Dossier Chris Marker: the suffering image 144384182X, 9781443841825

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Dossier Chris Marker

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image

By

Gavin Keeney

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image, by Gavin Keeney This book first published 2012 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2012 by Gavin Keeney All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4182-X, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4182-5

To Nezha . . .

Somewhere, even now, a lamb was being led up to the altar steps, a lamb chosen for its perfection and purity: even its delicate hooves, its knobby, skinny legs, were perfect. The eyes of those who had chosen it were loving – they valued it, enormously. And the lamb itself? It felt this love and shyly looked up at the eyes around it glowing with desire. It would not comprehend that desire had different depths. Gratified, it would get to its knees, it would gracefully lie before its lovers, it would never suspect the blow. —Jane Alison Whatever things are true, whatever things have dignity of holiness on them, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are winsome, whatever things are fair-spoken . . . think of the value of these things. —Saint Paul

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Un tombeau de “Chris Marker” Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xix Introduction .............................................................................................. xxi The Suffering Image Essays Exordium ..................................................................................................... 3 Very-still Photography Essay One .................................................................................................... 7 Anamnesis Essay Two ................................................................................................. 77 Immemory and the Immemorial Essay Three ............................................................................................. 101 Photography as “Painting” . . . Essay Four ............................................................................................... 117 Errant “Scholarship” Essay Five................................................................................................ 151 Something about Nothing Un-scientific, Concluding Postscript World-chiasmus....................................................................................... 217

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Appendices: “Markeriana” Appendix A ............................................................................................. 223 Séance “C.M.” Filmography/Videography....................................................................... 233 Bibliography............................................................................................ 247 Index........................................................................................................ 265

PREFACE UN TOMBEAU DE “CHRIS MARKER”

The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth.1 —Thornton Wilder

This book is and is not about Chris Marker; or, it is about Marker and not-Marker, self and not-self, “I” and Other (not-“I”). In this regard, one must bracket objective analysis, insofar as when one enters the charmed circle of art-critical exegesis, one is also entering a phantasmatic zone that encompasses interrelated and overlapping paralogisms or apparent tautologies that are also spectral forms given to artistic praxis, no less truthful as paralogisms, but nonetheless indicative of the absolute contingency of art as it faces and addresses the paradigmatic (the so-called Real). If in 1927 or so photography declared itself “objective,” and then failed, it is not without some value that this failure opened the floodgates of what the image, photographic and otherwise, portends. The highest works of any philosophical and/or artistic discipline teach us that ideas belong to no one. Ideas are intelligences/principalities. Giorgio Agamben’s version of an “archaeology of knowledge” (derived, in part, from Michel Foucault) is just such an exercise, wherein the critical intelligence he brings to his inquests of the apparatuses of power and the structure of discourses unearths and reveals a dynamic principle or constellation of “lights” that are, indeed, spectral functions within the same. This dynamic is the entire point of his excavations, which are truly archaeological in the classical sense (equal to the excavations of Troy or any ancient civilization that still haunts present-day affairs). But such is also an incipient “angelology of knowledge,” engaging a very different analysis of power and its distribution/administration through and crossing worlds. This haunting of the present by the past is what also permits anything whatsoever of the futural to be present at any moment past and/or present. It is this recondite, shadowy, spectral agency (that is, in its highest instantiation, a haunting of culture and its various manifestations in disciplines, as “angelology”) that also marks the works (one continuous work, in fact) of Marker, foremost his still photography, which is also the

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fundamental building block of his most impressive films and multimedia projects. Marker’s work is spectral in this regard alone – it indexes a past that is also a future (justifying the well-known aperçu that his past works are “memories of the future”), while this past that is also a future passes through the present (or, this future that is somehow always present in the past definitively haunts the here-and-now). This very dislocation of times for the eschatological-teleological present (a spectral present comprised of ghosts that circulate through all times) in many ways makes his project a deconstructivist project, but in a non-Derridean way, and only nonDerridean because the Derridean project is also an endless deferral of that essential futural moment that Marker reveals in his politics of the image (and of cinema) – the same presence that others (such as Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Rancière) have always bracketed due to their implicit fear of anything paradigmatic whatsoever returning to Earth proper. These inquisitions of power and the structures that substitute for life experience are what make Marker’s works utterly stunning in their most salient feature – that is, the very-still images. The singular image Marker returns to with the three exhibitions of still photography he staged between 2007 and 2011, “Staring Back” (2007), “Quelle heure est-elle?” (2009), and “Passengers” (2011), are thus telltale gestures toward the irreducible humanity of his project – this almost inexpressible, but also inexhaustible humanity qua ethos being the signature force of a fundamental universality that crisscrosses multiple times and places. It is these three consecutive and contiguous exhibitions that are the origin of this study of the nature of the “Markerian” reserve that inhabits all of the works assembled personally or collectively over the course of six and onehalf decades (1950-2012), an exceptional artistic-moral reserve that comes to its most exquisite expression in the mobilization of the still image itself toward ends other than the modernist fixation on the autonomy of the image of art (one of Emmanuel Levinas’ points in condemning that apparent autonomy as essentially immoral). This present study of “Marker & Co.” focuses its fire, then, on the political and subjective agency of Marker’s work, in association with other practitioners and other forces that inhabit his world and his work – both named and unnamed others. This complex (or this one thing) is effectively “philo-communist,” the secret lining in all socialist affairs – political or otherwise. Within every maneuver within Marker’s work is this secret lining that is also heedlessly “Christic” – it is what makes the still images “move” (a point that has been discussed in Marker scholarship without its source ever quite being properly delineated). As “secret,” it can only be

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partly revealed, anyway. Suffice to say that this “philo-communist” (philosophical-communist) aspect is the scintillating heart of the dark mystery of “Markerian” affairs. It moves, decidedly, in very mysterious ways. It is evident, nonetheless, in the “semi-divine” matrix of the works, which never devolve to self-referential projects, nor to the modernist bias of Art for Art’s sake. “Self-revelation” is always bracketed, though it often creeps into the picture, just before it vanishes again. (In this latter sense, and as “philo-communist,” Marker’s work superficially resembles that of the Anglo-“French” literary light John Berger,2 yet diverging as well, insofar as the former’s work ultimately focuses on the “Ideal” of the “Real,” versus the “Real” of the “Ideal.”) In excavating this dynamis in Marker’s work, what can be found is a surreptitious homage to the vacated axis of the paradigmatic, almost always configured as “utopia” – or a certain something else (something missing) that is absolutely political, yet transcends politics anyway. (We even witness a “feline utopia,” here-and-there, by way of Marker’s penchant for using the cat as cipher for the solitary, yet principled soul.) Marker’s version of utopia resides, as usual (qua utopia), “no-where.” It is also for this reason that the “Markerian” moment (the reserve function that animates all of his work) is productive of a sometimes sinister, sometimes semi-redemptive “shadow-land” that requires an inherent mistrust of the power of the image and its notorious fixity and alliance with the figure of death, something that André Bazin foresaw quite early, in his 1945 essay “Ontologie de l’image photographique,”3 before Levinas’ extraordinary 1948 essay “La réalité et son ombre,” and something that Bazin illustrated by employing one image, alone, in association with that essay – the Shroud of Turin. In re-visiting Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (after all of these years), a book that was at first a paper delivered at the plenary session of a conference in California in 1993 (following on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of what can only be called Capitalism Triumphant), it is possible to speak of the specters of Marker. For it is that renowned moment in Derrida’s work that launched what has become known as his “messianicity,” a very apt “end” to the deconstructivist project as such, given that it also re-launched the search for the paradigmatic within the syntagmatic (without naming the former), while signaling quietly the expectation of the return of the utopian principle within politics, after the ravages of both post-Marxist and neo-Marxist agitation (in concert, but as antitheses to one another) had strangely and effectively routed post-modern pessimism (late-modern nihilism), delivering, in turn, the rhetoric of the event (à venir), a confabulation present in the most

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advanced thought of the new century (Alain Badiou et al.) and a rhetorical figure that hearkens back to – at least – G.W.F. Hegel. Marker’s own deconstructivist project is, then, traceable to the late 1940s when he first assumed the name “Chris Marker” in the pages of Esprit, a left-wing Catholic journal associated with personalism (plus all that the same embodied in pre- and post-WWII France). If Levinas’ 1948 essay occurred at this exact same moment, we can only surmise that something was indeed “in the air,” and that this moment marked the emergence of a project that would serve to interrogate the role of the image in cultural production for the balance of the century, with the arrival of the twenty-first century denoting a critical turning point and a return to a more sobering adjudication of the same. Indeed, following upon deconstruction (derived from Edmund Husserl, after all, or the father figure that haunts all of Derrida’s works), and passing through postphenomenology (inclusive of the so-called theological turn, informed by Paul Ricoeur, Levinas, and Derrida), what emerged on this side of the twenty-first century was a return to Spirit (the highest evocation of utopia possible, insofar as Spirit is synonymous with humankind). We see across the arc of these several decades leading from Marker’s first independent films (after his apprenticeships with various savants and filmmakers in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s) a slow, almost ritualistic embrace of everything that was unfolding in late-modern thought, moving ineluctably toward a re-invigoration of the High Romantic, High Idealist trope of World Soul. In this regard, Marker’s work is decidedly “messianic,” while also denouncing Big History, and, upon close examination (through close readings noting aporias, inflections, and overt evocations of death as rite of passage), it is also quietly, emphatically “Christic.” Not theological and not atheological, this “Christic” moment is nonetheless semi-apocalyptic. (This semi-apocalyptic quality, which returns almost like clockwork across the trajectory of his work, is also the reason that self-revelation “returns to disappear,” again and again.) What is truly stunning, however, is that this “Christic” aspect remains unnamed, and it remains unnamed because he has extracted it from a field of signifying agency (through the very “archaeological” project of expropriating its signature) in a manner that has also liberated it from all possible forms of renascent dogma and/or doctrine – a process that is intimately allied with the very nature of questioning the ontological significance of the image and mimetic practice proper. When combined with the very same operation that his works have applied to political agency (foremost left-wing and Marxist thought), the political becomes “Christic,” and vice versa, strangely emptying political agency of historical agency, while also doubling that historical-

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eschatological power such that it invokes utopia and/or apocalypse (suggesting they may, after all, be the same thing).4 These twin principalities or intelligences, then, are the principal ghosts or specters of Marker. The “Christic” and the Marxist visions collide (arguably, as Derrida has pointed out, a collision that was also present as subtext in the writings of Karl Marx). And yet it is an unrecognizable form of each that collides with the other, producing a peculiar non-dialectical synthesis that is secretly allied with and illustrative of that which has been mostly missing for over one hundred years other than in the most bombastic and repressive regimes of thought and being – that is, the paradigmatic in/for itself. This, as well, seems to be the figure of “immemory” (the archaic field known as the immemorial) that Marker invokes by name by the 1990s, a field within thought that is absolutely haunted from the “beginning of time,” but mostly missing, anyway; for time immemorial is and was, at once, an indefinable, non-dogmatic something else that is also an opening to “Paradise” (that “Franciscan” vision of a virtuous world here-and-now, a notable aspect of Agamben’s project and a notable function within his work that is often criticized for its “darkening” of the horizon of thought and/or conceptual-speculative praxis as politics). In this sense, Antonio Negri’s and Badiou’s criticisms of Agamben count for exactly nothing, connoting the null set anyway that is at the heart of Badiou’s project and which is effectively masked by Negri’s “multitude.” There can be no apologies, then, for locating this immense gift of Marker’s multiple works as one work in a Romantic-Marxist, “Christic” realm, or in what is clearly a case of “dreaming the dream”; that is, dreaming justice through dreaming utopia, through dreaming the redemptive future (as apocalypse, if necessary), and by drawing very close to the past, while also drawing the past into the present toward that singular future, which then (through the very dark heart of the recursive nature of vision) appears here-and-now. This redemptive chord is what is called within the pages of this dossier the “Markerian” moment. In passing through that moment, we also pass into the dream of a restored “paradigmaticity” that is redemptive, wholly this-worldly, utterly Romantic (in the highest sense of the word), and purely evocative of life as shadow-land – a viewpoint that is productive of a concept of being as path to the Levinasian Other, with all images, as a result, provisional images of this hazardous state of affairs. Bazin was right (and Levinas was right).5 This primordial/futural state of being for the Other is fully embodied in the very image of the suffering image. The suffering image is the very image of the world of becoming (à venir). For this reason, the

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unfinished Owls at Noon project remains, irreducibly, Marker’s “last” project . . . Lastly, this book is written in diaristic mode, with all passages retaining their dates of inscription, plus a decidedly symphonic texture (with repeated themes, counter-themes, and variations crossing the structure of the work) as homage to Marker’s methodologies, but also as an organizational, mnemonic, and poetical formal pattern within the overall study. As all knowledge is effectively personal, or becomes personal, Dossier Chris Marker is also inherently performative. This latter concern is one of the great paradoxes of any attempt at constructing a systematic body of knowledge, of any and all epistemologies, sciences, technologies, and/or discourses, at least before that personal engagement with ideas is handed over (handed back) to the world at large. This is also one of the reasons why every work within Marker’s extensive “catalogue” is entirely personal (including the films he made with the SLON collective, which, after all, he inaugurated in and around 1967 with Loin du Viêt-nam). One can then read these pages in the manner of Julio Cortázar’s great novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) – that is to say, any which way. In assembling any book, there is also always an aspect of montage at play (arguably the manner in which thoughts are formed or “drip” into consciousness) – a form of fluidity often destroyed in the name of “system” or “scientific study” (the antithesis of the literary work of art). In this case, these essays are an extended homage to “all of that” – to the signature aspects of Marker’s work, plus. “All of that” is also the sole justification for these indulgences/voyages into what is (and what remains) a remarkable archive of singular works that belongs to no one in particular and, therefore, to everyone. There is no right or wrong in reading Marker. Dossier Chris Marker is intended, thus, as homage to his work as totality and to the speculative agencies that inhabit and haunt it. Marker once said that if one wishes to understand him, one must actually invent him. The unintentional misreadings, the attempts to de-code, etc., are all efforts that remain, in the end, suitably imperfect and ultimately futile. One must, however try . . . Written in Australia, and researched in libraries and archives in Australia, the UK, and France, this work is an attempt to consolidate and provide a snapshot of a record that is constantly shifting and constantly evolving, inclusive of well-meaning, but misguided attempts to fill in gaps in Marker’s personal life, foremost his war years. In trying, we reach the very limit that every “Markerian” moment registers – that is, the mysterious, non-discursive hiatus given to all investigations into truthtelling procedures, plus the irreducible presence of subjectivity itself

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(otherwise known as “The Fifteenth Stone”), always to be understood in relation to the impersonal forces that create, sustain, and destroy it. As this study comes to a close on July 31, 2012, word has arrived that Chris Marker has died. In approaching immortal works of Art one best treads lightly. Marker’s work will now “return,” endlessly; superficial secrets will be revealed and his record will be examined and re-examined as his reputation soars to new heights. Perhaps the French will now tear down the Sorbonne and put up Chris Marker, as Henri Michaux reportedly once suggested.6 (Such portends yet another French Revolution, only if.7) Yet the best way to honor the spirit of such an artist is to honor the spirit of the Spirit of the work. Quite simply, “Chris Marker” is now a very bright star in every future “Night Sky” . . . Long live “Chris Marker.” “Ite, missa est.” July 31, 2012

Notes 1

Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1941), p. 87. First published Longmans, 1927. “The whole purport of literature . . . is the notation of the heart. Style is but the faintly contemptible vessel in which the bitter liquid is recommended to the world.” Ibid., p. 17. 2 See Andrew Merrifield, John Berger (London: Reaktion, 2012). See also, Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1977), pp. 106109, regarding John Berger’s essay on the famous October 1967 photograph of the corpse of Che Guevara and its resemblance to Mantegna’s The Dead Christ. See John Berger, “Che Guevara Dead,” Aperture 13, no. 4 (1968): pp. 36-38. “The best writing on photography has been by moralists – Marxists or would-be Marxists – hooked on photographs but troubled by the way photography inexorably beautifies. . . . Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture.” Sontag, On Photography, p. 107. Or, perhaps, and in a slightly different sense, another contemporary figure by which to measure Marker’s work is the highmodern, Czech-“French” literary light Milan Kundera. In tracking the figures of speech and thought (Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s term) given to such, the “philocommunist” ethos effectively brackets all ideology until ideology confesses its complicity with what Fredric Jameson has called the “prison-house(s)” of language. Ideology, as such, is not the enemy. Ideology, in fact, must be restored to its pure state in relation to the “immemorial” or “the given.” Such implies that ideology without morality is the problem. Such also invokes Plato . . . Philocommunism, in present-day terms, almost always takes the form of anti-capitalism (or represents/invokes the “anti-capitalist sublime”). It often also takes the form of anti-modernism, and is effectively proto-anarchic. Marker’s relationship to anarchic

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forms of Surrealism in the 1940s is suggestive of this latter strain, though his subsequent “voyages” take a more-decidedly “political” or “leftist” turn. The presence of Jean Giraudoux, Gaston Bachelard, and Denise Bellon are “signs” of Marker’s relationship to Surrealism, and, in Bachelard’s case, Surrationalism. The well-known split in French Surrealism, in the 1920s, occurred along the two “patrimonial” lines of “André Breton” and “Georges Bataille,” or between the orthodoxy of Breton and the non-orthodoxy of Bataille (plus Aragon, Bachelard, Leiris et al.). Regarding Bataille’s “gnostic” worldview,” see the essay “Kant Nietzsche Undo Lacan,” pp. 81-94, in Gavin Keeney, “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). See also Denis Hollier, Les dépossédés: Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1993). 3 André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” pp. 9-17, in Gaston Diehl, ed., Les problèmes de la peinture (Paris: Confluences, 1945). For a Lacanian (psychoanalytical and eroticized) application of this famous essay to the works of Marker, foremost Sans soleil (1982), see Laurent Roth, “A Yakut Afflicted with Strabismus,” pp. 37-63, trans. Brian Holmes, in Laurent Roth, Raymond Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? À propos du CD-ROM “Immemory” de Chris Marker, ed. Christine van Assche, Yves Gevaert (Brussels: Yves Gevaert Éditeur; Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997). 4 This apolitical, atheological aspect of Marker’s work is always provisional, versus canonical. It is for this reason that it is also possible to claim that, ultimately, the work is “Christic” and “philo-communist.” 5 “Man as Other comes to us from the outside, a separated – or holy – face. His exteriority, that is, his appeal to me is his truth. My response is not added as an accident to a ‘nucleus’ of his objectivity, but first produces his truth (which his ‘point of view’ upon me can not nullify). This surplus of truth over being and over its idea, which we suggest by the metaphor of the ‘curvature of intersubjective space,’ signifies the divine intention of all truth. This ‘curvature of space’ is, perhaps, the very presence of God.” Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), p. 291. First published Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1961). 6 “Il faut raser le Sorbonne et mettre Chris Marker à la place.” This often-cited statement appears in Anatole Dauman, Anatole Dauman: Argos Films: Souvenirécran, ed. Jacques Gerber, with Noëlle de Chambrun (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989), p. 149; cited in Raymond Bellour, “The Book, Back and Forth,” pp. 109-54, in Roth, Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? À propos du CD-ROM “Immemory” de Chris Marker, p. 150 n 10. 7 Indeed, an alternative title for this book might have been Chris Marker: Another French Revolution. Notably, Bill Horrigan recently revealed in Wexblog that Marker lived on rue Courat, in Paris, “an unfashionable neighborhood he liked in part because it was where the Paris Commune made one of its bloody last stands.” That he lived and worked in the shadow of that event is extraordinarily telltale. That his works are, arguably, “Christic” also recalls Dostoevsky’s remark that

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revolutions generally fail because they are not spiritual enough. See Bill Horrigan, “Chris Marker: 1921-2012,” Wexblog, August 1, 2012, http://wexarts.org/wexblog/ ?p=6413.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This study was conducted under the auspices of an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship at Deakin University, School of Architecture and Building, Faculty of Science and Technology, Geelong, Victoria, Australia, as part of the author’s dissertation “Visual Agency in Art and Architecture,” and under the supervision of David Jones, Flavia Marcello, and John Rollo. The larger study included curation of the mixed-media exhibition “‘Shadow-lands’: The Suffering Image,” an explicit homage to Marker’s methodologies, held April 18-May 18, 2012, at Dennys Lascelles Gallery, Alfred Deakin Prime Ministerial Library, Deakin University Waterfront Campus, Geelong. The author would like to thank the various readers of these essays in the process of their formulation, and the libraries and archives that kindly permitted access to their collections, including: the British Film Institute, London, UK; the Australian Film Institute Research Collection (RMIT), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; the Australian Mediatheque (ACMI), Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; and Centre Pompidou (MNAM/CCI), Paris, France. Special thanks to Sylvie Douala-Bell and Étienne Sandrin, at the Nouveaux Médias division of the Pompidou, for their generous assistance in June 2012 with research related to “Zapping Zone,” and to Renée Albada Jelgersma and Peter Blum, at Peter Blum Gallery, New York, New York, USA, for facilitating the cover image from Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, and for the three consecutive Marker exhibitions, from 2007 to 2011, that form the “silent” origin of this investigation of the photographic image. Parts of this study were presented/rehearsed at three conferences in June-July 2012: “Religion, Civil Religion, and the Common Good,” London Metropolitan University, Faculty of Law, Governance and International Relations, Centre for the Study of Religion, Conflict and Cooperation/Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics, Wednesday, June 20-Thursday, June 21, London, UK; “Return to the Street,” Goldsmiths College, University of London, Centre for Cultural Studies, Wednesday, June 27Thursday, June 28, London, UK; and “Together < > Apart,” AAANZ 2012 (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference), University of Sydney, Thursday, July 12-Saturday, July 14, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

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The author also wishes to acknowledge the multitude of scholars whose works have influenced the course of this study (foremost the “Three Graces,” Catherine Lupton, Nora M. Alter, and Sarah Cooper, who penned the first exhaustive, critical-biographical studies of Marker in English), as well as various artists and interlocutors over the years who have indirectly, but nonetheless personally, precipitated this close reading of the works of Marker through their own intense artistic and critical activities. Lastly, it is to Chris Marker that this work is addressed; in gratitude, and – alas – In memoriam. This book could, then, be placed upon Marker’s grave (at Père Lachaise), as gift, but he is not there. As John Berger has written, “The dead do not stay where they are buried.” ******* The (mis)adventures of this text include attempting (and failing) to reconcile discrepancies in the public record regarding dates and details of Marker’s films and film collaborations, plus precise contents of key multimedia projects. The Filmography/Videography presented here is and remains, as a result, entirely provisional. Dossier Chris Marker closes a trilogy of books (produced and compiled between 2010 and 2012) focusing on art, architecture, and the allied arts as conceptual thought – that is, the author’s self-denoted “Saturn Trilogy.” The previous two titles in the series are: Art as “Night”: An Art-Theological Treatise (CSP, 2010), and “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (CSP, 2011). These three books effectively track the passage through and out of post-modern or late-modern nihilism and the return to the paradigmatic and the utopian, or Idealism proper, foremost the return from atheology to theology in artistic and political discourses.

INTRODUCTION THE SUFFERING IMAGE

Why, sometimes, do images begin to tremble?1 —Chris Marker

The question as to why images sometimes tremble suggests the antithesis or corollary embedded in the very image of images trembling; that is, the modern conundrum regarding the fixity (stasis) of images. This recourse to movement is a gesture toward what has come to be known as the event, a conflation of effects that may be traced back through poststructuralism, post-phenomenology, structuralism, and phenomenology to the purely conceptual or non-contingent issue of phenomenality itself. What moves within images? And what is the event of painting and photography? Or, how do images betray any event (arguably, the arrival of what is merely fixed in images). Several analogues arrive all at once: Veronese and his recourse to architectural mise-en-scène; Caravaggio and his late paintings (and what they portend as much as reveal); Friedrich Hölderlin and his fidelity to the event of poetry (by way of Alain Badiou and Martin Heidegger); Walter Benjamin and his early animosity toward photography and cinema (and his highly charged Arcades Project, in which it might be said the event hides); Surrealism’s vision of statues walking around at night (leaving their pedestals under cover of “darkness” as signature gesture toward all that statuary represses, and – of course – all that representational orders imprison); Dziga Vertov and Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein’s semi-coincidental theory and practice of montage (and its reliance on a multiplicity of effects and “times” to circumvent any privileging of individual subjects in favor of the collective); Adolf Loos’ architecture (suggesting, at once, the privileged “interior” of architecture and its dissembling status as object by way of its exterior as “mask”); Yves Klein’s overt and furtive gestures to de-stabilize art (at mid-century and the historically inexact advent of conceptual art); Marcel Duchamp’s Étant donnés (with its mesmerizing and surreptitious damning of mimetic orders per se, or its possible suggestion of a return of a wholly speculative mimesis); Rosalind E. Krauss’ “thinking the complex” (plus its assimilation

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into architecture and art, and architectural and art criticism, perhaps best exemplified by Yve-Alain Bois’ “A Picturesque Stroll around ClaraClara”); all of Richard Serra’s work (but especially his Grand Palais exhibition in 2007); and Gerhard Richter’s refusal of closure in painting (especially his swerving back and forth between photo-realism and abstraction, and the attendant middle ground of the blurred paintings or the over-painted photographs).2 What moves, then, within all of these situations is the figure of the repressed Other of modernity (everything bracketed, as in the phenomenological reduction itself, or what cannot be known, and everything present as formative force in all forms of formalism). In this manner, Chris Marker is a “formalist,” but without the additional baggage of the severe reduction to essence given to modernist types of formalism (if such was ever at play in any serious manner, anyway). It is to the type of formalism given to the nineteenth century (in literature and art) that we might turn to unearth what “moves” within Marker’s still photography (suggesting also that there is a Proustian dimension to his oeuvre), while also beginning to understand why Marker has “super-added” an affective sense of movement by digitizing his photo archive. That much of his recently exhibited still photography is derived from his video and film archive is instructive. These images, supplemented by new, still photography in the recent exhibitions “Staring Back” (2007), “Quelle heure est-elle?” (2009), and “Passengers” (2011), provide a type of passage to what always inheres within any artistic event; that is to say, the presence of wholly other forces that signal a mnemonic-aesthetic reserve in all systems of representation and all systems of repression (instrumental orders, personal and otherwise). Images move in mysterious ways . . . Marker’s great gift is to show us how different or differential times inhabit so-called objective states (both representational states and putative objective states). The super-added movement, after the fact, invokes what all forms of fixing time-space betray – or, very-still photography, while nominally invoking a past-present, opens on to a universal and nonobjective realm, the same that Kasimir Malevich quite literally fell into.3 All of this brings forth another question buried in all representational forms of formalizing experience (arguably the central issue of art), raising again the refusal of presence, yet not in the form of denial or repression, but, instead, in the form of re-sublimation or re-naturalization. Perhaps it is Gaston Bachelard’s description of Novalis’ “dialectical sublimation”4 that begins to access this alternative process of re-naturalization, versus repression and/or the imposition of a newly authorized order (totalizing formalization of difference). Badiou’s meditations on Immanuel Kant’s

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“subtractive ontology” (passim) offer this refusal as a necessary rite of passage toward the event proper. In Marker’s still photography (and in Marker’s film-essays) the stillness of the image is troubled by what crosses over the image itself, marking time in a manner that re-introduces the non-discursive, speculative agency that is the cause of the work (its origin and its future, at once). Notably, Marker’s work is always semisemiological, with signs signing something that is not quite nameable (or, arguably, something not present). As a result, and without naming that rite of passage to the event otherwise than as art (and even this turn is problematic), all such works figure the event, which (pace Andrei Tarkovsky) has, indeed, something to do with “conscience.”5 What is missing, then, is what has been tossed out over the past century (in the passage from Phenomenology proper to post-phenomenology). It is no accident that the principal means of critique in the passage through post-structuralism has been that of troubling representation (or a questioning and circling of what has haunted representation since the emergence of a sustained critique of its structuralization as a form of persistent and catastrophic hegemony). What moves in Marker’s still photography is also what is missing since the arrival of the great aporia (vacuum and void) created by the demise of modernism (the post-modern condition and its recourse to endless semiosis and reified/de-materialized orders that suggest but always defer presence as such). This missing something is what was figured in cinema along the same path out of latemodern nihilism: it is found in Michelangelo Antonioni’s work, in Tarkovsky’s work, and – emphatically – in Jean-Luc Godard’s work, but most succinctly, and less truculently, in the latter’s more recent elegiac works, perhaps starting with the majestic JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (1994).6 To name this something missing “the paradigmatic” means also to name the unnamable. This is what all works of art that access this austere territory within representation “index.” The seminal figure in this regard is no doubt Antonin Artaud, who quite literally went through the lookingglass. Each time I happen to recall . . . the surrealist rebellion as expressed in its original purity and intransigence, it is the personality of Antonin Artaud that stands out in dark magnificence, it is a certain intonation in his voice that injects specks of gold into his whispering voice. . . . I know that Antonin Artaud saw, the way Rimbaud, as well as Novalis and Arnim before him, had spoken of seeing. It is of little consequence, ever since the publication of Aurélia [1855], that what was seen this way does

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not coincide with what is objectively visible. The real tragedy is that the society to which we are less and less honored to belong persists in making it an inexpiable crime to have gone over to the other side of the looking glass.7

It is the so-called fixity of subject and object, and the subsequent dialectical play between the two, that is, then, the source of both the problem (question) and the answer. If we approach the vast intelligence embedded in nature (and in mimesis, plus in the cybernetic, not New-Age theory of memes) then we also approach the theory of “conscience” embedded in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), a work also embedded or buried within post-phenomenology in the form of an exit to the speculative-aesthetic event.8 Exiting the discursive apparatuses of fixed images and fixed (authorized) systems of representation, this same intelligence, given to “the world as such,” returns in the speculative agency of the image, or in representation itself. Once past the fixity of the self and its other-as-object (or the self-as-object and its other as subject), with Artaud, we enter the mirror and exit through the other side into spectrality, noumena, and – without question – a vast system of inference, echo, and conscience. For conscience to resound in such a way also means to access the echoing tableau and source of all images. To be faithful to this event requires, paradoxically, to re-naturalize the vision in images or works of art. To re-naturalize this event also requires that the resultant images or works effectively privilege the paradigmatic, or the axis of representation that has been more or less evacuated en route to the postmodern impasse. A form of knowledge emerges . . . This form of knowledge entails its very own form of reduction – a passage to a type of silence or stillness that inhabits the very-still images of a world given over to the speculativeaesthetic event. If Rousseau’s Émile is a touchstone in this regard, it is so because it touches the “hem” of the paradigmatic. What moves in very-still images is phenomenality itself, or what has come to be called formal ontology. Yet such ontology does engage new temptations to presence – whereas all such maneuvers are ultimately disposed of in the austere gesturalism of the paradigmatic fold of conscience. Michel Serres’ notion of the vast noise that must be repressed (naturalized) for anything at all to “appear” (to be experienced) is such an invocation of the idea of the paradigmatic or the singular “nature” of the synthesis given to the subject-object as one.9 Perhaps it is the reversibility or doubling of this event that is the secret address of very-still photography and its paradigmatic referentiality (its representational

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poverty as exit from the proverbial or Jamesonian, late-Marxist “prisonhouse of language”). In many ways, the theoretical coordinates for a type of visuality or visual knowledge that accesses the speculative-conceptual origin of images and conscience, while silencing mere discursive “noise” (through the re-naturalization of experience and through the production of a mnemonic and echoing archive), are to be found in positive form in symmetrical operations given to art criticism, and in negative form through asymmetrical or antithetical operations given to cultural criticism. Foremost in the positive or symmetrical sense is the vitalist-inspired, arthistorical works of Henri Focillon. The Life of Forms in Art,10 his most famous work, remains today a testament to a formalist undertaking aimed at cultural production proper. Its origin in 1934 attests to its historical status, as it immediately precedes the destruction of WWII, as Malevich’s quest to reach the “ground” of representational agency preceded the destruction of WWI. Focillon’s book (and his overall methodology) arrived – not without significance – from his studies of Medieval art and architecture. Similarly, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy,11 as an example of the “antithetical mode” (or asymmetrical critique of the production of culture), while accessing the origins of the Renaissance through an examination of “where” its earliest gestures coalesced, and “from where” such gestures were drawn, succeeds where other types of art-historical and cultural surveys fail, insofar as there is contained in the very structure of the work a critique of Burckhardt’s own times, plus a second “move” (from within the historical path of the work) to invoke the synchronic “Medieval.” Burckhardt’s device (the apparatus of his historicizing critique), therefore, performs what Hayden White has rightly shown to be the bias or cut of historiography; an elective aspect of writing history that suggests the “non-objective” is present nonetheless.12 In the instance of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, this elective conscience is figured in the form of Pico della Mirandola. The Medieval gesture made by Pico is to the precursors of the Renaissance (and to their supposedly suppressed “voice”); or to those who act in the context of this work as echo – an acknowledgement that the source code for the Renaissance resides, after all, in Medieval scholasticism (most especially in the wandering scribes who copied and, thereby, transmitted the collective archive of that body of knowledge, a body of knowledge that just happened to include “hieratic” works from Greek, Islamic, and Hebraic sources, and which became, in many ways, the foundation stones for speculative Renaissance scholarship).

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Art and culture are strange bedfellows; as they are not necessarily or always contiguous. Culture absorbs and in many ways anathematizes the implicit event of Art. Art criticism might free this imprisoned “soul,” yet cultural criticism is the primary and privileged means of doing so. The latter liberates the work and the times (memory itself). All critical methodologies that “historicize” (Fredric Jameson’s great dictum) also, to a degree, perform (in reverse) the process of assimilation that art undergoes. All art-critical methodologies that embrace a formalistic and conscientious critique of works and times become works of art in their own right. For all of these reasons, and for many yet unnamable causes hiding out in the work, the still photography of Chris Marker is both critique and work of art. It is this synthesis (versus dialectical struggle) that liberates the speculative agency of photography, while it also renaturalizes and/or re-sublimates the disasters visited upon the same. White notes in Metahistory that Burckhardt’s “fabric of greater or lesser brilliance,” or “greater or lesser freedom or oppression,” marks the true tonality of his entire historiographic project; that is, that “there was no progressive evolution in artistic sensibility, and in the end nothing but oppression stemmed from political and religious impulses.”13 Additionally, “The truths taught by history were melancholy ones. They led neither to hope nor to action. They did not even suggest that humanity would endure.”14 There is a sense in Marker’s photography of this same tragic chord. Yet there is also optimism (or optimistic pessimism, and vice versa). Given the seminal nature of La jetée (1962), one might even say that Marker’s work senses WWIII approaching, or anticipates and attempts to pre-empt its arrival, as Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice (1986) attempted, years later.15 The sense of history endlessly falling out of its own nest survives in these two works. Yet it is humanity that is the true subject of both; albeit humanity perhaps finally freed of its own history through the aegis of memory and the re-writing of all images within the protean field of the universal conscience – Marker’s and Tarkovsky’s “Zone.” The figure of the Medieval voice operates in the examples above as it operates in Novalis’ invocation of the same. It is not a literal or historical voice, time, or place. It is, however, an elective voice, time, and place; and it signals a tilting toward the paradigmatic in the form of a nominally “lost cause” and/or “lost time.”16 It asks/demands of its interlocutor the same that the interlocutor asks of it: “Speak, so that I may see you.” May 31, 2011

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Notes 1

Chris Marker, Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat, 1977/1993. The title Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat invokes several things all at once: the issue at stake in Régis Debray’s text Révolution dans la révolution?, which invokes the image of the guerrilla as often a “spearhead without a spear,” plus the death of Che Guevara in Bolivia, in 1967; Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-glass (and the enigmatic Cheshire Cat); the penchant of the Left to descend into factional infighting (and the recurring betrayal of workers by unions); and the spirit of Revolution in/for itself, or the red banners and such that pronounce the arrival/presence of the impersonal agency of revolt proper. Notably, Che appears in several of Marker’s films as a shadowy presence, half-remembered, half-forgotten (a scarf in La sixième face du Pentagone, a t-shirt in Le fond de l’air est rouge). He never quite appears directly, no doubt as homage to his shadowy activities in Latin America in the 1960s, but also as a type of “halo” permeating Marker’s political films. 2 In many ways, Marker’s archive resembles Gerhard Richter’s archive (“Atlas”), while its purpose is much closer to that of Aby Warburg’s “Mnemosyne-Atlas” (“Mnemosyne, A Picture Series Examining the Function of Preconditioned Antiquity-Related Expressive Values for the Presentation of Eventful Life in the Art of the European Renaissance”), 1924-1929. Warburg’s “Atlas” was composed of images mounted on wooden boards covered with black cloth, with a thematic cut being the justification for new iterations of the project. The subject matter or precise content of the images was not the issue, whereas the dynamic relation between the images was; that is, a similar dynamic to that which ruled the organization of books in his library. See: Aby Warburg, Aby Warburg: Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2003); E.H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970); and Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Zone Books, 2004). Richter’s atlas, with its various iterations, has been published and exhibited repeatedly. For the most recent publication, see Gerhard Richter: Atlas, ed. Helmut Friedel, trans. Michael Eldred (New York: DAP, 2007). The 1997 edition, Gerhard Richter: Atlas of the Photographs, Collages and Sketches, ed. Helmut Friedel, Ulrich Wilmes, trans. David Brit (New York: DAP; New York: Marian Goodman; London: Anthony d’Offay, 1997), was published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, New York, April 27, 1995-March 3, 1996, and at the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, April 8-June 21, 1998. The German edition of the exhibition catalogue, Gerhard Richter: Atlas der Fotos, Collagen und Skizzen: Lenbachhaus München, ed. Helmut Friedel, Ulrich Wilmes, was published by Oktagon, Cologne, 1997. Warburg’s atlas has – apparently – not survived other than in photographs of the photographs. For such images of Warburg’s atlas c.1926, see http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/ mnemosyne/images/1/. This image of an associative or promiscuous magic existing amongst images placed close together appears in Tarkovsky’s film Solaris

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(1972), and more recently in Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). In both of these cases the key images in question appear in a library (as surviving images of Warburg’s atlas also show his mnemonic tableau of photographs, maps, etc. displayed), functioning as a critical-poetical moment (or caesura), wherein a certain indefinable solution to an interminable problem is sought. An image common to the Tarkovsky and von Trier films, as above, is Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565). In Melancholia, however, this image appears in the opening montage of the film (the Prologue), perhaps as homage, versus the scene in Part I when Justine has retired to the library and assembled an array of books from which she is seeking the tag line to an advertising image her sadistic boss has confronted her with at her wedding dinner. (The Brueghel image is a classic condensing of the weariness of the world.) Jean-Luc Godard’s recourse to a similar form of mise-en-scène that includes books and images placed discreetly and/or otherwise within the frame of his films is of the same order. 3 Without descending into the Lacanian house of mirrors, we can understand this on an everyday level if we observe what Slavoj Žižek is up to with “Lenin.” In his essay “Repeating Lenin” (1997) – ever the trickster, he convened a symposium on Lenin, in Germany, in part to see what the reaction would be – Žižek sets up a deconstruction of the idea of form to effectively liberate the idea of radical form. “One should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberalmulticulturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of ‘narratives’ – not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form: Form has nothing to do with ‘formalism,’ with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which ‘colors’ the entire field in question.” Žižek is interested, as most fire-breathing artists are, in discerning the real Real amidst the rubbish of systems. In part, in appropriating “Lenin” he is also looking for the moment when Lenin realized that politics could one day be dissolved for a technocratic and agronomic utopia – “the [pure] management of things.” That Lenin failed is immaterial, since Žižek is extracting the signifier “Lenin” from the historical continuum, which includes that failure – or the onslaught of Stalinism. See Slavoj Žižek, “Repeating Lenin,” Lacan, 1997, http://www.lacan.com/ replenin.htm. 4 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, trans. Alan C.M. Ross, preface by Northrop Frye (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964). First published La psychanalyse du feu (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1938). 5 See Andrei Tarkovsky, Solaris (1972). 6 Catherine Lupton notes that both Marker and Godard are responsible for preserving the emphatic-didactic nature of the short film through to its re-birth in the 1970s, with its subsequent re-deployment as singular art form in the 1990s (for

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example, in the works of Harun Farocki, Tacita Dean et al.). Lupton names Chantal Akerman, Atom Egoyan, Isaac Julien, and Harun Farocki as exemplars of the “next wave,” while also noting that the venue in which these typically short films are shown shifts to galleries, versus theaters proper. See Catherine Lupton, “Introduction: Free Radical,” pp. 7-12, in Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion, 2005), pp. 8, 218 n 3. Lupton also notes that Godard was one of the few filmmakers of the French postwar generation who returned to the literary emphasis of the film-essay following the collapse of French New Wave cinema in the late 1960s. Foremost in this regard is Allemagne année 90 neuf zero (1991), Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993), JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (1994), his hallmark Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998), L’origine du XXIème siècle (2000), and Film socialisme (2010). (It is said that during his post-New Wave years of self-imposed exile in Switzerland, he lived on $24,000 a year. This idyll appears in JLG/JLG. His return to France, and Paris, is in many ways the central theme of the pensive 2001 feature Éloge de l’amour.) Lupton also notes that Godard was effectively destroying the presumptions of cinema along the path of his New Wave work, a project that is evident in the general economy of his cinematic works, but foremost in the caustic and/or ascerbic narrative chord of the later works; for example, For Ever Mozart (1996), Éloge de l’amour (2001), and Notre musique (2004). JLG/JLG notably closes with the director interviewing and hiring a blind film editor. Regarding the literary aspects of the “autoportrait” (the “cogito of dislocated instances”), inclusive of comments on JLG/JLG, versus the autobiographical film proper, see Bellour, “The Book, Back and Forth,” in Roth, Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? À propos du CD-ROM “Immemory” de Chris Marker, pp. 120-24. The literary force-field of the short film returns with particular paradigmatic precision in Tacita Dean’s 28minute Michael Hamburger (2007). Hamburger was, as of 2007, the unsurpassed translator of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poetry into English. At one memorable point in the film, Hamburger is in the garden of his modest house in Suffolk, England, pointing to an apple tree that he grew from a pip given to him by the poet Ted Hughes. Michael Hamburger was included in the exhibition “Tacita Dean,” April 2-29, 2009, at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, New York. The exhibition included two other short films, Darmstädter Werkblock (2007) and Prisoner Pair (2008), with her photogravure series Fernweh (2009) and the series of over-painted photographs entitled Painted Kotzsch Trees I-VI (2009) in the middle gallery, plus three large-scale, over-painted photographs, Urdolmen, Hünengrab (both 2008) and Riesenbett (2009), in the north gallery. Regarding the prints and over-painted photographs: “The photographs are of dolmen or ancient burial sites that can be found all over Northern Europe. Unlike the large photographs of ancient trees, which Dean has worked with before, the images of the stones are isolated by dark matte backgrounds making them other-worldly – detached from and of history – and imposing in their solemnity. Alongside these hang Painted Kotzsch Trees I-VI, a set of small, damaged albumen prints by the pioneering 19th-century German photographer, August Kotzsch. The backgrounds of the photographs have been painstakingly hand-painted in white gouache by Dean, isolating the delicate beauty

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and luminosity of these fragile images, while also treating the damage as equal part of the pictorial surface. Fernweh, 2009 is a new and ambitious gravure project with the Danish printmaker, Niels Borch Jensen. Using four found photographs as source material to create an improbable landscape, the work quotes Goethe’s Italian Journey. ‘Fernweh’ is an old fashioned German word for ‘a longing to travel.’” “Tacita Dean,” Press Release, Marian Goodman Gallery, http://i1.exhibite.com/mariangoodman/e116fa6d.pdf. Dean also produces editioned albums or folios of her works, for example, Tacita Dean, The Russian Ending (New York: Peter Blum Edition, 2001). See http://peterblumgallery.com/editions/tacita-dean/ the-russian-ending. Peter Blum Gallery, of course, also represents and exhibits works by Chris Marker. 7 André Breton, “A Tribute to Antonin Artaud,” pp. 77-79, in Free Rein (La clé des champs), trans. Michel Parmentier, Jacqueline d’Amboise (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); cited in Jacques Derrida, Paule Thévenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. v. 8 See Jean-Luc Marion, Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). First published Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). 9 See Michel Serres, “The Origin of Language: Biology, Information Theory, and Thermodynamics,” in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy, ed. Josué V. Harari, David F. Bell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982). Selections from the five-volume Hermès (1969-1980), first published by Éditions de Minuit. 10 Henri Focillon, La vies des formes (Paris: Flammarion, 1934); English edition, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan, George Kubler (New York: Zone Books, 1989); published in English, in 1948 by Wittenborn, with the addition of the essay “In Praise of Hands,” trans. S.L. Faison Jr. The Zone edition is a re-print of the Wittenborn edition. 11 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Phaidon, 1944). First published Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien: Ein Versuch (Basel: Schweighauser, 1860). 12 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-century Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Burckhardt appears in Part Two, Chapter Six, “Burckhardt: Historical Reason as Satire” (pp. 230-64), closing the section that opens with Jules Michelet, Chapter Three, “Michelet: Historical Realism as Romance” (pp. 135-61). 13 Ibid., p. 230. 14 Ibid. 15 Watching Tarkovsky’s films, repeatedly, one learns to think and see, at once, topologically. Marker notes, in the voice-over of Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999), that Tarkovsky essentially returns religious speculation to metaphysical speculation, the former’s supposed origin.

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This “lost time” is, arguably, a time within time that is also synonymous with revolutionary time, or that sense of time buried within Žižek’s statements that revolve around the appropriation of Lenin. These statements also signal that this time is always present, as potentiality, even when absent. “In a proper revolutionary breakthrough, the utopian future is neither simply fully realized, present, nor simply evoked as a distant promise which justified present violence – it is rather as if, in a unique suspension of temporality, in the short-circuit between the present and the future, we are – as if by Grace – for a brief time allowed to act as if the utopian future is (not yet fully here, but) already at hand, just there to be grabbed. Revolution is not experienced as a present hardship we have to endure for the happiness and freedom of the future generations, but as the present hardship over which this future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we already are free while fighting for freedom, we already are happy while fighting for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances.” Žižek, “Repeating Lenin,” n.p.

ESSAYS

EXORDIUM VERY-STILL PHOTOGRAPHY

Nichts war noch vollendet, eh ich es erschaut, / ein jedes Werden stand still. / Meine Blicke sind reif, und wie eine Braut / kommt jedem das Ding, das er will.1 —Rainer Maria Rilke Every theory of time is crucially connected with a radically defined ontology. A theory of time stemming from meta-ontology of hypostasis is first and foremost a radical reversal. The only time that is real is hypostatic. What does that mean? Much more – or much less – than that time is “only subjective”. The only time that is in a real relationship with being is the time that is in the relationship with the only – always my – being. With hypostasis. There is no other time than my aión, my “duration” – drivenness from the emergence from the unnamable nothingness to incomprehensible entrance into the otherness of being. The question of the essence of time should not refer to different modalities of time because they are only complex transfers of original hypostatic timeness. Undoubtedly: necessary transfers. Often also pragmatically necessary. However, they are deeply unreal. Time is singular. Time is like blood. Hypostatic blood. It runs out. When it runs out completely, I am no longer. It is only mine.2 —Gorazd Kocijanþiþ

Description without place: “This is not a description which locates its content in a historical space and time, but a description which creates, as the background of the phenomena it describes, an inexistent (virtual) space of its own, so that what appears in it is not an appearance sustained by the depth of reality behind it, but a decontextualised appearance, an appearance which fully coincides with real being.”3 Chris Marker (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, 1921-)4 has sustained a distinguished career plumbing the depths of photography and cinema, but his first projects were, in fact, literary, including travel books for Seuil, a series entitled Petite Planète, begun in 1954, featuring a photo of a woman on the covers characterizing the country presented in the text. A savant’s Baedeker, perhaps . . .5 Marker’s photographic oeuvre, while spanning decades, came to its full import, its complicated weaving of differential realities, in the 1960s

4

Exordium

with his seminal surveys, cinematic and photographic, of cultural and intersubjective forms of marking time. Foremost in this regard was La jetée (1962), culminating with Sans soleil (1982). The Paris 1968 photos presented in the exhibition “Staring Back” (2007) at the Wexner Center, in Columbus, Ohio (May 12-August 12, 2007), and at Peter Blum Gallery in New York, New York (September 8November 1, 2007), bear traces of Marker’s digitizing of his personal archive, something that, arguably, first came to fruition with his multimedia, CD-ROM-based installation “Immemory One” (1997), although the origins of the very idea of digitally altering, if not “abstracting” and reordering images (memory) may be found in Sans soleil (1982).6 It is this concept of “immemory” that carries the metaphorical weight of Marker’s entire philosophy of the slippage given to images – photographic and mnemonic. Like the films of Russian maestro Tarkovsky, about whom Marker made a preliminary documentary in the mid-1980s (during and following the filming of Tarkovsky’s film The Sacrifice, and while Tarkovsky was dying of brain cancer in a Paris hospital), it is not a matter of symbols indexing a parallel world, but of an irreal dimension within artistic signs that points to the return of the Real, however phantasmatic. Any literal, historical content is ultimately lost in both, as what emerges is an internal re-ordering that is marked by this very immemorial (forgotten and/or half-remembered) quality that opens the space of alterity, a path to the consciousness of the Other, yet within one’s own psyche, but also a path outside of mere being (subjectivity). It is, then, a case for anamnesis – for Platonic recovery of the lost and/or recondite, and for de-naturalizing memory per se toward another form of naturalization within the apparatus of cultural presence and its archival double as artistic artifact. If this is the true meaning of the idea of historicity – as Marker’s work is highly suggestive of the interweaving of political, psychic, and temporal phenomena – it is the open and unanswerable question regarding what it means to be historical (to exist within a milieu that elides the simple configurations of being, such as “I” or its other) that is paradoxically answered by Marker’s still photography. Paris in 1968 remains a shifting ground insofar as the causes of the revolt and its historical record are highly contested on the Right and the Left today. (Žižek points out in Violence that neo-liberals love Paris 1968 because it underwrites their own exuberant form of “liberal communism,” a somewhat sinister form of capitalist jouissance that carries traces of liberalism’s chronic bad conscience vis-à-vis the exploitation endemic to capitalism per se.) Marker’s exquisite renderings of this revolt are not political, nor are they, today, nostalgic, while they operate nonetheless

Very-still Photography

5

within the political and the retrospective gaze that is photography itself.7 Thus, there is an explicit moral dimension to the images that transcends their historical datum and forces a type of recognition of the unfathomable excess of a time and place that is wholly gone but remains as imprint or trace within the present-day order. For this reason, Marker has often invented a fictional future, far and away the best means of demarcating what “futural” truly means within a philosophical position that acknowledges all experience as marked by its potential to serve as redemptive caesura in the flow of time (to “end” time). Whether or not it was Marker’s classic Rolleiflex that was deployed in the streets of Paris in 1968, the subsequent editing and digital altering of these images has rendered them hyper-real, and their inclusion in the retrospective exhibitions noted above, as complex, places the personal in a register that begins to both account for the ineluctable reduction that passes through things and events as they pass into works of art and into the compounded and folded liminality of all archives (personal and otherwise), arguably a profoundly disturbing and potentially redemptive zone within cultural production, produced and substantiated as subjectivity and objectivity collide, and as both vanish as mutually determined and mutually contracted fatalities. August 24, 2011

Notes 1

Rainer Maria Rilke, Das Stunden-Buch: Enthaltend die drei Bücher: Vom moenchischen Leben, Von der Pilgerschaft, Von der Armuth und vom Tode (Leipzig: Insel, 1905), I, 1. Written between 1899 and 1903. Utterly untranslatable, this poem in English becomes a mere caricature of itself – a hollowed out vestige of its otherwise intense gravitational force-field of allusion and insinuation. 2 Gorazd Kocijanþiþ, “Time and Hypostasis: On Evolution as a ‘Transcendental Illusion.’” Kud Logos, 2011, http://kud-logos.si/2011/07/02/time-and-hypostasison-evolution-as-a-%E2%80%9Ctranscendental-illusion%E2%80%9D/. 3 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), pp. 5-6. 4 The main body of this present study was written before Marker’s death on July 29, 2012. See Appendix A: Séance “C.M.” for post-Marker comments. 5 Marker’s first film projects as director occurred in the 1950s with the earliest being Olympia 52 (1952), a 16mm, black-and-white, 82-minute documentary on the 1952 Helsinki Summer Olympics, Dimanche á Pèkin (1956), a 16mm, color, 22-minute travel film of the People’s Republic of China, and Lettre de Sibérie (1958), a 16mm, color, 67-minute travel film sponsored by France-URSS and the Foreign Ministry of the Soviet Union. He is also credited as co-director on Alain Resnais’ Les statues meurent aussi (1950-1953). It is also in the 1950s that Marker

6

Exordium

began to write about cinema and to collaborate on short films primarily providing written narrative or commentary; for example, Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1955), Mario Ruspoli’s Les hommes de la baleine (1956), Resnais’ Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), Resnais and André Heinrich’s Le mystère de l’Atelier quinze (1957), William Klein’s Les lumières de Broadway (1957), Jean-Jacques Langepin’s Des hommes dans le ciel (1958), Raymond Vogel and Alain Kaminker’s La mer et les jours (1958), Vogel’s Le siècle a soif (1958), Walerian Borowczyk’s animated Les astronauts (1959), and Paul Paviot’s Django Reinhardt (1957). 6 Regarding “Marker’s storehouse of images” and the production of a “lofty subliminity,” see Michael Wetzel, “Acousmêtrie: On the Relationship between Voice and Image in the Films of Chris Marker,” Media Art Net, 2004, http://www. medienkunstnetz.de/themes/art_and_cinematography/marker/1/. 7 He also always, and pointedly, pushes the revolt back into 1967, avoiding “1968” – as if the entire complex, for the Left, is simply a mythic construction regarding spontaneous revolt. See Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat (1977/1993).

ESSAY ONE ANAMNESIS

I. Con-science Halfway through Nora M. Alter’s book Chris Marker, she finally discusses in detail the reasons why “images sometimes begin to tremble,” a question that has been broached several times, but not fully answered, in the first half of the book. This aspect of images that Marker describes in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) is also the central mystery of why he has returned to photography in the 2000s after decades of working within the cinematic model of the short film-essay and its subsequent incorporation into new media (all the while mostly sidestepping the auteur-driven long forms that arrived out of the French New Wave, which he in part inaugurated). Marker’s expressed notion of the “trembling image” is detailed by Alter in the section of the book dealing with a series of films Marker made on Latin American affairs, ending in many ways with Le fond de l’air est rouge.1 This series of films focusing on revolutionary activities in Latin America includes Cuba Sí! (1961), parts of the “On vous parle de . . .” (“Report on . . .”) short films made with the collective SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles) in the late 1960s and early 1970s (especially two reports on Brazil and one on Chile),2 and La bataille des dix millions (1970). More important, however, are the unexpressed reasons that images tremble or what is in images that tremble. Marker’s reply within Le fond de l’air est rouge is that images tremble because the hand of the cameraman trembles. Yet this is only the first level of explanation – and the subsequent levels have to be ferreted out of Marker’s aspirations for film and for photography as definitive truth procedures – not gnarly statements of ideology or so-called objective surveys. What then causes the image to tremble is the hand of the cameraman and what is occurring in the heart and mind of that interlocutor. This directly engages what is central to all of Marker’s work (and which explains the incessantly discussed discord between image and narration in many of his major films) – that is, that human conscience animates all works of cinema and

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Essay One

photography that also truly document and secure a picture of the world as “war zone” – and, as if it were even necessary, Marker clearly at each point along the trajectory of his film work that approaches the very idea of documentary film denotes in the discursive and non-discursive aspects of his projects that one must, indeed, take sides.3 There is no objectivity in this regard. Conscience, in turn, invokes the other continuous thread that winds through the labyrinthine, time-inflected cinematic, photographic, and literary paths that Marker describes in traversing the planet or mining Paris for images of a conflict that exists in an intensely metaphysicalexistential zone within human cognition. This is the same zone that Tarkovsky’s films inhabit, and it is for this reason that Marker and Tarkovsky were so close in expressive terms, not content, in their film works. Tarkovsky’s Zone in Stalker (1979) is famously the origin of Marker’s Zone is Sans soleil (1982), as the latter is also the origin of “Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television” (1990) – Marker’s major multimedia exhibition/project prior to “Immemory One” (1997). All of this is to illustrate something approaching a pervasive, phantasmatic “Platonism” in Marker – or a type of filmic and photographic anamnesis that animates every project. In many senses, this is traceable to his very earliest projects and their literary aspects (if they were not, indeed, literary projects proper, such as his film criticism), but more critically to his alliances in postwar France with the renascent French intelligentsia, many of which had survived WWII to simply return to politics via a back door – or in the form of artistic agitation against de Gaulle and his rightist cultural policies.4 Marker’s alliances are well known by now, and well documented in both Alter’s book and in Catherine Lupton’s Chris Marker: Memories of the Future.5 Yet it is not these individuals so much as the forces they collectively harnessed and brought to bear in postwar France that matter most in deciphering the paradoxical nature of much of Marker’s production. It is the totality of the work (across various genres) that tells the greater tale of how images are intimately related to memory and conscience, and how images (when they reach a certain limit or threshold) do, indeed, begin to tremble. Such images approach, in this sense, an uneasy rapport with death, a limit reached often in Marker’s work that suggests an austere interpretive and speculative agency (as a type of imperative) inhabits the far reaches of the image proper – indexed, in a manner, at the higher-level ontological ground of images as limits, but exceeding this ground as insuperable excess. All of this, then, reduces the trembling image to a moment when extraordinarily powerful events cause the notorious fixity of images (their stillness or their silence) to dissolve toward a form of purely speculative

Anamnesis

9

agency, as dynamic function within images (whether literally moving or otherwise). The image then “speaks,” and it speaks insofar as it causes the very apparatus of the camera to fail in its quest for that holy and preternatural silence given to still images (the immemorial beginning/end, as one thing), a silence that, after all, covers a much larger and more profoundly capacious silence that is a reserve function within mimesis itself. This inner silence doubled, as limit, is a reserve function that – as pure function – is what actually causes images to “move.” What moves in images, then, is this confluence of terror, fear of death, confrontation with limits, and confirmation of the depth within all things – measured by memory, but resurrected in the work of art as formal de-limitation of the dynamic processes of anamnesis (as spectral memory). December 8, 2011

II. Meditations on the Unimaginable Surveying the emergence of neo-liberal capitalism and its mostly spectral operations over nearly 40 years suggests that the present concerns regarding true democratic rule in the West and its impending total collapse are profoundly intertwined with a possible renascent “republican,” rightwing fascism, insofar as the actual coordinates of neo-liberalism are not so much political as capitalist (or economic) and the attendant creeping determinism given to such forms of governance suggests that power might swerve at any moment from an avowed respect for the rights of citizens to a decidedly sinister repression of all rights in service to protecting the elite from “repatriation” of both wealth and privilege (privilege being defined in its most universal terms as the rights of citizens). As such, it is possible to sketch a form of latent neo-liberal fascism that draws it power from the protection and maintenance of power by the elite (or those who cross back and forth between institutional structures within government proper and capitalist exploitation of the populace, the latter embodied primarily in forms of corporatism but also select aspects of civil society in the sense that many so-called liberal “cultural” institutions, including academia, have capitulated to the hegemony of markets and depend, for their very survival, upon the self-same apparatuses and means of exploitation that mark the principal activities and structures of control formulated and written into law by neo-liberal capitalism). Hegemony in this scenario takes on a particularly insidious form of post-political agency, an extraordinarily elastic condition that – arguably – is traceable to postmodernist relativism; that is, an entirely spectral set of interlocking

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Essay One

activities that doubly hides within the vaporous relations of dematerialized capital, all the while tightening the noose on all forms of actually existing material relations. This complete “theft of the Real” is, after all, the principal crime of neo-liberal capitalism and its corollaries in debauched forms of liberalism and in corrupted forms of democraticpolitical governance. In a very real sense, then, the machinery of this globalist coup d’état might swerve at any moment from its synthetic administration of “the distribution of sensible” (Jacques Rancière’s term), or the Real, to the suzerainty of absolute despotism through hyper-material forms of enslavement, both territorial and personal. This totalitarian option always exists, as such (as given), insofar as power maintains its control over both the material and immaterial realms given to culture, while any loss or slippage of control warrants a carefully calibrated response in either new, subtle means to the same end, or, as seen over the course of the twentieth century at times of crisis, new and savage, brutally localized measures of repression. Such is an outline of the problem c.2011 . . . The beginning of an answer to this huge structural problem is, irreducibly, a massive correction, and whether it proceeds by crisis or by incremental progressive means is the only serious question worth asking. The scale of the corruption of society by neo-liberal capitalism is daunting, but the necessary corrective is – despite all alarmist calls regarding the redistribution of wealth or “class warfare” – to redistribute the wealth. The elite typically are overleveraged, just as the institutions they inhabit are over-leveraged (and this is particularly true of the nouveaux riches). Just guessing, we might say they have leveraged their privilege and wealth ten times – as they are all little “Madoffs” and they constantly require new forms of exploitation (and new subjects to exploit) to maintain their personal and corporate Ponzi schemes. This is measured, of course, in the consumption of material and speculative “real estate” (the houses, the cars, the private schools, the boats, the restaurants they frequent, the things they buy and the things they collect, including art, degrees, other peoples debt, bling, dogs, jets, pied-à-terres, etc.). The correction may proceed both by an internal shift in behavior and a return to a type of behavior that resembles a renascent social and economic conscience, or it may proceed punitively, through a slowly leveraged tax on privilege and the repatriation of social and cultural capital to the collective fund (ground) – in most cases governmentally administered – underwriting the very notion of the collective (the commutarian model). In the rarified instances of cultural institutions, where the privileges of power are most subtly expressed (though that subtlety is wearing thin), the

Anamnesis

11

first order of a correction would be the expulsion of the MBAs from the management of the universities and various organs of civil society such that capital might be banished from extorting “intellectual capital” from what has always been, and which was established as, a semi-neutral ground between government and the people. In academia, and due to the recent assault on so-called public universities by government (an assault made all the more explicit insofar as it is increasingly transparent that public universities “owned” and funded by the government are effectively now owned by capital due to the fact that governments are now owned by capital through systemic corruption), the primary return to civility requires that the current push to marginalize the humanities (as this has been the traditional hotbed of dissent against capital) be reversed through recapitalization of the same through government intervention. All attempts to privately fund universities leads, without exception, to the establishment of another form of exploitation by power, acting typically on behalf of themselves, whether by grant, endowment, or service. For institutes funded by private capital, to substitute for bona fide departments within universities that are established through democratic, versus autocratic or elite regimes of power (faculties, versus clubs), only preserves the opportunities for the ideological manipulation, subtle or otherwise, of the university. In returning the universities to true public service (meaning to independence within the civic realm) a first bastion against creeping economic determinism is re-established, and within such – as means of protecting speculative thought itself from capital – it is possible that an entirely (and truly) productive capacity within collective human agency is secured and “re-sacralized,” both as autonomous sphere for reflexive praxis and as bulwark against the reduction of everything to mechanisms within the spectral operations of a global criminal operation. (This “return” to the historical mission of the academy must be, however, premised on the re-definition of speculative thought as radical thought – and praxis – versus a conservative form of internal, self-actualizing “research” that has, in the past, led to the development of an order of faculty clubs that excludes anyone not part of the “conversation”; that is, a pervasive and institutional type of autism that produces endless circular and self-justifying publications, conference papers, and books that develop and sustain a discourse that turns inward at the expense of everything else, such as the proverbial Other, or all that demands that universities while being “closed networks” function as if they were in service to the larger world beyond their walls, versus in service to an academic elite that merely services itself or sells itself to capital for all the usual perks and privileges visited upon a chattering class. Foremost, then, speculative

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Essay One

thought must embrace, once again, a form of universality that negates all of the various disciplinary biases of the academies, including the conversion of humanities programs to vocational training and the attendant laissez-faire formulation of faculties as bastions of self-interest and neoliberal competition, the latter a game visited upon schools within schools by management and administration to make the tenured and often lazy liberal academic establishment “hop.” This tightening of the screws, through both performance reviews and quantitative measures applied to research, is but one game imposed by the MBAs, and at the behest of government and/or capital through withholding or rationing funding, as means of neutralizing dissent and as means of expropriating intellectual capital, all the while engendering a culture of fear and competitiveness given to the Darwinian dictates of the primary master of neo-liberalism – Capital proper and its consolidation of power.)6 December 8, 2011

III. OWS and “The Perfect Storm” Culture and art remained mired in and marred by the torsional fields of anomie given to the production of two worlds (in its many instantiations) insofar as cultural production is also contaminated by political ideology. For this reason the Occupy Wall Street movement is the perfect storm; and for this reason the early images of the movement are stunning (before it all descended into street fighting in response to the repressive regimes organized against it, precipitated by the expulsions from the iconic encampments of its progenitors by the authorities, foremost Liberty Plaza in New York). These early images truly “tremble” (in the sense that Marker indicated images sometimes tremble in his 1977 film Le fond de l’air est rouge), not so much because they are evocative of the timeless struggle for one world, but because they are shot through with an implied joy at resisting hegemony in all of its mutable, changeable, and utterly loathsome forms. The well-recognized “lack of demands” by OWS is emblematic of the bankrupt ethos of contemporary political agency held in thrall to capital – and the one demand the movement repeated anyway, to mostly deaf ears, was that money be removed from politics. If this suggests that politics is, after all, the issue, it does so only in the sense that politics is the privileged venue for Art’s battles for one world (a virtuous one world, versus a world constructed by fables of equality and access, or a world unified in the unholy name of markets and the freedom to consume).

Anamnesis

13

Art in this equation references something that is not co-equal to culture. Culture, as Marker noted in the film-essay Lettre de Sibérie (1958), is “what remains when everyone has left.”7 This sardonic assessment of culture is the universal response to systems of representation and memorialization given to authorized forms of culture, and Marker’s point in stating that images sometimes tremble is to say that within Art proper is something wholly other than the acceptable limits given to art as culture. This something that causes images to tremble is in the subject of the image and the subject as subject (the eye of the beholder, so to speak, and the eye of the artist/photographer). It has in many respects world-historical aspects that are part and parcel of the very processes of history in the making – but not history as discourse or history as record, but history as epochal event, given to singular moments of extraordinary fertility and rebirth (all the while informing a larger project that suggests an irrepressible “Hegelian” perception that places subjects and events in relation to Spirit coming to Spirit, but as self-knowledge, versus a justification for the State or the abstract and often inhumane exigencies of Science and/or rote rationality). The appearance of OWS as perfect storm indicates the battleground that is emerging historically, yet now, configured between the end of postmodernism and the beginning of whatever comes next. OWS signifies (through its opposition to everything except liberty proper, and through its resistance to being co-opted by the Left, unions, micro-histories, and postmodern discourses of difference and entrenched models of political agitation in conformity with what is permitted by power) the quixotic, yet powerful elevation of political agency to the level of Art. It does not engage the society of the spectacle in same manner as the Situationists, but instead utilizes the same strategies toward new ends. Notably, they have begun to intervene directly on behalf of their constituency, “the 99 percent,” in part as a result of being evicted from their early settlements in public and private parks, where it might be said they formalized the image of their resistance prior to sending it into the far corners (dark and otherwise) of neo-liberal society and its enveloping culture of endless collateral damage. Marker’s politically engaged films, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, structure and re-structure what is always at play and what is always at risk in the struggles to free pure political agency and return it to subjects. In this way, these films also conjoin subjectivity to political agency, while, insofar as these films document mostly failed moments of revolt and rebirth, they also lead forward and backward to his avowed respect for singular subjects and their relation to power and their entanglement in various forms of ideology (revolutionary ideology and its

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Essay One

other, forms of enslavement and disempowerment). This moment, then, within all of the moments of his film-essays, essays proper, and photographic documents (including the problematic digitalization of this photographic archive beginning with his new-media projects and installations) is reducible to the subject of “subject qua subject” (subject as subject to internal and external forces that are impersonal and often despotic). The late return to photography, and the mixing of times and places, plus the laconic, almost stripped, non-discursive aspects of these exhibitions and books of images collected “from the world at large” denotes, in turn, that irreducible subject that inhabits the silent interior of all of these works once the dust has settled (once the political, worldhistorical, and – strangely – personal agendas have dissolved). What is left is also what always mattered most – that is, the protection, elaboration, and revitalization of the “zone” in memory that confronts time as space, or space as time, indicating a collapse of this classical antinomy (plus an elective, yet misleading evocation of its spurious elision in quantum theory) when one reaches what can only be called the dimensional torsion of the “immemorial,” or that non-space and non-time where consciousness is born, or where consciousness is “borne aloft,” given that the “immemorial” is lost and must be re-found through time and space (and history). This seemingly paradoxical quest through imagery (and the critique of imagery required to reach this “zone” in cognition proper) is, as always, predicated on the understanding that life is constructed between two worlds, and these two worlds are only one world from the apparitional perspective of conscience and its secret alliance with the immemorial. Otherwise, the world remains the existential-metaphysical war zone that it often quite literally becomes at moments of crisis. This apparitional one world is also what ultimately inhabits Art. Political protest as Art is one way of measuring the distance between these two worlds. Yet the aestheticization of politics is an utterly slippery slope (as noted by Walter Benjamin) and the politicization of aesthetics equally troublesome (but for diametrically opposed reasons). OWS indulges neither, and as perfect storm this moment recoups many of the aspects of Marker’s filmic oeuvre, as almost all of the problems of the 1960s and 1970s remain unresolved and have only worsened in many respects. The image of politics then resides outside of all images, and (again) images tremble because of what they portend as much as what they picture. As limit, images conceal the apparatuses of a larger, impersonal and metaphysical form of knowledge that is primordial by its very nature. And it is not nature; or, if anything, it is anti-nature or purely formal reserve for worlds in the process of becoming. Far from static (as in forms of the so-called perennial

Anamnesis

15

philosophy), it is intensely dynamic and represents the origin of worlds, the origin of freedom, and the origin of all images, insofar as such images are also words (and all words, as forms of intelligence, refer back to the image of the immemorial – or that “zone” Marker formalizes as the place where images are stripped of their temporality, historicity, and instrumental value to become purely dynamic, mnemonic structures that signal, as Artaud might have said, “through the flames”). December 8, 2011

IV. Post-Marxism There is an almost-detectable, post-Marxist critique that circulates in Marker’s work in the form of questioning the evacuation of universals for microhistories and disparate narratives, a sometimes elegiac and sometimes caustic embrace of lost causes that also signals the “lost continent” that his work obliquely addresses – the paradigmatic, not as master narrative or noble lie but as immemorial force-field and dynamic function within what is otherwise known as History itself. The post-Marxist impulse (as part of post-structuralism) is primarily, today, and in retrospect, the capitulation to the empire of the broken sign, and Marker is not alone in stating that the “sign also sets” – a perspective that is at least honest, if not also an admission that Marxist, revolutionary praxis failed.8 In the subsequent fracturing of the larger narrative of historical materialism in the discourses of power, colonialism, feminism, and the like (discourses of différance), the attendant loss is found in the post-structuralist “histories of histories” and the deconstruction of humanist politics toward an assortment of impersonal agencies that animate discourse from within, versus the universalizing tendencies of macropolitics and the interventions of the revolutionary “actant” (person, persons, networks, collaboratives, movements, or such).9 This “loss” is the ghost that is not (or no longer) in the machine (the paradoxical absent ghost/Father); its psychic or psychological fold is the underlying drama of the Freudian and the Lacanian analytic of both repression and transactional therapies given to both. Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes is exemplary in this regard.10 This loss is also the paradigmatic or signature factor demoted by Michel Foucault and spectralized by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida. It only returns when Derrida finally addresses Marx (fulfilling a long-delayed promise) with Spectres de Marx11 – addressing the lost cause and the lost father, at once. From Louis Althusser to Žižek (or from A to Z), then; and when all is lost, what seemed vanquished re-appears.12

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Essay One

What re-appears, then? Arguably, the last frontier for late-capitalism is the subject (subjectivity) – and if the post-Marxist move played into the hands of capital (by disappearing into the microhistories of its assault on power) the return to the austere agency of the subjective is what always returns in Art, Love, and Revolution; the three instantiations of the event of Truth privileged by Badiou. The possible demise of the subject is the dynamic alter-agent animating post-humanism in all of its forms, and postMarxism fell into the trap of facilitating that end with its own dispersal into horizontal and impersonal agencies of power that are always underand over-written by power.13 With 1989, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Capitalism Triumphant moved on all fronts to enclose and further subjugate/enslave the subject, an insubstantial agent in the field of historical agency, insofar as it is marginalized in the makeshifts of individual liberty and consumerism. Proceeding by atomization, then, the post-human is far more than the technological enslavement of souls; it is also the absolute deracination and obliteration of con-science (morality versus ethics), or that which moves in all instances of the return to the subjective ground that opens on to that anteriority that is the immemorial.14 It is this struggle and its historical play that Marker’s works unendingly investigate – and it is as often an inquisition as an aubade to that return that is embedded in the stillness of the image (that doubled, two-way time of the image, of the image as document, and the time of the work of art (as means) that accesses the immemorial force-field of conscience as truth).15 The power of the image is in its dynamic function as unknown factor, residing in the faktum of image (the artifactual, technical form), yet also overriding that first power as document to launch, instead, into the mnemonic, echoing tableaux vivants of art as revolutionary act of resistance (from resistance to revolution) and redemption – an act or event that is, after all, ur-formalist par excellence. As ur-formalist, art restores a ground to the image that is most often catastrophic, apocalyptic, and redemptive (yet always so in relation to what is to come or to be recovered/re-discovered). Bazin’s vision of the image as impressed from somewhere else altogether is intact in Marker’s work insofar as that work is read theologically, against the apparatuses of art’s technicity, foremost in the multimedia installations and hyper-media adventures such as “Zapping Zone,” “Immemory One,” Level Five, and “Ouvroir,” for example – the excess in each, in relation to the technical apparatus, erasing the operative function of the media it exploits for the elective “interiority” of the event (the raison d’être for the work of art).16 February 27, 2012

Anamnesis

17

V. Post-Marxism and Neo-Marxism There are many moments in post-structuralist post-Marxism that help to explain Marker’s “Marxism,” if that is what it is. Foremost is the fact that there was never anything monolithic about post-structuralism in France and that its different positions vis-à-vis Marxism were and remain effectively a critique of both faces of late-modernity; a critique of the meta-narratives of Modernity proper (including Marxism), and a critique of the subsequent fracturing of the revolutionary project from the Left, as Capital’s mechanisms for assimilating and co-opting resistance became more and more subtle, primarily through a process of reification that, indeed, accounts for the so-called “Left melancholy” of post-Marxism in general.17 Marker’s position is detectable in his denunciation of the Tel quel group, which Terry Eagleton equates with “starry-eyed” Maoism, or “ceaseless disruption and overturning” but absolute lack in terms of contributing to the universal struggle for socio-economic justice through political agitation. Indeed, this universal struggle is precisely the point, as is the very concept of universals, as post-structuralism is effectively the evacuation of the paradigmatic in favor of the syntagmatic axis of cultural production, albeit toward critique but at the same time toward ineffectual critique and, instead, a type of parlor game for intellectuals. Marker’s own relationship to the specular games of deconstruction is telling, especially insofar as many of his projects indulge a similar discursive anima toward the construction of hegemonies (structures of power, but in the plural). According to Eagleton, the post-Marxist project, carrying on in many ways from the Tel quel project (primarily through Derrida’s influence, including the incorporation of deconstructivist “literary/textual critique” into the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe), vacates all possible theories of agency (of actants or agents, and subsequently of all subjects) heading, instead, for “decentred effect[s] of the semiotic process,” with an attendant focus on the split, precarious, pluralistic nature of all identity,” and which then often “slides at its worst into an irresponsible hymning of the virtues of schizophrenia.”18 Despite the war between post-Marxists and neo-Marxists, the effect on critical theory is nonetheless uniform in that “theory” is vacated by the 1990s due to its contamination by outdated political arguments for or against Marx, and the game is lost, insofar as the capitalist reification of difference has proceeded so far as to make all attempts at critique or resistance, at best, picturesque. From this perspective it is not difficult to understand Marker’s own place within this complex, never-uniform

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system of cultural praxis as cultural critique, given his intellectual origins in the intertwined milieux of postwar Marxist, left-literary, and High Existentialist Paris. This confluence of forces contains, however, the force-field evacuated by Marxism, or the “theological” impress of the immemorial; that which is the ghostly presence anyway in Marx, and that which was only teased forth out of post-structuralism in Derrida’s late “messianic phase.”19 Marker’s return to still photography, and his focus on the human face, becomes all the more powerful in relation to this perennial discord in French intellectual affairs between universals and contingency. Across the “face” of his work the presence of singular souls flashes within the otherwise discordant apparatus of the discursive operation, functioning as the quintessential “atheological” marker that indexes a larger force in the production of culture – the immemorial “face” of Humanity proper. Many of Levinas’ insights regarding ethics as determined by a universalizing function that must remain empty (utterly abstract and perpetually denatured) are present in Marker’s work. Levinas’ Totality and Infinity remarkably intones the exact essentialist dynamic processes operating within Marker’s work: “By essence the prophetic word responds to the epiphany of the face, doubles all discourse not as discourse about moral themes, but as an irreducible movement of a discourse which by essence is aroused by the epiphany of the face inasmuch as it attests the presence of a third party, the whole of humanity, in the eyes that look at me.”20 It is Marker’s relationship to Big History and Big Capital (plus his relationship to Big Communism or totalitarian communism) that discloses his Marxian strand of thought as more given to an interpretation of the subject’s captivity within the same than any ideological bias per se. It is the totalitarian aspects of Big Capital that, in turn, come in for heavy criticism in his performative critiques by way of narrative within the structure of his films. In this sense, his primary concern is the slippery terrain of historicity versus History proper. And it is his Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993) that underscores his departure from French Marxism per se, insofar as his condemnation of Big Communism is no less severe than his condemnation of Big Capital (primarily through his reductive, pseudo-documentary films of worldwide resistance to the imperial machinations of at-first Western hegemony (in its so-called Social Democratic forms) and, later, the incipient or emergent trends of neoliberal capitalism’s assault on the subject and all of the insidious forms of reification associated with this conscious or unconscious program). The narrative chord of Marker’s work is, therefore, entirely of this interrogation of hegemony’s multiple discourses, inclusive of those that

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are permitted to subsist on the Left by Capital (a component of the Marxist critique, but also an important truth relayed by way of post-Marxism’s deconstruction of meta-narratives and hegemony). His shifting allegiances to both literary-critical and political camps are, in this regard, not without a proper context, given that the context for the liberation of subjects is constantly undergoing historical change. What remains the same throughout all of his work (and which makes any focus on the technical apparatuses of his work misleading) is his exacting and often excruciating estimation of pure subjective agency and its valorization within the still photograph as talismanic index of a condition that faces both toward the fundamental mystery of being and outward toward the paradoxical prisonhouse of history as primary form of ideology. Exiting multimedia experiments just when the entire production of new media was becoming patently contaminated by the reificatory processes and practices of neoliberal capitalism (the co-optation of Art by Capital) makes sense, then, and the return to the still image in the 2000s is – after all – a return to the still point in all exegetical excursions to the “land of the people,” which, in turn, points to the ultimate conundrum of subjective agency as an evershifting locus for the production of one world. Pierre’s comments in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966) are emblematic of Marker’s “Romantic” sensibility, albeit a High Romantic,21 unforgiving bias in favor of all that moves in the image of Humanity as subject of History. One cannot not capitalize these terms (even though Marker often takes extraordinarily cutting swipes at Big History). Pierre’s (Marker’s) pseudo-naivety is instructive. In the closing passage of this film, famously made from a series of photographs Marker had taken over the course of a decade traveling the world, the issue of “something” that approaches humankind through the “Law of the Garden” is invoked without ever being named. It is an affective moment that signals the “Christic” lining for Marker’s Romantic Marxism, arguably the highest form of Marxism in terms of the idealist quest for justice that underwrites Marx’s program for countering the wholly inhuman forces of Darwinian capitalism (which might be reduced to the “Law of the Jungle”). What approaches is a supreme moment of universal solidarity across multiple frontiers – the entire edifice of national and international political praxis collapsing in a vision of a more primitive, yet more evolved or “futural” community configuring all revolutionary activity as grounded in the subject’s relationship to subjects. This passage is illustrated by images of paired subjects – human and animal, human and human, animal and animal. The suggestion, which also reinforces Marker’s repeated recourse in his work to the depiction of animals as antidote to human hubris, is

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toward a type of colloquy that exceeds all political, social, and artistic critiques, exiting – as it were – through a back door in subjective relations to enter Heinrich von Kleist’s secret back door to “Eden.” This “event” (the approach of something that exceeds all situations) is “Christic” in the manner that it is also configured as immemorial. The event sensed is something that always already exists (and its suggestive futurity resides in its suggestive anteriority). This near post-structuralist posture is nonetheless a gesture toward something timeless that resides within time. As post-structuralism often absorbed and re-configured many literarycritical gestures extending well into the past, merely bringing them forward while throwing out anything resembling universal or paradigmatic bias, Marker’s Marxian strain exhibits traces of this antagonism to the past while retaining the core principles of the Marxist quest for universal suffrage. The “Christic” appears by way of allusive, suppressed theological agency (the often formal gestures within the discursive apparatus of the work), loosely deployed as typical atheological moments that collapse upon closer scrutiny. In Pierre’s words, the Law of the Garden counters the Law of the Jungle. But the Garden implicated is the Garden of Gethsemane, not the Garden of Eden, even while the former echoes and closes out the crisis of the latter. It is the suffering image that Marker returns to; an image that is ineluctably tied to the image of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane en route to Golgotha.22 Famously (since Saint Paul and further elaborated upon most recently by Agamben), the “Christic” event overrules and overruns the Law (both Jewish and Roman law, or the very instantiation of religious-statist precepts as ideology).23 The Passion of Christ (via the Via Dolorosa) is the subsumation of that law through capitulation to another law. This other law is the redemptive path of a fateful but graceful return to the immemorial, paradigmatic axis of being beyond all this-worldly configurations of power and glory (Agamben’s point). It, in turn, frees the political from the historical and undermines all contingent expressions of political agency in favor of the primary subjective field of true political praxis – the evocation, defense, and instauration of the Kingdom of Heaven (as justice). The “Christic” operates in Big History as a dilapidated, torsional field, never one thing or another – and “dilapidated” only in the sense that its operative theological power requires history to carry out its ahistorical project. This other power is appropriately the dynamis within time that exits time through another time that is anterior to time in its empirical or historical (teleological) sense. Such is also always measured by wholly unconventional means. Marker’s works measure this “other” axis or power in being-in-the-world through accessing the

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immemorial, redemptive power of the still center of the still image. In all instances when he subjects the same to a discursive set of maneuvers (within the various media he exploits), the chief movement is not the narrative itself nor the apparatus of the camera as it indulges montage.24 The chief moment is that still center as “exit,” or that very-still image of a power that exceeds all contingent expression.25 The generally throw-away phrase “You never know what you are photographing,” utilized by many commentators of the avowed futurity of Marker’s work (and generating endless rhetoric on the work as a veritable “madeleine” aimed at the future versus the past), connotes not so much the fact that an image may end up having significance only in the future (or additional significance only with the passage of time) but, instead, the internal agency of the image beyond all possible or prescribed temporality as grounded in the proverbial here-and-now. This proximity to the internal time of the artwork denoted by Agamben as “messianic” in essence places Marker’s work in a relational vortex that conflates the post-structuralist privileging of contingency (the here-and-now) and the ever-displaced promise of universal suffrage (utopia). The often dystopian visions of post-Marxism do, indeed, appear in Marker’s work, but always in relation to another version of the “here-and-now,” and – perhaps – as perverse commentary on the empty pretexts of the high post-structuralist version of the here-and-now. Marker’s dark vision opens on to the possible, though not endlessly deferred event of the messianic in history. His dislocations of contemporary French thought occur primarily through the aegis of deconstructing deconstruction, a paradoxical endeavor that is also perhaps what effectively was the last “move” of Derrida in his own game of threeor four-dimensional chess (the language games of French theory, in general, insofar as they were always primarily literary games, or the functional equivalent of a “rhetorical Olympics”). Marker’s so-called memories of the future are, then, memories of a here-and-now that is (somehow) present all the while, not deferred, and always waiting in the wings of thought. This recourse to what can only be called historicity and its avowed anti-discursive function as phenomenality itself also indicates that Marker’s own linguistic coordinates are entirely outside of any identifiable school of thought. Hence “Giraudoux” . . . And hence his defense of “Malraux” (against much hard-line, French Communist criticism of Malraux’s role in French cultural affairs and his possible role in manipulating the Russian avant-garde, including Eisenstein, against Josef Stalin).26 Although most pessimists are secretly burned-out idealists (as, for example, the peculiar case of Jean Baudrillard), Marker’s pessimism is more or less always a partial capitulation for performative reasons to the

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dark remonstrations of the post-Marxist worldview, against which he then arrays a dazzling deconstruction of the very complicity of that worldview with the operative powers of repression that seek to create safe havens for resistance while monitoring and crushing any precise event or set of events that might lead to actual revolutionary and emancipatory action. March 10, 2012

VI. Hegemony (The Machine) The world is a vast machine (worlds within worlds that are also machines within machines). Whether that machine is monolithic or variegated, smooth or striated, is a matter for the critique of hegemony (since Antonio Gramsci) and, more properly, the critique of ideology. Yet as one world, this possible virtuous economy of political-social mechanisms is either oppressive or progressive. To be the latter requires, nonetheless, ideology – but ideology of a type that is grounded in the most subtle and mutable instantiations of power. The alternative is anarchy and the collapse of civil society and its productive analogues. The production of difference in the post-Marxist regimes of criticism have generally facilitated the deferral of the utopian impulse and/or its dissipation across horizontal axes of cultural critique and production, all the while further servicing the machine. Or at least that is the reading of the neo-Marxist critique of post-Marxism. Both are forms of complicity through confrontation with repression (socio-economic and psychodynamic repression) that conceal the possible one world that is virtuous. Since Medieval times, religion has played a decisive role in the determinations of empires and states. With the collapse of that world order new forms of secularized religious praxis emerged that contained the exact same mechanisms of control and systems of spectacle that divert attention from the ultimate ethical economy of a possible world that conserves as its most vital function (as empty function or x) the neutralization of anomie and the necessarily redemptive chord of the religious impulse itself in concert with the utopian, this-worldly gesture toward the here-and-now. It is this here-and-now that post-structuralism focused its fire upon, deforming the futural as always to come, versus always present. This absence which is the categorical datum or dictum of deconstruction is the emptied form of the paradigmatic and the policing of all improbable returns to any master narrative that might take up residence in or by way of the paradigmatic aspects of signs and images – or amid discourses, according to Foucault. For this reason alone, Derrida’s end game in

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circling the issue of “messianicity” resembles the end game of postphenomenology – in the latter case, the circling of phenomenality and the excess given to the event of the Kantian thing-in-itself. Both deconstruction and post-phenomenology converge on the function that exceeds all contingent expressions of the so-called quarry or prey – the Real. In each case, what obtains is the identification and privileging of the very factor that is most dynamic within a closed circuit of discourse and discourse analysis. Power resides in this function, and to strip it of any personal agency is to deliver it over to the impersonal agencies of the machinic apparatuses of power (which only ever pretend that they are not in fact controlled through human agency anyway). For Marker, the game is to expose the corrupted system of wheels and pulleys of the machinery, and to disclose the stubborn and often sublime humanity of the victims of the sinister apparatuses of power – those souls caught in the ropes and pulleys. His recourse to the human face is such a gesture; but it is a gesture that then points beyond the human face toward what has always been the last resort of pernicious systems of governance and control, the half-hearted provision of a “human face” to the machinery of oppression – a half measure always, and usually a re-configuration of the levers and administrative protocols toward a re-servicing of the machine. Gramscian critiques of hegemony (even those that have survived within post-Marxism, such as Laclau and Mouffe’s, or Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s) are subtle turns toward the machine to confront it head on while also sidestepping its reactionary capabilities. Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks are such an example, as they are written in a coded language that was intended to put off the censors.27 Alexandre Medvedkine’s and Eisenstein’s late films were of a similar order, insofar as they were devised to slip past the Soviet apparatchiks even though in most cases they failed to do so. Gramsci’s critiques of hegemony, before he was imprisoned, were no-holds-barred demolition projects of the shifting terrain of Italian socio-political constructs at a time when industrialization was also beginning to provide (through the workplace of the factory) the means for the organization of the proletariat. Prior to the 1920s, and following industrialization anyway, the chief means of control of the populace (both the peasantry and the emergent working classes) was through a conflation of various powers, inclusive of the Church, whereby the middle ground (the petite bourgeoisie) was the most volatile element of the structuralization of the distribution of wealth and privileges – they could, in fact, easily be bought off. Gramsci’s critique includes, as a result, a forceful deconstruction of rural society as much as urban society. In the

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middle ground of both, however, were sown the seeds of fascism.28 The rise of Italian fascism was the dynamic of the “neutral” factor (the petite bourgeoisie) being manipulated by emergent powers of reaction. Marker’s entire political project within the films that directly document the same struggles merely forwarded into late-capitalist times, plus the films that are detours into the interior of the con-science of the people (always reflected in the mirror of his own subjective voyages), is, therefore, consistent from first to last frame across multiple frames of reference. This consistency is a Marxian critique of cultural production and a deconstruction or archaeology of the apparatuses of power. The petite bourgeoisie is also quite often the target for the most damning statements, whether trade union officials or apparatchiks within the bureaucracies of the state. Where he exits the strict Marxist critique of power is through the internal shadow-lands of how, where, and when such things might be placed in perspective; not a perspective that governs contingency or results in an anamorphic game of receding opportunities or diminishing resources to access the Real (which in “Markerian” terms would connote the utopian), but a perspective that moves inward, through the intersubjective and intertextual house of mirrors of post-modern and post-structuralist language games (which posit no subject as such but, instead, an endless semiosis of free-floating signifiers), and – critically – past the ghosts of times past toward an “exit” long hidden in the ravages of modernist ideology proper. The “Christic” event of Marker’s work is a retrospective gaze that is always looking forward from the crucible of the present moment. That present as still center, stasis and its other (transformation), is also always moving forward, slowly, incrementally toward another moment – the redemptive apotheosis of the subject by its other – not-subject. This dynamic is played out in every work and every life moment (documented lived experience) – and, in the figures he focuses upon (Medvedkine, Tarkovsky et al.); it is the equivalent of a personal apocalypse that opens on to revelation,29 a not-time, not-space wherein all images and memories are activated as swarm and where the intelligences or principalities that animate what passes as quotidian experience are made evident as powers. At the heart of the “Christic” event is revelation, then – and in historical terms it does (after all) negate the closed tomb of all archives. This is the overcoming of death (of stasis), and the path through history as a catalogue of disasters marked by luminous faces that defy the same is the measure of that Levinasian escape from Being (formed nonetheless through or beyond being).30 Marker’s reduction (as a negation of contingency toward universality, but a negative ontology, after all) is wholly consistent with the ultra-avantgarde nature of the work of art as

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political-ethical praxis (yet praxis as resistance). He does not side with the “genie in the lamp” (nor with its owners, pace Gramsci, father of the theory of hegemony).31 He has, instead, formulated a unique position in regard to historical materialism and Marxist critique – siding with the operative agencies of production of culture that have, in turn, evolved to such a degree that conventional, orthodox Marxism no longer works other than as a touchstone, however anathematized in post-Marxism, for the necessary critique of power. Marker sides not with the owners of the “genie” but with the genie itself – and the inescapable Romantic Marxism that his work engages is, in many respects, the highest homage to Marx and to the spirit of communism. Out of the smoke and ash of the twentieth century comes a phoenix that was and is always present in the critique of ideology as false consciousness. It is the sworn enemy of power; for, as phoenix, it outsurvives all contingent forms of hegemony and the exercise of power. As proto-Romantic, this genie/phoenix/force is the “Christic.” It survives all horrors, defies all expectations of capitulation to anything other than the kingdom that is within. In this manner, the “Markerian” kingdom of shadows (images) is a rite of passage. And if that kingdom is a land of colorless shades, an under-world that leads to an over-world, it is a land haunted by the luminous debris of ideological shards that have, as remnants of false consciousness or ideologies past, fallen even further, so to speak, betraying true consciousness of the whole anyway through negation, a perhaps lost continent within the worlds-within-worlds model he embraces, but forever present nonetheless in memory. If the “genie in the lamp” is pure speculative capital (speculative thought itself as dynamis within all systems of the administration of the world, the “( )” of Althusser and Balibar’s Reading “Capital,” and the capitalized x of Kant’s Critique of Judgment), then all of Marker’s appropriations and expropriations of the technical apparatuses of literature, photography, cinema, and new media make sense in the larger trajectory of a project that subverts all such forms of techne toward the original ground of cultural production – techne in service to power. It is the configurations of power that then become the issue. Power returns, as it were, to its first cause (its originary ground and its ontological irruption into worlds through the word as image). Against all post-modern formulations of the relativization of social relations one finds, then, an overarching program that is, indeed, paradigmatic, political, existential, and “Christic.” Marker’s view of the world as Via Dolorosa is “Dantean” – it is a vast, circular meditation on justice that invokes a Gramscian critique of hegemony as an interlocking system of shifting class relations. It is

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“Christic” when it detours into the personal, the recondite, and the purely mnemonic-liminal, as if in that very register everything collapses into or toward the most salient form of consciousness and con-science – the merit of, after all, the “Christic” event. March 12, 2012

VII. Marker and “Critical Resistance” “The word ‘resistance’ does not of itself distinguish between emancipation and domination. . . . Critique is what makes it possible to distinguish emancipatory resistance from resistance that has been co-opted by oppressive forces.”32 Strangely, resistance also includes refusal to participate or be assimilated into the discourses, critical and/or merely ameliorative and mediational, that are permissible within the venues and disciplines deemed acceptable by the powers that be. In Marker’s case, and as early as Loin du Viêt-nam (1967), one of his primary concerns is the delineation and safeguarding of what constitutes the move from resistance to revolution, by way of what constitutes the move from demonstration to resistance. Yet this is also present in his works that predate the overt political films of the SLON years, starting with Nuit et brouillard (1955) and transformed into the unforgiving spectacle of Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005). If the post-Marxist juggernaut developed multiple narratives across a wide range of horizontally arrayed cultural systems, it also performed a type of self-lobotomy, throwing out in the process the entire reason for critique in its putative “classical” sense. In the polyglot work of French cultural theory, Marker’s Marxism and his subsequent neo-Marxism, if that is what it is, is of the order of “reflexive socioanalysis”; his critique resembles, as such, that of Pierre Bourdieu and Levinas, two figures who resist assimilation into the poststructuralist canon – two figures who strenuously object to be assimilated into that non-project, given especially that half of the game of oppression and co-optation is to define the enemy and turn the event of the insurrection into a cottage industry that might also be confined to the cottage – books, pamphlets, academia. Tearing down the Sorbonne is, then, not such a bad idea, while replacing it with Chris Marker (Henri Michaux’s apocryphal suggestion) represents not so much the privileging of a single individual but the elevation of the superlative project of perpetual critique without complicity or concessions to the object of the critique. (That the Sorbonne is Levinas’ home base is even more telling, in that, again, it is not the individual that matters but the complex within

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which they have allowed themselves to become embedded or imprisoned.33) Marker’s neo-Marxism is constructed along the arc of his work as a sustained analysis of the failure of the Left to accomplish the transition from resistance to revolution. As High Romantic Marxist, his Marxist sensibility is also never monolithic or dogmatic. He is, however, a universalist, first, and a partisan of lived experience (with all of its horizontally arrayed relationships), second. In all cases of ideology, with few exceptions, he is the latter. The universalist strain emerges, as with Bourdieu and Levinas, in tension and often in contradistinction to poststructuralist language games and the production of new false consciousness, the irresolvable founding state of critiques of ideology since Friedrich Nietzsche. The true crisis emerges, again and again, when the critique becomes a form of false consciousness unto itself. This is perhaps the underlying point of the overwhelming denunciation of the New Left in Le fond de l’air est rouge. It is, then, a “genealogy” of naturalized and re-naturalized universals (Franco Moretti’s “signs taken for wonders”) that is at stake in Marker’s political film-essays, but also in many of his late film-portraits (Medvedkine, Tarkovsky, Simone Signoret, and Denise Bellon) – as it is the same that also inhabits his indistinct or vague collection of anonymous or semi-anonymous doyennes of this and that.34 The female interlocutors of “the gaze” engage Marker as talismanic figures of grace amidst the maelstrom of the dominance of the male. It is an easy matter to dismiss, but it is also an uneasy matter to hang on to. Yet one cannot not hold on to it, especially if one is trying to sort out the discursive furniture of the presentations of cultural maps that he is constantly deploying and then conspicuously deconstructing and re-constructing. The explicit and the implicit collude, in this sense, in an ungodly conflation of twisted signifying systems. It is at times an elegant conflation of this-worldly artifice and a god-like view of the disasters visited upon humankind throughout the twentieth century. The Marxism counts; it is a means of saying “One + = . . .” The One remains the same throughout all of the distortions that it meets within the historical field. It is the equivalent of the holy sacrament surviving 2,000 years of strife within the often morally bankrupt Catholic Church. (At least this is the justification for many of the more high-profile conversions to Catholicism, while it also underwrites the very concept of radical orthodoxy that – arguably – Marker embraces.) The post-structuralist demolition project regarding totalizing orders is the central problem when its application meets historical problems. Historicity is much more slippery than meets the eye – and historicism is

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effectively only the outermost side of this questionable synthesis of subject and object (consciousness and unconsciousness), a gesture that runs like a river through all post-structuralist critiques concerning “What is to be done?” “Poststructural social theory is assumed to have some difficulty in explaining what counts as ‘improvement’ insofar as it denies there is a totalizing standpoint from which to judge overall social progress.”35 And, The poststructuralist inability to imagine a society without relations of power has made it the target of Michael Walzer and other critics who view poststructuralism as an expression of the “infantile leftism” that was common in the 1960s. The assumption is that, because the poststructuralists could not imagine a society without power, the poststructuralist attitude is one of resignation and of despair about the possibility of social improvement.36

One must presume that “infantile leftism” includes the Romantic trope of the “utopian,” and that the bias or cut of post-critical thought and its mirror image in neo-Marxism is ultimately guilty of provisional cynicism at best, and – at worst – a culpability with the very apparatuses of power it claims to dissect and deflect. In David Couzens Hoy’s Critical Resistance (an accurate map of the post-cultural and post-critical game up through 2004) the qualifications never stop rolling. The justification for post-Marxist cynicism (which is formed through an inversion of the “infantile leftism” and its subsequent fall from grace with the sea) is almost always served on the silver platter of honorific platitudes, a nod toward the celebrity-intellectual culture of French theory. In all fairness to the universalist, however, it must be acknowledged that resistance, if it starts from the situation, should not limit itself to tactical assessment or to merely instrumental reasoning about how best to achieve the social goals. In addition to tactical assessment, there should be critical assessment of goals. In this kind of critical assessment, there may even be a need to reflect on and to posit universal principles. Thus, even if the universalist mischaracterizes the poststructuralist position, it does not follow that the universalist is misguided.37

Somewhere, then, between the post-Marxist stance of utter flexibility and the neo-Marxist stance of utter inflexibility we find the figure of a filmmaker who might form an adequate replacement for the Sorbonne. These convoys of justification generally go off the road when they meet the bend in the road that returns them to their starting point; albeit a

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starting point that is the ultimate justification for the circular games of the critique that is not a critique. That justification is “language” – and it is the very figure of the bend in the road that returns any interlocutor to his/her place of origin – to start again . . . At this origin, regardless of whether or not the no-longer-subject is aware of it or not, something curious occurs. What occurs is that the no-longer-subject sees itself coming toward itself. When they meet, in Marker’s language, they earn a “Free Re-play.” This formalization of the blind spot in all systems of representation, in turn, demolished all pretexts to objectivity on the part of partisans of socioanalysis. In many ways Marker stands in the middle of this spatialized version of the High Idealist standoff “directing traffic.” The French attempts to kill off Descartes (since Jean-Paul Sartre) have all effectively ended with the same intellectual car crash. The subject, as such, always returns . . .38 It is easy to dismiss both Foucault and Deleuze in this regard, and highly difficult to displace or neutralize Bourdieu, Derrida, and Levinas. “For both Foucault and Bourdieu, power works best when it is invisible. When power becomes visible precisely as domination, it provokes resistance. Bourdieu argues that his method of reflexive socio-analysis reveals the arbitrariness of social relations scientifically, and thus that it makes resistance genuinely critical.”39 What distinguished Foucault from Bourdieu, however, is the simple mathesis of the latter and the inordinate paranoia of the former. In all inquisitions of power it is the steady hand that triumphs. All descents into paranoia or evocations of Hell proper and its analogues (insanity, etc.) are telltale signs of the lost cause of postmodern criticism in service to itself. Genealogy proceeds via aphorism: “‘A Nietzschean “aphorism,”’ Deleuze says, ‘is not a mere fragment, a morsel of thought: it is a proposition which only makes sense in relation to the state of forces that it expresses, and which changes sense, which must change sense, according to the new forces which it is ‘capable’ (has the power) of attracting.”40 Such is the justification for the situational reading, as opposed to the symptomatic reading of texts.41 Granted, the art of expropriation and appropriation is also a very high art. What passes in the French appropriation of Nietzsche however is not the high art of extracting a dynamic principle or elemental function that returns critique to its origins in meta-critique (a paradox, yes, but a necessary inversion of the predilections for starting points). Contained within the Nietzschean refraction of philology (his “home base,” after all), in the aphorism, is everything that moves in the larger apparatus of his work insofar as, pace Marker, the overarching trend is non-dogmatic and (quietly) transcendental.

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This “transcendental problem” is the whole undisclosed archival secret of post-structuralism. Without it, or without its telltale absence, poststructuralism would have been a completely literary venture (as it primarily is and was nonetheless), but operating formally on the side of complacency and total self-indulgence. What saves it from the same is that, despite its own conclusions to never conclude the inquest (because it could never, as Nietzsche could never, close the book on the transcendental), it strangely resists itself, as Bourdieu resists the Deleuzian Nietzsche. Bourdieu does so to give a wider berth to the passenger he is most inclined to favor: an incipient “return” to the universal within the here-and-now, refusing anyway the Cartesian subject and retaining the agent or the agential.42 Conventional wisdom states that Marker’s great masterpieces are La jetée (1962) and Sans soleil (1982); that is, the vast secondary literature in Marker studies privileges both of these films as somehow emblematic of his entire project.43 That both are fictional documentaries is instructive. If with La jetée Marker broke with the past (and he has suppressed most everything previous to that film), Sans soleil is his return to the past (a return to the subject of the subject). Both films are magnificent meditations (Cartesian meditations) on the nature and operative power of memory – of what memory is capable of as it negotiates the twists and turns of the internal landscape of self-consciousness in search of a way out of the same charmed and often-haunted tableau of personal reflection.44 This self-reflexive quality is what make Sans soleil mesmerizing, and it is what makes the film “exceptional.” The exception that marks this film is that all memory contains an exception, or an excess that does – after all – overturn the primacy of the internalized consciousness we call the subject. Yet this excess is what is saved across the entire arc of Marker’s work while also always measured against the field that Bourdieu would give primacy to. This topological knot between an interior shadow-world and an exterior shadow-world is the foremost map that these two films engender. They are classic French cartes des tendres – “atlases of emotion” (in Giuliana Bruno’s sense) that, in turn, chart a route toward an exit that upon arrival neutralizes and frees the images of memory toward and for the Other. If this excess in the mnemonic register of experience also connotes death (as the figure of the Other hypostasized as “the End”) it is only as the limit contained in the image (mnemonic, filmic, photographic, or such). Nietzsche’s own confrontation, then, with this limit (as formalized in the Eternal Return) is, indeed, pertinent. But it is the operative force of this confrontation turned back upon the nominal self that matters. This is what Levinas will unleash in his works as he

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negotiates the post-Heidegger, post-Sartre ravages of “French” epistemology. More than simply a generational issue, this confluence of considerations vis-à-vis the subject in both Marker’s and Levinas’ works indicates an extreme account of “what is,” insofar as this “what is” also contains “what might be” or what in the penultimate register for all such evaluations or transvaluations of values remains the theological limit embedded in metaphysics and philosophy when and if both reach the level of meta-critique (or, perhaps, “Level Five”).45 With Bourdieu we arrive at a closer proximity to Marker’s own position, albeit primarily due to the fact that Bourdieu is constructing his theory of socio-analysis with an eye on two main progenitors: Sartre (Marker’s “schoolmaster”) and Merleau-Ponty. Bourdieu makes Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment more concrete with his notion of the habitus. To understand the habitus one must recognize the difference between that idea and more traditional philosophical notions of habit. Standardly, habit is contrasted to deliberation or decisions of the will. However, Bourdieu views this bifurcation as an oversimplified account of agency. To generate a more complex account, he criticizes Blaise Pascal’s advice to act as if one believed, with the expectation that habits of action will lead to the actuality of belief. . . . Bourdieu argues that the attempt to explain social action will fail if one tries to work from a framework in which actions are caused exclusively either by voluntaristic decisions of reason or by reaction to mechanisms that are external to agents. Instead, he wants an account of agency whereby action is reasonable even if it is not the product of reasoned design. Action can be seen to be “intelligible and coherent without springing from an intention of coherence and a deliberate decision.”46

It is habitus and its close affinity with the very idea of donning the garb of the time (whether intentionally or programmatically and unconsciously) that registers Bourdieu’s worldview within the worldview of “Markerian” dissimulation. Bourdieu’s seriousness of purpose, while aligned within the intellectual parlor games of the French academicians, is categorically pure at its most salient moments. These moments then dovetail with those moments in Marker’s work that temporarily part the Red Sea and allow first passage toward “utopia.” The very term habitus is applicable to so much of Marker’s oeuvre, especially the later multimedia works where he is divining the potential of the pernicious advent of new means to old ends – that being, in retrospect, but also always there anyway, a critique of the means of perpetual lying, and a concomitant critique of “who lies.” “But if the habitus becomes second nature, what came first? Biology? Bourdieu does not deny biology [the body], but he sees the biological as

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always entwined with the social. Sometimes he seems to imply that the biological can be analytically separated from the social.”47 Yes and no (at once). This particular turn is against too much of Merleau-Ponty. It also beautifully avoids the terror of Foucault’s bio-political project. Thought itself still seems to have a possible “outside” to it (in principalities and in suitably disembodied forms of the socius). It is these same shadows that cross Marker’s work – they are the intelligences that Bourdieu demands reside in visibility, all the while, of course, more or less admitting that power resides below the radar, and that critique or critical resistance might have to sometimes take up the same agenda; that is, spectral agency might battle spectral agency curiously in the very place where it could be said to have its most profound or “ideological” purchase – Art. Thus, In another critique of intellectuals in The Rules of Art, Bourdieu says that they are “two-dimensional figures” who ignore what really interests them with the specific authority that they have. When intellectuals speak, they do so with the ambition of being universal. However, in reality they are merely mouthpieces of the “historical unconscious” of a “singular intellectual field” that is vetriloquizing through them. Real communication, he believes, cannot be achieved, as [Jürgen] Habermas thinks, by looking at the single universality that the individual intellectual projects. Instead, in intellectual debate . . . , genuine communication will not be possible unless the parties understand . . . the “multiple universalities” that are attempting to speak. That is, for Bourdieu we have to listen not merely to the universal propositions, but to the different kinds of historical unconsciousness that are trying to be heard. More important than the universals are the “specific histories of intellectual universes that have produced our categories of perception and thought.”48

Here Gramsci’s intellectuals as members of the petite bourgeoisie are strangely present as avatars of foremost grace, as if their critical station has returned to a type of zero degree where they might be of some profoundly progressive use. It all would seem to depend on their relationship to the universal and its antecedents, subject-object relations, no matter how historically debased and attenuated and/or dismissed in the vainglorious attempts to circumvent the return of anything resembling a paradigmatic, totalizing gesture toward the infinite (always the infinite micro-narratized within the excessive regimes of discourse analysis). These micro-narratives are secretly the locus of the penultimate work of art – the formalized and impoverished works that index and re-calibrate the reserve functions of Art. It is only in making such works speak of the haunted house of language that the great ghost might be seen and heard;

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the universal hiding out in the submissive spheres of academic and literary exegesis. The trick is to not narratize the principal universals (the Good and the True) into oblivion, but instead to narratize all forms and instantiations (conscious and otherwise) of false consciousness (the prison-house of Spirit) into smithereens. Both Marker and Bourdieu do this, albeit by two distinct routes. Marker proceeds analogically, moving up and down the paradigmatic axis, all depending on what the subject of his inquest is. Bourdieu does it pseudo-scientifically, pretending – as it were – to find the bones and ashes of systems at their most salient extreme moments of hyper-localization and/or demise. The latter is no less principled, while Marker – given the auspices of Art proper – needs not even play the game of empirical study in service to demolishing hegemony. Bourdieu re-introduces what Marker privileges through his artistic modus operandi by permitting a certain fluctuation within his fields: There is enough free play either in the habitus or in the field . . . to allow for the possibility of critical resistance, even if resistance rarely succeeds in bringing about genuine social transformation. On Bourdieu’s account, although the habitus is all-pervasive, it also has a degree of plasticity, and thus does not entirely preclude agency, whether individual or collective. Bourdieu is not a determinist. On the contrary, the notion of the habitus is intended to explain agency. Bourdieu thinks that structuralists such as [Claude] Lévi-Strauss and Althusser are misguided in reducing agents to structural epiphenomena. Social agents are not rule-following automata, and Bourdieu thinks that [Edmund] Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger are on the right track in giving non-mechanistic and non-intellectualist (i.e., anti-Cartesian) accounts of the relation of agents and the world. He insists, however, that he means “agents, not subjects.”49

This constant recourse to anything other than a subject is instructive insofar as it does benefit the overall analytical model in pursuit of what forms subjects and how subjects might be re-formulated. In the larger scheme of the post-structuralist project, the absence of the subject is either a case for despair or a case for a new method of subjectivization. Arguably, Deleuze and Guattari were equally concerned with the subject but could not bear to mention its name, proceeding by all possible locutions to never mention that abomination of Enlightenment-era epistemology: Defenders of Nietzschean agency therefore see defenders of Cartesian subjects as self-deceived cognizers who misrecognize their own complicity in maintaining substantive social dissymmetries that those who are better

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This of course raises the entire problem of French Nietzscheanism, an especially troublesome elision of many of the more normative or progressive aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, all swerves toward the Will to Power more or less automatically eclipsing the more subtle gestures of the liberation of personal agency from the correctly deduced “haunted” regimes of metaphysical thought, insofar as the latter is also contaminated by ideological distortions. Regarding determinism, fatalism, and necessity, “Bourdieu does not seem to feel the full force of this dilemma, for he insists instead, without much argument, that we should opt not for sociologistic resignation, but for a ‘rational utopianism’ that uses ‘the knowledge of the probable to make the possible come true.’”51 If Marker is embracing the productive casuistry of agents versus subjects with his late-1960s’ films with SLON, he is by the mid-1970s exiting the same and heading for an elaboration of the agential forces of history through individuals caught once more in the standoffs with power. Perhaps always there is this dynamic at play in his work; that irreducible antagonism that marks much of his earliest work and which might be traceable to Sartre, but more likely a matter of the postwar defiance that came with the destruction of the integrated forces of pre-war culture, no matter how problematic or regressive. This concord that quickly turns to discord is a lining that one finds in his turns from agency as embodied in historical force-field to agency embodied in individuals and in named and unnamed situations that are ultimately configurations of the dramas Bourdieu more or less unmasks. This unmasking of spectral agency and its episodic conflagrations are a “Markerian” thread that one also follows to its natural or unnatural conclusion in the immolation of subjects. They exist, but they are also immobilized or immolated in the mostly diabolical machinery of historical agency that also passes as collective and personal apocalypse. Two critical passages from Hoy delineate what is at stake in a tripartite schema as to how such background forces function, and how both Bourdieu and Derrida confront them: There are at least three controversial views about whether these background practices [their intelligibility combined with the subsequent reflexive analysis toward resistance and political praxis] can be made

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explicit through critique and then become the basis for resistance. The first is that there are bodily skills that exhibit a practical know-how that cannot be articulated entirely in the explicit knowing-that of theoretical assertions. The second is that there are also social skills that would break down if they were articulated and thematized explicitly. The third thesis is that there are phenomena that necessarily exceed any and all attempts to articulate them.52 Whereas Bourdieu could accept the first and second theses, . . . Derrida accepts the third and Bourdieu does not. Bourdieu is interested in theorizing the practices as they are practiced, which means coming up with a notion of “agents” who are neither “subjects” nor “zombies.” In contrast, concepts that are candidates for the third thesis will be disclosive conditions that make the uncovering of particular entities possible but that cannot be uncovered themselves. Derrida calls these notions quasitranscendentals. . . . A quasi-transcendental is not transcendent, which (for Kant) implies having the metaphysical status of ultimate reality. Quasitranscendentals are transcendental because they exceed attempts to make them explicit. This insistence on the excess of a quasi-transcendental means that it escapes complete articulation in any particular context, and that it can be iterated only in an other context (although it would exceed that context as well). A quasi-transcendental is something that transcends a context, but only from within yet another context. It is not part of the God’s-eye view of everything or the “view from nowhere.” That is why it is a quasi-transcendental, for it only ever appears contextualized. That is, it transcends any particular context, but it is only ever found in some context or other. It appears not as a repetition, which is always the same, but as an iteration, which is like a repetition except that it alters because the context is different.53

Here we see an objection to Deleuzian repetition formulated as exception, an opening to an embedded “ineffable” that nonetheless always remains within a context as a form of operative agency, while quietly not quite residing there. This particular form of deconstructivist “absence” and “presence” (and vice versa) is productive of a possible agency that is transcendental, while the manner in which it is grounded in discourse prevents its escape to a realm outside of the deconstructivist “hothouse.” Quasi-transcendentals are quasi-universals. In Badiou’s neo-Marxist project, by way of Being and Event, they will become abstract forces at play in a transcendental field – always, then, a type of singularity within multiplicity that also signals the null set, or the fully speculative agency of thought itself as pure function.54 “The Kantian universalist is therefore misguided in trying to assess social situations from a God’s-eye point of view. For Bourdieu such a

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point of view is still a particular social point of view that is failing to recognize itself as such.”55 It is still, then, contaminated with historical unconscious mechanisms of power and subjectivization. All social relations in such a view are inescapable facts of existence and all resistance must come from within the same sphere, though it remains an open question as to how one, as historical agent or participant in the same, might alter the historical unconscious without also fully and discursively understanding it. It would seem, nonetheless, that there always remains an opening within post-structuralism for conscious agency to actually exist outside of personal consciousness – or, a super-liminal form of agency that precludes closure within discourse analysis. In this regard, the passage out of post-structuralism invokes the “event” as that excess Derrida identified, though the gates of thought are still guarded by the three-headed dog mentioned above in terms of the permissible conditions obtaining within the critique of “background practices” or the world as such. Bourdieu (and Marker, perhaps) rejects “both absolutism and relativism, . . . striving instead for reflexivity.”56 “Self-analysis reveals not simply first-order knowledge of the object domain, but a second-order knowledge of ‘the instruments of knowledge in their historically determinate aspects.’”57 In this case, and with the additional prospect of determining Marker’s allegiances to or deviations from specific movements or schools within French cultural theory, it is Levinas’ objections to Heidegger, Sartre, and most of the post-structuralists that provides a possible key moment in decisively segregating Marker from his non-interlocutors (figures and discourses that he could not not be aware of, but which he never addresses head on).58 Curiously, when Marker tires of the humanistic realm, he then invariably heads for the penultimate Other – the singular animal or the animal kingdom.59 His recourse to the animal kingdom permits him, as well, the ultimate homage to what he has just exited – human agency per se. This “other story” is analogically disposed; it is part and parcel nonetheless of the humanistic. It operates as a respite under cover of a detour toward the proverbial outside or “otherwise than being” of Levinas. If Levinas is never named, both Marker’s and Levinas’ austere sounding of the depths of the classical, structural dyadic conundrum of ipseity and alterity alerts us to the fact that neither of them really cares for the operatic and often-bizarre valorization of anti-humanist agitation that inhabits much of post-modern French theoretical, so-called critical praxis. March 19, 2012

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VIII. Marker and Levinas If we are to take Michaux’s advice and tear down the Sorbonne and replace it with “Marker,” the question remains, What obtains within that confrontation other than the restoration of the singular subject to its foremost place in French critical resistance? In tearing down Levinas’ home base, what is at stake? In terms of a confrontation between two force-fields of meta-critique and its perpetual return to its own home base, arguable the very figure of the Eternal Return, or the key figure in Nietzsche’s oeuvre, that austere model that underwrites all of his work insofar as the vision at Sils Maria was always coming in the early work and always receding in the latter work, and given that post-structuralism is said to have “begun” with Deleuze’s 1962 book on Nietzsche, and that the Eternal Return is the event that Deleuze most ardently privileges, one could say that in tearing down the Sorbonne we are making a strategic strike at the very heart of the production of ideology – both officially sanctioned ideology and its other in the form of commentary upon it, but also always officially sanctioned. Levinas’ aspiration toward “First Philosophy” (ontology, plus metaphysics) is what distinguishes his philosophical project from that of both Bourdieu and Derrida. It is Derrida’s refusal of ontology (as always contaminated with onto-theology) that demarcates his position vis-à-vis Levinas’, even if both share a certain “messianicity.” Bourdieu’s habitus errs on the side of contingency and the bracketing of all universals that are not re-grounded in the social, while Levinas’ ontology errs on the side of ethics at the expense of morality proper – disembodied or otherwise. If the latter also oddly “re-grounds” abstract reason as morality, in a universalizing ethics, it is possible that Derrida holds the middle ground, in that he also refuses to demarcate much of anything preferring his signature formation of différance as the chief means of allowing no singular discourse to emerge with a “higher” purchase in thought – with the resultant horizontal or syntagmatic emphasis obliterating any attempt to move thought further along the paradigmatic axis of representation and, arguably, power/ideology (locus of onto-theological and socio-political justifications for thought itself as power). The entire operation revolves around what constitutes consciousness, and for Bourdieu “consciousness can try to achieve the same effects as the habitus does, but it cannot do so in the same way.”60 “As a sense for what is practically required, the habitus has a deeper urgency that ‘excludes all deliberation.’ Bourdieu characterizes the habitus as the system of ‘structured, structuring’ or ‘durable, transposable’ dispositions.”61

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It is Levinas’ sense of the intrinsic ahistorical nature of ontology that sets his work apart from the post-structuralists, or those critical theorists with which he has been more or less lumped. It is also this re-visitation of Heideggerian and Husserlian precepts within phenomenology that distinguished much of the post-structuralist project (Derrida in many respects proceeding from a critique of Husserl’s recourse to ideality itself). Levinas’ Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini, 1961) oddly coincides with Deleuze’s book on Nietzsche, establishing a dual center in many respects that accounts for the oval or elliptical form given to deconstructivist thought, a universe so to speak with no one center of gravity. Levinas, in relation to Bourdieu, retains knowledge or consciousness as the primary focus of sociality despite objections to Merleau-Ponty.62 He retains this emphasis, however, by re-naturalizing it within ethics. Though he may object to “the psychism of consciousness,” he still effectively requires the purely speculative agency of that cognitive operation to justify his privileging of ethics.63 This concept of consciousness as conscience is nonetheless deprived of its normative position in a morality that is transcendental, versus or in contradistinction to the contingent. The bar remains very high for any re-launching of a priori knowledge, while Kantian apperception moves downstream toward sensate and bodily cognition (through the socius). “Levinas wants to offer a third but entirely different account of the emergence of intersubjectivity, that is to say, of the awareness of the other as like the self but different from the self,” in contradistinction to embodied perception (pace Merleau-Ponty) and against any attempt to reload a priori or what he characterizes as onto-theological knowledge (pace Kant and pace Husserl and Heidegger, even given the latter’s attempts to produce new hyperlocalizations of the same through the production of new forms of false consciousness however subtle and based in linguistic games, inclusive of false etymologies).64 Famously, Levinas favors the face as the principal means of establishing contact with the Other, yet a theory of the face “theorized better through language than through sensation.”65 Thus, it is not the face per se that concerns Levinas but what is contained within it – consciousness that is always otherwise than self. This focus on the face also would seem to focus on the unknowability of the Other, which is said in Lacanian discourse to “not exist” (meaning that it is never theorized as such but always beyond cognizing or bringing into true relation with the psychisms of Lacanian exegesis). On both sides of this equation, a gulf actually, the “I” is placed in question and only resecured through ethics or intersubjective operations that nevertheless maintain an absolute alterity between subjects.

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The being that expresses itself imposes itself, but does so precisely by appealing to me with its destitution and nudity – its hunger – without my being able to be deaf to that appeal. Thus in expression the being that imposes itself does not limit but promotes my freedom, by arousing my goodness.66 The face supplies its own resistance, not in the name of universal concepts such as justice, guilt, or responsibility. Levinas believes that these ethical notions are made possible and explained by the fundamental phenomenon of the face, which is prior to conscious reflection. He thinks that goodness really can flow only from a face-to-face relation where one encounters and cares for the other’s subjectivity.67

“For Levinas, then, the face supplies the basis of ethical resistance, which is the resistance of the powerless.”68 Such claims move inexorable close to the line demarcating the presence of the Immemorial, which is – after all – a forgotten, primordial strand in thought that re-accesses the analogical and anagogical chain of representations that haunt deconstructivist thought. The silver lining here is the here-and-now in relation to the timeless. Universality does, indeed, return – but it returns undercover of a type of “night” when a priori thought has been extinguished, in the case of Levinas, and re-buried in the ground of the social, by Bourdieu. This all opens an immense project by both Levinas and Derrida to deal with the specter of death, primarily through deconstructing Heidegger’s being-toward-death, a particularly thorny aspect of Being and Time. Both Levinas and Derrida attempt to tear this concept away from the subject proper and re-situate it within a field that is immanence in/for itself. The mediations circle the problem of the subject having any real connection with the event of its own death, versus its contemplation. This, in turn, is elided with the figure of the Other and care for the Other through projection of one’s own fear of death onto the Other and care for their own mortality. “Only the individualization that results from facing up to one’s own death makes it possible for one to establish one’s own identity and integrity in one’s life.”69 This gloss of Heidegger’s hyperlocalization of Dasein in the figure of its own demise is troubled by Levinas and Derrida as a turning of the spectral agency of thought back upon itself with the result being a subtle re-substantialization of the a priori as consciousness of mortality. Yet all accounts within this particular register regarding death and its prospective effect, as possibility, on subjectivization are underwritten once again by the Immemorial and the event of the resurrection of the subject of subjectivity in the demolition of ipseity and alterity. It is the ahistoricity of these matters that matters most, and it is the same that would seem to inhabit Marker’s works and world, foremost in

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the sense that he negotiates all of the same contemporary issues regarding the Other but exits anyway for the more austere territory of con-science beyond mere consciousness. This Levinasian cut to his work works in two ways: one, through its instantiation of the Other as unknowable yet irreconcilably intimate interlocutor; and, two, by way of the short circuit of ideology and its progenitors now or elsewhere, present or past, and certainly always somehow from the future, as if the emissaries in La jetée, in providing a power source to re-start civilization were also providing a primordial source code for the justification of power without repression – for example, Vladimir Solovyev’s “justification of the Good” as penultimate purpose in Life. It would seem, then, that Marker would agree with Levinas in saying/writing that, “Freedom is not realized outside of social and political institutions.”70 While this is also true of Bourdieu’s position on ethics and its social and political construction, Levinas and Marker both opt out of the demolition of ontology and its preeminence only within fields of cultural production, reserving judgment regarding its transcendent function in the dynamis that inhabits such fields as signature event of the Other as Self. Indeed, it is this dynamic principle that Levinas and Marker share, while its origin in terms of each might be different, and even if the figure of Sartre seems to be the door through which both pass in a type of historical agency en route to ahistorical agency. Beyond Sartre is Heidegger, and beyond Heidegger is Hegel. In fact, Hoy states that Levinas is closer to Hegel than to Heidegger and Sartre in this regard.71 The ideal is the real of political institutions. Utopia as abstraction or “infantile leftism” is a worthless commodity, just as post-structuralism became worthless when it was commodified within the academies, primarily in the US. What happens with the commodification of anything is that the political is generally tossed aside. What happened beyond Heidegger and Sartre, at the opening of the twentieth century, is that a priori knowledge, a foremost gesture of the paradigmatic, was tossed aside. In throwing aside moral agency, the subject was also pitched out – and it is the subject of the subject, versus the subject per se, that endlessly returns in all times of crisis (quite often by way of Saint Augustine). The figure of death re-appears, again and again, in Marker’s work as a type of apostrophe that, in turn, indexes the unacknowledged excess of being. It is for this reason as well that all discussions of the image revert to the same. The image produces the image of death in the same manner as the Other produces the knowledge of death in the subject – as limit. The Eternal Return as limit also connotes the confrontation with this event of the Other – an event that subsumes all other events, and an event that returns to the elemental “Christic” moment in the sacrament that is the

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fundamental rite of the dynamic of redemption (redemptive praxis). If it is also a highly circular mathesis that suggests a logic of signifiers that undoes signifying agency, the logic of the image is that it is synonymous with the self-causing cause. This well-known “perversion of logic” (Nietzsche’s phrase) is embedded in the image of death and in the image as its “ontological” excess (Bazin’s point). In Marker’s work, death is always placed in relationship to the tortured path of the exegetical exercise of his narratives (pictorial and aural). The limit exposed is the recursive moment in memory (and in anamnesis) that, as “Christic,” prefigures the Alpha and Omega of all mimetic activity – beginning as end and end as beginning (the bracketing of the very notion of time as forming the paramount mystery of the self-causing cause). The self-causing cause preexists all things and is not the subject as such. In outlasting or negating all nominal things, it also underwrites the production of difference and the elastic distance that inheres in subject-object relations. In ethics, it creates the space of the moral, which is “beyond” any ethics anyway – or is “outside” of being proper. Levinas’ essentially mystical evocation of the outside of being or “otherwise than being” only exists in that it also subsists in this special form of bracketed time that indexes the immemorial force of con-science. His ethics may reserve the moral sphere for purely speculative purposes, but it nevertheless preserves moral agency as the ultimate ground of his project. Marker’s version of this is developed, instead, through the exit past mid-century phenomenological and structuralist language games toward more austere and properly pre-modern forms of moral agency that form subjects through the image of all that is not-subject. The Other functions as “not-I,” while also substituting for any relativist “I” that might preclude that opening. The “Markerian” real is the “Levinasian” real, or they both exit nihilist maneuvers by way of a “Hegelian” return to Spirit (not-I doubled) – “Hegel,” arguably the Father of “Marx.” March 21, 2012

IX. “Creative Marxism” Marx’s emancipatory project may be reduced to an essentialist list of acute synopses as follows (following Göran Therborn): “Proponent of emancipatory reason, of a rationalist scrutiny of the world, with a commitment to human freedom from exploitation and oppression”; “Historical materialist approach to social analysis” and “the present as history, with particular attention paid to the living and working conditions

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of ordinary people and to the economic and political materiality of power”; and “dialectical openness” and “sensitivity to, and comprehension of, contradictions, antinomies and conflicts in social life.”72 What this offers, in the wake of orthodox Marxism and late-modernism, is an opportunity to re-open the book under different, but similar auspices. The future is, indeed, just like the present, only better . . . In “Left Failures and Defeats,” Therborn dissects, as Marker dissects, the “important turning point . . . that broke out during the economic crises of the seventies and eighties,” paving the way for a “powerful right-wing backlash” ensuring “the moment of neoliberalism.”73 This “rendez-vous manqué between protestors of 1968 and the existing labour movements,” or an at-first “individualist iconoclasm,” followed by “mimetic early Bolshevik romanticism and ‘party-building,’” led, in turn, to “disillusionment” and “right-wing liberal renegadism.”74 It is a sobering judgment, written of course from an unrepentant Marxist perspective. The rightist backlash and “capacity for violence,” especially in Latin America, quite simply spelled doomsday for classical Marxist agitation based on class warfare.75 The “implosion of Communism in the 1990s . . . on an epochal scale,”76 and the resultant neo-liberalism and “opening of world markets” as temporary respite and provision of “material rewards,”77 as in all critiques of “the end” by the Left, more or less led to the necessity of the revolt moving upstream toward the sources of the true battle – the battle for the subject-citizen, a move that allowed a wider and more philosophical versus material analysis to unfold; a shift that in many ways was also a return to the Marxist equivalent of the self-causing cause. Backto-back “geopolitical events” of a magnitude that “divided and demoralized the Left and enormously strengthened the hand of the Right”78 (for example, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution in China, the Vietnam War, and state breakdowns in Africa) might account for post-Marxism, while – in fact – such events only served to bring Marxism into sharper focus and prepare the way for a more strenuous neoMarxism, after various flirtations with anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, Maoism, etc. All of this, and more, is in Le fond de l’air est rouge . . . Marker’s alliance with the resultant shifting ground of classical Marxism, and the position he takes vis-à-vis “creative Marxism” is of considerable interest in establishing the justifications for his turns toward and away from overt political agendas. His exits are always entrances to a neighboring “field,” most often a field that has lain fallow for years but which he has worked before. The return to the still image in 2007 is of this order, as is the return to semi-biographical film in the 1990s. In terms of critical theory (or what often passes as post-Marxism), however, Marker is

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rarely present as interlocutor. “As a concept, critical theory was launched in 1937 by Max Horkheimer, director of the exiled Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, who was writing in New York for the Institute’s Parispublished, German-language journal.”79 “The meaning of the term ‘critical theory’ was a philosophically self-conscious, reflexive conception of ‘the dialectical critique of political economy.’”80 This particular “school of fishes” in French academia could not but not interest Marker, in particular due to its distance from what is the fundamental aspect of classical Marxism – the people. What he seems to do, instead, is mine the field of so-called critical inquiry (which only appears to be a field related or running parallel to his own fallow tract) for incendiary images and subtexts, deploying a decidedly lyrical approach through works that are certainly critical but rarely didactic. Allergic to the ventriloquizing of the Left (speaking for the people or the multitude through exceedingly exquisite and increasingly intricate language games), Marker’s means of acting upon principles is to refine the apparatus through making it appear wooden and ineloquent – a perverse economy of signifying agency that often flies in the face of the prevailing Parisian intellectual fashions, making his work all the more interesting as a result due to its ultracontemporary modus vivendi operating always against the grain and exposing, as a result, the dynamic curve and swerve underway in cultural praxis. Nevertheless, “[Theodor W.] Adorno’s words are much closer to the radical mood of 2008 than that of 1968: ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed. The summary judgement that it has merely interpreted the world . . . becomes a defeatism of reason after the attempt to change the world had miscarried.’”81 This alone suggests that below the salt, or to the left of the Left, there is a far more promising ground being opened up and re-worked after years of laboring in the vineyards to extract the last drops of vintage Marxism and use it to produce a particularly aromatic and intense brandy, as it were – a cognac to age and savor in the coming years, when revolt might again be possible and the subject has, to a degree, regained its senses.82 This passage from classic Western Marxism through postMarxism and neo-Marxism is, thus, also another map that may be used to chart Marker’s peregrinations. Almost every voyage he has undertaken may be placed in relation to this rough passage through neo-liberal capitalism’s assault on subjects. In privileging the imperiled subject, Marker is also engaging the last frontier. Figures of classic Western Marxism include: Lukács, Korsch, Gramsci, Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, Horkheimer, Galvano Della Volpe,

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Herbert Marcuse (Horkheimer’s assistant in New York in the late 1930s), Henri Lefebvre, Adorno, Leo Löwenthal, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lucien Goldmann, Habermas, Althusser, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Lucio Colletti.83 Lyotard, Castoriadis, and Claude Lefort were all associated with Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-65), a journal formed by a splinter group from Trotskyism in postwar France.84 As a group, Socialisme ou Barbarie was anti-Stalinist and anti-Algerian War. Lyotard joined in 1954.85 It is this wholesale jumping of the ship and the subsequent gyrations in the marketplace of academic Marxism that serve notice that one might best step back for awhile until the dust settles, keeping one’s powder dry for the battles that are surely coming further down the road. With the French Nietzscheans, as above, the ride is particularly like a drunken joy ride though the suburbs, recalling perhaps Godard’s satirical film Week-end (1967), but signaling as well that there is a certain ominous something operating in the background of the agit-prop maneuvers of the demoralized Left. The shadow that falls, endlessly, is Lukács: Marx’s philosophy of history has seldom been sufficiently separated from his sociology. As a result, it has often been overlooked that the two constitutive elements of his system, class struggle and socialism . . . are closely related but by no means the product of the same conceptual system. The former is a factual finding of Marxian sociology . . . Socialism, on the other hand, is the utopian postulate of the Marxian philosophy of history: it is the ethical objective of a coming world order.86

The moral problem is: Bolshevism offers a fascinating way out [of the dilemma of condemning liberal democracy] in that it does not call for compromise. But all those who fall under the sway of its fascination might not be fully aware of the consequences of their decision . . . Is it possible to achieve good by condemnable means? Can freedom be attained by means of oppression?87

This defense of Marxism, plus its implicit warning that “to have a revolution one must have a revolution,” is part and parcel of what never quite goes away throughout the launch of post-Marxism and its troubled rapport with the enemy, however sardonic or however cynical. Yet, Marxism is not just any old theoretical corpus. As a distinctive cognitive perspective on the modern world, it is surpassed in social significance – in terms of numbers of adherents – only by the great world religions. As a modern pole of identity, it is outdistanced only by nationalism. Marxism

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acquired its very special historical importance by becoming, from the 1880s till the 1970s, the main intellectual climate of two major social movements of the dialectics of modernity: the labour movement and the anticolonial movement.88

From 1947 to 1977, then, Marker’s own involvement with the romance of the Left with classical Marxism and its historically determined variant, Western Marxism, is telltale. In France the upheavals of 1968 did not change the landscape of established serious left-wing journals, none of which was very conducive to creative Marxist theory. Les Temps Modernes, founded by Sartre right after the war, was the intellectually dominant journal, but was in a literaryessay mould. So was the left-wing-Catholic Esprit. La Pensée was under tight Communist Party control. L’Homme et la Societé, with roots in 1956 dissident Communism, was probably the journal most open to new Marxist thought.89

Creative Marxism was distinguished by the late-1950s’ and early-1960s’ turn toward “theoretical and conceptual issues,” and was a distinct event in the West, versus the East, insofar as it was further distinguished by its “openness” to reflection “without being foreclosed by party-line polemics or divisive political loyalties.”90 This aspect of Western Marxism ran straight into 1968, nevertheless overlapping with the earlier beginnings of post-Marxism and post-structuralism, with neo-Marxism effectively a response to 1968 and its aftermath. Sociology is said to have been the main ingredient within neo-Marxism, where “Marxism became both the political language and the theoretical perspective for a generation of radicals who found in it the best way to understand the phenomena of colonial wars and underdevelopment, as well as the domestic socioeconomic functioning of Western democracy.”91 Marker’s films more or less track this passage of Western Marxism toward its bifurcation in postMarxism and neo-Marxism, with the last great labor battles being fought in the early 1970s and the last anti-colonial Marxist insurgencies being squelched in the Third World (especially Latin America) by the middle to late 1970s, giving special significance to the Nicaraguan insurgency in the 1980s. “Neo-Marxism achieved Marx’s inclusion in the classical canon of sociology and made Marxist or marxisant perspectives legitimate.”92 What returned primarily to sociology was a moral agenda conjoined to a political and social agenda, whereas sociology had remained primarily formal and/or empirical throughout its somewhat marginalized emergence as an academic discipline.93 It is this sociological turn followed by a philosophical turn (focused most intently on the vacated premises of

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reflexive historiography) that is in many ways the beginning of the resurrection of the Marxist worldview from the ashes of its “scientific” or – more properly – pseudo-scientific measures and biases. This return to historiography (through the Annales school of Fernand Braudel, François Furet et al., and by way of White’s Metahistory) has effectively come around to a re-consideration of the struggle for liberty and justice (versus economic determinism, whether Communist or Capitalist) through the “back door” of Eden. (Furet left the French Communist Party in 1956, in protest to the Soviet invasion of Hungary. His principal studies were of the French Revolution and its “long-term social and economic processes.”94) This back door (creative Marxism in the face of dogmatism and orthodoxy) is premised on the very idea of “historicity” versus materialist history proper – historicity as the figure of an emaciated or attenuated utopia hiding out in the shadow-lands of ideology. It is also the venue of the highest reflexive praxis given to critical theory itself – critical theory as philosophically inflected praxis (or speculative thought in/for itself, but always here-and-now). With the return of socialism from science to utopia, there is a good chance that men and women concerned with critical social thought will turn with increasing interest to the great philosopher-historian of hope, Ernst Bloch, who pointed out that “Marxism, in all its analyses the coldest detective, takes the fairy-tale seriously, takes the dream of a Golden Age practically.” The free society without exploitation and alienation which the critical dialecticians hoped for, sometimes against all odds, is perhaps not so much a failure of the past as something that has not yet come to pass.95

Therborn notes that amongst neo-Marxist critiques, a certain Régis Debray stands out, for his “writings on the revolutionary endeavours in Latin America.”96 This statement is made amidst a rather sweeping aside that terms most neo-Marxist work decidedly “academic” and ineffectual, and – as a result – short-lived and swept aside within a decade or two. Yet with Derrida’s Spectres de Marx, we see a return of the ghost of Marx, walking the Earth once again: “Since neither capitalism nor its polarizations of life courses appear very likely to disappear in the foreseeable future, there is a good chance that the spectre of Marx will continue to haunt social thought.”97 Such is the diagnosis as of 2008, at the threshold of the most recent economic meltdown, and before the dark, Dionysian flowers of OWS bloomed in the canyons of Lower Manhattan in 2011. Such, too, is the recurring dream of an alternative world order that might counter the explicit and implicit criminal regimes of Capital proper. Amongst neoMarxist works of note, Therborn lists: Perry Anderson’s Passages from

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Antiquity to Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist State (both 1974); G.A. Cohen’s Karl Marx’s Theory of History (1978); and Nicos Poulantzas’ Political Power and Social Classes (1968). It is, however, instructive that he also includes Debray’s Révolution dans la révolution? (1967) and La critique des armes (1974), published respectively by Maspero and Seuil, or one of Marker’s various colleagues in arms, and the “guerrilla theorist” Chris Marker went looking for in Bolivia, in 1967, with François Maspero – Maspero, publisher of radical books, and subject of Marker/SLON’s film On vous parle de Paris: Maspero. Les mots ont un sens (1970). “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” Perhaps this means, after all, “Blessed are the ‘reflexive’ (they who reflect), for theirs is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory.” If there is one thing common to the repressive regimes of totalitarian communism and capitalism (dogmatic, totalizing ideology), it is the suppression of the reflexive register of subjectivity itself – or, the war on the subject; for, if there is one thing that Marker’s work privileges, it is this intense, internally focused process of divining the source code for worlds within worlds. What comes to mind, then, in looking at Marker’s photographs of the human subject “staring back,” is the great image of the great poet Osip Mandelstam (the NKVD photo, c.1938), staring back in defiance, staring down the very times that sent him off to the gulag – staring at no one in particular, and defiant of no one in particular. This “no one in particular” is co-equal to the antithesis of utopia, or to all that stands in the way of this other form of “progress” (non-utilitarian positivism) that is, ultimately, a spiritual voyage to “the land of the people” – that dynamic principle in all Art proper that addresses Life proper (or in all moral agency that is also, out of necessity, political and social praxis as experience). Here, too, we see, in the proper light, the figure of “Medvedkine” and Marker’s homage to the same; “the last Bolshevik,” or a figure who defied the totalitarian hubris of the Soviet regime, complicit nonetheless in the game of survival, and complicit in the ultimate game of the production of the socialist utopia that was the point of October 1917. If Western Marxism emerged as a response to the October Revolution, it was all more or less over by the 1920s for revolution in the West. Western Marxism, and its late-modern analogues (insofar as Marxism is explicitly a sustained critique of Modernism), effectively defies the ideological makeshifts of Left and Right. If it inhabits a nebulous socio-political non-space in-between the two, and if by 2008 the old dialectic of Left and Right has collapsed, it is because there is no true middle ground anyway (no Third Way and no synthesis). Both camps are ideologically bereft as of the last systemic meltdown of 1989-

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2009. The End of History never arrived . . . This supposed closure to the Cold War and its striations of developed, developing, and underdeveloped economies worldwide remains the major shibboleth of the crisis management of Capital in service to an elite/itself. “Blessed are the poor in Spirit [Ideology], for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” March 31, 2012

X. Coda: “Limbo” Thus, there is a strange confluence of the “Marxist,” the “messianic,” and the “Christic” in works that access this mostly secret territory in mimesis (in the interpretation and interpellation of worlds within worlds toward one world). “The messiah comes for our desires. . . . With fulfilled desires, he constructs hell; with unfulfillable images, limbo.”98 And yet we witness today a right-wing Pope who has recently outlawed Limbo, as if that were even desirable (and as if he actually had the power to do so, unless of course everyone were to admit that canon law is just another set of invented approximations to the real of the Real). And we also witness, as of late March 2012 (with the latest uprising in Spain in the form of a General Strike against neo-liberal capitalist austerity measures or means of extracting further pain from a thoroughly demoralized populace), “street protests” that include new-old forms of “urban resistance” (inclusive of attacks on property associated with the ruling class). These acts of sabotage included an assault on an upscale retail complex (somehow associated with the right-wing Catholic order Opus Dei),99 another of the right-wing Pope’s favorite hobby horses, implying – perhaps – that banishing Limbo might actually be part of a secret plot to liberate consumerist desire for this or that elite luxury good (or expensive meal), a symptom of something horribly pernicious nonetheless given that it resembles nothing more than an inversion of all attempts to put a “human face” on Communism behind the Iron Curtain by giving the populace permission to lust after consumer goods in the 1970s, in most cases fairly shoddy goods produced behind the Iron Curtain by the very slaves who were now permitted to buy them, if they could afford to. This penchant for re-inventing the square wheel is legendary and capitalism excels at it. In most cases, it is also the sign of the last gasp for a totally bankrupt ideology (as nationalism is the last refuge of scoundrels) – the swerve toward servicing rank appetites being the flip side of suppressing the same. In the case of Limbo, however, it is likely that this proto-typical prison will be reserved by History for those who have fallen from grace

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with the sea – the “sea” in this case being the permissible limits of cynicism and self-service; or, a place reserved for the political class that has brought the world economy to its knees once again after looting it for every last ounce of “surplus value.” What are luxury goods other than a super-abundant version of surplus value, a model that includes the production of exclusivity? The austerities required to bring utopia back into view have nothing to do with the recent round of attempts by Capital and its upper-class handmaidens to extract further pain from an already weary and half-defeated citizenry. If the energy still exists to take to the streets as of 2012, there is still hope. It would seem that there is a plethora of “last Bolsheviks” hiding in the wings, and waiting . . . April 1, 2012

Notes 1

Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006). See pp. 69-73 for a condensed discussion of the relationship of Le fond de l’air est rouge with the larger corpus of Marker’s more politically engaged filmmaking. This film documents the collapse of the Left plus its penchant for self-castration through compromise and internecine warfare. A second version was released in 1993 following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. 2 On vous parle du Brésil: Tortures (1969), On vous parle du Brésil: Carlos Marighela (1970), and On vous parle du Chili: Ce que disait Allende (1973). Marker made five films with SLON (Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles) in this series of short, 15- to 30-minute “documentaries.” See Alter, Chris Marker, pp. 40-41. SLON was originally registered in Belgium. “In 1974 [SLON] became a French company called ISKRA (the title of Lenin’s newspaper, which is reworked as the acronym for: Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle).” Sarah Cooper, Chris Marker (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 73. À bientôt, j’espère (1968) “spawned the idea for the Medvedkin groups – factory workers initially based at Besançon and then also in Sochaux who made their own films.” Ibid. Regarding SLON, etc., see “SLON 1971-1972,” Image et Son 255 (December 1971): pp. 29-32. 3 See Alter, Chris Marker, p. 51. Alter cites the filmmaker Roman Karmen in this regard: “The world is an endless war. There are two camps. You have to choose your camp and do everything to make sure it will be victorious.” These words are uttered in relation to Eisenstein’s well-known penchant for making propaganda films for the Soviet regime, even while being cited as exemplar of certain cinematic traits, including montage. Karmen’s comments are inserted into Marker’s Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993), a film about the Russian filmmaker Alexandre Medvedkine, another Russian maestro that Marker admires but also realizes made his own deals with the devil to simply survive the Stalinist purges, receiving the Lenin Prize in 1971.

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It is said that de Gaulle did next to nothing during the war, being in London, and that he became head of state primarily at the behest of the Allied powers. Conversation with a Yugoslav expat-artist at Mario’s, Brunswick Street, Melbourne, Australia, January 5, 2012. The conversation revolved around perceptions of the Russians and the Germans in the immediate postwar era. Marker’s cultural engagements with the Germans through Peuple et Culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s are all the more remarkable given that Germany was generally reviled up through the 1960s and Russia idolized (until the full measure of Stalin’s crimes against his own people was acknowledged). In Yugoslavia, Poland, and elsewhere, the Germans remained unforgiven due to the path of destruction wrought by the Germans. France, and Paris, in particular, and by comparison, escaped relatively intact. The Soviet invasion of Hungary, in 1956, is what finally turned most Western Marxists and fellow travelers against the USSR. 5 Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. One of the key moments in Lupton’s book is when she describes the postwar scene and the incorporation into French intellectual affairs of the radical Catholic doctrine of “personalism.” This agenda, which emerges as a means of defying ideological and historical abstractions, requires that all engagements with the world be also intensely personal – that is, impersonal agency measured, as it were, by an extreme and perhaps catastrophic form of personal agency. Such a view also incorporates or integrates “political, social, and moral dimensions” – Lupton’s characterization of the premise of Marker’s very first film project, Olympia 52, a documentary of the Helsinki Olympic Games of 1952. Ibid., p. 33. Lupton goes into exquisite detail regarding the intellectual and artistic milieu of late-1940s and early-1950s France, out of which Marker’s first film projects emerged. See Catherine Lupton, “The Invention of Chris Marker,” in ibid., pp. 13-39. In crystallizing this early agenda, Lupton writes: “Marker . . . would eventually take film as an opportunity to liberate the flux of inner life and memory from the defined states of writing and the limits of individual characters (before eventually turning to multimedia as yet another liberation, this time from the linearity and fixed projection rate of conventional films). Yet writing, transposed into spoken commentaries, would remain the central index of subjectivity in his films, tracking nuances and shifts of inner experience in a transient, inquisitive dialogue with the flow of images.” Ibid., p. 30. Lupton’s identification of personalism as one of the chief characteristics of the intellectual scene of the late 1940s revolves around the influence of the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, founder and editor of the journal Esprit. “Mounier was the primary intellectual force behind personalism, a philosophical and social movement that developed in France during the 1930s as an effort to reconcile Catholicism with left-wing political ideals. Personalism focused on the nature and potential of the human person, conceived as an amalgam of material, social and spiritual dimensions. It aimed to foster human development on all of these fronts: through political change, interaction with other individuals in humancentred social communities, and inner spiritual conviction. As a political philosophy it opposed the ideological conformity of totalitarian states, the alienation of modern mass industrial capitalism, and the bourgeois liberal

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democracy of the Third Republic.” Ibid., pp. 15-16. Personalism, a form of “philocommunism,” combined then-nascent Existentialism with radical Catholic anti-modernism. Mounier sought, as well, to reconcile the virtues of the Right and the Left. The majority of Marker’s contributions to Esprit fell within the sections entitled “Journal à plusieurs voix” and “Les livres”; the former a collage of short articles and polemics by various authors on intellectual and cultural trends of the moment, and the latter an extensive dossier of generally short book reviews, with Marker reviewing novels. Esprit is still in print as of 2012. Presumably, Marker departed company with Esprit, heading far-left and/or for the publishing house Seuil, when Mounier’s program of attempting to reconcile the virtues of the Left and Right proved in vain. These virtues, conservative and traditional on the one hand, and progressive and social on the other, met in what today is called the Center (that is, Center-Left or Center-Right). Not so much a synthesis as a compromise, such attempts at reconciling opposites generally service the Right and produce new monsters. Present in issues of Esprit during the time of Marker’s involvement, we also find two of his later interlocutors, Paul Ricoeur and Jean Cayrol. Additionally, if Ludwig Feuerbach is buried in personalism, and hidden within Feuerbach (as Young Hegelian) is Hegel and Marx (another Young Hegelian), it is somehow curious to find hidden with Karl Barth’s introduction to the 1957 edition of Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity the figure of Max Stirner, and, according to Barth, Feuerbach’s most astute critic, insofar as Feuerbach’s “essence” is the power of the heart and Man, not God. Stirner is the same figure we then find in the later pages of Jacques Derrida’s Spectres de Marx (1993), as the solipsistic pest Marx could never quite get rid of. What is hidden in all of this is the haunting of leftist culture and the various positions taken vis-à-vis Marxism and its perhaps strangest bedfellow, Existentialism. See Karl Barth, “An Introductory Essay,” pp. x-xxxii, trans. James Luther Adams, in Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, intro. Karl Barth, foreword H. Richard Niebuhr (New York: Harper, 1957). First published Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: O. Wigand, 1841). Regarding Stirner, “a still more left-wing Hegelian” than Feuerbach, see ibid., pp. xxviii-xxix. Regarding Feuerbach’s “Christology,” see “The Mystery of the Christian Christ,” in ibid., pp. 140-49. Regarding a contemporary dance between Left and Right under the auspices of “radical orthodoxy,” see Slavoj Žižek’s recent dialectical engagements with Christian theology by way of G.K. Chesterton, John Milbank et al. 6 It should be noted that the establishment of “private” academies has always been the game of both “reaction” and privilege, while the former is quite often in response to perceived biases and/or weaknesses in public schools, such as rampant secularization at the expense of faith. The early charter schools of the past few decades, while often based on discursive and/or ideological objections to what passed as public schools, were also often set up as “conservative” and/or religious alternatives. In the case of the elite, however, private academies have long been established as feeder schools for elite universities – and for elite private and public service. In this case, the simple justification is that an elite must educate an elite. Charter schools, if they are non-profit, offer a valid alternative education to the

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often factory-like production of public schools, ruled by their phalanxes of regents or bureaucrats. The obvious answer to this quandary is to revitalize the public schools that feed the public universities. This is also what neo-liberal capitalism is opposed to. If public universities continue to fall under the dictates of markets, and all studies are slowly converted to “marketable” products (including graduates as indentured servants), the only alternative is for utterly “unnatural” venues for the education of citizens to appear – as if out of nowhere, no doubt. With the advent of neo-liberalism in the 1970s (and this is only, of course, its most blatant manifestation in the form of the “financialization” of everything), the massive investments in public education of the previous half century sputtered and slowly were diverted into the production of new physical plants, at the expense of most everything else within the model (most especially faculty salaries). Building new schools also produced model factories for re-enforcing liberal hegemony, which unbeknownst to itself was morphing into neo-liberal hegemony through cooptation. If, by the 1980s, the evisceration of liberal dogma was in full swing, in the much-vaunted culture wars of the decade, the factory model was oddly in place to convert public education to a service industry for neo-liberal capital. Lastly, this process includes topological excesses that defy categorization or linear-empirical analysis. For example, the production of public schools as factories and the attendant loss of faith by faculties (and the de-humanization of faculties by an assault on unions and rights and privileges of faculties) might be traced to the simple revulsion most people feel when they are herded like sheep to the slaughter. If all of this began due to a massive build out of new public schools throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it is also possible that liberalism and neo-liberalism share a common, albeit mostly unconscious will to the indoctrination of subjects – as means of enforcing hegemony. The liberal production of subjects performs its magisterial acts of benevolence by permitting dissent in the charmed environments of youth and school while marginalizing any attempts to bring the same into the world, as such, in any truly de-stabilizing manner. (The cultural revolution of the 1960s was utterly unpredicted and often, today, lamented by the same forces that unleashed it.) This need for the perennial remaking of the “world as such” is all that really matters, however, and the neo-liberal attitude toward the revolutionizing of life (the freeing of subjects) is simply more brutal. The appearance, therefore, of at-first religious charter schools in the wake of the collapse of liberalism (recalling that Catholic schools have always provided an alternative for many to the public schools anyway) makes sense, insofar as “religion” is stripped of any ideological baggage and formulated in its true sense. This true sense (religion qua religion, or as personal reflexive space, versus dogma) also suggests that it offers a corrective to fully secularized culture, a culture that in modern times has also meant a total capitulation to the State. If State is co-equal to culture, culture falters. When culture falters, renascent forms of dissent appear – often under the guise of religion (which ultimately is premised in opposition to “Caesar”). The circularity of the problem more or less proves that much of the apparatus both of dissent and hegemony is unconscious of its ultimate locus in subjectivity. This accounts for the many diremptions (violent attempts at the dissociation of mutually generated

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affects in the body politic) and the topological torsion given to any analysis of this latest war between the Right and what’s left of the Left. 7 See André Bazin’s comments on this, Marker’s second film, in the October 30, 1958 review “Chris Marker, Lettre de Sibérie.” See André Bazin, Le cinéma français de la libération à la Nouvelle Vague (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1983), pp. 179-81. The essays collected here span the years 1945-1958. Bazin died in 1958, and this review is one of his last assessments of then-emergent French New Wave cinema. Alter points out in the subsection “Filmed Intelligence,” in Chris Marker, pp. 15-16, that Bazin detected in this work something profoundly unique in the development of the genre of the film-essay, something traceable to the early versions of this new artform (for example, Jean Vigo’s À propos de Nice, 1930), and something outlined as early as 1940 by Hans Richter in the short text “The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film.” See Hans Richter, “Der filmessay: Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilm,” pp. 195-98, in Christa Blümlinger, Constantin Wulf, eds., Schreiben Bilder Sprechen: Texte zum essayistischen Film (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1992). What Bazin detected is, in a sense, what inhabits all of Marker’s work, from literary to filmic to photographic queries regarding the relation of subjects to time and to space, and most of all to memory and the production, interpretation, and archiving of images. Bazin simply notes, in a prescient, somewhat reductive manner, “three rays” of intelligence that converge in this potent film-essay from 1958. These rays are indicative of the analysis Bazin visited upon cinema as a confluence or conflation of visual, verbal, and aural forms of knowledge. Marker uniquely synthesized these aspects of cinema in the short form, at this time, while they are played out in different ways through his subsequent wanderings between fictional films, such as La jetée (1962), and the explicitly political films of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Bill Horrigan also notes (as have others) that the narrative apparatus of Lettre de Sibérie at one point mocks “objective” analysis through the use of a “triplerepetition of identical footage joined to leftist, rightist, and ‘balanced’ voice-over commentary describing what we’re seeing in, roughly, the idioms of Pravda, the Voice of America, and UNESCO, respectively.” Bill Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” pp. 137-50, in Chris Marker: Staring Back (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts/Ohio State University, 2007), p. 140. 8 As part and parcel of post-modernism, post-Marxism is essentially an acceptance of the loss of over-arching political-social-artistic vision and its subsequent migration toward the submerged strata of the same in an attempt to administer the required medicine – the alleviation and re-calibration by critique of hegemony’s rule by what passes as the construction of enforced difference. See: Göran Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism? (London: Verso, 2008); Stuart Sim, ed., Post-Marxism: A Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Stuart Sim, Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History (London: Routledge, 2000). In art this movement was effectively an anarchic event, as typified perhaps by the anti-modern, loose-knit international movement known as Fluxus – pioneers of mediatic, conceptual, and installation art in the 1960s. See Ken Friedman, ed., Fluxus Reader (Chichester: Academy Editions, 1998). See especially: Estera

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Milman, “Fluxus History and Trans-History: Competing Strategies for Empowerment,” in ibid., pp. 155-65; and Stephen C. Foster, “Historical Design and Social Purpose: A Note on the Relationship of Fluxus to Modernism,” in ibid., pp. 166-71. For these documents online, see http://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/ vital/access/manager/Repository/swin:9624. 9 This apparent intervention from “without” (the macro-movements) only seems to proceed from the outside, while it is essentially misleading to present it as so, as revolutionary movements generally do, given that to do so also plays directly into the hands of power and the construction of the myths of power by capital. The emphasis on exteriority in Marxist and other revolutionary movements erred on the side of structure at the expense of that which is the secret nexus of all revolutionary activity – the power inherent in the absolute nature of simply being (the existential-metaphysical chiasmus known as subjectivity). 10 Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008). While nominally a “Lacanian,” Žižek’s principal causes are not Lacanian but Hegelian – or, more properly, “Young Hegelian” (Marxist-Hegelian). For the operative voices within Lacanian exegesis, including “Medieval voices,” see Slavoj Žižek, ed., Lacan: The Silent Partners (London: Verso, 2006). For the spectral operations of subjectivity vis-à-vis ideology, see: Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996); and Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999). 11 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994). First published Spectres de Marx: L’état de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993). 12 Regarding left-wing melancholy, including his own, and a negative critique of the 1960s, see Jacques Rancière, “The Misadventures of Critical Thought,” pp. 2549, in The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009). First published Le spectateur émancipé (Paris: Éditions La Fabrique, 2008). “Thus . . . we have left-wing irony or melancholy. It urges us to admit that all our desires for subversion still obey the law of the market and that we are simply indulging in the new game available. . . . The beast, so it is said, gets a stranglehold on the desires and capacities of its potential enemies by offering them, at the cheapest price, the most desirable of commodities – the capacity to experiment with one’s life as a fertile ground for infinite possibilities.” Ibid., p. 33. See also: Paolo Virno, Miracle, virtuosité et “déjà-vu”: Trois essais sur l’idée de “monde” (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 1996); Bernard Stiegler, Mécréance et discrédit 3: L’esprit perdu du capitalisme (Paris: Galilée, 2006); and Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000); all cited in Rancière, pp. 36 n 3, 36 n 4, 37 n 5. The foremost critique of capitalism’s ability to assimilate and subvert subversion remains, Luc Boltanski, Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2005). Regarding photography, video, and cinema, and the opposition of punctum and studium in the very “internal-external” discord of the singular still or stilled image (its inherent self-reliance, as aesthetic

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thing-in-itself, and its informative and/or narrative capacity), all by way of Roland Barthes’ Camera lucida (first published La chambre claire, 1981), etc., see Jacques Rancière, “The Pensive Image,” pp. 107-32, in The Emancipated Spectator. Rancière’s book is in many respects an update of Susan Sontag’s work on photography, most especially the seminal 1973 study On Photography, but also Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). This structuralist-inspired complex of punctum and studium runs through all of Marker’s work, with its various political implications, though Rancière seems to prefer the work of Jean-Luc Godard to illustrate his argument, most especially Moments choisis des Histoire(s) du cinema, as in Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006). First published La fable cinématographique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001). The circular or mise-en-abyme aspects of this argument are obvious, and, arguably, what is missing in all such neo-Marxist critiques of the economy of images circulating amidst the torpor of late-capitalism is the theological impress, or that which resides behind the image – or, in Antonin Artaud’s sense, below the substrate/surface, battling to emerge. Rancière invokes the Kantian thing-in-itself as analogue to the theological imprint, as the neoMarxist position yet retains all of the repressions of Marx, including theology, but also “Hegel.” He does cite Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, at the very end of his tale, as if this admission of the foreign body of the Father of Marx into the corpus of his critique permits him to hide a possible “exit.” Rancière, as Badiou and others of the neo-Marxist persuasion, prefers quasi-transcendentals to pure transcendentals – signifying agency, versus the signified. Derrida’s Spectres de Marx remains the exception in this regard, with its recourse to the ghosts of Marx and Marxism proper. See the discussion of that book, vis-à-vis Marker’s work, in the last chapters of this present study. That Derrida’s book appeared at the moment when Capitalism was proclaiming itself the Only Answer, is highly instructive. “The Misadventures of Critical Thought” first appeared in Aporia: Dartmouth’s Undergraduate Journal of Philosophy (Autumn 2007). “The Pensive Image” is the outcome of a seminar held in 2005-2006 at the Musée du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France. The contexts/timeframes for these two key essays represent the height of Capitalist splendor before the recent crash, in late 2007, when the “machine” extracted payment for the intervening years of “plenty,” inclusive of the most spectacular art bubble in recent history – if not ever. See The Emancipated Spectator, pp. 119-20, for what Rancière permits himself to indulge in the final pages of this work, and/or G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 170. Rancière’s allegiance to the Althusserian critique of Marxism effectively makes him a neo-post-Marxist. Marker is not. The timeframe of early-to-late 2007 is also the point at which Badiou was jetting into New York to comment on the state of affairs in the “artworld” (during the annual spectacle the Armory Art Fair), speaking as well at Jack Tilton Gallery, etc., on Marcel Duchamp as a “logician of Art.” See: Gavin Keeney, Art as “Night”: An Art-Theological Treatise (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), pp. 138-45, for comments on Badiou’s comments in Artforum (November 2006) on the event of art; and Keeney, “Else-

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where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011, pp. 21821, regarding Badiou’s comments on Duchamp vis-à-vis his then-new masterwork, Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes: L’être et l’événement, 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2006). In English, Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009). What is missing in all such discourses that privilege immanence (quasi-transcendentals) is that Art is – after all – a form of pure speculative capital. See Mark Devenney, “Quasi-transcendentalism and Critical Theory,” pp. 75-96, in Ethics and Politics in Contemporary Theory: Between Critical Theory and Post-Marxism (London: Routledge, 2004). As a result, what is speculated upon is also the chief issue/question. Whether or not such speculation includes the austerities of the image as figure (metonym) situated at the threshold of experience, at the very edge of the world as metaphysical-existential knot, remains the principal problem. Marker’s frequent recourse to the destruction of the image signals this very constellation or complex, and its agonistic relationship to the production of images per se. 13 For the spectralization of capitalism’s operations, see Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, Reading “Capital,” trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1970). First published Lire “le capital,” 2 vols. (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1965). Volume 1 of Lire “le capital” includes essays by Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière, and Pierre Macherey; Volume 2 includes essays by Louis Althusser, Étienne Balibar, and Roger Establet. English editions of the book have retained only the essays by Althusser and Balibar. See more recently, David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (London: Verso, 2012). For a review, see Owen Hatherley, “Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution by David Harvey – Review,” Guardian, April 12, 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/12/owen-hatherley-rebel-cities-harvey. 14 In this regard, and consistent with arguments concerning the status of subjectivity in the passage out of post-structuralism, see Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, Jean-Luc Nancy, eds., Who Comes after the Subject? (London: Routledge, 1991). See especially: Gérard Granel, “Who Comes after the Subject?”; JeanFrançois Lyotard, “Sensus communis: The Subject in statu nascendi”; and Jacques Rancière, “After What.” “But what might an aesthetical suprasensible be? The sensus communis, if we take sensus in the sense of feeling, cannot and must not be mediated by a concept. There, in aesthetics, the pure faculty of judgment, the capacity of bringing together the manifold without having the rule (concept) nor the law (Idea) of that bringing together – this is the definition of reflexivity – must operate without any additions, within the modesty of an immediate synthesis, the form, that makes the subjective synthesis, the feeling, immediately. In other words, reason in the broad sense, the theoretical faculty of intellectio, the practical faculty of acta, has no interest in it.” Lyotard, “Sensus communis,” in Cadava et al., eds., Who Comes after the Subject?, p. 223. “In an amazing dialectical sublation centered on the Firm, a finite world is thus perpetuated. There is the true actual subject: in this ‘form’ under which Capital has managed to hire mankind.” Granel, “Who Comes after the Subject?,” in Cadava et al., Who Comes after the Subject?, p. 151. For an important book on the return of the repressed (the “universal”) under

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cover of the Sublime, see Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime: Kant’s Critique of Judgment, 23-29, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). First published Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime: Kant, Critique de la faculté de juger, 23-29 (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1991). 15 Sarah Cooper approaches this fundamental mystery in the ontology of the image when she discusses film as a type of “second skin” in relation to the Zone in Sans soleil. “We approach Marker’s dream space in terms that bring us into contact with a texture. For the psychoanalytical theorist Didier Anzieu, the dream is a ‘pellicule’ (film) in the sense that it is a fine membrane, which envelops and protects certain parts of organisms, yet it is also like photographic film, which supports the sensitive layer that will be marked during sleep. . . . The film of the dream is open to internal and external stimuli and could break at any moment. The dream is given materiality through analogy with, and expression in terms of, film, which works well with reference to the kind of film that is impressed upon indexically, celluloid and not digital technology. The psychical life takes on a consistency here, through a skin or membrane that is also a photographic film: it comes to matter and be tangible through dreams.” Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 121. See Didier Anzieu, Le moi-peau (Paris: Dunod, 1995). First published 1985. English version, The Skin Ego, trans. Chris Turner (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). See also, Didier Anzieu, L’épiderme nomade et la peau psychique (Paris: Éditions du Collège de Psychanalyse Groupale et Familiale, 1999). First published by Éditions Aspygée, 1990. “In a fictional fantasy text, L’Épiderme nomade of 1990, Anzieu’s protagonist dons the skin of those he likes or desires, as they do his, in order to know one another intimately, quite literally placing each other in the position of being able to film their interior life. . . . His ultimate move into eternity is secured through his fabrication of a shroud made of pieces of the skin of all those he has known. . . . This skin is a film, a permeable layer through which he enters into epidermal contact with the other’s desire, and wears it, along with his own. It is this final move into a timeless dimension that is relevant here, narrated as the tactile experience of carrying the skin of others with him into eternity.” Cooper, Chris Marker, pp. 122-23. See Pierre’s comments in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966): “Et qu’il existe à travers notre part la plus irréfutable, notre part animale. . . . Il y a bien une Loi du Jardin, qui s’exprime par des gestes très simples, par les gestes les plus simples.” Ibid., p. 64. (“And that it exists through the most irrefutable part of ourselves, our animal side. . . . There is indeed a Law of the Garden, which expresses itself through very simple gestures, through the simplest of gestures.” Ibid., p. 64 n 7; translation Sarah Cooper.) See Chris Marker, Commentaires 2 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967), pp. 83-169, for the text/commentary for Si j’avais quatre dromadaires. For the passage cited above, see pp. 166-67. More than just the voice-over narration for the film, plus select images, the Commentaires version is a short photo-roman. Some of Marker’s most reflexive films in this regard are La jetée (1962), Le mystère Koumiko (1965), Sans soleil (1982), Level Five (1996), and Le souvenir d’un avenir (2002). “Pierre speaks of the dawning of an era of grace, with a hint of the revolution as he terms

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it a ‘Sierra Maestra’ of tenderness: ‘. . . quelque chose qui avance . . . à travers nous, malgré nous, grâce à nous, quand nous avons la . . . grâce . . . et qui annonce, pour on ne sait pas quand, la survivance des plus aimés.’” Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 64; see Marker, Commentaires 2, p. 168. (Or, “. . . something which is advancing . . . through us, in spite of us, thanks to us, when we have . . . grace . . . and which heralds, for an unknown time, the survival of the most loved.” Ibid., p. 64 n 8; translation Sarah Cooper.) That this resembles a late poem by Friedrich Hölderlin is certainly no accident . . . These are the closing sentiments/words (“the last word”) in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires. The “two-way street” of the image is addressed by Cooper in her discussion of temporality in Marker’s work: “A fascination with stillness runs throughout Marker’s work, even though it is not central to every film. It manifests itself principally through the existence of photographs, but also in more diverse ways, through the filming of statuary, painting and other static images, including the film still, in addition to a fondness for fixed frame shooting, which can give the effect of immobility, even though the footage we see is ‘moving’ in its duration. And on the way to stasis there are always delays, which slow down the temporal progression of the images or pause them, if only for a moment. Repeatedly the filmmaker responds dynamically to the emergence of stillness, as if it is conjured forth perpetually only in order for it then to be undermined. Camera mobility or the pace of montage reinserts stasis into the film’s flow: both create harmonious links or bring out tensions between the mobile and immobile, and leave many works poised between the two.” Ibid., pp. 4-5. Cooper assembles this discussion of temporality through a conflation of remarks regarding canonical texts by theorists of the image, including: Gilles Deleuze, L’image-temps (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1985); Sontag, On Photography; Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Diehl, ed., Les problèmes de la peinture; Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 1980); Emmanuel Levinas, “La réalité et son ombre,” Les temps modernes 38 (November 1948); and Emmanuel Levinas, Dieu, la mort et le temps (Paris: Éditions Grasset, 1993). See Cooper, Chris Marker, pp. 5-8. The date (1948) of Levinas’ contribution to Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les temps modernes is of interest insofar as the connection to Sartre and the date confirm the confluence of postwar philosophical and avant-garde thought in an existential and metaphysical mine field (left over from the war, no less) that centers on the subject as the subject (or the subject proper). See Séan Hand’s introduction (pp. 129-30) to “Reality and Its Shadow,” pp. 129-43, trans. Alphonso Lingis, in The Levinas Reader, ed. Séan Hand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), regarding this “controversial application of ethical responsibility to the field of aesthetics” and the “extraordinary riposte which it provoked from the editorial board of Les Temps Modernes, who actually prefaced the article with their own Sartrean objections.” Ibid., p. 129. Levinas more or less dismisses visual knowledge as a lesser variant of conceptual thought, noting that only criticism of the image can return the necessary ethical content. “The way in which the closed world of art therefore freezes time within images doubles and immobilizes being: characters suffer an eternal anxiety, imprisoned in an inhuman interval. The disengagement this

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encourages means that art is an evasion of responsibility, since it offers consolation rather than a challenge. Only criticism relates this irresponsibility to real history once more by measuring the distance between the myth proposed by art, and real being.” Ibid. Marker’s connections to Sartre (his philosophy teacher at Lycée Pasteur) and Esprit are indicative of his own allegiance to this complex, no matter how tortured, as are many of his early writings from the period, plus the recurrent thematic of temporality in most all of his later works. Regarding Marker’s early writings for DOC and Esprit, see Michael Chaiken, Sam DiIorio, “The Author behind the Auteur: Pre-Marker Marker,” Film Comment 39, no. 4 (July-August 2003): pp. 42-43. “[François] Niney labels the time with which Marker concerns himself ‘le temps historique’ . . . , and thereby establishes a connection to the past and future” through temporality and mere stasis. Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 8. See François Niney, “Remarques sur Sans soleil de Chris Marker,” Documentaires 12 (Summer-Autumn 1996): pp. 5-15. “[Marker’s] concern with temporality turns on the intertwining of beginnings and endings, as well as memories and future imaginings. But it is at those moments that gesture beyond the limits of a lifetime, and where the ontology of the image is not bound only to ceaseless movement or death and eternal stasis, that this protean director registers an enduring bond between film and survival.” Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 9. Walter Benjamin famously distinguished between two types of language, which Pierre’s comments, as above, seem to index; these two forms of expression being, “revelatory or expressive language and communicative language: that which, in naming, expresses and is the essence of things, and that which, as an image of things, is a useful vehicle of information.” Furthermore, “this distinction . . . does not belong to actual history, for from the time of original sin, from the time, that is, of the birth of history, man has lost revelatory paradisiac language. ‘Pure’ language is only an archaic memory – the memory of a past that has always been past.” Vincenzo Vitiello, “Desert, Ethos, Abandonment: Towards a Topology of the Religious,” pp. 136-69, in Jacques Derrida, Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), p. 143; first published Thierry Marchaisse, ed., La Religion: Séminaire de Capri sous la direction de Jacques Derrida et Gianni Vattimo (Paris: Éditions du Seuil; Rome: Éditions Laterza, 1996); with reference to Walter Benjamin, “On Language As Such and On the Language of Man” (written in 1916 and published posthumously), pp. 107-23, in Walter Benjamin, One Way Street, and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1985). This all plays out, dramatically, in La jetée, and contrary to “psychoanalytical” readings of the film, which generally problematize the hero’s death as a failure to renounce “the past” – that is, to give up on the remembered (haunted/haunting) image of the woman he revisits through time-travel, but an image that is also a metaphor for the irreducible imprint (remnant) of the immemorial tragedy (sacrifice) that creates worlds. “The time of the tragic hero is fulfilled inasmuch as death does not simply signify the end of life, but gives form to its destiny. It fulfils the ‘principle’, that which was there from the beginning. Death confers immortality on the tragic hero. But it is an ‘ironic immortality.’” Vitiello, “Desert, Ethos, Abandonment,” in Derrida, Vattimo, eds., Religion, p. 143; with reference to Walter Benjamin, The

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Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977). First published Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (Berlin: E. Rowohlt, 1928). Notably, Benjamin’s Trauerspiels was a direct homage to Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. 16 The sense of how techne might advance and/or hinder human progress was investigated by Marker as early as 2084: Vidéo-clip pour une réflexion syndicale et pour le plaisir (1984). 17 See David Couzens Hoy, “Post-Marxism: ‘Who Is Speaking?,’” pp. 191-226, in Critical Resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). The severe critique of post-structuralism as a system of maintenance of the status quo through an always-deferred relation to revolutionary praxis comes primarily through unrepentant critics of a neo-Marxian cast, including Terry Eagleton and Slavoj Žižek. “For [Žižek] poststructuralism is a misunderstanding of French philosophy by North Americans: ‘In short, an entity like “poststructuralist deconstructionism” (the term itself not used in France) comes into existence only for a gaze that is unaware of the details of the philosophical scene in France: this gaze brings together authors (Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard . . .) who are simply not perceived as part of the same épistème in France.’” Ibid., p. 225. The quote within the quote is from Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 2000), p. 243. “Left melancholy” is typified by the generally pessimistic (dark futurist) works of such figures as Jean Baudrillard, Paul Virilio, and Peter Sloterdijk. Regarding Virilio and technopessimism vis-à-vis Marker’s Immemory, see Erika Balsom, “Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine interactive?: Chris Marker’s Immemory and the Possibility of a Digital Archive,” E-Media Studies 1, no. 1, Spring 2008, http://journals.dartmouth.edu/ cgi-bin/WebObjects/Journals.woa/2/xmlpage/4/article/289. Regarding Sloterdijk, see Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldrid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). First published Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). See also, Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator for a corrective to the late cynicism of post-Marxist thought. 18 See Hoy, p. 209. The passage denouncing Tel quel cited by Hoy is from Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 197-98. 19 Regarding the late “messianicity” of Derrida’s thought and its relation to Emmanuel Levinas’ preferred mode of critique (that is, ethics), see Hoy, “Levinas and Derrida: ‘Ethical Resistance,’” in Critical Resistance, pp. 149-90. 20 Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 213; cited in Hoy, p. 187. While Derrida eventually came round to adopting Levinas’ reading of the negative function of the messianic both in history and in ethics (or in contingent versus ideological structures), he also stripped the concept of its primary religious and moral imprimatur. See Hoy, ibid. Much of the negative or atheological readings of the agencies associated with pure political praxis (or the paradigmatic) are derived from the inversion Marx made of Hegel’s teleological

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project (The Phenomenology of Spirit) plus Hegel’s emptying of Immanuel Kant’s concept of the thing-in-itself of any real content, in relation to the subject which effectively confronts the unknowable nature of things with the unknowable nature of the self (in/for itself). This all takes a curious turn with the production of différance in post-structuralism, well through Lacanian and neo-Marxist critique (as exemplified by Žižek). “Reality is posited as the result of a lack that must be filled in, but never is. Thus, when ideology is glossed as the misrecognition that there is nothing really going on, the philosophical point is to dismiss altogether the idea of reality as the ways things are in themselves. Žižek sums up Hegel’s critique of Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself in his remark that ‘the negative experience of the Thing must change into the experience of the Thing-in-itself as radical negativity.’” Hoy, p. 221; citing Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 206. This “nothing going on” is the linch pin of neoMarxist attempts to revive a critique of ideology, insofar as its inversions and topological variants include the summary judgment that ideology is always a case of “false consciousness” (of one kind or another) and imposed consciously or unconsciously (collectively or personally) as a means of covering over the naked truth (the emptiness of the Real). The critique of ideology in both post-Marxism and neo-Marxism is caught, as a result, in a dual process of attempting to overcome Lukács’ assessment of ideology as false consciousness and maintaining it. For Žižek, then, the game is to overturn it, but to also find out what was always hiding in the empty vessel anyway. “Changing the conception of the object [of ideology or of the Real] will also change the conception of the subject, and Žižek has intriguing thoughts not only about reality, but also about consciousness. Žižek notices that Hegel’s critique of Kant comes down to the claim that the transcendental object is nothing but a projection by the subject of its own nothingness. This is not an extrinsic criticism of Kant, since it was Kant who defined the transcendental object as an empty X, and then had to grant that the unity of consciousness was empty of content as well. If the transcendental object is nothing determinate, then neither is the subject, and thus for Žižek consciousness (as self-awareness) becomes a mystery.” Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 222. This mystery is reduced, by Žižek, to a fundamental confrontation with the world through anxiety, producing a double-edged sense that self and other, as conundrum, are irreducible other than through death. This anxiety is played out in all forms of interpersonal and existential-metaphysical interactions (between individuals and all mediating and representational orders, or structuralizations of the Real). In a sense, then, the death of the subject returns from post-structuralism effectively crucified once again upon the axes of the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic, producing the effective reduction that inhabits all such inquests – the return of the theological from within the atheological (a double “inside” returning from a doubled “outside”). This dynamic function (capitalized x, as above), identified and troubled by both post-structuralism and post-Marxism, is effectively the key to subjectivity in all of its multiple, virtual forms, collective or otherwise, and – pace Levinas – the crux of all questions regarding ethics and morality, the latter typically being suspect terrain, insofar as it is merely ideological or

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hegemonic (in Laclau’s sense), or a formation of, and/or an approach to, the Real – that is to say, a regressive constellation of forces that paper over an essentially empty assemblage composed of signifiers that are, in fact, repressive. Any shift in the signifying agency of the universalizing function will, therefore, automatically alter the conditions of subjectivity. 21 The term High Romantic is used throughout this study to connote and invoke a unique moment in Western aesthetics and artistic praxis, arguably traceable to the Jena Romantics, that is formulated as antithesis to the ravages of modernity (notwithstanding the latter’s notable and useful extravagances, but in contradistinction to the emphasis on rote rationality and all that such portends). See the late post-structuralist return to the same (for example, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière et al.). It is also important to note that the young Hegel is more or less a contemporary of this distinguished “school” of thought in Early German Romanticism, though he later denounced their presumptions to a synthesis of subjective and objective knowledge. “We all know that Hegel radically contested this claim in his lectures on aesthetics. As he sees it, the power of form, the ‘thought-outside-itself’ of the work, and the power of self-reflection, the ‘thoughtin(side)-itself’ of conceptual thought, are mutually opposed. The drive to identify them results either in the work being reduced to the demonstration of a specific virtuosity, an individual signature, or in its being caught in the endless symbolist game between form and meaning where one side is never more than the other’s echo.” Rancière, Film Fables, pp. 157-70. See also, Jean-Luc Nancy, “Around the Notion of Literary Communism,” trans. James Gilbert-Walsh, intro. Philippe Mesnard, in Jean-Luc Nancy, Multiple Arts: The Muses II, ed. Simon Sparks, trans. Simon Sparks et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). Regarding Nancy’s “praxis of sense,” see Gavin Keeney, “The Origin of the Arts,” pp. 22548, in “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 20022011, pp. 246-48. 22 In Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat (1977/1993), it is in-between the “Garden” and the “Castle” that “Life” purportedly takes place – or, in the street, so to speak. 23 On Pauline Christianity, as redemptive-catastrophic, historical force-field, see Vitiello, “Desert, Ethos, Abandonment,” in Derrida, Vattimo, eds., Religion. 24 Regarding technical innovations in filmmaking that influenced the emergent “self-reflexive” documentary of the 1950s, see Virginia Ann Bonner, Cinematic Caesuras: Experimental Documentary and the Politics of Form in Left Bank Films by Resnais, Marker, Varda (Atlanta, GA: Institute for Women’s Studies, Emory University, 2003), pp. 18-20. Primarily concerned with the integration of sound and image through new forms of film stock, camera, sound, and editing equipment, the shifts allowed new formalist methodologies to emerge from a rather placid and banal set of conventions that had ruled French cinema up to the time of the subsequent emergence of a new generation of politically motivated filmmakers. Bonner notes that these technical changes collided with “historical forces” to produce the experimental cinema of the postwar years leading to the more pop and narrative adventures of French New Wave. Many of Marker’s now-classic

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“Brechtian” distancing techniques were no doubt derived from his time in postwar theater prior to migrating into cinema by way of Bazin. Bonner discusses Resnais’ use of slippage between first-person narrative and second-person in terms of the director’s attempts to implicate the viewer’s own consciousness in the elaboration of the truth-telling mechanisms of Nuit et brouillard, something Marker will return to in Sans soleil. In Nuit et brouillard “this use of first- and second person carefully includes both the viewers and the filmmakers in these indictments [ . . . and] the pointed shift in address is clear.” Ibid., p. 110. For the application of the same within Sans soleil, see ibid., pp. 152-53. Regarding the use of Moussorgski’s song cycle “Sunless,” see “Diffracted Memory and the Web of Time in Chris. Marker’s Sans soleil,” pp. 143-84, in ibid. “Beyond its reference to Musorgskii and the influence this suggests, Marker’s concept of ‘sunlessness’ for this highly personal documentary film reconsiders the medium of cinema itself – a photographic medium that is dependent on light for representation. The title reflects a frustrated and even melancholy realization of the inability to ever represent fully a subject in the shifting light of documentary ‘objectivity,’ and the subsequent inability to express memory and meaning adequately to an audience. How can one convey the slippage of meanings among one’s memories in the absence of clearly illuminating light, of reducible fact, of definable Truth?” Ibid., pp. 144-45. 25 Images of war and armaments are the fundamental discordant element in Marker’s work between the always-futural state of humanistic “utopia” and the techno-hellishness of the here-and-now. For this reason, the unfinished, epic project Owls at Noon will probably remain unfinished. This strident disconnect between the implicit utopian lining of history and ideology (war being the latter’s primary technical expression) is the signature gesture of the opening of Sans soleil, which pairs an image of innocence (a still image of children from Iceland) with a still image of US warplanes. For the significance of these two images in the prelude to Sans soleil, see Bonner, Cinematic Caesuras, pp. 146-49. According to Bonner (by way of Elissa Marder), the sequence of images and black leader are based on the poetic meter of the Alexandrine verse form. Ibid., pp. 146-47 n 8. In Si j’avais quatre dromadaires, Pierre (Marker) states that “Iceland” (or “Scandinavia”) is a proverbial paradise because, in part, it has no army. See “Si j’avais quatre dromadaires,” in Marker, Commentaires 2, pp. 149-54. Additionally, both Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005) and Sans soleil (1982) rely on excerpts from the poems of T.S. Eliot, the former “The Hollow Men” (1925) and the latter “Ash-Wednesday” (1930). See Bonner, ibid., pp. 183-84, for the manner in which the latter poem echoes throughout Sans soleil. 26 André Malraux comes in for some severe criticism from the Left for various perceived crimes against the Communist cause, foremost his break with the French Communist Party at the outset of WWII. Malraux was later Minister of Information, Minister of State, and then Minister of Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle. Like Marker, much of Malraux’s life before and during the war is enshrouded in fog and self-perpetuated myth and/or obfuscation.

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Mike Donaldson, “Gramsci, Class and Post-Marxism,” International Gramsci Journal 1, 2008, http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/research/gramsci-journal/articles/ MikeDonaldson-article_first_issue.pdf. See Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, trans. Joseph A. Buttigieg, Antonio Callari, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). The Columbia University Press edition includes notebooks 1 through 8. First published Quaderni del carcere, 6 vols. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1971), and Quaderni del carcere, 4 vols. (Turin: Einaudi, 1975). 28 Ibid. According to Gramsci’s critique, the petite bourgeoisie was the main component in the rise of fascism, as it as often has been the chief agent in the shift from one economic system to another. In this sense, Gramsci’s proposed program was to reach this mutable class of social agents early and convert them to the communist cause. The primary measure in reaching the petite bourgeoisie was through cultural programs. Such also is consistent with Marker’s involvement with Peuple et Culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s and his subsequent return to overt political filmmaking with SLON in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His relationship to worker movements through to Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) is a chief element of his oeuvre. This same sordid tale of the betrayal of the people by the middle class is told in Patricio Guzmán’s epic, 262-minute film Battle of Chile (1975-1978) and its 57-minute sequel, Chile: Obstinate Memory (1997), films Marker had a rather potent and rarified role in facilitating. 29 Saint Ambrose’s sobria ebrietas. 30 There is not a trace of anything Heideggerean in Marker’s work, as there is throughout the corpus of post-modern and post-structuralist theory as praxis (theory as critique). What is evident, arguably, in the elegant curves and sinews of the body of Marker’s work, is an unnamed/unidentified Levinasian element that was notably constructed in opposition to Heidegger, by Levinas, as early as 1935. This also comes through in Marker’s repeated allusions to Giraudoux and the emphatic rejoinder to inhabit the Earth more forcefully, while also more delicately and ethically. In fact, it is a metaphysical remainder that is common to Levinas and Marker, but one that is re-naturalized often by rhetorical force to elude the incorporation of the same in new and pointless varieties of ideology, or the incorporation of incorporations that is the founding gesture of all ideology as false consciousness. In this regard see Badiou’s prohibitions against the same in Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2. In essence, incorporations of incorporations belong to thought itself, versus ideological formulations that tend to obscure and deform truths. Badiou’s injunction is effectively a nuanced, essentialist assault on the peregrinations of disembodied and spectral agencies in service to oppression, and which are the very basis of capitalist reification, though they are also present in other instances of formalized political-economic power, as well as many mostly harmless aggregations of speculative agency proper. Ultimately, the game is for all such incorporations to remain transparent and open to the historical path of human agency – albeit a version of the event that Badiou, a former Maoist and unrepentant Lacanian, would not openly subscribe to nor formulate, as such, except in the abstract, mathematical, half-formal ontology he generally indulges.

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Gramsci: “The meetings and discussions in preparation for the Factory Councils were worth more for the education of the working class than ten years of reading pamphlets and articles written by the owners of the genie in the lamp.” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from Political Writings (1910-1920), trans. John Mathews (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 238; cited in Donaldson, “Gramsci, Class and Post-Marxism”; from L’Ordino Nuova 1, no. 37 (February 14, 1920). The “owners of the genie” are reformists and opportunists, essentially those who would tinker with the apparatuses of power versus overthrow the entire capitalist project. “They are long-winded and vacuous rhetoricians, incapable of undertaking any kind of action or giving any concrete judgment whatsoever.” Gramsci, “The Instruments of Labor,” in Selections from Political Writings (1910-1920), p. 163. 32 David Couzens Hoy, “Introduction,” pp. 1-18, in Critical Resistance, p. 2. 33 Levinas (1906-1995) taught at the Sorbonne from 1972 until his retirement in 1978. He also taught at the University of Paris X (Nanterre) from 1967 to 1973. Levinas’ approach to ontology as contaminated by instrumental reason (or techne) is the core justification for the study of being and its analogues. “First philosophy” (ontology), then, soars above other concerns given to metaphysics as the most powerful expression of domination and is, therefore, the foremost venue for liberation. Levinas studied with Edmund Husserl and attended seminars by Martin Heidegger between 1928 and 1929. His relationship to the former informs many of the positive turns in his project, whereas his relationship to the latter is, as early as 1935, a case for a vehement rebuttal of the claims of Being and the paralogisms of Being-There. For key publications by Levinas, plus a summary of his life work, etc., see Bettina Bergo, “Emmanuel Levinas,” in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2011, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2011/entries/levinas/. 34 “The critical dimension of poststructuralism is achieved by using the technique that Nietzsche calls genealogy. Inherited from [David] Hume, Nietzsche’s genealogical analyses are critical in that they identify resistance and analyze the background practices that lead to it. Genealogy is also critical insofar as it suspects that consciousness’s sense of freedom hides deeper motivations that call this sense of freedom into question. . . . Genealogy does not deny that there is a level of conscious agency, but it doubts the efficacy and autonomy that self-consciousness attributes to itself.” Hoy, Critical Resistance, pp. 2-3. 35 Ibid., pp. 7-8. 36 Ibid., p. 11. 37 Ibid., pp. 11-12. 38 See Gavin Keeney, “Foreword: The Return of the Subject,” pp. vii-ix, in Simone Brott, Architecture for a Free Subjectivity: Deleuze and Guattari at the Horizon of the Real (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011). 39 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 15. 40 David Couzens Hoy, “Nietzsche: ‘Who Interprets?,’” pp. 19-56, in ibid., p. 22; see Gilles Deleuze, “Preface to the English Translation,” pp. viii-xii, in Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 1986), pp. xi-xii. Deleuze goes on within the preface to elucidate that it is the “image of thought” (as

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contracted in the Nietzschean aphorisms or expanded in his Genealogy of Morals) that Nietzsche is deconstructing. This “image of thought” is taken out of the dialectical machinery of classical epistemological studies (philology and such) and freed of its truth-telling aspect to be used, instead, for performative acts of creative world-making. Ibid., p. xii. This very process is in many ways emblematic, as well, of the general misreading of Nietzsche performed by the French Nietzscheans, insofar as the situatedness of this anarchic process attributed to Nietzsche is essential for a proper reading of Nietzschean deconstruction. First published Nietzsche et la philosophie (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1962). The new preface was written by Deleuze in 1983 for the Athlone Press, English translation of this seminal 1962 book, a book Hoy identifies as the key moment in the early development of poststructuralism. Hoy points out that Foucault recognized “the importance of this book” when he said that “we live in a Deleuzian age.” Hoy, Critical Resistance, pp. 241-42 n 1. This turning point c.1962 involved “denouncing” totality, mediation, etc., plus – as antidote – the “valorization of difference,” the hallmarks of Deleuzian critique. Essentially, as Foucault also announces, the primary assault was on Hegel, by way of Nietzsche – but an assault on Hegel as he had been assimilated into Marxism, using a post-modern version of Nietzsche that has since been effectively discredited. Ibid. For these comments by Foucault regarding Deleuze, see Cornel West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), p. 283. As such, the Necessity of the ethical critique embedded within Marker’s work requires removing it from a generally denatured art-historical analysis (and the artworld as its primary address) and returning it to the world at large. Conversely, it is in galleries and in books that Marker’s images speak most eloquently of the non-discursive disconnect of the artistic image and its privileged modalities, foremost with its recourse to the austerities of the metaphysical-existential imprint of the immemorial. (Arguably, the anarchic regimes of the Internet and cyberspace provide a strange combination of artistic and political agency not quite possible in either purely political or artistic venues and practices – even if the latter are never pure, and never quite truly exist anyway.) See Adrian Martin, Raymond Bellour, Chris Marker: Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, ed. Robert Leonard, Ben Wilson (Brisbane: Institute of Modern Art, 2008), for an example of how Marker’s new-media and installation work is eminently transferrable to books, and vice versa. The above edition of Owls at Noon was published following the exhibition “Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men,” Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, 2007. The presentation includes previously published material in the form of short essays by Adrian Martin (“Crossing Marker,” pp. 5-11) and Raymond Bellour (“Marker’s Gesture,” pp. 13-19, translation Adrian Martin). The balance of the book is a découpage intégral of the video Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, plus select photograms or stills. 41 Regarding this shift in “reading” from symptomatic to situational, see Gavin Keeney, “The Silence: Non-discursive Agency in Photography,” pp. 209-26, in “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011, pp. 216-17 n 16.

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“Pierre Bourdieu, in contrast [to Foucault et al.], resists the relativism that threatens the Nietzschean side of this spectrum and stands in a lineage that is closer to Marx and Merleau-Ponty. . . . The central idea of this theory [of the socially constructed aspects of power relations] is Bourdieu’s account of the habitus, which always is situated in what Bourdieu calls a field. The analysis of the habitus and the field can be taken as Bourdieu’s way of adding the social dimension to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of embodiment.” David Couzens Hoy, “Bourdieu: ‘Agents, Not Subjects,’” pp. 101-48, in Critical Resistance, p. 101. 43 The secondary literature (especially the monographs) on Marker’s work is essentially a consensus-building operation, insofar as each work references the previous and the lineage as totality serves to repeat certain bromides and specific judgments that are rarely qualified beyond the citation of an authoritative voice in the retrospective gaze of the scholar. This is particularly true with regard to the mnemonic and/or non-discursive nature of the futural qualifications assigned Marker’s work by way of the apparent documentary mode of his photography and film. The repetition, however, obscures the dynamic function of the “archaeological” recourse to the signature of things (Agamben’s locution for what Foucault actually offered to future scholars, versus the rhetoric of the Foucauldian inquisition into the privileges of power). 44 See Patricio Guzmán’s documentary film Chile: Obstinate Memory (1997) for a properly “Markerian” diatribe (put into the mouth of a professor) regarding memories as mirrors (or images in mirrors) that we are prone to get stuck in by becoming overly attached to them. This sentiment resembles, of course, the myth of Narcissus and Echo, and its permutations and transpositions across millennia. While not quite our own reflection (per Narcissus), memories do – after all – have an aspect of reflective fascination. Plato’s cave comes closer, as metaphor, in this regard; a metaphor utilized by Marker here-and-there. 45 Regarding the theological heritage of the presence of the immemorial, as buried in Nietzsche’s image of the Eternal Return, see Gavin Keeney, “La Présence: The Stigmata of the Irreal,” pp. 261-84, in “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011. 46 Hoy, Critical Resistance, pp. 105-106; see Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 50-51. First published Le sens pratique (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980). 47 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 107. 48 Ibid., pp. 112-13; see Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 344. First published Règles de l’art: Genèse et structure du champ littéraire (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1992). Hoy’s term multiple universalities is his own characterization of Bourdieu’s claim for the presence of universals as forms of historical unconscious agency, yet also suggests that the “worlds within worlds” of this gesture are effectively always re-naturalized as spectral agency, which would – in fact – make them otherwise than true universals, the latter which, since Kant, are purely non-contingent. This key moment in the post-structuralist conception of the end of metaphysics and the deconstruction of everything toward the unearthing of

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hidden mechanisms of power (the project of an “archaeology of knowledge,” in itself) is predicated on the demotion of universals to quasi-universals, always, however, in a larger quest for what eludes this very same process of leveling, while the very idea of re-naturalizing the true, pace Levinas, produces the possibility of an ethics. 49 Hoy, “Agents vs. Subjects,” pp. 114-23, in Critical Resistance, pp. 114-15; with reference to Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 9. First published Choses dites (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1987). 50 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 116. 51 Ibid., p. 121; with reference to Pierre Bourdieu, Loïc J.D. Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 197. “He therefore asserts that ‘not only can habitus be practically transformed (always within definite boundaries) by the effect of a social trajectory leading to conditions of living different from initial ones, it can also be controlled through awakening of consciousness and socioanalysis.’” Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 123; with reference to Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 116. 52 David Couzens Hoy, “Bourdieu vs. Derrida,” pp. 123-39, in Critical Resistance, p. 127. 53 Ibid., pp. 127-28. 54 For a corrective by Derrida to the notion that undecidability is essentially the key ingredient in the play of quasi-transcendentals, see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority,’” pp. 3-67, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, David Gray Carlson, eds., Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (London: Routledge, 1992). Most of the essays in this collection were presented as papers at a symposium held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, New York, New York, on October 1-2, 1989. (Derrida read only half of the paper collected in this publication at the Cardozo symposium, with the remainder being delivered and elaborated upon at a subsequent colloquium, entitled “Nazism and the ‘Final Solution’: Probing the Limits of Representation,” at the University of California, Los Angeles, on April 26, 1990.) Also published in Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990): pp. 919-1045. See also, Axel Honneth, Disrespect: The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). This particular Derrida text seems to have launched, in part, the investigation of Carl Schmitt that has not since abated, plus the recent work by Agamben to unearth the theological apparatuses that have come over from various forms of empire into secular forms of governance. Schmitt appears here as “interlocutor” for Walter Benjamin, by way of Benjamin’s text Zur Kritik der Gewalt (1921), albeit a text Derrida describes as “neo-messianical Jewish mysticism . . . grafted onto post-Sorelian neo-Marxism,” or – perhaps – vice versa. Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 29. In this same volume, where Derrida launches his analysis of deconstruction in relation to justice, J. Hillis Miller (one of the more astute colleagues of, or commentators on, Derrida) tackles the problem of violence and the law (the implied arbitrary nature of the former to impose the latter, plus the implied necessity of the former to overcome the inherent injustices of the latter).

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Miller does this by way of appropriating Heinrich von Kleist’s short story Michael Kohlhaas (1808), in the essay “Laying Down the Law in Literature,” pp. 305-29. (The epigraph for Miller’s essay is “Probability is not always on the side of truth.” This is taken from the Kleist story he is utilizing.) What is curious is that Miller invokes Kleist to effectively reach Kant, and to reach Kant’s Categorical Imperative (the Moral Law). Firstly, he troubles the concept that literature or poetry (by way of Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry) might ever constitute an alternative path to law as truth. “What kind of law might a poem or novel make statutory?” Ibid., p. 305. He then answers: “A work of literature may conceivably have inaugural originality, but not, it would seem, the universality of law, the demand made by a law on all people within its jurisdiction to obey it or suffer the consequences.” Ibid. Benjamin’s essay, Zur Kritik de Gewalt, cited by Derrida, circles the same problem (and it is this essay that prompted Schmitt to write to Benjamin to congratulate him on his treatment of this problem). Miller then invokes a second essay of his own, on Kant, entitled “Reading Telling: Kant,” published in J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Also published in J. Hillis Miller, J. Hillis Miller Reader, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Here he states (quoting himself and ventriloquizing Kant): “What faculty or agency within me is the source of the laws I establish with my ‘self-legislating will’? Kant’s books of moral philosophy are attempts to answer this question, or rather to explain why it cannot be answered, why we cannot ever confront the moral law within us face to face, though its imperative command over us is categorical.” Miller, “Laying Down the Law in Literature,” p. 327 n 35. All of this references, then, the immemorial source of the law (of justice as truth, versus law as truth, or law as justice) and the paralogisms of a critique of law, insofar as the word law is often a codeword for injustice. Thus Schmitt comes in for some very heavy “archaeological” analysis, from Derrida to Agamben. This is also what makes messianicity (the common ground of Benjamin, Derrida, Levinas, and Agamben), vis-à-vis a severe deconstruction of the religious origins of secular law, so powerful within the proper setting – that is, “outside the law.” As this essay by Derrida just precedes or coincides with his renowned work on Marx, in Spectres de Marx, it is to Marx that messianicity ultimately returns here. Arguably, it is this same complex that animates Marker’s work and his own relentless deconstruction of the apparatuses of power and privilege (political, cultural, and otherwise). Messianicity invokes the “Christic,” most especially Saint Paul’s version of the same, Saint Paul being the figure famously hidden in Benjamin’s dialectically profound “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” 1940). Benjamin’s essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (1921) appeared in English as “Critique of Violence,” pp. 278-300, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). Derrida points out in his endnotes that Benjamin’s essay was of this time (that is, between the wars), when a certain sense of imminent destruction was “in the air,” albeit behind as well as ahead, and when the significant differences

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between forms of political and cultural destruction (rebirth or repression) were under discussion in both conservative and progressive circles. “Zur Kritik de Gewalt is a critique of representation not only as perversion and fall of language, but as a political system of formal and parliamentary democracy.” Derrida, “Force of Law,” p. 64 n 3. Derrida then notes certain affinities between texts of Benjamin, Schmitt, and Heidegger, many sharing a “hostility to parliamentary democracy, even to democracy as such, or to Aufklärung, not only because of a certain interpretation of the polemos, of war, violence and language, but also because of a thematic of ‘destruction’ that was very widespread at the time.” Ibid., p. 66 n 4. Yet he also distinguishes between Heideggerean “Destruktion” and the Benjaminian version, the latter which “sought to be the condition of an authentic tradition and memory, and of reference to an originary language.” Ibid. This progressive search, as passage through Nietzschean nihilism, for an originary language for being – new, old, or otherwise – is detailed in Massimo Cacciari, Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, trans. Rodger Friedman (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). First published Dallo Steinhof: Prospettive viennesi del primo Novecento (Milan: Adelphi, 1980). Marker’s relationship to the same would seem to be through a sustained inquest into the nature of representation proper, in his case filmic-literary, but with the ChristicMarxist fuse intact – that is to say, immersion in a type of cultural-historical miseen-scène that suggests an answer to Miller’s question, as above, through the work of art as such. This “same,” then, becomes a “defense of the literary work of art,” albeit with all high-formalist gestures and aporias intact, insofar as Marker’s formalism is also where the apocalyptic and/or metaphysical imprint occurs, or where he addresses the inordinate, “incommensurable” aspects of his inquest into the truth-telling apparatus of the image. Benjamin’s Zur Kritik de Gewalt closes with: “But all mythical, lawmaking violence, which we may call executive, is pernicious. Pernicious, too, is the law-preserving, administrative violence that serves it. Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred execution, may be called sovereign violence.” Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” p. 300. For the appearance of Kleist in Marker’s work, via Giraudoux, see Berliner Ballade (1990). For the apocalyptic fuse writ large, see Owls at Noon (the bookend to La jetée). See also, Réda Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker’s La jetée,” Camera Obscura 24 (September 1990): pp. 139-61. 55 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 133. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid.; with reference to Bourdieu, In Other Words, p. 33. 58 Marker is too elliptical and allusive to directly address any of this other than to make occasional asides in his narrative to causes and effects that are effectively oblique to his agenda anyway; an agenda which might be focused, after all, on the self-causing cause of classical ontology, and all that such portends. Whereas both Godard and Tarkovsky utilize mise-en-scène in their films that includes direct reference either discursively or visually to books and texts, Marker rarely indulges this level of staged effects, a distinct remainder that is evidence, as well, that his

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later works’ origins in documentary film are still viable, however distended or unattended those origins may appear. 59 As such, the statement, “A cat is never on the side of power,” accompanying images of a street parade/festival of gigantic cats, is a rather light moment in Le fond de l’air est rouge, especially after nearly two hours of hard-hitting, dialectical, socio-cultural analysis. 60 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 106. 61 Ibid., p. 107; with reference to Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, pp. 68, 53. “Truth is crucial, Bourdieu argues in Pascalian Meditations . . . , and ‘if there is a truth, it is that truth is a stake in struggles.’ Only the objective portrayal of social dissymmetries that try to remain hidden will have an emancipatory effect, one that leads to constructive social criticism and effective political action.” Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 118; with reference to Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 118. First published Méditations pascaliennes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997). The passage Hoy indexes and extracts from The Logic of Practice is even more explicit: “The conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence produce habitus, systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. Objectively ‘regulated’ and ‘regular’ without being in any way the product of obedience to rules, they can be collectively orchestrated without being the product of the organizing action of a conductor.” Pierre Bourdieu, “Structures, Habitus, Practices,” pp. 52-65, in The Logic of Practice, p. 53. Bourdieu adds in a footnote: “Ideally, one would like to be able completely to avoid talking about concepts for their sake and so running the risk of being both schematic and formal. Like all dispositional concepts, the concept of habitus . . . is justified above all by the false problems and false solutions that it eliminates, the questions it enables one to formulate better or to resolve, and the specifically scientific difficulties to which it gives rise.” Ibid., p. 290 n. 1. While the swipe at schematism and formalism is somewhat incidental, it is also a telltale slip that suggests that habitus might be both an unconscious complex requiring a walk in the clear light of day and also a means to another end, insofar as the internalization and re-naturalization of knowledge is what supports the very idea of concepts and formal operations. The critique does, indeed, cut two ways; for the obvious need to air pernicious forms of habitus that are inherited is quite different than the production of productive or progressive forms of habitus, this being – perhaps – a belated justification for formalism and conceptual thought per se, but from the other end of the critique “looking back.” 62 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 152. 63 Ibid., p. 153; with reference to Emmanuel Levinas, Outside the Subject, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 101. First published Hors sujet (Montpellier: Fata Morgana, 1987). 64 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 152.

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Ibid., p. 157. Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969), p. 200; cited in ibid., p. 158. 67 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 159. 68 Ibid., p. 160. “Playing on two senses of regard (the sense of “seeing” and the sense of “mattering to”), Levinas construes the ethical relation whereby the well being of the other matters to me as a primordial rather than a derived condition.” Ibid., p. 162. With reference to the statement, “Prior to any act, I am concerned with the Other, and I can never be absolved from this responsibility.” Emmanuel Levinas, “Ethics and Politics,” pp. 289-97, trans. Jonathan Romney, in The Levinas Reader, p. 290. “Ethics and Politics” is a conversation between Levinas, Shlomo Malka, and Alain Finkielkraut conducted on Radio Communauté, September 28, 1982, shortly after the massacre in the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in West Beirut, Lebanon, an event perpetrated by Christian Phalangist soldiers with the tacit approval and/or on behalf of the Israel Defence Forces. The transcript originally appeared in Les nouveaux cahiers 18 (1982-1983). 69 Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 165. 70 Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1969), p. 241; cited in Hoy, Critical Resistance, p. 173. 71 Ibid. 72 Göran Therborn, “Introduction: Our Time and the Age of Marx,” pp. vii-xi, in From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. ix. 73 Göran Therborn, “Left Failures and Defeats,” pp. 23-26, in ibid., p. 23. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., p. 24. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid., p. 25. 78 Ibid. “After the Second World War, modernism was overwhelmingly left-ofcentre in all parts of the world, except, by and large, the countries involved in reactive modernization. Then in about 1980, came the avalanche of postmodernism. The same period that saw the eclipse of political Marxism also witnessed the denial of modernity in the name of postmodernity, and the rise of postmodernism. The latter has at least two very different origins. One is aesthetic: a mutation of the modernist succession of avant-gardes, most clearly developed in the field of architecture as a reaction against the austere high modernism of Mies van der Rohe and the International Style. The other source lies in social philosophy, a manifestation of ex-leftist exhaustion and disenchantment. The key figure here is the late French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, a disillusioned former militant of the far-left grouplet Socialisme ou Barbarie.” Göran Therborn, “Cultures of Critique,” pp. 26-41, in ibid., pp. 29-30. 79 Göran Therborn, “The Ground of Critical Theory,” pp. 72-76, in ibid., p. 72. 80 Ibid.; with reference to Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie” (1937), in Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, ed. Alfred Schmidt, Gunzelin Schmid Noerr (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988), p. 180. “The vocation of the critical theorist ‘is the struggle, to which his thinking belongs’. Critical theory is ‘one single elaborate existential judgement’. While 66

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rejecting a role in the existing division of labour, critical theorists do not stand outside or above classes. Between them and ‘the ruled class’ exists ‘a dynamic unity’, although that unity ‘exists only as conflict’. Through the interaction between the theorist and the ruled class, the process of social change may be accelerated. The task of critical theory is to contribute to ‘the transformation of the social whole’, which will occur only through ever sharper social conflicts. The theory, therefore, offers neither short-term amelioration nor gradual material improvements. Nevertheless, critical theory is theory, characterized by formal conceptualizations, deductive logic and experiential reference.” Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 73; with reference to Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” pp. 180, 190, 201. 81 Göran Therborn, “The Relevance of the Frankfurt School Revived,” pp. 82-84, in ibid., p. 82; ellipses in Therborn; with reference to Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E.B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), p. 3. First published Negative Dialektik: Jargon der Eigentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973). “Critical theory is usually regarded as part of a larger subdivision of twentieth-century Marxism called ‘Western Marxism’, a term launched in the mid-1950s by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who has sometimes been included in it himself. ‘Western Marxism’ has generally been treated as a pantheon of individuals and individual works that express a certain intellectual mood, rather than as a tradition or a movement. The set of Western Marxists has always been fuzzy, although by general agreement, the current started after the October Revolution, as a Western European reaction to it, a positive but special reaction, beginning with Georg Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy, both published in 1923 in German.” Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 83; with reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Les aventures de la dialectique (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1955). “It is generally agreed that another distinguished member of the first generation was Antonio Gramsci, who became the leader of the Italian Communist Party in 1924.” Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 84. 82 Or, to appropriate and give a slightly different spin to an old Jacobite toast, “To the little gentleman in black velvet.” (Thanks to Mary Daniels for this piquant and picturesque expression.) 83 Göran Therborn, “Western and Other Marxisms,” pp. 84-87, in ibid., p. 85; with reference to Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 25-26, and Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 3. 84 Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 86 n 52. 85 See Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington, Brian Massumi, foreword by Fredric Jameson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), for a summary of the loss of innocence associated with postmodern thought through petits récits (“little narratives”) and the subsequent recourse to a type of irrationalism that comes to its most potent expression in Lyotard’s resurrection of the theory of the Sublime. First

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published La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979). For a brief summary of Lyotard’s career, see Richard Wolin, “JeanFrançois Lyotard,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online, n.d., http://www. britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/353000/Jean-Francois-Lyotard. Regarding the non-discursive nature of the plastic arts, see Jean-François Lyotard, Discourse, Figure, trans. Antony Hudek, Mary Lydon (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). First published Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971). 86 Georg Lukács, “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem” (1918), trans. J. Marcus, Social Research 44, no. 3 (1977): p. 420; cited in Göran Therborn, “Rereading Western Marxism in Retrospect,” pp. 87-90, in From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, pp. 88-89; ellipses in Therborn. 87 Lukács, “Bolshevism as a Moral Problem,” p. 423; cited in Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 88; ellipses in Therborn. “This is a Marxism filtered by neo-Kantianism, very much present in the Max Weber circle in Heidelberg of which Lukács was then a part, and grafted onto an orthodox, in part left-wing, Marxism by Max Adler and the whole tendency of ‘Austro-Marxism’, which developed in Vienna in the decade prior to the First World War and included Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Renner and others in its ranks.” Ibid., p. 89. “The birth of Western Marxism consisted in conflating, or, if you prefer, transcending, the distinction between science and ethics with a Hegelian dialectic of class consciousness. Its first adumbration is Lukács’s first article after his return to Hungary as a Communist, ‘Tactics and Ethics’, though the article was written before the short-lived Soviet Republic. Here, morally correct action is made dependent on knowledge of the ‘historical philosophical situation’, on class consciousness. It ends on a note, later expanded, particularly in the key essay History and Class Consciousness, on reification and the consciousness of the proletariat: ‘This calling to the salvation of society is the world-historical role of the proletariat and only through the class consciousness of the proletarians can you reach the knowledge and the understanding of this road of humanity.’” Ibid.; with reference to Georg Lukács, “Taktik und Ethik” (1919). The English translation is presumably Therborn’s. See also, Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971). First published Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein: Studien über marxistische Dialektik (Berlin: Malik-Verlag, 1923). 88 Göran Therborn, “Marxism and the Routes through Modernity,” pp. 94-97, in From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 94. Therborn places the “terminus ad quem” for the labor movement (in Western capitalist countries) in the 1960s, not the 1970s. Ibid., p. 94 n 67. In this respect, the battles that Marker documents, in France, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, are the “end game.” 89 Göran Therborn, “European Marxism after the Second World War,” pp. 97-99, in ibid., p. 99 n 74. Of course, the fact that Marker never wrote for Sartre’s (his old schoolmaster’s) journal is of interest, as is the fact that he did write for Esprit. 90 Göran Therborn, “Critical Theory and the October Revolution,” pp. 90-92, in ibid., pp. 90-91. Therborn also points out that French socialism more or less disgraced itself with the Algerian War. Given that, and given the Soviet invasion

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of Hungary in 1956, where was a Marxist to turn but – perhaps – inward and upward. 91 Göran Therborn, “A Brief Resurgence,” pp. 100-101, in ibid., p. 100. 92 Ibid., p. 101. 93 “In intellectual terms, Marxism has maintained and developed itself primarily as historiography and, later, as sociology, as a socially mediated rather than an economically direct critique of political economy.” Göran Therborn, “The Future of Dialectics,” pp. 108-110, in ibid., p. 108. 94 Tony Judt, “François Furet (1927-1997),” New York Review of Books, November 6, 1997, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/nov/06/francois-furet19271997/. “This new study of the revolutionary era was already a radical departure from the accepted contemporary interpretation. In the tradition of Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel, the Annales approach, addressing long-lasting underlying structures and paying scant attention to political upheavals, was having a marked impact on the historiography of medieval and early modern France. Interpretation of the events of 1789-1799, however, was heavily influenced by the Marxists who dominated the study of the national revolutionary past after World War II. But in the following two decades, Furet was to go on to publish a series of utterly original essays, quite unlike anything he or others had written before, that have transformed our understanding of France’s revolutionary past. In a remarkable series of books, beginning with Penser la Révolution française (1978) and culminating in La Révolution 1770-1880 (1988) Furet destroyed what he himself called the ‘revolutionary catechism’: the Marxist and neo-Marxist account of France’s revolution as the model and forerunner of bourgeois revolutions everywhere, based on an interpretation of the years 1789-1794 as the classic instance of class conflict.” Ibid. 95 Göran Therborn, “The Future of Dialectics,” pp. 108-10, in From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 110; with reference to Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight, vol. 3 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 1370; original emphasis in passage omitted by Therborn. First published Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1959). 96 Therborn, From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, p. 100. 97 Ibid., p. 110. 98 “The messiah comes for our desires. He separates them from images in order to fulfill them. Or rather, in order to show they have already been fulfilled. Whatever we have imagined, we already had. There remain the (unfulfillable) images of what is already fulfilled. With fulfilled desires, he constructs hell; with unfulfillable images, limbo. And with imagined desire, with the pure word, the beatitude of paradise.” Giorgio Agamben, “Desiring,” pp. 53-54, in Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), p. 54. 99 The upscale retail complex in question was in Barcelona and belongs to El Corte Inglés, one of the largest and richest department store chains in Spain. See Carlos Delclós, “General Strike Marks Another Step Forward for Indignados,” Roar Magazine, March 30, 2012, http://roarmag.org/2012/03/general-strike-spainbarcelona-police-indignados/. The connections to Opus Dei are nebulous but

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nonetheless very real. Opus Dei generally invites and collects the wealthy and the powerful toward building shadowy networks within the prevailing apparatuses of the political and economic administration of society. Opus Dei, founded in 1928 in Spain by Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, was further empowered and consolidated in the early 1980s, in the heyday of the Jesuit scandal, when the Church nearly suppressed the latter order for its involvement in Latin American revolutionary struggles under the rubric of Liberation Theology. See Malachi Martin, The Jesuits: The Society of Jesus and the Betrayal of the Roman Catholic Church (New York: Linden Press/Simon & Shuster, 1987).

ESSAY TWO IMMEMORY AND THE IMMEMORIAL

I. The Beginning, the End, and (Perhaps) a Middle It would seem that St. Francis beheld the heavens above him occupied by a vast winged being like a seraph spread out like a cross. There seems some mystery about whether the winged figure was itself crucified or in a posture of crucifixion, or whether it merely enclosed in its frame of wings some colossal crucifix. But it seems clear that there was some question of the former impression; for St. Bonaventure distinctly says that St. Francis doubted how a seraph could be crucified, since those awful and ancient principalities were without the infirmity of the Passion. . . . St. Francis saw above him, filling the whole heavens, some vast immemorial unthinkable power, ancient like the Ancient of Days, whose calm men had conceived under the form of winged bulls or monstrous cherubim, and all that winged wonder was in pain like a wounded bird. This seraphic suffering, it is said, pierced his soul with a sword of grief and pity; it may be inferred that some sort of mounting agony accompanies the ecstasy. Finally after some fashion the apocalypse faded from the sky and the agony within subsided; and the silence and the natural air filled the morning twilight and settled slowly in the purple chasms and cleft abysses of the Apennines.1 —G.K. Chesterton

In ontology (and in formal ontology, plus teleology) a beginning suggests an end, and a beginning and end, perhaps, suggests a middle. And yet a middle cannot be determined without an end, as the end establishes, through its symmetrical relation to a beginning, a possible midpoint. This midpoint is also, in many senses, a turning point, insofar a midpoints take on an expressive significance or import based upon being at the center of a span of time (enclosed within beginning and end).2 Yet an end also cannot be inferred without a hypothetical starting point, and a middle is impossible without closure of one kind or another through the mutually inferred frame of a beginning and end. It is ultimately a paradoxical state for all things (and, if everything has a beginning and end, there is also the hyper- or meta-state of all beginnings and all endings, which falls to the presence of a primordial condition often referred to

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simply as the immemorial, or the forgotten beginning).3 It is the immemorial that underwrites all forms of anamnesis – that process of recovery of origins or first causes (foremost self-causing causes). As such, the immemorial also engages in the processes of diachrony (time itself), or in the half-remembered and half-cognized “laws of motion” that underwrite cognition proper – or, that which underwrites all politics, all art, and all social praxis. (Such also begins a recovery of universals, yet not through classical antitheses, but, instead, an operative supernaturalism that simply exists without justification, for itself.) If time is essentially an internalizing state (drawn from the world at large through temporalization of things held in a condition that is only apparently abstract), all beginnings (coupled with endings) realize by their simple existence, as possibility, a moving midpoint that is the essential feature of all theories of a teleological “nature.” Movement, in turn, is predicated formally upon its antithesis, stasis – stasis, then, as a condition of things that simply exist (the purported absolute nature of singular things, and by extension, the probable “ground” for images as things, etc.). This operative zone within things that simply exist coincides with, but exceeds as well, the “as such” or “for itself” of philosophical thought proper – signaling/calling to the “meta-physical.” There is in the very idea of the immemorial as beginning (but beginning coupled with end) a variation on the thematic indices (varieties) of time that begins to elaborate that all time is a product of an enormous sacrifice made in times forgotten – or, an enormous cataclysm in terms of how being emerges from nothing, and how the timeless evocation of that nothing is something, after all. This problem within ontology (and its necessary corollary in theoretical or philosophical systems as an apparent bracketing of the very premises of thought in favor of what is not thought, or not-thought) is a recursive version of anamnesis that by positing a beginning also posits an end. Midpoints are, then, such as Golgotha, said to be the “center” of this mystery and the origin of Western art as image of the limit given to all forms of representation as truth procedures; that is to say, midpoints exist as the ultimate or primary image of the “gift of the world,” as they are often, as well, images of the crisis and sacrifice that underwrites or creates worlds. It is for this reason that images suffer – for they are images of worlds within worlds (of the “plurisignation”4 of all aesthetic signs as things or things as events; a doubling, at the least, of an excess that defies categorization in experience, and foremost in that extreme state where experience of the world reveals its limits, while also suggesting something wholly other-worldly or preternaturally invoked

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through processes of signification, most especially the stillness of images that inhabit the far horizon of speculative thought and/or formal ontology). December 25, 2011

II. Stasis and Hypostasis Not only Christ, but the entire universe will disappear if there is no more circumscription or icon.5 —Saint Nicephorus

Let us say, then, that all midpoints or centers are places of stasis; that certain stillness prevails, not unlike Noon or Midnight (or the solstices).6 This silence is primordial and/or preternatural (versus merely natural). Note also that all concepts of infinity fade away (as this conceptual knot is an extreme moment within finitude, as it is an experiential knot, versus a cosmological or metaphysical knot). The idea of the image of the center connotes, then, the idea of a compressed moment that signifies all excess from beginning to end – or, the excess that is the penultimate dynamic potentiality of all stillness (in images or otherwise). As a result, images of such immense, anterior plurisignation suggest a reserve function in mimesis that has nothing to do with representation other than that such also takes the form of representation. (For this reason, all of Caravaggio’s late paintings are considered “self-portraits” or “auto-portraits.”7) This conundrum regarding the anterior or immemorial nature of the image resides at the crossroads of two worlds. One world is the here-and-now, and the other is simply its opposite. The opposite comes to its most powerful expression in the form of death or the end – an end that privileges, however, in ways that are thoroughly embedded in all images of such power, yet another time buried – as it were – within the image. The stillness of the center (or of Noon) is a privileged vision of a dynamic caesura; it opens on to what images access through their compression of time-space to image. The image of Golgotha as central fact of all time is not a Christian image per se, in this regard; it is, instead, the hypostasis of time – a “personification” of a dynamic principle in representation that exceeds the frame of the given (in this case “the given” as “gift”). The dynamic moment of this moment is the caesura itself. The stillness of images returns to that origin by way of the contraction of time to a framed time (or, as Giorgio Agamben has written, in “the time that remains”). The immemorial, in its many forms, reverses the universal or abstract, as well as the nominal or contingent, through its extravagant gestures of mere presence (coming to presence). To bracket it is also to exit or to

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negate the paradigmatic in favor of the syntagmatic. The latter is the equivalent of the prosaic structure of the world, while the former connotes the cataclysmic poetic structure of worlds – never singular worlds, then, but worlds within worlds and times within times; a wholly consistent worldview that empowers contingency with non-contingent forces that exceed singular things (images or otherwise) yet account for their very existence. In the world of images, this “power” is the signature gesture of the immemorial.8 It is the equivalent of Saint Francis’ vision of the seraph that somehow gave birth to the world through the first cause of the immemorial. As a result, all images that index or access the poetic structure of things partake of that suffering image of the seraph and of the central image of the crucifixion.9 December 25, 2011

III. Paralogisms of Time If there is no center without a beginning and an end (and if infinity destroys the idea of a center, except with Pascal and Kant, the former placing the subject at the center of two infinities, and the latter placing the Categorical Imperative or Moral Law within and the Starry Heavens above, as paralogism10 for the same), what occurs when the silent image of the crucifixion is placed at the center of the world (all time and all times), and what happens when we agree, in a purely speculative spirit, to agree that all images (when pushed to their limit) coincide with that center? Marker’s still photography is, arguably, the central issue (force) of (in) all of his work. In many respects, it is also the origin and end of all of his works, with the intermediate exploration of cinema always referring back to that preternatural silence that inhabits images that also begin to fall into the state generally troubled as “iconic.” The stillness of the still image is a form of silence that shuts down both discursive and dialectical operations, at least momentarily. Here, perhaps, is the source of the tension between Marker’s narration of his films and the visual element. Yet this silence confers another register for the assimilation of images – a problematic register insofar as it requires non-discursive forms of seeing to access. While contemporary theories of visuality privilege the same, they also tend to bracket or repress the nature of the image as limit – or, the apparent excess that is not so much contained within the image as limit, and not so much the image as screen for that excess, but, instead, an excess that returns all images of this austere and grave type to the “center” (the suffering image and the “economy of that mystery”).

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In this manner, perhaps the most startling moment in all of Marker’s film-essays is that instance when the still images of La jetée all of a sudden move . . . This justly famous moment occurs midway through the protagonist’s journey back in time where he has met a woman he recalls from childhood, but who he has no idea anyway as to why she exists, did exist, or will cease to exist. Midway – among the still images of the 29minute film constructed entirely of still images (shot expressly for the film) – one image moves. This image occurs within a series of close-up shots of the woman in question. She is asleep and the slow montage of singular images that suggests movement suddenly comes to a halt and she blinks (opens her eyes). It is the only “moving image” in the entire film. Moreover, she looks directly at the camera (looking at us looking at her). The narration – with its laconic, almost detached commentary on this strange set of events (post-apocalyptical events and the attempt by a group of scientists to access the past to secure the future) – turns on this very moment. All of Marker’s intensely felt relationship to images and to their implicit silence or functional presence as knot, nevertheless in concord or accord with thought and with allusion, elision, and evasion (a complex web of sincerity and insincerity regarding the truth-telling apparatus of the camera), falls away here . . . The moment is justly too powerful to contain anything other than the absolute power of the return gaze of the image.11 There exists in the arc and sweep of Agamben’s book The Kingdom and the Glory an immense mystery at play that appears and disappears quickly through the mention of the Grail Legend and the wounded Fisher King;12 that is, an inordinate caesura that invokes the schism he is tracing that survives through the centuries of theological nitpicking and the ravages of empire and its confrontations with ecclesiastical power (which increasingly comes to a strict and forbidding hypostasis in canon law). This schism, traceable always to the incorporation of metaphysics to theology, remains despite all attempts to paper over its presence in the experience of the world – an effective bracketing of the existentialmetaphysical fact of two worlds, and an often-inelegant elision of the metaphors of power and its distribution and management through oikonomia (Aristotle’s military metaphor from the Metaphysics returning throughout and across the Middle Ages, perhaps most forcefully in Thomas Aquinas’ Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle).13 In effect, a type of discourse on the distribution of power in the world begins to underwrite and support the striations of power through institutions furthering the conceptual distribution of dynamis or that element of theology that secretly stitches back together two worlds (and erases or indemnifies multiple agency under the sign or signature of a singular

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agency that can only be referred back to the universalizing praxis that draws its power from the highest good, connoted “thought of thought” by Aristotle). The many and various turns toward that singular power dispersed but made potent nonetheless through the conferring of ontological status for secondary causes (despite Aquinas’ carefully parsed treatise on causes, Commentary on the Book of Causes14) comes to a type of apotheosis in the passage where Agamben resorts once again to the power of negativity: “The concepts that underwrite that order of signing are genuinely ontological. That is, the signature ‘order’ produces a displacement of the privileged place of ontology from the category of substance to the categories of relation and praxis.”15 This place of relation and praxis is the Medieval gift of a vision of worlds within worlds, each according to its own power but partaking of the originary power. Such a place (defined through the mystery that out of “nothing” comes “something”) also restores the overarching mystery of the divine administration of the world. “Relation and praxis” become “experience,” and Aquinas’ doctrine of causes regulates the operation of the experience of the world, even as such an elegant model of nesting “principalities,” both in the territorial and metaphysical sense, becomes ultimately disfigured in the machinations of the administration of worldly power (the wounded Fisher King and the catastrophes of history). Throughout it all, then, remains the figure of the eschaton (messianic time) and the mystery Saint Paul conferred upon the “economy of the mystery” of the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection – a particularly potent version of beginning, middle, and end collapsed into the figure of the Savior. The originary schism persists, across time; yet within time is another time that is the effective echo of the collapse of time to its most salient signature gesture (and a movement, then, between registers of power, and a movement across regimes of images and the distribution of sensible particulars – or, a vision of the order of the monstrous cross-bearing seraph of Saint Francis’ confrontation with the immemorial on Mt. Alverno that signals everything re-organized under one thing, for all time, or for “the time that remains”).16 This “time that remains” (as contraction) re-orders the world and in many senses (or, for example, as the metric that inhabits works of art that are measured by their internal encapsulation of this mystery) overturns the temporalization of power restoring what always conferred upon secondary powers the “temporal” agency of its autonomy or ontology. What moves, then, in all figures and forms of “relation and praxis” is the Prime Mover (as revelation). What moves in history and multiplicity is, after all, the One. The Fisher King is “kept alive with communion bread that is served to him in the holy Grail.”17 He

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will be healed (or the schism between two worlds will be closed) by a “magic spear” – “the spear that inflicted the wound on Christ’s side” on Golgotha.18 As such, Medieval romance comes closer to the truth of the distribution of power in the world than most of the quasi-metaphysical disquisitions of orthodox theology. Yet within the theological vision is another vision; one that becomes wholly personal and wholly transformational when it also returns to the manner in which power or dynamis is transferred between worlds (between ontological states) – as “gift” (which can never be repaid).19 It is important to note in passing that Agamben, in an aside, confers upon the status of Deconstruction the chief merit of its embodiment of the event of the signature, as dynamic semiotic event.20 This would suggest that Deconstruction, and the entire Levinas-Ricoeur-Derrida complex (as further incorporated into the post-phenomenological turn, and especially Jean-Luc Marion’s work on “the given,” but most of all the “theological turn” within the “post-phenomenological turn”) leads forward from postmodernist nihilism to a re-evocation of the repressed paradigmatic order of things, or the vertical axis of representation and the nominal axis of power.21 Along the way, as if to prove the point, is the tortuous discussion and problematization of the “gift” by Derrida and others. The trajectory of the discourse, however, transcends Deconstruction proper and no doubt belongs more properly to Structuralism and structural anthropology. Its chief moments are: Marcel Mauss, Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’echange dans les sociétés archaiques (Paris: Alcan, 1925); Georges Bataille, La part maudite: Essai d’économie générale; La consumation (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1949); Pierre Klossowski, Pierre Zucca (photographs), La monnaie vivante (Paris: Éric Losfield, 1970); JeanFrançois Lyotard, Économie libidinale (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1974); Jean-François Lyotard, Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime: Kant, Critique de la faculté de juger, 23-29 (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1991); Jacques Derrida, Donner le temps: La fausse monnaie (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1991); and Jean-Luc Marion, Étant donné: Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1997). This concept of “libidinal economy” is complicated – if that is the central theme. No doubt it comes out of Surrealism (as a form of antimodernism).22 All of this crosses anthropology, politics, aesthetics, and economy – but its true address is religion (despite Lyotard’s objections). Lastly, Donner le temps: La fausse monnaie is from 1991 as well, just as Derrida was turning “messianic” with Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993), etc. Marion’s work takes effect afterward, and the theological turn takes wing. From 1923 to 1991, however, there are

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massive missing links in the conceptual apparatus of “the gift,” which presumably is centered on the problem of the Other, and ultimately on the cipher of the Sublime. An extraordinary moment occurs along the path of post-phenomenology in the form of Jacob Rogozinski’s essay “The Gift of the World” (1988), published in Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (1993). In this rather excoriating essay, which is part diatribe, part exclamatory existential-metaphysical artifact, Rogozinski states that “the Sublime schematizes the world,” conflating once again the Sublime and the Other; or, conflating the dynamis (signature of the event of the Other) that proceeds from the First Cause (remaining active in the world of all secondary causes through its sheer power or presence as organizing principle for life) with freedom – an effective collapse of the schism in the very confrontation with the Other.23 Two wills or two worlds collide, as the evocation of the same in German Idealism is reducible to a closure to metaphysics and dialectics in the experience of the world as vertiginous “place” of freedom. This confrontation is utterly anathematized or further schematized in the figure of death (as penultimate Other), and suggests that the schism is overcome through the transfiguration of the subject through the power of the Sublime Other that haunts (moves) the world. This schematization of the world by the Sublime Other is the same “order” given to the world through the immemorial gift of the world and delineated by Medieval theologians (such as Aquinas), by way of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, as a chain of self-causing causes (as Book XII of the Metaphysics is said to be Aristotle’s “theology”). It is the theft of the same that is the point of all insurrections and all attempts to recover what has been stolen. For this reason Marker’s film-essays (and the still photography they are ultimately based upon or pay homage to) address the theft of this “gift” – a signature quality of the totality of the work from the first films forward, but foremost Lettre de Sibérie (1958), plus the project with Alain Resnais regarding European appropriations of African culture, Les statues meurent aussi (1950-1953); the former containing the enigmatic statement that “culture is what remains when everyone has left.” Lettre de Sibérie is also the film that Bazin found to mark the beginning of true innovation in postwar French cinema, with its “three rays of intelligence”24 combining or converging within the tableau of the film as a stunning critique of both the power of cinema and the possibility of its active role in what can only be called (rightfully) the administration of the world. For Marker, and for his allies such as Godard and Resnais, cinema had a choice of either being complicit in the theft of the immemorial power given freely to the world (and the role of the image becomes critical in this regard), or it might act on behalf of that power and preserve it

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within the confines of the charmed and privileged medium that film was then becoming. Most of Marker’s predecessors and contemporaries (especially those whom he came to pay his utmost respect to by making filmic reference to, or films of or about their work, for example, the Russians, Vertov, Medvedkine, and Tarkovsky), insofar as they represented this same awe in the power of the image to elicit awe, in turn (and to turn the image toward its source), fell under the same spell – and their work falls, as a result, within the confines of a discipline that remains utterly radical (or anarchic, in the sense that references the first anarchon, source of all autonomies).25 December 27, 2011

IV. Immemory Guillaume Ollendorff rightly points out that the point of Marker’s published, CD-ROM version of the Pompidou exhibition “Immemory One” (1997) is not the digital technology that permitted him to archive and produce a portable mnemonic tour of his internal world. Marker reminds us that these “immemories” are interchangeable with anyone’s memories and souvenirs, their own geography. Immemory is not really about the landscape on display, but rather the course, the itinerary, the paths that each person chooses to explore this landscape. Marker’s mission is to offer a geography complete with maps, passages, territories, reliefs and even flat lands. What really matters to him, ultimately, is how we visit, how we explore this territory.26

Notoriously clumsy and effectively a rather prosaic storage device, the CD-ROM permitted Marker nonetheless to compile and format a vast amount of information from his personal archive that, in turn, was détourned toward his favorite subject, the elasticity of memory, its powers of assemblage and montage, its ineluctable forgetting and consequent remembering through inference and/or association, the incorporations of material that is not one’s own but becomes one’s own with and against time, and the interchangeability of memories in that secret archive that exceeds one’s personal memory bank – all indicative of the immemorial register that has been theorized since time immemorial that somewhere, in some other time-space (or some other dimension beyond our typical four dimensions), a register is kept that is – after all – a universal record, and where the personal shades into the impersonal, or where singular gestures of lived time become universalizing patterns that disclose an apparent

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archaic reserve function in all experience that we quite often simply reduce to the “ethical” and/or “moral” landscape of the world as such, or project further into a transcendental realm where justice presumably prevails.27 The High Romantic trope engaged here by Marker is erlebnis (or experience versus knowledge) – or, non-discursive knowledge versus discursive knowledge.28 What mars and marks all of Marker’s work is the swerve between incommensurability and what can be known (and how it can be known). The High Realist aspect of the work is its confession that experience is haunted by the incommensurable; that personal agency and impersonal agency are conjoined in experience of interlocking worlds and that certain functions within that mnemonic field are wholly beyond one’s comprehension and control. One processes life through the collection of memories, and those memories are built up from disparate experiences that are woven together in the mill of a larger memory that somehow constitutes con-science (personal and collective).29 Ollendorff notes that Immemory is marred by its apparent banality in terms of its so-called production values. It is not a sophisticated technological event and intentionally downplays the perceived and supposed virtues of virtuality. The inherent pessimism concerning the technological juggernaut known as new media is part and parcel of Marker’s well-rehearsed aversion to anything that might be used to further obscure what truly matters to him – not media per se, but the speculative agency of the non-discursive nature or anti-nature of the image in consort with thought.30 This echoing tableau is truly Blakean in its ability to assemble a private universe that opens on to other universes, or a parallel universe that secretly converges in the ultimate locus of self-reflexive thought – the Kingdom of Shadows and the shadow-land of images in service to nothing other than an immemorial truth that negates all temporality in favor of atemporal agencies that configure and disclose that anterior ground Marker’s voyages all circle and/or implicate. Marker’s errant scholarship becomes the archive-tomb. In its best moments, or rather its best spaces, Immemory offers us the invaluable sensation of being a child in the attic, exploring grandpa’s old chestbox. Photographs, ancient theatre tickets, recipes, letters: all kinds of collector items. There is an immense nostalgia that descends while listening to the old, Cuban music, or meeting Jules Verne mixed up with souvenirs that no one else can really share. These are the most beautiful “pages” of the work, where the artist gives up the stage for the traveller, the kid, the observer – a simple Chris Marker. It is a gesture of universality.31

March 11, 2012

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G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi (New York: Image Books, 2001), pp. 121-22. First published by Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., London, 1923. The theological value of Chesterton’s perhaps unintentional invocation of the Blakean “Ancient of Days” is that it is (oddly) also the figure of the demiurge (of both Plato and the neo-platonic Gnostics). Notably, this figure was incorporated into Christian orthodoxy as the second hypostasis of the Trinity (the Son or Logos). Additionally, the reason for the Christian incorporation, albeit at a level that privileges the autonomy of the Logos, is that the Gnostic dualism behind the absent God and the present demiurge severed the secret relation between Father and Son, one that is based on dynamis, versus mere similitude. Thus, the “demiurgic,” catastrophic nature of history, the Incarnation, and the world as self-willing will, yet through forgetting the immemorial (or, paradoxically, through its doubling), emerges. See Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Homo Sacer II, 2), trans. Lorenzo Chiesa, with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011). First published Il Regno e la Gloria: Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo (Homo Sacer II, 2) (Vincenza: Neri Pozza, 2007). Regarding the consolidation of the notional nature of the Trinity and the eclipse of a unitary view except through increasing abstraction, see especially “Being and Acting,” pp. 53-67. Agamben covers this overall problem of a developing schism in experience with a discussion of the economy of the Logos, or how the ungrounded not-nature of Being (the Father, not-world) creates the Logos (Son, becoming-world). This sacrificial act of “divine will,” creating a world and withdrawing from it, while present in the pagan world, nonetheless remained grounded in the One, in Plato as in the Gnostics (preserving a primordial unity beyond duality and multiplicity), until it was effectively divided into two to underwrite the idea of the gift of the world (free from fate or determinism) – that is, this world granted its own ungrounded status, and becoming autonomous (unfounded in anything other than itself), or free until the end of the world, when it returns to its origins (through the Second Coming). Agamben notes this schism as the ontological fault line underwriting and undermining the “mystery of the economy” of the Trinity. The paradox of the duality or schism of Father/Son is overcome through a second schism – two socalled incomplete states (unfoundeds) in “one” (two independent teleologies until the end of time). “That which is not” is the operative descriptive for this ontologically unfounded state (anarchon) that qualifies being qua being (versus being as becoming). This dual articulation becomes further rationalized as a “Trinity of substance” (the Father/theology proper) and a “Trinity of revelation” (the Son/salvific action). Ibid., p. 62. Clearly, Saint Francis’ vision intimately relates to the “economy of the mystery” of that which is hidden since the beginning of time (Saint Paul’s description of the event of Christ as echo of the beginning and end of time). As such, it was the Gnostics who were “the first to establish a parallelism between a cosmic-ontological drama and a historical process,” ibid, p. 34, via the Pauline “economy of the plerome” (Ephesians 1:10), ibid., p. 33. Agamben summarizes the clash between the Gnostics (“the disciples of

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Ptolemaeus of the school of Valentinus”) and the Trinitarians or Fathers of the Church as follows: At stake is “not so much the shift of the notion of economy from a process internal to the plerome to the incarnation of the Son – or from a supratemporal plan to a plan in the history of salvation . . . – but rather, more generally, an attempt to remove the term oikonomia from its Gnostic context in order to make it the central apparatus of the rising Trinitarian paradigm.” Ibid., p. 32. Thus, Agamben notes that the Trinitarians converted Saint Paul’s “economy of the mystery” to its antithesis, “the mystery of the economy.” Suffice to say, the main point or event of the dynamis given to the second hypostasis of the Trinity, after all is said and done, is its function as a grounding for the administration of life, personal and otherwise (and it is this reduction of oikonomia to the preservation of the world that is then incorporated into politics, underwriting power in subsequent iterations and conflations of politics as theology and vice versa). Yet within this dynamic fold known as the Trinity reside the beginning, the middle, and the end. Its name, as one thing, is “Revelation” (self-reflection and self-negation). 2 Teleology famously implies a linear version of time at the expense of all circular forms. Yet it is quite possible that the linear, teleological version – as recursive (pace Levinas) – contains an almost-secret version of a type of “circularity,” insofar as through its recursive nature it closes in upon itself. A midpoint suggests as well a center where time is folded back upon itself, while in circular or mnemonic models (such as eternity or eternal returns) the midpoint is a center around which turns “the world” and its incarnations, often over immense fields of time. Eschatology infers a disruption of the flow of both linear and classical eternal time, yet through an evocation or dislocation of all forms of time that remain tied to forms of subjectivity and/or experience as such. Eschatology as mnemonic event engages in an acknowledgement of what cannot be known or exceeds all forms of subjective time-space. Its event is the event of the appearance of pure agency (neither impersonal nor personal). It might be said to be an echo of the “founding of the world,” or a momentous occurrence of the order of time suddenly “blinking.” Art famously is predicated on time-space, versus space-time. 3 Such is First Philosophy (or Ontology). Needless to say, this is a nonspatiotemporal condition that exceeds empirical space-time, especially since there is no end until there is an end, and this end ends any spatiotemporal reference except in retrospect, which is impossible under the experiential terms of the formulation (or formalization) of the same. As such, only a preternatural form of consciousness or being (anterior to space-time) can witness the beginning, middle, and end. This all suggests the impersonal-personal agency of the event of Art proper – or, what is effectively the formal effects or conditions of art as event, plus its existential-metaphysical impress, and the necessity of a “beyond art” always already given to art (or contained within art). All images of this order of things, therefore, exceed the order of things per se, escaping finitude, often – then – the justification of/for art history, but also the justification of/for the Platonic “Good” in Art – its moral lining, etc.

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See Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History-Doctrine (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 1965). This “semantic richness/plenitude” is a founding principle in formalist theories and formalist practices that elude a purely instrumental or normative justification in favor of a profoundly atemporal historicity, a contraction and opposition (abstraction), that imparts both heightened historical agency and an extremely potent existential-metaphysical agency to works of art and literature as “documents” or things that embody, in an incarnational manner, the primordial trace of an ontological crisis. 5 Saint Nicephorus, Discours contre les iconoclastes . . . , ed. and trans. Marie-José Mondzain-Baudinet (Paris: Klincksieck, 1989), p. 9. Cited in Raymond Bellour, “The Double Helix,” pp. 48-75, in Passages de l’image (Barcelona: Centre Cultural de la Fundació Caixa de Pensions, 1991), p. 72. Bellour’s essay invokes both Marker’s Sans soleil and Lettre de Sibérie. The book/exhibition catalogue also includes an essay by Bellour on Marker’s “Zapping Zone” (1990). 6 See, for example, Giacomo Leopardi’s great poem “La vita solitaria” (1821) on Noon, or Nietzsche’s idea of Noon (and Midnight) and “the shortest shadow” . . . For the conflation of Noon and Midnight, see Book IV of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 7 Roberto Longhi is credited with this powerful insight into the paintings Caravaggio executed while effectively on the run, and in advance of his feverish death on a beach at Porto Ercole. To say “all of the late paintings” are self-portraits is, however, in excess of Longhi’s statements, while honoring the spirit of his insight (and giving, instead, the effects and power of the modern auteur to Caravaggio, wherein all works are more or less one continuous work, while in Caravaggio’s case the continuous, singular work began with his exile from Rome). See Roberto Longhi’s study, “Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia” (1943), inclusive of the supposition that the 1606 version of Saint Francis in Meditation is a self-portrait, and that it departs dramatically from his Roman period by virtue of both tonal and figurative-expressive means. See Roberto Longhi, “Ultimi studi sul Caravaggio e la sua cerchia,” pp. 1-54, in Opere complete: Studi Caravaggeschi, vol. 1 (Florence: Sansoni, 1999). 8 “Signature” is, in the estimation of Giorgio Agamben (pace Walter Benjamin), a “secret index” – or, a dynamic function within discourse that acts to “connect different times and fields.” Signatures “carry out a vital and determinate strategic function, giving a lasting orientation to the interpretation of signs.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 4. “Signatures move and displace concepts and signs from one field to another . . . without redefining them semantically.” Ibid. They are “something that in a sign or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or concept referring it back to a determinate interpretation or field.” Ibid. As such, signatures function ultra-historically, or as “pure historical elements” in discourse. Ibid. Agamben is discussing the relationship of secularization (or “disenchantment and detheologization” of the modern world) and its conceptual hardwiring to mostly repressed theological precepts that are not only its antecedents but also its secret signature. This analysis centers on the definition of “power” and its formalization in the world.

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Agamben’s investigation of the meanings of the Greek term oikonomia (“administration of the house”), and its analogical transference to a theological context by way of Saint Paul, includes the gnomic statement from Ephesians 1:910: “[God] has made known to us in all wisdom and insight the mystery of his will, according to his benevolence, which he set forth [proetheto] in Christ for the oikonomia of the fullness of time, to unite all things in him.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 23. Agamben adds: “God has assigned to the Messiah the oikonomia of the fullness of time, bringing to completion the promise of redemption.” Ibid. Agamben counters claims to a static “divine design of salvation,” a preordained plan, time, and end, and privileges, instead, the activity of oikonomia in the theological context; an evocation not of a fixed, symmetrical, or given beginning, middle, and end, but a dynamic fluctuating, nearly atemporal “administration” of the gift of the world, in the Franciscan sense. That this turns, nonetheless, on the central mystery of the incarnation and crucifixion is the chief concern. But in the process of freeing the “administration” of redemption to a dynamic fold within time, Agamben also liberates the central issue of the suffering image as, indeed, a center point, yet one that can only be located in a plurality of times and places (or within multiple agency that, in turn, suggests its true address is in forms of subjectivization, or the “self-administration” of the economy of subjects and their relation to the world as divine oikonomia – an other-worldly world that opens into memory and con-science but circles back to the here-andnow, anyway, until the end of time). There is a curious moment in Agamben’s exegesis concerning the incorporation of Greek oikonomia into Christian theology – and the path of his argument is the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity – when the Gnostic heresy is broached by way of Irenaeus’ Against Heresies. “The word appears for the first time with reference to Christ in the guise of the adjective oikonomos at the end of the long exposition of the Gnostic doctrines of the plerome and the Savior that opens the treatise.” Ibid., p. 32. “Following a pattern that is also present in Clement of Alexandria’s Excerpta, the Savior is composed of a spiritual element, deriving from Achamoth, a psychic element, and an ‘economic element of incredible craftsmanship’: the Christ who undergoes the passion is not spiritual, but psychic and ‘economic.’” Ibid. Suffice to say that such “heresies” generally attempted to enter into the internal workings of the Trinity, whereas Church doctrine attempted to work outward from the Trinity to formalize an “administration” of the faith in the world. This “fusion of the divine aeons from which the person of the Savior results” (ibid., p. 31, with reference to Adhémar d’Alès, “Le mot ‘oikonomia’ dans la langue théologique de saint Irénée,” Revue des études grecques 32 (1919): pp. 1-9) is in many senses an evocation of what Saint Paul called the “oikonomia of the mystery hidden for ages in God” (Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 23, citing Ephesians 3:9), versus what later became the “mystery of the economy,” or an obfuscation of the dynamic function of the suffering god. For this reason, the Gnostics could also call Christ “the man of the oikonomia” (ibid.), returning the emphasis (and restoring the “occult or asymmetrical” centrality) of the incarnation and the crucifixion to its foremost place – the absolute embodiment in time and history of the immemorial

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sacrifice. By the time of Tertullian, according to Agamben, a shift had occurred and the Trinitarian economy no longer concerned “being and ontology, but rather action and praxis.” Ibid., p. 41. Divine being has effectively vanished and in its place is erected the administration of the oikonomiae sacramentum. 10 Paralogisms in this context are not so much false conclusions as the phantasmatic aspects (or luminous debris, Gustaf Sobin’s term) of conceptual thought per se, arguably the very essence of art and its relationship to the Real . . . As psychisms, they are neither true nor false. 11 “A woman on the screen opens her eyes, looks at us and blinks, when the film skips from still images to a brief sequence of movement. It is a gasp close to an experience of the erotic or the religious or possibly both.” Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La jetée (London: Afterall Books, 2009), p. 3. “La Jetée opens out the possible times of the image and shows us how this is hinged to looking.” Ibid., p. 35. Harbord cites the narration of the film to locate this utter dislocation of the affect: “‘She welcomes him in a simple way. She calls him her ghost.’” Ibid., p. 86. “‘He knew there was no way out of time.’” Ibid., p. 100. This is the muchtroubled passage Réda Bensmaïa seizes upon in his critique of the film. See Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker’s La jetée.” This conundrum, which lies at the center of this seminal film, and which suggests the central mystery of the economy of Marker’s still photography as syntagm for an austere otherworldliness within all worldliness, is formulated through the mutually unknowable, contracted frames of the woman’s “time” and the man’s “time”; two times that coincide only through the time-travel that the film is constructed upon, and the relationship of the beginning of the film to the end of the film – or the construction, reconstruction, and demolition of the tragic encounter of two gazes that runs through the entire operation. The figure of the woman is perhaps the primary semiotic shifter (signature image) in Marker’s work, insofar as he uses such to melt the gaze of the spectator (or to destabilize the discursive apparatus of his various projects). This has been true since at least the Petite Planète series of travel books (inaugurated c.1954) Marker edited for Seuil (each of which had a photo of a woman on the cover representing the country concerned), and appears and disappears in his films from La jetée (1962) to Le mystère Koumiko (1965) to Sans soleil (1982) to Mémoires pour Simone (1986) to Level Five (1996), returning in his photographic exhibitions “Quelle heure estelle?” (2009) and “Passengers” (2011). This effectively makes Marker a troubadour of the image, or – more universally – a Romantic. The figure of the cat (especially Guillaume-en-Égypte) functions in a similar way, but is another matter altogether, insofar as Marker confers on the cat a solitariness that makes it godlike. 12 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, pp. 68-69. 13 Ibid. See pp. 80-87. 14 Ibid. See pp. 94-97. 15 Ibid., p. 88. 16 Chesterton notably insists that this vision was the beginning of the end of Francis’ life, and that it would have been such regardless of when it took place.

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“The tremendous story of the Stigmata of St. Francis . . . was in some sense the end of his life. In a logical sense, it would have been the end even if it had happened at the beginning.” Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi, p. 123. Alverno, therefore, reduces all else to the singular image of a “door” (the crucifix-bearing, six-winged seraph), a passage between two worlds that are nonetheless one world: “It was as though the real were cut in half by a door. . . . The door is the same one on both sides. The earth, the visible, the tangible, time and space, are on this side; heaven, the invisible, the eternal, the infinite, are on the other side. But everything is one, congruent, logical and true. The door which is Christ simultaneously rules the here and the beyond with his love, crucified on this side, glorified on the other.” Carlo Carretto, “My Passover,” pp. 128-36, in I, Francis: The Spirit of St. Francis of Assisi, trans. Robert R. Barr (London: Collins, 1982), pp. 128-29. First published Io, Francesco (Assisi: Cittadella Editrice, 1980). Carretto’s homiletic book is – as it is written in the first person (the voice of Saint Francis) – an extreme example of the existential-metaphysical crisis that produces both the exceptional work of art and the life and death of the martyr-saint. Carretto’s book is, for this reason, a type of auto-hagiographical account of the Passion of Saint Francis, “told” imaginatively 800 years after the event by the very person who endured it. The book also serves as a severe critique of modernity, insofar as “Saint Francis” is speaking of the dynamic function of Franciscanism after the fact, and “his” remarks regarding the desert of the modern world suggest that “poverty” is, after all, a transcendental factor that exists in relation to the world in which it operates as “antidote.” In this regard, the existential-metaphysical crisis of Alverno is the signature of the event of that “poverty.” 17 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 68. 18 Ibid. 19 Chesterton notes that Alverno was given to Saint Francis as a “gift” by Orlando of Chiusi, “who had great lands in Tuscany and who proceeded to do Saint Francis a singular and somewhat picturesque act of courtesy” in offering him a mountain. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi, p. 120. “Gifts” in this sense display the disproportionate nature of the distribution of power in the world, making the necessary attempt to repay the gift that can never be repaid an act that also reverses and/or recapitulates the mystery of the founding “gift of the world.” If the gift of the world proceeded by way of the word as image, then images (as word) are recapitulations of this gift, in reverse, suggesting that the analogical processes of anamnesis inhabit all images that approach the mystery of the gift and its (im)possible repayment. Images in this manner enter into a strategic alliance with the distribution of power in the world but also move antithetically or in opposition to the normative stream of time, insofar as they negate the negation that worlds are founded upon; that is, they begin to say the gift by unsaying the diminution of power that is inscribed in the world-historical process itself. By unsaying the secondary powers of worlds that rely nonetheless on the First Cause, they also begin to unsay the powers distributed through all secondary regimes – an evocation, then, of the necessity of praise for the founding gift, but also the launch of the reverse teleology that underscores the excoriating processes of the “return”

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that is embedded in the mystery of the contraction of time to a beginning, middle, and end within all hypostases of a “principality” (self, world, other). 20 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 4. 21 In this regard, see Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Paradigm?,” pp. 9-32, in The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’Isanto, with Kevin Attell (New York: Zone Books, 2009). First published Signatura rerum: Sul metodo (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2008). See also, Giorgio Agamben, “Theory of Signatures,” pp. 33-80, in ibid. 22 Regarding Surrealism and photography, plus photographers as “scientists” or “moralists,” see Sontag, “Melancholy Objects,” pp. 49-82, in On Photography. Amidst the Surrealist insurrection of the 1920s, László Moholy-Nagy stands as the great “modernist,” privileging “objectivity” in photography, or, arguably, all that fell from grace in the latter two-thirds of the twentieth century. For MoholyNagy’s “impersonal” and/or “realist,” and perhaps “pernicious,” agenda for photography, see pp. 92, 101, 122, in “The Heroism of Vision,” pp. 83-112, in ibid. See also, Petra Kayser, “Constructivism and the Machine Aesthetic,” pp. 16367, in The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910-37, ed. Jacqueline Strecker (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2011). Moholy-Nagy’s enlightened expectations for the new and multiple, interrelated arts of modernity are to be found in László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Photographie, Film (Munich: Albert Langen, 1925), with a second edition published by the Bauhaus in 1927 incorporating a new layout and design by Moholy-Nagy. See László MoholyNagy, Painting, Photography, Film, trans. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). Moholy-Nagy joined the Bauhaus in 1923 at the age of 28. This moment of “clarity” amidst the madness of the competing schools of modern art was distinguished by its attempt to banish subjectivity from the production of artworks – to access the pure instrumental agency of the apparatus of art as speculative thought itself, albeit through the impersonal processes of the artwork in relation to the greater forces operative within society or the world at large. Derived in part from Soviet agit-prop art, this moment failed with the subsequent slide toward the politicization of art both in the East and in the West, a process that unleashed the repressed aspects of subjective agency always present in art regardless of attempts to exterminate it. For Moholy-Nagy’s photograms (cameraless imprints of the “real”), see Renate Heyne, Floris M. Neusüss, Hattula MoholyNagy, eds., Moholy-Nagy: The Photograms: Catalogue Raisonné (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009). That both El Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy migrated to Germany from the East is telltale. This period in the mid- to late-1920s was in many senses exceptional, primarily because the feigned madness of Expressionism and Dada gave way to an attempt to turn modern art’s generally anarchic resources toward a social process of reform – or, toward resurrection from the flames of cynicism and dereliction, these two pseudo-“degenerate” qualities rightly the eternal mystery of the Expressionist and Dadaist camps, both of which always contained a secret moral lining anyway (as did Surrealism), most especially in the case of Hugo Ball, who abandoned the renowned Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich, twice; curiously, the second and last time, to disappear into self-imposed “internal exile,”

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and to write a book on the subject of Byzantine angelology (financially supported by Hermann Hesse). 23 Jacob Rogozinski, “The Gift of the World” (1988), in Jean-François Courtine et al., Of the Sublime: Presence in Question, trans. Jeffrey S. Librett (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 24 See Alter, Chris Marker, p. 15. “Bazin . . . praised the narrative sequence in Letter from Siberia that features a triad of different commentaries superimposed over the same visual track. The commentaries project ‘three intellectual beams’ onto that single track, and receive ‘their reverberation’ . . . in return.” Ibid. As Bazin would write: “The primary material is intelligence, and language is its direct expression. The image only intervenes in the third position, in reference to this verbal intelligence.” Bazin, “Chris Marker: Lettre de Sibérie,” p. 180; cited in Alter, Chris Marker, p. 15. Alter goes on to elaborate these three beams or “planes” within the film as: the audiovisual; the pedagogical; and the formal. See ibid., pp. 15-16. A Trinitarian/Christological (“Christic”) theology of the image would configure these three “beams” as: 1/ The Father/The Word (the narration); 2/ The Son/The Image (the “audiovisual” content); and 3/ The Holy Ghost/The Spirit (the critical or formal intelligence). Furthermore, each component could be aligned with the beginning, the middle, and the end (each a unique hypostasis of a form of time within time) – even as each component is a reflection of the other, or each aspect of the economy of the totality operates in topological accord with the other (and each aspect, as a result, might shift in terms of its placement or “signature” within the overall moment of the event of the work, or its semi-allusive “historical” or “artistic” merit). As such, the image is central and connotes through visual agency (plus sound, diegetic or otherwise) and montage (photographic or moving image, plus relational praxis) a condensed “cinematic” art that exists in excess of cinema proper. The critical intelligence (dynamic, formal, atemporal agency as historical/ahistorical crisis), perhaps Bazin’s main point anyway, is what crosses all of Marker’s work (as it also crosses all works by artists wherein the work is one continuous project). The Word (the narration in its complex and often discordant relationship to the image) as narrative chord against or for/with the image suggests that this aspect of the Trinitarian/Christological interpretation of art also confers upon the work a dynamic accord/discord that signals as well the presence and absence of a stable or static ousia (substance/ultimate ground), arguably what ideology falsely provides or attempts to provide. Thus, the apparatuses of the formal operation are never fixed, and the dislocations or caesuras are as important in the economy of the “time” of the project as the mostly absent, overarching thematic. The voice, image, and the ghostly agency come together (at the center, the convergence of the “three beams”) as limit (image/totality/crisis) – or as word-as-image (and vice versa). In many ways, Godard’s troubling of the crisis of cinema rests on this endless accord/discord embedded in cinema as (im)possible truth procedure. Notably, it is said that Godard crossed back and forth between the Right Bank and the Left Bank (that is, two schools of cinema in France delineated by the critics/theorists of the time) under the influence of Marker. See Richard Roud, “The Left Bank,” Sight and

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Sound: International Film Quarterly 32, no. 1 (Winter 1962-63): pp. 24-27. Roud is credited with coining the name “Left Bank School” for the group that initially included Alain Resnais, Marker, and Agnès Varda. The Right Bank school included Godard, Éric Rohmer, and François Truffaut. Roud confers on the Left Bank school an exceptional concern or emphasis on form (or the “problems of form”). For a short sketch of the birth of Nouvelle Vague cinema in France (c.1959), see Alter, Chris Marker, pp. 13-14. Alter, however, also notes that as early as 1953 a group of young filmmakers/critics (Resnais, Marker, Varda, and Alexandre Astruc) were involved – through a collective called Groupe des Trente – in the production of very short (30-minute) films that effectively collapsed and condensed the entire apparatus of cinema to a type of limit that would also focus its dynamic and formal apparatus in the “sociopolitical” spectrum as “commentary.” Ibid., p. 14. The Groupe des Trente’s manifesto states succinctly: “Next to the novel and other extensive works, there is the poem, the short story, or the essay, which often plays the role of hothouse; it has the function of revitalizing a field with the contribution of fresh blood. The short film has the same role. Its death will also be the death of film, since an art that ceases to change is a dead art.” Ibid. For Godard’s migration (to and fro), see Richard Roud, “The Left Bank Revisited,” Sight and Sound 46, no. 3 (Summer 1977): pp. 143-45. The distinction between the Right and Left Bank schools might be determined by the role of the auteur/author and the emphasis on personal (authorial) versus impersonal (formal) agency in filmmaking, a decidedly significant point of contention, and a slippery slope as well, given the fact that the “personalism” (Christian left-wing or Christian-Socialist aspects) of Marker’s approach to the film-essay is a chief characteristic of Bazin’s reading of the import of Lettre de Sibérie and the somewhat didactic nature of the short film c.1958 as passionate statement regarding “political and social problems and a conviction that these problems have their place in the realm of art” (Roud’s words, from “The Left Bank,” cited by Alter, in Chris Marker, p. 14). The point here would seem to be the role or relationship of the subjectivity of the filmmaker/author to the work, and whether that subjectivity was the central force of the work, or whether the subjectivity of the filmmaker/author referred, instead, to the source of all forms of subjective/autonomous agency – the transcendental good. (This would also suggest that Marker’s disregard for, or what others would call his perverse regard for hiding, the details of his own biography is based on this necessity of bracketing the subjectivity of the solitary soul in favor of the overarching purpose of the work – ultimately the mystery of impersonal agency, yet how the same comes to expression through personal agency). In this postwar resurrection of the protoanarchic aspects of art we find the role of the artist/author straddling, if not stranded upon, a type of reef within artistic praxis. The reef is the very divide between personal and impersonal agency, and the same is also underway in literature and philosophy (both almost surely influenced by postwar theology and atheology), especially in the form of the new novel (Alain Robbe-Grillet et al.) Marker’s irreducible literary imagination no doubt is also the chief nexus or switching point for his various peregrinations within cinema and the world at large.

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“If we do not understand this original ‘anarchic’ vocation of Christology, it is not even possible to understand the subsequent historical development of Christian theology, with its latent atheological tendency, or the history of Western philosophy, with its ethical caesura between ontology and praxis. The fact that Christ is ‘anarchic’ means that, in the last instance, language and praxis do not have a foundation in being. The ‘gigantomachy’ around being is also, first and foremost, a conflict between being and acting, ontology and economy, between a being that is in itself unable to act and an action without being: what is at stake between these two is the idea of freedom.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, pp. 58-59. This summary of what came to be the understanding of how the founding self-causing cause supports all subsequent self-causing causes (or the autonomy/ontology granted the world through Christ) overcame persistent problems of dualism in early Christian theology, formulated against both classical pantheism and monotheism, insofar as the schism introduced is hidden by the overriding unity of the Trinity. This autonomy of the hypostasis of God in Man was formalized in the Nicene Creed. 26 Guillaume Ollendorff, “The Art of Sorting Out: Chris Marker’s Immemory,” trans. Guillaume Ollendorff, Adrian Martin, Screening the Past 9, 2000, http:// www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/shorts/reviews/rev0300/gobr9a.htm. “Marker deliberately manufactures confusion – he directly connects his own work to that of his ‘masters’, quite simply because his ‘inside’ is a product of his ‘outside’. He has integrated the lot; there is no longer truly a border between outside and inside. That’s what memory is, an ever-changing border between what we receive and what we ‘are’ – and we are mainly what we get. The conventional differences between the work of others and one’s own work, or even the events of one’s own life, are becoming increasingly blurred. All this material has the same status: constitutive elements, stones, bricks, strata of the memory-fields that we visit.” Ibid. This presentiment, in turn, suggests Kant’s aperçu that we are effectively caught (or that our subjectivity appears) between two blind spots; one internal, and one external. The internal blind spot is the ultimate unknowability of our own operative personal agency, while the external is the unknowability of the thing-initself, whereby all experience of the world is mediated by representations that are approximations and the internal force-field of thought is directed toward a transcendental field that is inhabited by ghosts and dybbuks we call concepts and precepts. The internal shadow-land of the latter also faces away from the world, further inward or “upstream,” engaging the Kantian Imperative – the Moral Law. This latter “ghost in the machine” is the effective and affective regime of thought itself in concert with all that is not-self. See: Immemory One (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou/Les Films de l’Astrophore, 1998); Immemory: A CDROM (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2002); and Immemory: A CD-ROM, revised ed. (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 2008). 27 For further reflections on Marker’s use of new media against the grain, see Catherine Lupton, “Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology,” Chris Marker, n.d., http://www.chrismarker.org/catherine-lupton-in-memory-of-new-technology/. Lupton calls Marker’s new-media experiments an “awkward archaism,” one that

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advances by an “effortless dialectics,” and, in turn, distinguished by “proceeding elegantly by contraries” with “provocative tensions between the cutting-edge profile [Marker as new media pioneer] and the shock of the old [his reliance on outmoded hardware and software].” Ibid. Lupton adds that Marker’s approach to new media is distorted by his interest in old media. This primarily takes the effect of a backward glance into the antechambers of history or his own personal history/archive by way of the new, often exceptionally plastic forum of digital technology. Lupton also notes in passing that Marker does not have the same dystopian view of hypermedia as many of his contemporaries on the Left; she cites, for example, Andreas Huyssen’s 1995 book Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995). Additionally, she places Marker’s appropriation of digital media in accord with Walter Benjamin’s statements in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” that techne as such has no implicit moral compass embedded within it, and that all technological advances are a matter of what is done with them versus any implied or automatic threat to human autonomy/freedom or to a “natural-ness” that is essentially mythic. While this is true, and while it belongs properly to Benjamin’s materialist philosophy of history (as Lupton duly notes), it is also possible that by aiming technology in this direction (that is, as rear-view mirror) Marker is neutralizing, at least for the moment, its incessant leveling of everything it touches, in part the true address for both Benjamin’s and Huyssen’s critiques of the reproducibility and endless circulation of images. Michael Wood, in a very short review of Immemory, focuses the import of the project in the relation of images that are in many cases horrific and disturbing to the “Markerian” penchant for counterpoint: “However beautiful and haunting the images here, many of them are associated with historical pain or horror. . . . And yet there the proposition can be turned around, because there are faces, luminous, reflective, memory-laden, full of grace and courage, and silently speaking of life beyond and outside disaster. . . . People can put up with anything, these faces say. All the more reason not to put these people through everything. . . . The images are Marker’s, but they are not his alone. In his notes he expresses the wish that his memories will be replaced by ours, but of course we don’t really need to replace them: They are already ours. This was our century, from revolution to revolution, from war to war, from madeleine to madeleine. Even the ghosts are real. ‘It’s banal to say that memory misleads,’ Marker writes on the disc. Not because memory isn’t often wrong, but because its errors are part of our immemorial history.” Michael Wood, “Immemory Lane,” Artforum 41, no. 6 (February 2003): p. 33. In the exhibition “Roseware,” held at Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria (1998), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain (1999), and Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain (1999), Marker’s Immemory was included and the means for visitors to the installation to add their own images to the digital archival project was provided with the inclusion of cameras, scanners, and computers. The set up included: one Omega Jaz Disk; two PC Apple G3 AV Power Macs; one PC Apple 200 MHz Power Mac; two AV monitors; one scanner, one video camera; one Jaz player; one slide projector and screen; some chairs, tables, and drawing materials. The

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exhibition was developed by Laurence Rassel of Constant (a non-profit arts and media foundation based in Brussels, Belgium) with the assistance of Marker. Lupton notes that “Zapping Zone” (1990) resembled a “ramshackle, junkyard assemblage of elderly televisions and computer monitors,” and that “Silent Movie” (1995) was fabricated out of “five vertically-stacked television monitors” within the “solid weight of the steel tower designed to hold the monitors,” and which Marker described as his “homage to Russian Constructivism.” Lupton, “Chris Marker: In Memory of New Technology,” n.p. 28 The word experience, here, invokes the High Romantic form that premiates the existential over disembodied knowledge per se, notably a reaction against the excesses of the Enlightenment. Foremost, in this sense, is Novalis and the Jena Romantics (Fichte, the Schellings et al.), if only for the reason that they discounted Reason and privileged experience, but experience as the event of the existentialmetaphysical vortex of being. See Penelope Fitzgerald’s extraordinary historical novel The Blue Flower (London: Flamingo, 1995) for a fictionalized account of Novalis’ encounter with the same. While a glamorization of the High Romantic spirit, Fitzgerald’s book is nonetheless an exquisite rendering of this crisis. 29 This is one theme, amongst many, in Marker’s analysis/critique of Tarkovsky’s films. See Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999). According to Marker, the issue of “faith” is central to Tarkovsky’s films; yet faith in its most absurd forms, such as facing the mesmeric sea of Solaris (1972) and/or the Zone in Stalker (1979). 30 Marker notably possesses Thornton Wilder’s “six attributes of the adventurer”: 1/ “Memory for names and faces, with the aptitude for altering his own”; 2/ “The gift of tongues”; 3/ “Inexhaustible invention”; 4/ “Secrecy”; 5/ “Talent for falling into conversation with strangers”; and 6/ “Freedom from conscience that springs from a contempt for the dozing rich.” Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, p. 78. Of the latter, it must be added that contempt for the idle rich does not justify amorality but, instead, as with George Bernard Shaw, a higher modality of morality that is measured by its distance from conventional, hypocritical morality of the day. Regarding “secrecy,” Marker’s discretion conveys the same sense that one finds in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), or a disregard/disdain for revealing details of one’s synthetical worldview (sources and such, but also biographical issues that are best transformed or elided through the work of art, as such). Marker also, as consummate creative spirit, represents and troubles William Empson’s literary theory of ambiguity (polysemy), insofar as all seven forms in this famous analytic are to be found in Marker’s work, including discursive forms subsequently elaborated upon by Paul Ricoeur and others. See William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Chatto and Windus, 1930); Hilda Meldrum Brown, Heinrich von Kleist: The Ambiguity of Art and the Necessity of Form (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); and Paul Ricoeur, passim. In terms of cinema, see: Roy Armes, The Ambiguous Image: Narrative Style in Modern European Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976); and Murray Smith, “Film Art, Argument, and Ambiguity,” Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 64, no. 1 (Winter 2006): pp. 33-

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42. With Ricoeur, nonetheless, ambiguity returns to its theological and moralphilosophical context as figure of “possibility” – or, of other ways toward truth. 31 Ollendorff, “The Art of Sorting Out.” “One realizes, experiencing these zones and their cross-links, how one gives the same weight to so many different things in life – and how the only criteria for ranking such events are necessarily subjective. Here war, cinema and travel are always present as formative experiences. You will meet the ghost of communism that seems to haunt Marker’s entire life. You’ll meet Hitchcock, Saigon and Jules Verne . . .” Ibid. It is, of course, the ghost of communism that haunts the entire trajectory of Marker’s work; not Communism as ideology, but communism in its pure form as “dream,” or communism as Promised Land, beyond all temporal and corrupted instantiations of what is, arguably, the perpetual revolution required for the maintenance and administration of life proper. Marker’s relationship to ideology is not uniform; it all depends on what kind of ideology is at stake. In terms of the Marxist critique of ideology, his approach is similar to that of the now-traditional critique of Lukács, where ideology is a spectral form of control or conscious and half-conscious justifications for power and the inequalities of political-economic systems. Not strictly pejorative, then, “ideology” involves the production of structures of governance that either serve the common good or a corrupted or corruptible elite, never both. There is an extremely telling moment in Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993) where Nikolaï Izvolov, then a film student in Moscow (responsible for the recovery of Alexandre Medvedkine’s films considered lost in the 1930s), relates how shocked he was to find that ideology and art could exist side by side. It is a telling moment in a rather sordid tale of the Stalinist purges of the Soviet intelligentsia, insofar as Marker permits it (includes it) within the scope of his film documenting Medvedkine’s checkered career from agit-prop filmmaking in the late 1920s to all-but-forgotten, ghostly figure in the annals of Soviet cinema by the late 1960s. That said, Marker’s general attitude toward ideology is that it is a tissue of lies and distortions whose victims are typically the dispossessed and/or its enemies. Yet in terms of the conjunction of art and ideology, it is more than evident that Marker’s beliefs include the possibility of a benevolent ideological structure that would safeguard and bring about the communist dream. In this regard, he is not a post-structuralist with no interest in the paradigmatic other than to deconstruct it. In fact, there is more than enough evidence within his work to suggest that he believes in the “aristocracy of spirit” that Nietzsche embraced/foretold, or a meritocracy of a type that permits forms of higher-level ontology their place within the shifting terrain of social and political praxis. The critique he indulges of the apparatuses of power are in no way a denunciation of power in principle, but a forceful dissection of the endless corruption of power in service only to itself as privilege. It might also be said that Marker’s frequent recourse to formalist experiments betrays an incipient agit-prop aspect to his own work, often hiding within the self-reflexive or performative disjunctions of image-text or image-narrative relations. These formalist moments are, however, kept under control in service to a larger purpose that remains literary-exegetical, versus mannered and scopic. The entire discourse of the gaze is, thereby, inappropriate to Marker’s work, and the various attempts to apply it by

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psychoanalytically biased theorists falls apart upon closer inspection. The notorious mise-en-abyme of such theory elides another dimension within the critique that doubles back on the critic, offering as much information or misinformation about the author as it does the artist under analysis. It is all a case of classic misrecognition, often intentional misrecognition (or misprision). Marker’s work is effectively immune to psychoanalytical critique as it is to a poststructuralist reading because it has, in fact, a scope and intentionality within it that transcends subjects and subject-object relations per se. Such critiques only scratch at the surface, and generally post-structuralist enquiries of this order perform an instructive inquest into the symptoms associated with avowed repressions and/or elisions while missing the higher-order incorporations – the paradigmatic and ideological precision of the work of art that fuses transcendental and contingent orders within the visual, non-discursive apparatus of the body of art. The bias or cut of post-structuralist critique is wholly ill-equipped for the inquest it often undertakes in the name of the “archaeology of knowledge,” given that it is more or less mired in the reduction of everything to discourse. Tertullian’s “radiance of the visual,” or the excess of the aesthetic thing-in-itself as event, short-circuits all such readings. It is for this reason as well that the principal path out of poststructuralism came by way of the theological turn in late French phenomenology (or so-called post-phenomenology). In this sense, the only justified poststructuralist critique of Marker’s work would be one that also provided an exit from the charmed, circular, rhetorical hothouse of the analytic – a route beyond the excessive contingency of the reading. Being constitutionally incapable of such, and given that the possible route out is also upward (along the vertical axis of representational praxis itself), all such readings fail or at best detail a symptom or two within a complex that resides outside of purely subjective readings of the work of art. Such symptoms or repressions, such as the nature of the narrative voice within Marker’s more “difficult” films (for example, Le mystère Koumiko or Sans soleil) or the appearance and disappearance of Marker himself (physically or otherwise) indicate not a pathology to be delineated but a formal sublimation to be followed beyond the confines of the project proper, again along the paradigmatic axis that leads beyond all hermeneutics and beyond all makeshifts in the production of art as ideology (or ideology as art).

ESSAY THREE PHOTOGRAPHY AS “PAINTING” . . .

The trouble with people like [William Klein] is that we tend to cut them into pieces and to leave each piece to the specialists: a film to the film critic, a photograph to the photographic expert, a picture to the art pundit, a sketchbook to nobody in particular. Whereas the really interesting phenomenon is the totality of these forms of expression, their obvious or secret correspondences, their interdependence. The painter does not really turn to photography, then to cinema, he starts from a single preoccupation, that of seeing and communicating, and modulates it through all the media.1 —Chris Marker

I. The “Radiance of the Visual” The radiance of the visual is the clearing of the “sky” after the “storm” of images given to art has passed over the empty vault and “empyrean” of conceptual thought itself. It is neither sky nor image, but the first diffused light that returns after the storm. It is the darkening of the sky over Golgotha and the subsequent ethereal light that first appears – a preternatural sign of that moment when “It is finished.” For this reason one of the chief unacknowledged moments in Marker’s work is the apparent absence of Levinas, and foremost the apparent absence of Levinas’ 1948 essay “La réalité et son ombre,”2 an essay that emphatically dismisses the image as anything but a passage to revelation. The image itself is not revelation, though it has the ability in the case of difficult art to serve as a rite of passage or embodiment by negation of revelation, which in Levinas’ semi-mystical explication of its lack is also its positivity. The return of the conceptual in Levinas’ critique of images is, notably, by way of criticism – and when the production of images includes the production of criticism, as in Marker’s work, we have left the pure undifferentiated realm of image, where surface is, arguably, everything, for the proverbial depths, which more than explains Marker’s inquisitions of the value of the image in relation to larger forces at play in their circulation and economy of signifying agency, inclusive of History.3

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The date of Levinas’ essay is critical. Marker cannot not have been aware of it and its importance, given that it appeared in Sartre’s journal, and given that the Sartreans wrote a pointedly self-serving critique that appeared immediately preceeding the essay, as preface.4 Levinas’ essay is excoriating, yet it errs on the side of the angels, as we might also credit Marker’s entire corpus (with few exceptions). The exceptions might be Marker’s flirtations with so-called new media – yet even those excursions were both marked and marred by a critique of the apparatuses of art that also suggests that photography is the irreducible “modern” artform that must be protected against descending into idolatry. In reversing the arc of its production (as Marker’s work often does, by reverting to primitive instantiations of the same), photography and cinema cross over the threshold of its creation in the 1800s, meeting up with painting (which it was expected to kill off), and moving inexorably backward toward the origins of painting and the production of fictitious space in the Renaissance.5 This backward movement, from the twentieth century, also crosses and obliterates “art for art’s sake,” exiting the twentieth century at 1900, and engaging John Ruskin’s last complaints about the impending doom associated with the excesses of art in service to a degraded utilitarianism, plus the more grave issues of the encroaching amorality of art, a unique, avant-garde temporality given to the work of art by way of early progenitors of formalism. Beyond Ruskin, and passing through German Idealism and Romanticism, certain lost causes or prospects reappear, which signal the presence of the paradigmatic axis of representation that is the central feature of the production of imagery and its alliance with hegemony and ideology. This latter problem, unresolved across the ages, is the fundamental argument given to Levinas’ critique, insofar as all of the issues he raises regarding what obtains on this side of the image/mirror are also erased by passing through the image/mirror to the other side, beyond its surface and into the “wild blue yonder.” In the shadow-lands of the image, therefore, Tertullian’s “radiance of the visual”6 is a telltale trace of this struggle, part and parcel of the existentialmetaphysical striations of the image and its concord and/or discord with forms of ideation, versus ideology. Levinas’ recourse to criticism to “save” art is also a recourse to the speculative or conceptual import of art and its place on the paradigmatic axis in relation to all that lies in the world (here-and-now, above and below) and all that has passed into history, but which might be resurrected and re-configured through art – yet as a “meta-physics” of/for Art proper, versus Art in service to metaphysics. The utopian impulse in such a reading is the ethical impulse; and if Levinas refuses to stray into arguments regarding morality as such,

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it is because he senses that morality re-engages ideology, whereas ethics is a form of the same without the attendant emptying of the form for a purely ahistorical and atemporal “somewhere else.” This is the crux of the Levinasian dilemma, and it never quite goes away. Ethics trumps morality most keenly because of how morality has been defined in the Enlightenment, and because it is quite often, quite simply, a dogmatic form that re-performs ideological and hegemonic sleights of hand. Ethics is morality re-naturalized, and the work of difficult art is a way of measuring the very image of ethics, in motion, in the commercium of the high imaginary. April 6, 2012

II. The Face Nothing in the world can be compared to a human face. It is a land that one never tires of exploring, a landscape (whether rugged or peaceful) with a unique beauty.7 —Carl Theodor Dreyer

Through the conflation of Levinas, Marker, and Ruskin’s emphasis on the human face it is possible to reconstruct the absence of the moral dimension in art and determine how the image stands, in many respects, for this-worldly (fallen) aspects of the human visage. Levinas makes this explicit in “La réalité et son ombre,” as Bazin makes the fixity of the image and its relationship to death (as memento mori) the principal gesture of its “deathly” gesturalism – its ability to arrest time but also to point to the time of death, all in service to the troublesome suzerainty of the modern gaze, the same issue that Levinas deconstructs in making his own critique of subject-object relations, which, while phenomenological, end up being metaphysical anyway, as they resort to the austerities of Kantian paralogisms. With Ruskin, it is even more complex, in that his denunciation of High Renaissance pictorial conventions circles the disfigurement of the human image – most famously through his assault on Michelangelo. (Levinas more or less dismisses the excuses of/for abstract art and their recourse to “musicality,” as they are generally exercises in vanity or hubris that remain irreducibly human testimonials despite their regard for what passes within art as a dynamic function contained within the parameters of the artwork itself.) Nevertheless, it is the inhuman that repeatedly returns and inserts itself in all three of these critiques of the image – and it is inhuman agency (ideological, formal, or purely instrumental/utilitarian and empirical, historical or natural) that is taken to

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task; that is, inhuman agency as the premise, perhaps, of figuration, and fictitious space as analogue for the Imaginary in/for itself. If Marker’s version of inhumanity is primarily the various apparatuses of political hegemony that enslave souls, the human face remains nonetheless a mask, as it does for Levinas, and as Bazin served up the Shroud of Turin as a means of de-figuring the “ontology of the image.” What crosses through all teleology (and deconstructive, reverse teleology) is the inhuman, otherworldly “radiance” that is the conceptual as inhuman force. The inhuman cuts two ways, or upstream and downstream, and its relation to (reliance on) the subject is an either/or imperative: it either enslaves and destroys (degrades), or it liberates and redeems (ennobles). Life is a “war” (but between two forms of the same Levinasian “otherwise than being”). It is the purported disengagement of art from life that Levinas targets by way of a reference to the charmed hermeneutic of literature: Perhaps the tendency to apprehend the aesthetic phenomenon in literature, where speech provides the material for the artist, explains the contemporary dogma of knowledge through art. We are not always attentive to the transformation that speech undergoes in literature. The completion, the indelible seal of artistic production by which the artwork remains essentially disengaged, is underestimated – that supreme moment when the last brush stroke is done, when there is not another word to add to or to strike from the text, by virtue of which every artwork is classical.8

In placing the image (or the visual analogue for being) within the orbit of language and literature, Levinas turns the tables and begins his own reverse voyage to the substantiation of the image as a closed circuit that invokes interlocking economies of figuration and signification. He does, however, object to “all of the above,” or to all excuses that provide art with a transcendental function, effectively denying the image any moral value at all except through the addition of a critical intelligence that interrogates the illogic of the free-floating signifier. In this sense, Levinas’ critique crashes into Derrida’s, and the dance between the two never quite resolves itself in any harmonious way – while both indulge “Jewistic mysticism” (a common complaint against Derrida), with the hidden Talmudic or Lurianic aspects of Deconstruction coming over to Levinas’ phenomenological project and his distinct refusal to surrender to Deconstruction and vacate First Philosophy (ontology). There is, however, a secret defense of formalism in Levinas’ delimitations of visual agency as it pervades the image proper (this image always distinct from a picture, and a distinction that registers his return to arguments regarding what constitutes knowledge of the world or the

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Kantian thing-in-itself). Levinas’ object or image is being, not as hypostasized something, but as artifactual existent – and, in this way, he refuses the abstractions of being given to metaphysics and upper-level ontology, favoring the shadow-world he will then endlessly call into question. His defense of formalism takes the form of a denunciation of the absurdities of art that “thinks” it is privileged in roping off a zone of exception, a world unto itself (or a world in/for itself). While demolishing these pretensions by artists to have created an entirely self-enclosed world that he calls immoral, he manages through carefully crafted aporias (posed as questions) to leave the door open on the value of the proscriptive and prescriptive nature of these apparent vanities. This completion does not necessarily justify the academic aesthetics of art for art’s sake. The formula is false inasmuch as it situates art above reality and recognizes no master for it, and it is immoral inasmuch as it liberates the artist from his duties as a man and assures him of a pretentious and facile nobility. But a work would not belong to art if it did not have this formal structure of completion, if at least in this way it were not disengaged. We have to understand the value of this disengagement, and first of all its meaning. Is to disengage oneself from the world always to go beyond, toward the region of Platonic ideas and toward the eternal which towers above the world? Can one not speak of a disengagement on the hither side – of an interruption of time by a movement going on on the hither side of time, in its “interstices”?9

Furthermore, “To go beyond is to communicate with ideas, to understand. Does not the function of art lie in not understanding? Does not obscurity provide it with its very element and a completion sui generis, foreign to dialectics and the life of ideas? Will we then say that the artist knows and expresses the very obscurity of the real?”10 This particular turning point in his argument serves to privilege the shadowy and recondite world of art as a type of counterpoint to the illuminated and airy world of rationalist, “metaphysical” speculation. The discord between these two (the dialectic he preserves) will be reconciled in an existential-metaphysical mask thrown over the divide which he will then name “the face.” Being is not only itself, it escapes itself. Here is a person who is what he is; but he does not make us forget, does not absorb, cover over entirely the objects he holds and the way he holds them, his gestures, limbs, gaze, thought, skin, which escape from under the identity of his substance, which like a torn sack is unable to contain them. Thus a person bears on his face, alongside of its being with which he coincides, its own caricature, its own picturesqueness. . . . And yet all this is the person and is the thing. There is

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Essay Three then a duality in this person, this thing, a duality in its being. It is what it is and it is a stranger to itself, and there is a relationship between these two moments. We will say the thing is itself and is its image. And that this relationship between the thing and its image is resemblance.11

In Marker’s work there is a strange economy of a similar mystical aspect to the image (consistent with Jewish “messianicity”) and a concomitant incarnational/transfigurational quality that ends in a type of crucifixion of the object or subject as image. This latter “Christic” component is – as in a more law-based instantiation in Levinas’ meditations on the image – the invocation of the other side of the image (or all that it portends in its implied teleology. If this is an atheological excess or a hidden theological precept that indulges representational theories of what comprises knowledge of objects or worlds (the Other as thing-in-itself, as complex), it also registers in its very own discursive space-time the blind spot that Levinas and others insist inhabits and/or contaminates all interpersonal and intersubjective relations. With Derrida, this specular agency given to epistemology will become utterly detached from its object and circle within a time-space of its own making, with the deconstructive operation becoming a work of art in its own right/rite. This is also why deconstruction is in many ways a literary venture; and it is also why, in certain instances of post-modern exegesis, the High Romantic quest for the literary work of art returns with a vengeance. If Levinas privileges criticism as the means of restoring ethics to the hermetically sealed work of art, and in so doing he requires conflating the difficult work of art with the act of criticism itself, Marker’s work departs company with the critique of images as extraterritorial operation and enjoins image and critique (word as image, and vice versa). “Word” as such, in turn, entails criticism – and the “word” in all such cases remains sui generis, with the work of art, shipwrecked on the reef of figuration in service to the construction of worlds. It is this latter point that makes for the revolutionary work of art, a revolutionary spirit that is a perpetual curation of the world as work of art, not a given or imposed construction. The spectral figures of ideology (and their deconstruction) are what matter. The method of criticism or deconstruction differs, already in terms of the form of engagement with the image (as word or as picture), with Levinas’ apercu that the image reverts to the picture (must begin with a critique of the picture) taking on particular significance, if not importing an ominous quality to the production of images devoid of critique. A being is that which is, that which reveals itself in its truth, and, at the same time, it resembles itself, is its own image. The original gives itself as

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though it were at a distance from itself, as though it were withdrawing itself, as though something in a being delayed behind being. The consciousness of the absence of the object which characterizes an image is not equivalent to a simple neutralization of the thesis, as Husserl would have it, but is equivalent to an alteration of the very being of the object, where its essential forms appear as a garb that it abandons in withdrawing. To contemplate an image is to contemplate a picture. The image has to be understood by starting with the phenomenology of pictures, and not the converse.12

The placement of the picture plane, as mental tableau returning the image to its preliminary gesturalism as index of something else (present or not present), underlies Levinas’ insistence that the artwork is not a sign or a symbol in the modern case but something that obscures and dissimulates reality. Marker’s work, in its unrelenting production of distance (the discordant narration, the troubling of cinema by using still images to produce film-essays, his layered approach to overturning pictorial conventions through montage and distortion, pixellization and disintegration) approaches the image on cat’s paws (an apt simile, given his penchant for feline interlocutors as the most savvy interlocutors imaginable). Photography under such auspices strangely becomes painting, and painting strangely becomes literature. The incumbent destruction of the suzerainty of the eye also oddly returns the gaze to the inward tableau Levinas wishes to both warn against and save for possible later, post-rational purposes. The post-rational is the valorization of a potentiality in images to become ethical. If he hedges his bets, it is only because the history of the image (photographic, cinematic, and literary), as visual agency, accompanies humankind across the ages and is synonymous with the production of so-called reality. The idea of shadow or reflection . . . – of an essential doubling of reality by its image, of an ambiguity “on the hither side” – extends to the light itself, to thought, to the inner life. The whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory, outside of its revelation and its truth. . . . Art not only reflects, but brings about this allegory. In art allegory is introduced into the world, as truth is accomplished in cognition.13

The image as picture (versus image as word) is, despite all qualifications as integral part of being, demoted by Levinas, as he errs on the side of caution: The notion of the shadow thus enables us to situate the economy of resemblance within the general economy of being. Resemblance is not a

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These statements all add up to the familiar suggestion that the human skin (the human interval) is very much like an emulsion, a film, and that it is imprinted upon from two sides. In the Levinasian universe of reducing all things to their ethical function, that skin becomes the equivalent of an iconostasis/templon, and that templon becomes the equivalent of a moveable picture plane.15 In interpersonal relations, and as if that picture plane were sometimes opaque and sometime transparent, the mutual gaze of two subjects or the confrontation of two conscious beings entails the production of ethics at its most rudimentary level. This exchange is present in all difficult art. Marker’s art, as penultimate act of difficult art, connotes, confers, and troubles the same exchange, while it also gives greater freedom to the artwork to speak for itself. Levinas’ heavy-handed approach is flawed only because it is effectively disembodied, despite his aversion to such acts of abstraction. Art does embody something; and if it embodies a peculiar form of visual agency that speaks of autonomy for art, it also does so only in relation to its inescapable “anthropomorphism.” This anthropomorphism is only escapable, in turn, through the destruction of anamorphism and perspectivism, two analogues to being that are instrumental in the production of the physical and perceptual world – the politics of worlds and a de-based hegemony of so-called vision. Marker’s works partly destroy both, with anamorphism betrayed by his formalist ventures here-and-there, and perspectivism betrayed by his attempts to force everything to its knees by way of the “Zone,” that place that disconnects cause and effect and sends all images upward on a voyage along the paradigmatic axis of representation, but without the baggage of history or sign. And when he (Marker) is weary of all of this, he turns to the animal kingdom. In the gaze of the most picturesque other, the animal kingdom, the Levinasian project fails. With the “animal,” the blind spot is the inhuman, and this particular case of inhumanity quite often puts to shame Humanity proper. The body of art is, indeed, a form of knowledge, dark or otherwise.16 For it to be luminous requires that it be permeated by the light of conceptual and speculative praxis. In Levinas’ estimation, it remains a

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lesser vehicle for knowledge no matter how luminous it may become, and that light is always of the body anyway, never reaching thought proper or anything resembling revelation (self-knowledge). This skepticism is totalizing in many respects, and it is entirely given over to an age-old suspicion of imagery. The sui generis aspect of the image as a shadow of reality is an ancient conundrum, one that resides in the very production and destruction of images (mental, pictorial, or verbal). Yet thought must be embodied, in one way, shape, or form – it is axiomatic that intelligences are “lights,” and that vision (in its internal operations, and in its external operations) generates images. All such images are vehicles for knowledge, not knowledge per se. Objections to images involve how they are used (or what they say or might say). In the “Markerian” universe, as opposed to the Levinasian universe, images are what they are. They are incarnational/transfigurational vehicles speeding nevertheless toward a collision with what they are not – toward their own date with destiny (Calvary). This “what is” and this “what is not” is the very measure of what Levinas terms their obscurity. For Marker, however, the obscurity has certain virtues Levinas would never ascribe to the same – that is, the image is obscure, and the obscurity of the image has to do with its place in the world and its role in the construction of a better, virtuous world. That obscurity is dark knowledge embodied, or dark knowledge doubled (to double Levinas’ trope). The trouble begins when we begin to side with iconoclasm; for what is left in the wake of the destruction of images is the suzerainty of an impoverished world that pretends to be all that is given. Ideology invokes this rule insofar as it benefits power to prohibit the production of alternatives worlds (visions). Marker’s view would seem to be to give the image its own power, however temporal, as he would give any other human and/or animal subject their own power. But he then would also (and does) question that power . . . In questioning images, he is also engaging in intersubjective voyages to the Other. This is what marks his work in contradistinction to a Levinasian worldview that would quarantine images until they were proven harmless and/or ineffectual, reserving conceptual and critical fire for First Philosophy – an admirable and less dangerous route toward yet another apocalypse, or the one that inhabits thought in/for itself. Miraculously, Giraudoux, Marker’s great exemplar of conceptually inflected literature (painting with words), appears in Levinas’ 1948 essay, also, miraculously, the very same year that Marker assumed the name “Chris Marker” in the pages of Esprit, writing mostly reviews of literature and music. “All of Giraudoux’s work effects a casting of reality into images, with a consistency which has not been fully appreciated, despite

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Giraudoux’s glory.”17 Immediately following upon Levinas’ nod to Giraudoux, he writes: But up to now we seemed to be basing our conception on a fissure in being between being and its essence which does not adhere to it but masks it and betrays it. But this in fact only enables us to approach the phenomenon we are concerned with. The art called classical – the art of antiquity and its imitators, the art of ideal forms – corrects the caricature of being. . . . Beauty is being dissimulating its caricature, covering over or absorbing its shadow. Does it absorb it completely? It is not a question of wondering whether the perfect forms of Greek art could be still more perfect, nor if they seem perfect in all latitudes of the globe. The insurmountable caricature in the most perfect image manifests itself in its stupidness as an idol. The image qua idol leads us to the ontological significance of its unreality. This time the work of being itself, the very existing of a being, is doubled up with a semblance of existing.18

Here ideality is the enemy, and the subsequent critique of beauty is added to the critique of the image, which is the doubling of the doubling of the image. Giraudoux notably re-naturalized Greek myth in the existential mire of the then present-day, creating “modern versions of classical tragedy which emphasized the human qualities inherent in classical myth.”19 Marker does the same, but he drops the classical analogues and lets latterday present-day reality speak for itself.20 All of the criticisms of Marker’s tone in many of his most trenchant “documentary” films are of no serious account because, in fact, it is this discordant narrative, no matter how forced or no matter how ironical and/or fractured, that returns the critical edge to the work, refracted several times over, perhaps, but nevertheless there. By the time Marker takes up the camera on his own, especially with Lettre de Sibérie (1958), the three rays of intelligence in his films noted by Bazin have negated any possible return to so-called objective, documentary portrayals of the world. Bazin’s remarks regarding these three rays seem a form of revenge on Levinas’ unforgiving damnation of the image, while Marker’s first forays seem a determined attempt to apply everything he has learned in his apprenticeship period, inclusive of the late-1940s’ arguments ranging across the full spectrum of French criticism regarding what art can and cannot accomplish/say.21 In approaching iconoclasm, and then backing down, Levinas gives to the image the de-limited space of its own anxiety. “It cannot go toward the better.”22 It is stuck in the shadow-land, sui generis, bereft, lost at sea . . . “This sad value is indeed the beautiful of modern art, opposed to the happy beauty of classical art.”23 In returning art to a form of philosophical

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inquiry, by demanding its privileges be qualified, Levinas wishes to suggest what Marker then undertakes: Criticism already detaches [art] from its irresponsibility by envisaging its technique. It treats the artist as a man at work. Already inquiring after the influences he undergoes it links this disengaged and proud man to real history. Such criticism is preliminary. It does not attack the artistic event as such, that obscuring of being in images, that stopping of being in the meanwhile. The value of images for philosophy lies in their position between two times and their ambiguity. Philosophy discovers, beyond the enchanted rock on which it stands, all its possibles swarming about it. It grasps them by interpretation. . . . Philosophical exegesis will measure the distance that separates myth from real being, and will become conscious of the creative event itself, an event which eludes cognition, which goes from being to being by skipping over the intervals of the meanwhile.24

Short of smashing the idols and banning further production of the same, Levinas proposes to take the dynamis of art up into or home to philosophy. What he does not permit is that philosophy might be brought down into or home to art itself. (Is this not what Marker sets out to do, from the outset, and is it not actually an age-old pursuit?) Yet Levinas does it, anyway, under cover of “criticism”: Criticism, in interpreting, will choose and will limit. But if, qua choice, it remains on the hither side of the world which is fixed in art, it reintroduces that world into the intelligible world in which it stands, and which is the true homeland of the mind. The most lucid writer finds himself in the world bewitched by its images. He speaks in enigmas, by allusions, by suggestion, in equivocations, as though he moved in a world of shadows, as though he lacked the force to arouse realities, as though he could not go to them without wavering, as though, bloodless and awkward, he always committed himself further than he had decided to do, as though he spills half the water he is bringing us. The most forewarned, the most lucid writer none the less plays the fool. The interpretation of criticism speaks in full self-possession, frankly, through concepts, which are like the muscles of the mind.25

April 8, 2012

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Notes 1 Chris Marker, “William Klein: Painter/Photographer/Film-maker,” Graphis 194 (May-June 1978): p. 486; cited in Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 10. 2 Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” in The Levinas Reader. First published “La réalité et son ombre,” Les temps modernes 38 (November 1948): pp. 771-89. Also included in Emmanuel Levinas, Collected Philosophical Papers, ed. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987), pp. 1-13. 3 Curiously, History proper is absorbed into metaphysics, in Marker’s view, in the films of Tarkovsky – the latter of which, in turn, absorb metaphysics into art. 4 See Séan Hand’s introduction to this essay in The Levinas Reader, p. 129. “In Levinas’s view, art offers images, whereas criticism speaks through concepts. These images are interesting in the literal sense (inter-esse) without being useful. The way in which the closed world of art therefore freezes time within images doubles and immobilizes being: characters suffer an eternal anxiety, imprisoned in an inhuman interval. The disengagement this encourages means that art is an evasion of responsibility, since it offers consolation rather than a challenge. Only criticism relates this irresponsibility to real history once more by measuring the distance between the myth proposed by art, and real being.” Ibid. “The preface in Les Temps Modernes claims that Levinas has ignored Sartre’s treatment of this subject. . . . But Levinas’s article surely reveals a knowledge of, and disagreement with, the notion of the analogon proposed by Sartre in L’Imaginaire, a phenomenological study of the imagination produced in 1940. The Temps Moderne preface itself reminds us how L’Imaginaire reveals a deep mistrust of the word-image which can lure us into a state of hypnotic inertia, producing a degraded form of knowledge and thought.” Ibid. The controversy must have reverberated throughout postwar French letters and well into the 1950s’ cultural renaissance that, in part, sponsored Nouvelle Vague cinema by way of the early stand off between the Left and Right Bank schools of cinema. Additionally, Bazin’s essay “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” establishes a certain datum by which to judge and place Levinas’ more severe indictment of what has come to be known in the late twentieth century as “imagology.” Bazin’s essay closes with the words: “D’autre part le cinema est un langage.” 5 See Tarkovsky’s inordinate attempts to raise cinema to the level of painting, both by including images of paintings in almost all of his works and by making the cinematic image exceptionally “painterly.” See Marker’s comments in this regard, via voice-over, in Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999). 6 See Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 2005). First published Devant l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1990). “So the most beautiful aesthetics – the most desperate, too, since they are generally doomed to stalemate or madness – will be those aesthetics that, in order to open themselves completely to the dimension of the visual, want us to close our eyes before the image, so as [to] no longer see it but only to look at it, and no longer forget what Blanchot

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called ‘the other night,’ the night of Orpheus. Such aesthetics are always singular, strip themselves bare in not-knowledge, and never hesitate to call vision that which no waking person can see.” Ibid., p. 157. Regarding the incorporation of the same “not-knowledge” into the painting of Gerhard Richter, see Gavin Keeney, “The Silence: Non-discursive Agency in Photography,’” pp. 209-26, in “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011, pp. 214-25. 7 Carl Theodor Dreyer, “Imagination et couleur” (1955), in Refléxions sur mon métier, trans. Maurice Drouzy (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1983), p. 99; cited in Jean-François Chevrier, Catherine David. “The Present State of the Image/Actualitat de la imatge,” pp. 26-47, in Passages de l’image (1991), p. 36. Chevrier and David elaborate on this statement, in the context of the “Passages de l’image” exhibition, by further noting that the “face-landscape metaphor” in photography and cinema was established quite early on by Helmar Lerski, in an exhibition in 1942 entitled “Landschaft des Gestichts.” Marker has said, passim, that the recurring motif of the haunted image of a woman’s face, in La jetée and elsewhere, comes from a childhood memory of close-ups of Simone Genevois in Marco de Gastyne’s La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc (1929). See also, Chris Marker, “La passion de Jeanne d’Arc,” Esprit 190 (May 1952): pp. 840-43; review of Dreyer’s La passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). Regarding La merveilleuse vie de Jeanne d’Arc, see Chris Marker, “The Rest is Silent,” pp. 15-18, in Chris Marker: Silent Movie, Starring Catherine Belkhodja (Columbus: Wexner Center for the Arts/Ohio State University, 1995), p. 16. See also, Lynn Broad, “Locating the Past in the Present,” pp. 102-20, in Lynne Broad, Chris Marker: A Stylistic Analysis of His Film and Media Work, Thesis, Master of Arts, English, Media, and Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, 2008. For this image of Simone Genevois, plus Marker’s comments, see Roth, Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? À propos du CD-ROM “Immemory” de Chris Marker, pp. 94-95. 8 Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 131. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. “Art does not know a particular type of reality; it contrasts with knowledge. It is the very event of obscuring, a descent of the night, an invasion of shadow. To put it in theological terms, which will enable us to delimit however roughly our ideas by comparison with contemporary notions: art does not belong to the order of revelation. Nor does it belong to that of creation, which moves in just the opposite direction.” Ibid., p. 132. As such, Art proper is stuck between two worlds; and not so much stuck in-between two worlds, as transiting back and forth, crossing both, and casting shadows (or producing images common to both). Here is the beginning of a theology of the image, or – better – an “angelology of knowledge,” to follow on and complete Foucault’s and Agamben’s “archaeology of knowledge.” 11 Ibid., p. 135. 12 Ibid., pp. 135-36. 13 Ibid., p. 136; with reference to Plato’s Phaedo, or “the simultaneity of the idea and the soul,” yet with, additionally, a “simultaneity of a being and its reflection.” “As a dialectic of being and non-being, becoming does indeed, since the

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Parmenides, make its appearance in the world of Ideas. It is through imitation that participation engenders shadows, distinct from the participation of the Ideas in one another which is revealed to the understanding. The discussion over the primacy of art or of nature – does art imitate nature or does natural beauty imitate art? – fails to recognize the simultaneity of truth and image.” Ibid. This brings into focus the primary question as to which is more real than the other, whereas Levinas confers on both a provisional end to the dialectic through making the image a “residue of being” (of truth). Ibid. He then cites Jean Wahl regarding transdescendence, a peculiar term he strips of any “ethical significance” and offers as datum for the evaluation of the image vis-à-vis “this phenomenon of degradation or erosion of the absolute which we see in images and in resemblance.” Ibid., p. 137. In the same manner that he dignifies the “fallen face” of the individual (and all that it shows and/or all that it hides), Levinas is providing the image a similar value, while also conferring upon it an incipient incarnational power (a lower order of being, but being nonetheless, exiting the Kantian reserve of thing-in-itself for the excess that comes to expression in the aesthetic object of contemplation, albeit a rhetorical move that underwrites his ethical strategy and returns to the primordial chord that marks all such passages to ethics; that is, the atemporal, eschatological admonition “Until we have faces . . .” 14 Ibid. 15 See Gavin Keeney, “The Grand Glass,” pp. 75-83, in Art as “Night”: An ArtTheological Treatise, regarding the possible conceptual privileges bestowed by making this picture plane moveable. 16 See Gavin Keeney, “Topological Glossary,” pp. 163-72, in ibid. 17 Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 137. This statement occurs in the section of the essay entitled “The Meanwhile,” pp. 137-41, and is immediately preceded by the opening remarks, “To say that an image is a shadow of being would in turn be only to use a metaphor, if we did not show where the hither side we are speaking of is situated. To speak of inertia or death would hardly help us, for first we should have to say what the ontological signification of materiality itself is.” Ibid. The latter statement is, intentionally or not, an exceptional swipe or aside aimed most likely at Bazin’s earlier essay, “Ontologie de l’image photographique” (1945), or other contemporaneous versions, Sartrean and otherwise, of the same critique of the image and the limits of art. 18 Ibid. 19 Séan Hand, “Notes,” in ibid., p. 143 n 5. 20 Perhaps the most powerful statement to this effect exists in Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Cat without a Grin (1977/1993), where Marker openly admits that he is giving back the voice to the Other, often having been accused (he intones) of speaking for it. Yet the opening montage of the film is nothing short of exceptional (if not feigned hysterical), in that it gives events voice (historical and cinematic events are conflated) through Marker’s intervention in assembling the images and accompanying music, without commentary per se, but with an inordinate and overarching sensibility of the power of simple aesthetic judgement as power.

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Levinas finishes off his meditation with a return to “philosophical criticism” by way of another round of summoning the specter of death or a death that is not dead enough, invoking how the image plays into the dread of death and the existential chasm of anxiety that delivers an element of fatality to all images. Yet he does this through literature, not visual art, as if that venue were the best exemplification of the imaginary powers of image-making. He speaks of the “petrification” of time, invoking Edgar Allan Poe and the threat of the approach of death (which is not the same as the time of dying). This permits him to substitute the concept of the meanwhile for the interval. This, in turn, permits him to further underscore the idea that the image is essentially a delay, a detour, and a less-thanadmirable engagement with the world. “Art brings about just this duration in the interval, in that sphere which a being is able to traverse, but in which its shadow is immobilized. The eternal duration of the interval in which a statue is immobilized differs radically from the eternity of a concept; it is the meanwhile, never finished, still enduring – something inhuman and monstrous.” Levinas, “Reality and Its Shadow,” p. 141. By transposing eternal duration to eternal damnation, the result is to condemn art as a prison-house for the concept. That said, Levinas does not endorse the proscription of images, though he does manage to mention it as “the supreme command of monotheism, a doctrine that overcomes fate, that creation and revelation in reverse.” Ibid. Dread, fate, and the death that is not dead enough (fear of death) are all performative attacks on existentialism, and Sartre, more or less. Fate as creation and revelation in reverse, and the image as complicit in the production of the image of death qua fate, signals Levinas is headed for iconoclasm and stops short. Petrifaction, or the conversion of life to the frozen state of the statue, appears in reverse in La jetée (in a state of disintegration), through montage, and by inference through the decomposing state of the world after WWIII. It also occurs in its positive form in Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), but in a dream image, in a letter (poet to poet/scholar), read out loud, never seen. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid., p. 142. 25 Ibid., pp. 142-43. These last statements also make an allusion, in passing, to “intellectualism” in literature, a complaint that both Levinas and Marker would turn into a compliment, as, no doubt, any such similar complaint regarding film or visual art. Tarkovsky’s admission that he could not not make long boring films is of the same order. Embedded in the logic of this application of philosophical exegesis to art and literature is a de facto, unspoken defense of formalism in its higher, experimental modalities. Levinas often seems to be dismissing one thing, while allowing it back into play by way of a rear door, or once it has been properly disciplined through criticism.

ESSAY FOUR ERRANT “SCHOLARSHIP”

I. The “Medieval” Voice Upon close inspection certain works of contemporary art reveal dislocations, diremptions, and elisions that place them at odds with modernist art and begin an elegant process of dissociation that reveals an elective “errant” quality, which also suggests a “return” to pre-modern and anti-modern forms of visual exegesis – arguably a form of visionary agency given to excoriating and excessive (austere) forms of representation. This complex is found in a synoptic sense in Jacob Burckhardt’s great book The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) in the form of the “Medieval voice” (by way of Pico della Mirandola),1 as well as in Erwin Panofsky’s assertion that the origins of the Renaissance are to be found in wandering poet-scribes of the High Medieval period, a view that is corroborated in a peculiar manner by G.K. Chesterton’s description of Saint Francis of Assisi’s relationship to the Occitan troubadour culture of the south of France (in excess of, or in opposition to, the learned and orthodox culture of Paris and the universities).2 What transpires, then, in visual agency as visionary agency is the accessing of an order within Art proper that is transpersonal, but brought to bear through the highly personal (existential-metaphysical) “voyage(s)” of the artist-seer. Whether these visionary exploits are religious or not hardly matters; as all such adventures are ultimately confrontations with the gift of the world, which are also – in their foremost instantiation and presentation (and in the sense of the errant scholars and poets of the twelfth century, as with Saint Francis) – almost always acts of praise and/or mercy (if not Grace).3 The works of Marker (filmmaker, photographer, polemicist) and Anselm Kiefer (painter, sculptor, enfant terrible) share a common ground insofar as they bring “to ground” (or re-naturalize) a vision of an austere, even redemptive world that opens on to what Chesterton called Saint Francis’ first gift; that is, the refusal to see the forest for the trees (or, the visionary focus on the singular to release and empower a new order for the

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universal or transcendental worldview). In many respects this vision first requires that the ultra-instrumentalized world of self and other (dialectical relations, anomie, and specters of difference) be reduced to rubble. Such artworks that access this “ground” are highly elusive and allusive examples of visionary agency as “forms of revelation.” Such include: Marker’s still photography, as part and parcel of his early filmessays from the late 1950s through to the late 1970s, with special emphasis on the transition through multimedia exhibition and events such as “Zapping Zone” (1990), Level Five (1996), “Immemory One” (1997), and Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005), leading to his recent recourse in the middle 2000s to exhibitions of digitally altered still photography; and Kiefer’s “biblical projects” from the last decade, including Palmsonntag/Palm Sunday and Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem (both 2006), and the Monumenta 2007 exhibition (Paris), Sternenfall/Chute d’étoiles.4 This analysis of visionary experience in art touches upon the mysteries of subjectivity, in the sense that there is a pre-modern, “synchronic” Medieval aspect to artistic production that is utterly unique and untimely, versus formulated upon the coordinates of normative (Cartesian) subjective relations; that is to say, a unitarian view of the world that dissolves the discord of subject-object relations through a type of realism that is also a type of idealism (as Dostoevsky was a realist), and which might be suitably compared with the “synchronic baroque,” a type of subjective state that involves the artist-subject tying himself/herself up in chains (not unlike Houdini, the great magician) and then “suffering” an escape route (effectively producing a self-generated spectacle/crisis and its antidote). In this sense, Michel de Certeau’s The Mystic Fable is instrumental in delineating the contours of the struggle to produce both a new subject and a “new land” (always formulated within the existing world, as such, anyway).5 This synchronic plenitude, which is, arguably, buried within the modern world (as a type of anti-modernism) but accessible only through somewhat extreme acts of creative praxis, is what operates as visionary agency in artworks (literary, visual, and otherwise), insofar as those artistic acts are also lived experiences. The conflation of Marker and Kiefer, therefore, also requires an investigation or detour into their lives as peripatetic artists (Marker wandering the globe as filmmaker and photographer, but détourning the documentary form of filmmaking then prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, and Kiefer wandering postwar Germany and Europe to eventually settle at Barjac, in France, where he would produce his most seminal works at an industrial estate that also served as a

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petri dish for his reduction of painting to a form of sculpture, and sculpture to obscure, totemic objects).6 Both Marker and Kiefer suggest the “errant” aspects of the artist operating outside of the so-called artworld (Arthur Danto’s now somewhat discredited term) only to return to it with the filched idols of pure speculative thought to be found in this putative “outside” or “else-where” that is the essential trait of the “synchronic Medieval” (worlds within worlds) – always found through antithesis and through the investigation, interrogation, and collapse of dialectical orders of thought and cultural production, or through negative dialectics and the apophatic, “urtheological” vision that is the rite of passage for mysticism proper. In this manner, the words of Gorazd Kocijanþiþ are especially apt: What was before human gaze in history, the logos of the universe without a human being, is simply unnamable. This does not mean to me the negation of the incomprehensible, the utterly apophatic analogue to the cosmic and biological reality: just the logos of this incomprehensible reality is reduced to a meta-intelligible point of the absolute, non-human gaze onto its other. To call that Ding an sich is precisely three words too many – and yet I do not renounce with this claim the existence of the radical passivity of the objectivity and the primordial reality of logos. When the pre-human comes into us, we create – by feigning the world without hypostasis, the world before hypostasis – a transcendental illusion. Modern cosmology and evolutionary teachings as the transformations of mythical cosmogony and zoogony show their limitations in this very metaintelligible point. This limitation can be claimed by philosophical thought. Moreover, it has to claim it if it wants to remain philosophical. The theory that would express adequately the logos of the emerging universe and life in the universe is the very formalization of the cancellation of this gaze, its disappearance: the paradox of formula that renounces itself.7

December 24, 2011

II. Worlds within Worlds If one might speak of the striations within the world (of autonomies nesting within autonomies, or worlds within worlds), one must also acknowledge the classical and theological premise of speaking of such; that is, the dynamic analogues to being that reside in multiple agencies that draw their source of power from being. This system of nesting autonomies is based upon the concept that an anterior good establishes all subsequent orders that partake of this originary good. This dynamis/power (which comes from the Stoics and is of ousia/essence) relates all particulars to a

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first cause, while at the same time conferring upon subsequent causes the status of a first cause. This is the conundrum of the self-causing cause, and its order of being is to establish multiple agencies within an overarching power that is, according to Aristotle, “the first immovable mover who moves the celestial spheres and whose form of life . . . is, in essence, thought of thought.”8 As such, and in subsequent Christian theological incorporations of Greek metaphysics, “The power of God, which almost seems to become autonomous from his essence, can thus – in clear reference to Chapter X of Book L of Aristotle’s Metaphysics – be compared with the head of an army in a battle.”9 In conferring an autonomous or distinct ontological ground to what in the Christian dispensation becomes the salvific praxis of faith (and faith in the historical mission of the Church), early Christian theology also began a long process of valorizing phenomenal affects of the world, most especially history, a process that – over centuries – would lead to an apotheosis in the autonomy of art, insofar as it nested properly within the structure of the highly capricious and often dogmatic strictures of orthodoxy. The analogy to the army provides these provisional forms of autonomous agency an order that regulates particulars (connotes transcendence in immanence) but retains the dual nature of God and demiurge. The various contingent orders that become veritable, or virtual, things-in-themselves retain the agency of “nature” (secondary causes while containing a kernel of the first cause). “The problem of the relation between the transcendence and immanence of the good thus becomes [for Aristotle] that of the relation between ontology and praxis.”10 This all leads Aquinas to write: “The separate good of the universe, which is the first mover, is a greater good than the good of order which is found in the universe.”11 This would seem to indicate, then, that the dynamis is effectively co-equal to “thought of thought” – a recursive figure (versus reclusive figure) that secures a symmetrical relation to revelation, insofar as it also connotes the word as image (and vice versa), or the conceptual knot that consists of thought going out of thought, to return in time (through time) to thought; figure, then, of a sacrificial moment that contains beginning, middle, and end before it is even thought – the insuperable excess of the word as image (thesis and anti-thesis, singularity and multiplicity). Thus a “suffering,” as well; as memory is the autonomous ground or zone of the immemorial. This categorical “beyond” (rather than “above”) that privileges the here-and-now would seem to be the factor common to all things-in-themselves; and, if this is also the source of the putative autonomy of images (insofar as they rise to that

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occasion), it is also indicative of what moves in images, and of what causes certain images “to tremble.” If we apply this concept of dynamis to forms of multiple agency in the world, and worlds within worlds, the autonomous nature of art becomes focused in its ability to access this universal good. Insofar as art makes possible a view of this highest good (pure speculative thought), it partakes of this dynamic function in what has been called the worlding of worlds. Marker’s film-essays, since the earliest collaborations of the 1950s, have all indulged and betrayed this penchant for the image (moving and otherwise) to climb the analogical ladder, leaving behind the simple subject matter of the excursion and revealing a topos that is riven or shot through with the purely conceptual power of filmmaking and photography. For this reason, all of the so-called political films (inclusive of the films with SLON in the late 1960s and early 1970s) are not political films as such, but evocations of the broken premises of politics in service to ideology. Each of these films is essentially founded on the excoriating premise that there is always something else moving within politics that is profoundly ontological (a founding crime, even) – or, that each apparent documentary film is also an expressly “literary” undertaking. The frequent recourse to the image of the Proustian madeleine in Marker scholarship is utterly misleading, other than that it does signal that his use of images to invoke another time and place is intimately related to the mysteries of memory and how it operates within the totality of a mnemonic universe always more or less formulated in relation to the immemorial forces that are at play in the world in itself. Proust first broaches the subject of the “petites madeleines,” in Part One of À la recherche du temps perdu (Du coté du chez Swann), after a tortuous and highly self-indulgent tour of his youthful exploits of trying to get his mother to visit him in his bedroom at Combray (because he had to go to bed so early, and the evening had just set upon Combray and his imagination generally ran amock under the influence of those long shadows that fell across his room and his mind). “Many years had elapsed during which nothing of Combray, save what was comprised in the theatre and the drama of my going to bed there, had any existence for me . . .”12 Suddenly the madeleine appears, and it is such a shock that he cannot make out why it has utterly startled him. But he returns to it, over and over, going deeper into the depths of his being, searching for what is struggling to emerge from the singular encounter with a “little scallop-shell of pastry” dipped in tea. What does emerge is an avalanche of memories, all revolving around the little piece of madeleine his aunt Léonie used to give to him, when he went to say “Good morning” to her on Sunday mornings at Combray. Out of that memory comes a

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torrent of associated memories, and they build like an operatic crescendo, to fade again into obscurity, leaving a taste of something half understood, half remembered, and half catastrophic. This vertiginous space of memory in/for itself is in many ways the whole point of À la recherche du temps perdu, as it is also the significant other of all of Marker’s works. December 26, 2011

III. The Wanderer There is an element of errant wandering in Marker’s work that is part of the cycle (or epicycles) of vicarious experience of culture he more or less specializes in. Whether it is in Siberia, China, Korea, Japan, or the streets of Paris is of little concern. From the end of WWII, forward, Marker is the peripatetic voyeur – cultivating a taste for the oblique pleasures of “faraway” places, no matter how near at hand. The wanderer is an archetype, of course, and Marker’s peregrinations are legendary. Many are carried off in service of official and semi-official cultural institutions or for literary purposes – in the latter case, both for established publications and for his own project, the journeys become a “document” of a people and a place (but foremost an impressionistic tour of Marker’s experience of the same). Often, then, the more recondite or obscure the process (literary and geographical), the better.13 While at first a photographer and then a filmmaker, before either Marker was an errant scribe. This quality is curiously close to the wandering cleric-scholars of the High Middle Ages, the source (insofar as they were also poets) for the Renaissance – and within this complex, it is “literature” (or manuscripts) that carry the full weight of the rebirth that was the Renaissance (the circulation, copying, commenting upon, and interpretation of both classical literature and philosophy, and sagas and chronicles). While the mendicants of the High Middle Ages most often engaged in the transmission and generation of knowledge through commentary, the more legendary of the legendary were poets and musicians – or, troubadours. This aspect of Romance is inescapable in Marker’s work, while as the wandering becomes increasingly political, it also always remains primarily literary, exegetical, poetical, and – ultimately – a transcription of a voyage “to the people,” near and far. One thinks immediately of the photographers of Magnum, but also of the studied casualness of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. (Marker has said that he gave up photography for film because he realized that he would never be “as good as Robert Frank.”14) At one point, for

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example, Marker is said to have been sleeping in the office of one of the cultural affairs bureaus he was associated with in the early postwar years, as Josef Koudelka is said to have lived out of the Paris offices of Magnum. The intertwining of “spiritual” quest (troubadour fashion) and political praxis (discursive agency or license) is inescapable, as it was with many Magnum photographers.15 In a type of literary echo, then, the protagonist of Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s novel The Painter of Battles16 somehow encapsulates the late-modern, literary-artistic-political adventures of Marker, plus the studied “pseudo-objectivity” of Koudelka or Sebastião Salgado. In The Painter of Battles, the solitary soul living in a ruined tower on the coast of Spain (after a tragic sojourn in Croatia as a photographer during the Bosnian War) is engaged in a 360-degree montage of all the battles of the world (so to speak) – yet somehow knowing he will never quite finish it, or that if he does it will constitute his own end. Reminiscent of Marker’s immensely mnemonic digitalization of his photo-archive (and its incorporation into the multimedia projects following his last films), this mural is a bizarre tableau vivant that carries all the import of the “theology” of the image (of the moral merit of, and limit imposed on, as such, all imagery). While carnage is not Marker’s forte, the crisis of life – after all – is; both invoked crisis and lived crisis (the very processes of living fully or living large).17 While Sans soleil (1982) certainly surveys carnage, it does so at a respectful distance – as the central historical crime in this pensive tour of Japan is the utter disaster of Okinawa (the virtual extinction of an autonomous culture/people). One cannot but not think of Godard’s Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993), in this regard – a very short film (video) that traverses a single photograph. The sentiments expressed in the voice-over are “Markerian” to an extreme.18 This miniscule film is immense – and it signals the immensity of what moves in Marker’s work, in Magnum “documentary” photography, and in works that compress time to an inexplicable salience (near silence) that launches the work into the farthest reaches of speculative artistic praxis (artistic time-space). Venturing beyond one’s orbit, then, pays certain dividends. And if travel to the far corners of the world is ultimately a literary venture, traveling in time (in, for example, Marker’s La jetée), or traveling backward and forward but always returning to “Earth,” to the here-andnow (in, for example, Tarkovsky’s Solaris), is the ultimate test of the event of escaping finitude (and this is the point of Badiou’s concept of fidelity to the event in Being and Event19). However temporarily or, ironically, temporally multiple times are embedded in multiple places (and

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the sense that Siberia or Japan or San Francisco might also be an internalizing or “timely” confrontation with one’s self, or with one’s own memories), the picture-book travels or stories that inspired many of Marker’s filmic and real voyages suggest that many of the times depicted in his multiple works are mostly imaginary or imagined (“imaginary portraits,” in Walter Pater’s sense20), and often after the fact, as L’ambassade (1973) “returns” to Paris in a loop-the-loop of cognitiverecursive mimesis, to send the viewer down the rabbit hole, never to return. Sans soleil, perhaps the most profound meditation on time in his long career of compressing time to filmic time-space, is, for this reason, not about Japan, and Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966) is, therefore, given its dependence on multiple interpretations of still images, a study in the virtuality of the image itself. This virtuality confers upon images a dynamic function that exceeds all frames of reference per se, and it places speculative-intellect-in-motion as the true address of all images (still or otherwise), lending additional support to the idea that errant wandering is a process of recovering what has been forgotten, repressed, or somehow mis-placed. December 28, 2011

IV. Who is Chris Marker? The gestation period for totalizing works of art is very long – perhaps a lifetime. Marker’s work is, therefore, incomplete and all attempts to write his biography fail, foremost because he does not cooperate in filling in the missing pieces of that life. In fact, the elisions are as important as what is known, and not because they hide anything of any use in filling out the portrait. Whether born of a wealthy family in France, born in Mongolia, or having arrived from another planet, does not really matter.21 The errant wandering is what really tells the tale. Yet we know more or less that Marker was born in July 1921. We also know that his name is/was Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, and that he adopted the name Chris Marker by degrees, sometime in the late 1940s, sometimes utilizing the oddly punctuated form Chris. Marker, and sometimes simply C.M.22 The “accidental halo” is, therefore, proscriptive . . . Crossing various media, disciplines, and – quite literally – the planet, Marker’s work inscribes a semi-divine caesura (elision, hole, lack, absence) that marks a presence. In advance of post-structuralism and deconstruction, Marker was already marking this gap in things, while also re-inscribing the figure of the paradigmatic “grace” that belongs to this rupture. As such, the work and

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the identity are a type of perpetual montage, and, as montage (or as means of eliciting utterly speculative praxis or movement within an elemental stasis or finitude), the work and the identity are one thing.23 If both Magnum and Marker were born out of the crucible of WWII, both also attest to something underway since that global catastrophe – something that might only be called the long-stalled birth of a new world (the renaissance of the immemorial or the restoration of the so-called Kingdom). This new world remains outside of time, insofar as time is still regulated (“marked”) by the striations and complexities of the administration of life through ideology, versus imagination. The apparatuses of ideology are also the persistent themes that Marker addresses through the totality of his project – a totalizing quality that subsumes all particulars, including the scant biographical details of his personal life. The intellectual biography is all that matters, and it is writ large in his works. Indeed, it is that beginning (the formation of the project and the identity) in the late 1940s that truly matters, insofar as Marker was one of many “unemployed intellectuals” who were absorbed into the apparatuses of the re-born avantgarde cultural institutions of the time.24 The end of the war marks the beginning of his project. Perhaps Marker attended the Sorbonne (and perhaps he did not) . . . This would also make Michaux’s remark that “the Sorbonne should be razed and Chris Marker put in its place” particularly telling/illuminating.25 Marker’s relationship to Michaux, as fellow wanderer, is indicative of the philosophical-literary coordinates of his intellectual project. The muchcited “I write to you from a faraway country,” from Lettre de Sibérie (1958), is an explicit homage to Michaux.26 There is an element of immediacy and avoidance in the intellectual vortex of the films. The unwritten biography of Marker exists across the times and places of his works and in the relationships to other figures in the literary and artistic universe of postwar France (and beyond). As intellectual biography, this spectral corpus may also be culled from his relationship to the so-called artworld (and Marker’s elaborate distaste for the established canons of cultural praxis, as much as his dislike of the elite or self-anointed institutions, is critical, insofar as culture is effectively “dead” or fossilized by both). The settings his works appear in – alternative theaters, film festivals, museums and non-commercial galleries – are significant. A pointed concern or disregard for intellectual property and its conventions is obvious – that is to say, the inversion of (or aversion to) that concept, in a spirit that denounces any ownership (or patrimony) for ideas proper, is central to the production and distribution of the works.27 Of late it is the Pompidou, Wexner, MoMA, Arles, and such that

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are the preferred sites for showing his work – excluding the virtual spaces of “Ouvroir” (2008), his “museum-island” in Second Life.28 This intellectual biography proves especially promiscuous when one enters into the tangle of collaborations and credits that underwrites his films, or the role he played in other filmmakers’ projects, or the direct homages to Bellon, Medvedkine, Tarkovsky, Yves Montand, Signoret, Akira Kurosawa et al.29 Foremost in this hyper-associative economy or admixture of forces, alliances, influences, and appropriations is the nonauthorial agency best described as assimilative. The permutations within certain works (the different cuts, the incorporations, the incisions, sutures, and transpositions), plus the move to new media and its multi-dimensional efficacy, push Marker as auteur into the shadow-lands of the art project itself.30 What is in Marker’s work, then, is the unwritten intellectual biography/auto-portrait. In the topological torsion of influences, references, allusions, and evasions resides the halo of the artist (Marker and notMarker). Michaux is clearly there (as Lettre de Sibérie is Marker’s first major solo project, and it also seems to correspond to his first “voyages to the people”).31 As with all artists of a grave, oracular, and semi-tragic nature, the films of Marker are oblique portraits – the dance of self and other (ipseity and alterity), often tragicomic, but never merely comic, and almost always, ultimately, tragic anyway. They conform to a “gnoseological” vision of the world – the torsion non-dialectical and the agency most often non-discursive (which is why the image remains central within the three-fold field of “vision” defined by Bazin). What are the principalities (or the “angels”) of the work? Where and how do they appear and disappear? What is the implied hierarchy or symmetry within the tropological knots and asymmetries? What are the hidden symmetries – and what do they outline, infer, or sketch? These “intelligences,” while supported by the tri-partite schema Bazin denoted (regarding Lettre de Sibérie), are in excess of the operation, which appears discursive, at first, but almost always fails, or falls into an abyss of thought – an apophatic survey or cartography of affects, sublimities (sublimations), depths, and personal aporias. The personal is “lost” in the labyrinth, and the presence of “Ariadne” is often sensed in the speculative thread that winds through the maze of images, ideas, and physical or historical facts that are amassed through the cinematic eclipse of Reason – all told, a fusion of senses (of tenses and times) that more or less demolishes any intellectual understanding of the film, in favor of a much more grave and forbidding moral understanding. “Ariadne” in this context represents a gaze that returns from within the film – the lost paradigmatic eyes or smile

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of something just beyond the last frame of the film, or the last image of a flickering monitor, or – more recently – the last photograph in a trail of still images running around the walls of a gallery. As a type of threshold, then, or as event horizon (a buried threshold/horizon), Marker’s works are – indeed – memento mori (death masks).32 They express a divine praxis underwriting the world that always comes to crisis in the singular work of art as it reaches the limits of what it can say and opens on to another world of which it can say nothing, but bear witness to anyway. The limit is the compressed state of things as things, and the compressed state of subjects as subjects (the temporal autonomy granted singular beings). The various intertwined conditions of these works “as voyages” attempt to divine that “divine economy” that, in turn, negates singular things – almost always reducible to the confrontation of subject and world (I and Thou, Self and Other, etc.). This preternatural state within the image is what animates Marker’s works (his filmic worlds, for sure, but also his written works and his still photography). The impersonal-personal agency (or agencies) of these works (the principalities operative within them, no matter how hidden) comprises a peculiar dynamic synthesis for what passes in the world as the multiple hauntings of nominal “subjects”; a synthetic or synchronic force, then, that denotes or creates singularities and then erases them in the very historical or contextual processes that underwrite their being. The subjective condition of the films and film-essays is, as a result, a confrontation with the penultimate other, mortality – figure of the sublimities and hidden symmetries buried in all things and in all subjects; and figure of the convergence of two worlds in one world through the mysticism of the image (an economy that can only be reached or spoken of through a theology of the image and its preservation over the ages as literary-artistic revelation). The point would seem to be to disclose a virtuous singular economy in the diversity of all things (a secret, hidden symmetry) through the agency of the suffering image. This secret fuses two worlds in one world (and its investigation involves the unearthing of the often-macabre details of the temporal world, insofar as that half-world is not the entire story). This Platonic and Aristotelian paradox, at once (paradox, because Plato and Aristotle are often proposed as antithetical), requires the exegetical apparatuses that come to bear in the interpretive intelligence of Marker’s work denoted by Bazin as central to the film-essays of the late 1950s – an irreducible “Christic” operation when placed within the context of a theology of the image (and an atheological praxis when presented as fait

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accompli, or world devoid of the paradigmatic agency of the dynamis that runs from “Heaven” to “Hell”). Erring on the side of this world (and of the suffering image), a certain redemptive power is restored to the world and to its dynamic agency otherwise known as historical time – and this excess is what permits an exit from the Platonic-Aristotelian stalemate (the essential ahistorical kernel of all versions of the perennial philosophy). Within that dynamic formalization of being as event within the image (stasis as movement, fact as antithesis) is the caesura of the messianic (the redemptive remnant of time that exists within time, but as limit or compressed transcendental agency within immanence, and within works of art that are also memento mori). The “this-worldly” aspect of Marker’s “voyages to the people” is underwritten by an “other-worldly” something else that remains the ultimate center between being and not-being; or, a center between beginning and end that establishes a paralogical suture between two states, or two worlds, and – as event – (re)fashions one world to come. The paralogisms of the theology of the image invoke the paralogisms of the word (or of image as word, and of word as image). This economy of signifying agency (agencies) requires, in turn, certain austerities or conditions to be cognized. These conditions are “this-worldly,” insofar as they reside in the so-called sublunary realms (sui generis), while, given the agency of the event of the image, they climb the analogical/anagogical ladder to the stars – the paradigmatic axis of representation (without ideology). December 31, 2011

V. The Supremacy of the (Image as) Word Of the signs, then, by which men communicate their thoughts to one another, some relate to the sense of sight, some to that of hearing, a very few to the other senses. For, when we nod, we give no sign except to the eyes of the man to whom we wish by this sign to impart our desire. And some convey a great deal by the motion of the hands: and actors by movements of all their limbs give certain signs to the initiated, and, so to speak, address their conversation to the eyes: and the military standards and flags convey through the eyes the will of the commanders. And all these signs are as it were a kind of visible words. The signs that address themselves to the ear are, as I have said, more numerous, and for the most part consist of words. For though the bugle and the flute and the lyre frequently give not only a sweet but a significant sound, yet all these signs are very few in number compared with words. For among men words have obtained far and away the chief place as a means of indicating the thoughts

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of the mind. Our Lord, it is true, gave a sign through the odor of the ointment which was poured out upon His feet; and in the sacrament of His body and blood He signified His will through the sense of taste; and when by touching the hem of His garment the woman was made whole, the act was not wanting in significance. But the countless multitude of the signs through which men express their thoughts consist of words. For I have been able to put into words all those signs, the various classes of which I have briefly touched upon, but I could by no effort express words in terms of those signs.33 —Saint Augustine Arts are also called “beginnings,” and of these especially the architectonic arts.34 —Aristotle

There are theories of visuality present today that have no relation to the principal venue by which words hold sway (as signs hold sway). Augustine’s words, as above, signal that signs are multiple and speak in different ways to the addressee for those signs (words, images, and things). While visuality in art and in present-day media considers the image supreme to the word, it is only because the word has lost its grip on things. Things as primordial words are also the origin of words – while that origin is not dissimilar to the origin of images (in art and in literature). Words connote the word as image (image as word), yet only in a certain half light, or only in a zone within memory and within cognition (means to knowing) that serves a purpose to illumine the vortex of worlds drowning in signs. It is axiomatic that words are signs, and it is more so in the abstract anti-nature of structural and semiotic theories of signs. Prevalent in this regard is the interpretation of signs – the hermeneutic circle that discloses the so-called empire of signs, and the post-structural emphasis on the selfreferential plenitude of language proper, as it dovetails with a dematerialized veneration of signs signaling signs. This contextualization of the formal means within signs (and within language) has oddly revealed a type of bracketed preliminary subjectivity that, oddly, opens up whole new points of purchase within the structural analysis of language. The foremost cause, then, for visual languages is a formal regard for the noetic and liminal nature of all signs, insofar as they approach, as dynamic function within representation, an elemental regime within language as such. There are, therefore, certain principles to denote:

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1/ Visual language is caught in a difficult and uneasy rapport with verbal language, making non-discursive forms of intellection idiomatic, on the one hand, and utterly radical, on the other. 2/ Images in terms of their relationship to complex theories of representation and systems of utterance (developed or primitive) suggest that the functionality or agency of the word as image (as one thing) is no longer a threat to the ideological regimes of power or the suzerainty of orthodoxy, but, instead, to the supremacy of the dis-embodied word proper. 3/ The supremacy of the word proper denotes the primary coordinates for knowledge as knowledge of worlds, versus knowledge as abstract language mapping worlds. Such mapping of worlds incurs a price or cost that, indeed, is a de-materialization of the world it maps, paradoxically, or not, making of that world a prison-house of language. 4/ The avowed originary ground for language is the world as such. The world as such is also the common ground for visual language and its primordial and timeless relationship to the one-to-one configuration of word as image (and image as word). 5/ The one-to-one figure of language as image connotes a reserve function within visual and textual exegesis that suggests a possible end to the dialectic of word and image (form and content, etc.) – yet only insofar as the image (as word) and the word (as image) become as powerful as their elemental origin permits. 6/ There is, therefore, the necessity of a reduction within all forms of knowledge that, in turn, begins to access what might only be called anamnesis or an evocation of a type of transmigration of words between states within thought proper. This transmigration relates intimately (and in the most salient means given to language) to the subjective field of incorporation of thought into images and words. 7/ The incorporation of thought in all forms of language is the gateway to a subjective state that is co-equal to what has been called con-science. Yet, arguably, and in terms of contemporary thought, what is here called con-science has nothing to do with individual subjective states whatsoever, but, instead, a more anterior form of knowledge that is always present but evoked most powerfully in art and literature (these venues for the same being tutelary outposts for an ever-present present that only seems futural, or past, due to the time-space conditions and constraints of modern subjects). November 1, 2011

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VI. Franciscan Ontology Both Alain Badiou and Antonio Negri in denigrating Giorgio Agamben for indulging “Franciscan ontology” and “philosophical chiaroscuro” inadvertently ennoble something incredibly important; that is, the presence of two worlds in one world.35 This doubling of the world is, for Agamben, the fundamental condition of subjects in the world. This “ontology” of difference, or this shadowy world conception is a concession to the inescapable fact that one never quite inhabits the world as such, but is caught, instead, in-between two worlds. Franciscan ontology in this sense engenders a vision of a world that might be, but never quite inheres, here-and-now. This vision becomes in such a chiasmic structuring of experience the evocation of experience as history, and the reduction of worlds to world suggests a profound disconnection between subjects and world, due, perhaps, to the failure of distance (the failure of difference and distance) and its empowering of a form of alienation through difference only because something incredibly important is missing. Words as images slowly close in upon that cause that supersedes causes, or the Franciscan perspective that might condition two worlds as one world, strangely, then, overturning the production of two worlds in the place of one world, as one world belongs not to the dialectical struggle of subjects caught in the chaos of mere worlds, but another subject altogether – and one that proves, through simply being, that being (as such) is utterly ill-defined. Philosophical chiaroscuro is an image that serves to de-limit a realm within the production of images – and its relationship to the word as image is such that it almost always renders worlds shadowy and recondite. This shadow-land conceals more than it reveals. In the world of images (versus words), and in the dialectical machinery of thought that produces worlds atop the world (substitutes fictions for the real), shadow-lands become a means of denoting the very nature of captive subjects, plus possible ways out of captivity. The evocation of another form of subject (subjectivity), by way of the interplay of light and dark, produces in its chief moments an extraordinary uniformity of purpose in all forms of speculative intelligence (or thought as means to escaping the syntagmatic excesses of discursive thought – or, thought overcoming thought). In the production of ontologies of disciplines (the delegation of autonomies for discrete representational systems) yet another ontology of another order emerges – that is, an ontology of ontologies. This is, after all, a Franciscan ontology, and it runs all the way up to the far horizon of

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thought, and back. It returns, as loop, creating what can only be called con-science, circumnavigating sense and instilling an entirely different perspectivism than any present in mere ways of explaining away being. Therefore, and for another subject, the suggestive contours of an idealism that proceeds by the production of difference, through the eliding of differences, instills a paradoxical paradigm of worlds within worlds that lead to one world36 – yet only one world in the penultimate figure of word as image. November 1, 2011

VII. The Reduction: A Poverty of Signifiers Zakaj osamosvojene lepote / Brez osirotelosti od / Nerojenih vesti . . .37 —Neža Zajc

The word as image implies the path from a topology of affects to a poverty of signifiers by way of the categorical reduction as new categorical imperative. This process of removing chains of signification to empower or re-empower the given is the chief characteristic of a Franciscan ontology (or ontology of ontologies). In a seminal manner, then, images and the words to which they are attached become detached to reconfigure the very nature of being in a model that is no longer a model (a relational torsion that also suspends the primordial chord that subtends being). Lorenzo Chiesa writes of Agamben’s concept of the messianic (a move from his theorization of homo sacer to his theorization of a form of time that inheres in all time): “Messianic time should rather be equated with the time we need to ‘bring to an end, to achieve our representation of time’. From this perspective, eschatological and chronological time can no longer be clearly distinguished: the kairos ‘is nothing else than a chronos that is grasped’ as such.”38 In this regard, Agamben’s statements regarding “the time that remains” and its relationship to art (and especially poetry and music) expose the elemental reduction that is the heart and soul of his so-called Franciscan ontology. That this time that resides within all time also serves notice on time by isolating and bringing to perfection historical time is, quite simply, an elegant and austere evocation of the premises of the word as image. Chiesa continues: Having said that, the fact remains that Agamben is able to formulate a transvaluation of biopolitics only in the guise of a bio-theo-politics. The

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importance of this conclusion cannot be overstated. Badiou is therefore correct in emphasising that Agamben’s thought ultimately expresses a “latent Christianity” for which the heroic homo sacer of politics is silently turned into the homo messianicus of Christian religion. Furthermore, according to this interpretation, Agamben’s notion of “weak” (faible) being, a being characterized by a “presentative poverty”, could qualify his ontology as “Franciscan”. Although Badiou’s remarks are concentrated in less than two pages, this appellation seems far from gratuitous, especially once we give the right weight to what Agamben himself says about Franciscanism in The Time That Remains. Francis and his followers conceive their Order as a “messianic community”, Agamben claims, whose ultimate aim is to “create a space that escaped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them yet rendering them inoperative”. This can be achieved by means of the so-called usus pauper, literally “the poor use”, which Agamben unhesitatingly defines, again, as a “form of life”. In other words, the Franciscan principle of poverty does not limit itself to refusing private property, but rather promotes a use of worldly goods that, as ontological “nullification” (the “as not”/“hos me”), radically subtracts itself from the sphere of civil law. Here Agamben’s distinction between “imperfect nihilism” and “messianic nihilism”, which in Homo Sacer he derives from Benjamin, finds its final Christian meaning.39

The nature and, perhaps, law of the circulation, presentation, and economy of signifying signs that constitutes discourse, and its relational or topological field of embodying what might best be called anomie (the foundation of the state of emergency and the point upon which homo sacer becomes either pariah or hero), carries within it the purposeless beauty (in the Kantian sense) of another law – an austere ascetic/aesthetic law. What obtains in the reduction of images and the circularity of language to “presentative poverty” is the formal, ontological, and capitalized x that remains in all encounters with the Categorical Imperative – that is, a content-free function within all metaphysical formulations that confront their own limit as impassable image (word as image). Beyond this, or at this threshold, something else is possible that is nominally impossible in terms of the image that separates itself from the word or holds itself within itself, immune to the other of its own formulation.40 The reduction of language to its frontier as image and the reduction of the image (negating its suspect autonomy) present the negation of nihilism as a return to the nexus of both, in thought. Worlds famously appear where there once was nothing; out of many causes, one cause begins anew.41 November 2, 2011

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VIII. The Negation of Privileges and Biases The privileges, autonomies, and biases of singular disciplines melt away under the austere auspices of upper-level ontology (an ontology of ontologies grounded in universal precepts). This has always been the case; and it is also why singular disciplines often resist both formalization and intertextual operations from within. In the case of a poverty of signifiers, and under the spell of the closure of dialectical maneuvers based in discursive thought, the possibility of a strange syrrhesis appears in the form of universality being re-naturalized in discrete experience (the avowed pursuit of transcendence in immanence) and the particularity and elemental nature of worlds being absorbed into a unitary vision that is non-ideological and non-hegemonic. That this same process has been evident across the history of modernity suggests that it is also the location of the very idea of history and diachrony proper, or the source of the arguments for and against the autonomy of disciplines. That Kant famously protected the arts from all instrumentalization is not in itself surprising; yet that autonomy of the aesthetic also conferred upon the arts a necessary correlation to the Categorical Imperative – or, the aesthetic is not so much the production of works that evade temporality and contingency as singular things that engage upper-level ontology as limit. A poverty of signifiers is a process of reduction that requires discrete gestures toward the ineffable, insofar as the ineffable is the “unknowable.” The reduction, in the spirit of phenomenology (but not of phenomenology as a discipline), in turn, turns on the negation of signifying chains in order to erase the apparatuses of thought (the architectonic forms of rationality and discursive reason) while also, more critically, negating the torsional folds of subjectivity that hold self and other in perpetual strife (no matter how evocative or Romantic that strife may be, or what conciliatory forms that battleground within subjectivity might take, in Art, in Love, or in Revolution).42 An ascetic aesthetic, yet without its High Romantic modalities or its religious instrumentalities, is paradoxically both a “road to riches” and a “road to ruin” – even if this road paved with lead only ever prompts the desire that it be turned into gold. The attendant pursuit of negating the nihilist raptures of autonomous disciplines in a highly elegant and highly non-confrontational manner elicits from worlds one world. And nihilism (as an elective, versus enforced state of being) is formulated always by degrees, or discipline by discipline, such that its overwhelming cultural presence is accomplished by the conformity of worlds to a vision that originates in the production of anomie (estrangement and privilege as

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superstructural force-field). Any efforts to prevent full naturalization of one world devoid of this superstructural anomie only lead to the renewed spectralization of this one-to-one rapport of word as image (image as world) and a perpetuation of the isolated dramas of singular disciplines (a typical, permissible affect of the apparatuses of power), a fact that accounts for all failures (historical, personal, and otherwise) of avantgarde praxis. The principal means to this end that is no end is through the elective embrace of what Agamben has indicated is the collapse of the dichotomy given to time (the twinning nemeses of eschatology and teleology), insofar as this schism is configured metaphysically and closely associated with the mental and discursive apparatus of subjects as autonomous agents caught in worlds (and thus, in the manner of Cartesian subjectivity, given to provoking a crisis in thought that produces that sense of autonomy while preserving the entire farrago nonetheless). This reduction of topological production in both ideology and in the physical premises of worlds proceeds by way of the word and its “embeddedness” in things, and by way of how things become illumined by the word (as worlds). Such half measures resemble the straightjacket of discourse; while, at the threshold of exiting the same, the figural excesses of the apparatuses under duress return as forms of meta-discourse: metaphilosophy or meta-critique; and, in singular instances of the art-historical kind, theoretical positions that escape art history proper and take up residence at that austere frontier – for example, meta-painting. November 3, 2011

IX. Transcendence and Immanence “But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead, and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”43 —Thornton Wilder

Arguments for transcendence in immanence typically take the form of a deconstruction of metaphysical precepts based on the summary judgment of the same regarding disembodied forms of thought. As such, all arguments for the work of art as an exception also rely on an incarnational theory of art that closes down this very dichotomy within thought by way of non-discursive means given to art.

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Perhaps one of the most problematic accounts of transcendence in immanence is to be found in Deleuze’s book Pure Immanence, a series of essays published posthumously, and closing with the essay “Pure Immanence.”44 In Deleuze’s battle with metaphysics and spectral forms of thought, politics is conceived as proceeding from actual circumstances, versus from the rarified realm of political agency. This confers upon politics a highly material aspect that is never quite played out in the theoretical apparatus of his work – insofar as philosophy, for Deleuze, is always futural. The additional recourse to impersonal agency suggests that the subject remains the primary conundrum, yet a subject once again delineated as subject-slave in most forms of political expedience. In the work of art, this so-called impersonal agency is jettisoned for the highly personal passage of the work of art through its various phases in the production of its supposed autonomy as work of art. Deleuze was always, in many ways, grappling with Kant, as all attempts to re-situate the artwork in social and politicized venues must overcome Kant’s Categorical Imperative for subjects (and, arguably, for subjects in the process of becoming, or in processes of subjectivization, all of which might be considered a metaphor for the production of works of art that exceed that very process of forming worlds – subjective worlds and actually existing worlds). Sovereign power famously indulges abstractions such that abstraction in art is often perceived as siding with the hegemony of a de-materialized world co-equal to speculative thought itself. While this de-limitation of contingency in formulations of “transcendence” considers abstraction a reduction of the Real toward the spectral, it is also possible that abstraction is one means of invoking a degree of reduction that re-actualizes the Real through the very act of circumventing it (or selectively and electively negating aspects of its formalization in worlds). Transcendence and immanence then become one thing, when in the work of art the various means of its production, its means of reception, and its interpretive apparatuses are set aside for the work of art itself. Here, the subjectivization of an impersonal thing (the work of art) connotes the very terms given to the production of subjects per se. What occurs along the path of the work of art, plus its reception, is normally the re-naturalization of this austere figure of thing-in-itself; yet a thing-in-itself that requires, nonetheless, an other to exist (and to be re-naturalized). In this case, Rancière’s privileging of the “spectator” takes on a sense of urgency, insofar as the observer of the artwork is also a participant in the renaturalization of the abstracted subject (the impersonal agency) of art.45 November 4, 2011

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Notes 1

See Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, p. 120. For this Medieval “moment” in Burckhardt’s sweeping summary of the political-cultural matrix that produced the Renaissance, see Keeney, “The Origin of the Arts,” in “Else-where”: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011. 2 See Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi. See especially Chapter V, “Le Jongleur de Dieu,” pp. 59-74. The key moment in Chesterton’s tale is the description of how out of the “nihilist abyss” of the so-called Dark Ages emerged a new view of the world as such; or a new view of an old world broken into pieces by the collision of worldviews denoted by Chesterton as “pagan” and “Christian.” For Francis, and according to Chesterton, this new vision of the innocence of the world was approached through the agonistic process of “seeing the world upside-down” (ibid., pp. 66-67) and “the world hanging by a hair” (ibid., p. 71). Out of this catastrophic vision Francis developed a “theology” of praise; a means of seeing the world as a gift (and a debt that we can never repay). “All goods look better when they look like gifts.” Ibid. Furthermore, Chesterton locates the somewhat dark heart of Franciscan ontology in the reduction of the world to gift and the resultant necessity of praise. “It is the key of all the problems of Franciscan morality.” Ibid., p. 72. Or, “It is the highest and holiest of the paradoxes that the man who really knows he cannot pay his debt will be for ever paying it. He will be for ever giving back what he cannot be expected to give back.” Ibid. See also, Chapter II, “The World St. Francis Found,” pp. 11-28, in ibid. Moreover, Chesterton further focuses the essential existential-metaphysical crisis that leads to a new vision of the world in describing the very vision that Saint Francis formulated through crisis of that world as things out of scale (dislocated and distended): “He never saw things to scale in our sense, but with a dizzy disproportion which makes the mind reel.” That is, “like a short cut in the fourth dimension.” Ibid., p. 98. As such, El Greco comes to mind . . . This “out-of-scale” worldview connotes not so much a disdain for realism, or perspectivism, as a moral vision that places a bird (or let’s say a cat) on par with human existence. 3 This is also the foundation stone for Caravaggio’s great painting The Seven Acts of Mercy (1607). 4 A possible third tangent, as both counterpoint and analogue to Western theories of visual agency, is the Tibetan “Medieval” vision of Shambhala and its presentation as mandala (circle) or evocation of the transcendental, recursive “innocence” of the world as gift, the common ground to all such approaches to the world being an intense personalism that paradoxically negates normative definitions of ipseity and alterity, collapsing the dialectic. On Kiefer’s recent works, see Gavin Keeney, “The Apparition of the One,” pp. 133-54, in Art as “Night”: An Art-Theological Treatise. 5 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). First published La fable mystique: XVIe-XVIIe siècle (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1982). 6 Kiefer has since left Barjac, for the environs of Paris. For images of Barjac, see Anselm Kiefer: Sternenfall, Chute d’étoiles, ed. Paul Ardenne, Pierre Assouline

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(Paris: Éditions du Regard, 2007), pp. 340-49. See also, Anselm Kiefer: Sternenfall, Chute d’étoiles, ed. Philippe Dagen (Paris: Éditions du Regard/CNAP, 2007). The latter includes “Glossary: Anselm Kiefer from A to Z,” with the following entry: “Barjac. Since 1993 Anselm Kiefer has lived on a hillside that he owns in Barjac, a few miles from Nîmes in southern France. He lays great importance on his place of work. His studio and the surrounding property, called La Ribaute, cover eightyfive acres. La Ribaute is a veritable maze . . . that includes a network of corridors, caves, former factory buildings and various chambers – like Kiefer’s work, it is a site of multiple layers and multiple vestiges. . . . Every painting has its own place, a site that suits it and allows it to unleash its full power. For Kiefer, Barjac is a place of inspiration and meditation crucial to the maturation of his current work. He stores many types of material there, collects thousands of books, and grows numerous plants (sunflowers, tulips, etc.) which he uses in his paintings. Barjac is a ‘total studio’ where the artist finds, recycles, and sifts the elements essential to the construction of his oeuvre.” Ibid., p. 70. 7 Kocijanþiþ, “Time and Hypostasis,” n.p. 8 Agamben is paraphrasing Aristotle’s penultimate statements regarding the origin (foundation) of all secondary causes, from the “final chapter” of Metaphysics, Book XII (Lambda), Chapter X. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, pp. 79-80. Chapter X concerns “the problem of the relation between the good and the world (or the way ‘in which the nature of the universe contains the good’), and is traditionally interpreted as a theory of the superiority of the paradigm of transcendence over that of immanence.” Ibid., p. 80. The key passage Agamben isolates is: “We must now consider also in which of two ways the nature of the universe contains the good or the highest good, whether as something separate . . . and by itself . . . , or as the order . . . of the parts.” Ibid. See Aristotle, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, revised with introduction and commentary by W.D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953), Book XII, Chapter X, 1075a. First published 1924. This statement would, of course, agree with Aristotle’s elevation of speculative thought as the highest human good in the Nicomachean Ethics. This, in turn, would be repurposed in Christian theology as the analogical and anagogical path of the soul’s return to God. 9 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 70. 10 Ibid., p. 83. “Order is the theoretical apparatus that allows us to think the relation between the two objects [the concept of order and things in/for themselves], which immediately presents itself . . . as the problem of the way in which the nature of the universe contains the good.” Ibid. This “splitting of the object of metaphysics” effectively empowers the world of multiplicity and virtual agencies, while never quite negating the totality that slowly slips toward the image of infinity, in secular thought, and revelation, in religious thought. 11 Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, Book XII, Lesson XII, n. 2631; cited in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 80. See Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, trans. J.P. Rowan (Chicago: Regnery, 1961).

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Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, Swann’s Way and Within a Budding Grove, trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Terence Kilmartin (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), p. 48. First published in seven volumes, between 1913 and 1927. 13 Marker was associated with two groups in the early postwar years, Travail et Culture, and Peuple et Culture. Travail et Culture was a “left-wing cultural organization composed of writers, filmmakers, theater directors, playwrights, and other cultural activists.” Alter, Chris Marker, p. 7. Additionally, “It subsidized and provided logistical support for projects by artists, writers, and filmmakers on the left.” Ibid. Peuple et Culture, “founded in Grenoble in 1944,” was “under the sway of the Parti Communiste Français.” Thus, Marker swung back and forth between a Socialist and a Communist set of colleagues, while many of their activities overlapped anyway. See ibid., pp. 6-9. Marker was also writing for the “leftist Catholic review” (ibid., p. 8) Esprit throughout the mid-to-late 1940s and well into the 1950s. It was from 1954 through 1958 that he edited the Petite Planète series of “travel guides” for Seuil. Ibid., p. 9. 14 Ibid., p. 10. Alter is citing a letter (e-mail) from Marker to Bill Horrigan, curator of the multimedia exhibition “Silent Movie” (1995), dated March 31, 1994. 15 Magnum was founded in 1947 by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger, and David Seymour. 16 Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Painter of Battles, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Random House, 2008). First published El pintor de batallas (Madrid: Alfaguara, 2006). 17 Strangely, a lost film by Marker, La fin du monde vu par l’Ange Gabriel, from the mid-1940s, and described by Alain Resnais as “mostly blurry and sometimes unidentifiable images shot in a devastated Berlin at the end of the war” (Alter, paraphrasing Resnais, in Chris Marker, p. 8), plus a radio broadcast from 1949 entitled “Jusqu’à la fin des temps” (“Until the End of Time”), foreshadows La jetée and the many instances of Marker’s return to an apocalyptic view of history. La fin du monde also seems the perfect origin for the Zone in Sans soleil (1982) and the subsequent digitalization and fragmentation processes Marker would submit his work to – as both homage to the power of the image and a demonstration that the image does, after all, impose a limit that resides in representation as an “end” and/or confrontation with time itself. Resnais’ comments may be found in Alain Resnais, “Rendez-vous des amis,” in Birgit Kämper, Thomas Tode, eds., Chris Marker: Filmessayist (Munich: CICIM, 1997), p. 207; cited in Alter, Chris Marker, p. 8. See also, Alain Resnais, “Chris Marker,” Image et son: Revue du cinéma (April-May 1963): pp. 52-53. In many ways, La fin du monde vu par l’Ange Gabriel and Marker’s short story Till the End of Time, published in Esprit (January 1947), pp. 145-51, return endlessly, foremost in the exhibition “Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men” (2005). The link, backward and forward, is – as often as not – “T.S. Eliot.” See the review of André Habib, Viva Paci, eds., Chris Marker et l’imprimerie du regard (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 2008), in David Foster, “Chris Marker et l’imprimerie du regard,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 19, no. 1 (Spring 2010): pp. 92-95. See especially p. 95 for Foster’s comments on Paci’s comments (in this volume) on “Owls at Noon Prelude: The

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Hollow Men.” Foster notes, as well, that “one of the strengths of this collection [of essays] is that it does not simply pay attention to Marker’s films, but treats his video work, his museum installations, his photographic collections, and his literary work and screenplays as equal parts of his oeuvre.” Ibid., p. 94. 18 “Culture is the rule, and art is the exception. . . . The Rule is to want the death of the exception.” Jean-Luc Godard, Je vous salue, Sarajevo (1993). The video is two minutes long. See YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ItEHvYi8KZI. Je vous salue, Sarajevo was included in the exhibition “The Image in Question: War – Media – Art,” curated by Antje Ehmann and Harun Farocki, at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, October 21-December 23, 2010. 19 “Such is the intervenor, such is one who knows that he is required to be faithful: able to frequent the site, to share the fruits of the earth; but also, held by fidelity to the other event [the storm] able to discern fractures, singularities, the on-the-edgeof-the-void which makes the vacillation of the law possible, as dysfunction, its crookedness; but also, protected against the prophetic temptation, against the canonical arrogance; but also, confident in the event, in the name that he bestows upon it. And, finally, thus departed from the earth to the sea, embarked, able to test the fruits, to separate from their appearance the latent savour that they draw, in the future anterior, from their desire to not be bound.” Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), p. 261. First published L’être et l’événement (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988). 20 Another elusive and highly allusive artist of the twentieth century, Ian Hamilton Finlay (the Scots artist-poet-gardenist), was, according to an “imaginary portrait” penned by Stephen Bann, either born in the Orkney Islands or the Bahamas, in the latter case to a father who was also running rum. In the former case, and by suggestion, Finlay became a type of modern-day Arcadian, a role fully consistent with his work “divining” the rhetorical secrets of the tropological territory known as “Arcady.” See Stephen Bann, “Ian Hamilton Finlay: An Imaginary Portrait,” pp. 7-28, in Ian Hamilton Finlay (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1977). Exhibition catalogue, Serpentine Gallery, London, September 17-October 16, 1977. 21 See Nora M. Alter, “Introduction: The Solitary Cat,” pp. 1-16, in Alter, Chris Marker. Marker has used the reference from Kipling, “The Cat Who Walks by Himself,” as a type of autobiographical epigraph in both his correspondence and as elliptical or signature gesture within his films that refers to the essential figure of the wanderer (the subjective condition of the filmmaker proper, but also the apparent imperative of all of these works as irreducible meditations on the human condition). This gesture is hypostatized in the digital cartoon figure of “Guillaumeen-Égypte,” Marker’s double or avatar and the browsing public’s guide to the “publications” Immemory and Ouvroir, as well as various online sites Marker served as correspondent for; for example, Poptronics. 22 Ibid., p. 3. Alter points to Ross Gibson’s “Letters from Far-off Lands: Two Studies of Writing in Exile,” pp. 19-62, in South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), for further clues on the construction of this “literary” identity. See also:

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Kevin Jackson, “Who is Chris Marker?,” Independent Review (May 18, 1999): p. 9; and Thomas Tode, “Phantom Marker: Inventur vor dem Film,” pp. 31-52, in Kämper, Tode, eds., Chris Marker: Filmessayist. The latter is “a valiant attempt to trace a clear trajectory of the early part of Marker’s biography.” Alter, Chris Marker, p. 124 n 6. The supposed origin of the nom de plume “Chris Marker” is the magic marker. While this might be true, it is also a red herring or a bizarre, inverted reductio ad absurdum, as the associative aspects of the assumption of the name suggest a relationship with Alexandre Astruc’s idea of cinema as a form of writing (perhaps a “magical” form of writing) with light. See Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-garde: La Caméra-stylo,” pp. 17-23, in Peter John Graham, ed., The New Wave: Critical Landmarks (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1968). First published “Naissance d’une avant-garde: La camera-stylo,” L’écran français 144 (March 1948). Marker and Astruc crossed paths c.1953, if not earlier, when they were working for Peuple et Culture, and when both were members of the Groupe des Trente, the former organization working to “democratize” culture, and the latter specializing in very short (30-minute) films – that is, “cultural work” via the film-essay (with all of its variable and voluble content configuring both personal and impersonal “political” agency). See Alter, Chris Marker, p. 18. Yet Marker’s role in Peuple et Culture starts earlier, or immediately “postwar” (that is, in the late 1940s), with the organization’s arrival in Paris from Grenoble in 1946. (Peuple et Culture had been founded in 1944, and whether Marker was involved in its first activities depends on where he was during WWII proper.) See ibid., p. 7. His involvement with the Paris-based iteration of Peuple et Culture also coincides with his first-known writings for Esprit. Further complicating matters is that Marker’s first writings for Esprit are signed “Chris Marker,” as of early 1947, whereas they are signed “Chris Mayor” in 1946. (See Esprit online archive.) The key here, nonetheless, is Esprit (established in 1932), with its connections and its links to left-wing Catholic politics, which at first blush took a radical antimodernist form, and later (postwar) became a defiant aspect within, and ally of, the New Left. In Alain Resnais’ sardonic, 22-minute film about the national library of France, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), “the credits read ‘Chris and Magic Marker,’” the first indication of a perhaps retrospective gloss applied to the adoption of the nom de plume. Ibid., p. 124 n 4. Whether Marker had been in touch with Astruc during the writing of the essay on the “camera-style,” c.1947, and whether the shift to “Chris Marker” from “Chris Mayor” in January 1947 has anything to do with this revelation regarding the operative agency of cinema remains conjecture. This idea of a “camera-pen,” however, and the apparatus of the camera as a kind of stylus, also confers upon Marker’s development of the filmessay a type of long-term meditation on the seductive power of filmic images and their relationship to, or mediation between, concrete reality (things) and pure thought (concepts) – a formal deconstruction, perhaps, of the threat of a filmic “animism.” The issue of political agency (personal and otherwise) is, nonetheless, the chief characteristic of the work Marker undertakes from 1947 to 1977, closing in many respects with Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977), with its asymmetrical, symbolical-historical “mid-point” being the event of 1967-1968 (with the

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assassination/murder of Che Guevara in Bolivia as decisive) plus its aftermath (revolt in the streets of Paris and around the world); a process played out with the subsequent activities with SLON and coming to a type of closure with the complete collapse of the New Left in 1989. As such, an analysis of what was removed from Le fond de l’air est rouge between 1977 and its second incarnation as A Grin without a Cat in 1993, with aspects incorporated into “Zapping Zone” (1990), might provide clues as to what was further “lost” between 1977 and 1993. It has been noted by Alter that one aspect of Marker’s erasure of the past occurs with the “absence” of certain political players in his later projects; for example, Fidel Castro’s near total eclipse by images of the people of Cuba in the exhibition “Immemory One” (1997). Ibid., p. 72. Alter also notes that “Marker’s early films rarely focus on specific individuals. Rather they deal with anonymous people.” Ibid., p. 37. This changes over the course of his work, as he weaves between depicting the personal and impersonal aspects of political praxis. The term A Grin without a Cat is said to indicate the coming of the revolution, or the event of revolution without a “body” – or, as it exists in a state of perpetual expectation, versus its realization in historical time-space. Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat, in fact, traces “the slow corruption of the ideals and the dissolution of the dream” of revolution, with particular attention paid to Cuba and Castro along the way. Ibid., p. 69. See Ibid., pp. 69-73, for a discussion of this film. (Alter is discussing the 1977 version and does not seem to distinguish between the two iterations of the film.) This dynamic interplay between personal and impersonal agency (agencies) in the essentially “messianic” and mysterious vocation of “revolution” (as parousia) is the chief characteristic of Marker’s apocalyptic vision of history (of the historical-ahistorical event of revolution and the end of the world). It is also something that comes to expression as early as 1946 with his first contribution to Esprit, Chris Mayor, “Les vivants et les morts” (May 1946), pp. 768-85, with its invocation (by way of Hebrews 11:5) of the archangel Gabriel and the end of the world; a view reinforced, as well, in the perhaps simultaneous, apocryphal (“lost”) short film, noted above, La fin du monde vu par l’Ange Gabriel, one of the several 8mm films Marker is reportedly to have made in the late 1940s. “Till the end of time,” Marker’s first contribution to Esprit under the nom de plume “Chris Marker,” in January 1947, is most likely based on this lost film. Co-terminus with this critical time frame (1947-1953) are the books: Chris Marker, Le coeur net (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1949); Chris Marker, Veillée de l’homme et sa liberté (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1949); Chris Marker, Benigno Cacérès, Regards sur le Mouvement Ouvrier (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951); and Chris Marker, Giraudoux par lui-même: Images et textes présentés par Christian Marker (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1952). See Alter, Chris Marker, p. 9, for a summary of this sequence of publications. The various pseudonyms assumed by Marker, “post-Marker,” include: “Paul Lechat,” “Fritz Markassin,” “T.T. Toukanov,” and “Boris Villeneuve.” For ongoing details of “lost” aspects of Marker’s checkered personal history and various apocryphal projects and collaborations, see Christophe Chazalon, “Bibliographie de Chris Marker,” Chris Marker, n.d., http://www.chrismarker.ch/bibliographie/index.html.

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As analogue, Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory comes to a marvelous apotheosis when it reaches the Scholastic disquisitions on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. This occurs with Chapter 6, “Angelology and Bureaucracy,” pp. 144-66, wherein he invokes Pseudo-Dionysius to more or less escape once again into the “caesura of the speculative” (Philippe LacoueLabarthe’s locution from Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics, 1998) – through a deconstruction of the term hierarchy. See Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, pp. 152-59. Notably, on page 156, Hugo Ball appears very suddenly and then disappears as quickly (by way of Byzantinisches Christentum, Ball’s famous 1923 treatise on Byzantine angelology, “in which the figure of Pseudo-Dionysius is analyzed at length”). Ibid., p. 156. Pseudo-Dionysius is “an apocryphal author whose gesture [‘the invention of the very term “hierarchy”’] is one of the most tenacious mystifications in the history of Christian literature.” Ibid., p. 152. The book referred to is The Celestial Hierarchy. Agamben’s Warburgian philosophical inquest is not unlike Marker’s. Agamben as a latter-day Aby Warburg, and Marker as a latter-day Pseudo-Dionysius, suggests that montage (while often called “obscure”) is, after all, a form of intellectual or speculative mysticism. The systematicity of Pseudo-Dionysius, for example, conceals a dynamic, neo-Platonic reconfiguration of the very idea of multiple agencies at work in the world – of operative agencies and principalities that inhabit thought as much as physical space-time. That this all came to an absurd apogee/nadir (nadir/apogee) in the High Middle Ages is also, arguably, one reason that the Medieval gave way to the Renaissance. The rigidity of the order could not hold, and the world constructed on such a model (manifold worlds within worlds) could only crack, like an egg, to give birth to a new, more forgiving order. This all, nonetheless, explains the accusations, as above, aimed at Agamben of indulging “philosophical chiaroscuro” (and he does write by a form of literary-scholarly montage), while also partly explaining the apocryphal and slippery discursive agency of Marker’s work and life. Marker is in pursuit of the paradigmatic through an investigation of both the universal and contingent orders that “mark” time, while what eludes the archive of time is what he increasingly returns to over the course of his project – that is, the Warburgian image in motion (but a motion always in pursuit of what resides in the antechambers of the archive of knowledge of worlds, or the obscure dynamis that runs up and down the analogical ladder, to the stars and back, but which also cannot be contained – for long – within instrumentalized orders; or which, remarkably, runs from the beginning to the end of all works of art as models for worlds, and which ends once and for all at “the end of the world”/the end of art). It is not coincidental that Agamben cut his discursive teeth at the Warburg Institute Library in London where books are arranged hierarchically (and “hieratically”), but also where knowledge is a system of allusions, correspondences, and speculative gestures crossing suspect, unitary disciplines. Such synchronic studies and conjectures are the essence of the Dionysian or pseudo-Dionysian worldview. 24 See Alter, Chris Marker, p. 7. Joseph Rovan, founder of Peuple et Culture, reports that Marker was part of a “team of unemployed intellectuals” hired to work in the “documentation center.” This would be roughly 1946, when the bureau

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moved from Grenoble to Paris. Alter is citing Joseph Rovan, “Un mouvement culturel et politique: Peuple et Culture,” Les cahiers de l’animation 57-58 (December 1986): n.p. 25 Alter, Chris Marker, p. 5. 26 Alter connects this statement to Michaux’s “surrealist” Plume; précédé de Lointain intérieur (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1938). It is a type of transcription. Alter, Chris Marker, p. 27. To say that Michaux inhabited a visionary universe is to understate his hypnotic, allusive style. His travels within and without are coordinated assaults on conventions and times. His idiosyncratic artworks and his mannered approach to literature remain unassimilable effects and affects of a life lived at the margins of normative experience. “There is not one self. There are not ten selves. There is no self.” Henri Michaux, “Afterword” to Plume. (Plume is Michaux’s alter ego, as Sandor Krasna, in Sans soleil, or Guillaume-en-Égypte, passim, are Marker’s.) The similarities between Marker and Michaux are stunning. Both are classic elusive/reclusive figures, both traveled widely, and both wrote poetry, travelogues, and literary-poetic prose. Both were drawn to photography (perhaps at first by fascination and then through a sustained critique of its function within mimetic orders). Michaux was notably a friend of the Hungarian photographer George Brassaï, and from 1937 to 1939 he edited Hermès, a journal devoted to mysticism and poetry. The mystical and the recondite are the key ingredients in his work, often attributed to drugs; but more than likely the mystical bias was actually the source for his later experiments with mescaline. It is said that he studied with the Jesuits in his native Belgium and considered becoming a priest. Lupton notes that, in Immemory, Marker admits to “travelling Plume-fashion.” Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 222 n 7. Lupton also notes that Marker referred to his sometimes inscrutable process as “inventer le hasard” (“to invent by chance”), something derived from his studies of Giraudoux. Ibid., p. 224 n 58. This all gives additional merit to a close reading of an image of Marker, c.1939, by Louis Marcoussis published in Les devins: 16 pointes sèches de Marcoussis (Paris: La Hune, 1946). Regarding this image, see Note 10 in Appendix A: Séance “C.M.” of the present study. For Marker’s relationship to Michaux by way of the epistolary nature of his ciné-essays, see Bellour, “The Book, Back and Forth,” in Roth, Bellour, Qu’est-ce qu’une madeleine? À propos du CD-ROM “Immemory” de Chris Marker, pp. 111, 116. “The letter, for Michaux, is only the crystalline form of a larger manner of always addressing the reader, of calling upon him with all the means of the language. Michaux speaks to us, he draws each reader into a singular dialogue without any conventional identification, but with a certain effect: it is his wager on the future, his chance of survival. It is the only way to break the circle of a solitude that filmmakers experience less than writers, but which enters into the makeup of the filmmakerwriter.” Ibid., p. 111. “This fluidity implies knowing how to address oneself in order to move toward others, and knowing how to touch the other of each one who becomes involved. Beyond humanism, it is the gift of alterity, guaranteed perhaps by an ethic of reserve. This is what links Marker to Michaux.” Ibid.

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Peter Blum Gallery, New York, New York, would seem to be a late exception, except that Blum is a relatively benign, yet benevolent force in the artworld, having started well before the artworld became the nightmare it is today. The Pompidou (Paris), Wexner (Columbus, Ohio), and Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York) all commissioned works by Marker, which were then first exhibited in their galleries before traveling elsewhere (if at all). The Centre Pompidou commissioned “Quand le siècle a pris formes: Guerre et révolution” (1978), “Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television” (1990), and “Immemory One” (1997). The Wexner Center for the Arts commissioned “Silent Movie, Starring Catherine Belkhodja” (1995). MoMA commissioned Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005). “Passengers” (2011), Marker’s exhibition of photographs taken on the Paris métro, was exhibited at Peter Blum Gallery and then traveled to the International Photography Festival in Arles, France. While at Peter Blum Gallery, the edition of photographs was also for sale, but for relatively modest prices (the price going up as the edition sold down). 28 “Ouvroir” (as virtual installation) was created by Chris Marker and Max Moswitzer. A virtual museum situated in the Internet portal Second Life, and commissioned by the Museum für Gestaltung, Zürich, it was part of the 2008 exhibition “Chris Marker: A Farewell to Movies” at the Museum für Gestaltung. 29 Marker made film-essays on Alexandre Medvedkine and Andrei Tarkovsky that are incredibly delicate portraits of both, at or around the times of their deaths: Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993); and Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999). While not released until 1999, significant portions of the latter film were shot at the time Tarkovsky was finishing the film The Sacrifice (1986) and dying of cancer in a Paris hospital. The 26-minute, 1985-1986 portion (Tarkovski) was incorporated into “Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television” (1990), a multimedia installation for the Centre Pompidou, and part of the larger exhibition “Passages de l’Image,” September 18, 1990-January 13, 1991. Regarding Le tombeau d’Alexandre, see Alter, Chris Marker, pp. 46-52. Alter states that such “films are thus posited as death masks, as memento mori of even that which is not yet dead.” Ibid., p. 33. Regarding Marker’s relationship to Tarkovsky, see Susan Howe, “Sorting Facts; Or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker,” pp. 295-343, in Charles Warren, ed., Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film (Middleton, CT: Wesleyan University Press; Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996). Mémoires pour Simone (1986) was produced by the Cannes Film Festival. Signoret, while often appearing in Marker’s films as voice-over, such as in Le joli mai (1962), has links to Marker that crisscross his life, in the form of appearing in, for example: L’aveu (1970), directed by Constantin Gavras (Costa-Gavras), still photography by Marker; On vous parle de Prague: Le deuxième procès d’Artur London (1969), a SLON projected directed by Marker; La solitude du chanteur de fond (1974), a film about Signoret’s husband, Yves Montand, directed by Marker; and Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat (1977/1993); directed by Marker. More importantly, perhaps, she grew up in the Paris neighborhood of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and – born in 1921 – was an exact contemporary of Marker. She also frequented the same café in Paris, the Café de Flore, where the French

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intelligentsia met during and after the war and which Marker is said to have frequented during his time with Travail et Culture. Signoret began her acting career in a very modest fashion around 1942, dying in 1985 an acclaimed French screen presence. She was a partisan of leftist causes, as was her second husband Montand, throughout her 40-year, postwar career. There is no question that she is a type of “Ariadne” to Marker’s “Theseus” (eventually marrying the Italian-born “Dionysus”/Montand). Lupton states that Marker had known Signoret since “the 1930s,” meaning well before her acting career began, and when she and Marker were effectively teenagers. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 135. Bill Horrigan states that Signoret was “his childhood friend from Neuilly-surSeine.” Bill Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” in Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 146. Signoret, of Jewish extraction on her father’s side, took her mother’s maiden name for her screen name and worked briefly for an occupationist, pro-Vichy newspaper, Les nouveaux temps, in the early 1940s. Marker’s activities during the wartime years, his early twenties, are more or less a complete matter of conjecture. That conjecture includes “a paratrooper, a member of the French Resistance [the Maquis/FTP], [and] an interpreter for the U.S. army.” Alter, Chris Marker, p. 3. The Maquis was a group of resistance fighters who inhabited – primarily – the mountains and “bush” (maquis) of northeastern and southeastern France. It was initially comprised of young men attempting to escape forced conscription/labor under the Vichy regime in 1943. Nevertheless, Molly Nesbit notes in the brief essay “In Hind Sight,” pp. 151-53, in Chris Marker: Staring Back, that Marker and Simone Signoret attended the Lycée Pasteur, as did Anatole Dauman, where Sartre was a philosophy teacher. Notably, she also states that Marker contributed to (if not edited) the high-school literary journal Le trait d’union. Sartre provided his students with an array of avant-garde reading materials, including works by John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and William Faulkner. Ibid., p. 153. Nesbit also notes that both Signoret and Anatole Dauman recount the “story of Sartre at the Lycée Pasteur” in their respective memoirs. Ibid., p. 153 n 2. See Anatole Dauman, Anatole Dauman: Pictures of a Producer, ed. Jacques Gerber, trans. Paul Willemen (London: British Film Institute, 1992). Dauman was the producer of many of Marker’s films. In her 1976 memoir, Signoret describes Sartre’s arrival at the Lycée Pasteur at the time of the publication of La nausée. “At first the boys thought he was off his rocker. They were the offspring of the typical Neuilly middle class: vice presidents of engineering firms; that sort of caliber. Gradually Sartre captivated them completely – they all wanted to get a Ph.D. in philosophy.” Simone Signoret, Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), pp. 17-18. 30 Godard’s JLG/JLG: Auto-portrait de décembre (1994) is exemplary in this regard, with the putative subject of the film (JLG proper) seen only obliquely, or in shadows, if at all. 31 Marker’s first such voyage was in 1955, to China, with the film Dimanche à Pékin (1956) the outcome. The film is 22 minutes long. Ten years later, by the time of Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), with its 800 images from 26 countries (perhaps not all by Marker), Marker had somehow traversed the entire planet.

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Travels by this time include: China, Russia/Siberia, Israel, Cuba, Korea, Japan, and the US. After 1968, and with the advent of the SLON cooperative, Marker’s voyages became increasing “intra-territorial” or political. In the late 1970s the voyages “to the people” began anew, with Japan informing both the book Le dépays (Paris: Éditions Herscher, 1982) and the film Sans soleil (1982). Alter states: “Marker traveled to all of the continents (with the exception of Antarctica) and several islands in between, such as Iceland, Bijagos, Cape Verde, and Hokkaido.” Alter, Chris Marker, p. 5. The literality of this statement hardly matters. 32 In this sense, the invention of the daguerreotype in 1839, with its rather unforgiving ability to record every flaw in the human face or body, contains the entire history of photography as an apparatus that preserves an image of life in death (or death in life) – the memento mori itself. Early on, and in a particularly ascerbic assault on photography famously quoted in Walter Benjamin’s “A Little History of Photography,” Charles Baudelaire savagely decried the intrusion of photography into the arts in Salon of 1857. See Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott, Kingsley Shorter, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-1934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), p. 527. More than 150 years later, or well into its second centennial, photography has instead overspilled its supposed historical mandate and become an artform in its own rite, with all of the attendant issues of representational hubris given to the speculative work of art itself. 33 Saint Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II, Chapter 3:4, p. 36, in The Works of Aurelius Augustine: A New Translation, ed. Rev. Marcus Dods, vol. 9 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1873). 34 Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book V, 1013a; cited in Giorgio Agamben, The Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 10. First published L’uomo senza contenuto (Milan: Rizzoli, 1970). 35 Badiou objects to Agamben’s presentation of “being as weakness, as presentational poverty.” He calls him the “Franciscan of ontology,” who “prefers, to the affirmative becoming of truths, the delicate, almost secret persistence of life.” Badiou, Logics of Worlds, p. 559. “There are in fact two Agambens. The one holding onto an existential, fated and horrific background, who is forced into a continuous confrontation with the idea of death; the other seizing (adding pieces, manoeuvering and building) the biopolitical horizon through an immersion into philological labour and linguistic analysis: here, in the latter context, Agamben sometimes almost looks like a Warburg of critical ontology. The paradox is that these two Agamben[s] always live together and, when you least expect it, the first re-emerges to darken the second, and the gloomy shadow of death spreads over and against the will to live, against the surplus of desire. Or vice versa.” Antonio Negri, “The Ripe Fruit of Redemption,” trans. Arianna Bove, Il Manifesto, July 26, 2003, http://www.generation-online.org/t/negriagamben.htm. 36 “Since the goal is already present and thus no path exists that could lead there, only the perennially late stubbornness of a messenger whose message is nothing

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other than the task of transmission can give back to man, who has lost his ability to appropriate his historical space, the concrete space of his action and knowledge.” Giorgio Agamben, “The Melancholy Angel,” pp. 104-15, in Agamben, The Man without Content, p. 114. “By opening to man his authentic temporal dimension, the work of art also opens for him the space of his belonging to the world, only within which he can take the original measure of his dwelling on earth and find his present truth in the unstoppable flow of linear time.” Giorgio Agamben, “The Original Structure of the Work of Art,” pp. 94-103, in ibid., p. 101. “The essence of nihilism coincides with the essence of art at the extreme point of its destiny insofar as, in both, being destines itself to man in the form of Nothingness. And as long as nihilism secretly governs the course of Western history, art will not come out of its interminable twilight.” Giorgio Agamben, “A Self-annihilating Nothing,” pp. 52-58, in ibid., p. 58. 37 Neža Zajc, “Snameš belo masko si” (2011). “But independently Beauty / without an orphanage consciousness / of those, never born . . .” Translation by N.Z. 38 Lorenzo Chiesa, “Giorgio Agamben’s Franciscan Ontology,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, no. 1, 2009, http://www. cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/130/239. Chiesa is discussing the shift in Agamben’s thinking from the books State of Exception (Stato die eccezione, 2003) and Homo Sacer (Homo sacer, 1995) to The Time that Remains (Il tempo che resta, 2000). 39 Ibid. The citations within the citations are from The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). First published Il tempo che resta (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000). Badiou’s high-handed denunciation (mocking of Agamben) occurs in the appendices of Logics of Worlds. 40 See Jacques Derrida’s theory of auto-immunity or the expulsion of difference within closed worlds through “self-destruction” – an apt metaphor, perhaps, for Deconstruction proper. Texts include: Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascal-Anne Brault, Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, pp. 178, in Derrida, Vattimo, eds., Religion. As a figure of the Freudian drive (deathdrive), this metaphor that relies on biological torsion is an immense figure of dialectical and topological excess – a state within the biopolitical horizon that can cut two ways, nonetheless destroying antinomies but also destroying life if not situated in the place of its origin, or at the edge of the world as limit (as metaphysical-noetical limit). Its destructive capacity is, therefore, its negative function. This negative function is a value assigned to it historically through the very production of antinomies; political, biological, and subjective. 41 See arguments, passim, for and against the concept of causa sui – or, the socalled self-causing cause. Logically, causa sui makes no sense. Nietzsche famously called it the “rape of logic,” no doubt a backhanded compliment. 42 Art, Love, and Revolution are the three forms of the event premiated by Badiou in Being and Event. In each form of event the relationship of the subject to an

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event that overflows and overwhelms the normative processes of subjectivization, but also alters the very terms of engagement by the subject with worlds, is formulated as a type of catastrophe endured. 43 Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, p. 124. This justly famous spoken passage from the end of Wilder’s 1927 masterpiece is generally considered the authorial equivalent of all other forms of negating determinism (theological, nihilist, etc.), insofar as he places the figure of the bridge (an Incan rope bridge that collapsed at the very opening of his novel, killing five people) at the intersection of two worlds; a topological and tropological gesture that secretly conceals one world. In making the cause of the disaster (sought for in divine agency, as retribution, by the Franciscan monk who witnessed and catalogued the event and its possible purposes) impersonal agency bar none, or love itself, Wilder – through the pure vehicle/event of the novel – unveils a primary truth given to Art proper and to the production of (fictitious) worlds. The Franciscan monk, Br. Juniper, searches for and misses the underlying common ground for the five deaths at this one moment, whereas the godlike author (having created the characters and the event) is able to dispassionately disclose, however slowly over the course of the narrative, that the common element in each distinct life was a response to the event of love, bringing them all together at the decisive moment – each according to their own experience, and each according to their individual dramas/dreams. In a word, the drama is “immanence” (conjoined and fused to its other, “transcendence”). 44 Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001). 45 See: Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator; Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2007); and Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2004).

ESSAY FIVE SOMETHING ABOUT NOTHING

The conjuration is anxiety from the moment it calls upon death to invent the quick and to enliven the new, to summon the presence of what is not yet there. . . . This anxiety in the face of the ghost is properly revolutionary. If death weighs on the living brain of the living, and still more on the brains of revolutionaries, it must then have some spectral density. To weigh . . . is also to charge, tax, impose, indebt, accuse, assign, enjoin. And the more life there is, the graver the specter of the other becomes, the heavier its imposition.1 —Jacques Derrida

I. The Power and the Glory In the majestic arc of Agamben’s demolition/deconstruction of the appropriation of the determinate glory of the divine economy formulating worlds within worlds, by worldly forms of power (the assimilation and theft perpetrated by secular and ecclesiastical forms of governance, spectacle, and the apparatuses of control), there is an intensely claustrophobic moment in the second-to-last chapter, Chapter 7, “The Power and the Glory,” that is nearly unbearable.2 This passage through the dark heart of ceremonial power (of both Church and State) is illuminated briefly by the appearance of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Hegel, the former in the form of a statement regarding symbols (“The symbol is the thing without being the thing and yet it is the thing: an image condensed in the mirror of the mind and yet identical with the object . . .”), and the latter in an echo of the same (a symbol is “something obscure, which becomes ever more obscure the more forms we learn to understand . . .”).3 This intense deconstruction of the premises of power, privilege, and – ultimately – cultural production orchestrated by Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory invokes the mysteries of the economy of subjectivities and principalities that are at work in (and haunt) the world; that is, what comes into view is an elaborate hierarchy of intelligences that draw their power from the economy of hypostases (forms of divinity) that mirror one another within the holy trinity. As mutually determined forms of divine

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agency (and as reserve fund/ground within all forms of administration of the world, including the production, distribution, and elaboration of systems of governance), the inner economy of the trinitarian formulation of Christian theology is centered on the function of what Agamben identifies as “glory” and the circulation of the same within the three agencies of the trinitarian construction of the word (world) as image, and image as word (world). Subjectivity itself is called into question . . . As such, in the application of the doxological-theological paradigm to the modern world (which has essentially evolved from a progressive, atheological re-construction of the world based upon empirical and secular formulations of the very same external economy of bias and privilege, hegemony and ideology, or that which first appeared in the imperial and ecclesiastical garb of law and canon law), a rather devastating critique of the mutually contracted exigencies of the modern State and the modern ego comes into view. The entire range of secular concerns with constructing subjects that are free as long as they are also constrained by the State and its regulative structures and strictures is effectively called into question when the gift of the world as a powerful, interlocking set of principalities and universal agencies (speculative thought, and/or thought of thought) is revealed beneath the tattered clothing of the modern age – an antithetical “Gnostic” vision that is, after all, alive and well, as it would seem, because it has been buried in the theological model since the very beginning of the Christian dispensation.4 Marker’s works access this same problematic by a surfeit of images and facts (through the narrative and visual matrix of his filmessays, but also through the generally melancholy photographic regime he assembles to undermine the supremacy of any singular administrative model for the world). His politics is, therefore, an apolitical strain of a messianic type – an invocation of the endlessly deferred paradise to come (“communist,” in the pure sense), and, as such, his works enter into and operate within that “zone” or that “level five” that is effectively the sacrificial rite of passage of the suffering image at the center of the world and at the center of all time (and times). This mystery of subjective states within subjective states (and in this case in the world at large, versus within the abstract and universalizing tendencies of the Trinity) is what makes Marker’s still images “move.” (Yet it is this internal economy of the Trinity that preserves the world.) Yes, the hand of the cameraman trembles as well; but it trembles before that profoundly unsettling vision of a world and of a people (but, moreover, of singular persons, and most often singular women) lost in the apparatuses of a perpetually fallen

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world, suggesting once again the Gnostic vision of a semi-tragic drama played out in a world ruled by a demiurge. It all begins to fall into place (or it all begins to unravel) when we realize that this model of worlds within worlds is predicated on the fact (on the concrete particulars) of a universe animated by interlocking subjectivities that are also not-subjects per se (not subjects in the normative sense, anyway). The subject of subjectivities is, secretly, then, the not-subject (or, the mystery of subjectivity is that subjects are formed by subjective praxis – subjectivity itself). Agamben broaches this mystery in the form of a possible theology of aesthetics (not an aesthetics of theology).5 In a Zen setting, this possible theology of aesthetics is grounded in the ultra-paradoxical presence of “The Fifteenth Stone” (subjectivity itself), which can never be seen in Zen gardens – or which implies and supplies a blind spot in all things and in all instances (all experiences) of the world in motion (the heterogeneous world of human affairs).6 January 1, 2012

II. Personal and Impersonal Political Agency In the essay “Sixties,” in the booklet included in the 2008 DVD rerelease of Le fond de l’air est rouge/A Grin without a Cat (1977/1993), Marker reflects on the peculiar revolutionary moments from 1967 through the 1970s and the aftermath in the consolidation of power through reaction, noting briefly (in passing) the arrival of Nicolas Sarkozy “forty years later,” a neo-liberal who would find in May 1968 “the source of all evils.”7 Curiously, Marker’s rueful essay notes the various impressions of “1968” by way of both its detractors and its protagonists. As the theme of Le fond de l’air est rouge is the repeated failure of revolutionary praxis in its confrontation with power and orthodoxy, this recourse to a sardonic tone suggests that the political agency crossing all of Marker’s work (including the apparently non-political or apolitical works) is effectively and utterly non-ideological and profoundly concrete. The various movements and moments he documents in Le fond de l’air est rouge have their antecedents in History (and he capitalizes this word in the 2008 essay, as if to counter any mere academic reading of the term, and to, perhaps, doubly mock the misuse of the term in Marxist rhetoric). History in this sense includes previous concrete revolutionary events that echoed or reverberated within “1968,” and he notes, in particular, both the industrial actions of 1948, or the great miners’ strike, and the 1967

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Rhodiaceta strike, with its rare occupation by the workers of the physical plant of the textile factory in Besançon, France, the latter echoing, in turn, similar strikes from 1936 by the short-lived Popular Front.8 In 1967, in a flurry of activity, Marker is: in Cuba in the spring; in Bolivia (with François Maspero) in June, “searching for a certain Régis Debray”;9 back in Paris completing Loin du Viêt-nam (1967); and then in Washington, in October, to film the march on the Pentagon that is documented in La sixième face du Pentagone (1968). In late 1967, he is then back at Besançon to film the strike at the Rhodiaceta textile factory, for ORTF, the state-owned television station (through the aegis of the maverick news-magazine Caméra 3). This film became À bientôt, j’espère, and it was finally aired on March 5, 1968, after several attempts by the authorities to suppress it.10 Marker’s narrative on the fortieth anniversary of May 1968 (his essay is dated “May 2008”) invokes “the debris of History.”11 It does so in the same spirit that Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit invokes world history as Spirit. Marker cites the philosopher Maurice Clavel in stating that May 1968 was “Spirit itself” revolting against a materialistic society.12 By inference, Marker is also siding with the concept of revolt as historical praxis proper, and the statement he utilizes by Clavel permits him to obliquely reference the parallel argument that 1968 was the year “structure” took to the streets (an anti-structuralist statement that is essentially anti-ideological, anti-institutional, and proto-anarchic, while also being fundamentally against the abstractions of blood-less political agency in its various dogmatic and/or doctrinal forms). If anything, it is the failure of the intellectuals, not the workers or the students, that Marker lambasts. And it is the petty party politics that his critique in Le fond de l’air est rouge analyzes in sardonic montage. The Communist unions are equally to blame for the betrayal of those who take action (the workers, the demonstrators, the activists, the “guerrillas” et al.). Marker’s sense of history is tragic. His view of revolution as event, as political praxis, is based on an understanding of direct action – when protest becomes resistance, and when gesture (street theater, etc.) turns into transgression.13 The Communist Party had missed every helping hand offered by History and started the long spin of a motorless airplane. French Maoism would remain a landmark in the history of teratology. The foolishness of morons is a plague, but statistically speaking we have to put up with it. What is fascinating is the foolishness of clever people and, in this particular case [the connivance of the CGT, the Communist-led union, and the government], some of the cleverest.14

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Marker’s politics is a this-worldly type of transcendentalism (an ultraradical conflation of the transcendental and the immanent) – an Emersonian transcendentalism. His recourse to impersonal agency in Le fond de l’air est rouge (“a touch of red is in the air,” as a touch of “autumn” is in the air) invokes what moves in History as an evocation of rebirth or of “renaissance.” That it is almost always betrayed by Power (and he also capitalizes the word power in this retrospective essay on the 1960s) is one conclusion among others that is unavoidable in the synoptic survey of his putative documentary work. Yet his concept of this impersonal agency (or dynamic function) moving in time as historical praxis, and moving through what is called history, is privileged by the cyclical nature of culture proper (most often configured as repression). The structuralization and re-structuralization of forms of the administration of life, as it forms institutional complexes and then dissolves them anyway through the effects and affects of entropy given to its swerve between operativity and inoperativity, is what, after all, produces, reproduces, and productively or unproductively defines culture. As early as Lettre de Sibérie (1958), but also with Resnais’ Les statues meurent aussi (19501953) and Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), the latter two films for which Marker effectively “apprenticed,” the privileges and biases of official culture are questioned in favor of the lived experience of the world. Not a Marxist worldview then, as such, it is a worldview that nonetheless sides with Marxist-Leninist praxis (yet praxis as thought or intelligence, in its most preliminary and/or dynamic-speculative sense), insofar as it remains outside of ideological constructs that contribute to the ossification of the spirit, not revolt per se, of cultural rebirth. That said, he is equally critical of the failure of intellectuals and their abstract or avantgarde “machines” (Philippe Sollers and Tel quel, for example15) as he is of party politics per se (the PCF or CGT, in France, the later Fidel Castro, in Cuba, or the travesties of the Cultural Revolution in China). The squabble in L’ambassade (1973), when the dissidents holed up in an unnamed embassy in an unnamed city (“unnamed” until the very last moment of the film), signals what is coming in 1977 with Le fond de l’air est rouge. The alternative title, A Grin without a Cat, comes from the notion embedded in the film that revolution is focused almost always in the initial acts of resistance to power, as in the guerrilla movements of Latin America (a spearhead without a spear, etc.), and, then, endlessly compromised or squandered in the internecine warfare of political praxis. The political agency condemned is compromise, or when a new elite is formed and the first wave is betrayed and/or destroyed. (In L’ambassade, for example, the first great surprise is to find out that the military coup, which has plunged

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the unnamed country into crisis after revolutionary strikes and demonstrations have brought the country to its knees, has come about through a power play that has returned the middle class to preeminence through the agency of the army and through the divisive tactics of the Left, the anarchists, and the various militants represented by the handful of dissidents who have sought refuge in the unnamed embassy. The penultimate surprise, however, is that the country in question is France, and that the city in question is Paris, a fact that remains unknown until the camera pans outside the claustrophobic interior of the embassy to the streets and to the Eiffel Tower in the distance.16) Marker thus documents and valorizes revolution only insofar as it revives the primordial causes of political agency – the space of a politics and the formation of a people. The non-ideological cut (a loophole) of the films is focused in the biting commentary, which is often as pathos-ridden as it is sardonic-ironic. And, typical of every work he has ever produced, this pathos takes the form of his return to the singular face of passion (or the lack of the same) – the individual (as principal vehicle for the event of “renaissance” and/or defeat). The essay “Sixties” closes with the tragedy of the Action Directe, the French version of the Red Brigades (Italy) and the Baader-Meinhof Gang (Germany) – a strange moment given that Marker’s rhetoric often indulges the privilege or necessity of “direct action” (militant intervention). If in 1967 he is in Bolivia “looking for Régis Debray,” by 1977 the repeated Western (First World) attempts at guerrilla action and the violence implicit in the Marxist-Leninist canon have played out. From the death of Che Guevara in 1967 to the death (murder in prison) of the principals of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany (the so-called German Autumn captured in Gerhard Richter’s series of paintings entitled “October 18, 1977”17), what has returned is not a touch of “red” in the air, but a touch of “blue” – or, the inordinate sense that Left-Right politics is utterly incapable of resolving what is, after all, a historical standoff, a plague, that stretches across centuries producing the nightmare of Reason at the expense of Passion. If the “enemy” is various totalitarian regimes of power (Communist, neo-liberal, or otherwise), the “friend” is the proverbial other (the Emersonian “friend” who believes in the truth of the event of the individual). The first crucifixion (or the light crucifixion) is the event of Truth as lived experience; or, the re-naturalization of the so-called ego or “I.” The second crucifixion (as apocalypse) is another matter altogether, as in many ways it overturns or negates the first crucifixion, while it is also, effectively, the transfiguration or destruction of the nominal self after it

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has been catastrophically re-naturalized in the here-and-now.18 What transpires in Marker’s evocations of political agency is the complex of forms of domination and the historical attempts to free the individual from both morally bankrupt bourgeois conventions and the ideological constraints of systems (forms of administration and control). This focus on the individual is telling; for, what transgresses within revolutionary praxis is not the individual struggle so much as the mark of the individual conscience as revolutionary praxis (collective passion) and the suspension of the law in favor of the first truth (the first crucifixion in truth). What returns, then, in the three photographic exhibitions Marker mounted between 2007 and 2011,19 after the collapse of the last revolutionary outburst, and presumably on the threshold of the next, is the solitary pathos of the exquisite humanity of his project – the singular expressions of the passion (the first crucifixion in truth) that is embedded in time and in history, in the expressions of faces, and in the “cultural” vehicle of photography and its mnemonic force-field as document (the documentary agency of its time-worn apparatus).20 If Marker’s transcendentalism is Emersonian (or Kantian), it is also about limits, and that sense of limit is also an expressive index of a vast other-worldly power that is erased or imprisoned by Power proper. History is present in each unique moment captured – but it is present in singular instances as a manifestation of passion (Spirit), or what passes “in the air” as “revolutionary-incarnational” praxis, both personal and impersonal at once, and, therefore, highly personal (as personal “end”).21 The force-field of the photographic image (as event) is the power of mimetic agency and production – and Marker’s “voyages to the people” are non-discursive exercises or documents of a process that never quite ends. The short films (film-essays), the apocalyptic poems published in the pages of Esprit (c.1947), the books, the exhibitions, and the forays into “direct action” (his participation in the events he documents) all point to a variety of left-wing, Catholic personalism that first came to expression in the postwar work, always framed in contrast or in tension with the structures of power (as hegemony) and the political agencies at play in the historical tableaux depicted. These reflections of historical time become increasingly refracted through the operatic lens of the camera – the dialectical formulations breaking down and the abstractions of intellectual games deconstructed. The still imagery of the shifting survey holds the center, and the “soul” of the operatic production is the stillness of the singular image. Cinema begins and ends with the still image. This momentary stasis incurs the price of the moving image. The price of that movement is the tragic path of the historical project of all caesuras – political and

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otherwise. Marker’s studies are “Christic,” from beginning to end – yet the eloquence of the compositional structure of the work receives its elevation from what resides beyond the historical-political economy of what is documented. Sans soleil (1982) and Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977/1993) are both, strangely then, abstract studies in the highest, metaphysical sense (first crucifixions in truth), neither film being properly rooted in a time or a place.22 The nature of abstraction is loosed toward a totally non-rational space-time (the caesura or gap) that each document unseals in its acute “apocalyptic” end report. Each instance of abstraction bends back toward the shores of the here-and-now. Yet in the repeated circularity of the various reports (and in their recycling through other media and through other projects) there is that ever-elusive escape route (the passage through abstraction to the immemorial within memory), the cause célèbre for Marker’s conversion to the cryptic and “Christic” re-naturalization of the suffering image in a context that illuminates its placement as limit (as end in/for itself).23 In an odd coda to the essay “Sixties,” under the title “Points of Reference,” Marker assembles nine epigraphs; they are a conflation of his various concerns regarding revolutionary praxis. One, from Sigmund Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (The Uneasiness in Culture), regards the nature of images: “Whatever horror certain situations inspire in us, for example, that of the antique galley slave, or the Thirty Years’ War peasant, or the victim of the Holy Inquisition, or the Jew exposed to the pogrom, it is nevertheless impossible for us to put ourselves in the place of these unfortunate people.”24 A second is a quotation from Daniel CohnBendit regarding the origin of the Baader-Meinhof atrocities: “The origin of the urban guerrilla comes from farther away . . . It was then the Vietnam war and its silent approval by the powers of this country. It was then the student revolt, a blossoming of revolutionary utopias, which could at no price be given their chance in this country. Yes, we know and we will never forget how this merry-go-round of death began.”25 Marker then goes on to quote Castro, regarding the discord between Mario Monje Molina, Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Bolivia and Che Guevara, and Stalin regarding the unfortunate distance that develops between the masses and the leader (from a speech given in 1927) coupled with a statement from 1957 by Mao Tse-tung denouncing Stalin for the crime of “metaphysics” or believing in a fantasy (himself) and lopping off anyone’s head who might disagree with him.26 More importantly, the absurdity of the charade of power is demolished by a quotation from Carmen Castillon, published in Libération (October 15, 1977):

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She [Beatriz Allende] was not the only one to commit suicide. This involves all women who survive within the limits of action and death. Because a woman who cannot speak amongst men, because of this female solitude, this daily self-destruction, is also a form of suicide . . . True politics must contain the existence of people. One only struggles for others if one also struggles for oneself . . .27

This collage or montage of statements contains the kernel of the tragic, and the circumstantial collision of ideology and life, to which Marker effectively says “A-dieu” with Le fond de l’air est rouge. The serendipity of the last citation in the series of epigraphs is stunning. Marker closes Le fond de l’air est rouge with a scene of wolves being hunted by helicopter and shot to death on a snowy expanse, one after another. The last epigraph in the above-mentioned essay is followed by a footnote stating that he was unaware, at the time of the making of the film, of a song by Vladimir Vissotsky called “Hunting Wolves.” The song (which is an edgy elegy) includes the lines: “Let’s smile at the enemy / with our wolf’s smile / to cut short the rumors / But on the snow tattooed with blood / our signature / – we are no longer wolves.”28 Art in its highest modality is utopian – therefore, when utopia is present, art will no longer be required, as such. This Hegelian-Platonic sentiment or axiom, which cuts two ways at once, seems especially apropos of Marker’s work. The vague beginnings (the early literary works of the late 1940s), the early 1950s’ literary exploits, combined with the first forays into the film-essay, the studied and steady avoidance of any artistic regime once it has become established or exhausted (such as steering clear of Right Bank auteurism), the almost insistent or insane traveling to collect images of faraway cultures, peoples, lands – all inhabit that “zone” in memory that is ultimately and utterly utopian. If this land is also a no-where (or often mytho-poetic, making Marker a mythographer or, more properly, a cosmographer at times), it is only so insofar as its presence is deferred, while the causes of its absence (its loss, obstruction, betrayal) become the subject of the overt political films, with the same going underground (or within) in the more abstruse “apolitical,” finely wrought studies, meditations, and surveys of the state of things. If this paradoxically suggests the world-weariness of the World Soul, as it takes concrete form in very real people, places, and things, it is only because art addresses the concrete as much as it comes into being through highly speculative and exacting formal measures. World-weariness always appears in retrospect . . . These measures (or the metric of art) include the physical structure and technological devices of artistic media – which is why the precise conditions of Marker’s multimedia installations cannot be

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ignored, just as the venues in which these works appear are as important as the works proper. The false claim of the symbol (of a classical halfmeasure) is not the issue, insofar as the structural form of the more abstruse works, such as the dream-like aspects of Tarkovsky’s films, represents specific instances of the utopian impulses of the art of cinema. Yet if, as Marker notes in Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999), Tarkovsky sought to elevate cinema to the level of painting (through the simultaneous incorporation of painting, music, and literature into his films), he thereby built an operatic or symphonic structure that also defied reduction to mere symbolical tableaux; an economy, then, that finds its inverse corollary in Marker’s progressive move toward a more primitive and austere evocation of the pure poverty/communism of cinematic utopian praxis – that very structural or formal means to ends that he extracted from the Russian progenitors of avant-garde cinema. January 15, 2012

III. “Russia” and the Russians The “Russia” of Marker’s world is, in fact, the utopia that never arrived after the October 1917 revolution. (He upbraids himself in Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966) for this idealization of Russia, and his 1993 portrait of Medvedkine is highly troubled for the same reasons.29) Marker’s early problems with censorship (DOC, Le joli mai, etc.) are but a taste of what Tarkovsky, Medvedkine, and Vertov experienced and endured. Yet the first truth of this “Russian” obsession is that it is, after all, concrete in the sense that the works and alliances Marker built are all very real. The incorporations and appropriations are, therefore, important to acknowledge and properly assimilate to his often-complex political and ground-shaking vision of revolutionary praxis. In Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch, Marker describes Tarkovsky’s seven existential-metaphysical filmic crises as exercises in faith (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice), noting in particular the great Russian focus on the Earth and its redemptive facticity. He describes the long tracking shot in Andrei Rublev (1966), when the bellmaker is assembling the works to cast the bell that may or may not ring, as ending in a view that we all recognize from “the domes of our churches” – that is, the equivalent of the Pantocrator’s gaze, judging us from some other-worldly zenith; that is, a momentary pause at the paradigmatic point of “no return.” This vision of “Russia” is the dream of Art proper – the splendid confluence of pure artistic praxis and the

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Real. When Tarkovsky slowly pans the Medieval icons painted by Rublev, at the end of Andrei Rublev (and when color first appears in the film), it is not surprising, then, to find (as Marker notes in the voice-over of Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch) Malevich’s black cross within the semiabstract folds of the painting. Marker quotes Pavel Florensky on beauty – noting that beauty is rooted in the here-and-now (in things), and not otherworldly and/or lost in dis-embodied aesthetic theory. It is no coincidence that the protagonist of The Sacrifice (1986) teaches aesthetics . . . Both Marker and Tarkovsky are purists in this regard, and their aversion to lifeless abstraction is shared. Mirror (1975) and Nostalghia (1983) are “Markerian” in some respects. The central event in both films is decidedly self-revelation;30 and, as both filmmakers traffic in images that are also moving concepts, not symbols, that conceptual disposition is made all the more profound by its heteronomous, versus paradigmatic, relationship to painting, music, and literature. The non-discursive, non-linear, and apolitical politics of the works of both Marker and Tarkovsky, as these films move along the vertical axis of representation, shed all ideological baggage en route to that pleroma that is – as figure of speech and thought, at once – the utopian, pure-communist fuse (zenith) in all artistic means to no particular end other than “The End” – the “Finis” of early cinema, and the last words on Golgotha before the skies “closed.” Marker’s formalism is an expressive methodology for the activation of buried or obscure associative magic – a type of transcendental cinematic animism that is, also, “Russian.” The Real Presence of Marker’s photographic (painterly-literary) works is “judgment” – or, the transcendental-immanent moment common to the photographs, the film-essays, the multimedia projects, and the texts is the this-worldly presence of the Big Other – the goal/ghost of all ontological inquisitions. The precise or imprecise nature of these evocations of the utopia of the here-and-now (always a possible utopia) comes and goes in history and through time. The Zone of Sans soleil, the “zone” of “Zapping Zone,” the “fifth level” of Level Five, and the synchronic plenitude (plurisignation) of the tableaux vivants circle the semi-divine mystery of the incarnational force-field of art in its relation to judgment (pure paradigmatic, speculative agency or intelligence). In this manner, George Steiner’s statements regarding history, and his “Markerian” aversion to semiotic drift for its own sake, return the cataclysmic operations of art to the paradigmatic axis of representation en route to that second crucifixion of the suffering image. Steiner’s telltale appearance in the Marker-directed 1989 television series L’héritage de la chouette31 (plus the latter’s appropriation of the former’s statement, “It is not the literal past that rules

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us, but images of the past . . .”32) reinforces the classical double bind of dealing with images, and/or the incursions of judgment required in the production of art that is also philosophically sound. Ranging across photography, painting, and literature, the inquiring intellect reverses and rehearses Ruskin’s denotation of painting as superior to literature, invoking as well the spell of another art that is buried in all arts – the “art of memory” (and anamnesis as the fundamental dynamic function of all mimetic praxis). This range of options for artistic surveys (for representational values) works against the grain of singular disciplines and practices; the reversal of the progression from literature to painting, when reversed, returns the productive historical progression of the arts to the point at its center – a certain poverty (communism) of signifying agency, hallmark of utopian premises (the immemorial as un certain regard). Within this double movement, the center is always the same center – yet it is also, paradoxically, a moving center, or a dynamic center that occurs (appears and disappears) as event (Real Presence). The political agency of Marker’s work is that of the Other – or, the sublimities embedded in all encounters with the Other. In this way, it is the High Romantic trope of “experience” that becomes the language of choice – word as image (and image as word). The image is, then, the untranslatable word; as the word (as “experience”) resides in the imageas-word. (Marker’s comments regarding the translation of his 1949 novel Le coeur net, and its unrecognizable state when rendered into English and German in 1951, are a significant admission of this fact, as are Yves Bonnefoy’s remarks regarding translation . . .33) The political agency of the Other is the encounter itself as event – and the various interpretive regimes Marker has employed over time (or the economies of the image as word, and the representational values of signifying agency) represent the problems of the limit contained in both words and images. The excess that Marker isolates in the apparently apolitical projects (most emphatically in works of the order of high montage) is attributable to the presence of that encounter with incommensurability (or what haunts all experiences of the sublimity of worlds and words). Political praxis, under such terms, requires the questioning of all images and all words – pushing the frontier for utopia further and deeper into experience itself, versus records, documents, and surveys of the archive of experience past. (Translations of Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1922 Sonette an Orpheus (Sonnets to Orpheus) are an example of how language is, after all, highly situated in a regime of associative and dynamic, interpenetrating discourses of word-as-image. The banality of English translations of the Sonnets is, then, also a form of destruction – whereas the sublimity of the word-images survives, anyway,

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somewhere in-between German and English, in the universality of the image-word torsion of the poems. Similarly, Michael Hamburger’s translations of Hölderlin’s poetry reside more intimately at the site of their production, insofar as Hamburger was both German and a poet. Tarkovsky’s legendary staging of the opera Boris Godunov, in 1983 at Covent Garden, is a similar example of a translation that is accomplished through an elective transmission of one set of circumstances to another, yet through the facticity of the event and its translation of one threshold of experience to another.34 Marker’s works accomplish the same feat, while they also, in the end, are productive – as with Tarkovsky’s opera – of a new work of art as lived experience of an inaccessible “past” work of art through the agency of the pure political formalism of the artwork.) This universality of image-as-word is the utopian spirit of art as experience. Marker’s “Russia” resides in that non-space and that non-time. In theological terms, Art in/for itself – under the auspices of the utopian/communist imprint – becomes an expression of the Holy Spirit, in motion. January 19, 2012

IV. Alexandre Medvedkine Marker’s portrait of Medvedkine in Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993) is highly instructive of his own relationship to Soviet cinema. Most especially, this difficult or troubled rapport with the antecedents to cinéma vérité in the West (and its protean formal properties, in terms of structure and often satirical-critical commentary) comes forth in the figures he assembles to comment upon Medvedkine’s life work. When Medvedkine’s Scast’e (Le bonheur/Happiness) (1934) leaked to the West (c.1967), sent like an “SOS” in multiple bottles to various film archives (one by one from deep within the Soviet film world), Marker and SLON received a copy by way of Jacques Ledoux (curator of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique).35 The film opened the floodgates of a retrospective survey of Soviet filmmaking repressed and forgotten other than by remote and distant figures (partisans) who somehow survived the Stalinist purges of the 1930s.36 Marker’s Le tombeau d’Alexandre37 is comprised of a series of six letters addressed to Medvedkine.38 Letter One surveys Medvedkine’s early years: he is 17 years old at the time of the October Revolution; a member of the Red Cavalry in 1919 (during the Civil War); moves from theatrical/vaudevillian productions for the Red Army (mid-Civil War) to

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cinema in the late 1920s, making 18-to-20-minute films in the “people’s cinema” movement;39 and begins the ciné-train experiment (c.1930), making rather caustic and toxic films for one year documenting the broken industrial facilities and dysfunctional collectivized farms of the post-WWI Soviet Union, traveling the country with a young and idealistic cadre of “true communists” (that includes actors from Vsevolod Meyerhold’s theater company). Letter Two details the shift from post-Civil War Russia to Stalin’s campaigns to re-build the State’s crumbling infrastructure, rationalize its agricultural production, and re-propagandize all forms of culture in the process. Vertov appears in Letter Two as the progenitor of the Soviet documentary film that captures “life as it is” (“Kino-Pravda” or “Film Truth”) versus the more popular, fictionalized nature of cinema (as fantasy and/or escapism). This recourse to the hard facts, however, is notably and repeatedly undermined by the sheer brutality of those facts. Although the films produced by the ciné-train were considered lost in 1932, as many as nine were found (by Nikolaï Izvolov), and those subsequently released are exceptionally excoriating. Medvedkine and Company show in sardonic, black-and-white portraits the decrepitude of the factories, mines, and collective farms of the era. Watch Your Health! is the least daunting in this regard, even if it documents the lack of hygiene in the Red Army and in one particular case shows half a platoon disappearing (by slow dissolve) as they cross a ridge (implying the cost of disease and poor hygiene). Journal No. 4 documents a locomotive repair depot and the corruption of the bosses and the absenteeism and carelessness of the workers against a clipped and stylized presentation of the woes of everyday life at the Soviet plant.40 A workers’ tribunal is seen with its attendant standoff between managers and workers, a committee meets, drafts a report, and files it away . . . The film, in fact, documents the industrial shambles, and Medvedkine’s camera is subtly and suitably merciless. How Do You Live Comrade Miner? is perhaps the bleakest of the trio of films circulated, with its survey of the “Grand Mine October” (where 1,500 workers toil for a salary of 300-400 rubles, living en masse, singly and/or with their families, in barracks-style quarters, three to a bed, and with mattresses that lack straw because the quartermaster has “forgotten” to provide it). Medvedkine at one point shows the tattered clothes of the workers and contrasts them with the pinstriped suits of the bosses, which nonetheless also have holes in the seat of the pants from endless hours sitting around debating, producing charts, plans, and reports . . . The absurd nature of many of the films accounts for the fact that they were “lost” (or buried in the archives of the regime). They also attest to Medvedkine’s secret and often-repressed artistic side, insofar as the more

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avant-garde aspects of Russian art from the 1920s never quite go away. Marker at one point early on describes how the highest expressions of Russian avant-garde art in the 1920s were ultimately no different than the Socialist Realist work (canonized by Maxim Gorky at the Congress of Writers in 1934) that accompanied it and eventually took over. In the former case, he states, the artists were just that much more intelligent. In both cases, however, Art itself was quite simply reduced to propaganda – depicting the race toward the “New Man.”41 Medvedkine came from at least three generations of peasants. He fought for the ideals of the Revolution and never changed his mind, even as he negotiated the ravages of Stalin’s regime. His films generally ended up shelved and/or destroyed, and the appearance of Scast’e is all the more instructive given its silent-movie-like, Chaplin-esque qualities. Pure satire, Marker notes that it in fact documents many of the same events and miseries found during the ciné-train years. Medvedkine is presented as a “true communist” in a world of make-believe communists, where reality is always staged to cover over the grim reality of the totalitarian state.42 Like Meyerhold, Isaac Babel, and Vertov, he is presented as a tragic figure at the forefront and then edge of the birth of cinema.43 Meyerhold famously incorporated Vertov’s short films into many of his experimental theatrical works (and both Meyerhold and Vertov ended up dead by the early 1950s, Meyerhold shot during the purges and Vertov dying effectively of a broken heart). Marker spares no sarcasm for the retrospective, post-Stalin re-workings of Soviet history, pointing out that as one works backward through the nightmare of the twentieth century, one also always arrives at the cause for the nightmare – the battle against the combined dynasties of the Romanovs and the Russian Orthodox Church. This sentiment mirrors Cohn-Bendit’s statement regarding the origin of the atrocities of the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany (that origin for the cycle of bloodshed being the massive crimes of the Vietnam War era and the complicity of capitalism proper).44 In the first letter of Le tombeau d’Alexandre, Medvedkine is said by Lev Rochal (one of Marker’s interlocutors) to have changed “one religion for another” (or, Medvedkine’s early years, when he was steeped in that unique Russian religiosity that favors naturalism over supernaturalism, naturally evolved toward the religion of godless communism, as in postwar France and elsewhere many former Catholic priests and clerics became Marxists).45 Rochal states that “a believer takes to new ideals . . . to bring happiness to all mankind.”46 This shift underscores the hidden “religious” dimension (the redemptive praxis at the heart of communism), directly and indirectly explaining the unrepentant “communism” of the true believers. Medvedkine and Vertov are such

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souls (even as Marker shows that their attempts to maneuver within the apparatus of the Soviet state led them to inexplicable and often-damning compromises with power). The often-cited remark from Le tombeau d’Alexandre that this world is an endless war and the artist must choose sides (attributed to Roman Karmen) suggests Marker’s own allegiance to the “cause” (which is always the same cause).47 Le tombeau d’Alexandre approaches closure with Marker visiting Medvedkine’s grave. He has died on the threshold of perestroika, and he has died (Marker suggests) thinking that perhaps, after all, everything was not in vain.48 Marker uses one other figure to remarkable effect in this regard – and it is another nod toward the tragedy of the Soviet Union. This figure is Yakov Tolchan (a near exact contemporary of Medvedkine), and another survivor (but just barely). Tolchan worked with Vertov, as cameraman, as early as 1926 (and Tolchan’s heart is broken as well). He has given up all interest in anything other than music.49 Tolchan, Vertov, and Medvedkine are “dinosaurs” – remnants of a “lost” time. Marker shows a young girl cuddling a toy dinosaur as the credits come up, stating that yet some still find them adorable . . . One wonders, then, who is the “last Bolshevik.”50 Marker uses contemporary film scholars, plus the filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya, brilliantly (and foremost) to underscore the “rebirth” of interest in this almost forgotten genius of early Soviet cinema (inclusive of all of the problems of Medvedkine’s cyclical capitulation to Stalinism).51 Yet Medvedkine’s rebirth accompanies, oddly, the collapse of the Soviet state, suggesting Marx’s prescient prediction that true communism would one day emerge from the “highest” (though not necessarily most ethical or humanistic) form of capitalism. The darkness pervading this film is an indictment of the various apparatuses of corrupted power (of the paradigmatic in service to ideology at the expense of everything and anything else), a critique that is no less appropriate to the conditions on the ground in 1993, with the so-called triumph of neo-liberal capitalism, when the film was made.52 This darkness is a form of pessimism that dovetails with Dostoevskian pessimism – and the various martyrdoms along the path of the film are testimonials to the fact that the Revolution is always already to come. This “to come” (à venir) seems, today, to be a proprietary gesture of French criticism proper (Marxist and otherwise). Marker’s politics is neither Bukharinite nor Trotskyite. What obtains within his appropriations of “Russia” is that peculiar tragic chord that runs through its entire history. The last scene from Modeste Moussorgski’s Boris Godunov is used to superlative effect by Marker when coupled with resignation in the face of the endless cooptation of the Revolution by the forces of repression. The scene marshaled to portray this centuries-long

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historical tragedy is when a simpleton/muzhik (on his knees) weeps “for Russia,” as the opera based on Alexander Pushkin’s tale/play heads (“offstage”) toward yet another phase of usurpation and suffering (power plays coupled with renewed poverty and repression) . . . What emerges in this powerful survey of the “Russian tragedy” is the concurrent power of Art proper in its relation to power. Marker’s privileging of literature (as “untimely” speculative intelligence) is no less problematic, in this sense, as it is equally given to the distortions that roiled Soviet avant-garde art from the early 1900s up till its suppression in the 1930s by Stalin and the summary verdicts visited upon many of its key progenitors. The main ingredient remains, however, the utopian-spiritual nexus of the representational dynamic of art in its torsion with the here-and-now. Marker’s own work over the years between the late 1940s and the early 1990s is in many ways a mirror for this larger, century-long tragedy. His recourse to highly nuanced narrativity sides with his privileging of literature over the visual arts, something that effectively hides out in his own visual-exegetical works. If in Le tombeau d’Alexandre he famously proclaims that his task is to “question images,” that task also involves questioning his own use of the visual spectrum of knowledge in relation to what truly interests him – that is, the non-discursive (yet verbal-iconic) apparatuses of political agency and their incorporation and/or deformation in cultural production through political praxis, the latter (or the deformation of non-discursive knowledge) occurring with the unholy alliance between spectral ideology and the spectral-utopian plurisignation given to Art in its capital form.53 In the last letter we are treated to a one last revelation about Medvedkine’s dance with Stalin in the form of a rather innocuous and incompetent May Day 1939 film entitled Blossoming Youth, a fairly typical piece of bombast and non-sense produced in the heyday of the purges, and – Marker announces dramatically – directed by Alexandre Medvedkine.54 This last revelation, while damning, has been foreshadowed earlier in one of the most beautiful scenes of the film. Early on in the first letter, Marker is inside a Russian Orthodox church (clearly postperestroika) and noting the icons on the walls, but also the living icons or the faces in the group assembled listening to the holy liturgy – that is, surveying the post-communist human “presence.” It is at this point that he recalls an old adage, “Use a long spoon to sup with the devil.” It is served up under cover of questions regarding how far the Metropolitan of the Church went in collaborating with the Soviet regime – how far, he intones, not whether or not he did so. But this is then followed by a rhetorical question addressed directly to Medvedkine (and by association to all of his

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ill-fated fellow travelers in the world of Soviet agit-prop art): “Did you wear out your lives calculating the length of the spoon, only to discover there was no supper?” February 15, 2012

V. Denise Bellon The film Le souvenir d’un avenir (2002) is – due to its belatedness – a highly enigmatic work that traces the work of one of the progenitors of photo-journalism (well before Magnum was founded in New York by Robert Capa et al.), but also casts a withering eye on the path of the photographic image through WWII and beyond.55 It notes in particular Bellon’s association with (and alliance to) Surrealism, before and after WWII, with a nod toward Breton’s genius for finding artists and visual analogues for the Surrealist worldview. Post-WWI is presented as a temporary respite prior to the horrors that return with WWII, and Bellon’s work (1935-1955) crosses this time frame as an eloquent documentation of the uneasy accord found, despite trips to France’s African colonies and the Spanish Civil War. As “post-war becomes pre-war,” the 1937 World’s Fair becomes a propagandistic affair or circus, as the founding of the Cinémathèque Française56 becomes a precursor to the canonization of film and cinema as the principal means of condensing the agency of the image into a culturally determined, authorized form of spectacle. (It is here – under the spell of its commercialization – that one of the Lumière Brothers is summoned to state, rather late in Marker’s narrative, that cinema has “no future.”) Oddly, the aborted Helsinki Summer Olympics turn up, an event Marker would then return to in 1952 with his first feature film project, Olympia 52. Bellon’s photography serves, in 2002, as an archive for the progression of the image across media and venues (including advertising), a course charted primarily through its content and its implicit commentary on France, art, and the world falling once again into disarray, only to emerge in the 1950s to re-engage the “opposition between dream and reality” – by way of the 1947 Surrealist expo (and the famous group shot at the Désert de Retz when the remnant of the movement is photographed wearing masks amidst the ruined ruin of the eighteenthcentury “English-Chinese” gardens).57 There are moments in Marker’s work (and they appear in his treatise, or film-essay, on Bellon) that signal an apotheosis of the here-and-now; a form of what has come to be called, today, “power structuralism” – and in Bellon’s case this apotheosis is contained in the bracketed nature of the

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work (crossing the work, as it crosses Marker’s own work) set between the two Surrealist expos. Yet both Marker and Bellon exceed this historical mandate (knowledge as exception – or Godard’s “art as exception”) in the very fact that they pass through all such boundaries (epistemes, epochal shifts, political moments) en route to the proverbial source code for the same – the sheer irreducible plurisignation of the indexical force-field of art. Marker’s nearly incessant (or, at the least circular) denunciation of temporal agency in/for itself is – in itself – an indexical, formalistic rapport/regard in favor of the excess in all images. This excess that overflows art (and the making of images) is Life proper; or, this other moment in art is the moment that undoes all temporal agency (representational hubris) in art. Tel quel erred in some manner of speaking (of speaking), and what early post-structuralism posited was an exit from the paradigmatic remains of the modernist project – the ruins of modernity.58 By the year 2000, and consistent with the depletion of mere art-historical processes, Marker has, once again, moved on (by moving back toward the singularity of the image as nerve center, or as bundle of forces that merely take up residence, however fleetingly, in the image). If the image suffers, it is (not unlike the Shroud of Turin59) because it is super-representational in its most austere form (as thing-in-itself, so to speak, and aesthetic-paradigmatic surplus, all of which returns the image to its ur-ground as visual artifact/icon crucified at the limits of plurisignation). The intelligence noted by various Marker interlocutors (Bazin et al.) is the notable absence of simple cognitive agency in favor of the super-abundance of non-cognitive, non-discursive knowledge. This intelligence is what informs all of the incorporations Marker indulges, inclusive of his incorporations of his own photo archive. February 4, 2012

VI. “Staring Back” “I Stare 1” (in the version presented in the book released in association with the 2007 photographic exhibition “Staring Back”) opens with an image dated February 13, 1962 of a terrace/balcony at the place “where all huge demonstrations have always started or ended,” the Place de la République (in front of the Brasserie Alsacienne, 39 Boulevard du Temple, Paris). “Maurice Thorez, the Communist leader, stands like the statue of the ghost he soon will be, just like his party.” But, “Watch the tree,” intones Marker’s commentary.60 This section of the book closes with a photo of the same (undated, but sometime in 200261), with three less-

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grizzled souls standing in the exact same place (a young man and a young woman holding hands, and a middle-aged man talking on a cell phone), but with scaffolding hiding the façade of the building and a slightly more mature tree. Marker notes: In between I have been in Japan, Korea, Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students in Guinea-Bissau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees, Brazilian activists, animals everywhere. I covered the first free elections in East Germany after the fall of the Wall, and I sniffed the first moments of perestroika – in Moscow, when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other anymore. I traded film for video and video for the computer. In the middle, on the balcony, the tree has grown, just a little.62

He then adds: “Within these few inches, forty years of my life.”63 The first image, as noted above, is of a demonstration immediately following the accidental deaths of seven panic-stricken demonstrators corralled and crushed at the entrance to the Charonne métro station on February 8, 1962, during the police action called to suppress the protest against the ongoing Algerian War and the activities of the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (Secret Army Organization), a pro-war, far-right paramilitary group opposed to Algerian independence, founded by French Army officers and fellow travelers in 1961.64 The image that opens “I Stare 1” is, then, of a demonstration in early 1962, five days after the police brutally broke up a demonstration for Algerian independence. The closing image, taken in 2002, is of a demonstration against the CPE legislation (Contrat première embauche/First Employment Contract) wending its way through the National Assembly (lower house) of the French Parliament and prompting street action by those opposed.65 Forty years: 1962 to 2002 are framed by these two photos, with the slow-growing tree utilized as mnemonic marker “caught in-between” the rough justice of these ventures, or oblivious – it hardly matters. If oblivious, it is not unlike the “stars” in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, dancing above it all, engaged in another, more secret, and more profoundly adept conversation regarding things that do matter. Yet the tree signals other trees, clearly – and these other trees are trees that “measure” life more slowly, and more cautiously. The sequoia of La jetée, or any other tree in any other work, is invoked preternaturally – sign unto itself, as /tree/.66 In-between these two place-holding gestures, Marker further assembles images of street protests and demonstrations from the 1960s through to the images that ostensibly sponsored the exhibition, the 2006 anti-CPE actions in the streets of Paris. Buried here, then, are blurry images of the 1962 event (the anti-Algerian War protests) when, with a 16mm camera “stolen

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from an UNESCO drawer,”67 Marker first embarked on his filming of demonstrations. These images of 1962 include a two-page spread of four blurred figures running in the street, with Marker noting “I caught my first demo footage, rather fuzzy, stealing light from the television people.”68 The sequence then moves through images of the Pentagon protests in October 1967, documented in La sixième face du Pentagone (1968), with a rare image of Marker included (being led away by three MPs, after being arrested). One of his often-recycled images also appears here, the bloodied face of a protestor, grimacing and swooning, the outcome of the charge on the Pentagon proper that lead to baton-wielding US marshals (in suit and tie) brutalizing those who had managed to breach the ranks of the security cordon and enter the Pentagon gates; an event, in retrospect, that is the classic military maneuver of surrounding your enemy and then channeling them toward a well-planned ambush.69 Images of Paris 1968 follow with Paris 2002 as echo, Marker orchestrating the cut to show young girls with anti-FN (anti-National Front) face paint, each face picked out carefully to propose the impending internalization of the struggle – an interpretive aspect of the photographic work that moves from mass demonstrations to the more particularized protests of the 2000s, when “national” economic issues take precedent over overt “Third World” political struggles.70 While in 2002, thanks to Jean-Marie Le Pen, “a new generation takes the baton,”71 in 2006 the anti-CPE demonstrations are, for Marker, a set of conflicts that reveal an increasing isolation and creeping loss of compass for political protests, insofar as they signal a confusion within the body politic as it is overwhelmed by the various forms of economic injustice associated with capitalist “globalization” and factional strife within what is left of the Left. He notes with the 2006 images “the everlasting face of solitude,” a statement that nonetheless echoes a similar sentiment in Le joli mai (1962), and which runs across all of his work anyway as a telltale trait that never quite vanishes even with his most stringent political work of the late 1960s and early 1970s (with SLON), when he is dealing with collective struggles both abroad and at home. The recourse to the individual as opposed to the collective is a recurring motif that more or less appears dialectical only in the sense that Marker’s intellectual coordinates include a Marxian worldview – whereas that apparent “communism” is, in fact, a non-ideological bias “for the people,” at all costs. Part Three, “They Stare,” further focuses this sentiment of solitariness and the singularity of his true subject (all the while referencing the gallery installation): “We exchanged looks . . . But what did they get in exchange? . . . And now all of ‘em are aligned on this wall like they’re waiting for the

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firing squad or the final Examiner united as they will be on Judgment Day supposing there will be one and God won’t be tired of all that . . .”72 These middle images are portraits and move with an inexorable logic in their cadence, pairings, and subjective states. “They Stare” includes a passage through “acedia” (or what Marker mobilizes briefly – en passant – to establish a mood swing midway toward death, which appears and disappears here-and-there, but always here-and-now), noting the word acedia was invented by monks “to describe that state of utter dereliction”73 that comes with a highly reflexive outlook on the world (something Marker himself shares). Some of the images in “They Stare” are paired, and Marker states that one sequence depicts “a moment of certainty” when the nominal subject of the portrait has realized something critical in their relationship to the world – the Chilean worker’s knowledge that a nationalized factory “now was his property,” the Thai boxer’s moment of defeat, the Cuban cane-cutter’s expectation that he would meet the “challenge of the Ten Million” (which he would not), the German leftist who knew “her side had been severely beaten at the polls,” the Korean bowman who knew he was “best in category,” etc.74 The intertext concludes: “In this malignant, undefinable world, the speed of the shutter [1/50th of a second] stopped the rarest moment, a moment of certainty.”75 These pairings include two young men smoking, in which both (one white and one black) do, indeed, “stare back,” head cocked – but somewhat menacingly.76 This unnamed gesture, “they threaten,” unleashes, in turn, a sublimated aspect of Marker’s work, or the repressed notion of revenge as justice. These darker moods are also present in the section that troubles the term acedia – another submerged emotion that pervades “Staring Back,” however named. Into the mix of images immediately following the page on acedia he throws in a head shot of female mummy, noting “I wonder what she should care about now.”77 This grave portent is presented between a lovely Parisian fashion model, an unsmiling lass from Bissau, and the above-mentioned Korean bowman and Cuban cane-cutter. The commentary slips back and forth (in the book) between sets and subsets, referring to images both before and after the intertext, the “eyes” (eye/I) of the camera’s gaze meeting the eyes of the bemused, smiling, unsmiling, and pensive subjects. At the end of the book, as way out, Marker reverts to his beloved images of animals (many from Si j’avais quatre dromadaires, 1966), the sequence showing caged, bored, coquettish, and generally quizzical creatures that somehow “points / to the truest of humanity / better / than images / of humanity itself.”78 Yet before turning to the animal kingdom, Marker deploys the set of images entitled “I Stare 2” that eludes a certain defiance or joie de vivre in the face of the ultimate

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moment of certainty – death. Here we find people he would like to find once again, to “conquer a world.”79 They include both ordinary and famous people; of the latter, we see Salvador Dalí, Medvedkine, Tarkovsky, Castro, plus Janine and William Klein (two of the ambassadors from the future in La jetée). Of the former, we see, an “absolute beauty” in Cape Verde, a violinist in Stockholm, an elderly woman in Corsica kissing a sacred stone, entitled “Untitled I (Corsica, 1950s),” and young, middle-aged, and aged women of all ethnicities, his penchant for the female presence arcing across the entire exhibition but coming to a curious caesura here with the last two images of death in the form of two heads (both women, presumably) – one corpse-like (entitled “Dephine Seyrig”), the other a battered skull with braided wig, a still recalling Les statues meurent aussi (1950-1953). “Having spent decades resisting the idea of exhibiting still photos taken from his film footage,” Marker conceded in 2007.80 The images in “Staring Back” however are not all stills from films and videos, and the digitalization project of traditional stills, versus the production of still photographs from film and video, was well underway with “Zapping Zone” (1990) and “Immemory One” (1997).81 No matter when or where Marker gave up the SLR or TLR camera, the images in “Staring Back” carry the weight of the silent and often majestic force of the still image (digital or analogue). The intentional or unintentional blurring and pixelization of the archive (unintentional when the originals were of poor quality anyway) at times grows extreme (speeds up), foremost immediately following on the image of Medvedkine included here. This staccato-like technique (carried off primarily by blurring) begins to reassemble the images into a moving continuum – a saluting (bereted) soldier, an Asian “stewardess” with a clipboard, people watching a solar eclipse, a host of Marker’s female interlocutors, Castro seemingly caught in the raucous glare of his own rhetoric (with what looks like his middle finger stabbing at the air), perhaps a firefighter, two men eating what looks like coconut (with a third looking on, laughing), a woman in the subway appearing to be eaten by a poster of what might be Marilyn Monroe, perhaps a group of gypsies, a helmeted biker in leather jacket and goggles, and all ending with the memento mori noted above. Marker blurs and highlights, darkens and lightens the field of the image in most cases to pick out one person or detail.82 All black-and-white images, the removal or absence of color pushes the work further into the sepulcher of nearabstraction or near-abjection, his tone in the very laconic commentary for the images being, ultimately, at the edge of dejection. His anonymous “Madonnas” appear in clusters and are submerged in more iconic images

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of identifiable or half-identifiable persons, places, cultures, and events. In many senses they are observing the other images (often gazing in the direction of a neighboring image).83 Marker’s relationship to history (capitalized or otherwise) is as problematic as his relationship to images. His exceptional intelligence and the plasticity of his imagery are, as a result, extraordinarily slippery (and all partisans of his cause generally become slippery in the process of engaging Marker and his work). Bill Horrigan, curator of the Wexner exhibition, goes into some detail in his essay “Some Other Time” regarding the origin of “Staring Back,” citing correspondence from Marker over the term of the preparations, plus the apparently or ostensibly innocent incident of an e-mail with four images attached, sent from Marker in March 2006, of the anti-CPE demonstrations, which (it is said) set off the idea of the exhibition. Marker admits in a subsequent e-mail (dated April 1, 2006) that “these are not bonafide photographs.”84 In fact, the images he first sent to Horrigan were stills from his video footage, “somewhat manipulated thru the jujucraft of Photoshop and Painter.”85 The resultant irreality of the photographs suggests upon close inspection that the truthtelling aspects of photography are long gone and that another truth-telling process is underway. Marker is no post-modern relativist, but his appropriation of his own archive (plus images from television, film, and popular culture) nonetheless resides at the receding edge of verisimilitude, arresting both the agency of photography and its representational hubris. “Markerian” means to ends, therefore, include the manipulation of socalled truth; and the relationship of his images to the wider world out of which they come implodes inward, through that “immemorial” zone he has carved out for himself since Sans soleil (1982). The 200 black-andwhite images assembled for “Staring Back,” drawn from the years 1952 to 2006 (according to Horrigan), reference what Molly Nesbit calls a guess Marker hazarded in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) regarding “the existence of a collective immemory, which is to say a memory more ancient than memory, a memory immemorial.”86 It led him, twenty years later, to make the CD-ROM Immemory, itself now becoming the montage. This immemory of 1997 was a field stacked with beliefs and facts and images through which one clicked at a private pace, one screen yielding to the next, deeper and deeper down paths full of choices and splits. Here a different way of working was beckoning. It was not the linear edit of rhythm but an edit of small combinations of images and ideas, pairings in a field, an ambient edit punctuated by a cartoon cat offering menus of choice. This immemory was technically finite, but seemingly endless.87

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Nesbit also notes that Marker’s 1959 book Coréennes ends with a letter to a cat. The passage cited includes a long parenthetical last note: (I know you have the intelligence – cats understand things – not to see me playing Humankind against History, all those capital Hs with which one works up a sweat of understanding each morning, barbells for the intellectual. I know that my relations with these faces, with these familiar people, all filter through history, and that to help or to harm them there are other means than pataphysics. But if the Big Issues must be involved in this relation, let that remain between them and me – it is not for the onlookers. At the bottom of this trip is human friendship. The rest is silence.)88

One might say, “Watch the Big Issues . . .” Yet Immemory, which includes Coréennes, adds a postscript: The end of our century demands something else. What’s more, the notion of historical progress, of a powerful “current of history,” never mattered to me except in a deliberate play of the word “current”: not a directional flow over some chart plotted out by infallible commanders (there again, the ambiguity of the word “leader”), but instead the possibility to grasp the current meanings of the historical present, full of sound and fury, told, and so on. If I ever had a passion in the field of politics, it’s a passion for understanding. Understanding how people manage to live on a planet like ours. Understanding how they seek, how they try, how they make mistakes, how they get over them, how they learn, how they lose their way. That immediately put me on the side of the people who seek and make mistakes, as opposed to those who seek nothing, except to conserve, defend themselves, and deny all the rest.89

Lastly, the presence of the English voice-over for Chats perchés (2004), as text or subtext within the book version of the exhibition, is not simply incidental to the overall moral imperative of “Staring Back.” Its inclusion speaks volumes; as it traces Marker’s recurrent thematic of the wholesale evacuation of responsibility for the triumph of so-called Big Capital by a totally dysfunctional Left (supposed protector of the so-called Big Issues). This text, for example, amply explains Chirac’s victory in the 2002 elections when Le Pen scared the majority of French voters by placing second in the first round of voting – scared them silly, and forced them to their senses, while the Left mounted as many as seven candidates (three Trotskyites, “plus a few Communists, plus the Greens, plus a few mavericks”90). The appearance of M. Chat, a grinning cartoon cat (part Cheshire Cat, part Miyazaki), painted high on the walls of Parisian

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buildings, in the metro, etc., then leads Marker, in Chats perchés, into the streets in pursuit of the iconic cat, all the while documenting the cycle of political mayhem in the 2001-2002 election year, and beyond, starting in November 2001 and closing in May 2002, more or less, with the election of a new conservative Prime Minister (Jean-Pierre Raffarin). By March 2003, the US-led invasion of Iraq has occurred and Parisians again take to the streets. Anti-Americanism displaces any sympathy the French have felt – however momentary – for the beleaguered American Republic, while Raffarin begins to take the heat for quickly aborted promises of “tolerance,” etc. Marker notes: “Rhythm is what keeps the demos running. This one was born during the Vietnam years.”91 Marker’s narrative then becomes performatively scrambled. We see: a call for a General Strike (“a certain fuzziness in symbols”92); a June 2003 “die-in” for victims of AIDS (but combined with anti-Iraq War rhetoric); and, absurdly, young rightists and leftists squaring off (again), with a rightist quoting – favorably – a war-time poem by the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard, who at the time of the poem, “Liberté” (1942), had joined the French Communist Party. The cats disappear . . . Marker shuts down his dissection of the contortions of the body politic with a nod toward the tragedy of the pop star Bertrand Cantat (who accidentally killed his girlfriend, the beautiful young actress Marie Trintignant), plus the death of Léon Schwartzenberg (quintessential genteel radical).93 The humanistic touch is not melodrama but heartfelt exit from the madhouse of politics through and toward the proverbial gates of this-worldly strife. Passion rules . . . On cue, then, and only because Marker is writing the narrative, the cats re-appear (just in time, to compensate momentarily for the enveloping gloom of the film). Whole circles of them appear on the sidewalks – a sign of the irrepressible spirit Marker seeks amidst the maelstrom of neo-liberal France in 2002, when the Big Issues have been submerged in what he implies are the machinations of “post-cultural” politics and the concomitant atomization of the collective in favor of the individual (the proverbial “care of the self” at the expense of all others).94 Cats are never on the side of Power . . . February 15, 2012

VII. Something about Nothing Nothing is an appeal for Something. It can’t be otherwise. Yet the appeal is all there is; there’s only a naked crying-out appeal. A yearning. And so we come to the eternal conundrum of making something out of nothing.95 —John Berger

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The dynamis of Art proper in relation to ideology is thus: Ideology is not necessarily political – unless one also strips the political of temporal forms of indeterminate and determinate praxis and reduces it to its utmost liminal state at the edge of things. For the Real of ideology is not immanence per se, but immanence in collusion with transcendence (the paradigmatic as the ideological). To think in images is not the same as to indulge mere images as superior to intellection. It is, however, to force intellection into a higher (paradigmatic/ideological realm) that is imagistic (where word is image, and vice versa). Temporal agency (time itself as historical progression) is insufficient; teleology and eschatology collide in the work of art. A second register must be acknowledged in the production of culture and the always strategic incarnational and “utopian” purpose of art as moral agency in/for itself (always here-and-now, but also – paradoxically – elsewhere). This timeless aspect to cultural praxis is the moral force of art – beyond ethics, as such. It is ultimately – as well – a theological issue, because the Real is never “what is” but also “what is to come” (signed as “death” in mortal terms); this “what is to come” is the irreal lining (the epic within the tragic) that negates objective and so-called material orders or any possible localization of the moral law in a purely physical and nominally “natural” or empirical world.96 The moral aspects of ideology redeem ideology – and the corrupted forms of all historical instantiations of the same are overcome in the critical-artistic-theological vision of the world that ends. An always incipient apocalyptic “vesture” that also signals redemption, but a redemptive “outside” or excess of time (yet through it), is what makes a world “radiant” in this regard.97 Since 1962 and La jetée, ineluctably, time has been a massive red herring in the works of Marker, as in all subsequent criticism of his work. It is not time per se (nor the “Deleuzian” time-image) that is at stake – stasis and movement, etc. – but the futurity of the image and its bridgeforming aspect between here and there, now and then; its redemptive “index” and pataphysical discord are one. It is actually the “end” of time that has concerned Marker since the late 1940s; or, the passage through the image (of death as end) to another time. Marker’s works do, indeed, “mark” time (as all of the attendant play of adopting the name “Chris Magic Marker” invokes), yet his use of the image also negates its problematic fixity. Interrupting, distending, and/or troubling the image invokes the internal, often highly formalized metric of art noted by Agamben in The Time that Remains.98 Marker has entered this aspect of temporality in the work of art through literary-poetical-artistic interventions “from the beginning” – with his first published writings, and through to the unfinished

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project Owls at Noon. Within the entire trajectory of the works, it is the agency of history that moves, as exceptional field (in, but beyond, the words and images); yet it moves also as a formal (or formally austere) agent within all of the other issues that “move” (or all of the other agencies that animate his work). Marker’s relationship to the suffering image is, nonetheless, central to his films, and his often-tortured commentaries/narratives are true intertexts that, through the subjective register of the “I,” access this other-ness (other state) in things/times. In whatever “end” each work invokes, it is his voice (intention) that provides the internal metric, or the intentionality that returns the word to the Big Other (all that remains outside of the image, and all that invokes the utopian field of kairos and caritas that his works engage). Works of “Mercy,” then – and Art as Moral Law (moral agency in/for itself) . . . The work of art indexes the larger apparatuses of historical time and, at once, negates the same. History is, in “Markerian” senses, a perpetual tragedy, with Owls at Noon, perhaps, and thus-wise, remaining an unfinishable project. Set to survey the wreckage of the twentieth century (and perhaps before and beyond), Owls at Noon (as proposed/incomplete series) flies off nonetheless into twilight – not a twilight of the gods (in the Nietzschean or Heideggerean manner), but twilight of the suffering image of humankind. Through Marker’s work, one descends to Hell (and a unique historicized “Harrowing of Hell” ensues) to – perhaps – find time there as well; time sent to Hell, and Purgatory and Limbo as realm of the unfulfilled image (Agamben’s aperçu). Through the eyes of Beatrice, Paradise is nevertheless glimpsed (the recurrence of Marker’s “madonnas” taking on new, literary merit). Marker’s “Virgil” is Giraudoux, Medvedkine, Tarkovsky, Bellon, T.S. Eliot, or all to whom he pays respects to in his work – all those wellknown and lesser-known guides. By the middle 1970s, with Chile, the “war” is over (lost), or turns inward – toward the landscapes of the latecapitalist “triumph” (always presented through the shadow-land of its subjects/victims). Utopia waits, on the other side of the image(s), always futural (to come) and always sensed, anyway, within a dimension that is – after all – “non-objective” (in Malevich’s sense), or outside of time proper, yet in Art as limit, and in that long-corrupted, long-suffering thing called ideology (the art of Art, or the second body of Art as Life – Romantic experience, versus mere knowledge). The Moral Law suggests moral beauty, but moral beauty does not suggest the politicization of aesthetics. Instead, the approach to moral beauty proceeds by way of the deconstruction of the politicization of aesthetics and the negation of its dialectical opposite, the aestheticization

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of politics. Benjamin’s warning half a century ago concerning the latter gives way to the destruction of the entire antinomy, this dialectical “whatever” more or less utterly discredited with the advance of the image toward imagology in late modernity (the saturation of culture in the commercium of empty imagery, or life without content that addresses the real of the True). Marker’s “syntheses” (often by way of dialectics) are not dialectical maneuvers so much as deconstructions of the entire edifice of normative aesthetics (one-hundred-years young in modern terms), at the edge of a century that has seen an inordinate abuse of the image as ideological support. But this demolition of the pretenses to truth-telling by the image (and cinema, as composed of images) proceeds by a somewhat courteous bow to the older, more archaic senses and resources of the image (to the two-millennia-long theology of the suffering image) and the aesthetic through which the immemorial (immemory in Marker’s lexicon) arrives. Apprehension of moral beauty is, therefore, through the “gates of Hell,” insofar as an easy rapport with beauty (by way of the image of beauty) is a false path to the same (Agamben’s “fulfilled images” of desire).99 The agonistic is part and parcel of the apprehension of the True (and the theological-metaphysical corollaries, the Good, etc.) and requires “tarrying with” the negative – or, the voyage through the negation of temporality as expressed in the aesthetics of presence as formulated by Hegel and re-interpreted by Žižek, signaling, in turn, the required austerities that formalism and its analogues confer upon the work of art that might index something beyond dialectics (as synthesis, but also as double negative or the destruction of the dialectical in favor of the immemorial). Real Presence is through the suffering image – till time “ends,” so to speak; and, when time ends (as in the image, at least momentarily, but certainly not for eternity), the image gives way to the image of Paradise (Utopia/the Real-Irreal). The archaeology of art and the pretexts of the documentary praxis of photography contain this secret in their “archival” nature (Derrida et al.), as way out or exit (and always as speculative excess).100 All of the repressed theological aspects of the image come flooding forth (back and forth) through this exit (entering the here-and-now and leaving) by way of temporal embodiments of the archaic agency of the image as word. The flood increases in proportion to the increase in the generation of images – as perverse compensation in the economy of representational mayhem (the hellishness of mere historical-empirical being), each instance of the betrayal of the image betraying/revealing its origin nonetheless – for example, Marker’s “revenge of the eye” (or at the

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least when/if there is the required agent present for that archaeology of representational discourse – the extraction of the non-discursive a central tenet of art, modern and ancient, for or against the True).101 February 19, 2012

VIII. Spectres de Marker Thou art a scholar; speak to it, Horatio.102 —William Shakespeare

The specters of Marker are the themes (and variations) and counterthemes in the symphonic structure of his work as totality. It is the dissonances within that totality that signal a Romantic and post-Romantic sensibility, at once, while it is the secret concordances of his work with implicit and explicit theological and atheological values that suggest the nominal, overarching thematic of the work is, indeed, “orchestral.” Like all artists of the caliber that agonistically impose their own will on the material at hand, but also bracket that same will in favor of the impersonal forces that come to play in the struggle of producing the work of art, Marker has left a body of work that tells as many tales as it suppresses. One need not excavate all of the various particulars, nor would he suggest anyone even try to do so.103 What is evident in traversing a suggestive cut or section of his work is that the operative principles (within the dynamic, topological structure of his project) are best served by isolating the formalist aspects of the work, insofar as the latter delineate the critical nexus of the work in a finely wrought, life-long meditation on memory and its excesses, or all that exceeds mere personal agency when aligned with speculative and visual forms of knowledge – image as word (word as image). Art qua Art, then . . . This seems one way into Marker’s work, if and only if Art qua Art does not invoke Art for Art’s sake. The fundamental function of Art as limit is also the first dynamic principle that Marker invokes, even as he circumnavigates the planet in search of signs that will effectively undo all signs. This undoing of signs is an especial anima that animates his work, primarily because he is so suspicious of the very idea or concept that visual knowledge is anything other than a secret analogue for a more speculative, austere type of conceptual thought that only takes up uneasy residence in actual singular word or image, but somehow manages to outsurvive both. (This is also why his work is not documentary, while it is indexical.) It would appear that the discord between these two types of knowledge is intimately related to the first

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principle of his work; that is to say, all of the questions leveled at Art qua Art lead “upward” to a more rarified realm, a moral universe; yet a nonplace and non-time where, by the majestic recursive nature of art, one returns to Earth anyway. In this manner, it is the theological-atheological dissonance within the overall project that makes Marker a High Romantic, whereas it is the cultural-political dissonances within the same that make him a Christian Marxist.104 Combined, these two visionary force-fields, which are hardly contradictory, but instead “valedictory,” produce a sustained critique of “what is” for, or in favor of, “what might be.” Both also have a tendency to martyr their respective adherents . . . What happens, then, is that a “conservative” radicalism emerges, or a “radical” conservatism – conservatism in both cases implying “orthodoxy.”105 The orthodoxy involved is the defense of the gates. The gates involved are the entrance to Paradise. This defense is in service to what Saint Francis of Assisi called The Highest. Conflating Aristotle’s Highest Good and Saint Francis’ Most High One, one arrives at the conclusion that the theologicalatheological swerve noted above is nothing more than the act of faith in pursuit of itself – not a tale- or tail-chasing venture, but the only means possible to ascertain Truth, on the ground, utterly re-naturalized in the here-and-now and thoroughly freed of ideological and utilitarian taint. Such a condition is the forward-most place of “taking-place.” Such a place is, oddly, not a place at all. Marker’s work falls within this vast penumbral zone within worlds, haunted by all that it brackets, and all that it indexes en route to its apotheosis as Art. If Owls at Noon is the great unfinished and unfinishable project, it is so because it arcs (by electrical charge) all the way back to that first, perhaps apocryphal film Marker made or never made (perhaps a myth perpetrated by Resnais), La fin du monde, vu par l’ange Gabriel (c.1946).106 As such, the unseen image within all the images within Marker’s work says the same thing that the Latin Mass says: “Ite, missa est . . .” June 21, 2012

Notes 1

Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 109. Derrida is invoking “next to last things,” which always relate to the Real, but foremost to the real specter of the other as “death” or the image of the undoing of the nominal subject. See ibid., pp. 186-88 n 7, regarding Michel Henry’s “Marx” – Marx, 2 vols. (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1976). “If one integrates into the life of this living subjectivity the work of negativity or of objectivity, the phenomena or rather the non-phenomena of death and so forth, why persist in calling it life? On the other hand, we do not think this

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interpretation of being or of production as manifestation – or radical immanence – of a living and monadic substance . . . , an interpretation that is found to be widely justified in the letter of numerous texts of Marx, should be opposed by some philosophy of death (which would claim just as many rights and references in the same texts read differently). We are attempting something else. To try to accede to the possibility of this alternative (life and/or death), we are directing our attention to the effects or the petitions of a survival or of a return of the dead (neither life nor death) on the sole basis of which one is able to speak of ‘living subjectivity’ (in opposition to death): to speak of it but also to understand that it can, itself, speak of itself, leave traces or legacies beyond the living present of its life, ask (itself) questions regarding its own subject, in short, also address itself to the other or, if one prefers, to other living individuals, to other ‘monads.’ For all these questions, and such is the hypothesis of our reading, the work of the specter here weaves, in the shadow of a labyrinth covered with mirrors, a tenuous but indispensable guiding thread.” Derrida, Specters of Marx, pp. 187-88. 2 See Giorgio Agamben, “The Power and the Glory,” pp. 167-96, in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory. This suffocating transit is clearly performative on Agamben’s part. Within this chapter, which serves as a contraction of all that has gone before, the penultimate moment of claustrophobia comes with a description by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus of the ceremonial pomp and spectacle of the Byzantine Empire (pp. 184-88) in the first half of the tenth century. This section is made all the more intolerable by Agamben’s page-long citation from Porphyrogenitus’ Le livre des cérémonies, in which the enforced conflation of power and glory is described in excruciating detail as “the traditions and prescriptions relating to the imperial ceremony.” Ibid., p. 181. See Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Le livre des cérémonies, ed. and trans. Albert Vogt, vol. 1 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1935). This follows an equally painful expository section on the role of the fasces lictoriae in imperial Rome. Fasces were “elm or birch rods about 130 centimeters in length, bound together with a red strap into which an axe was inserted laterally.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 182. They were carried by “lictors, twelve in number” and accompanied the magistrate “on every occasion.” Ibid. It is the dynamic circulation of the fasces lictoriae that Agamben targets, versus their ceremonial symbolism. Despite the ceremonial aspects of all of this, Agamben goes to great length to expose that this is not an aesthetic excess of power at all, but – instead – an integral appropriation by empire of an ecclesiastical or liturgical rite that is, in fact, ancient. 3 Both of these statements are derived by Agamben from Ernst Percy Schramm’s Herrschaftszeichen und Staatssymbolik: Beiträge zu ihrer Geschichte vom dritten bis zum sechzehnten Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 19541965). Goethe’s maxim is taken from the frontis of Volume 1; Hegel’s appears in Volume 3, p. 1065. This book is “an immense poem [a nearly 1200-page, ‘monumental study’] dedicated to the signs of power,” of the “insignia and symbols of power.” Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 178. The massive force of this book and its role in Agamben’s project is, nonetheless, a momentary gesture, as the presence of both Goethe and Hegel suggest, whereas the mention of

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“Warburgian Pathosformeln” and “model-images (Bildmodel)” as underwriting Schramm’s treatise (while disappearing anyway under the taxonomic weight of the work) provides the necessary corrective to the gravity and enormity of Agamben’s project; albeit a project that plays by the rules of a scientific study but demolishes anything systematic by the implantation of Mannian “homeopathic” presences in the form, most of all, of anyone who has escaped this eclipse of passion that rigor, science, and power incur. More openly, the enormity of the discursive examination of texts in The Kingdom and the Glory, and of the dance between Church and State over centuries, is modulated by the recurrence of Saint Paul and Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite. Saint Paul’s inclusion makes sense insofar as Christian theology as dogma has repeatedly overridden many of his most radical gestures toward the messianic kingdom that exists through the “mystery of the economy” of the pleroma – or the “economy of glory” that is the “ministration of redemption [justice].” Ibid., pp. 202-203. Indeed, Agamben returns to Saint Paul, most especially to blast free the concept of glory from the “ministration of death” (Saint Paul’s words for the law, from 2 Corinthians 3:7). Ibid., p. 203. Pseudo-Dionysius appears and disappears at fairly regular intervals as a means of conveying a concurrent “encyclopedic” grasp of the divine economies that permeate the world, while differing entirely from the absurd taxonomical treatises that perpetuate the theft of glory that Agamben is slowly demolishing. Pseudo-Dionysius provides periodic “depth charges” for Agamben’s “archaeology of power.” Thus, in the darkest passages of Chapter 7, following upon the discussion of the apparatuses of imperial Roman pomp and late-Byzantine splendor, the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius appears, as antidote, with its aporetic statement: “Divinity is not manifested in the hierarchy but is itself ousia and dynamis.” Dionysius, the Areopagite, The Celestial and Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, trans. Rev. J. Parker (London: Skeffington & Son, 1894), p. 378a; cited in Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 178. What arrives, then, with Agamben’s last chapter, Chapter 8, “The Archaeology of Glory,” pp. 197-259, in ibid., is a masterful return to the economy of the Trinity, yet now examined from both an interior perspective and an exterior perspective. The interior perspective and its “mirroring” aspects – each element “glorifying the other” – returns all taxonomic studies of power and the administration of glory to its locus at the heart of the divine economy that both Saint Paul and Pseudo-Dionysius privilege. This internal view doubles the paradox of history as the field of divine praxis, for all such maneuvers within that field return to this nexus. This is, after all, Hegel’s point regarding symbols; as it is also Goethe’s. The “symbolic” field of historical praxis is underwritten by the divine praxis that gives it its force as force-field. Many of Saint Paul’s precepts regarding the “messianic community,” and its existence between the law and the parousia, incorporated into the Trinity (and in certain cases rendered inoperative), were redeemed by the neo-Platonic exegesis of Pseudo-Dionysius. This essential “mystery of the economy” (“whose darkness glory is not able completely to dispel in its light”) turns on the central paradox/phantom of a “generated anarchy.” Ibid., p. 211. For Saint Paul, the heart of the gospel “lies not the Trinitarian economy but messianic redemption.” Ibid., p. 204. The immanent trinity outlasts or ends (is in

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excess of) the economic trinity. Ibid., p. 210. Agamben states that this internal “mystery”/anarchy generates an economic (or finite/external) anarchy. The interaction of these two anarchies, in turn, becomes the unresolved theological impress in modern philosophy; that is, as the articulation/paradox of an infinite being and its finite history. Ibid., p. 211. Agamben points to the last works of Heidegger, in this regard, while the entire project of Hegel (and its inversion by the Young Hegelians/Marxists) is of equal significance, insofar as history and materialism are the central events of the “pleroma.” In a notable summary by Agamben of Origen’s comments on glory (through the latter’s Commentaire), all of the various contortions of the Trinitarian model become resolved in the “process of reciprocal glorification between father and son,” which “coincides with God’s self-knowledge, [and] which is to be understood as an autosophia,” a process “so intimate that the glorification cannot be said to be produced by the son but only in the son.” Ibid., p. 207. See Origen, Commentaire sur S. Jean: Tome V, Livres XXVIII et XXXII, ed. and trans. Cécile Blanc (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1992), pp. 335-37. Ultimately, the fracture between the immanent trinity and the contingent trinity has remained in force across 20 centuries of theological speculation, debate, and the constructions and deconstructions of power and the apparatuses of both power and glory. In the opposition resides “the fracture between ontology and praxis, theology and economy” that marks “the formation of economic theology” and which becomes absorbed into secular economic-political structures. Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory, p. 207. 4 For Saint Paul there were no Christians, just the “messianic community.” Ibid., p. 203. 5 Ibid., p. 198. The latter term (an aesthetics of theology) is, by all estimations, the beginning of the imperial project once again. Agamben likens this paralogism to Walter Benjamin’s privileging of a politics of art to counter an aesthetics of politics. Ibid. Agamben adds: “Beauty names precisely the ‘supplementary’ element that enables one to think glory beyond the factum of sovereignty,” or, to “depoliticize” the administration of life. Ibid., p. 212. 6 The mystery of “The Fifteenth Stone” is that it is never actually the same stone in Zen gardens. One can see from certain vantage points the 14 stones of the classical Zen garden, but never the fifteen. “The Fifteenth Stone” then “moves around” with the observer. The only vantage point that would allow the perception of all 15 stones is an aerial perspective – a syntagmatic gesture, then, for an elevated or nonhuman viewpoint. One might say it has to be imagined, or thought into presence. “The Fifteenth Stone” stands in for the viewer, obviously, but it also acts as the proverbial signature gesture (dynamic function, or doubly provocative x) that moves the entire operation to the inner ground of thought about thought (recursive, speculative thought). Such forms of thought immediately depart any definitive subject per se for the “impersonal” agencies of the world; a return, then, or a renaturalization of thought itself. This clearly demolishes most misunderstandings of Zen Buddhism as anti-intellectual games leading to quiescence. The non-discursive intellection at the center of this austere visual field (the mystery of “The Fifteenth Stone” within the carefully crafted and enclosed Zen garden) engages a type of

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thought that transcends mere discursive thought. Its true address is a fusion of the transcendental and the immanent in the here-and-now. Arguably, this is also the cross that modern art sought to bear when it knocked art off of its privileged pedestal. See the works of Richard Serra, especially, and critiques of the same. Notably, the puzzle of “The Fifteenth Stone” in Zen gardens appears as a metaphor for the ineffable in the work of the avant-garde composer John Cage. 7 Chris Marker, “Sixties,” pp. 2-6, in the booklet accompanying the DVD A Grin without a Cat (Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2008), p. 4. This Region 1 re-release of Le fond de l’air est rouge is the 180-minute version from 1993. Sarkozy became the twenty-third president of the French Republic in May 2007. 8 Ibid., p. 2. The Rhodiaceta strike was documented in the short film made by Marker with SLON, À bientôt, j’espère (1968). Marker notes that the title comes from a last taunt leveled by a striking union worker at the “the bosses” or management – a promise of retribution. Ibid., pp. 3-4. The Popular Front was a short-lived government of the Left, elected in 1936, and headed by Léon Blum. 9 Ibid., p. 3. Régis Debray, a French citizen and friend of Marker and Maspero, was being held in a Bolivian prison for alleged complicity in the guerrilla actions of Che Guevara and colleagues. Maspero was a Paris-based publisher of radical texts, including Debray’s Révolution dans la révolution? Lutte armée et lutte politique en Amérique latine (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1967), lionized in On vous parle de Paris: Maspero. Les mots ont un sens (1970), another SLON film directed and written by Marker. Debray studied with the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser at the École Normale Supérieure, graduating in 1965, just prior to leaving France for Cuba and then Bolivia. He was released from Bolivian prison in 1970 and in the 1980s became active in French government service under President François Mitterrand. 10 See Marker, “Sixties,” pp. 3-4. 11 Ibid., p. 4. 12 Ibid. Clavel had a long, checkered history of moving in and out of the apparatuses of power, including Gaullist and Communist associations. His break with the Gaullists in 1966 coincided with a return to radical Catholicism. 13 The turning point of La sixième face du Pentagone is, for this reason, the moment when the demonstrators, probing the encirclement of the Pentagon by security forces, suddenly find a breach in the defensive perimeter and charge the gates of the building itself. Marker likens this to the activation of the potential of the demonstration itself to “cross” boundaries, if only to seize a symbolic (and often pyrrhic) victory. The “performative” aspects or symbolic rites of the event come to a bizarre apotheosis when the ultra-theatrical Yippies attempt to levitate the Pentagon through shamanistic face paint, ominous chanting, and the waving of absurd fetishes. 14 Ibid., pp. 5-6. Marker is lamenting the complicity of the CGT with the government and its failure to fully back the strike. (Typical of anti-union reaction, many unionized workers who participated in the strike were subsequently dismissed.) This same betrayal of the activists by the party is at the forefront of his critique of the failure of the Latin American uprisings, most especially in Bolivia

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(with the betrayal of Che Guevara by Mario Monje et al.), but also in the strange dance Castro played in the 1960s, threatening to leave the orbit of the USSR only to capitulate in 1968 and side with the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia to crush the so-called Prague Spring. 15 The journal Tel quel, founded in 1960, was in many ways the beginning of the post-structuralist project in French belles lettres. The journal attracted the talents of, among others, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. See Patrick Ffrench, The Time of Theory: A History of Tel Quel (19601983) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 16 Marker notes in passing that there are no workers among the refugees in the embassy because it is very rare that factories are built near embassies, whereas universities quite often are. The mix of radicals hiding in the embassy includes intellectuals, professors, activists, anarchists, and the stock hard-line communist. 17 These paintings were created between March and November 1988, almost ten years after the events that inspired them, and first exhibited at Krefeld, Germany, between February 12 and April 4, 1989. They mark a decisive turn in Richter’s work, most especially toward a more grave and forbidding mimetic practice through excoriating abstraction. “The fifteen paintings that compose October 18, 1977 are based on photographs of moments in the lives and deaths of four members of the Red Army Faction (RAF), a German left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated a number of kidnappings and killings throughout the 1970s. Like On Kawara’s date paintings, these paintings have a single date as their title. On this date the bodies of three principal RAF members were found in the cells of the German prison where they were incarcerated. Although the deaths were officially deemed suicides, there was widespread suspicion that the prisoners had been murdered by the German state police. Richter based his paintings on newspaper and police photographs; his reworking of these documentary sources is dark, blurred, and diffuse. Richter hopes that, ‘by way of reporting,’ these paintings will ‘contribute to an appreciation of [our time], to see it as it is.’” Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. Wall text for the exhibition “Out of Time: A Contemporary View,” Museum of Modern Art, August 30, 2006-April 9, 2007, http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=79037. The series “October 18, 1977” was eventually purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in 1995, and exhibited in New York in 1997. 18 The first crucifixion, which is essentially existential or “of the senses,” conforms to the first Dark Night of the Soul, of Saint John of the Cross and the apophatic Christian tradition, whereas the second crucifixion conforms to the more severe, or second-level version of the Dark Night of the Soul, which is – ineluctably – “of the Spirit.” 19 “Staring Back” (2007), “Quelle heure est-elle?” (2009), and “Passengers” (2011). 20 Marker would attempt new political films well after Le fond de l’air est rouge, including, Le 20 heures dans les camps (1993), Casque bleu (1995), Un maire au Kosovo (2000), and Avril inquiet (2001), all dealing with the Bosnian War. Both

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Un maire au Kosovo and Avril inquiet remain unfinished. See Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, pp. 196-200. 21 An example of this crisis is perhaps Thomas Aquinas’ Christmas 1273 “silence,” when he more or less gave up writing the Summa Theologica, perhaps realizing that the personalization of knowledge required of the Holy Spirit includes internalizing all knowledge, even High Medieval theological speculation, and that a catalogue of the same is, in effect, a vainglorious pursuit antithetical in spirit to that Spirit. The conceptual kernel of all forms of “radical personalism” would seem to be that all systems of knowledge must be re-naturalized in the soul, or in the existential-metaphysical nexus of being here-and-now. As such, this portrait of Marker makes of the totality of his work a High Romantic, Christian Marxist project, albeit with the necessary holes and topological knots given to a particularly potent type of late-modern artistic praxis that is also incessantly political and idealistic. Universal history (and its shifting sands) is the foremost component of this process of re-naturalization, in that – pace Marker – Big History is made personal by internalizing its various dictates (and its various and ofteninsane twists and turns). As incomplete project, in the “Christic” sense, Big History becomes formidably larger than life when so internalized. Additionally, if Big History includes the mystery of the Incarnation, then its internalization is the key moment in the transfiguration of the individual by the larger apparatuses of the Christian dispensation – or historical time (teleology) plus eschatology. Notably, Aquinas was involved in trying to reconcile the schism between the Eastern and Western branches of the Church at the time of his crisis, and he died shortly afterward. An analogue for Big History as an imperfect archive for Spirit is the survival of the Holy Sacrament in the tortured body of the Church (Catholic and Orthodox). Holy Communion remains the moment within all such moments, and its value remains – arguably – inviolable, despite the travesties visited upon humankind in the name of Christianity over nearly two millennia. 22 This issue of a serviceable form of abstraction that is also a form of radical formalism in art is central to the mystery of the origin of the digitalization of images in Marker’s overall “archival” project: “In Sunless [1982], Marker had written of a plan for machines to come to the assistance of the human race. Beginning with Zapping Zone, a succession of innovative major works completed during the 1990s saw Marker elaborate the creative potential of new media technologies for mapping and interrogating the processes of human memory, and exploring the interfaces between private recollection and collective remembrance. The death of Alexander Medvedkine in 1989, closely followed by the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, prompted Marker in Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1993) to pull the thread of his friend’s life and unravel the history of twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union, via a screen assemblage of treated and insistently questioned images. Silent Movie [1995] conjured a resonant cinematic imaginary from Marker’s reminiscences of the pre-sound era, abetted by the serendipity of the computer interface that pilots the work. Level Five [1996] returned Marker to the forgotten and traumatic history of the Battle of Okinawa, reconfigured as an unfinished computer-game design bequeathed to a woman,

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Laura, by the dead lover whose memory she strives to preserve. . . . Immemory [1997] proposes a grand summa of Marker’s capacious memory as a series of interlocking hypermedia zones.” Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 178. Thus the agency of the image shifts through various media while the foundation for all remains more or less the still image, to which Marker will return as singular phenomenon after new media has effectively become a plague. Lupton notes that by the end of the 1990s Marker had more or less confessed to the collapse of cinema: “No, film won’t have a second century. That’s all.” Ibid. Lupton is citing a then-unpublished paper by Thomas Tode, “Film – That Was Last Century!,” from the November 16-17, 2002 conference held at the ICA, London, “Chris Marker: The Art of Memory.” See ibid., p. 234 n 5. See Thomas Tode, “Film – That Was Last Century!: Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory,” trans. Bernd Elzer, Film Studies 6 (Summer 2005): pp. 81-86. Lupton also points out that Marker’s valorization of new media was always for its more crude or primitive aspects, and that, as the technology advanced, he more or less preferred the archaic and outmoded equipment of the early days of digital media. This suspicion of the apparatuses of new media and its powerful alliance with commerce no doubt underwrites his return to old media, or what Lupton calls “the cultural memories and traces of the older media he has worked with: literature, film and photography.” Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 179. “Intelligence is a quality of mind that may choose to express itself through whatever medium is at hand, whether it be a typewriter, a Rolleiflex, a 16mm-film camera, a Sony Handycam or an Apple Mac loaded with image processing software.” Ibid., p. 10. The Zone that appears in Sans soleil is the brainchild of the narrator’s friend Hayao Yamaneko, “who designs video games and as a sideline obsessively feeds film images into a synthesizer, whose de-naturalized visual world he calls the Zone, in homage to Andrey Tarkovsky’s Stalker.” Ibid., p. 153. “Hayao’s Zone is initially introduced as a mechanism that can make explicit the operations of time and memory upon film images, by transforming them from mimetic representations of the world into shifting and manipulative fields of vivid pixellated colour. Hayao defends his treatment of archive film showing the Japanese protests of the 1960s by arguing ‘at least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.’” Ibid., p. 159. “Later in the film, another use is found for the ‘non-images’ of the Zone: showing things that do not officially exist in Japanese history and cultural identity.” Ibid., pp. 159-60. “At the end of Marker’s Sunless, Krasna’s [Marker’s] own images in their turn enter the Zone. Deformed and mutable, they are acquiring the patina of time and losing their aura of presence, but they can now be cherished as memories, held so that the fleeting ‘real look’, directed at the cameraman by a market woman from Praia in the Cape Verde Islands, can be fixed and contemplated: a resonant figure recollected against a ground of emptiness.” Ibid., p. 162. In terms of Le fond de l’air est rouge, the process of formally “détourned” imagery, or the bending of the image back toward itself, is already underway through the process of tinting (or what Marker first calls “tinkering,” and later, with the Apple IIGS, “Satori-pottering”), as it is with the

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near-simultaneous, 16-minute, two-screen video installation, Quand le siècle a pris formes: Guerre et révolution (1978). Ibid., p. 148. “The [latter] piece contained archive film images from the First World War and the Russian Revolution that had been treated by an image synthesizer, their representational content drained away in favour of shifting coloured fields that just retained the outlines of recognizable figures and objects as a solarized flare.” Ibid. This was followed by L’héritage de la chouette (1989), a 13-part television series devoted to the legacy of ancient Greek culture. “Between the installation and the television series, Marker began to diversify the media platforms in which he created work, under the impact of newly available technologies such as the Apple computer, the hand-held camera and the domestic video recorder.” Ibid., p. 149. All of this was presaged by the Zone in Sans soleil, “a machine with the power to create a realm outside space and time, designed for the contemplation of images in the form of memories.” Ibid. (Some of the first altered film stocks Marker employed were in Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977), including the scenes from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Ibid., p. 150.) This resembles Tarkovsky’s work in Mirror (1975) with similar stock footage and his often tinting of dream sequences to set them apart from the rest of the film. For more on Quand le siècle a pris formes, see Kämper, Tode, eds., Chris Marker: Filmessayist, pp. 287-88. For this passage toward digitalization, see Lupton, “Into the Zone,” in Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, pp. 148-76. For the seminal Russian influences on Marker’s formal processes and vision, see Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub (and “Shub’s successor in the compilation documentary genre, Nicole Védrès”). Ibid., p. 8. Marker staged a “self-curated” retrospective at the Cinémathèque Française in 1998 that included works by artists he both admired and was influenced by. Ibid., p. 177. 23 Marker’s focus on ordinary people (Everyman) is traceable, at the least, to his 1959 book Coréennes. In the postscript, and given the circumstances of the production of the work (an aborted film project that also would have been politically charged), Marker’s sentiments are exacting: “At the end of this journey, there is human friendship. The rest is silence.” Chris Marker, Coréennes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1959), p. 138; cited in Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 62. In François Lecointe, “Elephants at the End of the World: Chris Marker and Third Cinema,” Third Text 25, no. 1 (January 2011), pp. 93-104, this statement is translated, “At the base of this journey, there is human friendship. The rest is silence.” Ibid., p. 104; italics added. For the troubled interaction c.1947 of Peuple et Culture (then directed by Joseph Rovan) and the PCF (the French Communist Party), see Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, pp. 25-26. Marker edited the first issues of DOC (under the pseudonym “Chris Villeneuve”), a dossier-style publication that included “literary extracts or short poems and songs, background information on works of literature, music, art and film, and tips on how to work successfully with these materials in a popular educational context.” Ibid., p. 25. Travail et Culture, however, which shared a common documentation center (Centre Nationale de Documentation de la Culture Populaire) with Peuple et Culture, fell increasingly under the spell of the PCF (especially under the presidency of Maurice Delarue). Marker had first been drawn

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to Travail et Culture through the theater workshop (possibly as a young actor) but soon gravitated to André Bazin’s “centre for cinematographic initiation” within Travail et Culture. It was in the cinema section that Marker met Alain Resnais. Ibid., p. 24. Lupton’s summary is developed from Dudley Andrew, André Bazin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). The ideological split between the two groups also led to Marker’s resignation as editor of DOC. (Marker edited DOC 1 and DOC 2/3.) Immediately following the war, Bazin, Marker, and Benigno Cacérès (a founder of Peuple et Culture) frequently traveled to French-occupied Germany with Joseph Rovan to conduct educational conferences. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 27. For a report on one such trip, see Chris Marker, “Croix de bois et chemin de fer,” Esprit 175 (January 1951): pp. 88-90. See also: Joseph Rovan, “Un movement culturel et politique: Peuple et Culture”; and Joseph Rovan, Mémoires d’un Français qui se souvient d’avoir été Allemand (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999). Regarding Marker’s quitting DOC and his subsequent move toward Seuil, to edit the Petite Planète travel guides, see ibid., pp. 262-63. 24 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (1929); cited in Chris Marker, “Points of Reference,” pp. 7-8, in Marker, “Sixties,” p. 7; ellipses in Marker. 25 Ibid. Cohn-Bendit’s statement is dated October 18, 1977, the pivotal point in the German Autumn; that is, the morning members of the Baader-Meinhof group were found dead in their cells at Stammheim Prison. 26 Mao Tse-Tung, Summary of the Conference of Provincial and Municipal Secretaries (January 1957); cited in Marker, “Points of Reference,” in Marker, “Sixties,” p. 8. 27 Carmen Castillo, Libération (October 15, 1977); cited in ibid.; ellipses in Marker. 28 Vladimir Vissotsky, “Hunting for Wolves” (c.1978); cited in ibid. The operative agency of this compilation of citations is contained most emphatically in the dates: 1927; 1957; and 1977. The torsion is in the reciprocal formulation of the addresses, each one commenting on the other through Marker’s exquisite sense for literary montage. Yet “Wolves” is most important, because it is the exception. It happened after the fact (after the first version of the film was completed), and it proves Marker’s point that the complex he is documenting is effectively “eternal.” The battlefield ends up being life itself. 29 Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993). 30 Saint Ambrose’s “inebriated sobriety” – as means of access to the First Cause (arch-phenomenality within all phenomena). 31 Steiner appears in “Symposium, or Accepted Ideas,” the first episode of L’héritage de la chouette, expounding on the “centrality of the Other to ancient Greek notions of selfhood.” Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, p. 172. 32 George Steiner, quoted by Marker in Le tombeau d’Alexandre; cited in Alter, Chris Marker, p. 46. 33 See Hoyt Rogers, “Yves Bonnefoy and the Art of Translation,” New Arcadia Review 2, 2004, http://www.bc.edu/publications/newarcadia/archives/2/yves

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bonnefoy/. Regarding the formal apparatus of poetic language and its relation to the here-and-now: “Poetry is also a formal use of language. Indeed, only form allows us to hear the tone of the words, and it is precisely because verse is sonorous reality that words in it are no longer subject to the sole authority of conceptual thought. This enables us to perceive reality otherwise than through language. Form in poetry silences the conceptual meaning of words; it is therefore the condition of the direct gaze upon the world.” Yves Bonnefoy, in Shusha Guppy, “Interviews: Yves Bonnefoy, The Art of Poetry No. 69,” Paris Review 131, Summer 1994, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1790/the-art-ofpoetry-no-69-yves-bonnefoy. Bonnefoy, while a proponent of free or open verse, is acknowledging that “physical” or representational form (sound, meter, page layout, etc.) is as important to poetry as the conceptual or speculative content of its ideational, mnemonic form. This argument against the metaphysical nature of poetry is also a somewhat modern bias, insofar as it echoes the phenomenologicalstructuralist-realist dictum, “No ideas without things” (and vice versa). 34 For comments regarding Tarkovsky’s 1983 version of Moussorgski’s Boris Godunov and its subsequent re-staging at Covent Garden in 2003, see Stuart Jeffries, “Monster in the Making,” Guardian, September 19, 2003, http://www. guardian.co.uk/music/2003/sep/19/classicalmusicandopera. Apropos of the extrapolitical nature of Tarkovsky’s rendering of Moussorgski’s opera (based on a play by Alexander Pushkin), Irina Brown (Tarkovsky’s assistant for the 1983 version, and who was called in to direct the revival) stated on the eve of the 2003 recreation: “Andrei was not a director who created allegories or symbols. He talked in images.” Ibid. The 1983 opera coincides with Tarkovsky’s “exile” from Russia, when he had just finished filming Nostalghia in Italy, and when he had decided to remain in the West. Ibid. Marker addresses this opera in his homage to Tarkovsky, Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999). Regarding Tarkovsky’s relationship to the word as image (and vice versa), and the integral sensibility of his films’ focus on “stillness” and “reflection” (through long and slow tracking shots, moments of levitation, the passage of the camera “through” mirrors, etc.), see the book of Polaroid photographs, Andrei Tarkovsky, Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids, ed. Giovanni Chiaramonte, Andrei A. Tarkovsky, foreword by Tonino Guerra (London: Thames & Hudson, 2006). Guerra is the screenwriter, borrowed from Michelangelo Antonioni, with whom Tarkovsky worked with on Nostalghia (1983). First published Andrej Tarkovskij, Luce istantanea (Florence: Edizioni della Meridiana, 2003). The book originated with a project by Ultreya, a selfdescribed “group of cultural operators and creators of book projects in the fields of art and photography.” The 60 Polaroids (30 from Russia and 30 from Italy) included in the publication were taken between 1979 and 1984 and include aspects of the production of Nostalghia, as well as images of Russia. The original Polaroids included in Instant Light were also exhibited in Commune di Gonzaga, Italy, February 9-March 16, 2003. For additional Polaroids from a collection of 200 held by the Tarkovsky Foundation, Florence, see Andrey Tarkovsky, Bright, Bright Day, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair (London: White Space Gallery; Florence: Tarkovsky Foundation, 2007). The latter book includes: an introduction by Andrei

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A. Tarkovsky (Tarkovsky’s son); essays by Andrei Tarkovsky; poems by Arseny Tarkovsky (Tarkovsky’s father); Polaroid transfers and an essay by Stephen Gill; and an interview with the Russian philosopher and art critic Boris Groys, by Nadim Samman and Anya Stonelake. Antonioni is credited with giving Tarkovsky his first Polaroid camera in the mid-to-late 1970s. Regarding the facticity (“a praxis born of a respect for reality”) of these Polaroids, see Benjamin Halligan, “Russian Soul, Eurotrance: Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids, edited by Giovanni Chiaramonte and Andrei A. Tarkovsky,” Senses of Cinema 34, 2005, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2005/book-reviews/tarkovsky_polaroids/. 35 Ledoux famously appeared in Marker’s seminal 1962 film La jeteé as the principal inquisitor. “It all began in Brussels’ Film Library (‘Cinémathèque Royale’) when my friend Jacques Ledoux, the flamboyant conservator, received a package of brand new prints from Moscow. In it, classics like Eisenstein, connoisseurs choice like Barnet, and one totally unknown: Schastye (Happiness) by A.I. Medvedkin. Ledoux hadn’t ordered it, he didn’t even know the man’s name. Apparently, one hidden hand had thrown that bottle to the sea of Cinémathèques, hoping for a welcoming creek.” Chris Marker, “The Last Bolshevik,” Chris Marker, n.d., http://www.chrismarker.org/the-last-bolshevik-bychris-marker/. Previous to Medvedkine’s re-discovery in France in the late 1960s, the only mention in the West of his works had appeared in Jay Leyda’s Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier, 1960). Leyda was in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, studying film, and worked with Eisenstein. He migrated in 1936 to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, and published Eisenstein at Work (co-authored by Zina Voynow) in 1982. Marker first saw Medvedkine’s Schastye (Scast’e) as part of a Soviet film retrospective in Brussels (organized by Ledoux). He first met Medvedkine at the 1967 International Festival of Documentary Film in Leipzig, when Jay Leyda, also in attendance, announced that the director was there with the Russian contingent (Marker thinking that the Russian maestro was long dead). Marker/SLON’s subsequent film Le train en marche (1971) tells the story of Medvedkine’s ciné-train newsreels through historical footage of the period and an extended monologue by Medvedkine shot in 1971 in a Paris train station at Noisy-le-Sec. See Cooper, Chris Marker, pp. 89-93, for a brief description of this film. Le train en marche was used as an introduction to the French, theatrical re-release of Medvedkine’s Schastye. Regarding this re-release under the title Le bonheur, see below. 36 Originally made as a “silent” film, Schastye was restored and given a new soundtrack, with music by Moussorgski, by SLON in 1971, when the Soviets granted permission for its release in France. SLON was the cooperative Marker helped found in Paris in the late 1960s. It produced short films documenting worker movements in France and political insurrections abroad. SLON’s first film, Loin du Viêt-nam (1967), directed by Joris Ivens and produced by Marker, was comprised of short segments by key Marker allies, including Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, William Klein, and Jean-Luc Godard. For a portrait of this film collaborative, see Min Lee, “Red Skies: Joining Forces with the Militant Collective SLON,” Film Comment 39, no. 4 (July-August 2003): pp. 38-41. Among the small

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groups that formed within SLON to make films (and Marker says there were perhaps 12 members), Groupe Medvedkine was formed especially to film the strikes at Besançon in December 1967. See Marker, “The Last Bolshevik.” There is a sense within Marker’s sketch of the origins of SLON, and subsequent connections made between the Soviet Union and France, that Medvedkine’s “rebirth” in Russia was a result of the fact that he had developed a fan club in the West, of which Marker was its foremost member. Medvedkine was permitted to travel to France in 1971, under cover of a film project on ecology. This trip facilitated SLON’s short film, with Medvedkine as star, on the ciné-trains, Le train en marche (1971). It would seem that Medvedkine’s rise in the West was also the cause of his receiving the Lenin Prize in 1971, in the East. See Image et son: Revue du cinéma 255 (December 1971), pp. 1-32, for “Dossier Medvedkine,” including: an excerpt from a letter from Medvedkine to Eisenstein dated 1936 (pp. 6-7); an “article anonyme de 1935 cité dans le catalogue de la Cinémathèque Belge” (pp. 10-11) regarding Medvedkine’s Schastye; Marker’s “Le ciné-ours” (pp. 4-5); “Alexandre Medvedkine: 294 jours sur roues” (pp. 18-27), extracts; and “Au ‘Groupe Medvedkine’ de Besançon” (p. 28), homage by Medvedkine to his French admirers. 37 Chris Marker, The Last Bolshevik, DVD (Brooklyn, NY: Icarus Films, 2009). DVD 1: Alexandre Medvedkine, Happiness (1934); Medvedkine’s ciné-train short films Watch Your Health!, Journal No. 4, How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, The Conveyor Belt; the Medvedkine monologue (extract) from Marker/SLON’s Le train en marche (The Train Rolls On) (1971); and two recreations by Nikolaï Izvolov of Medvedkine’s lost films, Stop Thief! and The Story of Titus. DVD 2: Chris Marker, The Last Bolshevik (1993); and “Medvedkin and Dziga Vertov,” a six-minute segment (excerpt/outtake) with Izvolov. See Emma Widdis, “Happiness,” pp. 35-56, in Alexander Medvedkin (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005). Schastye (Happiness) is a film-parable that follows the adventures and “transformation of [idiot-savant] Khmyr from labouring peasant before the Revolution into a layabout ‘idler’ in the collective farm” of the post-Revolutionary USSR. Ibid., p. 55. The full title of the 1971 French/SLON version of the film is Le bonheur: Ou l’histoire de l’infortuné Khmyr, de sa femme-cheval Anna, de son opulent voisin Foka au dernier kolkhozien fainéant (Happiness: Or the Story of the Unfortunate Khmyr, His Horse-Wife Anna, His Wealthy Neighbour Foka, to the Last Lazy Kolkhozian). Jacques Rancière states that Marker’s Le tombeau d’Alexandre engages three “Russias”: pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia; the formation and collapse of the Soviet Union; and the unhappy aftermath. See Oliver Davis, Jacques Rancière (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 148. See also, Jacques Rancière, “La fiction de mémoire: À propos du Tombeau d’Alexandre de Chris Marker,” Trafic 29 (Spring 1999): pp. 36-47. Reprinted and translated into English in Rancière, Film Fables, pp. 157-70. Rancière: “The artistic work of memory is that which accords everyone the dignity of fiction.” Jacques Rancière, in Marie-Aude Baronian, Mireille Rosello, “Jacques Rancière and Indisciplinarity” (interview with Jacques Rancière), trans. Gregory Elliot, Art & Research 2, no. 1, Summer 2008, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/pdfs/jrinterview.pdf.

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Letter One covers the period of Medvedkine’s life (1900-1989) up to the Civil War in 1919-1920; Letter Two picks up with the move to the production of agitprop theater and film, with a brief survey of the artistic whirlwinds engulfing postrevolutionary Russia; Letter Three addresses the (mis)adventures of the ciné-train and Medvedkine’s implicit naivety and romanticism; Letter Four tracks his travails through the 1930s, with the deaths of Maxim Gorky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Isaac Babel; and Letter Five opens with the Nazi-Soviet pact and quickly devolves into the Minsk campaign (against the Germans), where (utilizing the recurring motif of a porcelain fisherman Medvedkine kept on his bookshelf) Marker notes he is now teaching “fishing to fighters” – filmmaking to soldiers. At the outset of the last (sixth) letter, Marker notes Stalin’s death in 1953. (Mockingly and/or surreally, he states that he is in Times Square, New York City, at the time, hanging out with the blind jazz musician Moondog, and visually implying by montage that he is “watching” the news unfold on some sort of illuminated, electronic billboard, as if a new year, 1953, is being counted down – which is absurd, of course, given that such billboards only arrived much later.) The sixth letter then moves quickly through Medvedkine’s receiving of the Lenin Prize in 1971, to his death at the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. Visiting Medvedkine’s grave, Marker hallucinates various images drifting across the face of the glassy surface of the tomb: “Throughout the film, Marker manipulates images, often highlighting detail or even applying computer-generated effects to alter footage. In a particularly reflexive moment, Marker questions his own images as he proposes two imagined endings for the film itself: one of galloping horses superimposed over a graveyard, treated with special effects and music by Alfred Schnittke; the other of Medvedkine’s grave again treated with special effects followed by two slowmotion shots of a Red Army cavalry rider with Russian choral music. Marker calls these possible endings ‘lyrical’ but then notes ‘that lyricism was dead,’ and the film continues with the fall of communism in Russia. But if lyricism is dead, it is a lyricism associated with the beautiful or the ineffable; it is a lyricism that fails to find the right distance and proper perspective, settling instead for a false proximity.” David Foster, “‘Thought-Images’ and Critical-Lyricisms: The Denkbild and Chris Marker’s Le tombeau d’Alexandre,” Image [&] Narrative 10, no 3, 2009, http://www.kravanja.eu/pdf_files/ChrisMarker1.pdf. Both the fifth letter and the last (sixth) letter indulge the post-perestroika meltdown that Russia went through, though it is all rather inconclusive. What is important is that shortly after Medvedkine’s death in 1989, when he died with a sense of hope for Russia, all hell broke loose. Marker notes that “the picture-book was closing.” We see statues being pulled down, disgruntled pensioners (when food was scarce due to hoarding), an exhibition on the horrors of the Afghan War (which was prematurely shut down following the August 1991 coup d’état perpetrated against Gorbachev), Vladimir Zhirinovsky (doors opening for demagogues), and the ravages of Chernobyl (post-1986). 39 Viktor Dyomen notes that after the Civil War, Medvedkine was made a general in the Red Army and placed in charge of propaganda, as a direct result of his absurdist “horse theater” – the skits he produced for troops during the Civil War,

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“between battles,” and criticizing the preceding battle (skits populated and spoken by horses, speaking back to the troops, as it were). In the opening sequences of the second letter, Medvedkine states in one of several interviews included in the film that following the Civil War (plus the carnage of WWI) the bleak landscape of the new Soviet Union included broken industries, worn-out people everywhere, and – effectively – an entire generation of illiterate souls. 40 This style includes “Brechtian” signposts, also suggesting Godard’s source for the same agit-prop affectation. Meyerhold’s theater company produced the prepackaged signposts that were used to semi-sarcastic effect in the ciné-train films, such as – to the effect – “Where is your conscience, Comrade?” 41 In Letter Two Marker quickly unleashes a high-wattage montage of high-avantgarde 1920s Soviet art that is utterly dizzying. He notes that here the culture of the past met “all the impatience of the future – memory plus madness.” “By mixing what others didn’t dare to mix, they simply invented modern art.” He then moves to cinema, by way of Eisenstein, commenting on the “beautifully symbolic” nature of Eisenstein’s reversal of Tsarist propaganda in Battleship Potemkin (1925), where appearances are utilized for propaganda, versus Potemkin’s propaganda by appearances. Yet already Marker slips in discomfiting gestures from the future, to show how in Odessa, Ukraine, the film has come to substitute for reality (and/or how art becomes reality), with the city having absorbed and commemorated the famous massacre on the steps depicted in the film, a massacre that never actually occurred (Eisenstein having invented it). Letter Two closes with reference to Russian filmmaker Roman Karmen (who famously re-staged the battle of Leningrad, in order to film it) and comments regarding his penchant for rearranging history, Marker noting that Karmen did not believe in objectivity (and by the placement and tone of this statement, plus all of the other gestures within the film, we might also assume that the same applies to Marker). This is the time frame when the armored trains of the Civil War gave way to agit-prop trains (the precursors to Medvedkine’s ciné-train experiments), and when Vertov and his brother began the Kino-Eye newsreels. 42 Marker notes that what distinguished Medvedkine’s documentation of the horrors of Soviet collectivization was that these appalling facts were viewed with a “socialist conscience.” David Foster troubles the truth-telling aspect of Marker’s narrative by conferring upon it a “critical-lyrical” quality that revolves around a “personally invested act of criticism.” See Foster, “‘Thought-Images’ and CriticalLyricisms,” passim. 43 Many commentators on this film have noted that Marker often pairs certain figures to “dialectical” effect, as he pairs Medvedkine and Babel at one point (both visually and through the commentary). Medvedkine and Babel were both in the Red Cavalry (c.1919) during the Russian Civil War, whereas Babel (a Jew), operating as a war correspondent, went on to denounce the atrocities of the Cossacks (the cavalry) as it rampaged through the Ukraine and the Russian steppe, burning entire villages and serving summary judgment on supposed enemies of the Bolshevik terror. See Isaac Babel, Red Cavalry, trans. Nadia Helstein (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1929). Medvedkine essentially romanticized this time and his role,

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never quite acknowledging what Babel exposed. Babel’s diaries from 1920 form the basis for the somewhat fictionalized tales in Red Cavalry. Marker’s use of Babel is not, however, without its own difficulties, as Babel’s works were equally distorted and marred by propagandistic and vapid ideological formulations that one could take as necessary, given his own need for survival, or naïve, given that the Bolshevik cause was – after all – very close to his heart, as it was for Medvedkine. Marker’s voice-over at one points quotes Babel: “We looked on the world like a meadow in May crossed by women and horses.” This romantic gesture is preceded, however, with the more grave statement that “epic is the silver lining of nightmare.” See James Wood, “Effects and Causes” (review of The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, 2002), New Republic, February 4, 2002, http://www.tnr. com/article/effects-and-causes. This review, while mostly a critique of Babel’s style, also connects obliquely to the primary literary issue that Marker wishes to exploit: “From Flaubert, Babel learned how to ration commentary; from Dostoevsky and Gorky, he learned that Russian history was a catalogue of violence and tragedy; from Gogol, he learned about grotesque portraiture; from Tolstoy, he learned that detail should be always dynamic, always attached to activity.” Ibid. See Isaac Babel, The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, ed. Nathalie Babel, trans. Peter Constantine (New York: Norton, 2002). The book includes the original Red Cavalryman dispatches, plus early (intermediate) sketches that went into the Red Cavalry stories. Babel was arrested in early 1939, tortured, and “confessed” to Trotskyism, etc.; he was shot ten months later in January 1940. Meyerhold was executed less than a month later, after “confessing” to being a British and Japanese spy. His theater company had been shuttered by the authorities a few years earlier when all last remnants of avant-garde art were repressed by order of Stalin. Marker notes that, while a dissenting partisan of the romance of the Civil War (whereas as for Medvedkine the Civil War was the “foundation of his life” and remained so), Babel’s essential problem was that his literary style could not help but pass judgment. In pairing Medvedkine and Babel, Marker is also underscoring a fundamental difference in artistic temperaments between the two. In Letter Two, Dyomen in many respects sums up the difference between Babel and those who survived the purges (at least some of those who survived) in describing Meyerhold and Medvedkine; that is, they were both ardent devotees of the propagation of new ideas, but also masters of satire – “feeding it to the people by the trough.” While satire did not save Meyerhold, it may have played a role, however small, in Medvedkine’s miraculous life; a life where – as Marker states at the outset (in a statement charged with a suitably infinite regress) – “miracles are one breath away from normality.” 44 See Marker, “Sixties,” p. 4. 45 This thread of Slavic religiosity is Ariadne’s thread. It leads out of the labyrinth of endless semiosis (the plague of signs reeling out of control and something Marker does denounce in the last passages of the last letter, regarding television) – but it is a thread that is dangerously tattered as well. As it survives in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, and in other forms in the visual arts, it is also a perfect instantiation of the mystic “Franciscan” vision of the entire world hanging by a

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single strand of hair (in a vast and dark void). This Slavic religiosity is essentially a form of pansophism, and was exemplified in the literary undertakings of the Russian Silver Age, foremost in the writings of Vladimir Solovyev, Alexander Blok, and Andrei Bely. It shades into mysticism at times and is present as a unique poetical language and a form of “Slavic personalism” in the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam. It returns in the films of Tarkovsky, arguably foremost in verbal form through the appropriations of his own father’s poetry, but also in the tableaux vivants he assembled within his films and the celebrated long tracking shots that often accompany the dream sequences. Not symbolic so much as baroque and often florid, the literary effects are offset by the moral tenor – most decidedly in the recourse to a universalizing rationality within the poeticizing form. This same tendency toward pansophism and its often discordant variants is behind the arguments regarding Aleksey Khomyakov’s influence on Pavel Florensky at the close of the Silver Age (1910-1920), the latter a late partisan of the Silver Age ethos nonetheless, this ethos essentially being the fusion of a “theological” vision with poetic vision. Solovyev’s thundering moral philosophy is astonishing in this regard. Yet all of this is relatively a synthesis of now-classical historical forces, beginning with Pushkin, and effectively a series of incorporations or mutually imbricated syntheses of Eastern and Western artistic and religious innovations within traditional structures. At its worst, this tendency shades into mesmerism and occultism, producing the remarkable and mostly harmless aberrations typified by Grigori Rasputin, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Nicholas Roerich, and George Gurdjieff. A unique figure bridging the two camps in Russian or Slavophile pansophism, Orthodox and otherwise, is Nicolas Berdyaev, who defended Khomyakov against Florensky, and who, adopting Marxism at the turn of century, nonetheless retained that heightened regard for orthodoxy that is coupled with a disdain for the institutions that accompany it. Florensky’s denunciation of Khomyakov is actually a mixed blessing, insofar as it underscores the significance of his contribution (albeit in terms Florensky considered damning): “‘Khomyakov’s thought slyly eludes ontologic definition, pouring forth with a mother of pearl play of colour. But this colour-play is one of superficial hues, dazzling, but not substantial, and therefore there are alterings and changes of the outline with but the slightest turn of the head, which provides not a stable grasp of thought and it leaves within the heart anxiety and question. Immanentism – suchlike is the flavour of the theory of Khomyakov.’” This passage is from Berdyaev’s defense of Khomyakov. Florensky attacked Khomyakov in the pages of the Bogoskovskii vestnik (Theological Messenger) in July-August 1916. See N.A. Berdyaev, “Khomyakov and Fr. Florensky” (1917), Berdyaev Online Bibliotek Library, n.d., http://www. berdyaev.com/berdiaev/berd_lib/1917_257.html. The issue of pan-Slavism and pansophism more or less fades away post-1920, in Russia, with the more universal aspects of its appeal being privileged in the turn to both the production of an antibourgeois, communist culture and – as antidote – the intense personal relationship to the same in the poetry and literature that will be increasingly suppressed by the Soviet authorities (major figures going underground and/or “dispatched” to the gulags of Siberia). The racial currents of pan-Slavism are kept alive, nonetheless,

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in the new nation states to the west born out of the carnage of WWI and the destruction of the Habsburg hegemony, most provocatively perhaps in Czechoslovakia where the battle between the new objectivity (the “New Man”) and the old subjectivity is played out in the nationalist-cultural program of sociologist, professor, and politician Tomáš Masaryk (first President of the Czechoslovak Republic); that is, a mostly mythicized or mytho-poetic agenda carried out through careful elision of anything extra-territorial (including German influences) and visually and aesthetically presented to the public at Prague Castle with the help of the Slovene architect Josip Pleþnik. The ýSR then underwent the same troubles as Russia, as Czech modernism arrived and began to confront the somewhat outmoded nationalistic and pseudo-traditional pretenses of Masaryk and Company. The Czechoslovak experiment collapsed in 1938 with the arrival (return) of the Germans. Post-WWII, the Czech and Slovak lands entered the Soviet Bloc. The same discord between Art and its Other (the world at large as ideology) is found in Czech art and belles lettres in the period from the founding of the Republic and its dissolution in 1938, with the poetist, critic, and artist Karel Teige being, arguably, the most complex figure in this regard. In cinema, the same struggle embodied in Medvedkine’s work is found in the new-wave, avant-garde films of VČra Chytilová (banned by the Czechoslovak authorities in the 1960s) and the semi-absurdist works of filmmaker JiĜí Menzel (drawing often on the equally semi-absurd, literary exploits of Bohumil Hrabal and others). The extreme, often catastrophic rapport between world and self (the very definition of “personalism”) was embodied in the plays and essays of Václav Havel, a figure who would become, with the Velvet Revolution of November 17-December 29, 1989, the progenitor of a political vision (based on the concept of civil society) that is essentially non-political, at least in terms of the semantic connotations of the word at the time. Marker addresses the first outbreak of organized Czech resistance to Soviet hegemony, the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 (beginning with the election of Alexander Dubþek as First Secretary of the Communist Party in January, and ending with the SovietWarsaw Pact invasion in August), in his monumental Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977). 46 Rochal and Viktor Dyomen are the two more astute commentators deployed within Marker’s commentary (a commentary within the commentary, as it were). As writers, they generally summarize the state of affairs within the Soviet system for intellectuals caught in the crosshairs of history. Both appear in the first letter to establish Medvedkine’s artistic “bonafides,” Dyomen saying that Medvedkine essentially “existed outside time,” while his time nonetheless left its marks on him. Rochal first appears to explain how Medvedkine’s soul was formed in pre-Soviet Russia, from a duality of religious and revolutionary presentiments that then converged in 1917. Marker’s prologue notes that Medvedkine was five years old (he was actually two years old) when Lenin wrote “What is to be Done?” and that he was 17 years old “when he knew.” The prologue also contains the ominous statement by Marker that “Now I can write,” following upon an admonition addressed to Marker by Medvedkine that he is a lazy bastard for not writing. This “Now I can write” is due to Medvedkine’s death. Prior to that event “there were

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too many things to hush up.” In Letter Four, Rochal explains that totalitarian art seeks to level everything, while Dyomen explains that bureaucracy comes to trump ideology and many works were banned in the Stalinist years simply due to “ambiguity,” or that which truly troubles the bureaucrats in charge of the production of authorized culture. The fourth letter of Le tombeau d’Alexandre is particularly difficult vis-à-vis visual art, as it also develops the thematic of the repression to come in the late 1930s and the use of cinema during the show trials in service to “totalitarian justice.” Marker notes that by this time “life has become a fiction film.” He also drops into this section of the film a nod toward the future in the form of his visit to Moscow in 1990, with Costa-Gavras, for the premiere of the latter’s film L’aveu (made with Marker in 1970). L’aveu documents the persecution of Artur London (a Czech communist official) during the 1952 Slánský show trial – part of a purge of the Czech Communist Party ordered by Stalin. At this point, Marker’s point is to show how cinema has crossed over to the production or fabrication of outright lies, versus its more nuanced or criticalmytho-poetic role in the production of “utopia” (always to come). 47 See Alter, Chris Marker, p. 51. 48 Marker sees Medvedkine for the last time in 1988, on the way back from Tbilisi, Georgia (during the filming of the television series L’héritage de la chouette), and Medvedkine is ebullient with the first flush of perestroika – yet this is before the impending collapse of the Soviet Union and the aftermath. See Marker, “The Last Bolshevik.” 49 Le tombeau d’Alexandre is divided into two, approximately 60-minute segments: “Le royaume des ombres” (“The Kingdom of the Shadows”), Letters 13; and “Les ombres du royaume” (“The Shadows of the Kingdom”), Letters 4-6. The “Entr’acte” for Le tombeau d’Alexandre (in the 2009 DVD release, and presumably in early versions, given its date of 1993) is Chat écoutant la musique (also in “Zone Bestiare,” in “Zapping Zone,” 1990), an elegiac and short (two-tothree-minute) film of Guillaume-en-Égypte, Marker’s cat and alter ego, sleeping on the keyboard of an electric piano, with music playing and a pulsing LED. See Jean-André Fieschi, “Poulpe au regard de soie!,” pp. 13-30, in Jean-André Fieschi, Patrick Lacoste, Patrick Tort, eds., L’animal-écran (Paris: Éditions Centre du Pompidou, 1996), for a discussion of this short interlude. Marker returns to music repeatedly in Le tombeau d’Alexandre, as “palliative,” and the soundtrack is mostly composed of works by Alfred Schnittke (“In memoriam,” “Quintet,” “Trio,” “Violin Concerto”), plus tonal works by “Michel Krasna” (one of Marker’s pseudonyms). Perhaps Schopenhauer’s high regard for music is at play here; an artistic form that truly exceeds all expectations in the hands of a master, and which demolishes most forms of ideological appropriation and pretension through its sheer formalization. Marker notes, ironically, in one passage of Le tombeau d’Alexandre (by way of an avant-garde musical composition by Swiss composer Arthur Honegger) how lyricism (in music and otherwise) was perceived by the Soviet regime as the enemy of the “New Man,” while also noting that the authorities equally condemned fetishism of style or form – avant-gardism in/for itself. He then comments on the fact that this paradoxical, double-headed

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condemnation of both art and music by Soviet bureaucrats (meaning censors) preceded that time when everyone would be “guilty of something” (that is, the late 1930s). “Kingdom of the Shadows” is a reference to comments made by Gorky upon seeing a Lumière Brothers’ film at the All-Russia Fair in Nizhny Novgorod in 1896. Marker inverts the characterization of cinema by the progenitor of Socialist Realism in the second half of Le tombeau d’Alexandre as a means of showing how cinema has become a means for the production of a shadowy and sinister, parallel world of pure propaganda. 50 David Foster notes that the French title of the film – Le tombeau d’Alexandre – refers to a long-standing literary form in French letters, versus a tomb proper – though Marker invokes both the form and the object, at once. The “tombeau,” a literary-rhetorical address (and later musical genre) dating to the Renaissance, is “an intensely personal form similar to the elegy,” or “a text or a collection of writing to the memory of a deceased individual by one or several friends or admirers.” Foster is quoting Jacques Charpentreau, Dictionnaire de la poésie (Paris: Fayard, 2006). See Foster, “‘Thought-Images’ and Critical-Lyricisms,” n.p. In this sense, the title of the film, in French and/or in English, retains an incommensurable quality that is in perfect keeping with Marker’s weaving together of criticism and elegy, plus his interweavings of literary and visual form. 51 Film scholar Nikolaï Izvolov is the primary interlocutor in the film, especially given his reconstructions of Medvedkine’s career. Other notable interlocutors include: Kira Paramonova (actor); Viktor Dyomen (writer/actor); Youli Raïzman (director); Chongara Medvedkina (Medvedkine’s daughter); Lev Rochal (writer); Vladimir Dimitriev (actor); Antonina Pirojkova (widow of Babel); Marina Goldovskaya (filmmaker); and Yacov Tolchan (cameraman for both Medvedkine and Vertov). 52 Francis Fukuyama’s now-discredited, infamous, and neo-conservative acclamation/diatribe regarding the arrival of the “End of History,” with the fall of the Soviet Union, is instructive in this regard. See Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” National Interest (Summer 1989): pp. 3-18. 53 During one of the commentaries covering the years of the ciné-train newsreels, Marker strikes a particularly telling “Markerian” note, by way of Medvedkine, when he remarks that within the bleak landscape of the collectivized factories, and by extension the endless meetings of the Communist Party committees attempting to formulate a strategy to extract maximum productivity from the workers, there are “no cultural workers present.” This is an exact formulation, by aside, to the premise for Marker’s work with SLON in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as it is also the precise reason for the establishment of Peuple et Culture in the late 1940s in Paris, the group Marker associated himself with immediately after returning from “no-where” (his unknown activities during the war). In another fragment from Medvedkine’s film Chudesnitsa (The Miracle Worker) (1936) a rather “literary” or “affected” portrait of a collectivized farm, a young girl/heroine (Nastasia) kneels before several milk cows writing on a sheet of paper her recommendation to the powers that be that to be kind to the cows might produce better quality milk. Here – finally – is a “cultural worker” hiding out in the frames

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of Medvedkine’s cunning portrait that verges on the theatrical, a quality that returns in his work (or never quite leaves, as such) as things grow more damning, foremost in the bizarre parable Schastye (Happiness) or the film Novaya Moskva (New Moscow). The latter film, made in 1938, enjoyed (according to Marker) exactly one screening before it was yanked by the censors for the usual reasons, or “ambiguity” (a synonym for plurisignation, one of the great attributes of highformalist, Soviet avant-garde art). Novaya Moskva documents the modernization of Moscow through architecture, with proposed plans taking on a decidedly de Chirico-esque quality, the “radiant future” apparently also a vast tableau of alienation. Marker indicates in the commentary that, given the sets for this filmcarnival, Medvedkine’s “excommunication” must be over, before noting that the ten-percent conformity at the end (the bow to Stalin) failed to save the film from recall anyway. That Medvedkine made these somewhat-late, satiric films so close to the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s, and survived to receive the Lenin Prize in 1971, is all the more remarkable. Izvolov explains in “Medvedkin and Dziga Vertov” that Schastye was not banned outright, but boycotted by the press (effectively the same fate suffered by the ciné-train newsreels). In the middle 1930s (according to Dyomen) both Medvedkine’s and Vertov’s film projects were, generally, either denied production or shelved upon release. The main culprit here seems to have been Boris Shumyatsky, head of the Soviet film industry, though he was arrested in 1938 and executed the same year. Medvedkine’s Chudesnitsa, however, was outright banned (initially), as was Eisenstein’s much darker Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow) (1937), a film dealing with the betrayal of a father to the authorities by his son, a film which Medvedkine – as party member – then defended. Eisenstein, in turn, defended Medvedkine’s Schastye. Meanwhile, following on Shestaia chast’ mira (A Sixth Part of the World) (1926), Odinnadtsatyi (The Eleventh Year) (1928), and Chelovek s kinoapparatom (Man with a Movie Camera) (1929), with a few films in-between, Vertov was back making opportunistic propaganda films – such as Kolybel’naja (Lullaby) (1937), which was immediately shelved upon Stalin’s orders anyway – and fading slowly into obscurity. Nonetheless, both Vertov and Medvedkine returned “to the fold,” however briefly, in the early to mid-1940s filming the war, at the front. Medvedkine’s Osvobozhdyonnaya zemlya (Liberated Earth) (1945) documents the siege of Minsk. Midway through Letter Four, Marina Goldovskaya describes Vertov’s fate as particularly telling, in that he worshipped the god of Communism which was all the while “beating him from all sides.” Goldovskaya’s father worked with Shumyatsky – in a technical role within the film ministry. He was arrested, interrogated, and tortured at Lubyanka Prison, and later released, all in association with the arrest of Shumyatsky – and all apparently because a mercury-vapor lamp blew up during a screening at a new theater in Moscow and the event was interpreted as an assassination attempt (“by the Japanese”) on the Politburo in attendance. See Marina Goldovskaya, Woman with a Movie Camera, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006). Dig deep enough into Marker’s films and they open up on to “Hell itself.” Within the many quotations of Medvedkine’s work in Le tombeau d’Alexandre, there is a moment

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when Marker shows a clip from a film about Russian muzhiks (peasants) who have descended to Hell and rather like it there, being accustomed to the “flames.” In many ways, in his late films especially, Marker is not unlike Medvedkine (and both are not unlike Antonin Artaud), sending secret hand signals through the flames – from within or beyond the collective madness of authorized culture. 54 Medvedkine’s last film projects (from the late 1960s and early 1970s) involved bashing Maoism on behalf of the Soviets, and a somewhat bombastic 1972 treatment on the virtues of ecology and the USSR. 55 Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon, Le souvenir d’un avenir (2002). Denise Bellon (1902-1999) was a member of the Alliance Photo Agency, founded in Paris in 1934 and lasting until 1940. Marker notes midway through the film that to become a photographer one must learn to sustain the gaze of others. Yet the spirit of Surrealism pervades this film, and its operative insurrection against the gaze is a secret gesture within the film – insofar as Surrealism, as Dada before it, détourned the suzerainty of vision, turning it in upon itself. Marker describes the “secret radiation” of Surrealism as that which also animates Bellon’s work. This secret radiation, in turn, is the “intelligence” that crosses the different media Surrealism invoked and cannibalized. Foremost in this regard, then, Marker’s treatise includes a homage to the brilliance of Marcel Duchamp (to his “eye and his intelligence”). 56 The Cinémathèque Française was founded by Henri Langlois out of his personal collection of films, which were almost lost during the war due to the German order during the occupation to destroy all films made before 1937. Marker’s film shows canisters of films being smuggled around Paris in baby carriages. Its present-day headquarters in Bercy include the Bibliothèque du Film. The Cinémathèque has its own checkered history, and Langlois was fired as head of the operation in 1968 leading to protests and its temporary closing. The Cinémathèque Française was headquartered at Palais de Chaillot from the early 1960s until the late 1990s, Chaillot also the principal site for Marker’s masterful meditation on the nature of images proper, La jetée. See Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 50. 57 Désert de Retz is an English-style folly garden (Anglo-Chinois), just outside of Paris, and not far from Versailles. It was created by the eccentric aristocrat François Racine de Monville during the run up to the French Revolution when gardens were utilized as political weapons (virtuoso mise-en-scène as political commentary). The isolated garden or “desert” was comprised of a series of follies (architectural fabrique), set in a somewhat intentionally wild or disheveled landscape (in opposition to the formal style of French baroque gardens that prevailed at the time), and which included a gigantic ruined column that also doubled as de Monville’s summer residence. The estate was recently restored after being chopped up and falling into ruin over two centuries, not unlike the fate suffered by the other great English-style landscape of the time, Ermenonville, site of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s death and initial interment (prior to his remains being exhumed and moved to the Panthéon in Paris). 58 One could guess that this all has to do with the incipient evacuation of the paradigmatic in favor of syntagmatic excess. Plurisignation invokes, at once, the former and the latter. Post-Marxism is equally guilty in this regard, having

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capitulated to an entire empire of broken signs. Marker is notably harsh, here and there, on signs in various guises or phases of depletion; for example, in Description d’un combat (1960), and in Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993). His project is, then, a critique of images as mere signs. This is true insofar as his work exceeds and eclipses the syntactic/semiotic drift of post-structuralism’s bias for forms of immanence and engages the semantic/transcendental in pursuit of speculative thought itself. His use or valorization of mere signs, on the other hand, is restricted to iconic gestures that are typically humorous, as with his endless play with cats (though they also signal inscrutability) and his remarks regarding the recurring spotted horse in Medvedkine’s theatrical and filmic work – a sign “taken as wonder” (or icon/logo) by ISKRA. Anti-modernism always appears when the true liberality of the arts is insulted by ideology – ideology that is benign, malignant, and/or otherwise (that is, bureaucratic). 59 See Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Diehl, ed., Les problèmes de la peinture. The one illustration accompanying the text is a black-and-white image of the Shroud of Turin (“photo” by C. Enrie). 60 Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 1. Published in association with the exhibition “Chris Marker: Staring Back,” at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, May 12-August 12, 2007. The exhibition also appeared at Peter Blum Gallery, New York, New York, September 8-November 3, 2007. 61 Bill Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” pp. 137-50, in ibid., p. 145. The book is dedicated, by Marker, to “Mr. Dominique Galouzeau de Villepin, then France’s Prime Minister.” This nod to the conservative Prime Minister regards, Marker notes, his passing “a law that triggered the demos that lured me to film them and from which I made stills that attracted the attention of Bill Horrigan and thus led to this.” Chris Marker, “Dedication,” in ibid. Horrigan and Marker were in touch due to the earlier exhibition/installation at the Wexner Center, “Silent Movie” (1995), following on Marker’s “residency” at the Wexner, 1994-1995. 62 Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 43. 63 Ibid. 64 See Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” in Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 143. “The Charonne massacre in 1962 was itself a deathly epilogue to the roundup in October 1961 of hundreds of Algerians in Paris, spearheaded by the Vichy-tainted chief of police, Maurice Papon, resulting in as many as an estimated 200 among the disappeared.” Ibid., p. 150 n 6. Philip Brooks and Alan Hayling’s documentary film Drowning by Bullets (1992), which includes footage from Le joli mai, shows the context of Marker’s image: the demonstrations of October 1961 by FLN sympathizers; the subsequent repression by police; and the February 1962 Charonne disaster; followed by the anti-OAS demonstration Marker’s image indexes. Regarding “I Stare 1,” see also, Steve Edwards, “Commons and Crowds: Figuring Photography from Above and Below,” Third Text 23, no. 4 (July 2009): pp. 447-64. See also, Régis Debray, “The Mediological State of Grace,” pp. 31-44, in Charles de Gaulle: Futurist for a Nation, trans. John Howe (London: Verso, 1994), for a suitably caustic reading of de Gaulle and his relationship to “History.” First published À demain de Gaulle (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1990). Debray is

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caught in the throes of a retrospective reading of “the great man,” insofar as the political system of the present has been utterly contaminated by faux ideologies perpetuated by media and, like Marker (his colleague), Debray suspects the decline of the Left is due as much to its embrace of a type of post-Marxist determinism as its own inability to embrace the necessity of “obsessive” political myth-making (de Gaulle’s “gift”). Debray is rehearsing a performative critique of politics, and, while caustic, actually defends de Gaulle. For a particularly damning critique of the academic and his/her embrace of “the social sciences,” or “soft sciences,” see ibid., pp. 49-50. Debray’s respect for structuralism (Lévi-Strauss et al.) is measured, while his disdain for its application to politics is absolute. He describes this latemodern form of determinism in highly sarcastic, “Markerian” terms as an updated version of Newtonian “celestial mechanics,” pushing the slow loss of heroic human agency back in time to the threshold of the French and English Enlightenment, while he sees – ironically – the emergence of chaos theory as a possible reprise of “how the insubstantial can triumph over the substantial.” Ibid., p. 50. “Now it seems that the ‘objective laws of history’ may themselves turn out to be a residual myth from the dawn of the magicians, and that the ancient myth of the great mover may come to appear a subtle idea, prefiguring the high noon of a more exact reason. The half-scholar minimizes the role of the individual; the true scholar may one day rehabilitate it.” Ibid. Rogue OAS activities amounted to a sustained attack on President de Gaulle, with the intent to precipitate a coup d’état. Their first failed attempt to assassinate de Gaulle occurred in 1962. Its campaign, however, was mostly waged in Algeria with a series of bombings that were intended to neutralize the Evian accord of March 1962 and the impending referendum, in June, on Algerian independence. The OAS’ origins lie in an elite, government-sanctioned army unit specializing in torture and terror against members of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), stretching back to the initial revolts by Algerians in middle 1950s. Resnais/Marker’s Nuit et brouillard, a film about the Nazi concentration camps of WWII, was coming to completion around 1955 during the first wave of terror in Algeria and became an oblique critique of French-sponsored terrorism in North Africa. See Virginia Ann Bonner, “Reinventing Documentary in Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard,” pp. 96-142, in Bonner, Cinematic Caesuras, pp. 119-23. 65 The legislation would have altered the agreement between newly hired French workers allowing them to be fired more easily by their employers. The Chirac government attempted to impose the new rules, arguably, as a means of alleviating unemployment for youth under the age of 26, while it was actually a rather transparent neo-liberal ploy (creeping “casualization” of the workforce) to benefit employers at the expense of workers in France who are not generally allowed to be dismissed without proper cause (and which does not typically include “downsizing”). Marker seems to mock many of the protestors for petty selfinterest, noting that the entertainment industry (actors and such, many involved in the marches) is the epitome of “casual” employment. Since Le joli mai (1962), Marker’s narrative style has often been called condescending by many critics. See Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 40. “Michel Delahaye says that the people to whom we

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are introduced [in Le joli mai] are all awful, but that this is because Marker’s superior attitude portrays them so that we can only judge them thus.” Ibid.; Cooper is citing Michel Delahaye, “La chasse à l’I,” pp. 5-17, Cahiers du cinéma 146 (August 1963): p. 5. Nonetheless, most instances of negative criticism of Marker’s “voice” (the putative “I” within the films) vanishes beneath the avalanche of positive criticism. With Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) Marker acknowledges his abuse of narrative: “Each step of this imaginary dialogue aims to create a third voice produced by the encounter of the first two and distinct from them . . . After all, perhaps that is dialectics? I am not boasting that I have succeeded in making a dialectical film. But I have tried for once (having in my time frequently abused the power of the directive commentary) to give back to the spectator, through the montage, ‘his’ commentary, that is, his power.” Chris Marker, Le fond de l’air est rouge: Scènes de la troisième guerre mondiale 1967-1977 (Paris: Librairie François Maspero, 1978), p. 7; cited in Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 105. “The elegance and erudition of his commentaries combine creative prose and factual observation to varying degrees, depending on film. Some bear a more open relation to fiction than others, as each in its own way features valuable testimony of historical events or people, social commentary and critique, along with a focus on different cultures.” Sarah Cooper, “Introduction,” pp. 1-10, in ibid., p. 3. “His ability to marshal vast amounts of material – both his own and other people’s footage – makes the label of ‘l’as du montage’ (the montage ace), which Laura gives him in Level 5, appropriate to a range of his films. . . . His occasional forays into the observational mode are balanced with more participatory works, in which Marker’s distinctive voice is heard, but he is never seen.” Ibid. This discord between narrative voice and the expected objective content of so-called documentary film is furthered troubled by critics here and there, especially antiintellectual American critics. See, for example, Vincent Canby, “Sans soleil: Views of the People,” New York Times (October 26, 1983): p. C24; and Vincent Canby, “The Screen: A.K. and Ulysse,” New York Times (January 29, 1986): p. C18. The latter is a combined review of Marker’s A.K. (1985) and Agnès Varda’s Ulysse (1982). Canby dislikes both for the intrusion of the self-reflexive narration. 66 This would include, of course, the image of the tree in Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, perhaps foremost the one in Leonardo’s Adoration of the Magi, a painting that Tarkovsky’s camera slowly follows upward (along the trunk and through the canopy), in the now-classic manner of his signature, slow-moving tracking shot, except here it is a painting he is tracking, as he tracked paintings at the close of Andrei Rublev (1966). This seminal scene from The Sacrifice is found in Marker’s homage to Tarkovsky, the 55-minute documentary film Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (and in a more condensed form in the 26-minute “Zone Tarkovski” portion of “Zapping Zone,” 1990). Marker actually shows Tarkovsky personally directing the camera work for this pivotal scene in The Sacrifice, as key parts of Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch were actually filmed on the set of Tarkovsky’s last film. 67 Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 7.

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Ibid. This image is entitled “Vietnam Demo 2 (Paris, 1966).” These titles remain provisional and highly mutable. See Note 76, below. 69 Marker notes in an e-mail to Bill Horrigan dated August 10, 2006: “It happens that the man in charge for the Pentagon security was none other than Donald Rumsfeld” and that the weapons the MPs were issued that day to put down the march were not loaded. Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” in Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 150 n 7. In retrospect, then, the presence of US marshals in suits and ties, the peculiar opening in the security cordon that permitted the demonstrators to reach the steps of the Pentagon (including Marker and his camera crew), and the eerie standoff that permitted a small group of demonstrators to enter the Pentagon proper, and then be beaten back, all adds up – today – to an obvious Rumsfeldian PSYOP typical of the time. Yet in retrospect, the events of the day were particularly menacing, insofar as no one knew what would happen and Marker’s report captured both the theatrical side of the initial march and the sinister side of the occupation of the steps of the Pentagon with its youthful, frightened MPs offset by the older, more threatening marshals who ran the show. 70 Marker’s May 1968 images were published in various places at the time of their production, including François Maspero’s journal Partisans 42 (May-June 1968) and Patrick Seale and Maureen McConville’s French Revolution 1968 (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin; London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1968). Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” p. 142. The photo credit at the time was “Snark International/Chris Marker,” Snark International being a “loosely organized photo agency” Marker was associated with. Ibid., p. 150 n 5. (Only two images attributed to Marker actually appear in the Seale and McConville book, as above.) 71 Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 21. 72 Ibid., p. 52. 73 Ibid., 57. Three of the images from Greece are held in the BNF, Paris, and are noted as intended for Jacques Lacarrière’s L’été grec: Une Grèce quotidienne de 4000 ans (Paris: Plon, 1975). The BNF images include: “Moine novice à Athos”; “Liturgie athonite”; “Delphes, détail du sanctuaire.” They are attributed to Chris Marker/Snark International. They would appear to originate sometime in the 1950s, however, given that the image of a battered monk “illustrating” the term acedia is entitled “Untitled (Mount Athos, 1950s).” 74 Ibid., p. 64. 75 Ibid. 76 These two images are included in the online “gallery” for the exhibition “Staring Back: Un choix de photographies” (February 23-April 5, 2008), held at the Galerie de France in 2008. The top image is entitled “Hooligan (Moscow, 1960s),” the print dated 2008; the lower image is identified as a young man in Cuba. Marker’s avoidance of the conventions of exhibiting photographs in galleries includes his penchant for misidentifying, altering, re-naming, and re-dating his own work. This only changes, slightly, when he is attempting to sell the prints through galleries. 77 Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 57. Marker scholars can no doubt place most of these images, or find the secret resonances/concordances they invoke with past incarnations. Yet the point is lost on the casual observer who would see them for

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what they are, generally devoid of such echoes. Not a case of post-modern double coding per se, it is rather the simple fact of the image that remains its foremost gesture, not its secret relationship to past usage by Marker. 78 Ibid., p. 126. The poeticized, metrical commentary is from Immemory. 79 Ibid., p. 80. 80 Sherri Geldin, “Director’s Foreword,” pp. 135-36, in ibid., p. 135. Horrigan notes that Marker stills have appeared in earlier thematic or group exhibitions, albeit highly rare occasions from roughly 2004 to 2006. He also notes that Peter Blum Gallery, New York, New York, “produced Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men as a limited edition [video], as well as editioning selected digital photo prints by Marker” in 2006. Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” in ibid., p. 150 n 3. Images from the anti-CPE demonstrations were included in the exhibition “The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society,” 2nd International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Seville, curated by Okwui Enzewor, 2006. Ibid. 81 Horrigan notes, “although the full range of photographs [under consideration] included dozens produced from camera negatives, Marker chose to deliver all of them in digital form.” Ibid., p. 144. In commenting upon the “Photo Browse” section of the installation “Zapping Zone,” Horrigan also notes that with this work Marker has effectively declared “the still photograph as the central standard,” a decision that harkens back “inevitably to 1962’s La Jetée . . . and forward to Le souvenir d’un avenir.” Ibid., p. 143. In a type of coda to the entire operation, Horrigan states that “the entirety of Staring Back” is punctuated by images “from Marker’s film, video, and book projects, and from Immemory, here regrouped by their creator for this occasion: an elegant reshuffle of the deck, portraits reclaimed from the printed page, from the trove of moving images, from the ever-morphing digital vault.” He then describes the exhibition as “an image archipelago, dispersed over continents horizontally and demolishing time vertically.” Ibid., p. 149. Part of the expressed value of the act of “salvage” is that images from rarely seen and/or impossible-to-find films re-appear. Most of these “disappeared” films pre-date La jetée and have vanished in part because Marker has no interest in their circulation: “Twenty years separate La Jetée from Sans Soleil. And another 20 years separate Sans Soleil from the present. Under the circumstances, if I were to speak in the name of the person who made these movies, it wouldn’t be journalism, rather spiritism.” Marker, c.2003; cited in ibid., p. 149. Marker’s self-cannibalization or self-plagiarism is accompanied by selective repressions or suppressions of early or related works. See Sarah Cooper, “A Second Beginning,” pp. 38-72, in Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 38, regarding Marker’s penchant for suppressing most work previous to 1962. See Cooper’s comments regarding “1950 to 1961” as Marker’s lost period. Ibid., p. 11. See also, Chris Darke, “Eyesight: Chris Darke Unearths Marker’s ‘Lost Works,’” Film Comment (May-June 2003): pp. 48-50; cited in Cooper, Chris Marker, p. 11. Despite the non-circulation of the “lost” films, most “are still held in French archives.” Ibid. (For example, see: Forum des Images, Bibliothèque Nationale de France; and the ISKRA archives.) For the early collaborations, see: Alter, Chris Marker, pp. 167-78; Philippe Dubois, ed., Théorème 6: Recherches sur Chris Marker (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle,

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2002), pp. 171-72; and Kämper, Tode, eds., Chris Marker: Filmessayist, pp. 37176. Additionally, despite Marker’s prohibition against being photographed (plus the select circulation of the few rare images of him that do exist), his image nonetheless appears secreted within his films and exhibitions, perhaps an affect left over from the Left Bank group when Marker, Varda, Resnais, and Godard would appear in one another’s films, albeit fleetingly, as Hitchcock appeared within his own films and it was a game to spot him, and as Godard appeared in his own films, including Éloge de l’amour, as late as 2001. With Marker, however, it is a slightly different game in the sense that his appearance is utterly fleeting and not meant as a cameo per se. Virginia Ann Bonner notes that Marker appears in Sans soleil twice, but once in reflection and once in a very brief closeup that is solarized and on its way “into the Zone” (vanishing into abstraction) so to speak. See Bonner, Cinematic Caesuras, pp. 150-51 n. 11. This game of cat and mouse is part and parcel of the distortions, diremptions, and elisions given to the irreducible presence of the filmmaker/photographer’s own subjective agency and his/her inability to completely vanish. 82 See Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 33. Amidst photos of the 2006 anti-CPE demonstrations, Marker isolates and/or superimposes in black and white (amidst a tonal field of mostly blurred grays) an image of “Che Guevara” on the back of a protestor, echoing an image he focused on momentarily in the film La sixième face du Pentagone during the raucous and more celebratory portion of the film, versus its darker ending with the violence that occurred on the steps of the Pentagon. In the latter case (1967), it is a young girl who has adopted “Che” as a type of mascot, without knowing much of anything about the man (or his philosophy of guerrilla warfare). In the former case (2006), it is more a matter of a perhaps vague notion that he died sometime around 1968 and has since become the “idol” of romanticrevolutionary fervor. The young girl wearing the Che scarf in La sixième face du Pentagone is, for Marker, the epitome of naïve youth on its way to “direct action” – the movement from demonstration (protest) to confrontation (resistance). To underscore the naivety of the youngsters in the 2006 demonstrations, Marker adds images of elderly CGT members amidst the march. In the 1970s, during a period of sustained labor unrest, the CGT was part of the grand alliance between the French Communist Party, the Socialist Party, and the Radical Party of the Left. 83 In the gallery, the images were mounted in camps on two diagonally opposed walls, and directly confronted one another across the intervening space. The addition of the animals was a last-minute gesture toward resolving this standoff. See Nesbit, “In Hind Sight,” pp. 151-53, in ibid., pp. 152-53. The field of the exhibition included two walls in a wedge-shaped room, with the space in-between the privileged place where the viewer stepped into the fray. Nesbit writes: “We are meant to sit on our fences between facing fields. He has added a field of sympathetic animals. All around us the friends and strangers and fellow travellers en route in life’s nighttimes are caught staring and dreaming. But mindfully. These stares have stored up memories of their own. They give the eyes their depth.” Ibid., p. 153. Horrigan notes the “binary structure of the exhibition,” with its pairings and sequencings, in his descriptions of the development of the project over the course

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of 2006. Marker writes to Horrigan in July: “‘Pairs’ materialized, some graphic, some geographic, some thematic. . . . I give that for what it’s worth, but sometimes instinct has its own merits.” E-mail from Marker to Horrigan, July 23, 2006; cited in Horrigan, “Some Other Time,” in ibid., p. 144. 84 Ibid., p. 138. 85 Ibid. Marker adds: “It’s an experiment I conducted for years, in order to extract meaningful images from the inordinate flow of video and television. I developed the concept of ‘superliminal,’ which is a sort of counterpoint to Subliminal. Instead of one frame lost in the stream of other, different frames, Superliminal is one frame lost in the stream of almost identical frames, or so it seems, for when you take ‘em one by one, one happens to be the real photogram, something nobody then has perceived, not even the guy who shot it (me, in most cases).” E-mail to Bill Horrigan from Chris Marker, April 1, 2006, ibid. By May 4, Marker is suggesting that the exhibition might be entitled “The Revenge of the Eye,” a figure of speech that references his concept of superliminal, insofar as it is applied to the work of others (most especially television), and insofar as it extracts something previously unseen in such works – an act of redemptive violence one might assume. See ibid., p. 140. In June, Marker is writing to say: “The whole thing (The Revenge) calls for a sort of archeology of the image.” Ibid., p. 143. Superliminal, then, invokes and/or equals revenge, redemption/expiation (of Original Sin), justice. Horrigan: “Photos migrate from a lonely self-containment, to the printed page where they converse with text, into the montage factory of film, with each migration bringing additive resonance and keeping the archive alive through the belief that to plunder is to replenish.” Ibid. The case becomes especially slippery when we consider that the film Si j’avais quatre dromadaires was made entirely with still images. What then are we looking at when frames or stills from this film are turned into photographs? Or, were they? Horrigan: The “Photo Browse” section of “Zapping Zone” “opens with extreme close-ups of contact sheets that Marker’s video camera virtually grazes upon. It then pulls back as hundreds of individual prints pass beneath our eyes, mainly randomly sequenced but occasionally organized according to subject.” Ibid. In a more nuanced manner, and apropos of photography as index, Nesbit notes that the methodology of Marker’s digitalization moves progressively toward a point of stasis buried deep in photography itself, but primarily by its recourse to black and white: “When the color of the world, or a color photograph, is translated into the register of black and white, shadow increases and light quickens; the photograph acquires a different, deeper space.” Nesbit, “In Hind Sight,” in ibid., p. 152. Marker only began exhibiting color prints with the exhibition “Passengers” in 2011. Beautifully, then, and apropos of nothing, the book Staring Back closes – past all post-rationalizations, credits, bibliography, filmography, etc. – with an image of Red Square, emptied except for the pacing figures of five soldiers/guards (or “sentinels,” guarding some unknown place/time), the edges of the image faded like an old photo recovered from the bins of ephemera in an old bookshop/stall in “old” Charing Cross – or such. There is, of course, no “red” in the square per se (nor in this black-and-white image) – it is, as always, in the eye/mind of the beholder.

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Nesbit, “In Hind Sight,” in ibid., p. 151. Ibid. 88 Ibid., p. 152. Coréennes was reputedly the outcome (fallout) of an aborted film project. The book of photographs effectively ended up jettisoning all intended political commentary for a more pure presentation of, as Vertov might say, “things as they are.” The visit to North Korea was also effectively a coup for Marker in the years following the Korean War (1950-1953). The North, post-partition or postWWII, was effectively shut off from the world by 1948, and Marker’s visit, like the other far-flung places he went to in the 1950s was a gesture of “good will” toward the communist country (as witness, versus critic). 89 Ibid. The sensibility here is Tolstoy’s. Marker’s moral position is on the side of the dispossessed, never power; or on the side of power insofar as it resides in the people. Yet his elemental focus on the here-and-now shades into the preternatural, a slide toward things recondite that, in the process, discloses that his moral vision is also in part transcendental. This passage could easily be torn from the pages of War and Peace. Curiously, Nesbit concurs with this sense that the moral vision embodied in Marker’s work is the same as that embodied in Tolstoy’s work, except she doesn’t mention Tolstoy. Instead, she does mention the poet Rilke, and cites one of the more powerful of the Sonnets to Orpheus: “. . . song is reality. Simple, for a god. / But when can we be real? When does he pour / The earth, the stars, into us? . . . / True singing is a different breath, about / nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind.” Rainer Maria Rilke, “Third Sonnet to Orpheus,” in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995); cited in Nesbit, “In Hind Sight,” in Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 153. This conflation follows on a statement regarding how minds are full of things (things we do not necessarily own). “When would a person’s memory yield to the field of immemory? Is the immemory impersonal? There’s the rub – inevitably minds always hold not only one’s own memories but the memories of others as well. The memories of others, what they call their ideas, are what is commonly called knowledge. In short, minds are largely filled by matter not their own.” Ibid., p. 152. Nesbit catches the breeze that is blowing through Marker’s work (Federico García Lorca’s duende, in many respects), plus the sound and the fury. Her appropriation of Rilke recalls the shortest sentence in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, “Drops dripped.” This pure evocation of the real/irreal nature of the world runs through Tolstoy and Marker like a river through a gorge. Marker’s comment on “commanders” in the postscript to Coréennes resembles Tolstoy’s remarks in War and Peace that generals think they make the decisions and determine the outcome of battles (making history), whereas the true decisions are made minute-by-minute in the trenches by ordinary soldiers. Marker’s loyalty to the unknown, the passing, the recondite, but also his privileging of privileged souls (Bellon, Medvedkine, Tarkovsky, Signoret et al.), suggests that his view of how history interacts with human destiny is not monolithic, neither for nor against History proper (despite his caustic comments). Instead, history would seem to move through people, in minute, almost-invisible rays or as “quotients” – particles perhaps, or linguistic dust, passing in and out of 87

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view, as humanity is composed of invisible and visible intelligences. This recourse to a dark, semi-vitalistic view of things is part of the mystery of the works, versus the person of Chris Marker. The artist is not so much erased by the event of Art proper as transformed by it, as contemporary theories of the event (“à venir”) increasingly and coherently circle (without naming) the same mystery; always in pursuit, anyway, of the superlative (yet forgotten, misplaced, and/or abandoned), singular agency of all creative praxis – that is, thought itself. 90 Chris Marker, “The Case of the Grinning Cat,” pp. 44-51, in Chris Marker: Staring Back, p. 45. The text notes that this was immediately post-9/11, and that the Left was in total disarray. 91 Ibid., p. 49. Raffarin resigned in 2005. 92 Ibid., p. 50. 93 Marker notes that a “celebrated physician and activist,” Schwartzenberg ranked among France’s most “beloved personalities.” He adds: “Through his whole life, Léon sided with the underdogs. A famous battle was in favor of immigrants, specially those who fall victim of inextricable red tape, the ‘paperless.’” Ibid. Given the ensuing media circus and the absurd postures of the Right and Left, Marker asks, “And you wonder why the Cats abandon us?” Ibid., p. 51. 94 Post-cultural is George Steiner’s term for the late-modern slide into relativism and its political, economic, and artistic manifestations or corollaries – that is to say, it is Steiner’s preferred term for post-modernism. The “obliviousness” of others to the larger issues of the collective (both national and transnational) is a theme that runs through Marker’s work from Le joli mai (1962) to Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) – and beyond. Indeed, this disconnect between personal experience and collective experience is one of the major themes of his overall work, while it is also – often – questioned in its most minute modalities through his disquisitions on personal subjectivity proper, foremost when he returns to the individual not as selfabsorbed personality but as vestige or “en-souled” remnant of a larger, ultimately indivisible whole – so-called humanity. Regarding Le joli mai, see Cooper, Chris Marker, pp. 38-45. Regarding Le mystère Koumiko (1965), see ibid., pp. 56-60. This latter film is in many ways a bizarre moment in Marker’s cinematic voyages, as it encompasses an intensely personal approach to subjectivity and subjective relations (I and Thou, ipseity and alterity), one that also involves an implicit love affair with both an enigmatic woman (Koumiko) and an enigmatic culture (Japan). Cooper notes: “This love affair is light and flirtatious but it is also tinged with melancholia throughout, as Koumiko, along with the city [Tokyo] through which she moves, drifts away from the filmmaker like so many fantasies and dreams. Melancholic for what it will never know, rather than what it has lost, this film recognizes a love that leaves otherness intact within the asymmetries of desire.” Ibid., p. 56. 95 John Berger, Here is Where We Meet (New York: Vintage, 2005), p. 53. 96 The so-called atheological, inclusive of contemporary post-structuralist forms, is in many ways the mark of the radical re-naturalization of theology. 97 Georges Didi-Huberman and Tertullian, in Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images. “Either you are merely the visible, in which case I will abhor you as an idol, or you

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open onto the radiance of the visual, in which case I will acknowledge in you the power to have touched me deeply, to have made a moment of divine truth surge forth, like a miracle.” Tertullian, cited in ibid., p. 28. 98 See Agamben, The Time that Remains, passim. This internal metric of art that is consistent (or co-terminous) with the eschatological irruption of a “time that remains” is intimately related as well to the nature of images and their external/internal dynamic. Such an “end” also implies the timeless plenitude of all that remains unfulfilled. Agamben arrives at this unique instantiation of the “time” of art through negation, but in the form of modernist nihilism. The double bind for art is that creative praxis secures the place in which being conforms to empirical time or experiences itself (in the Hegelian sense) but indexes something else that exceeds the same. For the emphasis of experience of the world over the self as such in French cinema, see Richard Armstrong, “The Living Image: French Cinema from the Lumières to the Banlieux,” Screen Education 41 (2006): pp. 1016. 99 Such fulfilled images are, then, “from Hell” – a truth that validates Dante’s vision of the same and cinema’s contemporary recourse to hellishness. 100 This “archaeology” or excavation and re-activation of the dynamis within discourses, inclusive of art, is the threshold condition for the theoretical-critical project per se, while – as such – it is also the reason that within Hegel’s vision of pleroma art itself will one day end as well, once it is effectively no longer needed, which is not the same thing as to say that it will vanish entirely. Instead, art will – when Spirit comes to full self-knowledge of Itself – head off in an entirely new direction (an end as beginning which has troubled scholars and perplexed Hegelians ever since). See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). Abridged translation of Introduction à la lecture de Hegel: Leçons sur La phénoménologie de l’esprit, professées de 1933 à 1939 à l’École des hautesétudes, réunies et publiées par Raymond Queneau (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1947). 101 The origin for the paratactical forms and forces in much Russian avant-garde art of the 1920s in Russian icons, etc., is telltale. This formalist force-field arrives with 1917, combining the sublimities of religion with those of Revolution and Art – as one unitary event. 102 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene I; emphasis added. This single line from Hamlet animates Derrida’s Specters of Marx, returning over and over again thoughout that work, as if to emphasize the absurdity of the demand. “It,” of course, is the ghost of Hamlet’s father; and while Derrida uses this figure and/or gesture to signify all that is repressed in the works of Marx, the absurdity of speaking to a ghost remains the prime purpose in its appropriation. To speak of the “specters of Marker,” is also to speak, rhetorically and otherwise, of the repressions and/or dialectical sublimations that animate all works of art. 103 In a 2009, realtime tour of “Ouvroir,” the museum he built in cyberspace on the Web portal Second Life, Marker’s comments on the galleries included very brief remarks on each image. Yet the most telling moment, in many respects, was when

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visitors (by way of avatars) waded into knee-high, flowing pools of imagery and effectively displaced the images, “wearing them.” This resembles the immersive environments Marker came to value most with his multimedia projects and exhibitions, yet it is also a simple homage to the stream of imagery cinema effectively is. This virtual tour of “Ouvroir” was conducted by Marker, from Paris, via the Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 16, 2009. Regarding Marker’s migration toward multimedia projects, in many respects the multimedia works actually favored Marker’s long-standing literary and nonsystematic “system” of appropriation or so-called copyleft procedures; that is, détournement, and/or outright “theft” of ideas, images, and texts, all in support of his role as “artisan bricoleur,” Julien Gester and Serge Kaganski’s term for Marker’s sensibility, c.2007, with special reference to “Ouvroir.” See Julien Gester, Serge Kaganski, “La seconde vie de Chris Marker,” Les Inrocks (Les inrockuptibles), n.d., http://www.lesinrocks.com/. Marker’s presence on the Web is generally mutable and undocumented, with various incarnations of short video works appearing and disappearing (for example, under the pseudonym “Kosinki” on YouTube). His “teleportation” (by avatar) into and out of “Ouvroir,” as “Sergei Murasaki,” guide, loiterer, interlocutor, etc., is also all but impossible to track. 104 This is not an altogether original perception/judgement of Marker. See Roth, “A Yakut Afflicted with Strabismus,” in which Marker is compared to Chateaubriand. 105 See Slavoj Žižek, John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). See also, Nathan Schneider, “Orthodox Paradox: An Interview with John Milbank,” The Immanent Frame, March 17, 2010, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2010/03/17/orthodoxparadox-an-interview-with-john-milbank/. 106 In characteristic self-effacing fashion, Marker mentions in 1962 his experiments with 8mm films prior to his apprenticeship with Alain Resnais, and their collaborative project Les statues meurent aussi (1950-1953), saying they were “little bits of 8mm that were rather awful,” while also mentioning Resnais’ experiments with 16mm, “which one day should be the concern of cinémathèques.” Jean-Louis Pays, “Extract from an Interview with Chris Marker by Jean-Louis Pays . . . ,” pp. 90-93, in Dauman, Anatole Dauman: Pictures of a Producer, p. 93.

UN-SCIENTIFIC, CONCLUDING POSTSCRIPT

WORLD-CHIASMUS

He speaks again. Of a truth too fantastic to be believed he retains the essential: an unreachable country, a long way to go. She listens. She doesn’t laugh.1 —Chris Marker By “good” we may signify either what is best in each class of things – and this is defined as “what is in its own nature desirable” – or that which makes other things good because they partake of it – and this, surely, is Plato’s “Ideal Good.”2 —Aristotle

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image is a study of a late-modern chiasmus (chaosmos), impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of Chris Marker as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency.3 As chiasmus, the opposing (but complementary) halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural. Arguably, and consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, these irreducible warring aspects of life experience are, in fact, resolved in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as “mask” or “screen” for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its Big Other, or within the frame, as the small other to that Big Other. A topological “knot” or ontological “problem,” it is this very conflict that animates all of Marker’s extensive works – filmic and otherwise. In the case of Marker, this age-old or immemorial “thing-in-itself” (the artwork as image of world-chiasmus) finds its foremost or penultimate formation in his very-still photography – the singular images that are also the building blocks for his renowned ciné-essays. Not without irony, this same austere, reductive force of the still image (as proscription) also inhabits the more complex, synthetic works (or montages) that he has formulated and presented “dramatically,” here-and-there, through the often-sketchy apparatuses of his new-media experiments, as of the late 1980s. Ultimately, this world-image as chiasmus was always present within his earliest literary projects, from the 1940s forward – most especially in books and essays, with or without actual images.

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Marker’s “return” to photography (via exhibiting still photography in galleries), in the late 2000s, is in many ways a return to the singular object of the artist’s desire; or, the image in/for itself, while that image – endlessly troubled or interrogated for decades – continues to speak “in tongues,” often against, or oblivious to, the voice of the author/artist/narrator. Despite the complications of the so-called post-modern condition (its nihilist-relativist bias), and its similar, mostly circular, concerns with the image and/or media, Marker’s work is not post-modern. In fact, when tested against immemorial cultural epiphenomena, that work withstands all attempts at categorization and/or art-historical analysis proper. It remains unassimilable to the post-modern cause . . . What emerges, upon closer examination, and through rigorous re-contextualization, is the prescient force of Marker’s works toward that futural state buried in art that is also “theological,” versus atheological, and heedlessly anterior to cultural politics per se. Combined with the modernist-classical (classic-modern) impulse toward the utopian, this work nonetheless stands astride the two currents that comprise the chiasmus of conceptual thought itself – world and not-world. As such, Marker is – after all – a High Romantic Christian Marxist. The “Christic” aspect is rightly well-hidden, but emerges when the eschatological versus historical center of his work (the existentialmetaphysical fuse) is exposed, and when his early years are examined in light of his later and/or final years. Marker’s apocalypse is writ large in the diverse works that cross decades, and it is a redemptive, world-shattering formation of art as pleroma. August 26, 2012

Notes 1

Chris Marker, La jetée: Ciné-roman (New York: Zone Books, 1992), n.p. Aristotle, Magna Moralia, in Aristotle, Metaphysics, II, Books X-XIV, Oeconomica and Magna Moralia, trans. Hugh Tredennick, G. Cyril Armstrong (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 453. Aristotle in Twenty-three Volumes, 23 vols. (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926-1962), vol. 18. 3 For example, Jacques Rancière notes a peculiar “reversal of perspective” given to the still images in the photographic series “Revenge of the Eye” (2006), photographs that led to the exhibition “Staring Back” (2007) at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, and an exhibition that then traveled widely. The swerve between political and subjective agency, arguably present in Marker’s work “from the beginning,” is present in these images in the somewhat crude manner by which he re-digitizes them, distorting, distending, and isolating a singular soul or detail from the larger vortex of the 2005-2006 street demonstrations 2

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he is documenting. “Revenge of the Eye” also, strangely, refers to the muchvaunted, hallowed “Markerian” moment noted by film critic André Bazin in the late 1950s and repeated ad infinitum over the years by others – that is, the movement “from eye to ear” (and back), or the evocation of the commentary as counterpoint, if not trump card, in the production of documentary cinema. “Revenge of the Eye” and the images of the demonstrations/riots in France c.20052006, in terms of the exhibition “Staring Back,” were effectively folded into a larger retrospective assemblage of “Markerian” moments drawn from his overall archive – that is, the films, the photographs, and the photographs behind or within the films. Rancière’s comments may be found in Jacques Rancière et al., “Art of the Possible,” trans. Jeanine Herman, Artforum 45, no. 7 (March 2007): pp. 25659, 261-64, 266-67, 269; a conversation between Rancière, Fulvia Carnevale, and John Kelsey.

APPENDICES: “MARKERIANA”

APPENDIX A SÉANCE “C.M.”

For Réda (and all scholars of the Immemorial) . . . Like the white swan’s eye to bear the director’s desire . . .1 —Anonymous A segment has been cut out of the back of his head. The sun, and the whole world with it, peep in. It makes him nervous, it distracts him from his work, and moreover it irritates him that just he should be the one debarred from the spectacle.2 —Franz Kafka

I. La jetée and L’année dernière à Marienbad . . . Death, where is your victory?3 —I Corinthians

The near simultaneity of Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962) and Alain Resnais’ L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) is no coincidence. Both films are magical-realist films – and if one were to marshal the statements of Alain Robbe-Grillet regarding L’année dernière à Marienbad,4 one would also be very close to the secrets of La jetée (creeping, as it were, toward the “exit” in both, on cat’s paws, nonetheless stunned). Both films are a fusion of word and image, with the former (the word) influencing and conditioning the latter (the image), while the latter acts as the Hegelian “Real” of the “Ideal.” As “realist” works of art, they are also utterly and literally “Borgesian,” and the sense remains, with both, that, as love stories, they tell a primordial tale – a tale that also invokes the intractable present-ness of all images, past and futural – as the statue in L’année dernière à Marienbad (based on a painting by Nicolas Poussin) is the origin and end of that story, and as in La jetée the repressions of the carnage of WWIII (as Réda Bensmaïa points out5) are played out through the dissolves and montage – the elisions, ellipses, distortions, and ambiguities of the mise-en-scène. The long lineage of the statue coming to

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life (or life returning to a statuesque state), from VítČzslav Nezval to Andrei Tarkovsky, as metonym for the fixity of images and signal gesture of the deathliness of the frozen subject as object, is – as with L’année dernière à Marienbad – an evocation of the complexities of a slightly sinister, semi-animistic universe that underwrites all singularities and the reversibility of all artistic visions. This chiasmus is always already able to be turned toward formalism or away, depending on the agenda of the formalist operation, or the so-called dissolve – that is, the montage, the literary allusiveness, and such, as means to no particular end. Marker’s apprenticeship with Resnais runs up through La jetée, and both exit this mnemonic world of the art film for other projects in the early 1960s. If Guernica (1950) is in La jetée, the precise coordinates for both films, as for their respective author’s other 1950s’ films, are to be found – as echo – in the formal experiments Robbe-Grillet’s novels compress into new literary form – experiments derived from Franz Kafka’s novels, and, arguably, a “Gnostic” worldview, with novelistic and cinematic form taking the place of the demiurge. Self-revelation remains the key. Though these two films seem to converge formally, they also clearly diverge conceptually. L’année dernière à Marienbad ends where it begins, in a claustrophobic, demonic universe of detached signifying agency, perhaps a model for an economy of images – mental and otherwise (yet of “eye and ear”). La jetée begins and returns to an image that may or may not be based on a photo of Robert Capa’s from the Spanish Civil War – the specularity of both films similar, the outcome quite different. This last coincidence, also repressed, suggests that the economy of images in Resnais’ Guernica is, indeed, at play in La jetée, the latter being a film that came about at the same time as Le joli mai (a not-so-subtle film with massive ethical and moral imperatives), as surplus. Marker’s worldview, then, is not so much “Gnostic” as “Christic.” The interior landscapes of these two films (La jetée and L’année dernière à Marienbad) are meditations on the spectral civil war between conscious and unconscious impulses (personal and impersonal forces) – the word and image standing in for each condition, and each “measure” switching places repeatedly within each film. Word becomes image (image-word), and image becomes word (word-image), whereas – as love stories – the denouement is left in an indeterminate state, with self-revelation returned to the viewer, the true subject of the two films as films.

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II. Photographies de “C.M.”: Word-images Resnais and Chris Marker appear to me to use montage in not only a brilliant but also a subtly new way – poetic and intellectual at the same time, playing simultaneously on the shock of the images’ beauty and the conflagration of their meaning, the text intervening all the while like the hand which strikes pieces of flint against each other.6 —André Bazin Moralists who love photographs always hope that words will save the picture.7 —Susan Sontag

Marker has exhibited his photography in various forms since the 1950s, with the first efforts taking place in book form. If his films are often, expressly, efforts at investigating the subjective-objective agency of the photographic image, the exhibitions that he returned to in the late 2000s are telltale “exits” from film proper and intimately related to his multimedia work, beginning with “Zapping Zone” (1990), and coming to momentary fruition, if not stasis, with “Immemory One” (1997).8 The critical period (or passage) seems to be, however, 2007-2008 and “Staring Back.” In many ways, the somewhat disturbing distortion in the images of the exhibition “Staring Back” (2007) operates as the remnant in the photographs of cinema, many of the images ostensibly taken from films, as stills, but begging the question, “What are these stills stills of, if many were at first stills anyway?” Additionally, if “Zapping Zone” and “Immemory One,” and “Ouvroir” (2008), as exhibitions, became repositories for many of these photographs, and his frequent publication of the commentaries were photo-essays (ciné-essays), is the role of the narrative inescapable? It would seem so, though when the photographs are installed in galleries proper (versus as installations or new-media events) that narrative apparatus mostly vanishes, with Marker having very little to say beyond minimal introductory texts in support of the entire presentation, or brief comments, en passant, in concert with the images (through intertext/intertitles).9 It all portends, then, and in multiple ways, that day (now come) when Marker will not be able to say anything else for or against these images, and when they finally “fall” into that archive (art-historical and otherwise) that always awaits the work of art.10 Yet what escapes all archives (and what Derrida endlessly troubled) is the transcendental signifying agency of the event of art – which ultimately ends up “speaking for itself,” regardless. This is what was always at stake in Marker’s photography and

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film, and this is what will remain after the dust settles, in the archive and in the crypt (the art-historical tomb his work will come to reside in, and the museums and libraries he always half-mocked, anyway). These images/motes, as “grains of sand,” reflect whole worlds, and the conceptual force-field of their collective agency is, after all, conceptual thought in/for itself (Hegelian, Augustinian, Aristotelian, and/or what have you), plus all that such entails, when it is heedlessly metaphysical and moral, at once. As “conceptualist,” then, or as conceptual-visual artist par excellence, Marker’s primary effects/affects are his words (his word-images), foremost those words that incessantly reach back toward the genesis of his project, the Esprit years (and beyond, into the reverse blue yonder), and what he has most emphatically repressed and/or suppressed – that is to say, the origin (or origins) of those words.11 It is reported somewhere, that Resnais, Jean Cayrol, and Marker considered at one point making a movie of the life of Christ.12 No doubt Marker would have contributed the magical-realist montage for the project, the excoriating synthesis of word and image. Would they have – collectively – made Christ into a “filmmaker”; that is, Christ as “cinematographer” of the Immemorial, mediating two worlds? Maranatha! August 22, 2012

Notes 1

Anonymous communication, August 7, 2012. Franz Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, ed. Max Brod, vol. 2 (New York: Schocken Books, 1949), pp. 192-93; cited in Jean-Louis Schefer, “Cinema,” pp. 108-38, in Jean-Louis Schefer, The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts by JeanLouis Schefer, ed. and trans. Paul Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 131. This essay is a collage of affects from both Schefer’s L’homme ordinaire du cinéma (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1980) and “L’image, la mort, la mémoire,” a special issue of Ça cinéma (1980). “I don’t know . . . , in the confrontation of gaze and body which constitutes a spectacle, how the spectator sees in its movement, its distance, its disappearance, this body from which he is separated, any body that is destined only for action, and allows nonetheless not so much its image but its former center of gravity to stay with the spectator, the center that was needed for his immobility prior to the action and for his solitude prior to the confrontation. By means of this lost center of gravity, this body acting at a distance from us, this same being animated by light, leaves the spectator with a longing for an existence in the past. It doesn’t leave its image; it allows the floating or sprouting inside of ourselves of this vague point by which we can always

2

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resemble a silent man, an immobile man. And so it infects us with all its sleep; it occurs within us.” Schefer, “Cinema,” in The Enigmatic Body, p. 131. With Marker (and with Kafka), we are invited, therefore, to enter that “exit” at the back of our heads, escaping, through the production and circulation of images, into the Immemorial, or the “reverse blue yonder” . . . 3 I Corinthians, 15:55. 4 See: Roy Armes, “In the Labyrinth: L’Année Dernière à Marienbad,” pp. 88-114, in The Cinema of Alain Resnais (London: Tantivy Press/A. Zwemmer; Cranbury, NJ: A.S. Barnes & Co., 1968); and Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pour un nouveau roman (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1963). Robbe-Grillet, of course, wrote the screenplay for L’année dernière à Marienbad. 5 See Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker’s La jetée,” a masterful critique of the dissolves to black in La jetée and their relationship to the “pre-I” state of consciousness, arguably pre-consciousness itself and the limit embedded in all representational systems. The recourse to black is interpreted against a reading of Roger Odin’s “Le film de fiction menacé par la photographie et sauvé par la bande-son (à propos de La jetée de Chris Marker),” pp. 147-71, in Dominique Chateau, André Gardies, François Jost, eds., Cinémas de la modernité: Films, theories (Paris: Éditions Klincksieck, 1981), and with the aid of the psychoanalytical theories of pre-subjective states in Piera Aulagnier’s Un interprète en quête de sens (Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1986). See Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram”: p. 159 n 17. Bensmaïa brushes up against something that is utilized in La jetée that also undermines the authority of the narrative voice of the film (contradicting Odin’s premise that the narrative stabilizes the discordant images, providing an interpretive schematic for what are otherwise wholly disparate and wholly “unholy” images of a disaster that is never directly confronted). This “Dark Night of the Soul” (Saint John of the Cross) or “Night of the World” (G.W.F. Hegel) is analyzed in Bensmaïa’s treatment as a type of psychosis present in the film, but which Marker represses or pushes to the “background” in the long, often-complex dissolves that also leave a cinematic imprint in what is, after all, a film that is made exclusively (with but one exception) from still images. Regarding this “economy of the dissolves,” see especially ibid.: pp. 142-44. In effect, this blackness (the black leader Marker uses to construct the film against or with) is evocative of the presence of death, a figure never fully acknowledged (as evidenced by the absence of images of decomposing or shattered bodies – after the apocalypse of WWIII), and a figure that makes the fable even more searing and the catastrophe of the ending even more moving. This analytic plays against similar inquisitions into the semiotic nature of the film by Philippe Dubois, Raymond Bellour, and Jean-Louis Schefer. Bensmaïa notes, in passing (in a footnote nonetheless), that in the print presentation (découpage) of La jetée, published in L’avant-scène du cinéma 38 (June 1964), Marker left out a key line of the narrative: “Now and then, he meets her in front of their signs.” After this statement, in the film, the justly moving line occurs, “She calls him her ghost.” See Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram”: pp. 149-51, 159-60 n 24. This telltale elision has to do, according to Bensmaïa, with the fact that key images

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in La jetée operate as pictograms, versus photograms. He also notes that Marker rarely if ever presents the dissolves as such, in the print versions of La jetée. The pictogram is presented, by Bensmaïa, utilizing Piera Aulagnier’s La violence de l’interprétation: Du pictogramme à l’énoncé, 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981), as an image that contains the imprint of the dissolution of the self within it as its principal operative agency – that is, the impersonal affect/effect of the spectral face of death as death drive. The image of death is, in this regard, the image that regards/underwrites all images of the world as existentialmetaphysical knots, and all inquiries into representation as, irreducibly, metaphysical forays toward “the beyond” (and “the beyond,” or beyond death, as the recursive force-field of the Immemorial, which Marker addresses elsewhere, more directly and with infinite delicacy). This discussion of the “economy of the dissolves” in La jetée is drawn, in part, from Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, “Sémiotique du film ou sémiotique textuelle? La question de la narration,” pp. 645-46, in Herman Parret, Hans-George Ruprecht, eds., Exigences et perspectives de la sémiotique: Recueil d’hommages pour Algirdas Julien Greimas (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 1985). This complex, and Marker is – if anything – an artist of complex cultural complexes, addresses multiple exigencies of the image proper and the historical development of the cinematic image in/for itself, from photography (and photography from painting). Regarding La jetée and its oftenproblematic incorporation into the critique of the photographic image, see: François Jost, “Photographies d’un film projeté,” in Ciro Bruni, ed., Pour la photographie (Sammeron: Germs, 1983), proceedings from the colloquium “Pour la photographie,” January 1982, Université de Paris VIII, cited in Bensmaïa; Bernard Leconte, “Autour du début de La jetée de Chris Marker,” in Bruni, ed., Pour la photographie; Raymond Bellour, “The Film Stilled,” Camera Obscura 24 (September 1990); and Jean-Louis Schefer, “À propos de La jetée,” pp. 89-93, in Passages de l’image, ed. Raymond Bellour, Catherine David, Christine van Assche (Paris: Éditions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990). Regarding the travails of the photographic image, see Chateau et al., eds., Cinémas de la modernité: Films, théories, proceedings of a colloquium held at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle, July 1-11, 1977, to which Robbe-Grillet contributed “Des stéréotypes aux structures: Le sens en question,” ibid., pp. 93-103. Regarding the travails of the photographic image and its importation into video and computer art, see Passages de l’image (1990), catalogue for a traveling exhibition first staged at the Centre Pompidou. Curiously, in the 1964 L’avant-scène du cinéma presentation of La jetée troubled by Bensmaïa, the pictogram related to the line excised by Marker does appear, but without the comment within the narrative. For this pictogram, see: Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram”: p. 151; and Chris Marker, “La jetée,” L’avant-scène du cinéma 38 (June 1964): p. 26. Doubly perplexing, perhaps, is another very similar pictogram that occurs in this issue of L’avant-scène, in advance of the La jetée section noted above. It is a still from Resnais and Hessens’ Guernica (1950), a film featuring an introductory text and elegiac poem (“La victoire de Guernica,” 1937) written by Paul Éluard. The pictogram from Guernica is entitled “La récitante: Les gens de Guernica sont de

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petites gens.” It should be noted that the pictogram, by definition, is written into stone (thus the tombstone as pictogram). In both La jetée and Guernica, the pictogram in question is more or less pockmarked (and/or ridden with what appear to be bullet holes). “The concept of the ‘pictogram’ . . . – a concept that essentially leads us back to the space and timeless time of originary activity – offers, it seems to me, a conceptual framework and a psycho-phenomenology that respond more adequately to both the formal and ‘material’ manifestations of [La jetée] (‘the work of the signifier’ and ‘the work of the fiction,’ taking up the distinction introduced by Odin).” Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram”: p. 143; with reference to Aulagnier, La violence de l’interprétation, and Odin, “Le film de fiction menacé par la photographie . . .” Regarding Guernica, and the role it played in Resnais’ move to longer, feature films, see James Monaco, Alain Resnais (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 18-21. See also, Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, pp. 43-46, for the interplay of Éluard’s poem and the images. It might be said, then, that the “Medusa-like” pictogram moves backward in representational time-space (versus empirical space-time) toward the “past-past” (time immemorial), while the photogram as mask/limit moves forward, nonetheless toward the same, presented here-and-there as the eschatological rupture into the “here-and-now” of the “there-and-then.” When the pictogram is also a photogram (and vice versa), this all gets infinitely more complex and “artistic-catastrophic” – as, perhaps, with Marker’s Owls at Noon. Regarding fades, dissolves, freeze frames, etc., in cinema, see also: Raymond Bellour, “La double hélice,” pp. 37-56, in Passages de l’image (1990); Philippe Dubois, “La photo tremblée et le cinéma suspendu,” La recherche photographie 3 (December 1987): pp. 19-29; and Philippe Dubois, “Le regard aveugle,” Hors-Cadre 6 (Contrebande): pp. 103-15; cited in Bensmaïa, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram”: p. 158 n 8. In light of these “repressions,” if that is what they are, Marker’s Owls at Noon is exactly the opposite, and almost an answer to all such criticisms of La jetée – that is, a searing etude of the ravages of world war and a particularly caustic version of Hegel’s “Dark Night of the World” (or the “night of bloody heads” as world psychosis). Importantly, Hegel was mocking the abject state of subjective or High German Idealism, more specifically J.G. Fichte’s version, while, perversely, his own Medusa-like figure, the “Night of the World,” became, within his totalizing system, the default antithesis or impersonal-personal, deranged mirror image of the subjective-objective synthesis he more or less denounced, also known as World Soul. 6 André Bazin, “Les films meurent aussi: Encore la censure,” France-Observateur (January 17, 1957): p. 19; cited in Jennifer Stob, “Cut and Spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the Metaphors of Horizontal Montage,” Studies in French Cinema 12, no. 1 (2012): p. 39. 7 Sontag, On Photography, p. 107. “What the moralists are demanding from a photograph is that it do what no photograph can ever do – speak. The caption is the missing voice, and it is expected to speak for truth.” Ibid., pp. 108-109. “Feuerbach observes about ‘our era’ that it ‘prefers the image to the thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being’ – while being aware

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of doing just that.” Ibid., p. 153; with reference to Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity. “For defenders of the real from Plato to Feuerbach to equate image with mere appearance – that is, to presume that the image is absolutely distinct from the object depicted – is part of that process of desacralization which separates us irrevocably from the world of sacred times and places in which an image was taken to participate in the reality of the object depicted.” Sontag, On Photography, p. 155. Feuerbach: “The best that you as an individual can attain, your ultimate and utmost accomplishment, is contemplation of God and submersion in God. And what in this life could differentiate you from God and be inserted as a partition between you and the contemplation of God? Is death alone going to raise this partition? But natural death is only the manifestation of a higher and different kind of death. You die only because, from eternity, you are known as you are in God, only because you, by your nature as a finite being, are already consumed forever in the eternally loving flame of the divine substance, only because you have died beyond time. Your present reflective and conscious submersion in God is but a renewal of and return to your eternal submersion, is but a bringing to awareness, a disclosure, of your original, substantial, unconscious, involuntary submersion in him. You could not submerge yourself in God had you not already been submerged in him, were you not already, by your very nature, submerged in God by God himself. Natural death, like your reflective and conscious submersion in God, has but one root, has as its source the original, the essential, the preconscious and superconscious submersion and dissolution in God. Thus, you can expect nothing after death, for death is precisely a result of that which you wrongly expect after death.” Ludwig Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, trans. James A. Massey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 21; italics added. First published Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (Nürnberg: J.A. Stein, 1830). Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality and The Essence of Christianity (1841) were published between “the expulsion of Napoleon from German lands in 1813 and the March Revolution of 1848.” James A. Massey, “Introduction,” in Feuerbach, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, p. xi. This brutal challenge to German and Lutheran orthodoxy was an attempt to demolish the explicit duality of “divided consciousness” embedded in religious, political, and social thought. Both Feuerbach and Heinrich Heine shared a generally caustic reading of the state of German orthodoxy in the years immediately preceding the German Revolution of 1848 and the July Revolution in France of 1830, when reaction in both countries was temporarily routed – though in both cases the revolution ultimately failed. With Feuerbach, time takes on the inordinate impress of the absolute necessity of historical time as the very preservation of the Immemorial: “Time is but the manifestation of the fact that everything has perished in God from all eternity. Finite reality would have eternal existence if there were no eternal being.” Feuerbach, ibid., p. 20. 8 See Marker’s sentiments/comments regarding cinema in Chris Marker: A Farewell to Movies (Abschied vom Kino), ed. Andres Janser (Zurich: Museum für Gestaltung, 2008).

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For the former, see Chris Marker: Passengers, ed. David Blum (New York: Peter Blum Edition, 2011); for the latter, see Chris Marker: Staring Back. The catalogues for Marker exhibitions actually shed very little light on the images, which remain generally “obscure” – are allowed to “speak” for themselves. 10 There is a not-unlovely mystery surrounding a single (aquatint) image by Louis Marcoussis, in Marcoussis, Les devins: 16 pointes sèches de Marcoussis. This edition (dated 1946), with a text by Gaston Bachelard, and a preface by Maurice Raynal (dated 1943), includes Plate 10, “Le médium” (19.8 x 19.8 cm.), which is denoted, via annotation, “Il s’agit d’un portrait de Chris Marker.” The link here is to Surrealism, albeit c.1939. The image in question, with Marker entranced (in profile) in front of a pair of spectral hands, is part of a series of etchings by Marcoussis, perhaps produced at Cusset c.1940. Marker would have been 18 or 19 years old at the time. The series “Les devins” was originally produced in an edition of six in November 1940. Marcoussis died in 1941. The La Hune edition, with the above notation added to Plate 10, by whomever, also coincides with Marker assuming his nom de plume, “Chris Marker,” in the pages of Esprit. See Jean Lafranchis, ed., Marcoussis: Sa vie, son oeuvre, catalogue complet des peintures, fixés sur verre, aquarelles, dessins et gravures (Paris: Éditions du Temps, 1961), pp. 182-83, 187, 338. This first catalogue raisonné, as above, includes texts by Tristan Tzara, Paul Éluard et al. Thanks to Lise Fauchereau, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Département des Estampes et de la Photographie, for this preliminary investigation into the provenance of this image. (Perhaps further details regarding the “context/origin” of this image, plus its annotation, will emerge with a new catalogue raisonné of Marcoussis’ work by Solange Milet.) This mysterious image is an exceptional index to a world mostly buried in Marker’s work, or the intellectual-artistic origins of his project, with the presence of Marcoussis and Bachelard suggesting a link, once again, as with the formal aspects of his films, to the 1920s, and to the various avant-garde insurrections of the period – French Surrealism being but one. (Marker’s late return to Surrealistinspired, animated short films c.2007-2008, many uploaded to YouTube under yet another pseudonym, thus makes sense in this sense. With his “return” to still photography c.2006-2007, he did not stop making films per se; he did, however, make only a certain kind of film, circulating them semi-anonymously.) Marcoussis (né Ludwik Kazimierz Markus) was of Polish-Jewish extraction and first arrived in Paris in 1903. He was a member of the Cubist school before decamping for Surrealism and is primarily known for his paintings. He was also a colleague of Apollinaire, who suggested the name “Marcoussis.” He produced a series of etchings in 1934 for an edition of Apollinaire’s Alcools. See Nadine Nieszawer, Marie Boyé, Paul Fogel, Peintres Juifs à Paris 1905-1939: École de Paris (Paris: Éditions Denoël, 2000). It is most likely that while hiding in Cusset, in the Allier, in 1940, that Plate 10 of Les devins was created. Was Marker in hiding, by then, as well? Is the Allier in the “maquis”? 11 The origin of the 2002 English version of the CD-ROM Immemory was, curiously, a request from the editors of Exact Change to publish Marker’s early, untranslated writings in English. Marker declined the offer, and offered up,

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instead, the English version of the CD-ROM, first published, in French, in 1998, by the Centre Pompidou. Whether these two editions of the CD-ROM are identical has never been, thus far, fully examined. Later editions of Marker’s works are also, almost always, revised editions. The subsequent addition of Xplugs (animated photo-montages) to the Exact Change edition of Immemory is most likely but one of many changes made following the 1998 “first edition,” or Immemory One. The 2008 revised edition featured additional Xplugs, and was updated for OSX. See http://exactchange.com/shop/marker-immemory/. 12 James Monaco attributes this statement to Roy Armes. See Monaco, Alain Resnais, p. 75.

FILMOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY

The sleep of Reason produces nightmares [most anywhere] . . . —Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Yinka Shonibare et al.

N.B.: All information bracketed below represents incomplete, unconfirmable, and/or conflicting data in the public record. Initially compiled from multiple sources and subsequently crosschecked against numerous databases and publications, the filmography presented here is, nevertheless, entirely provisional. Though Marker did not translate all titles of films and videos, English translations are provided here, nonetheless, as a courtesy to the reader. À bientôt, j’espère (Be Seeing You) (1968). Directed by Chris Marker and Mario Marret. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA); [Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF)]. 16mm, black and white, 55 minutes. À Valparaiso (1963). Production: Argos Films; Ciné Expérimental de la Universidad de Chile (Santiago). Commentary written by Chris Marker. 35mm, black and white, and color, [34 minutes]. A.K. (Portrait of Akira Kurosawa) (1985). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Greenwich Film Productions S.A. (Paris); Herald Ace Inc. (Tokyo); Herald Nippon Inc. (Tokyo). 35mm, color, [71 minutes]. All By Myself (1982). [Directed by Chris Marker. Apocryphal]. An Owl is an Owl is an Owl [n.d.]. Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” [Video], 3 minutes 18 seconds. And You Are Here (2011). Directed by Chris Marker. Video, 4 minutes 45 seconds. Avril inquiet (Worried April) (2001). Directed by Chris Marker. Unreleased. Video, 52 minutes. Azulmoon (1992). Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Video loop. Berlin ’90 (1990). Directed by Chris Marker. Excerpts from Berliner ballade (1990). Part of “Zapping Zone.” [Hi-8] video, 20 minutes 35 seconds.

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Berliner ballade (1990). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Antenne 2. [Hi-8] video, color, 25 minutes (televised version)/29 minutes (complete version). Bullfight/Okinawa (1994). Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Hi-8 video, 4 minutes 12 seconds. Casque bleu (Blue Helmet) [a.k.a. Témoignage d’un casque bleu and Gedanken eines Blauhelms] (1995). Directed by Chris Marker, with participation by François Crémieux. Production: Les Films du Jeudi; [Les Films de l’Astrophore]. Beta-SP video (blown up to 35mm), color, 26 minutes. Chat écoutant la musique (Cat Listening to Music) [c.1990]. Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” [Video], 2 minutes 47 seconds. Chats perches (Case of the Grinning Cat) (2004). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Les Films du Jeudi; Arte. Video, color, [59 minutes]. Chili (1975). [Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). Apocryphal]. Christo ’85 [a.k.a. From Chris to Christo] (1985). Directed by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” S-VHS video, 24 minutes. Ciné-tracts (1968). Created by Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Philippe Garrel et al. [Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA)]. 16mm, black and white, [2-3 minute films]. Classe de lutte (1968). Directed by Groupe Medvedkine de Besançon (Pol Cèbe, Bruno Muel, Nedjma Scialom, Binétruy et al.). Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). 16mm, black and white, 37 minutes. Coin fenêtre (1992). Directed by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Hi-8 video, 9 minutes 40 seconds. Cuba Sí! (Cuba, Yes!) [1961]. Created by Chris Marker, with Dervis Pastor Espinosa, Saul Yelin, Eduardo Manet, and Selma Diaz. Production: Les Films de la Pléiade. 16mm (blown up to 35mm), black and white, 52 minutes. Demain, la Chine (Tomorrow, China) (1965). Directed by Claude Otzenberger. [Commentary by “Christophe Berger” (Chris Marker)]. Production: Argos Films. Black and white, and color, 80 minutes. Des hommes dans le ciel (The Men in the Sky) (1958). Directed by JeanJacques Languepin, with A. Suire. [Commentary written by Chris Marker].

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Description d’un combat (Description of a Struggle) (1960). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Wim Van Leer (Israel); SOFAC (Paris). 35mm, color, 60 minutes. Détour Ceauúescu [n.d.]. Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Video, 8 minutes 2 seconds. Die Kamera in Der Fabrik (The Camera in the Factory) (1970). Directed by Chris Marker/Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). Production: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) (Hamburg); Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Groupe Medvedkine. 16mm, black and white, 88 minutes. Dimanche à Pékin (Sunday in Peking) (1956). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Pavox Films; Argos Films. 16mm (blown up to 35mm), color, 22 minutes. Django Reinhardt (1957). Directed by Paul Paviot. [Commentary written by Chris Marker (and Jean Cocteau)]. Production: Pavox Films. 35mm, black and white, [23 minutes]. D’un lointain regard (1966). Directed by Jean Ravel. [Co-direction of photography by Marker, with incorporation of parts of Le joli mai]. 10 minutes. Éclats [n.d.]. Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Video, 21 minutes 51 seconds. Éclipse [a.k.a. É-clip-se] (1999). Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Video, 8 minutes 13 seconds. Élégie di Moscou (Moscow Elegy) (1988). Directed by Alexandre Sokourov. [Produced by Marker]. Black and white, and color, 88 minutes. El primo año/La première année (The First Year) (1972). Directed by Patricio Guzmán. French production and subtitles by Chris Marker/ Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). Production (French edition): Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 90 minutes. Europort-Rotterdam (1966). Directed by Joris Ivens, with Marceline Loridan, Mirek Sebestik. French commentary written by Chris Marker based on the Dutch text of Gerrit Kouwenaar. Production: Argos Films; Nederlandse Filmproduktie Mij (NFM) (Rotterdam). 35mm, [black and white, and color], 19 minutes 56 seconds. Getting Away with It (1990). Directed by Chris Marker. Parts incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” Production: Cascando Studios. Video, color, 5 minutes.

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Guillaume Movie (2007). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded August 26, 2008. Video, 3 minutes 17 seconds. iDead (2011). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded October 7, 2011. Video, 2 minutes 27 seconds. Imagine (2011). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded August 24, 2011. Video, 31 seconds. Immemory One (1995-1997). Created by Chris Marker. Production: Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM)/Centre Pompidou; Les Films de l’Astrophore (with Nosferatu, Helsinki, and Centre pour l’Image Contemporaine de St. Gervais, Geneva). First exhibited: Centre Pompidou, Paris, June 4-September 29, 1997. Interactive, CD-ROMbased installation: 2 video projectors, 1 video monitor, 3 computers (with a mural of Guillaume-en-Égypte). Jouer à Paris (Playing in Paris) (1962). Directed by Catherine Varlin. [Editing by Chris Marker, with Sophie Coussein, and Catherine Bachollet]. Production: Sofracima. 35mm, black and white, 27 minutes. Jour de tournage (Filming Day) (1969). Directed by Chris Marker, assisted by Pierre Dupouey. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). 16mm, black and white, 11 minutes. Junkopia (1981). Directed by [John Chapman and] Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” Production: Argos Films [with Zoetrope Studios]. [16mm blown up to] 35mm, color, 6 minutes. Kashima paradise [a.k.a. La bataille de Narita] [1973-1974]. Directed by Yann Le Masson and Bénie Deswarte. [Commentary written by Yann Le Masson, Bénie Deswarte, and Chris Marker]. Production: Co-Ferc [Y. Le Masson; M. Hiernaux]. 35mm, black and white, [110 minutes]. Kino (2011). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded October 5, 2011. Video, 1 minute 45 seconds. La bataille des dix millions (The Battle of the Ten Million) (1970). Directed by Chris Marker, with Valérie Mayoux. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA); [KG Production (Paris); RTB; Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC)]. 16mm, black and white, 58 minutes. La bataille du Chili: La lutte d’un peuple sans armes (The Battle of Chile: The Struggle of a Powerless Town) [a.k.a. La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas] (1974-1980). Directed by Patricio

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Guzmán. Three-part edition produced [and co-written] by Chris Marker. [Production: Equipo Tercer Año, with Chris Marker and Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográfica (ICAIC)]. 16mm, black and white, [and color]. Part I (1975, French edition), [90 minutes]; two-part version, [84 minutes]; three-part version, [243 minutes]. La brûlure de mille soleils (The Burn of a Thousand Suns) [1964-1965]. Directed by Pierre Kast [with Jenny Pollet]. Produced by Clara d’Ovar. [Editing by Chris Marker]. Production: Argos Films; Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). 35mm, color, [25 minutes]. La clé des songes (The Key of Dreams) [1954-1955]. Directed by Chris Marker. Television series. 16mm. La douceur du village (The Softness of the Village) [1963-1964]. Directed by François Reichenbach. [Editing by Chris Marker, with Jane Dobby, Huguette Meusnier, and Jacqueline Lecompte]. Production: Les Films de la Pléiade. [Color], 47 minutes. La fin du monde, vu par l’ange Gabriel (1946). [Created by Chris Marker. 8mm, black and white. Apocryphal]. L’Afrique express (1970). Directed by Danièle Tessier and Jacques Lang [with Sophie Veneck]. [Introductory text by Chris Marker under the pseudonym “Boris Villeneuve”]. Production: Argos Films. 18 minutes. La jetée (The Pier) (1962). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Argos Films. 35mm, black and white, 28 minutes. L’ambassade (The Embassy) [a.k.a. L’ambassade: Un film en Super-8 mm trouvé dans une ambassade] (1973). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: E.K. Super-8mm, color, 21 minutes 18 seconds. La mer et les jours (The Sea and the Days) (1958). Directed by Raymond Vogel and Alain Kaminker. [Commentary written by Chris Marker]. Production: Son et Lumière. [Black and white], 22 minutes. L’Amérique insolite (Strange America) (1960). Directed by François Reichenbach. Incorporation of parts of Marker’s narrative for the never-completed film L’Amérique rêve (c.1959). Production: Les Films de la Pléiade. 35mm, [color], [86-90 minutes]. L’animal en question [Jacques Prévert et . . . un raton laveur] [1970]. Directed by André Pozner, Pierre Lhomme, Robert Doisneau, Michèle Wolf et al. Raccoon sequence by Chris Marker et al. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). 16mm, [black and white], and color, 38 minutes. La pseudo-société (1978). [Directed by Chris Marker. Apocryphal].

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La sixième face du Pentagone (The Sixth Side of the Pentagon) (1968). Directed by Chris Marker and François Reichenbach. Production: Les Films de la Pléiade. 16mm, black and white, and color, 28 minutes. La solitude du chanteur de fond (The Loneliness of the Long-distance Singer) (1974). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Seuil Audiovisuel. 16mm (blown up to 35mm), color, 60 minutes. La spirale (The Spiral) (1975). Directed by Armand Mattelart, Jacqueline Meppiel, and Valérie Mayoux (with Chris Marker, Silvio Tendler, and Pierre Flament). Production: Reggane Films; Seuil Audiovisuel. 35mm, color, 155 minutes. La surface perdu (1965). Directed by Dolorès Grassian. [Co-narration by Chris Marker]. Production: Association des Producteurs et Edite (APEC). 19 minutes. L’aveu (The Confession) (1970). Directed by Constantin Gavras (CostaGavras). [Still photography by Chris Marker]. [Production: Dorfman/Javal]. 35mm, 140 minutes. Le bonheur (Happiness) [a.k.a. Scast’e] (1934/1971). Directed by Alexandre Medvedkine. Soundtrack and an introductory short created by Marker and Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON) for the 1971 French version, Le bonheur. Production: Moskino Kombinat. 16mm and 35mm, black and white, 70 minutes. Le coeur des pierres (1967). Directed by E. Bettetini. [Screenplay by Chris Marker. Apocryphal]. Le facteur sonne toujours cheval (1995). [Directed by Chris Marker. 35mm, color, 52 minutes. Apocryphal]. Le fond de l’air est rouge (A Cat without a Grin) (1977/1993). Directed by Chris Marker, assisted by Valérie Mayoux, Luce Marsant, Pierre Camus, Annie-Claire Mittelberger, Christine Aya, Patrick Sauvion, and Jean-Roger Sahunet. Production: Dovidis; Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA); Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). 16mm (blown up to 35mm), black and white, and color, 240 minutes (1977 French version)/180 minutes (1993 international version). Leïla attaque (Leila Attacks) [c.2006]. Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded November 23, 2007. Video, 1 minute 9 seconds. Le joli mai: Mai 1962 (The Merry Month of May) (1962). Directed by Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme [with Pierre Grunstein, André Heinrich, Jacques Tribault, and Jacques Branchu]. Production: Sofracima. 16mm (blown up to 35mm) and 35mm, black and white, [and color], 165 minutes/[140 minutes (televised version)].

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Le mystère de l’Atelier Quinze (The Mystery of Studio 15) (1957). Directed by Alain Resnais and André Heinrich. [Commentary by Chris Marker]. Production: Les Films Jacqueline Jacoupy. 35mm, black and white, 18 minutes. Le mystère Koumiko (The Koumiko Mystery) (1965). Directed by Chris Marker [with Hayao Shibata, Koichi Yamada, Michel Mesnil, and Christine Lecouvette]. Production: Association des Producteurs et Edite (APEC); Sofracima; Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF). 16mm (blown up to 35mm), color, 54 minutes/[60 minutes (televised version)]. Le recours de la méthode (1978). Directed by Miguel Littin. [Subtitles by Marker]. 164 minutes. Le regard du borreau (Henchman Glance) (2008). Directed by Léo Hurwitz. [Marker’s “role” unknown. Apocryphal]. 31 minutes. Le siècle a soif (The Century Is Thirsty) (1958). Directed by Raymond Vogel [with Francis Bouchet]. [Verse commentary by Chris Marker]. Production: Images du Temps. 15 minutes. Le souvenir d’un avenir (Remembrance of Things to Come) (2002). Directed by Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker. Production: Les Films de l’Équinoxe; Arte. Video, black and white, [and color], 42 minutes. Le tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik) (1993). Directed by Chris Marker (with Andrei Pachkevitch). Production: Les Films de l’Astrophore; Michael Kustow Productions (UK); La Sept/Arte; Epidem Oy (Finland). [Hi-8] video (transferred to film), black and white, and color, 120 minutes. Le train en marche (The Train Rolls On) (1971). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 16mm and 35mm, black and white, 33 minutes. Le 20 heures dans les camps (Prime Time in the Camps) (1993). Directed by Chris Marker, with Roska Refugee Camp, Slovenia. Production: Les Films du Jeudi; [Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA)], [with Causes Communes (Belgium)]. Video, [black and white], and color, 28 minutes. Le volcan interdit (The Forbidden Volcano) (1948/1965). Directed by Haroun Tazieff. [Photography by Pierre Bichet, Vincenzo Barbagale, J.-L. Cheminée, R.-W. Decker, André Lartique, Chris Marker, F. Rackle, K. Yamada, and Haroun Tazieff; commentary written by Chris Marker]. Production: Ciné-Documents-Tazieff. 35mm, color, 79 minutes.

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Les astronauts (The Astronauts) (1959). Directed by Walerian Borowczyk [and Chris Marker]. Production: Argos Films; Les Films Armorial. 35mm, color, 14 minutes. Les chats (1963). [Directed by Chris Marker. Apocryphal]. Les chemins de la fortune [1964-1965]. Directed by Pierre Kassovitz [assisted by Régis Debray and Chris Marker]. [Production: Office de Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (ORTF)]. 16mm, black and white, [and color], 42 minutes 13 seconds. Les deux mémoires [1973-1974]. Directed by Jorge Semprún, with Alain Corneau. [Sound by Chris Marker]. Production: Fildebroc; Uranus Productions France; Aldebaran Films. 35mm, color, 141 minutes. Les groupes Medvedkine: Besançon-Sochaux 1967-1974 (2006). Directed by Chris Marker, Mario Marret, Michel Desrois et al. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). Black and white, and color, 334 minutes. Les hommes de la baleine (The Men of the Whale) (1956). Directed by Mario Ruspoli. [Commentary written by “Jacopo Berenizi” (Chris Marker)]. Production: Argos Films; Les Films Armorial. 16mm (blown up to 35mm), color, [24-28 minutes]. Les lumières de Broadway (Broadway by Light) (1957). Directed by William Klein. [Introductory text and “nonexistent” subtitles by Chris Marker]. Production: Argos Films. 16mm blown up to 35mm, color, 10 minutes. Les pyramides bleues (Paradise Calling) (1988). Directed by Arielle Dombasle. [“Artistic consulting” by Chris Marker]. Production: Ministère de la Culture; Lorimar Home Video; FR3 Cinéma; Mexico Inc.; Slav 1; Sofracima. 35mm, color, 97 minutes. Les statues meurent aussi (The Statues Also Die) (1950-1953). Directed by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. [Commentary written by Chris Marker]. Production: Tadié-Cinéma; Présence Africaine. 35mm, black and white, 30 minutes. Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia) (1958). Directed by Chris Marker [assisted by Marie-Claire Pasquier, Jasmine Chasney, and Remo Forlani]. Production: Argos Films; Procinex. 16mm (blown up to 35mm), black and white, and color, 62 minutes. Level Five (1996). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Argos Films; Les Films de l’Astrophore; [with] Karedas; Canal +; La Sept; Procirep; Coficine; and Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC). [Beta-SP blown up to] 35mm, color, 106 minutes.

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L’héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy) (1989). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: La Sept; Attica Art Productions (Groupe Fondation Onassis); FIT Productions; [with] Sofica Images Investissements; Centre National de la Cinématographie (CNC); Trebitsch Produktion International GmbH; and Société Nationale de Programmes France-régions FR3. Television series. 16mm, color, 13 episodes (26 minutes each). Liberté [a.k.a. Cuba si. Liberté] [1963]. Directed by Chris Marker. [Commentary and photography written and directed by Chris Marker]. Loin du Viêt-nam (Far from Vietnam) (1967). Directed by Joris Ivens, with Jean-Luc Godard (segment), Alain Resnais (segment), Claude Lelouch, William Klein, and Agnès Varda. [Produced by Chris Marker et al.]. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). 16mm (blown up to 35mm) and 35mm, black and white, and color, 115 minutes/[110 minutes (televised version)]. Matta ’85 (1985). Directed by Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” S-VHS video, 12 minutes. Mémoires pour Simone [a.k.a. Mémoire de Simone] (1986). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Festival International du Film de Cannes (an initiative of Yves Montand and Catherine Allégret, with the support of the journal Télérama). 35mm, color, 65 minutes. Metrotopia (2008). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded November 27, 2008. Video, 4 minutes 12 seconds. The Morning After (2008). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded November 12, 2008. Signed: “Created by Sandor Krasna.” Video, 5 minutes 41 seconds. Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955). Directed by Alain Resnais, with the assistance of André Heinrich, Chris Marker, and Jean-Claude Lauthe. Production: Argos Films; Como Films; Cocinor. 35mm, black and white, and color, 32 minutes. Olympia 52 (1952). Directed by Chris Marker, [with Jeannine Garane, Benigno Cacérès, and Anne-Marie Verbaere]. [Commentary by Chris Marker]. Production: Peuple et Culture; with Ministère de l’Education Nationale. 16mm (blown up to 35 mm), black and white, 82 minutes. One Sister and Many Brothers (1994). Created by Dušan Makavejev. [Near cameo appearance by Chris Marker]. 4 minutes. On vous parle de Flins (1970). Directed by Guy Devart. [Photography and editing by Chris Marker]. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). 16mm, black and white, 30 minutes.

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Filmography/Videography

On vous parle de Paris: Maspero. Les mots ont un sens (Report on Paris: Maspero. Words Have a Meaning) (1970). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 16mm, black and white, 20 minutes. On vous parle de Prague: Le deuxième procès d’Artur London (Report on Prague: The Second Trial of Artur London) [1969]. Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 16mm, black and white, 30 minutes. On vous parle du Brésil: Carlos Marighela (Report on Brazil: Carlos Marighela) (1970). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 16mm, black and white, 17 minutes. On vous parle du Brésil: Tortures (Report on Brazil: Tortures) (1969). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 16mm, black and white, 20 minutes. On vous parle du Chili: Ce que disait Allende (Report on Chile: What Allende Said) (1973). Directed by Miguel Littin and Chris Marker. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON)/Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA). 16mm, black and white, 16 minutes. Ouvroir [2008-]. http://slurl.com/secondlife/Ouvroir/186/64/40. Created by Chris Marker, with Max Moswitzer. A virtual museum created in Second Life, commissioned by the Museum für Gestaltung, Zurich, Switzerland. First exhibited in conjunction with the exhibition Chris Marker: A Farewell to Movies (Abschied vom Kio), Museum für Gestaltung, [March 12-June 29, 2008]. Overnight (2011). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded August 13, 2011. Video, 2 minutes 42 seconds. Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005). Created by Chris Marker. First exhibited: Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York, April 27-June 13, 2005. Installation: two-channel, eight-screen CD-ROMbased video [text composed in Javascript]; color, 19-minute loop with sound; with excerpts from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” (1925). Paul Seban: Le vendeur (1973). Directed by Raoul Sangla. Contains an extract from Le joli mai. 16mm, color, 43 minutes 16 seconds.

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Photo Browse [1990]. Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” 301 computer-animated photographs, 17 minutes 20 seconds. Pictures at an Exhibition (2008). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded September 26, 2008. Incorporated into “Xplugs,” in Immemory: A CD-ROM, revised edition (2008), and “Ouvroir” (2008). Video, 8 minutes 57 seconds. Puisqu’on vous dit que c’est possible (Because You Said It Was Possible) [a.k.a. Lip] (1974). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Centre de Recherche de l’Éducation Populaire et Action Culturelle (CREPAC)Scopcolor. 16mm, color, 60 minutes. Quand le siècle a pris forms: Guerre et révolution (When the Century Took Shape: War and Revolution) (1978). Directed by Chris Marker, with Pierre Camus. Production: Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM)/Centre Pompidou. Exhibition: “Paris-Berlin, 1900-1933: Rapports et contrastes France-Allemagne 1900-1933,” Centre Pompidou, July 12-November 6, 1978. Installation: Video U-matic [nine divisions] on two monitors; color, 12-minute loop. 16mm film converted to video. Rhodia 4 x 8 [a.k.a. Rhodia 4/8] (1969). Directed by Le Groupe Medvedkine de Besançon. [Direction attributed to Marker]. Production: Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (SLON). 16mm, black and white, 3 minutes. Roseware (1998-1999). Curated by Laurence Rassel, with the assistance of Chris Marker. First exhibited: “Kunst und Globale Medien,” Steirischer Herbst, Graz, Austria, September 26-October 26, 1998. Installation: 1 Omega Jaz Disk; 2 PC Apple G3 AV Power Macs; 1 PC Apple 200 MHz Power Mac; 2 AV monitors; 1 scanner; 1 video camera; 1 Jaz player; 1 slide projector and screen; some chairs, tables, drawing materials. Royal Polka (2011). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded May 1, 2011. Video, 1 minute 23 seconds. Salut les Cubains (1963). Directed by Agnès Varda. [Varda “assisted and advised” by Chris Marker]. 35mm, black and white, [28 minutes]. Sans soleil (Sunless) (1982). Directed by Chris Marker, with Pierre Camus. Production: Argos Films. [16mm blown up to] 35mm, color, 100 minutes. Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (If I Had Four Camels) (1966). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR) (Hamburg); Images Son Kinescope Réalisation Audiovisuelle (ISKRA)/Association

244

Filmography/Videography

des Producteurs et Edite (APEC). 16mm [and/or 35mm], black and white, 49 minutes/[70 minutes (televised version)]. Silent Movie, Starring Catherine Belkhodja (1994-1995). Created by Chris Marker. First exhibited: Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio, January 26-April 9, 1995. Production: Wexner Center for the Arts. Installation: metal stand; 5 20” SONY video monitors; 5 Pioneer laserdisc players; computer interface box; 5 video discs with 20-minute sequences (top to bottom: “The Journey”; “The Face”; “Captions”; “The Gesture”; and “The Waltz”); 18 black-and-white film/video stills; 10 computer-generated, semi-sarcastic film posters (Bow to the Rain; Breathless; Hastings; Hiroshima mon amour; It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad Dog; Owl People; The Quicksands of Time; Rambo Minus One; Remembrance of Things Past; and The War That Wasn’t); and soundtrack, “The Perfect Tapeur” (18 solo piano pieces lasting a total of 59 minutes and 32 seconds) [and/or 20-minute soundtrack by “Michel Krasna” (Chris Marker)]. Slon tango (1993). Created by Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” Hi-8 video, 4 minutes 15 seconds. Souvenir (1997). Directed by Michael Shamberg. [Electronic images by Chris Marker]. Production: Cascando Studios. 35mm, color, 78 minutes. Spectre [n.d.]. Created by Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” EMS-spectre video, color, 27 minutes. Stephan Hermlin (1997). [Created by Chris Marker for the art magazine Métropolis. 12 minutes. Apocryphal]. Tarkovski ’86 [1985]. Directed by Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” S-VHS video, 26 minutes. Tempo risoluto (2011). Created by Chris Marker. Posted to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki.” Uploaded February 14, 2011. Video, 6 minutes 15 seconds. Théorie des ensembles (1991). Created by Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” Production: Les Films du Jeudi. Video, color, 15 minutes 11 seconds. Tokyo Days (1988). Directed by Chris Marker. Incorporated into “Zapping Zone.” [Video], color, 20 minutes 15 seconds. Toute la mémoire du monde (All the Memory of the World) (1956). Directed by Alain Resnais, with Jean-Charles Lauthe, and André Heinrich. Assisted by “Chris and Magic Marker.” Production: Les Films de la Pléiade. 35mm, black and white, 21 minutes. 2084: Vidéo-clip pour une réflexion syndicale et pour le plaisir (2084: Video Clip for the Trade Unions’ Reflection and Pleasure) (1984).

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Directed by Chris Marker and Groupe Confédéral Audiovisuel, with Pierre Camus. Production: La Lanterne; Groupe Confédéral Audiovisuel. 16mm [plus video], color, 10 minutes. Un fichu métier (1955). [Directed by Chris Marker. Apocryphal]. Un maire au Kosovo (A Mayor of Kosovo) (2000). Directed by Chris Marker and François Crémieux. Unreleased. Video, 27 minutes. Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich) (1999). Directed by Chris Marker. Production: Audiovisuel Multimedia International Productions; La Sept/Arte; Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA); Arkeion Films. Video, black and white, and color, 55 minutes. Vidéo-Haikus (Three Video Haikus) (1994). Created by Chris Marker. “Petite ceinture” (1 minute); “Chaika/Tchaika” (1 minute 29 seconds); “Owl Gets in Your Eyes” (1 minute 10 seconds). Viva el Presidente!/Le recours de la méthode [1978]. Directed by Miguel Littin. [French subtitles by Chris Marker]. [Production: KG Productions]. 35mm, color, [164 minutes]. Vive la baleine (Three Cheers for the Whale) (1972). Directed by Chris Marker and Mario Ruspoli. [Commentary and sound by Chris Marker; edited by Chris Marker, with Danièle Tessier]. Production: Argos; [Prodix]. [16mm blown up to] 35mm, color, 30 minutes. Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television (1990-2009). Created by Chris Marker. First exhibited: “Passages de l’image,” Centre Georges Pompidou (Galeries Contemporaines, September 19, 1990-November 18, 1990; Salle Garance, September 12-October 15, 1990). Production: Musée National d’Art Moderne (MNAM)/Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris. Installation (1990): 14 color-video monitors; 13 laser-disc players; 13 loud speakers; 13 video-disc recorders; 7 computers; 7 computer programs; 4 light boxes, with 20 slides each; 11 color photos; 10 black-and-white photos (originally 50 images were intended, but reduced to 10); and 7 photomontages [40 x 80 cm.]. Divided into 13 zones, the 1990 version included: “Zone Frisco” (Junkopia, 6 minutes, 1981); “Zone Christo” (From Chris to Christo, S-VHS video, 24 minutes, music by Dmitri Shostakovich, 1985); “Zone Matta” (Matta ’85, S-VHS video, 12 minutes, 1985); “Zone Tarkovski” (Tarkovski ’86, S-VHS video, 26 minutes, 1985-1986); “Zone Éclats” (video, 21 minutes 51 seconds); “Zone Bestiare” (SVHS video, 9 minutes 4 seconds); “Zone Spectre” (EMS-spectre video, 27 minutes); “Zone Tokyo” (Tokyo Days, video, with Arielle Dombasle, 24 minutes, 1986); “Zone Berlin” (Berliner Ballade, Hi-8 video, 20 minutes 35 seconds, 1990); “Zone Photos” (Photo Browse,

246

Filmography/Videography

301 computer-animated photographs, 17 minutes 20 seconds, 1990); “Zone Clip” (Getting Away With It, 4 minutes 17 seconds, 1990); “Zone TV” (Détour Ceauúescu, video, 8 minutes 2 seconds, 1990); and “Zone Séquences” (20 minutes 45 seconds). “Zone Bestiare” included: Chat écoutant la musique (2 minutes 47 seconds, 1990); An Owl is an Owl is an Owl (3 minutes 18 seconds, 1990); and Zoo Pièce (2 minutes 42 seconds, 1990). “Zone Séquences” included clips from: Le fond de l’air est rouge (3 minutes 57 seconds; and 1 minute); Sans soleil (3 minutes 32 seconds; and 3 minutes 3 seconds); La solitude du chanteur de fond (2 minutes 57 seconds); Le joli mai (2 minutes 39 seconds); La sixième face du Pentagone (1 minute 37 seconds); and L’héritage de la chouette (1 minute 52 seconds). “Zone Éclats” included: Cocteau (47 seconds); 2084 (3 minutes 40 seconds); KFX (38 seconds); Statues 1 (1 minute 23 seconds); Taps (32 seconds); Statues 2 (52 seconds); Kat Klip (54 seconds); Alexandra (1 minute 40 seconds); Vertov (1 minute 52 seconds); Arielle (26 seconds); Chouettes (33 seconds); Zeroins (2 minutes 47 seconds); Moonfeet (1 minute 5 seconds); and Flyin’ Fractals (3 minutes 41 seconds). For the version exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, in 1992, Azulmoon (video loop, 1992) replaced Détour Ceauúescu in “Zone TV,” and Coin fenêtre (Hi-8 video, 9 minutes 40 seconds, 1992) was added to “Zone Bestiare.” A slightly revised (re-shuffled and expanded) edition was exhibited in 1994 at the Pompidou. Subsequent versions (1997-2009) included Apple IIGS components [added c.1997] for exhibitions in Amsterdam, Barcelona, Seville, Tokyo, and Graz. The “Air de Paris” version produced by the Centre Pompidou in 2009 included 20 zones (plus 10 collages, four lightboxes, and one Maneki Neko): “Zone Frisco”; “Zone Matta”; “Zone Photos”; “Zone Christo”; “Zone Tokyo”; “Zone Bestiare”; “Zone Berlin”; “Zone Séquences”; “Zone Clip”; “Zone Bosniaque”; “Zone Tarkovski”; “Zone Spectre”; “Zone TV”; plus “Zone Show”; “Zone Collages”; “Zone HyperStudio”; “Zone Slide Show”; “Zone Vidéo”; “Zone Graphs”; and “Zone Éléphant.” The latter seven, new zones were presented on Apple IIGS computer stations as homage, by Marker, to the then-defunct Apple model “of choice.” “Zone HyperStudio” and “Zone Vidéo” (a “zapping télévisuel” station connected to real-time television) included interactive consoles (with “zapping buttons”). Zoo pièce [n.d.]. Created by Chris Marker. Part of “Zapping Zone.” Video, color, 2 minutes 42 seconds.

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INDEX

Action Directe, 156 Adorno, Theodor W., 43, 44 Agamben, Giorgio, 20, 21, 81, 82, 83, 131, 132, 133, 135, 151, 152, 153, 177, 178, 179 Homo Sacer, 133 The Kingdom and the Glory, 81, 151 The Time that Remains, 133, 177 Allende, Beatriz, 159 Alter, Nora M., 7 Chris Marker, 7 Althusser, Louis, 15, 25, 33, 44 Althusser, Louis, and Étienne Balibar Reading Capital, 25 Anderson, Perry, 46 Lineages of the Absolutist State, 47 Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, 47 Aristotle, 81, 82, 84, 120, 127, 181 Metaphysics, 81, 84, 120 Artaud, Antonin, 15 Babel, Isaac, 165 Badiou, Alain, 16, 35, 123, 131, 133 Being and Event, 35, 123 Balibar, Étienne, 25 Bataille, Georges, 83 La part maudite, 83 Baudrillard, Jean, 21 Bazin, André, 41, 84, 103, 104, 110, 126, 127, 169 Bellon, Denise, 27, 126, 168, 169, 178 Benjamin, Walter, 43, 133, 179 Bloch, Ernst, 43, 46 Bonnefoy, Yves, 162

Bourdieu, Pierre, 26, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40 The Rules of Art, 32 Braudel, Fernand, 46 Brecht, Bertolt, 43 Breton, André, 168 Bruno, Giuliana, 30 Burckhardt, Jacob, 117 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 117 Cantat, Bernard, 176 Capa, Robert, 168 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 79 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 122 Castillon, Carmen, 158 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 44 Castro, Fidel, 155, 158, 173 Certeau, Michel de, 118 The Mystic Fable, 118 Chat, M., 175 Chesterton, G.K., 117 Chiesa, Lorenzo, 132 Chirac, Jacques, 175 Clavel, Maurice, 154 Cohen, G.A., 47 Karl Marx’s Theory of History, 47 Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 158, 165 Colletti, Lucio, 44 Dalí, Salvador, 173 Danto, Arthur, 119 Debray, Régis, 46, 47, 154, 156 La critique des armes, 47 Révolution dans la révolution?, 47 Deleuze, Gilles, 23, 29, 33, 37, 38, 136 Pure Immanence, 136

266 Della Volpe, Galvano, 43 Derrida, Jacques, 15, 17, 18, 21, 22, 29, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 46, 83, 104, 106, 179 Donner le temps, 83 Spectres de Marx, 15, 46, 83 Descartes, René, 29 DOC, 160 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 118 Eagleton, Terry, 17 Eisenstein, Sergei, 21, 23 Eliot, T.S., 178 Éluard, Paul, 176 Esprit, 45, 109, 157 Florensky, Pavel, 161 Foucault, Michel, 15, 22, 29, 32 Frank, Robert, 122 Freud, Sigmund, 158 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 158 Furet, François, 46 Giraudoux, Jean, 21, 109, 110, 178 Godard, Jean-Luc, 44, 84, 123, 169 Je vous salue, Sarajevo, 123 Week-end, 44 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 151 Goldmann, Lucien, 44 Goldovskaya, Marina, 166 Gorky, Maxim, 165 Gramsci, Antonio, 22, 23, 25, 32, 43 Prison Notebooks, 23 Guattari, Félix, 23, 33 Guevara, Ernesto Che, 156, 158 Habermas, Jürgen, 32, 44 Hamburger, Michael, 163 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 40, 41, 151, 154, 179 Phenomenology of Spirit, 154 Heidegger, Martin, 31, 33, 36, 38, 39, 40 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 163 Horkheimer, Max, 43 Horrigan, Bill, 174 Some Other Time, 174 Hoy, David Couzens, 28, 34, 40 Critical Resistance, 28

Index Husserl, Edmund, 33, 38 Izvolov, Nikolaï, 164 Kant, Immanuel, 25, 35, 38, 80, 134, 136 Critique of Judgment, 25 Karmen, Roman, 166 Kiefer, Anselm, 117, 118, 119 Aperiatur Terra et Germinet Salvatorem, 118 Palmsonntag, 118 Sternenfall, 118 Klein, William, and Janine Klein, 173 Kleist, Heinrich von, 20 Klossowski, Pierre, 83 Klossowski, Pierre, and Pierre Zucca La monnaie vivante, 83 Kocijanþiþ, Gorazd, 119 Korsch, Karl, 43 Koudelka, Josef, 123 Kurosawa, Akira, 126 L’homme et la societé, 45 La pensée, 45 Lacan, Jacques, 15 Laclau, Ernesto, 17, 23 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 171, 175 Ledoux, Jacques, 163 Lefebvre, Henri, 44 Lefort, Claude, 44 Les temps modernes, 45 Levinas, Emmanuel, 18, 26, 29, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 83, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 108, 109, 110, 111 La réalité et son ombre, 101, 103 Totality and Infinity, 18, 38 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 33 Löwenthal, Leo, 44 Lukács, Georg, 43, 44 Lupton, Catherine, 8 Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 8 Lyotard, Jean-François, 44, 83 Économie libidinale, 83

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime, 83 Malevich, Kasimir, 161, 178 Malraux, André, 21 Mandelstam, Osip, 47 Mao Tse-tung (Zedong Mao), 158 Marcuse, Herbert, 44 Marion, Jean-Luc, 83 Étant donné, 83 Marker, Chris À bientôt, j’espère, 154 Chats perchés, 175, 176 Coréennes, 175 Cuba Sí!, 7 Immemory (CD-ROM), 85, 86, 174, 175 Immemory One, 4, 8, 16, 85, 118, 173 L’ambassade, 124, 155 L’héritage de la chouette, 161 La bataille des dix millions, 7 La fin du monde, vu par l’ange Gabriel, 181 La jetée, 4, 30, 40, 81, 123, 170, 173, 177 La sixième face du Pentagone, 154, 171 Le coeur net, 162 Le fond de l’air est rouge, 7, 12, 27, 42, 153, 154, 155, 158, 159, 174 Le joli mai, 160, 171 Le souvenir d’un avenir, 168 Le tombeau d’Alexandre, 18, 163, 165, 166, 167 Lettre de Sibérie, 13, 84, 110, 125, 126, 155 Level Five, 16, 118, 161 Loin du Viêt-nam, 26, 154 Olympia 52, 168 On vous parle de Paris, 47 Ouvroir, 16, 126 Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 26, 118, 178, 181

267

Sans soleil, 4, 8, 30, 123, 124, 158, 161, 174 Si j’avais quatre dromadaires, 19, 124, 160, 172 Staring Back, 4, 169, 172, 173, 174, 175 Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch, 160, 161 Zapping Zone, 8, 16, 118, 161, 173 Marx, Karl, 15, 17, 25, 41, 44, 46, 166 Maspero, François, 47, 154 Mauss, Marcel, 83 Essai sur le don, 83 Medvedkine, Alexandre, 23, 24, 27, 47, 85, 126, 160, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 173, 178 Blossoming Youth, 167 How Do You Live Comrade Miner?, 164 Journal No. 4, 164 Scast’e, 163, 165 Watch Your Health!, 164 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 31, 32, 33, 38, 44 Meyerhold, Vsevolod, 165 Michaux, Henri, 26, 37, 125, 126 Michelangelo Buonarroti, 103 Monje Molina, Mario, 158 Montand, Yves, 126 Moretti, Franco, 27 Mouffe, Chantal, 17, 23 Moussorgski, Modeste Boris Godunov, 166 Negri, Antonio, 131 Nesbit, Molly, 174, 175 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 27, 29, 30, 34, 37, 38, 41 Ollendorff, Guillaume, 85, 86 Panofsky, Erwin, 117 Pascal, Blaise, 31, 80 Pater, Walter, 124 Pérez-Reverte, Arturo, 123 The Painter of Battles, 123 Petite Planète, 3

268 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 117 Plato, 127 Poulantzas, Nicos, 47 Political Power and Social Classes, 47 Proust, Marcel, 121 À la recherche du temps perdu, 121, 122 Pushkin, Alexander, 167 Raffarin, Jean-Pierre, 176 Rancière, Jacques, 136 Resnais, Alain, 84, 155, 181 Les statues meurent aussi, 84, 155, 173 Nuit et brouillard, 26 Toute la mémoire du monde, 155 Richter, Gerhard, 156 October 18, 1977, 156 Ricoeur, Paul, 83 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 162 Sonette an Orpheus, 162 Rochal, Lev, 165 Rogozinski, Jacob, 84 The Gift of the World, 84 Ruskin, John, 102, 103, 162 Saint Augustine, 40, 129 Saint Francis of Assisi, 82, 117, 181 Saint Paul, 20 Salgado, Sebastião, 123 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 153 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 29, 31, 34, 36, 40, 44, 102 Schwartzenberg, Léon, 176 Signoret, Simone, 27, 126 SLON, 7, 26, 34, 47, 121, 163, 171 Socialisme ou Barbarie, 44 Sollers, Philippe, 155 Solovyev, Vladimir, 40

Index Stalin, Josef, 21, 158, 164, 165, 167 Steiner, George, 161 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 4, 8, 24, 27, 85, 123, 126, 160, 161, 163, 173, 178 Andrei Rublev, 160, 161 Boris Godunov, 163 Ivan’s Childhood, 160 Mirror, 160, 161 Nostalghia, 160, 161 Solaris, 123, 160 Stalker, 8, 160 The Sacrifice, 4, 160, 161 Tel quel, 17, 155, 169 Tertullian (Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus), 102 Therborn, Göran, 41, 42, 46 Thomas Aquinas, 81, 82, 84, 120 Commentary on the Book of Causes, 82 Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, 81 Thorez, Maurice, 169 Tolchan, Yakov, 166 Tolstoy, Leo, 170 War and Peace, 170 Trintignant, Marie, 176 Vertov, Dziga, 85, 160, 164, 165, 166 Vissotsky, Vladimir, 159 Hunting Wolves, 159 Walzer, Michael, 28 White, Hayden, 46 Metahistory, 46 Žižek, Slavoj, 4, 15, 179 In Defense of Lost Causes, 15 Violence, 4 Zucca, Pierre, 83