychoanalytic corpus, stands not at the dif-
fused origin of a line that needs to be retraced with rectitude and fidelity
but at the ever-vanishing end of a network of repetitions and betrayals.
If the transference does not need to be superseded—there is nothing but
transference in Calle’s autobiographical world—it is because this trans-
ference is not one, because the legacy it enacts is no longer predicated on
a coherent and orderly domestic scene. Rather, its economy seems to be
one of dispersal (of players and toys) and impossible, self-undoing en-
counters. While visiting the Burlingham room, I thus had the sense that
my appointment was being made by and with the women of the house,
including Freud-in-drag, and my mother, whose birthday dinner that day
I almost missed when I forgot the wrapped-up box in the museum, like a
dice in the memory of a past to come.
But there are other rooms in the house, and we might have been too
hasty in recruiting the death drive at play in Dorothy Burlingham’s study
against the stability of the lineage. If Calle contaminates or at least disturbs
the figures of the Freudian legacy, producing momentary frictions and di-
gressions, can we also say that she upsets the setting of such a legacy, that
is, the conditions of its taking place and, ultimately, its long-term course?
Is it sufficient to diffuse, loop around the death drive while maintaining
it within the same domestic scene, and not question the fact that it has
been shaped by the same scene it is supposed to destabilize? Indeed, we
do not need to leave the room to find out. A few pages after “The Slashed
Portrait” and its promise of queer alliances, “The Rival” draws us back
into a normative state of affairs: on discovering that the love letter she
has been reading backward is addressed to “H” (allegedly, but not nec-
essarily, another woman), Calle crosses out the “H” and replaces it with
an “S.” Either me or you: “Go to the war!” would yell out Freud’s grand-
son, a year after playing the fort/da game, while throwing away a toy in
a fit of anger. The child knew, Freud explains, that his father had gone to
war and was thus offering his bystanders “the clearest indications that he
had no desire to be disturbed in his exclusive possession of his mother.”22
And his mother, Derrida points out, is also Freud’s daughter: Sophie, the
against house arrest 9
object of contention between “the two Freuds” and, we need to add, Anna
Freud’s rival for their father’s attention—the bystanders are indeed dis-
guised players.23 Despite the multiple exchanges between figures and roles,
the graphics of repetition delineated in Beyond and rearticulated in Calle’s
exhibition remain indissociable from the graphics of oedipal violence.24
Ultimately, rather than splintering the logic of the house, the desire for
destruction played out by Freud’s grandson (and granddaughter) maintains
it in place, serving a paradoxically conservative function. Repetition marks
here a return to the proper, if not a return of the proper: after all, the death
drive emerges in Beyond as the pleasure principle’s “domestic specter,” the
pleasure principle’s (the PP’s, the grandfather’s) “proper stranger,” a point
on which we will later elaborate.25 At this juncture, what I want to em-
phasize is the multifaceted link between repetition and oedipal violence,
a link Calle does not break but repeatedly exposes, most notably by dis-
playing items such as the rival’s love letter next to an old typewriter and
the remains of a burned mattress among Freud’s wedding ring and a lock
of Martha Freud’s hair. What does this mean for the archive and its fu-
tural past? In Archive Fever, after discussing the relation between law and
violence, Derrida writes, “In any case, there would be no future without
repetition. And thus, as Freud might say (this would be his thesis), there
is no future without the specter of the oedipal violence that inscribes the
superrepression into the archontic institution of the archive.”26 But what
is Derrida’s thesis, its “prosthesis” on Freud’s thesis? How far can it take
us toward the delineation of a libidinal landscape in which the future is
opened by something other than, something in excess of, oedipal violence?
Playgrounds II: Monica Bonvicini’s Destroy She Said
narboni: Even though at the beginning Destroy seemed to be a sort
of potential work, that might just as well have been thrown away, or
filmed, or played onstage, or read, a potential work that was made real
by the use to which it was put, so to speak . . .
duras: Yes: the use to which it was put by the reader or the spectator.
This is the only perspective I can work within now.
—Marguerite Duras , in conversation with critic Jean Narboni
  and director Jacques Rivette, in Destroy, She Said
In “An Archival Impulse,” Hal Foster discusses the works of contemporary
artists Thomas Hirschhorn, Sam Durant, and Tacita Dean as examples of
a heterogeneous practice, a mode of production at work in international
10 against house arrest
art that, while certainly not unprecedented, has now come to assume the
distinctive and pervasive character of a tendency. What these otherwise
disparate works share is “a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic
probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, phi-
losophy and history”27—art as a nonsystematic, indeed, antisystematic
investigation and expansion of our cultural archive. Their source mate-
rials are at times highly visible, collectively shared texts (such as in the
case of Douglas Gordon appropriating Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [United
States, 1960] and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver [United States, 1976]), at
times ignored or forgotten artifacts (like in the case of the artists under
analysis), so that their intervention will coincide with either a direct dis-
turbance of the mainstream or a recuperation of the marginal. All in all,
Foster emphasizes the hybrid and fragmentary nature of contemporary
archival art and suggests that its “orientation . . . is often more ‘institutive’
than ‘destructive,’ more ‘legislative’ than ‘transgressive,’” that is, geared
less toward the dismantlement of the museum than toward the produc-
tion of “other kinds of ordering.”28 He wonders, however, about how this
impulse relates to Derrida’s notion of archive fever and the “paradoxical
energy of destruction” that finds expression through the category of the
death drive, but he does not elaborate on such a point.
The point is, of course, crucial for us as we venture into the uncon-
scious of the archive and, I would claim, holds specific relevance also for
Foster, who feels inclined, perhaps compelled, to speak of a “quasi-archi-
val logic” and a “quasi-archival architecture” in describing the complex
arrangements that Dean and the others produce: “platforms, stations,
kiosks” assembled to spread like a “rhizome” rather than to hold their
place like a “tree or root.”29 Why is such a nonhierarchical use of the gal-
lery space suddenly named “quasi-archival”? Foster is ready to recognize
the artificial nature of all archival materials, which he defines as “found
yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private,”30 independently of
whether they occupy an official or unofficial position within a certain in-
stitutional order. Still, what is the notion of archive, the standard against
which these interventions are implicitly measured, that it makes sense to
assign them a shadow or a somehow secondary existence? Foster’s adop-
tion of the terms logic and architecture within the same sentence offers an
overt clue, taking us back to Derrida’s claim that the archive emerges at the
intersection of place and law, where the archons have instituted a proper
holding site—the archive comes into its own under house arrest. We know
that this symbolic apprehension (which is at once literal and metaphorical)
is perpetually put to the test, countered or eroded by a drive of loss and
against house arrest 11
dispersion, and yet the archive continues to stand, safeguarding its bound-
aries and assimilating that which it excludes or marks as quasi-archival.
It is here—where the logic of the archive and its architecture explicitly
confronts the threat of destruction—that I will situate Monica Bonvicini’s
video installation Destroy She Said (1998), certainly an expression of the
contemporary archival impulse about which Foster writes and yet one
in which the “institutive” component cannot be thought apart from the
“destructive” one. For almost two decades, Bonvicini has engaged in an
aggressive critique of the male-centered ideology of space and architecture,
assembling large-scale, multimedia installations that disrupt the alleged
neutrality of our urban and domestic environments. Her many pieces,
from Hammering Out (An Old Argument) (1998–2003) and Hausfrau
Swinging (1997) to Destroy She Said, undertake a feminist critique that, in
direct dialogue with the contributions of architectural theorists like Beat-
riz Colomina and Leslie Kane Weisman, considers sexuality and space as
mutually embedded dimensions of a politically constructed experience.31
Her aesthetic gestures are bold, often violent, and multilayered, as they
simultaneously mobilize, contaminate, and attack the strategies of mini-
malism, conceptual art, and postmodern appropriation. In Hammering
Out, for instance, the video of a woman’s hands holding a sledgehammer
and pounding on a plaster wall is projected directly onto a wall-like sur-
face, creating the tromp l’oeil effect of a destruction that neither stops nor
reaches completion. In Hausfrau Swinging, inspired by Louise Bourgeois’s
Femme/Maison (Woman/House, 1947), a video monitor placed before a
corner construction of white drywall panels shows us a naked woman
wearing a white cardboard house on her head: while swerving left and
right, she bangs her head (house) against the same corner walls that we
find installed in the gallery space. Irony laden and indomitable, Bonvi-
cini’s work constitutes an invaluable site for thinking the complexity of
the question at which Derrida hints but which he ultimately evades. How
can the death drive, the “anarchivic,” archive-destroying force internal to
any archival desire, also become radically “anarchic, anarchontic,” that is,
capable of subverting or undoing the order of the archons, the guardians
on whose power of domiciliation the archive is founded?
Bonvicini’s two-channel video installation Destroy She Said derives
its title from Marguerite Duras’s 1969 novel and film Détruire, dit-elle
(Destroy, She Said), both fragmentary texts that explore the intimacy
of violence and sexuality and drastically experiment with the compo-
sitional rules of literature and cinema. Bonvicini’s piece consists of two
freestanding, plasterboard walls onto which are projected excerpts of
10 against house arrest
art that, while certainly not unprecedented, has now come to assume the
distinctive and pervasive character of a tendency. What these otherwise
disparate works share is “a notion of artistic practice as an idiosyncratic
probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, phi-
losophy and history”27—art as a nonsystematic, indeed, antisystematic
investigation and expansion of our cultural archive. Their source mate-
rials are at times highly visible, collectively shared texts (such as in the
case of Douglas Gordon appropriating Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho [United
States, 1960] and Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver [United States, 1976]), at
times ignored or forgotten artifacts (like in the case of the artists under
analysis), so that their intervention will coincide with either a direct dis-
turbance of the mainstream or a recuperation of the marginal. All in all,
Foster emphasizes the hybrid and fragmentary nature of contemporary
archival art and suggests that its “orientation . . . is often more ‘institutive’
than ‘destructive,’ more ‘legislative’ than ‘transgressive,’” that is, geared
less toward the dismantlement of the museum than toward the produc-
tion of “other kinds of ordering.”28 He wonders, however, about how this
impulse relates to Derrida’s notion of archive fever and the “paradoxical
energy of destruction” that finds expression through the category of the
death drive, but he does not elaborate on such a point.
The point is, of course, crucial for us as we venture into the uncon-
scious of the archive and, I would claim, holds specific relevance also for
Foster, who feels inclined, perhaps compelled, to speak of a “quasi-archi-
val logic” and a “quasi-archival architecture” in describing the complex
arrangements that Dean and the others produce: “platforms, stations,
kiosks” assembled to spread like a “rhizome” rather than to hold their
place like a “tree or root.”29 Why is such a nonhierarchical use of the gal-
lery space suddenly named “quasi-archival”? Foster is ready to recognize
the artificial nature of all archival materials, which he defines as “found
yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private,”30 independently of
whether they occupy an official or unofficial position within a certain in-
stitutional order. Still, what is the notion of archive, the standard against
which these interventions are implicitly measured, that it makes sense to
assign them a shadow or a somehow secondary existence? Foster’s adop-
tion of the terms logic and architecture within the same sentence offers an
overt clue, taking us back to Derrida’s claim that the archive emerges at the
intersection of place and law, where the archons have instituted a proper
holding site—the archive comes into its own under house arrest. We know
that this symbolic apprehension (which is at once literal and metaphorical)
is perpetually put to the test, countered or eroded by a drive of loss and
against house arrest 11
dispersion, and yet the archive continues to stand, safeguarding its bound-
aries and assimilating that which it excludes or marks as quasi-archival.
It is here—where the logic of the archive and its architecture explicitly
confronts the threat of destruction—that I will situate Monica Bonvicini’s
video installation Destroy She Said (1998), certainly an expression of the
contemporary archival impulse about which Foster writes and yet one
in which the “institutive” component cannot be thought apart from the
“destructive” one. For almost two decades, Bonvicini has engaged in an
aggressive critique of the male-centered ideology of space and architecture,
assembling large-scale, multimedia installations that disrupt the alleged
neutrality of our urban and domestic environments. Her many pieces,
from Hammering Out (An Old Argument) (1998–2003) and Hausfrau
Swinging (1997) to Destroy She Said, undertake a feminist critique that, in
direct dialogue with the contributions of architectural theorists like Beat-
riz Colomina and Leslie Kane Weisman, considers sexuality and space as
mutually embedded dimensions of a politically constructed experience.31
Her aesthetic gestures are bold, often violent, and multilayered, as they
simultaneously mobilize, contaminate, and attack the strategies of mini-
malism, conceptual art, and postmodern appropriation. In Hammering
Out, for instance, the video of a woman’s hands holding a sledgehammer
and pounding on a plaster wall is projected directly onto a wall-like sur-
face, creating the tromp l’oeil effect of a destruction that neither stops nor
reaches completion. In Hausfrau Swinging, inspired by Louise Bourgeois’s
Femme/Maison (Woman/House, 1947), a video monitor placed before a
corner construction of white drywall panels shows us a naked woman
wearing a white cardboard house on her head: while swerving left and
right, she bangs her head (house) against the same corner walls that we
find installed in the gallery space. Irony laden and indomitable, Bonvi-
cini’s work constitutes an invaluable site for thinking the complexity of
the question at which Derrida hints but which he ultimately evades. How
can the death drive, the “anarchivic,” archive-destroying force internal to
any archival desire, also become radically “anarchic, anarchontic,” that is,
capable of subverting or undoing the order of the archons, the guardians
on whose power of domiciliation the archive is founded?
Bonvicini’s two-channel video installation Destroy She Said derives
its title from Marguerite Duras’s 1969 novel and film Détruire, dit-elle
(Destroy, She Said), both fragmentary texts that explore the intimacy
of violence and sexuality and drastically experiment with the compo-
sitional rules of literature and cinema. Bonvicini’s piece consists of two
freestanding, plasterboard walls onto which are projected excerpts of
12 against house arrest
Figure 1. Monica Bonvicini, Destroy She Said, 1998. Double sixty-minute color
video projection, two DVDs, stereo sound, two drywall screens, wooden structures,
white paint, sound system. Installation view: Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Julia Stos-
chek Collection—I Want to See How You See, April 16–July 25, 2010. Photo by
Henning Rogge; courtesy of Monica Bonvicini.
mostly European films from the 1950s through the 1970s.32 On enter-
ing the darkened exhibition space, one is immediately reminded of an
abandoned or temporarily deserted construction site—the drywall pan-
els, resting on wooden shafts like billboards, are lit from behind by red
industrial lamps and surrounded by pieces of wood and other building
materials, the markers of a process that has been suspended or displaced.
I remember thinking that it could also be a film set, the studio replica of a
construction site, but that one would never know for certain as everybody
directly involved (actors, director, crew) had disappeared or forgotten to
return. There is something impressive and disorienting about the entire
arrangement and the way in which it surrounds your body—it is as if the
pellicule separating dream and reality, hallucination and perception, had
finally dissolved and you were plunged into a world in which the ghostly
is overtly material and the material is overtly ghostly. Everything, from
the light to the sawdust on the floor, contributes to creating a simultane-
ous effect of rarefaction and solidity, persistence and ephemerality. The
body registers all this as it tries to find a place in front of the makeshift
screens (in between them, at their margins), as a double projection shows
the most iconic actresses of European postwar cinema: Ingrid Bergman in
against house arrest 13
Figure 2. Destroy She Said, installation view: De Appel, Amsterdam, Monica
Bonvicini, September 10–November 1, 1999. Photo by Ernst Moritz; courtesy of
Monica Bonvicini.
Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (Italy–United States, 1950), Monica Vitti
in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (The Adventure, Italy–France,
1960), Jeanne Moreau in Antonioni’s La Notte (The Night, Italy, 1961),
Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, France,
1962) and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville,
France, 1965), and Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion
(United Kingdom, 1965), among others. In all the shots, the women ap-
pear leaning on walls, door frames, and windowpanes, at once supported
and constrained (“framed”) by the very architectural elements that encircle
the visitor’s body in the exhibition space. Because of the pervasiveness of
these architectural markers, and also as a result of the panels’ sheer scale
and accessibility, even the medium shots soon start feeling like close-ups,
releasing the intimacy of those images that, habitually installed at a dis-
tance, have now been brought (too) close.
12 against house arrest
Figure 1. Monica Bonvicini, Destroy She Said, 1998. Double sixty-minute color
video projection, two DVDs, stereo sound, two drywall screens, wooden structures,
white paint, sound system. Installation view: Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Julia Stos-
chek Collection—I Want to See How You See, April 16–July 25, 2010. Photo by
Henning Rogge; courtesy of Monica Bonvicini.
mostly European films from the 1950s through the 1970s.32 On enter-
ing the darkened exhibition space, one is immediately reminded of an
abandoned or temporarily deserted construction site—the drywall pan-
els, resting on wooden shafts like billboards, are lit from behind by red
industrial lamps and surrounded by pieces of wood and other building
materials, the markers of a process that has been suspended or displaced.
I remember thinking that it could also be a film set, the studio replica of a
construction site, but that one would never know for certain as everybody
directly involved (actors, director, crew) had disappeared or forgotten to
return. There is something impressive and disorienting about the entire
arrangement and the way in which it surrounds your body—it is as if the
pellicule separating dream and reality, hallucination and perception, had
finally dissolved and you were plunged into a world in which the ghostly
is overtly material and the material is overtly ghostly. Everything, from
the light to the sawdust on the floor, contributes to creating a simultane-
ous effect of rarefaction and solidity, persistence and ephemerality. The
body registers all this as it tries to find a place in front of the makeshift
screens (in between them, at their margins), as a double projection shows
the most iconic actresses of European postwar cinema: Ingrid Bergman in
against house arrest 13
Figure 2. Destroy She Said, installation view: De Appel, Amsterdam, Monica
Bonvicini, September 10–November 1, 1999. Photo by Ernst Moritz; courtesy of
Monica Bonvicini.
Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (Italy–United States, 1950), Monica Vitti
in Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (The Adventure, Italy–France,
1960), Jeanne Moreau in Antonioni’s La Notte (The Night, Italy, 1961),
Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre sa vie (My Life to Live, France,
1962) and Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution (Alphaville,
France, 1965), and Catherine Deneuve in Roman Polanski’s Repulsion
(United Kingdom, 1965), among others. In all the shots, the women ap-
pear leaning on walls, door frames, and windowpanes, at once supported
and constrained (“framed”) by the very architectural elements that encircle
the visitor’s body in the exhibition space. Because of the pervasiveness of
these architectural markers, and also as a result of the panels’ sheer scale
and accessibility, even the medium shots soon start feeling like close-ups,
releasing the intimacy of those images that, habitually installed at a dis-
tance, have now been brought (too) close.
14 against house arrest

Meticulously excised from the original films, removed from their formal
and narrative contexts, then edited together and projected side by side,
these solitary images now exist in a state of strange simultaneity. All the
shots in the piece, even when given to us in succession, seem to partake
of a configuration that refuses the stillness of archival synchrony and is
instead pervaded by an unstable, intermittent temporality—as if the past
and future of the other, invisible shots, had irreparably infiltrated the vis-
ible present and disrupted any fixed point of reference. “C’e’ nessuno?”
(“Anybody there?”), yells Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, pressing against
the closed shutters of a deserted house, and the second time we hear her
throaty voice is in Alphaville, where Anna Karina is calmly closing the
door to Lemmy Caution’s hotel room. When Brigitte Mira cries at the cru-
elty and ignorance of the world, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen
Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul, West Germany, 1974), her despair reverber-
ates through the walls of Alphaville’s technocratic and loveless city and
Stromboli’s arid insular landscape. Slowly, by virtue of rhythmic repetition,
a hypnotic, multilayered sound track, and the haunting use of slow speed,
these images begin to touch each other, loop around, intertwine—as if the
edit that, in an operation contrary to cinematic suture, has disjoined them Figure 3. Destroy She Said: Lemmy Caution leaving behind the madness of the
from the original films could also expose the layers of a potential, forgot- future in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Courtesy of Monica Bonvicini.
ten relationality. Indeed, they appear like Foster’s “promissory notes for
future elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios,” implicitly
mobilizing the suspended, oscillatory temporality of the future anterior
on which we have placed aesthetic and political value. What will have
happened to Monica Vitti’s anguished look in the encounter with Anna
Karina’s mysterious smile? Or to Lemmy Caution’s smooth gestures vis-à-
vis Deneuve’s edgy behavior? What would it mean to reenvision the past
of modernist European cinema—with its narrative, stylistic, and symbolic
norms—in light of crossings that have never taken place, of events that
exceed what is visible on the actual film strip?
I believe that Destroy She Said is less an invitation to invent new sto-
ries by allowing characters to move outside self-enclosed fictional worlds
than it is an invitation to reconfigure the enunciation of existing ones, to
imagine that they could have been told otherwise, spoken by other speak-
ers, and thus unfolded differently, become other than what they ended up
being. Unbound by constraints of chronology and causality, Bonvicini’s
montage releases a play of gazes that radically disarticulates the dyad of
male look and female image. Despite the complexity of camera and editing Figure 4. Destroy She Said: Monica Vitti waiting for her traveling companion
in a small Sicilian town in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Adventure. Courtesy of
strategies, such a division is still operational in the films quoted, if only
Monica Bonvicini.
because many of the actresses there photographed (Bergman, Karina, Vitti)
are indeed being photographed by their directors–husbands or companions
14 against house arrest

Meticulously excised from the original films, removed from their formal
and narrative contexts, then edited together and projected side by side,
these solitary images now exist in a state of strange simultaneity. All the
shots in the piece, even when given to us in succession, seem to partake
of a configuration that refuses the stillness of archival synchrony and is
instead pervaded by an unstable, intermittent temporality—as if the past
and future of the other, invisible shots, had irreparably infiltrated the vis-
ible present and disrupted any fixed point of reference. “C’e’ nessuno?”
(“Anybody there?”), yells Monica Vitti in L’Avventura, pressing against
the closed shutters of a deserted house, and the second time we hear her
throaty voice is in Alphaville, where Anna Karina is calmly closing the
door to Lemmy Caution’s hotel room. When Brigitte Mira cries at the cru-
elty and ignorance of the world, in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen
Seele auf (Fear Eats the Soul, West Germany, 1974), her despair reverber-
ates through the walls of Alphaville’s technocratic and loveless city and
Stromboli’s arid insular landscape. Slowly, by virtue of rhythmic repetition,
a hypnotic, multilayered sound track, and the haunting use of slow speed,
these images begin to touch each other, loop around, intertwine—as if the
edit that, in an operation contrary to cinematic suture, has disjoined them Figure 3. Destroy She Said: Lemmy Caution leaving behind the madness of the
from the original films could also expose the layers of a potential, forgot- future in Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville. Courtesy of Monica Bonvicini.
ten relationality. Indeed, they appear like Foster’s “promissory notes for
future elaboration or enigmatic prompts for future scenarios,” implicitly
mobilizing the suspended, oscillatory temporality of the future anterior
on which we have placed aesthetic and political value. What will have
happened to Monica Vitti’s anguished look in the encounter with Anna
Karina’s mysterious smile? Or to Lemmy Caution’s smooth gestures vis-à-
vis Deneuve’s edgy behavior? What would it mean to reenvision the past
of modernist European cinema—with its narrative, stylistic, and symbolic
norms—in light of crossings that have never taken place, of events that
exceed what is visible on the actual film strip?
I believe that Destroy She Said is less an invitation to invent new sto-
ries by allowing characters to move outside self-enclosed fictional worlds
than it is an invitation to reconfigure the enunciation of existing ones, to
imagine that they could have been told otherwise, spoken by other speak-
ers, and thus unfolded differently, become other than what they ended up
being. Unbound by constraints of chronology and causality, Bonvicini’s
montage releases a play of gazes that radically disarticulates the dyad of
male look and female image. Despite the complexity of camera and editing Figure 4. Destroy She Said: Monica Vitti waiting for her traveling companion
in a small Sicilian town in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Adventure. Courtesy of
strategies, such a division is still operational in the films quoted, if only
Monica Bonvicini.
because many of the actresses there photographed (Bergman, Karina, Vitti)
are indeed being photographed by their directors–husbands or companions

Figure 5. Destroy She Said: the patient of a cold modern clinic longing for Mar-
cello Mastroianni’s attention in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Night. Courtesy of
Monica Bonvicini.
Figure 6. Destroy She Said: Catherine Deneuve causing her apartment’s walls to
collapse in Polanski’s Repulsion. Courtesy of Monica Bonvicini.
against house arrest 17
(Rossellini, Godard, Antonioni). In its place, Destroy She Said activates
a relationship of mutual “portraying” between the women on-screen, a
horizontal transference that finds support in the very architecture of the
piece. As the montage occurs not only between successive images but also
between images projected on adjacent screens, the relay of gazes exceeds
any conventional shot–reverse shot formation, rendering it impossible to
decide who is looking and who is being looked at, who is portraying and
who is being portrayed. The muse becomes the maker, and the maker is
referred to or pulled into the scene as yet another actor in the story.
The exchange between diegesis and enunciation becomes most palpable
(perhaps because already anticipated, hinted at by the film) in the case of
Karina and My Life to Live, a film in twelve episodes telling the story of
Nana, a young woman who works as a clerk in a Parisian record store.
She vaguely aspires to a movie or stage career but, in need of money to
pay the rent, little by little turns to prostitution. In their book on Godard,
Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman highlight how the film’s penultimate
sequence stages the complex dynamics of the relationship between artist
and muse, at once affirming and, to some degree, undermining the rigid
gender distinction it has historically entailed. The sequence consists of a
series of close-ups portraying Karina in a small hotel room: first in front
of a window, then against a white wall, and finally next to a photographic
portrait of Elizabeth Taylor. As Karina poses still or gently moves her head,
we hear a male voice reading aloud from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval
Portrait.” We initially assume that the voice belongs to the young man in
the room, whom we have just seen holding a Poe volume, but soon realize
that it is Godard’s. “This is our story,” Godard says, “a painter portraying
his love.” The story is about an artist who paints the most lifelike portrait
of his wife and thereby drains her of her vitality until, with the completion
of the work, she dies. We know a destiny of death will soon also befall
Nana, who is eventually killed by the pimps who are attempting to ex-
change her. Here, however, the mismatch of image and voice allows Karina
the actress, whose corporeality exceeds the role she plays, to claim a life of
her own and “‘talk back’ from the site of Nana, transforming the autho-
rial monologue into an intersubjective dialogue.”33 In Destroy She Said,
this process of authorial subversion goes even further. The voice of her
director–husband having vanished, Karina’s face begins to silently speak
to Taylor’s and the other actresses’ solitary portraits.34 What emerges is a
perceptual and libidinal connectedness that had thus far remained latent, a
bond that will have become visible as the enunciation of the original films
is torn into pieces or, rather, twisted on itself to the point of unraveling.
It is as though the women on-screen are now portraying, enacting, a love

Figure 5. Destroy She Said: the patient of a cold modern clinic longing for Mar-
cello Mastroianni’s attention in Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Night. Courtesy of
Monica Bonvicini.
Figure 6. Destroy She Said: Catherine Deneuve causing her apartment’s walls to
collapse in Polanski’s Repulsion. Courtesy of Monica Bonvicini.
against house arrest 17
(Rossellini, Godard, Antonioni). In its place, Destroy She Said activates
a relationship of mutual “portraying” between the women on-screen, a
horizontal transference that finds support in the very architecture of the
piece. As the montage occurs not only between successive images but also
between images projected on adjacent screens, the relay of gazes exceeds
any conventional shot–reverse shot formation, rendering it impossible to
decide who is looking and who is being looked at, who is portraying and
who is being portrayed. The muse becomes the maker, and the maker is
referred to or pulled into the scene as yet another actor in the story.
The exchange between diegesis and enunciation becomes most palpable
(perhaps because already anticipated, hinted at by the film) in the case of
Karina and My Life to Live, a film in twelve episodes telling the story of
Nana, a young woman who works as a clerk in a Parisian record store.
She vaguely aspires to a movie or stage career but, in need of money to
pay the rent, little by little turns to prostitution. In their book on Godard,
Harun Farocki and Kaja Silverman highlight how the film’s penultimate
sequence stages the complex dynamics of the relationship between artist
and muse, at once affirming and, to some degree, undermining the rigid
gender distinction it has historically entailed. The sequence consists of a
series of close-ups portraying Karina in a small hotel room: first in front
of a window, then against a white wall, and finally next to a photographic
portrait of Elizabeth Taylor. As Karina poses still or gently moves her head,
we hear a male voice reading aloud from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Oval
Portrait.” We initially assume that the voice belongs to the young man in
the room, whom we have just seen holding a Poe volume, but soon realize
that it is Godard’s. “This is our story,” Godard says, “a painter portraying
his love.” The story is about an artist who paints the most lifelike portrait
of his wife and thereby drains her of her vitality until, with the completion
of the work, she dies. We know a destiny of death will soon also befall
Nana, who is eventually killed by the pimps who are attempting to ex-
change her. Here, however, the mismatch of image and voice allows Karina
the actress, whose corporeality exceeds the role she plays, to claim a life of
her own and “‘talk back’ from the site of Nana, transforming the autho-
rial monologue into an intersubjective dialogue.”33 In Destroy She Said,
this process of authorial subversion goes even further. The voice of her
director–husband having vanished, Karina’s face begins to silently speak
to Taylor’s and the other actresses’ solitary portraits.34 What emerges is a
perceptual and libidinal connectedness that had thus far remained latent, a
bond that will have become visible as the enunciation of the original films
is torn into pieces or, rather, twisted on itself to the point of unraveling.
It is as though the women on-screen are now portraying, enacting, a love
18 against house arrest
that travels along the trajectory of their gazes rather than intending an
absent male figure, thus suggesting the possibility of telling other stories
and perhaps surviving their end.
In “Girl Love,” Kaja Silverman also speaks of an erotic exchange be-
tween female subjects that, unfolding through the workings of the per-
ceptual signifier, excludes or redefines the male term. At the center of her
beautiful reading of James Coleman’s Photograph is in fact the claim that
“the girl” in the installation “is pulled not between a female friend and a
male friend, but between two mothers”: the loving mother of the nega-
tive Oedipus complex, who is perceived as phallic, and the lacking mother
of its positive counterpart, who is discovered as “castrated.”35 Unlike the
lacking mother, an object not only of devaluation but also of hatred, the
loving mother is at once a cherished love-object and a loving subject with
whom the girl can pleasurably identify. Rivalry is yet to enter the scene. “It
is here,” Silverman writes, “and not within the positive Oedipus complex,
that female desire begins.”36 While the eruption of the castration crisis,
and the subsequent turn to the father as the only possible antidote to her
newly perceived lack, traditionally alienates the girl from the mother (and
other women), the desire aroused during this first, negative phase does
not die out but becomes latent, available for future recovery and, in prin-
ciple, capable of modifying even the dynamics of heterosexual relations.
What comes to the fore in Destroy She Said does not contradict Sil-
verman’s account of female libido but exceeds and ultimately erodes its
parameters. There is a sense of relatedness that cannot be confined to a
specific phase of the Oedipus complex or to a recovery actuated through
displacement: simultaneity rather than succession, contamination (conden-
sation) rather than clear-cut differentiation, seem to organize the family of
women gathered together by Bonvicini. Indeed, the installation traces the
contours of an erotic scenario in which the tension between sister–sister
or mother–daughter relations and sexual love is ultimately irresolvable.
That such a scenario violates the symbolic and its kinship norms does
not extinguish the installation’s psychic intensity but, on the contrary,
heightens it and makes it reverberate with doom. If a sense of possibility
emanates from Karina’s enigmatically quiet face, which reimagines for us
the luminosity of love, we cannot ignore the anguish that pervades the
piece as a whole, leaking through from contiguous shots and persisting as
the other, ineluctable side of the women’s rediscovered bond. Repeatedly,
the shots of Karina in Alphaville and My Life to Live are followed by
scenes drawn from Repulsion and He Ran All the Way: Yvonne Furneaux
drenched in rain and petrified by unspeakable terror; Catherine Deneuve
(her sister in Repulsion) hallucinating that a wall in their apartment is
against house arrest 19
cracking open without collapsing, right as she touches the light switch;
and Shellie Winters, on the other side of the ocean, firing a gun against an
unseen figure, her eyes filled with pain and a certain desperate tenderness.
Both are stories of extreme female confinement ending in madness and
murder. Though the original plots might be unknown to the viewers of
the installation, several formal interventions heighten for them the sense
of inescapable restlessness: a split screen in the case of Repulsion and slid-
ing screens alternating within the same panel in the case of He Ran All
the Way.37 Whom are they killing, and at what cost? That is, which course
does the death drive run when the oedipal triangle opens up, threatening
to turn into a figure with no finite shape?
Toward an Improper Death: Antigone and the Impurity of the Death Drive
Beyond all oppositions, without any possible identification or synthesis,
it is indeed a question of an economy of death, of a law of the proper
(oikos, oikonomia) which governs the detour and indefatigably seeks
the proper event, its own, proper propriation (Ereignis) rather than life
and death, life or death.
—Jacques Derrida , The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud
  and Beyond
O tomb, O bridal chamber, O deep-dug home, to be guarded forever,
where I go to join those who are my own.
—Sophocles
Nobody is seen dying on the screens of Bonvicini’s installation; rather,
it is as though the women who crossed paths here were endlessly sus-
pended between life and death. We know that in some of the original
films, they will die a death that is imposed on them and that, nonethe-
less, they assume voluntarily (Karina in My Life to Live and Falconetti in
The Passion of Joan of Arc); in others, they will fall into a state of stupor
or bereavement (Deneuve and Furneaux in Repulsion); in others yet, the
end will coincide for them with a condition of indefinite, hopeless wait-
ing (Vitti in The Adventure and Mira in Fear Eats the Soul). Bonvicini’s
installation, conversely, by repeatedly short-circuiting the denouement of
narrative cinema, allows (but also compels) the women to return to us as
ghosts claiming the life–death they did not have. If, for Derrida’s Freud,
life and death are tangled beyond opposition and synthesis, constituting
the detour that our life-death is, then the women’s restless return, their
18 against house arrest
that travels along the trajectory of their gazes rather than intending an
absent male figure, thus suggesting the possibility of telling other stories
and perhaps surviving their end.
In “Girl Love,” Kaja Silverman also speaks of an erotic exchange be-
tween female subjects that, unfolding through the workings of the per-
ceptual signifier, excludes or redefines the male term. At the center of her
beautiful reading of James Coleman’s Photograph is in fact the claim that
“the girl” in the installation “is pulled not between a female friend and a
male friend, but between two mothers”: the loving mother of the nega-
tive Oedipus complex, who is perceived as phallic, and the lacking mother
of its positive counterpart, who is discovered as “castrated.”35 Unlike the
lacking mother, an object not only of devaluation but also of hatred, the
loving mother is at once a cherished love-object and a loving subject with
whom the girl can pleasurably identify. Rivalry is yet to enter the scene. “It
is here,” Silverman writes, “and not within the positive Oedipus complex,
that female desire begins.”36 While the eruption of the castration crisis,
and the subsequent turn to the father as the only possible antidote to her
newly perceived lack, traditionally alienates the girl from the mother (and
other women), the desire aroused during this first, negative phase does
not die out but becomes latent, available for future recovery and, in prin-
ciple, capable of modifying even the dynamics of heterosexual relations.
What comes to the fore in Destroy She Said does not contradict Sil-
verman’s account of female libido but exceeds and ultimately erodes its
parameters. There is a sense of relatedness that cannot be confined to a
specific phase of the Oedipus complex or to a recovery actuated through
displacement: simultaneity rather than succession, contamination (conden-
sation) rather than clear-cut differentiation, seem to organize the family of
women gathered together by Bonvicini. Indeed, the installation traces the
contours of an erotic scenario in which the tension between sister–sister
or mother–daughter relations and sexual love is ultimately irresolvable.
That such a scenario violates the symbolic and its kinship norms does
not extinguish the installation’s psychic intensity but, on the contrary,
heightens it and makes it reverberate with doom. If a sense of possibility
emanates from Karina’s enigmatically quiet face, which reimagines for us
the luminosity of love, we cannot ignore the anguish that pervades the
piece as a whole, leaking through from contiguous shots and persisting as
the other, ineluctable side of the women’s rediscovered bond. Repeatedly,
the shots of Karina in Alphaville and My Life to Live are followed by
scenes drawn from Repulsion and He Ran All the Way: Yvonne Furneaux
drenched in rain and petrified by unspeakable terror; Catherine Deneuve
(her sister in Repulsion) hallucinating that a wall in their apartment is
against house arrest 19
cracking open without collapsing, right as she touches the light switch;
and Shellie Winters, on the other side of the ocean, firing a gun against an
unseen figure, her eyes filled with pain and a certain desperate tenderness.
Both are stories of extreme female confinement ending in madness and
murder. Though the original plots might be unknown to the viewers of
the installation, several formal interventions heighten for them the sense
of inescapable restlessness: a split screen in the case of Repulsion and slid-
ing screens alternating within the same panel in the case of He Ran All
the Way.37 Whom are they killing, and at what cost? That is, which course
does the death drive run when the oedipal triangle opens up, threatening
to turn into a figure with no finite shape?
Toward an Improper Death: Antigone and the Impurity of the Death Drive
Beyond all oppositions, without any possible identification or synthesis,
it is indeed a question of an economy of death, of a law of the proper
(oikos, oikonomia) which governs the detour and indefatigably seeks
the proper event, its own, proper propriation (Ereignis) rather than life
and death, life or death.
—Jacques Derrida , The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud
  and Beyond
O tomb, O bridal chamber, O deep-dug home, to be guarded forever,
where I go to join those who are my own.
—Sophocles
Nobody is seen dying on the screens of Bonvicini’s installation; rather,
it is as though the women who crossed paths here were endlessly sus-
pended between life and death. We know that in some of the original
films, they will die a death that is imposed on them and that, nonethe-
less, they assume voluntarily (Karina in My Life to Live and Falconetti in
The Passion of Joan of Arc); in others, they will fall into a state of stupor
or bereavement (Deneuve and Furneaux in Repulsion); in others yet, the
end will coincide for them with a condition of indefinite, hopeless wait-
ing (Vitti in The Adventure and Mira in Fear Eats the Soul). Bonvicini’s
installation, conversely, by repeatedly short-circuiting the denouement of
narrative cinema, allows (but also compels) the women to return to us as
ghosts claiming the life–death they did not have. If, for Derrida’s Freud,
life and death are tangled beyond opposition and synthesis, constituting
the detour that our life-death is, then the women’s restless return, their
20 against house arrest
intermittent appearing and disappearing, strikes us as the endeavor to find
a death that is their own. I hesitate to call this death “proper” because
the problem revolves precisely around the ambiguity of this term: to what
extent can a death that is “proper” in the sense of “domestico-familial”
also be one’s own, “the closest to oneself,” when the very conditions of
domesticity subordinate the feminine as ornament or supplement?38 The
death drive at work in Destroy She Said seems to refuse the appellation
of “proper stranger,” which Derrida adopts to define its relation to the PP
(the grandfather of the house), instead breaking the genealogy of the pa-
triarchal legacy and promoting in its place what I will call an “improper”
death, a death that resists and exceeds the law of the proper, of the oikos
as “place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.”39 The question then
becomes, will an improper death, a death that refuses the proper, be ulti-
mately incompatible with life?
That Bonvicini is engaged in dismantling the walls of a certain cin-
ema—the boundaries between inside and outside, vertical and horizontal,
structure and ornament—affects not only the content but also the form
of the archive, questioning the very conditions of possibility under which
archivization can be thought. In The Architecture of Deconstruction, Mark
Wigley investigates the age-old lock between philosophy and architecture,
reminding us that Derrida has often spoken of deconstruction as “the ‘so-
liciting’ of an edifice, ‘in the sense that Sollicitare, in old Latin, means to
shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety.’”40 Destruction is here, as
in Bonvicini, not an act of demolition but a process of “destructuring” or
“critical unbuilding” that, by interrogating the system from within, ex-
poses its limits, the way in which they have been concealed and the ex-
tent to which this concealment has been essential to the production of a
certain institutional stability. How far can this deconstruction be taken?
If, according to Derrida, the archive can only emerge at the intersection
of place and law, building and authority, requiring for its very appearance
“a law which is the law of the house,” is Bonvicini’s all-female and ruin-
ous archive destined to remain a criminal, aberrant, indeed, impossible
archive? It is without doubt a deviant archive, certainly with respect to
the logic of surveillance and social control that fueled the organization
of memory in modernity but also with respect to the paternal, patrilin-
eal logic that Derrida exposes without actively betraying.41 And yet, are
not the limits of the archive “performative” rather than intrinsic to what
presents itself as its structure?
It is here that questions of legacy, repetition, and death can no longer
be maintained separate from an inquiry into the symbolic system and its
kinship norms. What would entail rethinking the intersection of place and
against house arrest 21
law in relation to the figure of Antigone, whom Derrida himself invokes
when wondering if, vis-à-vis the psychoanalytic legacy, “Anna-Antigone”
has ever spoken in her own name? What role can the daughter whom Freud
once called “my Antigone” play in reenvisioning the rules of inheritance,
if one were really to pull the “nebulous matrix” of the fort/da game by
more than “only one of its strings/sons [fils]”?42 In Freud’s Moses, whose
ingenious writing Derrida patiently reenacts, Yosef Yerushalmi addresses
Freud in the second person, asking, “When your daughter conveyed those
words to the congress in Jerusalem, was she speaking in your name?”43 The
reference is to the 1977 invitation that Anna Freud received by the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem to inaugurate a chair “carrying the name” of her
father (who had died in 1938) and to the written statement she instead
sent in her proxy. Speaking in her father’s name means, for Yerushalmi,
validating his signature, reinscribing a mark that, having inaugurated a
certain archive, should now return to confirm its integrity. However, be-
cause “there is no meta-archive,” because any interpretation (including
Yerushalmi’s) performatively alters that which is being interpreted, the
question of the proper name is eminently one not of authorship but of or-
der, the problem of order persisting even after that of authorship has been
deconstructed.44 Himself a contributor to the Freud corpus, Yerushalmi
cannot help but be deeply invested in such a question. As Derrida points
out, what is at stake is nothing less than the unity and virility of the “we”
that Yerushalmi adopts in speaking of the psychoanalytic archive: “we the
fathers, we the archons.”45 And yet, I must notice, such cohesion finds itself
already internally disrupted by the double identification of Sigmund Freud
with Oedipus and Anna Freud with Antigone. “Your Antigone,” writes
Yerushalmi, but this also means the one who is daughter and sister to you,
her father and brother, both having been born from the same woman.
The death drive without which the archive cannot be thought is most
political at this very juncture because it is here that we encounter the limit
instituting the political as a separate sphere. In contesting the Hegelian
interpretation of Antigone and the distinction it draws between kinship
and the state, Judith Butler emphasizes that Antigone comes to speak
in her own name by adopting the language of the state she opposes, at
once drawing on and disrupting the linguistic boundaries that identify
the domain of “sovereign authority and action” and distinguish the fe-
male from the male, the rules of kinship from the law of the state. Her
claim emerges as one “not of oppositional purity but of the scandalously
impure,” a transgression that is inextricably embedded in what it trans-
gresses—the symbolic as network of norms guaranteeing linguistic intel-
ligibility on the basis of a regulation of desire structured around the incest
20 against house arrest
intermittent appearing and disappearing, strikes us as the endeavor to find
a death that is their own. I hesitate to call this death “proper” because
the problem revolves precisely around the ambiguity of this term: to what
extent can a death that is “proper” in the sense of “domestico-familial”
also be one’s own, “the closest to oneself,” when the very conditions of
domesticity subordinate the feminine as ornament or supplement?38 The
death drive at work in Destroy She Said seems to refuse the appellation
of “proper stranger,” which Derrida adopts to define its relation to the PP
(the grandfather of the house), instead breaking the genealogy of the pa-
triarchal legacy and promoting in its place what I will call an “improper”
death, a death that resists and exceeds the law of the proper, of the oikos
as “place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.”39 The question then
becomes, will an improper death, a death that refuses the proper, be ulti-
mately incompatible with life?
That Bonvicini is engaged in dismantling the walls of a certain cin-
ema—the boundaries between inside and outside, vertical and horizontal,
structure and ornament—affects not only the content but also the form
of the archive, questioning the very conditions of possibility under which
archivization can be thought. In The Architecture of Deconstruction, Mark
Wigley investigates the age-old lock between philosophy and architecture,
reminding us that Derrida has often spoken of deconstruction as “the ‘so-
liciting’ of an edifice, ‘in the sense that Sollicitare, in old Latin, means to
shake as a whole, to make tremble in entirety.’”40 Destruction is here, as
in Bonvicini, not an act of demolition but a process of “destructuring” or
“critical unbuilding” that, by interrogating the system from within, ex-
poses its limits, the way in which they have been concealed and the ex-
tent to which this concealment has been essential to the production of a
certain institutional stability. How far can this deconstruction be taken?
If, according to Derrida, the archive can only emerge at the intersection
of place and law, building and authority, requiring for its very appearance
“a law which is the law of the house,” is Bonvicini’s all-female and ruin-
ous archive destined to remain a criminal, aberrant, indeed, impossible
archive? It is without doubt a deviant archive, certainly with respect to
the logic of surveillance and social control that fueled the organization
of memory in modernity but also with respect to the paternal, patrilin-
eal logic that Derrida exposes without actively betraying.41 And yet, are
not the limits of the archive “performative” rather than intrinsic to what
presents itself as its structure?
It is here that questions of legacy, repetition, and death can no longer
be maintained separate from an inquiry into the symbolic system and its
kinship norms. What would entail rethinking the intersection of place and
against house arrest 21
law in relation to the figure of Antigone, whom Derrida himself invokes
when wondering if, vis-à-vis the psychoanalytic legacy, “Anna-Antigone”
has ever spoken in her own name? What role can the daughter whom Freud
once called “my Antigone” play in reenvisioning the rules of inheritance,
if one were really to pull the “nebulous matrix” of the fort/da game by
more than “only one of its strings/sons [fils]”?42 In Freud’s Moses, whose
ingenious writing Derrida patiently reenacts, Yosef Yerushalmi addresses
Freud in the second person, asking, “When your daughter conveyed those
words to the congress in Jerusalem, was she speaking in your name?”43 The
reference is to the 1977 invitation that Anna Freud received by the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem to inaugurate a chair “carrying the name” of her
father (who had died in 1938) and to the written statement she instead
sent in her proxy. Speaking in her father’s name means, for Yerushalmi,
validating his signature, reinscribing a mark that, having inaugurated a
certain archive, should now return to confirm its integrity. However, be-
cause “there is no meta-archive,” because any interpretation (including
Yerushalmi’s) performatively alters that which is being interpreted, the
question of the proper name is eminently one not of authorship but of or-
der, the problem of order persisting even after that of authorship has been
deconstructed.44 Himself a contributor to the Freud corpus, Yerushalmi
cannot help but be deeply invested in such a question. As Derrida points
out, what is at stake is nothing less than the unity and virility of the “we”
that Yerushalmi adopts in speaking of the psychoanalytic archive: “we the
fathers, we the archons.”45 And yet, I must notice, such cohesion finds itself
already internally disrupted by the double identification of Sigmund Freud
with Oedipus and Anna Freud with Antigone. “Your Antigone,” writes
Yerushalmi, but this also means the one who is daughter and sister to you,
her father and brother, both having been born from the same woman.
The death drive without which the archive cannot be thought is most
political at this very juncture because it is here that we encounter the limit
instituting the political as a separate sphere. In contesting the Hegelian
interpretation of Antigone and the distinction it draws between kinship
and the state, Judith Butler emphasizes that Antigone comes to speak
in her own name by adopting the language of the state she opposes, at
once drawing on and disrupting the linguistic boundaries that identify
the domain of “sovereign authority and action” and distinguish the fe-
male from the male, the rules of kinship from the law of the state. Her
claim emerges as one “not of oppositional purity but of the scandalously
impure,” a transgression that is inextricably embedded in what it trans-
gresses—the symbolic as network of norms guaranteeing linguistic intel-
ligibility on the basis of a regulation of desire structured around the incest
22 against house arrest
taboo.46 According to the Hegelian tradition, her complex act (burying
her brother twice and not denying the deed in front of the king) and the
violation of both gender and kinship norms it entails are posited as “nec-
essarily failed and fatal” as well as eminently, emblematically “criminal.”47
“Antigone,” Jacques Lacan writes in the seminar devoted to the question
of ethics, “chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of
the criminal as such,” pursuing her desire beyond the threshold of the
Até—“the limit that human life can only briefly cross,” the border that
the living cannot traverse for long without falling into incommunicability
and, indeed, forfeiting their very right to life.48 Against the grain of this
tradition, Butler asks a question, which itself possesses the strength of a
claim, that will help us rearticulate the relation between the death drive
and the archive and, conjointly, reposition those libidinal configurations
that, like in the case of Destroy She Said, defy the norm. Does Antigone’s
willful death manifest the universal limit of the symbolic or, Butler asks,
“a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that
forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives
can be countenanced as living?”49
Antigone’s death, we know, is not one. Long before Creon condemns
her to be buried alive, Antigone has been living a deathlike life. Under the
weight of Oedipus’s curse (the wish that his children had not been born,
the demand that Antigone be bound to no other man), she has experienced
only a spectral, diminished kind of existence, without love or children.
“Between-life-and-death”: this is the impossible zone where Lacan situ-
ates Antigone as she relentlessly pursues a desire in which incestuous love
fatally coincides with self-destruction.50 Traversing and, even more, for a
time inhabiting this zone, which falls beyond the limits of the symbolic,
cannot but bring about the subject’s “second death,” a demise that super-
sedes the conditions of physical destruction. In her obstinacy, Antigone
makes visible for us “something that might be called the pure and simple
desire of death as such.”51 The impossibility of her desire stands here for
the impossibility of desire as such, for the nothingness that sustains and
orients it. With respect to this desire—like the femme fatale that Žižek will
identify among her progeny and that reappears in many of the films quoted
in Destroy She Said—Antigone “embodies a radical ethical attitude.”52
However, Butler underscores that, caught in the temporality of the
curse, Antigone has indeed inhabited a shadowy zone all her life, even
before her defiant words and actions, so that descending into the tomb
that Creon has arranged for her is but a return to a life that she has
known all along, a familiar and familial one. At once a place of death
and erotic fulfillment, and also a shelter, a dwelling place, the tomb is not
against house arrest 23
only her final destination but also her place of origin. In a circularity that
leaves no escape—the future anterior being here the time of the curse, of
a blinding repetition—her death will have always already been her only
life. And yet, Butler asks, is the annihilation befalling Oedipus’s cursed
progeny that of death as inescapable limit of human life or, rather, that
of a “social death,” the social nonexistence imposed on those who do not
conform to our culture’s symbolic norms? In his work on slavery, Orlando
Patterson proposes the term to define the unlivable life of those who are
deprived of fundamental human rights, and Butler adopts it to identify
other kinds of social nonexistence, for instance, in the case of HIV and
AIDS patients and nonnormative forms of kinship.53 That the price of a
life exceeding symbolic norms is death, that such a life could instead be
conceived as a possibility that is not always already lost, that criminality
asserts the contours of another legality—Antigone points us toward this
other horizon of intelligibility as much as she displays for us the demonic
power of the death drive.
The question of the archive posed by Bonvicini’s work reinserts itself
precisely at this juncture. “Archive fever” (mal d’archive) is Derrida’s name
for the workings of the death drive—an internal erosion, a forgetfulness
that does not oppose memory from the outside but unravels its very tex-
ture. And yet, does the memory of Antigone reveal the vicissitudes of the
death drive in its purest form, or does it persist as the reminder of that
which we have to forget, to foreclose for the archive of Oedipus and the
fathers of psychoanalysis to gather its signs, to establish a domicile? That
a living tomb imposes itself as the “house” of this other archive, as the
only site where the memory of Oedipus’s progeny can be both preserved
and erased (preserved as the reminder of that which needs to be erased),
seems less to affirm the necessities of death than to expose the violence of a
particular sociosymbolic arrangement. If every archive is in principle spec-
tral, ghostly, eroded by the death drive, we must then determine whether
it is inevitable for the death drive to follow the one path that condemns
Antigone to a living death—if indeed we can even argue for the purity of
the death drive as such.54 How can we envision an archive in which the
death drive (the path it takes in a patriarchal order) is diverted, detoured,
given more than one route, so that the house that constitutes its domicile
can be other than a funeral chamber? What would this other domicile—
this other “scene of domiciliation”—look like?
22 against house arrest
taboo.46 According to the Hegelian tradition, her complex act (burying
her brother twice and not denying the deed in front of the king) and the
violation of both gender and kinship norms it entails are posited as “nec-
essarily failed and fatal” as well as eminently, emblematically “criminal.”47
“Antigone,” Jacques Lacan writes in the seminar devoted to the question
of ethics, “chooses to be purely and simply the guardian of the being of
the criminal as such,” pursuing her desire beyond the threshold of the
Até—“the limit that human life can only briefly cross,” the border that
the living cannot traverse for long without falling into incommunicability
and, indeed, forfeiting their very right to life.48 Against the grain of this
tradition, Butler asks a question, which itself possesses the strength of a
claim, that will help us rearticulate the relation between the death drive
and the archive and, conjointly, reposition those libidinal configurations
that, like in the case of Destroy She Said, defy the norm. Does Antigone’s
willful death manifest the universal limit of the symbolic or, Butler asks,
“a limit that requires to be read as that operation of political power that
forecloses what forms of kinship will be intelligible, what kinds of lives
can be countenanced as living?”49
Antigone’s death, we know, is not one. Long before Creon condemns
her to be buried alive, Antigone has been living a deathlike life. Under the
weight of Oedipus’s curse (the wish that his children had not been born,
the demand that Antigone be bound to no other man), she has experienced
only a spectral, diminished kind of existence, without love or children.
“Between-life-and-death”: this is the impossible zone where Lacan situ-
ates Antigone as she relentlessly pursues a desire in which incestuous love
fatally coincides with self-destruction.50 Traversing and, even more, for a
time inhabiting this zone, which falls beyond the limits of the symbolic,
cannot but bring about the subject’s “second death,” a demise that super-
sedes the conditions of physical destruction. In her obstinacy, Antigone
makes visible for us “something that might be called the pure and simple
desire of death as such.”51 The impossibility of her desire stands here for
the impossibility of desire as such, for the nothingness that sustains and
orients it. With respect to this desire—like the femme fatale that Žižek will
identify among her progeny and that reappears in many of the films quoted
in Destroy She Said—Antigone “embodies a radical ethical attitude.”52
However, Butler underscores that, caught in the temporality of the
curse, Antigone has indeed inhabited a shadowy zone all her life, even
before her defiant words and actions, so that descending into the tomb
that Creon has arranged for her is but a return to a life that she has
known all along, a familiar and familial one. At once a place of death
and erotic fulfillment, and also a shelter, a dwelling place, the tomb is not
against house arrest 23
only her final destination but also her place of origin. In a circularity that
leaves no escape—the future anterior being here the time of the curse, of
a blinding repetition—her death will have always already been her only
life. And yet, Butler asks, is the annihilation befalling Oedipus’s cursed
progeny that of death as inescapable limit of human life or, rather, that
of a “social death,” the social nonexistence imposed on those who do not
conform to our culture’s symbolic norms? In his work on slavery, Orlando
Patterson proposes the term to define the unlivable life of those who are
deprived of fundamental human rights, and Butler adopts it to identify
other kinds of social nonexistence, for instance, in the case of HIV and
AIDS patients and nonnormative forms of kinship.53 That the price of a
life exceeding symbolic norms is death, that such a life could instead be
conceived as a possibility that is not always already lost, that criminality
asserts the contours of another legality—Antigone points us toward this
other horizon of intelligibility as much as she displays for us the demonic
power of the death drive.
The question of the archive posed by Bonvicini’s work reinserts itself
precisely at this juncture. “Archive fever” (mal d’archive) is Derrida’s name
for the workings of the death drive—an internal erosion, a forgetfulness
that does not oppose memory from the outside but unravels its very tex-
ture. And yet, does the memory of Antigone reveal the vicissitudes of the
death drive in its purest form, or does it persist as the reminder of that
which we have to forget, to foreclose for the archive of Oedipus and the
fathers of psychoanalysis to gather its signs, to establish a domicile? That
a living tomb imposes itself as the “house” of this other archive, as the
only site where the memory of Oedipus’s progeny can be both preserved
and erased (preserved as the reminder of that which needs to be erased),
seems less to affirm the necessities of death than to expose the violence of a
particular sociosymbolic arrangement. If every archive is in principle spec-
tral, ghostly, eroded by the death drive, we must then determine whether
it is inevitable for the death drive to follow the one path that condemns
Antigone to a living death—if indeed we can even argue for the purity of
the death drive as such.54 How can we envision an archive in which the
death drive (the path it takes in a patriarchal order) is diverted, detoured,
given more than one route, so that the house that constitutes its domicile
can be other than a funeral chamber? What would this other domicile—
this other “scene of domiciliation”—look like?
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter two

Digital Impressions
Writing Memory after Agnès Varda

Phantoms

To the point that certain people can wonder . . . if his daughter ever
came to life (zoˉeˉ), was ever anything other than a phantasm or a
specter, a Gradiva rediviva, a Gradiva-Zoe-Bertgang passing through at
Berggasse 19.
—Jacques Derrida , Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

A Freudian Impression appears as the subtitle of Jacques Derrida’s Ar-

chive Fever, and as much as the word archive does, the word impression
also warrants closer examination. Early in Archive Fever, the impres-
sion already emerges as the site of a certain archival density, the trace
of a process that led Derrida to select “in an instant,” as he says, the
provisional title of his upcoming lecture. The impression is marked by
a proper name and accompanied by a recurring visual representative:
Gradiva, the haunting figure, the “mid-day ghost” of Wilhelm Jensen’s
homonymous story and the subject of the Roman bas-relief that initially
inspired the German writer (Freud would analyze the story in a famous
essay and display a plaster cast of the relief in his Viennese study and,
later, at his London residence. So that Gradiva, too, will have played a
part in Calle’s preposterous exhibition.)1 The impression sustains three
“condensed” or “overprinted” meanings, which Derrida himself lists: the
first is scriptural or typographic, that of “an inscription . . . which leaves a
mark at the surface or in the thickness of a substrate”; the second is quasi-
conceptual, “archive” being a notion rather than a concept and yet hold-
ing “the very possibility or the very future of the concept”; and finally, the
2 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
third is genealogical, pertaining to the impression “left by” Freud through
his formal and informal writings, his macro- and microinterventions in
the developing history of psychoanalysis, and also “left in” him, on his
very body, through circumcision.2 Although less typographical than print-
ing proper (“printing of the typical sort”), circumcision is nonetheless a
“graphic mark” and as such falls under the sway of repetition, becoming
the trace of an inextricably private and public history. In the economy of
Freud’s archive, which here coincides with a certain economy of writing,
the first and third meanings of the word impression not only overlap but
also inform each other, defining an archival field—a field of archival im-
pressions—that is caught between the analysis and the reproduction of
the “archontic” or patriarchal principle of archivization.
In proposing the last ante or higher bid to his internally split Freud-
ian theses on the archive, Derrida asks again if Anna–Antigone has even
spoken in her own name, that is, if it is possible to undo the paternal,
patrilineal logic that Freud exposed but also reenacted.3 This time, though,
he reformulates the question as to invoke a particular specter, indeed, the
specter of an impression whose diverse meanings we have enumerated ear-
lier: “Was [his daughter] ever anything other than a phantasm or a specter,
a Gradiva rediviva?”4 We might be tempted to address this query and the
dissolution of the archontic principle it entails by turning to the endless
movements of “dissemination,” the figure for the new concept of writing
(at once deconstructive and affirmative) toward which Derrida worked
in several texts. After all, “dissemination figures that which cannot be the
father’s” (la dissemination figure ce qui ne revient pas au père), that is,
that which cannot return to, amount to, the inheritance of the father—a
dispersal of the sign affecting signifier and signified alike, “an irreducible
and generative multiplicity” that does not presuppose any originary unity
or coherence.5 And yet, as Gayatri Spivak began to show in her early essay,
“Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” the stakes are too high to
leave Derrida’s own formidable discourse undeconstructed, especially as it
concerns the relation between writing and the “seminal jet” of the writer’s
pen, what Derrida calls elsewhere “the fortuitous resemblance, the purely
simulated common parentage of seme and semen.”6 Because under the
cloak of this seemingly accidental coincidence, along the threads (fils) of
this common semantic lineage, the seminal effects of the patriarchal logic
threaten to spread and take in that which dissemination was supposed to
release—which is to say, Derrida’s unraveling of Freud’s corpus can reach
as far as dissemination does but not reach further. (This limit, of course,
cannot be fixed or, for that matter, definitely surpassed.)
It is in response to dissemination as a strategy for thinking another
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 3
concept of the archive that I turn to Agnès Varda’s recent audiovisual
works, most prominently her digital film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The
Gleaners and I, France, 2000). Beyond the distinction of content and form,
theme and syntax, “gleaning” figures there as the gathering of what is left
behind (food, objects, images), unaccounted for, stepped over, or sent to the
trash heap—at once what Varda films and what she does by filming. Varda
opens her film by posing the question of definition—“G as is gleaning,”
“to glean is to gather after the harvest,” “a gleaner is one who gleans,”
she says, while turning the pages of the Larousse dictionary and showing
us the black-and-white reproductions of Jules Breton’s and Jean-François
Millet’s paintings. As the film progresses, she will take us on a journey that
crosses the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the human
body and the landscape, and the ephemeral and the long lasting. Through
“gleaning,” I will maintain, Varda provides us with a heterodox mode of
archiving and, concurrently, a use of digital technology that counters the
patriarchal logic still lingering in the thought of dissemination. Indeed,
her intervention opens up the possibility of elaborating a notion of “im-
pression” that, starting with (but not being confined to) the capabilities
of the digital, redefines and expands our concept of the archive as well
as our very definition of writing. In Varda’s films, the impression ceases
to be an inscription left by a writing implement (stylus) onto a writing
surface, emerging instead as a folding of the visible onto itself, a turning
inside out or rolling back that occurs within the texture of perception; at
the same time, the dispersal of meanings and forms that gleaning entails
(what we might be tempted to call dissemination) is reconfigured as an
operation that unfolds in and through the fabric of a self-differing visible,
its creases and knots, pleats and lips.
This shift in perspective has several implications. Impression as folding
registers the necessity for a concept of writing that draws on, instead of
leaving behind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology. The latter
constitutes a radical interrogation of the visible—an affirmation of its di-
vergence—rather than yet another instantiation of the metaphysics of pres-
ence. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s description of the “flesh”—the internally
differentiated mass of the visible—as “folding back, invagination, or pad-
ding” will allow us to envision writing beyond the language of dissemina-
tion.7 “Invagination” marks here not a retreat into a gendered or feminist
essentialism but rather the opening to a principle of always incomplete
differentiation, the delineation of a field in which metaphoric alliances can
be turned inside out, played with, and realigned, only for more interfer-
ences to occur. In my reading of Varda, invagination will thus emerge not
only as a mode of textual construction, a style of cinematography and
2 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
third is genealogical, pertaining to the impression “left by” Freud through
his formal and informal writings, his macro- and microinterventions in
the developing history of psychoanalysis, and also “left in” him, on his
very body, through circumcision.2 Although less typographical than print-
ing proper (“printing of the typical sort”), circumcision is nonetheless a
“graphic mark” and as such falls under the sway of repetition, becoming
the trace of an inextricably private and public history. In the economy of
Freud’s archive, which here coincides with a certain economy of writing,
the first and third meanings of the word impression not only overlap but
also inform each other, defining an archival field—a field of archival im-
pressions—that is caught between the analysis and the reproduction of
the “archontic” or patriarchal principle of archivization.
In proposing the last ante or higher bid to his internally split Freud-
ian theses on the archive, Derrida asks again if Anna–Antigone has even
spoken in her own name, that is, if it is possible to undo the paternal,
patrilineal logic that Freud exposed but also reenacted.3 This time, though,
he reformulates the question as to invoke a particular specter, indeed, the
specter of an impression whose diverse meanings we have enumerated ear-
lier: “Was [his daughter] ever anything other than a phantasm or a specter,
a Gradiva rediviva?”4 We might be tempted to address this query and the
dissolution of the archontic principle it entails by turning to the endless
movements of “dissemination,” the figure for the new concept of writing
(at once deconstructive and affirmative) toward which Derrida worked
in several texts. After all, “dissemination figures that which cannot be the
father’s” (la dissemination figure ce qui ne revient pas au père), that is,
that which cannot return to, amount to, the inheritance of the father—a
dispersal of the sign affecting signifier and signified alike, “an irreducible
and generative multiplicity” that does not presuppose any originary unity
or coherence.5 And yet, as Gayatri Spivak began to show in her early essay,
“Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,” the stakes are too high to
leave Derrida’s own formidable discourse undeconstructed, especially as it
concerns the relation between writing and the “seminal jet” of the writer’s
pen, what Derrida calls elsewhere “the fortuitous resemblance, the purely
simulated common parentage of seme and semen.”6 Because under the
cloak of this seemingly accidental coincidence, along the threads (fils) of
this common semantic lineage, the seminal effects of the patriarchal logic
threaten to spread and take in that which dissemination was supposed to
release—which is to say, Derrida’s unraveling of Freud’s corpus can reach
as far as dissemination does but not reach further. (This limit, of course,
cannot be fixed or, for that matter, definitely surpassed.)
It is in response to dissemination as a strategy for thinking another
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 3
concept of the archive that I turn to Agnès Varda’s recent audiovisual
works, most prominently her digital film Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The
Gleaners and I, France, 2000). Beyond the distinction of content and form,
theme and syntax, “gleaning” figures there as the gathering of what is left
behind (food, objects, images), unaccounted for, stepped over, or sent to the
trash heap—at once what Varda films and what she does by filming. Varda
opens her film by posing the question of definition—“G as is gleaning,”
“to glean is to gather after the harvest,” “a gleaner is one who gleans,”
she says, while turning the pages of the Larousse dictionary and showing
us the black-and-white reproductions of Jules Breton’s and Jean-François
Millet’s paintings. As the film progresses, she will take us on a journey that
crosses the boundaries between the personal and the collective, the human
body and the landscape, and the ephemeral and the long lasting. Through
“gleaning,” I will maintain, Varda provides us with a heterodox mode of
archiving and, concurrently, a use of digital technology that counters the
patriarchal logic still lingering in the thought of dissemination. Indeed,
her intervention opens up the possibility of elaborating a notion of “im-
pression” that, starting with (but not being confined to) the capabilities
of the digital, redefines and expands our concept of the archive as well
as our very definition of writing. In Varda’s films, the impression ceases
to be an inscription left by a writing implement (stylus) onto a writing
surface, emerging instead as a folding of the visible onto itself, a turning
inside out or rolling back that occurs within the texture of perception; at
the same time, the dispersal of meanings and forms that gleaning entails
(what we might be tempted to call dissemination) is reconfigured as an
operation that unfolds in and through the fabric of a self-differing visible,
its creases and knots, pleats and lips.
This shift in perspective has several implications. Impression as folding
registers the necessity for a concept of writing that draws on, instead of
leaving behind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenology. The latter
constitutes a radical interrogation of the visible—an affirmation of its di-
vergence—rather than yet another instantiation of the metaphysics of pres-
ence. Indeed, Merleau-Ponty’s description of the “flesh”—the internally
differentiated mass of the visible—as “folding back, invagination, or pad-
ding” will allow us to envision writing beyond the language of dissemina-
tion.7 “Invagination” marks here not a retreat into a gendered or feminist
essentialism but rather the opening to a principle of always incomplete
differentiation, the delineation of a field in which metaphoric alliances can
be turned inside out, played with, and realigned, only for more interfer-
ences to occur. In my reading of Varda, invagination will thus emerge not
only as a mode of textual construction, a style of cinematography and
4 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
montage that incessantly folds its materials upon themselves, but also as
the figure for a concept of writing that cannot be thought of independently
of perception. Intermittent and fluctuating, inseparable from the invisible
that constitutes its other side, the visible is not simply another medium in
which a certain differential structure can be traced—rather, it provides us
with the principle for thinking an expanded grammatology.8
Finally, impression as folding folds the Freudian corpus onto itself, be-
coming the impression left on Freud by those figures psychoanalysis has
relegated to marginal or inertly official positions: Antigone, Oedipus’s
daughter and companion in exile, who would later bury her brother and
claim the right to commemorate his death against the injunction of the
king; and Anna Freud, who acted as her father’s nurse and secretary and
whose theoretical writings reinforced the more conservative aspects of
Freud’s thought, but who would also live and work with psychoanalyst
Dorothy Burlingham for the rest of her life. I will then shift the tense of
Derrida’s question and ask, will Antigone–Anna Freud have ever spoken in
her own name? In the archive’s futural past, the term Freudian might come
to name less a certain line of inheritance (no matter how fractured), a cer-
tain enduring impression, than a mesh of self-expropriating, self-enfolding
transmissions. What Amy Villarejo has called “the lesbian impression” of
Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema becomes here the figure for an indefinite series
of polymorphous appropriations, the marker of a theory that refuses the
domestication of sexuality as well as the patriarchal economization of
memory.9 If the archive still privileges the lineage that runs from Oedipus
to Freud, relegating Antigone–Anna Freud to its margins, I will claim that
the archives of the so-called digital age can help us imagine an unruly,
porous, incoherent legacy—a rediscovery as much as a creation of our
psychoanalytic and cinematic past.
“To Film with One Hand My Other Hand”: Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse
Each gesture is an event—one might even say, a drama—in itself. . . . the
gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.
—Walter Benjamin , “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary
  of His Death,” Illuminations
We must be several in order to write, even to perceive.
—Jacques Derrida , “Freud and the Scene of Writing,”
  Writing and Difference
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 5
At the forefront of audiovisual experimentation since the early 1960s,
Agnès Varda embraced the digital camcorder in the late 1990s, producing
the film essay The Gleaners and I in 2000 and, shortly afterward, the com-
panion piece Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse . . . deux ans après (The Glean-
ers and I: Two Years Later, France, 2002). A superb example of cinematic
writing, these works offer us the mise-en-scène of a marginal and yet dif-
fuse practice—“gleaning,” which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dictionary
defines as the gathering of “grain or other produce left by reapers” as well
as of “information or material bit by bit.” The reasons for gleaning are as
diverse as its objects: gleaners glean for necessity, ethical stance, pleasure.
They glean unharvested wheat, odd-shaped fruit, and vegetables; expired
food; discarded appliances; and abandoned toys. A deft documentarist,
Varda locates and engages in conversation with gleaners of all kinds as
they wander the countryside, the seashore, and the city, but “in times past,”
her voice-over tells us, “only women gleaned,” while a montage sequence
shows us female gleaners from paintings by Breton and Millet, black-and-
white Larousse pictures, and a turn-of-the-century film clip. Gleaning, we
will soon realize, is not only what she documents but also what she per-
forms as she gathers images from the contemporary world and the history
of painting, printmaking, and cinema, tracing constellations that at once
display and repeat the humble yet deft gesture of the glaneuse. This is how
she remembers—her own life, the lives of those whom she has loved and
with whom she has worked, and the history of cinema, all being woven
together in a memory that presents no clear-cut boundaries nor orderly
lines of transmission. Can we look at digital gleaning as a practice and a
theory of the margins—a mode of cultural preservation at odds with the
archive as an “archic, in truth patriarchic” ordering of space and time?
The promise of a different genealogy, indeed, of a nonlinear, disorderly
lineage? If gleaning becomes the new heterodox figure for archiving in
the digital age, what impression will Varda have left on the way in which
we not only write film history but also think of cinematic writing, what
Varda herself once called cinécriture?10
Varda’s filmmaking, I claim, articulates a heterodox image archive not
only through choice of topic but also by virtue of compositional patterns
and an editing style that unravel the distinction between subject and ob-
ject—of recording, classification, and interpretation. By interlacing images
as if they belonged to a texture with neither center nor definite boundar-
ies, The Gleaners and I engenders a dispersal of positions that persists
despite the predominance of an explicit analogical thread. Indeed, we
will see, there is no stable archival object or archiving subject that we
can hold, or by which we can be held, in a time that is simply present or
4 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
montage that incessantly folds its materials upon themselves, but also as
the figure for a concept of writing that cannot be thought of independently
of perception. Intermittent and fluctuating, inseparable from the invisible
that constitutes its other side, the visible is not simply another medium in
which a certain differential structure can be traced—rather, it provides us
with the principle for thinking an expanded grammatology.8
Finally, impression as folding folds the Freudian corpus onto itself, be-
coming the impression left on Freud by those figures psychoanalysis has
relegated to marginal or inertly official positions: Antigone, Oedipus’s
daughter and companion in exile, who would later bury her brother and
claim the right to commemorate his death against the injunction of the
king; and Anna Freud, who acted as her father’s nurse and secretary and
whose theoretical writings reinforced the more conservative aspects of
Freud’s thought, but who would also live and work with psychoanalyst
Dorothy Burlingham for the rest of her life. I will then shift the tense of
Derrida’s question and ask, will Antigone–Anna Freud have ever spoken in
her own name? In the archive’s futural past, the term Freudian might come
to name less a certain line of inheritance (no matter how fractured), a cer-
tain enduring impression, than a mesh of self-expropriating, self-enfolding
transmissions. What Amy Villarejo has called “the lesbian impression” of
Ulrike Ottinger’s cinema becomes here the figure for an indefinite series
of polymorphous appropriations, the marker of a theory that refuses the
domestication of sexuality as well as the patriarchal economization of
memory.9 If the archive still privileges the lineage that runs from Oedipus
to Freud, relegating Antigone–Anna Freud to its margins, I will claim that
the archives of the so-called digital age can help us imagine an unruly,
porous, incoherent legacy—a rediscovery as much as a creation of our
psychoanalytic and cinematic past.
“To Film with One Hand My Other Hand”: Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la
glaneuse
Each gesture is an event—one might even say, a drama—in itself. . . . the
gesture remains the decisive thing, the center of the event.
—Walter Benjamin , “Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary
  of His Death,” Illuminations
We must be several in order to write, even to perceive.
—Jacques Derrida , “Freud and the Scene of Writing,”
  Writing and Difference
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 5
At the forefront of audiovisual experimentation since the early 1960s,
Agnès Varda embraced the digital camcorder in the late 1990s, producing
the film essay The Gleaners and I in 2000 and, shortly afterward, the com-
panion piece Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse . . . deux ans après (The Glean-
ers and I: Two Years Later, France, 2002). A superb example of cinematic
writing, these works offer us the mise-en-scène of a marginal and yet dif-
fuse practice—“gleaning,” which Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate dictionary
defines as the gathering of “grain or other produce left by reapers” as well
as of “information or material bit by bit.” The reasons for gleaning are as
diverse as its objects: gleaners glean for necessity, ethical stance, pleasure.
They glean unharvested wheat, odd-shaped fruit, and vegetables; expired
food; discarded appliances; and abandoned toys. A deft documentarist,
Varda locates and engages in conversation with gleaners of all kinds as
they wander the countryside, the seashore, and the city, but “in times past,”
her voice-over tells us, “only women gleaned,” while a montage sequence
shows us female gleaners from paintings by Breton and Millet, black-and-
white Larousse pictures, and a turn-of-the-century film clip. Gleaning, we
will soon realize, is not only what she documents but also what she per-
forms as she gathers images from the contemporary world and the history
of painting, printmaking, and cinema, tracing constellations that at once
display and repeat the humble yet deft gesture of the glaneuse. This is how
she remembers—her own life, the lives of those whom she has loved and
with whom she has worked, and the history of cinema, all being woven
together in a memory that presents no clear-cut boundaries nor orderly
lines of transmission. Can we look at digital gleaning as a practice and a
theory of the margins—a mode of cultural preservation at odds with the
archive as an “archic, in truth patriarchic” ordering of space and time?
The promise of a different genealogy, indeed, of a nonlinear, disorderly
lineage? If gleaning becomes the new heterodox figure for archiving in
the digital age, what impression will Varda have left on the way in which
we not only write film history but also think of cinematic writing, what
Varda herself once called cinécriture?10
Varda’s filmmaking, I claim, articulates a heterodox image archive not
only through choice of topic but also by virtue of compositional patterns
and an editing style that unravel the distinction between subject and ob-
ject—of recording, classification, and interpretation. By interlacing images
as if they belonged to a texture with neither center nor definite boundar-
ies, The Gleaners and I engenders a dispersal of positions that persists
despite the predominance of an explicit analogical thread. Indeed, we
will see, there is no stable archival object or archiving subject that we
can hold, or by which we can be held, in a time that is simply present or

Figure 7. The Larousse dictionary showing Jean-François Millet’s Les
glaneuses in Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and
I, France, 2000).
Figure 8. A woman in the French countryside telling her story to Varda’s
camera in The Gleaners and I.
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 7
past. The initial montage sequence already reveals, or rather enacts, this
irreducible entanglement of identities and temporalities. While offering a
first audiovisual definition of gleaning, it comprises shots that constantly
shift between media (painting, printmaking, photography, and film) and
historical periods (the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and
the turn of the millennium to the twenty-first century). A crucial transi-
tion occurs when a close-up of the women portrayed in Millet’s painting,
which Varda tracks down at the Musée d’Orsay, turns into the close-up of
an older woman standing at the edge of a plowed field. Speaking directly
to the camera, she says, “Gleaning, that’s the old way . . . my mother said,
‘Pick up everything so nothing gets wasted.’” In the following shots, her
body fully visible against the bare landscape, she proceeds to pick up a few
ears of wheat, gathering them in a large apron. She does so for the camera
slowly and with a strange mix of ease and hesitation—her gleaning is a
performance of gleaning for Varda’s camera and on Varda’s behalf, and we
are all aware of this. But her performance is doing something more—it is
repeating not only what has happened an endless number of times (to her
and other women through the centuries) but also what is now happening
in front of her. In fact, she is mirroring what Varda herself is doing, that
“digital gleaning” that will soon become the occasion for a tableau and
that is itself nothing but a repetition of the peasant’s gesture.
What interests me, together with the delineation of a gesture that has
no original, that constitutes and undoes its own original through repeti-
tion, is the temporality of the encounter between the archived and the
archiving, the impossibility of disentangling the one from the other and
assigning them a fixed position in time. To increase the confusion, a shot
of our contemporary gleaner is followed by a brief clip of found foot-
age, probably from the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth,
showing several women working in a wheat field. Wearing long dresses,
their heads covered with white caps, like in a Millet painting, they are
performing the same activity, though at a much more sustained pace and
without clear signs of self-awareness. The flickering of the film and its
dark diurnal light suggest a mixture of remoteness and immediacy—we
would like to see more, but Varda, whether for lack of footage or compo-
sitional restraint, cuts to the image of other female gleaners, again not in
the present but in the art-historical past. Through an operation of mon-
tage that folds its materials upon themselves, interweaving them rather
than proceeding by accumulation or dialectical tension, what emerges is
a process of mutual portraiture. Like in Bonvicini’s video installation, the
editing traces the contours of a figure that exists only in between times, a
self-differentiating, heterogeneous figure that archives its own perpetual

Figure 7. The Larousse dictionary showing Jean-François Millet’s Les
glaneuses in Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (The Gleaners and
I, France, 2000).
Figure 8. A woman in the French countryside telling her story to Varda’s
camera in The Gleaners and I.
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 7
past. The initial montage sequence already reveals, or rather enacts, this
irreducible entanglement of identities and temporalities. While offering a
first audiovisual definition of gleaning, it comprises shots that constantly
shift between media (painting, printmaking, photography, and film) and
historical periods (the nineteenth century, the early twentieth century, and
the turn of the millennium to the twenty-first century). A crucial transi-
tion occurs when a close-up of the women portrayed in Millet’s painting,
which Varda tracks down at the Musée d’Orsay, turns into the close-up of
an older woman standing at the edge of a plowed field. Speaking directly
to the camera, she says, “Gleaning, that’s the old way . . . my mother said,
‘Pick up everything so nothing gets wasted.’” In the following shots, her
body fully visible against the bare landscape, she proceeds to pick up a few
ears of wheat, gathering them in a large apron. She does so for the camera
slowly and with a strange mix of ease and hesitation—her gleaning is a
performance of gleaning for Varda’s camera and on Varda’s behalf, and we
are all aware of this. But her performance is doing something more—it is
repeating not only what has happened an endless number of times (to her
and other women through the centuries) but also what is now happening
in front of her. In fact, she is mirroring what Varda herself is doing, that
“digital gleaning” that will soon become the occasion for a tableau and
that is itself nothing but a repetition of the peasant’s gesture.
What interests me, together with the delineation of a gesture that has
no original, that constitutes and undoes its own original through repeti-
tion, is the temporality of the encounter between the archived and the
archiving, the impossibility of disentangling the one from the other and
assigning them a fixed position in time. To increase the confusion, a shot
of our contemporary gleaner is followed by a brief clip of found foot-
age, probably from the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth,
showing several women working in a wheat field. Wearing long dresses,
their heads covered with white caps, like in a Millet painting, they are
performing the same activity, though at a much more sustained pace and
without clear signs of self-awareness. The flickering of the film and its
dark diurnal light suggest a mixture of remoteness and immediacy—we
would like to see more, but Varda, whether for lack of footage or compo-
sitional restraint, cuts to the image of other female gleaners, again not in
the present but in the art-historical past. Through an operation of mon-
tage that folds its materials upon themselves, interweaving them rather
than proceeding by accumulation or dialectical tension, what emerges is
a process of mutual portraiture. Like in Bonvicini’s video installation, the
editing traces the contours of a figure that exists only in between times, a
self-differentiating, heterogeneous figure that archives its own perpetual
8 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
Figure 9. An early cinema film clip in The Gleaners and I.
transformations. Here, however, the sense of doom that still pervades the
perceptual and libidinal exchange between Bonvicini’s women has lifted
or, rather, undergone a mutation. After the early cinema detour, we return
to contemporary France and see our woman pointing at a modest house,
right next to the wheat field: “I was born in that farmhouse and I will die
there too,” she says almost matter-of-factly. “But not quite yet!” responds
Varda. Like her model or accomplice gleaner, Varda, too, has death on her
mind, but she is determined not to quit gleaning. Not quite yet.
Later, a sequence shot in Varda’s home, but enveloped by—and envelop-
ing—shots of the rural landscape, further reveals the aesthetic and political
complexity of her image archive. Varda has just returned from Japan and is
opening her suitcase, retrieving all sorts of objects, from ornamental boxes
to postcards and print fabrics. This is how she remembers, her voice says,
by gleaning souvenirs and bringing them back to her house, which, through
the years, despite its leaky ceiling and strange mold spots, has become a
small archival depository. Many postcards replicate images that we have
come to identify as typically Japanese: sushi, Mount Fuji, Hokusai’s wave,
Kabuki masks, the white Maneki Neko cat, and so on. There are also a
catalog bearing her name on the front cover and postal stamps reproducing
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 9
Figure 10. Another black-and-white image of gleaners from the history of paint-
ing in The Gleaners and I.
her face—quite likely she traveled to Japan on the occasion of a film ret-
rospective, and the wealth of materials, however briefly and unassumingly
exhibited, is a testament to her prestige. She goes through the items at a
fast pace but then starts lingering on something that, to her amazement, she
found in a Tokyo department store: beautifully detailed, lustrous postcards
showing Rembrandt’s portraits of himself and his wife Saskia. We see her
hands taking the postcards out of a white envelope and delicately pass-
ing them in review. “Saskia, up close,” we hear over the details of Saskia’s
embroidered collar. “And then my hand up close.” Now she is holding the
camera with one hand, while the other is floating above the Rembrandt
images, almost caressing them. “I mean this is my project: to film with one
hand my other hand. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary.
I feel as if I am an animal, worse, I am an animal I don’t know. And here’s
Rembrandt’s self-portrait, but it’s just the same in fact, always a self-por-
trait.” The proximity of the camera draws us into the creases and dark
spots of her aging hand, transforming its surface into an alien landscape.
Self-portrait, autobiography, memoir: Varda’s extraordinary shots pres-
ent us with a philosophical meditation that unfolds not despite but through
8 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
Figure 9. An early cinema film clip in The Gleaners and I.
transformations. Here, however, the sense of doom that still pervades the
perceptual and libidinal exchange between Bonvicini’s women has lifted
or, rather, undergone a mutation. After the early cinema detour, we return
to contemporary France and see our woman pointing at a modest house,
right next to the wheat field: “I was born in that farmhouse and I will die
there too,” she says almost matter-of-factly. “But not quite yet!” responds
Varda. Like her model or accomplice gleaner, Varda, too, has death on her
mind, but she is determined not to quit gleaning. Not quite yet.
Later, a sequence shot in Varda’s home, but enveloped by—and envelop-
ing—shots of the rural landscape, further reveals the aesthetic and political
complexity of her image archive. Varda has just returned from Japan and is
opening her suitcase, retrieving all sorts of objects, from ornamental boxes
to postcards and print fabrics. This is how she remembers, her voice says,
by gleaning souvenirs and bringing them back to her house, which, through
the years, despite its leaky ceiling and strange mold spots, has become a
small archival depository. Many postcards replicate images that we have
come to identify as typically Japanese: sushi, Mount Fuji, Hokusai’s wave,
Kabuki masks, the white Maneki Neko cat, and so on. There are also a
catalog bearing her name on the front cover and postal stamps reproducing
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 9
Figure 10. Another black-and-white image of gleaners from the history of paint-
ing in The Gleaners and I.
her face—quite likely she traveled to Japan on the occasion of a film ret-
rospective, and the wealth of materials, however briefly and unassumingly
exhibited, is a testament to her prestige. She goes through the items at a
fast pace but then starts lingering on something that, to her amazement, she
found in a Tokyo department store: beautifully detailed, lustrous postcards
showing Rembrandt’s portraits of himself and his wife Saskia. We see her
hands taking the postcards out of a white envelope and delicately pass-
ing them in review. “Saskia, up close,” we hear over the details of Saskia’s
embroidered collar. “And then my hand up close.” Now she is holding the
camera with one hand, while the other is floating above the Rembrandt
images, almost caressing them. “I mean this is my project: to film with one
hand my other hand. To enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary.
I feel as if I am an animal, worse, I am an animal I don’t know. And here’s
Rembrandt’s self-portrait, but it’s just the same in fact, always a self-por-
trait.” The proximity of the camera draws us into the creases and dark
spots of her aging hand, transforming its surface into an alien landscape.
Self-portrait, autobiography, memoir: Varda’s extraordinary shots pres-
ent us with a philosophical meditation that unfolds not despite but through
10 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
Figure 11. A detail of Millet’s Les glaneuses (1857; in color this time) in The
Gleaners and I.
the body, challenging a tradition of thought as old and self-assured as that
of Western metaphysics. If René Descartes, to guarantee the autonomy and
self-presence of the thinking subject, had to separate the “I am” from its
own living body, which was then reduced to a corpse or a machine, here
Varda reverses this movement of thought to the point of bringing animal-
ity, the mystery of the animal(s), into her reflection on the self.11 These
hands through which she (audiovisually) writes—and through which she
is written, committed to memory, archived—do not exist in the immediacy
of the present, nor in a state of solipsism, but are invisibly connected to
the other hands we see or glimpse in the film. Indeed, they form the fig-
ure of an irreducible plurality. Moreover, to say that they stand as both
object and subject of portraiture would be to understate or even miss the
extent to which Varda’s cinécriture undermines the Cartesian division of
mind and body.12 As the right hand touches the left one by virtue of the
camera, its look coming into being as “palpation at a distance,” and the
left hand projects its own eerie landscape onto the right one, we witness
the movement of a folding or reversibility that, even within the shot, un-
does the distinction between subject and object—of memory, writing, ar-
chiving.13 Archiving-as-gleaning is that which occurs in between hands,
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 11
not the activity of the one on the other or the passivity of the other toward
the one. Finally, this zone in between hands is also a zone in between the
living and the dead, the ghostly zone of writing (archiving) and the death
drive. The body that is at once filming and being filmed has emerged as
the bearer of a temporality already split in the anticipation of death. “My
hands,” Varda says the first time she is filming one hand with the other,
“keep telling me that the end is near.”
Carefully intercut with shots of rural France, the Rembrandt sequence
affirms gleaning as a mode of remembrance that mobilizes often improb-
able (even perishable) objects such as heart-shaped potatoes and a Lu-
cite clock with no hands. These objects find in Varda’s old house not a
monumental, official residence—the “fortress” of Alain Resnais’s Toute
la mémoire du monde (All the Memory of the World, France, 1956), the
French National Library, or Freud’s house–museum—but a fragile and
yet enduring shelter, a domicile with porous walls, rhizomatically linked
to the other odd depositories she encounters during her travels.14 A few
examples: the studio where a self-defined painter-and-retriever arranges
the objects he salvages during his nocturnal expeditions; the totem tow-
ers built by a retired brick mason from Russia using scraps of all kinds
but most prominently dolls; the studio where artist Louis Pons composes
by virtue of chance, turning “useless things” into “sentences”; and most
remarkably, the cabin filled with spices and odd objects where Charles,
an older Vietnamese man, cooks the discarded and yet still edible food
that Salomon, a younger African man, recovers in the city’s back alleys.
This is how they describe each other: “Mr. Charles, he’s a friend, more
than a friend; a protector, a godfather, he’s everything to me,” says Salo-
mon. And Charles, in return: “Salomon is a little bit like a migrating bird;
he arrives, he moves, he disappears; and then he comes back again, and
then leaves.” For Varda and her interlocutors, gleaning performs its own
effacement through detours that allow differing lives to delineate and af-
firm themselves as lives in their own right, even if in conflict with officially
sanctioned forms of kinship and community—as in the case of Alain, who
resides in the immigrant shelter where he volunteers as a literacy instructor
and sustains himself by selling papers in front of train stations and eat-
ing vitamin-rich vegetables cast off from urban markets. With respect to
the singularity both of these lives and of her own, Varda’s house is not a
death chamber but the place in which she assumes her mortality, making
visible a time that cannot be measured or translated into discreet units.
This time, unlike Antigone’s, does not obey the temporality of a curse that
has always already been happening, secreting instead an excess of life ca-
pable of transforming the relation between past and future. Here Antigone
10 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
Figure 11. A detail of Millet’s Les glaneuses (1857; in color this time) in The
Gleaners and I.
the body, challenging a tradition of thought as old and self-assured as that
of Western metaphysics. If René Descartes, to guarantee the autonomy and
self-presence of the thinking subject, had to separate the “I am” from its
own living body, which was then reduced to a corpse or a machine, here
Varda reverses this movement of thought to the point of bringing animal-
ity, the mystery of the animal(s), into her reflection on the self.11 These
hands through which she (audiovisually) writes—and through which she
is written, committed to memory, archived—do not exist in the immediacy
of the present, nor in a state of solipsism, but are invisibly connected to
the other hands we see or glimpse in the film. Indeed, they form the fig-
ure of an irreducible plurality. Moreover, to say that they stand as both
object and subject of portraiture would be to understate or even miss the
extent to which Varda’s cinécriture undermines the Cartesian division of
mind and body.12 As the right hand touches the left one by virtue of the
camera, its look coming into being as “palpation at a distance,” and the
left hand projects its own eerie landscape onto the right one, we witness
the movement of a folding or reversibility that, even within the shot, un-
does the distinction between subject and object—of memory, writing, ar-
chiving.13 Archiving-as-gleaning is that which occurs in between hands,
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 11
not the activity of the one on the other or the passivity of the other toward
the one. Finally, this zone in between hands is also a zone in between the
living and the dead, the ghostly zone of writing (archiving) and the death
drive. The body that is at once filming and being filmed has emerged as
the bearer of a temporality already split in the anticipation of death. “My
hands,” Varda says the first time she is filming one hand with the other,
“keep telling me that the end is near.”
Carefully intercut with shots of rural France, the Rembrandt sequence
affirms gleaning as a mode of remembrance that mobilizes often improb-
able (even perishable) objects such as heart-shaped potatoes and a Lu-
cite clock with no hands. These objects find in Varda’s old house not a
monumental, official residence—the “fortress” of Alain Resnais’s Toute
la mémoire du monde (All the Memory of the World, France, 1956), the
French National Library, or Freud’s house–museum—but a fragile and
yet enduring shelter, a domicile with porous walls, rhizomatically linked
to the other odd depositories she encounters during her travels.14 A few
examples: the studio where a self-defined painter-and-retriever arranges
the objects he salvages during his nocturnal expeditions; the totem tow-
ers built by a retired brick mason from Russia using scraps of all kinds
but most prominently dolls; the studio where artist Louis Pons composes
by virtue of chance, turning “useless things” into “sentences”; and most
remarkably, the cabin filled with spices and odd objects where Charles,
an older Vietnamese man, cooks the discarded and yet still edible food
that Salomon, a younger African man, recovers in the city’s back alleys.
This is how they describe each other: “Mr. Charles, he’s a friend, more
than a friend; a protector, a godfather, he’s everything to me,” says Salo-
mon. And Charles, in return: “Salomon is a little bit like a migrating bird;
he arrives, he moves, he disappears; and then he comes back again, and
then leaves.” For Varda and her interlocutors, gleaning performs its own
effacement through detours that allow differing lives to delineate and af-
firm themselves as lives in their own right, even if in conflict with officially
sanctioned forms of kinship and community—as in the case of Alain, who
resides in the immigrant shelter where he volunteers as a literacy instructor
and sustains himself by selling papers in front of train stations and eat-
ing vitamin-rich vegetables cast off from urban markets. With respect to
the singularity both of these lives and of her own, Varda’s house is not a
death chamber but the place in which she assumes her mortality, making
visible a time that cannot be measured or translated into discreet units.
This time, unlike Antigone’s, does not obey the temporality of a curse that
has always already been happening, secreting instead an excess of life ca-
pable of transforming the relation between past and future. Here Antigone
12 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
Figure 12. Agnès Varda miming Jules Breton’s famous gleaner, La Glaneuse (1877),
in The Gleaners and I.
can be glimpsed as a figure whose destiny, under different sociosymbolic
conditions, can be imagined as other than what it was.
Beyond the Caméra-Stylo
I mean this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand. To
enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel as if I am an
animal, worse, I am an animal I don’t know.
—Agnès Varda
The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees
and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and
recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking.
—Maurice Merleau-Pont y , “Eye and Mind”
Early in The Gleaners and I, a brief sequence overtly confirms Varda as
the glaneuse of the title, the one who collects images that habitually have
no place in our culture’s official repositories (or when they do, it is in the
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 13
Figure 13. Varda trading Breton’s wheat ears for her SONY digital camera in
The Gleaners and I.
context of paradigmatic arrangements or of configurations that are said
to “draw on” the archive rather than constituting it). She has traveled to
Arras to see Breton’s famous painting La Glaneuse (1859), the portrait
of a lone woman standing in the fields at the end of the day, almost still,
holding a sheaf of wheat ears on her shoulder. We have already glimpsed
a black-and-white Larousse reproduction of this piece, but here we are
confronted with its subdued majesty, the richness of the earth colors, and
the awe-inspiring composure of the figure. In the museum, Varda has po-
sitioned herself next to the painting, humorously and solemnly miming
the gleaner’s pose: a bunch of wheat ears on her shoulder, she is standing
against a floral, earth-colored background (a curtain that two men are
holding in place for the occasion) in such a way that her image doubles
Breton’s figure. The proportions are of course disorienting, Varda’s head
barely reaching the knees of the solitary glaneuse. Caught in suspended
motion, with a curious and vaguely enigmatic smile, she is looking straight
at the camera. Will the tableau come back to life? Will this other Grad-
iva, who once trained to become a museum curator, reanimate herself
by turning into her own dispersed and utterly unoriginal model? Indeed,
Varda drops the ears of wheat on the floor and, lifting a digital camera,
12 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
Figure 12. Agnès Varda miming Jules Breton’s famous gleaner, La Glaneuse (1877),
in The Gleaners and I.
can be glimpsed as a figure whose destiny, under different sociosymbolic
conditions, can be imagined as other than what it was.
Beyond the Caméra-Stylo
I mean this is my project: to film with one hand my other hand. To
enter into the horror of it. I find it extraordinary. I feel as if I am an
animal, worse, I am an animal I don’t know.
—Agnès Varda
The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees
and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and
recognize, in what it sees, the “other side” of its power of looking.
—Maurice Merleau-Pont y , “Eye and Mind”
Early in The Gleaners and I, a brief sequence overtly confirms Varda as
the glaneuse of the title, the one who collects images that habitually have
no place in our culture’s official repositories (or when they do, it is in the
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 13
Figure 13. Varda trading Breton’s wheat ears for her SONY digital camera in
The Gleaners and I.
context of paradigmatic arrangements or of configurations that are said
to “draw on” the archive rather than constituting it). She has traveled to
Arras to see Breton’s famous painting La Glaneuse (1859), the portrait
of a lone woman standing in the fields at the end of the day, almost still,
holding a sheaf of wheat ears on her shoulder. We have already glimpsed
a black-and-white Larousse reproduction of this piece, but here we are
confronted with its subdued majesty, the richness of the earth colors, and
the awe-inspiring composure of the figure. In the museum, Varda has po-
sitioned herself next to the painting, humorously and solemnly miming
the gleaner’s pose: a bunch of wheat ears on her shoulder, she is standing
against a floral, earth-colored background (a curtain that two men are
holding in place for the occasion) in such a way that her image doubles
Breton’s figure. The proportions are of course disorienting, Varda’s head
barely reaching the knees of the solitary glaneuse. Caught in suspended
motion, with a curious and vaguely enigmatic smile, she is looking straight
at the camera. Will the tableau come back to life? Will this other Grad-
iva, who once trained to become a museum curator, reanimate herself
by turning into her own dispersed and utterly unoriginal model? Indeed,
Varda drops the ears of wheat on the floor and, lifting a digital camera,
14 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
conspicuously points it toward us (which also means toward the second
camera on the scene, the one that is filming her). In this crossing of lenses,
we, too, are being gleaned.
“These new small cameras,” says her voice-over, “they are digital, fan-
tastic; their effects are stroboscopic, narcissistic, and even hyper-realistic.”
We know that Varda has picked not any camera but, as she discloses in an
interview, “the more sophisticated of the amateur models [the Sony DV
CAM DSR 300],” looking for that freedom of expression that is brought
about by the unlikely combination of simplicity and precision, like in the
case of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera praised by André Bazin.15
On the screen of Varda’s digital initiation, we are offered a brief display of
effects, a seemingly lighthearted introduction to the camera as optical toy:
after a close-up of Varda’s face is internally fragmented and interwoven
with the pixilated bits of another woman’s portrait, a slow-motion pan
transforms a domestic interior into a movement of blurry color patches,
until we reach the trembling contour of Varda’s body and see her open
palm extending toward the camera, as if to redirect our vision. In its per-
formative and ludic drive, such a digression about the digital tool, the
new medium of her cinematic gleaning, reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s
notion of “second technology” and the attempt to imagine an interplay
between human beings and nature that resists capitalistic exploitation.
Unlike the first technology, which strives to master nature in all serious-
ness, the second technology engages the world in a relationship of recur-
ring “play,” affirming repetition as the return of that which is different.16
In her essay “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I,”
Homay King emphasizes this playful and world-opening aspect of digital
filmmaking, contrasting it to the “old Cartesian dream”—conquering the
world through immateriality—with which new media are most often asso-
ciated. She calls Varda’s cinema “materialist, feminist, phenomenological,
and political” and compares her digital camera first to a “receptacle,” then
to “a brush or a marker; an implement of what Varda calls cinécriture,
her portmanteau word for cinematic writing.”17
It is here, in the deferred overlapping of allegedly incompatible terms
(“receptacle” and “marker”), that King touches on the possibility of re-
defining a certain notion of writing. Indeed, her terminology already acti-
vates multiple theoretical reverberations. There is, first of all, Varda’s own
fabrication of the neologism cinécriture to account for “all the facets of
a film’s conception and realization” and disarticulate the long-held oppo-
sition of screenwriter and director.18 At once specific and heterogeneous,
cinematic writing gathers or occurs around the figure of the author, whose
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 15
individual voice is as much constituted as it is expressed through such a
diverse process of composition. There is also, in the background, Alex-
ander Astruc’s celebrated 1948 article “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde:
La Caméra-Stylo,” which delineates the contours of a theory-practice of
cinema in which “direction is no longer a means of illustrating or present-
ing a scene, but a true act of writing.” In this new cinema, “the filmmaker/
author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen,” having at
his disposal a language “as flexible and subtle as written language.”19 A
point of departure for the auteur theory that coalesced around the Nou-
velle Vague, Astruc’s notion of caméra-stylo resurfaces in our context less
for its potentially conservative claims about authorship than for the treat-
ment of cinematic writing as mode of inscription, the effect of a compos-
ite marker on a writing surface. There is, finally, Kaja Silverman’s recent
essay “The Author as Receiver,” which allows us to view the previous
interventions in light of an expanded notion of subjectivity and reverse
the metaphor of the caméra-stylo. In her analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s
deceivingly autobiographical film JLG/JLG (“self-portrait, not autobiog-
raphy,” insists the filmmaker), Silverman maintains that by speaking under
the sign of his own death, Godard emerges not as a creator or a producer
but rather as “the site where words and visual forms inscribe or install
themselves.” The filmmaker is here closer to the writing surface than to
the writing implement (stylus), as he writes by offering himself up to the
work of inscription. “The Godard who lives on after his authorial death,”
claims Silverman, “is not a scriptor, but rather a receiver. What he receives
is language itself.” Fifty years after Astruc, the caméra-stylo is reconfigured
as “an instrument that receives.”20
Let’s stay with Silverman a bit longer, as she elaborates on the concur-
rent adoption of those terms that, belonging to different semantic fields,
had initially caught our attention: “I have recourse to the metaphor of
inscription as well as that of installation,” she writes in a parenthetical
clause, “because Godard himself sometimes thinks of the artist as a re-
ceptacle, and sometimes as a writing surface.”21 In both cases, the author
is located on the side of passivity, and it is by inhabiting this domain that
he becomes most creative, that is, capable of receiving the richness of the
world’s linguistic and perceptual signifiers.22 This constitutes a pivotal
conceptual move, a complex displacement of the traditional opposition
between passivity and activity, and our understanding of Varda’s work
highly benefits from it. And yet, if receptacle is now aligned with the
writing surface rather than the writing implement, I cannot help notic-
ing the persistence of a certain separation between reception and writing,
14 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
conspicuously points it toward us (which also means toward the second
camera on the scene, the one that is filming her). In this crossing of lenses,
we, too, are being gleaned.
“These new small cameras,” says her voice-over, “they are digital, fan-
tastic; their effects are stroboscopic, narcissistic, and even hyper-realistic.”
We know that Varda has picked not any camera but, as she discloses in an
interview, “the more sophisticated of the amateur models [the Sony DV
CAM DSR 300],” looking for that freedom of expression that is brought
about by the unlikely combination of simplicity and precision, like in the
case of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera praised by André Bazin.15
On the screen of Varda’s digital initiation, we are offered a brief display of
effects, a seemingly lighthearted introduction to the camera as optical toy:
after a close-up of Varda’s face is internally fragmented and interwoven
with the pixilated bits of another woman’s portrait, a slow-motion pan
transforms a domestic interior into a movement of blurry color patches,
until we reach the trembling contour of Varda’s body and see her open
palm extending toward the camera, as if to redirect our vision. In its per-
formative and ludic drive, such a digression about the digital tool, the
new medium of her cinematic gleaning, reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s
notion of “second technology” and the attempt to imagine an interplay
between human beings and nature that resists capitalistic exploitation.
Unlike the first technology, which strives to master nature in all serious-
ness, the second technology engages the world in a relationship of recur-
ring “play,” affirming repetition as the return of that which is different.16
In her essay “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I,”
Homay King emphasizes this playful and world-opening aspect of digital
filmmaking, contrasting it to the “old Cartesian dream”—conquering the
world through immateriality—with which new media are most often asso-
ciated. She calls Varda’s cinema “materialist, feminist, phenomenological,
and political” and compares her digital camera first to a “receptacle,” then
to “a brush or a marker; an implement of what Varda calls cinécriture,
her portmanteau word for cinematic writing.”17
It is here, in the deferred overlapping of allegedly incompatible terms
(“receptacle” and “marker”), that King touches on the possibility of re-
defining a certain notion of writing. Indeed, her terminology already acti-
vates multiple theoretical reverberations. There is, first of all, Varda’s own
fabrication of the neologism cinécriture to account for “all the facets of
a film’s conception and realization” and disarticulate the long-held oppo-
sition of screenwriter and director.18 At once specific and heterogeneous,
cinematic writing gathers or occurs around the figure of the author, whose
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 15
individual voice is as much constituted as it is expressed through such a
diverse process of composition. There is also, in the background, Alex-
ander Astruc’s celebrated 1948 article “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde:
La Caméra-Stylo,” which delineates the contours of a theory-practice of
cinema in which “direction is no longer a means of illustrating or present-
ing a scene, but a true act of writing.” In this new cinema, “the filmmaker/
author writes with his camera as a writer writes with his pen,” having at
his disposal a language “as flexible and subtle as written language.”19 A
point of departure for the auteur theory that coalesced around the Nou-
velle Vague, Astruc’s notion of caméra-stylo resurfaces in our context less
for its potentially conservative claims about authorship than for the treat-
ment of cinematic writing as mode of inscription, the effect of a compos-
ite marker on a writing surface. There is, finally, Kaja Silverman’s recent
essay “The Author as Receiver,” which allows us to view the previous
interventions in light of an expanded notion of subjectivity and reverse
the metaphor of the caméra-stylo. In her analysis of Jean-Luc Godard’s
deceivingly autobiographical film JLG/JLG (“self-portrait, not autobiog-
raphy,” insists the filmmaker), Silverman maintains that by speaking under
the sign of his own death, Godard emerges not as a creator or a producer
but rather as “the site where words and visual forms inscribe or install
themselves.” The filmmaker is here closer to the writing surface than to
the writing implement (stylus), as he writes by offering himself up to the
work of inscription. “The Godard who lives on after his authorial death,”
claims Silverman, “is not a scriptor, but rather a receiver. What he receives
is language itself.” Fifty years after Astruc, the caméra-stylo is reconfigured
as “an instrument that receives.”20
Let’s stay with Silverman a bit longer, as she elaborates on the concur-
rent adoption of those terms that, belonging to different semantic fields,
had initially caught our attention: “I have recourse to the metaphor of
inscription as well as that of installation,” she writes in a parenthetical
clause, “because Godard himself sometimes thinks of the artist as a re-
ceptacle, and sometimes as a writing surface.”21 In both cases, the author
is located on the side of passivity, and it is by inhabiting this domain that
he becomes most creative, that is, capable of receiving the richness of the
world’s linguistic and perceptual signifiers.22 This constitutes a pivotal
conceptual move, a complex displacement of the traditional opposition
between passivity and activity, and our understanding of Varda’s work
highly benefits from it. And yet, if receptacle is now aligned with the
writing surface rather than the writing implement, I cannot help notic-
ing the persistence of a certain separation between reception and writing,
16 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
the latter being most closely associated with inscription. But doesn’t one
also write by receiving? Isn’t reception another word for the passivity
of all writing? How can we disarticulate the privileged condensation of
writing and inscription as the operation that leaves a mark by means of
an instrument (stylus, stiletto, phallus) that “gives” (ink, blood, semen)?
Varda’s camera, I claim, will allow us to propose a notion of writing in
the digital age that stands before and after inscription: the camera that
receives or, rather, “gleans” (gathers together and disperses) is the camera
that writes. The archival impressions of psychoanalysis and cinema will
have been other in light of it.
Writing of the Flesh
The sequence that introduces the small wonders of digital play eventually
ends on a somber and elegiac note, as Varda deliberately moves her hand
forward to screen her face. What follows this self-effacing gesture is the
first of a series of extraordinary “self-portraits,” in which the filmmaker
shows what is considered minor, marginal, and even useless in establish-
ing identity: the back of her head, her hair, her hands, and then nothing of
herself at all. In this case, the close-up is at once remarkable and discrete
for how little it shows of Varda’s face (only her forehead, eyebrows, and
hair) and how much it mobilizes vision’s indirect labor. Varda is combing
her hair with her right hand and then parting it with the help of the left
one: the roots are gray, almost white, and the hair is thinning. She slowly
repeats the gesture, all the while facing a mirror that is visible to us only
by virtue of a second mirror, placed in the background and doubling the
reflective surface of the first. What we see of her face is what is projected
from mirror to mirror: it is, indeed, inseparable from the play of refrac-
tions that these surfaces engender. At the same time, we hear Varda’s
voice-over reciting a verse about “old age,” not an enemy, perhaps even a
friend: “still,” she adds, “my hair and my hands keep telling me that the
end is near.” The word “hands” marks an edit that takes us back outside,
to the road and the countryside. Varda occupies the passenger’s seat and
is now filming her left hand by means of the right one. It is a close-up,
and in the daylight, we can see all the creases, the protruding veins, and
those brown spots that signal the inexorable aging of the human body. As
Naomi Schor reminds us, these are the very dermal details that portrai-
ture has been traditionally asked to erase or disguise, being connoted as
feminine and transient: “the portrait painter,” writes Hegel in his Lectures
on Aesthetics, “will omit folds of skin and, still more, freckles, pimples,
pock-marks, warts etc.”23 The prosaic requires sublimation.
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 17
There is a reversal to this scene, one that appears in Varda’s most re-
cent film, Les plages d’Agnès (Beaches of Agnes, France, 2008), but that
is worth mentioning here, as we elaborate on a kind of writing that un-
folds by a turning inside out of the visible rather than by virtue of marks
left on or in the visible. The film starts with a shot of Varda on a wide
northern beach, walking barefoot toward the camera and saying, “And
yet it’s others I’m interested in, others I like to film. . . . This time, to talk
about myself, I thought, ‘if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.’” As the word “landscapes” is
pronounced, the editing transforms the beach into the site of a curious
mise-en-scène: a crew of mostly young people is carrying and arranging
mirrors of all shapes, styles, and sizes right on the shore, in preparation
for the filming of Beaches of Agnes. Varda is among them, giving precise
instructions (“no, facing the sea . . . turn it around, parallel to the sea . . .”) or
recording what has already been set up with her digital camera. The effect
of such a process is the display of the labyrinthine quality of the process
itself—an operation coinciding with a play of images in which water and
sand, faces and waves, glass and weeds intermingle without merging into
one or gaining internal coherence. On the contrary, this is the display of
the plural and the opaque. As the wind keeps blowing a long, ruffled scarf
over her face, Varda turns the incident into an ironic and poignant state-
ment of purpose: “That’s how I want the portrait. . . . Film me in old spotty
mirrors and behind scarves.” And then, while her voice-over begins to as-
sociate the “present” images with images of the past, reminiscing about
her parents’ bedroom and her mother listening to Schubert’s Unfinished
Symphony (which now we, too, are hearing), she opens up a mirror com-
posed of multiple screens, a folding mirror, such as we might have found
in a turn-of-the-century boudoir, until the inextricable reflections of her
body and the landscape become once more the subject of self-portraiture.
What is this intercourse between inside and outside, depth and surface,
self and other? In the folds of the mirror(s), these divisions seem not only
to fall apart but also to engage each other in a process of mutual reconfigu-
ration. We are very far from the scenario that Rosalind Krauss theorizes
in her essay “Video: An Aesthetics of Narcissism,” a critical assessment
of American video practice in the 1970s in light of Jacques Lacan’s early
psychoanalysis. There the technological possibility of instant feedback
and the artists’ play with their own mirror reflection bring about a “col-
lapsed present” (against the sense of time as “a propulsion toward an end”
that Krauss champions) and the fusion of subject and object (against the
workings of consciousness and the reflexiveness that modernist art can
afford).24 Here the camcorder allows Varda to film her own hand and to
16 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
the latter being most closely associated with inscription. But doesn’t one
also write by receiving? Isn’t reception another word for the passivity
of all writing? How can we disarticulate the privileged condensation of
writing and inscription as the operation that leaves a mark by means of
an instrument (stylus, stiletto, phallus) that “gives” (ink, blood, semen)?
Varda’s camera, I claim, will allow us to propose a notion of writing in
the digital age that stands before and after inscription: the camera that
receives or, rather, “gleans” (gathers together and disperses) is the camera
that writes. The archival impressions of psychoanalysis and cinema will
have been other in light of it.
Writing of the Flesh
The sequence that introduces the small wonders of digital play eventually
ends on a somber and elegiac note, as Varda deliberately moves her hand
forward to screen her face. What follows this self-effacing gesture is the
first of a series of extraordinary “self-portraits,” in which the filmmaker
shows what is considered minor, marginal, and even useless in establish-
ing identity: the back of her head, her hair, her hands, and then nothing of
herself at all. In this case, the close-up is at once remarkable and discrete
for how little it shows of Varda’s face (only her forehead, eyebrows, and
hair) and how much it mobilizes vision’s indirect labor. Varda is combing
her hair with her right hand and then parting it with the help of the left
one: the roots are gray, almost white, and the hair is thinning. She slowly
repeats the gesture, all the while facing a mirror that is visible to us only
by virtue of a second mirror, placed in the background and doubling the
reflective surface of the first. What we see of her face is what is projected
from mirror to mirror: it is, indeed, inseparable from the play of refrac-
tions that these surfaces engender. At the same time, we hear Varda’s
voice-over reciting a verse about “old age,” not an enemy, perhaps even a
friend: “still,” she adds, “my hair and my hands keep telling me that the
end is near.” The word “hands” marks an edit that takes us back outside,
to the road and the countryside. Varda occupies the passenger’s seat and
is now filming her left hand by means of the right one. It is a close-up,
and in the daylight, we can see all the creases, the protruding veins, and
those brown spots that signal the inexorable aging of the human body. As
Naomi Schor reminds us, these are the very dermal details that portrai-
ture has been traditionally asked to erase or disguise, being connoted as
feminine and transient: “the portrait painter,” writes Hegel in his Lectures
on Aesthetics, “will omit folds of skin and, still more, freckles, pimples,
pock-marks, warts etc.”23 The prosaic requires sublimation.
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 17
There is a reversal to this scene, one that appears in Varda’s most re-
cent film, Les plages d’Agnès (Beaches of Agnes, France, 2008), but that
is worth mentioning here, as we elaborate on a kind of writing that un-
folds by a turning inside out of the visible rather than by virtue of marks
left on or in the visible. The film starts with a shot of Varda on a wide
northern beach, walking barefoot toward the camera and saying, “And
yet it’s others I’m interested in, others I like to film. . . . This time, to talk
about myself, I thought, ‘if we opened people up, we’d find landscapes.
If we opened me up, we’d find beaches.’” As the word “landscapes” is
pronounced, the editing transforms the beach into the site of a curious
mise-en-scène: a crew of mostly young people is carrying and arranging
mirrors of all shapes, styles, and sizes right on the shore, in preparation
for the filming of Beaches of Agnes. Varda is among them, giving precise
instructions (“no, facing the sea . . . turn it around, parallel to the sea . . .”) or
recording what has already been set up with her digital camera. The effect
of such a process is the display of the labyrinthine quality of the process
itself—an operation coinciding with a play of images in which water and
sand, faces and waves, glass and weeds intermingle without merging into
one or gaining internal coherence. On the contrary, this is the display of
the plural and the opaque. As the wind keeps blowing a long, ruffled scarf
over her face, Varda turns the incident into an ironic and poignant state-
ment of purpose: “That’s how I want the portrait. . . . Film me in old spotty
mirrors and behind scarves.” And then, while her voice-over begins to as-
sociate the “present” images with images of the past, reminiscing about
her parents’ bedroom and her mother listening to Schubert’s Unfinished
Symphony (which now we, too, are hearing), she opens up a mirror com-
posed of multiple screens, a folding mirror, such as we might have found
in a turn-of-the-century boudoir, until the inextricable reflections of her
body and the landscape become once more the subject of self-portraiture.
What is this intercourse between inside and outside, depth and surface,
self and other? In the folds of the mirror(s), these divisions seem not only
to fall apart but also to engage each other in a process of mutual reconfigu-
ration. We are very far from the scenario that Rosalind Krauss theorizes
in her essay “Video: An Aesthetics of Narcissism,” a critical assessment
of American video practice in the 1970s in light of Jacques Lacan’s early
psychoanalysis. There the technological possibility of instant feedback
and the artists’ play with their own mirror reflection bring about a “col-
lapsed present” (against the sense of time as “a propulsion toward an end”
that Krauss champions) and the fusion of subject and object (against the
workings of consciousness and the reflexiveness that modernist art can
afford).24 Here the camcorder allows Varda to film her own hand and to
18 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
see its digital image “at the same time” as she is filming, thanks to the
small LCD screen that overtly doubles the world for the receiver, render-
ing the viewfinder superfluous. This complex gesture delineates for us the
contours of a mode of writing (archiving) that cannot be thought of in-
dependently of the perceptual world. What emerges is an intertwining or
encroachment of forms that I will attempt to describe by proposing the
expression “narcissism of the other”—an opening of the subject beyond
the intentionality of consciousness and the very distinction between sub-
ject and object, a mode of being outside-of-oneself that Maurice Merleau-
Ponty had begun to interrogate in his last, unfinished text, The Visible and
the Invisible. Varda’s narcissism of the other, I will maintain, is writing
(archiving) before and after inscription.
Like the Rembrandt sequence, in which Varda explicitly states the re-
markable limits of her project (“to film with one hand my other hand”), the
mirror sequences also affirm vision as a kind of touch, a “palpation with
the look” that finds the one who sees or touches always already caught
in a relation of reversibility with what is seen and touched. This is what
Merleau-Ponty calls the paradoxical reflexivity of the sensible, a revers-
ibility between the seer and the seen, the toucher and the touched, which
our lived body exemplifies without exhausting: as the body can touch only
because it is also tangible, the body can see only because it is also visible.
Narcissism, in Merleau-Ponty’s novel and eccentric sense, is the name for
this elusive encirclement, which is at once perceptual and libidinal:
Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself
he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus,
for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes
from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself
looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity—which
is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to
see in the outside, as the other sees it, the contour of a body one
inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within
it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the
phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another
and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.25
Since the seer is part of the fabric of the world—her body being made of
the same “stuff” the world is made of—it is the reflection of herself that she
sees when she looks at the world (and, conjointly, landscapes and beaches
when she gazes at her own image). But it also happens that the activity of
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 19
her look is turned upon itself, transformed into a passivity that is not the
contrary of activity but its enigmatic foil. As she sees, the seer finds herself
being looked at, not simply by her own look reflected in the mirror, but
by the look of things surrounding (and traversing) her.26
It is important to underscore that if reversibility allows us to conceive
of a self “by confusion,” it is nonetheless in relation to a fabric, a connec-
tive tissue beyond our body, that it must be thought. Reversibility, and
thus narcissism, is not of the self but of the “flesh.” Neither mind nor
matter, the “flesh of the world,” constitutes Merleau-Ponty’s endeavor to
interrogate what traditional philosophy has not yet named. The flesh is
an “element” in the sense that water, air, earth, and fire were elements for
the pre-Socratic philosophers: not things in themselves but “rhizomata,”
the roots of all things. In his last, formidable chapter, “The Intertwining—
The Chiasm,” he writes,
The flesh is an ultimate notion . . . it is not the union or compound
of two substances, but thinkable by itself, if there is a relation of
the visible with itself that traverses me and constitutes me as a seer,
this circle which I do not form, which forms me, this coiling over
[enroulement] of the visible upon the visible, can traverse, animate
other bodies as well as my own.27
Being the stuff of which all visibles are made, the flesh is itself endowed
with the open, unending reflexivity that our body so powerfully mani-
fests: the reversibility between the seer and the seen, the touching and the
touched. Indeed, perception occurs in the encounter or friction between
these “two lips,” the sensing and sensible leaves of which each visible is
made: the deux lèvres that anticipate, but also exceed, Luce Irigaray’s im-
age of the two lips touching each other.28
But how can the erotics of the flesh also be an erotics of writing?
Merleau-Ponty does not speak of writing (and Derrida repeatedly, symp-
tomatically, relegates perception to an uncertain exterior domain), and
yet the flesh, with its irreducible and nonhierarchical layers, constitutes
an internally differentiated mass. Always returning to itself and yet never
coinciding with itself, the flesh is the name for the diacritical structure of
perception: an articulation of the sensible that is “lace-work,” “intertwin-
ing (entrelacs) of space and time,” “chiasm” of dimensions that are neither
autonomous nor coincident.29 There is no fusion between my body and
the world, between the seer and the seen. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty
reminds us, there is always a fission or écart between them: “it is time to
18 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
see its digital image “at the same time” as she is filming, thanks to the
small LCD screen that overtly doubles the world for the receiver, render-
ing the viewfinder superfluous. This complex gesture delineates for us the
contours of a mode of writing (archiving) that cannot be thought of in-
dependently of the perceptual world. What emerges is an intertwining or
encroachment of forms that I will attempt to describe by proposing the
expression “narcissism of the other”—an opening of the subject beyond
the intentionality of consciousness and the very distinction between sub-
ject and object, a mode of being outside-of-oneself that Maurice Merleau-
Ponty had begun to interrogate in his last, unfinished text, The Visible and
the Invisible. Varda’s narcissism of the other, I will maintain, is writing
(archiving) before and after inscription.
Like the Rembrandt sequence, in which Varda explicitly states the re-
markable limits of her project (“to film with one hand my other hand”), the
mirror sequences also affirm vision as a kind of touch, a “palpation with
the look” that finds the one who sees or touches always already caught
in a relation of reversibility with what is seen and touched. This is what
Merleau-Ponty calls the paradoxical reflexivity of the sensible, a revers-
ibility between the seer and the seen, the toucher and the touched, which
our lived body exemplifies without exhausting: as the body can touch only
because it is also tangible, the body can see only because it is also visible.
Narcissism, in Merleau-Ponty’s novel and eccentric sense, is the name for
this elusive encirclement, which is at once perceptual and libidinal:
Thus since the seer is caught up in what he sees, it is still himself
he sees: there is a fundamental narcissism of all vision. And thus,
for the same reason, the vision he exercises, he also undergoes
from the things, such that, as many painters have said, I feel myself
looked at by the things, my activity is equally passivity—which
is the second and more profound sense of the narcissism: not to
see in the outside, as the other sees it, the contour of a body one
inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within
it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the
phantom, so that the seer and the visible reciprocate one another
and we no longer know which sees and which is seen.25
Since the seer is part of the fabric of the world—her body being made of
the same “stuff” the world is made of—it is the reflection of herself that she
sees when she looks at the world (and, conjointly, landscapes and beaches
when she gazes at her own image). But it also happens that the activity of
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 19
her look is turned upon itself, transformed into a passivity that is not the
contrary of activity but its enigmatic foil. As she sees, the seer finds herself
being looked at, not simply by her own look reflected in the mirror, but
by the look of things surrounding (and traversing) her.26
It is important to underscore that if reversibility allows us to conceive
of a self “by confusion,” it is nonetheless in relation to a fabric, a connec-
tive tissue beyond our body, that it must be thought. Reversibility, and
thus narcissism, is not of the self but of the “flesh.” Neither mind nor
matter, the “flesh of the world,” constitutes Merleau-Ponty’s endeavor to
interrogate what traditional philosophy has not yet named. The flesh is
an “element” in the sense that water, air, earth, and fire were elements for
the pre-Socratic philosophers: not things in themselves but “rhizomata,”
the roots of all things. In his last, formidable chapter, “The Intertwining—
The Chiasm,” he writes,
The flesh is an ultimate notion . . . it is not the union or compound
of two substances, but thinkable by itself, if there is a relation of
the visible with itself that traverses me and constitutes me as a seer,
this circle which I do not form, which forms me, this coiling over
[enroulement] of the visible upon the visible, can traverse, animate
other bodies as well as my own.27
Being the stuff of which all visibles are made, the flesh is itself endowed
with the open, unending reflexivity that our body so powerfully mani-
fests: the reversibility between the seer and the seen, the touching and the
touched. Indeed, perception occurs in the encounter or friction between
these “two lips,” the sensing and sensible leaves of which each visible is
made: the deux lèvres that anticipate, but also exceed, Luce Irigaray’s im-
age of the two lips touching each other.28
But how can the erotics of the flesh also be an erotics of writing?
Merleau-Ponty does not speak of writing (and Derrida repeatedly, symp-
tomatically, relegates perception to an uncertain exterior domain), and
yet the flesh, with its irreducible and nonhierarchical layers, constitutes
an internally differentiated mass. Always returning to itself and yet never
coinciding with itself, the flesh is the name for the diacritical structure of
perception: an articulation of the sensible that is “lace-work,” “intertwin-
ing (entrelacs) of space and time,” “chiasm” of dimensions that are neither
autonomous nor coincident.29 There is no fusion between my body and
the world, between the seer and the seen. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty
reminds us, there is always a fission or écart between them: “it is time to
20 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized
in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand
touching the things, but I never reach coincidence.”30 Far from being a
prototype of presence, the flesh is “the dehiscence of the seeing into the
visible and of the visible into the seeing.”31 Difference is of perception as
it is of language.32
Varda’s filmmaking affirms vision as this folding or rolling back of the
visible upon itself: writing as perceptual chiasm and the chiasm of percep-
tion as writing. In the so-called natural world, as in the world of technol-
ogy, the flesh writes itself—folds and unfolds itself, in a labor of differen-
tiation that is never finished and always already begun.33 The camcorder,
the pen, even the body (of the filmmaker, the actor, the spectator) are not
simply instruments through which the flesh coils its own paths. Rather,
they are of the flesh, and if the latter constitutes the condition for their
emergence and cannot be reduced to the exchanges it makes possible, they,
too, cannot be viewed as mere instantiations of a visibility that precedes
them. “To film one hand with the other hand” is here the figure for the
chiasm of the seeing and the visible as it writes the embodied “I” of the
filmmaker, an “I” to which it cannot be reduced but also, in a circular and
imperfect fashion, an “I” from which it cannot be separated. “I feel as if
I am an animal,” says Varda, over the image of her hand being filmed by
her other hand. “Worse, I am an animal I don’t know.” Looking back at
us from a depth that is at once alien and familiar, nearby and remote, the
hand that is seen in these shots engenders the hand that sees as much as
it is being engendered by it—both inhabiting, belonging to the impersonal
visibility that Merleau-Ponty has called flesh; both allowing for the nebu-
lous emergence of a subject that (unclear to itself) can only find its own
image(s) in the outside of which it is made.
Impression as Invagination of the Visible
This figure—the chiasm—returns, repeats itself throughout Varda’s film,
at the level of both cinematography and editing, as the form of an always
incomplete folding, of a reversibility that is mutual and yet asymmetrical,
the balance between the visible and its other side always being held back
by a fission or missing coincidence. In “The Double Session,” an admira-
bly convoluted reading of Plato and Mallarmé, Derrida also writes of an
undecidable and multiple figure: the hymen, the fold that “renders (itself)
manifold but (is) not (one).”34 At once the name for the fabric of the Mal-
larmean text and the “generality of writing,” the hymen first and foremost
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 21
counts as “in-between” or medium, in the double sense of middle (nei-
ther–nor) and element (matrix). A self-differing medium, a middle with no
permanent extremes, the hymen brings about the dissolution of the pres-
ent and, together with it, the contamination of the proper and the literal:
existing only “under the false appearance of a present,” the hymen “will
have always been . . . a re-folding, a re-plying,”35 rather than the inaugural
modification of an anterior and independent meaning. The indirect, retro-
active influence that this essay has exercised on my reading of Merleau-
Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh can hardly be overemphasized. However,
if many of Derrida’s turns (pirouettes) have informed my attempt to think
audiovisual writing as an operation of folds rather than seeds or cuts, I
also need to take distance from them to the extent that they revolve and
paradoxically congeal around the very notion that should guarantee their
dispersal—dissemination.
The limits of dissemination are the limits of a lingering heterosexual
logic. On one hand, dissemination asserts the endless displacement of
meaning, rendering obsolete the distinction between signifier and signi-
fied, syntax and semantics, and putting in its place a play of “signs” that
can neither be arrested nor controlled. “Dissemination,” writes Derrida,
“affirms the always already divided generation of meaning.”36 The semi-
nal spur that seems to precede dissemination, providing it with an origin,
constitutes instead one of its effects, as the diacritical structure of lan-
guage prevents the identification of any autonomous semantic nucleus.
On the other hand, dissemination does not coincide with the operation
of the hymen but finds in the hymen a site for its own wider operation:
“Dissemination in the folds of the hymen: that is the ‘operation.’”37 The
play of signs is a play of “scattered emissions,” a spilling that has always
already occurred and cannot stop from occurring—a leakage not of the
hymen but in the hymen: “here perhaps is what the hymen will always have
disseminated . . . SPERM, the burning lava, milk, spume, froth, or dribble
of the seminal liquor.”38 Even shifting metaphors fulfill a complementary
function. If the hymen is a “textile,” it is a textile that is to be pierced, and
it takes a pen or sewing instrument to puncture (and reweave) its lining:
“if—as a folded sail, candid canvas, or leaflet—the hymen always opens
up some volume of writing, then it always implies and implicates the pen
[plume].”39 So, after all, writing (the hymen) must wait for the implement
that “scratches or grafts the writing surface—plies it, applies it, stitches
it, pleats it, and duplicates it,” the incision or cut being generative of (re-
sponsible for) the folding rather than amounting to one of its effects. As
Spivak succinctly notes, “the project of La double séance finally puts the
20 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized
in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand
touching the things, but I never reach coincidence.”30 Far from being a
prototype of presence, the flesh is “the dehiscence of the seeing into the
visible and of the visible into the seeing.”31 Difference is of perception as
it is of language.32
Varda’s filmmaking affirms vision as this folding or rolling back of the
visible upon itself: writing as perceptual chiasm and the chiasm of percep-
tion as writing. In the so-called natural world, as in the world of technol-
ogy, the flesh writes itself—folds and unfolds itself, in a labor of differen-
tiation that is never finished and always already begun.33 The camcorder,
the pen, even the body (of the filmmaker, the actor, the spectator) are not
simply instruments through which the flesh coils its own paths. Rather,
they are of the flesh, and if the latter constitutes the condition for their
emergence and cannot be reduced to the exchanges it makes possible, they,
too, cannot be viewed as mere instantiations of a visibility that precedes
them. “To film one hand with the other hand” is here the figure for the
chiasm of the seeing and the visible as it writes the embodied “I” of the
filmmaker, an “I” to which it cannot be reduced but also, in a circular and
imperfect fashion, an “I” from which it cannot be separated. “I feel as if
I am an animal,” says Varda, over the image of her hand being filmed by
her other hand. “Worse, I am an animal I don’t know.” Looking back at
us from a depth that is at once alien and familiar, nearby and remote, the
hand that is seen in these shots engenders the hand that sees as much as
it is being engendered by it—both inhabiting, belonging to the impersonal
visibility that Merleau-Ponty has called flesh; both allowing for the nebu-
lous emergence of a subject that (unclear to itself) can only find its own
image(s) in the outside of which it is made.
Impression as Invagination of the Visible
This figure—the chiasm—returns, repeats itself throughout Varda’s film,
at the level of both cinematography and editing, as the form of an always
incomplete folding, of a reversibility that is mutual and yet asymmetrical,
the balance between the visible and its other side always being held back
by a fission or missing coincidence. In “The Double Session,” an admira-
bly convoluted reading of Plato and Mallarmé, Derrida also writes of an
undecidable and multiple figure: the hymen, the fold that “renders (itself)
manifold but (is) not (one).”34 At once the name for the fabric of the Mal-
larmean text and the “generality of writing,” the hymen first and foremost
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 21
counts as “in-between” or medium, in the double sense of middle (nei-
ther–nor) and element (matrix). A self-differing medium, a middle with no
permanent extremes, the hymen brings about the dissolution of the pres-
ent and, together with it, the contamination of the proper and the literal:
existing only “under the false appearance of a present,” the hymen “will
have always been . . . a re-folding, a re-plying,”35 rather than the inaugural
modification of an anterior and independent meaning. The indirect, retro-
active influence that this essay has exercised on my reading of Merleau-
Ponty’s philosophy of the flesh can hardly be overemphasized. However,
if many of Derrida’s turns (pirouettes) have informed my attempt to think
audiovisual writing as an operation of folds rather than seeds or cuts, I
also need to take distance from them to the extent that they revolve and
paradoxically congeal around the very notion that should guarantee their
dispersal—dissemination.
The limits of dissemination are the limits of a lingering heterosexual
logic. On one hand, dissemination asserts the endless displacement of
meaning, rendering obsolete the distinction between signifier and signi-
fied, syntax and semantics, and putting in its place a play of “signs” that
can neither be arrested nor controlled. “Dissemination,” writes Derrida,
“affirms the always already divided generation of meaning.”36 The semi-
nal spur that seems to precede dissemination, providing it with an origin,
constitutes instead one of its effects, as the diacritical structure of lan-
guage prevents the identification of any autonomous semantic nucleus.
On the other hand, dissemination does not coincide with the operation
of the hymen but finds in the hymen a site for its own wider operation:
“Dissemination in the folds of the hymen: that is the ‘operation.’”37 The
play of signs is a play of “scattered emissions,” a spilling that has always
already occurred and cannot stop from occurring—a leakage not of the
hymen but in the hymen: “here perhaps is what the hymen will always have
disseminated . . . SPERM, the burning lava, milk, spume, froth, or dribble
of the seminal liquor.”38 Even shifting metaphors fulfill a complementary
function. If the hymen is a “textile,” it is a textile that is to be pierced, and
it takes a pen or sewing instrument to puncture (and reweave) its lining:
“if—as a folded sail, candid canvas, or leaflet—the hymen always opens
up some volume of writing, then it always implies and implicates the pen
[plume].”39 So, after all, writing (the hymen) must wait for the implement
that “scratches or grafts the writing surface—plies it, applies it, stitches
it, pleats it, and duplicates it,” the incision or cut being generative of (re-
sponsible for) the folding rather than amounting to one of its effects. As
Spivak succinctly notes, “the project of La double séance finally puts the
22 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 23

phallus in the hymen.”40 The phallic remainders of dissemination end up

maintaining receptivity in a position that is beyond reversibility: despite
Derrida’s claims to the contrary, the fold does not fold itself but relies on
predetermined differences and, lastly, irreversible terms.
It is in the wake of dissemination that it remains possible for Derrida
to advocate for the plurality of the “Freudian impression” while asking
if Anna–Antigone has ever spoken in her own name. I have argued in the
first chapter that such an archival speech act belongs to a time—the fu-
ture anterior—in which the play of the death drive will have been exposed
in its domestic implications, Antigone becoming the figure of a memory
that resists the strictures of the past such as it was. Here it is the notion
of impression that I have been attempting to reformulate in view of the
weight it bears on the economy of both writing and psychoanalysis. If, in
Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé, “the casting aside [mise à l’écart] of being
defines itself and literally (im)prints itself in dissemination, as dissemina-
tion,” in my reading of Varda’s digital film, which I consider akin to Loie
Fuller’s luminous dance, the dehiscence of being (flesh) affirms itself as the
winding (serpentement) of the visible.41 In The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-Ponty calls this turning inside out of the visible a “folding back”
or “invagination,” and we interpret the latter to stand not as the opposite Figure 14. Varda’s hand, framing, capturing, and playing with the trucks, in The
of penetration or insemination but as the name for the chiasmatic relation Gleaners and I.
binding allegedly contrary terms—inside and outside, activity and passiv-
ity, depth and surface.42 Again, what is folding–folded upon is indefinitely extends her left hand forward, to frame and encircle the speeding trucks
and systematically articulated—not a full visibility, a visibility “in flesh with her fingers. “Again one hand filming the other, and more trucks,” her
and blood,” a visibility of the present. Impression as invagination does voice-over says. She continues, “I’d like to capture them. To retain things
not coil or confound a preexisting difference but is creative of differences passing? No, just to play.” This childlike gesture returns over and over,
to come, finding in the filmmaker’s hands its anonymous and singular in a fast-paced montage of similar shots, all showing trucks of assorted
signature. This also means that the relation between camera and substra- sizes, shapes, colors, in a row, one by one, one next to the other, and her
tum is reversible and that, paradoxically, even when a stylus is at work, hand, enveloping these images and invariably losing them. As the weather
the incision is an effect of the folding, an operation of (rather than in) the changes dramatically from shot to shot, we realize that these playful bits
folds, the pen (plume) being also a feather, a fan, a butterfly, a dancer.43 have been filmed at different times during her journeys and then edited
There is another sequence, halfway through The Gleaners and I, in together, in a rhythmic alternation of appearance and disappearance with-
which Varda’s hands directly affirm the tie between gleaning and the im- out clear beginning or end. Here, in what could be considered the film’s
permanent folding of the visible. She is traveling by car across the coun- impossible center, digital gleaning offers us the recurring trace of its own
tryside and filming one of those cloudy, strangely luminous skies that process, the impression of a vision or touch that retreats from itself while
announce a summer storm, like in Pierre-Edmond-Alexandre Hédouin’s seeing or touching itself. Notwithstanding Derrida’s own version of the
painting Gleaners Fleeing the Storm (1852), which the curators of a small phenomenological project, Varda does not dream of an archive in which
museum will bring out of storage and display in the last shot of the film. “the trace no longer distinguishes itself from the substrate” and the sin-
Then her attention shifts to the trucks passing by in the adjacent lane, as gular can only coincide with the instant of indifferentiation, “when the
has already occurred several times in the film. This time, however, Varda step is still one with the subjectile.”44 In The Gleaners and I, there is no
22 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 23

phallus in the hymen.”40 The phallic remainders of dissemination end up

maintaining receptivity in a position that is beyond reversibility: despite
Derrida’s claims to the contrary, the fold does not fold itself but relies on
predetermined differences and, lastly, irreversible terms.
It is in the wake of dissemination that it remains possible for Derrida
to advocate for the plurality of the “Freudian impression” while asking
if Anna–Antigone has ever spoken in her own name. I have argued in the
first chapter that such an archival speech act belongs to a time—the fu-
ture anterior—in which the play of the death drive will have been exposed
in its domestic implications, Antigone becoming the figure of a memory
that resists the strictures of the past such as it was. Here it is the notion
of impression that I have been attempting to reformulate in view of the
weight it bears on the economy of both writing and psychoanalysis. If, in
Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé, “the casting aside [mise à l’écart] of being
defines itself and literally (im)prints itself in dissemination, as dissemina-
tion,” in my reading of Varda’s digital film, which I consider akin to Loie
Fuller’s luminous dance, the dehiscence of being (flesh) affirms itself as the
winding (serpentement) of the visible.41 In The Visible and the Invisible,
Merleau-Ponty calls this turning inside out of the visible a “folding back”
or “invagination,” and we interpret the latter to stand not as the opposite Figure 14. Varda’s hand, framing, capturing, and playing with the trucks, in The
of penetration or insemination but as the name for the chiasmatic relation Gleaners and I.
binding allegedly contrary terms—inside and outside, activity and passiv-
ity, depth and surface.42 Again, what is folding–folded upon is indefinitely extends her left hand forward, to frame and encircle the speeding trucks
and systematically articulated—not a full visibility, a visibility “in flesh with her fingers. “Again one hand filming the other, and more trucks,” her
and blood,” a visibility of the present. Impression as invagination does voice-over says. She continues, “I’d like to capture them. To retain things
not coil or confound a preexisting difference but is creative of differences passing? No, just to play.” This childlike gesture returns over and over,
to come, finding in the filmmaker’s hands its anonymous and singular in a fast-paced montage of similar shots, all showing trucks of assorted
signature. This also means that the relation between camera and substra- sizes, shapes, colors, in a row, one by one, one next to the other, and her
tum is reversible and that, paradoxically, even when a stylus is at work, hand, enveloping these images and invariably losing them. As the weather
the incision is an effect of the folding, an operation of (rather than in) the changes dramatically from shot to shot, we realize that these playful bits
folds, the pen (plume) being also a feather, a fan, a butterfly, a dancer.43 have been filmed at different times during her journeys and then edited
There is another sequence, halfway through The Gleaners and I, in together, in a rhythmic alternation of appearance and disappearance with-
which Varda’s hands directly affirm the tie between gleaning and the im- out clear beginning or end. Here, in what could be considered the film’s
permanent folding of the visible. She is traveling by car across the coun- impossible center, digital gleaning offers us the recurring trace of its own
tryside and filming one of those cloudy, strangely luminous skies that process, the impression of a vision or touch that retreats from itself while
announce a summer storm, like in Pierre-Edmond-Alexandre Hédouin’s seeing or touching itself. Notwithstanding Derrida’s own version of the
painting Gleaners Fleeing the Storm (1852), which the curators of a small phenomenological project, Varda does not dream of an archive in which
museum will bring out of storage and display in the last shot of the film. “the trace no longer distinguishes itself from the substrate” and the sin-
Then her attention shifts to the trucks passing by in the adjacent lane, as gular can only coincide with the instant of indifferentiation, “when the
has already occurred several times in the film. This time, however, Varda step is still one with the subjectile.”44 In The Gleaners and I, there is no
24 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
confusion between the hand that films and the hand that is being filmed—
no moment “proper” to the archive—the pressure or folding that one hand
exercises on the other being always reversible and never fully realized.45
Gleaning is the archiving—indeed, the writing—of perception.
Futures of an Invention
The archivization produces as much as it records the event.
—Jacques Derrida , Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
In the Rembrandt sequence, it is the human hands—that is, what is unique
and yet less recognizable in terms of identity and identification—that
are chosen to sustain a meditation on death and the possibilities of life.
Here gleaning takes its maximum distance from the modern archive, the
nineteenth-century archive, with its drive toward the classification of in-
dividuals and the ordering of time.46 Early cinema, Mary Anne Doane
reminds us in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, originated from and
contributed to this very archival impulse: its capacity to provide a direct
record of what happens, as it happens, participated in the structuring of
contingency and the reification of time that modernity was already vehe-
mently pursuing through a variety of technological means. The instant,
the point, the absolutely present—that which can be seized, stored, and
represented as self-identical: though irremediably “haunted by historicity,”
this is the time the modern archive aims at construing and appropriating.47
What would it mean, then, to rethink the history of cinematic practice
in relation to gleaning—gleaning as a mode of archiving that refuses not
only the distinction between subject and object but also the temporality
of the clock, its irreversibility and measurability? Varda herself offers us
an invaluable suggestion when she visits the estate of Étienne-Jules Mar-
ey’s great great grandson and films the hut from which Marey, cinema’s
famous ancestor, and his assistant Georges Demenÿ captured images of
flying birds with their newly invented chronophotographic gun. She goes
even further, showing us some of Marey’s experimental pictures and film
bits, which, “technical prowess aside,” she says, “are pure visual delight”:
a dog, a donkey, a white cat, a rabbit, all enjoying what appears to be a
freshly discovered capacity for movement. This is perhaps the digital gla-
neuse’s ultimate gesture of re-vision. Well beyond the apparent intention
to capture and decompose movement, could we consider the chronophoto-
graphic gun as an unwilling and improbable precursor of Varda’s camera?
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 25
That is, could we conceive of gleaning not only as the digital future of
cinema but also as its forgotten analog past?
Varda even suggests that a similar pursuit could be undertaken in rela-
tion to psychoanalysis, the other great turn-of-the-century invention. Her
repeated encounter with Jean Laplanche, the winemaker and eminent psy-
choanalyst, invites us to reconceive psychoanalysis itself as gleaning—as
the open, creative gathering of discarded and apparently valueless signs.
Varda meets Laplanche and his wife, Nadine, during the filming of The
Gleaners and I, and, though curious about the husband’s other profession,
she pretends to be unaware of Laplanche’s prestige and concentrates on
the couple’s winemaking activity. In the sequel shot two years later, Varda
returns to the Pommard estate and, this time acknowledging Laplanche’s
stature as an analyst and a philosopher of psychoanalysis, proceeds to
gather what had been left behind: a discretely marvelous insight on glean-
ing and psychoanalysis. As Laplanche puts it—articulating après-coup,
according to the logic of deferred action or “afterwardsness,” what could
not be understood the first time around—psychoanalysts, too, “pay atten-
tion to things that no one else does . . . to what falls from discourse, what is
dropped.”48 After all (afterwards), psychoanalysis is a form of gleaning.49
There is, in this barely covert analogy between the filmmaker’s receptive
look and the analyst’s listening, an exhortation to refind our psychic his-
tory outside, on the side of things—indeed, to practice a psychoanalysis
of the outside—as Varda herself will most clearly do in The Widows of
Noirmoutier (2004) and Beaches of Agnes. A video installation and a film
made of scenes that are as many multimedia “installations,” these two
pieces join The Gleaners and I in redefining the trajectory of the moving
image at the threshold of interiority and exteriority.
In Digital Baroque, Timothy Murray explores the terms and effects
of “a deeply significant archeological shift from projection to fold that is
emphasized, if not wholly embodied, by the digital condition.”50 Working
in the countertradition of Deleuzian philosophy, but also acknowledging
the contributions of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, Murray proposes the fold
as the trope for a new way of thinking the relationship between cinema
and new media, a mode of configuring the “deep memory of the archive”
that refuses the unidirectionality, continuity, and cohesion usually associ-
ated with projection and its Renaissance precursors. In attunement with
Murray’s project and its aesthetic and political implications—the baroque
names here a “crisis of property” that reaches into the libidinal sphere—I
suggest that we reconsider our memory of cinema (and psychoanalysis) in
light of gleaning as the archiving of perception, the folding of dimensions
24 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s
confusion between the hand that films and the hand that is being filmed—
no moment “proper” to the archive—the pressure or folding that one hand
exercises on the other being always reversible and never fully realized.45
Gleaning is the archiving—indeed, the writing—of perception.
Futures of an Invention
The archivization produces as much as it records the event.
—Jacques Derrida , Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression
In the Rembrandt sequence, it is the human hands—that is, what is unique
and yet less recognizable in terms of identity and identification—that
are chosen to sustain a meditation on death and the possibilities of life.
Here gleaning takes its maximum distance from the modern archive, the
nineteenth-century archive, with its drive toward the classification of in-
dividuals and the ordering of time.46 Early cinema, Mary Anne Doane
reminds us in The Emergence of Cinematic Time, originated from and
contributed to this very archival impulse: its capacity to provide a direct
record of what happens, as it happens, participated in the structuring of
contingency and the reification of time that modernity was already vehe-
mently pursuing through a variety of technological means. The instant,
the point, the absolutely present—that which can be seized, stored, and
represented as self-identical: though irremediably “haunted by historicity,”
this is the time the modern archive aims at construing and appropriating.47
What would it mean, then, to rethink the history of cinematic practice
in relation to gleaning—gleaning as a mode of archiving that refuses not
only the distinction between subject and object but also the temporality
of the clock, its irreversibility and measurability? Varda herself offers us
an invaluable suggestion when she visits the estate of Étienne-Jules Mar-
ey’s great great grandson and films the hut from which Marey, cinema’s
famous ancestor, and his assistant Georges Demenÿ captured images of
flying birds with their newly invented chronophotographic gun. She goes
even further, showing us some of Marey’s experimental pictures and film
bits, which, “technical prowess aside,” she says, “are pure visual delight”:
a dog, a donkey, a white cat, a rabbit, all enjoying what appears to be a
freshly discovered capacity for movement. This is perhaps the digital gla-
neuse’s ultimate gesture of re-vision. Well beyond the apparent intention
to capture and decompose movement, could we consider the chronophoto-
graphic gun as an unwilling and improbable precursor of Varda’s camera?
di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s 25
That is, could we conceive of gleaning not only as the digital future of
cinema but also as its forgotten analog past?
Varda even suggests that a similar pursuit could be undertaken in rela-
tion to psychoanalysis, the other great turn-of-the-century invention. Her
repeated encounter with Jean Laplanche, the winemaker and eminent psy-
choanalyst, invites us to reconceive psychoanalysis itself as gleaning—as
the open, creative gathering of discarded and apparently valueless signs.
Varda meets Laplanche and his wife, Nadine, during the filming of The
Gleaners and I, and, though curious about the husband’s other profession,
she pretends to be unaware of Laplanche’s prestige and concentrates on
the couple’s winemaking activity. In the sequel shot two years later, Varda
returns to the Pommard estate and, this time acknowledging Laplanche’s
stature as an analyst and a philosopher of psychoanalysis, proceeds to
gather what had been left behind: a discretely marvelous insight on glean-
ing and psychoanalysis. As Laplanche puts it—articulating après-coup,
according to the logic of deferred action or “afterwardsness,” what could
not be understood the first time around—psychoanalysts, too, “pay atten-
tion to things that no one else does . . . to what falls from discourse, what is
dropped.”48 After all (afterwards), psychoanalysis is a form of gleaning.49
There is, in this barely covert analogy between the filmmaker’s receptive
look and the analyst’s listening, an exhortation to refind our psychic his-
tory outside, on the side of things—indeed, to practice a psychoanalysis
of the outside—as Varda herself will most clearly do in The Widows of
Noirmoutier (2004) and Beaches of Agnes. A video installation and a film
made of scenes that are as many multimedia “installations,” these two
pieces join The Gleaners and I in redefining the trajectory of the moving
image at the threshold of interiority and exteriority.
In Digital Baroque, Timothy Murray explores the terms and effects
of “a deeply significant archeological shift from projection to fold that is
emphasized, if not wholly embodied, by the digital condition.”50 Working
in the countertradition of Deleuzian philosophy, but also acknowledging
the contributions of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, Murray proposes the fold
as the trope for a new way of thinking the relationship between cinema
and new media, a mode of configuring the “deep memory of the archive”
that refuses the unidirectionality, continuity, and cohesion usually associ-
ated with projection and its Renaissance precursors. In attunement with
Murray’s project and its aesthetic and political implications—the baroque
names here a “crisis of property” that reaches into the libidinal sphere—I
suggest that we reconsider our memory of cinema (and psychoanalysis) in
light of gleaning as the archiving of perception, the folding of dimensions
26 di g i t a l im p r e s s i o n s

that are reversible and yet not symmetrical. Through their interventions
in the cinematic archive, Bonvicini’s video installation and Varda’s film
trace for us the folds of a memory to come—a memory of cinema that is
multiple, incomplete, ever shifting, in which the digital does not realize
the dream of an absolute, immaterial, totalizing recall but, on the con-
trary, allows for the proliferation and mobilization of singular viewpoints.
Emerging where a disorder of media coincides with a disorder of time,
these works can help us envision the contours of a subterranean or latent
audiovisual modernity. If the archive—both of cinema and psychoanaly-
sis—still sanctions the line that runs from Oedipus to Freud, confining
Antigone–Anna Freud to its outside, the archives of the so-called digital
age can help us imagine a promiscuous, disorderly, polymorphous legacy,
one in which the women of modernist cinema unravel the enunciation
that had initially decided their destiny and the gleaner’s camera recon-
figures the path marking the anticipation of one’s own death. Antigone’s
“scandalously impure” claim, a claim that appropriates the very language
of the power she defies, stands here as the point of departure for another
understanding of cinema’s possibilities (and, conjointly, of psychoanalysis’s
shunned ties). Indeed, this is my question for cinema’s futural past—will
Antigone’s claim also have been an archival one?
 Chapter three

Folding Time
Toward a New Theory of Montage

Virtual Archives

How does one prove in general an absence of archive, if not in relying

on classical norms (presence/absence of literal and explicit reference to
this or to that, to a this or to a that which one supposes to be identical
to themselves, and simply absent, actually absent, if they are not simply
present, actually present? . . . )
—Jacques Derrida , Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

It suffices that a book be possible for it to exist.

—Jorge Luis Borges , Labyrinths

“To archive otherwise” is to archive according to a logic that defies con-

scious thinking, to enact a mode of remembrance that, insofar as it real-
izes itself through covert associations, will always require attentive and
imaginative interpretation. What is psychoanalysis if not the theory of this
other modality of archivization, the practice that does not take memories
at face value but looks for what lies hidden and forgotten, perceptible
only in the form of apparently insignificant signs, stubborn symptoms,
or improbable rhetorical figures? What is “repression” if not this other
modality of archivization, a process in which effacement and disguise
inevitably accompany the formation of every mnemic trace? In Archive
Fever, Derrida foregrounds the term otherwise to unravel the opposition
between archivization and unconscious inscription (repression) on which
“ordinary history” is based and against which psychoanalysis, in its quest
for “historical” rather than “material” truth, has constituted itself.1 In fact,
2 f o ld i n g time
this term allows him to gesture in an even more radical direction, opening
up the field of archival memory not only to the unconscious but also to
the virtual (which, he insists, must be understood in its most general sense
and not only in relation to new technologies). “The moment has come,”
he claims, “to accept a great stirring in our conceptual archive, and in it
to cross a ‘logic of the unconscious’ with a way of thinking of the virtual
which is no longer limited by the traditional philosophical opposition
between act and power.”2 What is at stake is nothing less than the “full
and effective actuality” of that which is being recorded—the reality of the
event that will have left a mark in our memory.
That Derrida seems only to touch on this argument, and does so in
the longest parenthetical clause of the book, should alert us as to its lat-
eral efficacy. If the archive as consignation, as memory that gathers and
preserves itself at the intersection of place and law, has always and in
principle presupposed the occurrence of the archived event, then we are
now facing a mutation that threatens the very architectural integrity of
the archive—its physical and symbolic coherence. Derrida positions this
digression in the chapter on Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses, and while
a discussion around psychoanalysis as a Jewish science far exceeds the
aims of our work, it is strategically relevant for us that the reference to
virtuality appears between the recurring mention of Anna–Antigone and
the interrogation of messianic time: repetition and oedipal violence, on one
hand, the “future to come [l’a-venir],” on the other. “But it is the future,”
he states, “that is at issue here, and the archive as an irreducible experience
of the future.”3 This future, however, should not be conceived as a “future
present,” a future that will succeed the present and become such in turn,
as if time, chronology, and actuality were one and the same. With respect
to a future present—foreseeable, ordered in advance, already holding a
proper place in the line of transmission—the archive can be considered as
“already given, in the past or in any case only incomplete,” its operations
possessing constantive rather than performative value.4 What happens,
then, in the sphere of thought and politics, when the archive ceases to be
regarded as a record of what is, was, or will be present, becoming instead
the active repository of “what will have been” in between past and future?
In Time Travels, Elizabeth Grosz proposes that we rethink feminist
theory in light of a concept of time that undoes the constraints of the here
and now, exposing it as a fiction that substitutes presence for the risks and
the promises of temporal excess and becoming. While primarily drawing
on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and the distinction
between the actual and the virtual, in a section titled “Law, Justice, and
f o ld i n g t i m e 3
the Future,” she explicitly singles out the future anterior or future perfect
as the time of change: irreducible to the present and any autonomous
temporal dimension, the future anterior provides feminist theory with the
possibility of envisioning a future that does not resemble the past. Here
Grosz also proposes the work of Drucilla Cornell as the site of an engage-
ment with the “virtualities,” the “unactualized latencies” of the past, that
is, with points of resistance or lines of subversion that belong to the past
in the mode of virtuality.5 The past is not given in the self-evidence of the
present but ceaselessly unfolds in tension with a future that defies predic-
tion—in turn, the openness of the future can be thought only in relation
to a past that was never present or, rather, that existed only virtually. For
Cornell, who explicitly refers to “Derrida’s unique conception of the future
as the not yet of the never has been,” only this remembrance of things to
come—indeed, a memory in the future anterior—can constitute the basis
for transformative political thought.6
How can we think the crossing of the unconscious and the virtual in the
domain of perception, as it pertains to the internally differentiated mass
that Merleau-Ponty has called “flesh”? In the previous chapter, I argued
on behalf of perception as a writing of the flesh, a folding of spatial and
temporal dimensions that are neither autonomous nor coincident. But
what does it mean to archive otherwise in the self-differing world of the
flesh? Can film—the actual films that constitute the history of cinema—be
viewed as a reservoir of virtual traces, the depository of memories that
have yet to be formed? A few digital works seem to touch specifically on
these sedimented and yet not predetermined audiovisual layers, perform-
ing a gesture of archivization that exists at the very threshold of memory
and creation, translation and invention. Pierre Huyghe’s L’ellipse (The El-
lipsis, 1998), a video installation that mixes contemporary footage with
scenes drawn from Wim Wenders’s film The American Friend (France and
West Germany, 1977), and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory (1997),
an eccentric constellation of images, sounds, and words, stand out for
the strategic precision with which they inhabit and foreground such a
threshold. Despite the diversity of their compositional strategies, both
pieces mobilize the cinematic cut or “edit” as bearer of a memory that
comes from the future, allowing for the emergence of images (specters)
that speak of lost life as much as of life that demands to be lived. To the
extent that it gives visibility to what did not actually happen—but might
have had, under different sociosymbolic conditions—this is the time of
the archive that we have called “Antigonean.” In this impure or contami-
nated time, I will argue, the edit itself operates as a “fold” rather than a
2 f o ld i n g time
this term allows him to gesture in an even more radical direction, opening
up the field of archival memory not only to the unconscious but also to
the virtual (which, he insists, must be understood in its most general sense
and not only in relation to new technologies). “The moment has come,”
he claims, “to accept a great stirring in our conceptual archive, and in it
to cross a ‘logic of the unconscious’ with a way of thinking of the virtual
which is no longer limited by the traditional philosophical opposition
between act and power.”2 What is at stake is nothing less than the “full
and effective actuality” of that which is being recorded—the reality of the
event that will have left a mark in our memory.
That Derrida seems only to touch on this argument, and does so in
the longest parenthetical clause of the book, should alert us as to its lat-
eral efficacy. If the archive as consignation, as memory that gathers and
preserves itself at the intersection of place and law, has always and in
principle presupposed the occurrence of the archived event, then we are
now facing a mutation that threatens the very architectural integrity of
the archive—its physical and symbolic coherence. Derrida positions this
digression in the chapter on Yosef Yerushalmi’s Freud’s Moses, and while
a discussion around psychoanalysis as a Jewish science far exceeds the
aims of our work, it is strategically relevant for us that the reference to
virtuality appears between the recurring mention of Anna–Antigone and
the interrogation of messianic time: repetition and oedipal violence, on one
hand, the “future to come [l’a-venir],” on the other. “But it is the future,”
he states, “that is at issue here, and the archive as an irreducible experience
of the future.”3 This future, however, should not be conceived as a “future
present,” a future that will succeed the present and become such in turn,
as if time, chronology, and actuality were one and the same. With respect
to a future present—foreseeable, ordered in advance, already holding a
proper place in the line of transmission—the archive can be considered as
“already given, in the past or in any case only incomplete,” its operations
possessing constantive rather than performative value.4 What happens,
then, in the sphere of thought and politics, when the archive ceases to be
regarded as a record of what is, was, or will be present, becoming instead
the active repository of “what will have been” in between past and future?
In Time Travels, Elizabeth Grosz proposes that we rethink feminist
theory in light of a concept of time that undoes the constraints of the here
and now, exposing it as a fiction that substitutes presence for the risks and
the promises of temporal excess and becoming. While primarily drawing
on the philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze and the distinction
between the actual and the virtual, in a section titled “Law, Justice, and
f o ld i n g t i m e 3
the Future,” she explicitly singles out the future anterior or future perfect
as the time of change: irreducible to the present and any autonomous
temporal dimension, the future anterior provides feminist theory with the
possibility of envisioning a future that does not resemble the past. Here
Grosz also proposes the work of Drucilla Cornell as the site of an engage-
ment with the “virtualities,” the “unactualized latencies” of the past, that
is, with points of resistance or lines of subversion that belong to the past
in the mode of virtuality.5 The past is not given in the self-evidence of the
present but ceaselessly unfolds in tension with a future that defies predic-
tion—in turn, the openness of the future can be thought only in relation
to a past that was never present or, rather, that existed only virtually. For
Cornell, who explicitly refers to “Derrida’s unique conception of the future
as the not yet of the never has been,” only this remembrance of things to
come—indeed, a memory in the future anterior—can constitute the basis
for transformative political thought.6
How can we think the crossing of the unconscious and the virtual in the
domain of perception, as it pertains to the internally differentiated mass
that Merleau-Ponty has called “flesh”? In the previous chapter, I argued
on behalf of perception as a writing of the flesh, a folding of spatial and
temporal dimensions that are neither autonomous nor coincident. But
what does it mean to archive otherwise in the self-differing world of the
flesh? Can film—the actual films that constitute the history of cinema—be
viewed as a reservoir of virtual traces, the depository of memories that
have yet to be formed? A few digital works seem to touch specifically on
these sedimented and yet not predetermined audiovisual layers, perform-
ing a gesture of archivization that exists at the very threshold of memory
and creation, translation and invention. Pierre Huyghe’s L’ellipse (The El-
lipsis, 1998), a video installation that mixes contemporary footage with
scenes drawn from Wim Wenders’s film The American Friend (France and
West Germany, 1977), and Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory (1997),
an eccentric constellation of images, sounds, and words, stand out for
the strategic precision with which they inhabit and foreground such a
threshold. Despite the diversity of their compositional strategies, both
pieces mobilize the cinematic cut or “edit” as bearer of a memory that
comes from the future, allowing for the emergence of images (specters)
that speak of lost life as much as of life that demands to be lived. To the
extent that it gives visibility to what did not actually happen—but might
have had, under different sociosymbolic conditions—this is the time of
the archive that we have called “Antigonean.” In this impure or contami-
nated time, I will argue, the edit itself operates as a “fold” rather than a
4 f o ld i n g time
cut—a turning inside out rather than an excision of the visible, a reversal
rather than an annihilation of perception. As such, the edit becomes the
guarantee that disjuncted or contradictory pasts can spring out of the one,
self-differing time that Merleau-Ponty has called “flesh.” It is here, in the
wake of the philosopher’s “posthumous productivity,” that I will propose
to reconfigure the virtual as the invisible of which the flesh is made—not
the opposite of the visible but its latent and inexhaustible counterpart.7
The site of a memory in excess of repression, the edit as intertwining of
the visible and the invisible promises to release a past that never existed
in the present of the film—a time that “will have been” only in the coiling
that digital memory manifests.
The Edit Is a Fold: Pierre Huyghe’s L’ellipse
I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along
that line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere
detective might well do so, too.
—Jorge Luis Borges , Labyrinths
One cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it
disappear, but it [the invisible] is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual
focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Visible and the Invisible
In the last twenty years, French multimedia artist Pierre Huyghe has flu-
idly engaged with architecture, music, cinema, and television, producing a
body of work in which the appropriation of preexisting materials occurs
under the sign of repetition and replay rather than representation and
citation. For instance, in Remake (1994–95), a shot-by-shot re-creation
of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (United States, 1954), he recruits
amateur actors to “reinterpret” the original performances, while in Les
incivils (1995), inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellaci e uccellini (The
Hawks and Sparrows, Italy, 1966), he asks the original actors to revisit
the sites where the film was shot and reenact specific scenes. In the two-
channel video installation The Third Memory (2000), something different
yet occurs. Huyghe brings John Wojtowicz, whose infamous robbery of a
Brooklyn bank had inspired Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (United
States, 1975), to a studio set built on the model of the bank seen in the
film. Here he invites Wojtowicz not only to reconstitute the event for the
f o ld i n g t i m e 5
camera but also to explain the reasons behind his actions, only to discover
that his memory had been “affected by the fiction itself” and that “he had
to integrate the fiction of Dog Day Afternoon into the fact of his life.”8
The final piece intercuts this hybrid reconstruction with scenes from the
film featuring Al Pacino and a variety of archival materials (news foot-
age and newspaper clippings) documenting the holdup and its aftermath.
Though specific strategies and outcomes highly differ, in all these cases,
the original film becomes, for Huyghe, a “score,” an “open scenario,” the
point of departure for “investigat[ing] how a fiction, how a story, could
in fact produce a certain kind of reality. An additif of reality.”9 The artist
only sets the conditions, provides the framework for chance encounters
to occur or recur, at the threshold of reality and fiction. It is this sense of
potentiality, this interest in existing films as transitional construction sites,
spectral and incomplete configurations, that has caught and held my at-
tention since I was first exposed to these pieces.
The Ellipsis is the most restrained of Huyghe’s interventions into the
outside of the artwork. The screen we face in the gallery is unusually
elongated and divided into three sections, each constituting the site of an
independent video projection. If the three sequences were to be played si-
multaneously and then brought to a standstill, the resulting visual effect
would be that of a peculiar, disjointed filmstrip. This is indeed what I see
when I look at the documentation of the piece presented in most catalogs
and also what I envision when I try to remember my gallery experience—as
if a strange simultaneity pervaded the entire piece, seeping through the in-
terstices dividing the screen. But in the actual workings of the installation,
we see only three successive flows of images—three distinct, interlocked
sequences. In each case, the actions are minimal.
On the left, a handsome young man stands in a modern hotel elevator,
walks along a red-lit corridor, enters a room that mixes Japanese design
with 1970s decor, and tiredly looks out the window. The hotel sits right
on the Seine, surrounded by a landscape under construction where gray
buildings intermingle with empty lots and gigantic yellow and red cranes.
The Eiffel Tower is partially visible in the distance. Asleep on the bed, his
coat still on, the man wakes up at the ring of the phone and, speaking a
German-accented English, engages in a succinct conversation: his French
interlocutor is calling from an apartment just on the other riverbank and
is inviting him there, to check the results of a hospital report. A shot of
the elevator control panels ends the sequence, the green digits above the
buttons marking the descending floors. On the right, the man stands in
front of a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Seine and a replica of
4 f o ld i n g time
cut—a turning inside out rather than an excision of the visible, a reversal
rather than an annihilation of perception. As such, the edit becomes the
guarantee that disjuncted or contradictory pasts can spring out of the one,
self-differing time that Merleau-Ponty has called “flesh.” It is here, in the
wake of the philosopher’s “posthumous productivity,” that I will propose
to reconfigure the virtual as the invisible of which the flesh is made—not
the opposite of the visible but its latent and inexhaustible counterpart.7
The site of a memory in excess of repression, the edit as intertwining of
the visible and the invisible promises to release a past that never existed
in the present of the film—a time that “will have been” only in the coiling
that digital memory manifests.
The Edit Is a Fold: Pierre Huyghe’s L’ellipse
I know of one Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along
that line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere
detective might well do so, too.
—Jorge Luis Borges , Labyrinths
One cannot see it there and every effort to see it there makes it
disappear, but it [the invisible] is in the line of the visible, it is its virtual
focus, it is inscribed within it (in filigree).
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty , The Visible and the Invisible
In the last twenty years, French multimedia artist Pierre Huyghe has flu-
idly engaged with architecture, music, cinema, and television, producing a
body of work in which the appropriation of preexisting materials occurs
under the sign of repetition and replay rather than representation and
citation. For instance, in Remake (1994–95), a shot-by-shot re-creation
of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (United States, 1954), he recruits
amateur actors to “reinterpret” the original performances, while in Les
incivils (1995), inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Uccellaci e uccellini (The
Hawks and Sparrows, Italy, 1966), he asks the original actors to revisit
the sites where the film was shot and reenact specific scenes. In the two-
channel video installation The Third Memory (2000), something different
yet occurs. Huyghe brings John Wojtowicz, whose infamous robbery of a
Brooklyn bank had inspired Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (United
States, 1975), to a studio set built on the model of the bank seen in the
film. Here he invites Wojtowicz not only to reconstitute the event for the
f o ld i n g t i m e 5
camera but also to explain the reasons behind his actions, only to discover
that his memory had been “affected by the fiction itself” and that “he had
to integrate the fiction of Dog Day Afternoon into the fact of his life.”8
The final piece intercuts this hybrid reconstruction with scenes from the
film featuring Al Pacino and a variety of archival materials (news foot-
age and newspaper clippings) documenting the holdup and its aftermath.
Though specific strategies and outcomes highly differ, in all these cases,
the original film becomes, for Huyghe, a “score,” an “open scenario,” the
point of departure for “investigat[ing] how a fiction, how a story, could
in fact produce a certain kind of reality. An additif of reality.”9 The artist
only sets the conditions, provides the framework for chance encounters
to occur or recur, at the threshold of reality and fiction. It is this sense of
potentiality, this interest in existing films as transitional construction sites,
spectral and incomplete configurations, that has caught and held my at-
tention since I was first exposed to these pieces.
The Ellipsis is the most restrained of Huyghe’s interventions into the
outside of the artwork. The screen we face in the gallery is unusually
elongated and divided into three sections, each constituting the site of an
independent video projection. If the three sequences were to be played si-
multaneously and then brought to a standstill, the resulting visual effect
would be that of a peculiar, disjointed filmstrip. This is indeed what I see
when I look at the documentation of the piece presented in most catalogs
and also what I envision when I try to remember my gallery experience—as
if a strange simultaneity pervaded the entire piece, seeping through the in-
terstices dividing the screen. But in the actual workings of the installation,
we see only three successive flows of images—three distinct, interlocked
sequences. In each case, the actions are minimal.
On the left, a handsome young man stands in a modern hotel elevator,
walks along a red-lit corridor, enters a room that mixes Japanese design
with 1970s decor, and tiredly looks out the window. The hotel sits right
on the Seine, surrounded by a landscape under construction where gray
buildings intermingle with empty lots and gigantic yellow and red cranes.
The Eiffel Tower is partially visible in the distance. Asleep on the bed, his
coat still on, the man wakes up at the ring of the phone and, speaking a
German-accented English, engages in a succinct conversation: his French
interlocutor is calling from an apartment just on the other riverbank and
is inviting him there, to check the results of a hospital report. A shot of
the elevator control panels ends the sequence, the green digits above the
buttons marking the descending floors. On the right, the man stands in
front of a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the Seine and a replica of
6 f o ld i n g time
the Statue of Liberty. His distinctive profile is once again perfectly etched
against the natural light background. He holds a folder of medical papers
in his hands and, while examining them, becomes increasingly shaken: it
has been confirmed that his illness is fatal. Matter-of-factly, his shady host
offers him deep regrets, a glass of water and a pill, and the head shot of a
third party to use for identification purposes. The dying man will have to
recognize this stranger in the subway crowd and shoot him point blank,
then walk away without running. “Take it easy, just move like a normal
passenger,” says the gangster, while his henchman plays a few notes on
the piano in guise of a musical comment.
In between the sequences, the same man, again wearing a winter coat,
exits the same hotel elevator. After all, this is what he is supposed to do or
to have done to cross the river and reach the gangster’s apartment. Now,
however, he has no mustache and his hair has thinned. He looks roughly
twenty years older. Yet we recognize his profile and, despite a sense of
disorientation, cannot but follow him through the artificially lit hall into
the streets. His manner of walking is purposeful and self-assured, and the
camera tracks his movements across the embankment without interrup-
tion, sometimes remaining at his side, sometimes tailing or anticipating
him. “Hi,” he murmurs unexpectedly, “how is life?” his look shifting in
direction and depth to momentarily meet the look of the camera opera-
tor. It will take him about eight minutes to complete his walk, and for
this entire duration, the camera will not lose sight of him, tracing a path
that is continuous and yet convoluted, in part because of its changing po-
sition with respect to the actor, in part because the terrain they traverse
f o ld i n g t i m e 7
Figure 15. Pierre Huyghe, L’ellipse (The Ellipsis, 1998). Triple projection, S16,
Beta digital, sound, thirteen minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York/Paris.
is full of angular architectural elements, staircases, underground passage-
ways, and uneven sidewalks. The man walks at a brisk pace, but then on
the Grenelle bridge, he slows down a bit and stops a few times, showing
signs of fatigue and growing apprehension, as if he were troubled by the
prospect—or the memory—of his destination. The Eiffel Tower is clearly
visible, and in place of the Statue of Liberty, there stand a scaffold and a
billboard informing us that the statue is temporarily on display in Tokyo.
When he enters the apartment, the man steps toward the floor-to-ceiling
window and remains there, glancing through a folder of papers. We hear
a few notes coming from a piano that is not there.
The man on the screen is Swiss–German actor Bruno Ganz. He ap-
pears as the protagonist of Wenders’s The American Friend in the side
sequences and as a stand-in for “himself” in the central tracking shot,
which was filmed twenty years later in the same location, the district of
Beaugrenelle. At once simple and complex, the structure of the piece dis-
plays an irreducible labyrinthine quality. In Wenders’s film, the two se-
quences follow one another by means of an ellipsis: a sharp edit erases
or, rather, hides the space-time it takes the protagonist to walk from the
Hotel Nikko to the apartment building on the other bank of the Seine.
The narrative holds here specific relevance. Once a talented art restorer,
Jonathan (Ganz) is now suffering from a rare blood disease and is tor-
mented by the prospect of not leaving his wife and young child a legacy.
6 f o ld i n g time
the Statue of Liberty. His distinctive profile is once again perfectly etched
against the natural light background. He holds a folder of medical papers
in his hands and, while examining them, becomes increasingly shaken: it
has been confirmed that his illness is fatal. Matter-of-factly, his shady host
offers him deep regrets, a glass of water and a pill, and the head shot of a
third party to use for identification purposes. The dying man will have to
recognize this stranger in the subway crowd and shoot him point blank,
then walk away without running. “Take it easy, just move like a normal
passenger,” says the gangster, while his henchman plays a few notes on
the piano in guise of a musical comment.
In between the sequences, the same man, again wearing a winter coat,
exits the same hotel elevator. After all, this is what he is supposed to do or
to have done to cross the river and reach the gangster’s apartment. Now,
however, he has no mustache and his hair has thinned. He looks roughly
twenty years older. Yet we recognize his profile and, despite a sense of
disorientation, cannot but follow him through the artificially lit hall into
the streets. His manner of walking is purposeful and self-assured, and the
camera tracks his movements across the embankment without interrup-
tion, sometimes remaining at his side, sometimes tailing or anticipating
him. “Hi,” he murmurs unexpectedly, “how is life?” his look shifting in
direction and depth to momentarily meet the look of the camera opera-
tor. It will take him about eight minutes to complete his walk, and for
this entire duration, the camera will not lose sight of him, tracing a path
that is continuous and yet convoluted, in part because of its changing po-
sition with respect to the actor, in part because the terrain they traverse
f o ld i n g t i m e 7
Figure 15. Pierre Huyghe, L’ellipse (The Ellipsis, 1998). Triple projection, S16,
Beta digital, sound, thirteen minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York/Paris.
is full of angular architectural elements, staircases, underground passage-
ways, and uneven sidewalks. The man walks at a brisk pace, but then on
the Grenelle bridge, he slows down a bit and stops a few times, showing
signs of fatigue and growing apprehension, as if he were troubled by the
prospect—or the memory—of his destination. The Eiffel Tower is clearly
visible, and in place of the Statue of Liberty, there stand a scaffold and a
billboard informing us that the statue is temporarily on display in Tokyo.
When he enters the apartment, the man steps toward the floor-to-ceiling
window and remains there, glancing through a folder of papers. We hear
a few notes coming from a piano that is not there.
The man on the screen is Swiss–German actor Bruno Ganz. He ap-
pears as the protagonist of Wenders’s The American Friend in the side
sequences and as a stand-in for “himself” in the central tracking shot,
which was filmed twenty years later in the same location, the district of
Beaugrenelle. At once simple and complex, the structure of the piece dis-
plays an irreducible labyrinthine quality. In Wenders’s film, the two se-
quences follow one another by means of an ellipsis: a sharp edit erases
or, rather, hides the space-time it takes the protagonist to walk from the
Hotel Nikko to the apartment building on the other bank of the Seine.
The narrative holds here specific relevance. Once a talented art restorer,
Jonathan (Ganz) is now suffering from a rare blood disease and is tor-
mented by the prospect of not leaving his wife and young child a legacy.
8 f o ld i n g time
A shifty art dealer (Dennis Hopper) leads him to believe that his illness
is terminal and introduces him to a gangster (Gérard Blain) who, in turn,
lures him to Paris with the promise of an advantageous deal. On the left,
in the hotel room, Jonathan is waiting for the results of decisive medical
tests. On the right, in the gangster’s apartment, he is confronted with the
fake evidence of his imminent death and is invited to become a hit man
in exchange for a considerable sum of money. Thus the edit that takes
Jonathan from one riverbank to the other also marks the space-time it
takes for a man to be left alive and found dead—not in the present of the
shot but in the future of the film. (At the end, Jonathan will in fact die,
though unexpectedly, while driving away with his wife toward what he
believed to be a new future.)
Huyghe rightly regards this kind of edit (which he improperly calls a
“jump cut”) as a figure of speech, a rhetorical device that not only allows
but also compels the viewer to process a break in the continuity of the
narrative, restoring coherence where a temporal and/or spatial displace-
ment has occurred. However, in its very arbitrariness, this type of transition
relies on and mobilizes the spectator’s capacity to fill a certain narrative
gap by means of his or her imagination. Whether such an operation is
performed automatically or registered as a demand for interpretive work,
at all times, it marks the severance or, rather, the suspension of a certain
perceptual and affective link. As Huyghe observes,
for the viewer, it signifies a momentary loss of his relationship with
the character. But the event or the character has not disappeared
permanently. They are simply elsewhere in time or space. . . . By
momentarily inhabiting this elsewhere, by mentally reconstructing
this intervening moment, the viewer actively occupies his or her
time and becomes the co-author of the narrative.10
The Ellipsis builds on this participatory strategy, externalizing what
Huyghe calls “the insertion of one’s own subjective experience into the
editing of the narrative,” dramatizing the process through which we mingle
the images appearing on the screen with the virtual, invisible images stored
in our memory, independently of any clear-cut distinction between reality
and fiction. However, if “the insert seems to re-establish the continuity
of the event and its spatial development,” Huyghe suggests, “another el-
lipsis replaces the first one: a biographical ellipsis.”11 Not only is the ac-
tor twenty years older, but his character also died twenty years earlier, at
the end of the film to which he is now returning: in this passage between
f o ld i n g t i m e 9
life and death—which coincides with the interval between shots—time is
kaleidoscopic.
Indeed, The Ellipsis goes beyond exposing cinema’s reliance on editing
and the spectator’s active role in narrative construction. While displaying
the impossibility of ever saturating the interstice between shots, Huyghe’s
intervention invites us to conceive of this very rift as a virtual archive or,
more precisely, as an “archive of the virtual.”12 The artist’s remarks already
suggest that the edit is not a permanent, absolute break but an interruption,
a temporary suspension of the relationship between film and spectator. I
will take these remarks further and, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s work,
maintain that the edit itself—cinema’s most distinctive impression—con-
stitutes less an excision than a folding of the visible upon itself, a coiling
that is also a rearticulation of the relation between the visible and the
invisible. As a fold, the edit operates beyond the opposition of continu-
ity and discontinuity, becoming instead the promise (and the threat) of a
heterogeneous continuity, the site of an excess, a self-effacing and yet fruit-
ful remainder. Unfolding, refolding a film by intervening directly between
shots can thus bring about a rearrangement in what Jacques Rancière has
called “the distribution of the sensible,” a transformation of the relation
between the visible and the invisible that is at once aesthetic and political.13
There is vision, Merleau-Ponty writes, because there is entanglement of
the visible and the invisible, because “the surface of the visible is doubled
up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve,” and such a dou-
bling is in principle reversible: like “the finger of the glove that is turned
inside out.”14 In cinema, as in life, every visible partakes of this interwoven
texture, of which the visible and the invisible are like the obverse and the
reverse. Through the edit—in the edit—the visible is not erased but twisted
upon itself, returned to that invisible that Merleau-Ponty defines as its “se-
cret counterpart,” its “inner framework,” and there imperfectly preserved
for further disclosure.15 Ganz and the Parisian landscape never stopped
being between the frames of Wenders’s film—on the contrary, they con-
tinued to inhabit this fissure, this elusive opening, the way ghosts inhabit
a world that, though imaginary, possesses the same perceptual horizon
as our own. That Huyghe turned “the finger of the glove” inside out that
day in the life of Paris and Bruno Ganz, filming the sequence-shot now at
the center of the installation, does not exhaust the invisibility opened up
by the edit but only points in its direction. The archive of the virtual mu-
tates here into an archive of the invisible, yet only on condition that we
understand the latter as the name for a latent and indefinitely productive
in-visibility, an im-memory whose only (abyssal) ground coincides with
8 f o ld i n g time
A shifty art dealer (Dennis Hopper) leads him to believe that his illness
is terminal and introduces him to a gangster (Gérard Blain) who, in turn,
lures him to Paris with the promise of an advantageous deal. On the left,
in the hotel room, Jonathan is waiting for the results of decisive medical
tests. On the right, in the gangster’s apartment, he is confronted with the
fake evidence of his imminent death and is invited to become a hit man
in exchange for a considerable sum of money. Thus the edit that takes
Jonathan from one riverbank to the other also marks the space-time it
takes for a man to be left alive and found dead—not in the present of the
shot but in the future of the film. (At the end, Jonathan will in fact die,
though unexpectedly, while driving away with his wife toward what he
believed to be a new future.)
Huyghe rightly regards this kind of edit (which he improperly calls a
“jump cut”) as a figure of speech, a rhetorical device that not only allows
but also compels the viewer to process a break in the continuity of the
narrative, restoring coherence where a temporal and/or spatial displace-
ment has occurred. However, in its very arbitrariness, this type of transition
relies on and mobilizes the spectator’s capacity to fill a certain narrative
gap by means of his or her imagination. Whether such an operation is
performed automatically or registered as a demand for interpretive work,
at all times, it marks the severance or, rather, the suspension of a certain
perceptual and affective link. As Huyghe observes,
for the viewer, it signifies a momentary loss of his relationship with
the character. But the event or the character has not disappeared
permanently. They are simply elsewhere in time or space. . . . By
momentarily inhabiting this elsewhere, by mentally reconstructing
this intervening moment, the viewer actively occupies his or her
time and becomes the co-author of the narrative.10
The Ellipsis builds on this participatory strategy, externalizing what
Huyghe calls “the insertion of one’s own subjective experience into the
editing of the narrative,” dramatizing the process through which we mingle
the images appearing on the screen with the virtual, invisible images stored
in our memory, independently of any clear-cut distinction between reality
and fiction. However, if “the insert seems to re-establish the continuity
of the event and its spatial development,” Huyghe suggests, “another el-
lipsis replaces the first one: a biographical ellipsis.”11 Not only is the ac-
tor twenty years older, but his character also died twenty years earlier, at
the end of the film to which he is now returning: in this passage between
f o ld i n g t i m e 9
life and death—which coincides with the interval between shots—time is
kaleidoscopic.
Indeed, The Ellipsis goes beyond exposing cinema’s reliance on editing
and the spectator’s active role in narrative construction. While displaying
the impossibility of ever saturating the interstice between shots, Huyghe’s
intervention invites us to conceive of this very rift as a virtual archive or,
more precisely, as an “archive of the virtual.”12 The artist’s remarks already
suggest that the edit is not a permanent, absolute break but an interruption,
a temporary suspension of the relationship between film and spectator. I
will take these remarks further and, drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s work,
maintain that the edit itself—cinema’s most distinctive impression—con-
stitutes less an excision than a folding of the visible upon itself, a coiling
that is also a rearticulation of the relation between the visible and the
invisible. As a fold, the edit operates beyond the opposition of continu-
ity and discontinuity, becoming instead the promise (and the threat) of a
heterogeneous continuity, the site of an excess, a self-effacing and yet fruit-
ful remainder. Unfolding, refolding a film by intervening directly between
shots can thus bring about a rearrangement in what Jacques Rancière has
called “the distribution of the sensible,” a transformation of the relation
between the visible and the invisible that is at once aesthetic and political.13
There is vision, Merleau-Ponty writes, because there is entanglement of
the visible and the invisible, because “the surface of the visible is doubled
up over its whole extension with an invisible reserve,” and such a dou-
bling is in principle reversible: like “the finger of the glove that is turned
inside out.”14 In cinema, as in life, every visible partakes of this interwoven
texture, of which the visible and the invisible are like the obverse and the
reverse. Through the edit—in the edit—the visible is not erased but twisted
upon itself, returned to that invisible that Merleau-Ponty defines as its “se-
cret counterpart,” its “inner framework,” and there imperfectly preserved
for further disclosure.15 Ganz and the Parisian landscape never stopped
being between the frames of Wenders’s film—on the contrary, they con-
tinued to inhabit this fissure, this elusive opening, the way ghosts inhabit
a world that, though imaginary, possesses the same perceptual horizon
as our own. That Huyghe turned “the finger of the glove” inside out that
day in the life of Paris and Bruno Ganz, filming the sequence-shot now at
the center of the installation, does not exhaust the invisibility opened up
by the edit but only points in its direction. The archive of the virtual mu-
tates here into an archive of the invisible, yet only on condition that we
understand the latter as the name for a latent and indefinitely productive
in-visibility, an im-memory whose only (abyssal) ground coincides with
10 f o ld i n g time
the incessant reversibility of perception.16 The memory that we envision
as resisting the physical and symbolic supervision of Derrida’s archons
might find its most proper, that is, improper, antieconomic domicile in
this very fissure—the edit as fold.
Time and the Invisible
If The Ellipsis reminds us of “the labyrinth of the straight line” that Jorge
Luis Borges describes in “Death and the Compass,” it also demands that
we understand its impossible simplicity by further investigating the re-
lation between vision and time. I used to wonder what the installation
would have looked like, which effects it would have produced, had Huyghe
asked Hanna Schygulla, another memorable representative of New Ger-
man Cinema, to take that walk across the Seine. An actress returning
from the future to briefly relive the life of a character she never played but
whose actor she knew very well—would this have amounted to a bolder
intervention? I believe now that The Ellipsis’s effectiveness, its capacity
to articulate a complex temporal landscape, springs forth from the mini-
malist quality of its moves. Not even by having the same actor retrace his
own steps, repeat the crossing that he supposedly made as a character,
can the installation restore the continuity between the two film shots. In-
deed, the potential for the new that Merleau-Ponty invites us to pursue
in the unthought of every thinker, and that Grosz and Cornell attribute
to transformative political thought, resides in this inerasable divergence,
which coincides with the impossibility of ever closing the circle of time, of
exhausting time’s internal difference.17 What is then the relation between
time and perception, if the edit can hold in reserve—as its own invisible
lining, its own mysterious depth—a memory that comes from the future,
instead of simply gathering and safeguarding the past as it was?18
In the “Working Notes” to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-
Ponty begins to consider the perceptual field, with its doubling of vis-
ibility and invisibility, its dehiscence and “never-finished differentiation,”
as “the model of every transcendence.”19 Eventually, he proposes that we
see the intimate connection between the flesh of things, which is also an
intertwining of the visible and the invisible, and a temporality that defies
the metaphysical model of presence.20 “Past and present,” he writes, “are
Ineinander, each enveloping-enveloped—and that itself is the flesh.”21 Like
the flesh, time is a “chiasm,” the interlacing of dimensions that are neither
autonomous nor coincident.22 There is no certainty of the present that can
be established from beneath or outside the flow of time: as it appears, “the
f o ld i n g t i m e 11
new present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it
was just there, one never coincides with it.”23 Far from being a point or a
segment of time, which we can place on a line between past and future,
the present is like the visible that we inhabit—“always ‘behind,’ beyond,
far off,” around us and yet at a distance.24 Indeed, like the flesh, time it-
self is endowed with an inexhaustible depth and is characterized by sev-
eral leaves or sheets. What we see, the so-called here and now, emerges
only as the ostensible counterpart of the invisible and of other layers of
time: “the present, the visible,” writes again Merleau-Ponty, “counts so
much for me and has an absolute prestige for me only by reason of this
immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere, which
it announces and which it conceals.”25 Huyghe does not need to play the
sequences of The Ellipsis at once to show their mutual implication—each
sequence already holds the others in a relation of simultaneity, bearing
them “inside” or “behind” rather than connecting them in an external
and sequential manner.26 In this respect, the sequence that follows Ganz
across the river affirms itself as the installation’s perfect and impossible
center—a sliver of heterogeneous time, a cycle that returns in the past as
it has been transformed by the future it will have engendered. “Even in
the present,” Merleau-Ponty suggests, “the landscape is a configuration,”
a pattern woven in the self-differing texture of the flesh.27
It must be underscored that the flesh becomes here the name for “the
spatializing-temporalizing vortex,” the open and always incomplete circle
through which perception is formed and time propagates itself—a coiling
over by “fission or segregation,” an interweaving that is also a splitting
apart, a breaking up, a turning away.28 As Judith Butler notices in her essay
on Merleau-Ponty and Malebranche, “the flesh challenges the grammar
by which it is made available to us in language,” tracing its own winding
through detours and divisions that prevent us from opposing proximity
and distance, belonging and estrangement, luminosity and obscurity.29 If
the flesh is “a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself,” this re-
turn is always accompanied by a withdrawal or departure, a taking leave
that is the condition of every arrival.30 There is no fusion between present
and past, just as there is no coincidence between my body and the world,
the seeing and the visible: “my left hand is always on the verge of touch-
ing my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the
coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization.”31 On the contrary,
Merleau-Ponty reminds us, there is always a fissure or écart between
them—difference is of perception as it is of time. It is this divergence, this
“incessant escaping,” that allows for the internal generativity of the flesh
10 f o ld i n g time
the incessant reversibility of perception.16 The memory that we envision
as resisting the physical and symbolic supervision of Derrida’s archons
might find its most proper, that is, improper, antieconomic domicile in
this very fissure—the edit as fold.
Time and the Invisible
If The Ellipsis reminds us of “the labyrinth of the straight line” that Jorge
Luis Borges describes in “Death and the Compass,” it also demands that
we understand its impossible simplicity by further investigating the re-
lation between vision and time. I used to wonder what the installation
would have looked like, which effects it would have produced, had Huyghe
asked Hanna Schygulla, another memorable representative of New Ger-
man Cinema, to take that walk across the Seine. An actress returning
from the future to briefly relive the life of a character she never played but
whose actor she knew very well—would this have amounted to a bolder
intervention? I believe now that The Ellipsis’s effectiveness, its capacity
to articulate a complex temporal landscape, springs forth from the mini-
malist quality of its moves. Not even by having the same actor retrace his
own steps, repeat the crossing that he supposedly made as a character,
can the installation restore the continuity between the two film shots. In-
deed, the potential for the new that Merleau-Ponty invites us to pursue
in the unthought of every thinker, and that Grosz and Cornell attribute
to transformative political thought, resides in this inerasable divergence,
which coincides with the impossibility of ever closing the circle of time, of
exhausting time’s internal difference.17 What is then the relation between
time and perception, if the edit can hold in reserve—as its own invisible
lining, its own mysterious depth—a memory that comes from the future,
instead of simply gathering and safeguarding the past as it was?18
In the “Working Notes” to The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-
Ponty begins to consider the perceptual field, with its doubling of vis-
ibility and invisibility, its dehiscence and “never-finished differentiation,”
as “the model of every transcendence.”19 Eventually, he proposes that we
see the intimate connection between the flesh of things, which is also an
intertwining of the visible and the invisible, and a temporality that defies
the metaphysical model of presence.20 “Past and present,” he writes, “are
Ineinander, each enveloping-enveloped—and that itself is the flesh.”21 Like
the flesh, time is a “chiasm,” the interlacing of dimensions that are neither
autonomous nor coincident.22 There is no certainty of the present that can
be established from beneath or outside the flow of time: as it appears, “the
f o ld i n g t i m e 11
new present is itself a transcendent: one knows that it is not there, that it
was just there, one never coincides with it.”23 Far from being a point or a
segment of time, which we can place on a line between past and future,
the present is like the visible that we inhabit—“always ‘behind,’ beyond,
far off,” around us and yet at a distance.24 Indeed, like the flesh, time it-
self is endowed with an inexhaustible depth and is characterized by sev-
eral leaves or sheets. What we see, the so-called here and now, emerges
only as the ostensible counterpart of the invisible and of other layers of
time: “the present, the visible,” writes again Merleau-Ponty, “counts so
much for me and has an absolute prestige for me only by reason of this
immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere, which
it announces and which it conceals.”25 Huyghe does not need to play the
sequences of The Ellipsis at once to show their mutual implication—each
sequence already holds the others in a relation of simultaneity, bearing
them “inside” or “behind” rather than connecting them in an external
and sequential manner.26 In this respect, the sequence that follows Ganz
across the river affirms itself as the installation’s perfect and impossible
center—a sliver of heterogeneous time, a cycle that returns in the past as
it has been transformed by the future it will have engendered. “Even in
the present,” Merleau-Ponty suggests, “the landscape is a configuration,”
a pattern woven in the self-differing texture of the flesh.27
It must be underscored that the flesh becomes here the name for “the
spatializing-temporalizing vortex,” the open and always incomplete circle
through which perception is formed and time propagates itself—a coiling
over by “fission or segregation,” an interweaving that is also a splitting
apart, a breaking up, a turning away.28 As Judith Butler notices in her essay
on Merleau-Ponty and Malebranche, “the flesh challenges the grammar
by which it is made available to us in language,” tracing its own winding
through detours and divisions that prevent us from opposing proximity
and distance, belonging and estrangement, luminosity and obscurity.29 If
the flesh is “a texture that returns to itself and conforms to itself,” this re-
turn is always accompanied by a withdrawal or departure, a taking leave
that is the condition of every arrival.30 There is no fusion between present
and past, just as there is no coincidence between my body and the world,
the seeing and the visible: “my left hand is always on the verge of touch-
ing my right hand touching the things, but I never reach coincidence; the
coincidence eclipses at the moment of realization.”31 On the contrary,
Merleau-Ponty reminds us, there is always a fissure or écart between
them—difference is of perception as it is of time. It is this divergence, this
“incessant escaping,” that allows for the internal generativity of the flesh
12 f o ld i n g time
and the emergence not only of multiple and even contrasting visions but
also of incongruent, discontinuous temporal layers.32 “It is this negative,”
writes Merleau-Ponty, “that makes possible the vertical world, the union
of the incompossibles, the being in transcendence, the topological space
and the time in joints and members, in dis-junction and dis-membering.”33
If there is only one world and one time, their depth is in principle open
to unending differentiation.
Merleau-Ponty repeatedly interrogates the relation between the visible
and the invisible as the cipher of a reversibility, a porosity that belongs to
both time and perception, to the very depth or “flesh of time” in which
we live.34 When he maintains that “in our flesh as in the flesh of things,
the actual, empirical, ontic visible, by a sort of folding back, invagination,
or padding, exhibits a visibility, a possibility that is not the shadow of the
actual but its principle,”35 what takes shape is the figure of an inextricable
and yet always shifting, never realized adherence between the visible and
its invisible counterpart—a figure whose relevance to all dimensions of
our existence will soon come into focus. That the invisible is here called
a “visibility” points to the impossibility of conceiving the reverse inde-
pendently of the obverse, as much as the adoption of the term principle
expresses the necessity of thinking the invisible beyond any actual, de
facto invisibility. “Rather,” we read in the chapter titled “The Intertwin-
ing—The Chiasm,” “it is the invisible of this world, its own and interior
possibility, the Being of this being.”36 The invisible is such in principle, de
jure, and cannot be directly brought into visibility or exhausted by any
work of translation, but it would be a mistake to understand it as pre-
determined and immutable. While latent, the invisible is not preformed,
already outlined in an elsewhere that is sealed from the visible and yet
capable of conditioning it. Nor does the invisible constitute a “formless
content,” a pure meaning awaiting actualization or mise en forme as if the
latter were called for or imposed from outside.37 The invisible, the flesh
of time from which the visible comes into sight and the present acquires
its vague contours, is incessantly rearticulated by the very visions it solic-
its or initiates, in a circularity that defies the directionality of intentional
consciousness and the movement of a thought that agrees with itself in
the mode of conformity. The openness of the flesh is abyss and prolifera-
tion, fecundity and dehiscence.38
It is crucial, as we explore the visionary potential of an archive of the
invisible, to realize that the openness of the flesh—because it belongs to
time and perception—also permeates, spreads through “imaginary fields,
ideological fields, mythical fields.”39 Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on
f o ld i n g t i m e 13
Institution and Passivity prove fundamental in this respect, at once an-
ticipating and extending the reflection that he develops in his last, unfin-
ished text. The sensible world, with its “gaps, ellipses, allusions,” with its
sense by divergence, can claim ontological priority to the extent that its
horizon is also the horizon of history, a history beyond objectivity and the
intentionality of consciousness.40 Indeed, whether investigating the institu-
tion of a feeling, a work of art, or a domain of knowledge, Merleau-Ponty
discovers the same “subterranean logic” or style—that of a question in
relation to which the answer can be “truly new,” but “not so new that it
creates the question.”41 Rather, “the question is earlier like something that
haunts,”42 a demand that returns with the insistence of a ghost. The mode
of existence of the institution presents here the porosity, circularity, and
contamination that will distinguish the flesh—the indefinitely open does
not coincide with pure invention, creation ex nihilo, but must be affirmed
as time’s internal and always coimplicated possibility. In both private and
public history, we can observe “crystallizations” of the past and the future,
that is, dynamic stratifications, “simultaneities” in which preservation and
supersession, sedimentation and production, encroach upon each other.43
It is not by chance that we find here the coordinated assessments of
Albert Einstein’s theory of time and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural an-
thropology, both criticized for assuming the viewpoint of the absolute
spectator (kosmotheoros).44 For Merleau-Ponty, “time is the very model
of institution,” a symbolic matrix, a field, and by positing himself outside
of it, Lévi-Strauss construes a model of kinship that mirrors the socio-
symbolic system to which he belongs, instead of gesturing toward pos-
sible ones. Against what is explicitly defined as a masculinist viewpoint,
Merleau-Ponty writes,
This working of the past against the present does not result in a
closed universal history or in a complete system of all possible
human combinations with respect to such an institution as, for
example, kinship. Rather, it results in a picture of diverse, complex
probabilities, which are always connected to local circumstances,
burdened with a coefficient of facticity, and such that we can never
say of one that it is more true than another, although we can say
that one is more false, more artificial, and has less openness to a
future which is less rich.45
Anticipating the criticism of Lacanian psychoanalysis that we put forward
in the first chapter, Merleau-Ponty claims that, like the perceptual world,
12 f o ld i n g time
and the emergence not only of multiple and even contrasting visions but
also of incongruent, discontinuous temporal layers.32 “It is this negative,”
writes Merleau-Ponty, “that makes possible the vertical world, the union
of the incompossibles, the being in transcendence, the topological space
and the time in joints and members, in dis-junction and dis-membering.”33
If there is only one world and one time, their depth is in principle open
to unending differentiation.
Merleau-Ponty repeatedly interrogates the relation between the visible
and the invisible as the cipher of a reversibility, a porosity that belongs to
both time and perception, to the very depth or “flesh of time” in which
we live.34 When he maintains that “in our flesh as in the flesh of things,
the actual, empirical, ontic visible, by a sort of folding back, invagination,
or padding, exhibits a visibility, a possibility that is not the shadow of the
actual but its principle,”35 what takes shape is the figure of an inextricable
and yet always shifting, never realized adherence between the visible and
its invisible counterpart—a figure whose relevance to all dimensions of
our existence will soon come into focus. That the invisible is here called
a “visibility” points to the impossibility of conceiving the reverse inde-
pendently of the obverse, as much as the adoption of the term principle
expresses the necessity of thinking the invisible beyond any actual, de
facto invisibility. “Rather,” we read in the chapter titled “The Intertwin-
ing—The Chiasm,” “it is the invisible of this world, its own and interior
possibility, the Being of this being.”36 The invisible is such in principle, de
jure, and cannot be directly brought into visibility or exhausted by any
work of translation, but it would be a mistake to understand it as pre-
determined and immutable. While latent, the invisible is not preformed,
already outlined in an elsewhere that is sealed from the visible and yet
capable of conditioning it. Nor does the invisible constitute a “formless
content,” a pure meaning awaiting actualization or mise en forme as if the
latter were called for or imposed from outside.37 The invisible, the flesh
of time from which the visible comes into sight and the present acquires
its vague contours, is incessantly rearticulated by the very visions it solic-
its or initiates, in a circularity that defies the directionality of intentional
consciousness and the movement of a thought that agrees with itself in
the mode of conformity. The openness of the flesh is abyss and prolifera-
tion, fecundity and dehiscence.38
It is crucial, as we explore the visionary potential of an archive of the
invisible, to realize that the openness of the flesh—because it belongs to
time and perception—also permeates, spreads through “imaginary fields,
ideological fields, mythical fields.”39 Merleau-Ponty’s course notes on
f o ld i n g t i m e 13
Institution and Passivity prove fundamental in this respect, at once an-
ticipating and extending the reflection that he develops in his last, unfin-
ished text. The sensible world, with its “gaps, ellipses, allusions,” with its
sense by divergence, can claim ontological priority to the extent that its
horizon is also the horizon of history, a history beyond objectivity and the
intentionality of consciousness.40 Indeed, whether investigating the institu-
tion of a feeling, a work of art, or a domain of knowledge, Merleau-Ponty
discovers the same “subterranean logic” or style—that of a question in
relation to which the answer can be “truly new,” but “not so new that it
creates the question.”41 Rather, “the question is earlier like something that
haunts,”42 a demand that returns with the insistence of a ghost. The mode
of existence of the institution presents here the porosity, circularity, and
contamination that will distinguish the flesh—the indefinitely open does
not coincide with pure invention, creation ex nihilo, but must be affirmed
as time’s internal and always coimplicated possibility. In both private and
public history, we can observe “crystallizations” of the past and the future,
that is, dynamic stratifications, “simultaneities” in which preservation and
supersession, sedimentation and production, encroach upon each other.43
It is not by chance that we find here the coordinated assessments of
Albert Einstein’s theory of time and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural an-
thropology, both criticized for assuming the viewpoint of the absolute
spectator (kosmotheoros).44 For Merleau-Ponty, “time is the very model
of institution,” a symbolic matrix, a field, and by positing himself outside
of it, Lévi-Strauss construes a model of kinship that mirrors the socio-
symbolic system to which he belongs, instead of gesturing toward pos-
sible ones. Against what is explicitly defined as a masculinist viewpoint,
Merleau-Ponty writes,
This working of the past against the present does not result in a
closed universal history or in a complete system of all possible
human combinations with respect to such an institution as, for
example, kinship. Rather, it results in a picture of diverse, complex
probabilities, which are always connected to local circumstances,
burdened with a coefficient of facticity, and such that we can never
say of one that it is more true than another, although we can say
that one is more false, more artificial, and has less openness to a
future which is less rich.45
Anticipating the criticism of Lacanian psychoanalysis that we put forward
in the first chapter, Merleau-Ponty claims that, like the perceptual world,
14 f o ld i n g time
“the symbolic system, the pattern, would be a social thing”—never pure
and permanently set in its differential structure. “The system is always ar-
tificial,” he adds a few paragraphs later, “the essences of kinship are styles
of existence,” modulations rather than strictures; and in the margins of
the manuscript, he notes apropos of Lévi-Strauss, “What psychoanalysis
would have to say (against Freud) of this masculinism. This is perhaps
adequate to existing societies but not to possible societies.”46 In light of
these remarks, the “wild being” that The Visible and the Invisible inter-
rogates can no longer be equated with any primitive, natural, or neutral
field on which institutions would later establish themselves but becomes
yet another name for the fluctuating openness of the flesh. 47 As Laura
Doyle points out in Bodies of Resistance, this openness offers a “point of
entry for the call or force of interpellation” but also holds “the potential
to collapse or detour the power of discipline and force from within.”48 If
sociosymbolic limits to this openness are always in place, these limits are
also always susceptible to change.
In film and in installation art, the edit or fold operates as the hinge,
the turning point, the open and potentially disarticulating pivot around
which the reversibility of the visible and the invisible occurs. Situated at
the impossible center of the chiasm and partaking of its inerasable and
productive divergence, the edit marks not the accord but the plurality, even
the friction of directions and layers: the reversibility constituting the flesh
“is a coincidence always past or always future, an experience that remem-
bers an impossible past, anticipates an impossible future.”49 Certain edits
already foreground the existence of such invisible crossings, transform-
ing the films to which they belong into labyrinths of time—from Orson
Welles’s Citizen Kane (United States, 1941) and Alain Resnais’s L’Année
dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, France and Italy, 1961)
to Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden, Austria and France, 2005). But edits
that seemingly promote narrative continuity, too, can become the site of
unpredictable reversals. Like the “embroidered mark” on Siegfried’s cloak,
which Freud compares to the dream’s “weak spot,” where interpretation
begins, a strategically retrieved edit presents the viewer with the possibility
of accessing the other side of the film, its invisible or unconscious lining.50
However, the “X” of the edit marks not a breach point but a turning point,
the privileged site for turning the visible inside out and accessing the in-
visible of the film. The invisible is here another name for the unconscious,
which Merleau-Ponty attempts to redefine while invoking the contours of
“an ontological psychoanalysis,” an interpretation of Freud’s philosophy as
a “philosophy of the flesh.”51 As the invisible, the unconscious is outside,
f o ld i n g t i m e 15
in the midst of things rather than at the center of the psyche: “this un-
conscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back
of our ‘consciousness,’ but in front of us, as articulations of our field.”52
However, because the invisible or the unconscious are more than a back-
ground that could be converted into a figure by shifting focus, every edit is
always the index of a permanent reserve of invisibility, of an unconscious
that is never available to complete disclosure. Unfolding, refolding a film,
whether literally or metaphorically, calls forth the depth of its surface—
a depth that is of the visible and of time. By letting images touch each
other or come apart, by loosening or disjoining the lock between them and
their invisible counterpart, digital folding brings about a perturbation in
the sensible that is also a disturbance in the sociosymbolic order of time.
Crossings: Vertigo, Again
A normal film always balances moments of intensity with others
of distraction or repose. Imagine that these moments of repose
tell another story, make up another film, one which plays with the
apparent film, contradicting it, speculating on it, prolonging it.
—Raúl Ruiz , Poetics of Cinema
So it is back to playing, again. Like Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la gla-
neuse (The Gleaners and I, France, 2000), Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Im-
memory offers us an idiosyncratic example of what an aesthetics of play
might look like in the age of digital reproduction. Once more, the digital
emerges here as a medium that invents itself by reinventing other me-
dia, a medium for which contamination seems to be the most distinctive
mode of existence. Produced in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou
in Paris and designed for the personal computer, Immemory is composed
of seven zones—Travel, Museum, Memory, Poetry, War, Photography, and
Cinema. To the viewer–user who navigates its intricate layout, each zone
becomes visible as a fluctuating constellation of still and moving images,
sounds, and written texts. Each zone proposes a veritable geography not
of space but of time, bleeding into the others and forming associations
under the sign of involuntary rather than voluntary memory, fragmen-
tary rather than systematic knowledge. In 1998, Immemory temporarily
mutated into Roseware, an interactive installation that invited visitors of
the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona to add (upload) new materi-
als and thus literally expand Marker’s original archive. We find here the
14 f o ld i n g time
“the symbolic system, the pattern, would be a social thing”—never pure
and permanently set in its differential structure. “The system is always ar-
tificial,” he adds a few paragraphs later, “the essences of kinship are styles
of existence,” modulations rather than strictures; and in the margins of
the manuscript, he notes apropos of Lévi-Strauss, “What psychoanalysis
would have to say (against Freud) of this masculinism. This is perhaps
adequate to existing societies but not to possible societies.”46 In light of
these remarks, the “wild being” that The Visible and the Invisible inter-
rogates can no longer be equated with any primitive, natural, or neutral
field on which institutions would later establish themselves but becomes
yet another name for the fluctuating openness of the flesh. 47 As Laura
Doyle points out in Bodies of Resistance, this openness offers a “point of
entry for the call or force of interpellation” but also holds “the potential
to collapse or detour the power of discipline and force from within.”48 If
sociosymbolic limits to this openness are always in place, these limits are
also always susceptible to change.
In film and in installation art, the edit or fold operates as the hinge,
the turning point, the open and potentially disarticulating pivot around
which the reversibility of the visible and the invisible occurs. Situated at
the impossible center of the chiasm and partaking of its inerasable and
productive divergence, the edit marks not the accord but the plurality, even
the friction of directions and layers: the reversibility constituting the flesh
“is a coincidence always past or always future, an experience that remem-
bers an impossible past, anticipates an impossible future.”49 Certain edits
already foreground the existence of such invisible crossings, transform-
ing the films to which they belong into labyrinths of time—from Orson
Welles’s Citizen Kane (United States, 1941) and Alain Resnais’s L’Année
dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, France and Italy, 1961)
to Michael Haneke’s Caché (Hidden, Austria and France, 2005). But edits
that seemingly promote narrative continuity, too, can become the site of
unpredictable reversals. Like the “embroidered mark” on Siegfried’s cloak,
which Freud compares to the dream’s “weak spot,” where interpretation
begins, a strategically retrieved edit presents the viewer with the possibility
of accessing the other side of the film, its invisible or unconscious lining.50
However, the “X” of the edit marks not a breach point but a turning point,
the privileged site for turning the visible inside out and accessing the in-
visible of the film. The invisible is here another name for the unconscious,
which Merleau-Ponty attempts to redefine while invoking the contours of
“an ontological psychoanalysis,” an interpretation of Freud’s philosophy as
a “philosophy of the flesh.”51 As the invisible, the unconscious is outside,
f o ld i n g t i m e 15
in the midst of things rather than at the center of the psyche: “this un-
conscious is to be sought not at the bottom of ourselves, behind the back
of our ‘consciousness,’ but in front of us, as articulations of our field.”52
However, because the invisible or the unconscious are more than a back-
ground that could be converted into a figure by shifting focus, every edit is
always the index of a permanent reserve of invisibility, of an unconscious
that is never available to complete disclosure. Unfolding, refolding a film,
whether literally or metaphorically, calls forth the depth of its surface—
a depth that is of the visible and of time. By letting images touch each
other or come apart, by loosening or disjoining the lock between them and
their invisible counterpart, digital folding brings about a perturbation in
the sensible that is also a disturbance in the sociosymbolic order of time.
Crossings: Vertigo, Again
A normal film always balances moments of intensity with others
of distraction or repose. Imagine that these moments of repose
tell another story, make up another film, one which plays with the
apparent film, contradicting it, speculating on it, prolonging it.
—Raúl Ruiz , Poetics of Cinema
So it is back to playing, again. Like Varda’s film Les Glaneurs et la gla-
neuse (The Gleaners and I, France, 2000), Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Im-
memory offers us an idiosyncratic example of what an aesthetics of play
might look like in the age of digital reproduction. Once more, the digital
emerges here as a medium that invents itself by reinventing other me-
dia, a medium for which contamination seems to be the most distinctive
mode of existence. Produced in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou
in Paris and designed for the personal computer, Immemory is composed
of seven zones—Travel, Museum, Memory, Poetry, War, Photography, and
Cinema. To the viewer–user who navigates its intricate layout, each zone
becomes visible as a fluctuating constellation of still and moving images,
sounds, and written texts. Each zone proposes a veritable geography not
of space but of time, bleeding into the others and forming associations
under the sign of involuntary rather than voluntary memory, fragmen-
tary rather than systematic knowledge. In 1998, Immemory temporarily
mutated into Roseware, an interactive installation that invited visitors of
the Antoni Tàpies Foundation in Barcelona to add (upload) new materi-
als and thus literally expand Marker’s original archive. We find here the
16 f o ld i n g time
evidence of Marker’s passion for the infinite workings of condensation
and displacement, the vicissitudes of a memory that is at once singular
and rhizomatically rooted in the deep, anonymous time of the media. Al-
ready in the booklet accompanying the CD-ROM, Marker emphasizes
the expansiveness of this “I” whose contours he has never ceased to trace:
My fondest wish is that there might be enough familiar codes here
(the travel picture, the family album, the totem animal) that the
reader–visitor could imperceptibly come to replace my images with
his, my memories with his, and that my Immemory should serve as
a springboard for his own pilgrimage in Time Regained.
It is a curious and yet not surprising wish, as Marker’s “all-terrain I” (to
adopt Raymond Bellour’s formulation) has long thrived on the intimacy
of plurality: the other, the addressee, is not only a coauthor—“you” is
also the condition of possibility for the I to say “I” without being locked
in the trappings of substance.53 The “I” is a shifter, and Marker’s film es-
says, Sans Soleil (France, 1982) above all, have dramatized its vicissitudes
among a plethora of linguistic as well as perceptual signifiers. But Im-
memory does yet something else: it appropriates the fluidity of shifters as
a digital media practice in its own right; that is, it embraces it in terms of
its formal, technological setup. When you navigate Immemory, moving
between voices or subject positions cannot but entail also moving between
media (the printed book, cinema, video, photography).
Interacting with the CD-ROM in a private rather than public space
certainly engenders diverse rhythms and possibilities of play (the instruc-
tions to the user, “Don’t zap, take your time,” resonate differently in a
museum, where other visitors are waiting in line, not to speak of the com-
petence required for smoothly uploading new materials under pressure).
Yet, in both cases, we are led to witness a pulsation, a flickering of vision
and movement, an oscillation between display and withdrawal that is a
function of the aesthetic and technological configuration of the CD-ROM
itself. Oddly enough, what this actual new form encourages is first and
foremost a virtual relationship or, rather, a relationship that tests the limits
of the virtual (invisible): in Immemory, as Bellour reminds us, “the dia-
logue between sender and addressee remains virtual; and one still has very
little understanding of what a CD-ROM may be, somewhere between the
withdrawing film and the book of images.”54 Playing with Immemory, the
perceptive viewer–user soon begins to trace her own itinerary—what Freud
calls the Bahnung or pathway of unconscious desire—among memories
f o ld i n g t i m e 17
and media.55 At the risk of falling into an automatic and tedious process
of reassemblage, she engages in a constitutive detouring, performing a
gesture that is similar to the one described by Rainer Maria Rilke in a
1914 letter to Hedwig von Boddien. In the letter, Rilke imagines a group
reading of Swann’s Way that would not only encourage but also rely on
the participant’s willingness to mime the very process of association struc-
turing Proust’s work:
One person or another would read aloud what especially struck
home to him out of the inexhaustible pages and would hold it out
in a specific way to the general opinion . . . [and] to many a one his
own childhood would appear out of half-oblivion, and one would
pass from tale to tale far into the summer night, but also far into
the mutually true, rich and alive.56
In Flesh of My Flesh, Kaja Silverman references this passage while intro-
ducing her argument on behalf of analogy as the structure of Being—as
the basis for a relationality that connects human beings and things in
an always-evolving network of reversible and potentially nonhierarchical
similarities. The process of analogic discovery and expansion envisioned
by Rilke partakes of the collective imagination to the extent that it brings
together the author and the reader, and the readers among themselves,
“not in spite of the particularities of their lives but rather through them.”57
Marker’s CD-ROM inscribes this very process into its structural design.
In Immemory, the “Memory” zone sets off with the mise-en-abyme
of two highly recognizable photographic portraits—Marcel Proust’s and
Alfred Hitchcock’s—and a question, “What is a madeleine?” “This is a
madeleine,” we read after clicking on Hitchcock’s picture and seeing Kim
Novak’s famous profile and platinum blond hair, multiplied and distorted
as if coming to us from the surface of a curved mirror. Marker’s madeleine
is Madeleine (Kim Novak), the heroine of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (United
States, 1958) and this film is, to him, “the story of a man who can no
longer tolerate the tyranny of memory: what has been, has been, and no
one can change things anymore. He wants to change things.” A film that
many, like Marker himself has noted, cannot but “know by heart,” Ver-
tigo stands at the intersection of countless creative histories. A free adap-
tation of Boileau-Narcejac’s novel D’entre les morts, the film has become
the catalyst for a series of videos, photographs, and installations—too
many for a comprehensive list to be drawn up outside of a catalog or in-
dex. Among those one remembers when remembering the film are some
16 f o ld i n g time
evidence of Marker’s passion for the infinite workings of condensation
and displacement, the vicissitudes of a memory that is at once singular
and rhizomatically rooted in the deep, anonymous time of the media. Al-
ready in the booklet accompanying the CD-ROM, Marker emphasizes
the expansiveness of this “I” whose contours he has never ceased to trace:
My fondest wish is that there might be enough familiar codes here
(the travel picture, the family album, the totem animal) that the
reader–visitor could imperceptibly come to replace my images with
his, my memories with his, and that my Immemory should serve as
a springboard for his own pilgrimage in Time Regained.
It is a curious and yet not surprising wish, as Marker’s “all-terrain I” (to
adopt Raymond Bellour’s formulation) has long thrived on the intimacy
of plurality: the other, the addressee, is not only a coauthor—“you” is
also the condition of possibility for the I to say “I” without being locked
in the trappings of substance.53 The “I” is a shifter, and Marker’s film es-
says, Sans Soleil (France, 1982) above all, have dramatized its vicissitudes
among a plethora of linguistic as well as perceptual signifiers. But Im-
memory does yet something else: it appropriates the fluidity of shifters as
a digital media practice in its own right; that is, it embraces it in terms of
its formal, technological setup. When you navigate Immemory, moving
between voices or subject positions cannot but entail also moving between
media (the printed book, cinema, video, photography).
Interacting with the CD-ROM in a private rather than public space
certainly engenders diverse rhythms and possibilities of play (the instruc-
tions to the user, “Don’t zap, take your time,” resonate differently in a
museum, where other visitors are waiting in line, not to speak of the com-
petence required for smoothly uploading new materials under pressure).
Yet, in both cases, we are led to witness a pulsation, a flickering of vision
and movement, an oscillation between display and withdrawal that is a
function of the aesthetic and technological configuration of the CD-ROM
itself. Oddly enough, what this actual new form encourages is first and
foremost a virtual relationship or, rather, a relationship that tests the limits
of the virtual (invisible): in Immemory, as Bellour reminds us, “the dia-
logue between sender and addressee remains virtual; and one still has very
little understanding of what a CD-ROM may be, somewhere between the
withdrawing film and the book of images.”54 Playing with Immemory, the
perceptive viewer–user soon begins to trace her own itinerary—what Freud
calls the Bahnung or pathway of unconscious desire—among memories
f o ld i n g t i m e 17
and media.55 At the risk of falling into an automatic and tedious process
of reassemblage, she engages in a constitutive detouring, performing a
gesture that is similar to the one described by Rainer Maria Rilke in a
1914 letter to Hedwig von Boddien. In the letter, Rilke imagines a group
reading of Swann’s Way that would not only encourage but also rely on
the participant’s willingness to mime the very process of association struc-
turing Proust’s work:
One person or another would read aloud what especially struck
home to him out of the inexhaustible pages and would hold it out
in a specific way to the general opinion . . . [and] to many a one his
own childhood would appear out of half-oblivion, and one would
pass from tale to tale far into the summer night, but also far into
the mutually true, rich and alive.56
In Flesh of My Flesh, Kaja Silverman references this passage while intro-
ducing her argument on behalf of analogy as the structure of Being—as
the basis for a relationality that connects human beings and things in
an always-evolving network of reversible and potentially nonhierarchical
similarities. The process of analogic discovery and expansion envisioned
by Rilke partakes of the collective imagination to the extent that it brings
together the author and the reader, and the readers among themselves,
“not in spite of the particularities of their lives but rather through them.”57
Marker’s CD-ROM inscribes this very process into its structural design.
In Immemory, the “Memory” zone sets off with the mise-en-abyme
of two highly recognizable photographic portraits—Marcel Proust’s and
Alfred Hitchcock’s—and a question, “What is a madeleine?” “This is a
madeleine,” we read after clicking on Hitchcock’s picture and seeing Kim
Novak’s famous profile and platinum blond hair, multiplied and distorted
as if coming to us from the surface of a curved mirror. Marker’s madeleine
is Madeleine (Kim Novak), the heroine of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (United
States, 1958) and this film is, to him, “the story of a man who can no
longer tolerate the tyranny of memory: what has been, has been, and no
one can change things anymore. He wants to change things.” A film that
many, like Marker himself has noted, cannot but “know by heart,” Ver-
tigo stands at the intersection of countless creative histories. A free adap-
tation of Boileau-Narcejac’s novel D’entre les morts, the film has become
the catalyst for a series of videos, photographs, and installations—too
many for a comprehensive list to be drawn up outside of a catalog or in-
dex. Among those one remembers when remembering the film are some
18 f o ld i n g time

of the most distinctive interventions in contemporary audiovisual culture:

Marker’s films La jetée (The Jetty, France, 1962) and Sans Soleil; Vic-
tor Burgin’s photographic installation The Bridge (1984) and his video
Venise (1993); David Reed’s mixed media installations Judy’s Bedroom
and Scottie’s Bedroom (1995); and Douglas Gordon’s piece Feature Film
(1999). At the turn of the new century, it is almost as if this film on the
radical elusiveness of memory could be known by heart but figuratively
remembered, pieced together only through the works that it has inspired.
What Immemory does specifically is to provide us with the “gaps, ellipses,
allusions” that we need to rediscover the film as our own.58 As we glide
along its surfaces, our memory of cinema (and life) is activated primarily
by what is missing on the computer screen, by the intimate and indefi-
nitely productive distance that separates film shot from film shot, film
frame from film frame. The proliferation of images that matters the most Figure 16. The shot before the edit: Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) leaving the
here is the virtual or invisible one, the one yet to occur, to emerge from clinic after visiting Scottie (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (United
the rifts, the misalignments, the temporary accords existing between the States, 1958).
displayed images—as if the shots or frames were held together by crossings
that unfold at the edge of visibility, as if seeing occurred in and through
the edits. What, then, is my madeleine?
An edit in the middle of Vertigo is marked by two inconspicuous tran-
sitional shots. The first shot, construed according to the rules of perspec-
tive, shows a long, unwelcoming corridor, with a window at the far end
(where the vanishing point would be) and a woman in a light gray coat
walking toward it. The woman is Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie’s
loyal and ingenious friend, and she is now leaving the clinic where Scottie
(James Stewart) is being treated for the deep melancholia that has befallen
him after Madeleine’s suicide. During her last visit, Midge could not get
through to him, as if he were enveloped in a curtain of blindness and un-
able even to acknowledge her presence. In the corridor shot, she walks
steadily, never turning around and eventually disappearing in the distance.
We do not see her leave the building and stroll through the city—she is not
a wanderer, like Scottie and Madeleine, but rather resembles a detective
Figure 17. The shot after the edit: San Francisco under the sun as Scottie returns
who has foregone, or is being denied, the pleasures of flânerie. Indeed, this to his life in Vertigo.
is the last time we have any contact with her—the corridor shot marks her
disappearance from the film itself. The following shots, inaugurated by
a bird’s-eye view of San Francisco—an aerial pan that remains strangely
unanchored—will show us Scottie revisiting the sites where he had initially
followed Madeleine: the luxury apartment building on Nob Hill; Earnie’s
restaurant; the wooden house in the Western Addition; the Palace of the
Legion of Honor, with its monumental rooms and Carlotta’s enigmatic
portrait. No longer in a state of sensorial withdrawal, Scottie is once again
18 f o ld i n g time

of the most distinctive interventions in contemporary audiovisual culture:

Marker’s films La jetée (The Jetty, France, 1962) and Sans Soleil; Vic-
tor Burgin’s photographic installation The Bridge (1984) and his video
Venise (1993); David Reed’s mixed media installations Judy’s Bedroom
and Scottie’s Bedroom (1995); and Douglas Gordon’s piece Feature Film
(1999). At the turn of the new century, it is almost as if this film on the
radical elusiveness of memory could be known by heart but figuratively
remembered, pieced together only through the works that it has inspired.
What Immemory does specifically is to provide us with the “gaps, ellipses,
allusions” that we need to rediscover the film as our own.58 As we glide
along its surfaces, our memory of cinema (and life) is activated primarily
by what is missing on the computer screen, by the intimate and indefi-
nitely productive distance that separates film shot from film shot, film
frame from film frame. The proliferation of images that matters the most Figure 16. The shot before the edit: Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes) leaving the
here is the virtual or invisible one, the one yet to occur, to emerge from clinic after visiting Scottie (James Stewart) in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (United
the rifts, the misalignments, the temporary accords existing between the States, 1958).
displayed images—as if the shots or frames were held together by crossings
that unfold at the edge of visibility, as if seeing occurred in and through
the edits. What, then, is my madeleine?
An edit in the middle of Vertigo is marked by two inconspicuous tran-
sitional shots. The first shot, construed according to the rules of perspec-
tive, shows a long, unwelcoming corridor, with a window at the far end
(where the vanishing point would be) and a woman in a light gray coat
walking toward it. The woman is Midge (Barbara Bel Geddes), Scottie’s
loyal and ingenious friend, and she is now leaving the clinic where Scottie
(James Stewart) is being treated for the deep melancholia that has befallen
him after Madeleine’s suicide. During her last visit, Midge could not get
through to him, as if he were enveloped in a curtain of blindness and un-
able even to acknowledge her presence. In the corridor shot, she walks
steadily, never turning around and eventually disappearing in the distance.
We do not see her leave the building and stroll through the city—she is not
a wanderer, like Scottie and Madeleine, but rather resembles a detective
Figure 17. The shot after the edit: San Francisco under the sun as Scottie returns
who has foregone, or is being denied, the pleasures of flânerie. Indeed, this to his life in Vertigo.
is the last time we have any contact with her—the corridor shot marks her
disappearance from the film itself. The following shots, inaugurated by
a bird’s-eye view of San Francisco—an aerial pan that remains strangely
unanchored—will show us Scottie revisiting the sites where he had initially
followed Madeleine: the luxury apartment building on Nob Hill; Earnie’s
restaurant; the wooden house in the Western Addition; the Palace of the
Legion of Honor, with its monumental rooms and Carlotta’s enigmatic
portrait. No longer in a state of sensorial withdrawal, Scottie is once again
20 f o ld i n g time
responsive to his surroundings, but only to the extent that they remind him
of his lost love. Soon his attention will focus on a redheaded woman (Judy
Barton, also played by Kim Novak), whose profile uncannily resembles
Madeleine’s. The film is now ready to turn back on itself and resume its
course, as Scottie will obsessively attempt to transform the earthy store
clerk into the sophisticated woman in the pearl gray suit.
I had already seen Vertigo many times when Marker’s CD-ROM in-
directly reminded me of this edit and the ellipsis it introduces, triggering
a fascination with the hidden world of the film. Through the years, I had
repeatedly shifted my identification with the film’s characters—from Scot-
tie to Midge to Judy–Madeleine—and also had come to identify with the
film itself, to the point that I could hardly bear its abrupt end.59 Now this
edit allowed me, if not to fold the film inside out, at least to imagine one
of its invisible pleats. As conventional as it is in marking a chronological
time lapse (a year goes by before Scottie remerges from his mineral-like
solitude), the edit separating the shot of the corridor from that of the city
can nonetheless open out and expand into a zone of virtual encounters.
Midge must disappear for Judy Barton to appear. This much is clear in the
economy of the film, which, to a large degree, privileges Scottie’s point of
view. But—in the interval between the upsurge of Scottie’s illness and his
recovery—nobody is seeing, if not the city itself, inhabited by a cluster of
ghosts: Scottie, for whom the world has died; Madeleine, who is dead to
the world; Midge, who has faded from the scene; and Judy, who cannot
leave her hideout. What would the city look like—what does it look like,
what does it see—during this indefinite, spectral time? Unlike Scottie, the
city and its other phantoms are not drained of all desire—they continue
to live their daily lives. What if, for instance, Midge were to run into Judy
first, during a lunch break or an evening stroll, or Madeleine’s profile were
to reappear independently of Scottie’s probing and melancholic look? How
would their encounter, or their solitary wanderings, redefine the libidinal
relations between one character and the other (perhaps Midge and Judy
would fall in love) and those between the film and its spectators? Several
details in Vertigo already put us on the trail of this elusive, fragmentary,
and almost impersonal memory, as if anticipating or remembering what
might have occurred between or behind shots: mirrors reflecting what they
should hide, Kim Novak’s calculated poses and remote gaze, colors (red,
green, blue) so carefully chosen that they start weaving their own fabric
of associations.60 Lost time is the other side of the film, its invisible lining
or membrane, and cannot but transpire in the images we see—looking for
it, bringing it into visibility, whether through words or audiovisual means,
can turn into a subversive form of spectatorship.
f o ld i n g t i m e 21
In his introduction to Immemory, Marker writes that “no film has ever
shown so well that memory, if deranged, can be used for something quite
different than remembering: it can be used to reinvent life, and finally to
vanquish death.” This is Scottie’s movingly impossible dream—to revive
Madeleine, to bring the dead woman back in flesh and blood through Judy
and her strange willful submission. (Because she, too, yearns for a world in
which it is not too late to love and be loved.) But, paradoxically, the cost
of this dream of revivification is death. In the end, Judy Barton will die one
last time, suddenly and under ambiguous circumstances, falling from the
very tower that had sealed her complicity in the film’s murderous scheme.
Indeed, many times during the film, she could find her place among the
women of Monica Bonvicini’s installation Destroy She Said (1998), framed
and haunted as she is by the architectural tokens of power (the museum,
the church, the tower). Yet, in the space and time of the edit that we have
foregrounded, she finds respite and continues to exist as a figure for whom
another desire is at least conceivable—not immune to the death drive but
capable of detouring the path that the death drive follows in the rest of
the film. Here it is as if the interstices of montage, the latent folds of the
visible world, came the closest to constituting that withdrawn, always-
mutating domicile that our memory needs to resist the archive’s arresting
order—until the film resumes its course as that which leaves no escape.
A Matter of Life and Death
Playing with Immemory and its entanglement of memory and forgetting,
one could imagine a sequence-shot of Midge walking through the city
and returning, over and over, to Scottie’s clinic, in a loop that would keep
the film perfectly suspended between life and death; or a sequence-shot
of Midge wandering downtown and, by a mix of chance and conjecture,
finding her way to the Empire Hotel, where Judy Barton hides behind
the mask of her original persona, in a detour that would open the film to
multiple twists, perhaps even to a rejection of its expected course; or all
of them at once, as if they belonged to a series of parallel, interlacing, or
barely touching layers of memory, in a configuration whose dimensions
exceed the space and time of classical geometry. Like in the case of Bruno
Ganz crossing the Seine, any long take of Midge exploring San Francisco
would not constitute a recording of homogeneous space and time. On the
contrary, in the self-differing domain of perception, the sequence-shot,
which André Bazin celebrated for its capacity to display the ambiguity of
life, emerges as yet another way of folding the fabric of the flesh and thus
of rearticulating the relation between the visible and the invisible. Beyond
20 f o ld i n g time
responsive to his surroundings, but only to the extent that they remind him
of his lost love. Soon his attention will focus on a redheaded woman (Judy
Barton, also played by Kim Novak), whose profile uncannily resembles
Madeleine’s. The film is now ready to turn back on itself and resume its
course, as Scottie will obsessively attempt to transform the earthy store
clerk into the sophisticated woman in the pearl gray suit.
I had already seen Vertigo many times when Marker’s CD-ROM in-
directly reminded me of this edit and the ellipsis it introduces, triggering
a fascination with the hidden world of the film. Through the years, I had
repeatedly shifted my identification with the film’s characters—from Scot-
tie to Midge to Judy–Madeleine—and also had come to identify with the
film itself, to the point that I could hardly bear its abrupt end.59 Now this
edit allowed me, if not to fold the film inside out, at least to imagine one
of its invisible pleats. As conventional as it is in marking a chronological
time lapse (a year goes by before Scottie remerges from his mineral-like
solitude), the edit separating the shot of the corridor from that of the city
can nonetheless open out and expand into a zone of virtual encounters.
Midge must disappear for Judy Barton to appear. This much is clear in the
economy of the film, which, to a large degree, privileges Scottie’s point of
view. But—in the interval between the upsurge of Scottie’s illness and his
recovery—nobody is seeing, if not the city itself, inhabited by a cluster of
ghosts: Scottie, for whom the world has died; Madeleine, who is dead to
the world; Midge, who has faded from the scene; and Judy, who cannot
leave her hideout. What would the city look like—what does it look like,
what does it see—during this indefinite, spectral time? Unlike Scottie, the
city and its other phantoms are not drained of all desire—they continue
to live their daily lives. What if, for instance, Midge were to run into Judy
first, during a lunch break or an evening stroll, or Madeleine’s profile were
to reappear independently of Scottie’s probing and melancholic look? How
would their encounter, or their solitary wanderings, redefine the libidinal
relations between one character and the other (perhaps Midge and Judy
would fall in love) and those between the film and its spectators? Several
details in Vertigo already put us on the trail of this elusive, fragmentary,
and almost impersonal memory, as if anticipating or remembering what
might have occurred between or behind shots: mirrors reflecting what they
should hide, Kim Novak’s calculated poses and remote gaze, colors (red,
green, blue) so carefully chosen that they start weaving their own fabric
of associations.60 Lost time is the other side of the film, its invisible lining
or membrane, and cannot but transpire in the images we see—looking for
it, bringing it into visibility, whether through words or audiovisual means,
can turn into a subversive form of spectatorship.
f o ld i n g t i m e 21
In his introduction to Immemory, Marker writes that “no film has ever
shown so well that memory, if deranged, can be used for something quite
different than remembering: it can be used to reinvent life, and finally to
vanquish death.” This is Scottie’s movingly impossible dream—to revive
Madeleine, to bring the dead woman back in flesh and blood through Judy
and her strange willful submission. (Because she, too, yearns for a world in
which it is not too late to love and be loved.) But, paradoxically, the cost
of this dream of revivification is death. In the end, Judy Barton will die one
last time, suddenly and under ambiguous circumstances, falling from the
very tower that had sealed her complicity in the film’s murderous scheme.
Indeed, many times during the film, she could find her place among the
women of Monica Bonvicini’s installation Destroy She Said (1998), framed
and haunted as she is by the architectural tokens of power (the museum,
the church, the tower). Yet, in the space and time of the edit that we have
foregrounded, she finds respite and continues to exist as a figure for whom
another desire is at least conceivable—not immune to the death drive but
capable of detouring the path that the death drive follows in the rest of
the film. Here it is as if the interstices of montage, the latent folds of the
visible world, came the closest to constituting that withdrawn, always-
mutating domicile that our memory needs to resist the archive’s arresting
order—until the film resumes its course as that which leaves no escape.
A Matter of Life and Death
Playing with Immemory and its entanglement of memory and forgetting,
one could imagine a sequence-shot of Midge walking through the city
and returning, over and over, to Scottie’s clinic, in a loop that would keep
the film perfectly suspended between life and death; or a sequence-shot
of Midge wandering downtown and, by a mix of chance and conjecture,
finding her way to the Empire Hotel, where Judy Barton hides behind
the mask of her original persona, in a detour that would open the film to
multiple twists, perhaps even to a rejection of its expected course; or all
of them at once, as if they belonged to a series of parallel, interlacing, or
barely touching layers of memory, in a configuration whose dimensions
exceed the space and time of classical geometry. Like in the case of Bruno
Ganz crossing the Seine, any long take of Midge exploring San Francisco
would not constitute a recording of homogeneous space and time. On the
contrary, in the self-differing domain of perception, the sequence-shot,
which André Bazin celebrated for its capacity to display the ambiguity of
life, emerges as yet another way of folding the fabric of the flesh and thus
of rearticulating the relation between the visible and the invisible. Beyond
22 f o ld i n g time
the opposition of continuity and discontinuity, and the sharp distinction
between decoupage and editing, which still orients our understanding of
Bazin’s critical system, the sequence-shot highlighted through digital media
exposes the heterogeneity of the perceptual world. “Even in the present,”
Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “the landscape is a configuration,” “a crystal-
lization of time.”61 Significantly, the image of the crystal also appears in the
manuscript of Bazin’s famous essay on William Wyler. While comparing
the aesthetic structure of Wyler’s mise-en-scène to the invisible stratifica-
tion of the seashell, Bazin adopts the term cristallographie, even if only to
cross it out and substitute it with travail moléculaire.62 But this hesitation
is sufficient to delineate the image of a sedimentation, an enmeshment of
layers, a simultaneity of dimensions that defies any clear-cut distinction
between continuity and discontinuity.
In Heretical Empiricism, Pier Paolo Pasolini describes montage as the
operation that confers sense on the scattered and opaque materials of
the film, which he compares to sequence-shots of variable duration, in
the same way that death brings sudden intelligibility to the chaos of one’s
life. Constituting a potentially infinite sequence-shot, both cinema and
life need death or montage to acquire a certain internal differentiation,
which Pasolini calls here “sense” and identifies with a shift from the con-
fusion and contradictions of the present to the clarity and coherence of
the past. Of course, we can interpret this death not as a punctual event
but as “a death in life or a being for death,” which is what Gilles Deleuze
does when criticizing Pasolini for holding on to the concept of “montage
king,” montage as abstract harbinger of life.63 Yet Huyghe’s The Ellipsis
suggests yet another interpretive horizon. If the edit is reconceived as a
fold—as a reserve of invisibility rather than an annihilation of percep-
tion—then we find it persisting, even insisting, on the other side of the
sequence-shot that follows Ganz across the Seine. Conversely, we can en-
vision a sequence-shot, indeed, a multiplicity of sequence-shots, for each
edit that brings about an interruption of the visible. We do not need to
resort to a notion of editing as bare cutting to insert death into the life of
the footage shot in continuity, that is, to introduce articulation into the
flow of lived experience. Neither do we need to cling to an idea of ty-
rannical editing to see that death is the lining of life, the interweaving of
what has been and what will no longer be. Folding is the play not only of
metamorphosis but also of death. We can transform “the powers of death
into poetic productivity,” to adopt Merleau-Ponty’s beautiful formulation,
and turn it on itself, because death already constitutes the membrane of
life, its pervasive and secret layer.
It is uncanny, especially if one is familiar with Ganz’s career, to witness
f o ld i n g t i m e 23
the actor returning to the scene of Wenders’s The American Friend, one
of his most famous early films. A few years later, he would play the angel
in the acclaimed Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, France and
West Germany, 1987), also by Wenders, and then his professional life
would enter a period of uncertainty, until a return to more prominent
roles in the last decade. In The Ellipsis’s complex architecture, the cen-
tral sequence-shot—the edit as fold—plays with all these registers of life
and cinema and their ghostly vitality. A sense of affirmation prevails here
over the self-effacement, the inexorable vanishing into time of the shot
and its protagonist. Yet, on the reverse side of this visual fragment, death
is everywhere—dispersed, anonymous, and ever occurring. Watching the
actor passing through the landscape that had seen him act his part as a
young man, I am reminded of what Deleuze writes in discussing Freud’s
death drive:
Blanchot rightly suggests that death has two aspects. One is
personal, concerning the I or the ego, something which I can
confront in a struggle or meet at a limit, or in any case encounter
in a present which causes everything to pass. The other is strangely
impersonal, with no relation to “me,” neither present nor past but
always coming, the source of an incessant multiple adventure in a
persistent question. . . . There is always a “one dies” more profound
than “I die,” and it is not only the gods who die endlessly and in a
variety of ways.64
Not only is the actor aging and approaching his own end, indeed, the
beginning of an end that in the film has already occurred, but the world
around him, too, will have been incessantly growing older and dying,
many times over, though not according to the same existential rhythms.
By emphasizing the indefinite productivity of the flesh, the openness in
excess of the subject that the future anterior manifests, I realize now that
I have been in unremitting contact with what Merleau-Ponty rarely men-
tions, the punctum caecum or blind spot of reversibility—the radical fad-
ing that accompanies any perceptual emergence, the disappearance that
any appearance engenders by virtue of its own inner workings and that
cannot be recuperated, woven back as such into the fabric of the flesh.
Archival memory as creation is also this relentless erosion, the paradoxi-
cal effect of a fecundity that arises when the death drive undoes the per-
ceptual texture of the archive.
22 f o ld i n g time
the opposition of continuity and discontinuity, and the sharp distinction
between decoupage and editing, which still orients our understanding of
Bazin’s critical system, the sequence-shot highlighted through digital media
exposes the heterogeneity of the perceptual world. “Even in the present,”
Merleau-Ponty reminds us, “the landscape is a configuration,” “a crystal-
lization of time.”61 Significantly, the image of the crystal also appears in the
manuscript of Bazin’s famous essay on William Wyler. While comparing
the aesthetic structure of Wyler’s mise-en-scène to the invisible stratifica-
tion of the seashell, Bazin adopts the term cristallographie, even if only to
cross it out and substitute it with travail moléculaire.62 But this hesitation
is sufficient to delineate the image of a sedimentation, an enmeshment of
layers, a simultaneity of dimensions that defies any clear-cut distinction
between continuity and discontinuity.
In Heretical Empiricism, Pier Paolo Pasolini describes montage as the
operation that confers sense on the scattered and opaque materials of
the film, which he compares to sequence-shots of variable duration, in
the same way that death brings sudden intelligibility to the chaos of one’s
life. Constituting a potentially infinite sequence-shot, both cinema and
life need death or montage to acquire a certain internal differentiation,
which Pasolini calls here “sense” and identifies with a shift from the con-
fusion and contradictions of the present to the clarity and coherence of
the past. Of course, we can interpret this death not as a punctual event
but as “a death in life or a being for death,” which is what Gilles Deleuze
does when criticizing Pasolini for holding on to the concept of “montage
king,” montage as abstract harbinger of life.63 Yet Huyghe’s The Ellipsis
suggests yet another interpretive horizon. If the edit is reconceived as a
fold—as a reserve of invisibility rather than an annihilation of percep-
tion—then we find it persisting, even insisting, on the other side of the
sequence-shot that follows Ganz across the Seine. Conversely, we can en-
vision a sequence-shot, indeed, a multiplicity of sequence-shots, for each
edit that brings about an interruption of the visible. We do not need to
resort to a notion of editing as bare cutting to insert death into the life of
the footage shot in continuity, that is, to introduce articulation into the
flow of lived experience. Neither do we need to cling to an idea of ty-
rannical editing to see that death is the lining of life, the interweaving of
what has been and what will no longer be. Folding is the play not only of
metamorphosis but also of death. We can transform “the powers of death
into poetic productivity,” to adopt Merleau-Ponty’s beautiful formulation,
and turn it on itself, because death already constitutes the membrane of
life, its pervasive and secret layer.
It is uncanny, especially if one is familiar with Ganz’s career, to witness
f o ld i n g t i m e 23
the actor returning to the scene of Wenders’s The American Friend, one
of his most famous early films. A few years later, he would play the angel
in the acclaimed Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire, France and
West Germany, 1987), also by Wenders, and then his professional life
would enter a period of uncertainty, until a return to more prominent
roles in the last decade. In The Ellipsis’s complex architecture, the cen-
tral sequence-shot—the edit as fold—plays with all these registers of life
and cinema and their ghostly vitality. A sense of affirmation prevails here
over the self-effacement, the inexorable vanishing into time of the shot
and its protagonist. Yet, on the reverse side of this visual fragment, death
is everywhere—dispersed, anonymous, and ever occurring. Watching the
actor passing through the landscape that had seen him act his part as a
young man, I am reminded of what Deleuze writes in discussing Freud’s
death drive:
Blanchot rightly suggests that death has two aspects. One is
personal, concerning the I or the ego, something which I can
confront in a struggle or meet at a limit, or in any case encounter
in a present which causes everything to pass. The other is strangely
impersonal, with no relation to “me,” neither present nor past but
always coming, the source of an incessant multiple adventure in a
persistent question. . . . There is always a “one dies” more profound
than “I die,” and it is not only the gods who die endlessly and in a
variety of ways.64
Not only is the actor aging and approaching his own end, indeed, the
beginning of an end that in the film has already occurred, but the world
around him, too, will have been incessantly growing older and dying,
many times over, though not according to the same existential rhythms.
By emphasizing the indefinite productivity of the flesh, the openness in
excess of the subject that the future anterior manifests, I realize now that
I have been in unremitting contact with what Merleau-Ponty rarely men-
tions, the punctum caecum or blind spot of reversibility—the radical fad-
ing that accompanies any perceptual emergence, the disappearance that
any appearance engenders by virtue of its own inner workings and that
cannot be recuperated, woven back as such into the fabric of the flesh.
Archival memory as creation is also this relentless erosion, the paradoxi-
cal effect of a fecundity that arises when the death drive undoes the per-
ceptual texture of the archive.
This page intentionally left blank
 Chapter four

Archiving Disappearance
From Michelangelo Antonioni to New Media

Cinema Is the Outside

But where does the outside commence? This is the question of the
archive. There are undoubtedly no others.
—Jacques Derrida , Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression

As though we had always had cinema without realizing it?

—Gilles Deleuze , The Movement Image

In the “exergue” to Archive Fever, Derrida ties the economy of the ar-
chive to two modes of inscription: printing and circumcision. The latter,
he writes, “leaves the trace of an incision right on the skin: more than
one skin, at more than one age. To the letter or by figure.”1 It is through
circumcision that Freud (his body and his corpus) partakes of and sus-
tains a certain lineage, a legacy that includes Freud’s father, Jakob, the
“arch-patriarch” of psychoanalysis, and one in which Derrida, too, is
invested. However, because it implicates what the philosopher calls the
“body proper,” rather than a properly exterior body, at first, circumcision
is put aside in favor of the more typical marks of printing, which incontro-
vertibly require an “external substrate.”2 As if a preexisting principle had
already sanctioned the order according to which these two modalities of
archivization are to be archived, the apparatus comprising paper, ink, and
press commands here privileged consideration. In fact, asks Derrida, “can
one imagine an archive without foundation, without substrate, without
2 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
subjectile?”3 What is at stake is the very distinction between mneme and
hypomnema—between live, internal, natural memory, on one hand, and
inert, external, artificial memory, on the other. “Plato’s Pharmacy” is not far
behind, and in his lecture at the Freud Museum, Derrida explicitly retraces
the debate on writing that occupied several of his early texts. Archiving is
after all what puts spontaneous memory to the test, promising (or threat-
ening) to affirm psychoanalysis as “a theory of the archive and not only
as a theory of memory”—of memory as fundamentally technological.4
Derrida is unambiguous in this respect: “There is no archive without a
place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a
certain exteriority. No archive without outside.”5 Yet, he adds, as if writ-
ing a footnote or postscript, “but where does the outside commence?”6
The claim that inside and outside, speech and writing, perception and
memory, are mutually implicated, rather than hierarchically ordered,
has long characterized Derrida’s reading of the Freudian text. Already
in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” the mystic writing pad becomes the
“tool” that simultaneously reveals and constitutes the psyche as a writing
machine—an apparatus whose operations expose the paradoxical prior-
ity of repetition and, with it, the pervasiveness of erasure and finitude
“within the psyche.”7 One can say that “life is death” because the labor
of the trace does not install itself on a preexisting and allegedly pure vi-
tality—the deferring of memory as writing is always already at work in
the so-called living present of perception. In Archive Fever, these consid-
erations return to foreground the intimacy of memory and technology
and the necessity to rethink psychoanalysis—as both theory and practice
of the archive—in relation to new technological devices. Electronic mail,
for instance, would have possessed the power to change the past as well
as the future of psychoanalysis: a “postal” technology, a mode of corre-
spondence that stands at the threshold between the private and the public,
e-mail can radically transform the “time” of writing, that is, not only the
rhythm but also the structure of archivization.8 The consequences would
have been extensive, affecting the interlocked spheres of theory, clinical
practice, politics, and law. Indeed, asserts Derrida at a more general level,
“the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the struc-
ture of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and
in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it
records the event.”9 The passivity of recording, transcribing, translating
in a different medium is of the performative kind, instituting rather than
sealing a certain memory—conception of memory, practice of memory,
memory of memory—yet the body, in its organic materiality, its proximity
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 3
to the self-presence of the voice, remains at the margins, relegated to the
uncertain zone between memory and perception (or rather, to a zone that
sees perception itself awkwardly split between technological and natural
experience).
In Technics and Time, 3, Bernard Stiegler addresses the question of
the outside in a way that retrieves perception from the periphery of writ-
ing. While indirectly engaging with grammatology and the affirmation of
“life as différance,” Stiegler returns to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology
and its analysis of internal time consciousness. Through a series of bold
theoretical moves, Stiegler proceeds to hone his own earlier remarkable
statement: that “life (anima—on the side of the mental image) is always
already cinema (animation—image-object).”10 At the center of the present
inquiry, we find the constitution of the temporal object (e.g., a melody or
a film) and the dynamics of retentional finitude in the age of mechanical
and digital reproduction. Stiegler simultaneously draws on and redefines
Husserl’s distinction between primary and secondary memory, the latter
coinciding with recollection “proper” and the former (also called primary
retention) naming the association between the present now and the nows
that have just passed. By claiming that imagination always already plays
a role in the process of perception, Stiegler makes it impossible to isolate
primary retention from the mediated workings of memory and thus to
speak of a living present that is not originally haunted by recollection.11
However, for Stiegler, secondary memory (recollection) is as indissociable
from primary memory as it is from tertiary memory. Husserl calls the lat-
ter “image consciousness,” identifying it with a painting or a bust and ve-
hemently excluding it from the constitution of the temporal object. Being
a kind of artificial memory, image consciousness coincides with what was
never perceived or experienced by consciousness, thus falling outside the
realm of phenomenological investigation. Stiegler, on the contrary, argues
that both primary and secondary memory are “rooted” (embedded) in ter-
tiary memory, that consciousness is formed by a heritage or past that it has
not directly lived. In the definition he proposes, tertiary memory comprises
“all forms of ‘objective’ memory: cinematogram, photogram, phonogram,
writing, paintings, sculptures—but also monuments and objects in gen-
eral, since they bear witness, for me, say, of a past that I enforcedly did
not myself live.”12 If, for Derrida, there is “no archive without outside,”
that is, no memory without a technology of inscription, for Stiegler, there
is no perception that does not already rely on and reproduce an external
memory archive.
Stiegler pushes his argument even further. Not only is cinema (as tertiary
2 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
subjectile?”3 What is at stake is the very distinction between mneme and
hypomnema—between live, internal, natural memory, on one hand, and
inert, external, artificial memory, on the other. “Plato’s Pharmacy” is not far
behind, and in his lecture at the Freud Museum, Derrida explicitly retraces
the debate on writing that occupied several of his early texts. Archiving is
after all what puts spontaneous memory to the test, promising (or threat-
ening) to affirm psychoanalysis as “a theory of the archive and not only
as a theory of memory”—of memory as fundamentally technological.4
Derrida is unambiguous in this respect: “There is no archive without a
place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a
certain exteriority. No archive without outside.”5 Yet, he adds, as if writ-
ing a footnote or postscript, “but where does the outside commence?”6
The claim that inside and outside, speech and writing, perception and
memory, are mutually implicated, rather than hierarchically ordered,
has long characterized Derrida’s reading of the Freudian text. Already
in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” the mystic writing pad becomes the
“tool” that simultaneously reveals and constitutes the psyche as a writing
machine—an apparatus whose operations expose the paradoxical prior-
ity of repetition and, with it, the pervasiveness of erasure and finitude
“within the psyche.”7 One can say that “life is death” because the labor
of the trace does not install itself on a preexisting and allegedly pure vi-
tality—the deferring of memory as writing is always already at work in
the so-called living present of perception. In Archive Fever, these consid-
erations return to foreground the intimacy of memory and technology
and the necessity to rethink psychoanalysis—as both theory and practice
of the archive—in relation to new technological devices. Electronic mail,
for instance, would have possessed the power to change the past as well
as the future of psychoanalysis: a “postal” technology, a mode of corre-
spondence that stands at the threshold between the private and the public,
e-mail can radically transform the “time” of writing, that is, not only the
rhythm but also the structure of archivization.8 The consequences would
have been extensive, affecting the interlocked spheres of theory, clinical
practice, politics, and law. Indeed, asserts Derrida at a more general level,
“the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the struc-
ture of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and
in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it
records the event.”9 The passivity of recording, transcribing, translating
in a different medium is of the performative kind, instituting rather than
sealing a certain memory—conception of memory, practice of memory,
memory of memory—yet the body, in its organic materiality, its proximity
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 3
to the self-presence of the voice, remains at the margins, relegated to the
uncertain zone between memory and perception (or rather, to a zone that
sees perception itself awkwardly split between technological and natural
experience).
In Technics and Time, 3, Bernard Stiegler addresses the question of
the outside in a way that retrieves perception from the periphery of writ-
ing. While indirectly engaging with grammatology and the affirmation of
“life as différance,” Stiegler returns to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology
and its analysis of internal time consciousness. Through a series of bold
theoretical moves, Stiegler proceeds to hone his own earlier remarkable
statement: that “life (anima—on the side of the mental image) is always
already cinema (animation—image-object).”10 At the center of the present
inquiry, we find the constitution of the temporal object (e.g., a melody or
a film) and the dynamics of retentional finitude in the age of mechanical
and digital reproduction. Stiegler simultaneously draws on and redefines
Husserl’s distinction between primary and secondary memory, the latter
coinciding with recollection “proper” and the former (also called primary
retention) naming the association between the present now and the nows
that have just passed. By claiming that imagination always already plays
a role in the process of perception, Stiegler makes it impossible to isolate
primary retention from the mediated workings of memory and thus to
speak of a living present that is not originally haunted by recollection.11
However, for Stiegler, secondary memory (recollection) is as indissociable
from primary memory as it is from tertiary memory. Husserl calls the lat-
ter “image consciousness,” identifying it with a painting or a bust and ve-
hemently excluding it from the constitution of the temporal object. Being
a kind of artificial memory, image consciousness coincides with what was
never perceived or experienced by consciousness, thus falling outside the
realm of phenomenological investigation. Stiegler, on the contrary, argues
that both primary and secondary memory are “rooted” (embedded) in ter-
tiary memory, that consciousness is formed by a heritage or past that it has
not directly lived. In the definition he proposes, tertiary memory comprises
“all forms of ‘objective’ memory: cinematogram, photogram, phonogram,
writing, paintings, sculptures—but also monuments and objects in gen-
eral, since they bear witness, for me, say, of a past that I enforcedly did
not myself live.”12 If, for Derrida, there is “no archive without outside,”
that is, no memory without a technology of inscription, for Stiegler, there
is no perception that does not already rely on and reproduce an external
memory archive.
Stiegler pushes his argument even further. Not only is cinema (as tertiary
4 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
memory) constitutive of human consciousness but consciousness itself is
and has always been cinematographic. The term cinematographic names
here that which is structured by and operates according to the editing
of temporal objects.13 “Perception is cinema,” he writes, and “not ‘only
in cinema,’” because the relation between consciousness and its objects
is originally mediated by a process of montage that finds in cinema its
most vivid instantiation.14 Cinema’s immense power stems from this co-
incidence between the structure of consciousness and its own technical
procedures. Hence the immense danger facing us today, as television and
the Internet de-form cinema’s capacity to individuate consciousness at
both the individual and collective levels. Under the sway of an insidious
economic logic, hypervideo technologies relentlessly pursue a synchrony
that threatens to impose a “globalized, impersonal One” and, correspond-
ingly, a homogenous, undifferentiated world.15 What Stiegler calls the
“disorientation” or “becoming-ill” of contemporary technoculture coin-
cides with the unprecedented loss of individuation, the disruption of the
complex interplay between synchronization and diachronization brought
about by the programming industries. The urgency of the question can
hardly be overemphasized—at stake is nothing less than our capacity to
imagine and enact a future.16 But is this dissolution, we must ask, this
movement toward the deadening uniformity of time, endemic to all uses
of hypervideo technologies? By “becoming television,” is cinema destined
to leave us bereft of consciousness and thus of all differentiation? Which
also means—where does cinema commence?
That cinema does not begin or end with film, that is, with the adop-
tion of a specific writing device, constitutes one of the underpinnings of
this book and one that would find Stiegler in agreement to the extent
that perception, for him, has always been a form of “archi-cinema.” Like
psychoanalysis, which Derrida retroactively projects onto a landscape of
quasi-immediate postal exchanges, cinema would have developed differ-
ently under different technological conditions—above all, the diffusion of
light, inexpensive digital camcorders, and the ever-increasing capability for
sound–image transmission on a worldwide scale. Among the pieces mark-
ing the transition to global media, Marco Poloni’s installation The Desert
Room (2006) stands out for the precision with which it investigates the
unstable stratification of our audiovisual landscape, registering, indeed,
displaying, the simultaneous persistence and disappearance of twentieth-
century cinema. A meticulous reproduction of the hotel room where, in
Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Italy, 1975), the television re-
porter played by Jack Nicholson exchanges his identity for that of a dead
man, The Desert Room does not show any footage of the film. Instead, it
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 5
allows us to participate in and reflect on the way in which the digital ar-
chive is emerging as an archive without archivists—as “a fold in passivity”
rather than active production.17 Here Foster’s “artist-as-archivist” ceases
to archive and instead lets himself become the arena where archivization
occurs as that which is in excess of any controlling agency. By rearranging
the relation between old and new technologies, The Desert Room comes
to embody an unconscious, involuntary memory apparatus of which cin-
ema is the dispersed, self-effacing subject and toward which we (whether
makers or spectators) are in a position of interiority and passivity.
In The Desert Room, there is no unity of flow structuring our rela-
tion to the space and time of the room and its viewing devices. Yet such a
fading of consciousness does not necessarily generate a doomed scenario.
Although Stiegler is right in denouncing the control of global media and
the gravity of our current predicament, his tendency to reduce cinema and
perception to consciousness is problematic. As Merleau-Ponty’s rereading
of Husserl elucidates, perception does not end or begin with conscious-
ness. There is “a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the see-er
in the seen,” a self for whom activity and passivity do not oppose each
other, and this self is not the subject of consciousness.18 Caught up in the
flesh of the world, this self is openness to the thickness of the perceptual
field rather than assimilation, permeability rather than absorption. Cin-
ema has the capacity to “make us see” such a constitutive involvement,
reaffirming the porosity of our being.19 In The Desert Room, I will claim,
“archiving cinema” names a process of mutation that requires us to think
beyond the Husserlian model, transforming the archives of consciousness
still punctuating Technics and Time into what Merleau-Ponty has termed
“Memory of the World.” The latter constitutes the unfinished attempt to
envision the anonymity and generality of the perceptual self, to understand
perception in relation to the flesh, that is, to a differentiation beyond or
before consciousness. The cinema that is disappearing or has already dis-
appeared, the one that Stiegler is invested in guarding (Antonioni being
among his examples), was already not a cinema of consciousness, and yet
it possessed the most remarkable capacity to modulate time, showing a
layering of dimensions that belongs to the surface of the world rather than
to the depth of the subject. Archival art, I will maintain, has the power to
remind us of this other mode of articulation, even as it displays its fading
away under the pressure of the global media system. Indeed, it also sug-
gests that a certain use of new technologies might expand our sense of
cinema’s potential and help us discover yet more subversive economies at
the heart of its analog past.
4 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
memory) constitutive of human consciousness but consciousness itself is
and has always been cinematographic. The term cinematographic names
here that which is structured by and operates according to the editing
of temporal objects.13 “Perception is cinema,” he writes, and “not ‘only
in cinema,’” because the relation between consciousness and its objects
is originally mediated by a process of montage that finds in cinema its
most vivid instantiation.14 Cinema’s immense power stems from this co-
incidence between the structure of consciousness and its own technical
procedures. Hence the immense danger facing us today, as television and
the Internet de-form cinema’s capacity to individuate consciousness at
both the individual and collective levels. Under the sway of an insidious
economic logic, hypervideo technologies relentlessly pursue a synchrony
that threatens to impose a “globalized, impersonal One” and, correspond-
ingly, a homogenous, undifferentiated world.15 What Stiegler calls the
“disorientation” or “becoming-ill” of contemporary technoculture coin-
cides with the unprecedented loss of individuation, the disruption of the
complex interplay between synchronization and diachronization brought
about by the programming industries. The urgency of the question can
hardly be overemphasized—at stake is nothing less than our capacity to
imagine and enact a future.16 But is this dissolution, we must ask, this
movement toward the deadening uniformity of time, endemic to all uses
of hypervideo technologies? By “becoming television,” is cinema destined
to leave us bereft of consciousness and thus of all differentiation? Which
also means—where does cinema commence?
That cinema does not begin or end with film, that is, with the adop-
tion of a specific writing device, constitutes one of the underpinnings of
this book and one that would find Stiegler in agreement to the extent
that perception, for him, has always been a form of “archi-cinema.” Like
psychoanalysis, which Derrida retroactively projects onto a landscape of
quasi-immediate postal exchanges, cinema would have developed differ-
ently under different technological conditions—above all, the diffusion of
light, inexpensive digital camcorders, and the ever-increasing capability for
sound–image transmission on a worldwide scale. Among the pieces mark-
ing the transition to global media, Marco Poloni’s installation The Desert
Room (2006) stands out for the precision with which it investigates the
unstable stratification of our audiovisual landscape, registering, indeed,
displaying, the simultaneous persistence and disappearance of twentieth-
century cinema. A meticulous reproduction of the hotel room where, in
Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Italy, 1975), the television re-
porter played by Jack Nicholson exchanges his identity for that of a dead
man, The Desert Room does not show any footage of the film. Instead, it
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 5
allows us to participate in and reflect on the way in which the digital ar-
chive is emerging as an archive without archivists—as “a fold in passivity”
rather than active production.17 Here Foster’s “artist-as-archivist” ceases
to archive and instead lets himself become the arena where archivization
occurs as that which is in excess of any controlling agency. By rearranging
the relation between old and new technologies, The Desert Room comes
to embody an unconscious, involuntary memory apparatus of which cin-
ema is the dispersed, self-effacing subject and toward which we (whether
makers or spectators) are in a position of interiority and passivity.
In The Desert Room, there is no unity of flow structuring our rela-
tion to the space and time of the room and its viewing devices. Yet such a
fading of consciousness does not necessarily generate a doomed scenario.
Although Stiegler is right in denouncing the control of global media and
the gravity of our current predicament, his tendency to reduce cinema and
perception to consciousness is problematic. As Merleau-Ponty’s rereading
of Husserl elucidates, perception does not end or begin with conscious-
ness. There is “a self by confusion, narcissism, inherence of the see-er
in the seen,” a self for whom activity and passivity do not oppose each
other, and this self is not the subject of consciousness.18 Caught up in the
flesh of the world, this self is openness to the thickness of the perceptual
field rather than assimilation, permeability rather than absorption. Cin-
ema has the capacity to “make us see” such a constitutive involvement,
reaffirming the porosity of our being.19 In The Desert Room, I will claim,
“archiving cinema” names a process of mutation that requires us to think
beyond the Husserlian model, transforming the archives of consciousness
still punctuating Technics and Time into what Merleau-Ponty has termed
“Memory of the World.” The latter constitutes the unfinished attempt to
envision the anonymity and generality of the perceptual self, to understand
perception in relation to the flesh, that is, to a differentiation beyond or
before consciousness. The cinema that is disappearing or has already dis-
appeared, the one that Stiegler is invested in guarding (Antonioni being
among his examples), was already not a cinema of consciousness, and yet
it possessed the most remarkable capacity to modulate time, showing a
layering of dimensions that belongs to the surface of the world rather than
to the depth of the subject. Archival art, I will maintain, has the power to
remind us of this other mode of articulation, even as it displays its fading
away under the pressure of the global media system. Indeed, it also sug-
gests that a certain use of new technologies might expand our sense of
cinema’s potential and help us discover yet more subversive economies at
the heart of its analog past.
6 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
“What Can You See?”: Marco Poloni’s The Desert Room
In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap, and in a strange
way—as is very well shown by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the title of
one of the chapters of Le Visible et l’invisible—entrelacs (interlacing,
intertwining). There is not a single one of the divisions, a single one of
the double sides that the function of vision presents, that is not mani-
fested to us as a labyrinth.
—Jacques Lacan , Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental
  Concepts of Psychoanalysis
These machines have always been there, they are always there, even
when we wrote by hand, even during so-called live conversation.
—Jacques Derrida , Echographies
Whether alluded to or directly referenced, Antonioni’s The Passenger in-
sistently returns in a number of photographs, films, and multimedia pieces
by Italian and Swiss artist Marco Poloni. To Poloni—who, for many of
his works, prefers the term dispositif (apparatus, viewing system) to the
habitually adopted installation—The Passenger offers the example of a
methodical and yet necessarily unfinished investigation into the structures
and dynamics of perception. One cannot but revisit the film because the
film never leaves itself or, rather, because it leaves itself incessantly, as it
unfolds, and therefore cannot be said to properly begin or end. Like The
Passenger, Poloni’s site-specific dispositifs activate the figure and modus
operandi of the detective or reporter—an external observer who allegedly
holds sway over his own vision—only to expose the limitations and ulti-
mate failure that such a perceptual and political setup entails. In Shuttle
(2001), for instance, a projection screen and a forward traveling camera
linked to a command console give the visitor the impression that she can
explore the gallery space at will and in real time. Yet, while registering all
the objects in the two exhibition rooms and even the trees in the garden
outside, the image persistently conceals or excludes the contours of the
visitor herself, as if she were not there where she thinks she is. In fact, the
camera movements take place in a scale model of the rooms, a miniature
world whose existence is revealed to the viewer only as she moves forward
in the installation venue. In The Wrong Room (2003), Poloni produces and
disturbs yet another typical observation scene, this time placing the visi-
tor before two parallel monitors and turning the corresponding cameras
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 7
toward the city streets down below—life is happening in front of us, and
by panning and zooming and thus causing the volume to rise, we can
get closer to it. Again, the cameras are instead moving from within two
scale models of the exhibition space placed outside the windows, while
the seemingly synchronous sounds we hear are in fact a mix of real-time
noises and prerecorded conversations, at times almost matching the ac-
tions of the passers-by, more often missing them and surprisingly creating
the effect of an interior monologue or film voice-over.20
An effect of false synchronicity also characterizes Mr. Locke, . . . (2002),
a short video piece in which Poloni superimposes a portion of The Passen-
ger’s sound track to low-definition images downloaded from the web. The
original scene features a key exchange between David Locke (Nicholson)
and an African witch doctor, who responds to Locke’s interview questions
by stating matter-of-factly, “Your questions are much more revealing about
yourself than my answers will be about me,” and then literally turning the
camera back on the reporter. In the video, these words are heard over the
close-up of a bearded, Arab-looking man, and in the aftermath of 9/11, we
find ourselves wondering whether he is an Al-Qaeda terrorist—we are now
the interviewers or, rather, the interrogators on the scene of a new global
war and, in the play of reversed specularity prompted by the sound track,
are forced to confront our beliefs and practices.21 In The Desert Room,
Poloni complicates this series of setups by engaging with The Passenger’s
complex layering of space and time in a manner that is at once direct
and oblique, straightforward and circuitous. The apparatus constitutes
the remarkably careful reproduction of the hotel room where Nicholson
vanishes as Locke and, as such, possesses heightened symbolic resonance.
At the same time, it draws us into a setting that has substituted the gal-
lery space and its white walls with coarse surfaces. Whereas the earlier
works retain a certain abstract, cerebral, even rarefied quality, The Desert
Room asks us to inhabit a dense and even overwhelming field of percep-
tual stimuli—the nocturnal sounds, the flickering neon light, the rotating
ceiling fan, the sand on the floor, the odor of “whateverness” pervading
the room, and the moving images on the TV and computer screens. What
happens to us in this deceivingly self-enclosed space exceeds the boundar-
ies of individual or collective consciousness.
Let’s reenter the desert room. A long, narrow corridor, its walls painted
azure blue, leads us to a carved wooden door. In the film, Locke walks
along this corridor after unsuccessfully trying to make contact with guer-
rilla fighters in the Sahara Desert. His Land Rover stuck on a sand dune,
he is forced to walk his way back to the hotel, carrying camera and tape
6 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
“What Can You See?”: Marco Poloni’s The Desert Room
In this matter of the visible, everything is a trap, and in a strange
way—as is very well shown by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the title of
one of the chapters of Le Visible et l’invisible—entrelacs (interlacing,
intertwining). There is not a single one of the divisions, a single one of
the double sides that the function of vision presents, that is not mani-
fested to us as a labyrinth.
—Jacques Lacan , Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental
  Concepts of Psychoanalysis
These machines have always been there, they are always there, even
when we wrote by hand, even during so-called live conversation.
—Jacques Derrida , Echographies
Whether alluded to or directly referenced, Antonioni’s The Passenger in-
sistently returns in a number of photographs, films, and multimedia pieces
by Italian and Swiss artist Marco Poloni. To Poloni—who, for many of
his works, prefers the term dispositif (apparatus, viewing system) to the
habitually adopted installation—The Passenger offers the example of a
methodical and yet necessarily unfinished investigation into the structures
and dynamics of perception. One cannot but revisit the film because the
film never leaves itself or, rather, because it leaves itself incessantly, as it
unfolds, and therefore cannot be said to properly begin or end. Like The
Passenger, Poloni’s site-specific dispositifs activate the figure and modus
operandi of the detective or reporter—an external observer who allegedly
holds sway over his own vision—only to expose the limitations and ulti-
mate failure that such a perceptual and political setup entails. In Shuttle
(2001), for instance, a projection screen and a forward traveling camera
linked to a command console give the visitor the impression that she can
explore the gallery space at will and in real time. Yet, while registering all
the objects in the two exhibition rooms and even the trees in the garden
outside, the image persistently conceals or excludes the contours of the
visitor herself, as if she were not there where she thinks she is. In fact, the
camera movements take place in a scale model of the rooms, a miniature
world whose existence is revealed to the viewer only as she moves forward
in the installation venue. In The Wrong Room (2003), Poloni produces and
disturbs yet another typical observation scene, this time placing the visi-
tor before two parallel monitors and turning the corresponding cameras
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 7
toward the city streets down below—life is happening in front of us, and
by panning and zooming and thus causing the volume to rise, we can
get closer to it. Again, the cameras are instead moving from within two
scale models of the exhibition space placed outside the windows, while
the seemingly synchronous sounds we hear are in fact a mix of real-time
noises and prerecorded conversations, at times almost matching the ac-
tions of the passers-by, more often missing them and surprisingly creating
the effect of an interior monologue or film voice-over.20
An effect of false synchronicity also characterizes Mr. Locke, . . . (2002),
a short video piece in which Poloni superimposes a portion of The Passen-
ger’s sound track to low-definition images downloaded from the web. The
original scene features a key exchange between David Locke (Nicholson)
and an African witch doctor, who responds to Locke’s interview questions
by stating matter-of-factly, “Your questions are much more revealing about
yourself than my answers will be about me,” and then literally turning the
camera back on the reporter. In the video, these words are heard over the
close-up of a bearded, Arab-looking man, and in the aftermath of 9/11, we
find ourselves wondering whether he is an Al-Qaeda terrorist—we are now
the interviewers or, rather, the interrogators on the scene of a new global
war and, in the play of reversed specularity prompted by the sound track,
are forced to confront our beliefs and practices.21 In The Desert Room,
Poloni complicates this series of setups by engaging with The Passenger’s
complex layering of space and time in a manner that is at once direct
and oblique, straightforward and circuitous. The apparatus constitutes
the remarkably careful reproduction of the hotel room where Nicholson
vanishes as Locke and, as such, possesses heightened symbolic resonance.
At the same time, it draws us into a setting that has substituted the gal-
lery space and its white walls with coarse surfaces. Whereas the earlier
works retain a certain abstract, cerebral, even rarefied quality, The Desert
Room asks us to inhabit a dense and even overwhelming field of percep-
tual stimuli—the nocturnal sounds, the flickering neon light, the rotating
ceiling fan, the sand on the floor, the odor of “whateverness” pervading
the room, and the moving images on the TV and computer screens. What
happens to us in this deceivingly self-enclosed space exceeds the boundar-
ies of individual or collective consciousness.
Let’s reenter the desert room. A long, narrow corridor, its walls painted
azure blue, leads us to a carved wooden door. In the film, Locke walks
along this corridor after unsuccessfully trying to make contact with guer-
rilla fighters in the Sahara Desert. His Land Rover stuck on a sand dune,
he is forced to walk his way back to the hotel, carrying camera and tape
8 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Figure 18. Marco Poloni, The Desert Room (2006), installation view: the corridor
leading to the reproduction of Jack Nicholson’s hotel room. Courtesy of Marco
Poloni.
recorder on his shoulders. He is exhausted and only wants water. It is
thus as seers who have failed to see that we approach the desert room.
(The Girl, as she is called in the script, the enigmatic character played by
Maria Schneider, is yet to enter the picture. But it is as if she were already
observing, witnessing, registering Locke’s incapacity to see.) In Poloni’s
The Desert Hotel (2006), a later constellation of photographs interspers-
ing stills from The Passenger with pictures of the hotel (now abandoned
and barely recognizable) where the film was shot and images of the village
around it, we will see Nicholson approaching the door. Here, conversely,
there are no “framed” images, as if Poloni had realized a complete gesture
of translation—from the surface of the celluloid to the depth of the instal-
lation—and the remembered scene were now all around us.
I have watched The Passenger many times, but if I were asked to vi-
sualize the wooden door, I could not do so in any detail. I could conjure
up a sense of the space and its cooling colors, all the more striking after
the interminable opening sequence shot under the desert sun, but not the
door itself. Yet, when I see the door to The Desert Room, I see it because
I have seen it before, because its shape and texture come to me not in the
alleged present of perception but through the thickness of a certain mem-
ory—the memory of the film as it is made visible by the installation. That I
am not the source of this memory does not make me a puppet but, on the
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 9
Figure 19. Jack Nicholson returning to his room after a failed reportage in Mi-
chelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Italy, 1975).
contrary, binds me to the world in ways that defy the boundaries between
subject and object, activity and passivity, collective and individual memory.
It confers on me a vitality—a ghostly vitality—that simultaneously marks
and exceeds my life span. “The mental image,” writes Stiegler, “is always
the return of some image-object, its remanence,” a certain spectral effect
that we call reality—the affirmation of life as that which must constantly
revive itself, calling back the phantasms of which it is made.22 In this re-
spect, the fact that I have seen The Passenger many times is less important
than the fact that I have seen cinema all my life. The door to the desert
room does not designate the threshold between cinema and its outside—
rather, it reminds us of the threshold in which we live, of the constitutive
contamination between life and cinema, technology and perception.
The room itself is barely furnished: a bench, a metal bed, a lamp hang-
ing from the wall, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, a desk lamp, a coffee
table, a ceiling fan, a round table, and two chairs. With the exception of
the bed, all furnishings are made of light or painted wood. They strike you
for the worn-out, dull, homogenous materials—it is a desolate setting, the
only hint of color coming from the blue pattern of the tiled floor. The de-
fective neon light contributes to increasing the sense of alienation, while
the large window does not afford any view of the outside. It is nighttime
(night having become the metaphor for Antonioni’s daytime desert), and
the only thing you can discern in the surrounding darkness is the sound
of crickets. There are, however, traces of life. The bed is unmade, and ly-
ing around, you can see a couple of books, two old suitcases, a half-drunk
8 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Figure 18. Marco Poloni, The Desert Room (2006), installation view: the corridor
leading to the reproduction of Jack Nicholson’s hotel room. Courtesy of Marco
Poloni.
recorder on his shoulders. He is exhausted and only wants water. It is
thus as seers who have failed to see that we approach the desert room.
(The Girl, as she is called in the script, the enigmatic character played by
Maria Schneider, is yet to enter the picture. But it is as if she were already
observing, witnessing, registering Locke’s incapacity to see.) In Poloni’s
The Desert Hotel (2006), a later constellation of photographs interspers-
ing stills from The Passenger with pictures of the hotel (now abandoned
and barely recognizable) where the film was shot and images of the village
around it, we will see Nicholson approaching the door. Here, conversely,
there are no “framed” images, as if Poloni had realized a complete gesture
of translation—from the surface of the celluloid to the depth of the instal-
lation—and the remembered scene were now all around us.
I have watched The Passenger many times, but if I were asked to vi-
sualize the wooden door, I could not do so in any detail. I could conjure
up a sense of the space and its cooling colors, all the more striking after
the interminable opening sequence shot under the desert sun, but not the
door itself. Yet, when I see the door to The Desert Room, I see it because
I have seen it before, because its shape and texture come to me not in the
alleged present of perception but through the thickness of a certain mem-
ory—the memory of the film as it is made visible by the installation. That I
am not the source of this memory does not make me a puppet but, on the
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 9
Figure 19. Jack Nicholson returning to his room after a failed reportage in Mi-
chelangelo Antonioni’s The Passenger (Italy, 1975).
contrary, binds me to the world in ways that defy the boundaries between
subject and object, activity and passivity, collective and individual memory.
It confers on me a vitality—a ghostly vitality—that simultaneously marks
and exceeds my life span. “The mental image,” writes Stiegler, “is always
the return of some image-object, its remanence,” a certain spectral effect
that we call reality—the affirmation of life as that which must constantly
revive itself, calling back the phantasms of which it is made.22 In this re-
spect, the fact that I have seen The Passenger many times is less important
than the fact that I have seen cinema all my life. The door to the desert
room does not designate the threshold between cinema and its outside—
rather, it reminds us of the threshold in which we live, of the constitutive
contamination between life and cinema, technology and perception.
The room itself is barely furnished: a bench, a metal bed, a lamp hang-
ing from the wall, a chest of drawers, a nightstand, a desk lamp, a coffee
table, a ceiling fan, a round table, and two chairs. With the exception of
the bed, all furnishings are made of light or painted wood. They strike you
for the worn-out, dull, homogenous materials—it is a desolate setting, the
only hint of color coming from the blue pattern of the tiled floor. The de-
fective neon light contributes to increasing the sense of alienation, while
the large window does not afford any view of the outside. It is nighttime
(night having become the metaphor for Antonioni’s daytime desert), and
the only thing you can discern in the surrounding darkness is the sound
of crickets. There are, however, traces of life. The bed is unmade, and ly-
ing around, you can see a couple of books, two old suitcases, a half-drunk
 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 11

Figure 22. Jack Nicholson trading his identity for that of a dead man in The
Passenger.

Figure 20. The Desert Room, installation view: the room where identities are
bottle of gin. It could be a 1970s film set or an abandoned outpost, save
traded. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
for the TV in front of the bed and a laptop on the table. The TV is tuned
to Al Jazeera, broadcasting around-the-clock news, and the laptop is open,
showing the interface of a video editing program, as if someone had been
working on it. Who was sitting at the table before we entered the desert
room? Who will be sitting there as we enter the room and reach for our
assigned place?
In The Passenger, the desert room constitutes the site where Locke ex-
changes his identity with that of a man he barely knows. On returning
from his failed reportage, Locke has found Robertson (Charles Mulvehill)
lifeless and, taking advantage of their uncanny physical resemblance, has
proceeded to switch clothes, passports, and personal belongings. Dead to
his wife and colleagues, he will follow the path traced in advance by his
double (who turns out to have been an arms dealer), keeping appointments
he has never made and, last, running into his assassins. (There is another
desert room at the end of The Passenger, the one where Locke meets his
death as Robertson and the film prepares to retreat from its spectators by
virtue of a seven-minute tracking shot.23) During the scene that interests
us, Nicholson is sitting at the round table in his room, bare chested and
covered in sweat. His back turned to us, he is bent over the identity papers
Figure 21. The Desert Room, installation view: the ceiling fan spinning against
the immobile air. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
he has decided to forge—his own passport will become the passport of the
dead man. He has removed the pictures from both documents with a razor
blade and is now switching them, gluing his own picture in place of the
dead man’s, and vice versa. In The Desert Room, this is the seat reserved
 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 11

Figure 22. Jack Nicholson trading his identity for that of a dead man in The
Passenger.

Figure 20. The Desert Room, installation view: the room where identities are
bottle of gin. It could be a 1970s film set or an abandoned outpost, save
traded. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
for the TV in front of the bed and a laptop on the table. The TV is tuned
to Al Jazeera, broadcasting around-the-clock news, and the laptop is open,
showing the interface of a video editing program, as if someone had been
working on it. Who was sitting at the table before we entered the desert
room? Who will be sitting there as we enter the room and reach for our
assigned place?
In The Passenger, the desert room constitutes the site where Locke ex-
changes his identity with that of a man he barely knows. On returning
from his failed reportage, Locke has found Robertson (Charles Mulvehill)
lifeless and, taking advantage of their uncanny physical resemblance, has
proceeded to switch clothes, passports, and personal belongings. Dead to
his wife and colleagues, he will follow the path traced in advance by his
double (who turns out to have been an arms dealer), keeping appointments
he has never made and, last, running into his assassins. (There is another
desert room at the end of The Passenger, the one where Locke meets his
death as Robertson and the film prepares to retreat from its spectators by
virtue of a seven-minute tracking shot.23) During the scene that interests
us, Nicholson is sitting at the round table in his room, bare chested and
covered in sweat. His back turned to us, he is bent over the identity papers
Figure 21. The Desert Room, installation view: the ceiling fan spinning against
the immobile air. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
he has decided to forge—his own passport will become the passport of the
dead man. He has removed the pictures from both documents with a razor
blade and is now switching them, gluing his own picture in place of the
dead man’s, and vice versa. In The Desert Room, this is the seat reserved
12 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Figure 23. The Desert Room, installation view: the anonymous visitor facing
images of war. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
for the visitor. Sitting down at the table is a deliberate choice as much
as it is a driven move. The scene has been arranged for her in advance.
What she sees on the computer screen is live footage of the very room in
which she finds herself, randomly interwoven with documentary footage
of a Middle Eastern war zone. The time and place are not specified, but
in the geopolitical context of 2006, we have no doubt it is contemporary
Iraq. The footage shows an array of wartime urban situations: armored
vehicles stationed in the streets, U.S. soldiers conversing with passers-by,
a demonstration that ends in bloodshed after bullets are fired, the con-
sequences of fuel shortage, a U.S. helicopter being ambushed, and so on.
The documentary footage and the live images alternate with a typical in-
terval of about ten seconds. The spectator does not have control over the
substitution—she cannot edit the materials or even arrest their flow. The
live footage is filmed from a shifting point of view, one that slowly travels
back and forth through the enclosed space. By using the four arrows of
the computer keypad (left, right, up, and down), highlighted for her with
orange stickers, the visitor is able to pan and tilt what she believes to be
a CCTV camera. Yet, no matter how long or how painstakingly she scans
the room, she cannot find herself in the image. Everything else is there,
but the seat she is occupying is empty.
There is more to the scene in the desert room than a mere trading of
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 13
Figure 24. The Desert Room, installation view: the anonymous visitor looking
for her own image. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
identities. In The Passenger, the scene opens with a shot of a white ceiling
fan spinning against the immobile air and producing a steady, oppressive
sound. As the camera pans down, we see Nicholson in the act of sitting
down and, on the table itself, a variety of objects: a photographic camera,
a bottle of gin, a water pitcher, a glass, and the passports of the two men,
both open on the photo page. We hear a knock at the door, but Nichol-
son does not turn around or speak. Rather, he lifts his head just slightly,
looking ahead, as if registering a change imperceptible to us. Almost im-
mediately, we hear Robertson’s voice, and then Locke’s, alternating in a
conventional introductory dialogue: “Sorry to barge in like this. I saw
your lights on, thought you might like a drink . . . my name is Robertson.
David Robertson. First time I’ve been in this part of Africa. Do you know it
well?” and “No, I’ve never been up here before. I’m a reporter. My name’s
Locke.” Our initial disorientation decreases as the dialogue continues to
overlap with close-ups of Nicholson working on the forgery—the voices
are coming to us from the past, but how? Is this a flashback of the acous-
tical kind? The shot of a tape recorder in the playback mode seems to
provide us with a clear answer—the voices are actually in the room and
not in the character’s mind. Yet, as the camera pans left, as if following
Nicholson’s gaze, we encounter the utterly unexpected. There is no edit
or visible marker of discontinuity, only a slow pan along the blank wall
12 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Figure 23. The Desert Room, installation view: the anonymous visitor facing
images of war. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
for the visitor. Sitting down at the table is a deliberate choice as much
as it is a driven move. The scene has been arranged for her in advance.
What she sees on the computer screen is live footage of the very room in
which she finds herself, randomly interwoven with documentary footage
of a Middle Eastern war zone. The time and place are not specified, but
in the geopolitical context of 2006, we have no doubt it is contemporary
Iraq. The footage shows an array of wartime urban situations: armored
vehicles stationed in the streets, U.S. soldiers conversing with passers-by,
a demonstration that ends in bloodshed after bullets are fired, the con-
sequences of fuel shortage, a U.S. helicopter being ambushed, and so on.
The documentary footage and the live images alternate with a typical in-
terval of about ten seconds. The spectator does not have control over the
substitution—she cannot edit the materials or even arrest their flow. The
live footage is filmed from a shifting point of view, one that slowly travels
back and forth through the enclosed space. By using the four arrows of
the computer keypad (left, right, up, and down), highlighted for her with
orange stickers, the visitor is able to pan and tilt what she believes to be
a CCTV camera. Yet, no matter how long or how painstakingly she scans
the room, she cannot find herself in the image. Everything else is there,
but the seat she is occupying is empty.
There is more to the scene in the desert room than a mere trading of
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 13
Figure 24. The Desert Room, installation view: the anonymous visitor looking
for her own image. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
identities. In The Passenger, the scene opens with a shot of a white ceiling
fan spinning against the immobile air and producing a steady, oppressive
sound. As the camera pans down, we see Nicholson in the act of sitting
down and, on the table itself, a variety of objects: a photographic camera,
a bottle of gin, a water pitcher, a glass, and the passports of the two men,
both open on the photo page. We hear a knock at the door, but Nichol-
son does not turn around or speak. Rather, he lifts his head just slightly,
looking ahead, as if registering a change imperceptible to us. Almost im-
mediately, we hear Robertson’s voice, and then Locke’s, alternating in a
conventional introductory dialogue: “Sorry to barge in like this. I saw
your lights on, thought you might like a drink . . . my name is Robertson.
David Robertson. First time I’ve been in this part of Africa. Do you know it
well?” and “No, I’ve never been up here before. I’m a reporter. My name’s
Locke.” Our initial disorientation decreases as the dialogue continues to
overlap with close-ups of Nicholson working on the forgery—the voices
are coming to us from the past, but how? Is this a flashback of the acous-
tical kind? The shot of a tape recorder in the playback mode seems to
provide us with a clear answer—the voices are actually in the room and
not in the character’s mind. Yet, as the camera pans left, as if following
Nicholson’s gaze, we encounter the utterly unexpected. There is no edit
or visible marker of discontinuity, only a slow pan along the blank wall
14 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 15

until, carefully framed by the open window, Robertson (Mulvehill) walks

into the shot, carrying on the conversation that we thought was just be-
ing played back. A few moments later, Locke (Nicholson) joins him. And
they remain there, on the balcony, the dead man and his double, talking
about the desert, the disparity between their professions or trades (Rob-
ertson introduces himself as a businessman), the poetry of the landscape,
and waiting—Robertson wearing the light blue shirt that Locke will soon
put on in his place and saying, in passing, that he suffers from a bad heart.
Eventually, the camera resumes its leftward movement to follow Robert-
son into the room and then starts to pan in the opposite direction, leaving
Robertson off-screen and bringing Nicholson back into the frame—not
in the time of their original conversation, but as he is sitting at the table,
listening to the recorded dialogue and switching his passport photo for
that of the dead man.
Rarely has a sequence-shot produced such an effect of temporal com-
plexity. Not only does Antonioni’s writing style render the conventional
flashback superfluous, it also exposes its limitations, delineating a land-
Figure 25. The Desert Room, installation view: yet another room—the visit is
scape that is internally layered, folded over on itself, rather than segmented
not over. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
by an external agency. The conversation in the desert room belongs to a
time that has persisted all along since the alleged present of its occurrence
and that now reemerges with daunting mechanical accuracy. Indeed, such piece and will allow us to determine the specificity of its intervention.
a return would not be possible if the original present itself—the “living” In the meantime, to our surprise, our visit is far from over. As we exit the
present of the conversation—were not already split from within, divided room, we find not the outside of the installation but yet another room—
between a past and a future, doubled by its own acoustic shadow. Here a scale model of the place we have just left. We discover it behind a door
the tape recorder heightens a fissure that is already of perception, a de- that, despite the considerably reduced size, looks like the one we opened
hiscence without which “there would be no archive.”24 At the same time, at the beginning: the same painted wood, the same circular carvings. The
by inscribing the dialogue in the process of its being uttered, the tape re- interior, too, reproduces the room with breathtaking precision. There is
corder offers us the guarantee of an unprecedented exactitude, together even a fluorescent tube flickering according to the same pattern (a com-
with the illusion of a “live” effect. But it is not only the conversation—the puter interface controls both lights) and a TV monitor tuned to the same
desert room itself is not (has never been) in the present. As it opens onto Al Jazeera channel. The video camera that we could manipulate but not
the desert, to which it belongs and by which it is bounded, this room has detect in the life-sized room is here at the center of the miniature room,
always constituted an archival site, the repository of intersecting or isolated conspicuously hanging from a dolly. No wonder we fell into the trap. Yet
memories as well as of indefinite “strata of forgetting.”25 (Interestingly, the hardly any sense of relief accompanies our discovery. In front of the ap-
hotel where the film was shot, which Poloni tracks down in the village of paratus’s displaced core, we meet not the cipher of our entrapment but the
Illizi in the Algerian desert, is said to have become a retirement home for reminder of a fundamental impossibility, the figure of a certain failure—I
ex-Mudjaheddin fighters of the National Liberation Front.) We will soon cannot coincide with myself in the act of seeing, I cannot see myself seeing.
return to this multilayered temporality and the long take through which But how is this distance or discrepancy—a difference that is of all forms
it is manifested. Montage has here fully entered the space and time of the of perception—affected by the transition to electronic and digital media?
shot, presenting us with a radically discontinuous continuity. The disori-
entation that it generates further complicates the architecture of Poloni’s
14 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 15

until, carefully framed by the open window, Robertson (Mulvehill) walks

into the shot, carrying on the conversation that we thought was just be-
ing played back. A few moments later, Locke (Nicholson) joins him. And
they remain there, on the balcony, the dead man and his double, talking
about the desert, the disparity between their professions or trades (Rob-
ertson introduces himself as a businessman), the poetry of the landscape,
and waiting—Robertson wearing the light blue shirt that Locke will soon
put on in his place and saying, in passing, that he suffers from a bad heart.
Eventually, the camera resumes its leftward movement to follow Robert-
son into the room and then starts to pan in the opposite direction, leaving
Robertson off-screen and bringing Nicholson back into the frame—not
in the time of their original conversation, but as he is sitting at the table,
listening to the recorded dialogue and switching his passport photo for
that of the dead man.
Rarely has a sequence-shot produced such an effect of temporal com-
plexity. Not only does Antonioni’s writing style render the conventional
flashback superfluous, it also exposes its limitations, delineating a land-
Figure 25. The Desert Room, installation view: yet another room—the visit is
scape that is internally layered, folded over on itself, rather than segmented
not over. Courtesy of Marco Poloni.
by an external agency. The conversation in the desert room belongs to a
time that has persisted all along since the alleged present of its occurrence
and that now reemerges with daunting mechanical accuracy. Indeed, such piece and will allow us to determine the specificity of its intervention.
a return would not be possible if the original present itself—the “living” In the meantime, to our surprise, our visit is far from over. As we exit the
present of the conversation—were not already split from within, divided room, we find not the outside of the installation but yet another room—
between a past and a future, doubled by its own acoustic shadow. Here a scale model of the place we have just left. We discover it behind a door
the tape recorder heightens a fissure that is already of perception, a de- that, despite the considerably reduced size, looks like the one we opened
hiscence without which “there would be no archive.”24 At the same time, at the beginning: the same painted wood, the same circular carvings. The
by inscribing the dialogue in the process of its being uttered, the tape re- interior, too, reproduces the room with breathtaking precision. There is
corder offers us the guarantee of an unprecedented exactitude, together even a fluorescent tube flickering according to the same pattern (a com-
with the illusion of a “live” effect. But it is not only the conversation—the puter interface controls both lights) and a TV monitor tuned to the same
desert room itself is not (has never been) in the present. As it opens onto Al Jazeera channel. The video camera that we could manipulate but not
the desert, to which it belongs and by which it is bounded, this room has detect in the life-sized room is here at the center of the miniature room,
always constituted an archival site, the repository of intersecting or isolated conspicuously hanging from a dolly. No wonder we fell into the trap. Yet
memories as well as of indefinite “strata of forgetting.”25 (Interestingly, the hardly any sense of relief accompanies our discovery. In front of the ap-
hotel where the film was shot, which Poloni tracks down in the village of paratus’s displaced core, we meet not the cipher of our entrapment but the
Illizi in the Algerian desert, is said to have become a retirement home for reminder of a fundamental impossibility, the figure of a certain failure—I
ex-Mudjaheddin fighters of the National Liberation Front.) We will soon cannot coincide with myself in the act of seeing, I cannot see myself seeing.
return to this multilayered temporality and the long take through which But how is this distance or discrepancy—a difference that is of all forms
it is manifested. Montage has here fully entered the space and time of the of perception—affected by the transition to electronic and digital media?
shot, presenting us with a radically discontinuous continuity. The disori-
entation that it generates further complicates the architecture of Poloni’s
16 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Tele-images
If The Passenger already pushes cinema to its limits, performing the disap-
pearance of the seeing subject and displaying the exteriority of perception,
The Desert Room simultaneously registers and enacts the disappearance
of cinema itself.26 Archiving cinema becomes here inextricable from the
realization of a technopolitical change that threatens to erase the very
memory that it is also transmitting—to efface it in the process of inscrib-
ing it for the future. As Derrida repeatedly reminds us, archival memory
cannot be thought independently from finitude and forgetfulness. Whether
this wearing away might also engender the persistence of cinema as other
than itself, creating an expanded memory or, rather, the memory of an
expanded cinema, stands out among the stakes of Poloni’s reflection on
contemporary media. In the context of the installation, substituting the
reporter’s old still camera and tape recorder with a TV monitor and a
laptop connected to an observation camera constitutes a move that is as
self-evident as it is intricate and irreducible to any single effect. The tem-
poral layering that The Desert Room invites us to inhabit and explore is
also, perhaps above all, a layering of technologies at different stages of
their development. “What can you see?” is Nicholson’s question to his
traveling companion (Maria Schneider), as their journey comes to an end
and the film prepares to affirm its autonomy from the characters’ view-
point through the final tracking shot. “What can you see?” becomes here
Poloni’s indirect and inexorable, methodical question to the visitor of the
viewing system—what can you see, as cinema is disappearing amid new
technologies of vision? Can you see cinema disappearing?
In Echographies of Television, a book-length conversation between Der-
rida and Stiegler, the question of the “tele-image” is addressed from the
viewpoint of both its analogical and digital incarnations. Among the most
pressing issues they discuss is the relation between audiovisual media and
actuality, which Derrida defines first of all as artifactuality:
The first trait is that actuality is, precisely, made [faite] . . . it is
not given but actively produced, sifted, invested, performatively
interpreted by numerous apparatuses which are factitious or
artificial, hierarchizing and selective, always in the service of forces
and interests to which “subjects” and agents . . . are never sensitive
enough. No matter how singular, irreducible, stubborn, distressing
or tragic the “reality” to which it refers, “actuality” comes to us by
way of a fictional fashioning.27
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 17
Although an assessment of the tension between singularity and technics
reaches beyond the aim of our work, an inquiry into the artificial, manu-
factured character of the tele-image directly pertains to it. Whether ana-
log or digital, stored in a cardboard box or in a computer hard drive, any
still or moving image we encounter results from a complex process of
selection and arrangement, one that involves often unconscious decisions
about lighting, depth of field, framing, editing, and so on. Image making
is a mode of writing, and writing, for Derrida, is already a tele-technology,
a process of temporal differentiation, a play of traces that renders im-
mediacy and proximity always already impossible. As we pointed out in
connection with The Passenger, this is true also of live conversation and di-
rect, “unmediated” vision. What distinguishes the contemporary tele-image
stems from the fact that a maximum of distance or deferral is mustered
to activate an experience of instantaneity. The time that we call “live” or
“real” is only an effect, indeed, the effect of a certain spectrality, and as
such is inherently permeable to the workings of the death drive. If there
is a specificity to our present condition, it is precisely “this restitution as
‘living present’ of what is dead,” the inordinately successful attempt to
conceal the gaps of time.
Throughout the interview, Stiegler tests Derrida’s inclination to consider
contemporary technologies in terms of relative rather than absolute speci-
ficity. His position is multifaceted rather than merely antagonistic, aris-
ing as it does from his own engagement with the question of technics—a
project of philosophical revision aimed at “thinking the relation of being
and time as a technological relation.”28 On one hand, Stiegler claims that
human life has always been indissociable from exteriorization and pros-
theticity, from a “putting-outside-the-self,” a setting at a distance of the
what (the technical object) that is also constitutive of the who (the living
being) from which the separation takes place. The double genitive mark-
ing the expression “invention of the human” points to this radical ambi-
guity, the generative confusion of subject and object that we find at the
origin of humanity: with respect to the human, technics has always been
“inventive as well as invented.”29 On the other hand, Stiegler highlights
the novelty of modernity’s audiovisual technologies. Expanding Husserl’s
phenomenology, he argues for the specificity of film as a “properly” tem-
poral object—an object that not only exists “in time” but that is also made
“of time.” Unlike a glass, for instance, a glass of water (Stiegler’s exam-
ple), which belongs to time in the sense that it is finite, a film is originally
“woven” in the fabric of time and does not exist independently of its own
simultaneous appearance and disappearance. As pure flux, it emerges in
16 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Tele-images
If The Passenger already pushes cinema to its limits, performing the disap-
pearance of the seeing subject and displaying the exteriority of perception,
The Desert Room simultaneously registers and enacts the disappearance
of cinema itself.26 Archiving cinema becomes here inextricable from the
realization of a technopolitical change that threatens to erase the very
memory that it is also transmitting—to efface it in the process of inscrib-
ing it for the future. As Derrida repeatedly reminds us, archival memory
cannot be thought independently from finitude and forgetfulness. Whether
this wearing away might also engender the persistence of cinema as other
than itself, creating an expanded memory or, rather, the memory of an
expanded cinema, stands out among the stakes of Poloni’s reflection on
contemporary media. In the context of the installation, substituting the
reporter’s old still camera and tape recorder with a TV monitor and a
laptop connected to an observation camera constitutes a move that is as
self-evident as it is intricate and irreducible to any single effect. The tem-
poral layering that The Desert Room invites us to inhabit and explore is
also, perhaps above all, a layering of technologies at different stages of
their development. “What can you see?” is Nicholson’s question to his
traveling companion (Maria Schneider), as their journey comes to an end
and the film prepares to affirm its autonomy from the characters’ view-
point through the final tracking shot. “What can you see?” becomes here
Poloni’s indirect and inexorable, methodical question to the visitor of the
viewing system—what can you see, as cinema is disappearing amid new
technologies of vision? Can you see cinema disappearing?
In Echographies of Television, a book-length conversation between Der-
rida and Stiegler, the question of the “tele-image” is addressed from the
viewpoint of both its analogical and digital incarnations. Among the most
pressing issues they discuss is the relation between audiovisual media and
actuality, which Derrida defines first of all as artifactuality:
The first trait is that actuality is, precisely, made [faite] . . . it is
not given but actively produced, sifted, invested, performatively
interpreted by numerous apparatuses which are factitious or
artificial, hierarchizing and selective, always in the service of forces
and interests to which “subjects” and agents . . . are never sensitive
enough. No matter how singular, irreducible, stubborn, distressing
or tragic the “reality” to which it refers, “actuality” comes to us by
way of a fictional fashioning.27
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 17
Although an assessment of the tension between singularity and technics
reaches beyond the aim of our work, an inquiry into the artificial, manu-
factured character of the tele-image directly pertains to it. Whether ana-
log or digital, stored in a cardboard box or in a computer hard drive, any
still or moving image we encounter results from a complex process of
selection and arrangement, one that involves often unconscious decisions
about lighting, depth of field, framing, editing, and so on. Image making
is a mode of writing, and writing, for Derrida, is already a tele-technology,
a process of temporal differentiation, a play of traces that renders im-
mediacy and proximity always already impossible. As we pointed out in
connection with The Passenger, this is true also of live conversation and di-
rect, “unmediated” vision. What distinguishes the contemporary tele-image
stems from the fact that a maximum of distance or deferral is mustered
to activate an experience of instantaneity. The time that we call “live” or
“real” is only an effect, indeed, the effect of a certain spectrality, and as
such is inherently permeable to the workings of the death drive. If there
is a specificity to our present condition, it is precisely “this restitution as
‘living present’ of what is dead,” the inordinately successful attempt to
conceal the gaps of time.
Throughout the interview, Stiegler tests Derrida’s inclination to consider
contemporary technologies in terms of relative rather than absolute speci-
ficity. His position is multifaceted rather than merely antagonistic, aris-
ing as it does from his own engagement with the question of technics—a
project of philosophical revision aimed at “thinking the relation of being
and time as a technological relation.”28 On one hand, Stiegler claims that
human life has always been indissociable from exteriorization and pros-
theticity, from a “putting-outside-the-self,” a setting at a distance of the
what (the technical object) that is also constitutive of the who (the living
being) from which the separation takes place. The double genitive mark-
ing the expression “invention of the human” points to this radical ambi-
guity, the generative confusion of subject and object that we find at the
origin of humanity: with respect to the human, technics has always been
“inventive as well as invented.”29 On the other hand, Stiegler highlights
the novelty of modernity’s audiovisual technologies. Expanding Husserl’s
phenomenology, he argues for the specificity of film as a “properly” tem-
poral object—an object that not only exists “in time” but that is also made
“of time.” Unlike a glass, for instance, a glass of water (Stiegler’s exam-
ple), which belongs to time in the sense that it is finite, a film is originally
“woven” in the fabric of time and does not exist independently of its own
simultaneous appearance and disappearance. As pure flux, it emerges in
18 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
the very process of vanishing, thus perfectly matching the spectator’s own
stream of consciousness. “A film, like a melody,” Stiegler writes, “is essen-
tially a flux: it consists of its unity in and as flow. The temporal object, as
flux, coincides with the stream of consciousness of which it is the object:
the spectator’s.”30 However, unlike a simple melody, a film can be played
over and over with unwavering fidelity: “it cannot be emphasized strongly
enough that before the phonograph, as before cinema, such repetitions
were strictly impossible.”31 Cinematographic and phonographic record-
ings can repeat themselves accurately and indefinitely, bringing about the
recurrence of the past of which they are the indexical trace. The total co-
incidence between the time of the film (as object capable of technical rep-
etition) and the time of the spectator (as subject of consciousness) confers
cinema a unique and pervasive power.
Indeed, Stiegler’s brilliant move is to claim that strictly technical repeti-
tion, while being specific to cinema and the phonograph, comes forward as
the “revelation of the structure of all temporal objects.”32 What is revealed
and, I would add, enhanced is that tertiary memory—the memory of a
past that we have not necessarily lived, as it reaches us through media of
all kinds—plays a constitutive role even at the level of so-called immediate
perception. There is no life that is not always already haunted by phan-
tasms, no vision that unfolds outside the thickness of an external or inter-
subjective memory, a time that is not mine alone. Cinema owes its singular
force, which is nothing less than the capacity to “transform life,” to the
fact that it reaffirms the way in which consciousness has always operated.
For Stiegler, “consciousness is already cinematographic,” not on occasion
but in its very structure, as it operates according to criteria of selection
and combination that are proper to film editing.33 Editing includes here a
whole array of formal techniques and effects (from image juxtaposition
to freeze-frame shots) and coincides with the revision and rearrangement
of the memories themselves, in a play between recollection and forgetting
that always passes through tertiary memory. When we watch an actual
film, the images and sounds flowing on the screen become the object of
our consciousness—our “stream of consciousness”—interweaving with
the invisible montage of our own memories. In the course of this double
projection, the time of the film becomes our own time. The examples
that Stiegler offers us admirably show how profound this intertwining,
this coincidence without “coincidence,” can be: Federico Fellini’s Inter-
vista (Interview, Italy, 1987), Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amerique (My
American Uncle, France, 1980), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse
(Eclipse, Italy, 1962)—all these films partake of and manifest the phan-
tasmatic essence of life.
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 19
What happens to this extraordinary coincidence once we leave the
domain of film? Should one draw a more specific distinction between
analog, electronic, and digital media? By adopting the term discrete to
define both analogical and digital images (and any combination of the
two), Stiegler acknowledges that a radical discontinuity is proper to all
audiovisual signs. Continuity, unity, naturalness are but the effect of a
double synthesis, the one “spontaneously” realized by the spectator and
the one laboriously (through inconspicuously) attained by the apparatus:
“the image is always discrete, but it is always discrete, as it were, as dis-
creetly as possible.”34 However, by exploiting the technical capabilities of
television and new media, the cultural industry has turned memory into
a completely mass-produced object, above and beyond anything the Hol-
lywood system could accomplish during its heyday. Both at the end of
the book on disorientation and at the beginning of the one on cinematic
time, Stiegler writes,
The programming industries, and more specifically the mediatic
industry of radio-televisual information, mass-produce
temporal objects heard or seen simultaneously by millions, and
sometimes by tens, hundreds, even thousands of millions of
“consciousnesses”: this massive temporal co-incidence orders the
event’s new structure, to which new forms of consciousness and
collective unconsciousness correspond.35
Under the economic imperative of “saving” time, the contemporary tele-
system values and promotes only speed, immediacy, global reach, that is,
what neutralizes spatial distance and flattens out time. As such, the in-
dustrialization of memory has profoundly, perhaps irreversibly, affected
the relation between consciousness and the temporal object. If forgetting
is part and parcel of memory, the difference that memory needs to be re-
membered, the programming industries have gained control over the cri-
teria according to which effacement and thus memorization occur: “the
industrialization of memory . . . is the industrial synthesis of retentional
finitude” in conformity with an economic logic that reduces time to cal-
culation.36 The result is a loss of individuation and, in turn, the collapse
into a condition of unmitigated disorientation.
It is true, Stiegler acknowledges, that digital technologies allow the spec-
tator to develop an analytic relation to the image, making the latter avail-
able for direct intervention and blurring the distinction between producer
and consumer. If we acquire the necessary competency, any video editing
program gives us the opportunity to decompose and recompose what so
18 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
the very process of vanishing, thus perfectly matching the spectator’s own
stream of consciousness. “A film, like a melody,” Stiegler writes, “is essen-
tially a flux: it consists of its unity in and as flow. The temporal object, as
flux, coincides with the stream of consciousness of which it is the object:
the spectator’s.”30 However, unlike a simple melody, a film can be played
over and over with unwavering fidelity: “it cannot be emphasized strongly
enough that before the phonograph, as before cinema, such repetitions
were strictly impossible.”31 Cinematographic and phonographic record-
ings can repeat themselves accurately and indefinitely, bringing about the
recurrence of the past of which they are the indexical trace. The total co-
incidence between the time of the film (as object capable of technical rep-
etition) and the time of the spectator (as subject of consciousness) confers
cinema a unique and pervasive power.
Indeed, Stiegler’s brilliant move is to claim that strictly technical repeti-
tion, while being specific to cinema and the phonograph, comes forward as
the “revelation of the structure of all temporal objects.”32 What is revealed
and, I would add, enhanced is that tertiary memory—the memory of a
past that we have not necessarily lived, as it reaches us through media of
all kinds—plays a constitutive role even at the level of so-called immediate
perception. There is no life that is not always already haunted by phan-
tasms, no vision that unfolds outside the thickness of an external or inter-
subjective memory, a time that is not mine alone. Cinema owes its singular
force, which is nothing less than the capacity to “transform life,” to the
fact that it reaffirms the way in which consciousness has always operated.
For Stiegler, “consciousness is already cinematographic,” not on occasion
but in its very structure, as it operates according to criteria of selection
and combination that are proper to film editing.33 Editing includes here a
whole array of formal techniques and effects (from image juxtaposition
to freeze-frame shots) and coincides with the revision and rearrangement
of the memories themselves, in a play between recollection and forgetting
that always passes through tertiary memory. When we watch an actual
film, the images and sounds flowing on the screen become the object of
our consciousness—our “stream of consciousness”—interweaving with
the invisible montage of our own memories. In the course of this double
projection, the time of the film becomes our own time. The examples
that Stiegler offers us admirably show how profound this intertwining,
this coincidence without “coincidence,” can be: Federico Fellini’s Inter-
vista (Interview, Italy, 1987), Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amerique (My
American Uncle, France, 1980), and Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse
(Eclipse, Italy, 1962)—all these films partake of and manifest the phan-
tasmatic essence of life.
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 19
What happens to this extraordinary coincidence once we leave the
domain of film? Should one draw a more specific distinction between
analog, electronic, and digital media? By adopting the term discrete to
define both analogical and digital images (and any combination of the
two), Stiegler acknowledges that a radical discontinuity is proper to all
audiovisual signs. Continuity, unity, naturalness are but the effect of a
double synthesis, the one “spontaneously” realized by the spectator and
the one laboriously (through inconspicuously) attained by the apparatus:
“the image is always discrete, but it is always discrete, as it were, as dis-
creetly as possible.”34 However, by exploiting the technical capabilities of
television and new media, the cultural industry has turned memory into
a completely mass-produced object, above and beyond anything the Hol-
lywood system could accomplish during its heyday. Both at the end of
the book on disorientation and at the beginning of the one on cinematic
time, Stiegler writes,
The programming industries, and more specifically the mediatic
industry of radio-televisual information, mass-produce
temporal objects heard or seen simultaneously by millions, and
sometimes by tens, hundreds, even thousands of millions of
“consciousnesses”: this massive temporal co-incidence orders the
event’s new structure, to which new forms of consciousness and
collective unconsciousness correspond.35
Under the economic imperative of “saving” time, the contemporary tele-
system values and promotes only speed, immediacy, global reach, that is,
what neutralizes spatial distance and flattens out time. As such, the in-
dustrialization of memory has profoundly, perhaps irreversibly, affected
the relation between consciousness and the temporal object. If forgetting
is part and parcel of memory, the difference that memory needs to be re-
membered, the programming industries have gained control over the cri-
teria according to which effacement and thus memorization occur: “the
industrialization of memory . . . is the industrial synthesis of retentional
finitude” in conformity with an economic logic that reduces time to cal-
culation.36 The result is a loss of individuation and, in turn, the collapse
into a condition of unmitigated disorientation.
It is true, Stiegler acknowledges, that digital technologies allow the spec-
tator to develop an analytic relation to the image, making the latter avail-
able for direct intervention and blurring the distinction between producer
and consumer. If we acquire the necessary competency, any video editing
program gives us the opportunity to decompose and recompose what so
20 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
far has appeared as a continuum. These new analytic skills could help us
resist the current production of indifferentiation and even engender, to-
gether with a new capacity for synthesis, “new forms of reflexivity”—not
simply the extension of the intelligibility afforded by writing but its un-
foreseeable renewal.37 However, such a potential is systematically held in
check by a network of global synthesis that trades in memory as capital, in
fact deciding which events will have taken place on the basis of profitabil-
ity alone. For Stiegler, only the implementation of a “politics of memory”
could effectively counter this economic hegemony and the impact it exer-
cise on life itself. Otherwise, the very “exactitude of the modern modalities
of archivization” will backfire and “close off” the future, that is, prevent
the temporal differentiation, the ecstasy of time without which there can
be no individual or collective consciousness.38 “No future” is Stiegler’s
slogan for the impoverishment of our lives, the catastrophe against which
T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were warning us at the onset of the
television age, and I share his sense of urgency. However, I also maintain
that a hybrid work like The Desert Room points us toward an alternative
assessment of the dangers and possibilities brought about by new tech-
nologies. An archive of media mutations, the installation requires that we
disperse ourselves into a memory that is at once differentiated and utterly
impersonal—that we enter a flux that is heterogeneous and yet in excess of
intentional consciousness. Indeed, it suggests that the time of cinema—the
perceptual depth permeating and animating our lives, the past that we re-
appropriate every time we hear and see—is not the time of consciousness.
It Is No Longer I (It Has Never Been I)
Let’s reconsider the way in which Stiegler defines “the time of cinema” in
light of The Desert Room and its mobilization of Antonioni’s The Passen-
ger, one of modernist cinema’s great films on the autonomy and externality
of perception. “Perception is cinema, not ‘only in cinema,’” writes Stiegler
against Husserl’s exclusion of image consciousness (tertiary memory) from
the constitution of the temporal object.39 This is for me the most compel-
ling formulation, and it would find me in complete agreement if it did not
translate a series of previous, interconnected claims, whose implications I
would now like to render explicit: that the time of cinema is the time of
the encounter between the spectator and the actual film (any number of
actual films) in its full and uninterrupted duration; that, as such, it coin-
cides with the time of intentional consciousness, albeit one that is bound
to the temporal object through tertiary memory; finally, that the time of
consciousness, in its unity of flow, is the time of montage as operation of
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 21
revision originating in the consciousness that it also defines. Indeed, for
Stiegler, consciousness itself can be envisioned as “this post-production
center, this control room assembling the montage, the staging, the real-
ization, and the direction, of the flow of primary, secondary, and tertiary
retentions.”40 In all cases, the affirmation of perception as cinema corre-
sponds to an assertion of the cinematographic structure of consciousness.
Such an homologation is so encompassing that even Deleuze is somehow
assimilated. While criticizing Deleuze for missing the consequences of his
objection to Bergson, Stiegler translates Deleuze’s clause “as though we
had always had cinema without realizing it?” into “as if it ‘had always
had cinema without realizing it.’”41 But is consciousness the only syn-
onym for the personal pronoun adopted by Deleuze in a paragraph that
has cinema as its grammatical subject? Although Deleuze’s philosophy
would certainly provide its own forceful answer to this question, I will
continue to engage with it along the lines of phenomenology, although a
phenomenology that reaches beyond Stiegler’s reading of Husserl through
Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology.
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty invites us to think per-
ception before and after consciousness, as a coiling or folding of the vis-
ible upon itself rather than as a coindividuation of subject and object, as a
movement whose innermost principle is reversibility rather than synthesis.
There is a porosity between bodies, a proliferation of lateral or oblique
transactions always crossing the borders of our so-called body proper, and
this will cease to baffle us “as soon as we no longer make belongingness
to one same ‘consciousness’ the primordial definition of sensibility, and
as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself,
a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the
sentient.”42 My life, my past, is not only formed through the others—it
exists in the others, in the world, its eccentricity being the condition for
any experience of the self that I might have. What we have grown accus-
tomed to calling “subjectivity” is but a modulation or differentiation of
the flesh, an interweaving of threads that belong to the same temporal
and perceptual fabric:
the “consciousness” itself to be understood not as a series of
individual (sensible or non sensible) I think that’s, but as openness
upon general configurations or constellations, rays of the past and
rays of the world at the end of which, through many “memory
screens” dotted with lacunae and with the imaginary, pulsate
some almost sensible structures, some individual memories. It is
the Cartesian idealization applied to the mind as to the things
20 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
far has appeared as a continuum. These new analytic skills could help us
resist the current production of indifferentiation and even engender, to-
gether with a new capacity for synthesis, “new forms of reflexivity”—not
simply the extension of the intelligibility afforded by writing but its un-
foreseeable renewal.37 However, such a potential is systematically held in
check by a network of global synthesis that trades in memory as capital, in
fact deciding which events will have taken place on the basis of profitabil-
ity alone. For Stiegler, only the implementation of a “politics of memory”
could effectively counter this economic hegemony and the impact it exer-
cise on life itself. Otherwise, the very “exactitude of the modern modalities
of archivization” will backfire and “close off” the future, that is, prevent
the temporal differentiation, the ecstasy of time without which there can
be no individual or collective consciousness.38 “No future” is Stiegler’s
slogan for the impoverishment of our lives, the catastrophe against which
T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer were warning us at the onset of the
television age, and I share his sense of urgency. However, I also maintain
that a hybrid work like The Desert Room points us toward an alternative
assessment of the dangers and possibilities brought about by new tech-
nologies. An archive of media mutations, the installation requires that we
disperse ourselves into a memory that is at once differentiated and utterly
impersonal—that we enter a flux that is heterogeneous and yet in excess of
intentional consciousness. Indeed, it suggests that the time of cinema—the
perceptual depth permeating and animating our lives, the past that we re-
appropriate every time we hear and see—is not the time of consciousness.
It Is No Longer I (It Has Never Been I)
Let’s reconsider the way in which Stiegler defines “the time of cinema” in
light of The Desert Room and its mobilization of Antonioni’s The Passen-
ger, one of modernist cinema’s great films on the autonomy and externality
of perception. “Perception is cinema, not ‘only in cinema,’” writes Stiegler
against Husserl’s exclusion of image consciousness (tertiary memory) from
the constitution of the temporal object.39 This is for me the most compel-
ling formulation, and it would find me in complete agreement if it did not
translate a series of previous, interconnected claims, whose implications I
would now like to render explicit: that the time of cinema is the time of
the encounter between the spectator and the actual film (any number of
actual films) in its full and uninterrupted duration; that, as such, it coin-
cides with the time of intentional consciousness, albeit one that is bound
to the temporal object through tertiary memory; finally, that the time of
consciousness, in its unity of flow, is the time of montage as operation of
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 21
revision originating in the consciousness that it also defines. Indeed, for
Stiegler, consciousness itself can be envisioned as “this post-production
center, this control room assembling the montage, the staging, the real-
ization, and the direction, of the flow of primary, secondary, and tertiary
retentions.”40 In all cases, the affirmation of perception as cinema corre-
sponds to an assertion of the cinematographic structure of consciousness.
Such an homologation is so encompassing that even Deleuze is somehow
assimilated. While criticizing Deleuze for missing the consequences of his
objection to Bergson, Stiegler translates Deleuze’s clause “as though we
had always had cinema without realizing it?” into “as if it ‘had always
had cinema without realizing it.’”41 But is consciousness the only syn-
onym for the personal pronoun adopted by Deleuze in a paragraph that
has cinema as its grammatical subject? Although Deleuze’s philosophy
would certainly provide its own forceful answer to this question, I will
continue to engage with it along the lines of phenomenology, although a
phenomenology that reaches beyond Stiegler’s reading of Husserl through
Merleau-Ponty’s indirect ontology.
In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty invites us to think per-
ception before and after consciousness, as a coiling or folding of the vis-
ible upon itself rather than as a coindividuation of subject and object, as a
movement whose innermost principle is reversibility rather than synthesis.
There is a porosity between bodies, a proliferation of lateral or oblique
transactions always crossing the borders of our so-called body proper, and
this will cease to baffle us “as soon as we no longer make belongingness
to one same ‘consciousness’ the primordial definition of sensibility, and
as soon as we rather understand it as the return of the visible upon itself,
a carnal adherence of the sentient to the sensed and of the sensed to the
sentient.”42 My life, my past, is not only formed through the others—it
exists in the others, in the world, its eccentricity being the condition for
any experience of the self that I might have. What we have grown accus-
tomed to calling “subjectivity” is but a modulation or differentiation of
the flesh, an interweaving of threads that belong to the same temporal
and perceptual fabric:
the “consciousness” itself to be understood not as a series of
individual (sensible or non sensible) I think that’s, but as openness
upon general configurations or constellations, rays of the past and
rays of the world at the end of which, through many “memory
screens” dotted with lacunae and with the imaginary, pulsate
some almost sensible structures, some individual memories. It is
the Cartesian idealization applied to the mind as to the things
22 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
(Husserl) that has persuaded us that we were a flux of individual
Erlebnisse, whereas we are a field of Being.43
Despite the complexity of its retentions, Husserl’s diagram continues to
offer us a “positivistic” representation of time because it reduces the origi-
nary transcendence of the present, anchoring it to absolute points and lines
and ordering it in relation to a self-contained, continuous flux. Instead,
one should take “as primary, not the consciousness . . . but the vortex . . . the
spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not consciousness fac-
ing a noema)”—the self-differing, polymorphous being of which we are
part.44 In the flesh of time, there is intertwining and reversibility between
the past and the present, not between the consciousness of the past and
the consciousness of the present. The “vertical,” “architectonic” past that
Marcel Proust’s work brings to light, which is also the time of dreams
and of the unconscious, comprises a simultaneity of temporal dimensions
(vectors, lines of force) that exceeds intentionality.45
That “we” is other than a collection or gathering together of “con-
sciousnesses” already transpires in The Passenger’s treatment of the desert
room scene. As the camera slowly pans left, moving from the present of
the tape recorder to the past of the live conversation without any break
in continuity, what emerges is an impersonal vision, a certain articula-
tion of the fabric of time to which characters and spectators alike belong
not as consciousness but as eccentric seers. Asking who is seeing betrays
here our attachment to a notion of vision as activity, as the act of a sub-
ject vis-à-vis an external object, whether it is another human being or the
landscape outside the window or the screen in front of us at the movie
theater. Instead, in The Passenger, the camera gives visibility to a certain
modulation of the flesh, a constellation of figures and forms among which
we temporarily find (or do not find) our place by “fission or segregation”
rather than synthesis.46 Once we understand that the reversibility of the
seeing and the seen is not a chance operation or a willful experiment but
the very principle of perception, “there is . . . no problem of the alter ego
because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous vis-
ibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial
property that belongs to the flesh.”47 Perception is cinema to the extent
that it occurs outside, on the side of things, on what Merleau-Ponty calls
“the surface of an inexhaustible depth.”48 Such a depth is simultaneously
of the visible and of time—a memory that propagates in all directions,
encompassing and traversing us as beings made of the same stuff. For
this memory, Merleau-Ponty finds a tentative name, a name that—in the
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 23
language of a novel philosophy—corresponds to an incomplete sentence
and a clause:
This is still only an approximative expression, in the subject–object
language (Wahl, Bergson) of what there is to be said. That is, that
the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things. That
the being that has been cannot stop having been. The “Memory of
the World.” That language has us and that it is not we who have
language. That it is being that speaks within us and not we who
speak of being.49
Perception as “Memory of the World” speaks of a dispossession that is
simultaneously anonymity and openness.
It is in relation to this memory, to the flesh time as “Memory of the
World,” that retentional finitude is to be thought, as is the power of mon-
tage. In the “Working Notes,” Merleau-Ponty writes that forgetting “must
be conceived not as occultation (Bergson), not as a passage into nothing-
ness, annihilation—and not as a positive function that envelops a knowl-
edge of what it hides (Freud–Sartre), but as a manner of being to . . . in
turning away from.”50 Turning away, withdrawing, folding back—in its
discontinuity, forgetting is revealed here as partaking of the very move-
ment of the flesh. If we understand “perception as differentiation, forget-
ting as undifferentiation,” then editing—the folding of the visible upon
itself, without coincidence and without radical erasure—becomes another
name for the eccentric labor of perception.51 There is no “control room” or
“postproduction center” in this scenario. The Desert Room reedits, refolds
for us (with us) the impersonal visibility that The Passenger had already
depicted, exposing it to the revision of new technologies and further un-
doing the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the film, the
surface of the screen and the depth of the world. For Stiegler, the time of
consciousness is “always the time of contraction, condensation, abbrevia-
tion—the time of montage: it is always cinematic time,” and vice versa.52
In the world of the flesh that The Desert Room manifests and transforms,
the time of cinema as montage is the time not only of contraction but also
of expansion, dilation, and rearticulation. It persists by virtue of internal
fissions, splittings, multiplications, and superimpositions, in principle re-
maining open to what cannot find visibility as consciousness—to forms
of life that are yet to be imagined.
22 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
(Husserl) that has persuaded us that we were a flux of individual
Erlebnisse, whereas we are a field of Being.43
Despite the complexity of its retentions, Husserl’s diagram continues to
offer us a “positivistic” representation of time because it reduces the origi-
nary transcendence of the present, anchoring it to absolute points and lines
and ordering it in relation to a self-contained, continuous flux. Instead,
one should take “as primary, not the consciousness . . . but the vortex . . . the
spatializing-temporalizing vortex (which is flesh and not consciousness fac-
ing a noema)”—the self-differing, polymorphous being of which we are
part.44 In the flesh of time, there is intertwining and reversibility between
the past and the present, not between the consciousness of the past and
the consciousness of the present. The “vertical,” “architectonic” past that
Marcel Proust’s work brings to light, which is also the time of dreams
and of the unconscious, comprises a simultaneity of temporal dimensions
(vectors, lines of force) that exceeds intentionality.45
That “we” is other than a collection or gathering together of “con-
sciousnesses” already transpires in The Passenger’s treatment of the desert
room scene. As the camera slowly pans left, moving from the present of
the tape recorder to the past of the live conversation without any break
in continuity, what emerges is an impersonal vision, a certain articula-
tion of the fabric of time to which characters and spectators alike belong
not as consciousness but as eccentric seers. Asking who is seeing betrays
here our attachment to a notion of vision as activity, as the act of a sub-
ject vis-à-vis an external object, whether it is another human being or the
landscape outside the window or the screen in front of us at the movie
theater. Instead, in The Passenger, the camera gives visibility to a certain
modulation of the flesh, a constellation of figures and forms among which
we temporarily find (or do not find) our place by “fission or segregation”
rather than synthesis.46 Once we understand that the reversibility of the
seeing and the seen is not a chance operation or a willful experiment but
the very principle of perception, “there is . . . no problem of the alter ego
because it is not I who sees, not he who sees, because an anonymous vis-
ibility inhabits both of us, a vision in general, in virtue of that primordial
property that belongs to the flesh.”47 Perception is cinema to the extent
that it occurs outside, on the side of things, on what Merleau-Ponty calls
“the surface of an inexhaustible depth.”48 Such a depth is simultaneously
of the visible and of time—a memory that propagates in all directions,
encompassing and traversing us as beings made of the same stuff. For
this memory, Merleau-Ponty finds a tentative name, a name that—in the
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 23
language of a novel philosophy—corresponds to an incomplete sentence
and a clause:
This is still only an approximative expression, in the subject–object
language (Wahl, Bergson) of what there is to be said. That is, that
the things have us, and that it is not we who have the things. That
the being that has been cannot stop having been. The “Memory of
the World.” That language has us and that it is not we who have
language. That it is being that speaks within us and not we who
speak of being.49
Perception as “Memory of the World” speaks of a dispossession that is
simultaneously anonymity and openness.
It is in relation to this memory, to the flesh time as “Memory of the
World,” that retentional finitude is to be thought, as is the power of mon-
tage. In the “Working Notes,” Merleau-Ponty writes that forgetting “must
be conceived not as occultation (Bergson), not as a passage into nothing-
ness, annihilation—and not as a positive function that envelops a knowl-
edge of what it hides (Freud–Sartre), but as a manner of being to . . . in
turning away from.”50 Turning away, withdrawing, folding back—in its
discontinuity, forgetting is revealed here as partaking of the very move-
ment of the flesh. If we understand “perception as differentiation, forget-
ting as undifferentiation,” then editing—the folding of the visible upon
itself, without coincidence and without radical erasure—becomes another
name for the eccentric labor of perception.51 There is no “control room” or
“postproduction center” in this scenario. The Desert Room reedits, refolds
for us (with us) the impersonal visibility that The Passenger had already
depicted, exposing it to the revision of new technologies and further un-
doing the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the film, the
surface of the screen and the depth of the world. For Stiegler, the time of
consciousness is “always the time of contraction, condensation, abbrevia-
tion—the time of montage: it is always cinematic time,” and vice versa.52
In the world of the flesh that The Desert Room manifests and transforms,
the time of cinema as montage is the time not only of contraction but also
of expansion, dilation, and rearticulation. It persists by virtue of internal
fissions, splittings, multiplications, and superimpositions, in principle re-
maining open to what cannot find visibility as consciousness—to forms
of life that are yet to be imagined.
24 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Passivity and the Time of Cinema
The perceiving subject, as a tacit, silent Being-at (Etre-à), which returns
from the thing itself blindly identified, which is only a separation
(écart) with respect to it—the self of perception as “nobody,” in the
sense of Ulysses, as the anonymous one buried in the world, and that
has not yet traced its path.
—Maurice Merleau-Pont y , The Visible and the Invisible
The Girl has no name. Her path almost crosses Nicholson’s in London
and then interlocks with it in Barcelona. Both times, she is sitting on a
bench, reading a book, at ease and yet slightly detached from her sur-
roundings. She is a student of architecture and seems to have no fixed or
proper dwelling, living instead in a permanent state of wandering. Maria
Schneider plays the character with composure and informal precision, and
we simply accept that she is there, that she appears twice to the protago-
nist in locations a thousand miles apart from each other. Caught up in the
meanders of the story by mere chance (by a doubling of mere chance), she
is interested in its unfolding, in letting it become what cannot be predicted
in advance. Her stance or posture is operative beyond the distinction be-
tween activity and passivity—as if her mode of existence, her style of being,
as Merleau-Ponty would say, consists of a sort of “oneiric wakefulness,”
an acceptance of the erratic metamorphoses that one better tolerates in
dreams.53 She encourages, even pressures, Nicholson to keep the appoint-
ments made by the dead man, but in so doing, she also maintains the fu-
ture open to the unexpected, including the protagonist’s demise and her
own sudden disappearance from the screen. By the end of the film, she is
the one who sees on Nicholson’s behalf. She has followed him to the Ho-
tel de la Gloria, in southern Spain, and is now standing next to an open
window: “What can you see?” he asks twice, and twice she describes the
dusty courtyard and the movements of the people occupying it. Part of her
enigma derives from the passivity with which she translates images into
words, a passivity that is not submissiveness to the other but the capacity
to see outside of herself—as if she were someone else or, rather, nobody
at all, “the self of perception as ‘nobody,’” the hinge for a unique and yet
decentered fluctuation of perception.54
That Maria Schneider will continue to see, after Nicholson’s death, we
cannot take for granted, but we can certainly imagine. Similarly, we can
imagine that someday she will be sitting at the round table in The Desert
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 25
Room, the untimely witness of a vision that could not be traced without
her because it was she who guaranteed its dispersal. To think the creativity
of memory in relation to the passivity of perception—this is the challenge
that Nicholson could not meet and that the film carefully documents. His
transition from television reporter, invested in controlling images and thus
blind to most of what he sees, to passenger in a journey of dispossession
ultimately proved to be too much for him. Overwhelmed by the activity
of his passivity—which is to say, also by the passivity of his activity—like
the man who regained his sight after forty years of blindness, he gives up
on vision.55 The Desert Room invites us to engage in a mode of seeing that
is closer to Schneider’s (the student of architecture) than to Nicholson’s
(the reporter): the woman with no name relays the impersonal memory
of the film to the plural anonymity of the installation viewers. “Activity =
passivity,” Merleau-Ponty’s notation for the reversibility of perception, is
here understood as openness to a memory of media that entails our own
dissolution as subjects of consciousness.56 A tribute to modernist cinema
and the impossibility of producing such a cinema in the present, the instal-
lation shows that a search for the self as antidote to the commodification
of human life cannot ignore the challenges to subjectivity that twentieth-
century cinema had already posed. On the contrary, it suggests that new
configurations will emerge if we resist the temptation of looking for our
image where we think it should be found.
In The Desert Room, as in the preceding artworks, the time of cinema
becomes the time of montage as folding of the flesh—rearticulation not
only of plotlines but also of structures, redefinition of the conditions un-
der which stories (or their undoing) can be told. As perception undergoes
new technological mutations, a certain practice of digital media enables
us to see otherwise—to envision a past that has never been present and,
together with it, a future that cannot be exhausted by willful anticipation.57
Archiving is here the name for a memory that passes through a past that
was not lived, a past that demands to become visible while also affirming
its own constitutive withdrawal. Memory in excess of evidence, vision in
excess of actual visibility—the archive of the future preserves a heritage
or inheritance that I do not possess but assume as openness to metamor-
phoses outside my control, to the emergence of what we will not recognize
if not as the underside of our dreams. What Merleau-Ponty says of a cer-
tain red punctuating the fabric of the visible—that it is “a fossil drawn up
from the depth of imaginary worlds”—is also true of the archival image,
as long as we do not resist the indefinitely productive power of the flesh.58
24 a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e
Passivity and the Time of Cinema
The perceiving subject, as a tacit, silent Being-at (Etre-à), which returns
from the thing itself blindly identified, which is only a separation
(écart) with respect to it—the self of perception as “nobody,” in the
sense of Ulysses, as the anonymous one buried in the world, and that
has not yet traced its path.
—Maurice Merleau-Pont y , The Visible and the Invisible
The Girl has no name. Her path almost crosses Nicholson’s in London
and then interlocks with it in Barcelona. Both times, she is sitting on a
bench, reading a book, at ease and yet slightly detached from her sur-
roundings. She is a student of architecture and seems to have no fixed or
proper dwelling, living instead in a permanent state of wandering. Maria
Schneider plays the character with composure and informal precision, and
we simply accept that she is there, that she appears twice to the protago-
nist in locations a thousand miles apart from each other. Caught up in the
meanders of the story by mere chance (by a doubling of mere chance), she
is interested in its unfolding, in letting it become what cannot be predicted
in advance. Her stance or posture is operative beyond the distinction be-
tween activity and passivity—as if her mode of existence, her style of being,
as Merleau-Ponty would say, consists of a sort of “oneiric wakefulness,”
an acceptance of the erratic metamorphoses that one better tolerates in
dreams.53 She encourages, even pressures, Nicholson to keep the appoint-
ments made by the dead man, but in so doing, she also maintains the fu-
ture open to the unexpected, including the protagonist’s demise and her
own sudden disappearance from the screen. By the end of the film, she is
the one who sees on Nicholson’s behalf. She has followed him to the Ho-
tel de la Gloria, in southern Spain, and is now standing next to an open
window: “What can you see?” he asks twice, and twice she describes the
dusty courtyard and the movements of the people occupying it. Part of her
enigma derives from the passivity with which she translates images into
words, a passivity that is not submissiveness to the other but the capacity
to see outside of herself—as if she were someone else or, rather, nobody
at all, “the self of perception as ‘nobody,’” the hinge for a unique and yet
decentered fluctuation of perception.54
That Maria Schneider will continue to see, after Nicholson’s death, we
cannot take for granted, but we can certainly imagine. Similarly, we can
imagine that someday she will be sitting at the round table in The Desert
a r c h i v ing di s a p p e a r a nc e 25
Room, the untimely witness of a vision that could not be traced without
her because it was she who guaranteed its dispersal. To think the creativity
of memory in relation to the passivity of perception—this is the challenge
that Nicholson could not meet and that the film carefully documents. His
transition from television reporter, invested in controlling images and thus
blind to most of what he sees, to passenger in a journey of dispossession
ultimately proved to be too much for him. Overwhelmed by the activity
of his passivity—which is to say, also by the passivity of his activity—like
the man who regained his sight after forty years of blindness, he gives up
on vision.55 The Desert Room invites us to engage in a mode of seeing that
is closer to Schneider’s (the student of architecture) than to Nicholson’s
(the reporter): the woman with no name relays the impersonal memory
of the film to the plural anonymity of the installation viewers. “Activity =
passivity,” Merleau-Ponty’s notation for the reversibility of perception, is
here understood as openness to a memory of media that entails our own
dissolution as subjects of consciousness.56 A tribute to modernist cinema
and the impossibility of producing such a cinema in the present, the instal-
lation shows that a search for the self as antidote to the commodification
of human life cannot ignore the challenges to subjectivity that twentieth-
century cinema had already posed. On the contrary, it suggests that new
configurations will emerge if we resist the temptation of looking for our
image where we think it should be found.
In The Desert Room, as in the preceding artworks, the time of cinema
becomes the time of montage as folding of the flesh—rearticulation not
only of plotlines but also of structures, redefinition of the conditions un-
der which stories (or their undoing) can be told. As perception undergoes
new technological mutations, a certain practice of digital media enables
us to see otherwise—to envision a past that has never been present and,
together with it, a future that cannot be exhausted by willful anticipation.57
Archiving is here the name for a memory that passes through a past that
was not lived, a past that demands to become visible while also affirming
its own constitutive withdrawal. Memory in excess of evidence, vision in
excess of actual visibility—the archive of the future preserves a heritage
or inheritance that I do not possess but assume as openness to metamor-
phoses outside my control, to the emergence of what we will not recognize
if not as the underside of our dreams. What Merleau-Ponty says of a cer-
tain red punctuating the fabric of the visible—that it is “a fossil drawn up
from the depth of imaginary worlds”—is also true of the archival image,
as long as we do not resist the indefinitely productive power of the flesh.58
This page intentionally left blank
 notes

Introduction

  1. Raúl Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Dis Voir, 1995),
109.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Laura Mulvey, Death 24× a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Lon-
don: Reaktion Books, 2006). Cf. also Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (Lon-
don: Reaktion Books, 2004).
  4. Bernard Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” in Jacques Derrida and Bernard
Stiegler, Echographies of Television: Filmed Interviews, trans. Jennifer Bajorek,
145–63 (Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2002).
  5. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 102, 105.
  6. See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3–22.
  7. Ibid., 4–5.
  8. See, in particular, chapters 1 and 4.
  9. See, e.g., Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, eds., Future Cinema: The Cin-
ematic Imaginary after Film (Boston: MIT Press, 2003), and Joachim Jager, Ga-
briele Knapstein, and Anette Husch, eds., Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection
(London: Hatje Cantz, 2007).
10. For a nuanced introduction to installation art, see Claire Bishop, Installa-
tion Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005).
11. Curiously, both pieces will reappear in Les plages d’Agnès (Beaches of Ag-
nes, France, 2008), Varda’s return to analog filmmaking and yet another example
of eccentric autobiographical gleaning.
12. Dominique Païni, “Should We Put an End to Projection?,” trans. Rosalind
Krauss, October 110 (Fall 2004): 24.
13. On the ever-evolving essay form, see Ursula Biemann, ed., Stuff It: The
Video Essay in the Digital Age (Vienna: Springer, 2003).
14. T. W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique, no. 32 (Spring/
Summer 1984): 171. In the last paragraph, Adorno writes, “Therefore the law of
the innermost form of the essay is heresy.” Ibid., 171.
2 notes to introduction
15. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenow-
itz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17.
16. Ibid., 67.
17. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 45.
18. Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media and Cinematic Folds (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 28.
19. Scott Durham, “‘An Accurate Description of What Has Never Occurred’:
History, Virtuality, and Fiction in Godard,” in Companion to Jean-Luc Godard,
ed. Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
20. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2005), 76.
21. Derrida, Archive Fever, 2.
22. On the proper as “domestico-familiar,” see my discussion of Derrida’s read-
ing of Freud in chapter 1.
23. I would like to thank Timothy Campbell for directing my attention to this
aspect of the term’s etymology.
24. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2005), 5.
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 242.
26. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort,
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 130.
27. Sophie Calle, Appointment with Sigmund Freud (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2005).
28. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 201.
1. Against House Arrest
  1. Derrida, Archive Fever, 2.
  2. Ibid., 3.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid., 4.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid., 3.
  7. Ibid., 12.
  8. Ibid., 3–4, 79.
  9. Ibid., 7.
10. On Antigone as the point of departure for another psychoanalysis, see
George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), and
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2000).
notes to chapter 1 3
11. For a wider introduction to the contemporary debate on Antigone, see Ce-
cilia Sjoholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).
12. Photographs of the apartment “as it was” were taken before their depar-
ture from Nazi-annexed Austria to allow for a precise restaging of the original
scene. These photographs are now hanging in the Viennese apartment, which,
having turned into a museum, remains nonetheless uncannily empty or, so to
speak, inhabited by proxy. As Susan Bernstein notices in her work on the writing
of architecture, the effect is remarkable: the house itself is already a ghost or a
trace, a displaced site. See Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture
in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2008), 95, 105–6.
13. My mobilization of Anna Freud as a potential figure of transgression is not
meant to deny her actual conservative stance in matters of psychoanalytic theory.
See, e.g., The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume II, 1936: The Ego and the Mecha-
nisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1977) and her con-
frontation with Melanie Klein.
14. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.
15. The fragment is quoted in Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to
Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
405; Sophie Calle, Appointment with Sigmund Freud (London: Thames and Hud-
son, 2005). On the artist’s impressive multimedia production and her controversial
strategies of appropriation and role-playing, see Christine Macel, ed., Sophie Calle:
M’as-tu vue? (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 2003).
16. For a reading of this exhibition with respect to archival art in the twenti-
eth century, see Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). I am particularly indebted to Spieker for suggesting play
as the operative word in tracing the entangled relation between Calle’s work and the
archive of psychoanalysis. In this chapter, however, I attempt to turn his important
question—what does it mean to play with the archive, to put the archive at play?—
into an inquiry on the very conditions of play, its embedded economic structure.
17. “In February 1998, I was invited by James Putnam to create an exhibition
in London at 20 Maresfield Gardens, where Dr. Sigmund Freud had lived, for a
short time, and died. This house and its contents are preserved as the Freud Mu-
seum. . . . The exhibition, entitled ‘Appointment,’ took place from February 12 to
April 25, 1999.”
18. This contamination extends beyond Calle’s adoption of the first person as
the deferred voice of the female patients. Not only does Calle perform her role on
behalf of the patients who entered the archive only by being “written in” through
the case histories, as Spieker suggests, but she also performatively upsets the dis-
tinction between patient and analyst.
19. Derrida, Post Card, 302; cf. also the translator’s note clarifying that “in
2 notes to introduction
15. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenow-
itz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 17.
16. Ibid., 67.
17. Mieke Bal, Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, Preposterous History
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 45.
18. Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media and Cinematic Folds (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 28.
19. Scott Durham, “‘An Accurate Description of What Has Never Occurred’:
History, Virtuality, and Fiction in Godard,” in Companion to Jean-Luc Godard,
ed. Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
20. Elizabeth Grosz, Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2005), 76.
21. Derrida, Archive Fever, 2.
22. On the proper as “domestico-familiar,” see my discussion of Derrida’s read-
ing of Freud in chapter 1.
23. I would like to thank Timothy Campbell for directing my attention to this
aspect of the term’s etymology.
24. Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2005), 5.
25. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 242.
26. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort,
trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 130.
27. Sophie Calle, Appointment with Sigmund Freud (London: Thames and
Hudson, 2005).
28. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 201.
1. Against House Arrest
  1. Derrida, Archive Fever, 2.
  2. Ibid., 3.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid., 4.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Ibid., 3.
  7. Ibid., 12.
  8. Ibid., 3–4, 79.
  9. Ibid., 7.
10. On Antigone as the point of departure for another psychoanalysis, see
George Steiner, Antigones (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), and
Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2000).
notes to chapter 1 3
11. For a wider introduction to the contemporary debate on Antigone, see Ce-
cilia Sjoholm, The Antigone Complex: Ethics and the Invention of Feminine Desire
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004).
12. Photographs of the apartment “as it was” were taken before their depar-
ture from Nazi-annexed Austria to allow for a precise restaging of the original
scene. These photographs are now hanging in the Viennese apartment, which,
having turned into a museum, remains nonetheless uncannily empty or, so to
speak, inhabited by proxy. As Susan Bernstein notices in her work on the writing
of architecture, the effect is remarkable: the house itself is already a ghost or a
trace, a displaced site. See Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture
in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 2008), 95, 105–6.
13. My mobilization of Anna Freud as a potential figure of transgression is not
meant to deny her actual conservative stance in matters of psychoanalytic theory.
See, e.g., The Writings of Anna Freud, Volume II, 1936: The Ego and the Mecha-
nisms of Defense (New York: International Universities Press, 1977) and her con-
frontation with Melanie Klein.
14. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.
15. The fragment is quoted in Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to
Freud and Beyond, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987),
405; Sophie Calle, Appointment with Sigmund Freud (London: Thames and Hud-
son, 2005). On the artist’s impressive multimedia production and her controversial
strategies of appropriation and role-playing, see Christine Macel, ed., Sophie Calle:
M’as-tu vue? (Munich, Germany: Prestel, 2003).
16. For a reading of this exhibition with respect to archival art in the twenti-
eth century, see Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). I am particularly indebted to Spieker for suggesting play
as the operative word in tracing the entangled relation between Calle’s work and the
archive of psychoanalysis. In this chapter, however, I attempt to turn his important
question—what does it mean to play with the archive, to put the archive at play?—
into an inquiry on the very conditions of play, its embedded economic structure.
17. “In February 1998, I was invited by James Putnam to create an exhibition
in London at 20 Maresfield Gardens, where Dr. Sigmund Freud had lived, for a
short time, and died. This house and its contents are preserved as the Freud Mu-
seum. . . . The exhibition, entitled ‘Appointment,’ took place from February 12 to
April 25, 1999.”
18. This contamination extends beyond Calle’s adoption of the first person as
the deferred voice of the female patients. Not only does Calle perform her role on
behalf of the patients who entered the archive only by being “written in” through
the case histories, as Spieker suggests, but she also performatively upsets the dis-
tinction between patient and analyst.
19. Derrida, Post Card, 302; cf. also the translator’s note clarifying that “in
4 notes to chapter 1
French the pronunciation of PP [pleasure principle] is pépé, which is also the
affectionate term for grandfather. Derrida will play upon this double meaning
throughout” (287).
20. Ibid., 341.
21. Amy Villarejo, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
22. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as quoted in Derrida, Post
Card, 326.
23. Remarkably, Derrida himself establishes a comparison, in fact, a relation
of rivalry, between the two sisters: “There is a mute daughter. And more than an-
other daughter who will have used the paternal credit in abundant discourse of
inheritance, it is she who will have said, perhaps, this is why it is up to your father
to speak. Not only my father, but your father.” Derrida, Post Card, 3.
24. Of course, this does escape Derrida, who writes: “But how to separate this
graphics [of jealousy, revenge, and guilt] from that of the legacy? Between the two,
however, there is no relation of causality or condition of possibility. Repetition leg-
ates itself, the legacy repeats itself. . . . The legacy and jealousy of a repetition . . . are
not accidents which overtake the fort:da, rather they more or less strictly pull its
strings.” Ibid., 336.
25. Ibid., 317.
26. Derrida, Archive Fever, 80.
27. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3.
28. Ibid., 5.
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Ibid., 5.
31. See Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Papers on Architecture, 1992), and Leslie Kane Weisman, Discrimination by De-
sign: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1994).
32. Shelley Winters in John Berry’s film noir He Ran All the Way (United States,
1951) figures prominently as an exception.
33. Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York:
New York University Press, 1998), 29. It is interesting to note that Karina later be-
came a filmmaker, writing and directing Vivre Ensemble (Living Together, France,
1973) and Victoria (Canada/France, 2008).
34. Among the faces this exchange of gazes indirectly conjures up is Renee
Falconetti’s. In fact, we might recall that in My Life to Live, Nana watches Carl
Theodore Dreyer’s La Passion de Jean d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, France,
1928) and finds herself moved to tears by the film’s extraordinary close-ups. As
Farocki and Silverman notice, the two women come to mirror each other, their
fate of death having been sealed by external, oppressive powers (the Church and
its judges, in one case, capitalism and the male pimps, in the other). Despite their
notes to chapter 1 5
limited agency, both women voluntary assume their destiny, becoming the very
example of ethical being. But is their death inevitable? The death about which the
character of “the philosopher” speaks toward the end of Godard’s film is “voluntary
and temporary,” whereas theirs is freely assumed yet unwanted and permanent.
35. Kaja Silverman, “Girl Love,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 14.
36. Ibid., 15.
37. These solutions further complicate the horizontal montage already active
between the two adjacent panels.
38. On the feminine as ornament in relation to architecture, see Mark Wigley,
The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press), 136.
39. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.
40. Wigley, Architecture of Deconstruction, 35.
41. For an in-depth investigation of the archive in relation to the logic of mo-
dernity, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986):
3–64; Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” in The Sign
of the Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok,
81–118 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); and Mary Ann Doane, The
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
42. Namely, that of the oedipal triangle; cf. Derrida, Post Card, 341.
43. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, Judaism Terminable and Inter-
minable (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 100. Cf. also Derrida,
Archive Fever, 41–43.
44. On the performative in relation to the archive, see Derrida, Archive Fever,
67–68: “the interpretation of the archive (here, for example, Yerushalmi’s book)
can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance,
by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to
have a rightful place in it. There is no meta-archive. Yerushalmi’s book, including
its fictive monologue, henceforth belongs to the corpus of Freud (and of Moses,
etc.), whose name it also carries.”
45. Ibid., 48.
46. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 5.
47. Ibid., 6, 33, 55.
48. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992),
283, 262.
49. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 29.
50. Lacan, Seminar VII, 272.
51. Ibid., 282.
52. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 63.
4 notes to chapter 1
French the pronunciation of PP [pleasure principle] is pépé, which is also the
affectionate term for grandfather. Derrida will play upon this double meaning
throughout” (287).
20. Ibid., 341.
21. Amy Villarejo, Lesbian Rule: Cultural Criticism and the Value of Desire
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003).
22. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, as quoted in Derrida, Post
Card, 326.
23. Remarkably, Derrida himself establishes a comparison, in fact, a relation
of rivalry, between the two sisters: “There is a mute daughter. And more than an-
other daughter who will have used the paternal credit in abundant discourse of
inheritance, it is she who will have said, perhaps, this is why it is up to your father
to speak. Not only my father, but your father.” Derrida, Post Card, 3.
24. Of course, this does escape Derrida, who writes: “But how to separate this
graphics [of jealousy, revenge, and guilt] from that of the legacy? Between the two,
however, there is no relation of causality or condition of possibility. Repetition leg-
ates itself, the legacy repeats itself. . . . The legacy and jealousy of a repetition . . . are
not accidents which overtake the fort:da, rather they more or less strictly pull its
strings.” Ibid., 336.
25. Ibid., 317.
26. Derrida, Archive Fever, 80.
27. Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3.
28. Ibid., 5.
29. Ibid., 7.
30. Ibid., 5.
31. See Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality and Space (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Papers on Architecture, 1992), and Leslie Kane Weisman, Discrimination by De-
sign: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1994).
32. Shelley Winters in John Berry’s film noir He Ran All the Way (United States,
1951) figures prominently as an exception.
33. Kaja Silverman and Harun Farocki, Speaking about Godard (New York:
New York University Press, 1998), 29. It is interesting to note that Karina later be-
came a filmmaker, writing and directing Vivre Ensemble (Living Together, France,
1973) and Victoria (Canada/France, 2008).
34. Among the faces this exchange of gazes indirectly conjures up is Renee
Falconetti’s. In fact, we might recall that in My Life to Live, Nana watches Carl
Theodore Dreyer’s La Passion de Jean d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, France,
1928) and finds herself moved to tears by the film’s extraordinary close-ups. As
Farocki and Silverman notice, the two women come to mirror each other, their
fate of death having been sealed by external, oppressive powers (the Church and
its judges, in one case, capitalism and the male pimps, in the other). Despite their
notes to chapter 1 5
limited agency, both women voluntary assume their destiny, becoming the very
example of ethical being. But is their death inevitable? The death about which the
character of “the philosopher” speaks toward the end of Godard’s film is “voluntary
and temporary,” whereas theirs is freely assumed yet unwanted and permanent.
35. Kaja Silverman, “Girl Love,” October 104 (Spring 2003): 14.
36. Ibid., 15.
37. These solutions further complicate the horizontal montage already active
between the two adjacent panels.
38. On the feminine as ornament in relation to architecture, see Mark Wigley,
The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press), 136.
39. Derrida, Archive Fever, 7.
40. Wigley, Architecture of Deconstruction, 35.
41. For an in-depth investigation of the archive in relation to the logic of mo-
dernity, see Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986):
3–64; Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes,” in The Sign
of the Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok,
81–118 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983); and Mary Ann Doane, The
Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
42. Namely, that of the oedipal triangle; cf. Derrida, Post Card, 341.
43. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses, Judaism Terminable and Inter-
minable (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991), 100. Cf. also Derrida,
Archive Fever, 41–43.
44. On the performative in relation to the archive, see Derrida, Archive Fever,
67–68: “the interpretation of the archive (here, for example, Yerushalmi’s book)
can only illuminate, read, interpret, establish its object, namely a given inheritance,
by inscribing itself into it, that is to say by opening it and by enriching it enough to
have a rightful place in it. There is no meta-archive. Yerushalmi’s book, including
its fictive monologue, henceforth belongs to the corpus of Freud (and of Moses,
etc.), whose name it also carries.”
45. Ibid., 48.
46. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 5.
47. Ibid., 6, 33, 55.
48. Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960,
ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992),
283, 262.
49. Butler, Antigone’s Claim, 29.
50. Lacan, Seminar VII, 272.
51. Ibid., 282.
52. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through
Popular Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press), 63.
6 notes to chapter 1
53. Cf. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1982).
54. For a very different interpretation of the death drive, one that grounds itself
on the Lacanian concept of the Real and criticizes Butler’s reading of Antigone as
“redemptive” of the past and ultimately conservative with respect to the Symbolic
that attempts to subvert, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
2. Digital Impressions
  1. Sigmund Freud, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” Standard
Edition 9 (1907): 1–96.
  2. Derrida, Archive Fever, 25–30.
  3. In his Freud’s Moses, Yerushalmi, whose ingenious writing Derrida pa-
tiently reenacts, addresses Freud’s phantom in the second person, asking him if
his Antigone (“your Antigone”) indeed was speaking in her own name or in his.
The reference is to the 1977 invitation that Anna Freud received from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem to inaugurate a chair “carrying the name” of her father and
to the written statement she sent instead in her proxy. As Derrida points out, what
is at stake is nothing less than the unity and virility of the “we” that Yerushalmi
adopts in speaking of the psychoanalytic archive. Cf. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48.
  4. Derrida, Archive Fever, 95.
  5. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1981).
  6. Ibid., 45.
  7. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 152. Despite its provocative im-
plications, Derrida’s own adoption of the term invagination maintains us within
the sphere of dissemination, also confirming the split between language and per-
ception; see Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7,
no. 1 (1980): 55–81. For an interpretation of “flesh” that privileges “ontological
kinship” over difference, tracing an alternative history of modern thought, see Kaja
Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 9.
  8. On the relation between the flesh and textuality, see Vicki Kirby, “Culpabil-
ity and the Double Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty,” in Feminist Interpreta-
tions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, 127–45
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006).
  9. See Villarejo, Lesbian Rule, especially the chapter titled “Archiving the Di-
aspora: A Lesbian Impression.”
10. Varda elaborates on the new term by stating, “Cinécriture is the total con-
cept, the filmmaker’s imprint from the writing of the scenario to what occurs during
the choice of décor, location scouting, the actual shooting and the editing process.”
See Agnès Varda, “Interview: A Personal Vision,” Passion (June–July 1986): 20.
notes to chapter 2 7
11. On questioning the limits of the human in the context of Western philosophy,
see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet,
trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
12. In “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I,” Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 24 (Fall 2007): 422, Homay King emphasizes that the
film “denies the digital this divorce from the tangible and the time-bound. It uses
digitality in ways antithetical to the Cartesian dream of immateriality. . . . It insists
on matter, body, and duration. . . . With The Gleaners and I, Varda crafts a digital
cinema that is material, feminist, phenomenological, and political.”
13. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 123.
14. To emphasize that Freud’s house–museum constitutes the stronghold of a
certain psychoanalytic legacy, in Big Archive, 187, Spieker refers directly to Yerush-
almi, who writes, “The Freud Archives . . . were created by Anna Freud, Freud’s
devoted daughter, and Dr. Kurt Eissler, surely the most zealous guardian of his
reputation, for the . . . express purpose of preserving Freud’s legacy and memory
for future generations.” Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Series Z: An Archival Fantasy,”
Journal of European Psychoanalysis no. 3–4 (Spring 1996–Winter 1997), http://
www.psychomedia.it/jep/number3-4/yerushalmi.htm. Clearly the “Antigone–Anna
Freud” I have been interested in following is not the devoted daughter but the de-
fiant daughter and sister.
15. In the interview, Varda adds, “I had the feeling that this is the camera that
would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958. I felt free
at that time.” See “The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An Interview with Agnes
Varda,” Cineaste 26, no. 4 (2001): 24. Regarding the Bell and Howell 16mm cam-
era, André Bazin writes that it constitutes “a projection of hand and eye, almost a
living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness,” thus anticipating
several of the phenomenological implications discussed in this work. See Bazin,
“An Aesthetics of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh
Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 33.
16. For a thorough discussion of these concepts, see Miriam Bratu Hansen,
“Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999):
306–43.
17. King, “Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 421, 423.
18. Varda, “Interview.”
19. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” in
The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 22, 19.
20. Kaja Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” October 96 (Spring 2001): 4,
5. Here the artist himself seems to have become the medium, and yet the fusion is
never complete: “I am a person who likes to receive,” Silverman quotes Godard
saying. “The camera cannot be a rifle, since it is not an instrument that sends out
but an instrument that receives. And it receives with the aid of light.”
21. Ibid., 24.
6 notes to chapter 1
53. Cf. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass.: Har-
vard University Press, 1982).
54. For a very different interpretation of the death drive, one that grounds itself
on the Lacanian concept of the Real and criticizes Butler’s reading of Antigone as
“redemptive” of the past and ultimately conservative with respect to the Symbolic
that attempts to subvert, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death
Drive (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
2. Digital Impressions
  1. Sigmund Freud, “Delusions and Dreams in Jensen’s Gradiva,” Standard
Edition 9 (1907): 1–96.
  2. Derrida, Archive Fever, 25–30.
  3. In his Freud’s Moses, Yerushalmi, whose ingenious writing Derrida pa-
tiently reenacts, addresses Freud’s phantom in the second person, asking him if
his Antigone (“your Antigone”) indeed was speaking in her own name or in his.
The reference is to the 1977 invitation that Anna Freud received from the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem to inaugurate a chair “carrying the name” of her father and
to the written statement she sent instead in her proxy. As Derrida points out, what
is at stake is nothing less than the unity and virility of the “we” that Yerushalmi
adopts in speaking of the psychoanalytic archive. Cf. Derrida, Archive Fever, 48.
  4. Derrida, Archive Fever, 95.
  5. Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1981).
  6. Ibid., 45.
  7. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 152. Despite its provocative im-
plications, Derrida’s own adoption of the term invagination maintains us within
the sphere of dissemination, also confirming the split between language and per-
ception; see Derrida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avital Ronell, Critical Inquiry 7,
no. 1 (1980): 55–81. For an interpretation of “flesh” that privileges “ontological
kinship” over difference, tracing an alternative history of modern thought, see Kaja
Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), 9.
  8. On the relation between the flesh and textuality, see Vicki Kirby, “Culpabil-
ity and the Double Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty,” in Feminist Interpreta-
tions of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and Gail Weiss, 127–45
(University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006).
  9. See Villarejo, Lesbian Rule, especially the chapter titled “Archiving the Di-
aspora: A Lesbian Impression.”
10. Varda elaborates on the new term by stating, “Cinécriture is the total con-
cept, the filmmaker’s imprint from the writing of the scenario to what occurs during
the choice of décor, location scouting, the actual shooting and the editing process.”
See Agnès Varda, “Interview: A Personal Vision,” Passion (June–July 1986): 20.
notes to chapter 2 7
11. On questioning the limits of the human in the context of Western philosophy,
see Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet,
trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
12. In “Matter, Time, and the Digital: Varda’s The Gleaners and I,” Quarterly
Review of Film and Video 24 (Fall 2007): 422, Homay King emphasizes that the
film “denies the digital this divorce from the tangible and the time-bound. It uses
digitality in ways antithetical to the Cartesian dream of immateriality. . . . It insists
on matter, body, and duration. . . . With The Gleaners and I, Varda crafts a digital
cinema that is material, feminist, phenomenological, and political.”
13. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 123.
14. To emphasize that Freud’s house–museum constitutes the stronghold of a
certain psychoanalytic legacy, in Big Archive, 187, Spieker refers directly to Yerush-
almi, who writes, “The Freud Archives . . . were created by Anna Freud, Freud’s
devoted daughter, and Dr. Kurt Eissler, surely the most zealous guardian of his
reputation, for the . . . express purpose of preserving Freud’s legacy and memory
for future generations.” Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, “Series Z: An Archival Fantasy,”
Journal of European Psychoanalysis no. 3–4 (Spring 1996–Winter 1997), http://
www.psychomedia.it/jep/number3-4/yerushalmi.htm. Clearly the “Antigone–Anna
Freud” I have been interested in following is not the devoted daughter but the de-
fiant daughter and sister.
15. In the interview, Varda adds, “I had the feeling that this is the camera that
would bring me back to the early short films I made in 1957 and 1958. I felt free
at that time.” See “The Modest Gesture of the Filmmaker: An Interview with Agnes
Varda,” Cineaste 26, no. 4 (2001): 24. Regarding the Bell and Howell 16mm cam-
era, André Bazin writes that it constitutes “a projection of hand and eye, almost a
living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness,” thus anticipating
several of the phenomenological implications discussed in this work. See Bazin,
“An Aesthetics of Reality: Neorealism,” in What Is Cinema? vol. 2, trans. Hugh
Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 33.
16. For a thorough discussion of these concepts, see Miriam Bratu Hansen,
“Benjamin and Cinema: Not a One-Way Street,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 2 (1999):
306–43.
17. King, “Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 421, 423.
18. Varda, “Interview.”
19. Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Caméra-Stylo,” in
The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 22, 19.
20. Kaja Silverman, “The Author as Receiver,” October 96 (Spring 2001): 4,
5. Here the artist himself seems to have become the medium, and yet the fusion is
never complete: “I am a person who likes to receive,” Silverman quotes Godard
saying. “The camera cannot be a rifle, since it is not an instrument that sends out
but an instrument that receives. And it receives with the aid of light.”
21. Ibid., 24.
8 notes to chapter 2
22. For the concept of perceptual signifier, see Kaja Silverman, World Specta-
tors (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
23. See Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New
York: Routledge, 2007), 23.
24. See Rosalind Krauss, “Video: An Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1
(Spring 1976): 50–64.
25. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 139.
26. In “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” Judith Butler writes of
this vision that defies the very distinction between activity and passivity: “Some-
thing sees through me as I see. I see with a seeing that is not mine alone. I see,
and as I see, the I that I am is put at risk, discovers its derivation from what is
permanently enigmatic to itself.” Butler, The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-
Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 202.
27. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 140.
28. For a discussion of Irigaray’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, see
Vicki Kirby, “Culpability and the Double Cross”; Judith Butler, “Sexual Difference
as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty,” in
Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture, ed.
Laura Doyle, 59–77 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Eliza-
beth Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flash,” in Merleau-Ponty, Interi-
ority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James
Morley, 145–66 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Cathryn
Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-
Ponty (London: Routledge, 1998).
29. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 270, 117.
30. Ibid., 147.
31. Ibid., 153.
32. In Visible and the Invisible, 126, explicitly referring to Lacan, Merleau-Ponty
states that “the vision itself, the thought itself, are . . . ‘structured like a language,’ are
articulation before the letter.” And in the “Working Notes,” that Lacan “describe[s]
perception as a diacritical, relative, oppositional system” (213).
33. See Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 146, 152.
34. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 229. For an account of the
debate on Merleau-Ponty’s and Derrida’s different notions of chiasm, see Vasse-
leu, Textures of Light.
35. Ibid., 211, 238.
36. Ibid., 268.
37. Ibid., 271; emphasis mine.
38. Ibid., 266.
39. Ibid., 271–72.
notes to chapter 3 9
40. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,”
in Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 54.
41. Derrida, “Double Session,” 216.
42. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible.
43. These terms appear in Derrida, “Double Session,” 272.
44. Derrida, Archive Fever, 97–99.
45. “What is the moment proper to the archive?” asks Derrida in the “Pream-
ble” to Archive Fever, 25, adding soon afterward, “If there is such a thing, the in-
stant of archivization strictly speaking.” In my reading of Varda, the refusal of the
“proper” moment extends to a refusal of the proper as domestic (see chapter 1).
46. Cf. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986):
3–64, and Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes.”
47. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 23.
48. Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (often rendered as “deferred action”
but translated by Laplanche as “afterwardsness”) is central to Laplanche’s own
theory of “enigmatic signifiers.” See Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation, and
the Drive (London: ICA, 1993).
49. In her article on Varda, King, “Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 428, points
out that Laplanche’s theory of “enigmatic signifiers” had implicitly anticipated the
notion of psychoanalysis as gleaning: addressed to us by the other and yet unde-
codable, the messages that Laplanche calls enigmatic signifiers are “tossed” into
the unconscious like “psychic junk.” Destined to remain irrecoverable despite their
call for interpretation, these messages possess the power to engender an unending
series of imperfect and potentially creative translations.
50. Murray, Digital Baroque, 5.
3. Folding Time
  1. See Derrida, Archive Fever, 63–64, 59.
  2. Ibid., 63–67; see also Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).
  3. Ibid., 68.
  4. Ibid., 51.
  5. Grosz, Time Travels, 76.
  6. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruc-
tion, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 108.
  7. See the annotation “Goethe: genius [is] posthumous productivity,” in Mer-
leau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France
(1954–55), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston, Ill.: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2010), 9.
  8. Quoted in Adrian Dannat, “Where Fact and Fiction Meet,” The Art News-
8 notes to chapter 2
22. For the concept of perceptual signifier, see Kaja Silverman, World Specta-
tors (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000).
23. See Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New
York: Routledge, 2007), 23.
24. See Rosalind Krauss, “Video: An Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1
(Spring 1976): 50–64.
25. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 139.
26. In “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” Judith Butler writes of
this vision that defies the very distinction between activity and passivity: “Some-
thing sees through me as I see. I see with a seeing that is not mine alone. I see,
and as I see, the I that I am is put at risk, discovers its derivation from what is
permanently enigmatic to itself.” Butler, The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-
Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Hansen (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005), 202.
27. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 140.
28. For a discussion of Irigaray’s reading of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh, see
Vicki Kirby, “Culpability and the Double Cross”; Judith Butler, “Sexual Difference
as a Question of Ethics: Alterities of the Flesh in Irigaray and Merleau-Ponty,” in
Bodies of Resistance: New Phenomenologies of Politics, Agency, and Culture, ed.
Laura Doyle, 59–77 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2001); Eliza-
beth Grosz, “Merleau-Ponty and Irigaray in the Flash,” in Merleau-Ponty, Interi-
ority and Exteriority, Psychic Life and World, ed. Dorothea Olkowski and James
Morley, 145–66 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999); and Cathryn
Vasseleu, Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas, and Merleau-
Ponty (London: Routledge, 1998).
29. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 270, 117.
30. Ibid., 147.
31. Ibid., 153.
32. In Visible and the Invisible, 126, explicitly referring to Lacan, Merleau-Ponty
states that “the vision itself, the thought itself, are . . . ‘structured like a language,’ are
articulation before the letter.” And in the “Working Notes,” that Lacan “describe[s]
perception as a diacritical, relative, oppositional system” (213).
33. See Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 146, 152.
34. Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session,” in Dissemination, trans. Barbara
Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 229. For an account of the
debate on Merleau-Ponty’s and Derrida’s different notions of chiasm, see Vasse-
leu, Textures of Light.
35. Ibid., 211, 238.
36. Ibid., 268.
37. Ibid., 271; emphasis mine.
38. Ibid., 266.
39. Ibid., 271–72.
notes to chapter 3 9
40. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Displacement and the Discourse of Woman,”
in Feminist Interpretations of Jacques Derrida, ed. Nancy J. Holland (University
Park: Penn State University Press, 1997), 54.
41. Derrida, “Double Session,” 216.
42. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible.
43. These terms appear in Derrida, “Double Session,” 272.
44. Derrida, Archive Fever, 97–99.
45. “What is the moment proper to the archive?” asks Derrida in the “Pream-
ble” to Archive Fever, 25, adding soon afterward, “If there is such a thing, the in-
stant of archivization strictly speaking.” In my reading of Varda, the refusal of the
“proper” moment extends to a refusal of the proper as domestic (see chapter 1).
46. Cf. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (Winter 1986):
3–64, and Ginzburg, “Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes.”
47. Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time, 23.
48. Freud’s concept of Nachträglichkeit (often rendered as “deferred action”
but translated by Laplanche as “afterwardsness”) is central to Laplanche’s own
theory of “enigmatic signifiers.” See Jean Laplanche, Seduction, Translation, and
the Drive (London: ICA, 1993).
49. In her article on Varda, King, “Matter, Time, and the Digital,” 428, points
out that Laplanche’s theory of “enigmatic signifiers” had implicitly anticipated the
notion of psychoanalysis as gleaning: addressed to us by the other and yet unde-
codable, the messages that Laplanche calls enigmatic signifiers are “tossed” into
the unconscious like “psychic junk.” Destined to remain irrecoverable despite their
call for interpretation, these messages possess the power to engender an unending
series of imperfect and potentially creative translations.
50. Murray, Digital Baroque, 5.
3. Folding Time
  1. See Derrida, Archive Fever, 63–64, 59.
  2. Ibid., 63–67; see also Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine, trans. Rachel Bowlby
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005).
  3. Ibid., 68.
  4. Ibid., 51.
  5. Grosz, Time Travels, 76.
  6. Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accommodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruc-
tion, and the Law (New York: Routledge, 1991), 108.
  7. See the annotation “Goethe: genius [is] posthumous productivity,” in Mer-
leau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity: Course Notes from the Collège de France
(1954–55), trans. Leonard Lawlor and Heath Massey (Evanston, Ill.: Northwest-
ern University Press, 2010), 9.
  8. Quoted in Adrian Dannat, “Where Fact and Fiction Meet,” The Art News-
10 notes to chapter 3
paper (2002), http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=4510.
  9. George Baker, “An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,” October 110 (Fall 2004):
84.
10. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed., Pierre Huyghe (Geneva: Skira, 2004), 252.
11. Ibid.
12. Derrida, Archive Fever, 66.
13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Lon-
don: Continuum, 2006).
14. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 152, 263.
15. Ibid., 215.
16. For an interpretation of the archive that investigates Derrida’s own notion of
invisibility and its relation to virtuality, see Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics).
17. On the concept of “unthought,” see Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits
of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 2002).
18. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 149.
19. Ibid., 153, 231.
20. On time and the flesh, see Glen A. Mazis, “Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Back-
ward Flow’ of Time: The Reversibility of Temporality and the Temporality of Re-
versibility,” in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas W.
Busch and Shaun Gallagher, 53–68 (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992), and Dorothea Olkowski, “Merleau-Ponty’s Freudianism: From the Body
of Consciousness to the Body of the Flesh,” Review of Existential Psychology and
Psychiatry 18, nos. 1–3 (1982–83): 97–116.
21. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 268.
22. Ibid., 267.
23. Ibid., 184.
24. Ibid., 195.
25. Ibid., 114.
26. Ibid., 267, 195.
27. Ibid., 240.
28. Ibid., 244, 143.
29. Judith Butler, “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Han-
sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 197.
30. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 146.
31. Ibid., 147.
32. Ibid., 148.
33. Ibid., 228.
34. Ibid., 111.
35. Ibid., 152.
36. Ibid., 151.
notes to chapter 3 11
37. I take issue here with the interpretation of flesh as “formless content” (vs.
Derrida’s différance as “contentless form”) proposed by Leonard Lawlor, Think-
ing through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003).
38. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 52, Merleau-Ponty explicitly
writes “abyss or openness.”
39. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 124.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 24; see also p. 22: “What defines human institution? A past which
creates a question, puts it in reserve, makes a situation that is indefinitely open.”
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 77.
44. Merleau-Ponty uses this term in Institution and Passivity, 73, and Visible
and the Invisible, 113.
45. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 78–79; see also p. 72: “[The spirit
of the institution] consists in not being limited, prohibited, enclosed on a island of
customs . . . setting an unlimited historical labor underway.”
46. Ibid., 74–75, 113n55.
47. For a reading that emphasizes the productivity of the flesh, see Lawrence
Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008),
and Françoise Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion
of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 23–50 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2000).
48. Doyle, Bodies of Resistance, xxiii, xxiv.
49. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 122.
50. Describing the “weak spots” of the dream as the point at which interpreta-
tion can begin, Freud uses a significant comparison: these dream sites “serve my
purpose just as Hagen’s was served by the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak.
That is the point at which the interpretation of the dream can be started.” He con-
tinues, “The trouble taken by the dreamer in preventing the solution of the dream
gives me a basis for estimating the care with which its cloak has been woven.”
Sigmund Freud, “The Forgetting of Dreams,” Standard Edition 5 (1900–1): 515.
51. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 270.
52. Ibid., 180.
53. Raymond Bellour, “The Book, Back and Forth,” in Laurent Roth and Ray-
mond Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de
Chris Marker (Paris: Yves Gevaert Editeur/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), 115.
54. Ibid., 113.
55. For an interpretation of Bahnung that foregrounds the workings of vision,
expanding into a theory of the perceptual signifier, see Silverman, World Spectators.
56. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters: 1910–1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and
M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 110.
10 notes to chapter 3
paper (2002), http://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/article.asp?idart=4510.
  9. George Baker, “An Interview with Pierre Huyghe,” October 110 (Fall 2004):
84.
10. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, ed., Pierre Huyghe (Geneva: Skira, 2004), 252.
11. Ibid.
12. Derrida, Archive Fever, 66.
13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (Lon-
don: Continuum, 2006).
14. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 152, 263.
15. Ibid., 215.
16. For an interpretation of the archive that investigates Derrida’s own notion of
invisibility and its relation to virtuality, see Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics).
17. On the concept of “unthought,” see Merleau-Ponty, Husserl at the Limits
of Phenomenology, ed. Leonard Lawlor and Bettina Bergo (Evanston, Ill.: North-
western University Press, 2002).
18. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 149.
19. Ibid., 153, 231.
20. On time and the flesh, see Glen A. Mazis, “Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Back-
ward Flow’ of Time: The Reversibility of Temporality and the Temporality of Re-
versibility,” in Merleau-Ponty, Hermeneutics, and Postmodernism, ed. Thomas W.
Busch and Shaun Gallagher, 53–68 (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1992), and Dorothea Olkowski, “Merleau-Ponty’s Freudianism: From the Body
of Consciousness to the Body of the Flesh,” Review of Existential Psychology and
Psychiatry 18, nos. 1–3 (1982–83): 97–116.
21. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 268.
22. Ibid., 267.
23. Ibid., 184.
24. Ibid., 195.
25. Ibid., 114.
26. Ibid., 267, 195.
27. Ibid., 240.
28. Ibid., 244, 143.
29. Judith Butler, “Merleau-Ponty and the Touch of Malebranche,” in The
Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty, ed. Taylor Carman and Mark B. Han-
sen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 197.
30. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 146.
31. Ibid., 147.
32. Ibid., 148.
33. Ibid., 228.
34. Ibid., 111.
35. Ibid., 152.
36. Ibid., 151.
notes to chapter 3 11
37. I take issue here with the interpretation of flesh as “formless content” (vs.
Derrida’s différance as “contentless form”) proposed by Leonard Lawlor, Think-
ing through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2003).
38. In Husserl at the Limits of Phenomenology, 52, Merleau-Ponty explicitly
writes “abyss or openness.”
39. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 124.
40. Ibid.
41. Ibid., 24; see also p. 22: “What defines human institution? A past which
creates a question, puts it in reserve, makes a situation that is indefinitely open.”
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid., 77.
44. Merleau-Ponty uses this term in Institution and Passivity, 73, and Visible
and the Invisible, 113.
45. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 78–79; see also p. 72: “[The spirit
of the institution] consists in not being limited, prohibited, enclosed on a island of
customs . . . setting an unlimited historical labor underway.”
46. Ibid., 74–75, 113n55.
47. For a reading that emphasizes the productivity of the flesh, see Lawrence
Hass, Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008),
and Françoise Dastur, “World, Flesh, Vision,” in Chiasms: Merleau-Ponty’s Notion
of Flesh, ed. Fred Evans and Leonard Lawlor, 23–50 (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 2000).
48. Doyle, Bodies of Resistance, xxiii, xxiv.
49. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 122.
50. Describing the “weak spots” of the dream as the point at which interpreta-
tion can begin, Freud uses a significant comparison: these dream sites “serve my
purpose just as Hagen’s was served by the embroidered mark on Siegfried’s cloak.
That is the point at which the interpretation of the dream can be started.” He con-
tinues, “The trouble taken by the dreamer in preventing the solution of the dream
gives me a basis for estimating the care with which its cloak has been woven.”
Sigmund Freud, “The Forgetting of Dreams,” Standard Edition 5 (1900–1): 515.
51. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 270.
52. Ibid., 180.
53. Raymond Bellour, “The Book, Back and Forth,” in Laurent Roth and Ray-
mond Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de
Chris Marker (Paris: Yves Gevaert Editeur/Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), 115.
54. Ibid., 113.
55. For an interpretation of Bahnung that foregrounds the workings of vision,
expanding into a theory of the perceptual signifier, see Silverman, World Spectators.
56. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters: 1910–1926, trans. Jane Bannard Greene and
M. D. Herter Norton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969), 110.
12 notes to chapter 3
57. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, 9.
58. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 124, 133.
59. See Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, 119: “In any film worth seeing you should
identify with the film itself, not with one of its characters.”
60. “This red,” we read in Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 132, “is
what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which
it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that
it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain
node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive.”
61. Ibid., 240, 208; emphasis mine.
62. I would like to thank Dudley Andrew for directing my attention toward this
term and the inspiring article in which it is discussed. See Diane Arnaud, “From
Bazin to Deleuze: A Matter of Depth,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory
and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Jaubert-Laurencin (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2011), 92.
63. Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 34.
64. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 112–13.
4. Archiving Disappearance
  1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 20.
  2. Ibid., 8.
  3. Ibid., 26–27.
  4. Ibid., 19.
  5. Ibid., 11; emphasis original.
  6. Derrida, Archive Fever, 8.
  7. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman,
Yale French Studies 48 (1972), 228; see also Derrida, Archive Fever, 14.
  8. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 225.
  9. Derrida, Archive Fever, 17.
10. Bernard Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” in Derrida and Stiegler, Echogra-
phies, 162.
11. On the difference between primary and secondary memory, Stiegler writes,
“In the temporal object as melody, Husserl discovers primary retention. Primary
retention is a kind of memory, but it is nonetheless not the aspect of memory in-
volving recall. . . . Primary retention is what the now of an unfolding temporal ob-
ject retains in itself from all of its previous nows.” As such, it belongs to the order
of perception and not of imagination. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3:
Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Palo Alto,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), 14.
notes to chapter 4 13
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. Ibid., 39.
15. Ibid., 5.
16. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen
Barker (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
17. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 235. (Here the term is adopted
to describe the invisible.)
18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Michael Smith, in The
Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 124.
19. Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-
Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 48–60 (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964).
20. For a phenomenologically inflected reading of Poloni’s work, see Michael
Newman, “Evident Hypotheses: Marco Poloni’s Photographic Scripts for Short
Films,” in Shadows Collide with People, ed. Stefan Banz, 55–64 (Zurich: Fink,
2005).
21. The streaming video was actually downloaded from the “Most Wanted”
section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s website.
22. Stiegler, “Discrete Image,” 148.
23. I develop a close reading of this sequence in the first chapter of my previ-
ous book, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008).
24. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 51.
25. Ibid., 23.
26. On The Passenger’s insistent reenactment of disappearance as constitutive
of the process of vision, see Torlasco, Time of the Crime.
27. Jacques Derrida, “Artifactualities,” in Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 3.
28. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans.
Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 133.
29. Ibid., 137.
30. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 12.
31. Ibid., 21.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 17.
34. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 156.
35. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2, 241; quoted in Technics and Time, 3, 1.
36. Ibid., 9.
37. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 102, 105.
38. Ibid., 105; for a discussion of the differences between Stiegler and Derrida
12 notes to chapter 3
57. Silverman, Flesh of My Flesh, 9.
58. Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity, 124, 133.
59. See Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema, 119: “In any film worth seeing you should
identify with the film itself, not with one of its characters.”
60. “This red,” we read in Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 132, “is
what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which
it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that
it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain
node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive.”
61. Ibid., 240, 208; emphasis mine.
62. I would like to thank Dudley Andrew for directing my attention toward this
term and the inspiring article in which it is discussed. See Diane Arnaud, “From
Bazin to Deleuze: A Matter of Depth,” in Opening Bazin: Postwar Film Theory
and Its Afterlife, ed. Dudley Andrew with Hervé Jaubert-Laurencin (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2011), 92.
63. Gilles Deleuze, The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 34.
64. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1994), 112–13.
4. Archiving Disappearance
  1. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 20.
  2. Ibid., 8.
  3. Ibid., 26–27.
  4. Ibid., 19.
  5. Ibid., 11; emphasis original.
  6. Derrida, Archive Fever, 8.
  7. Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman,
Yale French Studies 48 (1972), 228; see also Derrida, Archive Fever, 14.
  8. Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” 225.
  9. Derrida, Archive Fever, 17.
10. Bernard Stiegler, “The Discrete Image,” in Derrida and Stiegler, Echogra-
phies, 162.
11. On the difference between primary and secondary memory, Stiegler writes,
“In the temporal object as melody, Husserl discovers primary retention. Primary
retention is a kind of memory, but it is nonetheless not the aspect of memory in-
volving recall. . . . Primary retention is what the now of an unfolding temporal ob-
ject retains in itself from all of its previous nows.” As such, it belongs to the order
of perception and not of imagination. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3:
Cinematic Time and the Question of Malaise, trans. Stephen Barker (Palo Alto,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2011), 14.
notes to chapter 4 13
12. Ibid., 28.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. Ibid., 39.
15. Ibid., 5.
16. See Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen
Barker (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009).
17. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 235. (Here the term is adopted
to describe the invisible.)
18. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Michael Smith, in The
Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, ed. Galen A. Johnson
(Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 124.
19. Merleau-Ponty, “The Film and the New Psychology,” in Sense and Non-
Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, 48–60 (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1964).
20. For a phenomenologically inflected reading of Poloni’s work, see Michael
Newman, “Evident Hypotheses: Marco Poloni’s Photographic Scripts for Short
Films,” in Shadows Collide with People, ed. Stefan Banz, 55–64 (Zurich: Fink,
2005).
21. The streaming video was actually downloaded from the “Most Wanted”
section of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s website.
22. Stiegler, “Discrete Image,” 148.
23. I develop a close reading of this sequence in the first chapter of my previ-
ous book, The Time of the Crime: Phenomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film
(Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008).
24. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 51.
25. Ibid., 23.
26. On The Passenger’s insistent reenactment of disappearance as constitutive
of the process of vision, see Torlasco, Time of the Crime.
27. Jacques Derrida, “Artifactualities,” in Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 3.
28. Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans.
Richard Beardsworth and George Collins (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University
Press, 1998), 133.
29. Ibid., 137.
30. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 12.
31. Ibid., 21.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 17.
34. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 156.
35. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 2, 241; quoted in Technics and Time, 3, 1.
36. Ibid., 9.
37. Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 102, 105.
38. Ibid., 105; for a discussion of the differences between Stiegler and Derrida
14 notes to chapter 4 notes to chapter 4 15

on determination and the future, see Richard Beardsworth, “Toward a Critical 56. Ibid., 265.
Culture of the Image,” Tekhnema 4 (Spring 1998): 114–41. For Derrida, the “cat- 57. On the paradoxical status of anticipation, at once indispensable to and
egorical imperative” is “to let the future have a future.” See Derrida and Stiegler, dangerous for archivization as openness to the future, Derrida says, “By the same
Echographies, 85. token, this increase, this intensification of anticipation may also nullify the future.
39. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 39. This is the paradox of anticipation. Anticipation opens to the future, but at the
40. Ibid., 28. The sentence continues by stating that “the unconscious, full of same time, it neutralizes it.” See Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 105.
protentional possibilities (including the speculative) would be the producer” of 58. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 132.
this montage. But this unconscious still remains “housed” in the consciousness
as control room or center of production rather than being dispersed outside of it.
41. Ibid., 12–13; emphasis mine. The full passage, as quoted by Stiegler, reads,
“Cinema, in fact, works with two complementary givens: instantaneous sections
which are called images; and a movement or a time which is impersonal, uniform,
abstract, invisible, or imperceptible, which is ‘in’ the apparatus, and ‘with’ which the
images are made to pass consecutively. Cinema thus gives us a false movement—it
is the typical example of false movement. But it is strange that Bergson should give
the oldest illusion such a modern and recent name (‘cinematographic’). . . . Does
this mean that for Bergson the cinema is only the projection, the reproduction of
a constant, universal illusion? As though we had always had cinema without real-
izing it.” Ibid., 3, 12.
42. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 142.
43. Ibid., 240.
44. Ibid., 244.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 143, 242.
47. Ibid., 142.
48. Ibid., 143.
49. Ibid., 194.
50. Ibid., 196.
51. Ibid., 197. Merleau-Ponty elaborates on the distinction between perception
as differentiation and forgetting as undifferentiation by writing, “The fact that one
no longer sees the memory = not a destruction of a psychic material which would
be the sensible, but its disarticulation which makes there be no longer a separa-
tion (écart), a relief.”
52. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 30–31.
53. In Institution and Passivity, 157, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “oneirism just
beneath the surface of all waking life.”
54. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 201.
55. At the end of the film, the character played by Nicholson tells the story of a
man who, blind from birth, gained his sight after forty years of complete darkness.
Following a period of elation, he began to be horrified by all the ugliness and dirt
he found in the world and eventually killed himself. Seeing all of a sudden, see-
ing too much, seeing without patiently developed filters—the world as encircling
spectacle was more than he could bear.
14 notes to chapter 4 notes to chapter 4 15

on determination and the future, see Richard Beardsworth, “Toward a Critical 56. Ibid., 265.
Culture of the Image,” Tekhnema 4 (Spring 1998): 114–41. For Derrida, the “cat- 57. On the paradoxical status of anticipation, at once indispensable to and
egorical imperative” is “to let the future have a future.” See Derrida and Stiegler, dangerous for archivization as openness to the future, Derrida says, “By the same
Echographies, 85. token, this increase, this intensification of anticipation may also nullify the future.
39. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 39. This is the paradox of anticipation. Anticipation opens to the future, but at the
40. Ibid., 28. The sentence continues by stating that “the unconscious, full of same time, it neutralizes it.” See Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies, 105.
protentional possibilities (including the speculative) would be the producer” of 58. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 132.
this montage. But this unconscious still remains “housed” in the consciousness
as control room or center of production rather than being dispersed outside of it.
41. Ibid., 12–13; emphasis mine. The full passage, as quoted by Stiegler, reads,
“Cinema, in fact, works with two complementary givens: instantaneous sections
which are called images; and a movement or a time which is impersonal, uniform,
abstract, invisible, or imperceptible, which is ‘in’ the apparatus, and ‘with’ which the
images are made to pass consecutively. Cinema thus gives us a false movement—it
is the typical example of false movement. But it is strange that Bergson should give
the oldest illusion such a modern and recent name (‘cinematographic’). . . . Does
this mean that for Bergson the cinema is only the projection, the reproduction of
a constant, universal illusion? As though we had always had cinema without real-
izing it.” Ibid., 3, 12.
42. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 142.
43. Ibid., 240.
44. Ibid., 244.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 143, 242.
47. Ibid., 142.
48. Ibid., 143.
49. Ibid., 194.
50. Ibid., 196.
51. Ibid., 197. Merleau-Ponty elaborates on the distinction between perception
as differentiation and forgetting as undifferentiation by writing, “The fact that one
no longer sees the memory = not a destruction of a psychic material which would
be the sensible, but its disarticulation which makes there be no longer a separa-
tion (écart), a relief.”
52. Stiegler, Technics and Time, 3, 30–31.
53. In Institution and Passivity, 157, Merleau-Ponty speaks of “oneirism just
beneath the surface of all waking life.”
54. Merleau-Ponty, Visible and the Invisible, 201.
55. At the end of the film, the character played by Nicholson tells the story of a
man who, blind from birth, gained his sight after forty years of complete darkness.
Following a period of elation, he began to be horrified by all the ugliness and dirt
he found in the world and eventually killed himself. Seeing all of a sudden, see-
ing too much, seeing without patiently developed filters—the world as encircling
spectacle was more than he could bear.
This page intentionally left blank
 index
Page numbers in italics refer to
illustrations.
Adorno, T. W., xiii, 94, 101n14
Adventure, The (Antonioni), 13, 15,
19
Aldrich, Robert, x
Alphaville (Godard), 13–14, 15, 18
American Friend, The (Wenders), xx,
57, 73
analog technologies, 29, 48–50,
67, 79–80, 91. See also archives;
cinema; digital technologies;
editing; memory
Angst essen Seele auf (Fassbinder),
14, 19
Antigone (figure), xv, xvi, xix, 3–4,
19–23, 26, 28, 35, 46, 50, 52,
102n10
Antigone’s Claim (Butler), xvi, xviii
Antigone’s Noir (Torlasco), x, xviii, xx
Antonioni, Michelangelo, xvi, xxi, 13,
15–16, 17, 19, 78, 80–92
Antoni Tàpies Foundation, 65
Appointment (Calle), xviii, 4–9
Appointment with Sigmund Freud
(Calle), 5
Architecture of Destruction, The
(Wigley), 20
“Archival Impulse, An” (Foster), 9
Archive Fever (Derrida), xiii, xvi,
1–4, 8–11, 20–25, 48, 51, 75–76,
105n44
archives: archival impulse and, xii,
9–10, 79; archiving otherwise and,
51, 53, 99; definitions of, xiii, xiv,
xv, 1–2, 25; domiciliation and,
1–2, 6, 21–23, 35; exteriority and,
xx, 64–66, 75–80; gender and,
xviii, 8–20; gleaning and, 32–34;
heretical, xv, xvii, 29; installation
art and, 9–10, 79–89; memory
and, 1–3, 49, 52, 73; perception’s
relation to, xvi, 44–48; repetition
and, xx, 3, 6–9, 20, 26, 31, 52;
shadow, xiv–xvii; temporality and,
xiii, 46, 53–54; virtuality and, 51–
53, 59–65, 68. See also perception
Astruc, Alexander, 39
Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)
(Lippit), xvi
Bal, Mieke, xiv
Bazin, André, 38, 71–72
Beaches of Agnes (Varda), 41, 49
Bel Geddes, Barbara, 68, 69
Bellour, Raymond, 66
Benjamin, Walter, 28, 38
Bergman, Ingrid, 12, 14
Bergson, Henri, 52, 95, 97, 114n41
2 i n d e x
Bernstein, Susan, 103n12
“Birth of a New Avant-Garde, The”
(Astruc), 39
Blain, Gérard, 58
Boddien, Hedwig, 67
Bodies of Resistance (Doyle), 64
Bonvicini, Monica, xii–xiii, xviii–xix,
3, 9–23, 31–32, 50, 71; photos of,
12–13, 15
Borges, Jorge Luis, 51, 54, 60
Bourgeouis, Louise, 11
Breton, Jules, 27, 29, 37
Bridge, The (Burgin), 68
Burgin, Victor, 68
Burlingham, Dorothy, 7–8, 28
Butler, Judith, xvi, xviii, 3–4, 21–22,
61, 106n54, 108n26
Caché (Haneke), 64
Calle, Sophie, xviii, xix, 3–9, 25,
103n18
caméra-stylo, 36–40
CD-ROMs, xii, xiv, 53, 65–71
Centre Pompidou, 65
chiasm (term), xvii, 43–44, 46, 60, 64
cinécriture (term), 38, 106n10
cinema: archival impulse and, xii, xiii,
10–20, 48, 94; caméra-stylo and,
36–40; consciousness and, 77–80,
90–95; delayed, xi; double vision
and, ix; editing and, 65–71, 87–88,
97; exteriority and, xx–xxi, 64–66,
75–80; gleaning and, 29, 32–38;
memory and, xi, xiv–xv, 54–55,
91–94; montage and, 27–28, 72–
73, 88, 94, 114n40–41; repetition
and, xi–xii, xx, 3, 6–9, 20, 26, 31,
38, 52; temporality and, ix–xi, 48,
91–99. See also specific artists,
directors, films, and installations
circumcision, 26, 75
Citizen Kane (Welles), 64
Coleman, James, 18
Colomina, Beatriz, 11
Combe, Sonia, 2
consciousness, 42, 60–65, 77–80,
92–96
Cornell, Drucilla, 53, 60
Creatures, The (Varda), xiii
Dean, Tacita, xii, 9–10
“Death and the Compass” (Borges),
60
death drive, xvi, xviii, xx, 2–3, 6, 8–9,
11, 19–23, 46, 71–73, 106n54. See
also domesticity
Death 24× a Second (Mulvey), xi
delayed cinema, xi
Deleuze, Gilles, xv, 49, 52, 72–73, 95
Demenÿ, Georges, 48
Deneuve, Catherine, 13, 18
D’entre les morts (Boileau-Narcejac),
67
Derrida, Jacques: antifoundationalism
and, 6–7, 20, 90; Archive Fever,
xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 1–4, 8–11,
20–23, 25, 48, 51, 75–76, 105n44;
dissemination and, 26–27, 47;
“The Double Session,” 44–46;
Echographies of Television, 90–94;
“Freud and the Scene of Writing,”
28, 76–77; inscription and, xvi,
xix, 25, 51, 75–77; on perception,
43, 78; “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 76;
The Post Card, 4, 19, 104n23;
temporality and, xix, xx, 53,
115n57; “To Speculate—On
‘Freud,’” 6
Descartes, Réne, 34, 38, 95
Desert Room, The (Poloni), xii, xx,
xxi, 78–90, 94, 97–99; photos of,
82–84, 86–87, 89
Destroy, She Said (Duras), 11
Destroy She Said (Bonvicini), xii, xix,
i n d e x 3
9–23; photos of, 12–13, 15
difference and differentiation, xix, 27,
43–46, 59–61, 64, 77, 88, 92–93,
97–98, 114n51
Digital Baroque (Murray), xiv, 49
digital memory, xiv, xviii, 4, 49, 54
digital technologies: consciousness
and, 77–80; electronic mail and, 76;
gender and, 50; gleaning and, 29,
31, 36–40, 48–50; self-portraiture
and, 36–37, 41–42, 46–47, 47.
See also specific art installations,
techniques, and technologies
“Displacement and the Discourse of
Woman” (Spivak), 26
dissemination, 26–27, 39, 45, 50,
75–76, 106n7
Doane, Mary Anne, 48
Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet), 54–55
domesticity, xv, xviii, 1–3, 6, 8–9,
20–23, 35
“Double Session, The” (Derrida),
44–46
double vision, ix, x
Doyle, Laura, 64
Durant, Sam, 9
Duras, Marguerite, 9, 11
Durham, Scott, xiv
écart (term), 43, 46, 61, 98,
114n51. See also difference and
differentiation
Echographies of Television (Derrida
and Stiegler), 90–94
Eclipse (Antonioni), 92
economy, xviii, 1–4, 8, 19–20, 26, 46,
60, 75
Edipo Re (Pasolini), xviii
editing, xx, 29, 31, 53–60, 65–71,
87–88, 92, 97. See also fold (term);
montage
Einstein, Albert, 63
Eissler, Kurt, 6, 107
Ellipsis, The (Huyghe), xii, xx, 53–60,
72–73; photos of, 56–57
Emergence of Cinematic Time, The
(Doane), 48
Evans, Walker, x
Exile Shanghai (Ottinger), 8
exteriority, xvi–xvii, xx, 42, 49, 64–66,
75–80
“Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 36
Falconetti, Renee, 104n34
Farocki, Harun, 17, 104n34
Fassbinder, Ranier Werner, 14
Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder), 14, 19
Fellini, Federico, 92
Femme/Maison (Bourgeois), 11
flesh (term), 40–48, 53, 71, 73, 95–96,
99
Flesh of My Flesh (Silverman), 67
fold (term), xvii, xix, xx, 27–28, 42–
49, 53–65, 71, 79
Forbidden Archives (Combe), 2
forgetting, 3, 71, 88, 92–93, 97–99,
114n51
fort/da (game), 6, 8, 21
Foster, Hal, xii, 9–11, 14, 79
“Franz Kafka” (Benjamin), 28
Freud, Anna, xv, xix, 4, 6, 20–21,
25–26, 28, 52, 106n3
Freud, Sigmund, xiii, xv, xviii, xix, 19,
25–26, 46, 64, 73, 111n50
“Freud and the Scene of Writing”
(Derrida), 28, 76–77
Freud’s Moses (Yerushalmi), 21, 52,
106n3
Fuller, Loie, 46
Furneaux, Yvonne, 18
future anterior tense, xv, xviii, 3, 5, 9,
14, 23, 28–29, 46, 52–53
Ganz, Bruno, 57, 59, 61, 71–73
2 i n d e x
Bernstein, Susan, 103n12
“Birth of a New Avant-Garde, The”
(Astruc), 39
Blain, Gérard, 58
Boddien, Hedwig, 67
Bodies of Resistance (Doyle), 64
Bonvicini, Monica, xii–xiii, xviii–xix,
3, 9–23, 31–32, 50, 71; photos of,
12–13, 15
Borges, Jorge Luis, 51, 54, 60
Bourgeouis, Louise, 11
Breton, Jules, 27, 29, 37
Bridge, The (Burgin), 68
Burgin, Victor, 68
Burlingham, Dorothy, 7–8, 28
Butler, Judith, xvi, xviii, 3–4, 21–22,
61, 106n54, 108n26
Caché (Haneke), 64
Calle, Sophie, xviii, xix, 3–9, 25,
103n18
caméra-stylo, 36–40
CD-ROMs, xii, xiv, 53, 65–71
Centre Pompidou, 65
chiasm (term), xvii, 43–44, 46, 60, 64
cinécriture (term), 38, 106n10
cinema: archival impulse and, xii, xiii,
10–20, 48, 94; caméra-stylo and,
36–40; consciousness and, 77–80,
90–95; delayed, xi; double vision
and, ix; editing and, 65–71, 87–88,
97; exteriority and, xx–xxi, 64–66,
75–80; gleaning and, 29, 32–38;
memory and, xi, xiv–xv, 54–55,
91–94; montage and, 27–28, 72–
73, 88, 94, 114n40–41; repetition
and, xi–xii, xx, 3, 6–9, 20, 26, 31,
38, 52; temporality and, ix–xi, 48,
91–99. See also specific artists,
directors, films, and installations
circumcision, 26, 75
Citizen Kane (Welles), 64
Coleman, James, 18
Colomina, Beatriz, 11
Combe, Sonia, 2
consciousness, 42, 60–65, 77–80,
92–96
Cornell, Drucilla, 53, 60
Creatures, The (Varda), xiii
Dean, Tacita, xii, 9–10
“Death and the Compass” (Borges),
60
death drive, xvi, xviii, xx, 2–3, 6, 8–9,
11, 19–23, 46, 71–73, 106n54. See
also domesticity
Death 24× a Second (Mulvey), xi
delayed cinema, xi
Deleuze, Gilles, xv, 49, 52, 72–73, 95
Demenÿ, Georges, 48
Deneuve, Catherine, 13, 18
D’entre les morts (Boileau-Narcejac),
67
Derrida, Jacques: antifoundationalism
and, 6–7, 20, 90; Archive Fever,
xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, 1–4, 8–11,
20–23, 25, 48, 51, 75–76, 105n44;
dissemination and, 26–27, 47;
“The Double Session,” 44–46;
Echographies of Television, 90–94;
“Freud and the Scene of Writing,”
28, 76–77; inscription and, xvi,
xix, 25, 51, 75–77; on perception,
43, 78; “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 76;
The Post Card, 4, 19, 104n23;
temporality and, xix, xx, 53,
115n57; “To Speculate—On
‘Freud,’” 6
Descartes, Réne, 34, 38, 95
Desert Room, The (Poloni), xii, xx,
xxi, 78–90, 94, 97–99; photos of,
82–84, 86–87, 89
Destroy, She Said (Duras), 11
Destroy She Said (Bonvicini), xii, xix,
i n d e x 3
9–23; photos of, 12–13, 15
difference and differentiation, xix, 27,
43–46, 59–61, 64, 77, 88, 92–93,
97–98, 114n51
Digital Baroque (Murray), xiv, 49
digital memory, xiv, xviii, 4, 49, 54
digital technologies: consciousness
and, 77–80; electronic mail and, 76;
gender and, 50; gleaning and, 29,
31, 36–40, 48–50; self-portraiture
and, 36–37, 41–42, 46–47, 47.
See also specific art installations,
techniques, and technologies
“Displacement and the Discourse of
Woman” (Spivak), 26
dissemination, 26–27, 39, 45, 50,
75–76, 106n7
Doane, Mary Anne, 48
Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet), 54–55
domesticity, xv, xviii, 1–3, 6, 8–9,
20–23, 35
“Double Session, The” (Derrida),
44–46
double vision, ix, x
Doyle, Laura, 64
Durant, Sam, 9
Duras, Marguerite, 9, 11
Durham, Scott, xiv
écart (term), 43, 46, 61, 98,
114n51. See also difference and
differentiation
Echographies of Television (Derrida
and Stiegler), 90–94
Eclipse (Antonioni), 92
economy, xviii, 1–4, 8, 19–20, 26, 46,
60, 75
Edipo Re (Pasolini), xviii
editing, xx, 29, 31, 53–60, 65–71,
87–88, 92, 97. See also fold (term);
montage
Einstein, Albert, 63
Eissler, Kurt, 6, 107
Ellipsis, The (Huyghe), xii, xx, 53–60,
72–73; photos of, 56–57
Emergence of Cinematic Time, The
(Doane), 48
Evans, Walker, x
Exile Shanghai (Ottinger), 8
exteriority, xvi–xvii, xx, 42, 49, 64–66,
75–80
“Eye and Mind” (Merleau-Ponty), 36
Falconetti, Renee, 104n34
Farocki, Harun, 17, 104n34
Fassbinder, Ranier Werner, 14
Fear Eats the Soul (Fassbinder), 14, 19
Fellini, Federico, 92
Femme/Maison (Bourgeois), 11
flesh (term), 40–48, 53, 71, 73, 95–96,
99
Flesh of My Flesh (Silverman), 67
fold (term), xvii, xix, xx, 27–28, 42–
49, 53–65, 71, 79
Forbidden Archives (Combe), 2
forgetting, 3, 71, 88, 92–93, 97–99,
114n51
fort/da (game), 6, 8, 21
Foster, Hal, xii, 9–11, 14, 79
“Franz Kafka” (Benjamin), 28
Freud, Anna, xv, xix, 4, 6, 20–21,
25–26, 28, 52, 106n3
Freud, Sigmund, xiii, xv, xviii, xix, 19,
25–26, 46, 64, 73, 111n50
“Freud and the Scene of Writing”
(Derrida), 28, 76–77
Freud’s Moses (Yerushalmi), 21, 52,
106n3
Fuller, Loie, 46
Furneaux, Yvonne, 18
future anterior tense, xv, xviii, 3, 5, 9,
14, 23, 28–29, 46, 52–53
Ganz, Bruno, 57, 59, 61, 71–73
4 i n d e x
gender: archiving and, xviii, xix, 8–20;
domicilation and, 1–2, 6, 21–23,
35; gleaning and, 29, 31–35, 50;
inscription and impression and,
26–27, 44–48; psychoanalytic
tradition and, 3–5, 20–22, 103n18
“Girl Love” (Silverman), 18
Gleaners and I, The (Varda), xii, xiii,
xix, 27–50, 65; photos of, 30,
32–33, 36–37
Gleaners Fleeing the Storm (Hédouin),
46
gleaning, 27, 29, 32–40, 46–50,
101n11, 109n49
Godard, Jean-Luc, xiv, 13–14, 15,
17–18, 107n20
Gordon, Douglas, xi, xii, 10
Gradiva (figure), 25–26, 37
Grosz, Elizabeth, 52–53, 60
Hammering Out (An Old Argument)
(Bonvincini), 11
Haneke, Michael, 64
Hatoum, Mona, xiv
haunting, 19, 25, 35, 48, 53, 58–59,
63, 70–71, 73, 77, 83, 92
Hausfrau Swinging (Bonvincini), 11
Hawks and the Sparrows, The
(Pasolini), 54
Hédouin, Pierre-Edmond-Alexandre,
46
Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 40
He Ran All the Way, 17–19
heresy, xv–xvi
Heretical Empiricism (Pasolini), 72
Der Himmel über Berlin (film), 73
Hirschhorn, Thomas, 9
Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard), xiv
Hitchcock, Alfred, x, xi, xx, 10, 54,
65–71, 69
Hopper, Dennis, 58
Horkheimer, Max, 94
Husserl, Edmund, 77, 79, 94–96
Huston, John, x
Huyghe, Pierre, xii, xiii, xx, 53–60,
56–57, 72–73
hymen (as fold), 44–45
Immemory (Marker), xii, xiii, xx, 53,
65–71
impression (term), xvi, xviii, xix, 8,
25–28, 44–48. See also writing
inscription (term), xvii, xviii, xix, 2,
25, 27, 39–40, 42, 51, 75–80. See
also writing
installation art, xi, 3, 9–20, 54–60,
80–95. See also specific artists and
installations
institution (term), xviii, 63
Intervista (Fellini), 92
invagination, 27, 44–46, 62, 106n7.
See also impression (term); Varda,
Agnès; writing
invisibility, xviii, xx, 28, 51–53,
59–65, 68. See also Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice; virtuality
Iraq, 86
Japan, 32–33
Jensen, Wilhelm, 25
Jetty, The (Marker), 68
Judy’s Bedroom (Reed), 68
Karina, Anna, 13–14, 17–18
King, Homay, 38, 107n12, 109n49
kinship relations, 2–3, 21, 23, 64
Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich), x
Krauss, Rosalind, 41
Labyrinths (Borges), 51, 54
Lacan, Jacques, 3, 22, 41, 63, 80,
106n54
La Glaneuse (Breton), 37
La jetée (Marker), 68
i n d e x 5
Laplanche, Jean, 49, 109n49
Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais), 64
Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 40
L’ellipse. See Ellipsis, The (Huyghe)
Lesbian Rule (Villarejo), 8
“Les glaneuses” (Millet), 30
Les incivils (Huyghe), 54
Les veuves de Noirmoutier (Varda),
xii–xiii, 49
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 63–64
Lippit, Akira Mizuta, xvi, xviii
Lumet, Sidney, 54
Ma cabane de l’échec, xiii
Mallarmé, Stephen, 45–46
Maltese Falcon, The (Huston), x
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), xi
Marey, Étienne-Jules, 48
Marker, Chris, xii, xiii, xiv, xx, 53,
65–71
“Matter, Time, and the Digital”
(King), 38, 107n12, 109n49
memory: archives and, 1–3, 49, 52,
65–71, 73, 76–77, 83, 94, 96;
cinema and, xi, xiv–xv, 54–55,
65–71; death drive and, 71–73;
digital, xiv, xviii, 58, 80–90; editing
and, 53–60; exteriority and, 77–80;
forgetting and, 3, 71, 88, 92–93,
97–99; performativity and, 8,
20–21; tertiary, 77, 94, 112n11. See
also fold (term); Husserl, Edmund;
temporality
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice:
consciousness and, 42, 79; “Eye
and Mind,” 36; flesh notion and,
42–48, 53, 71–73, 95–96, 99; fold
concept and, xvii, xix, xx, 27, 49,
59, 71–72, 79; The Visible and
the Invisible, ix, xviii, 27–28, 42,
44–48, 54, 59–65, 72, 95, 98–99,
112n60
Millet, Jean-François, 27, 29, 30, 31,
34
montage, 27–28, 72–73, 88, 94, 97,
114n40–41. See also editing; fold
(term)
Moreau, Jeanne, 13
Mr. Locke, . . . (Poloni), 81
Mulvehill, Charles, 85, 88
Mulvey, Laura, xi
Murray, Timothy, xiv, 49
My American Uncle (Resnais), 92
Nicholson, Jack, xxi, 78, 81, 83, 85,
87–90, 98–99
Night, The (Antonioni), 13, 16
Novak, Kim, x, 67, 70
Oedipus complex, 18–19, 23
Oedipus Rex (Pasolini), xviii
Ottinger, Ulrike, 8, 28
“Oval Portrait, The” (Poe), 17
Pacino, Al, 55
Païni, Dominique, xiii
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, xviii, 54, 72
Passenger, The (Antonioni), xxi, 78,
80–89, 85, 86, 90–91, 96
Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 19
passivity, xviii, 63, 76, 79, 83, 98–99,
108n26
patriarchy, xviii, 1–2, 6, 20–23, 26–29,
75
Patterson, Orlando, 23
perception, 12, 27–28, 43–49, 53–55,
60–62, 71–80, 95–97, 114n51
performativity, 8, 20–21, 38, 52, 76,
90, 105n44
phenomenology, xiv–xvii, xix, 27, 38,
47, 77, 91, 95, 107n15. See also
Husserl, Edmund; Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice; psychoanalysis
Photograph (Coleman), 18
4 i n d e x
gender: archiving and, xviii, xix, 8–20;
domicilation and, 1–2, 6, 21–23,
35; gleaning and, 29, 31–35, 50;
inscription and impression and,
26–27, 44–48; psychoanalytic
tradition and, 3–5, 20–22, 103n18
“Girl Love” (Silverman), 18
Gleaners and I, The (Varda), xii, xiii,
xix, 27–50, 65; photos of, 30,
32–33, 36–37
Gleaners Fleeing the Storm (Hédouin),
46
gleaning, 27, 29, 32–40, 46–50,
101n11, 109n49
Godard, Jean-Luc, xiv, 13–14, 15,
17–18, 107n20
Gordon, Douglas, xi, xii, 10
Gradiva (figure), 25–26, 37
Grosz, Elizabeth, 52–53, 60
Hammering Out (An Old Argument)
(Bonvincini), 11
Haneke, Michael, 64
Hatoum, Mona, xiv
haunting, 19, 25, 35, 48, 53, 58–59,
63, 70–71, 73, 77, 83, 92
Hausfrau Swinging (Bonvincini), 11
Hawks and the Sparrows, The
(Pasolini), 54
Hédouin, Pierre-Edmond-Alexandre,
46
Hegel, G. W. F., 3, 40
He Ran All the Way, 17–19
heresy, xv–xvi
Heretical Empiricism (Pasolini), 72
Der Himmel über Berlin (film), 73
Hirschhorn, Thomas, 9
Histoire(s) du cinema (Godard), xiv
Hitchcock, Alfred, x, xi, xx, 10, 54,
65–71, 69
Hopper, Dennis, 58
Horkheimer, Max, 94
Husserl, Edmund, 77, 79, 94–96
Huston, John, x
Huyghe, Pierre, xii, xiii, xx, 53–60,
56–57, 72–73
hymen (as fold), 44–45
Immemory (Marker), xii, xiii, xx, 53,
65–71
impression (term), xvi, xviii, xix, 8,
25–28, 44–48. See also writing
inscription (term), xvii, xviii, xix, 2,
25, 27, 39–40, 42, 51, 75–80. See
also writing
installation art, xi, 3, 9–20, 54–60,
80–95. See also specific artists and
installations
institution (term), xviii, 63
Intervista (Fellini), 92
invagination, 27, 44–46, 62, 106n7.
See also impression (term); Varda,
Agnès; writing
invisibility, xviii, xx, 28, 51–53,
59–65, 68. See also Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice; virtuality
Iraq, 86
Japan, 32–33
Jensen, Wilhelm, 25
Jetty, The (Marker), 68
Judy’s Bedroom (Reed), 68
Karina, Anna, 13–14, 17–18
King, Homay, 38, 107n12, 109n49
kinship relations, 2–3, 21, 23, 64
Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich), x
Krauss, Rosalind, 41
Labyrinths (Borges), 51, 54
Lacan, Jacques, 3, 22, 41, 63, 80,
106n54
La Glaneuse (Breton), 37
La jetée (Marker), 68
i n d e x 5
Laplanche, Jean, 49, 109n49
Last Year in Marienbad (Resnais), 64
Lectures on Aesthetics (Hegel), 40
L’ellipse. See Ellipsis, The (Huyghe)
Lesbian Rule (Villarejo), 8
“Les glaneuses” (Millet), 30
Les incivils (Huyghe), 54
Les veuves de Noirmoutier (Varda),
xii–xiii, 49
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 63–64
Lippit, Akira Mizuta, xvi, xviii
Lumet, Sidney, 54
Ma cabane de l’échec, xiii
Mallarmé, Stephen, 45–46
Maltese Falcon, The (Huston), x
Man with a Movie Camera (Vertov), xi
Marey, Étienne-Jules, 48
Marker, Chris, xii, xiii, xiv, xx, 53,
65–71
“Matter, Time, and the Digital”
(King), 38, 107n12, 109n49
memory: archives and, 1–3, 49, 52,
65–71, 73, 76–77, 83, 94, 96;
cinema and, xi, xiv–xv, 54–55,
65–71; death drive and, 71–73;
digital, xiv, xviii, 58, 80–90; editing
and, 53–60; exteriority and, 77–80;
forgetting and, 3, 71, 88, 92–93,
97–99; performativity and, 8,
20–21; tertiary, 77, 94, 112n11. See
also fold (term); Husserl, Edmund;
temporality
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice:
consciousness and, 42, 79; “Eye
and Mind,” 36; flesh notion and,
42–48, 53, 71–73, 95–96, 99; fold
concept and, xvii, xix, xx, 27, 49,
59, 71–72, 79; The Visible and
the Invisible, ix, xviii, 27–28, 42,
44–48, 54, 59–65, 72, 95, 98–99,
112n60
Millet, Jean-François, 27, 29, 30, 31,
34
montage, 27–28, 72–73, 88, 94, 97,
114n40–41. See also editing; fold
(term)
Moreau, Jeanne, 13
Mr. Locke, . . . (Poloni), 81
Mulvehill, Charles, 85, 88
Mulvey, Laura, xi
Murray, Timothy, xiv, 49
My American Uncle (Resnais), 92
Nicholson, Jack, xxi, 78, 81, 83, 85,
87–90, 98–99
Night, The (Antonioni), 13, 16
Novak, Kim, x, 67, 70
Oedipus complex, 18–19, 23
Oedipus Rex (Pasolini), xviii
Ottinger, Ulrike, 8, 28
“Oval Portrait, The” (Poe), 17
Pacino, Al, 55
Païni, Dominique, xiii
Pasolini, Pier Paolo, xviii, 54, 72
Passenger, The (Antonioni), xxi, 78,
80–89, 85, 86, 90–91, 96
Passion of Joan of Arc, The, 19
passivity, xviii, 63, 76, 79, 83, 98–99,
108n26
patriarchy, xviii, 1–2, 6, 20–23, 26–29,
75
Patterson, Orlando, 23
perception, 12, 27–28, 43–49, 53–55,
60–62, 71–80, 95–97, 114n51
performativity, 8, 20–21, 38, 52, 76,
90, 105n44
phenomenology, xiv–xvii, xix, 27, 38,
47, 77, 91, 95, 107n15. See also
Husserl, Edmund; Merleau-Ponty,
Maurice; psychoanalysis
Photograph (Coleman), 18
6 i n d e x
Poe, Edgar Allen, 17
Poetics of Cinema (Ruiz), ix, x
Polanski, Roman, 13, 16, 18–19
Poloni, Marco, xii, xx, 78–90, 94, 97;
photos of, 82–84, 86–87, 89
Pons, Louis, 35
Post Card, The (Derrida), 4
projection (technique), xiii, 49
Proust, Marcel, 67, 96
Psycho (Hitchcock), xi, 10
psychoanalysis: archiving otherwise
and, xv, 51, 53, 99, 107n14; Butler
and, 3–4; Derrida and, xvi, 2–3, 78;
gender and, 3–5; Lacan and, 41,
63. See also cinema; death drive;
specific practitioners and theorists
Quoting Caravaggio (Bal), xiv
Rancière, Jacques, 59
Rear Window (Hitchcock), 54
Reed, David, 68
Remake (Huyghe), 54
Rembrandt van Rijn, 33, 35, 48
repetition, xi–xii, xviii, xx, 3, 6–9, 20,
23, 26, 31, 38, 52, 76
repression, xx, 2–3, 9, 51, 54
Repulsion (Polanski), 13, 16, 18–19
Resnais, Alain, 35, 64, 92
reversibility, 34, 43–46, 50, 60–64, 68,
70–73, 95–96. See also perception;
temporality
rhizoma, 10, 35, 43, 66
Rilke, Ranier Maria, 67
Roseware (Marker), 65
Rossellini, Roberto, 13–14, 17
Ruiz, Raúl, ix, x
Sans Soleil (Marker), 68
Schneider, Maria, xxi, 82, 90, 98
Schor, Naomi, 40
Schubert, Franz, 41
Schygulla, Hanna, 60
Scoresese, Martin, 10
Scottie’s Bedroom (Reed), 68
self-portraits, 33, 35, 36–37, 40–44
“Series Z” (Yerushalmi), 6
Silverman, Kaja, xviii, 17–18, 67,
104n34, 107n20
Spade, Sam, x
Spieker, Sven, 103n16, 103n18,
107n14
Spivak, Gayatri, 26, 45
Stewart, James, 68, 69
Stiegler, Bernard, xi, 77–80, 83, 90–95,
112n11, 114n41
Stromboli (Rossellini), 13–14
Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 10
Taylor, Elizabeth, 17
Technics and Time, 3 (Stiegler), 77,
79–80
technology, 90–94. See also analog
technologies; digital technologies;
Stiegler, Bernard; temporality
temporality: archivization and, xiii,
46, 53–54; chronological, 6;
cinema and, ix, x–xi, xi, 48, 91–99;
digital interventions in, 29, 31,
53–60, 65–71, 76, 87–88, 91–94;
fold concept and, 53–65; future
anterior and, xv, xvii, xviii, 3, 23,
28, 46, 52–53, 94; as institution,
63–64; simultaneity and, 13, 18,
41–42, 60–61, 80–81, 113nn40–41;
technology and, 29, 48–50, 90–94.
See also cinema; Derrida, Jacques;
memory; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice;
montage; Stiegler, Bernard
tertiary memory, 77, 94, 112n11
Third Memory, The (Huyghe), 54
Time of the Crime, The (Torlasco),
xviii
Time Travels (Grosz), xv, 52
i n d e x 7
Torlasco, Domietta, x, xviii, xx
“To Speculate—On ‘Freud’” (Derrida),
6
Toute la mémoire du monde (Resnais),
35
24-Hour Psycho (Gordon), xi
Uccellaci e uccellini (Pasolini), 54
unconscious, 51–53, 64–65, 113n40
Unfinished Symphony (Schubert), 41
Varda, Agnès, xii, xiii, 27–50, 65,
101n11, 106n10; photos of, 30,
36–37, 47
Venise (Burgin), 68
Vertigo (Hitchcock), x, xx, 65–71, 69
Vertov, Dziga, xi
“Video” (Krauss), 41
Villarejo, Amy, xviii, 8, 28
Viola, Bill, xiv
virtuality, 51–53, 59–65, 68. See also
invisibility
Visible and the Invisible, The
(Merleau-Ponty), xvii, 28, 42, 44–
48, 60–65, 95–99, 112n60
Vitti, Monica, 13–14, 19
Vivre sa vie (Godard), 13, 17–19
Weisman, Leslie Kane, 11
Welles, Orson, 64
Wenders, Wim, xx, 53, 57, 73
Widows of Noirmoutier, The (Varda),
xii–xiii, 49
Wigley, Mark, 20
Winters, Shellie, 19
Wojtowicz, John, 54–55
writing, 36–44, 75–76. See also
Derrida, Jacques; dissemination;
impression (term); inscription
(term); invagination
Wrong Room, The (Poloni), 80
Wyler, William, 72
Yerushalmi, Yosef, 6, 21, 52, 106n3
Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 22
6 i n d e x
Poe, Edgar Allen, 17
Poetics of Cinema (Ruiz), ix, x
Polanski, Roman, 13, 16, 18–19
Poloni, Marco, xii, xx, 78–90, 94, 97;
photos of, 82–84, 86–87, 89
Pons, Louis, 35
Post Card, The (Derrida), 4
projection (technique), xiii, 49
Proust, Marcel, 67, 96
Psycho (Hitchcock), xi, 10
psychoanalysis: archiving otherwise
and, xv, 51, 53, 99, 107n14; Butler
and, 3–4; Derrida and, xvi, 2–3, 78;
gender and, 3–5; Lacan and, 41,
63. See also cinema; death drive;
specific practitioners and theorists
Quoting Caravaggio (Bal), xiv
Rancière, Jacques, 59
Rear Window (Hitchcock), 54
Reed, David, 68
Remake (Huyghe), 54
Rembrandt van Rijn, 33, 35, 48
repetition, xi–xii, xviii, xx, 3, 6–9, 20,
23, 26, 31, 38, 52, 76
repression, xx, 2–3, 9, 51, 54
Repulsion (Polanski), 13, 16, 18–19
Resnais, Alain, 35, 64, 92
reversibility, 34, 43–46, 50, 60–64, 68,
70–73, 95–96. See also perception;
temporality
rhizoma, 10, 35, 43, 66
Rilke, Ranier Maria, 67
Roseware (Marker), 65
Rossellini, Roberto, 13–14, 17
Ruiz, Raúl, ix, x
Sans Soleil (Marker), 68
Schneider, Maria, xxi, 82, 90, 98
Schor, Naomi, 40
Schubert, Franz, 41
Schygulla, Hanna, 60
Scoresese, Martin, 10
Scottie’s Bedroom (Reed), 68
self-portraits, 33, 35, 36–37, 40–44
“Series Z” (Yerushalmi), 6
Silverman, Kaja, xviii, 17–18, 67,
104n34, 107n20
Spade, Sam, x
Spieker, Sven, 103n16, 103n18,
107n14
Spivak, Gayatri, 26, 45
Stewart, James, 68, 69
Stiegler, Bernard, xi, 77–80, 83, 90–95,
112n11, 114n41
Stromboli (Rossellini), 13–14
Taxi Driver (Scorsese), 10
Taylor, Elizabeth, 17
Technics and Time, 3 (Stiegler), 77,
79–80
technology, 90–94. See also analog
technologies; digital technologies;
Stiegler, Bernard; temporality
temporality: archivization and, xiii,
46, 53–54; chronological, 6;
cinema and, ix, x–xi, xi, 48, 91–99;
digital interventions in, 29, 31,
53–60, 65–71, 76, 87–88, 91–94;
fold concept and, 53–65; future
anterior and, xv, xvii, xviii, 3, 23,
28, 46, 52–53, 94; as institution,
63–64; simultaneity and, 13, 18,
41–42, 60–61, 80–81, 113nn40–41;
technology and, 29, 48–50, 90–94.
See also cinema; Derrida, Jacques;
memory; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice;
montage; Stiegler, Bernard
tertiary memory, 77, 94, 112n11
Third Memory, The (Huyghe), 54
Time of the Crime, The (Torlasco),
xviii
Time Travels (Grosz), xv, 52
i n d e x 7
Torlasco, Domietta, x, xviii, xx
“To Speculate—On ‘Freud’” (Derrida),
6
Toute la mémoire du monde (Resnais),
35
24-Hour Psycho (Gordon), xi
Uccellaci e uccellini (Pasolini), 54
unconscious, 51–53, 64–65, 113n40
Unfinished Symphony (Schubert), 41
Varda, Agnès, xii, xiii, 27–50, 65,
101n11, 106n10; photos of, 30,
36–37, 47
Venise (Burgin), 68
Vertigo (Hitchcock), x, xx, 65–71, 69
Vertov, Dziga, xi
“Video” (Krauss), 41
Villarejo, Amy, xviii, 8, 28
Viola, Bill, xiv
virtuality, 51–53, 59–65, 68. See also
invisibility
Visible and the Invisible, The
(Merleau-Ponty), xvii, 28, 42, 44–
48, 60–65, 95–99, 112n60
Vitti, Monica, 13–14, 19
Vivre sa vie (Godard), 13, 17–19
Weisman, Leslie Kane, 11
Welles, Orson, 64
Wenders, Wim, xx, 53, 57, 73
Widows of Noirmoutier, The (Varda),
xii–xiii, 49
Wigley, Mark, 20
Winters, Shellie, 19
Wojtowicz, John, 54–55
writing, 36–44, 75–76. See also
Derrida, Jacques; dissemination;
impression (term); inscription
(term); invagination
Wrong Room, The (Poloni), 80
Wyler, William, 72
Yerushalmi, Yosef, 6, 21, 52, 106n3
Žižek, Slavoj, 3, 22
This page intentionally left blank
Domietta Torlasco is associate professor of French and Italian and compara-
tive literary studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of the
digital film Antigone’s Noir and the book The Time of the Crime: Phe-
nomenology, Psychoanalysis, Italian Film.