Chapter Five:

Projecting the Post-War as Cinematic Sabotage: Alfred Hitchcock’s Resistance

to War Room Reading and the Foreign Agencies 1

"The past was written, the future will be read. This could beexpressed in this form:  what was written in the past will be read inthe future, without any relation of presence being able to establishitself between writing and reading."

Maurice Blanchot, The Step

Not Beyond p.30

“Discursive manipulations

are incisions.”

Friedrich Kittler, Discourse

Networks: 1800 / 1900

(Stanford, CA: Stanford UP,

1990), 344.

No theory of reading can

avoid being a theory of

tropes. . .

1

Paul De Man, Hypogram

and Inscription, 45

[I am like] a castaway who

drifts on a wreck by

climbing to the top of an

already crumbling mast.

But from there he has a

chance to give a signal

leading to his rescue.

Walter Benjamin, “Letter to

Gerschom Scholem,” April

17, 1931, in Gershom

Scholem, Walter Benjamin:

The Story of a Friendship,

233.2

Perhaps it is the encounter of

death, which is only ever an

imminence, only ever a

suspension, an anticipation, the

encounter of death as anticipation

with death itself, with a death that

2

has already arrived according to

the inescapable: an encounter

between what is going to arrive

and what has already arrived.

Between what is going to come (va

venir) and what just finished

coming [vient de venir], been what

goes and comes. But as the same.

Both virtual and real, real as

virtual. . . Death has just come

from the instant it is going to

come

--Jacques Derrida, Demeures:

Fiction and Testimony, 64; 653

without the possibility of this fiction, without the spectral virtuality of this

simulacrum and as a result of this life of the fragmentation of the true, no truthful

testimony would be possible. Consequently, the possibility of literary fiction

haunts the so-called truthful, responsible, serious, real testimony as its proper

possibility. This haunting is perhaps the passion itself, the passionate place of

literary writing, as the project to say everything—and wherever it is auto-

biographical, that is to say, everywhere, and everywhere autobio-

thanatographical” Demeure, 72

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this spectral law both constitutes and structures the abiding

[demeurrant’]reference in this narrative; it exceeds the opposition between real

and unreal, actual and virtual, factual and fictional” Demeure (91)

Virtually, with a virtuality that can no longer be opposed to actual factuality.(92)

Return to the virtual as a question of the not yet.4

Stylistics of the camp in Night and Fog where you have the enumeration of

different towers form the camps-Alpine, modern, no style at all. That kind of that

sort of enacts visually the project we are doing, figuring out the figurability of the

archive as a device by which people reckon their lives or read their lives or have

their lives read.

return in the chapters four and five to the philosophical issues we have opened

up in intro to chapter three. So I plan to open the Hitchock chapter with Night

and Fog and Toute la memoire, putting a lot of the Holocaust film stuff in notes

(or whatever seems necessary. The fantasy of the Nazi snuff film seems

crucial--another "missing" item in the archive that would go back to chapter three

and the missing briefcase. And I thought I could go from the films to a discussion

at the end of chapter three of the not yet read in terms of Derrida and Lacoue-

Labarthe on Heidegger's archi-fascism and poetry.

Inspect(raliz)ing the Archive5

Thinking about the way archives are dysfunctional in relation to a

certain kind of haunting--the BN inspector in Toute la memoire--or

Spieker's account of the Surrealist Office of Research and its failure

as rather its successful death and return as revenant to all

archives, a Goyaesque dream of reason:  far from being a properly

4

functioning, totalizing, all access rational archive of recording,

immediate recall and retrieval, and information processing, the

archive is already inhabited by ghosts.  Perhaps the ghostly return of

the inspector as "inspectre" in Toute la memoire is a way of

allegorizing the failure of the police to police the archive, a

failure that leads to certain kinds of successes that turn out to be

failures (like the Surrealist office) or subject to trauma (Otlet's

Mundaneum project was halted by the Nazis shortly after invasion of

Poland in 1939.  He had begun as an international peace project in the

wake of WW II--spectres of Otelet.  It then gets reconstructed in the

late 1990s). Whereas Vannevar Bush invented the memex in the wake of

WII having done research for the Department of Defense.  His

recording machine is very Kittler / Virilio in its links to war (war

is necessary, rational, etc).

Or we might think of Toute la memoire as haunted by the camp, by Night and

Fog—the camps in the present are totally lacking in humans—no tourists, no

guards, just locals who ride or wake by without noticing what is right next to

them. They are not haunted, apparently.

Toute al memoire du monde6

See Derrida’s discussion of la memoire, le moiré, and les moirés in Memoirs for Paul de Man—la memoire is what is not in need of being written down, wat one may have trouble recalling; le memoire is like memo, or recorded memories; and les memoires (plural masculine is like memoirs, autobiograghy. The Mars book with a woman’s face on the cover then helps personify the book as la memoire, as memory that can’t be written down.

There’s a gap between the title la memoire and what is being documented—le memoire—the written contents. Out of that gap is a play between technological

5

intrusion—the camera in shadow at the start and the dropping of the microphone into the center of the screen—so the narrator is already personified as a machine Resistance and Deportation was the working title and then renamed as Night and Fog. Continuity and discontinuity in the final series of long shots as the camera moves behind a column and goes blind so to speak. One image of the reading room makes it look like a cathedral. We see the vaulted arches at the top and the (stained glass?) window at the back, in the center of the film image.

Within these long shots, mostly high angle almost overhead shots, we see a close up of a book shelf, the camera dollies in, dollies right and cuts to a an image of a BN inspector silent in the shadow behind a large sculptural ornament attached to a column. There is no voice-over, and his stillness recalls the busts we saw earlier, which in turn were comparable to many of the shots of people, sen in close up, looking up at various objects or books in the library but never taking them down. The shots of busts have the camera move, making the busts more animated than the still people all shot without the camera moving. We see one person in a reading room at one point, but again he is still. Otherwise, all the reading rooms are empty as are the storage rooms. The Mars book becoming a prisoner also begins with an overhead shot. SO there is a connection between the shot from above and imprisoning and guarding of he books (the rows of books in the stacks look like cell blocks). The film nourish tone of the film helps the uncanny reversal of human as sculpture, of bust as human (animate inanimate and vice versa). In one of the high angle shots, we see an inspector walking up and down between the reading tables. One of the first overheads is when the guy pushes the cart with book requests stops at a desk with a woman at it who gets up to check it out. There’s a kind of border control here, paper check for the books, which have their request slips in them, she then sits back down (there is a bust n front of her on her desk), and we cut to a second overhead shot of the guy pushing the cart as the narrator refers to the books passing into circulation as going through the looking glass. The policeman with BN cap (Bibliotechque Nationale) is a n amenation of the Archon function fo the archive, of one the archive’s aspects, its nomos function. That function is increasingly spectral and yet also increasingly graphic, as we see a book “inoculated’ with a shot, but it continues past the looking glass. Circulation of he books is not their liberation. The last lines put an ironic touch on the possibility of the paper crunching pseudo insect readers ever assembling all the memory of the world into a single secret from end to end, from linearization to “happiness” (in quotation marks in the subtitle to indicate the ironic tone of the narrator). What we see in the final shot of the film is a kind of Arcimboldo happy face, in which the library architecture and the people use it combine to make an abstract face. So the work of reading as abstract reruns as a pattern to be recognized, a happy face of memory which Is not a human face yet not human and which can be recognized only by humans capable of reading it, translating into a metaphor, a figure, face, personification of memory.7

Night and Fog. Dir Alain Resnais. 1955

6

Toute la Memoire du Monde. Dir Alain Resnais. 1956.8

Side-Splitting9

General issue of resistance.10 Explain why Hitchcock is central, but also why he

is not entirely exceptional and hence requires he be flanked by related films

about the resistance to the French Resistance, including Jean-Pierre Melville’s

La Silence de la mer (1947), Army of Shadows (1969), and Louis Malle’s

Lacombe Lucien. The persistence of the Nazi problem well past the 1940s in

films like Defiance, Inglourious Basterds, Katyn, the release of Rosselini’s War

Trilogy by Criterion. Perhaps begin with the citation of Sabotage in Inglourious

Basterds as a way of motivating a return to Sabotage.

Auteurist and film apparatus accounts of Hitchcock and cinema more generally.

Spacing and timing of the screen, projected image, lighting, reading, and

synchronization of sound and iamge.

Hitchcock stages the other side of cinema—of the screen—in Sabotage, when

the police man is pulled into the room where the terrorists are plotting as we see

the rear scene of the film being projected, the hallway a space between the

screen and the room—his hand gives him away.—to which Tarentino returns in

Inglorious Bastards.

Sabotage in relation Lifeboat--both bad films

In terms of box office.

Has to do with the way they make siding an issue.

7

Th eback of hte theater showing hte non scree that had opened as a

sound--diegetic, but only cinematic murder in a film in which a bomb

on top of two film cannisters explodes.

Interval behind the screen--talk to loudspeakers--but then no sound

in the room where the saboteurs plot.

Shadows of the screen on the right sign while we see on the other side

the image backwards and compressed, the entire shot very

Expressionistic in its mise-en-scene.  The sound as he enters is “Well it’s all over

now."

but hen "watch out" and goes behind the curtain and "hold the phone"

before he enters the behind the screen space, where we never see the

loudspeakers.  And we see a guy on stairs, again an Expressionistic

shot, and then the old guy running, apparently his pants on fire

saying "hold the phone, hold the phone as he runs off the screen.

Audience laughter throughout.

Side-splitting is about comedy and suspense and propaganda.  You can't

get the guys behind it because the law is already in a  paralegal zone, under

construction, undercover, and breaking the law (the chit for the restaurant, where

he shouldn't have taken her) or bending it.  Verlocs's washing his hands bin the

sink, then wiping them as he goes outside the pet shop, and also wring them is

echoed by Spenser's hand on the window sill, pulled by

8

a saboteur into the living room, and then Mrs V's wringing her hands after she

throws the knife and fork down on the plate.  They are side to side, confronting

each other, but almost no space between them, but

this is the place of the cut. It’s the family as front turned front to front.

The same sort of thing happens is the more comic melodrama Stage

Fright.  opening shot of Safety Curtain, then the curtain splits the villain’s body in

two after he slips.

Gruesome yet funny.  A happy ending. Sort of like the behind the scene last shot

in 39 Steps. And Torn Curtain.

Hitckcock's cameo in Stage Fright in relation to his being unseen by Doris, a rear

projection shot , as I recall of him. because Doris" herself split as

she too plays a role and begins manipulating the detective the way

the Dietrich as manipulated Richard Tod (or so we think).

The flashback and voice over seems to authenticate his version at the start, his

version of being framed.  But the curtain itself is the cut that frames.

The question in Sabotage is when and how and under what conditions to take

cinema seriously, when to dismiss it as a joke or trivial. If there is a crime scene,

it is not reducible to a Bazinain notion of film as indexical.

Also Saboteur begins with the aluminum siding onto which the titles

are projected, then the smoke.  Later the dam (one side visible) then

the ship explosion--people blow up in an Eisensteinian montage, but we

can't tell what happens to the ship.  Later we see Robert Cummings

looking out the window and the newly launched ship turned on its side, listless,

9

as

it were, having been blown up.

The side becomes a wall--the bookcase scene too is a failure.

Repetition of the speech scene in 39 Steps (also repeated in The Third Man) in

the form of an auction.

The dropped letter in lipstick floating on top of the cab, where it is finally noticed

and then they see the light flashing on and off from the building, like the two

close ups of the light bulb in Sabotage. .

Cohen remains within a visual anti-auteurial reading of the signature.

The apparatus approach to the signature would be that the signature

is the apparatus allegorized in the film s as a question of the cut,

the frame, the interval, the space behind the screen image.  This same

space occupies The Final Destination 3D and Inglorious Basterds,

which cites Sabotage near the beginning because of the silver nitrate

flammable flame thing.

The timing of  the cut is also off--like the amputated foot in

Lifeboat--cutting of Todd in Stagefright a kind of joke, the face of

the clock and the face of the mechanism and the bomb all superimposed,

the letter Sabotage two dimensional, yet casting shadows, like the art

decco lettering of the Nortorious font in the title sequence of that

film.

Never clear what the sides are.

But what Cohen misses is sound--the sound does not match the cut, or

10

make sense--the audience laughter doesn't go with an image of the film

in the first two walk throughs.

Only becomes visible when the saboteurs enter.

Then Spenser arrives too early.

Then the ending of Cock Robin, again a shadow.

Even Verloc says he is not responsible that Spenser is, and in a certain way he is

right, even if his argument is completely bogus.

He did intend to kill Stevie, he felt boxed in, forced to pass the ball, to relay the

film.  But Verloc is then a figure of the auteur--he leaves his signature on the film

itself.

Spenser starts to seem like the saboteur when he starts saving Mrs V and

covering up her crime, as the hero did in Blackmail (where it was more clearly a

case of self-defense). In that case, sound and silent versions clearly the key to

Hitchcock’s signature.

Also the fake death and then passport scene at the beginning of Secret Agent.

The “dead” novelist is issued twopassports, one Americna and one vBritish. We

see the passport in close up (the American). When he meets his “wife” he ask

her to identify herself, and she gets her passport and he reads it; then she asks

for his and he giver her his. Then he reads a letter to her written in code. He

spends a lot of time folding up a paper when he registers at the hotel, and the

manager writes out the hotel room number for gim. He matches it to the door

11

number after he enters and sees Robert Young from behind, thinking he must be

in the wrong room at first.

He also puts the letter back in the envelope, a letter that seems to be addressed

to both of them—has info for her and then for him) and pockets it, just as he

pocketed the folded piece of paper when registering.

The guy he has to stop, the MR5 guy tells him is playing both sides. So a double

agency requires a double agency in turn to fight, a front of marriage, a staged

death by a young novelist, who entrance matches the portrait we dollie into him

at the end of the staged death. He is already a representation even before the

coffin is emptied (by a one armed guy who lights his cigarette, in a way that

prefigures “dead’ guy lighting up. Comedy in he that scene repeated in the comic

dleialgoue of he assignment scene and then of meeting the wife scene.

Renais’s Toute la memoire and Night and Fog in terms of bio-biblio-processing.

Holocaust: The Liberation of Auschwitz (2005)

Director: Irmgard von zur Mühlen

Shot by the Soviet cameraman attached to the 1st Ukrainian front, this

documentation, used by as prosecution evidence at the Nuremburg

War Crime Trials, records the plight of the remaining 6,000 prisoners,

the instruments of torture, the remains of the dead and the closing of

Auschwitz.

Outstanding documentation filmed by Russian film crews as the camp

12

was liberated with a few scenes "staged" by the prisoners of the camp

in the days following liberation.

In the Hitchcock chapter Jean-Pierre Melville's La silence de la mer as a kind of

counter-account of resistance from within occupied territory--the film is about a

"good" German officer who billets himself in a rather ice house in which a man

and his niece live. He talks, they never acknowledge him, until he leaves. But

it's all about partial reading (literally and metaphorically) and the mirror stage of

reading, the impossibility of moving into a symbolic where you could confess or

absolve (each other) of war crimes (committing them or not resisting them, failing

to execute them). The film ends literally with the French uncle and niece in the

dark. It also begins with a title sequence that follows from reading the novel the

film adapts out of a suitcase. And it ends with a shot of the last two pages, the

camera moving quickly from one to the other, and then FIN on the last page. I

might also bring in my reading of a scene from Melville's later and more

controversial Army of Shadows.

During his vacation in Paris, he doesn’t talk to any French. No Germans and

French talk to each other. Even the uncle does not talk to the typist or the

German when he goes to the Kommandatur’s office.

La Silence de la Mer—reading literally out of a suitcase—the opening shot is a

man walking on a street and dropping off a suitcase by a man standing there.

The standing man picks it up, opens it, reveals under the clothes resistance

newspapers and then underneath them and to the left a copy of the book La

13

Silence de la Mer. The opening credits show the dedication page, to a “poet

assasine.”

The last two pages are shown as the last two shots of the film, first part of a page

dated October 1941 and the a printer’s notice dated February 10, 1942, and the

text shows the same line heard on the soundtrack “And I was cold.” So now we

see that the voice-over was a record of a transcription. Then we get to the final

page, with publication history, and dates, and then the turning of the last page,

and FIN.

The German becomes a good German by not blowing up Chartres and he is also

linked to Notre Dame in the first shot of his confession of his trip to Paris.

The shot of the woman’s scarf with the two hands separated is the inverse of

shots of her hands knitting, or holding and then letting fall the ball of string.

Adieu is the only word she speaks.

Is the image of her scarf quoted by Godard at the end of 1a of Histoire(s) du

cinema when he shows the separated hands? The hands look like mirror images

more than Michelangelo’s creation scene in the Sistine Chapel, closer to

Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet crawling around the walls and the mirror.

See Derrida Adieu. And then

The date of Treblinka in the film is wrong (see Ginette Vincendeau’s booklet to

the Eureka Master’s of Cinema DVD. The date is superimposed over the photo

14

of Hitler.

Other sceneat the Kmmadntu’rs office—very od because we don’t see

symbolslongorenirely. Just after the poster of Hitlercomes into the frame, we

dolly into to awindow andsee theflag with swatiska hanging form it, not in thteshot

we saw of the uncle eneringhtebuilding. Thereis also htelngheld shot of

htebuildings isceneoutside anotherwndow. Espicallybizarre at the endof htefilm

is cutting back and forth—four times—between the uncle and German before he

leaves. I the last shot, just before the fade to black, e brings his arms to his side

and we see his hands. He had said that he realized a man’s hands tell as much

about as his face because a man can control them even less easily.

The film ends with Fin after a literally partial reading of the book, or a partially

readable book, only part of which is delivered in voice-over. The text and image

again do not match.

Two earlier scenes also show partially readable texts: the first is Interdict aux

Juifs, only half-seen on the frame, and the second is the newspaper folded up as

a bookmark for the German office in a book by Anatole france, where france

seems to be a pun, and no title is seen. The newspaper is folded to highlight the

word “Disobedience’and hten a handwritten notation taken form France is written

on the newspaper as a k kind of annotation—It is a good thing when an officer

refuses to follow criminal orders.”

So it is a resistance newspaper, apparently, and the officer and the Uncle

exchange glances, the adjutant pauses as he enters on this silent exchange.

15

The film is perhaps about silent witnessing. The woman is the most mute, but all

are muted. The last panning shot of the two faces in close up, the niece and

uncle in profile and a kind of silhouette is also silent, and the voiceover says that

they continued to be silent. (earlier we see her knitting, her face lit, the

background all black. SO you have to read, and resistant reading is partial

reading, seeing what is cut out, what is highlighted, what is being sold to you—

the suitcase looks partly like a salesman’s box of stuff—like secret agent as

traveling salesman—and what is right in front of you but you don’t look at—like

the too much light of the niece’s “burning” brightly lit eyes that the German

shields himself from, like the angle the German looks at over the fireplace and

the uncle also looks at and then later after the German looks at it again, when it

is out of the frame, we get close ups of the uncle, German, and niece, then a

zoom in to the angle, then a quick cut away (whereas we see the Hitler photo a

long time). The German becomes a tourist, an innocent, a good German. The

last scene involving reading is after the German finishes his flashback about his

tour, after we earlier saw him take the tour, and a lot of the footage, or nearly al

of it is silent. The German is obviously cut in to other footage. Always low angle

shots with no background. When he finishes he talks about the plan the

Germans have to crush the French spirit and then the camera tracks along the

book shelf showing a number of books, the most prominent of which is

Rousseau’s two volume Confessions. Not an accident that it is not there are two

volumes.

There’s an uncanny element in the film—the photo of Hitler—another mute image

16

as we get a voice-over with no mention of Hitler.

The “dark” ending, literally and metaphorically, put the French in the dark. The

imperative to disobey cannot be uttered directly--spoken, but only placed in a

bookmark on a paper in a book, like the suitcase as box enclosing the book only

now the book is the box—a place for the resistance to resistance—an open book

as opposed to the opened Shakespeare (weird analogy between the Scots’ view

of Macbeth as illegitimate King of Scotland and the French of Petain as illegit

President of Vichy France), and the closed books on the shelves, a place that is

both internal and external, only partially readable.

There’s another scene of partial reading when we see from outside the house,

low anger, at night, the German looking through travel books for France, ending

with Paris. The top, about Isle de la Cite is cut off. Also the newspaper at the

start is dated July 1942, but the movie begins with the title 1941.

There are also two mirror scenes—one when the uncle is actually looking at a

mirror, his eyes down, and camera dollies and out and we see that the image is

his reflection. He has heard the harmonium and mentions that it had stayed

open at the same page as it was before the catastrophe. So it is ahistorical

marker. But he thinks his daughter is practicing again (he is happy) but it is the

German playing. Later, when we see the uncle in a German’s office, we see him

see the German in uniform in a mirror and see the German . reflected in the

mirror looked startled. He then kind of bows and says nothing.

He also reads the Treblinka report (not shown to us) and the list of people who

have been executed in punishment for the shooting of a German officer. That ext

17

is complete. We see the entire list.

The double, mirror reflections make reading into an issue of confession and

excuse—no one can confess the other, no one is the priest who keeps the

secrets of the other—both sides are incriminated, the German who talks and the

french who do not. The German crazily asks to be ssigned military duty so he

can return to the front. Seems suicidal.

We know he will not disobey his orders, even if criminal, nor can he tell the uncle

and niece to resist. But they have a tacit understanding, an understanding that

must remain unspoken and unsaid, even in voice-over. There’s still a mirror

stage, a misrecogniton irreducible to interior pathos, domestic space.

The German also looks at the globe, then reaches for a book and puts it back.

We see the double constellation and the score still open above the harmonium.

There is a moment of canonization of the library—whereas earlier he had said

that the Germans had Goethe, the English, Shakespeare, but the French couldn’t

decide among their greats who was the greatest. Now the canon is a collective,

a national spirit. Hence the uncanniness of the theological here—it is a spirit that

haunts.

Hitchcock chapter—start with his having made films of the concentration camp

and his several propaganda films—Saboteur, the French ones that were never

shown, and their commercial failure or, in commercial success, the shocking

success of Nazis (they blow up the ship in Saboteur). Monumental end at the

statue of liberty—more stark even than North by Northwest. Go to Lifeboat as a

projection of Germany after the war as a problem of reading the archive through

18

modern recording media (film in the gfilm,typewriter, etc). But most crucially

reading as reading the surface. Then go to the title sequence.

Begin with question of the archive and Hitchcock with Tom Cohen. Then go to

surfaces with Jameson’s chapter on North by Northwest.

From there paralinear reading and the archive in the wake of the disaster.

Reading becomes a question of the surfacing of ht archive, its collection and

recording, and paralinear narrative that poses a problem of taking sides —who is

who?

From the point of view of reading, citational nodes network technemes,

rhizomatic algorithms, postal nodes, “times,” phonemes that sound like others,

angles. . . . there can be no glossary here, no symbol [to understand Hitchcock’s

films]. . . One is, as it were, always in the debris floating at the opening of

Lifeboat, in the afterlife of a semioclasm. Tom Cohen, Hitchcock’s Cryptonomies:

Secret Agents, 49

Here, far more abstractly, we confront the same grid of parallel lines, systemically

carved into the rock surface like a strange Mayan pattern. Again what is

confirmed by this pattern, and scored in the space of the scene, is the primacy of

surface itself: the earth as surface upon which the anti-like characters move and

agitate, the sky as a surface from which intermittently a model and deadly

technological mechanism dips; and here finally the upending of the surface into

the vertical monument, prodigious bas-relief which has no inside and cannot be

19

penetrated; upon which, as in some ultimate lunar landscape—neither country

nor city—the human body, in its most vulnerable manifestations, must crawl,

itself taking on something of there merely implicit or potential volume of the bas-

relief.

Frederic Jameson, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” 64-6511

Question of what is hitcockian about Hitcock, his signature, becomes aquestion of the cut

and reading, of open reading or reading as a scene of violence, interrption. Bankhead’s

thrust and tear through the newspaper is a less explicit version of the violent ruins left in

he wake of the ship’s destruction in the opening title sequence

We could pose this as a problem of philology and reading comparatively, De Man on

Heidegger—violence of interpretation (which is internal) versus non-violent, open and

edited text (prior to reading; like Riffaeterre elimination of reading, of what comes

prepares for reading s that reading doesn’t have to happen.

Lifeboat does violence to the Nazi for what he and other would have done (put them in a

concentration camp), not for what e did (murder, or euthanasia?)

So we have violence, gang violence, then a violent interpretation of that gang violence.

The film leaves us in de Man’s indeterminate exegetical method—his essay ends in a

violent critical gesture of criticism—the critical of the critical closes to avoid violence or

danger of poetry—being poetic by aiming friendly fire at another philologist Struck—

discourse of madness—poetry is madness, mental torture (Holderlin).

SaBOATage: 12/11 Changed Everything

20

Released just a year before World War II ended, Lifeboat stages a scene of

reading an editorial page of a crumpled, old newspaper that projects a post-war future as

a “problem.” Shot over the shoulder of the reader, John Kovac (John Hodiak, Figure one,

upper right), the editorial title is set in large type (Figure one, lower left).

Figure 1

“What Shall We Do with Germany--After the War?” In smaller type, “Our Post

War Problem” appears just below it.12 Lifeboat projects beyond the immediate

question of whether the survivors will be found before they die of thirst and

starvation to a larger question of the future as itself a problem: Victory will not

mark the end, even it presumably will arrive soon, but the beginning of a problem

21

for the U.S. (“us”) even more than it will be for Germany. The newspaper’s

editorial complicates the determination of what “post” means for “us” both by its

relatively obsolescence as “old news” and by the large type for the word

“Mailbox” for letters to the opposite and placed opposite the words “Post War.” A

declaration of the end of the war will arrive through a postal relay and delay

network. News may arrive eventually, but is delayed, late, boxed in (like the

survivors in the lifeboat).13

We take this scene of reading, which we will discuss shortly in more detail, to

be exceptional in Hitchcock’s many scenes of newspaper in his other films,

making Lifeboat a singular film.14 Contemporary critical debates over Hitchcock

turn largely on how to make sense of his many repetitions and citations various

motifs: images (blonde and brunette women; birds; books), cameo appearances,

sound effects (conversations being drowned out by louder sounds), and themes

(the wrong man; murder) across his fifty-two films. The difficulty of systematically

itemizing Hitchcock’s film into repeatable units of signification has become

explicit, the common question asked by critics including Peter Conrad, Slavoj

Zizek, Frederic Jameson, Michael Walker, and Tom Cohen, how to account for

the polysemous and sometimes senseless relays and channels of symbolic

meaning (agency, auteurism, meaning) in non-auteurist terms (subjectless

History, for Jameson), non-symbolic terms (the Lacanian Real, in Zizek’s case; a

deconstructive “anarchivist anterior marks that precedes “occularcentrism,” in

Cohen’s).15 As Tom Cohen writes, “there has always been a problem with

characterizing Hitchcock’s signifying strategies, into which trap the most

22

sophisticated theorists have stumbled. Objects are hosted, seem marked, yet

refuse assigned contents and dissolve into citational networks; after their

passage through a sort of ‘spies’ post office,’ they reemerge elsewhere, become

host” (45).16

We characterize the problem of reading repetition somewhat differently. The

problem with reading Hitchcock in terms of what Jameson calls “form-intrinsic”

meaning (reading repetitions as symptoms in a text) and “form-extrinsic” meaning

(reading repetitions as symptoms across works in an auteur’s oeuvre) is less

whether one reads the films in terms of an auteurist subject than it does with

identifying what counts as the “motifs” as Michael Walker calls them, of

Hitchcock’s films, and, more crucially, what counts as Hitchcock’s signature, first

identified by William Rothman in Hitchock’s Murderous Gaze as a bar series of

metaphorical marks and gestures. Lifeboat’s practice of repeating as what we

call “sui-citation” puts into question what constitutes a recognizable repetition. To

be sure, some repetitions are obvious in Lifeboat, as when characters turn their

back toward the camera when amputating one of Gus’s legs and when they

murder the U-boat captain, Willy (Figure 2, upper left and upper right); when Willy

first appears grasping the boat-rail, shot from the left side, one hand at a time

and the young German sailor survivor at the end of film grasps the boat-rail one

hand at a time, this time of the right side of the boat (Figure 2, middle left and

right). Similarly, Gus’s shoe drops and then is picked up to kill Willy (Figure 2,

lower left and right), Connie is knocked down twice on falls to the right and also

lies down once to the right; she comments explicitly on the dispossession of her

23

camera and film of the shipwreck, worth millions of dollars, her torn stocking, and

finally her bracelet used as fishbait. Commenting on these kinds of repetitions

constitutes, as Jameson observes, that are the stock in trade of “intrinsic-form”

criticism. The shots of the hands of the German sailors from left side to right side

and of the shoe upside down and right side up help to make our case about

Lifeboat’s allegory of reading as a side to side movement.

24

Our concern at the moment is not to comment on these particular repetitions but

to point out that certain repetitions in Lifeboat, as we shall see, are difficult to

recognize, and others that may be recognized do not solicit an obviously

symbolic reading but are instead engimas. 17

Conceding in advance that Hitchcock’s repetitions, if read closely, will

inevitably mean that the critic’s text will move between symbolic and psychotic

registers, we maintain that Lifeboat, lies in the consequences of its merges

repetition and rupture for reading and for politics, not that it departs from

Hitchcock’s “normal” repetitions and allegorical structure, as The Wrong Man and

25

his last four films have often been said to do.18 Lifeboat allegorizes reading as

repetition and rupture within a diegetic, “prefabricated” allegory of the film as a

response to what political theorist Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin writing with

deep sense of urgency in the 1930s identified (from opposite sides of the political

spectrum) as an irresolvable crisis of liberal democracy: liberal democratic states

unavoidably preserve themselves by secretly circumventing the law or openly

suspending in order to commit acts of violence, supposedly to protect its citizens,

that it disavows.19 Under pressure after Lifeboat sank quickly after its theatrical

release, Hitchcock affirmed that his film was a propaganda film about the need

for the U.S. to unite internally (characters allegorically personify and embody

labor and management; whites and blacks; men and women; rich and poor) and

externally with its allies (in this case, Canada) against their common threat,

namely, Nazi Germany, embodied in Lifeboat by the duplicitous and bi-lingual U-

Boat captain, Willy (Walter Sleazak).

This pre-fabricated allegory reads like a cover story or alibi to anyone who has

watched the film with any attention, however, because Lifeboat refuses to resolve

the crisis of liberal democracy it stages: in terms of sovereignty, sovereign takes

power not only in terms of age, physical strength, and ruthlessness but also

through his reading and linguistic capacities, his detection of foreign accents and

translation of foreign languages. As in Walter Benjamin’s account of sovereignty

the German Mourning Play, in Lifeboat, sovereignty is always weak or tyrannical;

the lifeboat itself contain a variety of survivors with a potentially combustible mix

of domestic and foreign threats, and the sovereign has to decide who is friends

26

and foe apart from who is native and who is foreign, a decision made all the more

difficult for much of the film when it turns out that the villain, a German (played by

a then well-known American character actor) and heroine, an American both

speak German and English fluently. The circumstances in which the characters

of Lifeboat find themselves, stranded, cut off from all outside communication,

1 Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue (silent) remade with Colin Firth around 2009.

A series of images in he film call up a camera lens, a net and a frame.Opening Act is in a courtroom. The judge’s monocle is like a lens—first it rings a part of the iamge in to close up—the prosecutor—then the second time, it brings a blurry image partly into focus (of awoman). SO it’s a point of view shots. There are lots of matching shots of characters addressing the camera almost directly.

There is he camera as well (photographers take pictures of Larita after she has been found guilty and exists the court.In the south of France, a closeup of a tennis racket (net) begins a shot of tennis being played (Latirta ends up being hit by a tennis ball).Then here’s the Oval mirror in the scene with Larita smoking and getting made p.

There there are the newspaper photos, one of her with other guys at the race track, which then the Mother (another hideous Mother in Hitchock’s oeuvre) . One of the daughters and the mother find an earlier issue with a matching photo of Larita from her trial (posing for a painting, as we cut into the caption below the photo). She the photo works as a framework, matching text and image directly.Larita then sees the same camera she saw earlier and throws something at it to knock it off the table.

A photographer recognizes her in the gallery at her uncontested divorce trial and this time when she leaves, she proudly poses (Shoot me. There’s nothing left to kill.

During the trial, Hitchcock moves back and forth between the present of the trial and back to the past where events mentioned at the trial happened by going medium close up into an object, then back out from the same object in the courtroom.

The ring—or image produced by a lens that frames—figures the narrative structuring (the camerawork and the editing) of the film.

Theres strange tension between the narrative of her being an innocent martyr (she doesn’t accept the painter’s offer made I his letter or reject it, nor do we see them kiss—the husband’s pov lines up the wife and painter so that we see the wife’s head formthe back)

27

uncertain how to find safety or avoid danger, constitute a permanent state of

emergency: accordingly, the state of exception (the suspension or limitation of

legal norms) becomes the rule.20 In Lifeboat, the sovereign’s most crucial

exercise of power, namely, deciding who shall live and who shall die, taken either

with a vote or without one, remains illegitimate, a self-parody because it

necessarily takes sides, even if the side involves a new combination of previously

—so no image inco=riminates her yet she does seem to deduce theboy she marries and does seem to be a woman of ill repute. Text and image only come together (in a netural way) when we see the caption under the photos of Larita 9Mrs. Aubrey) poses to be painted.

Also, Latirta signs in at the french hotel as Larita Grey. A forgery, but allegorically apt—she is neither black or white.

2 See Pierre Missac, “Walter Benjamin: From Rupture to Shipwreck,” in On

Walter Benjamin, ed. Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1988), 220. Missac

adds Benjamin’s “signals not being received, understood, or recorded, the

shipwrecked figure clings hopelessly to the most fragile debris, to the last straw

(I: 1243). In vain, of course, as he knew: his existence cannot be saved.”

3 The Time That Does Not Remain: Ex-Hum(aniz)ation: The Camp in the Camp / the

Camp Without the Camp as Notes Surfaced from Underground of the Yet to Be Exhumed

If it is true that for a certain Freud, “our

unconscious cannot conceive of our

mortality” (is unable to represent

mortality to itself), then it would seem to

follow that dying is unrepresentable, not

only because it has no present, but also

because it has no place, not even in

28

allied or antagonistic characters.21

By putting into question what it means to read, the scene of newspaper

reading, to which we are now just about to return, is exceptional in taking the

form of a “paralinear” reading; that is, reading in Lifeboat either advances and

retreats by moving from side to side: as the reading of one text closed, another

text opens up that in turn is closed. Paralinear reading both advances and

time, the temporality of time. . . Nothing

can be done with death that has always

taken place already: it is the task of

idleness, a nonrelation with a past (or

future) utterly bereft of present. Thus the

disaster would be beyond what we

understand by death or abyss, or in any

case by my death, since there is no

more place for “me”: in the disaster I

disappear without dying (or die without

disappearing).

--Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the

Disaster, 118-19.?

We reconceputalize the camp as an arche-archive to come, as that which is

written to be found, read, and archived at an unspecified later time, by attending

to the concrete storage boxes and notes left by victims buried in the camps

themselves, some of which have been recovered and now known as the Scrolls

of Auschwitz.? Our reconceptualization of the camp as an archive containing an

29

retreats, but only as a recursive and precursive return to and an anticipation of

similar reading open and shut interpretive moments, consequently putting

deconstructive pressure on the differences between variously conflicting political

sides. Political and social differences may be put temporally aside as alliances

shift, allowing the group to suspend or alter democratic norms and procedures

that enable succession of awkward but peaceful transitions from one leader to

arche-archive in boxes of writings the exhumation and reading of that which is “to

come,” will mean extending the concept of the bio/thanatopiolitics of bare life to

include a concept bare death, a death that is irreducible to one’s “organic” death

and that is unrepresentable (we turn to Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster

and Derrida Aporias).? In theorizing the camp as an arche-archive to come with

an impossible topography of the always already internal exteriorized archive, we

will also elaborate our concept of “unread –ability” in relation (un)repeatability

and (ir)replaceabilty by first putting an assumed theological and mediatic

distinction between scrolls and shrouds into question and then by turning to

Derrida’s account of death in Aporias and his readings, in Demeure: Fiction and

Testimony, of two lost manuscripts mentioned in Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant

of My Death, in which he writes the endnote on Walter Benjamin’s briefcase we

discussed in the earlier chapter, and Derrida’s reliance on the metaphor of

cinema. In our account of the Scrolls, the camp arche-archivalization literally has

no center, as an reconstruction a necessarily uncanny temporality of

reassemblage, an after word not only of records produced and destroyed as

much as not only of records produced and destroyed as much as was possible

by the Nazis, but more crucially, by the victims themselves.

30

another (the old rich man Charles D. 'Ritt' Rittenhouse (Henry Hull), then Kovac,

then Willy, then Connie). Yet the suspensions are so extreme that they make a

mockery of democratic justice (notably, secret ballot elections of a leader, trial by

jury). A deceptive, determined Nazi is put in charge of the lifeboat by mistake, for

example, giving him the time to push the dying Gus overboard while the others

sleep, and, in the film’s most disturbing scene, a would be execution of the Nazi

bring in Derrida’s substrate as medium specific impression contact zone here

—and media as graphosphere (Echographies of Television] . As we get to the

scrolls, we are not talking about material remains but , not an archeology, o

rphiloogyas model of arciaelogical reconstruction—critique iat the end of Archive

Fever. Cite Excavation and Its Discontents collection.

We juxtapose the Scrolls and Demeures in order explore the meditization of the

archive, to understand better what the unread –ability of the arche-archiving of

the camps has to do with the importance scholars universally grant to film and

filmmaking, the frequent use of film and photography as metaphors, as film and

filmmaking have become the central media in debates of archival reconstruction

and reuse.

Writing Near Death: The Shrouded Scrolls of Aushwitz

We want to read supplementary notes that have been written by victims “near” death

to a future reader and left for that reader near the remains of the recently dead and the

full written records recorded by the victims. Here four notes, all cited by Didi-

Hubermann:

31

turns into a lynching near the end of the film. 22 Although Willy, the Nazi villain,

and the democratic heroes have been clearly established by this point, a new

exception appears as Willy is murdered: George 'Joe' Spencer (Canada Lee),

the one black man on the lifeboat, votes with all the others to execute who

initially saving Gus by amputating his leg, later quietly pushed him overboard.

Yet as the others fall on him, Joe is shot in close up, standing apart, uninvolved

I have buried, in the terrain of the Birkenau camp near the

crematoria, a camera, the remains of the gas in a metal box, and

notes in Yiddish on the number of people who had arrived in

convoys and were sent to be gassed. I remember the exact

location of these objects and I can them at any moment. (110)

A message to the world must be addressed to the world from here.

Whether it be found soon or in several years, it will always be a

terrible accusation. His message will be signed by two hundred

men of the Sonderkommando of Crematorium I, fully conscious of

their imminent death [ . . ] The message has been carefully

prepared. It describes in great detail the horror that have been

committed here these last two years. The names of the

executioners of the camps appear. We publish the approximate

number of people exterminated, describing the manner methods,

and the instruments used in their extermination. The message has

been written on three large parchment pages. The writer-editor of

the Sonderkomommnado—a former artist form Paris—has copied it

in a beautiful calligraphy according to the style of the old

32

in the violence and looking horrified by the way the others viciously hammer

Willy’s hands, grasping the boat rail, with Gus’s (William Bendix) shoe Willy had

dropped into the boat after throwing Gus’s amputated leg overboard. The other

shoe drops, as it were, but literally, and it is pointedly the same shoe dropping

twice that creates a political scandal. Deciding how to resolve a conflict by

closing down reading displaces the conflict elsewhere: the news will still report

parchments, in India ink so that the writing does not fade. The

fourth page contains the signatures of the two hundred men of the

Sonderkomnado. The parchment pages have been attached with a

silk thread, rolled, enclosed in a cylindrical zinc box, specially made

by one of our smiths, and finally sealed and welded to be protected

from the air and humidity. This box has been left by the carpenters

between the springs if the ottoman in the padding. [“(The

calligraphy parchments that Miklos Nyiszli mentions have not been

found.)”107 Another identical message has been buried in the yard

of Crematorium II (108-09). Another version of the uncanny—two

notes, but no box.]

The notebook and other texts remained in the pits soaked with

blood as well as the bones and flesh often not fully burned. These

we could recognize from the smell. Dear finder, look everywhere in

every parcel of earth. Underneath are buried dozens of

documents, mine and those of other people, which cast light on

what happened here. Numerous teeth have been buried, it was

we, the workers of the Kommando, who deliberately dispersed

33

disasters on native soil origin (as in the newspaper column headlined “Fire

Destroys Arsenal,” figure three, left).

Paralinear reading and listening (we take reading [in] Hitchcock to be

stereophonic, reading a silent activity in the films that competes with sound) not

only rupture (the boat sinking), but what Tom Cohen calls the “semioclasm” (vol

1, 49) left in boat’s wake, a catastrophe that makes reading into an Überreading

them around the terrain as much as we could so that the world

might find tangible evidence of the millions of murdered human

beings. As for us, we have lost all hope of surviving until the

Liberation. (D-H, 108)

We must, as we have until to know . . . make all known to the world

by means of a historical chronicle. From now on, we will hide

everything in the ground. I ask that all these various description and

notes, buried and in their time signed Y.A.R.A., be collected. They

are found in different containers and boxes, in the yard of the

crematorium I: one, entitled Deportation, is founding the bone pits

of crematorium I; the other entitled Aushchwitz, is found under a

pile of bones, southwest of the same yard. After that, I rewrote it

completed it, and reinterred it separately among the ashes of the

crematorium II. I wish them to be put in order and printed together

under the title In the Horror of the Atrocities. We, the 170 men

remaining, are about to leave for the sauna. We are sure that we

are being brought to our deaths. They have chosen thirty men to

remain at crematorium IV. (DH, 109)

34

and deciding a “sui-siding,” that is, a taking of sides that resolves political

conflicts only by going way overboard with a high-handed pre-emptive strike

“justified” both retroactively and with a bad conscience. “Überreading” is not

“über” in the sense of “super,” as in Nietzsche’s Übermensch, echoed in the

fascist distortions of Willy, but in the more sense of “over.”23 The reliability of any

reading is weakened in Lifeboat because only surfaces are legible: the film’s

Reading these notes backwards as an arche-archive that has gone unread

because prematurely unified and even sanctified as a set of single documents,

means attending to a strange supplementary logic in the recording of the deaths

of the victims that uncannily unsettles a distinction between the living and the

dead: writing themselves into death (by murder, not suicide), the authors

substitute the note for themselves and the records the notes identify stand in the

for lives of the victims, but their relative importance gets entangled rather than

neatly boxed up: unlike Walter Benjamin’s distinction between his manuscript

and his life, the records are deliberately scattered, left to be exhumed later,

collected, reordered, titled and published. Some records are sealed to be

preserved, others are soaked in blood. Some are rewritten and reinterred. The

records, one might say are to be resurrected but the body parts are presumed to

be unidentifiable and not in need of care (paper becomes a contact sheet for

human remains). Like Freud’s account of the uncanny as the mixing of the

organic and inorganic, the living and the dead, “sowing” the body parts and

boxes in the mass graves is connected to the sewing of the parchment. Mixed

signals mean missed signals, the repetition compulsion uncannily existing on a

continuum with witnessing.

35

characters (and the spectator identifying with them) either over-read or under-

read the surface, looking literally from above or below, sometimes moving from

one side of a text to another or from one side one text to one side of another text.

Reading always lies at sea in Lifeboat, unable to establish truth by occupying a

starting position above the fray and unable to stop, be over and out. By the

same token, we shall see, reading in Hitchcock’s film constitutes micro-states of

exception that threaten to collapse juridical, ethical and political justice and

What happens in the camp, then, is not only that people are made to survive

beyond death which is not death, as do the Musselmanner in Agamben’s account

in Remnants of Auschwitz, but that those neither people who survive nor those

who die are not able to determine when the dead are dead, or distinguish less

the dead from the living (about to be) dead but singling the dead from the deader

than dead. The death of the victim is not reducible to time noted on a coroner’s

report. As the Scrolls of Auschwitz already make apparent as a testimony of

testimony, as a record of witnessing a record located elsewhere.

We juxtapose the Scrolls and Demeures in order explore the mediation of the

archive, to understand better what the unread –ability of the arche-archiving of

the camps has to do with the importance scholars universally grant to film and

filmmaking, the frequent use of film and photography as metaphors, as film and

filmmaking have become the central media in debates of archival reconstruction

and reuse.

The Camp within / without the Camp: An Arch-anarchivology to Come

36

criminality, by suspending norms that differentiate democratic from totalitarian

regimes. Decisions and actions by the characters are paradoxical, either lawfully

unlawful or unlawfully lawful.

Up, Para-scope:  Ueberlesen (Overreading)

Before we turn to the Scrolls, we need to first explain further what we mean

by calling them an arche-archive. Critical attention to concrete specific fragments

of the Scrolls, notes written by victims with instructions regarding the contents of

these containers, will throw into relief the extent to which reading the camp as an

archive means that what is read has been posted in a relay system, deferred.

Immediately conflating these documents with documents of political resistance by

the victims, as when was the case of the uprising that destroyed crematorium IV,

offers for us an intense moment of reading as the resistance to reading, an

evasion of problems posed by the archaeology and archiving of a past that is

arche-archival and yet to come.

[trans will be needed] The category enables to Didi-Huberman to form a new

way of classifying the dead: “Between the healthy victims who did not want to

speak and the victims to weak to speak if they wanted, Didi-Huberman says

there is “a third position. It is no less extreme, such is its incomparable force. It is

the testimony formulated and transmitted in spite of all by the members of the

Sonderkommando” (105). He assigns a different kind of box to testimonies,

imagining that the sending, transmission, and reception of these notes and

37

We would now, at long last, like to return to the scene of newspaper paper

reading with which we began this chapter to show how reading in Lifeboat is

specifically a repetition that literal or figuratively rupture a surface. The rupture

may as well take the form of continuity (the opening extended take with no break

in sound) as discontinuity (a tear in a newspaper). In the shot of the editorial

page (figure one, upper left), an index finger amusingly pokes through the page,

accompanied by a tearing sound. 24 The almost detached finger not only points

photos is a closed matter, the last word. Didi-Huberman even acceding to their

theological title for the notes:

They form what is called—with reference to the megliot of the

Hebrew Bible, the scrolls of the “Lamentations of Jeremiah” in

particular—the Scrolls of Auschwitz. Writing of the disaster, writing

of the epicenter, the Scrolls of Aushwitz constitutes the testimonies

of the drowned who were not yet reduced to silence, who were still

capable of observing and describing. Their authors ‘lived closer to

the epicenter of the catastrophe than any other prisoner. They

were present, day after day, at the destruction of their own people,

and were aware, in the global scale, of the process to which the

victims were doomed.’ Their whole effort was to transmit the

knowledge of such a process as far as they possibly could. A

knowledge that would have to be searched for in the blood soaked

earth, in the ashes, and in the heaps of bones in which the

members of the Sonderkommando disseminated their testimonies

in order to give them some chance of surviving” (108).

38

to a problem of reading the future but itself becomes legible as a metaphor for

intelligence gathering, questioning, and enemy capture: the finger resembles a

little periscope, looking around, and when bent, both a question mark (and

viewed as inverted), the fishing hook on which Constance (“Connie”) Peterson’s

(Tullulah Bankhead) expensive bracelet (strangely turned into a ring when seen

below the surface) is hung as fish bait. Like a periscope, the finger figures

The closure of the category of testimony, enfolded into the concept of the archive

as a box, is all that matters to Didi-Huberman, apparently, since it allows for a

narrative sequencing of death and life, a topography of transmission of, even if

that means that testimony becomes a homogenous category, regardless of the

medium specificity of its contents and their fragmentary nature. Didi-Huberman’s

“third position” amounts to a stabilizer, a tranquilizer, and stands as the non-

paradoxical inversion of Agamben’s no man’s border land paradoxes of homo

sacer.

[Now we turn from unread –ability to the question of media and the storage

unit.] Consider, for example, the continuing controversy of the place of

photography and film in archiving the holocaust: images of the dead victims or

their exhibition are frequently equated with pornography and Hell. For example,

the title of the first section Images In Spite of All: Four Photographs from

Auschwitz is “Images Pieces of Film Snatched from Hell.”? [Georges Didi-

Huberman Image in Spite of All (Chicago, Chicago UP, 2008 trans. Shane B.

Lillis). Didi-Huberman draws on the many comparisons made by many victims

between the camps and Dante’s Hell. Yet the Hell to which he refers must also

include the archive from which they are stored and (some would say “snatched”)

39

reading alternately as both “over the shoulder” reading and reading from below.

On both cases, reading disrupts Kovac’s (and our) reading of the text at hand, or,

more precisely, disrupts the reading of a text about the future as a solvable,

problem, as I noted earlier, but a text about the future as a problem that possibly

lacks a (final) solution in future: Can there be such a thing as a "post" war? Or

will war continue even after victory has been declared and one side has officially

allowed to be exhibited in 2001. Once archival reconstruction and exhibition

begins, the referent of Hell, itself a literary metaphor, may no longer confined to

the camps themselves.] The tendency to pathologize and demonize certain

remaining images, unintentionally echoes the topological construction “L’Enfer”

(hell) section of the Bibilotheque Nationale in Paris, reserved for pornographic

books and images, or even earlier, the restricted library reserved for

pornographic images of the library for ancient Roman from the remains of

Pompeii in the aftermath of Mount Vesuvius’ eruption.? [In speaking of the Rudolf

Hoess’s, the Commandant of Auschwitz, presentation of photographs taken at

Auschwitz to Otto Thiernick, the Nazi Minister of Justice, Didi-Huberman, writes

that “this use of photography verged on a pornography of killing” (24). See also

Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat, Holocauste ordinaire: Histoires d'usurpation : “Dans

cet essai poignant, Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat dénonce avec une précision

implacable la pornographie de la mort et du massacre ainsi que cette volonté

destructrice de toujours vouloir "parler à la place de l'autre" afin de mieux

l'exclure. In Image in Spite of All, Didi-Huberman notes that Godard had shown in

1968 images of totalitarianism and pornography together but does not discuss

Godard’s use of pornographic images in Histoire(s) du cinema.]

40

surrendered to the other (as indeed happened with Cold War)?

“Dive, Dive, Dive!" Untenlesen (Under Reading)

The two, more rapid shots that follow the shot of the editorial page about Post War

Germany disclose who is reading whom and thereby demonstrate that this sequence

constitutes an interpretive state of exception we call paralinear reading. In a shallow

Yet this sacrificial economy of processing documents by selecting only some

of the for survival, either to be accessed in archives or displayed in museums,

hasn’t worked out very well, or, to put it another, has worked only too well.

Fierce internecine polemics among scholars and filmmakers of the holocaust

have become more heated, not less, over time, as ethical questions about how to

memorialize the holocaust have largely overtaken juridical questions about what

happened and who should be held responsible and punished.? [Errol Morris’s

Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred Letucher (1996) and Agamben’s Remnants

of Auschwitz (1994) mark watershed transitions: Agamben divorces ethics from

legal questions in the first chapter and turns to Foucault’s conception of the

archive in his last chapter to best refute revisionists, and Morris focusing on both

a trial of a Canadian revisionist tried for hate speech after he claimed in print that

the holocaust didn’t happen as well as evidence Fred Leutcher surreptitiously

gathered from the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau to support the defendant. Morris

interviews the Auschwitz archivist and Nazi documents to refute Leuchter. On

the doubling legal and bureaucratic archive as historical research archive in the

nineteenth century, see Sven Spieker, the Big Archive: Art from Bureacracy (MIT,

2008)]

41

focus medium shot, wealthy journalist Connie’s smiling face moves, in close up and

more or less in focus, from left to right across the bottom of the screen, with Willy

rowing the becalmed lifeboat while the Stanley “Sparks” (Hume Croyn) quietly plays a

flute, both characters being out of focus in the background (Figure two, upper left and

upper right).

Death Trips

The word “Cinema” in reverse,

printed backwards on the right

hand page, but left to right on

the left hand page, of Godard

and Ishgapour’s Cinema:

Archeology of Cinema

Notes on Shoah: Disc 3, 15:00

“extreme” German word used

word but translated as

“extreme” only once –condition

of the Sonderommando—to this

hell.”

92:36 Scene with Hilberg

handling the document about

order for trains. He does a

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brilliant reading of it until

Lanzmann concludes so,

16,000 dead Jews in one page.”

Hilberg says he likes to handle

to he documents because he

knows they passed through the

bureaucrats’ hands. There is a

surplus value in the archival

document—the document itself

—in a way that is similar to the

archivist touching the

documents in Mr. Death.

90:05—voice over of ex-

nazi member—he was director

of the trains and stationed in

Warsaw and also in Krakow.

His voice sounds different

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(scratchier) than other voice-

over voices and we see why

when we see him on TV, in

black and white, like the other

Nazi we see again two small TV

sets, one smaller than the

other, and the one is hidden by

the technican; the other, smaller

one is visible, but the image

appears so faint that you can

barely make it out. Lots of

moments of delayed

identification in the film. Hilberg

talks about the document for

some time (very impressively)

before he is identified by a title

as “Raul Hilberg, Historian.”

Happens all the time in the film.

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Figure Three

The next shot, in deep focus, (Figure two, left), now from a 90 degree angle from

the previous shot, shows her resting in the lap of the working man, John Kovac

(John Hodiak), who has laid aside reading the newspaper he was just reading.

(The last interview with the Nazi

shows Lanzmann having taken

the pointer and using it to point

at the map (or blueprint) of

Treblinka.

Surplus of the archive

Problem wihtSpectral Evidence

is that it assumes hter was a

place and htat then it could be a

problem of representation—but

assumes an originary uinity—

whereas the return toehcamp is

already toa imaginary

topography—the issue in Mr

Death is the crematorium, yet

the archivist plooks ath

tebluprint for Birkenau. The

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Connie then proceeds to read Kovac from below by looking at him from another,

eroticized side, testing the emotional waters by guessing the meaning of various

and variously tattooed initials on Kovac’s beefy chest. 

Before commenting on Connie’s reading of Kovac’s tattooed initials, we want

to press pause momentarily to observe that Connie’s rupturing tear in the

newspaper is only the film’s most literal version of a writing allegorized as

crematoria were located just

utsideof the camp (Birkenau).

So the gas ans left the campl,

turned left and went 50

kilometers to the cermatiorria.

There is already a fracture it eh

the camp already a transiton

before the transitionfrom life

todeath, already an unanny kind

of traveling. Yes you are going

to Hildebreck—you are going

on vacation—on resettlement—

no ou are going to your adeath.

The last destination. It is advertised as a misdirection. The woman who learns they are

to be killed and tells the women first and then the men. No one believes her. They are

killed, she is kept back and tortured until she points the guy who toldher. He is throwna

aliveinteh oven and everyone else is told that the samething will happen to them if they

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incision we can see now in Kovac’s tattooed initials. All newspaper pages seen

in the film figure inscription as incision in the form of montage, a graphic design

page layout that places one story randomly next to another and uses

advertisements that often take the form of montage.25 The first scene of

newspaper reading in the film makes this figurative incision of newspaper

graphics explicit in a comic advertisement for a “Reduco” weight loss program

talk to any of ht prisoners about to gassed and creamted. So even the blueprints of the

camp are not only a fetish fo the archive but do not match the ruins that were once

standing. Morris uses a documentary convention but then does not deliver what the

convention is upposed to deliver.An earlier question of what can be admitted to

have happened (the Holocaust) has more recently turned into a question of what

can be admitted in a different sense, allowed to enter the archive or even allowed

to construct an archive that has any use value at all. In other words, we have

now a problem of sovereignty in the archive, with disagreement focused on

exceptions to norms as to what is considered a “good” image and a “bad” image,

what is considered a legitimate use of photographic and film images and an

illegitimate abuse of them, and even whether any images may be used at all.

Let us turn now to a specific case of the controversy over images of the

camps, namely, the reception of the French exhibition catalogue Memoires des

camps (Memories of the camps) in 2001, four photographs taken in August, 1944

from inside of Auschwitz. After his contribution to the catalogue was fiercely

attacked at length, Georges Didi-Huberman reprinting it with an extended

response to his attackers in his book, Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs

from Auschwitz. And in Did’Hubermann’s self-defense, the problem of the

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(see figure three, left). In his typically self-effacing, de rigeur and cameo

appearance, Hitchcock's appears in two contrasting profile images of his entire body, the

words “before” and “after” above each profile to show how highly effective the "Obesity

Slayer" weight loss program is (figure two, left).

sovereignty of the camp archivist and filmmaker who uses it emerges. While his

critics regard the images as the equivalent of pornography (which they

pathologize), Didi-Huberman justifies attention to them in terms of heir

exceptionalism: “The four photographs taken in August 1944 by the

Sonderkommando of crematorium V are the exception that asks us to rethink the

rule, the fact that asks us to rethink history” (61). Defending Godard’s montage

editing practice in “Toutes les histories,” Didi-Huberman writes that “in the form is

Godard’s free choice. Here the artist—according to western tradition—gives

himself the sovereign freedom of reuse: he chooses two photograms of Dachau

and associates them with Hollywood shot” (145). Legitimate images for Didi-

Huberman not only entail a postal system of sovereignty as rethinking and

reusing, always coming after a delay, but, more specifically, after the operation of

the camps ceases, after the moment of their liberation. The spacing of the

archive as a library within a library paradoxically blacks out the moment one

would think is most in need of archivalization, namely, the moment the camps

were working.

Boxing Up the Disaster and the Question of

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Sovereignty and Survival in the Film and Media

Archive

To understand the importance of photography and film in the camp as archive / storage unit, and what we men by its unread -ability, we need to perform a deconstructive reshelving operation, one that risks more than self-embarrassment given the heated controversy around what do with deeply disturbing materials. We may find that we have written ourselves into a book on a library shelf where the internal “library of the pathological” is not a given or decisive discovery but is being contested by participants in the debate, possibly by readers of the present book. Yet there is an even more serious danger, in our view, in going straight to a responsibility patch to calm a panic attack that prematurely (and unethically) closes down thought in the name of the ethical. Let us be clear about our purposes, then. [Derrida on Responsibility,” Critical Inquiry 33 (Winter 2007), 307.As Rudolf Gasche writes, “if knowledge remains on the threshold of a responsible decision, if a decision is a decision, on the condition that it exceeds simple consciousness and simple theoretical determination, the responsible self must, in principle, be unable—that run the risk of not being able –to fully account for the singular act constitutive of a responsible decision. It follows from this that responsibility is necessarily linked to the secret—not, of course, in the form of withholding knowledge regarding a specific decision but in the form of an essential inability to ultimately make the reasons for one’s actions fully transparent. . . . But, while a decision that that is based merely on knowledge annuls responsibility, a decision that forgoes knowledge and defies the demand to give reasons is not without problems that threaten responsibility as well.” “European Memories: Jan Patocka and Jacques] A certain allegorical and rhetorical diversion or distraction, a kind of play has to be put into play, to paraphrase Derrida, if we are understand the dimensions of bare life and unread-ability for the archive and self-storage that precede and follow the camp, that require the camp be read as the reconstruction of a camp within the camp. There is a constitutive problem of historicism. Because determining

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Figure Four

In addition to word “slayer,” the name of the company, “Reduco” marks a more

literally linguistic incision: a new company brand name is coined as a

hieroglyphic neologism by deforming two words, “Reduce” and “Corporation,” into

a single, compound word that is apparently pronounced “reducko.” If so,

(over)determinations only temporarily may be read as such, there comes a moment when the determination as such is no longer visible and has to be reconstructed. And the necessity of reconstruction involves puts immense pressure on distinctions between what is narratable and not, what is hallucination and imagination, what is fiction and what is testimony; which media, if any, are indexical and which are not: even narratives that tell the truth cannot tell the whole truth; a living person may be mistaken for a ghost; testimony may be perjury; photos may be staged). The debate over the four photographs taken in August 1944 is of interest to us because it foregrounds the problem of unread –ability in relation to a problem of uncanny reversibility, a problem that requires the thinking of sovereignty not only in terms of bare life but in terms of bare death, as it were, of determining both the dead are dead, of differentiating annihilation into obliteration and of determining, the importance or irrelevance of visual media and writing to determining death once it is acknowledge that the time of death is not the end of death.4 Didi-Huberman wants an operable machine that guarantees its ethics

from the start but ends up bankrupting the archive, melting down, if

not burning up, the images that remain.He avoids the moment of decision, of

taking responsibility for the decision (which is not a more choice

ceaseless struggle ethos against the powers [of] monstra, the monster

of savagery.

One Step Not Beyond . . . the Grave

The problems for both sides of the debate over the four Sonderkommando

photographs may be summarized as follows. Didi-Huberman can use the

photographs effectively against the prohibition on imaging the unimaginable in

that its doubleness is, as it were, more real than a single photo: “the phantasm of

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“Reduco” may call up the sense of “reduction” as “cutting down,” but only by

repeating the name a second time at the bottom of the advertisement and

following it with the word “Corporation.” The combination text / image

advertisement left open to be read by the spectator is the by-product of a

capitalist public news machine (the cost to the consumer reduced largely through

advertising) that presents an indexical problem: even the photos of the body

one image is supported by a phantasm of the absolute instant: in the history of

photography, which is true for the very notion of the snapshot; it is even truer in

the memory of the Shoah, where a “secret film”—Claude Lanzmann’s hypothesis

—about the “absolute moment,” the death of three thousand Jews by

asphyxiation in a gas chamber—can be dreamed of ().” However, by clinging to

positivism rather than the uncanniness of the photos, defaulting to the photo as

indexical position, Didi-Huberman ends up having to devalue them: “While they

are singular, the images are not unique for all that, and are even less absolute.”

He goes further in conceding that “it is clear that of the exhausting mass of visible

things [here oddly conflated with images of things] that surround us, not all

deserve the time that it would take us to decipher their dynamics.” Didi-

Huberman discovers not the sequential move from monad (photographic still) to

montage but the uncanny film loop. Just as the Nazi snuff film functions, as Didi-

Huberman insightfully, as a phantasm for Lanzmann, so the door functions as a

phantasm for Didi-Huberman, a means of connecting a series of double images

he then mistakes for a montage. Didi-Huberman thus does not acknowledge his

own role in playing the sovereign, he who decides the exception. Having said

that there most images (in general) do not deserve the time it would take to

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shows what has gone missing (in the “Obesity Slayer” advertisement), with

political bodies being metaphors.26 (Similalry,Connie’s finger through the

newspaper is like a book manicule, a trope emptied of meaning.) For example,

the headline of the story to the far left of the advertisement juxtaposes

Hitchcock’s cut down body weigh made possible by a legally created

“Corporation” to collective building as body enlargement: “civic bodies” of

“prominent citizens” make the city park a success because they “join together.”

decipher them, he is unable to establish any criteria for deciding which images

(of the Holocaust in particular) are deserving of our time. Moreover, Didi-

Huberman substitutes choice for decision, describing a “formal mechanism” for

viewing that guarantees the "opening sight itself to a start up of knowledge and to

an orientation of ethical choice" (`(179).?   Decision in the visual archive is

arguably ethical, however, only because cannot know in advance or provide a

proper distance and orientation.

The intellectual differences between Didi-Huberman and his antagonists

turns out to be surprisingly slight: both sides agree that “it is impossible, indeed,

to bear witness from the inside of death” (105); while his critics want to put an

end to all images, Didi-Huberman merely wants to preserve—that is, read-- a

select few, and these few, moreover, do not require any rethinking of what he

calls the dual system of reading images as veils that cover and torn veils that

reveal Didi-Huberman uses to read all images deserving of our attention. In

place of optical unconscious, we get a “torn consciousness; in place of the four

photographs, we get a generalized account of the way images appeal to “the

incessant desire to show what cannot be seen” (133).

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Civic and corporate entities separate and combine like human bodies, which in

turn are figures as well (the photos of Hitchcock’s doubled body being both split

and joined through “before” and “after” labels).

We may now begin to see how the repetition of newspaper reading scenes in

Lifeboat makes reading itself a literal or figurative rupturing of a linear narrative

Didi-Huberman’s category of the legitimate because inadequate “in spite of all”

image / testimony has as much conceptual integrity in his eyes as the

exaggerated and distorting “all” image have for his critics.

The singularity of what Didi-Huberman singles out as a “not all” image (and the endlessly revisable narrative it generates) is really not singular at all, just a repetition, like his many insistent repetitions of the phrase “in spite of all,” like his repetitive characterization of the not image as a rethinking of history. Like his critics, Didi-Huberman does not interrogate want it means to construct the camp within the camp, to represent death from the “outside” of death, and so remain stuck in a stop and go loop—a live wire with a dead end, so to speak.5 A cultural graphology of the camp as archive for us means reading Derrida’s Freudian impression of the archive together with his commentary in Demeures: Fiction and Testimony on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. How Derrida calls the “anarchivological” drive in the archive, his critique of an archaeological desire to reconstruct the past, the ash of the archive that remains impossible to archive may be productively reread through a problem Derrida identifies of determining once and for all the distinction between fiction and testimony, in order to show that the camp (Agamben) both calls and blocks a call to read as a problem of archivalization, sovereignty, and the burial and exhumation of documents, media, and bodily remains. [(not limited to Foucault’s account, that Agamben relies on in Remnants of Auschwitz)] We take this blacking out, this prohibition of imaging what happens in the camp when it was in operation, as the necessity of extending the concept of bare life to bare death, of conceptualizing testimony in terms of a reverse apostrophe, an address to the living from the dead but unburied.6 Perhaps add brief discussion of Renais Night and Fog and Toute la memoire as well as of the issue of archiving in Mr. Death and Shoah, as well as the photos of passports and I.D. materials in Night and Fog.7      When Night and Fog and Toute la Memoire du Monde are juxtaposed against each other, one hardly is able to compare the atrocities that assault the viewer, in Night and Fog, with the force of a high speed train with Resnais’ depiction of the immense amount of work that goes into cataloging and archiving all of the items

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structure or temporal sequence having to do with “before and after.”27 Connie’s

reading of Kovac’s various tattooed initials attaches a question of narrative

sequence to the question of the (presumed to be an) identity of the initials (figure

two, right), that are themselves repeated but not in serial form. Reading the

future, in this case, a specifically romantic future in which Connie and Kovac

in the Bibliotheque Nationale. However, when one considers the somber tone the segments where Resnais discussing the architectural design of the camps, and the person’s who were (supposedly) unwittingly responsible for the Nazi death camps, and the machine-like nature of all the workers within the Bibliotheque Nationale, the differences start to fade away. The Nazi death camps were impressive in that they efficiently carried out disposal of millions of human lives in a systematic fashion, with every person involved in the process claiming negligence to what was being administered. They were a nightmarish combination of bureaucracy, industrialization, and barbarism. The Bibliotheque Nationale is a depository where all the information in the world that can possibly be preserved, is preserved. Thus, the two different caps represent two different basic goals: for the Concentration camps, Destruction of Memory, and for the Bibliotheque Nationale, the preservation of memory.  Both goals are unobtainable, because in pursuit of the preservation of memory, some artifacts will be lost or destroyed; whereas, in the pursuit of the destruction of memory, some artifacts will survive.

The narrator in Toute la memoire du monde explains the rule for the library – everything must be kept even if the item is only consulted once in its history. The idea is that everything must be kept because no one can ever know what will prove to be the most reliable source as testament to our civilization. The books enter the library and immediately are subjected to inspection, labeling and classification. This is also plainly the case in Night and Fog as the Nazis tattoo, shave and organize thousands of humans with numbers and symbols of different colors and shapes. The reason the books and the humans are forever trapped inside these buildings is because they have been labeled, and thus, archived. And those persons who administrate the classification gain control of the subjects because they have named their prisoners. Without these classification systems neither the concentration camp nor library could function. The catalog is the brain of each system and both films show how each institution takes care to maintain its lists and daily inspections. Both films show long shots scanning the buildings where books or people are trapped to show details of the architecture. This emphasizes the point made in Night and Fog about these buildings being constructed with the inhabitants in mind.

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might fall in love, is represented as the disruption of a man reading by a woman's

finger and then her ability to read (as in put her finger on, or, possibly in) that

man's romantic history inscribed and exhibited on his bared, beefcake chest. The

largest and most prominent initials are tattooed at the center of Kovac’s chest,

also the center of the shot (figure one, lower right). Unlike the other initials,

When viewing All the World’s Memory with Night and Fog, it is apparent both films deal with the categorization and storing of two very different subjects through meticulous bureaucracy and cataloguing. All the World’s Memory makes numerous references to the “prison” the books endure while being archived. Before a book titled Mars finds a place on the shelf, the narrator explicitly refers to the book as a prisoner while a cage door is shut over it. The Bibliotheque Nationale is also referred to as a fortress and maze. In Night and Fog, the narrator mentions how victims of medical experiments were scrupulously photographed and catalogued upon entering. Both films refer to their respective spaces as self-contained universes, such as the “city” which existed within the concentration camp as well as the different areas where media is stored within the Bibliotheque Nationale. Although books and people share almost nothing in common, it is interesting to draw comparisons between the way individuals within the concentration camp were “filed” according to ability to work, how sick they were, etc. This process of filing recalls the standards by which books entering the Bibliotheque Nationale are scrutinized and sorted according to subject matter/field. While Night and Fog is certainly a more taxing film to watch than All the World’s Memory, the similarities the films share with one another highlight archiving on two very different spectra of historical preservation to attempted historical eradication of a people.

Although Night and Fog and All the World’s Memory are presumably about different subjects entirely, the first being a Holocaust documentary and the second being a documentary about the Bibliotheque Nationale, they share some striking similarities. Both of them carry a staggering number of architectural shots, many of which appear in grids. There is a shot of the Bibliotheque from above as it is placed within the city that looks like a grid. There is a shot of a concentration camp from above, also gridded into blocks like a city. The process that accompanies the movement of books into the library is also eerily similar to the process of moving humans into the concentration camp. The books are checked, stamped with the proper stamps, labeled, catalogued and even inoculated in the long process of entering the library. It is the same for the prisoners. There is a sequence in Night and Fog that illustrates this all to well, showing how each prisoner is tattooed and assigned with different markings on each shirt to a different group of people – prisoner or Kapo or criminal. They are

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"B.M." are written on a banner, and the banner covers an image of a human

heart while, in contrast, all of the other initials have no images.28 An acute

reader Connie remarks that the letters “B.M” are larger than the others tattooed

on Kovac’s chest and asks Kovac provocatively if they stand for the name his

first love or his last, taking the difference in the size of the various initials to

then assigned to a block and even catalogued – just like the books – through a log that is kept by the Kapo in each block and updated every time a prisoner is killed.

Toute la memoire du monde  and Night and Fog were both released in 1956 by director Alain Renais. While they both focus on two completely different subjects, the Bibliotheque nationale in Paris and the horrors of the holocaust, the language and methodology of both films are eerily similar.

     We find that the treatment of books in the Bibliotheque nationale to be similar and in many ways better than the treatment prisoners were subject to in Nazi concentration camps. While the books in Paris are “imprisoned” during the cataloging process, and soon put to rest in an exact location specific to its subject, victims of the camps were literally imprisoned, physically cataloged with numbers and grouped according to their status, political prisoner or common criminal. Prior to their placement on the shelves a final verification is made for new books, much like the daily inspections of inmates. Similarly , the Bibliotheque nationale “kept everything as a rule”, while the Nazi's made use of everything, hair, clothing, and even the dead bodies of inmates, nothing was wasted. The bibliotheque functioned as a small community, every step important, from the process of acquiring new holdings, how they are cataloged, where they are placed and ultimately how they are retrieved all depended on the community working together properly to ensure the security of their holdings. This was the ultimate goal of the concentration camps, built to hold inmates they were structured like small villages, with barracks, hospitals, dinning halls, etc. had the war not been lost the cycle would have continued, inmates serving as the building blocks to future Nazi society, forcing labor upon them to sustain their way of life. Inmates ultimately serving as books but treated much worse, exploiting them until they were deemed useless and killed with their bodies left to be reused in other ways.

What’s up with French police—attracted a huge backlash against the film—groups tried to get it removed from Cannes Festival—left wing Humanite supporting the film.

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initiate and close a narrative or narratable sequence (figure three, right). If she

guesses correctly, the beginning and ending of Kovac’s love story remains

indeterminate since Kovac refuses to answer. Given the frequency with which

Hitchcock uses initials in his films, we reasonably may ask if "B.M." refers not to

a person signifies any word or words with the letters “B” and “M,” especially given

an oddity of punctuation: the letters "B.M." are followed by dots midway level

Shot of a French policeman posing with Nazi.

The films are eventualizing the archive, the constructed aspect of that make up the paper world that auto-archives people—gets amped—the obliteration of the concentration camps poses as a threat of loss (of the camps).

We want to contextualize why we are talking about film in relation to the archive and to a very particular archive—it would motivate formal analysis The formal strategy –focusing on three shots of Night and Fog—more than representation as question of staging and access to the archive.

We are talking about a figural question of the content of our book, not taking a thematic inventory. Films in which self-storage is visible are less interesting than films that pose the questions that self-storage takes up.

Inglorious Basterds and Shutter Island show that this story is not dead.

Why do we want to talk about these texts and not others.

Lifeboat is an Anglo response; we have French responses; we have U.S. soldiers.

8

French translation Des voixs des camps (scrolls of Auschwitz) ends with a

facsimile of a text by Zalamn L). The English translation includes a facsimile of

the book manuscript by Ber Mark, however. It also has the foreword by his wife.

So his manuscript becomes a kind of scroll as well.

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with letters (figure one, lower right) rather than, as is the custom (conformed to

elsewhere on Kodiak’s chest) at the bottom right of the letter: "Best Man?"

"Black Mail?" Or are we to invite the blockage of reading the scene presents us

with an allegory of reading the signification of insignificance as a problem of

reading in motion, of creating a movement, in political terms: read in an anal

register, "B.M." might stand for either “bowel movement” or "blocked movement

Memoires des camps, the exhibition catalogue—has Didi-Hubeman’s “Images in

Spite of All” in it at the end, with his reproductions of the six photos, and it also

has a section earlier in the book showing the photos as evidence of resistance to

the Nazis, and also a facsimile of a manuscript page from the Scrolls of

Auschwitz. Controversy turns both on who took the photos and from where, but

the controversy seems to have been triggered, since the photos had been

[published in the book Auscwhitz in 1990, by the cropping and by the

enchacement of the one of the faces of the women—clarification of the image,

putting a face on it (one woman remains blurred), so there is an effect of

sequencing as well as merging of the doubles into one another, out of one

another—like the controversy over whether the two photos are taken from inside

the crematorium or not, or whether it’s a door frame of a window frame.

Fantasy in Mr. Death of the archivist is that the archive is transparent, as long as

you know German. The archive reads itself. This assumption is what the

Memoires des camp exhibition and exhibition catalogue challenge. But all they

want to order is to put the papers and photos in order, make use of traditional

methods to classify and establish the provenance of this or that photo and

document.

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(constipation)."29 More crucial than any specific translation, however, is the

resistance to any particular translation Kovac offers. He is a kind of block-head

to Connie’s “bankhead.”

Jean Luc-Godard as archeologist and archivist—no one single medium—text,

sound, or image—we get recurrent repetitions—the typewriting sound, voice over

of Gorard, and montage as an accelerated speed that is readable yet

incomprehensible—time enough to make ids of photos, but not time enough to

make sense of them. The film is incredibly idiosyncratic and hermetic. It’s

Godard’ history. Yet Godard is not a sovereign subject—he puts himself in the

film—he exteriorizes himself—disembodies himself by not having his typing

match him typing or the sound o typing matching his typing and not by not lip-

synching his voice-over, also by quoting—not clear who is doing the quoting on

the image, or turning the text into an image, a pun “toi” in “histoire” We are not

gettinga transcription of Godard’s personal thoughts but a remixing, a transferring

of “Godard” through film to video. We get Godard as a transmission, kind of like

in his King Lear.

In Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, First Era, Part Two at 101:33.

Lanzmann quotes near the end from an order by SS Ubersturmfuerher Walter Rauf(f?) an order to for van modifications to gassing vans and refers to the number of Jews killed as having been “verarbeitet (processed).” Both words are in the subtitle. Jews are referred to as people, just as the “load.” The “load” rushes or screams.

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Alles ist in Ordnung?

The central interpretive and political problems paralinear reading present the

survivors in Lifeboat are, first, how and when to make their move(ment) to find

safety and, second, who to trust or deceive. [JULLIAN: WORK In Serres etc.

9 a mini-allegory of the carousel as cinematic writing machine in Hitchcock's The

Ring.? The title of the film runs rings around the film by multiplying the meanings

of “ring.” The title initially seems to refer to the boxing ring, since the film title

appears in a single long take superimposed over a freeze frame longshot of a

boxing ring. But the frozen shot of the boxers each touching hands and seen in

profile already prefigures a pattern of triangulation that follows in which the

boxers form an antagonistic and inseparable pair, a static object of art, with a

third man, the referee watching them as if he were a stand in for the spectator.

There is also a wedding ring from a husband and a bangle from his rival, who are

also sparing partners in the boxing ring. A gypsy fortune teller also displays a

deck of cards in a circle which ends with two kings, the King of Diamonds and the

King of Hearts, which describe up the man described by the fortune teller, as “a

tall, rich, young man” she will marry.

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here] My notes on your comments:

Lifeboat in eco-discourse as a metaphor of lifeboat for earth—ship of state metaphor—a

leveling gesture that enables the renegotiation of social contracts. Shot of the empty

chairand closeof Captain’s hat Hume Croyn puts on it. The captain is dead. A kind of

uniformity in war—in uniforms as remarkers, remains—auniside unisize.

Tickets sold to the boxing match also appear in a roll, all marked 6D. And the

best man drops the wedding ring and mixes it up to great comic effect with a

button that has popped off his vest while he is on knees looking for the ring.

But the circle of the circle, as it were is the carousel. The woman courted by both

men is a ticket seller. When she sells tickets, several shots with the carousel

appear. In the early shots of the film, the carousel appears blurred in the

background behind the face of one of the eventual rivals, as if it were a

mechanism producing his fantasy of the woman, briefly shown just after he first

spots her becoming a ghost like enlarged face. Later, similar effects are used as

she imagines her fiancée in a boxing match.

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In Serres’s natural contract—reduction of boundaries—being on a ship, reduction of

boundaries leads to a renegotiation of social contracts automatic. Lifeboat reading we are

embarked on is an automatic critique.

Lifeboat brings you face to face with the threat of extinction and there free you totally

change what you've been doing.

Let us take a brief detour: The carousel is a kind of stroboscope or cinematic

prototype; there is an early shot of it from a ride that is a machine like p.o.v.;

similarly, the tickets, also serial, are comparable to a spool of celluloid film, each

ticket a frame; when the tickets become open, the woman makes a silent pitch to

the guy she later falls in love with but does not marry, as if the tickets were

soliciting and activating the romance plot; and of course, one buys a ticket to the

cinema, and the boxing match is indoors; and later we see two sequences in

which the tickets are show close up and in time lapse photography as the show

sells outs. Similarly, a poster, partly obscured, links rounds to money; anyone

who goes more than one round gets X pounds. So the “cinema” generates

revenue for the challenger; we see the text of the poster and “A” pound looks like

a weight used for weight lifting, a kind of ideogram rather than a number or letter.

We are now back on track. We also see the carousel’s bottom part at the top

of the frame shot in deep focus, sometimes slowing to a stop as mothers and

children get on and off. (The first rides we see are all for couples, each couple

paired up in two seater rides.) Then we get some shots of the carousel that

shows us words written on the top circle. The boxing star is named “One Round

Joe” so boxing rounds are opposed to the endless rounds of the carousel, and

62

Lifeboat stages a series of problems between temporality and narrative—a short circuit,

there’s no way out of the lifeboat. We never see the rescue imaged,

Joe is an excluded or included middle of a set—the disintegration of sameness, which is

the lifeboat, and the immediate problems that come into defining life. Just like Gus and

Willy and are both German.

also in a brief racist bit, to the rounds of a policeman who is not watching the

crowd but instead has been diverted by the act and watches it as the crowd

does. Only in the last shot of the carousel, a transitional shot from day to night,

do we read the words on it in sequence, “Rapid Riding Machine of the Times.”

It’s kind of like the flashing neon “Blonde Girls Tonight” looped message outside

the theater near the beginning of The Lodger which parallels the ticket tape neon

news lights on a building telling us the latest news on the serial murderer dubbed

“The Avenger” and the newspaper headlines sold first thing in the morning on the

street announcing the latest murder.

63

Could also link eco sci--fi films like Silent Running and Sunshine as versions of the ship

as lifeboat.

60th anniversary of Geneva convention—NPR report on the origins of it—had to do with

the creation of different classes of persons—postwar management to create different

classes of civilians, non-combatants—attempt to regulate the violence of the state by

We see the carousel again in The Ring when the Western Union messenger

turns up with the message from the fiancée giving her unwished news of his

success. The carousel is a riding machine as writing machine as cinema

machine, the film as an amusement ride, but not so amusing in its programming

of romance as a freak show. As if to underline the point, Hitchcock has a pair of

Siamese twins shows up at the wedding. (Although ostensibly a romantic

melodrama, The Ring is a lot like Browning’s Freaks, which contains its own

revenge melodrama, and anticipates the much later noir, Nightmare Alley.)

The Ring ends with a shot of a camera filming the fight that ends the film in a

kind of live action version of the initial freeze frame photo of the fight, calling up

the film canister containing a bomb in Sabotage and the weird way the title of the

film canister (Bartholomew’s Murders?).about a serial killer) that Stevie carries on

the bus ends up entering / not entering the diegesis as key by leading the

detective back to Verloc’s theater and hence to the criminal but that the

policeman hero pockets in order to cover up evidence that Verloc’s wife

murdered him, as the policeman hero pocketed a woman’s glove at the scene of

the crime in Hitchcock’s earlier film Blackmail to protect his unfaithful girlfriend

turned murderess, a glove she had dropped earlier at a restaurant before

64

various non-governmental organizations who could prevent the refugee thing from

happening.

Ny Times

US airs alien files kept o immigrants –like the Stasi files—kept on immigrants

dumping him for a date with another at a nearby table; both women are engaged

in dialogue that does not transmit (did she say befor or after? The detetive asks

at the end of Sabotage; the bobby whispers a joke into the ear of the heroine,

who leaves the policeman with the painting of the joker.  In other words,

Sabotage auditions the potential of reading the canister / contents only to have

them inadvertently and unknowingly sabotaged.

10 we may grasp more clearly the way the temporalities of testimony and

archivalization, of the impression, link up media to an uncanny and contradictory

temporality and placelessness (Unheimlichkeit). Derrida introduces a cinematic

metaphor—the screenplay—when commenting on a passage in Maurice

Blanchot's The Instant of My Death in which a young French man is “prevented

from dying by death itself”: as the Nazi officer in charge organizes a firing squad,

the man’s family silently and slowly goes back inside the chateau, “as if

everything had already been done.” This last phrase leads Derrida to comment:

He is the only man and thus the last man, this man already less

young. The Last Man is not only the title of another of Blanchot's

65

The document is lillegible—because of its poor reproduction –it’s really about

genealogy-nothing in the files has been redacted.

Like a census—its’ a border monitoring—a prephotographic archive.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6097427

books. The eschatology of the last man is marked in the phrase

that states in the mode of fiction ("as if") that the end has already

taken place before the end: "as if everything had already been

done." Death has already taken place, however unexperienced [sic]

its experience may remain in the absolute acceleration of a time

infinitely contracted into the point of an instant. The screenplay is

so clear, and it describes the action so explicitly in two lines, that

the program is exhausted in advance. We know everything with an

absolute knowledge. Everything, all of it, has already happened

because we know what is going to happen. We know the

screenplay; we know what is going to happen. It is over; it is

already over from instant of the credits. It begins with the end: as in

The Madness of the Day, it begins with the end. We know it

happened. "As if everything were already done," it already

happened. The end of time. What will happen now will sink into

what was done, as it were backward, into what has already arrived,

that is to day, death. (Jacques Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and

Testimony, 62)

66

The Origins of the Geneva Conventions

ALEX CHADWICK, host:

U.S. Bares ‘Alien Files’ Kept on Immigrants

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/us/12archives.html

The temporality of the narrative is uncanny not because the repressed returns

but because it places testimony and the archive backward in a non-place where

death precedes death, becoming metaphorical visible as a movie screenplay,

specifically, a last man scenario.

We are now in a position to turn to the Scrolls left by members of

Sonderkommando to be exhumed later. We find yet again in these Scrolls a

black box trope left in the exhumed notes themselves, the fantasy that the

accusations will always stand, will always be transparent, will be found by the

right reader (any reader who finds them is presumed to be right). The Scrolls

stand as testimony beyond a legal sense. They are not offered as legal

evidence. Indeed, the notes titled collectively as Scrolls become operative as a

theological model of reading as re-cognition, in other words, a total recall and

retrieval guidance system that transmits the recording of the present to the future

intact. Yet listening at the receiving end of the transmitted notes becomes a

problem of reading because taking it necessarily involves, long after evidence

has to used in trials, a philological and archaeological reconstruction of records

of an event that are not reducible to an absolute moment or single place: they

retrace an impression of what cannot be retraced.

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By JANIE LORBER

“Immigration files containing a wealth of information

collected by American border agents, some of it dating from the late

19th century, will be opened to the public soon and permanently

For this reason, gas chambers (when in operation) have become a hot black

box, regarded both as the epicenter of the catastrophe, the heart of darkness, the

dark room, the “eye of the cyclone, the eye of history,” (106) but also the most

inaccessible space, the reader / viewer locked out by self-appointed guardians of

the archives. Imagining the place and time of the gas chambers in operation is

paradoxically viewed as pornographic (not evidence but the source of sadistic,

perverse pleasure, so that Spielberg’s averted gas chamber turned shower

scene in Schindler’s List is regarded by all parties to the debate as porn) yet also

the most authentic, the best evidence and refutation of revisionists. In the 1980s,

filmmakers have split over the question of the use value of the archive. Whereas

Alain Renais’s Night and Fog (1955) alternates between color photography of

Auschwitz in the present and black and white archival footage of the camps and

Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969) confronted interviewees with

documents from the archive about their collaboration with the Nazis and inserting

archival footage, Claude Lanzman decided to film Shoah ( 198) without using

any archival footage, just filming in color interviews with survivors. By contrast,

Jean-Luc Godard included archival footage in his Histoire(s) du Cinema (1988),

though the film is not a documentary about the holocaust as is Shoah. Despite

68

preserved, providing intriguing nuggets about such famous immigrants

or visitors as Alfred Hitchcock and Salvador Dalí.”

These political problems are also a narratological problem of the order and

ordering of movement (figuring out the sequence or of events to decide of, as the

Germans say, everything is “in Ordnung”). How these political problems also

this split, the anti-archivist Claude Lanzmann and archivist Jean-Luc Godard

share a similarly phantasmatic view of the archive, both imagining the existence

of film footage of the camp in operation. Lanzmann says that if he had found a

Nazi snuff film of gas chambers in operation, he would have destroyed it:

Spielberg chose to

reconstruct. To reconstruct,

in a sense, means to

manufacture archives. And

if I had found an existing

film—a secret film that

showed how three

thousand Jews, men,

women, children, died

together in a gas chamber

at a crematorium II at

Auschwitz, if I had found

that, not would I have

shown it, I would have

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constitute a narratological problem may best be grasped if we turn back now to

the film’s opening title sequence over the single high angle shot of the sinking

ship into the following overhead shot pf the surfacing detritus and then to the

echoing repetition at the ending when another ship sinks. While many films,

Hitchcock’s included, have a loop narrative structure, Lifeboat complicates this

loop by twisting it the very beginning of the film so that a distinction between

destroyed it. I am unable to

say why. It is obvious. (95)

Godard says something similar about the actual existence of Nazi film footage of

the camp, arriving, however, the inverse conclusion that the footage should be

shown (destroying it does not occur to him): “We always discover archives a

long time afterward. [. . .] I have no proof whatsoever of what I am claiming, but I

think that if I worked with an investigative journalist on this, I would find the

images of the gas chambers after about twenty years. We would see the

prisoners entering, and we would see in what state they come out” (cited byDidi-

Huberman, p. 216, n. 73). We perhaps somewhat precipitously hazard from

these two quotations the following generalization: both the archivist and anti-

archivist Lanzman creates a camp with a camp, the two camps being early mirror

opposites: the anti-archivist imagines the archive as the contents of which are to

be burned, a crematorium, as it were; the archivist imagines this crematorium

within the camp (for burning pornographic, “bad” images) while creating another

space, an unmarked urn, for not yet ashed remnants rendered readable. As

Didi-Huberman puts it, “Something—very little, a film—remains of a process of

annihilation . . . it is neither full presence or absolute silence. It is neither

70

norm and rupture is deconstructed: the opening event is a rupture, a rupture that

precedes a continuous semioclasmic aftermath that does not fold over into two,

symmetrically sized sides. The elliptical opening shot puts into question cause

and effect. Lifeboat opens with the sinking of an Allied ship, but the last item

seen in the lengthy first take as the ocean flows to the left is a corpse face down

of a German sailor with a German life preserver--so the sinker has also been

resurrection, nor death without remains. It is death insofar as it makes remains.

It is a world proliferating with lacunae, with singular images which placed

together in a montage, will encourage readability, an effect of knowledge” (167).

We have singled out Didi-Huberman’s Images of Auschwitz and the heated

debate it has provoked for attention because of its indirect impact of the question

of the archive when its use value has to do with the ethics of remembering rather

than refutation. Did-Hubermans interest is saving a legitimate use value for

visual media sheds helps explain the paradoxical ways opponents occupy the

same ground for the same purpose by enabling us to the uncanny effect of the

mediatization of the holocaust in its arche-archivalization. Didi-Huberman

observes acutely the difficulty of reading images, including their reverse sides:

“All this cries out the need for ‘a genuine archaeology of photographic

documents,’ as Clement Cheroux suggests. It could only be done by ‘examining

the conditions of their creation, by studying the documentary content, and by

questioning their use.’ It is a tough program. It would require, for example,

access to the reverse side of images—which recent digitalization projects often

forget about—in order to glean the slightest sign, the slightest inscription that

might better situate the image and identity, as far as possible, of the person who

71

sunk, which is also where the film ends, sort of, but we have to read the narrative

only by looking at the flotsam left on the surface; reading involves depth charges,

as it were, but explosions have no timer attached them, as in the bomb hidden in

a film canister that Stevie caries on the bus in Sabotage).

took the photograph: the question of viewpoint (undoubtedly, Nazi, for the most

part) is capital in this domain” (67). Contrary to our account of Walter

Benjamin’s briefcase, Didi-Huberman’s model of the archive is one of

reassembly: We know that in 1940, just before committing suicide, Walter

Benjamin was able to reformulate, to retrace and reassemble all of his sources,

from the Kabala to Kafka, from Karl Marx to Rosenzweig, in a notion of Erlosung

[redemption] understood from the point of view of the catastrophe and in the

absence of any “salvation” either historical (definitive victory over the forces of

totalitarianism) or religious (resurrection, definitive victory over the forces of

death)” (169). Didi-Huberman cites no evidence about Benjamin here, and he

has to miss the briefcase in order to conceptualize Benjamin’s self-archivalization

as a total retracing and reassemblage, as a redemption that redeems the

dialectic of enlightenment (“’redemption’ is . . . that which enlightens us regarding

the dialectical manner in which both of these states exist on the foundation or

possibility of the other” (170).? [Presumably Didi-Huberman has in mind WB’s

letter to GS.]

Retracing and reassemblage is less a matter of readability, however, as it is a map of the archive made geographically specific. The central point of the debate over the four Sonderkommando photographs taken in Auschwitz turns out not to be the veracity of the photos (everyone agres they are not fakes) but the place

72

Infra-reading and Ex-humanization

If we turn to the opening title sequence and the following shot, we can

recast the terms of Hitchcock debate as one if subjectivation (and identification,

auteur, etc) and desubjectivation as a dynamic between what we have earlier

called “infrareading,” now understood as reading side to side in paralinear

from where they were taken. Didi-Huberman says they were taken from within a gas chamber, looking out from a door. His critics wonder if that is the case; one critic says the photographer looks through a window, not a door. This positivist debate is of less interest to us, however, than the fact that the photos are doubles. Did-Huberman astutely notes that “we are not dealing with one image. In each case of his locations, the clandestine photographer of Birkenau pressed the shutter release twice, the minimal condition for his testimony to account, from two angles at least, for the time that he took to observe. (123).” Rather than critically examine this uncanny doubling, Didi-Huberman reproduces and manufactures it in the way it reproduces the four photos on two pages, in opposite and reverse orders: “To maintain the chronology of the testimony [of David Szmulewski] would suppose the contact prints from the Auschwitz museum were produced from an inverted negative, a lack of technical attention all the more banal since the films in this format carry no single permanent inscription allowing us to distinguish the between the obverse and the inverse of the negative. If such were the case, it would be necessary—while keeping the chronology—to reverse the shots that we are shown in the prints conserved at Auschwitz. The question then remains open” (110). Yet right after acknowledging that we are left with an open question, Didi-Huberman labels the four photos as he thinks they were taken (117), not the ways they may be. The captions the four photos on page immediately following showing says they are “reversed” (118). Retracing, reassemblage, rethinking and turn out to be slightly different instances, then, of the sheer repetition.11 Roger Callois, "The Sociology of the Executioner," in Denis Hollier, ed TheCollege of Sociology 1937-39. reverberated with my Lifeboat chapterand that image in the Benjamin and play book of the toy guillotine

12 Texture of the rumpled newspaper, sort of the like ocean sometimes—perhaps

an image of disfigured monumentality or monumentalization as disfiguration.

13 The manicule—the long history of the index as archiving—the trope of the

finger gets emptied out. See Bill Sherman, Used Books

73

fashion, on the one hand, and reading after, both toward the future and from the

past, or ex-humanization, on the other: anthropomorphism and

anthrompomorphization, as Paul de Man put it is a trope. Here the troping of

detritus, or things shown, with equal amounts of screen time, floating on the

ocean surface, turns, at the end of the shot, into the unexpected thingness of the

trope, when a face down, German sailor’s corpse floats into view. Though a

14 See The 39 Steps (in the train car with the lingerie salesmen and Reverend,

not connecting Robert Hannay to the newspaper they read about him, an

accused murderer) and again at the Scottish farmer's house (the young wife

Hannay mistakes for the farmer’s wife and Hanney exchange glances as the

farmer says grace and opens one eye to see what's going on) and in Shadow of

a Doubt (Uncle Charlie [Joseh Cotton] reads the newspaper). And in Suspicion,

Fontaine identifies Grant by holding up a newspaper with a photo of him in it.

Criminal reading newspaper on his bed and mirror reflection near the start of

Blackmail; cameo of Hitchcock reading on the Tube train in .

15 On atomizing Hitchcock, see Frederic Jameson, Everything You Wanted to

Know about Hitch, . For a critique see Cohen. Cohen’s own ”users guide” is

hardly exhaustive, however, and contains “memes” (various letters) that might be

collected under the heading of initials, for example. Cohen notes the repetition of

the initials “HH” in many Hitchcock films, but he forgets “FF” in Foreign

Correspondent and Hitchcock’s broader use of the same initial for the first letter

of the first and last names. See also Peter Conrad’s Hitchcock Murders,

discussed by Cohen p. 65. For an encyclopedic attempt to catalogue Hitchcock’s

repetitions, see Michael Walker, Hitchcock's Motifs

74

presumed enemy of the Lifeboat’s audience, the sailor’s corpse provides no

emotional relief but instead constitute a s chock—how could supplies from an

English freighter we saw sinking be in the same stream as a dead German

sailor? The corpse appears at the end of a series of things, as another text—

his lifeboat jacket identifies him as a sailor in the “Deutches Reich”--so the folds

not only between opposed sides politically but between things to be recovered

Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, 2005.

16

Morris, Christopher D. The hanging figure: on suspense and the films of Alfred HitchcockWestport, Conn. : Praeger, 2002. book LIBRARY WEST General Collection PN1998.3.H58 M67 2002

. Find the director and other Hitchcock gamesThomas M. Leitch.Author: Leitch, Thomas M.Published: Athens : University of Georgia Press, c1991. bookLIBRARY WEST General Collection PN1998.3.H58 L46 1991Hitchcock's motifsMichael Walker.Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press,

75

and corpses to be recovered by survivors who are also salvagers. Infrareading is

a life and death chain, the first sunken boat an unnamable death boat, that

makes the reading of the human things an exhumation that is ex-human, that

decides what is alive or dead.

c2005.

Deconstruction and the visual arts : art, media, architectureedited by Peter Brunette, David Wills.Published: Cambridge ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, 1994.  ARCHITECTURE/FINE ARTS LIBRARY General Collection N71 .D43 1994 (REQUESTED ARCHI)The encyclopedia of Alfred HitchcockThomas Leitch ; foreword by Gene D. Phillips.New York : Facts on File/Checkmark Books, c2002.

Hitchcock's motifsMichael Walker.Amsterdam : Amsterdam University Press, c2005.17 By describing Cohen’s book on Hitchcock “psychotic,” we mean that Cohen

76

delivers close readings that Zizek and Jameson never mange, as well as an

attention to writing in its broadest sense, including de Man's inscription, and

media, in Benjamin and Kittler’s sense. What happens if the ocular state is

sabotaged, its cognitive programming auto-interrupted as a regime of memory

management (mass culture industry)? . . . This compels a detour to a site in

Hitchcock that had been routinely occluded: an explicit recurrence to marking

systems, cryptomony, letters, “reading,” mnemonic traces, sound, translation

itself, telepathy and telegraphy, postal relays, and the ways these problems take

shape within an order laced by espionage. . . . A spectographics prowls at the

virtual interface of epistemology and event, trope and inscription, translation and

mnemonics, an imaginary era of the book, on the one hand, and one of the

image (Bild), video, the electronic archive, and so forth, on the other. For if the

cinematic is distinguished, always, by accounting in advance for its own

repetitions, it also divides, recedes before itself, re-marks and precedes its own

apparition. . . . When [Hitchcock] uses the term pure cinema, it [sic] has little to

do with the “visual.” The pure movement in question invariably involves citational

networks and temporal folds, mnemonic explosions and cuts, the leads and

telegraphic chains that accompany the cinematic rush or hiatus. This

77

cinemallographics precedes figuration, predates hieroglyphics, traverses aural

and visual chains, coalesces in and erases memory. Cinema knows that it

precedes phenomalization” (247). Rather than an encyclopedia of Hitchcock that

merely accumulates facts when analysis is needed, Cohen suggests,

alternatively, that “one might need, if only to begin with, an awareness that there

appears a signifying agency in Hitchcock irreducible to visual or linguistic

precepts, yet which partakes aggressively of the ‘citational structure’ of the

image. One might rather need a nonglossary, just the beginning of one, to turn

over a first layer of what transformative nodes, puns, repetitions, secret agents,

trace networks—ad these would have to be wired, incessantly, to self-marking

cites of teletechnicity. That is, fundamentally and inclusively, what Hitchcock calls

the “cinematic.” (48) But the price is Cohen pays for replacing an encyclopedia

with what he calls a “user’s guide” made of up various motifs is not merely that

he "relapses" (to use his word) into symbolic readings (candy as excrement in

The Secret Agent; He constantly uses the word “like” or puts a word in scare

quotes such as “bomb” to describe a film, and even cites images from the films to

describe what is beyond the human, form, personification—bubbling water

Manxman and Pyscho are the “bog,” “Mother,” the “prefigural”) and so remains

78

with the trap of Zizek's Lacanian reading, but that, insofar as Cohen moving past

Zizek's symbolic reading, Cohen hallucinates readings of letters (the in Dr. Hartz,

the villain in The Lady Vanishes includes the initials “A” “H,” for “Alfred

Hitchcock”; similarly, the Royal Albert Hall in the remake of The Man Who Knew

Too Much mark the initials “A” and “H,” for “Alfred Hitchcock”;); relies on

metaphors drawn from new media to describe invisible, secret agencies

(interface, networks); sees resemblances between objects that are totally unlike

(a statue and a helicopter); and alternates, often in the same sentence, between

historicist and ontological terms (“predates,” “antefigural,” “before the advent,”

“precessional,” and so on) derived from conflicting discourses of deconstruction

and historicism.?  

Cohen’s text does not advance an argument but repeats and recites the same points. (writing the sameHitchbook twice; writing the same book three times or four times,depending on how you see the Hitchcock book(s).  Compare the passage cited

above to the passage we cite now from Cohen below:

Networks of repetitions, insignia, signature effects, and language

experiments down to preletteral numeral logics run across this work

(xii)

The ‘espionage’ of the teletechnic empire in Hitchcock occurs with

79

the invocation, it seems, of every variant of the linguistic arsenal—

every telegraphy and telephony, teletype and news press, glass-

boothed taxidermy shop and solar church, phonographic relay and

machine of transport, kitchen and chocolate factory. Every

cryptonomy thrown up by the text, including the labyrinth of

Hitchcock’s own signature systems, appears politically inscribed

within a general challenge and overthrow of the ocularcentric state

—one whose technical suppression forms the perpetual

MacGuffuin of the narrative “MacGuffins” in lace. (73-74)? Compare

quotations on p. 347 and 248, the every end of the book and the preface

While one could easily see a repetition compulsion at work in Cohen’s text that

makes for turgid prose and overingenious readings, we take his psychotic texts

to be major contribution to Hitchcock criticism: they open the possibility of

reframing the problem of interpreting Hitchcock not as escaping the trap of the

symbolic but of reading Hitchcock’s filmic “cryptonomies” as psychotic reading, a

psychosis induced by a gap between repetitions of the proper name and of the

graphic mark that mark a failure to bridge inscription and phenomenalization.

As de Man writes at the end of “Hypogram and Inscription”, “the materiality (as distinct from the phenomenality) that is thus revealed [in Victor Hugo’s poem,

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“Ecrit sur la vitre d’une fenetre flamade,” or “Written on the windowpane of a window”], the unseen “crystal” whose existence becomes a certain there and a certain then which can become a here and a now in the reading “now” taking place, is not the materiality of the mind or of a time or of the carillon—none of which exist, except in the figure of prosopoeia (giving face)—but the materiality of an inscription.? Description, it appears, was a device to conceal inscription. Inscription is neither a figure, nor a sign, nor a cognition, nor a desire, nor a hypogram nor a matrix, yet no theory of reading can achieve consistency if . . . it responds to its powers only by a figural evasion which [sometimes] takes the subtly effective form of evading the figural. (51). Cohen too evades the figural literally links the unfinished name “Mar-“ to marks. “it is more than peculiar that the recurrence in almost all of Hitchcock’s film of some variant of a name beginning Mar- has received no critical attention—where the work implants in some name or figure (central or minor), reference to a marking system that acknowledged the entire order of the visual in cinema to be immersed in a marking or marring event” (endnote 5, 250). In asserting the connection of the recurrent “name” “Mar-“ and the graphic system of “marking” through italics, Cohen offers the reader a hallucinatory account of connective repetition that passes from syllable to word and presented as if by way of compensation for Cohen’s frustration of the reader’s demand for closure and sense other critics provide through symbolic readings (readings the reader does not recognize are in fact foreclosed). In Cohen’s text, the hyphen, a typographic mark takes on unintended allegorical significance as a marker of that which separates names, or poetry, from language and concepts, or philosophy, as the unreadable figure that allows for symbolic readings of Hitchcock’s that gain their coherence either at the price of assuming that the films can be reduced to discrete signifying elements atoms, elements, motifs, and so on, that the critic then processes as the unity of the work or at the price of close reading altogether in favor of generalization.? Zizek does not read The Wrong Man at all; Jameson mises the public park as the opposite of the private property that is the open cornfield. On The Wrong Man, see Zizek. Zizek’s reading may be easily countered if one were merely to list scenes simply he fails to observe, much less analyze: the spinning shot in the jail cell, etc). I would also maintain that the last four films, apart perhaps from Topaz, are all much better than they have been credit for being and would constitute a profitable point of departure for reading Hitchcock’s oeuvre, as opposed to the dominant mode, established by William Rothman, who reading

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Hitchcock from The Lodger through Psycho. Lifeboat sank, so to speak, upon its release in 1944 and has yet to receive sustained critical attention. The closest anyone has come is the chapter entitled “Lifeboat” in 87-120, which takes what we are calling the pre-fabricated allegory of he film at face value. Cohen mentions the film in passing in both volumes of Hitchcock’s Crpytonomies, notably in the context of the difficulty of trying to break Hitchcock’s into an encyclopedia. Cohen’s psychotic text remains stranded, perhaps even wrecked, between names and concepts, between poetry and philosophy, the sensory and non-sensory.? intra-sensory circulations [do] not occur between one kind of sense experience and another but between, on the one side, the sensory as such, and, on the other, the non-sensory mind” (de man, 50).18 See Zizek’s intro for an excellent discussion of the various ways in whichcritics

have divided up hitchcock’s oeuvre.

19 See Carl Schmitt , Political Theology and The Concept of the Political and

Walter Benjamin “Critique of Violence,” . For parallels between them, see

Giorgio Agamben, State of Emergency, Homo Sacer and “Taking Exception” in

Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s –abilities. See also Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law”

in Acts of Religion trans Gil. Stanford)

20 On the paradox of the state of exception, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology

and The Concept of the Political and Giorgio Agamben, State of Emergency. For

Schmitt, the paradox is not just a political problem but a reading strategy. In his

reading of Hamlet, for example, Schmitt finds states of exception everywhere.

See Hamlet or Hecuba.

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21 See WB, Origins of German Tragic Drama, and Weber. Agamben has not

written on this very difficult text.

22 In Young and Innocent, the opening theme music is the music we hear in the

dance hall when the killer in black face drummer recognizes the tramp with a

matching zoom (not as close as the extreme zoom of the drummer’s twitching

eyes) and the superimposition of the tramp‘s old clothes over his new duds.

After an instrumental, there’s an interval, an intermission, and then they come

back and play the same theme song again until the drummer, having taken too

much speed, to stop the twitching breaks down. Girl says “deblacken his face”

about the villain in blackface who appears to have passed out so that she may

properly have the champ recognize him.

See also the black character who is made the object of racist fun in the carnival

scene at the beginning in The Ring. The racist laughter is made grotesque by

close up shots of fully open mouths, especially the cop’s mouth.

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Also, lawyer scene with eyeglasses. Cameo of Hitchcock outside the court after

the hero steals the lawyer’s glasses and wears them to escape disguised. The

earlier scene with the attorney, takes off his glasses efore asks him if he is

representing the prosecution. “No, I’m on your side.” Later, girl says “Can’t you

see I’m on their side.” The recognition of the villain seen only in the first scene.

Depends on a break, in this case, the kids getting a break because the drummer

misreads the cops and , in paranoid fashion, thinks they are after him when they

are really after the tramp and the daughter . heroine. And she also repeats her

first aid scene by helping the villain as she had helped the hero after he fainted.

A similar moment involving glasses and H’s cameo occurs in Stage Fright. Also

part of the heroine’s disguise, but she can’t really see where she is going.

23 Nietzsche comes up explicitly in Rope, of course.

24 I am not regarding the film as an exception as Zizek does The Wrong Man (he)

or late Hitchcock, or the British Hitchcock.

25 See Matthew Titlebaum, ed. Montage and Modern Life (1919-1942)

(Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1992) esp. pp. 14-47.

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26 Hitchcock weighs in, as it were, on film theory debate about the indexicality of

the film image, with Hitchcock, pace Bazin, implying that pint is not “precessional”

to film, as Cohen puts it, but a fingering as figuring of hwat is missing. The

detached finger comlements the missing fourth finger in The 39 Steps (that

Hannay mistaken recalled as thethird finger), and the inexplicable disppaearnce

of Mis Froy’s name from the wndow in The Lady Vanishes. Robert Donat is also

unable to transcribe musical notiations and of course fails to remember te tume

Froy taught him to remember at the end of the film; he manages to establish that

is correct only when he saees the lable of hher tea stickon the window, exteriror

and trash, for a moment.

27 See the end of Sabotage where the Chief Detective cannot recall whether mrs.

Verloc’s words flowed or preceded the explosion set off by the now murdered

Verloc’s accomplice: scratching his head, he asks himself “Was it before? Or

was it after?” End of film.

28 For a reading of the initials, "B.M." in Shadow of a Doubt, click here. See Tom

Cohen's brief entry on "bm" in Crytpnomies (vol 1), chapter 2, "A User's Guide."

29 Does this (a)reading put Lee Edelman's anal as opposed to phallic reading of

Hitchcock in the shitter, as it were? Is reading closely a waste of time, a "shitty"

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“The End” marks a ruination of signification that stands outside the film that

precedes it, framed by the black fade and fade in, but perhaps recalling the fade

to black over Willy says “Danke schoen” as well as the first long shot of the

detritus from the freighter just after we see the corpse of the German sailor. The

“The End” sequence marks a figurative monument to ruination and ex-

passing the time, diversion and distraction?

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termination; that is puts into play as an excess the very notion of the terminus,

making it more a terminus, a transfer point back into the film that a way out of it.

This sort of playful excess of signification constitutes form in general, but in

Lifeboat, it indirectly and unknowingly allows for a rethinking of the state of

exception as the norm with no end, but of suspension as not merely of the law

but of play itself. Giorgio Agamben and Samuel Weber have noted a structural

similarity in the logic of Carl Schmitt critique of the law in Political Theology and

Walter Benjamin’s critique of “law preserving violence” in “A Critique of Violence.”

On the basis of this structural similarity, Agamben deconstructs Schmitt into

Benjamin, finding no political difference between the fascist and the Marxist;

seizing on Benjamin’s appreciate letter to Schmitt, Weber supports Agamen’s

reading. In “Force of Law,” Derrida goes even further in a postscript, ignoring

chronology and asking if Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence,” a violence that

cannot always be recognized and may be a catastrophe, not a resolution, is

essentially the same as Nazis’ “Final Solution” hammered out in 1942 and

executed in the death camps until 1945, well after Benjamin died in Port Bou (in

1940).

If we follow Derrida’s lead in reading “A Critique of Violence” by ignoring

chronology, however, and read Benjamin’s essay in light not of the Nazis’ “Final

Solution” but in the light of Benjamin’s late, undated “Concept of History,” and if

we similarly read Schmitt’s Political Theology in light of Schmitt’s later, post-war

book Hamlet or Hecuba, we may see more clearly that their respective

legitimations of specific kinds of violence turn on how they read the ability of the

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sovereign to control the play of law and their adoption of a specific kind of

aesthetic. In an appendix to Hamlet or Hecuba, Schmitt returned to Benjamin’s

Origin of the German Mourning Play and differentiates his reading of Hamlet as a

tragedy of state from Benjamin’s reading of Shakespeare’s play as a “mourning

play,” or failed tragedy. For Schmitt, the state has too little control over what

Benjamin calls “law preserving violence.” In Schmitt’s Hobbesian terms,

government can function well only with a dictator who interrupts the play of

politics as usual, that is to say, politics as theater: the state of exception is a

declaration that politics is serious business, not just a declaration of martial law;

liberal democracies will fail necessarily, according to Schmitt, because they are

too playful, they allow for too little control over law-preserving violence.

For Benjamin, the opposite is the case. In “The Concept of History,” we see

that the state has too much control, that revolution cannot mean merely taking

control of he means of production, or redirecting and ration(aliz)ing the uses of

technology in terms of its utility. All one can do is to hope to stop the train of

history, to interrupt it, to bring time to a standstill and open a new time frame.

Read in this light, Benjamin’s “divine violence,” impossible to recognizable as

such with certainy, looks like an accident. If technology is one of the hallmarks of

modernity, then so is the workplace accident: with the assembly line comes

injuries to worker’s bodies, their fragmentation; by the same token, with modern

warfare comes “friendly fire” and “co-lateral damage” to civilians. For Benjamin,

the state’s excessive, unstoppable control and rationalization of technology can

only be suspended by the politicizing of aesthetics, in Benjamin’s oft-cited

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formulation. Yet while for Schmitt, Hamlet is key because it is “purely” Catholic

tragedy, (not because Hamlet is often a joker), Benjamin adopts a playful

modernist aesthetic (even the Mourning Play is a modernist simulation of

tragedy). What Benjamin means by an anti-fascist political aesthetics at the end

of “The Concept of History” is far from clear, but any attempt to interpret it should,

in our view, address Benjamin’s recurrent interests in toys, as we have seen, and

but film but, more specifically, in Charlie Chaplin, whom Benjamin effectively

reads as a Dadaist.30 Read in Benjamin’s terms, Chaplin in Modern Times, turns

out to be an incredibly playful deconstructor, not only because he doesn’t keep

up with the assembly (even falling into the machine itself and then getting so it

out when it is put in reverse) but because he continues to mime his work

behavior after he gets off and is on his own “free” time: he acts as if he were still

turning screws as he did on the assembly line after when he was at work.

Benjamin interrupts not only the time of seriousness (the plays while at work) but

also the time of play, leisure (he “works” when is not at work). Interruption here

takes the farcical form of hypercontinuous suspension and deconstruction of

oppositions work and play, tool and part, human and machine, seriousness and

playfulness, ability and disability, going forward and going in reverse, competent

and incompetent, not a decisive break from the practices of everyday life taking

the form of espionage, for example. Schmitt adopts the rhetoric of serious

decision, while Benjamin adopts the Dadaist practices of stop and go

suspension.

30 See . See Also Erich Auerbach on Chaplin in Mimesis.

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Go to Jitchcock UFA Expressionist connection, number seventeen

From Number Seventeen

Go into shot below as fake out, then the apparatus and indexicality and the

Nazification of all politics (via Kovac and Connie) and then into stereophonic

paralinear linear—takes place as silent reading and dialogue over it (like

intertiles) or music. The text is foregrounded visually, but sounds and silence

detract or interfere with the audience’s reading of the foregrounded text.

The first life or death decision is suicide—first attempt is blocked—because baby

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has drowned, mother tries to kill herself----and second attempt succeeds. But

she blames the baby, wrapped in black , on Willy, into whose arms it lands, and

begins beating him.

Mrs. Higley, the mother, leads the charge on Willy. Connie spokesperson for the

film (in a speech like Bob Cummings in Saboteur) as he figures the books on the

bookshelf to try to get Peggy’s attention but only gets the Nazi leader’s instead.

Rijkels pun on nazi as not see..

Adaptation of novel—a retrofitting of an earlier media by film—or reshelving operation.

Bankhead's intrusion into the newspaper with her finger echoes her use of the

camera at the start of the film and her typewriter, both means of inscription and

both thrown overboard (what Kodiak calls her "handcuff," or bejeweled bracelet,

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is also lost later to a fish, and transformed through a continuity error into a ring).

Similarly, her blurred face and Sleazak's blurred body echo their linkage through

their command of foreign languages (they both are fluent in English, German,

and French). Moreover, Bankhead is the first on the boat (it's something of a

mystery exactly how she got there; "ladies first" doesn't explain it) and U boat

captain is the last one on. The one continuity error in a fakey movie (all studio

shots of the actors and rear projection footage of the ocean) involves the one

underwater shot in the film, namely, the shot of the fish taking the bracelet turned

into a ring as bait.The depths are not to be trusted (to trust them is to "take the

bait"). Yet the spectator's reception of the surface is set at a paranoic default.

How much is the surface to be trusted? Are we overreading (reading into things)

by reading the film very closely? Or are we underreading, not reading closely

enough?

A simple anti-Hitchcockian feministic criticism (see The Women Who Knew Too

Much) would see here a struggle over power reduced to an instrumental

understanding of communications technology as a weapon (to be wielded like a

club)--who controls it, who writes the script of history and who shoots it.  But

Hitchcock figures that gender struggle much more precisely in spatial terms as a

question of over and underreading that arises from an inability see below the

surface. Note the recurrent use of zooms on significant objects, like the empty

chair of the woman whose baby drowned (was she murdered? or did she finally

succeed in committing suicide?) and Gus's empty shoe after his leg is cut

off). Neither Kodiak nor Bankhead are reliable authority figures in the film, and

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she shares unsavory aspects of the U-Boat captain, especially when she defends

their murder of him on grounds that he would have taken them to concentration

camps.  Her feminism is just as aberrant and queer as Kodiak's macho posing.

Kodiak is initially a worker figure (John Steinbeck as proterlariannovelist). But he

becomes a sort of sellout by the end of the film--Henry Hull grabs somecash

before he gets in the boat--but Kodiak wins the poker game (we don'tknow if Hull

is lying or not)--we don't see his cards. So the deal isat the end that Hull will give

Kodiak the 50k he owes him and Kodiakwill apprently manage one of his plants

with his new but as yet unarticulatedlabor management plan.

Nachlesen / Nachleben

Example of a side to side reading—what closes off reading, taking sides,

necessaity of pararreading, paralinear. There is a paralinear reading, but one

which puts deconstructive pressure on differentiating two sides and imaging a

future free of war and explosion, if in the form of payback.

Before and After Cameo of Hitchcock

reading has been pushed aside in cultural history / material culture studies

by articulating a practice of unpacking that goes from “side to side” rather than a

(non)reading that takes sides or differs with itself (reading with Freud). “Thinking

Through the Box” (neither inside nor outside, but, again, side to side in a

“paralinear” or “para-tactical” manner. The storage unit would be historicize to

situate current work on the archive as funding source, but we would also

deconstruct it—it’s a unit without unicity; it is about configurations: self-storage

allows us to “do things” with things (like the archive).

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The political consequences of this metaphor of reading a-side (side to side is not

a “full” reading that covers all the spaces) will unfold especially clearly in the

Lifeboat chapter. After the ship sinks, by the way, the first object we see is a Red

Cross box. The film begins by generating a problem of taking sides by failing to

cut, showing us a continuous, evenly spaced series of objects (from Red Cross

box to the corpse of German sailor). My account of the film has to do with the

way it forces us to read the surface as aftermath.

Playing cards also have one legigble side. We never learn who really won.

Super as in Over—getting on top, above, periscope a kind detached finger, or a

detached leg—the empty shoe—the same shoe is used to kill U-Boat captain.

Peri-reading

GIve context of the film, how it resists going toward a future that

would break,--the parabolic structure of the film--beginning with blown

up ship and ending it; one shoe drops then the other.  Discussion of

Superman--Ubermensch and what de Man calls the super-reader--Uberleser

getting on top of anything--his spatial metaphor--kind of like Freud's

--impossible topography, but also no destination--serality means

going nowhere. See Anthropomorphism and Trope” on public transportation and

transfer. Correspondence and Obsession—a kind of serial repetition

compulsion that takes one nowhere.

The lifeboat is adrift.

After this moment go to newspaper reading and then underwater--the ring

all we have is the surface

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go back to opening title sequence and step the wake--the serial--the

lack of a fold--film in a  film--no position of exteriority vis a vis

the boat--also the typewriter--no transcription either.

No record of what happens aboard.

Return to close reading of Hodiak's initials and Bankhead's finger

No connection between the indexical, newspaper, and the tattoo (already broken

connection by the camera, the typewriter

no finger writing, tattooed permanent, unlike Ms Froy and trash on

outside of window versus her signature on inside and then blown off by pollution

somehow in the dark.

She even loses the ring from her finger.

The Lynching

Hitchcock and blackface

Black character in the Ring

Blackface in Young and Innocent

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Blackface in To Catch a Thief

Blackman in Lifeboat plus oil smeared characters getting into the boat, and

Canadian woman

African setting for remake of the Man Who Knew Too Much

Half-caste character in Murder!

Black woman and “foreigner” at the openig of Frenzy.

U-571 [Blu-ray]

Uber/Unterlesen:

In the Wake . . . Up Call

The important thing is that the first chapter will serve as an

analytical exposition of turning a thing into a trope (with some

attachments) that will set up the next chapter on Lifeboat as the

consequence of this procedure for close/d reading (namely, side to

side, over and under).

(fleshed out with some other scenes of reading in Hitchcock and maybe Lang

too). Work in glass house scene from Army of Shadows, The Man Escaped, La

Mer (Hitchcock as British lapsed Catholic critics (fake nun in The Lady Vanishes,

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nun at end of Vertigo, et, etc, etc) versus Bresson (Mozart Requiem soundtrack)

–and Bazin—as total Catholics).

I’ll bring in de Man’s “super-reader”-or Ubermensch-Leser—in my discussion of

Lifeboat, since there we have the discussion of the master race—de Man’s

ironized super-reader is the one, for Hitchcock, who necessarily overreads, and

who, by going over or beyond the page, underreads, at the cost of his life. I can

flank the film with Rope (Nietzsche made explicit), no cut, and Stage Fright (Cut

as guillotine).

Up Peri-text

Up, Para-Scope

(continues reading side to side idea and in Lang film of reading backwards (and

upside down from chapter two). Lifeboat puts in play the relation between the

side and the edge in terms of the cut, editing determining length of the take and,

in this film, a stationary shot. The cut produces a kind of reading from the ledge

rather than on a cutting edge, a dangerous place where one looks down or up, as

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in the opening and closing sequences of Vertigo, Mt Rushmore in N by NW, the

hotel ledge in Foreign Correspondent, the church tower in The Man who Knew

Too Much (first version), etc., etc. Survivors in the boat as Nachleben,

uberleben, life beyond life (that perhaps should have died).

Other related titles or subheadings: “S(h)elf-Help”; “Reading Aside”--Deals with

the way

And the end of chapter Lifeboat, add two versions of landlocked lifeboats, the

glass structure in the library of Army of Shadows and the Coffin at the end of

Missing (a film about U.S. citizenship, in many ways). Brief discussions of both

films to elaborate on the complexity of close(d)reading and the politics of

resistance inside Resistance whether the book / reading / eating room inside the

library reading is open or closed.

I was watching Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows again last night

(it's like a work of art masterpiece version on an action movie) and

noticed two strange moments in which a book written by the leader of

the Resistance group in the film, who happens to be a catholic priest, is shown in

close up.  The first shot of this book is seen as a flashback, the last of, I

believe, four flashback shots, as the hero is being marched by two rows of Nazi

guards to be executed along with his fellow prisoners, who have just had their

Last Smoke, using up the hero's remaining cigarettes.  Only one prisoner

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crosses himself, however, before they get up to go.  The music gets kind of

Catholic as the prisoners are being marched through prison and the hero gets his

voice-over and we see the book.  Now I thought that the title of the

book Transfini et Continum "pre-echoed," as it were, QM's conception

of "transfinitude."   I thought, "what a strange coincidence, sort

of." It trns out that Melvilele ahd the books, who were writtenby a real

philosopher and member of the Resitance, withte fkae name of the preist on the

covers.  Just a random connection somewhere that seemed to confirm to me, as

crazy it was to think it, that I was right about QM's covert

anti-Semitism.  But as nothing more than a cool moment, and I would never say

anything about it.   But after the hero escapes, there's a scene with

him in hiding putting on a table the five books he has to keep him

company, all by the same theologian / Resistance leader (who is

merciless when it comes to killing their most effective members if

they are caught by the Nazis.  He is Jesuitical, and his merciless is

ironized by the hero.)  But here's the thing.  All of the titles are

about math, set theory, and formalism and logic, all written before

the war, the hero says in voice-over.  The Transfini book comes last,

and then there's a shot of the hero's hand on the stack of five books (there are

several great shots of hands in the film, one when the heroine takes the hero's

right hand in both of hers for a few moments by way of consoling him and

another when another hero holds one cyanide capsule in the wounded (by SS

torture) palm of his hand, shot in close up, and offers the capsule to a

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dying fellow prisoner while lying (the hero saying he has two capsules when

we’ve just seen that he only has one). The film cuts away before we know if the

offer is accepted or not by the nearly dead man.

I still do not know what to make of the book shots, especially the

fact that only the book shot in the execution scene is the only one

that is NOT a flashback (all of the other shots have appeared earlier

in the film, so it's kind of a montage "seeing your life before your

eyes before you die" kind of moment, except that it is quite drawn

out.

But the film inadvertently offers a frame, perhaps because of its

delayed release, for Badiou and QM as Catholic stinker / thinkers whose

writings are out-of-date, attempts or set up theories allowing

philosophy to go back before WWII but without going back to Sartre:

in the film, theology prefigures the Resistance, then becomes the

Resistance, the remains, remainder, and legacy of the Resistance

but only if the books remain unopened stacked neatly, and held in

place by a comforting hand. Theology is thus the resistance to the Resistance.

The stack of books takes us back to the lunch scene in the theologian’s library

(the priest closes books during this scene, puts one back on a shelf) with the

lunch in the glass wooden box.

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Maybe I've been reading too much Perec.

One odd thing is that the books were published AFTER the war, so the

dates are wrong, and the covers are indeed fakes.

There must be something in that film about set theory and

narrative--being unable to resist, or digging yourself deeper into

evil the more you try to resist (the hero murders a traitor, just as

another member of the Resistance murders a woman member of the

Resistance at the end of the film).

There's almost no on-screen violence, as if it were set apart, like the glass house

within the library, which the shot by shot voice—over makes the space seem

large rather than small.

A scene in Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows (1969).  Two brothers, neither

of whom knows the other is working for the Resistance) have breakfast in a

little glass room in the middle of the room, a personal library, because it's easier

to heat that room.  But there's something strange about the glass house in the

library here (one brother is a priest and he’s the one who lives here) that seems

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well worth pursuing (glass offering no resistance) as a scene of non/resistant

reading.

“Living in a Glass House”—Jesus’s admonition against rock throwing—as a

reading of the glass house scene in Army of Shadows (translated into a new

historicizing admonition: “don’t throw stones at those who didn’t resist, because

those who did resist even resisted the resisters closest to them without either

knowing it and in other cases collaborated with other resisters.”)

To live in a glass house is a revolutionary virtue par excellence. It is also an

intoxication, a oral exhibitionism, that we badly need.

Surrealism, 2:1, 209

Also the telephone booth scene in Blackmail when the couple think they are

speaking privately but have been heard or read their lips by the blackmailer

standing outside. In a later scene outside the booth, we can only hear some of

what the cop says when takes the call.

In the Hitchcock chapter Jean-Pierre Melville's La silence de la mer as a kind of

counter-account of resistance from within occupied territory--the film is about a

"good" German officer who billets himself in a rather ice house in which a man

and his niece live. He talks, they never acknowledge him, until he leaves. But

it's all about partial reading (literally and metaphorically) and the mirror stage of

reading, the impossibility of moving into a symbolic where you could confess or

absolve (each other) of war crimes (committing them or not resisting them, failing

to execute them). The film ends literally with the French uncle and niece in the

dark. It also begins with a title sequence that follows from reading the novel the

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film adapts out of a suitcase. And it ends with a shot of the last two pages, the

camera moving quickly from one to the other, and then FIN on the last page. I

might also bring in my reading of a scene from Melville's later and more

controversial Army of Shadows.

During his vacation in Paris, he doesn’t talk to any French. No Gremans and

French talk to each other. Even the uncle does not talk to the typist or the

German when he goes to the Kommandatur’s office.

La Silence de la Mer—reading literally out of a suitcase—the opening shot is a

man walking on a street and dropping off a suitcase by a man standing there.

The standing man picks it up, opens it, reveals under the clothes resistance

newspapers and then underneath them and to the left sa coy of the book La

Silence de la Mer. The opening credits show the dedication page, to a “poet

assasine.”

The last two pages are shown as the last two shots of the film, first part of a page

dated October 1941 and the a printer’s notice dated February 10, 1942, and the

text shows the same line heard on the soundtrack “And I was cold.” So now we

see that the voice-over was a record of a transcription. Then we get to the final

page, with publication history, and dates, and then the turning of the last page,

and FIN.

The German becomes a good German by not blowing up Chartres and he is also

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linked to Notre Dame in the first shot of his confession of his trip to Paris.

The shot of the woman’s scarf with the two hands separated is the inverse of

shots of her hands knitting, or holding and then letting fall the ball of string.

Adieu is the only word she speaks.

Is the image of her scarf quoted by Godard at the end of 1a of Histoire(s) du

cinema when he shows the separated hands? The hands look like mirror images

more than Michelangelo’s creation scene in the Sistine Chapel, closer to

Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet crawling around the walls and the mirror.

See Derrida Adieu. And then

The date of Treblinka in the film is wrong (see Ginette Vincendeau’s booklet to

the Eureka Master’s of Cinema DVD. The date is superimposed over the photo

of Hitler.

Other scene at the Kommadntur’s office—very odd because we don’t see

symbols long or entirely. Just after the poster of Hitler comes into the frame, we

dolly into to a window and see the flag with swatiska hanging form it, not in the

shot we saw of the uncle entering the building. There is also the long held shot of

the buildings isceneoutside anotherwndow. Espicallybizarre at the endof htefilm

is cutting back andforth—four times—between theuncle andGerman before he

leaves. I the last shot, just before the fade to black, e brings his arms to his side

and we see his hands. He had said that he realized a man’s hands tell as much

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about as his face because a man can control them even less easily.

The film ends with Fin after a literally partial reading of the book, or a partially

readable book, only part of which is delivered in voice-over. The text and image

again do not match.

Two earlier scenes also show partially readable texts: the first is Interdict aux

Juifs, only half-seen on the frame, and the second is the newspaper folded up as

a bookmark for the German office in a book by Anatole France, where France

seems to be a pun, and no title is seen. The newspaper is folded to highlight the

word “Disobedience’ and then a handwritten notation taken form France is written

on the newspaper as a k kind of annotation—It is a good thing when an officer

refuses to follow criminal orders.”

So it is a resistance newspaper, apparently, and the officer and the Uncle

exchange glances, the adjutant pauses as he enters on this silent exchange.

The film is perhaps about silent witnessing. The woman is the most mute, but all

are muted. The last panning shot of the two faces in close up, the niece and

uncle in profile and a kind of silhouette is also silent, and the voiceover says that

they continued to be silent. (earlier we see her knitting, her face lit, the

background all black. SO you have to read, and resistant reading is partial

reading, seeing what is cut out, what is highlighted, what is being sold to you—

the suitcase looks partly like a salesman’s box of stuff—like secret agent as

traveling salesman—and what is right in front of you but you don’t look at—like

the too much light of the niece’s “burning” brightly lit eyes that the German

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shields himself from, like the angle the German looks at over the fireplace and

the uncle also looks at and then later after the German looks at it again, when it

is out of the frame, we get close ups of the uncle, German, and niece, then a

zoom in to the angle, then a quick cut away (whereas we see the Hitler photo a

long time). The German becomes a tourist, an innocent. The last scene

involving reading is after the German finishes his flashback about his tour, after

we earlier saw him take the tour, and a lot of the footage, or nearly al of it is

silent. The German is obviously cut in to other footage. Always low angle shots

with no background. When he finishes he talks about the plan the Germans

have to crush the French spirit and then the camera tracks along the book shelf

showing a number of books, the most prominent of which is Rousseau’s two

volume Confessions. Not an accident that it is not there are two volumes.

There’s an uncanny element in the film—the photo of Hitler—another mute image

as we get a voice-over with no mention of Hitler.

The “dark” ending, literally and metaphorically, put the French in the dark. The

imperative to disobey cannot be uttered directly--spoken, but only placed in a

bookmark on a paper in a book, like the suitcase as box enclosing the book only

now the book is the box—a place for the resistance to resistance—an open book

as opposed to the opened Shakespeare (weird analogy between the Scots’ view

of Macbeth as illegitimate King of Scotland and the French of Petain as illegit

President of Vichy France), and the closed books on the shelves, a place that is

both internal and external, only partially readable.

There’s another scene of partial reading when we see from outside the house,

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low angle, at night, the German looking through travel books for France, ending

with Paris. The top ,about Isle de lat Cite is cut off. Also the newspaper at the

start is dated July 1942, but the movie begins with the title 1941.

There are also two mirror scenes—one when the uncle is actually looking at a

mirror, his eys down, and camera dollies and out and we see that the image is

his reflection. He has heard the harmonium and mentions that it had stayed

open at the same page as it was before the catastrophe. So it is a historical

marker. But he thinks his daughter is practicing again (he is happy) but it is the

German playing. Later, when we see the uncle in a German’s office, we see him

see the German in uniform in a mirror and see the German . reflected in the

mirror looked startled. He then kind of bows and says nothing.

He also reads the Treblinka report (not shown to us) and the list of people who

have been executed in punishment for the shooting of a German officer. That ext

is complete. We see the entire list.

The double, mirror reflections make reading into an issue of confession and

excuse—no one can confess the other, no one is the priest who keeps the

secrets of the other—both sides are incriminated, the German who talks and the

French who do not. The German crazily asks to be assigned military duty so he

can return to the front. Seems suicidal.

We know he will not disobey his orders, even if criminal, nor can he tell the uncle

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and niece to resist. But they have a tacit understanding, an understanding that

must remain unspoken and unsaid, even in voice-over. There’s still a mirror

stage, a misrecogniton irreducible to interior pathos, domestic space.

The German also looks at the globe, then reaches for a book and puts it back.

We see the double constellation and the score still open above the harmonium.

There is a moment of canonization of the library—whereas earlier he had said

that the Germans had Goethe, the English, Shakespeare, but the French couldn’t

decide among their greats who was the greatest. Now the canon is a collective,

a national spirit. Hence the uncanniness of the theological here—it is a spirit that

haunts.

Paratactical Reading as Unreading?

Lacoue-Larbarthes’ Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry is a very subtle critique

of Heidegger “archi-fascist” thought and analysis the “infinitely reticent complicity”

(47) of Adorno's brutal critique of Heidegger (in Adorno's "Parataxis" essay and

Jargon of

Authenticity).  It’s clear that LL has to route his argument through Hoelderlin

because of MH’s take on German poetry, but it’s not clear to me why he needs

Badiou. (Moreover, he says “it is necessary to make an exception of Hoedlerlin”

30.)

I wondered why LL is invested in replacing poetry with mytheme (p. 40) and why

he reconciles so easily with Badiou, who wants to equate suture with mytheme in

the name of a non-violent reading of poetry and also in the name of philosophical

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philosophy (the matheme) shorn of aesthetics / poetry (p. 81). The convergence

of suture and mytheme is not only possible (Badiou) but probable (-L).

In the postscript, which comes after the conference and a few days later in the

form of a letter—a strange kind of extension, or posting happening here—Badiou

seems to want to save philosophy from poetry and thereby get rid of Heidegger

and deconstruction too. Hence Meillasoux’s attack as apostle and prophet on

Derrida in After Finitude. Hence the suture is a kind of amputation, a privation of

philosophy that is the cost of its purification (set theory). So LL’s “mytheme” may

be doing a more subtle sort of operation, a wounding that is a separation and

opening—by saying that Heidegger is discussing the mytheme, not poetry, MH

saves poetry for philosophy, and German Romanticism from national

aestheticism (sur-facism and archi-fascism) and Wagner’s total work of art

oriented to the future and giving “the people the language and the figures in

which to speak itself and recognize itself, that is ism to identify (with) itself” 31) in

the exception of WB (“the single case,” 34), whose essay on FH precedes MH’s

book, and the MH echoes even if he never read it. So philosophy and poetry can

be reunited in WB and divorced in MH as a different kind of distancing from MH’s

or Ent-furing. Or, as LL puts it early on: “After two thousand years of

versification . . . poetry attempts to respond once again to this vocation that it is

more than political—I would say: archi-political. But perhaps it does so to its

own detriment and misfortune, if this vocation is definitively dictated to it by

philosophy.” (26).

So the dictamen is for LL perhaps a troping of definitive dictation—a synethis, as

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he says, of Dichtung and Dictare—that lays out the Kantian precondition of

poetry, not poetry itself, as poetry’s inner form. This is the paradox that

Hoelderlin’s poems disclose in their poetry—the conditions of poetry that are

partly philosophical but not “definitively dictated” by philosophy. LL opens up a

dialogue between philosophy and poetry—suture as not a cutting of dialogue or a

return of philosophy to its origins (which only go back to Heidegger on the

Sprung, leap in Contributions to Philosophy and elsewhere) and Walter Benjamin

on the Ursprung. Hence the word “convergence” (81) in the postscript too to

describe the similarity between suture and mytheme. The suture is not the

same as the mytheme, but almost the same (they may be sad to have an

uncanny relation—difference in their sameness). Because the repressed for both

writers is deconstruction (no mention of Derrida on Heidegger or WB; no mention

of de Man on MH on FH). LL does mention “deconstruciton” in quotation marks

(p. 78) but uses it to mean “unworks” and in relation to WB, whose comments at

the end of his essay on FH and “princieple of sobriety . . . as that which dictates

to poetry its proper task. At the end of his essay, B writes the following: its

political, and more than political, significance should be immediately apparent”

(78). What kind of deconstruction is this? “immediately apparent?” Totally

naïve. What does and more than political mean? What is the surplus her that

ispased over with reticence (so clear it need not be said)? Is LL doing what he

asks if Heidegger did to FH, namely, “refused to read” (31) WB, LL even refusing

to read WB’s refusal to read the second of the two versions of FH’s poem)? Is

keeping Heidegger in play at the end (p. 80) the cost for LL of keeping an

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un(w)holy Jew as non-Jew (not theologico-political but theologico-poetic)? “There

is no way to attach any theological-politics to this failing theologico-poetics. No

historical mission of the Poem or the Hymn . . . [WB] will make Hoelderlin the

secret—eccentric—center of Romanticism” (79). I don’t think LL ever mentions

that WB was a German-Jew. And isn’t FH a case of poetry becoming literally

un/readable in its revisions, the late Hoedlerlin going unread by everyone

because it is regarded as ravings of a madman?

This law governing the Ent-furing or distance of myth . . . would permit us to

glimpse the appearance, in the greatest poems, of this nonmythological and non

mythic figure, since there is no Gestalt that is not by definition mythic or

mythological. Every great poem would thus tend toward a figure that is

absolutely paradoxical in that this figure would be sustained by nothing but the

very lack and default of that which ought to support it.” (52) Yet MH is a

necessary remainder, a kind of coffin (80), in which LL can incessantly s/lay to

rest WB on German soil and preserve poetry as the “archi-political”(26)— Or at

least in what LL calls the West (that is not geographical) and keeping WB out of

theology and keeping MH in the position of forever having to pay off a debt to

WB. MH becomes a weak power that enables WB’s weak power—but LL’s

weakening of MH, MH’s weakness once LL has divorced MH’s theologico-potiics

from theologico-poetics), also makes his power weaker and thus stronger than

WB’s weak messianism. Heidegger becomes a spectre, the uncanny

persistence of theological in the political.

Perhaps LL needs the postscript—the posted partial postscript that takes the

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form of a reply to a post-script sent to him by AB, into another double the two

who think the 1930s together. For Badiou the suture is the detached; for LL, the

dictamen, not the mytheme, seems to be that which can “in no way attach” (79)

politics to poetics.

Mythological is about unity; mythic is about internal tensions within the unity 951-

52).

I ended up with the following series of undecidable (for me) questions about LL's

"paratactic" reading, his own paradoxical " reticent complicity" (47-49) with

Heidegger, his detour through Heidegger (via Adorno's essay on MH,

"Parataxis") to get to WB on F Hoedlerlin and the “dictamen” (“evokes kinship of

dichten and dictare” (51); the task of the duty “located somewhere between

rendering and abandoning, giving over and giving up” (51); inner form as material

content and material truth, precondition of poetry) after leaving MH behind in the

dust.  Even the last sentence is devoted to WB, after a paragraph linking MH and

WB.  Is LL doing what he says TA didn't do, going as far as TA should have done

and blowing Heidegger up (and saying what needs to be said by locating in MH's

thought a politics of archi-fascism rather than sur-fascism), but then only

apparently saving MH's thought from his politics by first condemn it all the more

powerfully (MH wants to speak the truth of fascism) after having seemed to

defend it from accusations of Nazism, etc., (in terms of what he did or didn’t do,

though condemning Heidegger for never speaking adequately about 1933-45 or

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asking to be forgiven). By remaining within an aesthetic theory / negative

dialectics that equate poetry and philosophy with truth, TA remains caught up in

MH’s mythological (not mythic) political thought of the nation as the future to be

fulfilled, of theologico-political account of the poetry to think philosophy (in

theologico-poetic terms). (Heidegger’s “political preaching” [83]; “Heidegger’s

theologico-political preaching” (63); see also similar disparagements of

Heidegger’s “sermonizing”; yet see also the assertion followed by its negation,

and the opening of a withdrawal from politics to ontology (essence): “Heidegger’s

political preaching is encrypted: It is not a political preaching, and in order to

hear it, it is necessary to take a step beyond—or rather back from—the political”

[83]) LL can afford to end his book by align MH’s thought with WB’s in a kind of

meaningless gesture of generosity before ending with a tribute sentence to WB

because MH has already been eviscerated, so the MH and WB linkage has no

charge in it, no depth charge, no debt, no danger, just a bomb defused).  Has LL

turned TA's "parataxis" essay into a paratactical reading of MH’s political thought

in order to finish the job TA started but didn’t finish?  Is LL then only pretending to

be complicit, whether he knows he is pretending or not? 

Or, is LL truly attempting to salvage Heidegger's by going around ("para") it via

Adorno, by conceding TA's critique while then extending it, acknowledging LL’s

own complicity, in order not to demolish MH but to read his tainted (archi-fascist)

political thought (inscribed in his writings, 66) as one gesture, a gesture others

have had to repeat, including TA and LL), of complicity and reticence (TA repeats

MH, in that case)?  I tend to go with the former reading, especially given that he

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repeats Agamben's move (or vice versa) in Homo Sacer almost word for word

when using WB to Klossowski on Bataille to condemn Bataille as a (sur-)fascist

(p. 66).   If this is the case, there is no archi-ethical politics to be distinguished

from the archi-fascist politics.  Yet the book's thought is so subtle and careful,

even temperate in tone and so patient, that I wonder if the book is better than LL

knows it is, that it opens up a paratactical reading of its own parataxis and

paratactical maneuvers in order to render itself unreadable (undecidable--to

make of paratatics a kind of de Manian resistance to reading as reading, a

reinscription of reticence about complicity).  It does kind of shock me that he

does not address de Man's brilliant essay on Heidegger and Hoelderlin  in

Blindness and Insight--perhaps that repression is necessary, that is LL's

reticence about complicity, a reticence and complicity not totally reducible to the

archi-ethical because it has no beginning and no ending but always depends for

its force on its paratactical mobility. 

I was thinking all this makes Derrida's turn to the Marrano all the

more compelling as a figure of archivalization and self-storage (as

opposed to the Muselmann, who is beyond archiving).

Vide-o

Vide as in empty, a void, avoiding seeing, blandness in the archive, about the

image about the paradox of making a film without any film in it except for what

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the director has filmed, as in Lanzmann’s are, perhaps though a case of

blindness and insight..

Spare Life

Baidou on suturing Philosophy from four extra-philosophical concerns: politics,

science (positivism)—pure philosophy is the matheme for Badiou. Badiou’s

concern with the suture another kind of philosophical attachment disorder. See

Lacoue-Labarthe quoting Alain Badiou, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, p.

81: I have always conceived the suture as an operation carried out by

philosophy, in some ways grafted onto certain aspects that have been unilaterally

detached and isolated from the post-Romantic poem”

This is the exact opposite of what Agamben says he is doing—NS is not an

exception and Agamben is getting a problem that is historical but not an

ahistorico-philosophical argument.

Following Agamben’s concern with the immediacy of life as political, we are

saying that media are not immediately political either, pure instruments to

organize and capture bare life.

One other thought on Agamben's “Muselmann.” It’s very interesting that the

word is not translated into English as "Muslim." Though Agamben is very careful

to trace the anti-Semitic etymology of "holocaust" in Remnants and to justify his

having dispensed with it, he does not confront the problem of anti-Arabism in the

camps, the way soon to be dead Jews, living dead, were classified by other Jews

as Muslims. Nor does Shoah deal with Jewish contempt (the contempt of Jews

in the camps) for the Sonderkommando, the "worst of the worst" (like the

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Judenrat, only in the camps themselves) who helped ready the victims, gas them

and cremate them.

Note David Mamet’s homcide (1991), a lirary scene in which the librarian

decodes Grosfa for the detective, whois also asked what is he if doesn’t know

howto rad Hebrew whenshowna page about conceling the name in the Book of

Esther. Mosad sets him up and tries to blackmail him. At the end of the film, he

has been taken off homocide after being shot twice. The crucial scene for my

purspoes is the toy train store that serves as a front for a NeoNazi organization,

complete with banners and printed materials in a back room. The detective takes

a toy train and smashes a glass case and then sets the bomb the Mosad agent

gave him, who got all the documents that the librarian would have given the

detective but didn’t because “212” acked for them. The place blows up on his

way to the car waiting for across the street. But Mosad really wants the list of

names (apparently all Jews) he turned in as evidence in the candystore murder

case, claiming those people are vulnerable. But they are lying because it turns

out that two anti-Semitic black kids shot her for her “fortune” in the basement.

Grandma was a gun runner, her son has a lot of pull with the mayor. The

detective is a secular Jew, but the victim of anti-Semitic slurs. Grosfa turns out to

be part of a name for pigeon feed with the last letters torn off. There’s a shot of

the detective next to the word “pigeon” on a roof fairly early on, so you know he is

the mark being set up. There’s a also a passport scene in which teo detectives

sign out a fake passport inorder to con a wanted black man into showing up at a

place where they can arrest him. He shoots the detective twice (he has lost his

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gun again, nad you could see that one coming since he never repaired his

holster) and then is shot by a SWAT guy.

What is the not yet read for us?

Return to this question in relation to the archi-fascism of Heidegger and Heidegger’s own sense of the future anterior of reading.

"The dying of Others is not something

that we experience in an authentic

sense; at most we are always just

'there-alongside.' . . . By its very

essence, death is in every case mine."

--Martin Heidegger, Being and Time,

paragraph 47.

By speaking of a death that, in order to

be irreplaceable and because it is

unique, is not even individual—“never

individual,” he says—Blanchot puts

forward a statement that would appear

troublesome even to the Jemeinigkeit,

the “mine every time,” which according

to Heidegger essentially characterizes a

Dasein that a announces itself to itself in

its own being-for-death.”

--Jacques Derrida, Demeures, 511. The yet to be read and the future anterior of the nationalization /

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theologizalization of the bureaucratic archive. I think we aresomewhat explicitly resisting a secular account of the archive as astate (non-sacred, modern) bureaucracy, information gathering, datamining ripping,FBI, national security, warrantless searches).

2. Freud and Derrida both want to resist the closure of he archive inreligious and nationalistic terms while keeping in play or open thepossibility of an essentially hope-less Jewish future.

Heidegger as the real beginning as homeless (uncanny) and violent. Lacoue-

Labarthes, p. 7

LL repeats Agamben’s critique of Bataille via WB to Klossowski—doing the work

of fascism, p. 66 in speaking of Heidegger’s “archi-fascism”, which “has nothing

to do” with Breton’s 1934 “sur-fascism.” WB’s remark discloses MH’s “archi-

fascism”: “Heidegger’s discourse against ‘real fascism’ had no other ambition

than to liberate the truth of fascism.” (66) Heidegger

“For this is the tragic for us: that packed into some simple box [Behaeter], we

very quickly move away from the realm of the living, and not that—consumed in

flames—we expiate the flames which we could not tame” Hoelderlin cited by LL,

p. 54

Dis-figuration, pp. 54-55

Dis-figuration . . . is the very failure of the figure, which is to say the purest

affirmation of the il faut. Put another way, dis-figuration is the retreat or

withdrawal of the figure. . . . neither does dis-figuration signify the pure and

simple disappearance of the figure: It designates its becoming absent (because

henceforth impossible), and it does so by way of what this becoming absent

leaves as an ineffaceable trace. Dis-figuration affects everything within the order

of the transport, as Hoelderlin says in French, when he elaborates the so-called

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formal or structural conception of tragedy and introduces the important notion of

the ‘caesura.’”(55)

Heidegger has a “mission” (66). He preaches, sermonizes. Hoelderlin does not.

Hoelderlin “had too great a sense of transcendence , even if the latter offered

only the faceless face of its withdrawal. And especially, ruining all the preaching,

there is the final disorganization of the work, the reworkings that reach the limits

of the readable, the prosaic literalization of the discourse, as well as the fierce

attack on the hymn and the desolation of the last poems. All of which Heidegger

refused to read or—who knows?—did not even see . . .” Lacoue-Labarthes, (31,

emphasis and ellipsis in the original).

The phrase “il faut” the title of LL’s second caper is used twice in the mass

murder / jail scene in Army of Shadows, as they walk down the hall.

See Lacoue-Labarthe’s discussion of the dictamen in “The Courage of Poetry” as

the Kantian condition for WB of poetry, of inner form as material content and as

truth content68–80.

The dictamen is two concepts: first, the unity of task and testimony and, second,

the Gestalt, or figure, “the figure is for each poem the mode of presentation and

of articulation of its inner form or content.” (72).

Gestalt refers to myth, but not to the mythological (73; 74) “The mythic—which is

the dictamen, or which the dictamen is—is experienced itself in tis configuration

or in its figurability. This is why the poem is at bottom a gesture of existence—in

view of existence. The poem, to remain with Benjamin;s vocabulary, is a figure of

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life. Which amounts ot saying that life is poetic.”

74.topos, 75

WB: The princniple of the dictamen as such is the supreme sovereignty of

relation” 77)—all based ona a read ong of WB’s early essay (Vol 1 of haravrd

UP) entitled “On Two Poems by Friedrich Hoelderlin”

WB deconstructs or “unworks” the mythological and theological (78)

“In other words, there is no way to attach any theologico-politics to this failing

theologico-poetics.” (79)

dictamen is about an “archi-ethics of poeticizing”

But LL ends by refusing to totally differentiating MH and WB: “In reality, for both

Benjamin and Heidegger [who is still caught up in mythological and success

rather than failure of the mythic]—but certainly not in the same way—intransitivity

an d transitivity do not cease to encroach upon one another. And it is a matter, in

both cases, of what poetry testifies to in attesting to itself as such, tat is, in

attesting to itself in its relation to truth, in saying the truth. Is it a (modern)

vocation to martyrdom? Courage itself? Yes, but in the mode of failure.” (80)

Life and poem, p. 72-73

Testimony of a truth or of the truth, p. 71

WB and Heidegger part of the same epoch (68), just as Adorno is complicit with

MH as well in suturing philosophy to poetry as mytheme (44-51)

Similarly, historians are bio-biblo-processers—they use fragments/ documents in

the archive in certain ways to tell their micro or macro histories. So are

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anthropologists who use the raw data of their field notes.

Only a short chapter of Memoires des camp covers 1945-1999. See Spectral

Evidence for more in memorial / art about the camps.

Life and Death Certificates

By putting pressure on Agamben's account virtual bare life as mediatized

bare life, we could rethink the opposition

he too quickly draws between Nazi biopolitics and Heidegger’s Dasein as

an existential analytic by taking up the question of technology in

Heidegger that Derrida does not address at the end of Aporias. And connect it to

hiedegger saying the essence of technology is not technology, that techne has

nothing to od with technology but with the work of art.

In “Gesclecht: the Hand,” Derrida reads Heidegger as anti-technology, especially

modern technology; ditto his “Drugs” interview in Points—technology is an add

on for Heidegger, Derrida says).  This is a common reading (see Hubert Dreyfus;

also J. Goldberg in, I think, Shakespeare’s Hand, or maybe Writing Matter).  But

we could take up the frequent pairing of Benjamin and Heidegger (post-scriptum,

last page of “Force of Law,” end of Lacoue-Labarthe's Heidegger and the Politics

of Poetry and end of Arendt’s memoir on WB in the intro to Iluminations) in order

to arrive at a more nuanced reading of Heidegger and WB on mediatized, virtual

bare life, the standstill / gestus of epic theater as opposed to bios that departs

from or precedes bios, as in Agamben's account.

Jean-Pierre Melville's La silence de la mer the other day and have taken a 

bunch of notes  on it and image captures from it.  I thought I might put it the

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Hitchcock chapter as a kind of counter-account of resistance from within

occupied territory--the film is about a "good" german officer who billets himself in

a rather ice house in which a man and his niece live.  he talks, they never

acknowledge him, until he leaves.  but it's all about partial reading (literally and

metaphorically) and the mirror stage of reading, the impossibility  of moving into a

symbolic where you could confess or absolve (each other). The film ends literally

with the French uncle and niece in the dark.It also begins with a title sequence

that follows from reading the novel the film adapts out of a suitcase.  And it ends

with a shot of the last two pages, the camera moving quickly from one to the

other, and then FIN on the last page. I might also bring inmy reading of a scene

from Melville's later and more controversial Army of Shadows.

Derrida's response (entitled Marx & Sons) in Ghostly Demarcations.  Here it is:

What if, to conclude, we floated the idea that not only Spinoza, but Marx himself, Marx the liberated ontologist, was a Marrano? A sort of clandestine immigrant, a Hispanic-Portuguese disguised as a German-Jew who, we will assume, pretended to have converted to Protestantism, and even to be a shade anti-Semitic? Now that would really be something! We might add that the sons of Karl knew nothing of the affair  . . . they would have been Marranos who were so well disguised, so perfectly encrypted, that they themselves never suspected that that's what they were--or else had forgotten the fact that they were Marranos, repressed it. denied it, disavowed it.  It is well known that 'real' Marranos as well. to those who, though they are really, presently, currently, effectively, ontologially Marranos, no longer even know it themselves. Claims have also been advanced to the effect that the question of marranism was recently been closed for good. I don't beleive it for a second.  There are still sons--and daughters--who, unbeknownst to themselves, incarnate or metempsychosize the ventriloquist specters of ttheir ancestors.p. 262

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