Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes 9781907747915

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Half Title......Page 2
Title Page......Page 6
Copyright Page......Page 7
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Note on Translations......Page 11
Works by Walter Benjamin......Page 12
Works by Roland Barthes......Page 13
Introduction: Photography, Life, and the Work of Art......Page 14
From the Photographic Image to the Practices of Looking......Page 16
Photography, Vision and Affect......Page 18
Photography versus Film......Page 20
On the Comparative Dimension and the Structure of the Argument......Page 21
Notes to the Introduction......Page 23
Part I: Marcel Proust......Page 28
The Question of Autobiography......Page 29
The Uses of Photography......Page 30
A Photographic Opening......Page 32
Images of Memory......Page 34
A Question of Translation......Page 43
Notes to Chapter 1......Page 46
The Photograph in the Drawer......Page 49
Picturing the Other......Page 51
Marcel and the Grandmother: Between Loss and Mutual Restitution......Page 53
Marcel and Albertine: Between Mortification and Construction......Page 58
The Persistent Self......Page 63
Notes to Chapter 2......Page 64
Proustian Forms of Emotion......Page 67
Visual and Emotional Cavities......Page 69
Death of a Grandmother......Page 70
Sleeping Albertine......Page 73
Refilling the Cavities......Page 77
Notes to Chapter 3......Page 80
Part II: Walter Benjamin......Page 84
The Structure of Memory......Page 85
Memory and Photography......Page 88
Photography and Excavation......Page 89
Memory as Visual and Verbal Detour......Page 91
Bricolage......Page 94
Camera obscura......Page 96
Benjamin Palimpsest......Page 97
Notes to Chapter 4......Page 99
In and Out of the Field of Looks......Page 102
Self-Portraits I......Page 104
The Gaze......Page 105
The Look......Page 109
Self-Portraits II......Page 113
Being in Transit......Page 118
Notes to Chapter 5......Page 119
Pure Affect, No Affect......Page 124
Against Affective Memory......Page 127
Affect — Photography — Impression......Page 132
Feeling/Seeing Surfaces......Page 133
Between Proust and Baudelaire......Page 137
The Restricted Look......Page 138
Notes to Chapter 6......Page 140
Part III: Roland Barthes......Page 144
Life and the Work of Art......Page 145
Matt Images......Page 147
Just Images......Page 150
Camera obscura — Camera lucida......Page 157
Notes to Chapter 7......Page 158
Reaching beyond the Self......Page 161
The Subject: Focused on an Empty Centre......Page 164
Struggling with the Emotions......Page 166
In the Frame of the Same......Page 169
The Shift from the Self to the Other......Page 171
The Barthesian Dialectic of Hollowness and Repletion......Page 177
Become who you are......Page 179
Notes to Chapter 8......Page 181
Conclusion: Barthes, Benjamin, Proust ‘et la Photographie’......Page 184
Notes to the Conclusion......Page 189
Translations used:......Page 191
Critical Works......Page 192
Index......Page 202

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Regarding Lost Time Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes

LegendA egenda , founded in 1995 by the european Humanities Research Centre of the University of Oxford, is now a joint imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge. Titles range from medieval texts to contemporary cinema and form a widely comparative view of the modern humanities, including works on Arabic, Catalan, english, French, german, greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish literature. An editorial Board of distinguished academic specialists works in collaboration with leading scholarly bodies such as the Society for French Studies and the British Comparative Literature Association.

The Modern Humanities Research Association ( ) encourages and promotes advanced study and research in the field of the modern humanities, especially modern European languages and literature, including English, and also cinema. It also aims to break down the barriers between scholars working in different disciplines and to maintain the unity of humanistic scholarship in the face of increasing specialization. The Association fulfils this purpose primarily through the publication of journals, bibliographies, monographs and other aids to research.

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Editorial Board Chairman Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London Professor Malcolm Cook, University of Exeter (French) Professor Robin Fiddian, Wadham College, Oxford (Spanish) Professor Paul Garner, University of Leeds (Spanish) Professor Andrew Hadfield, University of Sussex (English) Professor Marian Hobson Jeanneret, Queen Mary University of London (French) Professor Catriona Kelly, New College, Oxford (Russian) Professor Martin McLaughlin, Magdalen College, Oxford (Italian) Professor Martin Maiden, Trinity College, Oxford (Linguistics) Professor Peter Matthews, St John’s College, Cambridge (Linguistics) Dr Stephen Parkinson, Linacre College, Oxford (Portuguese) Professor Suzanne Raitt, William and Mary College, Virginia (English) Professor Ritchie Robertson, The Queen’s College, Oxford (German) Professor David Shepherd, Keele University (Russian) Professor Michael Sheringham, All Souls College, Oxford (French) Professor Alison Sinclair, Clare College, Cambridge (Spanish) Professor David Treece, King’s College London (Portuguese) Managing Editor Dr Graham Nelson 41 Wellington Square, Oxford ox1 2jf, UK [email protected] www.legenda.mhra.org.uk

Regarding Lost Time Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes ❖ Katja Haustein

Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2012

First published 2012 Published by the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

LEGENDA is an imprint of the Modern Humanities Research Association and Routledge Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© Modern Humanities Research Association and Taylor & Francis 2012 ISBN 978-1-907747-91-5 (hbk) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopying, recordings, fax or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the publisher. Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Contents ❖



Acknowledgements Note on Translations List of Abbreviations



Introduction: Photography, Life, and the Work of Art



part i: marcel proust

1 Writing Life Visually 2 Picturing the Self and the Other 3 Proust’s Visual and Emotional Cavities



1 16 36 54

part ii: walter benjamin

4 Photography, Memory, and Representation 5 From Sight to Site: Benjamin’s Self-Portraits 6 Eye and Affect



ix x xi

72 89 111

part iii: roland barthes

7 From Life to Sign, or, ‘La vie comme œuvre’ 8 Transgressing Egotism: Self hood, Vision and Affect

132 148



Conclusion: Barthes, Benjamin, Proust ‘et la Photographie’

171



Bibliography Index

178 189

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v

This book would never have seen the light of day without the amazing support of a whole number of people. Above all, I am much obliged to Martin Crowley who helped me with the perfect mix of inspiration, patience and encouragement through the ups and downs of writing the dissertation on which this book is based. Amongst all the family, friends, and colleagues who have helped and inspired me throughout the writing process I should like to mention with particular gratitude: Zoe Bray, Christine Chen, Carolin Duttlinger, Frank Corcoran and Iain Fraser (who both also greatly improved some of the Benjamin translations), Martin van Gelderen, Emma Gilby, Nicole Moreham, Mark Singleton, Stefan H. Uhlig, and Lucy Turner Voakes. I benefited from discussion of earlier versions of individual chapters with Irene Albers, Malcolm Bowie, Johnnie Gratton, Martin Jay, Tim Mathews, Ingrid Wassenaar, Andrew Webber, Emma Wilson, Jay Winter, and Kathrin Yacavone. I thank Paul Earlie for his excellent work on a large part of the translations and Ursula Marx at the Walter Benjamin Archive for her invaluable advice and assistance. The European University Institute in Florence and the British Academy offered me Research Fellowships which enabled me to transform the dissertation into a book. Further generous support was offered by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Arts and Humanities Research Council, Trinity Hall, the Newton Trust, the Departments of French and German of the University of Cambridge, and Churchill College who also admitted me as a research fellow. I am immensely grateful to those who make these institutions work. Some of my chapters draw on articles I have published in French Studies, 63 (2009), the Australian Journal of French Studies, 41, 3 (2004) and Anamnesia: Private and Public Memory in Modern French Culture, edited by Peter Collier, Anna Magdalena Elsner and Olga Smith (Oxford: Lang, 2009). I thank the editors for their permission to reuse material that first appeared on their pages. It has been a great pleasure to work with the people at Legenda, particularly Graham Nelson and Richard Correll. They have been models of friendliness, patience and efficiency. I am deeply grateful to my parents Renate and Horst Haustein who have been supportive in every possible way. I thank my children Antonin and Nicolaus for constantly reminding me that authorhood and mothership should not be confused. And finally, my very special thanks goes to Andreas Corcoran. Dieses Buch ist für Dich. k.h., Cambridge and Berlin, July 2011

NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS v

Most English translations of the French and German texts cited are taken from the existing translations listed in the bibliography. In those cases where there is no translation or I would disagree with the existing translation I offer my own.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS v

Works by Marcel Proust CP  Proust, Marcel, Correspondance, ed. by Phillip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) CSB  Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) JS  Jean Santeuil, précédé par Les Plaisirs et les Jours, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) RTP  A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89)

... and in Translation SL  Selected Letters, ed. by Philip Kolb, trans. by Terence Kilmartin, 4 vols (London: HarperCollins, 1983–2000) ASB  Against Sainte-Beuve and Other Essays, trans. by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1994) SLT  In Search of Lost Time, ed. by Christopher Prendergast, trans. by Lydia Davis et al., 8 vols (London: Allen Lane, 2002)

Works by Walter Benjamin B  Briefe, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966) GS  Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89) GB  Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000) BK  Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000)

... and in Translation BCHR  A Berlin Chronicle, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 3–60 CB  The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. and annotated by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) SW  Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et al., 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996–2003) OGTD  The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998) AP  The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999) BC  Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. by Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006)

xii

List of Abbreviations

Works by Roland Barthes N  Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977–78), ed. by Thomas Clerc (Paris: Seuil/Imec 2002) PR  La Préparation du roman I et II. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1978–79 et 1979–80), ed. by Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/Imec 2003) OC  Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002) LA  Le Lexique de l’auteur: Séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes études 1973–1974 suivi de Fragments inédits du ‘Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes’, ed. by Éric Marty et Anne Herschberg Pierrot (Paris: Seuil, 2010)

...and in Translation WDZ  Writing Degree Zero, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967) IMT  Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) ES  Barthes, Roland, Empire of Signs, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983) RL  The Rustle of Life, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) PT  The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) CL  Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993) SC  The Semiotic Challenge, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) RB  Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Papermac, 1995) SFL  Sade/Fourrier/Loyala, trans. by Richard Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) LD  A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002) NL  The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–78), ed. by Thomas Clerc, trans. by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) PN  The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1978–79), trans. by Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) References will be given to volume and page number.

INTRODUCTION v

Photography, Life, and the Work of Art How does one write one’s own life? How does one get from lived experience to sign or image? This is the key question of autobiographical writing and it is one of the key questions posed by Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes in their autobiographical works. But what is autobiography and what becomes of the genre in the twentieth century, the age where visual media have increasingly come to rival the written text as the preferred means to capture and preserve lost time? More precisely, what is the role of these visual media — and in particular of photography — within the process of transforming life into a work of art, one’s own Work of Art? The first permanent photographic picture was produced around 1827. Roland Barthes includes the heliograph by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in the illustrations to his autobiographical essay on photography of 1980, La Chambre claire [Camera Lucida]. The picture shows the still life of a table, laid for one person. Seventeen years later the first person was portrayed, accidentally, in a photograph. In 1839 on a Paris street a pedestrian walked into the frame and stayed for a shoe polish, just about long enough to be pinned to paper by Louis Daguerre. By the time Proust embarked on his Search for Lost Time in 1907, portrait photography was a wellestablished phenomenon, widely received in art, literature and mass media culture. The photographic studio, the place where as children Marcel, Walter and later Roland had their portraits taken, had become a popular site for the self-creation and ideological self-affirmation of the bourgeois family. By now portrait photography had become a commercialized industry, and family albums, as Benjamin notes in his 1931 essay ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ [Little History of Photography], had turned into the common decoration of any bourgeois coffee table (GS, II.1, 374–75). Moreover, around the turn of the twentieth century, the Kodak technique had made the camera accessible to the masses and the amateur photographer, producing portraits or snapshots of his companions, as portrayed by Proust in the character of Robert de Saint-Loup, had become a widespread phenomenon.1 The accelerated proliferation and popularization of portrait photography and of photography in general did not take place without affecting and transforming people’s individual and collective sensual perception. In the course of the twentieth century our relation to reality, to collective history, and to our individual lives, has undergone significant modifications. The omnipresence of photographs in our everyday experience goes hand in hand with the desire to observe, record, and archive our public and private histories. Even in everyday situations, we find

2

Introduction

ourselves in the position of the ‘subject-as-look’: the photographer, or the ‘subjectas-spectacle’: the photographed object.2 Thanks to the digital camera, we can now continuously take and erase pictures. The period of processing being abolished, we can view photographs with (almost) no delay. What the old-fashioned cameras of Proust’s, then Benjamin’s and later Barthes’s childhood days paved the way for, the digital camera has achieved: moments of being have become indistinguishable from moments of pure appearance, while at the same time our need to capture and preserve some kind of ‘authenticity’ has become ever more urgent. A vicious circle, it seems, with no escape.3 Yet despite the omnipresence of visual images in our experience of everyday life, and despite the difficulty of not perceiving oneself (or others) as image, the prediction with which Benjamin concludes his ‘Little History of Photography’ — that the photographic picture would replace the written word and that, accordingly, the illiterate of the future would be one who was ignorant of photographs, not of writing — has not come true.4 The development and modification of the genre of life writing over the twentieth century is here an example. Although photography appears to facilitate direct access to reality and therefore seems the ideal medium for the reproduction of the past and the preservation of memories, photographs have by no means replaced the autobiographical text. People continue to keep diaries, and autobiography remains one of the most popular literary genres.5 Photography has clearly not replaced writing as the medium to record and preserve life. But it has changed it. Etymologically, ‘autobiography’ comes from the Greek and means αυτο = ‘his, hers, self ’, βίος = ‘life, lifetime’, γράφειν = ‘to carve, to paint, to write’.6 Philippe Lejeune takes his well-known definition of 1973 from this: autobiography, he writes, is a ‘récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité’ [retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality].7 During the twentieth century, however, all of the categories Lejeune relies on, the ‘récit’, the ‘personne’, the ‘vie individuelle’ and the chronological, teleological ‘histoire de sa propre individualité’, have been under fundamental re-negotiation; they have, as categories, been declared at least temporarily invalid or have come back under different circumstances and in highly modified forms. Our idea of what autobiography is or might be has changed and is still changing continuously. Today autobiography appears as a genre that is constantly ref lecting its own mediality, as writing-in-progress, a genre in search of its own end. The medium of photography occupies a central position here. Photography is not only a potential cause for the metamorphoses of autobiography. It is also central to the figuring of those metamorphoses, as it supplies the genre with crucial metaphorical devices. If, however, photographic forms of representation as well as photographic ways of seeing have gained such inf luence on the autobiographical text, what does it mean to write life visually? Marcel Proust’s autobiographical novel A la recherche du temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] (1909–1922), Walter Benjamin’s constantly revised versions of Berliner

Introduction

3

Chronik [Berlin Chronicle] and Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert [Berlin Childhood around 1900] (1932–38), as well as Roland Barthes’s at times explicitly anti-autobiographical texts from Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes to La Chambre claire [Camera Lucida] and the sketches of Vita Nova (1974–80) offer particularly rich material for the exploration of this question. Their shared intense fascination for photographs is imbedded in a shared captivation by everything visual in general. This is why we can read Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s autobiographical works in light of the twentieth-century development that has been termed the ‘pictorial turn’ (W. J. T. Mitchell), the shift from a text-based culture to a culture in which images, and with them physical and technological forms of visual perception and presentation, have become a primary means of cognition and signification. Indeed, if Proust is a master of showing,8 and Benjamin a creator of ‘Märchenphotographien’ [fairytale photographs],9 then Barthes has but one ailment: ‘je vois le langage’ [I see language] (OC, IV, 735 / RB, 161). What is more, Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s fascination with visuality crystallizes around variations of the same figure: the concept of immediate, momentary, yet arbitrary cognition that is, as we shall see, inherently linked to the experience of seeing and being seen. Proust calls this figure mémoire involontaire where an involuntary sensual sensation triggers memory images that are truthful because, as Benjamin maintains, they return the look. It is from here that Benjamin takes his concept of the aura, and Barthes develops his ideas of ‘air’ and ‘punctum’. Examining and comparing mémoire involontaire, aura, ‘air’ and ‘punctum’ in Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s autobiographical works will not only help us to draw out the similarities between these conceptualized sensations, it will also enable us to expose the differences that can be discerned from the ways in which each of the writers places and evaluates their experience within his autobiographical project. In this way, tracing this figure and its metamorphoses from Proust via Benjamin to Barthes will allow us to imbed their individual autobiographical projects within a wider diachronic perspective, and to position one particular strand in the history of autobiography in close relation to a field that is still in the making: the ‘Histoire des Regards’ [History of Looking] (OC, V, 798 / CL, 12)].10 From the Photographic Image to the Practices of Looking Walter Benjamin is ground-breaking in his observation of the way that human perception is subject to historical modifications. In his essay ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ [The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility] he notes: Innerhalb großer geschichtlicher Zeiträume verändert sich mit der gesamten Daseinsweise der menschlichen Kollektiva auch die Art und Weise ihrer Sinneswahrnehmung. Die Art und Weise, in der die menschliche Sinneswahrnehmung sich organisiert — das Medium in dem sie erfolgt — ist nicht nur natürlich sondern auch geschichtlich bedingt (GS, I.2, 478). [ Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which

4

Introduction human perception is organized — the medium in which it occurs — is conditioned not only by nature but by history (SW, IV, 255).]

Benjamin’s statement has proven to be very inf luential and indeed more recent studies on photography tend to theorize this medium within the context of a history of visual perception.11 Most prominently, Jonathan Crary has shown how the invention of new optical devices has inf luenced our visual perception of reality and its conditions. Inasmuch as the technical apparatus inserts itself between the world and the observing subject, the subject finds himself, Crary argues, removed from the centre-position. Thus ‘natural’ ways of seeing are revealed to be at once subjective, fallible, and productive.12 The writings of Proust, Benjamin and Barthes share this close association of media theory with perception theory. All three writers understand their autobiographical work also as a contribution to a history of looking. For this reason we shall not only consider the dimension of photographs as alleged trace of the real that helps to redefine problems of (self-)referentiality in autobiographical writing. Rather, we will contextualize the medium within a wider network of technological and natural ‘practices of looking’ that surround and permeate the photographic picture.13 The aim is to explore the textual staging of these practices of looking and the ways in which they transform twentieth-century autobiographical writing. Turning away from the diagnosis of a ‘denigration of vision’ in twentieth-century thought,14 we shall concentrate on the immense fascination for vision and the visual media, and with it for the experience of seeing and being seen, at the core of Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s autobiographical works. If photography is, as Hans Belting argues, essentially a medium of the look, then the image, as Gottfried Boehm observes, can no longer be defined as merely a still and two-dimensional arrangement of forms, lines and shades of colours that is oriented towards a frame.15 Instead, the frame becomes precarious and permeable and the f lat stillness dynamic, as we begin to perceive the image as determined by that intentional look which we, as the viewers, direct at the picture as an imaginary field. Seen from this angle, the photograph is no longer petrified but turns into an animated and mobile ‘Sichtbarkeitsgebilde’ [visibility formation], where the various gazes of the photographer, the viewer and the portrayed object(s), both within and without the image, intersect.16 And if, accordingly, we shift the emphasis from an analysis of photographs to the exploration of the multiple gazes that frame and surround them, we find that visual perception is no longer limited to the sphere of optics and the optical media but can be interpreted as determining the historically modifiable processes of experience and cognition, of reading the world and remembering the past, and hence as conditioning the (trans-)formations of subjectivity. This opening up of perspectives, which increasingly emerges in theoretical interventions into visual studies, already lies at the heart of Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s ways of writing life as writing vision. It is a dimension of their work that we shall explore in this study.

Introduction

5

Seeing the Self through the Other In the 1960s, the philosophical paradigm of the subject fell into ill repute. The humanist-enlightenment conception of subjectivity and the notion of the autonomy of the individual were taken to trial. Titles such as, Tod des Subjekts?, Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, or, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’, echo Barthes’s 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ and testify to the ongoing repercussions of this paradigm shift.17 The 1980s, however, also saw a revival of the category of the subject. This revival took place not only in the domain of critical theory, where some scholars began to argue in favour of a return of the subject,18 but also affected avant-garde narrative practice, within which the genre of autobiography had a remarkable comeback.19 For some time debates were heated and statements about the dissolution of a ‘centered subject’20 through language stood almost implacably against the postulation of subjects as ‘selbstbewusste Einzelwesen’ [self-conscious individuals].21 Today things have calmed down. And yet what remains is ongoing uncertainty as to the status and shape of the subject that hinges somewhere between wholeness and destruction and that, in either form, often appears to be locked within the frame of the same. Studying Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s conceptions of aesthetic subjectivity helps to move the debate forward. In their autobiographical works, all three writers bring into play the figure of the other and thereby open the debate on identity towards alterity. For a long time, Proust has been interpreted mostly as a narcissistic writer whose texts may be constructive or deconstructive, but always return, eventually, to the observing self.22 In analyses of Benjamin’s work, the category of the other has mostly appeared in the shape of the non-localizable instance of the ideological gaze,23 while Barthes’s autobiographical texts have often been understood as manifestations of a ‘carnival’ of the self.24 Unlike many other interventions into the genre of autobiography this study explores the ways in which Proust, Benjamin and Barthes discuss the paradigm of the autobiographical self by shifting the emphasis onto the figure of the other. The aim is to explain the dynamics between the other and the self by focusing on the role of photographic and natural vision. If the image, as Boehm tells us, is determined by the subject’s intentional gaze, then we could say that, under this gaze, the image may take on life and may thus be seen to look back at its viewer. Indeed, a central concern to Proust, Benjamin and Barthes is the question as to what happens to the subject-as-look and the object-as-spectacle if, suddenly, ‘the object stares back’.25 We shall see that with the help of the definition of photographs as conglomerations of gazes, and through the staging of technological and natural practices of looking, Proust, Benjamin and Barthes explore the dialogical dimension of seeing and (not) being seen. By so doing, they develop new visions of self hood. Photography, Vision and Affect The 1960s’ diagnosis of the death of the subject had entailed the dying away of scholarly interest in the theme of affect and emotion. As Fredric Jameson

6

Introduction

argues, the end of the bourgeois paradigm of the subject signalled the end of the psychopathologies of that subject, and with it the ‘waning of affect’.26 Other critics, such as Rei Terada, have followed Jameson in reconciling themselves to the aporia that, in Manfred Frank’s wording, ‘a dead subject emits no more cries of pain’.27 And yet, in the same way that the deconstruction of the subject has not led to the end of the self, the diagnosis of the fading of affect does not lead to the end of emotion; it leaves a void. And, in leaving this void, creates a slipstream. After a longstanding silence on the theme, we now witness an overwhelming surge of critical interest in emotion, motivated by the desire to rehabilitate the area as a subject worthy of academic enquiry and to develop new, interdisciplinary approaches to the study of a phenomenon always susceptible, furthermore, to historical change.28 Beyond that, the critical turn towards the emotions is complemented by contemporary narrative practice and artistic creation that underscores its tremendous force of attraction.29 In this spirit, the works of Proust, Benjamin and Barthes are examples of a careful and frequently renewed measuring of a terrain that has to be newly defined, newly inscribed. Although each of the three writers has a different answer to offer, their individual projects are closely connected by what Barthes calls a ‘glissement du sens’ [skidding of meaning] (OC II, 823 / SC, 186). They can be read as illustrations, or stations, of a process of shifting whereby vision and photography serve as the preferred means of figuration. As James Elkins reminds us, seeing is not an emotionally neutral, purely physical process. Although seeing is often said to be the most rational of the senses, it cannot always be controlled by our consciousness. It is, on the contrary, soaked in unconscious affect, closely connected with love and desire as well as with jealousy, possessiveness, violence or fear.30 The experience of seeing and being seen can be linked to the affective recognition, confirmation and self-increase of the subject, while not seeing and not being seen tend in the opposite direction: at the heart of visual indifference and distance lie disregard for and the annihilation of the subject-as-spectacle and, with this, the possible decrease of the spectator’s own self-awareness and self-assurance. At the same time, however, the experience of the reciprocal look can also be experienced as a shock, as a sudden, unmediated confrontation that may have traumatizing consequences, while seeing from a spatial and emotional distance can be regarded as a means not to self-destruction but, on the contrary, to the protection of the self. We will see that the first of these conf licts, between the restorative reciprocal look and destructive blindness, is the predominant theme of Proust’s and Barthes’s stories of love and loss. The second conf lict, between the shock of mutual recognition and a preservative visual and affective distance, is what characterizes Benjamin’s autobiographical writing. It is the oscillation of photography between these two extremes — its mechanical, emotionally neutralizing, petrifying and f lattening effects and, conversely, the irresistible affective power fed by the assumed magic and truthful realization of the object in the photograph — that offers Proust, Benjamin and Barthes an entry into the rethinking of affect, its effects on autobiographical representation, and the experience and conception of identity and alterity.

Introduction

7

Photography versus Film Of the three writers that are the object of this enquiry we may say that Marcel Proust’s views on film were the least sophisticated. The reason for this might have been, quite simply, a lack of interest. Proust was a passionate collector of photographs, yet he never set foot in a cinema. And although the development of cinema coincides with his work on A la recherche du temps perdu, we find only a few direct references to the new medium, most of which are dismissive. Proust uses the idea of ‘une simple vision cinématographique’ (RTP, IV, 468 / SLT, VI, 198) almost exclusively to criticize the limitations of conventional realism. Whereas his references to cinema tend to be fairly one-dimensional, his uses of the photographic, both as a motif and metaphorically, are much more complex. Indeed the cinematic often appears merely as a derivative of a certain kind of photographic representation that manages to meticulously record reality on its material surface yet misses its truth content.31 Roland Barthes’s attitude towards film and photography is different in this respect. Although, like Proust, Barthes finds it difficult to distinguish clearly between the two media (OC, V, 791),32 he decides to emphasize an ‘opposition radicale’ between them (OC, II, 583) that he claims to be most significant for any autobiographical project. Barthes detects this opposition in the potential for authentication. In contrast to photography, Barthes argues, film lacks the capacity to verify that a person or an object has truly existed outside its visual representation. This is the main reason why he writes La Chambre claire explicitly ‘contre le cinéma’ [in opposition to the Cinema] (OC, V, 791 / CL, 3). As Barthes explains, ‘au cinéma, sans doute, il y a toujours du référent photographique, mais ce référent glisse, il ne revendique pas en faveur de sa réalité, il ne proteste pas de son ancienne existence; il ne s’accroche pas à moi: ce n’est pas un spectre’ [in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts, it does not make a claim in favor of its reality, it does not protest its former existence; it does not cling to me: it is not a specter] (OC, V, 861 / CL, 89). In the same way that Proust defines cinematic representation as a chronological depiction of all the objects which at a given moment are present at a particular place (RTP, IV, 468), Barthes also accuses film of creating a false continuum when writing: ‘Le cinéma, même celui qui ne se donne pas au départ pour un cinéma de masse, est un discours d’où l’histoire, l’anecdote, l’argument (avec sa conséquence majeur, le suspens) n’est jamais absent’ [the cinema, even when it is not geared to popular demand, is a discourse from which storytelling, anecdote, plot (and therefore suspense) are never absent] (OC, II, 260).33 When watching a film, Barthes complains, giving his argument a Proustian turn, we cannot punctuate the phenomenological surface of the world reproduced and render meaning to what we perceive: ‘Fermer les yeux, c’est faire parler l’image dans le silence’, he notes, ‘devant l’écran, je ne suis pas libre de fermer les yeux; sinon, le rouvant, je ne retrouverais pas la même image’ [Shutting your eyes is to make the image speak in silence [...] in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image] (OC, V, 833 / CL, 55). Walter Benjamin is in harmony with Barthes when anchoring one essential difference between film and photography in the idea

8

Introduction

that photography testifies to the ‘here and now’ of the object while film does not. And yet his explanation is different. According to Benjamin the reason for this shortcoming does not so much lie in the allegedly ineluctable chronology of the moving image. Rather, it is grounded in the fact that when watching a film we as the audience can no longer immediately empathize with the world portrayed. We can only empathize with the apparatus of the movie camera that conspicuously inserts itself between the subject-as-spectacle and ourselves in the role of the subjects-as-look (GS, I.2, 489–90). Benjamin’s reasoning would later turn into one of the most common arguments against the possibility of cinematic autobiography. ‘Film makes us impatient for a direct transcription — an actual imprint of the person, unmediated and uncreated’ writes Elisabeth Bruss in 1980.34 And Philippe Lejeune notes in the same year: ‘Le cinéma n’a en fait aucun moyen de fondre les deux aspects du sujet autobiographique, énonciateur et énoncé. Pas possible d’être à la fois des deux côtés de la caméra [...]’ [The cinema has in fact no means to merge the two aspects of the autobiographical subject: enunciator and enunciated. It is not possible to be on both sides of the camera at the same time [...]].35 Bracketing off the concern that this may after all be true for photography as well, these statements illustrate the persistence of the idea that photography is the only medium that can offer immediate access to reality. Whereas film is said to resemble language because it emphasizes the fact that the world it records is in some way or other mediated, the conviction remains that ‘photography is’, in Rosalynd Krauss’s words, ‘an imprint or transfer off the real’.36 As a technological reproduction of reality with the alleged potential to circumvent the pitfalls of human perception, photography inf luences the metamorphoses of autobiography inasmuch as it relegates language to its imaginary qualities. Accordingly, more than film, photography forces the autobiographical text to reconsider its referential dimension and with it the question of authenticity and of truth.37 On the Comparative Dimension and the Structure of the Argument My interest in the dialogical and affective visual relationship between the self and the other in autobiographical works has guided the choice of material and extends to the intertextual plane of this study. For both Benjamin and Barthes the experience of reading Proust had a significant inf luence on their own writing and particularly on the form and content of their autobiographical projects. We shall see that Proust’s autobiographical novel both illuminated and obscured Benjamin’s own search for lost time and that Benjamin’s life writing emerges from this dialectical inf luence. For Barthes, who, like Benjamin before him, never succeeded in writing more than a few short essays and drafts on the Proustian œuvre, Proust was an elective relative, a central figure of identification, a medium for remembrance as well as autobiographical realization. Barthes’s relationship to Benjamin is, however, less evident and has been the object of much speculation. It is difficult to gauge the extent to which Barthes knew Benjamin’s works. Barthes quotes Benjamin once in 1960 and draws more extensively on him in his seminar series Le Neutre (1977–78).38 Yet in the text which bares the most visible resemblance to Benjamin’s thinking, La

Introduction

9

Chambre claire, Barthes does not mention him once. While Proust is omnipresent in Barthes’s work, Benjamin, as we will see in the course of this investigation, is its omnipresent absentee. There are a number of studies that have compared Proust with Barthes, Barthes with Benjamin, and Benjamin with Proust.39 Whereas Proust’s inf luence on Benjamin and Barthes’s reception of Proust are well documented, Barthes’s relation­ ship to Benjamin’s work, although often stated, is less thoroughly researched.40 Essays that compare Benjamin and Barthes often identify similar inf luences and theoretical concepts in their works, yet mostly fail to explore them in adequate detail or to consider them within their respective historical and critical contexts.41 My own enquiry differs from these earlier comparative studies inasmuch as it does not intend to focus on the comparison of certain motifs and conceptions, but rather is interested in analysing the actual and individual ‘reading encounters’ between Proust, Benjamin and Barthes, understood as dynamic and transgressive processes.42 If it is true that Barthes and Benjamin could not have written their autobiographical projects without Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, this raises the following questions: What becomes of the Proustian work in the course of their reading encounters? How does Proust’s text, in turn, inf luence and shape both Benjamin’s and Barthes’s understanding and practice of visual life writing? And to what extent does the origin of Benjamin’s and Barthes’s conceptions of the transposition process of life into art, of self and other, memory and affect, lie here, in the transformative and dangerous experience of reading Proust? In putting Proust, Benjamin and Barthes into dialogue with each other, my intention is not to develop a chronological or even a teleological argument. Rather, Barthes’s, Proust’s and Benjamin’s works are understood as reactions to similar crises, as variations on similar themes. If, as prominent critics of postmodern culture have argued, the epistemological paradigms of depth, being, inwardness and truth have increasingly been devalued in the course of the twentieth century and replaced by (multiple) surface(s), by appearance and simulacrum, then Proust, Benjamin and Barthes fundamentally renegotiate and question this alleged gradual paradigm shift from ‘Sein’ [being] to ‘Schein’ [appearance], volume to f latness, in their re-conceptions of autobiographical memory and representation.43 Against the background of the ‘disappearance of the subject’ 44 or, conversely, its return, Proust, Benjamin and Barthes suggest ways to rescue the paradigm of the subject by dissolving its contours, by opening the self towards the other, by handing identity over to alterity. Moreover, regarding the ‘waning of affect’, they relocate the emotive experience of their autobiographical selves in the voided field of affect and emotion. One central ‘Denkbild’ [thought figure] (GS, IV.1, 428) which will increasingly organize the overall argument is the metaphor of the visual and emotional ‘Hohl­ raum’, insufficiently translated as ‘hollow space’ or ‘cavity’. Drawing on a formu­ lation by Benjamin according to which the second, non-manifest and hence essential meaning of words creates ‘den eigentümlichen Hohlraum, Resonanz­ boden’ [that peculiar hollow space, the sounding board] within them (GS, III, 242 / SW, II, 315), in the course of this study we shall follow the manifold strategies

10

Introduction

with which Proust, Benjamin and Barthes carve out those paradigms that form the main components of traditional generic definitions of autobiography: the conception of representation as ref lection of reality, and the notion of a unified and substantiated subject that is endowed with an interior from which its affects and emotions originate and that can hence be adequately expressed in the text. Yet, as I have already begun to suggest, and in opposition to a widespread interpretation of twentieth-century autobiography, the argument does not move from repletion to emptiness, nor does it comply with the often stated re-auratization of surface and appearance that has allegedly replaced depth or being. In the same way that the autobiographical writings of Proust, Benjamin and Barthes cannot be subsumed under a ‘denigration of vision’ in twentieth-century thought, they do not confirm the ‘waning of affect’ or the destruction of the subject, nor do they affirm a substitution of ‘Herzensschrift’ [lit.: writing of the heart] with its indifferent storing through preservation in technical media.45 In contrast to these potentially linear narratives, my argument follows what recalls a negative dialectics. Proust’s, Benjamin’s and Barthes’s autobiographical writings hollow out the basic paradigms that define the genre of autobiography by means of vision and photography. Yet, in doing so, they do not simply leave us with empty word shells. On the contrary, their texts conjure these paradigms under modified conditions, and in residual forms. Relocated on a scale that expands between truth and simulacrum, inwardness and surface, vision and blindness, ‘pure affect’ and ‘no affect’,46 they reappear, as Barthes has it, ‘à un autre tour de la spirale’ [at another turn of the spiral] (OC, IV, 647), lined by, or coated with, the shadow images of the past. Notes to the Introduction 1. Saint-Loup is reported to own a Kodak (RTP, II, 141). Invented in 1888, the Kodak box and its roll of film with one hundred exposures made it possible to produce series of spontaneous snapshots that contrasted with the carefully staged portraits taken with the plate camera in the photographic studios. On the history of photography see, for instance, Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography: From 1839 to the Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1982); Graham Clarke, The Photograph (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 2007). 2. I take both terms from Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 135. 3. Jean Baudrillard was one of the leading scholars to think about this topic. He would call what he described as the complete abolition of the difference between the structure of signs and reality ‘the perfect crime’, Le Crime parfait (Paris: Galilée, 1995), pp. 125–29. 4. In ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ Benjamin famously writes, implicitly quoting László Moholy-Nagy: ‘ “Nicht der Schrift-, sondern der Photographieunkundige wird, so hat man gesagt, der Analphabet der Zukunft sein” ’ [‘The illiteracy of the future’ someone has said, ‘will be ignorance not of reading or writing, but of photography’) (GS, II.1, 385 / SW, II, 527). Benjamin qualifies this statement, however, by suggesting that the caption will turn into the essential part of the picture (ibid.) and that meaning will therefore occur in the interplay between photograph and text. 5. Along with the other kind of life writing: biography. Hence what Lyndall Gordon claims for biography holds also true for its sister genre: ‘The late twentieth century is often called “the golden age of biography”, but the golden age, conceivably, still lies ahead’, ‘Telling Lives’, Guardian, 29 January 2005, ‘Review’, p. 7. 6. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf, Autobiographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), p. 8.

Introduction

11

7. Philippe Lejeune, ‘Le Pacte autobiographique’, Poétique, 14 (1973), 137–62 (p. 138); trans. by Katherine Leary in On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 4. 8. As Benjamin notes in ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’ [Toward the Image of Proust]: ‘nie gab es einen, der so wie er die Dinge uns zeigen konnte’ [There has never been anyone else with Proust’s ability to show us things] (GS, II.1, 321 / SW, II, 245). 9. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Nachwort zur Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert’, in Über Walter Benjamin, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), pp. 275–98 (p. 76). 10. In recent years the relationship between autobiography and photography has become the object of intensified academic attention. Monographs on the topic include: Manfred Schneider, Die erkaltete Herzensschrift: Der autobiographische Text im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Hanser, 1986); Linda Haverty Rugg, Picturing Ourselves: Autobiography & Photography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Timothy Dow Adams, Light Writing & Light Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Susanne Blazejewski, Bild und Text: Photographie in autobiographischer Literatur (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002); Traces photographiques, traces autobiographiques, ed. by Danièle Méaux (St Étienne: Presses Universitaires, 2004); Sean Ross Meehan, Mediating American Autobiography: Photography in Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, and Whitman (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2008). Main distinctions in method and interest between existing scholarship and my own study will be laid out brief ly in this introduction. 11. Amongst the many examples are: Bernd Busch, Belichtete Welt: Eine Wahrnehmungsgeschichte der Fotografie (Munich: Hanser, 1989); Bernd Stiegler, Philologie des Auges: Die photographische Entdeckung der Welt im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Fink, 2001); and Stiegler, Theoriegeschichte der Photographie (Munich: Fink, 2006), which dedicates one chapter to Benjamin, pp. 255–78. 12. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990). 13. I draw the term from Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, ed. by Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 14. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). Jay also subsumes Proust’s and Barthes’s works under his argument, see pp. 181–86, 437–58. 15. Compare, for a detailed discussion of photography in light of a ‘Geschichte des Blicks’ [History of Looking], Hans Belting, ‘Die Transparenz des Mediums: Das photographische Bild’, in Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft (Munich: Fink, 2002), pp. 213–40. I take the quotation from p. 227. Gottfried Boehm, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Bilder’, in Was ist ein Bild? (Munich: Fink, 1994), pp. 11–38. 16. The term ‘Sichtbarkeitsgebilde’ was coined by the nineteenth-century art-theorist Konrad Fiedler. I quote from Boehm, ‘Die Wiederkehr der Bilder’, p. 17. 17. Nagl-Docekal, Herta, et al. (eds), Tod des Subjekts? (Vienna, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1987); Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, ed. by Manfred Frank et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 18. Paradigmatically, see, Alain Renaut, L’Ère de l’individu: Contribution à une histoire de la subjectivité (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), and more recently, Reinhard Sieder, Die Rückkehr des Subjekts in den Kulturwissenschaften (Wien: Turia + Kant, 2004). 19. In France the genre of autobiography gained particular popularity amongst writers associated with the Nouveau Roman. In 1983 and 1984 alone were published: Nathalie Sarraute’s Enfance, Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Le Miroir qui revient, Philippe Sollers’s Portrait du joueur and Marguerite Duras’s L’Amant. 20. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 15. 21. Manfred Frank, ‘Subjekt, Person, Individuum: Eine Begriffsdifferenzierung’, in Die Frage nach dem Subjekt, pp. 7–28 (p. 23). 22. Paradigmatically, see interpretations by Angelika Corbineau-Hoffmann, Marcel Proust: ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Tübingen: Francke, 1993) and Jacques Chabot, L’Autre et le moi chez Proust (Paris: Champion, 1999). Significant advances from the self to the other have been made

12

Introduction

by Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), and by Mieke Bal, in The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust Visually (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997) and in ‘Akte des Schauens: Proust und die visuelle Kultur’, in Marcel Proust und die Künste, ed. by Wolfram Nitzsch and Rainer Zaiser (Cologne: Insel, 2004), pp. 90–111. We shall return to these interpretations in Part I of this study. 23. This is a tendency of Schneider’s Benjamin- analysis in Die erkaltete Herzensschrift, pp. 105–50. 24. Paradigmatically, see Ann Jefferson, ‘Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes’, in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. by Ken Hirschkop et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 152–77. 25. James Elkins, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). 26. Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 15–16. 27. Manfred Frank, What is Neostructuralism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 10. 28. To mention just a few of the most important studies that approach the theme of emotion from different angles: Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture and Film (New York: Verso, 2002); Stanley Corngold, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Martha C. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) and Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a general introduction to the debate see Handbook of Emotions, ed. by Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones (New York and London: Guilford Press, 2000); Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, American Historical Review, 107/3 ( June 2002), 821–45; Ute Frevert, ‘Die Geschichtsmächtigkeit der Emotionen im 20. Jahrhundet’, in Perspektiven der Gesellschaftsgeschichte, ed. by Paul Nolte et al. (Munich: Beck, 2000), pp. 105–25. 29. Two randomly picked examples are the art exhibitions ‘Schmerz’ [Pain], Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (5 April — 5 August 2007) and ‘Gefühl ist Privatsache: Verismus und Neue Sachlichkeit’ [Emotions are a private Affair: Verism and New Objectivity], Kulturforum, Berlin (23 April — 15 August 2010). 30. On seeing as unconscious, reciprocal, affective experience that ultimately transforms both spectator and object, see, Elkins, The Object Stares Back, pp.11–12. That not even the Renaissance believed in the rational and logical potential of vision has lately been argued by Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 31. For further information on Proust’s relation to film and on cinematic adaptations of A la recherche du temps perdu see Proust at the Movies, ed. by Marion Schmid and Martine Beugnet (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006) and Proust und die Medien, ed. by Uta Felten and Ulrich Roloff (Munich: Fink, 2005). On the history of cinema in general and its relation to photography see, Gerhard Kemner and Gelia Eisert, Lebende Bilder: Eine Technikgeschichte des Films (Berlin: Nicolai, 2000). 32. On this difficulty see Michael Wood, ‘Other Eyes: Proust and the Myths of Photography’, in The Strange M. Proust, ed. by André Benhaïm (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), pp. 101–24. 33. Trans. by Norman King as ‘Roland Barthes: “Towards a Semiotics of Cinema”: Barthes in interview with Michel Delahaye, Jacques Rivette’, in Cahiers du Cinéma: Volume 2: 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, ed. by Jim Hillier (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 276–85 (p. 279). 34. Elisabeth Bruss, ‘Eye for I: Making and Unmaking Autobiography in Film’, in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. by James Olney (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), pp. 296–320 (p. 308). 35. Lejeune, ‘Cinéma et Autobiographie: Problèmes de vocabulaire’, Revue belge du cinéma, 19 (1987), 7–13 (p. 10). 36. Rosalynd Krauss, ‘Photographic Conditions of Surrealism’, October, 19 (Winter 1981), 3–34 (p. 26). 37. The discussion of the relationship between autobiography, photography and film must remain rudimentary here. A detailed investigation into this topic offers Rachel Gabara in her study From Split to Screened Selves: French and Francophone Autobiography in the Third Person (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).

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38. Benjamin features on the seminar’s reading list with Mythe et Violence (Paris: Denoël, coll. ‘Lettres nouvelles’, 1971) (N, 26). Barthes’s first reference to Benjamin draws on Benjamin’s analysis of Brecht’s epic theatre, in ‘Préface à Brecht: “Mère Courage et ses enfants” (avec des photographies de Pic)’ (OC, I, 1075). 39. Comparative studies of Proust and Benjamin include Henning Teschke, Proust und Benjamin: Unwillkürliche Erinnerung und dialektisches Bild (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000); Robert Kahn, Images, Passages: Marcel Proust et Walter Benjamin (Paris: Kimé, 1998); Dominik Finkelde, Benjamin liest Proust — Mimesislehre — Sprachtheorie — Poetologie (Munich: Fink, 2003). 40. For two short but comprehensive outlines of Barthes’s reception of Proust see Antoine Compagnon, ‘Proust et moi’, in Autobiography, Historiography, Rhetoric: Essays in Honour of Frank Paul Bowman, ed. by Mary Donaldson-Evans et al. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), pp. 59–73, and Malcolm Bowie, ‘Barthes on Proust’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14/2 (2001), 513–18. For a more specific analysis see Éric Marty, ‘Marcel Proust dans La Chambre claire’, L’Esprit Créateur, 46/4 (2006), 125–33 and Kathrin Yacavone, ‘Barthes et Proust: La Recherche comme aventure photographique’, in ‘L’Écrivain préféré’ , Fabula LHT (Littérature, histoire, théorie), 4 (1 March 2008), available online at . 41. For an overview on similar motifs, see Catherine Coquio, ‘Walter Benjamin et Roland Barthes’, in Global Benjamin: Internationaler Benjamin-Kongress, 1992, ed. by Klaus Garber et al. (Munich: Fink, 1999), pp. 1147–66. The first book-length study which seeks to define the conception of photography in both Barthes’s and Benjamin’s work tends to neglect an exploration of the interrelationship between both writers: Ronald Berg, Die Ikone des Realen: Zur Bestimmung der Photographie im Werk von Talbot, Benjamin und Barthes (Munich: Fink, 2001). Forthcoming is Kathrin Yacavone’s Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (London and New York: Continuum, 2012). 42. I take the term ‘reading encounter’ from Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter: Identity and Desire in Proust, Duras, Tournier, and Cixous (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996). 43. For analyses of this paradigm shift, see again Jameson, Postmodernism, and Norbert Bolz, Kleine Geschichte des Scheins (Munich: Fink, 1991). 44. Peter Bürger, Vom Verschwinden des Subjekts: Eine Geschichte der Subjektivität von Montaigne bis Barthes (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998). 45. The latter has been argued by Manfred Schneider in Herzensschrift. 46. I draw both terms from Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 168.

Part I v

Marcel Proust

CHAPTER 1

v

Writing Life Visually The Question of Autobiography Can we discuss Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu as ‘autobiography’? For a long time the majority of Proust scholars would have answered this question in the affirmative and would indeed have opted for ‘autobiography’ or ‘memoir’ as the most justifiable generic depiction. With the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1960s, however, biographically oriented interpretations were swept aside by a surge of analyses that focused on the text’s narrative structures and compositional aspects, strongly emphasizing its fictional status.1 And yet, inasmuch as the generic ambiguity of La Recherche continues to provoke debate amongst Proust’s academic readers, it is useful to step back and reconsider its premises.2 Novel or autobiography, fiction or non-fiction — how useful is this question really and where would we draw the line in the first place? Consider for example Philippe Lejeune’s argument. For him the question whether a literary text is autobiographical or not essentially depends on the existence of the ‘autobiographical pact’ which, as a kind of contract between writer and reader, states the identity of biographical and textual ‘I’. This is why for Lejeune autobiography cannot be a question of degree, it can only be all or nothing.3 Yet how would this definition relate to La Recherche? Proust’s own statements about the text’s generic status are manifold as they are inconsistent. In his correspondence Proust repeatedly discusses ‘roman’, ‘essai’ and ‘mémoire’ as the literary genres in relation to which he wishes to demarcate his own work. When referring directly to his text, however, Proust remains evasive, choosing relatively vague wordings such as ‘mon livre’ [my book] or ‘mon ouvrage’ [my work] as principal means of description.4 This circumvention of any precise generic definition is not accidental. Proust’s writing is not just generically ambiguous: it is a place of contact among many genres; it is fiction and non-fiction, representation, confession, translation, imitation, imagination, invention; it is grounded in the past as much as it is grounded in the future. Although extreme in its multi-valence, this hybridity does not make La Recherche an exception. On the contrary, it would be difficult to find an autobiographical text that could fully meet Lejeune’s condition. This is not to suggest, however, that all genre definitions are relative and therefore to be ignored. In the same way that the concept of the autobiographical pact cannot determine the generic locus of A la recherche du temps perdu, the other possible genre-theoretical extreme, the definition of autobiography as a figure of reading and understanding that at a fundamental level occurs in all texts would not be more helpful.5 As far

Writing Life Visually

17

as we can tell from Proust’s statements in his correspondence and his poetological observations in La Recherche itself, for Proust generic distinctions remain important benchmarks in relation to which he can develop his own writing.6 Generic boundaries are useful in that they can be transgressed in narrative discourse. The situation is one of reciprocal inf luence, a dynamic interplay whereby ‘norm’ and ‘practice’ reciprocally condition and transform each other.7 Generic distinctions are important as ideal constructions that can be ref lected upon and played with in the act of writing. Take for instance the title Proust eventually came to choose for his work. The notion of recherche and temps perdu amplifies rather than resolves the reader’s expectation that he or she will be faced with an autobiographical recall of a person’s life.8 At the same time, however, Proust cherishes from the beginning a strategic ambiguity as to the identity of his narrator-figure. These are only two illustrations of the Proustian games with modes of representation and forms of narrative voice that without our generic expectations would lose their alluring power. This is why Walter Benjamin argues in his 1929 essay ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’ [Toward the Image of Proust] that the generic hybridity of Proust’s œuvre is neither a potential shortcoming nor owed to the work’s fragmental character but, on the contrary, a sign of its extraordinary artistic significance. Benjamin depicts La Recherche by choosing the term ‘autobiographisches Werk’ which implies both autobiography and novel, an autobiographical work in which, he claims, just about everything is beyond the norm (GS, II.1, 310). Benjamin’s suggestion sheds light on a central desire of Proust’s writing. This is the writer’s task, as Roland Barthes puts it in his lecture course of 1978–80 on La Préparation du roman, ‘de faire de sa vie une œuvre, son Œuvre’ [making his life into a work, his Work] (PR, 275 / PN, 207). Reading Proust’s Recherche in this vein as a form of ‘écriture de vie’ will enable us to explore the ways in which Proust renegotiates the relation between world and sign and to shed light on the autobiographer’s creative, imaginary act of writing. For Proust, photography had a central role to play in this process. The Uses of Photography Jean Cocteau tells us that there were two tables in the bedroom of 102 Boulevard Haussmann where Proust spent the last years of his life writing. One table was in reach of the bed and covered in phials and notebooks. The other table was piled with ‘des photos de cocottes et de duchesses, de ducs et de valets de pied de grandes maisons’ [photos of tarts and duchesses, dukes and footmen employed in great houses].9 The memoirs of Céleste Albaret, Proust’s cherished maid of many years, and the recollections of André Maurois confirm this description.10 It therefore does not come as a surprise that photographs are a recurring motif in La Recherche, the Esquisses and in Proust’s Correspondance.11 Next to posed studio portraits we find ‘carte-d’album’ of famous people (RTP, I, 478), series of snapshots in Kodak or amateur style, x-rays (RTP, II, 569), stereoscopy (RTP, II, 107), the grandmother’s famous photographs of paintings of monuments and landscapes (RTP, I, 39), photography of architecture such as the images of Venice by the brothers Alinari (RTP, I, 386; II, 198), chronophotography à la Muybridge and Marey, the kinetoscope

18

Writing Life Visually

(RTP, I, 7), or Bloch’s ‘photographies spirites’ [spirit photographs] (RTP, II, 489 / SLT, III, 188). And yet, despite of the frequent use of photographic motifs, we can take Proust’s claim quite seriously according to which ‘L’art photographique est exactement ce que je déteste le plus’ [photographic art is precisely what I detest the most] (CP, XIII, 54).12 For what unites the manifold forms of photography in Proust’s writing is not their art-historical value but rather their potential relevance for human visual perception and imagination, for the workings of memory, and for its conditions. This extends to one of the main interests of this chapter, Proust’s metaphorical use of the medium. Next to the more obvious and often described metaphors ‘chambre noire’, ‘chambre obscure’ [dark room], ‘négatif ’ [negative] or ‘instantané’ [snapshot], we can find a number of expressions that can either be read as allusions to the act of taking a photograph, ‘tirer’ [to develop, print], ‘poser’ [to pose], ‘capturer’ [to capture], ‘enregistrer’ [to record], or that imply the processing of the negative picture, ‘déveloper’ [to develop] or ‘révéler’ [to reveal], to name only two examples. Before Proust scholars discovered photography as a motif worthwhile of academic investigation, critics and theorists of photography had long begun to use some of Proust’s observations on the medium as source of inspiration. Siegfried Kracauer and Susan Sontag, for example, famously read La Recherche as example of an antiphotographic aesthetic where the involuntary, unmediated memory image (depth) wins over the photographic picture that is equated with voluntary, mediated memory (f latness).13 More recent critics have reconsidered the significance of involuntary memory in the text. And in this way, their interpretation of the role of photography has changed. Where Manfred Schneider boils the text down to mortification and signature, Rainer Warning opts for a more dynamic reading, arguing for an opposition between the text’s idealistic poetics and its deconstructive narrative practice.14 Mieke Bal, in turn, inspired by Barthes’s notion of photographic f latness, describes Proust’s fascination with photography as intoxication with platitude that she finds to be contrasted with a staging of depth.15 Seen photographically, Proust’s writing is marked by a peculiar tension. While his poetic contemplations are grounded in the idea of involuntary memory, an idea we shall often find described in the metaphor of processing a photographic picture, he also contrasts the alleged blindness of the camera’s gaze with the idea of cognition through the experience of a look that is returned. Does Proust, then, develop his conception of life writing out of an opposition to photographic forms of recording? In any case, we shall see that his visual poetics of life writing is driven by a conf lict between the fascination of the concept of allegedly authentic photographic impression and its anti-photographic translation.

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A Photographic Opening Nos yeux ont plus de part qu’on ne croit dans cette exploration active du passé qu’on nomme le souvenir (CSB, 151–52). [Our eyes play a greater part than we think in this exploration of the past we call memory.]

One of the main characteristics of Proustian experience is the inaccessible nature of reality and the idea that, in order to reach reality in its ‘essence’, we have to renounce the concept of rational observation and search for other forms of relay. The principal pathway to this essence must somehow be linked to the act of remembering since, in Proust’s words, ‘la réalité ne se forme que dans la mémoire’ [reality takes shape only in memory] (RTP, I, 182 / SLT, I, 185). A look at the opening pages of La Recherche, the famous description of ‘Le Réveil’, offers a good entry to explore the workings of memory according to Proust. Showing the narrating self in a state between dreaming and waking, recalling the days of his past, Proust’s overture not only serves to acquaint his readers with the major themes of his autobiographical novel, it also lays out a whole arsenal of photographic metaphors, the unpacking of which will serve to guide us through our investigation.16 In ‘Le Réveil’ the place of childhood, Combray, is put in a double-phased past. The narrating ‘I’ is contemplating a time when he was sleeplessly lying in bed, half dreaming, half remembering the even earlier days of his childhood. To depict this in-between state, Proust uses the image of an optical instrument, describing the narrator to open his eyes ‘pour fixer le kaléidoscope de l’obscurité’ [(to) stare at the kaleidoscope of darkness] (RTP, I, 4 / SLT, I, 8). Yet the images he sees f lashing up in the dark appear in no chronological order but simultaneously show scenes from different periods of the narrator’s life juxtaposed with each other. Emerging directly from the limbs they are unconscious bodily memory images. Depicted as immediate realizations rather than representations of the past, they suggest an originality and totality where dream, memory and (past) reality, image and signification still seem undivided. But they remain fugitive, disappearing again as quickly as they had f lashed up in the dark before. The more the narrator is awake, the more the images slow down. To further describe the narrator’s visual confusion and his transition from the different states of dreaming to reverie and full awakening, Proust replaces the metaphor of the kaleidoscope by the image of a second optical instrument, the kinetoscope: Ces évocations, tournoyantes et confuses ne duraient jamais que quelques secondes; souvent, ma brève incertitude du lieu où je me trouvais ne distinguait pas mieux les unes des autres les diverses suppositions dont elle était faite, que nous n’isolons, en voyant un cheval courir, les positions successives que nous montre le kinétoscope. Mais j’avais revu tantôt l’une, tantôt l’autre, des chambres que j’avais habitées dans ma vie, et je finissais par me les rappeler toutes dans les longues rêveries qui suivaient mon réveil (RTP, I, 7). [These revolving, confused evocations never lasted for more than a few seconds; often, in my brief uncertainty about where I was, I did not distinguish the various suppositions of which it was composed, any better than we isolate,

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Writing Life Visually when we see a horse run, the successive positions shown to us by a kinetoscope. But I had seen sometimes one, sometimes another, of the bedrooms I had inhabited in my life, and in the end I would recall them all in the long reveries that followed my waking (SLT, I, 11).]

The choice of this second optical metaphor is surprising. A kinetoscope does not show latent images, but fully developed snapshots. Nor does it produce a visual chaos but, by showing separate pictures of a sequence in rapid chronological succession, simulates a continuously unfolding movement. We could read this incongruity between process and picture as a first indication for Proust’s at times unsystematic, non-strategic, and imprecise use of photographic metaphors. Rather than reading it as a paradigm for what has been going on until now, however, we could also read it as an image of transition, as an introduction of what is coming next, during a phase not of dreaming or reverie but of deliberate remembering. The narrator’s act of awakening is described as the moment when the circulating images finally come to a standstill (RTP, I, 8). Now, with everything back in its habitual place and order, and the self (or selves) reunited, the narrator decides not to go back to sleep again but to spend what remains of the night consciously remembering the people and places of his past (RTP, I, 9). Yet this does not recreate the absolute presence of the dream images nor does it facilitate their transition from unconscious to conscious recognition. On the contrary, now the remembering self finds himself cut off from the past inasmuch as the images he sees are no longer vivid revocations of the past but images from which all life has escaped. Showing uninhabited places (RTP, I, 43) that merely reveal ‘le décor strictement nécessaire’ [the bare minimum of scenery] (RTP, I, 43 / SLT, I, 46) these pictures appear as empty stage settings. Although, like the earlier dream images, associated with the idea of photographic f lashlight (RTP, I, 43), their effect is no longer immediate realization but rather increased distance and alienation. Showing isolated, shadowlike objects standing out alone against the darkness (RTP, I, 43) and people portrayed as lifeless extras (RTP, I, 18), cast-off skins from the past, these voluntarily recalled images remain dead. ‘Mort à jamais? C’était possible’ [Dead forever? Possibly] (RTP, I, 43 / SLT, I, 46). If the exertions of our intelligence (RTP, I, 44) deliver nothing but waste matter, then the involuntary sensation leads us back to the latent pictures from the beginning. The narrator depicts ‘le pays obscur’ [the obscure country] where his mind must search and how it finds itself ‘en face de quelque chose qui n’est pas encore et que seul il peut réaliser, puis faire entrer dans sa lumière’ [face to face with something that does not yet exist and that only it can accomplish, then bring into light] (RTP, I, 45 / SLT, I, 48). He notes the way in which this something arises deep inside himself, ‘l’image, le souvenir visuel’ [the image, the visual memory] and how his eyes catch the light of something whose shape he cannot yet recognize (RTP, I, 45 / SLT, I, 48–49). He sees an elusive eddying of stirred-up colours, worried whether it will ever reach the surface of his limpid consciousness (RTP, I, 46). This description of the narrator’s ‘réveil dans la chambre obscure’ [awakening in the dark room] (RTP, I, 633) recalls the position of a photographer bending over the developer’s bath, observing the negatives f loating in the fusion, awaiting the

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emergence of manifest images.17 Proust himself famously compares the scene to a game in which les Japonais s’amusent à tremper dans un bol de porcelaine rempli d’eau, de petits morceaux de papier jusque-là indistincts qui, à peine y sont-ils plongés s’étirent, se contournent, se colorent, se différencient, deviennent des f leurs, des maisons, des personnages consistants et reconnaissables (RTP, I, 47). [the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper until then indistinct, which, the moment they are immersed in it, stretch and shape themselves, colour and differentiate, become f lowers, houses, human figures, firm and recognizable (SLT, I, 50).]

Both situations share, as similar features, the emphasis on the latency period on the side of the image and the increased attention and suspension on the side of the observer: ‘Dix fois il me faut recommencer, de me pencher vers lui’ [Ten times I must begin again, lean down towards it] (RTP, I, 46 / SLT, I, 49), notes the nar­rator, until ‘tout d’un coup le souvenir m’est apparu’ [suddenly the memory appeared] (RTP, I, 46 / SLT, I, 49). The opening to A la recherche du temps perdu describes the first phase in a writer’s long journey from world to word. It describes the process of retrospective realization of past life and with it the premises of what is to follow, the transposition and translation of this lost reality within the act of autobiographical writing. The course of our enquiry shall be modelled on this imagined trajectory as we will explore in greater detail the photographic forms of memory and perception laid out on the opening pages, to then look at possible ways of their transposition, or translation, into the autobiographical text. Images of Memory One striking feature of Proust’s use of photographic imagery in ‘Le Réveil’ is the distinction between the temporal aspect of photography, the process of developing the picture, and its spatial aspect, the developed photograph. While the former is used as a paradigm for the successful event of unintentional memory, the latter becomes the image for intentional memory, illustrating, as duplication, the failure to reach past reality. This conception of involuntary memory as ‘image à faire’ and voluntary memory as ‘image faite’18 also occurs in a passage from the last volume of La Recherche, Le Temps retrouvé [Finding Time Again], which describes the narrator’s attempt to remember his journey to Venice: J’essayais maintenant de tirer de ma mémoire d’autres ‘instantanés’ notamment des instantanés qu’elle avait pris à Venise, mais rien que ce mot me la rendait ennuyeuse comme une exposition de photographies, et je ne me sentais pas plus de goût, plus de talent, pour décrire maintenant ce que j’avais vu autrefois, qu’hier ce que j’observais d’un œil minutieux et morne, au moment même (RTP, IV, 444). [I tried now to extract from my memory other ‘snapshots’, particularly the snapshots it had taken in Venice, but the very word made it as boring as a photograph exhibition, and I felt that I had no more taste, or talent, for

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Writing Life Visually describing now what I had seen earlier, than yesterday for describing what I was observing, at that very moment, with a doleful and meticulous eye (SLT, VI, 173–74).]

The boredom, the sadness, the minute but downcast look that characterizes this deliberate act of remembering is dramatically contrasted with the euphoric sen­ sation that follows when the involuntary act of stepping onto two uneven cobble stones triggers off the emergence of intoxicating, blue shining images: ‘c’était Venise!’ (RTP, IV, 446). Once more photographic metaphors describe the failure of memory when they are employed to depict the act of remembering as conscious dupli­cation of reality, and illustrate a success when they refer to the process of dev­ eloping unconscious memory images. The following passage further explains this opposition between duplication and resuscitation and offers a definition of the space of memory: Car la mémoire, au lieu d’un exemplaire en double toujours présent à nos yeux, des divers faits de notre vie, est plutôt un néant d’où par instants une similitude actuelle nous permet de tirer, ressuscités, des souvenirs morts; mais encore il y a mille petits faits qui ne sont pas tombés dans cette virtualité de la mémoire, et qui resteront à jamais incontrôlables pour nous (RTP, III, 653). [For memory is not a copy, always present to our eyes, of the various events of our life, but rather a void from which, every now and then, a present resemblance allows us to recover, to resurrect, dead recollections; but there are also thousands of tiny facts which never fell into this well of potential memories and which we shall never be able to check (SLT, V, 131).]

The past is not lost without trace but latently preserved in the virtual sphere of memory. Memory is not understood as an arsenal of photographs that preserves the doubles of people, places, objects, but as nothingness (‘néant’) out of which the memory images have to be drawn and developed (‘tirer’). This conception of memory is based on the idea that the actual event and its conscious experience are separated by a time of deferral. Ref lecting on his first encounter with Albertine Simonet the narrator remarks: Ce qu’on prend en présence de l’être aimé, n’est qu’un cliché négatif, on le développe plus tard, une fois chez soi, quand on a retrouvé à sa disposition cette chambre noire intérieure dont l’entrée est ‘condamnée’ tant qu’on voit du monde (RTP, II, 227). [in the presence of the person we love, we take only negatives, which we develop later, at home, when we have at our disposal once more our inner dark room, the door of which it is strictly forbidden to open while others are present (SLT, II, 450).]

The negatives Proust writes about here have never been consciously seen before. Only when they are remembered they get transferred from the realm of the unconscious to conscious cognition. This recalls Benjamin’s ‘Dunkelkammer des gelebten Augenblicks’ [dark room of the lived moment] (GS, II.3, 1064), where the original impression remains invisible until the future provides the necessary means for its exposure. Elsewhere Proust emphasizes the double meaning of ‘impression’ as both impression and imprint of the past, ‘sa figure matérielle’ [their material outline]

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and its quality of ‘trace’ (RTP, IV, 458 / SLT, VI, 188). He thereby draws upon a second dimension we have encountered in ‘Le Réveil’. This is the conception of ‘impression’ as unconscious and absolute image.19 Proust’s photographic depiction of the workings of memory can be further unpacked when related to two central metaphors of memory: the storeroom, associated with the learnable techniques of memoria, and the wax tablet, which does not explain the artful act of remembering but the physio-psychological process.20 Seeking to further complicate this distinction Aleida Assmann describes how in nineteenth-century psychology the book, the palimpsest and the trace became central terms in research on memory. Most prominently, Sigmund Freud formu­lates the following paradox: how can we comprehend the simultaneity of the two opposing functions of preservation and deletion, that is, the strange co-presence of permanent trace and tabula rasa? In search for an answer, and to picture the movement from unconscious to consciousness, Freud first tries out, like Proust, the metaphor of the photographic apparatus. Later he would replace it with the metaphor of the mystic writing pad which enables him to depict the process of memory in the imagery of writing and overwriting, preserving and deleting.21 Without losing the component of preservation and storing, Freud is thus, as Assmann observes, among the first to lead the debate away from spatial conceptions of memory and to relocate it within the new framework of psychological tem­ porality.22 Interestingly, Freud’s image of the mystic writing pad is not too remote from his earlier image of the photographic camera. Freud’s notion of the unconscious as comprising pictographic inscriptions on a sensitized psyche and his description of the writing pad as two hands, one writing as the other erases, call to mind some of the earliest renditions of photography by Hippolyte Bayard, Niépce, William Henry Fox Talbot or Daguerre, who depicted photographic recording as a process whereby nature is perennially drawn even while drawing itself.23 Thus Freud’s allegory of the writing pad shares with the image of the photographic apparatus the idea that in order to preserve the trace we have to renew it. In order to preserve the information it has to be processed. We find a similar conception in Proust, who uses the analogy between remembering and the photographic process not only to describe how impressions inscribe themselves within our mind but also to emphasize the element of discontinuity and transformation. According to Proust, during the act of remembering the original impressions are not simply reproduced; they are also transformed. Proust hints at this aspect in an early passage from his Carnets of 1908: Si brusquement de telle chose que nous voyons (même dans un album une photographie qui ressemble un peu à Illiers) sans que nous puissions y penser, se dégage brusquement, chimiquement, le passé, alors nous sentons en nous une substance entièrement différente de ce que nous pensons maintenant.24 [So suddenly can the past escape, chemically, from something that we see (even if what we see is just an album photograph which only somewhat resembles Illiers) that before we could even think about it, we now feel within ourselves a substance entirely different from what we presently thought].

Here the manifest image is not congruent with the latent original. The movement

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of the image from unconscious to consciousness, from darkness to light, is not understood as a continuous process, but as something discontinuous and interrupted. The crucial element here is the element of forgetting, which precedes and conditions the ability to remember. Pondering upon the mechanisms of involuntary memory Proust writes: ‘Le souvenir, grâce à l’oubli [...] il nous fait tout à coup respirer un air nouveau, précisément parce que c’est un air qu’on a respiré autrefois’ [the memory, thanks to forgetfulness [...] suddenly makes us breathe a new air, new precisely because it is an air that we have breathed before] (RTP, IV, 449 / SLT, VI, 178–79). The ‘vision première’ (RTP, II, 194) is an image that we have never consciously seen before we remember it. Conscious experience and memory are mutually exclusive. Only what has not been consciously experienced can be involuntarily remembered. Taking Freud’s theory of shock in Jenseits des Lustprinzips [Beyond the Pleasure Principle] as his basis, Benjamin comments in a short speech on Proust, held on his own fortieth birthday: Zur Kenntnis der mémoire involontaire: ihre Bilder kommen nicht allein ungerufen, es handelt sich vielmehr in ihr um Bilder, die wie nie sahen, eh wir uns ihrer erinnerten. [...] Wir stehen vor uns, wie wir wohl in Urvergangenheit einst irgendwo, doch nie vor unserem Blick, gestanden haben (GS, II.3, 1064). [On the cognition of mémoire involontaire: not only do its images come without bidding. Rather, they are images we never saw before we remembered them. [...] We confront ourselves as we may have once before in pre-history, yet never have we stood before our own gaze.]

Not ref lection but realization, ‘making present’, is Proust’s method (GS, II.1, 320). This act of remembering as ‘presentification’ is not directed towards the past but turns towards the future.25 This is what inspires Benjamin’s theory of history, in which he combines the Freudian metaphor of the writing pad with the Proustian image of the photographic process to define one of his most important concepts, the dialectical image: Will man die Geschichte als einen Text betrachten, dann gilt von ihr, was ein neuerer Autor von literarischen sagt: die Vergangenheit habe in ihnen Bilder niedergelegt, die man denen vergleichen könne, die von einer lichtempfindlichen Platte festgehalten werden. ‘Nur die Zukunft hat Entwickler zur Verfügung, die stark genug sind, um das Bild mit allen Details zum Vorschein kommen zu lassen [...]’ (GS, I.3, 1238).26 If one looks upon history as a text, then one can say of it what a recent author has said of literary texts — namely, that the past has left in them images com­ parable to those registered by a light-sensitive plate. ‘The future alone possesses developers strong enough to reveal the image in all its details’ (SW, IV, 405).

Assmann argues that Benjamin’s statement is an example of how both complementary metaphors of memory, the storeroom (with its connotations of spatiality, continuity, eschatology), and the idea of the trace (emphasizing temporal discontinuity, forgetting as bridge between past and present, crystallizing in a point beyond time), can closely combine with each other. The same can be said for Benjamin’s role model Proust. One of Proust’s earliest formulations of involuntary memory, taken from Jean Santeuil, reads as follows:

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Et la photographie de tout cela avait pris sa place dans les archives de sa mémoire, des archives si vastes que dans la plus grande partie il n’irait jamais regarder, à moins d’un hasard qui les fît rouvrir, comme avait été cet accroc du pianiste ce soir-là ( JS, 898). [And the photograph of all this had taken its place in the archives of his memory, archives so vast that the greater part of them would never be seen, unless an accident such as the pianist faltering that evening opened them up once again.]

We store our everyday impressions in the archives of memory where they are for­ gotten, until in a future moment the contingent sensation of an analogy between past and present leads to the sudden emergence of the manifest image. This particular time structure takes us back to the narrator’s position at the end of ‘Le Réveil’: bending over the porcelain bowl as over a developer’s bath the narrator is attentively awaiting the sudden realization of the images of the past, any time now. Proust’s conception of an intentional and a non-intentional relation between the remembering self and the remembered object is closely linked to his conception of perception. The Proustian quest for the true look, as we might call it, will therefore occupy us now. Eyes Open, Eyes Shut Proust writes: ‘Notre tort est de croire que les choses se présentent habituellement telles qu’elles sont en réalité, les noms tels qu’ils sont écrits, les gens tels que la photographie et la psychologie donnent d’eux une notion immobile’ [Our error stems from believing that things habitually appear to us as they are in reality, names as they are written, people as the static concepts presented by photography and psychology] (RTP, IV, 153 / SLT, V, 538). The analogy to photography here serves to describe our everyday perception of the world that surrounds us as accurate, superficial, and immobilizing vision of things seen ‘as they are’. According to Proust the artist’s task is therefore to search behind the layers of matter, experience, words: c’est exactement le travail inverse de celui que, à chaque minute, quand nous vivons détourné de nous-même, l’amour propre, la passion, l’intelligence, et l’habitude aussi accomplissent en nous, quand elles amassent au-dessus de nos impressions vraies, pour nous les cacher entièrement, les nomenclatures, les buts pratiques que nous appelons faussement la vie (RTP, IV, 474–75). [[it] is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life (SLT, VI, 204–05).]

A look into the Esquisses, where we find that the expression ‘nomenclatures’ replaces the earlier ‘clichés photographiques’, confirms a close association between photography and the habitual, worn out forms of language.27 Seen photographically, the world-as-spectacle appears to us as homogenous and absolute. The observing subject and the world he perceives are separated by an ‘écran diapré’ (RTP, I, 83)

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a dappled screen that keeps the true impressions out of reach. This screen is our everyday consciousness in its habitual state of deformation. The Proustian narrator explains: Quand je voyais un objet extérieur, la conscience que je le voyais restait entre moi et lui, le bordait d’un mince liséré spirituel qui m’empêchait de jamais toucher directement sa matière; elle se volatilisait en quelque sorte avant que je prisse contact avec elle, comme un corps incandescent qu’on approche d’un objet mouillé ne touche pas son humidité parce qu’il se fait toujours précéder d’une zone d’évaporation (RTP, I, 83). [When I saw an exterior object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, edging it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would dissipate somehow before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a damp object never touches its wetness because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation (SLT, I, 86).]

The screen that inserts itself between the observing subject and the world in the moment of their encounter inhibits sight, causes blindness. “‘Il s’agit bien de cela” ’, notes Proust in the Esquisses, “‘il s’agit de casser la glace” ’ [‘Indeed, that is what must be done: the mirror must be broken’] (RTP, IV, 856). It is this haze, the frozen surface, the pane of frosted glass, the photographic layer or the cinematographic screen we need to cut through in order to attain clear sight.28 Proust contrasts the experience of not seeing and not being seen with the sensation of the mutual look. A return to the description of the narrator’s attempt to remember Venice and the scene that tells of the Madeleine experience enables us to further clarify this opposition. In the opening of the Venice passage the narrator’s gaze is described as bleak, bored, indifferent.29 The only aspect it reveals from the past is a series of photographic reproductions. Here dead eyes look at dead images. In his essay ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ [On Some Motifs in Baudelaire] of 1939 Benjamin compares this blind and blinding gaze in Proust’s Venice- passage to the gaze of the camera lens. He argues that its cruelty resides in the fact that the lens does not fulfil an expectation that is inherent to any human gaze: the expectation of being returned. ‘ “Die Wahrnehmbarkeit” ’, Benjamin notes quoting Novalis, ‘ist “eine Aufmerksamkeit” ’ [‘Perceptibility’ [...] is ‘an attentiveness’]. Benjamin con­ tinues by associating this ‘perceptibility’ with his own notion of aura: Die Wahrnehmbarkeit, von welcher er [Novalis] derart spricht, ist keine andere als die der Aura. Die Erfahrung der Aura beruht also auf der Übertragung einer in der menschlichen Gesellschaft geläufigen Reaktionsform auf das Verhältnis des Unbelebten oder der Natur zum Menschen. Der Angesehene oder angesehen sich Glaubende schlägt den Blick auf (GS, I.2, 646). [The perceptibility he (Novalis) has in mind is none other than that of the aura. Experience of the aura thus arises from the fact that a response characteristic of human relationships is transposed to the relationship between humans and inanimate or natural objects. The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at us in turn (SW, IV, 338).]

Benjamin understands the auratic experience as an exchange of glances between the

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subject-as-look and the object-as-spectacle.30 To further illustrate this definition of the aura Benjamin refers to the following passage from Le Temps retrouvé: Certains esprits qui aiment le mystère veulent croire que les objets conservent quelque chose des yeux qui les regardèrent, que les monuments et les tableaux ne nous apparaissent que sous le voile sensible que leur ont tissé l’amour et la contemplation de tant d’adorateurs, pendant des siècles. Cette chimère deviendrait vraie s’ils la transposaient dans le domaine de la seule réalité pour chacun, dans le domaine de sa propre sensibilité (RTP, IV, 463).31 [Some mystery-loving minds maintain that objects retain something of the eyes that have looked at them, that we can see monuments and pictures only through an almost intangible veil woven over them through the centuries by the love and contemplation of so many admirers. This fantasy would become truth if they transposed it into the realm of the only reality each person knows, into the domain of their own sensitivity (SLT, VI, 193).]

By mentioning love and devotion in relation to perception, this quotation points us toward what is to become the decisive element for Proust’s conception of (mutual) cognition: the relation between perception, cognition and involuntary affect. Two more text passages are illuminating within this context. The first illustrates the failure of involuntary memory and thereby the failure of a reciprocal gaze, the second its success. The first is the well-known sequence about three trees in Hudimesnil. The narrator notes: Je regardais les trois arbres, je les voyais bien, mais mon esprit sentait qu’ils recouvraient quelque chose sur quoi il n’avait pas prise, comme sur ces objects placés trop loin dont nos doigts [...] eff leurent seulement par instant l’enveloppe sans arriver à rien saisir (RTP, II, 77). [I gazed at the three trees, which I could see quite clearly; but my mind suspected they hid something on which it could have no purchase, as our fingertips [...] may from time to time barely touch but not quite grasp objects which lie just out of reach (SLT, II, 297).]

The narrator’s fatigued gaze [vision fatigue] slips off the impenetrable material surface of its object. The image of the trees remains ‘vague’, he cannot get them closer, their picture remains an ‘image [...] effacée’ , ‘obscur’ (RTP, II, 78). The narrator further describes his vision of the trees as follows: Comme des ombres ils semblaient me demander de les emmener avec moi, de les rendre à la vie. Dans leur gesticulation naïve et passionnée, je reconnaissais le regret impuissant d’un être aimé qui a perdu l’usage de la parole, sent qu’il ne pourra nous dire ce qu’il veut et que nous ne savons pas deviner (RTP, I, 78). [Like risen shades, they seemed to be asking me to take them with me, to bring them back to the realm of the living. In their naïve and passionate gesticulations, I read the impotent regret of a loved one who, having lost the power of speech, knows that he will never be able to let us know what he wants, and that we can never deduce his meaning (SLT, II, 298).]

This scene is remarkable not only because it once again combines failed recognition with a photographic imagery but also because it reads like the unsuccessful encounter between beloved friends. The trees have lost their ability to speak, the

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onlooker cannot guess what they are seeking to express. Not mutual animation but mutual mortification stands at the end of this meeting. While the trees remain ‘fantômes du passé’ [ghosts from my past], the narrator himself feels as if he were dying: ‘j’étais triste comme si je venais de perdre un ami, de mourir à moi-même, de renier un mort ou de méconnaître un dieu’ [I was as sad as though I had just lost a friend or felt something die in myself, as though I had broken a promise to a dead man or failed to recognize a god] (RTP, II, 78–79 / SLT, II, 298–99). The second example introduces the Madeleine experience. The narrator observes: Je trouve très raisonnable la croyance celtique que les âmes de ceux que nous avons perdus sont captives dans quelques être inférieur, dans une bête, un végétal, une chose inanimée, perdues en effet pour nous jusqu’au jour, qui pour beaucoup ne vient jamais, où nous nous trouvons passer près de l’arbre, entrer en possession de l’objet qui est leur prison. Alors elles tressaillent, nous appellent, et sitôt que nous les avons reconnues, l’enchantement est brisé. Délivrées par nous, elles ont vaincu la mort et reviennent vivre avec nous. Il en est ainsi de notre passé (RTP, I, 43–44). [I find the Celtic belief very reasonable, that the souls of those we have lost are held captive in some inferior creature, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate thing, effectively lost to us until the day, which for many never comes, when we happen to pass close to the tree, come into possession of the object that is their prison. Then they quiver, they call out to us, and as soon as we have recognized them, the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and they return to live with us. It is the same with our past (SLT, I, 47).]

While habitual perception (and rational memory) remains peculiarly blind, in the act of involuntary memory that which had never been consciously seen before receives a face. The object-as-spectacle turns into a subject and looks back. Its per­ ceptibility resides in its attentiveness, in its suspension. In the moment of mutual, affective cognition the hazy layers of habitual indifference vanish. The essence is revealed. The past becomes present. Subject and object are equal, they share the same space. At this point we should remind ourselves that Proust’s conception of the experience of the mutual gaze is not, as it may seem here, anti-photographic. In the same way that Benjamin does not formulate his first definition of the aura in resistance to but on the basis of the experience of looking at photographs, Proust does not oppose his conception of ‘impressions vraies’ [true impressions] to photography. Rather, as we could already discern in the overture, Proust locates their origin and emergence within the imagery of photographic processing.32 This brings us back to Proust’s conception of trace. In his photography essay Benjamin describes how the observer of photographs is bound to feel the compulsory need to search for the tiny spark of chance, to discover the spot where ‘im Sosein jener längstvergangenen Minute das Künftige noch heut und so beredt nistet, daß wir, rückblickend, es entdecken können’ [in the immediacy of that long-forgotten moment the future nests so eloquently that we, looking back, may rediscover it] (GS, II.1, 371 / SW, IV, 510). The preservation of the object’s glance and with it the possibility of retrospective recognition, is,

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however, if we follow Benjamin, dependent on the interplay of light and shadow which we only find in early daguerreotypes, where darkness has not yet been completely overcome and the picture has not yet been turned into a murderous mirror (GS, II.1, 376). Proust’s characterization of the images of involuntary memory shares its main features with Benjamin’s photographic experience. These are the aspect of inevitable chance, latency, the dialectics of past and present, and the oscillation between light and shadow. Proust writes: Mais justement la façon fortuite, inévitable, dont la sensation avait été rencontrée, contrôlait la vérité du passé qu’elle ressuscitait, des images qu’elle déclenchait, puisque nous sentons son effort pour remonter vers la lumière, que nous sentons la joie du réel retrouvé. Elle est le contrôle aussi de la vérité de tout le tableau fait d’impressions contemporaines qu’elle ramène à sa suite, avec cette infaillible proportion de lumière et d’ombre, de relief et d’omission, de souvenir et d’oubli que la mémoire ou l’observation conscientes ignoreront toujours (RTP, IV, 457–58). [But the very fortuity, the inevitability of the manner in which the sensation was encountered, controlled the authenticity of the past that it resuscitated, the images it let loose, since we feel it striving towards the light, we feel the joy of the real, found again. It is also the control of the truth of the whole picture made out of contemporary impressions that it brings in its train, with this infallible proportion of light and shade, intensity and omission, memory and forgetfulness, of which conscious memory or observation will always be incapable (SLT, VI, 187).]

In light of its photographic imagery memory according to Proust appears as a process that begins with the self-inscription of latent images within our mind and ends with their retrospective deciphering as the possibility of a revelation of truth. As Proust notes with regard to the interior book of signs yet unknown: Ce livre, le plus pénible de tous à déchiffrer, est aussi le seul que nous ait dicté la réalité, le seul dont ‘l’impression’ ait été faite en nous par la réalité même. De quelque idée laissée en nous par la vie qu’il s’agisse, sa figure matérielle, trace de l’impression qu’elle nous a faite, est encore le gage de sa vérité nécessaire (RTP, IV, 458). [That book, the most painful of all to decipher, is also the only one dictated to us by reality, the only one whose ‘impression’ has been made in us by reality itself. Whatever the ideas that may have been left in us by our life, their material outline, the trace of the impression they originally made on us, is always the indispensable warrant of their truth (SLT, VI, 188).]

What Proust’s elaborations cannot explain at this stage, however, and what, as Freud himself acknowledged, the metaphor of the mystic writing pad also fails to answer, is the question of how the ‘true impressions’, once brought from darkness to light, can be permanently preserved. How does it work ‘to make an impression pass through all the successive states which will lead to its stabilization and expression’ (RTP, IV, 461 / SLT, VI, 190)? It is at this point that Proust’s use of the photographic process as paradigmatic metaphor ends. As a medium of permanent preservation and representation photography falls short in comparison with the medium of writing. Now the textual assimilation to the visual medium turns into dissimilation and the

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literary text reconsiders the particular qualities of its own mediality on the basis of an opposition to the visual medium. A Question of Translation We saw that Proust perceives the act of remembering not as the continuous movement of the memory image from unconscious to conscious recognition, but as a transposition that is interrupted by the element of forgetting. Involuntarily evoked by our senses, the ‘impressions oubliées’ [forgotten impressions] (RTP, IV, 864) emerge before our inner eye. We consciously turn towards them and process them within our minds. Memory, Proust reminds us here, is not a mere realization of past reality but ‘un acte de création’ [one of those acts of creation] (RTP, IV, 458 / SLT, VI, 188). This is why, eventually, memories do not appear on the side of reality but on the side of imagination.33 Within this context Proust’s statement that ‘le devoir et la tâche d’un écrivain sont ceux d’un traducteur’ [the writer’s task and duty are those of a translator] (RTP, IV, 469 / SLT, VI, 199) becomes intelligible. Translating the traces is an act of creation. Only during the retrospective act of deciphering and translating is meaning produced. It is therefore only consistent that in the same way that the photographic picture was earlier used as metaphor for voluntary memory, it now appears as counter-model for the poetics of (life-)writing. Proust notes: ‘Quelques-uns voulaient que le roman fût une sorte de défilé cinématographique des choses. Cette conception était absurde. Rien ne s’éloigne plus de ce que nous avons perçu en réalité qu’une telle vue cinématographique’ [Some even wanted the novel to be a sort of cinematographic stream of things. This was an absurd idea. Nothing sets us further apart from what we have really perceived than that cinematographic approach] (RTP, IV, 461 / SLT, VI, 191). The cinematic stream, understood less as a sequence of moving images than as a succession of blurred photographs, can only grasp reality’s material surface, never its essence. The aim of Proust’s ‘écriture de vie’ is clearly not chronological, horizontal, f lat mimesis nor is it the accurate capture of isolated sensations, both of which he finds embodied by photographic representation. Proust seeks, by contrast, to represent the different layers of time within memory, to find a means to connect the present with the past, the remembering with the remembered self (or selves). That both can only be achieved out of an opposition to photographic representation and photographic mediality becomes even more obvious when we turn towards the first example of the narrator’s attempt to capture and to articulate his impressions in writing. This is described in the scene dedicated to the church towers in Martinville-le-Sec and Vieuxvicq (RTP, I, 177–80). The narrator recalls a carriage ride during which he is fascinated to perceive the fast changes in perspective that inf luence his view of the church towers. At first his eyes follow the movements of silhouettes, lines and surfaces under the changing effects of sunlight and darkness. Yet he remains dissatisfied, feeling unable to reach beyond the deceptive ‘clarté’ (RTP, I, 178) of the object. As the towers disappear temporarily from sight, the narrator tries to revisit their sight in his mind. Now their surfaces seem to open up to him and release words f looding his mind, triggering

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sensations of pleasure. This second visualization of the towers in memory and their realization through language augment the experience of an ecstatic moment beyond the f low of time. It results in the narrator’s attempt to write (RTP, I, 179). In the ensuing text the narrator’s phenomenological observations are replaced by poetic comparisons and adventurous personifications.34 The towers light up as golden cones, as birds, as f lowers, as shy young girls, only to finally vanish again in the dark. Yet despite the effort this exercise in style remains unsatisfactory. The chosen images remain doubly isolated. They cannot be either associated with each other or connected to the writing self. They remain fragmented, distant, f lat. They cannot fill what the narrator earlier defines as a space with four dimensions, the fourth dimension being the dimension of Time (RTP, I, 60).35 In his theoretical ref lections on the nature of literature Proust famously offers metaphor as a solution. Metaphor, he argues, is to art what memory is to life, the convergence of two sensations by ‘le miracle d’une analogie’ [the miracle of an analogy] (RTP, IV, 450 / SLT, VI, 180). According to Proust ‘[...] le style pour l’écrivain [...] est une question non de technique mais de vision’ [style for a writer [...] is a question not of technique but of vision] (RTP, IV, 474 / SLT, VI, 204). Consequently, metaphor is the privileged expression of a profound vision that moves beyond the sphere of appearances to reach the being of objects. Proust writes: Ce que nous appelons la réalité est un certain rapport entre ces sensations et ces souvenirs qui nous entourent simultanément — rapport que supprime une simple vision cinématographique, laquelle s’éloigne par là d’autant plus du vrai qu’elle prétend se borner à lui — rapport unique que l’écrivain doit retrouver pour en enchaîner à jamais dans sa phrase les deux termes différents. On peut faire se succéder indéfiniment dans une description les objets qui figuraient dans le lieu décrit, la vérité ne commencera qu’au moment ou l’écrivain prendra deux objets différents, posera leur rapport, [...] et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d’un beau style. Même, ainsi que la vie, quand en rapprochant une qualité commune à deux sensations, il dégagera leur essence commune en les réunissant l’une à l’autre pour les soustraire aux contingences du temps, dans une métaphore (RTP, IV, 468). [What we call reality is a certain relationship between these sensations and the memories which surround us simultaneously — a relationship which is suppressed in a simple cinematographical vision, which actually moves further away from truth the more it professes to be confined to it — a unique relationship which the writer has to rediscover in order to bring its two different terms together permanently in his sentence. One can list indefinitely in a description all the objects that figured in the place described, but the truth will begin only when the writer takes two different objects, establishes their relationship, [...] and encloses them within the necessary armature of a beautiful style. Indeed, just as in life, it begins at the moment when, by bringing together a quality shared by two sensations, he draws out their common essence by uniting them with each other, in order to protect them from the contingencies of time, in a metaphor (SLT, VI, 197–98).]

What as mémoire involontaire remains a momentary, fugitive sensation, can be preserved through metaphor in the continued existence of the work of art. Interestingly, the claim for totality and essence inherent to this poetological dictum

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does not converge with the description of memory we encountered above: the presentation of a conception of memory grounded in the idea of a trace that gains its persistence from a dialectics of absence and presence. This reveals a noticeable difference between Proust’s theoretical ref lections and his narrative practice. Gérard Genette was among the first to point out the tension between the programmatic poetics of La Recherche and the narrative structure of the text. Genette’s dismantling of the Proustian metaphor as a palimpsest and his extrapolation of its metonymic, diegetic character helps us to explain by what means Proust’s life writing eventually succeeds in endowing the f lat, isolated, photographic fragments with temporal depth and in establishing the necessary links between them to construct a sequential narrative.36 Proust’s text establishes the internal connection between the isolated photographic impressions with the help of an imagery that, in contrast to his own poetological explanation, does not end with the isolation and immobilization of ‘la durée d’un éclair [...] un peu de temps à l’état pur’ [the duration of a f lash of lightning [...] a little bit of time in its pure state] (RTP, IV, 451 / SLT, VI, 180). On the contrary, it is its resemblance in difference, its effort toward assimilation and its simultaneous resistance to it, that makes Proustian metaphor permeable to the manifold layers of time and transparent for the writings and rewritings within memory. Through this metaphorical practice the ‘vision première’ (RTP, II, 194) can be transferred into a textual form that reaches beyond the cinematographic stream of pictures to capture its spatio-temporal expansion. This finally explains why in the opening pages of ‘Le Réveil’, Proust, despite making extensive use of photographic imagery, eventually chooses the image of the Japanese f lowers instead of the allegory of the photographer bending over the developer’s bath to illustrate the process of mémoire involontaire. The f lowers can represent the idea of the past’s infinite metonymical unfolding which the idea of the manifest picture that inevitably marks the end of any photographic exposure fails to depict. What emerges from Proust’s writing technique is a text without solid form, a dynamic texture that converges with the photographic conception of the trace of reality as it infinitely transgresses it. Allowing for a sheer incalculable combination of puzzle pieces taken from the past, future and present, Proust’s network of words is able to preserve the traces and to endow them with meaning, because it creates precisely what the narrator was looking for in his first exercise in style: the f lexible, the mobile, the four-dimensional space. This is how Proust can reverse original and representation when he exclaims: La vraie vie, la vie enfin découverte et éclaircie, la seule vie par conséquent pleinement vécue, c’est la littérature. Cette vie qui, en un sens, habite à chaque instant chez tous les hommes aussi bien que chez l’artiste. Mais ils ne la voient pas, parce qu’ils ne cherchent pas à l’éclaircir (RTP, VI, 474). [Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it (SLT, VI, 204).]

Yet once again a photographic metaphor sneaks back into the writing when Proust returns to the notion of the ‘image à faire’, first used in ‘Le Réveil’, concluding his

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thought with the following words: ‘Et ainsi leur passé est encombré d’innombrables clichés qui restent inutiles parce que l’intelligence ne les a pas “développés” ’ [And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never ‘developed’ them] (RTP, IV, 474 / SLT, VI, 204). * * * * * Thus far we have mainly been concerned with the accumulative dimension of the text of A la recherche du temps perdu. We have traced the trajectory of the first, latent impression via its successful, euphoric development to its preservation in the autobiographical text. Yet in Proust’s work depth can also reveal itself as illusion and the textural edifice can be threatened with collapse. The model of superposition and juxtaposition can disintegrate into endless serialization. We shall look at this dimension, which the Proustian narrator often experiences as traumatic, in the following chapter dedicated to the photographic gaze and its implications for Proust’s conception of the self and the other. Seen from this angle, Proust’s life writing will expose some additional facets that have until now remained in disguise. Notes to Chapter 1 1. In the words of Gérard Genette: ‘La recherche n’illustre qu’elle même’ [the Recherche illustrates only itself ], Discours du récit: Essai de méthode, in Figures III (Paris: Seuil 1972), p. 68; trans. by Jane E. Lewin as Narrative Discourse (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), p. 22. 2. Amongst the most inf luential contributors to the discussion are: Jeffrey Mehlman, Structuralist Study of Autobiography: Proust, Leiris, Sartre, Levi-Strauss (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974); Ursula Link-Heer, Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ und die Form der Autobiographie (Amsterdam: Grüner, 1988); Suzanne Nalbantian, Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art: Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Anaïs Nin (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997); Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); and Gian Balsamo, ‘The Fiction of Marcel Proust’s Autobiography’, Poetics Today, 28/4 (2007), 573–606. Cohn’s study also includes a detailed overview on generic Proust criticism, pp. 58–78. 3. Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 25. 4. See as exemplary C, XI, pp. 251–52, 235. For more references and their discussion, see Marcel Muller, Les Voix narratives dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Geneva: Droz, 1965), pp. 159–63, and Jean-Yves Tadié, Proust et le roman: Essai sur les formes et techniques du roman dans ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), pp. 17–30. 5. This is Paul de Man’s position who writes: ‘Just as we seem to assert that all texts are autobiographical, we should say that, by the same token, none of them is or can be’, ‘Autobiography as De-Facement’, Modern Language Notes, 94/4 (1979), 919–30 (p. 922). 6. As Jacques Derrida writes: ‘Tout texte participe d’un ou plusieurs genres, il n’y a pas de texte sans genre, il y a toujours du genre et des genres mais cette participation n’est jamais une appartenance. [...] En se marquant de genre, un texte se démarque’ [Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participating never amounts to belonging [...] Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself ], ‘La Loi du genre/The Law of Genre’, Glyph, 7 (1980), 176–232 (p. 185; p. 212). 7. See Tzvetan Todorov, Genres in Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 14. 8. For Proust’s contemplations over the title, see ‘Introduction générale’ (RTP, I, LXXII– LXXIV). 9. I draw the quotation from Brassaï, Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997),

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p. 35. Translated by Richard Howard as Proust in the Power of Photography (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 13. 10. For Maurois’s statement, see again, Brassaï, p. 35. For Céleste Albaret’s recollection, see Céleste Albaret and George Belmont, Monsieur Proust (Paris: Éditions Robert Laffont, 1973), p. 76. According to Valérie Sueur, Proust’s collection of photographs does still exist and is now in possession of his descendants, ‘Impressions et réimpressions: Proust et l’image multiple’, in Marcel Proust: L’Écriture et les arts, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié (Paris: Gallimard 1999), pp. 89–101 (p. 95). Proust’s letters confirm that photographs regularly featured as mediators between the secluded author and the exterior world, both in the form of aide-mémoire and as inspiration for his own imagination (C, II, 212; X, 40). 11. For the Esquisses [Sketches] see paradigmatically, ‘La photographie de Mme Guermantes’, ‘Une photographie de Mme de Guermantes’ and ‘Les photographies d’Albertine’ (RTP, II, 1114–16, 1145; IV, 655–56). For photography in Proust’s correspondence see Luc Fraisse, Proust au miroir de sa correspondance (Liège: Sedes, 1996), pp. 132–38. The first book-length study of photography in Proust’s Recherche was Jean-François Chevrier’s Proust et la Photographie (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1982). 12. Proust in a letter to Gaston de Pawlowski, 11 January 1914. 13. Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Die Photographie’, in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970), pp. 24–35 and Theorie des Films: Die Errettung der äußeren Wirklichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), pp. 39–40; Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), p. 164. A further example for this tendency is Renate Hörisch-Helligrath’s essay in which she favours literature’s ‘unscientific truth’ over photography’s realism, ‘Das deutende Auge: Technischer Fortschritt und Wahrnehmungsweise in der Recherche’, in Marcel Proust: Motive und Verfahren, ed. by Edgar Mass (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1986), pp. 14–30 (p. 26). 14. Although Warning’s earlier Proust studies refer to photography only in passing, they have significantly inf luenced Frank Wegner’s doctoral dissertation ‘Photography in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Cambridge University, 2002) and Annette Weber’s short analysis, ‘Dys­ phorische Bilder: Anmerkungen zur Inszenierung des fotografischen Wahrnehmungsdispositivs in Marcel Prousts A la recherche‘, in Die Endlichkeit der Literatur, ed. by Eckart Goebel and Martin von Koppenfels (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), pp. 162–74. Interestingly, in his first essay which also considers the role of photography, Warning explicitly distances himself from media-theoretical interpretations of La Recherche. According to Warning, Proust puts a ‘schwache Intermedialität’ [weak intermediality] as citation into service of his leading theme of duration and volatility, aura and profanation, ‘Aura und Profanation: Zur Poetik und Poesie der Intermedialität in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’, in Proust und die Künste, ed. by Wolfram Nitsch and Rainer Zaiser (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 2004), pp. 263–91 (pp. 266–67). 15. Bal, ‘The Flatness of Photography’, in The Mottled Screen, pp. 181–249. Irene Albers offers a different interpretation in ‘Proust und die Kunst der Photographie‘, in Nitsch and Zaiser (eds), Proust und die Künste, pp. 205–39. Albers argues that in La Recherche photography is both technique and art, counter model and model of involuntary memory, cipher of an objective reproduction of reality and its creative deformation. Albers’ meticulous analysis is a role model for my own reading. 16. Hans Robert Jauß writes within this context of ‘kernels’ or ‘crystallization points’ in ‘Le Réveil’ which are developed during the further unfolding of the narrative, Zeit und Erinnerung in Marcel Prousts ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Romans (Heidelberg: Winter, 1955), pp. 106–07. 17. For the depiction of the awakening scene as ‘chambre noire intérieure’ [inner dark room] (RTP, II, 227 / SLT, II, 450), see, Roxanne Hanney, ‘Proust and Negative Plates: Photography and the Photographic Process in A la recherche du temps perdu’, Romanic Review, 74 (1883), 342–54 (p. 344); Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1997), p. 76; Albers, ‘Prousts photographisches Gedächtsnis’, p. 36. According to Brassaï, Proust had experience in developing photographs, Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie, p. 168. 18. I take both terms from Chevrier, Proust et la Photographie, p. 30. 19. In her psychoanalytic interpretation of Proust’s Recherche Julia Kristeva writes counter to interpretations in the tradition of Gilles Deleuze’s Proust et les signes: ‘Contrairement à ce qu’on a

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pu croire, ce ne sont pas des “signes” mais des “impressions” que Proust recherche et déchiffre’ [Contrary to what is commonly believed, it is not ‘signs’ but ‘impressions’ that Proust seeks out and deciphers], whereby she understands impressions as sensory traces of the world, Le Temps sensible: Proust et l’expérience littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 441, 444. We shall come back to Deleuze’s position in chapter II.3. 20. Harald Weinrich, ‘Typen der Gedächtnismetaphorik’, in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, ed. by Karlfriedrich Gründer et al. (Mainz: Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, 1964), pp. 23–26. 21. Sigmund Freud, ‘Notiz über den Wunderblock’ (1925), in Studienausgabe, ed. by Alexander Mitscherlich et al., 10 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), iii, 363–70. 22. Aleida Assmann, ‘Zur Metaphorik der Erinnerung’, in Mnemosyne: Formen und Funktionen der kulturellen Erinnerung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer 1991), p. 22. 23. Geoffrey Batchen points this out in Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997), p. 187. 24. I take this Proust quotation from Chevrier, Proust et la photographie, p. 78. 25. In the words of George Poulet: ‘Ce fait essentiel et jusqu’à maintenant mal étudié que, chez Proust, l’amour du passé est précédé par l’amour du futur, et n’est rien d’autre en son origine que celui-ci même’ [This essential and up to now poorly studied fact that, in Proust, love of the past is preceded by love of the future, and is nothing else in its origin but this], ‘Marcel Proust’, in Études sur le temps humain (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), iv, 299–335 (p. 301). 26. The author Benjamin refers to is André Monglond. 27. The passage reads: ‘entièrement, [les clichés photographiques biffé] les nomenclatures’ [completely, [with the photographic negatives crossed out], with the repertoire of words] (RTP, IV, 1268). Albers points this out in ‘Prousts photographisches Gedächtnis’, Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur, 109 (2001), 19–56 (p. 28). 28. Interestingly, Jacques Lacan’s conception of the ‘écran’ shows resemblance to the Proustian image. We shall look into this closeness and its implications for the conception of self and other in chapter I.2. 29. This is even more emphasized in the Esquisses where Proust tells of ‘mon cœur refroidi’ [my cooled heart], ‘mon œil [...] avec une froideur’ [my eye [...] coldly] as part of a general state of ‘glace’ [ice] that renders the unfolding of ‘joie’, ‘enthousiasme’ and their communication to the reader impossible (RTP, IV, 802). 30. It is important to note that the expectation Benjamin describes can both be directed at ‘einen intentionalen Blick der Aufmerksamkeit’ [an intentional gaze of attentiveness] as well as ‘einen Blick im schlichten Wortsinn’ [a gaze in its simple, literal meaning]. The object-as-spectacle, Benjamin explains, does not have to be a human being, it can also be ‘ein Unbeseeltes’ [an inanimate object] (GS, I.2, 646, 647). 31. Benjamin quotes this passage in his own translation (GS, I.2, 647). 32. In his brief evaluation of photography and memory, Warning, by contrast, adheres to Kracauer’s and Sontag’s understanding of photography as voluntary memory versus involuntary memory: ‘Die Bewertung der Photographie innerhalb der Recherche ist höchst ambivalent, aber unübersehbar ist doch das Bemühen, sie zum Auratischen in größtmögliche Distanz zu bringen’ [The evaluation of photography within the Recherche is highly ambivalent. Highly visible is, however, the effort, to keep photography in the greatest possible distance to the auratic] ‘Aura und Profanation’, p. 281. 33. See Proust’s claim that it is a ‘contradiction de chercher dans la réalité les tableaux de la mémoire’ [contradiction [...] to search in reality for memory’s pictures] (RTP, I, 419 / SLT, I, 430). 34. This sequence is based on Proust’s article ‘Impressions de route en automobile’ that appeared in Le Figaro in 1907. 35. I am following Albers’s analysis of the same passages here, in ‘Prousts photographisches Gedächtnis’, p. 38. In addition, see, Karlheinz Stierle, ‘Proust, Giotto und das Imaginäre’, in Modernität und Tradition: Festschrift für Max Imdahl zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Karlheinz Stierle, Gottfried Boehm and Gundolf Winter (Munich: Fink, 1985), pp. 219–49 (p. 471). 36. Genette, ‘Proust Palimpseste’, in Figures (Paris: Seuil, 1966), pp. 39–67, and ‘Métonymie chez Proust’, in Figures III (Paris: Seuil, 1972), pp. 41–63.

CHAPTER 2

v

Picturing the Self and the Other The Photograph in the Drawer It is surprising that in a work we read as an autobiographical novel and which is so attentive to visuality, we find so few passages that depict the narrator’s external appearance. And while there are many photographs of lovers, artists and relatives, the text hardly ever mentions photographs of the narrator himself. Indeed, such a portrait is described only once. The passage is very short and therefore largely overlooked: in his room at the Grand Hotel in Balbec the narrator is having breakfast in bed. The two ‘courriers de cabinet’ Céleste and her sister Marie keep him company, and Céleste says to her sister: Tu n’as donc pas vu dans son tiroir sa photographie quand il était enfant? Il avait voulu nous faire croire qu’on l’habillait toujours très simplement. Et là, avec sa petite canne, il n’est que fourrures et dentelles, comme jamais prince n’a eu. Mais ce n’est rien à côté de son immense majesté et de sa bonté encore plus profonde. — Alors, grondait le torrent Marie, voilà que tu fouilles dans ses tiroirs maintenant (RTP, III, 241–42). [Haven’t you seen the photograph in his drawer then of when he was a child? He wanted to make us believe they always dressed him very simply. And there, with his little cane, he’s nothing but fur and lace, like no prince ever had. But that’s nothing compared with his immense majesty and his even more profound goodness. — ‘So now you’re rummaging in his drawers,’ scolded Marie the mountain torrent (SLT, IV, 247).]

Like Céleste, we search through Proust’s drawers for traces of his real self and we hit upon something: there exists one photographic portrait, rarely ever reproduced, which corresponds perfectly to Céleste’s description: we see the author as a boy, half Louis XVII, half little Lord Fauntleroy, posing in front of a splendid Gobelin tapestry.1However, what at first sight appears to be the right track quickly turns out to be a red herring. If we were not being told that this was the child Marcel Proust, we would not recognize him. Curiously lacking the expected attributes of the iconic Proustian look such as the large dark eyes and the black hair contrasting with the delicate white skin — here the boy appears to be almost blond — the child’s individuality disappears behind the princely masquerade of bourgeois self-staging. Moreover, the text itself increases rather than clarifies our confusion: Céleste’s naïve and emphatic descriptions of the portrait are contradicted by the narrator’s statements and throughout the whole scene the photograph is never displayed but

Picturing the Self and the Other

Fig. 1. Marcel Proust en petit prince, c. 1880 © Société des amis de Marcel Proust

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remains hidden in the drawer. Behind all these layers of textual and photographic representation, in this game of display and disguise, the narrator’s as well as the author’s individuality escape our grasp.2 This passage confirms what we have already found in the previous chapter. In La Recherche moments of analogous, external representation are always eventually an impasse. Moreover, the ‘real’ origin of the autobiographical self will never be found. The scene confirms Leo Bersani’s depiction of the text as a ‘non-attributable autobiographical novel’.3 The ekphrasis of the photographic portrait of the author as a child, which, as we will see, in Walter Benjamin’s autobiography Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert becomes one of the crucial scenes, thematizing the traumatic threat of the self ’s effacement (GS, IV.1, 260–63), in Proust’s text appears as a wilful seduction strategy. Like the featuring of Céleste Albaret and her sister Marie as ‘courriers’, like the rather coquettish mention of the name ‘Marcel’ in volume three (RTP, III, 38, 170, 583, 622), or the reference to Françoise’s millionaire cousins — who are, as the narrator pretends, ‘Dans ce livre [...] où tout a été inventé’ [in this book [...] in which everything has been made up] the only ‘gens réels, qui existent’ [real people, who exist] and have real names (RTP, IV, 424 / SLT, VI, 154) — this scene is a joyful play with fact and fiction, presence and absence, a short and pleasurable act of de Manian self-defacement which the narrator then simply abandons.4 So, why is this passage nevertheless important for our investigation? It illustrates an aspect of Proust’s uses of photography that has so far escaped our notice: in La Recherche photographic portraits are not really interesting unless they relate to another person, unless they thematize alterity and thus become significant for a relationship between two people. Proust’s work has often been accused of being highly egocentric, revolving solely around the narrator. This passage shows, however, that in La Recherche moments of pure narcissism prove to be dead ends. There is no self-identity without dialogue with others. Here identity is never selfsame but always relational and permeable to alterity; subjectivity is always intersubjectivity. Moreover, the passage is an indicator for what we shall explore in this chapter, namely the assumption that the conception of the self and the other in La Recherche is intimately linked to the way the text uses real and ‘mental’ photography.5 My interpretation will be centred around an analysis of the narrator’s two central ‘love stories’ in La Recherche, the narrative of Marcel and his grandmother, and the narrative of Marcel and Albertine. Picturing the Other Photographs can be perceived as truthful reproduction of the subject they portray. Yet they can also have the reverse effect on their viewers, appearing arbitrary, fragmenting and alien. Despite being permanently and unchangeably preserved in the picture, the unity of the portrayed person may be seen as dissolved in this momentary appearance which only exposes a static, contingent, fragmented facet of his or her being. In its confirmed authenticity the photograph seems inauthentic, because the represented detail does not appear as a special case of the general

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but as a fragment that can no longer be integrated into the whole. Photographs, writes Kracauer, ‘veranschaulichen nicht die Erkenntnis des Originals, sondern die räumliche Konfiguration eines Augenblicks; nicht der Mensch tritt in seiner Photographie heraus, sondern die Summe dessen, was von ihm abzuziehen ist’ [[photographs] make visible not the knowledge of the original but the spatial configuration of a moment: what appears in the photograph is not the person but the sum of what can be subtracted from him or her].6 Alienation and fragmentation are two dominant effects of photographs in A la recherche du temps perdu and Proust discusses both effects, mostly in passages where a spectator looks at a portrait of a (beloved) other. Robert de Saint-Loup, for instance, hesitates to show the narrator a photograph of his lover Rachel, fearing that it might give a wrong impression (RTP, II, 141 / SLT, II, 364). In an inverted variant of this scene the narrator shows SaintLoup a portrait of Albertine only to witness the friend’s immense stupefaction. Saint-Loup finds himself unable to deduce any meaning from the picture of a girl to whom he is entirely indifferent. For the narrator, his visual impressions of Albertine are insolubly merged with sensations of taste, smell and touch. The photograph can, however, dissolve the cognitively unified field and reduce the observer’s perception to the visual sphere. This ‘automization of sight’7 leads to the unloosening of the eye from the network of referentiality incarnated in tactility and its subjective relation to the space perceived. To Saint-Loup the photograph appears as ‘bloße[r] Ober­ f lächenzusammenhang’ [lit.: ‘what-hangs-together-on-the-surface’], a f lat picture, as Barthes would have it in La Chambre claire, from which no coherent individuality can be deduced (OC, V, 873). Inserting itself between the subject-as-look and the subject-as-spectacle, the photograph decentres the viewer. It reveals the physical gaze as closely linked to sensory experience and guided by subjective perception, thereby unveiling the object of affection as mere ‘centre générateur d’une immense construction’ [core of an immense construction] (RTP, IV, 22 / SLT, V, 406). To Saint-Loup the photograph shows only the ‘résidu’ of Albertine (ibid.), the ‘Rest­ bestand’ [residuum] as Kracauer would have it,8 which the narrator, in this scene, can no longer perceive. That photography’s dissociative potential is not only destructive but can also be rendered positively productive is illustrated in Charles Swann’s most cherished photograph of his lover Odette. It is an early daguerreotype, ‘où sous un chapeau de paille orné de pensées, on voyait une maigre jeune femme assez laide, aux cheveux bouffants, aux traits tirés’ [showing a thinnish young woman wearing a straw-hat adorned with pansies, rather plain, with puffed-out hair and drawn features], a portrait taken at a time ‘antérieur [...] à la systématisation de traits d’Odette en un type nouveau, majestueux et charmant’ [before the definitive redesign of Odette’s features into their new pattern, full of majesty and charm] (RTP, II, 216 / SLT, II, 439). Swann likes this photograph precisely for its dissociative power, which allows him to associate Odette, via this portrait, with Boticelli’s ‘Jethro’, a painting that during the course of Swann’s love for Odette transforms from likeness into archetype. Whereas photography can dissolve the coherent Gestalt of the subjectas-spectacle, subjective imagination as well as art can reunite the fragmented traits into a meaningful constellation. In these passages Proust clearly distinguishes the

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mechanical gaze of the camera lens from the gaze of the human eye. In the most important scenes that involve the narrator and his grandmother or the narrator and Albertine, however, Proust no longer deploys the camera only as seemingly objective apparatus. He mostly uses it as a signifier for human visual perception and conf lates the camera eye with the eye of the observer. Moreover, here the focus no longer resides primarily on the effects of photography on the identity of the portrayed other but rather concentrates on the dramatic effects photography can have on the perceiving self. As the main interest of this chapter concerns the mutual inf luence between self and other, we shall now consider those passages where the narrator’s relationship to his two love objects, the grandmother and Albertine, are configured through the uses of photography. Marcel and the Grandmother: Between Loss and Mutual Restitution While so far the investigative process of unravelling and reshaping identities via photography has been described as irritating, surprising or pleasurable, in the relationship between the narrator and his grandmother it becomes threatening. In Le Côté de Guermantes [The Guermantes Way] the narrator rushes back from Doncières to Paris. Entering the parlour, he is surprised to see his grandmother, who, immersed in reading a book, does not notice her grandson.9 Suddenly, he has the impression of participating in his own absence: ‘J’étais là, ou plutôt je n’étais pas encore là puisqu’elle ne le savait pas’ [I was there in the room, but in another way I was not there because she was ignorant of the fact] (RTP, II, 438 / SLT, III, 137). Because his grandmother does not see him, he is unable to see in her the person he knew and had missed so much. Instead of the usual ‘être aimé’ [beloved figure] appears an ‘être nouveau’ [new person] (RTP, II, 439 / SLT, III, 138), to whom nothing connects him but his indifferent gaze upon her. As there is no mutual exchange of looks, mutual recognition becomes impossible. What is more, the alienation from the beloved other which the narrator perceives also becomes an alienation from his own self: ‘Il n’y avait là que le témoin, l’observateur, en chapeau et manteau de voyage, l’étranger qui n’est pas de la maison’ [The only part of myself that was present [...] was the witness, the observer, in travelling-coat and hat, the stranger to the house] (RTP, II, 438 / SLT, III, 137). Marcel becomes an objective observer, who, a stranger to himself, gazes upon something unknown. It is precisely this relation between seeing and not being seen, as well as the total indifference of the gaze, which the narrator associates with the act of taking a photograph: ‘Ce qui, mécaniquement, se fit à ce moment dans mes yeux quand j’aperçus ma grand-mère, ce fut bien une photographie’ [What my eyes did, automatically, in the moment I caught sight of my grandmother, was to take a photograph] (RTP, II, 438 / SLT, III, 137). The following perceptions by the narrator as focalizer whose eyes function like ‘un objectif purement matériel, une plaque photographique’ [a purely mathematical lens, a photographic plate] (RTP, II, 439 / SLT, III, 138), are as frightening to him as real photographs can be: ‘j’aperçus sur le canapé, sous la lampe, rouge, lourde et vulgaire, malade, rêvassant, promenant au-dessus d’un livre des yeux un peu fous, une vieille femme accablée que je ne connaissais pas’ [I saw, sitting there on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, ill, her mind in a daze, the slightly

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crazed eyes wandering over a book, a crushed old woman whom I did not know] (RTP, II, 440 / SLT, III, 138).10 Photography here functions specifically as figuration of the self–other relation. By being associated with the mechanical reproduction of the unique aspect of a moment that had never been recognized before, Marcel’s mental photograph reveals ‘pour la première fois et seulement pour un instant’ [for the first time and for a mere second] (RTP, II, 440 / SLT, III, 138) what Benjamin calls the ‘OptischUnbewusste’ [optical unconscious] (GS, II.1, 371). Taking Benjamin’s linking of photography to psychoanalysis further, Marcel’s photographic revelation of his grandmother can be associated with Sigmund Freud’s concept of ‘das Unheimliche’ [the uncanny] where something that was once familiar becomes unfamiliar through the process of repression and it is the act of repression itself, which constructs this experience of the uncanny.11 The uncanny, as a class of the frightening which leads back to what is known as old and long familiar, is revealed in the mental photograph of the grandmother. The perception of the other as stranger in the photograph engenders in Marcel the feeling of disconcerting alterity. Yet it is not so much the alterity of the beloved other that seems to shock Marcel but rather the alienation from his own self which is its effect. In an interview Julia Kristeva states that ‘the Freudian message, to simplify things, consists in saying the other is in me. It is my unconscious.’12 What Kristeva describes in relation to an actual stranger can here be related to Marcel’s encounter with the grandmother as the unfamiliarized familiar (or the ‘unheimlich Heimliche’) in the photograph. The destabilizing experience of encountering the other reveals the observer’s own alterity within himself. In the mental photograph the other becomes the uncanny image of the self as ‘other within the self ’. A further psychoanalytic connection discernible here is the relation of this scene to Jacques Lacan’s concept of ‘le regard’ [the gaze] in Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse [The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis]. Like Proust, Lacan also conceives of an antinomic relation between seeing and being seen: there is no coincidence between the eye of the subject and the gaze of the object since ‘ jamais tu ne me regardes là où je te vois’ [you never look at me from the place from which I see you].13 And like Proust, Lacan also uses the camera as a central metaphor.14 However, while Proust associates the camera with the eye of the subject, Lacan conf lates it with the gaze of the Other as entirely desubjectivized and ‘insaisissable’ [unapprehensible].15 It is therefore not his conception of the ‘gaze’ but his theorization of the ‘look’ as a fundamental element of his concept of the gift of love, which becomes relevant here.16 Lacan first distinguishes between ‘la dimension du grand Autre’ and the operation of ‘s’aimer à travers l’autre’ [the dimension of the capital Other [...] loving oneself through another].17 He then argues that what responds in the other when he is acknowledged and what might be regarded as synonymous with the other in his capacity as subject, is the look: ‘Ne semble-t-il pas que [...] la pulsion [...] est chargée d’aller quêter quelque chose qui, à chaque fois, répond dans l’Autre? [...] Disons qu’au niveau de la Schaulust, c’est le regard’ [[Does it not seem that the drive [...] is given the task of seeking something that, each time, responds in the Other? [...] Let us say that at the level of the Schaulust, it is the gaze].18 Kaja

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Fig. 2. Mme Adrien Proust, mère de Marcel Proust, c. 1903 © Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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Silverman has highlighted the closeness of Lacan’s conception of the reciprocal look to Benjamin’s notion of the aura, and it is via Benjamin’s understanding of the aura that we will be able to link Lacan to Proust.19 In his first conception of the aura in the essay ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ [Little History of Photography] of 1931 Benjamin describes an artwork as auratic not when it resists mechanical reproduction but when it encourages the intersubjective relation between the portrayed object and the spectator (GS, II.1, 370–71). As we saw in the previous chapter, the aura is thus essentially understood as the exchange of glances between two subjects: ‘Die Aura einer Erscheinung erfahren, heißt, sie mit dem Vermögen belehnen, den Blick aufzuschlagen’ [To experience the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look back at us] (GS, I.2, 646–47 / SW, IV, 338). Moreover, just as Proust describes how the non-reciprocal look, configured through the camera lens as analogous to the human eye, leads to the alienation of self and other, Benjamin writes in his Baudelaire essay: Was an der Daguerreotypie als das Unmenschliche, man könnte sagen Tödliche mußte empfunden werden, war das (übrigens anhaltende) Hereinblicken in den Apparat, da doch der Apparat das Bild des Menschen aufnimmt, ohne ihm dessen Blick zurückzugeben. Dem Blick wohnt aber die Erwartung inne, von dem erwidert zu werden, dem er sich schenkt. Wo diese Erwartung erwidert wird (die ebensowohl, im Denken, an einen intentionalen Blick der Aufmerksamkeit sich heften kann wie an einen Blick im schlichten Wortsinn), da fällt ihm die Erfahrung der Aura in ihrer Fülle zu (GS, I.2, 646). [What was inevitably felt to be inhuman — one might even say deadly — in daguerreotypy was the (prolonged) looking into the camera, since the camera records our likeness without returning our gaze. Inherent in the gaze, however, is the expectation that it will be returned by that on which it is bestowed. Where this expectation is met (which, in the case of thought processes, can apply equally to an intentional gaze of awareness and to a glance pure and simple), there is an experience [Erfahrung] of the aura in all its fullness (SW, IV, 338).]

Benjamin’s notion of the aura here designates a subject-to-subject relation which effects what Lacan calls ‘toute une assomption affective du prochain’ [a whole affective assumption of one’s fellow man],20 where ‘Belehnung’ [investiture] functions as a kind of animation of a petrified other. Benjamin finds this auratic animation paradigmatically realized in Proust’s concept of involuntary memory (GS, I.2, 646), and, indeed, the following passage in La Recherche can be understood as such a (re-)animation of a dead other: [...] je me baissai avec lenteur et prudence pour me déchausser. Mais à peine eusje touché le premier bouton de ma bottine, ma poitrine s’enf la, remplie d’une présence inconnue, divine, [...]. L’être qui venait à mon secours, qui me sauvait de la sécheresse de l’âme, c’était celui qui, plusieurs années auparavant [...], dans un moment [...] où je n’avais plus rien de moi, était entré, et qui m’avait rendu à moi-même, car il était moi et plus que moi (le contenant qui est plus que le contenu et me l’apportait). Je venais d’apercevoir, dans ma mémoire [...] le visage tendre [...] de ma grand-mère, telle qu’elle avait été ce premier soir d’arrivée; [...] je retrouvais dans un souvenir involontaire et complet la réalité vivante (RTP, III, 152–53).

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Picturing the Self and the Other [[...] I bent down slowly and cautiously to remove my boots. But hardly had I touched the first button of my bottine, before my chest swelled, filled with an unknown, divine presence, [...]. The person who had come to my assistance, who was rescuing me from my aridity of soul, was the one who, several years before, [at] a moment when I no longer had anything of myself, had entered, and who had restored me to myself, for it was both me and more than me (the container which is more than the content, and had brought it to me). I had just glimpsed, in my memory [...] the tender [...] face of my grandmother, such as she had been that first evening of our arrival; [...] the living reality of whom [...] I had rediscovered in a complete and involuntary memory (SLT, IV, 158).]

The relation between self and other as that of mutual completion which is here evoked in the image of the grandmother as the ‘contenant’ for the grandson as the ‘contenu’ can be restored, although in its exact inversion, as it is now the grandson who contains the identity of his grandmother in his memory. Thus, the reanimation of the other as subject also generates the recuperation of the self: ‘Le moi que j’étais alors et qui avait disparu si longtemps, était de nouveau si près de moi qu’il me semblait encore entendre les paroles qui avaient immédiatement précédé [...]’ [The self that I was then and which had vanished all that time ago, was once again so close to me that I seemed to hear still the words that had come immediately before] (RTP, II, 154 / SLT, IV, 159). Here the subject-to-subject relation which Benjamin designates in his notion of the aura and Lacan describes in his concept of the gift of love can be (re-)established. Accordingly, we could say that in this scene of involuntary resurrection the narrator gives the grandmother the gift of love by situating her in intimate relation to the auratic images of involuntary memory. And yet, we soon realize that such an explanation only works to a certain extent: in the parlour scene the self ’s othering seemingly implies the self ’s move beyond his own inwardness and hence appears as a first step toward the recognition of the other as total alterity. However, if the disconcerting experience of encountering the other as stranger eventually only reveals the self ’s otherness within himself, this does not really overcome the self ’s interior but rather absorbs the alienated other into the self. It is therefore eventually a move back toward self-centred enclosure. A similar ambivalence can be detected in the scene of involuntary resurrection. Here the regained self from the past is also perceived as a volatile phantasmagoria, ‘un songe’ [a dream] (RTP, II, 154 / SLT, IV, 159), which comes close to but does not entirely fuse with the current self. We could explain this simultaneity of nearness and distance as confirmation of an additional element of Benjamin’s aura as ‘einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag’ [the unique appearance or semblance of distance, no matter how close it may be] (GS, II.1, 378 / SW, II, 518). But while for Benjamin nearness threatens the subject with destruction, whereas distance preserves his alterity,21 in Proust’s text nearness is desired while distance as alienation causes loss anxiety. We find this dramatically illustrated by the subsequent passage in La Recherche where the narrator describes how he sees in his grandmother ‘[...] au moment où je la retrouvais comme dans un miroir, une simple étrangère qu’un hasard a fait passer quelques années auprès de moi [...], mais pour qui, avant et après, je n’étais rien, je ne serais rien’ [at the moment when I had found her again as if in a mirror, a mere stranger whom chance had led to spend

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a few years with me [...] but for whom, before and after, I was nothing, would be nothing] (RTP, III, 155 / SLT, IV, 160). Now the image of the self ’s wholesome recuperation via the resurrection of the other revokes the failed encounter between grandmother and grandson in the parlour. But while in the parlour the other as stranger turns into the image of the alienated self, here the narrator perceives his own image dissolving into the image of his grandmother. Whereas, therefore, in the parlour scene the other as other is absorbed into the self, here the self is at risk of being absorbed into the other. My reading of these passages shows that the figure of the grandmother is not simply used to illustrate connotations of totality and authenticity as no other figure in the book is.22 These connotations are undeniably attached to her and the text seems to be anxious to protect them. Yet, the description of the Marcel– grandmother relationship already demonstrates that mutual recuperation and completion are constantly endangered by alienation and loss. Moreover, the text here gestures towards what will become a dominant characteristic of the Marcel– Albertine narrative: the total regaining of self and other must remain momentary and, indeed, illusory, in order to drive the narrative forward. Marcel and Albertine: Between Mortification and Construction Roland Barthes describes the gaze of the Proustian narrator as an ‘opération [qui] se conduit d’une façon froide et étonnée’ [operation [...] conducted in a cold and astonished fashion] (OC, V, 101 / LD, 71) and it is precisely this distance and cold­ ness that in the relation between Marcel and Albertine again relates the nar­rator’s eye to that of the camera lens. Yet, be it in long-distance vision where he perceives Albertine in profile, as a black ‘silhouette’ against the background of the glowing sea (RTP, II, 214), or in close-up vision when her facial features become all out of focus and dissolve into swimming details: neither her looks nor her nature can be grasped visually. Albertine constantly changes and the images taken fail to represent her, an experience which the narrator then generalizes as follows: [...] car tandis que se rectifie la vision que nous avons de lui, lui-même qui n’est pas un objectif inerte change pour son compte, nous pensons le rattraper, il se déplace, et, croyant le voir enfin plus clairement, ce n’est que les images anciennes que nous en avions prises que nous avons réussi à éclaircir, mais qui ne le représentent plus (RTP, II, 229). [[...] for, while our vision of others is being adjusted, they, who are not made of mere brute matter, are also changing; we think we have managed to see them more clearly, but they shift; and when we believe we have them fully in focus, it is merely our older images of them which we have clarified, but which are themselves already out of date (SLT, II, 452).]

The impossibility of getting hold of Albertine’s f leeting presence enhances Marcel’s craving to capture and dominate her, to scan every inch of her surface as in the scene of their first kiss: here, Marcel’s lips appear as an insufficient means to gain ‘connaissance’ of the beloved woman and it is his scanning eyes that are supposed to capture her nature (RTP, II, 659). Yet, despite all efforts, all that can be revealed

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is a succession of different perspectives. Rather than discovering a hidden essence, Marcel’s perception is characterized by a fragmentation into diverse aspects. Contemplating what he calls ‘les dernières applications de la photographie’ [the latest developments in photography], the narrator notes: [...] je ne vois que cela qui puisse, autant que le baiser, faire surgir de ce que nous croyions une chose à aspect défini, les cent autres choses qu’elle est tout aussi bien, puisque chacune est relative à une perspective non moins légitime. Bref, de même qu’à Balbec, Albertine m’avait souvent paru différente, maintenant, comme si, en accélérant prodigieusement la rapidité des changements de perspective et des changements de coloration que nous offre une personne dans nos diverses rencontres avec elle, j’avais voulu les faire tenir toutes en quelques secondes pour recréer expérimentalement le phénomène qui diversifie l’individualité d’un être et tirer les unes des autres, comme d’un étui, toutes les possibilités qu’il enferme, dans ce court trajet de mes lèvres vers sa joue, c’est dix Albertines que je vis; [...] (RTP, II, 660). [[...] I know of nothing that is able, to the same degree as a kiss, to conjure up from what we believed to be something with one definite aspect, the hundred other things it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less valid perspective. In short, just as in Balbec Albertine had often seemed different to me, now, as if, by magically accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and colouring a person offers us in the course of our various encounters, I had tried to contain them all within the space of a few seconds in order to re-create experimentally the phenomenon which diversifies a person’s individuality and to draw out separately, as from a slip-case, all the possibilities it contains — now what I saw, in the brief trajectory of my lips towards her cheek, was ten Albertines (SLT, III, 363).]

Through his look, not only does Marcel scan Albertine’s body, but his eyes operate also like a zoom lens: D’abord au fur et à mesure que ma bouche commença à s’approcher des joues que mes regards lui avaient proposé d’embrasser, ceux-ci se déplaçant virent des joues nouvelles; le cou, aperçu de plus près et comme à la loupe, montra, dans ses gros grains, une robustesse qui modifia le caractère de la figure (RTP, II, 660). [For a start, as my mouth began to move towards the cheeks my eyes had led it to want to kiss, my eyes changed position and saw different cheeks; the neck, observed at closer range and as if through a magnifying glass, became coarsegrained and showed a sturdiness which altered the character of the face (SLT, III, 362–63).]

Here the ‘gros grains’ of Albertine’s skin curiously recall the structure of photo­ graphic paper. In a very similar urge to find the true nature of his late mother by scrutinizing her photographs, Barthes describes in La Chambre claire the futile attempt to penetrate the exteriority of portraits in order to find what might be hidden beyond: ‘J’ai beau scruter, je ne découvre rien: si j’agrandis, ce n’est rien d’autre que le grain du papier: je défais l’image au profit de sa matière’ [Alas, however hard I look, I discover nothing: if I enlarge, I see nothing but the grain of the paper: I undo the image for the sake of its substance] (OC, V, 869 / CL, 100). Marcel’s kiss, presented as a series of enlargements, does not succeed in fulfilling

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the ‘promesse de bonheur’ [promise of happiness] (RTP, III, 647 / SLT, V, 125). The narrator’s attempt to arrest Albertine — as one of those ‘êtres de fuite’ [creatures of f light] (RTP, III, 600 /SLT, V, 81) — so as to seize the totality of her being not only fails but leads to dissolving her image into invisibility, producing indistinction and blindness.23 Instead of becoming clear, in these close-ups, everything becomes, as Mieke Bal observes, ‘muddled’.24 Eventually, Marcel is left with nothing. Marcel’s desire to capture Albertine’s ungraspable presence famously leads him to her imprisonment in the family’s apartment in Paris where he discovers that only when Albertine is asleep can her body become the medium that seems suitable for his desire. Sleeping here is a state of complete passivity and surrender, where Albertine is stripped bare of her ‘différents caractères’ (RTP, III, 578). She becomes all nature, like a plant: ‘Elle n’était plus animée que de la vie inconsciente des végétaux, des arbres, vie plus différente de la mienne, plus étrange et qui cependant m’appartenait davantage’ [She was animated only by the unconscious life of plants, of trees, a life more different from my own, stranger, and yet which I possessed more securely] (RTP, III, 578 / SLT, V, 60). The more the subject is deprived of her power and turned into a lifeless object, the more her very mortification invigorates Marcel’s imagination. Under Marcel’s gaze Albertine’s body becomes, like her black outline on the beach of Balbec, the perfect, empty surface which he can fill with his infinitely proliferating images of a ‘série indéfinie d’Albertines imaginées’ (RTP, II, 213). And yet, although Marcel now experiences the sensation of entirely possessing Albertine, he knows that the only Albertine he can ever call his own is an ‘Albertine imaginaire’ (RTP, II, 230). To the narrator Albertine appears as ‘l’enveloppe close d’un être qui par l’intérieur accédait à l’infini’ [the closed outer casing of a being which on the inside was in touch with the infinite] (RTP, III, 888 / SLT, V, 357). All he can ever refer to are constructed, supplementary identities of his lover.25 The total alterity of the other which emerges in these passages is also the theme of Emmanuel Levinas’s essay ‘L’Autre dans Proust’.26 In this essay Levinas reads the relationship between Marcel and Albertine against the grain of its obvious failure and as a representation of what he describes as ‘Eros dans sa pureté ontologique’ [Eros in his ontological purity] where the distinct separation between self and Other is preserved in an originary and irreducible relation.27 Here solitude obtains a new meaning: taking place in its conversion into communication, its despair appears as an inexhaustible source of hope.28 Levinas can only argue this way, as Ingrid Wassenaar observes, by bracketing the Proustian text off into ‘a vacuum without readers, characters, stories, or conf licts’.29 Yet he can also only do so by leaving aside what is the focus of our investigation here, the predominance of vision in the relation between Marcel and Albertine. The consideration of vision, however, changes the perspective even if we remain within the confines of Levinas’s own theory. Levinas’s interpretation recalls a term which he first develops in Le Temps et l’Autre, like his Proust essay first published in 1947, a term which becomes one of the central concepts in Totalité et infini: the ‘visage’. Just as Levinas claims for Albertine and Marcel, the ‘visage’ describes a relation where the Other is neither like the I nor opposed to it but preserved in his total alterity. Against the common

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understanding of the word, ‘visage’ does not mean the physical human face and, even though etymologically related to ‘vision’, the ‘visage’ cannot be seen. Rather than the plastic form of the face which, according to Levinas, is always already deserted, the ‘visage’ is a source of language: ‘Le visage est une présence vivante, il est expression. [...] Le visage parle. La manifestation du visage est déjà discours’ [The face is a living presence; it is expression [...] The face speaks. The manifestation of the face is already discourse].30 The ‘visage’ is consequently the way in which the Other presents himself.31 But, rather than an experience that would turn him into the object of the self ’s intentional acts, the ‘visage’ is a (linguistic) epiphany or revelation. The attempt to circumscribe one of Levinas’s most complex terms can only remain insufficient here. Nevertheless, what it already indicates is Levinas’s sus­ picion of vision. ‘L’abord des êtres, dans la mesure où il se réfère à la vision’, he writes in Totalité et infini, ‘domine ces êtres, exerce sur eux un pouvoir’ [Inasmuch as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises a power over them].32 As, according to Levinas, the gaze is associated with perception and know­ledge, it annihilates the ‘visage’ by bringing it within the sphere of the Same. Yet the ‘visage’ is present in its refusal to be contained.33 The ‘visage’ is what transcends the visible.34 We should not try to play off Levinas’s theoretical writings against his inter­ pretation of a literary text. However, his suspicion of vision leads us back to Marcel’s photographic look at Albertine, and thus leads back to my argument, which is rather different from Levinas’s interpretation in ‘L’Autre dans Proust’. As we have already seen, Marcel’s zoom-like glance at Albertine is associated with a desire for knowledge, for possession, control and domination. Albertine’s constant withdrawal into mystery nurtures this desire, it is its very precondition. And yet, even if we leave aside the unfolding of the story which ends with Albertine’s escape and death, it remains difficult to comprehend at which point this should turn into communication. For Albertine cannot express herself. She has no voice. Marcel’s look does not leave room for that, it reduces Albertine to a mere object of vision. His look is the attempt to render her expressionless, to rob her of all her signs, to turn her into the source of his fantasies in which he attempts to incorporate her alterity into his very idea of that alterity. Marcel’s look thus seeks to annihilate Albertine’s ‘visage’ by bringing it within the realm of the Same. Although Marcel has to bear the alterity of the other and is exposed to it, his first and foremost endeavour is nevertheless to capture the other with his eyes, to arrest her in order to become able to integrate her into his own world. Marcel’s desire must not be fulfilled, as the total alterity of the other is the very spur of his desire.35 And yet, his desire is motivated by, not directed at the total alterity of the other and its aim remains possession. Therefore, Albertine’s constant withdrawal can at no point turn into giving and Marcel’s look leaves no space for hope. Just as the alienating photographic encounter between Marcel and his grandmother in the parlour is contrasted with the resurrection of the grandmother’s nature through involuntary memory after her death, so the photographic estrangement between Marcel and Albertine during their first kiss and in the passages that show

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Albertine sound asleep is contrasted with a similar scene of sudden confrontation after the lover’s departure and death. Marcel has already spent some time with his mother in Venice when he receives a telegram containing the following message: ‘Mon ami vous me croyez morte, pardonnez-moi, je suis très vivante, je voudrais vous voir, vous parler mariage, quand revenez-vous? Tendrement. Albertine’ [Dear friend you believe me dead, my apologies, never more alive, would like to see you to discuss marriage, when do you return? Affectionately, Albertine] (RTP, IV, 220 / SLT, V, 605–06). Interestingly, contrary to the narrator’s involuntary epiphany in Balbec, in the case of Albertine Marcel’s reading of the telegram fails to resurrect the lost other (RTP, IV, 220). And whereas in the grandmother scene the momentary resurrection of the lost other leads to the momentary recuperation of the past self, here the failure to reanimate Albertine’s nature also causes Marcel’s failure to regain his own complete identity: ‘J’aurais été incapable de ressusciter Albertine parce que je l’étais de me ressusciter moi-même, de res­ susciter mon moi d’alors’ [I would have been incapable of reviving Albertine because I was incapable of reviving myself, of reviving my former self ] (RTP, IV, 221 / SLT, V, 606). Moreover, just a few lines earlier the narrator observes: ‘L’homme que j’étais, le jeune homme blond n’existe plus, je suis un autre’ [The man that I was, that fair-haired young man, no longer exists, I am someone else] (RTP, IV, 221, my emphasis / SLT, V, 606).36 The failure of any stable ascription of identity to the beloved other and the inability to remember her nature not only leads to the othering of the self but also causes his veritable pluralization. The ‘innombrables Albertine’ (RTP, IV, 60) correspond to ‘innombrables moi’ [countless selves] (RTP, IV, 14 / SLT, V, 398), selves that, as ‘moi de rechange’ [alter­ native selves] (RTP, IV, 174 / SLT, V, 559), like Albertine dissolves into a metonymical series of contingent substitutes. Even after her death the images of Albertine remain f lat photographic snapshots: ‘incomplètes, des profils, des instantanés’ [incomplete sequences of Albertines, silhouettes, snapshots] (RTP, III, 655 / SLT, V, 133)].37 As we have seen, in the case of the grandmother seeing can be translated into knowing and the resurrection of the grandmother’s true nature via involuntary memory enables Marcel to finally realize her loss. Marcel’s work of mourning begins, which eventually leads to the overcoming of his grief. This is different in the case of Albertine. Although the narrator claims that Albertine has entirely fallen into oblivion, it is because he fails to resurrect her true nature that he can neither begin to mourn her properly nor entirely overcome her loss. This cannot only be illustrated by the fact that Marcel’s ready belief in the telegram’s authenticity and truth later turns out to be a symptomatic, multi-layered misreading, as the sender was not the late Albertine, but Gilberte Swann, who intended to announce her forthcoming wedding with Robert de Saint-Loup. This also becomes obvious when we read the preceding narrative where memory images of Albertine haunt the sexualized descriptions of Venetian nightlife, frequently breaking through the narrative’s surface like small traumatic eruptions.38 In his essay ‘Perdre de vue’ J.-B. Pontalis notes: ‘Quand la perte est dans la vue, elle cesse d’être un deuil sans fin’ [When it is in sight, loss ceases to be a mourning

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without end].39 While the grandmother’s nature can (momentarily) be taken into the gaze, Albertine remains the irreducible other, in Barthes’s words ‘impénétrable, introuvable, intraitable’ [impenetrable, intractable, not to be found] (OC, V, 173 / LD, 134). Even after her death Albertine’s f leeting existence engenders suffering as well as a desire to capture, arrest and control her, which is the driving force of Marcel’s endless ‘Albertinages’. The Persistent Self In the Marcel–grandmother narrative the relation between the self and the other is first of all understood as that of mutual completion. Here the self is founded in the other and the other is founded in the self. Accordingly, the identity of the self can only be regained via the resurrection of the lost other through involuntary memory. The identificatory incorporation of the other into the self facilitates the recuperation of the lost self and thus appears as one step further towards the momentary regaining of the narrator’s ‘vrai moi’ (RTP, IV, 451) in Le Temps retrouvé on which his search appears to come to an end. Yet the ideal of mutual completion at the same time appears as endangered by (photographic) alienation and loss. Just as the other is threatened with absorption into the self, the self is at risk of dissolution into the other. In the Marcel–Albertine narrative, by contrast, an identificatory incorporation of the lost other is per se impossible. Here desire becomes the epitome of the total and insurmountable alterity of the other. Yet, rather than being an example of an ethical encounter between self and other in the sense of Levinas, the Marcel–Albertine narrative thus illustrates the inevitable failure of intersubjectivity, leading to the destruction of the other and the (temporary) exhaustion of the self. However, both the grandmother narrative and the narrative of Albertine can only be fully understood in their close interrelation. The unmediated images of involuntary memory contrasted with the use of photography not only show the struggle to capture the moment of absolute presence beyond all rational measurement of time but also demonstrate that the illusion of nearness may only enhance the separation between the observed other and the observing self. It is in this tension between loss and recuperation, withdrawal and possession, that we find the driving force of the text. The comparative reading of both narratives therefore shows that Proust is not interested in a photographic fixing of the other, the conservation of presence in arrested images, but in the very desire for that fixity, staged in the act of excessive writing. The self ’s permanent struggle to regain, petrify or construct an other who can never be captured permanently leaves a self which is exposed to and defined by the incommensurable alterity of the other. The constant alternation between loss and mutual restitution produces a self who is changeable and easily infected by the other’s plurality, yet a self who never entirely dissolves but remains the same in his very alterations. This is, as Proust writes in a variant, a ‘moi permanent’ [permanent self ] formed by ‘nos moi successifs’ [our successive selves] (RTP, IV, 1145). The self we encounter in La Recherche gains his very persistence from his exposure to otherness. What here emerges in the interaction with the other is, accordingly, a subject disturbed by alterity, unstable and mobile, but which is therefore all the more resistant, breaking while remaining whole.

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Notes to Chapter 2 1. See Fig. 1. Marcel Proust en petit prince, c. 1880. 2. Concerning the photograph, Céleste Albaret recalls the following encounter: ‘Une nuit, il [Proust] me montre une vieille photo: — Que pensez vous de cet enfant, Céleste? — Eh Monsieur, c’est un petit prince. Dieu, qu’il est beau, avec sa petite canne. Ce serait peut-être vous, s’il n’était pas blond. Il a dit en riant: — Mais, Céleste, j’était tout blond, enfant, avant d’être tout noir avec ce nez cassé, comme aujourd’hui. [...] — C’était la photographie préférée de ma grand-mère Weil, prenez-la, chère Céleste, je vous la donne’ [One night he shows me an old photo: — What do you think of this child, Céleste? — Eh, Monsieur, it’s a little prince. God, how beautiful he is with his little stick. It could be you, if he weren’t blond. He said, laughing: — But, Céleste, when I was a child I was perfectly blond, before I became all dark with this broken nose, as today. [...] — This was the favourite photograph of my grandmother Weil, take it, dear Céleste, I give it to you], Albaret and Belmont, Monsieur Proust, pp. 169–70, 371. After Proust’s death Céleste donated the photograph to the Musée Marcel Proust in Illiers where it is now on display. The authenticity of the portrait remains controversial, a fact that extends Proust’s game of display and disguise to the photographic representation itself. 3. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 12. 4. The idea that this Proustian game is intentional is further supported by the fact that the numerous displays of the name ‘Marcel’ are not leftovers of earlier text-versions but the result of later additions (RTP, III, 1718). 5. One critic who paved the way here is again Mieke Bal with ‘The Flatness of Photography’, in The Mottled Screen, pp. 181–249. Bal’s analysis mostly focuses on the extrapolation of the visual poetics of La Recherche. Yet her observations on the relation between photography and (inter-)subjectivity are illuminating. This chapter is both indebted to and critical of her interpretation. 6. Kracauer, ‘Die Photographie’, in Das Ornament der Masse, p. 32; trans. as ‘Photography’, in The Mass Ornament, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 56–57. 7. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, p. 19. 8. Kracauer, ‘Die Photographie’, p. 30, ‘Photography’, p. 55. 9. See Fig. 2. Mme Adrien Proust, c. 1903. 10. This experience is repeated after the grandmother’s death when the narrator looks at her real photographic portrait: ‘[...] nos rapports ont été trop fugitifs pour n’avoir pas été accidentels. [...] Nous n’avions pas été créés uniquement l’un pour l’autre, c’était une étrangère. Cette étrangère, j’étais en train d’en regarder la photographie par Saint-Loup’ [our relations were too f leeting not to have been accidental [...] We had not been created solely for one another, she was a stranger. I was busy looking at Saint-Loup’s photograph of that stranger] (RTP, III, 172 / SLT, IV, 177). The dysphoric element of the by now famous parlour scene was first commented on by Samuel Beckett, who writes in his Proust essay of 1931: ‘[...] he [Marcel] is present at his own absence. [...] The notion of what he should see has not had time to interfere its prism between the eye and its object. His eye functions with the cruel precision of a camera; it photographs the reality of his grandmother. And he realises with horror that his grandmother is dead, long since and many times, that the cherished familiar of his mind, mercifully composed all along the years by the solicitude of habitual memory, exists no longer, that this mad old woman, drowsing over her book, overburdened with years, f lushed and coarse and vulgar, is a stranger whom he has never seen’, ‘Proust’, in Proust and Three Dialogues (London: Calder & Boyars, 1970), p. 28. Kracauer interprets the passage as an example for the photographic adjustment whose most important characteristic, he argues, is the photographer’s ‘gefühlsmäßige Abgelöstheit’ [emotional detachment], Theorie des Films, p. 40. This suggestion will be the theme to Chapter 3 of this study. Recent interpretations of the motif of photography that include the encounter in the parlour and that have inf luenced my own interpretation are Bal, The Mottled Screen, pp. 195–201, and Albers who reads the scene as a ‘media-pastiche’, ‘Proust und die Kunst der Photographie’, pp. 211–15.

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11. Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’ (1919), Studienausgabe, iv, pp. 264, 267. 12. Julia Kristeva, Interviews, ed. by Ross Mitchell Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), p. 41. 13. Jacques Lacan, Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), p. 95; trans. by Alan Sheridan as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), p. 103. 14. Lacan writes: ‘C’est par le regard que j’entre dans la lumière, et c’est du regard que j’en reçois l’effet. D’où il ressort que le regard est l’instrument par où la lumière s’incarne, et par où [...] je suis photo- graphié’, Quatre Concepts, p. 98 [‘It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which [...] I am photo-graphed’, Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 106]. 15. Lacan, Quatre Concepts, p.79; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 83. 16. Lacan’s term ‘le regard’ is usually translated as ‘the gaze’. In my argument I follow Kaja Silverman’s differentiating translation of ‘le regard’ as ‘gaze’ and ‘look’ which I find extremely clarifying. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, see, for example, pp. 96, 240. 17. Lacan, Quatre Concepts, p. 177; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 194. 18. Lacan, Quatre Concepts, p.178; Four Fundamental Concepts, p.196. 19. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, pp. 93–99. My following argument is inspired by her analysis. 20. Lacan, ‘L’Aggressivité en psychanalyse’, in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), p. 117; trans. by Bruce Fink as ‘Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis’, in Écrits (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 96. 21. See again Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, pp. 98–99. 22. This is suggested by Warning in his essay ‘Supplementäre Individualität: “Albertine endormie” ’, in Proust-Studien (Munich: Fink, 2000), p. 94. Warning highlights the deconstructive tendencies in La Recherche which he sees exemplified in the Albertine narrative. He contrasts the subject’s unity with his dispersal and eventually sees Proustian identity defined as supplementarity. His reading resonates with Malcolm Bowie’s interpretation entitled ‘Self ’ in his monograph Proust among the Stars, pp. 1–29. My own reading is indebted to Warning’s and Bowie’s analyses. This chapter is, however, an attempt to carry their interpretations further by locating the Proustian subject beyond the complementary categories of wholeness and destruction. 23. For a detailed analysis of this passage which has inf luenced my own interpretation, see Wegner, ‘Photography in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu’, pp. 56–71. 24. Bal, The Mottled Screen, p. 6. 25. As Warning observes, in the Albertine narrative identity appears in light of Derrida’s ‘dissémi­ nation’, ‘Supplementäre Individualität’, pp. 84–85. For a reading of the Albertine-passages against the background of Bergson’s ‘durée’ see Albers, ‘Prousts photographisches Gedächtnis’, pp. 50–55. 26. Emmanuel Levinas, ‘L’Autre dans Proust’, in Noms propres (Paris: Fata Morgana, 1976), pp. 117– 24. So far, Levinas’s article has received surprisingly little attention. Two exceptions are Jacques Chabot’s monograph L’Autre et le moi chez Proust and the more nuanced discussion by André Benhaïm, Panim: Visages de Proust (Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2006). 27. Levinas, ‘L’Autre dans Proust’, p. 154. Levinas distinguishes between ‘l’Autre’, usually translated as ‘other’, and its personalized form ‘L’Autrui’, usually translated as ‘Other’. While ‘L’Autre’ may be incorporated into the Same ‘L’Autrui’ never can be, and while the former confirms totality the latter stands for infinity. When referring to Levinas I will use this differentiation but always employ ‘other’ in my own ref lections to distinguish them from Levinas’s theory. 28. Levinas, ‘L’Autre dans Proust’, p. 155. 29. Ingrid Wassenaar, Proustian Passions: The Uses of Self-Justification for ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 177. 30. Levinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (Paris: Kluwer Academic, 1971), p. 61; trans. by Alphonso Lingus as Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1979), p. 66. 31. Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 61.

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32. Levinas, Totalité et infini, p. 211; Totality and Infinity, p. 194. 33. Ibid. 34. This discussion of ‘visage’ is based on Colin Davis, Levinas: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 46, 132–36. 35. For a different interpretation see, Schneider, Die erkaltete Herzenschrift, pp. 73–75, 93. 36. Note the surprising colour of the young man’s hair which corresponds to the photograph in the drawer (Illustration no. 1) and which is, as such, another component of Proust’s game with fact and fiction. 37. The alienating aspect of photographic renditions of Albertine is also emphasized in Esquisse VII: ‘Les photographies d’Albertine’ (RTP, IV, 655). 38. For a more detailed analysis of this passage, see Warning, ‘Vergessen, Verdrängen und Erinnern in der Recherche’, in Proust-Studien, pp. 161–65. For an interpretation in Freudian terms see Bowie, Freud, Proust, and Lacan: Theory as Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 73–76. 39. J.-B. Pontalis, ‘Perdre de vue’, in Perdre de vue (Paris: Seuil, 1988), pp. 275–98 (p. 298).

CHAPTER 3

v

Proust’s Visual and Emotional Cavities Proustian Forms of Emotion Your pet aversion. — Les gens qui ne sentent pas ce qui est bien, qui ignorent les douceurs de l’affection. [Your pet aversion: People with no feeling for what is right, who do not know the comforts of affection.]1

During the discussion of the ways in which Proust endeavours to translate life into life writing and of how he conceptualizes the self in its relation to the other it has become more and more evident that Proust’s use of photographic imagery, and with it the concept of autobiographical writing, are closely linked to questions of affectivity and emotion. In analysing the problem of how to recognize and represent the world, or a beloved person, we saw that a kind of sudden, unmediated, affective cognition has a central role to play. When investigating conceptions of the self and the other, we saw that feelings (such as love, anxiety, jealousy, and grief ) and their absence (indifference) both serve an important function, not only on the level of intra-textual character relations but also with regard to the poetic dimension of life writing. In order to begin to understand the dynamics and visual-poetic implications of emotions in La Recherche we have so far drawn on psychoanalytical concepts: Freud’s conception of the unconscious as photographic apparatus and later as mystic writing pad, his description of the uncanny, or Lacan’s thoughts on the gaze and the look. In so doing, however, it became apparent that these psychoanalytical concepts could only help to explain the Proustian text up to a certain point. In fact, the text constantly seemed to go beyond these theoretical constructions, and indeed, to fill, expand, and burst them open at the same time. If it has become clear that Proust’s relation to photography is ambivalent, we must acknowledge that his relation to psychological concepts is as well. The Proustian narrator likes to see himself as an ‘exacte analyste’ (RTP, IV, 4) in a world he describes as an ‘univers psychopathologique’ (RTP, IV, 40). But he also claims, as quoted before: ‘Notre tort est de croire que les choses se présentent habituellement telles qu’elles sont en réalité, les noms tels qu’ils sont écrits, les gens tels que la photographie et la psychologie donnent d’eux une notion immobile’ [Our error stems from believing that things habitually appear to us as they are in reality, names as they are written, people as the static concepts presented by photography and psychology] (RTP, IV, 153 / SLT, V, 538). And he exclaims, surprised by a sudden attack of emotional pain: ‘Comme la

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souffrance va plus loin en psychologie que la psychologie!’ [How much more sharply suffering probes the psyche than does psychology!] (RTP, IV, 3 / SLT, V, 387). It has been said that Proust’s conception of emotion is to a large extent based on the psychological and psychoanalytical conceptualizations of his contemporaries. With equal justification, however, it can be argued that it is informed by Romantic notions of feeling. We shall see in this chapter — through an analysis of the photographic imagery — that in La Recherche Proust practises a narrative of visual and emotional distance. If for Jean-Jacques Rousseau the self needs, in order to know his own heart, to first read the heart of the other,2 the Proustian gaze slips off the exterior surface of an other whose being remains impenetrable. At the same time, however, Proust’s writing originates from the idea of mutual recognition through unmediated, affective memory, an idea that is also inspired by Romantic conceptions of affective knowledge.3 In order to understand the dynamics and poetic implications of emotive sensations in A la recherche du temps perdu most critics have thus far drawn on psychoanalytical concepts of desire and jealousy, of mourning and melancholy, while comparatively little research has been dedicated to the role of affects beyond their psychoanalytic consignment to (post-)Freudian theories of drives.4 It is only in more recent criti­ cism that the affective dimensions of La Recherche have been brought to attention and even used to argue in favour of a general revival of pathos and affect as subjects worthy of critical investigation in their own right.5 What will interest us in the discussion of photographic and corporeal vision and emotion in this chapter, however, is not a reading of the text in light of a revival of holistic notions of emotionality, nor an attempt to account for the ‘intelligence of emotions’.6 What is more intriguing in La Recherche, by contrast, are not only those sections that can be read as a continuing celebration of the power of affect and the upheavals of emotion, but those scenes that suggest quite the opposite. We shall read the text as part of a growing tendency to hollow out the Romantic idea of emotion and to that end we will look at the signs of an increasing erosion of the concept of emotional knowledge. What we shall find in La Recherche is not only the idea or experience of absolute affectivity, but its advancing displacement by the expansion of what I propose be called ‘emotional cavities’. These are zones where there is no longer any interaction or closeness, no emotional contact or correspondence between the narrator and another character, or the narrator and the world he perceives, but rather emotional distance and difference, zones where the narrator is left alone, standing before the frame. By exploring these emotional cavities we shall see that Proust’s writing moves beyond the limitations of both Romantic theorizations of emotions as well as their Freudian inscription into an economy of drives. Introducing an understanding of affectivity that neither theorizes it as essential and all-pervading nor simply disqualifies it in a modernist gesture of affect-denial, Proust proposes a notion of affect that eventually appears as privatized, contingent and endangered.

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Visual and Emotional Cavities When discussing the question of memory and representation in A la recherche du temps perdu we came across the dimension of Proustian mémoire involontaire as an affective, auratic experience, an experience based on what Benjamin called ‘Beseelung’, the mutual animation between the self and the object of his observation through an exchange of looks. This conception of involuntary memory stands in a Romantic tradition. It bears traces of the Romantic notion of a transcendental depth perspective as the ideal of a complete correspondence and total mediation between the self and the world, the self and the other, the ideal of their sympathetic fusion through affective memory.7 However, in La Recherche such an affective communication between the observing self and the world of objects cannot often be achieved. The narrator’s desire to fill ‘une ligne, une surface, un volume’ with his love (RTP, IV, 681) and to establish a connection often remains unfulfilled. We have witnessed the failure of such affective recognition when studying the passage about the three trees in Hudimesnil. In cases like this the narrator finds himself unable ‘de mettre de la profondeur derrière la couleur des choses’ [to see through the colours of things to anything deeper] (RTP, II, 162 / SLT, II, 385). Instead of animated, three-dimensional landscapes he finds that the world remains to be reduced to mere lines, silhouettes, and colours. The world is perceived as distant, ‘immobile’ (RTP, II, 160), as if framed, a series of arbitrary, f lat pictures: ‘Bien souvent ce n’était, en effet, que des images’ [Quite often they were nothing but images] (RTP, II, 161 / SLT, II, 384).8 These pictures constantly replace one another and let the world disintegrate into a series of different images, making the ‘rapport nécessaire’ (RTP, II, 162) between the observing self and the world as spectacle impossible. In those cases the experience of a ‘Gleichgestimmtheit des Gemütes und der Natur’ [synchrony of mood and nature],9 which we find particularly in the autobiographical writings of Rousseau (Correspondances) as well as Chateaubriand (Mémoires d’outre-tombe), and which Proust has often imitated in his pastiches, proves to be impossible.10 In its place, the narrator perceives the world as inanimate, soulless, like the sea which ‘ne me semblait pas vivante, mais figée’ [no longer seemed to be a living thing, but more like a still life] (RTP, II, 68 / SLT, II, 287). Reduced to a mere surface ref lection (RTP, II, 163) the world remains lifeless, as if deprived of its core, f lattened out. When, as in these cases, mutual animation remains impossible, the self is left at a distance, alone. Instead of mutual correspondence we find that the observer and the world he perceives are separated by an emotional vacuum that cannot be overcome. This phenomenon, the emergence of emotional cavities, not only marks the narrator’s perception of the world of objects. It also fundamentally affects his relationship to other people. In what follows I shall substantiate this hypothesis by a close reading of two markedly different scenes that both involve emotional reactions: the sight of someone beloved dying and the sight of someone beloved sleeping. Both scenes have become well known in recent criticism. What has been less commented on, however, is that they are linked by a similar imagery, and that they are variations of familiar Romantic topoi: the death-bed scene and the image of the sleeping woman being observed by her contemplative lover.

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Death of a Grandmother A reading of the passages that relate to the grandmother’s death leads us back to the ‘photographic’ encounter between Marcel and his grandmother in the parlour which we began to discuss in the previous chapter. The narrator’s photographical observation of his grandmother not only reveals mutual estrangement, as argued above, it also reveals the grandmother’s advanced physical decay and thus marks the moment when the narrator notices for the first time his grandmother’s illness and fathoms the possibility of her death. Now, it is no longer the living person he perceives, but a ‘fantôme’ (RTP, II, 438). When Proust depicts the narrator as ‘photographe qui vient prendre un cliché des lieux qu’on ne reverra plus’ [photo­ grapher who has called to take a photograph of places that will never be seen again] (RTP, II, 438 / SLT, III, 137) he is already suggesting that in taking the picture the irretrievable loss of the portrayed object is sealed. Photographs show a completed future whose endgame is death. ‘Je frémis’, writes Roland Barthes in La Chambre claire when looking at a photograph of his mother, ‘d’une catastrophe qui a déjà eu lieu. Que le sujet en soit mort ou non, toute photographie est cette catastrophe’ [I shudder [...] over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe] (OC, V, 867 / CL, 96). Upon seeing his grandmother Proust’s narrator experiences a similar catastrophe. Yet whereas at the heart of Barthes’s shiver lies the traumatic experience that the observer’s grief cannot be transformed into mourning,11 Marcel shudders because he realizes his own alienation from the once beloved other, and with it the complete absence of feeling. His photographic gaze unveils to him the grandmother’s beloved, timeless being as imagination and, by circumventing any affective bond, discloses the world of transience and decay, ‘celui où vivent les étrangers dont on dit “il vieillit bien” ’ [inhabited by the strangers we describe as ‘ageing well’] (RTP, II, 439–40 / SLT, III, 138). The association of photography with death and indifference which Proust establishes here is further developed in relation to a real photograph. In Balbec the grandmother wishes her portrait to be taken by Robert de Saint-Loup so as to leave it to her grandson in the case of her death (RTP, III, 173). Here the subject transforms herself in advance into the object of representation. In front of the camera she freezes into a statue. As the gaze of the camera lens is a dead gaze, it drives all life out of the portrayed subject. Rather than preserving her nature, it erases the unique individuality of her expression like traces disappearing in the melting snow (RTP, III, 1041). In the parlour scene as well as in the scene in Balbec, Proust shows how photography confronts the viewer with transience and death without allowing for any possibility of emotional appropriation. By using photography Proust thematizes what Philippe Ariès describes as ‘ “l’évacuation” de la mort’ [‘the evacuation’ of death] in modernity.12 In the photograph, death — predicted, preserved and abolished alike — becomes meaningless. In the face of death, photography leaves the viewer emotionally paralysed. Proust uses the photographical here to disclose an emotional void where we had expected to find an intersubjective space filled with affection. The narrator’s indifferent and unreturned gaze at the grandmother as spectacle

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is also the theme of the passages describing her agony and the event of her death. Although there are no explicit references to real or mental photography here, we will see that a discussion of these passages helps to further illuminate my argument. The inexorable process of his grandmother’s physical decay is ref lected by the steady decline of her eyesight. It is immediately after her stroke that the narrator observes his grandmother ‘glissant à l’abîme [...] l’œil égaré, incapable de plus faire face à l’assaut des images que ne réussissait plus à porter sa prunelle’ [slithering into the abyss [...] a distraught look in her eyes, which were no longer capable of focusing on the onrush of images their pupils could bear no more] (RTP, II, 612 / SLT, III, 314). During the weeks that follow, the strength of her eyes is constantly changing. Sometimes they completely lose their force (RTP, II, 627), then her eyesight comes back, but her gaze remains hollow and without focus, appearing ‘inquiet, plaintif, hagard’ [anxious, doleful, wild] (RTP, II, 629 / SLT, III, 331). Eventually she ceases to recognize her grandson and with him the people that surround her (RTP, II, 630). From the beginning, this process of increasing blindness is closely linked to the control and repression of emotion. As the grandmother’s own eyesight declines she desperately seeks to render her suffering invisible to others. Under the immense pressure of affect-control her body turns into both a shield whose surface the entourage can only brush against, and a cage that keeps the suffering patient tightly imprisoned (RTP, II, 618).13 Using all her energy to erase the traces of suffering on her face (RTP, II, 619) her face begins to turn into marble (RTP, II, 628). Death is described as a sculptor who slowly whittles the grandmother into a representation of herself, one that increasingly renders the original individual, the affective being, unrecognizable and, in the end, dispensable. What evolves under the gaze of the narrator is, eventually, an aesthetic petrification (RTP, 620). It is only with the grandmother’s death that her representation can be completed. In an act of retrospective creation her corpse is turned into an allegory of youth: ‘Sur ce lit funèbre, la mort, comme le sculpteur du Moyen Âge, l’avait couchée sous l’apparence d’une jeune fille’ [On that funeral couch, death, like a sculptor of the Middle Ages, had laid her to rest with the face of a young girl] (RTP, II, 640–41 / SLT, III, 343).14 We find a similar sublimation of individual suffering earlier on when a treatment with leeches lowers the grandmother’s blood pressure and seems to restore her eyesight for one last time. The narrator observes: [...] dans son visage pâle et pacifié, entièrement immobile, je vis grands ouverts, lumineux et calmes, ses beaux yeux d’autrefois [...] ses yeux doux et liquides comme de l’huile, sur lesquels le feu rallumé qui brûlait éclairait devant la malade l’univers reconquis’ (RTP, II, 630). [[...] in her pale face, now pacified and utterly motionless, I saw her beautiful eyes, wide open, luminous and calm as they once used to be [...] her eyes, soft and liquid as oil, in which the rekindled fire which was now burning lit up for the sick woman the recaptured universe (SLT, III, 332–33).]

Yet it is only the narrator’s wishful words that conjure a connection between the grandmother and her environment that no longer exists. The light in her eyes is only a physical, short-lasting effect of the treatment, not a sign of regained

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spiritual eyesight as the narrator suggests. While the narrator’s speech takes over the task of interpreting what the suffering patient herself cannot express, her body is increasingly deprived of its individuality and humanity. Just as in the parlour scene, it is now perceived as the body of a beast, a transformation emphasized by the depiction of her half-closed, blind eyes, her gaze that seems to have turned inwards (RTP, II, 632). In the same way that the grandmother can no longer see her grandson, the grandson can no longer see his grandmother: ‘Mais si ce n’était plus qu’une bête qui remuait là’, he wonders, ‘ma grand-mère, où était-elle?’ [But if it was only a beast that was stirring there, where was my grandmother?] (RTP, II, 632 / SLT, III, 334). The weeks of the grandmother’s agony are thus not only marked by her loss of eye-sight but by a blindness that, as a blocking of the reciprocal gaze, also includes the grandson as well as the rest of the entourage, whose eyes do not only settle on the grandmother’s suffering body but on the other bystanders, observing and evaluating their emotional conduct. Marcel watches his mother, he notes how the Duc de Guermantes meets the demands of social etiquette as well as Dr Dieulafoy’s impeccable tact. He studies Françoise’s emotional conduct and observes father and grandfather, who, worn out by keeping watch at the bedside, are seen to take on the ‘masque d’indifférence et l’interminable oisiveté’ [a mask of indifference, and the interminable whiling away of time] (RTP, II, 636 / SLT, III, 339). In turn the narrator himself becomes an object of observation. When searching the priest’s face for signs of truthful compassion he sees how the priest covers it with his hands to secretly search Marcel’s face until, when discovered, he quickly closes the gap between his fingers (RTP, II, 635). And finally, when being expected to kiss his grandmother for the last time, Marcel is asked by his parents to erase from his own face any possible traces of agitation. In this way Proust creates a whole network of gazes, framing the grandmother’s death-bed, of people watching and being watched, observing the presence or absence of signs of emotion on each other’s faces, seeking to interpret, erase or disguise them.15 Proust had at one stage planned to compare the death-bed scene to the death of Wagner’s Isolde (RTP, II, 1208). The passage he had in mind reads, in Jean d’Arièges’s translation, as follows: Suis-je seule à entendre / cette mélodie / qui, avec une douceur / [...] / exprimant tout / s’irradiant de lui / en réconciliatrice / m’investit, / [...] Dans la houle des vagues, / dans les sons retentissants, / dans le tourbillon / de la respiration universelle, / être submergée, / m’engloutir, / inconsciente!... / Joie suprême!... (RTP, II, 1927). [Am I alone in hearing / this melody / which, with a sweetness / [...] expresses everything / radiating from him / like a peacemaker / besieging me / [...] In the swell of the waves, / in the resonating sounds, / in the whirlpool / of universal breathing, / to be submerged, / to be devoured / unconscious! ... / Supreme joy!]

It is clear why Proust could no longer use this comparison. Wagner’s scene recalls the stereotypical nineteenth-century death-bed scene that Ariès describes as char­ ac­terized by the spontaneous expression of emotion, mirroring the ‘affectivité

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absolue’ [absolute affectivity] which was the new function of the Romantic family.16 In Proust’s variation, however, the affectionate gazes have become hollow and emotions such as empathy, grief, and compassion run empty. All that remains of the Wagnerian metaphors of nature — the motif of reconciliation, unification, the idea of immersion in sweet universal respiration, that contribute to the Romantic image of ‘la belle mort’17 — is the constant buzzing of the respirator. The visual void, the emotional cavity that, just as between narrator and grandmother in the parlour scene, expands between the dying grandmother and the people that witness her dying, is only filled by these mechanical sounds, that ‘font croire à des impressions de souffrance ou de bonheur chez ceux qui déjà ne sentent plus’ [suggest impressions of pain or pleasure in those who can no longer feel] (RTP, II, 636 / SLT, III, 338). The blocking of the mutual gaze reaches its peak when the grandmother opens her eyes for the last time (RTP, II, 640). Instantly, the narrator turns away from her sight and throws himself between the dying grandmother and Françoise so as to conceal the old maid’s dramatic tears. As Christiaan Hart Nibbrig observes, the moment of the grandmother’s death is a moment of visual absence. It cannot be seen, only heard, negatively, as the absence of sound, when the hissing of the oxygen in the respirator stops (RTP, II, 640).18 Sleeping Albertine The narrator’s ref lections on the sleeping Albertine share some important motifs with the scenes that describe the grandmother’s agony and her death. Again, the narrator as observer is looking at a beloved woman who does not return his gaze. And just as the death-bed scene is set in a Romantic scenario the descriptions of Albertine asleep are also mapped onto a Romantic horizon. In fact, a conf lict of images and concepts emerges here that is even more explicit than in the passages concerning the grandmother’s death. As Warning points out, we find the Romantic motif of sleep, the metaphors of the Romantic word-field of landscape, the wind, the sea, enriched by the motif of dreamy, contemplative observation, ‘le pouvoir de rêver’ [the power of dreaming] (RTP, III, 578 / SLT, V, 59) and the scenario of the moonlit night.19 Yet in the same way that the ideal of the Romantic beautiful death is emptied of its metaphysical kernel in the grandmother’s death scenes, so here is the ideal of Romantic love. Ariès reminds us that at the heart of the ‘révolution du sentiment’ [revolution in feeling] introduced by Romanticism was the individualization of emotion. Begin­n ing in the eighteenth century, affectivity was no longer group-oriented but in­creasingly individualized and associated with one-to-one intensity.20 This is further specified by Niklas Luhmann who explains in Liebe als Passion [Love as Passion] that it was only in the course of the eighteenth century that ‘der semantische Leerraum, den diese von ständischen Bindungen nur abstrahierende Vor­stel­lung des Individuums bereit hält, inhaltlich angereichert und ausgefüllt [wird]’ [the semantic void left by this abstract idea of an individual no longer tied to his social standing becomes filled out and enriched with content]. Drawing on Wilhelm von Humboldt and Friedrich Schleiermacher he contends:

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Erst in dieser philosophischen Anthropologie [Humboldt, Schleiermacher] und in der durch sie beeinf lussten romantischen Literatur wird die Konkretheit und Einzigartigkeit des Individuums zum universalistischen Prinzip erklärt. [It was only by virtue of this philosophical anthropology and the Romantic literature inf luenced by it that the concreteness and uniqueness of the individual could be raised to the level of a universalistic principle.]21

The same wish for individualization motivates the narrator when he first sets eye on Albertine. Directing his gaze at the ‘petite bande’ [little group], he seeks to focus it on the figure of Albertine, to single her out, to bestow her with individuality and identity, and thereby transform her into the suitable object of his affection. Yet soon he realizes that the idea of the beloved other as unique and wholesome individuality cannot be maintained. As we saw earlier, the object of his affection is constantly diffusing before his eyes. Marcel’s attempts to individualize Albertine always eventually turn into the experience of withdrawal, invisibility, and difference (RTP, II, 201–02). ‘Le modèle chéri’, as he earlier observes, ‘bouge; on n’en a jamais que des photographies manquées’ [the beloved model keeps moving; and the only snapshots we can take are always out of focus] (RTP, I, 481 / SLT, II, 64). We find the same ambivalence between the inf luence of Romantic expectations and their collapse in the three passages that have Albertine’s sleeping body as their object of observation. The sight of sleeping Albertine gives the narrator, as he remarks, ‘le pouvoir de rêver que je n’avais qu’en son absence’ [the ability to dream which, normally, I only had in her absence] (RTP, III, 578). Invoking the moonlit nights at Balbec (RTP, III, 579), her soft breathing sounds to him like a heavenly sound (RTP, III, 579). Yet the images that at first seem to resonate with Romantic reverie and the motif of ‘holy sleep’ are soon deprived of their metaphysical implications. Indeed, under the narrator’s gaze Albertine’s body undergoes a process of transformation that is reminiscent of that of the grandmother’s: ‘En perdant la conscience’ [by losing consciousness] Albertine is stripped bare of her ‘différents caractères d’humanité’ [various marks of humanity] (RTP, III, 578 / SLT, V, 60). She is reduced to ‘une existence physiologique’ (RTP, III, 581), turned into a piece of soulless nature (RTP, III, 578). It is on the basis of this deanimation, this dehumanization of Albertine, that ‘son sommeil réalisait dans un certaine mesure la possibilité de l’amour’ [her sleep realized, to a certain degree, the promise of love] (RTP, III, 578 / SLT, V, 60). But what kind of love is this that begins with the desire of individualization and seemingly ends with the attempt to remove the core of the object of one’s affection? In his Diskursgeschichte der Leidenschaft [Discourse History of Passion] Wolfgang Matzat argues that the assumption of a ‘leibseelische Tiefendimension’ [depth-dim­ ension of body and mind] that transcends the level of representation is of central significance to the Romantic conception of affectivity.22 Hence in the confrontation between two minds, Romantic desire, supported by infinite imagination, does not only ever refer back to the desiring self but finds room in the depth of the other. Because this depth-dimension within the other has the function to mirror the depth-dimension within the self, the Romantic subject is always in search of an experience of correspondence.23 He is, in Luhmann’s slightly awkward wording,

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in search of an intimate relationship as ‘zwischenmenschliche Interpenetration’ [intersubjective interpenetration].24 Against this background Marcel’s ref lections on the sleeping Albertine take on a different meaning. In the same way that the narrator had previously been searching for a Romantic individualization of Albertine, his contemplations of the sleeping Albertine now somewhat echo a Romantic longing for ‘intersubjective interpenetration’: ref lecting on the effect of Albertine’s closed eyes upon his own position and self-awareness Marcel notes: ‘Quand elle dormait, je n’avais plus à parler, je savais que je n’étais plus regardé par elle, je n’avais plus besoin de vivre à la surface de moi-même’ [When she was asleep, I did not have to speak any more, I knew that she could not see me, I did not have to live on the surface of myself ] (RTP, III, 578 / SLT, V, 60). This formulation, which draws on the contrast between a ‘moi profond’ [deep self ] and a ‘moi superficiel’ [superficial self ], resonates with a passage from Proust’s Journées de Lecture, where the ‘pure’ communication between reader and author during the act of reading is favourably contrasted with the face-to-face communication between friends: ‘L’atmosphère de cette pure amitié est le silence, plus pure que la parole [...] entre la pensée de l’auteur et la nôtre il n’interpose pas ces éléments irréductibles, réfractaires à la pensée, de nos égoïsmes différents.’ [The atmosphere of this pure form of friendship is silence, which is purer than speech [...] Between the author’s thought and our own it does not interpose the irreducible elements, refractory to thought, of our two distinct egos].25 In light of this model of ideal communication the process of dehumanizing Albertine appears less negative, for the configuration of a friendship between writer and reader resembles Marcel’s idea of a Romantic friendship with ‘mon amie’ [my friend] Albertine (SLT, V, 460 / RTP, IV, 75). The stripping bare of Albertine’s multiple social facades, the silencing of her various voices and gazes, her habits and pretensions, the closure of her eyes so that the observing self no longer has ‘to make an appearance’, does bear a resemblance to the conception of friendship as a communication of souls, uninhibited by convention — the idea of a pure encounter outlined in Journées de Lecture. Indeed, reading Albertine’s silent body as if reading a text seems at times to give access to her ‘naturel plus profond’ [far deeper naturalness] (RTP, III, 579 / SLT, V, 61). In a variation on the motif of sleeping Albertine the narrator further describes this sensation: Sa figure avait perdu toute expression de ruse ou de vulgarité, et entre elle et moi [...] il semblait y avoir un abandon entier, un indissoluble attachement [...] Son sommeil n’était qu’une sorte d’effacement du reste de la vie, qu’un silence uni sur lequel prenaient de temps à autre leur vol des paroles familières de tendresse. En les rapprochant les unes des autres, on eût composé la conversation sans alliage, l’intimité secrète d’un pur amour (RTP, III, 621–22). [Her face had lost any expression of deviousness or vulgarity [...] each of us seemed entirely given up to the other, indissolubly joined. Her slumber was a kind of blotting-out of the rest of life, a level silence from which familiar words of affection would sometimes take f light. By piecing these words together one could have composed the perfect conversation, the secret intimacy of pure, unalloyed love (SLT, V, 101–02).]

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Yet once again, as in the scene of the grandmother’s death, the narrator’s romantic sublimations are soon revealed to be nothing more than idealizing projections. This becomes particularly evident when we look at the ways in which the process of the profanation of Albertine’s body is linked to the loss of her glance. Under the narrator’s eyes the surface of Albertine’s body freezes. Her skin turns into a perfect unity, even her face appears uninterrupted by her eyes: ‘ces paupières abaissées mettaient dans son visage cette continuité parfaite que les yeux n’interrompent pas’ [her lowered lids gave her face that perfect unity that open eyes would have disrupted] (RTP, III, 579 / SLT, V, 61). Albertine’s body takes on a statuesque beauty and majesty precisely because she has no more glance (RTP, III, 579). Now the images of pure communication and interpenetration are quick to turn again into images of separation, control and possession. With her eyes shut, Albertine’s multiple selves can no longer escape through that way (RTP, III, 578). Firmly enclosed within the surface of her body the narrator concludes that ‘sa vie m’était soumise’ [her life was subject to me] (RTP, III, 578 / SLT, V, 60). Under his measuring gaze the surface of her body turns into a petrified shell, a prison, or a shield, a border at least, impenetrable from inside or outside. Once this state seems fully attained and Albertine’s being utterly in control, the narrator’s voice can fully take over. Albertine as petrified surface now forms the perfect screen onto which he can project his images of ideal love. Warning reminds us that Adorno, in his brief comments on the sleeping Albertine, compares the love between Marcel and Albertine to the love between Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde that, as we have seen, Proust had decided not to use as an allegory for the grandmother’s death. Adorno concludes: Die arme, hinfällige, verwirrte Liebe Unterschlupf findet, wo die Geliebte dem Tode sich anähnelt. Seit dem zweiten Akt des Tristan ist, im Zeitalter des Verfalls von Liebe, diese nicht inniger verherrlicht worden als in der Beschreibung von Albertines Schlaf, die mit erhabener Ironie den Erzähler Lügen straft, der seine Liebe verleugnet.26 [Poor, frail, confused love finds a refuge in the place where the beloved comes to resemble death. In the era of its decay, love has not been more fervently celebrated since the second act of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde than in the description of Albertine’s sleep, which with sublime irony proves the narrator wrong in denying his love.]27

However, to interpret the passages on Albertine asleep as a glorification of Romantic love in the age of love’s decline is to overlook precisely what makes these scenes so compelling: the double perspective of their Romantic horizon and its dismantling.28 Just how distant these scenes are in fact from Adorno’s interpretation becomes even more obvious when we take into account that, in the same way that Albertine’s eyelids are not absolutely closed, only ‘abaissées’ [lowered] (RTP, III, 579 / SLT, V, 61), with her eyeballs, like the grandmother’s before, turned inwards, she is not entirely lifeless. Her interior, beneath the surface, remains an abyss; beneath the surface, she remains free. The passage which describes how Marcel ‘embarks on her sleep’ most clearly tells of this double dimension. It is, like the description of the physical unification of the two lovers, certainly amongst the strangest insofar as

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it systematically undermines the Romantic concepts of mutual penetration, fusion and affective totality: Marcel presses his body closely against Albertine’s so as to ‘l’embrasser sans avoir interrompu son sommeil’ [kiss her without breaking into her sleep] (RTP, III, 581 / SLT, V, 62). He notes: ‘Il me semblait à ces moments-là que je venais de la posséder plus complètement, comme une chose inconsciente et sans résistance de la muette nature’ [It seemed to me at those moments that I had possessed her more completely, like an unconscious and unresisting part of dumb nature] (RTP, III, 581 / SLT, V, 62). But what Marcel neglects to acknowledge during his fantasies of power is the fact that Albertine is not mute. In the same way that her eyes are not absolutely closed her voice is not absolutely silenced. Albertine’s breath is mixed with murmurs; at one point her hand tightens as a result of some unknown affective impulse (RTP, III, 579) and in a second variation on the sleeping Albertine, the name of her alleged lover, ‘Andrée’, escapes her lips (RTP, III, 621). Reading the scenes on Albertine asleep against the grain of the narrator’s perception, it becomes quite obvious that the text does not tell of mutual unification, penetration, a merging of bodies and souls, nor even of successful subjugation and possession. What we have in fact is the radical emptying out of Marcel’s romantically inf luenced projections as well as his fantasies of power and control. Albertine becomes the object of an act of solitary satisfaction, while at the same time Marcel turns into an imaginary lover for Albertine.29 While their bodies are pressed together their minds remain wide apart. The ideal of affective totality turns into an experience of affective difference. Instead of physical and emotional interpenetration we find physical and emotional isolation. Love turns out to be not openness towards the other, not a correspondence of souls, but a solitary relation with oneself. As the Proustian narrator notes elsewhere: Quand on aime l’amour est trop grand pour pouvoir être contenu tout entier en nous; il irradie vers la personne aimée, rencontre en elle une surface qui l’arrête, le force à revenir vers son point de départ et c’est ce choc en retour de notre propre tendresse que nous appelons les sentiments de l’autre et qui nous charme plus qu’à l’aller, parce que nous ne reconnaissons pas qu’elle vient de nous (RTP, I, 598). [When we are in love, our love is too vast to be wholly contained within ourselves; it radiates outwards, reaches the resistant surface of the loved one, which ref lects it back to its starting-point; and this return of our own tenderness is what we see as the other’s feelings, working their new, enhanced charm on us, because we do not recognize them as having originated in ourselves (SLT, II, 185).]

Refilling the Cavities The expansion of visual and emotional cavities between the observing self and the world of objects or other persons does not lead to a state of indifference, or a complete absence of feeling. These emotional cavities develop a pull that provokes affective responses in the observing self. They cause anxiety in the case of the grandmother or desire in the case of Albertine. They cause the wish, the need, to refill these cavities. This refilling is possible. The sensation of involuntary memory

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can (momentarily) trigger the experience of mutual emotional correspondence, of completion and affective cognition. Proust here stands in the Romantic tradition of what we have called a holistic notion of emotionality. However, it would be misleading to believe that he simply continues this tradition. Not only does Proust contrast the moments of absolute affective experience with the growing expansion of emotional cavities, he also shows this absolute affectivity itself to be in a state of ‘ébranlement’ [insecurity] and danger. Benjamin reminds us in his Baudelaire essay that Proust overtakes Henri Bergson’s basic antagonism between ‘vita activa’ and ‘vita contemplativa’, the second only being accessible via the paths of memory (GS, I.2, 609). Because the sensation of emotional intensity can only be experienced within the act of individual remembering it leaves the active state of alienation unchanged. Yet even more importantly — and here Proust differs from Bergson’s conception — whether this sensation of emotional intensity within the act of remembering is possible is not only beyond willpower but also based on coincidence. As Proust notes: ‘il dépend du hasard que nous le [notre passé] rencontrions avant de mourir, ou que nous ne le rencontrions pas’ [It depends on chance whether we encounter this object (our past) before we die, or do not encounter it] (RTP, I, 44 / SLT, I, 47). The power of affective memory and with it the possibility of affective recognition is already questioned here. Its fragility is already inscribed into the concept of affective memory itself. Conceived by a subject who experiences emotional isolation, it bares the traces of this isolation. Seen from this angle, Benjamin’s observation that the concept of mémoire involontaire ‘gehört zum Inventar der vielfältig isolierten Privatperson’ [is part of the inventory of the individual who is isolated in many ways] (GS, I.2, 611 / SW, IV, 316) takes on a new dimension. Affective memory is, possibly, a way to retrospectively overcome emotional isolation, to facilitate, retrospectively, affective experience. Yet because whether or not the desire to refill the visual and emotional cavities can be satisfied within memory depends entirely on chance, it may well never be accomplished. This second possibility is played through in the case of remembering Albertine. During Albertine’s lifetime photographical imagery is not only associated with the observation of the real, exterior Albertine. We find it also linked to the ways in which Albertine can be remembered. In opposition to the case of the grandmother, the act of remembering Albertine is not described as the mental processing of an involuntary imprint that facilitates retrospective affective cognition. The metaphor for remembering Albertine is not the photographic trace and with it the image of retrospective resurrection, but the superficial, arbitrary snapshot. Albertine re-emerges in the narrator’s mind ‘non grâce à un effort de résurrection mais comme par le hasard d’une de ces rencontres qui — comme cela se passe dans les photographies que ne sont pas “posées”, dans les instantanées — laissent toujours la personne plus vivante’ [not thanks to an effort of resurrection but through one of those chance encounters which — as happens in the kind of photograph which is a snapshot, rather than a ‘posed’ photograph — always breathe life into the person] (RTP, IV, 74 / SLT, V, 459). These snapshots are lively representations, but they fail to preserve. They are supplementary, fugitive, and replaceable. ‘Notre mémoire’,

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we read with regard to Albertine, ‘ressemble à ces magasins qui, à leurs devantures, exposent d’une certaine personne, une fois une photographie, une fois une autre. Et d’habitude la plus récente reste quelque temps seule en vue’ [Our memory is like one of those shop-windows where different photographs of a certain person are displayed on different days. Sometimes it is the most recent one which stays on show for a time, in isolation] (RTP, II, 244 / SLT, II, 467). In the same way that Albertine escapes all attempts at individualization she escapes all attempts at retrospective affective cognition. Remembering Albertine can only ever mean retrospective imaginary projection.30 This is why, even after her disappearance and death, Albertine as remembered remains as unknowable and ungovernable, as emotionally distant, as the living Albertine had been before. As Marcel notes: ‘j’essayais maintenant en vain de me rappeler, de revoir dans une obscurité qui ne finirait plus’ [I tried now in vain to recall or to visualize in the endless darkness] (RTP, IV, 70 / SLT, V, 455). In the case of Albertine, depth cannot be associated with meaning or filled with emotion, but remains an obscure and inexplorable abyss. Unlike the case of the grandmother, the wish to recover Albertine is not accomplished in Proust’s image of the container-contained model that implies affective correspondence and mutual completion (RTP, III, 152–53). Instead, we find it replaced by its distorted picture, the image of violent incorporation. As the narrator observes: Parfois au crépuscule en rentrant à l’hôtel je sentais que l’Albertine d’autrefois, invisible à moi-même, était pourtant enfermée au fond de moi comme aux ‘plombs’ d’une Venise intérieure, dont parfois un incident faisait glisser le couvercle durci jusqu’à me donner une ouverture sur ce passé. Ainsi par exemple un soir une lettre de mon coulissier rouvrit un instant pour moi les portes de la prison où Albertine était en moi vivante, mais si loin, si profond, qu’elle me restait inaccessible (RTP, IV, 218). [Sometimes at dusk on my return to the hotel I felt that the Albertine of former times, although invisible, was none the less locked deep inside me, as if in the lead-lined cells of some inner Venice, where from time to time an incident would shake the heavy lid enough to give me a glimpse into the past. Thus for instance one evening a letter from my broker reopened for an instant the gates of the prison where Albertine lay living within me, but so far and so deep that she remained inaccessible to me (SLT, V, 603–04).]

Not contained but swallowed by the narrator, Albertine survives inside his memory but does so as ‘émmurée’ [prisoner], buried in an interior ‘cachot’ [dungeon] (RTP, IV, 220 / SLT, V, 605). Hence, unlike the grandmother, Albertine is not turned into a living part of the remembering self but remains isolated, enigmatic, a con­ demned pathway. Keeping her inside his memory, the narrator can close her in, occupy and control the fringes around her, seal off all the doors of her outcast safe, and yet again she escapes. Albertine remains emotionally cut off. The affective vacuum that in the descriptions of Albertine sleeping separates the narrator from the object of his attention now continues to expand within the depth of his memory. Albertine therefore does not stand for emotional experience but for its erosion, not for affective preservation but for oblivion, not for time regained but time lost.31

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Ébranlement Proust’s description of the subject and his emotions is torn between two oppositions. While Proust’s poetics seek to maintain the Romantic ideal of a total mediation and correspondence between self and world, self and other, his narrative increasingly deprives this ideal of its core. Often, the narrator finds it impossible to supply the world he perceives with volume and substance. Looking outwards ‘nous ne voyons passer que des silhouettes plates’ [we see only f lat shadows] (RTP, IV, 199–200 / SLT, V, 585), depth appears as a ‘mirage’ (RTP, II, 712). Looking inwards, the soul, as the supposed seat of emotions, remains inaccessible behind the shield of the bodily surface when the narrator finds himself ‘trompé par l’apparence du corps comme on l’est dans ce monde où nous ne percevons pas directement les âmes’ [misled by the appearance of the body, as we are in this world where souls are not directly perceptible] (RTP, II, 28 / SLT, II, 246). Indeed, we may find that the soul consists of nothing but the bone-structure which the ‘photographie par les rayons X’ reveals (RTP, II, 569). We may find others as well as ourselves to be ‘sans contenu’ [without content] (RTP, III, 371 / SLT, IV, 377) and accordingly our attempts to express and externalize emotions may be nothing but the result, with Mme Verdurin, ‘[de] nuancer l’inexistant, sculpter le vide’ [(to) refine the nicer quibbles of non-existence, give vacancy its shape] (RTP, I, 591 / SLT, II, 177). If depth is a mirage, if physical and mental interpenetration is impossible, then love becomes a solitary event based on the construction of secondary images, not only for Marcel and Albertine but even more so for Swann, who mistakes representation for reality when ‘approchant de lui la photographie de Zéphora, il croyait serrer Odette contre son cœur’ [bringing Zipporah’s photograph close to him, he would believe he was clasping Odette against his heart (RTP, I, 222 / SLT, I, 228). But Proust’s writing does not stop here. For the expansion of emotional distance and difference causes an anxiety and a desire that cannot be stilled by mortification and control or covered over by fantasy images. The need, the wish to refill these cavities remains. Proust offers as a solution the ideal of mutual completion through involuntary memory. But the fulfilment of this ideal not only already bears in itself the signs of the atrophy of emotional experience it reacts against, it is also confronted with its own distorted picture of violent incorporation. Oscillating between a romantically inspired wholesome notion of affect and its modernist erosion, Proust’s autobiographical novel thus proposes the return of affectivity under modified conditions. By circumscribing affect as privatized, fragile, and contingent, Proust’s work initiates a process of rethinking affect and emotion that will be of fundamental importance for the autobiographical work of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. Notes to Chapter 3 1. Proust, aged thirteen or fourteen, answering an English questionnaire (CSB, 336 / ASB, 113). 2. The passage I have in mind here reads: ‘[...] j’ai résolu de faire faire à mes lecteurs un pas de plus dans la connoissance des hommes, en les tirant s’il est possible de cette règle unique et fautive de juger toujours du cœur d’autrui par le sien; tandis qu’au contraire il faudroit souvent pour

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connoitre le sien même, commencer par lire dans celui d’autrui’ [[...] I resolved to take my readers one step further in their knowledge of mankind, by drawing them away, if at all possible, from that singular and erroneous rule which insists that we must always judge the hearts of others in relation to our own; on the contrary, we must often begin by reading the hearts of others in order to understand our own], Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ébauches des Confessions, in Œuvres complètes, ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard 1959), i, 1148–64 (p. 1149). 3. Proust himself famously notes that his mémoire involontaire is inspired by respective passages of Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre tombe and Nerval’s Sylvie (RTP, IV, 498). For the etymology of ‘affect’, see the corresponding Benjamin chapter II.6. 4. Paradigmatically, see Bowie, Freud, Proust and Lacan: Theory as Fiction; Emma Wilson, Sexuality and the Reading Encounter, ch. 3; and Ingrid Wassenaar, Proustian Passions, ch. 5. 5. As exemplary, see, Roland Barthes, ‘Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure’ (1978) (OC, V, 459–70), and the first book-length study of affectivity in Proust by Inge Crosman Wimmers, Proust and Emotion: The Role of Affectivity in Proust’s ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003). 6. The former characterizes Crosman Wimmers’ study which centres the discussion of emotion on ‘the inner life of the novel’s principal figure’ as a ‘single, unified subject’ who in the end manages to restore his identity, Proust and Emotion, pp. 4, 176, 181. The latter is the aim of Martha C. Nussbaum in Love’s Knowledge, ch. 11: pp. 261–85, and Upheavals of Thought, particularly pp. 511–26. 7. For a discussion of Proust’s relation to Romanticism and particularly to Chateaubriand, see Luzius Keller, ‘Beseelte Landschaften und Landschaften der Seele: Prousts Verhältnis zur Romantik am Beispiel seines Dialogs mit Chateaubriand’, in Romantik: Aufbruch zur Moderne, ed. by Karl Maurer and Winfried Wehle (Munich: Fink, 1991), pp. 325–53. 8. On the motif of photographic f latness in Proust, see Bal, The Mottled Screen, part 3. 9. I quote this formulation by G. Hess from Wolfgang Matzat, Diskursgeschichte der Leidenschaft: Zur Affektmodellierung im französischen Roman von Rousseau bis Balzac (Tübingen: Narr, 1990), p. 104. 10. One paradigmatic example of such a pastiche is Proust’s Sonate clair de lune ( JS, 116–18). 11. ‘La Photographie’ notes Barthes, ‘est sans culture: lorsqu’elle est douloureuse, rien, en elle, ne peut transformer le chagrin en deuil’ [The Photograph [...] is without culture: when it is painful, nothing in it can transform grief into mourning] (OC, V, 862 / CL, 90). 12. Philippe Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort (Paris: Seuil, 1977), p. 608. 13. For Proust’s development of the metaphor of illness as ‘cage’, see (RTP, II, 1692–93). 14. On the iconography of this scene and particularly on the grandmother being transformed into a medieval ‘gisant’ (a sculpture of a dead person lying, as if sleeping, on a sarcophagus or cenotaph), see Nicola Luckhurst, ‘Proust’s Beard’, in Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers, ed. by Martin Crowley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 95–113 (p. 106). 15. This interpretation follows Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig’s reading of the deathbed-scene as ‘zwischen­menschlicher Hohlraum’ [intersubjective void], in Ästhetik der letzten Dinge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), pp. 72–77. 16. Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort, p. 604. 17. Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort, p. 403. 18. Hart Nibbrig, Ästhetik der letzten Dinge, p. 76. 19. Warning analyses the Romantic imagery in what he refers to as ‘Albertine endormie’ with regard to the theme of individuality. My discussion of emotion and the visual in this section builds on aspects of his interpretation, ‘Supplementäre Individualität: “Albertine endormie” ’, in ProustStudien, pp. 77–108. 20. Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort, pp. 464–66. 21. Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), p. 167, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones as Luhmann, Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 132. 22. Matzat, Diskursgeschichte der Leidenschaft, p. 15. 23. Matzat, Diskursgeschichte der Leidenschaft, pp. 111–12. 24. Luhmann, Liebe als Passion, p. 14.

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25. Proust, Journées de Lecture (CSB, 187 / ASB, 219). 26. Adorno, ‘Kleine Proust-Kommentare’, in Noten zur Literatur, II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), pp. 203–15 (pp. 206–07). 27. Adorno, ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’, in Notes to Literature, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–92), i, 174–84 (p. 183). 28. As Warning maintains, in this passage Adorno does not distinguish clearly enough between theme and horizon, ‘Supplementäre Individualität’, p. 91. 29. I follow Warning’s interpretation, in ‘Supplementäre Individualität’, pp. 88–89. 30. Warning argues that Albertine’s uniqueness is the result of remembering projection, ‘Supplementäre Individualität’, p. 94. 31. One could explain Proust’s imagery of incorporation with Freud’s depiction of the melancholy process, or with Nicolas Abraham’s and Maria Torok’s theory of ‘la maladie du deuil’ [the mourning illness], in which the interior ‘crypte’ functions as a central metaphor. Yet there are two main arguments against a psychoanalytical reading. First, the metaphor of incorporating Albertine characterizes the relation between Marcel and Albertine from an early stage onwards (RTP, III, 501, 512); it is not exclusively an element of mourning but a general symptom of the difficulty in remembering Albertine. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, as Martin von Koppenfels has shown, the ‘crypt’ is essentially silent, no direct signs refer to it. Therefore, it does not correspond to a formation but rather to a paralysis of symbolic processes, Einführung in den Tod: Lorcas New Yorker Dichtung und die Trauer der modernen Lyrik (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), pp. 128–29. It is however an important part of my overall argument that in La Recherche the insurmountable alterity of the other who is marked by emotional (in-)difference, feeds and motivates the writing process.

Part I I v

Walter Benjamin

CHAPTER 4

v

Photography, Memory, and Representation The Structure of Memory Das, wovon man weiß, daß man es bald nicht mehr vor sich haben wird, das wird Bild (GS, I.2, 590). [When one knows that something will soon be removed from one’s gaze, that thing becomes an image (SW, IV, 53).]

Walter Benjamin began his autobiographical project with Berliner Chronik [Berlin Chronicle], written on Ibiza in the summer of 1932. For Benjamin this was a time of severe crisis.1 He had just gone through a painful divorce case with his then wife Dora, he was confronted with substantial financial hardships, and envisaging not only professional boycott but also life-threatening discrimination and exile in the face of rising Nazism in Germany. Leaving, loss and mourning had long been central motifs of Benjamin’s work. Now, however, for the first time, these themes were to be faced in his own life. Benjamin’s crisis peaked in July 1932, shortly after his fortieth birthday. Against the background of the political and economical situation, but also out of his own determination to have lived a fulfilled life, Benjamin travelled to Nice. His plan was to end his life.2 We do not know why, after minute preparations that include farewell letters and a last will, Benjamin decided to abandon the plan at the last moment. He left Nice again in early August to travel to Poveromo, where in the autumn of 1932 he decided to abandon the unfinished draft of Berliner Chronik and to begin the second version of his autobiographical project, Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert [Berlin Childhood around 1900]. The new version differs considerably in content and form from the first version. Contrary to its own poetological device, Berliner Chronik, with its chronological narrative that comprises scenes of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, with its descriptive and ref lective character, had threatened to become what it must not be: a conventional autobiography. Indeed, while in Berliner Chronik Benjamin argues against traditional forms of autobiography, which have to do with development and the steady f low of time, and for the substitution of chronology by topography, when he rules out any direct connection between text and reality, it is only in Berliner Kindheit that this programmatic device is put into practice.3 Here most of the narrative passages, anecdotes, recollections of friends and other direct references to

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Benjamin’s biography are erased. The f low of the narrative increasingly coagulates into individual memory images in no chronological or thematic order. In style and content these images recall the six paragraphs on childhood impressions in Benjamin’s philosophical fragments Einbahnstraße [One-Way Street] of 1928 which, com­piled under the title ‘Vergrößerungen’ [Enlargements], already implied the imi­ tation of a photographic technique (GS, IV.1, 113–14).4 Reading Benjamin’s life writing, we find, instead of the history of a life, the history of its remembrance, and comparing the different versions, this history emerges as a transformative process.5 Memory is, as Nicolas Pethes argues, less the writing down of autobiographical elements than the structural and structuring force of Benjamin’s texts.6 Hence in the same way that in the different drafts of Berliner Chronik and Berliner Kindheit the description of the act of remembering and the conception of memory undergo transformation, so does the structure of the text. This is why the generic development of Benjamin’s autobiographical writings offers the key to their meaning. Although the metamorphoses of Benjamin’s text(s) are a process without end — even the last authorized version of 1938 must be regarded as a work in progress — the general parameters between which the different text versions expand remain the same: taking distance from one’s own life, the act of departure, coping with loss, contemplating death.7 And they are refracted through the prism offered by the work of Marcel Proust. Benjamin was among the first intellectuals in Germany to realize the ground­ breaking significance of Proust’s work. Only three years after Proust’s death Benjamin began to translate selected volumes of A la recherche du temps perdu, the text he took as a major source for philosophical inspiration as well as personal insight (GB, III, 62). In a letter to Rainer Maria Rilke of 1925 he remarks that ‘der Gewinn einer so eingehenden Beschäftigung mit dem großen Meisterwerk wird mir im Laufe der Zeit sehr fühlbar werden’ [what I have gained from having been so deeply involved with this great masterpiece will in time become very tangible for me] (GB, III, 98 / CB, 285). And yet, his further correspondence reveals that his reading encounter with Proust was anything but harmonious. In 1926 Benjamin diagnosed ‘innere Vergiftungserscheinungen’ [symptoms of intestinal poisoning] (GB, III, 195 / CB, 305), stating that he had thrown the whole of Proust into a corner to work ‘ganz für mich allein’ [on my own] (GB, III, 151 / CB, 298). In 1928 he contemplated abandoning the Proust translation altogether.8 Towards the end of 1932, however, at the time when Benjamin began his work on Berliner Chronik, he again intensified his occupation with Proust’s autobiographical novel.9 Benjamin’s ref lections on his reading encounter with Proust reveal not only an elective affinity between the two writers,10 they also emphasize the enormous anxiety of seeing one’s own writing, and even one’s self, dissolved within the image of Proust. If for Benjamin Proust is one of the main ‘Geleiter’ [guide(s)] (GS, VI, 467 / SW II, 597) that light his way back to the places of childhood, then Paris provides the hypotext for Benjamin’s Berlin. Yet Benjamin meets the guidance that Proust’s work offers with strong hesitation. As he explains in Berliner Chronik: Soll ich es mit einem Wort sagen, was ich Paris für diese Betrachtungen verdanke, so ist es: der Vorbehalt. Kaum wäre es mir möglich, dem Hin und

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Photography, Memory, and Representation Wieder dieser Erinnerungen an mein frühestes Stadtleben mich zu überlassen, stünden nicht von Paris her streng umschrieben die beiden einzigen Formen vor mir, in denen das auf legitime Art, das heißt mit der Gewähr der Dauer geschehen kann [...] Die erste Form ist geschaffen im Werke von Marcel Proust und der Verzicht auf jedes Spielen mit verwandten Möglichkeiten wird schwerlich eine bündigere Gestalt finden als die der Übersetzung, welche ich ihr zu geben vermocht habe (GS, VI, 467).11 [If I had to put in one word what I owe to Paris for these ref lections, it would be ‘caution’: I should scarcely be able to abandon myself to the shifting currents of these memories of my earliest city life, had not Paris set before me, strictly circumscribed, the two forms in which alone this can legitimately — that is, with a guarantee of permanence — be done; The first form was created in the work of Marcel Proust, and the renunciation of any dalliance with related possibilities could scarcely be more bindingly embodied than in the translation of it that I have produced (BCHR, 5–6).]

Benjamin notably extracts his memory images from objects and scenes that are strikingly similar to those from which Proust distils his own. In both works we find the first visit to the theatre, the child’s playing in the park, the motifs of sleeping, dreaming and awakening in the dark room, reading, the absence of the mother during a reception, the telephone, the peculiar silence on existing siblings.12 Yet whereas Proust deciphers these images as illuminations of subjective experience, for Benjamin they are picture-puzzles of society and are, as such, capable ‘in ihrem Innern spätere geschichtliche Erfahrung zu präformieren’ [at their core, of preforming later historical experience] (GS, VII.1, 385 / BC, 38). The affect of individual yearning, so it seems, is absorbed into historical cognition.13 Reading Berliner Kindheit against the biographical and text-genetical background, we soon realize that Benjamin’s own autobiographical project is also a counterdraft to Proust’s autobiographical work. We may therefore presume that Proust’s inf luence on Benjamin’s autobiographical writing is dialectical. While Benjamin rejects some of the features of Proust’s writings, they have already deeply permeated his texts. The self ’s experience is permeable to the experience of the other. Decentralization is the effect. Without being called on, Proustian memory images are always already there. Therein lies their uncanny quality. Even when being used as a contrast they remain present and Benjamin continues to integrate them as originally foreign elements into his own texts.14 It seems that it is only through Proust that Benjamin can remember his childhood, as it is only in resistance to Proust that he can write it. Going through the three versions of Benjamin’s autobiographical project — just as Benjamin, when writing, would successively unveil the manifold layers of his childhood — we will find that archaeological metaphors of excavation are increasingly dissolved into images of overlapping layers, revealing depth as false depth. Surprisingly, however, during this transformative process, the motif of the photographic — as the potential incarnation of f latness — does not gain in significance but is, on the contrary, increasingly replaced by alternative metaphors for memory and representation. The description of the textual and mnemonic structure of Benjamin’s work as ‘Märchenphotographien’ [fairytale photographs]15 or ‘ornate prose snapshots’16 falls short. For the images Benjamin eventually creates

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seem to distinguish themselves from photographic images inasmuch as they lack the element of immediate realization and hence of coincidence and trace. Unlike Proust’s involuntary memory images that originate in the unconscious impression, Benjamin’s images appear as results of visual and acoustic redirection. This said, my investigation will begin by taking a broader look at Benjamin’s theoretical figurations of memory as they ref lect the Proustian model. Memory and Photography Das Problem des Gedächtnisses drängt in die Bilder.17 [The problem of memory pushes its way into the images.]

In the same way that Benjamin’s personal act of remembering is inf luenced by Proust so are his theoretical observations on memory. And like Proust, Benjamin uses photographic metaphors as ‘Denkbilder’ [thought figures] that help him picture the workings of memory. We saw that Benjamin follows Proust (and Freud) in that photographic imagery appears to him as particularly useful in describing the mechanism of two separate systems: the human consciousness which receives the stimuli in the image of lens and viewfinder, and the memory that preserves these stimuli in the image of the photographic plate. The photographic, therefore, allows Benjamin to combine two previously separate metaphoric fields: the trace (time) and the archive (space).18 This is why, in his short speech on Proust, Benjamin writes regarding the mémoire involontaire: ‘ihre Bilder kommen nicht allein ungerufen, es handelt sich vielmehr in ihr um Bilder, die wir nie sahen, ehe wir uns ihrer erinnerten’ [not only do its images come without bidding, rather, these are images which we never saw before we remembered them] (GS, II, 1064). In the image of the photographic process, latency appears as opposed both to forgetting and to the conscious act of remembering. Proust’s depiction of involuntary memory as a photographic process also fundamentally inf luences Benjamin’s definition of the dialectical image (GS, I.3, 1238). Just like Proust before him, Benjamin describes the mind as a memory archive where latent images are stored. Only a few of these images can be brought to light through the accidental, sudden shock of involuntary resurrection. Benjamin’s fascination with the originally Proustian idea of the indeterminacy of decipherment of the image in the ‘Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit’ [Now of Recognizability] (GS, I.2, 682) marks his thinking about memory and history and resurfaces in variations throughout many of his theoretical writings. If, however, Benjamin shares Proust’s fascination for the temporal aspects of photography — the photographic process — he also sympathizes with Proust’s distrust of its spatial aspects — the photograph as a product. This is how Benjamin can argue that photographic technology extends the range of voluntary memory (GS, I.2, 644) and use the famous Venice episode from La Recherche as a counter image to develop further his idea of the aura as an exchange of glances that for Benjamin forms the core of involuntary memory (GS, I.2, 646). Our glimpses at Benjamin’s photographic renditions of memory in his theoretical writings must remain erratic here.19 They suffice, however, to offer the necessary

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backdrop that allows us to understand the transformations in which these same images resurface in Benjamin’s autobiographical texts. For it seems that, when analysing Berliner Kindheit, we cannot simply apply what we have learned from Benjamin’s theoretical work. And while it appears to be likely that the ‘photographic’ provides the impetus and structure for Benjamin’s autobiographical writings,20 it may also be worth listening to other, rather more hesitant voices that question the significance of photography for Benjamin’s thinking.21 Closely following the twists and turns of Benjamin’s autobiographical writings between 1932 and 1938, I shall therefore discuss in what forms and to what extent the photographic metaphors which Benjamin develops in his theoretical texts enter his autobiographical work, what other metaphors he suggests, how these metaphors are transformed in the three different versions of his Berlin- text, and what this transformation process may tell us about the overall structure and poetics of Benjamin’s life writing. Photography and Excavation While Proust opens his autobiographical novel with a scene that describes the narrator’s attempt to remember his own childhood photographically, a first look at Benjamin’s Berliner Chronik reveals fewer photographic images than metaphors taken from the field of archaeology. As Benjamin writes on one of the first pages: ‘Wer sich der eigenen verschütteten Vergangenheit zu nähern trachtet, muß sich verhalten wie ein Mann, der gräbt’ [He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging] (GS, VI, 486 / BCHR, 26). Rather than a horizontal dynamics, this allegory suggests a vertical movement into the depths of the past to explain the act of remembering. Freud once characterized the work of the psychoanalyst — a person who reconstructs what has been forgotten through the hints provided by the patient — as the work of an archaeologist.22 In harmony with Freud, Benjamin here introduces with the idea of digging into unknown matter an allegory that does not suggest archival capacity and order but inaccessibility and withdrawal. Moreover, whereas Freud, and with him Proust, carefully distinguishes between active and passive memory, in Berliner Chronik Benjamin avoids this opposition by introducing a third category: the medium of language: ‘Die Sprache hat es unmißverständlich bedeutet’, Benjamin notes, ‘daß das Gedächtnis nicht ein Instrument zur Erkundung der Vergangenheit ist sondern deren Schauplatz. Es ist das Medium des Erlebten wie das Erdreich das Medium ist, in dem die toten Städte verschüttet liegen’ [Language shows clearly that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theatre. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred] (GS, VI, 486 / BCHR, 25–26). In distinction to the idea of memory as based on an unmediated impression or imprint of the past, Benjamin’s description underscores the idea that memories have no immediate connection with the past at all. Even when being excavated and recuperated from the depths of the earth they can never be separated from their medium. In his short text ‘Ausgraben und Erinnern’ [Excavation and Memory] Benjamin emphasizes this aspect. Using the same allegory he concludes: ‘So müssen wahrhafte Erinnerungen viel weniger berichtend verfahren als genau den Ort bezeichnen, an dem der Forscher ihrer habhaft wurde’ [In this sense, for authentic

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memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them] (GS, IV.1, 400– 01 / SW, II, 576). While, accordingly, in Berliner Chronik the image of excavation predominates, Benjamin uses a photographic metaphor only once: Es ist also durchaus nicht immer Schuld einer allzukurzen Belichtungsdauer, wenn auf der Platte des Erinnerns kein Bild erscheint. Häufiger sind vielleicht die Fälle, wo die Dämmerung der Gewohnheit der Platte jahrelang das nötige Licht versagt, bis dieses eines Tages aus fremden Quellen wie aus entzündetem Magnesiumpulver aufschießt und nun im Bilde einer Momentaufnahme den Raum auf die Platte bannt. Im Mittelpunkte dieser seltnen Bilder aber stehen stets wir selbst. Und das ist nicht so rätselhaft, weil solche Augenblicke plötzlicher Belichtung gleichzeitig Augenblicke des Außer-Uns-Seins sind und während unser waches, gewohntes, taggerechtes Ich sich handelnd oder leidend ins Geschehen mischt, ruht unser tieferes an anderer Stelle und wird vom Chock betroffen wie das Häufchen Magnesiumpulver von der Streichholzf lamme. Dies Opfer unseres tiefsten Ichs im Chock ist es, dem unsere Erinnerung ihre unzerstörbarsten Bilder zu danken hat. (GS, VI, 516). [It is not, therefore, due to insufficient exposure time if no image appears on the plate of remembrance. More frequent, perhaps, are the cases when the halflight of habit denies the plate the necessary light for years, until one day from an alien source it f lashes as if from burning magnesium powder, and now a snapshot transfixes the room’s image on the plate. Nor is this very mysterious, since such moments of sudden illumination are at the same time moments when we are beside ourselves, and while our waking, habitual, everyday self is involved actively or passively in what is happening, our deeper self rests in another place and is touched by the shock, as is the little heap of magnesium powder by the f lame of the match. It is to this immolation of our deepest self in shock that our memory owes its most indelible images (BCHR, 56–57).]

The passage corresponds to Benjamin’s photographic description of the dialectical image quoted above. Yet whereas with the latter Benjamin sought to find an explanation for historical cognition, in the former he searches for a formula for the act of remembering one’s own self. The photographic metaphor shares with the image of excavation the idea of remembering as searching in the dark, the potential unavailability of the memory images and their storage in an archive of fragmented and deformed residues of the past. Yet at the same time the photographic metaphor neglects the dimension of depth. Instead it focuses on the temporal aspects of memory which the mostly spatial model of excavation was insufficient to depict. In the passage above the metaphor of the photographic plate seems more appropriate because it corresponds to the poetics of the ‘Momentaufnahme’ [snapshot] (GS, VI, 470) that Benjamin seeks to emphasize here. In correspondence with Proust’s concept of involuntary memory Benjamin develops his theory of latency and isolation according to which the only images endowed with the power of memory and preservation have been the object of a sudden and momentary illumination. We find a description of a similar dialectic of uniqueness and duration, volatility and repetition in ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’. In this essay Benjamin develops the idea of the technical determinedness of the auratic appearance (GS, II.1, 376 / SW, II, 517) according to which the mechanical element of shock enters into a

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constellation with the pre-technical, auratic appearance. When associated with the idea of the self, however, as in Berliner Chronik, this dialectic becomes problematic. In the passage above Benjamin divides the self into the habitual, active, conscious self and a ‘deeper’ self that normally escapes recognition. As photography cuts through the screen of habit and paves the way to the optical unconscious, it is in the sudden moment of involuntary illumination that the hidden self becomes visible, a sudden visibility, a ‘now of recognizability’ that is, however, coupled with sacrifice and destruction. For it is only through the presentation of the interior self as a form of destruction, it seems, that the indestructibility of the memory image can be achieved. Interestingly, however — and most commentators silently ignore this aspect — in Berliner Chronik Benjamin interrupts this passage midway and in none of the later versions does he use the image of the photographic plate again. Why? Memory as Visual and Verbal Detour In the chapter ‘Die Mummerehlen’ from the first authorized version of Ben­jamin’s autobiographical project, the Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert of 1932/33, Ben­ jamin contrasts the metaphor of photographic exposure with a different form of self-representation. He writes: Beizeiten lernte ich es, in die Worte, die eigentlich Wolken waren, mich zu mummen. Die Gabe, Ähnlichkeiten zu erkennen, ist ja nichts als ein schwaches Überbleibsel des alten Zwangs, ähnlich zu werden und sich zu verhalten. Den aber übten Worte auf mich aus (BK, 7). [Early on, I learned to disguise myself in words, which really were clouds. The gift of perceiving similarities is, in fact, nothing but a weak remnant of the old compulsion to become similar and to behave mimetically. In me, however, this compulsion acted through words (BC, 131).]

Against the exposure of the self in the photograph, against the idea of a similarity to oneself, the child favours assimilating himself to language — a medium that does not lead to destructive illumination but offers the possibility of disguise.23 In his essay ‘Über das mimetische Vermögen’ [On the Mimetic Faculty], which Benjamin wrote in 1933 while also working on Berliner Kindheit,24 using some of the same formulations, Benjamin defines language or text as ‘ein Archiv unsinnlicher Ähnlichkeiten, unsinnlicher Korrespondenzen’ [an archive of nonsensuous similarities, of nonsensuous correspondences] (GS, II.1, 213 / SW, II, 722). This definition is ref lected in the first and the second version of Berliner Kindheit. In the chapter ‘Schmetterlingsjagd’ [Butterf ly Hunt] Benjamin attempts to evoke the Potsdam suburb of Babelsberg, where the family used to spend their summers: So zittert durch die schmetterlingserfüllte Luft das Wort ‘Brauhausberg’ [...] Aber der Name hat alle Schwere verloren, enthält von einem Brauhaus überhaupt nichts mehr und ist allenfalls ein von Bläue umwitterter Berg, der im Sommer sich auf baute, um mich und meine Eltern zu behausen (GS, VII.1, 393, my emphasis). [Thus through air teeming with butterf lies vibrate[d] the word ‘Brauhausberg’, which is to say, ‘Brewery Hill’ [...] But the name has lost all heaviness, contains

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nothing more of any brewery, and is, at most, a bluemisted hill that rose up every summer to give lodging to my parents and me (BC, 52).]

As Pethes points out, here the word ‘Brauhausberg’ echoes through the whole passage. The semantics of the associations are determined by the sound of the words, not the other way around, and it is alliteration that generates the memory image.25 A similar tendency characterizes another chapter, ‘Winterabend’ [Winter Evening], which Benjamin opens with the description of a scene where the child and his mother are walking through a winter’s evening in Berlin. Here, however, we find the sound of words complemented with a second medium: light. ‘Es war ein dunkles, unbekanntes Berlin, das sich im Gaslicht vor mir ausbreitete’, Benjamin recalls, ‘[...] und in die Fassaden war Licht getreten’ [It was a dark, unknown Berlin that spread out before me in the gaslight [...] and the faces of the houses shone with light] (GS, VII.1, 414 / BC, 92). At first the passage seems to describe a failure of recollection. In the same way that the gaslight leaves the city unknown, the light in the facades also does not tell the passer-by anything about the illuminated rooms inside. The light is only concerned with itself (GS, VII.1, 414) and leaves the autobiographical self outside. But the light also guides him to a postcard. When looking at the side of the postcard displaying the illustration, the same experience repeats itself. The picture shows an unknown Berlin square in the moonlight. The moon and all the windows are cut out and light shines through the holes when the card is held against a lamp. Once again, the light does not reveal anything to the viewer. It is only in association with the caption, ‘Hallesches Tor’, that the act of looking at the postcard opens the way to remembering. ‘Ich kannte die abgebildete Gegend nicht’, notes Benjamin, ‘ “Hallesches Tor” stand darunter. Tor und Halle traten in ihr zusammen und bildeten die erhellte Grotte, in welcher ich die Erinnerung an das winterliche Berlin vorfinde’ [I was not familiar with the neighbourhood pictured. ‘Halle Gate’ was inscribed at the bottom. Gate and hall converged in this image, and formed that illuminated grotto where I meet with the memory of a wintry Berlin] (GS, VII.1, 414 / BC, 93). In the name ‘Hallesches Tor’ name and object are set apart, just as elsewhere ‘Muhme Rehlen’ becomes ‘Mummerehlen’, ‘Markthalle’ transforms into ‘Mark-Thalle’ and ‘Blumeshof ’ becomes ‘Blume-zoof ’ (BK, 64). They represent the child’s original hearing of words which Benjamin attempts to conjure in both versions of Berliner Kindheit.26 Neither formed by photographic recollection nor as presentations of material reality Benjamin’s memory images are evocations oriented around both the illumination of secondary images (the picture on the postcard) and the distorted sound of words (the caption). Thus, the memory image emerges in the combination of light and language. The past is only accessible through detour. Not as an immediate impression, but only in its mediated form can memory be experienced. Light and words offer this medium — def lected light and deformed words — and it is here that ‘die ganze entstellte Welt der Kindheit’ [the whole distorted world of childhood] has its place (BK, 9 / BC, 133). The counterpart to Benjamin’s concept of remembrance as visual and verbal detour is described in the short text ‘San Gimignano’ of 1929. Benjamin writes: ‘Worte zu dem zu finden, was man vor Augen hat — wie schwer kann das sein. Wenn sie dann aber kommen, stoßen sie mit kleinen Hämmern gegen das

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Wirkliche, bis sie das Bild aus ihm wie aus einer kupfernen Platte getrieben haben’ [To find words for what one has in front of one’s eyes — how difficult that can be. Yet when they actually arrive, they push with little hammers against the Real, until they have driven the image out of it as if it were out of a copper plate] (GS, IV.1, 364). The same idea resurfaces in Berliner Chronik where Benjamin notes that his text contains ‘Bilder [...] nicht in der Art genereller sondern jener, die nach der Lehre des Epikur aus den Dingen ständig sich absondern und unsere Wahrnehmung von ihnen bedingen’ [Images that, according to the teaching of Epicurus, constantly detach themselves from things and determine our perception of them] (GS, VI, 489 / BCHR, 29). The concept of reality’s immediate self-secretion as image resembles the metaphor of the photographic plate. Yet in the same way that references to the photographic plate are erased from the last version of Berliner Kindheit this Epicurean concept of perception also disappears. Now the memory images are no longer exuded from the objects themselves but created by and within language. It is this linguistic and disfiguring creation of images that leads behind the phenomenological facades of reality as it opens the way to the past. But what exactly do we find there? Unlike in Proust’s Recherche, we are not confronted with the idea of an unmediated resurrection, a shock-like realization of the ‘what-hasbeen’. What we find instead is a hollowed-out space, the ‘helle Grotte’ we just saw to be formed by the syllables ‘Tor’ and ‘Halle’. In this hollowed-out space, this cavity, the past can be conjured.27 The precarious relation between the metaphor of the photographic process and the image of the postcard as a different, anti-photographic kind of ‘light writing’ becomes even more visible when we return to the quotation describing memory as photographic plate in Berliner Chronik, position the quotation within its context and trace what happens to it in the transition process from Berliner Chronik to the two authorized versions of Berliner Kindheit from 1932/33 and 1938. In Berliner Chronik the image of the photographic plate introduces a scene which tells of the child lying in bed when his father enters his bedroom and tells him of a remote cousin’s death. What the father conceals, and which the child is to learn only later, is the fact that the cousin had died of syphilis. In Berliner Chronik Benjamin first leaves the scene unfinished. Taking it up again two pages later, the photographic metaphor is replaced by another visual metaphor, the déjà-vu, yet only to be replaced again in the following sentence by a metaphor taken from the acoustic sphere, the echo. In this last variation the posthumous shock that the past moment receives is no longer caused by an optical impulse, the photographic f lashlight, but by an acoustic stimulus: ‘ein Wort, ein Klopfen oder Rauschen’ [a word, a tapping, or a rustling] (GS, VI, 518 / SW, II, 634). This acoustic stimulus instantly banishes us — and again Benjamin uses the image of a cavity — into the ‘kühle Gruft des Einst’ [cool tomb of long ago] where we hear the past as present resounding from the vault, a present that, as Benjamin concludes, predicts the future. (GS, VI, 518–19 / SW, IV, 634). This second version of the scene in the child’s bedroom in Berliner Chronik reappears almost unchanged in the 1932/33 version of Berliner Kindheit where Benjamin calls it ‘Eine Todesnachricht’ [News of a Death]. In the 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit,

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however, it changes again. In this last authorized version all explanatory metaphors of memory, from the photographic plate to the echo, have disappeared. What remains is only the description of the scene itself complemented by a concluding statement on the importance of topography for the act of remembering. For Benjamin adds: ‘Ich nahm von seiner [des Vaters] Erzählung nicht alles auf. Dagegen habe ich mir an diesem Abend mein Zimmer eingeprägt, als wenn ich gewußt hätte, eines Tages würde ich nochmals darin zu tun bekommen’ [I did not take in everything he said. But I did take special note, that evening, of my room, as though I were aware that one day I would again be faced with trouble there] (GS, VII.1, 410–11 / BC, 85–86).28 All the memory metaphors Benjamin employs in the different versions of ‘Todesnachricht’ in Berliner Chronik and in the two versions of Berliner Kindheit — the photographic plate, the déja-vu, the echo and the voided space of the child’s room — share the temporal structure of the future perfect and with it the dimension of latency that ends with the sudden realization of truth. What gets lost in the course of Benjamin’s revisions, however, is the idea of the memory image as self-realization of past reality, as self-imprint, and hence the idea of the memory image as emerging from the impression as unmediated trace. Bricolage If according to Benjamin remembering means ‘eine anschauliche Vergegenwärtigung von Bildern’ [the actualization of images in visual terms] (GS, I.1, 217 / OGTD, 37), then the child’s playful activities can tell us more about what this implies. They help us further to explore the second medium of memory Benjamin described in ‘Hallesches Tor’: light. In Berliner Kindheit Benjamin notes how the child learns early on, ‘Vorteil aus dem Licht zu ziehen’ [how to take advantage of the light] (BK, 49). Not only postcards but also thimbles with transparent tops are held against the light (GS, VII.1, 425). ‘Was in mir vorging’, Benjamin recalls, ‘konnte ich behutsam nach Hause unter meine Lampe tragen’ [What went on inside me I could warily bring home and find again under my lamp] (GS, VII.1, 416 / BC, 95–96). It is at the child’s writing desk, as it is at the desk of the remembering adult, that these fragmented and discontinuous images are cut out and preserved. In Berliner Chronik we already find scattered hints for the conception of life writing as ‘basteln’, ‘bricolage’, as ‘Bilder ausschneiden’ [cutting out pictures] (GS, IV.1, 280). The motif is further developed in Berliner Kindheit where we read the following passage: An manchen Tagen standen Leute droben. Vorm Himmel schienen sie mir schwarz umrandet wie die Figurinen der Klebebilderbogen. Nahm ich nicht Schere und Leimtopf zur Hand, um, wenn ich mit dem Bauen fertig war, ähnliche Püppchen auf Portale, Nischen und Fensterbrüstungen zu verteilen? (GS, VII.1, 390). [On many days, people would be standing there above. Against the sky they appeared to me outlined in black, like the little figures in [scrapbook] sheets. Once I had the buildings in place, didn’t I take up scissors and glue-pot to distribute manikins like these at doorways, niches, and windowsills? (BC, 47)]

Bricolage is also the theme of the chapter ‘Der Nähkasten’ [The Sewing Box], where the child is occupied with

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Photography, Memory, and Representation [...] Ausnähsachen [...] in die es nach der Zeichnung Blumen nähte. Und während das Papier mit leisem Knacken der Nadel ihre Bahn frei machte, gab ich hin und wieder der Versuchung nach, mich in das Netzwerk auf der Hinterseite zu vergaffen, das mit jedem Stich, mit dem ich vorn dem Ziele näherkam, verworrner wurde (GS, VII.1, 426). [[...] sewing things [...] and applied himself to the pattern by which f lowers were embroidered. And while the paper made way, with a slight crackling sound, for the path of the needle, I would now and then surrender to the temptation to dote on the knot-work on the underside, which, with every stitch that brought me closer to the goal on the front, became more entangled (BC, 114–15).]

Reading both the first passage, on cutting out images, and the second, on knitting together, further illustrates how closely the act of writing and the cutting out of images are related within the act of remembering as weaving the text or texture of memory. This is why Benjamin notes of the child’s desk, that it is used for both, ‘Schreiben’ and ‘Bilder ausschneiden’ [writing and cutting out pictures] (GS, IV.1, 280). If Benjamin’s memory images differ from Proust’s impressions because they lack the quality of trace, they also resemble them inasmuch as they are ‘f lüchtig[]’ [f leeting] (BK, 111) and hence escape visual or textual fixation. In a short text of 1924 from Denkbilder Benjamin notes: ‘In allem wahrt man den Spielraum, der es befähigt, Schauplatz neuer unvorhergesehener Konstellationen zu werden. Man meidet das Definitive, Geprägte’ [In everything, they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations. The stamp of the definitive is avoided] (GS, IV.1, 309 / SW, I, 416). According to this device, in Berliner Kindheit Benjamin no longer uses the motif of the photographic camera, but the image of explicitly pre-photographic apparatuses such as the Imperial Panorama (BK, 17–19), and those ‘straff gebundne[] Büchlein’ [tightly bound booklets] (BK, 111) that were the shortlived predecessors of the cinematograph. In both panorama and booklet the memory images as ‘Reisebilder’ [Travel Scenes] (BK, 17) emerge as pictures that light up brief ly only then to disappear again, as in the chapter ‘Kaiserpanorama’ [Imperial Panorama], where ‘das Bild in seinem kleinen Rahmen wankte, um alsbald nach links vor meinen Blicken sich davon zu machen’ [the picture would sway within its little frame and then immediately trundle off to the left, as I looked on] (BK, 18 / BC, 43). These images ‘f litzen rasch vorbei’ [whiz by quickly] when one is leafing through the little booklet or looking through the windows of a moving train (GS, VII.1, 387, 399). What is true for ‘Unglücksfälle und Verbrechen’ [Misfortunes and Crimes] is also true for these pictures: ‘[...] ich faßte vor ihnen Fuß, um an dem f lüchtigen Hauch, den dies Geschehn zurückgelassen hatte, mich zu sättigen. Da war er auch schon wieder hin [...]’ [I planted my self before these places in order to steep my senses in the evanescent breath which the event had left behind. It, too, was already gone] (GS, VII.1, 422 / BC, 106). By the time the child arrives he is left with nothing but the sight of the vacated arenas of what has been: ‘Tauchten sie auf ’, Benjamin writes, ‘so waren sie, wenn ich an Ort und Stelle kam, schon wieder fort [...]’ [If they did happen to arise somewhere, they were already gone by the time I got there [...]] (GS, VII.1, 421 / BC, 103). And once again, the remembering self ‘hatte [...] das Nachsehn’ [could only look on uselessly] (BK, 110 / BC, 121).

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Camera obscura In his speech ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ [The Author as Producer] of 1934 Benjamin argues that it is the task of the contemporary writer to transfer the ‘photographische Form’ onto the literary form. Writers, he continues to recommend, should write as if they were taking photographs. The aim is that ‘wir — die Schriftsteller — ans Photographieren gehen’ [we — the writers — take up photography] (GS, II.2, 692–93 / SW, II, 775). Correspondingly, in his notes to his work on Baudelaire, Benjamin names the photographic camera as the ideal instrument of the materialist ‘Dialektiker’ since the camera, he goes on to explain, offers the negative image which can then be processed by the concept [Begriff ]. The task of the materialist dialectic is ‘festzustellen’ [both ‘to assert’ and ‘to arrest’]. The image thus produced is not definite but objective: ‘Seine Objektivität ist mit seiner kritischen Funktion strikt identisch: es ist das objektive — das heißt von der Überlieferung unbestochene — Bild [...]’ [Its objectivity is strictly identical with its critical function: this is the objective, that is, the image not corrupted by traditional perception] (GS, I.3, 1166). Interestingly, it is precisely this ‘photographic method’ which Benjamin vehemently dismisses when it comes to reading and writing his own past. In Berliner Kindheit, his aim is not photographic objectivity, not precision, nor coincidence, but the conjuring of an affective, visual and acoustic sensation. Instead of the revocation of a pre-existing past, the representation of a ‘Sachgehalt’ [material content], it is the subjective act of the recording itself, and with it the subject who does the recording, that becomes of central significance. What Benjamin writes with regard to Proust’s Recherche also holds true for his own autobiographical writing: ‘Einheit des Textes nämlich ist allein der actus purus des Erinnerns selber’ [Only the actus purus of remembrance itself constitutes the unity of the text] (GS, II.1, 312 / SW, II, 238). This does not mean that in Berliner Kindheit memory is purely self-referential. Rather, it means that past and memory simultaneously condition and unsettle each other. We saw that in his short text ‘Ausgraben und Erinnern’ [Excavation and Remem­ brance] Benjamin already questions the idea of an original past. The act of remem­ bering, he argues, is not about the recuperation or excavation of a past reality but can be described as a process whereby the material content is both constituted and dispersed. ‘Ausstreuen’ [to disseminate] and ‘umwühlen’ [to dig over] are the characteristic verbs Benjamin uses to describe this process. As ‘zerstreut und fort­ getragen’ [scattered and carried away] they resurface in Berliner Kindheit (GS, VII.1, 422). The facts do not exist as pure objects of cognition but are, on the contrary, insolubly merged with the layers of memory images that can only ever create simulacra [(Trug)Bilder] of the idea of an essence. A chapter from Berliner Kindheit further illustrates this concept. In ‘Das Fieber’ [The Fever] Benjamin describes how the sick child turns his bed into a cave: So richtete ich’s manchmal ein, daß sich in diesem Bergwall eine Höhle auftat. Ich kroch hinein; ich zog die Decke über den Kopf und hielt mein Ohr dem dunklen Schlunde hin, die Stille ab und zu mit Worten speisend, die als Geschichten aus ihr wiederkehrten. Bisweilen mischten sich die Finger ein und führten selber einen Vorgang auf (BK, 48).

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Photography, Memory, and Representation [Hence, I sometimes arranged things so that a cave opened up in this mountain wall. I crawled inside; I drew the covers over my head and turned my ear toward the dark abyss, feeding the stillness now and then with words, which came back out of it as stories. On occasion, the fingers joined in and themselves stage-managed the scene (BC, 75).]

It has been said that the shadow games which the child plays underneath the blanket are reminiscent of Plato’s parable of the cave.29 The platonic cave as ‘Szenario der Umlenkung’ [scenario of redirection/def lection] has often been compared to the camera obscura.30 The camera obscura is also the decisive metaphor for Benjamin here. In the same way that the child translates the echoes resounding from the depths of the ‘Betthöhle’ [bed cave] into his own shadow images on blanket and walls, the narrator of Berliner Kindheit also does not create authentic reproductions of the past. Rather, his writing captures the past’s volatile, secondary ref lections.31 Benjamin Palimpsest In his essay ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’ [Toward the Image of Proust] of 1929 Benjamin describes the ‘Teppich des gelebten Daseins’ [carpet of lived existence] (GS, II.1, 311) as a series of memory images that cannot be stilled. As endless chains, their coherency is guaranteed only by the act of remembering itself. Whereas an experienced incident is finite inasmuch as it is enclosed in the sphere of lived experience, the remembered incident is ‘schrankenlos’ [infinite] (GS, II.1, 312 / SW, II, 238). This is why the knitting-together of memory images turns into an endless act of collecting images as it becomes an unlimited process of remembering. Benjamin defines this process not as a substantial but as a serial movement, ‘weil [ein erinnertes Erlebnis] nur Schlüssel ist zu allem was vor ihm und zu allem was nach ihm kam’ [because it [the remembered event] is merely a key to everything that happened before it and after it] (GS, II.1, 312 / SW, II, 238). He thus identifies with regard to Proust what Genette would later discuss as the metonymical structure of the mémoire involontaire. A similar metonymical structure can be claimed for the memory images in Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit. Consider as case in point, next to the metaphor of the carpet, another image that features in both the Proust essay and in Berliner Kindheit. This is the image of the stocking. In Berliner Kindheit Benjamin describes how he liked to play with the stockings that his groping hand would feel in the darkness of the cupboard: Nichts ging mir über das Vergnügen, meine Hand so tief wie möglich in ihr [der Strümpfe] inneres zu versenken. Ich tat das nicht um ihrer Wärme wegen. Es war ‘Das Mitgebrachte’, das ich immer im eingerollten Innern in der Hand hielt was mich in ihre Tiefe zog [...] Nicht oft genug konnte ich die Probe auf diesen Vorgang machen. Er lehrte mich, dass Form und Inhalt, Hülle und verhülltes dasselbe sind. Er leitete mich an, die Wahrheit so behutsam aus der Dichtung hervorzuziehen wie die Kinderhand den Strumpf aus ‘Der Tasche’ holte (GS, VII.1, 416–17). [For me, nothing surpassed the pleasure of thrusting my hand as deeply as possible into its [the stocking’s] interior. I did not do this for the sake of the pocket’s warmth. It was the ‘little present’ rolled up inside that I always held in

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my hand and that drew me into the depths [...] I could not repeat the experiment on this phenomenon often enough. It taught me that form and content, veil and what is veiled, are the same. It led me to draw truth from works of literature as warily as the child’s hand retrieved the sock from ‘the pocket’ (BC, 96–97).]

Associated with the act of life writing, the stocking, as metaphor for ‘truth’, no longer refers to an external referent. Accordingly, the writing process neither means the excavation of truth, nor the excavation of an antecedent reality. Rather, the act of writing and remembering bears in itself the truth. Searching for the ‘little present’ means witnessing the unfolding of the memory process at the same time as the writing process unfolds. In opposition to the idea of a hermeneutic model of depth that was still inf luential in Berliner Chronik — paradigmatically summarized in the archaeological metaphors of remembrance — the textual and mnemonic structure of Berliner Kindheit replaces this model by a poetics of f latness whereby depth is revealed as illusion, or better, depth is revealed to be nothing more than the infinite unfolding of surface. If Benjamin, however, in the course of writing and rewriting his autobiographical text increasingly substitutes metaphors of surface for metaphors of depth, if chronology is increasingly replaced by a system of ‘non-simultaneous simultaneities’, what does this tell us about the spatio-temporal conception of the text? In his 1925 essay on ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’ [Goethe’s Elective Affinities] Benjamin identifies two different components of the art of interpretation. The first, the ‘Kommentar’ [commentary], refers to the ‘Sachgehalt’ [material content] of the text. The second, the ‘Kritik’ [critical interpretation], aims at its ‘Wahrheitsgehalt’ [truth content]. In other words, since ‘Kritik’ is based on the interpretation of the material content it is a secondary form of reading, just like a translation (GS, I.1, 125). As has been shown by Dominik Finkelde, whose argument I am following here, Benjamin defines this relation between material content and truth content as palimpsest.32 Regarding the critic who interprets the material content of a text, Benjamin remarks: ‘Man darf ihn mit dem Paläographen vor einem Pergamente vergleichen, dessen verblichener Text überdeckt wird von den Zügen einer kräftig­ eren Schrift’ [One may compare him to a paleographer in front of a parch­ment whose faded text is covered by the lineaments of a more powerful script] (GS, I.1, 125 / SW, 297–98)]. According to this remark the truth content of a text cannot be excavated like an object, it cannot be intentionally accessed. The truth content can only ever remain the interpretation of an interpretation.33 In this way a system of textual layers emerges in which the ‘verblichene Text’ [faded text] can only be deciphered through a more recent text layer ‘der sich auf ihn bezieht’ [which refers to that text] (GS, I.1, 125 / SW, I, 298). Hence each of the different layers, it seems, are equally original.34 In his essay ‘Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Leskows’ [The Storyteller: Ref lections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov] of 1936 Benjamin defines the term ‘Erzählung’ [story] according to the same principle. In opposition to the novel, the short story, or the newspaper article, ‘Erzählung’ stands, Benjamin notes, in the oral tradition inasmuch as it emerges from the slow ‘Einander-Überdecken dünner und transparenter Schichten [...], daß das treffendste Bild von der Art und Weise abgibt, in der die vollkommene Erzählung aus der

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Schichtung vielfacher Nacherzählungen an den Tag tritt’ [piling up, one on top of the other, of thin, transparent layers which constitutes the most appropriate image of the way in which the perfect narrative is revealed through the layers of various retellings] (GS, II.2, 448 / SW, III, 150). We find a corresponding image to this conception of ‘Erzählung’ as palimpsest in Berliner Kindheit; Benjamin calls it the art of getting lost. ‘Diese Kunst’, Benjamin explains, ‘habe ich spät erlernt; sie hat den Traum erfüllt, von dem die ersten Spuren Labyrinthe auf den Löschblättern meiner Hefte waren’ [This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks] (BK, 11 / BC, 54). The graphical traces preserved on the sheets of blotting paper are the first traces. Yet as imprints of the antecedent text on the pages of the child’s notebook they are originally secondary traces.35 By turning secondary into first traces Benjamin’s maze suggests a supplementary structure. The categories of original and representation, archetype and likeness, no longer apply. Truth only manifests itself in form of a ref lection, or rather, truth emerges in the in-between spaces of a loosely knitted texture of spatially and temporarily remote textual images. Benjamin’s poetics of memory is characterized by the permanent figure of the in-between. This explains why the photographic metaphors and with them the Proustian notion of impression can no longer apply. The past, Benjamin tells us here, is only readable through the various transparent layers that can no longer be distinguished from each other. And it is only in the interpretation of these multiple layers of mediated, secondary sound and shadow images that truth can emerge. In the in-between spaces of this mobile network, in the in-between spaces of these reciprocal correspondences, life can be both ‘auf bewahrt’ [stored] and ‘aufgehoben’ [preserved/suspended] (GS, I.2, 703). Notes to Chapter 4 1. See Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), particularly, pp. 230–38. 2. Scholem, Walter Benjamin, p. 223. 3. Benjamin writes: ‘Erinnerungen, selbst wenn sie ins Breite gehen, stellen nicht immer eine Autobiographie dar. Und dieses hier ist ganz gewiss keine [...]. Denn die Autobiographie hat es mit der Zeit, dem Ablauf und mit dem zu tun, was den stetigen Fluß des Lebens ausmacht. Hier aber ist von einem Raum, von Augenblicken und vom Unstetigen die Rede. Denn wenn auch Monate und Jahre hier auftauchen, so ist es in der Gestalt, die sie im Augenblick des Eingedenkens haben. Diese seltsame Gestalt — man mag sie f lüchtig oder ewig nennen — in keinem Falle ist der Stoff, aus welchem sie gemacht wird, der des Lebens’ (GS, VI, 488). [Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. And these quite certainly do not [...]. For autobiography has to do with time, with sequence, and what makes up the continuous f low of life. Here, I am talking of space, of moments and discontinuities. For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have at the moment of commemoration. This strange form — it may be called f leeting or eternal — is in neither case the stuff that life is made of within this context (SW, II, 612)]. 4. See also Benjamin’s Denkbilder [Thought Figures] (GS, IV.1, 356–57, 398, 420). 5. On the ‘Umwandlung der Lebensgeschichte in die eines Erinnerns’ [transformation of the history of life into the history of reminiscence] see Ignatz Knips, ‘Eingedenken und mémoire involontaire’, Weimarer Beträge, 40 (1994), 128–34 (pp. 129–30), and more recently Nicolas Pethes, Mnemographie: Poetiken der Erinnerung und Destruktion nach Walter Benjamin (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999), p. 325.

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6. Pethes, Mnemographie, p. 263. 7. The ‘Fassung letzter Hand’ [Final Version] or ‘Pariser Fassung’ of Berliner Kindheit um neun­ zehnhundert was discovered in 1981 in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris and published in 1987. It was still meant to be supplemented by revised additional texts. The earlier version of 1932/33 was discovered in 1987 and published as ‘Gießener Fassung’ in 2000. See for the text’s genesis see Scholem, Walter Benjamin, particularly, pp. 225–38; Bernd Witte, ‘Bilder der Endzeit: Zu einem authentischen Text der Berliner Kindheit von Walter Benjamin’, DVjs, 58 (1984), 570–92; Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Nachwort’ (BK, 115–26); and, brief ly, Anja Lemke, ‘Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert’, in Benjamin-Handbuch: Leben — Werk — Wirkung, ed. by Burkhard Lindner (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2006), pp. 653–63 (pp. 653–54). 8. He did so ‘angesichts der ungeheuer absorbierenden, auf meine eigenen Schrift[en] intensiv inf luenzierenden Natur dieser Arbeit’ [given the hugely absorbing nature of this work which also enormously inf luences my own writings] (GB, III, 406). 9. As Benjamin writes to Adorno: ‘Es wird Sie interessieren, daß erstmals auch wieder vier Bände Proust dabei sind, in denen ich oft lese’ [You will be interested to hear that it once again includes four volumes of Proust, in which I often read] (GB, II, 557–58 / CB, 398). See also Walter Benjamin — Gershom Scholem: Briefwechsel 1933–1940 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), p. 20. 10. This was suggested by Peter Szondi, ‘Hoffnung im Vergangenen: Über Walter Benjamin’, in Schriften, ed. by Wolfgang Fietkau, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978), ii, 275–94 (p. 278). 11. The first form Benjamin refers to here is Léon Daudet’s Paris vécu, a title that emphasizes the significance of topography for Benjamin’s life writing (GS, VI, 467). We shall discuss this dimension of Benjamin’s autobiographical project in the following chapter. 12. Szondi explains these coincidences on social and historical common grounds, ‘Hoffnung im Vergangenen’, p. 280. And yet they seem too detailed to be just accidental. 13. Szondi, ‘Hoffnung im Vergangenen’, p. 287. 14. Pethes, Mnemographie, p. 275. 15. Adorno, ‘Nachwort zur Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert’, p. 76. 16. Gerhard Richter, Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2000), p. 166. 17. Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses (Munich: Beck, 1999), p. 177. 18. See chapter I.1. 19. For a detailed analysis of mémoire involontaire and the dialectical image, see Teschke, Proust und Benjamin, although Teschke does not discuss the aspect of the photographic. For photography and the conception of history in Benjamin, see, again, Cadava, Words of Light. 20. See again Adorno, Richter, Cadava, quoted above, and Rugg’s rather generalizing remark according to which ‘Benjamin converts photography into theory and literature’, Picturing Ourselves, p. 7. 21. Karl Heinz Bohrer, for example, maintains that the ‘nachdrückliche Betonung medialer Vermittlung’ [expressly emphasized inf luence of the media] emerges in Benjamin’s writing, ‘weil sie dem Modus des Geheimnisse aufdeckenden Momentanismus entspricht, nicht wegen der technischen Innovation’ [because it best fits the momentary method which divulges the hidden, quite apart from any revolution of a technical nature], Der Abschied: Theorie de Trauer: Baudelaire, Goethe, Nietzsche, Benjamin (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), p. 556, my emphasis. Bohrer’s concern mirrors Warning’s claim for a ‘weak mediality’ in Proust, ‘Aura und Profanation’, in Proust und die Künste, pp. 266–67, quoted above. 22. Freud, ‘Konstruktionen in der Analyse’ (1937), in Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband: Schriften zur Behandlungstechnik, 393–406 (pp. 396–97). 23. On further analysis of the word ‘Wolke’ [cloud] in this respect, see, Werner Hamacher, ‘The Word Wolke — if it is one’, Studies in 20th Century Literature, 11/1 (1986), 133–62. 24. See Benjamin’s letter to Scholem in Benjamin–Scholem, p. 39. 25. Pethes, Mnemographie, p. 292. 26. As Hart Nibbrig comments: ‘Die gezielte Rückbesinnung ist auch eine Erneuerung, in der

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sich das “ursprüngliche Vernehmen der Worte” (Trauerspiel) wiedereinstellt’ [The concerted recollection is also a renewal which brings back the ‘original perception of the words’ (Mourning Play)], ‘Das déjà-vu des ersten Blicks: Zu Walter Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert’, DVjs, 47 (1973), 711–29 (pp. 719, 729). For more passages on the sound of words, see Berliner Chronik (GS, VI, 495, 497, 511). 27. For another example of the use of the metaphor of the cavity, see, Berliner Chronik, where Benjamin describes recollections of summer as ‘Moose, die man auf gut Glück im Dunkeln sich von den Wänden in einer Höhle rauft’ [moss that one plucks at random in the dark from the walls of a cave] (GS, VI, 512 / BCHR, 53). 28. While the narrator will revisit the child’s room in his mind to remember, the father had come there to forget, see the addition made in the final version: ‘Mein Vater war hereingekommen, um nicht allein zu sein. Er suchte aber mein Zimmer auf und nicht mich. Die Beiden konnten keinen Vertrauten brauchen.’ [My father had come by in order not to be alone. He had sought out my room, however, and not me. The two of them could have wanted no confident] (GS, VII.1, 411 / BC, 86). 29. Witte, ‘Bilder der Endzeit’, p. 588. 30. Busch, Belichtete Welt, p. 13. See, paradigmatically, Paul Valéry in a lecture delivered in 1939 at the Sorbonne on the occasion of the centenary of photography: ‘Qu’est-ce que la fameuse caverne de Platon, si ce n’est déjà une chambre noire, la plus grande, je pense, que l’on ait jamais réalisée.’, ‘Discours du centenaire de la photographie’ (1939), Études photographiques, 10 (2001), 89–97 (p. 95) [What is Plato’s famous cave if not a camera obscura, the largest every conceived, I suppose?, ‘The Centenary of Photography’, trans. by Roger Shattuck and Frederick Brown, in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. by Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980), pp. 191–98 (p. 197)]. 31. We shall take up again this line of argument in the following chapter on Benjamin’s selfportraits. 32. Dominik Finkelde, Benjamin liest Proust, pp. 126–27. 33. Bettine Menke points this out, in Sprachfiguren: Name — Allegorie — Bild nach Benjamin (Munich: Fink, 1991), pp. 276–77. 34. Both Menke and Finkelde relate Derrida’s conception of ‘archi-écriture’ to Benjamin’s argument: ‘C’est ce que veut dire archi-écriture: non pas une écriture première faisant l’objet d’une archéologie mais toujours une écriture déjà, à même le sol, des écritures’ [This is what is meant by arche-writing: not a first writing which would be the object of an archaeology, but always a writing already, right on the soil, of writings], ‘Scribble: pouvoir/écrire’, in William Warburton, Essai sur les hiéroglyphes des égyptiens, ed. by Patrick Tort (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1978), p. 12. 35. Pethes, Mnemographie, p. 297.

CHAPTER 5

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From Sight to Site: Benjamin’s Self-Portraits In and Out of the Field of Looks Der Engel ich höre ihn noch / aber er hat kein Gesicht mehr als / Deines das ich nicht kenne [The angel I still hear him / but he has no more face than / Yours which I do not know]1

A chapter from Berliner Kindheit that was thus far deliberately left aside now comes into focus: ‘Die Mummerehlen’, which opens the 1932/33 version of the text, is a memory image that Benjamin later calls a photographical ‘Selbstportrait’ [selfportrait] (B, II, 591).2 In the same way that Proust alludes to the photograph in the drawer,3 in ‘Die Mummerehlen’ Benjamin also refers to two photographic portraits that exist in reality. The first portrait shows the child Walter and his brother Georg dressed up as ‘Salontiroler’ [parlour Tyroleans] (GS, II.1, 374), posing in front of a painted scene of the Alps. Both children are staring, with an air somewhere between silent suffering and apathetic indifference, in opposite directions.4 The description of the second portrait comes from that of a little boy standing next to a palm tree, dressed in a child’s costume and carrying a sombrero. Although taken a good twenty years later than the portrait of the child Marcel Proust, Benjamin’s photographs are of the same genre. Exhibiting their objects in props and masquerade remote in time (Louis XVII in the case of Proust) or space (the Alps, the palm tree, the sombrero in the case of Benjamin) they are both examples of bourgeois selfstagings that leave their objects transformed beyond recognition. The photographs are similar, but their respective functions within the texts are very different. Both Proust and Benjamin discuss the display and erasure of photographic self-portraits. And yet, because Proust, as we have seen, is not in search of his own portrait, the references of his narrator to his own picture are playfully negligent and are given little space compared to the theme of his fascination and obsession with photographs of others. Similarly, we may suspect that Benjamin is also ultimately not in search of his own picture. Nevertheless, in his version of photographic exposure and its deletion the photographic self-portrait acquires major significance for Benjamin’s mode of autobiographical writing. For Benjamin is interested in an aspect associated with photography that leaves Proust utterly unmoved. Once more drawing on a

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Fig. 3. Walter und Georg Benjamin in Schreiberhau Carte-de-visite Photograph, Atelier Gillert, c. 1902

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Lacanian vocabulary, as I have done in the case of Proust, we could call this aspect the ‘gaze of the Other’, a gaze that, as a primordial and external gaze, is separated from the self and removes the self from his central position while transforming him from an observing subject into the object of observation. In this chapter we shall therefore explore the question of how the Benjaminian self is constructed (or deconstructed) through a network of looking, this network’s implications for the dynamics of power relations, how the photographic camera inserts itself into these power relations, and finally, the self ’s strategies for avoiding them. During the course of the analysis we will, as in the corresponding chapter on Proust, take up again facets of Lacan’s theorization of ‘le regard’ to help us disentangle the different looks that organize Benjamin’s writing.5 Assuming that Benjamin’s autobiographical writing is marked by the conf lict between a regime of the ‘gaze’ and a regime of the ‘look’ that determines the conception of self hood in Berliner Kindheit, the following discussion is divided into two main sections. The first section focuses on the ‘Blickraum der Photographie’ [visual space of photography] (GS, II.1, 372 / SW, II, 512) and its effects on the subject who enters it. The second section concentrates on the process of the erasure of this ‘Blickraum’ and analyses the ‘Bildraum’ [image space] (GS, II.1, 309 / SW II, 217) the text eventually offers instead. Self-Portraits I Benjamin’s description of the photographic self-portrait in his 1932/33 version of Ber­liner Kindheit, which we referred to brief ly in the introduction, reads as follows: Wohin ich blickte, sah ich mich umstellt von Leinwandschirmen, Polstern, Sockeln, die nach meinem Bilde gierten wie die Schatten des Hades nach dem Blut des Opfertiers. Am Ende brachte man mich einem roh gepinselten Prospekt der Alpen dar, und meine Rechte, die ein Gemsbarthütlein erheben mußte, legte auf die Wolken und Firnen der Bespannung ihren Schatten. Doch das gequälte Lächeln um den Mund des kleinen Älplers ist nicht so betrübend wie der Blick, der aus dem Kinderantlitz, das im Schatten der Zimmerpalme liegt, sich in mich senkt. Sie stammt aus einem jener Ateliers, welche mit ihren Schemeln und Stativen, Gobelins und Staffeleien etwas vom Boudoir und von der Folterkammer haben. Ich stehe barhaupt dar; in meiner Linken einen gewaltigen Sombrero, den ich mit einstudierter Grazie hängen lasse. Die Rechte ist mit einem Stock befaßt, dessen gesenkter Knauf im Vordergrund zu sehen ist, indessen sich sein Ende in einem Büschel von Pleureusen verbirgt, die sich von einem Gartentisch ergießen. Ganz abseits, neben der Portiere, steht die Mutter starr, in einer engen Taille. Wie eine Schneiderfigurine blickt sie auf meinen Samtanzug, der seinerseits mit Posamenten überladen und von einem Modeblatt zu stammen scheint. Ich aber bin entstellt von Ähnlichkeit mit allem, was hier um mich ist (BK, 7–9). [Wherever I looked I saw myself surrounded by folding screens, cushions, and pedestals which craved my image much as the shades of Hades craved the blood of the sacrificial animal. In the end, I was offered up to the crudely painted prospect of the Alps, and my right hand, which had to brandish a kidskin hat, cast its shadow on the clouds and snowfields of the backdrop. But the tortured smile on the lips of the little mountaineer is not as disturbing as the look I take

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From Sight to Site in now from the child’s face, which lies in the shadow of the potted palm.6 The latter comes from one of those studios which — with their footstools and tripods, tapestries and easels — put you in mind of both a boudoir and a torture chamber. I am standing there, bareheaded, my left hand holding a giant sombrero which I dangle with studied grace. My right hand is occupied with a walking stick, whose curved handle can be seen in the foreground while its tips remain hidden in a cluster of ostrich feathers spilling from a garden table. Over to the side, near the curtained doorway, my mother stands motionless in her tight bodice. As though attending to a tailor’s dummy she scrutinizes my velvet suit, which for its part is laden with braid, and other trimming and looks like something out of a fashion magazine.7 I however am distorted by similarity to all that surrounds me here (BC, 131–32).]

In his essay ‘Looking at Photographs’, Victor Burgin — borrowing his terminology from film theory — identifies four basic types of look in the photograph: the look of the camera as it photographs the ‘pro-photographic’ event; the look of the viewer as he looks at the photograph; the ‘intradiegetic’ looks exchanged between people depicted in the photograph and/or looks from people towards objects, and the look the portrayed person may direct to the camera.8 Burgin’s categorization of different types of look can help us to untie the relations of looking that traverse the ‘field of looks’ in Benjamin’s description of the two photographs. Indeed we find the depersonalized look of the camera that turns the self into a spectacle. We also find the look of the ‘self-as-spectator’ at the photograph. We have the supposedly ‘intradiegetical’, or perhaps rather, ‘intrapictorial’ look of the mother that, curiously, does not alight upon the child itself but upon his costume. And finally, we find two variations: although the portrayed subject does not look into the camera but towards the right-hand side of the photograph, his gaze ‘sinks into the spectator’. Moreover, the portrayed self does not look at objects, but the props in turn ‘lust for his own image’. Benjamin’s network of looks within and around the photographs describes a power conf lict between the gaze and the look. Turning again to Lacan’s theory of ‘le regard’ where we had left it in the discussion of Proust’s autobiographical novel, and applying it even further, will enable us to understand this conf lict. The Gaze In ‘Die Mummerehlen’ the gift of recognizing similarities is described as part of the child’s learning process in understanding the world. Words have this effect on the child to become similar to apartments, furniture, clothes, yet not to patterns of manners, and not to his own image (BK, 7). This similarity to oneself, is, however, precisely what is demanded from the child when he enters the ‘field of looks’ that is the photographic studio. In ‘Die Mummerehlen’ Benjamin describes himself being seen. No longer occupying a mastering vantage point, the portrayed self experiences how he becomes himself the object of an external gaze. The basic separation between the gaze and the space occupied by the subject that Benjamin suggests here is similar to that in which Lacan grounds his theoretical observations on the gaze. As in Lacan’s model of the ‘field of vision’, in Benjamin’s scene the gaze that focuses the subject is not only depersonalized (there is no mention of a photographer), but

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also de-anthropomorphized, inasmuch as it is entirely conf lated with the technical gaze of the camera. Moreover, like for Lacan, for Benjamin the relation of the gaze of the camera to the look of the subject is antinomic because it cannot be met or returned. And just as Benjamin does here, Lacan also describes the process whereby the subject is either ratified or negated through the inapprehensible agency of the gaze, as a ‘photo session’: ‘Ce qui me détermine foncièrement dans le visible’, we remember reading in Les Quatre Concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, c’est le regard qui est au-dehors. C’est par le regard que j’entre dans la lumière, et c’est du regard que j’en reçois l’effet. D’où il ressort que le regard est l’instrument par où la lumière s’incarne, et par où [...] je suis photo-graphié. [What determines me, at the most profound level, in the visible, is the gaze that is outside. It is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which [...] I am photo-graphed.]9

This photographic gaze precedes the subject-as-spectacle. What is more, it cannot be identified, but rather, it surrounds the subject. When Lacan writes: ‘je ne vois que d’un point, mais dans mon existence je suis regardé de partout’ [I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides],10 we find this experience dramatized in Benjamin’s photographic studio where the props are described as craving for the self ’s picture.11 However, while a dialogue between Benjamin’s autobiographical text and Lacan’s theory helps to unpack some of Benjamin’s basic assumptions, the differences between the two remain striking. Lacan’s concept of ‘le regard’ and the model of subjectivity on which it is based are transhistorical. For Lacan the gaze is a ‘fonction de la voyure’ [function of seeingness]12 which refers to the ‘deep structure’ of the human psyche. To be in the world simply means to be seen: ‘Ce qui nous fait conscience nous institue du même coup comme speculum mundi’ [That which makes us consciousness institutes us by the same token as speculum mundi].13 Lacan is not interested in an investigation of the historical vicissitudes the gaze or the subject may be susceptible to, nor does he seek to analyse any particular structures of society’s visual regimes.14 Even Lacan’s use of the metaphor of the camera does not necessarily imply any kind of historical periodization. For Lacan, as Kaja Silverman reminds us, cuts the word in half, ‘photo-graphié’, thereby suggesting that the camera appears as an appropriate image simply because it schematizes its object within light.15 Benjamin’s description of the external gaze and its effects on the subject in ‘Mummerehlen’ is quite different in this respect. His depiction of the experience of being photographed dramatizes the murderous aspects of the command of self-sameness when the process of the self being transformed into his own picture is described as an act of ritual sacrifice [Blutopfer]. Moreover, in contrast to Lacan, for Benjamin the emergence of the camera does cause a decisive modification of the schematization of the object within light, a modification which can indeed be linked to precisely definable technical and historical changes. In his ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ Benjamin sees a direct connection between the new prowess of modern cameras that were able to erase the darkness characterizing earlier photographs, minutely recording the external appearance of their objects, and what he depicts in Marxist terms as the

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‘zunehmende Entartung des imperialistischen Bürgertums’ [deepening degeneration of the imperialist bourgeoisie] (GS, II.1, 377 / SW, II, 517). We find this struggle between darkness and light ref lected in ‘Die Mummerehlen’, where the child seems to hide in the shadow of the palm tree but cannot escape the camera’s f lashlight. In Benjamin’s autobiographical text, illumination means subjection. Here, the process of being photographed is understood as ratification of the self-as-subject in terms of a self-relinquishment. It causes the dissociation of consciousness and identity through the analogous fixation of the trace that ties the subject down to a socially sanctioned identity alien to itself. The photographic gaze not only tracks down the subject-as-spectacle and arrests it, but, by annihilating distance, threatens to devour its individuality, threatens to make it same. This process of specular subjection, the victory of conformity over diversity, is further emphasized by the child’s masquerade. Dressed up in a costume that has pretensions to exotic otherness but actually illustrates its ‘imperialist’ domestication as fashion ideal, Benjamin emphasizes the erasure of otherness. The ‘intrapictorial’ look of the mother at the child does not offer protection here. On the contrary: with her waist pulled in by her costume, which gives her the shape of a tailor’s dummy, her position resembles that of the child’s own in its disfiguring masquerade.16 Her eyes, however, as brief ly mentioned above, are not directed at the child itself but at his costume. Both victim of and accomplice to the external gaze she thus appears to facilitate rather than prevent the joining of the child and his image.17 We find this further confirmed in the chapter ‘Bettler und Huren’ [Beggars and Whores] where the motifs of mother, fashion and conformity resurface. In this chapter the child appears as ‘Gefangener des alten und neuen Westens’ [prisoner of the old and the new West End], as prisoner of his ‘Clan’ (BK, 92) whose only possible form of revolt is sabotage: Auf sie [Sabotage] griff ich zurück, wenn ich der Mutter mich zu entziehen suchte. Am liebsten bei den ‘Besorgungen’, und zwar mit einem verstockten Eigensinn, der sie erbitterte. Ich hatte nämlich die Gewohnheit angenommen, immer um einen halben Schritt zurückzubleiben (BK, 92). [[To this sabotage] I had recourse whenever I sought escape from my mother. Usually it was on those occasions when she was out ‘running errands’, and when my impenitent self-will would often drive her to the edge of despair. I had, in fact, formed the habit of always lagging a half-step behind her (BC, 159).]

The mother is described as the Other who introduces the child to the world of cultural representations. Just as the child in the photographic studio seeks to escape social standardization by receding into the shade, here the child seeks to resist by always lagging a half-step behind. In his photographic self-portrait Benjamin describes how the external gaze situates the subject in ideology. Yet for Benjamin the gaze as schematization of the object in light does not merely, as Lacan argues, put us ‘in the picture’. Nor is the self-abandonment of the ‘true’ self understood as a depth-psychological given. In ‘Die Mummerehlen’ the subject’s experience of the world as ‘omnivoyeur’ [allseeing]18 causes anxiety and takes on a traumatizing dimension. Here ‘illumi­nation’ does not only lead to social ratification, it threatens destruction. The ideo­logical

From Sight to Site

Fig. 4. Franz Kaf ka, c. 1887 © Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Walter Benjamin Archiv

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subject emerges at the expense of the self. And the camera is not just a meta­ phor for the process of scopic subjection. It functions as its actual and historically localizable tool. The fundamental suspicion Benjamin articulates here against the gaze does not necessarily, as one may believe at this point, indicate a general denigration of vision in his thinking. For Benjamin specularity does not always imply subjection. As mutual look it even becomes essential for the formation of self hood. It is this other dimension of seeing and being seen we shall explore now when shifting the emphasis from the self-as-spectacle to the self-as-look and directing the attention to the ‘extrapictorial’ look of the narrating self at the photograph, in particular at the portrayed child. The Look While the eyes of the observing self wander from one to the other photograph and memory images merge with what can actually be seen, the eyes of this second portrayed child seem to take on life. Indeed, whereas with regard to the first photograph the eyes of the child are not mentioned (only the child’s fatigued smile), when looking at the second photograph the beholder feels the child’s look ‘sinking into’ his own consciousness. Now we find the non-reciprocal gaze of the camera’s external gaze contrasted with the reciprocal look between the subject-as-look and the object-as-spectacle. The visual axis that emerges here and connects the viewer with the portrayed object mirrors that which we earlier began to discuss with regard to Proust.19 This is the idea of a subject-to-subject relation based on the experience of the mutual look. Here the observer’s look endows the object-as-spectacle with the capacity to look back. By opposing the child’s look against the blinding gaze of the camera Benjamin adds the dimension of a power struggle between the ideological, collective gaze and the subjective look. The lighting up of the child’s eyes under the productive look of the viewing self appears as a sign of resilience. What takes place here is what we have earlier discussed with reference to Lacan as the gift of love that opposes the gaze inasmuch as it establishes an equal subject-tosubject relation based on the reciprocal look. In the moment of its experience, the object resists objectification. It lifts up its eyes. Yet Benjamin’s construction of the mutual look becomes even more complex when we acknowledge that in the existing photograph which Benjamin uses as a model, the child whose look sinks into the observer’s consciousness, is not Ben­ jamin. In fact, Benjamin engages here in what he elsewhere calls a citation without quotation marks (GS, V.1, 572), whereby he simultaneously conceals and reveals that his ekphrasis is based on a photographic portrait that does not show himself but Franz Kaf ka at the age of five.20 We find the portrait first described in Benjamin’s ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ (GS, II.1, 376–77).21 Interestingly, it is by using this Kaf ka photograph that Benjamin articulates his conception of the aura for the first time in a theoretical text.22 Benjamin comments: Dies Bild in seiner uferlosen Trauer ist ein Pendant der frühen Photographie, auf welcher die Menschen noch nicht abgesprengt und gottverloren in die Welt

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sahen wie hier der Knabe. Es war eine Aura um sie, ein Medium, das ihrem Blick, indem er es durchdringt, die Fülle und die Sicherheit gibt (GS, II.1, 375–76). [This picture, in its infinite sadness, forms a pendant to the early photographs in which people did not yet look out at the world in so excluded and godforsaken a manner as this boy. There was an aura about them, a medium that lent fullness and security to their gaze even as it penetrated that medium (SW, II, 515–17).]

The aura here appears as a medium that is inherently linked to the glance of the portrayed object. Yet Benjamin’s formulation is ambivalent. Under the term ‘Pendant’ the Kaf ka portrait could be both complement of and counterpart to the auratic daguerreotypes of an earlier epoch. The portrait, it seems, reveals the aura in the process of its inevitable disappearance. Moreover, Benjamin’s implicit identification with the portrait of Kaf ka does not merely illustrate that he is less concerned with the private than with, in Bernd Witte’s words, the social condition of the child’s individuality in the bourgeois, Jewish milieu around 1900.23 When Benjamin once again draws on the dimension of the photograph as a doubling, or, as Barthes puts it in La Chambre claire, ‘l’avènement de moi-même comme autre’ [the advent of myself as other] (OC, V, 798 / CL, 12), he does so with a different purpose in mind. For his visual identification with the portrait of Kaf ka offers a displacement ‘auf gute Art’ [in a good way] (BK, 7), a refuge for the self in the image of the other, against the ideological demand of self-sameness.24 The opening up of the self towards the other who is not self and not other but between self and other, between several diffractions of self and other, draws on the dialectic of distance and nearness the aura sets into play. In this moment, when the observer sees himself in the photograph, as other, as self, in this act of looking, the self becomes simultaneously same and other, loses and at the same time gains himself in and through the look of the other. He is, because he is self and other at the same time, or perhaps neither. He is, in Lacoue-Labarthe’s wording, ‘ce qui doit se “présenter” ne se présente pas lui-même, n’apparaisse pas comme lui-même’, ‘se différencie, s’aliène, s’extériorise, s’extasie, se donne [...] et, se donant, se perdre’ [which ‘must “present” itself not present itself, not appear as itself ’, but instead ‘differentiate itself, alienate itself, externalize itself, transport itself, give itself [...] and, through giving itself, lose itself ’].25 In 1938, the year during which Benjamin completed his so-called ‘Fassung letz­ter Hand’ of Berliner Kindheit, Bertold Brecht notes in his Arbeitsjournal [Work Journal]: benjamin ist hier. Er schreibt an einem essay über baudelaire. [...] merkwürdigerweise ermöglicht ein spleen benjamin, das zu schreiben. er geht von etwas aus, was er aura nennt, was mit dem träumen zusammenhängt (dem wachträumen). er sagt: wenn man einen blick auf sich gerichtet fühlt, auch im rücken, erwidert man ihn (!). die erwartung, daß, was man anblickt, einen selber anblickt, verschafft die aura. [...] alles mystik, bei einer haltung gegen mystik. [...] es ist ziemlich grauenhaft. [benjamin is here. he is writing an essay on baudelaire [...] oddly enough it is spleen that enables benjamin to write this. he uses as his point of departure something he calls the aura, which is connected with dreaming (daydreams). he says: if you feel a gaze directed at you, even at your back, you return it (!).

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From Sight to Site the expectation that what you look at will look back at you creates the aura. [...] a load of mysticism, although his attitude is against mysticism [...] it is abominable.]26

Brecht’s comment has become well-known as an example of straightforward materialism. Yet it is interesting inasmuch as it touches upon an important point: the aura is a kind of hallucinatory subject-to-subject relation that is based on the look but that at the same time transgresses the eye. The aura is visual by being non-visual. Indeed, looking at the Kaf ka portrait we notice that the child’s eyes are not directed at the viewer but seem to focus on something that lies beyond the left-hand side of the portrait’s frame. The same can be observed with regard to the other two famous examples of auratic portraiture: David Octavius Hill’s photograph of the fisherwoman from New Haven, and the self-portrait of the photographer Karl Dauthendey with his wife, whose gaze, as Benjamin observes, passes him by, absorbed in an ominous distance (GS, II.1, 370–71). In both cases, we do not look into the eyes of the photographed object. To some extent emblematic of what Levinas, as we have seen, calls ‘visage’, the aura of a subject cannot be reduced to sight but is a visual metaphor for a revelation, a mutual attention or attentiveness, that ultimately transcends the visible.27 It is in this hallucinatory experience of the self as irretrievable other that the self can escape the threat of external incorporation. In this ‘rapport sans rapport’ [relation without relation]28 the two ‘selves’ do not merge, they do not form a whole, a clearly contoured ‘I’. On the contrary, they destabilize and transgress one another. The idea of a centred self is abandoned because it is only in the refusal to be contained, in the process of infinite withdrawal that the subject emerges. In this sense the auratic encounter between viewer and viewed object is also an erotic encounter. In his Baudelaire essay Benjamin emphasizes the ‘unapproachability’ of the cult image. Quoting Paul Valéry he argues that we recognize the auratic object through the fact that ‘keine Idee, die es uns erweckt, keine Verhaltensweise, die es uns nahelegt, es ausschöpfen oder erledigen könnte’ [no idea it inspires in us, no mode of behaviour it suggests we adopt, could ever exhaust it or dispose of it]. The cult image would be that, Benjamin continues, ‘woran sich das Auge nicht sattsehen kann. Womit es den Wunsch erfüllt, der sich in seinen Ursprung projizieren läßt, wäre etwas, was diesen Wunsch unablässig nährt’ [that of which our eyes will never have their fill. What it contains that fulfils the original desire would be the very same stuff on which the desire continuously feeds] (GS, I.2, 645 / SW, IV, 337–38). This ‘Wunsch im Blick’ [desire in the look]29 causes an exaltation of its object. The production of an inexhaustible and inconsumable beauty is the result.30 It is in this auratic/erotic encounter that the stillness of the photograph is mobilized, transcended. It is here that the self experiences his own dissolution in the image of the other-as-self, in the infinite, dynamic sensation of mutual attention. This is an act of reciprocal seeing that has nothing in common with mirroring as the ref lection of identity or sameness. As Benjamin notes in the Baudelaire essay: Blicke dürften um so bezwingender wirken, je tiefer die Abwesenheit des Schauenden, die in ihnen bewältigt wurde. In spiegelnden Augen bleibt sie unvermindert. Eben darum wissen diese Augen von Ferne nichts (GS, I.2, 648).

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[Glances may be all the more compelling, the more complete the viewer’s absence that is overcome in them. In eyes that look at us with mirrorlike blankness, the remoteness remains complete (SW, IV, 340).]

Against the nearness of the gaze that tracks the self down and thwarts him with destruction, auratic hallucinatory perception restores distance. It is perhaps because the aura ultimately transcends what can be seen that in the second and third description of the Kaf ka photograph the narrator’s eye is complemented by the ear. While in Berliner Kindheit we read, ‘Ich hauste so wie ein Weichtier in der Muschel haust im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, das nun hohl wie eine leere Muschel vor mir liegt. Ich halte sie ans Ohr’ [Like a mollusc in its shell, I had my abode in the nineteenth century, which now lies hollow before me like an empty shell. I hold it to my ear] (BK, 9 / BC, 132), in the Kaf ka essay we find that ‘unermesslich traurige Augen beherrschen die ihnen vorbestimmte Landschaft, in die die Muschel eines großen Ohrs hineinhorcht’ [immensely sad eyes dominate the landscape arranged for them, and the auricle of a large ear seems to be listening for its sounds] (GS, II.2, 416 / SW, 2, 800). Auratic hallucinatory perception transcends what seems to be visually arrested, mobilizes the petrified portrait, dissolves its frame and restores self hood beyond the confines of the ‘subject’. It is this idea of the aura as hallucinatory subjectivity in which ‘ein vergessenes Menschliches’ [something human that is forgotten] lights up for the last time,31 leaving a charac­ terless, elementary, pure feeling of mourning, as well as this synaesthetic, affective sensation of the aura which we can only experience in the moment of its necessary disappearance, that confused Brecht. Benjamin’s description of the ‘Blickraum’ of the photograph is dialectical. It emphasizes photography’s honorific as well as its repressive functions, its redemptive opening up of the terrain of the self towards the terrain of the other as well as the threat of the self ’s destruction under the gaze of the Other. And yet Benjamin eventually abandons the passage on the photograph and erases it from the last pre­ served version of Berliner Kindheit. Why? Because photography can, after all, not escape the grasp of the gaze? Because it fails to preserve? In Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde [What We See, What Watches Us] Georges Didi-Huberman writes with reference to James Joyce: Mais la modalité du visible devient inéluctable — c’est-à-dire vouée à une question d’être — quand voir, c’est sentir que quelque chose inéluctablement nous échappe, autrement dit: quand voir, c’est perdre. Tout est là.32 [But the modality of the visible becomes ineluctable — that is, devoted to a question of being — when to see is to feel that something ineluctably escapes us. In other words: when to see is to lose. That is all we need to know.]

Is it perhaps also in opposition to this ineluctable modality of the visible that Benjamin eventually abandons the passage on the photograph? And if so, what does he offer instead? With these questions we shall engage in the following section on the Benjaminian self, set free, on his journey through the spaces and places of childhood, when Benjamin, in his last version of Berliner Kindheit, shifts from sight to site.

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Self-Portraits II The successive disappearance of Benjamin’s photographic self-portrait in the process of continuous modifications of Berliner Kindheit finds its mise-en-abîme in the story of the Chinese painter with that ‘Die Mummerehlen’ concludes. In the first version of 1932/33 Benjamin writes: Sie [die Geschichte] stammt aus China und erzählt von einem alten Maler, der den Freunden sein neuestes Bild zu sehen gab. Ein Park war darauf dargestellt, ein schmaler Weg am Wasser und durch einen Baumschlag hin, der lief vor einer kleinen Türe aus, die hinten in ein Häuschen Einlaß bot. Wie sich die Freunde aber nach dem Maler umsahen, war der fort und in dem Bild. Da wandelte er auf dem schmalen Weg zur Tür, stand vor ihr still, kehrte sich um, lächelte und verschwand in ihrem Spalt (BK, 10). [The story comes from China and tells of an old painter who invited friends to see his newest picture. This picture showed a park and a narrow footpath that ran along a stream and through a grove of trees, culminating at the door of a little cottage in the background. When the painter’s friends, however, looked around for the painter, they saw that he was gone — that he was in the picture. There, he followed the little path that led to the door, paused before it quite still, turned, smiled, and disappeared through the narrow opening (BC, 134).]

At first the Chinese painter stands with his guests in front of the painting. Then he disappears — yet only to reappear again in the picture. Eventually, his presence vanishes from the visible surface of the painting like the description of the photographic self-portrait from the autobiographical text. In the 1938 version of the text, however, we find that not only has the description of the self-portrait been erased but also the story that describes the vanishing process itself.33 Like the majority of references to photography most passages that refer directly to the autobiographical self disappear from the last version. The child, we read in the chapter ‘Verstecke’ [Hiding Places], dare not at any price be found (GS, VII.1, 418).34 Within the context of ‘hide and seek’ finding the child corresponds to his arrest and exposure under the photographic gaze; it means, ‘mich als Götzen unterm Tisch erstarren machen, für immer als Gespenst in der Gardine mich verweben, auf Lebenszeit mich in die schwere Türe bannen’ [to hold me petrified as an idol under the table [...] weave me as a ghost for all time into the curtain, confine me for life within the heavy door] (GS, VII.1, 418 / BC, 100). Identification as subjection and fixation, which the photograph simultaneously effects and subverts, must be rendered impossible. Accordingly, Benjamin remarks in Berliner Chronik that ‘das Subjekt, das jahrelang im Hintergrund zu bleiben war gewohnt gewesen, sich nicht so leicht an die Rampe bitten lässt’ [this subject, accustomed for many years to waiting in the wings, would not be easily summoned to the limelight] (GS, VI, 476 / BCHR, 15). It is not until the last version of Berliner Kindheit that this ‘Vorkehrung des Subjekts, das von seinem “ich” vertreten, nicht verkauft zu werden, fordern darf ’ [the precaution of the subject represented by the ‘I’, which is entitled not to be sold cheap] (GS, VI, 476 / SW, II, 603) is fully pursued. Benjamin’s strategy for avoiding visual as well as textual self-exposure becomes

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even more evident in the correspondence of a passage from the chapter ‘Der Strumpf ’ [The Stocking] to a section from the essay ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’, where Benjamin writes: Kinder kennen ein Wahrzeichen dieser Welt, den Strumpf, der die Struktur der Traumwelt hat, wenn er im Wäschekasten eingerollt, ‘Tasche’ und ‘Mitgebrachtes’ zugleich ist. Und wie sie selbst sich nicht ersättigen können, dies beides mit einem Griff in etwas Drittes zu verwandeln: in den Strumpf, so war Proust unersättlich, die Attrappe, das Ich, mit einem Griff zu entleeren, um immer wieder jenes Dritte, das Bild, das seine Neugier, nein, sein Heimweh stillte, einzubringen (II.1, 314, my emphasis). [Children know a symbol of this world: the stocking which has the structure of this dream world when, rolled up in the laundry hamper, it is a ‘bag’ and a ‘present’ at the same time. And just as children do not tire of quickly changing the bag and its contents into a third thing — namely, a stocking — Proust could not get his fill of emptying the dummy, his self, at one stroke in order to keep garnering that third thing, the image which satisfied his curiosity — indeed, assuaged homesickness (SW, II, 240).]

Within Benjamin’s allegory the stocking plays a role similar to that which Lacan describes as the imaginary integration of real objects, or, vice versa, the integration of imaginary objects into a real environment. The stocking forms a structure that produces a point in the system which seems to be occupied by the ‘I’. Arranging real objects in an imaginary formation suggests an entity which is, however, revealed to be imaginary. ‘Imaginaire renvoie ici’, writes Lacan, ‘au rapport du sujet avec ses identifications formatrices’ [Imaginary here refers [...] to the subject’s relation to its formative identifications].35 If this structure is dissolved, the imaginary ego becomes recognizable as mere image.36 It is this image, not an autobiographical essence or the photographic trace, which structures the horizon of Benjamin’s self-writing. ‘[D]ie unauf haltsam wachsende Diskrepanz von Poesie und Leben’ [the inexorably growing discrepancy between poetry and life] (GS, II.1, 311) shows the self only as the imaginary vanishing point of a writing that forms itself independently from the instance of the author. The ‘I’ of representation is no longer primordial cause but effect of language, or writing (testimony), ‘dessen Beziehung auf ein Subjekt’, as Benjamin writes in a 1919 meditation on authorship and the artwork in correspondences, ‘so bedeutungslos ist wie die Beziehung irgendeines pragmatisch-historischen Zeugnisses (Inschrift) auf die Person seines Urhebers’ [whose relationship to a subject is just as unimportant as the relationship of any kind of pragmatically historical testimony (inscription) to the personality of its author] (GB, II, 48 / CB, 149). For Benjamin it is again Proust who reveals: Wie die Gesellschaft das Ich in Betrieb nimmt — und welche Gesellschaft das Ich in Betrieb nimmt. Wie sie es tut: mittels einer Destruktion, die sich im Gedächtnis vollzieht. Welche es tut: eine untergehende bürgerliche Gesell­schaft, die von den unbesiegten Mächten der feudalen bezwungen wird (GS, II.3, 1060). [How society activates the ‘I’ — and what society does so. How it does it: with the help of a destruction consummated in memory. What kind does it: a foundering bourgeois society, vanquished by yet unbeaten forces of the feudal one.]

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It is this ‘activation’ of the ‘I’ by society by means of his destruction that Benjamin rejects in his description of the experience of being photographed. The ‘subject’ as homogenous entity, which is what this ‘activation’ is aiming to produce, is therefore, in Benjamin’s thinking, a category that needs to be abandoned.37 As Adorno observes: ‘In all seinen Phasen hat Benjamin den Untergang des Subjekts und die Rettung des Menschen zusammengedacht’ [In all of his phases Benjamin associated the downfall of the subject with the redemption of man].38 Opposing the heirs of aesthetic subjectivity, for Benjamin the unified ‘I’ is not only an illusion but also an outmoded form of self-ref lection.39 This does not, however, lead him into the radical ‘Antisubjektivismus’ [anti-subjectivism] that Adorno later ascribes to Benjamin’s work.40 Benjamin is not interested in a suspension of the subject but rather in its transgression and differentiation. Summarizing the position of metempsychosis in a short piece on Death, he writes: ‘Das Individuum ist eine unteilbare aber unabgeschlossene Einheit [...] Auf das scheinbar ganze (geschlossne) Individuum kommt es nicht an’ [The individual is an indivisible yet incomplete unity [...] the seemingly whole (cohesive) individual does not matter] (GS, VI, 71). Accordingly, when Benjamin writes ‘ich’ in Berliner Kindheit, he does not refer to an essence or a truth of the subject but to an imaginary form of the self. The only way to write about the ‘true’ self is therefore to do this as indirectly as possible. As we read in Berliner Chronik where Benjamin contemplates an autobiography in form of a graphical scheme of his life, as a labyrinthine family tree: ‘Was in der Kammer seiner rätselhaften Mitte haust, Ich oder Schicksal, soll mich hier nicht kümmern, umso mehr aber die vielen Eingänge, die ins Innere führen’ [I am not concerned here with what is installed in the chamber at its enigmatic centre, ego or fate, but all the more with the many entrances leading into the interior] (GS, VI, 491 / BCHR, 31). To avoid the danger of self-exposure the self can only be described ex negativo. Thus it becomes the invisible, the unrepresentable vanishing point of the autobiographical text. In ‘Die Mummerehlen’ Benjamin favours, against the demand of similarity to oneself, another kind of similarity, a similarity that we have discussed in the pre­ vious chapter as non-sensuous similarity, a similarity to the sound of words, or colours, words and colours like clouds, like ‘zerf ließendes Gewölk’ [melting clouds] (BK, 10). This is why the short passage that describes the child painting, which in the first version of Berliner Kindheit introduces the story of the Chinese painter, in the last version fills an entire new chapter, entitled, ‘Die Farben’ [The Colours]. In this chapter Benjamin again takes up the theme of mimesis and cognition. And the act of painting is not only described as a form of disguise, as the self merging into the object, but in the imagery of love making: Es ging mir wie beim Tuschen, wo die Dinge mir ihren Schoß auftaten, sobald ich sie mit einer feuchten Wolke überkam. Ähnliches begab sich mit Seifenblasen. Ich reiste mit ihnen durch die Stube und mischte mich ins Farbenspiel der Kuppel bis sie zersprang. Am Himmel [...] verlor ich mich an die Farben (GS, VII.1, 424). [It was like when I painted with watercolours, when things would open their womb to me as soon as I overcame them with a moist cloud. Something similar

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occurred with soap bubbles. I travelled in them throughout the room and mingled in the play of colours of the cupola, until it burst. [...] In the sky [...] I would lose myself to the colours.]41

Just as in the story of the Chinese painter, here the image is no longer image, it no longer represents, but rather the self enters into the image, disappears within the image. The process is magic, magic mimesis.42 Thus words and colours as clouds stand for a particular kind of iconoclasm: the image is being handed over to nonvisibility. Against the photographic locking into place the Benjaminian self is increasingly set free and rejoices in his mobility. Travelling through the spaces and places that form the Berlin of Benjamin’s childhood, like a chameleon the self takes on ‘die Schutzfärbung des Planeten’ [protective colouring of the planet] (GS, II.3, 1221), the colours and textures of his surroundings, assimilates himself into objects, merges into the folds of the curtains, becomes one with interiors or facades, and melts into the ‘Weichbild’ [purlieus] of the city (GS, VI, 470). As Ernst Bloch notes with regard to Benjamin’s Einbahnstraße: ‘gegenständlich geht überhaupt niemand recht auf der Straße, ihre Dinge scheinen mit sich allein’ [objectively, nobody is really walking down the street, its objects seem to exist alone with themselves].43 The self is both omnipresent and nowhere to be seen. He has escaped from the gaze into the world of objects. During the process of his defacement, his displacement, he has increasingly turned from sight into site, or rather, non-site. For ‘ent-stellt’, disfigured, as Werner Hamacher reminds us, also means ‘ohne Stelle’, lacking a place.44 Atopic, the self takes on a nomadic form of existence, his state is ‘to be in passing’, in transit, and it is therefore that he finds himself particularly drawn to ‘non-lieux’ as Michel de Certeau would say, places as ‘passages’, or ‘Schwellenorte’ [threshold-places], to use Benjamin’s own words. These non-places that dominate Berliner Kindheit are places as ‘in-between’ spaces: the corridor between rooms, the doorstep between outside and inside, stairwells between different f loors, the carriage or the train between city and land.45 One of these places as passages is the loggia which replaces the description of the photograph in the last version of Berliner Kindheit as a different ‘Art von Selbstportrait’ [kind of self-portrait], a self-portrait that not only substitutes ‘Verborgenheit’ [con­ cealment] and ‘notwendige Verhüllung’ [necessary disguise] (B, II, 591–92) for exposure but also symbolizes the transformation of arrest into motion. The loggia shares with the photographic studio the same winter garden furnishings. Moreover, just as the photograph is to the autobiographical self both ‘Thronsaal’ [throne room] and ‘Folterkammer’ [torture chamber] the loggia is both ‘Wiege’ [cradle] and ‘Mausoleum’ (GS, VII.1, 386, 388). Yet while the ‘gepolsterten Tropen’ [upholstered tropes] of the studio are experienced as being claustrophobic, suffocating and humid (GS, II.1, 375), the loggia suggests openness and transgression. Revoked by the repeated glance of the remembering self from the passing train (GS, VII.1, 387), and offering the remembered self a vantage point from which he can cast an eye into the foreign world of the courtyards (BK, 67), the loggia is a space erected in and through the crossing of looks. Made out of glass it is located between inside and outside, between the interior of the bourgeois apartment and the courtyard as the

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space of the poor. It is a twilight zone, a ‘schattenreiches Gelass’ [shadowy chamber] (GS, VII.1, 387) that hinges between the air and light of the courtyard and the sticky darkness of the interior rooms. Both birthplace and grave, the loggia appears as a space that expands between and connects both remembering and remembered self, birth and death. Although the loggia is the only place in Berliner Kindheit to which Benjamin assigns a certain continuity, it is nevertheless not a place that invites its visitor to stay.46 ‘Unbewohnbarkeit’ [uninhabitability] is its nature and ‘obdachlos’, homeless, like the palm tree, is whoever takes residence here (GS, VII.1, 387). In Brecht’s ‘Lesebuch für Städtebewohner‘ [Reader for Those Who Live in Cities] of 1925/1926 an anonymous voice gives the following advice: ‘Zeige, o zeige dein Gesicht nicht [...] bleibe nicht sitzen! [...] Ich sage dir: Verwisch die Spuren!’ [Don’t show, o don’t show your face [...] don’t stay sitting! [...] I tell you, / Erase the traces!] (GS, II.2, 555–56 / SW, IV, 232). As we read in Benjamin’s ‘Kommentare zu Gedichten von Brecht’ [Commentary on poems by Brecht] of 1938/39, Brecht’s poems do not only offer advice to the citizen as political emigrant in his own country. The ‘KryptoEmigration’ they suggest can also be read as a pre-form of the real emigration, of the real illegality, that was to come (GS, II.2, 556). Just as Brecht’s poems portend for Benjamin, the image of the loggia predicts the future life of the human being in exile. It predicts and mirrors the state of the narrating self who re-imagines the ‘Raum des Lebens’ [space of life] (GS, VI, 477) of his childhood. Under Benjamin’s writing hand the lost city of Berlin is re-erected and transformed into a book, ‘die Stadt ein Buch’ [the city as book], as Benjamin writes in a section from Einbahnstraße entitled, ‘Stückgut: Spedition und Verpackung’ [Mixed Cargo: Shipping and Packing] (GS, IV.1, 133). The movement is doubly in transit: inasmuch as the autobiographical text becomes a portable ‘lieu de mémoire’ for someone ‘der selber nicht mehr recht zum wohnen kommt’ [who himself no longer has a proper abode] (GS, VII.1, 387 / BC, 42), its focus, the loggia, is a ‘lieu de passage’ for someone who is, and has always been, voluntarily or involuntarily, a ‘passager’. In contrast to the photographic self-portrait that displays the self ’s visual appearance, the loggia forms a cavity, yet a cavity that is filled with the air, the ‘Luft der Höfe’ [air of the courtyards] (GS, VII.1, 386) that carries the sounds of childhood: the roaring city train, the carpet-beating, Romeo’s last sigh (GS, VII.1, 387). The air is the medium that preserves the memory images as it can be constantly experienced. For it is ‘ein Beisatz dieser Luft’ [a whiff [or ‘admixture’] of this air] that, as Benjamin notes, was still around the vineyards of Capri, ‘und es ist eben diese Luft, in der die Bilder und Allegorien stehen, die über meinem Denken herrschen wie die Karyatiden auf der Loggienhöhe über die Höfe des Berliner Westens’ [and it is precisely this air that sustains the images and allegories which preside over my thinking, just as the caryatids, from the heights of their loggias, preside over the courtyards of Berlin’s West End] (GS, VII.1, 386 / BC, 39).47 This does not imply, however, that the emphasis on the acoustic as opposed to the visual turns the loggia into the image of an ‘akustisches Inkognito’ [acoustic unknown].48 The loggia is not merely the acoustic counterpart to the photograph. Rather, the image of the loggia continues a tendency that had already begun in

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‘Die Mummerehlen’, where the hallucinatory experience of the aura was shown to transcend what can be captured by the physical eye. The loggia is a space that hinges between the visual and the acoustic. A cavity in form of an echo-chamber, a ‘leere Muschel’ [empty shell] as Benjamin notes in ‘Die Mummerehlen’ (GS, VII.1, 417) whose sides ref lect light and sound, gazes and whispers in a synaesthetic fusion. Hence what Benjamin writes in the Passagen-Werk [Arcades Project] with regard to the Parisian arcades can equally be said for the loggia and the ways in which it conjures up the lost world of childhood as well as the presence of the self that once moved through it: Blickwispern füllt die Passagen. Da ist kein Ding, das nicht ein kurzes Auge wo man es am wenigsten vermutet, aufschlägt, blinzelnd schließt, siehst du aber näher hin, ist es verschwunden. Dem Wispern dieser Blicke leiht der Raum sein Echo. ‘Was mag in mir, so blinzelt er, sich wohl ereignet haben?’ Wir stutzen. ‘Ja, was mag in dir sich wohl ereignet haben?’ So fragen wir leise zurück (GS, V.2, 672). [The whispering of gazes fills the arcades. There is no thing there that does not, where one least expects it, open a fugitive eye, blinking it shut again; but if you look more closely, it is gone. To the whispering of these gazes, the space lends its echo. ‘Now what’, it blinks, ‘can possibly have come over me?’ We stop short in surprise. ‘What, indeed, can possibly have come over you?’ Thus we gently bounce the question back to it (AP, 542).]

The ‘gaze-whisper’ that fills the air of the vacated places revisited in and through the writing of the remembering I signifies both preservation and abolishment, nearness and distance, presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, glances lifted and withheld. Once again: the image of the loggia as self-portrait is not the antithesis to the photographic self-portrait it eventually comes to replace.49 Rather, it is in the image of the loggia that Benjamin can fully develop what within the ‘Blickraum’ of the photograph began: the self ’s escape from the gaze of the Other as an act of self-displacement, of the self ’s transgression into the terrain of the other. Rather than existing as inconsolable counterpoints, the photographs and the loggia are different stations of the same trajectory, the process of an increasing destabilization and mobilization of the self, of the opening up of the visual towards the acoustic in the act of self-disguise, against arrest and exposure. Indeed, the opposition between the photographic and the cloudy that the metamorphosis of the text increasingly enhances is already inscribed into the photographic image itself. After all, it is not without reason that photography emerges in the opening lines of Benjamin’s little history of photography, as Bettine Menke reminds us, from the twilight zone of the fog (GS, II.1, 368).50 Being in Transit How are we, then, to imagine Benjamin’s subject? What is it that the gaze-whisper of the loggia conjures? In his conception of subjectivity Benjamin abandons categories such as ‘Persönlichkeit’ [personality], the celebration of which he associates with

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Fascism (GS, II.2, 695) or ‘Charakter’, the dissolution of which he welcomes as a positive and liberating development. Instead, he offers a conception of subjectivity that dissolves the sharp contours of the ‘Subject’ which photographs simultaneously define and begin to transgress, and depicts the state of self hood as being in transit, as ‘passage’. The image of the loggia illustrates this ‘passage’. It is the epitome of the ‘in-between’ space, the third space, to which the self escapes from the ideological gaze, from the cult of the ‘Person’, from the constrictions of representation.51 It is hence when Benjamin notes with reference to Proust that ‘in den Falten erst sitzt das Eigentliche’ [only in the folds does the essential reside] (GS, VI, 467), that he provides us with the key to his own autobiographical writing. For it is in the folds of the curtains as it is in the folds of the text — the space ‘in-between’ defined matter as well as the space ‘in-between’ signs — that offers him the terrain to elaborate new strategies of self hood that may (or may not) help to survive in an unhomely world.52 * * * * * Benjamin’s replacement of the photographic self-portrait in ‘Die Mummerehlen’ by a different kind of self-portrait, the loggia, relates to one more reason which we have thus far only gestured towards. Despite being stations of the same trajectory, the looks which Benjamin describes in ‘Die Mummerehlen’ and the visual-acoustic gaze-whisper that characterizes ‘Loggien’ are marked by a subtle but decisive difference. Whereas ‘Die Mummerehlen’ stages the immediate, hallucinatory and reciprocal exchange of glances, however indirect they may be, the loggia is filled with secondary images and sounds. The passage I quoted above from the Passagen-Werk emphasizes this point. Rather than describing a look that ‘sinks into the observer’, the glances we encounter in Benjamin’s arcades are glances that, whenever we look closer, disappear. These glances are not marked by coincidence, but by a slight spatial and temporal deferral. What we are eventually left with is not the glance itself but its visual def lection. The reason for this transformation of the look in the course of writing and re-writing Berliner Kindheit is essentially linked to the relationship between eye and affect in Benjamin’s autobiographical project. This relationship is hence the theme of the following chapter. Notes to Chapter 5 1. Heiner Müller, ‘Glückloser Engel 2’, in Dichtungen zu Walter Benjamin, ed. by Erdmut Wizisla and Michael Opitz (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), p. 29. 2. The word ‘Mummerehlen’ ref lects the child’s misunderstanding of ‘Muhme Rehlen’, trans. as ‘Aunt Rehlen’. 3. See: chapter I.2. 4. See Fig. 3. Walter und Georg Benjamin in Schreiberhau, c. 1902. 5. As Ursula Link-Heer puts it, with reference to passages in Benjamin’s writing that thematize the aura-constituting gaze, ‘most commentators have neither investigated nor really considered such sentences’, ‘Aura Hysteria or the Lifted Gaze of the Object’, in Mapping Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Digital Age, ed. by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 114–24 (p. 114). 6. The original says: ‘as the look that sinks into me from the child’s face, which lies in the shadow of the potted palm’.

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7. The original says: ‘she scrutinizes my velvet suit like a tailor’s dummy’. 8. Victor Burgin, ‘Looking at Photographs’, in Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 142–53 (p. 148). 9. Lacan, Quatre Concepts, p. 98; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 106. 10. Lacan, Quatre concepts, p. 69; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 72. 11. For more examples of the omnipresent gaze in Berliner Kindheit, see paradigmatically Benjamin’s description of the morning in the loggia of which he notes: ‘Nie konnte ich ihn hier erwarten; immer erwartete er mich bereits’ [Never did I have the chance to wait for morning in the loggia; every time, it was already waiting for me], and the description of the f lame in the fireplace which the child perceives as if it is looking at him: ‘Bald sah die Flamme [...] zu mir hin’ [Soon the f lame [...] was peeping out at me] (GS, VII.1, 387, 397 / BC, 41, 61). 12. Lacan, Quatre concepts, p. 77; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 82. 13. Lacan, Quatre concepts, p. 71; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 75. 14. Notwithstanding this aspect, Kaja Silverman attempts to introduce an historical element into Lacan’s theory via a new interpretation of the element of the screen. She suggests: ‘The screen represents the site at which the gaze is defined for a particular society, and is consequently responsible both for the way in which the inhabitants of that society experience the gaze’s effects, and for much of the seeming particularity of that society’s visual regime’, Threshold of the Visible World, p. 132. 15. Silverman, Threshold of the Visible World, p. 132. 16. Roland Barthes’s description of the photograph as ‘corset de mon essence imaginaire’ [corset of my imaginary essence] curiously echoes Benjamin’s depiction of the mother (OC, V, 798 / CL, 13). 17. This puts her into a position not unlike the one of the mother in Lacan’s mirror stage, see Lacan, ‘Le Stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du Je’, Écrits, pp. 93–100. The ambivalent position of the mother is also underscored by the fact that Benjamin’s description does not make it entirely clear whether her gaze is ‘intrapictorial’ or ‘extrapictorial’. The real photograph Benjamin used as model for his description does not feature the mother at all. Eduardo Cadava uses the mother’s ambivalent position for an argument in which he claims that it is in fact the child’s gaze that fixes the mother, Words of Light, pp. 117–18. 18. Lacan, Quatre concepts, p. 71; Four Fundamental Concepts, p. 75. 19. See chapter I.2. 20. See Fig. 4. Franz Kaf ka, c. 1887. Anna Stüssi was the first critic to point out Benjamin’s identi­ fication with Kaf ka here, see, Erinnerung an die Zukunft, pp. 189–92. 21. This version already addresses the conf lict between gaze and look, emphasizing that the child’s eyes ‘reign’ over the props while stating that, at the same time, they are its fate. The visual axis between viewer and viewed object, however, is only established in the second version quoted above. The third version of this scene stems from Benjamin’s Kaf ka essay, written in the summer of 1934, after Benjamin had completed the first version of Berliner Kindheit. We find it in the section entitled ‘Ein Kinderbild’ (GS, II.2, 416), and it corresponds almost word by word to the first version in the photography essay. 22. Benjamin first mentions the aura in his Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen [Protocols on drug experiments] of 1927 where he notes: ‘Vielmehr ist das Auszeichnende der echten Aura: das Ornament, eine ornamentale Umzirkung in der das Ding oder Wesen fest wie in einem Futteral eingesenkt liegt. Nichts gibt vielleicht von der echten Aura einen so richtigen Begriff wie die späten Bilder van Gogh’s, wo an allen Dingen — so könnte man diese Bilder beschreiben — die Aura mit gemalt ist’ [Rather, what distinguishes the authentic aura is this: the ornament, an ornamental framing in which the object or being sits snugly as if in its own sheath. Perhaps there is nothing that gives us such good understanding of the authentic aura as the late pictures of van Gogh, where in all his painted objects — this is how one might describe these pictures — the painter paints their aura as well] (GS, VI, 588). 23. Bernd Witte, Walter Benjamin: Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1985), p. 9. 24. The choice of Kaf ka is not arbitrary. As Cadava points out, Kaf ka is for Benjamin the incarnation of deformation. In his notes on Kaf ka Benjamin writes: ‘Kaf ka, scheint mir, ist davon so beherrscht, daß er überhaupt keinen Vorgang in unserm Sinn unentstellt darstellen kann. Mit

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andern Worten, alles, was er beschreibt, macht Aussagen über etwas anderes als sich selber. Der dauernden visionären Gegenwart der entstellten Dinge erwidert der untröstliche Ernst, die Verzweif lung im Blick des Schriftstellers selbst’ [It seems to me that this is haunting Kaf ka to the point that he is absolutely incapable of representing any process un-deformed — as we would understand it. In other words, everything he describes, tells us something about something other than itself. The inconsolable seriousness, the desperation in the eyes of the writer himself responds to the permanent, visionary presence of the deformed objects] (GS, II.3, 1204). 25. Lacoue-Labarthe, ‘L’Imprésentable’, Poétique, 21 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), pp. 53–95 (p. 75), trans. as ‘The Unrepresentable’, in The Subject of Philosophy, ed. by Thomas Trezise (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 116–58 (p. 143). Cadava, whose argument I am following here, makes this reference, Words of Light, p. 110. 26. Bertold Brecht, Arbeitsjournal, ed. by Werner Hecht, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973), i, 16. Trans. by John Willett as Journals (London: Methuen, 1993), p. 10 (entry for 25 July 1938). 27. Levinas, Éthique et infini, pp. 79–80. In the idea that the look [regard] is not necessarily limited to the eye Benjamin not only meets Levinas but also Sartre and Lacan. See paradigmatically Sartre’s discussion of ‘le regard’ [the gaze] where that which is experienced as look can also be caused by a rustle, L’Être et le Néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), pp. 310–64 and Lacan’s anecdote of the sardine tin where ‘regarder’ means ‘seeing/regarding’ as well as ‘concerning’, in Quatre concepts, pp. 88–90. 28. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969), p. 104. 29. I draw this expression from Marleen Stoessel, Aura: Das vergessene Menschliche. Zu Sprache und Erfahrung bei Walter Benjamin (Munich: Hanser, 1983), p. 150. 30. In the Artwork essay Benjamin defines this moment of incommensurability as the essential difference between a painting and a photograph. Yet, as we have seen in the three descriptions of the Kaf ka portrait he also ascribes this incommensurability to and develops it out of the photograph. As Link-Heer notes: ‘Photo and film are not per se without aura, although they participate in its decline’, ‘Aura Hysteria’, p. 117. We find a similar self–other configuration in Barthes’s Fragments d’un discours amoureux, where Barthes describes the beloved other as ‘atopos’, as ‘l’autre que j’aime et qui me fascine’ [the other whom I love and who fascinates me] and as unclassifiable: ‘je ne puis le classer’ [I cannot classify the other] (OC, V, 65 / LD, 34). 31. Benjamin uses this expression in a letter to Adorno of 7 May 1940 (B, II, 849). 32. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992), p. 14. 33. This process of disappearance has been analysed by Schneider who concludes: ‘Die Kürzungen des späteren Textes vollziehen drei Reduktionen: Tilgung des Steckbriefs, Tilgung der Spur und Tilgung der Tilgung’ [The abridgements of the later text effect three reductions: deletion of the ‘wanted’ poster, deletion of the trace and deletion of the deletion], Die erkaltete Herzensschrift, p. 126. 34. For a passage parallel to this one, see, Einbahnstraße (GS, IV.1, 116). 35. Lacan, Le Séminaire: Livre 1 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 134; trans. by John Forrester as The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book 1, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 116. 36. The association of this passage with Lacan has been suggested by Pethes, Mnemographie, p. 277. 37. Another case in point is Benjamin’s eulogy to the characterless human being in Kaf ka’s texts upon which Adorno comments in a letter to Benjamin: ‘[...] lassen Sie mich der Kuriosität halber sagen, zur Stelle über “Charakterlosigkeit”, daß ich im vorigen Jahr ein kleines Stück “Gleichmacherei” geschrieben habe, in dem ich die Auslöschung des individuellen Charakters in der gleichen Weise positiv genommen habe‘ [Let me tell you, because it’s so odd, that I wrote a small piece last year, ‘Levelling’, in which I accepted the extinction of individual character positively in the same way as you do] (GS, II.3, 1178). 38. Adorno, ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971–86), x.1, 238–53 (p. 240). 39. See Karl Heinz Bohrer, ‘Das Ich erscheint Benjamin als Illusion, als eine verjährte Form der Selbstref lexion’ [The I appears to Benjamin as an illusion, as a time-barred form of selfref lection], Der Abschied, p. 535.

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40. Adorno, ‘Charakteristik’, p. 250. See also Manuela Günter, who understands Benjamin’s auto­ biographical self as ‘Inversion der Ich-Figur zum Anti-Subjekt’ [inversion of the ‘I’-figure into an anti-subject], Anatomie des Anti-Subjekts: Zur Subversion autobiographischen Schreibens bei Sieg fried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin und Carl Einstein (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1996), p. 133. 41. Howard Eiland’s translation attenuates the sexual connotations of the passage, compare (BC, 110–11). 42. See Benjamin’s variation of the Chinese painter in his notes on Kaf ka: ‘Zur Funktion von Gleichnissen in Kaf ka: Chinamaler tritt vor Augen seiner Freunde in sein letztes, vollkommenstes Bild und verschwindet im Innern der gemalten Pagode: eben damit aber hatte sein Bild magischen Charakter erlangt und war keines mehr. Sein Schicksal teilt Kaf ka’s Welt’ [Regarding the function of similes in Kaf ka: before the eyes of his friends a Chinese painter steps into his last, most accomplished picture and disappears into the interior of the painted pagoda: precisely through this his picture had acquired magic character and was a picture no more. Kaf ka’s world shares his destiny], in Benjamin über Kafka, ed. by Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981), p. 170. Other variations of the same thought figure can be found in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel-book (I.1, 216), where the entry and disappearance into the object of enquiry describes the process of cognition, and in the Kunstwerk-essay (VII.1, 380), where the image of the Chinese painter is used to explain the difference between the perception of an artwork (the audience ‘sinks into’ the picture) as opposed to the viewing of a film (the distracted mass ‘sinks’ the artwork into itself ). Hence the kind of similarity, or mimicry, described here does not only shed light on Benjamin’s notion of representation but also on his idea of cognition. ‘Gewölk’, as Hart Nibbrig notes, ‘schließt durch Entstellung den Kern der Dinge auf ’ [Clouds unlock the kernel of things through defacement], ‘Das déjàvu des ersten Blicks’, p. 719. 43. Ernst Bloch, ‘Revueform in der Philosophie’, in Erbschaft dieser Zeit, Gesamtausgabe, 16 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), iv, 368–71 (p. 369). 44. Werner Hamacher, ‘Die Geste im Namen: Benjamin und Kaf ka‘, in Entferntes Verstehen, Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 280–323 (p. 292). We find this also suggested in the passage quoted above from ‘Die Mummerehlen’. The sentence: ‘Ich aber bin entstellt von Ähnlichkeit von allem, was hier um mich ist’ implies both the child’s ‘being disfigured/distorted by’ and his ‘being removed from’ the surroundings (BK, 9, my emphasis). 45. Carol Jacobs hints at something similar for Berliner Chronik when she notes that the shadowy existence of the dead, their place, is ‘between: windows, thresholds, gravestones’, ‘Walter Benjamin: Topographically Speaking’, in Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions, ed. by David S. Ferris (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 94–117 (p. 104). 46. ‘Seitdem ich Kind war haben sich die Loggien weniger verändert als die anderen Räume’ [In the years since I was a child, the loggias have changed less than other places] (GS, VII.1, 387 / BC, 42). 47. On the medium air (and light) as memory carrier, see Pethes, Mnemographie, pp. 290–91. The air that drifts through the loggia finds its pendant in the ‘Luft von Blumeshof ’ [the air of Blumeshof ] (GS, VII.1, 414). Perhaps Benjamin had in mind here the passage in Proust’s Recherche that also deals with air as memory carrier and the famous ‘paradis qu’on a perdus’ [paradise that we have lost] (RTP, IV, 449 / SLT, VI, 179). 48. See, by contrast, Schneider’s interpretation in Herzensschrift, p. 125. 49. Here I differ from Gerhard Richter, who, like Schneider before him, bases his argument on an ‘antagonism between the ear and the eye, between sound and images’, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 218. Interestingly, however, while Schneider contrasts an ‘optical’ Berliner Chronik with an ‘acoustic’ Berliner Kindheit (Schneider, p. 123), Richter reverses interpretation, reading Berliner Chronik as acoustic, and Berliner Kindheit as ‘optical’ (Richter, pp. 163–98, 199–230). 50. Bettine Menke, ‘Bild-Textualität: Benjamins Schriftliche Bilder‘, in Der Entzug der Bilder, ed. by Michael Wetzel (Munich: Fink, 1994), p. 53. 51. Homi Bhabha’s notion of post-modern identity as ‘being in the beyond’ echoes Benjamin’s conception half a century later, Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 7.

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52. In his Brecht Commentaries Benjamin quotes the following line from Brecht’s Lesebuch für Städtebewohner: ‘Sorge, wenn Du zu sterben gedenkst / Daß kein Grabmal steht und verrät, wo du liegst’ [Make sure, when you turn your thoughts to dying / that no gravestone divulges where you lie] (GS, II.2, 556 / SW, IV, 232). ‘Das leere Grab’ [The Empty Grave] as complement to the loggia: in Berliner Kindheit one of two ‘Rätselbilder’ [mystery images] (GS, VII.1, 401) — real in Port Bou.

CHAPTER 6

v

Eye and Affect Pure Affect, No Affect When analysing the conceptions of representation and subjectivity in Benjamin’s autobiographical project, we encountered the intense affective sensation associated with the experience of the aura in the reciprocal look. And we came across its converse: the blindness of the camera’s gaze, leaving unfulfilled the subject’s expectation that his or her look would be returned. While the antagonism between the affective, restorative, reciprocal look and indifferent, destructive blindness was the predominant theme of Proust’s love stories, Benjamin’s autobiographical writing is characterized by a different conf lict: at the core of Berliner Chronik and Berliner Kindheit lies the tension between the shock of mutual recognition and the striving for a preservative visual and affective distance. Rather than focusing on the well-explored correlation between photography, mourning and melancholia in Berliner Kindheit, we shall therefore shift the emphasis in this chapter and discuss the relationship between technological or bodily vision and affect, with particular interest both in self-exposure to affect contagion and the act of self-immunization.1 This intention requires a few preliminary remarks. It is one of the conceptual difficulties of Benjamin’s thinking that it is driven by both the lamentation of the loss of the aura and the belief in the necessity of its destruction. Indeed, Benjamin’s claim that Baudelaire’s writing is torn between a ‘Leiden am Verfall der Aura’ [suffering from the aura’s decline] (GS, V.1, 433) and, conversely, the ‘Einverständnis’ [accordance] with its ‘Zertrümmerung’ [demolition] (GS, I.2, 653) is also symptomatic for his own texts. This inconsistency specifically marks Benjamin’s understanding of photography which, as ‘Die Mummerehlen’ amply illustrates, appears as a medium soaked with aura while at the same time contributing to its destruction. Benjamin’s writing thus emerges from the dialectical ambivalence between a nostalgic, mystical adherence to the aura as inter-subjective, visual, affective recognition and a materialistically inspired trust in the necessity of its overcoming in a liberating state of alienation. This is also why Benjamin understands modernization as a process that counts amongst its main side effects the decay of experience and with it the waning of affect. With great clarity Benjamin diagnoses in his works — from the Storyteller essay to the Artwork essay and his study on motifs in Baudelaire — the decline of the aura and the impoverishment of eros, and links this development to the emergence and proliferation of the new visual media. In early daguerreotypes the aura appears for the last time (‘Kleine

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Geschichte der Photographie’) only to be smashed by the modern photographic camera to which Benjamin assigns the blind and blinding effect that destroys reciprocal affective recognition and communication (‘Motive bei Baudelaire’). And later, it is first photography, and then film, that bring about the necessary (because liberating) effect of (self-)alienation — in Benjamin’s own words, the ‘heilsame Entfremdung’ [salutary estrangement] (GS, II.1, 379 / SW, II, 518–19) (‘Kleine Geschichte’, ‘Kunstwerk’-essay). How does Benjamin’s autobiographical work with its transformations between the years 1932 and 1938 relate to this ideal of salutary alien­ation? There are two critical approaches to Benjamin’s thinking that may help us to clarify this question. Proceeding from the etymological meaning of ‘aesthetic’ (from ‘αἰσθητικός’: ‘perceptible by feeling’) and its opposite ‘anaesthetic’ (from ‘ἀναισθησία’ as ‘lack of feeling, insensibility, also towards pain’ and ‘ἀναίσθητος’ as ‘benumbed’, the ‘immunization’ of both body and mind), Susan Buck-Morss investigates Benjamin’s ‘Kunstwerk’-essay from a neurological perspective.2 Buck-Morss argues that, for Benjamin, being cheated out of experience has become the general state. Inasmuch as the synaesthetic system is marshalled to parry technological stimuli in order to protect both the body from the trauma of accident and the psyche from the trauma of perceptual shock, it reverses its role. Its goal becomes to numb the organism, to deaden the senses, to repress memory. According to Benjamin’s diagnosis, she therefore concludes, the cognitive system of the modern subject is no longer one of aesthetics but one of anaesthetics. In contradistinction to Buck-Morss, Martin Jay shifts the emphasis from a neurological to a psychoanalytical (Freudian) viewpoint when analysing Benjamin’s attitude towards Weimar culture of commemoration in light of his attempts to come to terms with the traumatic loss of his school friend Fritz Heinle.3 Jay’s argument differs from Buck-Morss’ conclusions inasmuch as he claims that, rather than raising the psychological ‘protective shield’ [Reizschutz] in the act of remembering, Benjamin ‘labored to keep it lowered’ so that the wounds would be kept open and ‘the pain would not be numbed’.4 Against the background of these two contrasting interpretations my question becomes further complicated: does Benjamin’s autobiographical project reveal the autobiographical subject as a ‘traumatophile type’, as Jay suggests,5 or does it represent an example of selfwriting as self-immunization? Can we, in other words, describe Benjamin’s act of autobiographical writing as a form of expression of ‘cool conduct’ which is staging an emotionally distancing, at times prosthetic gaze?6 Or should we rather interpret Benjamin’s memoirs in terms of an affective reanimation of the past, realized in moments of the ecstatic, hallucinatory, auratic look? Hal Foster’s attempt to conceptualize the relationship between trauma and art may be useful here. Trauma, Foster argues, continues the poststructuralist critique of the subject by other means. By satisfying two contradictory imperatives — to guarantee identity and to deconstruct its foundation — for Foster trauma discourse pre­sents the subject as simultaneously ‘evacuated’ and ‘elevated’. Consequently, the experience of trauma, he argues, paradigmatically comprises both direct, un­med­iated affective experience and an absence of affect, inasmuch as it is resistant to cog­n itive processing and induces ‘psychic numbing’. Thus the artistic subject appears to be

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‘driven to inhabit a place of total affect and to be drained of affect altogether’. ‘This oscillation’, Foster concludes, ‘suggests the dynamic of psychic shock (of trauma). Pure affect, no affect: It hurts, I can’t feel anything’.7 Although Foster’s description of what he believes to be emblematic of a contemporary cultural sensibility may be too general to be productively applied to Benjamin’s writing, his phrasing could well be used to depict the extremes between which Benjamin’s autobiographical writing expands, the two opposite poles of ‘pure affect’ and ‘no affect’ his texts constantly negotiate in an internal, infinite dialectical debate. A look at some of Benjamin’s theoretical remarks on this matter substantiates this supposition. ‘Der heutige Mensch; ein reduzierter also, in einer kalten Umwelt kaltgestellter’ [Present-day man; a reduced man, therefore, chilled and in a chilly environment] (GS, II.2, 699 / SW, II, 779), Benjamin defines the object of enquiry when speaking about Brecht in his 1934 lecture ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ [The Author as Producer]. And yet, whenever he describes the modern subject as an emotionally reduced being he also seeks to loosen up this ‘cold persona’.8 ‘Bild und Sprache haben den Vortritt’, Benjamin writes in his essay ‘Der Sürrealismus — Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz’ [Surrealism — The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia]. ‘Nicht nur vor dem Sinn. Auch vor dem Ich. Im Weltgefüge lockert der Traum die Individualität wie einen hohlen Zahn’ [Language takes precedence. Not only before meaning. Also before the self. In the world’s structure, dream loosens individuality like a bad tooth (lit.: hollow tooth)] (GS, II.1, 297 / SW, II, 208). Individuality as a hollow tooth — Benjamin’s variation on the metaphor of the subject as cavity characterizes his ‘cold persona’ as hard on the surface and void inside. In his writings, however, this figure is repeatedly exposed to ecstatic, transgressing experience, both in moments of dreaming and in the sudden sensations of affective memory from which Benjamin’s images often originate, moments in which self-growth and self-loss become indistinguishable. The ‘Lockerung des Ich durch den Rausch’ [loosening of the self by intoxication] (GS, II.1, 297 / SW, II, 208) frequently appears as one of Benjamin’s main devices.9 In fact, how closely indifference and affect are interrelated in Benjamin’s work can be discerned from the metaphor of the cavity. Loosening a hollow tooth eventually leads to a missing tooth and thus the image induces a double cavity, a double absence. The idea resonates with Benjamin’s representation of the autobiographical I in Berliner Kindheit as displaced and atopic. We saw in the previous chapter, however, that lacking a place does not necessarily mean lacking feeling. Quite the opposite, as Roland Barthes maintains in his 1973 text Le Plaisir du texte [The Pleasure of the Text] when describing the sensation of pleasure as representational void, inherently linked to the experience of self-loss as being ‘atopique’ (OC, IV, 232). Using these introductory observations as a point of departure, we shall see in this chapter that in the process of writing and rewriting his autobiographical project Benjamin re-measures the voided field of emotion by seeking to newly define the relationship between affect and eye. Benjamin’s life writing is torn between emotional distance and a longing for the immeasurable upheavals of affect that may shatter the calm surface of ratio(-nalization). Out of this tension emerges the dialectic dynamics between ‘pure affect’ and ‘no affect’ that will now be explored.

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Against Affective Memory Affect, according to its etymological determination, refers to both our bodily and mental states. ‘Affectus’, we read in Kluge’s etymological dictionary, translates as: ‘der körperliche oder geistige Zustand, Stimmung, Leidenschaft’ [the physical or psychological disposition, mood, passion]. ‘Affectus’ was originally the verbal abstractum to ‘afficere’ [to work on, to inf luence], combining ‘facere’ [do] and ‘ad’ [at, to]. As the verb ‘affect’ hence belongs to the word family of ‘facere’ it is related to the verb ‘infect’.10 Proceeding from the term’s double dimension as physical and psychological ‘feeling’, we shall first look at Benjamin’s treatment of Proustian mémoire involontaire as a sensual, synaesthetic sensation to then investigate the emotive dimension that lies at the heart of the involuntary impression. Associating the feeling of homesickness with the idea of contamination, Benjamin opens the introduction to his 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit with the following words: Im Jahr 1932, als ich im Ausland war, begann mir klar zu werden, daß ich in Bälde einen längeren, vielleicht einen dauernden Abschied von der Stadt, in der ich geboren bin, würde nehmen müssen. Ich hatte das Verfahren der Impfung mehrmals in meinem inneren Leben als heilsam erfahren; ich hielt mich auch in dieser Lage daran und rief die Bilder, die im Exil das Heimweh am stärksten zu wecken pf legen — die der Kindheit — mit Absicht in mir hervor. Das Gefühl der Sehnsucht durfte dabei über den Geist ebensowenig Herr werden wie der Impfstoff über einen gesunden Körper. Ich suchte es durch die Einsicht, nicht in die zufällige biographische sondern in die notwendige gesell­ schaftliche Unwiederbringlichkeit des Vergangenen in Schranken zu halten (GS, VII.1, 385). [In 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth. Several times in my inner life, I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary. In this situation, too, I resolved to follow suit, and I deliberately called to mind those images which, in exile, are most apt to waken homesickness: images of childhood. My assumption was that the feeling of longing would no more gain mastery over my spirit than a vaccine does over a healthy body. I sought to limit its effect through insight into the irretrievability — not the contingent biographical but the necessary social irretrievability — of the past (BC, 37).]

According to Benjamin’s meditation, the deliberate resurrection of memory images from childhood and the translation of these individual experiences into the collective images of a whole generation serve as inoculation against the pain that departure and loss have inf licted onto the remembering self. Accordingly, in this opening paragraph Benjamin programmatically opposes the concept of involuntary memory. Indeed it becomes evident that the passage contains an implicit reference to Proust when we compare it to the following passage from Berliner Chronik, where Benjamin observes: Wer einmal den Fächer der Erinnerung aufzuklappen begonnen hat, der findet immer neue Glieder, neue Stäbe, kein Bild genügt ihm, denn er hat erkannt:

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es ließe sich entfalten, in den Falten erst sitzt das Eigentliche: jenes Bild, jener Geschmack, jenes Tasten um dessentwillen wir dies alles aufgespalten, entfaltet haben; und nun geht die Erinnerung vom Kleinen ins Kleinste, vom Kleinsten ins Winzigste und immer gewaltiger wird, was ihr in diesen Mikrokosmen entgegen tritt. So das tödliche Spiel, mit dem Proust sich einließ, und bei dem er Nachfolger schwerlich mehr finden wird als er Kameraden brauchte (GS, VI, 467). [He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this had been unfurled and dissected: and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms, grows ever mightier. Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilettantishly, in which he will hardly find more successors than he needed companions (BCHR, 6).]

By abandoning himself to the involuntary impressions, Benjamin argues, Proust succumbs to severe emotional dangers. Proust, as Benjamin reads him in his Proust essay, is in search of the infinite repetition, the restoration of the original first happiness his narrator momentarily achieves in an involuntary epiphany. ‘Dieser herzstockende, sprengende Glückswille’, notes Benjamin, the ‘blinde, unsinnige und besessene Glücksverlangen in diesem Menschen. Es leuchtete aus seinen Blicken’ [this heart-stopping, explosive will to happiness [...] the senseless, obsessive quest for happiness of this man. It shone from his eyes]. Yet these eyes, he continues, ‘waren nicht glücklich’ [were not happy] (GS, II.1, 312–13 / SW, II, 239). For Proust was ‘zerfetzt von Heimweh [...] nach der im Stand der Ähnlichkeit entstellten Welt’ [racked with homesickness, homesick for the world distorted in the state of similarity] (GS, II.1, 314 / SW, II, 240) — the world of his childhood. Not to give in to the dynamics of involuntary memory, to the uncontrollable emergence of latent images from the past and thereby to prevent their potentially incalculable affective blows, is therefore one of Benjamin’s main priorities. Written six years earlier than the 1938 introduction to Berliner Kindheit, the opening sentence of Berliner Chronik already tells of this: ‘Da will ich mir die zurückrufen, die mich in die Stadt eingeführt haben’ [Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city] (GS, VI, 465 / BCHR, 3). Voluntary memory prevents involuntary resurrection. What follows in the course of writing and rewriting his autobiographical text is a detailed reconsideration of Proust’s mémoire involontaire as a concept that dangerously relies on the openness of the synaesthetic system. Take as a first example of this reconsideration ‘Der Lesekasten’ [The Reading Box] from the 1932/33 version of Berliner Kindheit, a chapter that focuses on the relationship between memory and touch. Here Benjamin recalls the child’s preferred toy, the ‘reading box’, containing small plates with letters that could be combined to make words. Inasmuch as the reading box stands for the child’s favoured activities, reading and writing, for Benjamin it becomes the incarnation of childhood. It is, as such, the object of all the narrator’s yearning. As Benjamin notes: ‘Was ich in Wahrheit in ihm [dem Lesekasten] suche, ist sie selbst: die ganze Kindheit, wie sie in dem Griff gelegen hat, mit dem die Hand die Lettern in die

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Leiste schob, in der sie sich zu Wörtern reihen sollten’ [Indeed, what I seek in it is just that: my entire childhood, as concentrated in this movement (Griff ) by which my hand slid the letters into the groove, where they would be arranged to form words] (BK, 71 / BC, 141). The realization of involuntary meaning can only be reproduced voluntarily, through the voluntary repetition of the hand’s movement reaching out for the letter plates. Moreover, far from being fully revoked, the past moment withdraws. For Benjamin concludes his observation as follows: ‘Die Hand kann diesen Griff noch träumen, aber nie mehr erwachen, um ihn wirklich zu vollziehen. So kann ich davon träumen, wie ich einmal das Gehen lernte. Doch das hilft mir nichts. Nun kann ich gehen; gehen lernen nicht mehr’ [My hand can still dream of this movement, but it can no longer awaken so as actually to perform it. By the same token, I can dream of the way I once learned to walk. But that doesn’t help. I now know how to walk. There is no more learning to walk] (BK, 71 / BC, 141–42). In contradistinction to Proust Benjamin argues within the framework of his own autobiographical project that past and present moment do not and cannot merge. The remembering self can conjure the memory images before his inner eye, he can isolate them, arrest and observe them, and yet in their originality they remain irretrievably distant. Whereas in another chapter, ‘Die Speisekammer’ [The Buttery], the hand of the child can mediate the experience of an erotic union with the world of objects, when honey, raisins, rice, jam and butter offer themselves to the child’s groping hand while constantly renewing themselves (GS, IV.1, 250), in ‘Der Lesekasten’ the role of the hand has become more modest, its place is ‘verödet’ [deserted/desolated] (GS, II.2, 464). In ‘Loggien’ [Loggias], Benjamin broaches the same phenomenon with relation to sight. Mind-travelling, the narrator remembers himself as a young man strolling through the city of his childhood in search of the past. The memory images that appear in his mind are generated and strengthened by the glances he casts from the train into the courtyards (GS, VII.1, 387, 399). Once more Benjamin describes the act of remembering as the deliberate repetition of a past action. The retrospective gaze is a new gaze, the second gaze that conjures the first gaze of the child. As Benjamin emphasizes: ‘Später entdeckte ich vom Bahndamm aus die Höfe neu’ [Later, from the perspective of the railroad embankment, I rediscovered the courtyards] (GS, VII.1, 387 / BC, 41).11 Yet just as the deliberate repetition of the gesture in ‘Der Lesekasten’ fails to facilitate an immediate encounter with the past, the second gaze does not function as a medium that triggers a sudden fusion of past and present. On the contrary, the second gaze leads to a new discovery of the old, preserving rather than erasing the difference. A third example that involves in addition to the sense organs hand and eye also the ear is ‘Der Mond’ [The Moon], newly added to the 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit. In this chapter Benjamin draws on Proust’s ‘Le Réveil’, the scene that Benjamin elsewhere depicts as ‘die klassische Stelle über das Erwachen des Nachts im dunklen Zimmer und die Orientierung darin’ [classic section on the awakening at night in a dark room and the orientation therein] (GS, V.1, 509). Just as in Proust’s opening scene during the course of the night, space and time slide away from the Proustian self so that when he awakes ‘le bouleversement sera complet dans les

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mondes désorbités’ [the confusion among the disordered worlds will be complete] (RTP, I, 5 / SLT, I, 9), in ‘Der Mond’ Benjamin’s self also perceives the world in the moonlight as ‘Gegen- oder Nebenerde’ [some counter-earth or alternative earth] (GS, VII.1, 426 / BC, 161). Yet whereas Proust describes sleeping as a state of depersonalization that in the moment of awakening comes to an end (RTP, I, 5–6 / SLT, I, 9–10), to Benjamin’s awakening self the bedroom turns into a scenery of estrangement. Inasmuch as the moonlight reveals the world to be disfigured, the contours of the room appear as ‘ein Ärgernis’ [a provocation] (GS, VII.1, 426 / BC, 161) and the clinking sound of the water jug is described as ‘ein falscher Freund’ [a false friend] (GS, VII.1, 427 / BC, 162). In Proust’s text the reconstruction of the environment helps to reconcile past and present self. In Benjamin’s passage, how­ ever, the fusion between past and present self fails and duplication, alienation and isolation result.12 In a crucial passage from Benjamin’s 1928 treatise Ursprung des deutschen Trauer­ spiels [The Origin of German Tragic Drama], Benjamin already discusses the subject’s increased alienation from the world and his own body as a symptom of depersonalization. Yet he gives the argument a different turn when linking it with the ‘killing’ of affects. He argues: ‘Die Ertötung der Affekte, mit der die Lebenswellen verebben, aus denen sie sich im Leibe erheben, vermag die Distanz von der Umwelt bis zur Entfremdung vom eigenen Körper zu führen’ [The deadening of the emotions, and the ebbing away of the waves of life which are the source of these emotions in the body, can increase the distance between the self and the surrounding world to the point of alienation from the body]. Interestingly, however, Benjamin comes to a positive conclusion when he continues: Indem man dies Symptom der Depersonalisation als schweren Grad des Traurig­seins erfaßte, trat der Begriff von dieser pathologischen Verfassung, in welcher jedes unscheinbarste Ding, weil die natürliche und schaffende Bezie­ hung zu ihm fehlt, als Chiffer einer rätselhaften Welt auftritt, in einen unver­ gleichlich fruchtbaren Zusammenhang (GS, I.1, 319, my emphasis). [As soon as this symptom of depersonalization was seen as an intense degree of mournfulness, the concept of the pathological state, in which the most simple object appears to be a symbol of some enigmatic wisdom because it lacks any natural, creative relationship to us, was set in an incomparably productive context (OGTD, 140).]

Here the numbing of the synaesthetic system and with it the pathological state of alienation is given a liberating and even (pro-)creative connotation. The follow­ing observation from ‘Der Lesekasten’, once more contemplating the limits of memory, points into the same direction: ‘Nie wieder können wir Vergessenes ganz zurück­ gewinnen. Und das ist vielleicht gut’ [We can never entirely recover what has been forgotten. And this is perhaps a good thing] (BK, 70, my emphasis / BC, 140). A little remarked passage from Berliner Chronik is revelatory within this context inasmuch as it not only thematizes the relationship between a sensation — here haptic and visual — and the act of remembering, but also describes its potential affective consequences. Benjamin observes: ‘Gewiß stehen zahllose Fassaden der Stadt genau wie sie in meiner Kindheit gestanden haben; der eignen Kindheit

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aber begegne ich in ihrem Anblick nicht. Zu oft sind meine Blicke seitdem an ihnen entlang gestrichen, zu oft sind sie Dekor und Schauplatz meiner Gänge und Besorgungen gewesen.’ [It is true that countless facades of the city stand exactly as they stood in my childhood. Yet I do not encounter my childhood in their contemplation. My gaze has brushed them too often since, too often they have been the décor and theatre of my walks and concerns] (GS, VI, 487 / BCHR, 26). The passage describes the failure of the second gaze that, as habitual gaze, slips off the surface of ‘objects’ and thus does not pave the way for an unrestricted access to the past. Yet Benjamin continues with an assertion that is crucial within our context: Ganz anders aber würde ich mich selber in diesem Alter gegenwärtig finden, hätte ich den Mut, eine gewisse Haustür zu durchschreiten, an der ich tausend und zehntausendmal vorüberfuhr. Eine Haustür im alten Westen. Sie und die Fassade ihres Hauses freilich sagen meinen Augen nichts mehr. Die Sohlen wären wohl die ersten, die mir, wenn ich die Haustür hinter mir geschlossen hätte, Meldung brächten, daß sie Abstand und Zahl der ausgetretnen Treppenstufen in mir selber aufgefunden hätten (,) daß sie auf dieser ausgetretenen Etagentreppe in alte Spuren getreten seien und wenn ich die Schwelle jenes Hauses nicht mehr überschreite ist es die Furcht vor einer Begegnung mit diesem Innern des Treppenflurs, der in der Abgeschiedenheit die Kraft bewahrt hat, mich wiederzuerkennen, welche die Fassade längst verlor (GS, VI, 487, my emphasis). [But I should confront myself at that age in quite a different way had I the courage to enter a certain front door that I have passed thousands upon thousands of times. A front door in the old West End. True, my eyes no longer see it, or the facade of the house. My soles would doubtless be the first to send me word, once I had closed the door behind me, that on this worn staircase they trod in ancient tracks, and if I no longer cross the threshold of that house it is for fear of an encounter with this stairway interior, which has conserved in seclusion the power to recognise me that the facade lost long ago (BCHR, 27).]

This quotation adds a new dimension to Benjamin’s earlier claim that it may be a good thing not to be able to entirely regain what one has forgotten. It reveals that at the centre of Benjamin’s strategy of remembering as voluntary repetition of the original gaze, or the original movement of the limb, resides the fear of an immediate, involuntary encounter with the past that may have incalculable and potentially traumatizing consequences. In light of this quotation the previous examples of sense memory appear not so much as moments of failure but also as part of a larger strategy of avoidance whereby conscious memory turns into a buffer that blocks the openness of the synaesthetic system. The desire not to cross the threshold between present and past but, on the contrary, to keep the psychological ‘protective shield’ raised, is at the core of this practice. What Benjamin in his first version of Berliner Kindheit describes as the ‘Ängste des Ohrs’ [fears of the ear] (BK, 74) are here the anxieties of the eye, the agony of the foot that the involuntary touch of its sole may facilitate a momentary coincidence of present and past, risking a hallucinatory, transgressive experience of reciprocal recognition in the immediate encounter.13 Taming the eye, numbing the hand or foot by means of deliberate, controlled repe­ tition of the original gaze, the original touch, appears as a strategy to prevent the involuntary impression from penetrating the membrane of the protective shield and

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with it potential trauma. Benjamin’s strategy of self-immunization thus appears as a defence strategy against Proust’s mémoire involontaire, against what Benjamin had earlier described as Proust’s ‘deadly game’. This observation directs our attention once more at the affective kernel of involuntary memory which Proust calls ‘impression’. We shall therefore brief ly return to this key concept of Proustian mnemonics and reconsider its link to photography within the context of affect. Affect — Photography — Impression We saw that Proust describes the impression as the imprint of reality into the subject’s mind where it has to be processed like a latent image in the developer’s bath. The recognition of this memory image coincides with an affective sensation, ‘un plaisir délicieux’ (RTP, I, 44), that invades and fills body and mind of the remembering self. In Proust et les signes, Gilles Deleuze defines the Proustian impression as what we could translate as the ‘encountered sign’.14 ‘Le signe’ as ‘l’objet d’une rencontre’ [the object of an encounter] is a sign that is felt or sensed rather than perceived through intellectual cognition.15 As Deleuze argues, affect is a more effective trigger for deep thought because of the way it hits us immediately, forcing us to engage involuntarily. ‘Plus important que la pensée’, he writes, ‘il y a ce qui “donne à penser” [...] des impressions qui nous forcent à regarder, des rencontres qui nous forcent à interpréter, des expressions qui nous forcent à penser’ [More important than thought, there is ‘what leads to thought’ [...] impressions which force us to look, encounters which force us to interpret, expressions which force us to think].16 To further illustrate his argument Deleuze quotes the following passage from Proust’s Recherche: Car les vérités que l’intelligence saisit directement à claire-voie dans le monde de la pleine lumière ont quelque chose de moins profond, de moins nécessaire que celles que la vie nous a malgré nous communiquées en une impression, matérielle parce qu’elle est entrée par nos sens (RTP, IV, 457). [For the truths that the intellect grasps directly as giving access to the world of full enlightenment have something less profound, less necessary about them than those that life has, despite ourselves, communicated in an impression, a material impression because it enters through our senses (SLT, VI, 187)].

In her analysis of emotional knowledge Martha Nussbaum draws on the same quotation. Proust’s imprints of reality are emotional impressions, she contends, listing a few more paradigmatic passages from La Recherche, emotional impressions that appear in the form of ‘an immense new jolt’ ‘a physical blow [...] to the heart’, ‘like a thunderbolt’, ‘an open wound’.17 While neither Deleuze nor Nussbaum pay attention to Proust’s association of the impression with the photographic, it is precisely this link that interests Benjamin.18 We saw that all three metaphors from the field of the photographic with the help of which Proust seeks to figure his idea of involuntary memory — the latent images, the processing of these images, and their serialization as cinematographic pictures — find their way into Berliner Chronik (GS, VI, 516) and the first version of Berliner Kindheit (BK, 111). The key example for the relation between affect, impression and photography is however Benjamin’s rendition of the photographic self-portrait in ‘Die Mummerehlen’. We

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earlier discussed this rendition and its subsequent erasure from the 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit in light of Benjamin’s concept of subjectivity. Now this passage becomes of central significance with regard to the relationship between memory and affect, since Benjamin’s ekphrasis centres around the description of how the look of the child in the photograph hits the viewer like a physical blow, sinking into his mind: ‘Doch das gequälte Lächeln um den Mund des kleinen Älplers ist nicht so betrübend’, we remember reading, ‘wie der Blick, der aus dem Kinderantlitz, das im Schatten der Zimmerpalme liegt, sich in mich senkt’ [But the tortured smile on the lips of the little mountaineer is not as disturbing as the look that sinks into me from the child’s face, which lies in the shadow of the potted palm] (BK, 8). In the course of rewriting his autobiographical text Benjamin increasingly seeks to cir­cum­vent this involuntary synaesthetic sensation that photography may cause. Empha­sizing, just as Benjamin does, the haptic quality of looking at images and the affective reaction this may release, Jill Bennett writes in her study of Empathic Vision: ‘Images have the capacity to address the spectator’s own bodily memory; to touch the viewer who feels rather than simply sees the event, drawn into the image through a process of affect contagion.’19 The shock of the photographic impression which is unclear to our intellect, yet clear to our senses and feelings, penetrates the surface of our conscious mind. This is one more reason why Benjamin deletes all of the photographic passages in the course of revising his autobiographical text. It is this potential for affect contagion of the ‘encountered sign’ and with it the potentially affective ‘wounds’ that photography can inf lict on its viewers — the dimension of photographs which Roland Barthes calls the ‘punctum’ — that Benjamin seeks to inoculate mind and body against in the last version of Berliner Kindheit. It remains, however, important to note at this point that Benjamin’s act of auto­ biographical writing as a strategy of anti-photographic self-immunization does not lead to complete affect denial. Rather than utterly erasing the affective dimension from his text, Benjamin’s strategy leads, as we shall see in the following section, to the framing of affect, to the delimitation of the transgressive and hallucinatory, affective repercussions of the auratic ‘Augenblick’ [moment, lit.: eye’s glance]. Two delimitation strategies we shall analyse within this context are the conversion of depth into surface, and the restriction — and with it the regulation — of the look. Feeling/Seeing Surfaces Let us reconsider the passage quoted above where Benjamin describes the narrator’s fear of entering the house of childhood (GS, VI, 487). The passage is a paradigmatic example for Benjamin’s understanding of the connection between affect, vision and space insofar as it points at the particular relationship between exterior and interior, surface and depth in Berliner Kindheit. The encounter (Benjamin uses the word ‘Begegnung’) between the remembering self and the interior of the staircase triggered by the physical touch of his foot must be avoided because it may bring about an involuntary encounter with the narrator’s own past identity. Yet as long as the past remains behind the facade, and is thus kept at a controllable distance, the direct confrontation or fusion between past and present self — which for Proust was the object of his longing — can be prevented. ‘Der Chock des Wiederhabens

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wäre so zerstörend’, Benjamin explains in ‘Der Lesekasten’, ‘daß wir im Augenblick auf hören müßten, unsere Sehnsucht zu verstehn. So aber verstehn wir sie, und um so besser, je versunkener das Vergessene in uns liegt’ [The shock of repossession would be so devastating that we would immediately cease to understand our longing. But we do understand it; and the more deeply what has been forgotten lies buried within us, the better we understand this longing] (BK, 70 / BC, 140). Involuntary recognition and recuperation are here inherently linked to destruction, whereas voluntary recollection paired with ‘Angstbereitschaft’ [being ready to fear] functions as shock prevention. Consider within this context the following scene from Berliner Chronik which recalls the child’s return from the summer holidays to the family’s Berlin apartment. Once more Benjamin describes how the voluntary repetition of the child’s original gaze, the glances into the courtyards that were earlier described to facilitate voluntary memory, now fail to unlock the places and spaces of the past: Denn noch brannten in uns die düsteren Lampen, die vereinzelt in den Höfen geschienen hatten aus Fenstern, denen oft die Vorhänge fehlten, in schmutz­ starrenden Treppenhäusern, aus Kellerfenstern, in dene Lappen hingen. Das waren die Höfe, die die Stadt mich sehen ließ wenn ich aus Hahnenklee oder Sylt zurückkam und die sie dann wieder in sich verschloß und die sie nie zu sehen gab, nie zu betreten (GS VI, 503). [For within us still burned the melancholy lamps that had shone in isolation from courtyard windows often without curtains, from staircases bristling with filth, from cellar windows hung with rags. These were the backyards that the city showed me as I returned from Hahnenklee or Sylt, only to close upon them once more, never to let me see or enter them (SW, II, 623].

In the same way that, in ‘Der Mond’, the othering of the self and the alienation between self and world are felt as being deeply uncanny, here the experience of returning to an unhomely home is associated with fear. Linking the child’s affective reaction to the narrator’s own emotive state, Benjamin adds: Aber diese letzten fünf Angstminuten der Einfahrt eh alles aussteigt, haben sich in Blicke aus meinen Augen verwandelt und es gibt vielleicht Menschen, die in sie sehen wie in Hoffenster, die in schadhaften Mauern stecken und in denen am frühen Abend die Lampe steht (GS, VI, 503). [But those five last fearful minutes of the journey before everyone got out of the train have been converted into the gaze of my eyes and there are those perhaps who look into them as into courtyard windows in damaged walls, in which at early evening a lamp stands (SW, II, 623).]

Interestingly, the same scene resurfaces in the 1932/33 version of Berliner Kindheit where Benjamin inserts the following variation to his conclusion: ‘Doch diese überzähligen Minuten, eh alles aussteigt, stehen heute noch in meinen Augen. Mancher Blick hat sie vielleicht gestreift wie in den Höfen Fenster, die in schadhaften Mauern stecken und hinter denen eine Lampe brennt’ [Yet those few spare minutes preceding our exit from the train are still before my eyes. Many a gaze has perhaps touched on them, as if from those windows which look out of dilapidated walls in courtyards and in which a lamp is burning] (BK, 31 / BC,

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128). In both versions the remembering self appears in the image of the illuminated courtyard window. The difference, however, resides in the replacement of the formulation ‘in sie sehen’ [to look into] by the word ‘gestreift’ [touched upon]. As such, Benjamin’s image illustrates mutual estrangement. And it emphasizes a double superficiality. Under the narrator’s eyes the world coagulates into surfaces (albeit dilapidated) — and so does the narrator’s own self. If the eye is commonly perceived as the ‘window to the soul’, in Benjamin’s image the view into the soul of the self is blocked, or rather, the soul is no longer located behind the surface but on the surface itself. As Benjamin writes elsewhere, playing with the etymology of ‘Mal’ as ‘Maß’ [measure], ‘Kopf bild’ [likeness], or ‘Zeichen’ [sign]20: ‘Das Mal (:) die Fläche, auf der von innen und außen her etwas zur Erscheinung kommen kann. Die Mauer. Das menschliche Antlitz’ [The likeness (:) the surface, on which something can appear from within and without. The wall. The human face] (GS, VI, 120). Another example taken from Berliner Chronik for how under the narrator’s gaze spaces are voided, interior turns into exterior, and depths transform into surfaces, are Benjamin’s above-mentioned ref lections on the loss of his school friend, the poet Fritz Heinle. They mirror Benjamin’s strategy for coming to terms with the loss of his own childhood world. Benjamin tells of two different attempts to try to conjure the space of Heinle’s life — ‘den Raum seines Lebens’ (GS, VI, 477). Stating that one could only meet Heinle in his writing, in the first attempt Benjamin seeks to translate ‘das Unmittelbare der Erfahrung’ [the immediacy of the experience] into a lecture on Heinle’s poetry. Yet, according to his own perception, Benjamin fails to transmit its meaning to the audience (GS, VI, 477). In the second attempt Benjamin takes even more emotional distance. He no longer tries to evoke Heinle’s poetry — as the spiritual sphere of his author — but the real, external and arbitrary space he inhabited, particularly the meeting house where they gathered for their philosophical debates: ‘heut ist mir diese räumliche Stelle, in der wir damals zufällig unser Heim eröffneten, der strengste bildliche Ausdruck für die geschichtliche, die diese letzte wirkliche Elite des bürgerlichen Berlin einnahm’ [Today this point in space where we happened to open our Meeting House is for me the consummate pictorial expression of the point in history occupied by this last true elite of bourgeois Berlin] (GS, VI, 478 / SW, II, 605). Rather than evoking the lost subject himself — in Berliner Kindheit the past self, here the beloved other — Benjamin conjures the image of the arbitrary, voided place he once frequented. Moreover, just as in the opening paragraph to the Berliner Kindheit of 1938, Benjamin chooses to look through the lens of collective history. This is not a strategy that allows the shocks, as Jay maintains, ‘to develop into full-f ledged traumas’,21 but, on the contrary, it keeps them at bay. Benjamin’s autobiographical text does not stage remembering as reciprocal animation, but remembering as conjuring ex negativo, via the detour of a depersonalized and hence emotionally distant, defined space. In an essay on Robert Walser of 1929 Benjamin observes that the characters in Walser’s texts are ‘zum Weinen traurig’ [sad to the point of tears]. Yet their despair, he adds, is marked by an imperturbable ‘Oberf lächlichkeit’ [superficiality] as the result of having survived a severe crisis (GS, II.1, 327 / SW, II, 259). A peculiar combination of desperation and superficiality also marks Benjamin’s own

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autobiographical writing. In the process of remembering, the Benjaminian narrator vacates places and spaces, erecting screens and surfaces against the potentially destructive shock of sudden, affective realization. The autobiographical self that stands at the end of this process is an alienated self, suspended between emotive liberation and isolation. Yet again, the process of translating depth into surface that marks Benjamin’s autobiographical text does not lead to a final state of superficiality as indifference. For, as we saw in the two previous chapters, Benjamin lines these facades and empty spaces that he erects in his writing with the visual and acoustic ref lections of past emotive states, with secondary images as secondary emotions. Inasmuch as the Benjaminian self undergoes a process of depersonalization, his feelings also become characterless, abstract, shapeless and ‘gereinigt’ [purified]. Twice Benjamin uses this formulation, which combines the absence of ‘Charakter’ with the purity of emotion. First we find it in the section ‘Ein Kinderbild’ [Portrait of a Child] from the Kaf ka essay of 1934, where Benjamin discusses the photographic portrait of himself as a boy merging into the Kaf ka portrait in ref lections which we have seen to resurface again in ‘Die Mummerehlen’. Following on from his observations on the two photographs Benjamin argues that Kaf ka’s figures can be ‘geradezu charakterlos’ [devoid of character, as it were]. Therefore — and here Benjamin quotes from Franz Rosenzweig’s theological magnum opus Der Stern der Erlösung [Star of Redemption] of 1921 — they are marked by a ‘ “ganz elementare Reinheit des Gefühls” ’ [‘a very elemental purity of feeling’] (GS, II.2, 418 / SW, II, 801). Secondly, we read it in Benjamin’s notes to the same essay, where he writes, once more drawing on Rosenzweig, who is in fact commenting on the alleged character of the Chinese people, ‘ “[...] Keine Lyrik irgend eines Volks ist so reiner Spiegel der sichtbaren Welt und des unpersönlichen, aus dem Ich des Dichters entlassenen, ja geradezu aus ihm abgetropften Gefühls” ’ [‘No poetry of any people is such a pure mirror of the visible world and of the impersonal, dripped off as it were, emotion, exuding from the poet’s I’] (GS, II.3, 1200). This curious image of emotion dripped off the poet’s self recalls another enigmatic image which Benjamin uses in Einbahnstraße. It reads: ‘Der Blick ist die Neige des Menschen’ [insufficiently translated as: In the eyes we see people to the lees] (GS, IV, 125 / SW, I, 472). The resemblance of these two images becomes more obvious when we consider the double etymological meaning of ‘Neige’ as ‘Neigung’ for both ‘affection’ and ‘Senkung, wo es nach unten geht’ [descent, where it goes down], but also as ‘Ende’ [end] or ‘letzter Inhalt eines Gefäßes’ [last content of a vessel].22 Highlighting the link between eye and affect, in this second etymological dimension of ‘Neigung’ the eye appears as a pathway through which affect f lows away, leaving the self as an empty vessel. Yet the image also contains the idea of the lowering of the eye. It thus resonates with Benjamin’s practice of seeing in Berliner Kindheit where he propagates, as it were, the ‘Neigung des Blicks’ as defence strategy against affect contagion, as opposed to the ‘Aufschlagen des Blicks’, which was at the core of the immediate auratic encounter (GS, I.2, 646–47). Thus the image of the gaze as ‘Neige des Menschen’ helps to describe the practice of remembering in Berliner Kindheit. Showing empty facades and emptied spaces, Benjamin’s memory images keep the past at a visual and affective distance. Filled with emotions that have dripped off

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the narrator’s own self, these memory images become containers for Benjamin’s depersonalized ‘Stauung[en] des Gefühls’ [congestion(s) of emotion] (GS, I.1, 383). Between Proust and Baudelaire In both his essay on Proust and in his study of Baudelaire, Benjamin introduces Proust’s work as a celebration of the ‘Glück des Schauens’, the blissful experience of seeing.23 For Proust, Benjamin argues, the aura — as the reciprocal, affective investiture mediated by the exchange of glances between the viewer and his object — becomes the ‘Quellpunkt der Poesie’ [wellspring of poetry] (GS, I.2, 647 / SW, IV, 354). Yet Benjamin does not only see the striving for happiness in Proust’s writing, he also emphasizes its author’s extraordinary sensual and affective isolation. In the Passagen-Werk Benjamin sums up his observations as follows: Proust konnte als ein beispielloses Phänomen nur in einer Generation auftreten, die alle leiblich-natürlichen Behelfe des Eingedenkens verloren hatte und, ärmer als frühere, sich selbst überlassen war, daher nur isoliert, verstreut und pathologisch der Kinderwelten habhaft werden konnte (GS, V.1, 490). [Proust could emerge as an unprecedented phenomenon only in a generation that had lost all bodily and natural aids to remembrance and that, poorer than before, was left to itself to take possession of the worlds of childhood in merely an isolated, scattered, and pathological way (AP, 388).]

We saw in the introduction to this chapter that Benjamin portrays Proust as a writer whose work is driven by the will to restore the original happiness of the first look. Yet this will can never be truly fulfilled and is therefore paired with desperation. In Benjamin’s eyes, Proust seeks to expose himself to the shocks which Baudelaire, by contrast, aims to avoid. ‘Baudelaire’, Benjamin contends, ‘hat es zu seiner Sache gemacht, die Chocks mit seiner geistigen und physischen Person zu parieren’ [Baudelaire made it his business to parry the shocks, no matter what their source, with his spiritual and physical self ] (GS, I.2, 616 / SW, IV, 319). In contrast to Proust’s hallucinatory, transgressive and productive look Baudelaire’s gaze does not animate but secures and arrests its object. The distinction Benjamin makes between Proust’s affective look and Baudelaire’s indifferent gaze is based on a distinction in temporal and spatial distance. Whereas the aura is associated with the ‘Ferne des im Angeblickten erwachenden Blicks’ [the faraway of the look arising in the eyes of the beheld] (GS, V.1, 396), Benjamin underscores that Baudelaire’s ‘sichernde[r] Blick enträt der träumerischen Verlorenheit an die Ferne’ [securing gaze lacks the daydreaming surrender to the faraway] (GS, I.2, 650). If, as Benjamin’s contemporary, the psychiatrist and philosopher Erwin Straus has shown, distance, defined as ‘raum-zeitliche Form’, is the overall ‘spatial-temporal form’ of feeling,24 then Proust’s look gives room to the mutual affective assumption of self and other, subject and object, while Baudelaire’s gaze seeks conversely to erase this room and to banish any motion in space or time that may allow feeling to evolve.25 According to Benjamin, Proust’s affective memory stages the infinite return of the ‘Augen-Blick’ in which desire [Wunsch] and memory coincide. Baudelaire’s gaze, by contrast, is not attentive to physical and emotional sensation. Rather,

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Benjamin associates it with the ‘brechende Auge’ [eye growing dim] as the ‘Urphänomen des verlöschenden Scheins’ [ur-phenomenon of expiring appearance ] (GS, V.1, 401 / AP, 319). In distinction to Proust’s look Baudelaire’s gaze is hence not ‘aesthetic’, but ‘anaesthetic’, it is a dead and deadening gaze. ‘Ein­gedenken’, as involuntary reanimation, is not its concern, but ‘Andenken’ as prosaic storing of petrified objects; not ‘Erfahrung’, experience, but ‘Erlebnis’ as isolated experience. As Benjamin emphasizes in Zentralpark [Central Park] of 1939: ‘Das Andenken ist das Komplement des “Erlebnisses”. In ihm hat die zunehmende Selbstentfremdung des Menschen, der seine Vergangenheit als tote Habe inventarisiert, sich niedergeschlagen’ [The souvenir is the complement to ‘isolated experience’. In it is precipitated the increasing self-estrangement of human beings, whose past is inventoried as dead effects] (GS, I.2, 681 / SW, IV, 183). In this vein, Benjamin’s reading of Baudelaire’s anaesthetic gaze appears as part of the subject’s overall strategy of self-immunization that strives for the acceptance of loss, whereas Proust’s affective, restorative look appears as paired with desperation and, as such, a symptom for the inability to let go. Although almost diametrically opposed to each other, both Baudelaire’s and Proust’s practices of seeing are therefore equally remote from the concept of the work of mourning as a healing process. Baudelaire’s gaze secures the subject, makes him ‘dingfest’ [frozen in his tracks], not only, as Benjamin elsewhere explains, in the sense of ‘agnoszieren’ [‘to recognize’, ‘to identify a dead body’] and ‘Verdinglichung’ [objectification] (GS, I.3, 1074), but also in the term’s literal sense, ‘ding-fest’ as making ‘object-proof ’. In this way, Baudelaire’s allegorical gaze does not only petrify the subject but also protects him, armouring the subject against the objectified world (GS, V.1, 405). While therefore, in Benjamin’s terms, Baudelaire seeks to harden the protective shield, safe-guarding himself against the sensual and affective stimuli from within and without, Proust exposes himself to the synaesthetic impulses of the world, the impresses of memory, so as to keep the wound open. ‘No affect’, ‘pure affect’ — now we may ask as to where we can locate Benjamin’s own practices of looking on the emotive scale that expands between the two opposing poles Benjamin constructs by contrasting Proust with Baudelaire. The Restricted Look Consider the memory image with which both the 1932/33 version and the 1938 version of Berliner Kindheit conclude: ‘Das Bucklichte Männlein’ [The Little Hunch­ back]. Benjamin writes: Solange ich klein war, sah ich beim Spazierengehn gern durch jene waagerechten Gatter, die auch dann erlaubten, vor einem Schaufenster sich aufzustellen, wenn grade unter ihm ein Schacht sich auftat, welcher dazu diente, mit etwas Licht und Luft die Kellerluken, die in der Tiefe sich befanden, zu versorgen. Die Luken gingen kaum ins Freie sondern eher ins Unterirdische. Daher die Neugier, mit der ich durch die Stäbe jedes Gatters, auf dem ich gerad fußte, niedersah, um aus dem Souterrain den Anblick eines Kanarienvogels, einer Lampe oder eines Bewohners mit davonzutragen. Es war nicht immer möglich. Wenn ich aber bei Tage dem vergebens nachgetrachtet hatte, so konnte es

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The child’s glance into the Hegelian ‘Schacht’ [shaft] visualizes the subject’s search for unconscious memories.26 While the search for the past at daytime suggests the futility of the voluntary attempt to remember, the look at night-time recalls the unconscious act of remembering, for at night the shaft looks back. This counter-gaze not only collects, as Benjamin writes, ‘den Halbpart des Vergessens’ [the half part of oblivion]; what is more, it renders the child ‘dingfest’. Once again Benjamin uses the term that suggests at once petrification and protection through distancing and alienation from the objectified world. Accordingly, the gaze of the little Hunchback has a double effect: it facilitates the act of remembering under the condition of forgetting — under the eyes of the Little Hunchback the past withdraws and the child has ‘das Nachsehn’ [looks on uselessly] (BK, 110). Moreover, the child, as Benjamin points out, constitutes himself under the gaze of the Little Hunchback, yet he can never see the Little Hunchback in turn. Although there is a look and a counter-look, these looks never coincide. Rather than as allegory for reciprocal, auratic recognition, the visual relationship between the Little Hunchback and the child is hence not marked by coincidence but by deferral.27 Inasmuch as their looks never meet, past and present can never fuse. This is why the gaze of the Little Hunchback neither complies with Proust’s hallucinatory, affective look nor with Baudelaire’s blind and blinding gaze. The look and the counter-look always remain separated by a slight temporal difference, a difference that, if we recall the scene analysed above where Benjamin formulates the fear of entering the house of his childhood, can also be interpreted as safety distance. This structure of memory corres­ponds to Benjamin’s conception of autobiographical representation as detour. The un­mediated, auratic-erotic fusion of the child with the world that surrounds him is irretrievably lost. Yet this loss of unity also guarantees the self ’s protection and hence its survival. Alienated from the world of objects and rendered immune to the potential onslaughts of the synaesthetic stimuli, object-proof, the self is no longer in danger of being destroyed by the sudden shock of immediate realization. In this way the mythic world of childhood can be preserved, yet at a distance. The hallu­ cinatory, the unmediated look becomes mediated, restricted, obstructed, framed. Examples of this framed and restricted look can not only be found in ‘Das Bucklichte Männlein’, where the child enjoys peering through shop windows and

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through horizontal gratings that cover the shafts opening into the pavements. They resurface throughout the whole text corpus of Berliner Kindheit: In ‘Der Fischotter’ [The Otter] the child spends hours behind the ‘trüben Fenster’ [dim windows] (GS, VII.1, 408); in ‘Ein Weihnachtsengel’ [A Christmas Angel] he seeks to discover life in the ‘trüben Fenster einer Hinterwohnung’ [dim windows of a rear dwelling] (GS, VII.1, 421); in ‘Unglücksfälle und Verbrechen’ he looks into ‘ein ausgeraubtes Schaufenster’ [a looted shop window] and through the ‘Milchglasscheiben’ [frostedglass windows] of an ambulance. He peeps through the barred windows of a police car, and wonders what may be behind the ‘festgeschlossenen Laden des ElisabethKrankenhauses’ [tightly drawn shutters of the Elisabeth Hospital] (GS, VII.1, 422). In ‘Hallesches Tor’ the child gazes through the cut-outs of a postcard, and in ‘Tiergarten’ he investigates the colourful stained-glass windows in the corridor (GS, VII.1, 395). Seen through a frame or screen that is blurred, coloured, frosted, barred or even closed, the past only becomes visible in the form of restricted fragments, as cut-outs.28 While the auratic look is hallucinatory, erotic, expansive, metonymic, and, as such, gives in to the infectious power of involuntary memory, the second look that Benjamin introduces in Berliner Kindheit, consciously repeating the first look, helps to inoculate the remembering self against the incalculable risk of affect contagion through memory images. The first look is blissful and infinite. Yet being unpredictable in its consequences, the first look also fails to protect the viewer against excessive energies from without. Hence the look that Benjamin increasingly cultivates in the process of writing and re-writing Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert is a restricted look that keeps its distance. It renders the past opaque, disfigures it, but at the same protects the remembering subject. In this way, Benjamin’s practice of looking, increasingly staged in Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, aims to prevent trauma while at the same time resisting total indifference and closure. In this way, suspended between pure affect and no affect, Benjamin’s restricted look seeks to escape both Baudelaire’s attempted ‘Sterilisierung’ [sterilization] of poetic experience (GS, I.2, 614) and the danger of being drawn into Proust’s deadly game with the encountered sign. Notes to Chapter 6 1. Seen through the lens of recent criticism, the theme of emotion in Benjamin’s work mostly crystallizes around the keywords morning and melancholia. For studies that stand out from the vast literature on this subject, see Susan Sontag, who explains Benjamin’s work through the alleged ‘saturnian element’ in the author’s character, ‘Under the Sign of Saturn’, in Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), pp. 109–77. Karlheinz Bohrer, in turn, reads Berliner Kindheit with the help of his own theoretical category of the ‘Abschiedsfigur des je schon Gewesenen’ [farewell image of what always already was], Der Abschied, pp. 12, 577. Richter interprets Benjamin’s autobiographical work in light of Paul de Man’s conception of autobiography as ‘thanatography’, Walter Benjamin and the Corpus of Autobiography, p. 176. On the relationship between mourning and photography, see Cadava, who depicts Benjamin’s autobiographical texts as photographic ‘autothanatographies’, Words of Light, p. 129, and Hubertus von Amelunxen, who argues for an allegorical determination of the photographic image in Benjamin’s thinking, see, ‘Schwarze Galle. Ein Eindruck der Vergängnis: Vorläufige Bemerkung zu Walter Benjamin, Fotogeschichte, 9/34, (1989), 3–10 and, ‘Skiagraphia —

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Silberchlorid und schwarze Galle: Zur allegorischen Bestimmung des photographischen Bildes’, in Allegorie und Melancholie, ed. by Willem van Reijen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992), pp. 90–109. One of the rare examples that seek to explore different avenues with regard to the role of the senses and emotions in Benjamin’s work is Sigrid Weigel’s essay on the concept of Eros in Benjamin’s work, ‘Eros’, in Benjamins Begriffe, ed. by Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), i, 299–340. On emotion and visual media, see David Darby, ‘The Emotions in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Benjamin, Memory and Modernity’, in Emotions and Cultural Change/Gefühle und kultureller Wandel: Stauffenburg Colloquium 56, ed. by Burkhardt Krause and Ulrich Scheck (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2006), pp. 171–80. 2. Susan Buck-Morss, ‘Between Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Benjamin’s Artwork-Essay Reconsidered’, October, 62 (1992), 3–41. For further information on the etymology of ‘Ästhetik’/‘Anästhetik’, see, Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, 24th edition, ed. by Elmar Seebold (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2002). 3. Together with his girlfriend, Frederika Seligson, Heinle committed suicide in protest against the outbreak of the First World War. 4. Martin Jay, ‘Walter Benjamin, Remembrance and the First World War’, in Perception and Experience in Modernity (Benjamin Studien. Studies 1), ed. by Helga Geyer-Ryan, Paul Koopman and Klaas Yntema (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2002), pp. 185–208 (p. 190). 5. Jay, ‘Benjamin, Remembrance’, p. 198. The expression ‘traumatophiler Typ’ stems from Benjamin himself who uses it in relation to Baudelaire (GS, I.2, 616). 6. I draw the term from Helmut Lethen’s study of the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit [New Objectivity], Verhaltensweisen der Kälte, Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994). 7. Foster, The Return of the Real, pp. 166, 168. 8. ‘Cold persona’ [kalte Persona] is the central term of Lethen’s Verhaltensweisen der Kälte. 9. This depiction complies with Lethen’s definition of the ‘cold persona’ as an artificial figure that appears as armour-plated to the point where he only ever contains emptiness, at once fighting off and taking pleasure in the experience of decentring, Verhaltensweisen der Kälte, p. 42. 10. ‘Affectus’, in Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch; Oxford Dictionary of English. 11. On the motif of the second gaze see Pethes, whose interpretation I follow here, Mnemographie, p. 281. 12. On this intertextual link between ‘Der Mond’ and ‘Le Réveil’, see Günter, Anatomie des AntiSubjekts, pp. 151–52. 13. There is a biographical side to the fears of the eye and the other sense organs. Scholem reports that Benjamin was ‘sozusagen unkörperlich’ [incorporeal, as it were] and that he had a ‘Lärmpsychose’ [noise psychosis] (like Proust), Walter Benjamin, pp. 122, 143. At the same time, however, we know that Benjamin liked to eat. As he notes in his Moscow diary, the report of his futile courting of Asja Lacis, a text that would be another fine example of the expansion of emotional cavities: ‘Ich lese auf meinem Zimmer Proust, fresse dazu Marzipan’ [I am reading Proust in my room, gorging marzipan with it] (GS, VI, 298). It would be an interesting aspect to contemplate within this context why reading the author who, according to Benjamin, does not know how to describe people eating (!) (GS, II.3, 1050), provokes the reader’s devouring of sweets. 14. Deleuze use the term ‘signes recontrés’, Proust e les signes, p. 123. 15. Deleuze, Proust et les signes (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1964), pp. 123, 25; trans. by Richard Howard as Proust and Signs (London: Allen Lane, 1973), pp. 166, 16. 16. Deleuze, Proust et les signes, p. 117; Proust and Signs, p. 161. 17. Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, pp. 266–67. Nussbaum quotes from the English translation of A la recherche du temps perdu: Remembrance of Things Past, trans. by Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, 3 vols (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), iii, pp. 429, 431, 425. 18. Paradigmatically, see (GS, II.1, 323 and II.3, 1064). 19. Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 36. Bennett takes the term ‘affect contagion’ from Silvan Tomkins, Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tompkins Reader, ed. by Eve Kosof ky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995).

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20. ‘Mal’, in Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch. 21. Jay, ‘Benjamin, Remembrance’, p. 191. 22. ‘Neigung’, in Kluge: Etymologisches Wörterbuch. 23. It is not the purpose of this section to offer a comprehensive analysis of Benjamin’s relationship to Proust and Baudelaire. Rather, its schematic character is deliberate inasmuch as it will serve to highlight those features of Benjamin’s readings as they become significant for his own autobiographical project. 24. In the original wording: the ‘übergreifende raum-zeitliche Form des Empfindens’, Erwin Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne: Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie (Berlin: Springer, 1956), p. 407. 25. The link between emotion and movement already lies in the etymology of the term: ‘emotion’, James R. Averill explains, ‘stems from the Latin, e + movere, which originally meant “to move out”, “to migrate”, or “to transport an object” ’, ‘Inner Feelings, Works of the Flesh, the Beast Within, Diseases of the Mind, Driving Force, and Putting on a Show: Six Metaphors in the History of Psychology’, in Metaphors in the History of Psychology, ed. by David E. Leary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 104–32 (p. 107). 26. See Pethes, Mnemographie, p. 295. 27. See, by contrast, Pethes’ interpretation of the same passage who concludes, quoting Benjamin: ‘Bilder entstehen unter dem Blick. Erinnerungsbilder werden sie aber nur, wenn sie “Erscheinungen einer Ferne” (GS, II.1, 378) sind, das heißt auratische: solche, die zurückblicken. Und eben in diesem Sinne ist die Erfahrung, die in das Bucklichte Männlein formuliert wird, zu lesen’ [Images emerge under the gaze. Yet they only turn into memory images, when they are ‘appearances of a distance’, that is, auratic appearances, appearances that look back. And precisely in this sense we should read the notion of experience which ‘The Little Hunchback’ formulates], Mnemographie, p. 294. 28. I am drawing here on Bohrer’s analysis of the window motif in Berliner Kindheit, see Der Abschied, p. 568. Bohrer suggests the term ‘der gebändigte Blick’ [the tamed look], thus giving Benjamin’s practice of looking a redemptive turn, p. 568.

Part I I I v

Roland Barthes

CHAPTER 7

v

From Life to Sign, or, ‘La vie comme œuvre’ 1 Life and the Work of Art Il semble que maintenant nous disposions d’assez de liberté méthologique pour aborder la double question de l’écriture de vie et de la vie comme écriture [...] (LA, 81) It seems that now we have enough methodological liberty to tackle the double question of life writing and life as writing [...]

How can we define the relationship between the world, life, and the work of art? Is it a rivalry, a battle, a dialectical conf lict? Is the work of art a derivation, a translation, a creation? Which is more ‘true’: life, the text, or the (photographic) image? And where would we locate the subject in this relationship, the self-whois-going-to-write? In short, what does it mean to transform one’s life into a work, one’s own Work? (PR, 275). These were the questions Roland Barthes came to ask with growing urgency during the final years of his life. They were the object of a lecture course Barthes convened in 1973–74 at the École pratique des hautes études. It served him as a forum of preparation for his autobiography ‘sous rature’ [under erasure],2 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (1975), in which the infinitely rotating spirals of texts and images turn around an imaginary ‘moi’. With a shifting focus from self-creation to self-expression, they were the object of Barthes’s ref lections during a subsequent lecture series (1974–76) on the ‘discours amoureux’ [a lover’s discourse], ref lections he would later turn into the best-selling book of the same title. The death of his mother in October 1977, an event to which Barthes consequently refers to as the ‘milieu de ma vie’ (OC, V, 467) dividing life into a before and an after, causes a further shift in perspective. In a series of lecture courses and seminars with strong autobiographical overtones, La Préparation du roman, convened at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, Barthes returns to the long rejected instance of the biographical author. Re-conceptualizing the writing self as ‘persona scribens’, the one who merges life and life writing, these seminars prepare us for what would then be the object of La Chambre claire. Published in 1980, only weeks before Barthes’s fatal accident, the book was written, as Jacques Derrida recalls, by someone who by that time lived in the acute awareness of his own impending death.3 La Chambre claire is no longer mainly dedicated to self-creation or selfexpression but rather conceptualized as the light-trace of and the testimony for an other who was (and still is) the loved object of the writing self.

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When contemplating the question of self writing and later of mourning and commemoration, Barthes, like Benjamin before him, increasingly turns to Marcel Proust. In Roland Barthes Proust figures as a role model for the creation of the imaginary ‘écrivain comme fantasme’ [writer as fantasy] (OC, IV, 655 / RB, 77), in La Chambre claire he appears as paradigm for the writing of the ‘originalité de la souffrance’ (OC, V, 850), while in La Préparation du roman, in turn, he increasingly func­tions as a pathfinder of new forms of life writing. Introduced as an author who inaug­urates in his own work ‘l’entrée massive, audacieuse de l’auteur’ [the inten­sive, audacious entrance of the author] (PR, 278 / PN, 209), Proust now appears as a ‘biographologue’ [biographologist] who redefines the relationship between life and text. In Barthes’s view, Proust creates ‘l’écriture de vie, la vie écrite (au sens fort, trans­formateur du mot “écriture”), la “bio-graphématique” ’ [life writing, the life written (in the strong sense, which transforms the word ‘writing’) [...]: the biograph­ematic] which is always also ‘une thanatographie’ (PR, 278–79 / PN, 210).4 For Barthes, as for Benjamin before him, both Proust the biographical person and his work increasingly constitute the principal medium through which life writing becomes possible. As Barthes points out in the series of radio recordings of 1978 for which he wanders to the places and spaces of Proust’s life, Proust is the writer who is frequently causing the sensation of a ‘déjà-dit, déjà-vécu par Proust’ [already said, already lived by Proust].5 Yet while this omnipresence of Proust could drive Benjamin to the verge of intellectual impotence, Barthes does not conceive of it as an obstacle. On the contrary, for Barthes it has a stimulating effect. Proust, he frequently claims, makes him want to write, not about Proust, but generally. In the same way that for Barthes the biographical figure Proust is an instance not of comparison but of identification, Proust’s work functions as a ‘mathésis générale’ [universal learning] for his own writing (OC, IV, 240). As Barthes explains in the radio recordings: Je crois qu’il y a un moment où on n’a plus envie d’écrire sur Proust mais où on a envie d’écrire ... comme Proust ... non pas pour se comparer à lui, ça serait bien prétentieux [...] mais il est parfaitement [...] légitime de s’identifier à lui [...]. Il a un pouvoir d’identification très grand. Par conséquent, on pourrait très bien concevoir de ... d’accepter de, par exemple, de, de réécrire quelque chose que ressemblerait à La Recherche du temps perdu parce qu’au fond maintenant nous sommes dans une civilisation de la néomanie, on favorise énormément l’originalité, mais il y a eu des civilisations où on acceptait d’écrire ce qu’on appelait des imitations. On pourrait très bien concevoir de réécrire La Recherche du temps perdu, au fond, La Recherche du temps perdu c’est comme une sorte de mythe moderne, ça a un peu la valeur de ... d’Œdipe, par exemple, on peut le réécrire plusieurs fois à mon avis, en fin on verra [...] peu importe l’échec au fond.6 [I think there comes a moment when one no longer desires to write about Proust, one desires to write ... like Proust ... not in order to compare oneself to him, that would be all too pretentious [...] but it is perfectly [...] legitimate to identify with him [...]. There is a tremendous power of identification in his work. As a consequence, one could very well conceive of ... of accepting, for example, the, the rewriting of something which would resemble La Recherche du temps perdu because, at heart, our present civilization is one of neomania, we accord enormous privilege to originality, but there have been cultures in which

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Barthes could be alluding to Vita Nova here, the utopian, autobiographical novel he contemplated writing towards the end of his life and to the preparation of which La Préparation du roman offers the theoretical framework. Vita Nova, of which eight short outlines are preserved, is Barthes’s third attempt to conceptualize an autobiographical work. The project was to combine various literary genres with photographs.7 In most sketches originating from the experience of the mother’s death and aspiring towards the cathartic reinvention of the self as a writer, the project does indeed bear resemblance with the Proustian adventure. In contrast to Proust, Benjamin is hardly visible in Barthes’s writing. Barthes knew at least Benjamin’s essays ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter der technologischen Repro­duzierbarkeit’ and ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ which, as ‘Les Analpha­bètes de l’avenir’, features in a 1977 special issue on photography of the Nouvel Observateur.8 Barthes lists this issue in the bibliography of La Chambre claire where he also uses several of the photographs with which the editor had illustrated Ben­jamin’s text. Yet in spite of the highly visible affinities between Barthes’s and Benjamin’s writing, whenever Barthes explicitly refers to Benjamin, he does so brief ly and mostly for illustrational purposes.9 While Proust is omnipresent in Barthes’s writing and A la recherche du temps perdu one of the most prominent inter­ texts of his autobiographical work, Benjamin features as their omnipresent absentee. Reading Barthes’s autobiographical works against the backdrop of the manu­ script of La Préparation du roman, we shall discover that contrary to the widespread assump­tion according to which Barthes writes in the Proustian mnemonic tra­ dition, he rather develops his notion(s) of memory essentially in resistance to the Proustian con­cept of mémoire involontaire as the origin of the autobiographical artwork. Empha­sizing, as he does in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, that ‘mon corps ne marche pas dans l’histoire de la madeleine’ [my body does not consent to the story of the madeleine] (OC, IV, 710 / RB, 135–36), Barthes sets against Proust’s end­lessly unfolding involuntary memory images the concept of the ‘immobilité vive’ [living immobility] that, in structural reminiscence to Benjamin’s dialectical image, aspires to the mnemonic ideal of the pure factum. Curiously, it is only in his last seminar, ‘Proust et la Photographie’, that Barthes turns away from the concept of the photographic ‘c’est ça’ as the model for autobiographical representation. We shall begin, however, by looking at Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire, Vita Nova and La Préparation du roman. Matt Images We saw that Proust bases his autobiographical novel on the conception and meto­ nymical exposure of mémoire involontaire as the momentary and arbitrary (self ) imprint of the past. Benjamin, by contrast, follows in his Berliner Kindheit a

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mnemonic practice that is grounded in the idea of voluntary repetition which circumvents (photographic) coincidence, promoting difference as visual and verbal ‘Umweg’ [detour] instead. Roland Barthes, in turn, articulates a surprising position in one of his 1978 sessions at the Collège de France. Pondering his envisaged auto­biographical novel Vita Nova, Barthes states that he would face one major difficulty when trying to write a ‘Roman anamnésique’ [an anamnesic novel] in the Proustian style, for he suffers, so he claims, from the weakness of one ‘organ’: ‘je vais dire lequel: la Mémoire, la faculté de se souvenir’ [I’ll tell you which one: Memory, the ability to remember]. In fact, he continues, ‘Je n’ai pas de Mémoire’ [I have no Memory] (PR, 42 / PN, 15–16). As he explains, there are several types of creative, sense-endowing mnemonic deformations. One of them is Proust’s ‘éclats vifs’. Yet what they subvert is not the acuity of the individual recollection but the chronological order of time. His own mnemonic weakness, Barthes tells his audience, is different. Instead of associating memory with a f lash of light, as Proust does, Barthes chooses the converse image, the ‘brume’ [mist], implying diffusion rather than exposure (PR, 42 / PN, 16). ‘En fait’, Barthes unpacks this metaphor elsewhere, ‘mon amnésie a un caractère qui n’est pas brutalement négatif, c’est une impuissance de mémoire, une brume’ [In actual fact, the nature of my amnesia is not entirely negative, it is an incapacity of memory, a mist] (PR, 43 / PN, 412)].10 Barthes then goes on to specify that his weakness is not only caused by the haziness of the individual memory images but also by the fact that these memory images do not link up. They lack the metonymical dimension of Proust’s memory images. ‘Sans doute’, Barthes concludes, ‘ai-je quelques souvenirs-éclairs, des f lashes de mémoire, mais ils ne prolifèrent pas, ils ne sont pas associatifs (“torrentueux”) ≠ Proust. Ils sont immédiatement épuisés par la forme brève [I probably do experience a few memory-f lashes, f lashes of memory, but they don’t proliferate, they’re not associative (‘torrential’) ≠ Proust. They’re instantly exhausted by the short form] (PR, 43 / PN, 16). Barthes directs us to the ‘anamnèses’ as examples of this matt ‘forme brève’. We find them inserted as a halftime break into the text of Roland Barthes. In Roland Barthes Barthes equates the anamnesis with the ‘biographème’ which is in fact ‘rien d’autre d’une anamnèse factice’ [nothing but a factitious anamnesis] (OC, IV, 685 / RB, 109). Like the biographemes, Barthes’s anamneses do not construct a ‘récit’ but are fragmented, dispersed, mobile, ‘à la façon des atomes épicuriens’ [like Epicurean atoms] (OC, III, 706 / SFL, 9). In that they resemble the Proustian impressions. And yet, they are not involuntarily but voluntarily evoked, and as such they do not appear in the figure of the photographic latent image but are associated with the photograph as a finished product (OC, V, 811). Accordingly, in contrast to the Proustian impression, Barthes’s ‘biographème’ is not linked to the interior of the observer’s mind but rather resides on its surface. Like the photo­g raph the ‘biographème’ is essentially ‘plate’. For photography, ‘anamnèse’ and ‘biographème’ holds true: ‘L’essence de l’image est d’être toute dehors’ [The essence of the image is to be altogether outside] (OC, V, 873 / CL, 106). Whereas Proust’s impressions are the seeds, the famous Japanese f lowers that metonymically unfold into the texture of memory (RTP, I, 47) in Roland Barthes the anamneses are not meant to develop

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nor are they meant to interconnect. For Proust the immobility and isolation of the memory images is — if we recall his exercises in style revolving around the towers of Martinville and Vieuxvicq — a proof of failure. For Barthes it is the aim. It is in their immobility that escapes signification, in their resistance to metonymical proliferation, that the anamneses stand in contrast to the main effort of Roland Barthes, which is, ‘de mettre en scène un imaginaire’ [to stage an image-system/ imaginary] (OC, IV, 681). Like photographs Barthes’s anamneses do not signify, they make present (OC, IV, 725). Whereas Proust’s impressions are processed but never turned into manifest pictures, Barthes’s anamneses, by contrast, are tautological images. They are meant to remain as close as possible to the idealized state of pure denotation. ‘Ces quelques anamnèses sont plus ou moins mates (insignifiantes: exemptés de sens). Mieux on parvient à les rendre mates, et mieux elles échappent à l’imaginaire’ [These few anamneses are more or less matte, (insignificant: exempt of meaning). The more one succeeds in making them matte, the better they escape the image-system/imaginary] (OC, IV, 685). As Barthes concludes, drawing once again on photographic imagery: ‘J’appelle anamnèse l’action — mélange de jouissance et d’effort — qui mène le sujet à retrouver, sans l’agrandir ni le faire vibrer, une ténuité du souvenir’ [I call anamnesis the action — a mixture of pleasure and effort — performed by the subject in order to recover, without magnifying or sentimentalizing it, a tenuity of memory] (OC, IV, 685 / RB, 109).11 What Barthes calls an impotence in La Préparation du roman, the incapacity to remember, is a strength in Roland Barthes, the strength to resist (or to arrest) the picture-torrent that washes away the writing self into the realms of the Imaginary. When Barthes describes the act of remembering not as an act of re-creation but rather as a quasi-photographic realization of the what-has-been that seeks to circum­vent the Proustian stage of imaginary translation, he begins to develop a mnemonic ideal of the pure factum. This is not of course what Roland Barthes was mostly about. Yet as its narrator notes: ‘Un livre inverse peut être conçu: qui rapporterait mille “incidents”, en s’interdisant d’en jamais tirer une ligne de sens’ [A converse book is conceivable: which would report a thousand ‘incidents’ but would refuse ever to draw a line of meaning from them] (OC, IV, 725 / RB, 151). This book becomes Barthes’s note on photography. Contemplating the readability of photographs in La Chambre claire Barthes argues that photographic images share with the anamnesis as prose image and the haiku as poetic image in that they resist development. In the photograph everything is already there. Yet there is one crucial difference. This is the element of the gaze, here the ‘regard insistant’ (OC, V, 828). Think, for instance, of the famous ‘Photographie du jardin d’Hiver’ (OC, V, 844–47). One evening, shortly after the death of his mother, Barthes is going through a collection of photographs of her. At first the pictures appear as exposures of her mere physique. They are of a painful analogy that renders true recognition impossible (OC, V, 841). And yet, like Benjamin’s photographic (self-)portraits, they have one particular, spared detail: the clarity of the portrayed person’s eyes. Under the observer’s insistent glance the impenetrable surface of the photograph dissolves. Looking at the photograph turns into the experience of a true eye contact. Both the instance of the photographer

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as ‘opérateur’ and the indexicality and materiality of the picture disappear in the hallucinatory sensation of an exchange of glances between the subject-as-look and the object-as-spectacle. As Barthes reports: Ce n’était pour le moment qu’une luminosité toute physique, la trace photographique d’une couleur, le bleu-vert de ses prunelles. Mais cette lumière était déjà une sorte de médiation qui me conduisait vers une identité essentielle, le génie du visage aimé (OC, V, 843). [For the moment it was a quite physical luminosity, the photographic trace of a color, the blue-green of her pupils. But this light was already a kind of mediation which led me toward an essential identity, the genius of the beloved face (CL, 66).]

Inasmuch as the photograph can by way of physicality capture the light trace of the portrayed person’s eyes, viewer and viewed are connected. They recognize each other, the object transforms into a subject, she returns the look.12 Just Images Barthes’s description of the Winter Garden Photograph shares several characteristics with Benjamin’s description of the daguerreotype of the fisherwoman from New Haven in ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’. Eliding the figure of the photographer, both portraits reveal the immediate ‘reality’ of the portrayed subject. Whereas Benjamin distinguishes his daguerreotype from later photographs where stronger lenses sacrifice their objects to the limelight, in the case of the Winter Garden Portrait Barthes emphasizes the haziness of the picture and rules out potentially destructive similarity. Defying photographic exposure, Barthes’s ‘brume’ appears as a continuation of Benjamin’s ‘Nebel’ [Fog]. And while Barthes’s photograph does not speak unless it becomes the object of the viewer’s attentive look, Benjamin’s fisherwoman wants to be named. If for Benjamin the daguerreotype of the fisherwoman is an example of the aura, then Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph is an example of the ‘air’.13 The air cannot be dissected, the air is not schematic or intellectual, the air is not similarity, but ‘expression’. Being linked, like the aura, to the experience of seeing and being seen, the air is both inherent to the photograph and depends on the viewer, under whose attentive look it occurs (OC, V, 876). In this way aura and air are not revealed at first sight but depend on a slight temporal deferral. Either they accrue under the onlooker’s ‘regard resistant’ that dissolves the still materiality of the photographic surface, or they only become fully perceptible at the point where it is possible to shut one’s eyes in front of it.14 And in the same way that Benjamin’s look at the portrait of the fisherwoman is an erotic look that desires what it perceives (GS, II.1, 370–71), Barthes’s look at the Winter Garden Photograph also oscillates between the son’s affection and the lover’s demand. Barthes emphasizes this dimension when complementing the mother’s portrait with Félix Nadar’s photograph of a white-haired woman holding f lowers against her mouth.15 By deliberately leaving it open whether the picture shows the photographer’s mother or wife, Barthes enhances the portrait’s fine, melancholic eroticism (OC, V, 846).16 The cult image is, we remember reading in Benjamin’s

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essay ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’, ‘woran sich das Auge nicht sattsehen kann’ [that of which our eyes will never have their fill] (GS, I.2, 645 / SW, IV, 337–38). Using the same metaphor of the devouring eye that crosses the act of seeing with eating, Barthes tells in La Chambre claire of the ‘pâture’ [pasture] which the Winter Garden Photograph offers, a nourishment to his mind which, however, ‘n’en est pas rassasié’ [is never satisfied by it] (OC, V, 856 / CL, 82). The series of similarities between Barthes and Benjamin ends when we compare Barthes’s rendition of the Winter Garden Photograph with Benjamin’s description of another auratic picture that also portrays a child in a winter garden, the portrait of Franz Kaf ka in Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert.17 When viewing the photographs of his mother in La Chambre claire Barthes is declaredly searching for his mother, one with herself, her irreducible core, her ‘âme particulière’ [individual soul] (OC, V, 850 / CL, 75). What Barthes calls his mother’s unique identity must not and cannot be visually exposed to the reader. As the object of Barthes’s desiring look it becomes the invisible vanishing point of his writing. Considering Benjamin’s description of the Kaf ka photograph, however, and the ways we found it to be transgressed and eventually erased in the last version of Berliner Kindheit, it becomes clear that Benjamin was looking for something different. Presenting the Kaf ka portrait as a self-portrait, we saw that Benjamin introduces into his discussion of the aura the idea of an overcoming of identity as a category which eventually merges into the ideal of collective anonymity. Hence, what Barthes is hoping to zoom in on by means of the photographic, Benjamin infinitely opens up. Before taking a closer look at Barthes’s conception of the self and the other, however, we shall think about the Winter Garden Photograph in relation to Proust’s contemplations of the true and truthful involuntary memory image. This will also eventually guide us back to where we earlier began this discussion, to the conception of memory and photography in Barthes’s autobiographical writing. Barthes cites Proust when he calls the Winter Garden Photograph an ‘image juste’ (OC, V, 845). As we recall, Proust uses this expression to describe the narrator’s experience of involuntary memory when bending down to unbutton his shoes (RTP, III, 152–53). The sensation results in the mental image of his late grand­ mother emerging before his inner eye. On the face of it the similarity between the images lies in the fact that they both retrieve the true being of the loved object. And yet their relationship is more complex. Barthes’s statement is based on one of his main assumptions formulated in La Chambre claire, from which his fascination with photography mostly results. This is the assumption that each photograph is ‘une émanation du référent’ (OC, V, 854). What Barthes formulates here is a photo­ grapher’s version of the death of the author and eventually the idea of the referent’s adherence, who, immediately and allegedly without external inf luence, turns into his own image. By calling the Winter Garden Photograph an ‘image juste’ Barthes suggests that in the same way that something which is involuntarily remem­bered, something which is involuntarily recorded can only be true in the sense of truly having been there. For Barthes this is where the homology to Proust lies: Pour une fois, la photographie me donnait un sentiment aussi sûr que le souvenir, tel que l’éprouva Proust, lorsque se baissant un jour pour se déchausser

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Fig. 5. Félix Nadar, Mère ou femme de l’artiste, 1890 © bpk / Ministère de la Culture, France — Médiathèque du Patrimoine, Dist. RMN / Félix Nadar

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From Life to Sign il aperçut brusquement dans sa mémoire le visage de sa grand-mère véritable, ‘dont pour la première fois je retrouvais dans un souvenir involontaire et complet la réalité vivante’ (OC, V, 845). [For once, photography gave me a sentiment as certain as remembrance, just as Proust experienced it one day when, leaning over to take off his boots, there suddenly came to him his grandmother’s true face, ‘whose living reality I was exper­iencing for the first time, in an involuntary and complete memory’ (CL, 70).]

In both cases the ‘image juste’ does not rely on imitation (Realism) nor does it ref lect what Barthes calls in La Préparation du roman with regard to Joyce’s notion of epiphany ‘la quiddité’, the ‘whatness’ of the object. Rather, the image is both just and truthful because it results from the sensation of the ‘coalescence affective’ between reality and representation that leads to the satori of the ‘c’est ça’ (PR, 155, 159).18 What Barthes does not mention, however, is the fact that Proust’s description of the ‘image juste’ is closely linked to two scenes in A la recherche du temps perdu that have photography as their theme: the photographic encounter between grandson and grandmother in the parlour and the scene where the grandmother has her photograph taken by Robert de Saint-Loup. In both scenes photography, both as a metaphor and as a product, cuts through the screen of subjective perception and reveals what had thus far remained optically unconscious, the grandmother’s physical decay. In these scenes photography does not stand for recognition but facilitates alienation. It does not create but destroys affective bondage. And it predicts the future death of the beloved object. Barthes’s Winter Garden Photograph, by contrast, has the opposite function. Rather than anticipating future destruction, within the context of Barthes’s writing the Winter Garden photograph moves backwards in time, showing the mother as the child Barthes could not have known and therefore recognizes.19 The Winter Garden Photograph is hence oblivious of the reality of illness and death. Born out of the desire to resurrect what is no longer there, to defer the moment of the realization of loss, the Winter Garden Photograph creates the illusion of persistent physical and emotional bondage. Proust does not share Barthes’s spiritual and sentimental adherence to the testimonial and potentially preservative qualities of photographs. Taking photographic portraits for magic emanations of the real is in La Recherche rather the object of sometimes sympathetic yet always relentless exposure.20 While Barthes insists on the referential quality of photographs that to him preconditions truth in mnemonic recognition, Proust constructs his involuntary memory image in opposition to the photograph as a product.21 In the case of the grandmother Proust’s image is ‘juste’ not because it is an immediate emanation of the lost beloved object but precisely because it is not. There is another crucial difference between Proust and Barthes that requires clarification here. Although Barthes’s note on photography develops further what began with the ‘anamnèses’ in Roland Barthes, in La Chambre claire photo­g raphy eventually appears as distinguished from the workings of memory. ‘La Photographie’, Barthes notes in La Chambre claire, ‘ne remémore pas le passé (rien de proustien dans une photo)’ [The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph)] (OC, V, 855 / CL, 82). This statement also seems to hold true with

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regard to the Winter Garden Photograph, which owes some of its extraordinary force to the fact that it captures a moment in time that is beyond what the observer’s memory could comprehend. As Barthes underscores: ‘Aucune anamnèse ne pourra jamais me faire entrevoir ce temps à partir de moi-même (c’est la définition de l’anamnèse)’ [No anamnesis could ever make me glimpse this time starting from myself (this is the definition of anamnesis)] (OC, V, 842 / CL, 65). Barthes’s repeated statements against an association between memory and photography, including the Winter Garden Photograph, call into question what critics have often claimed: that La Chambre claire should be read as a practice of remembering which, at the same time, also develops a ‘Theorie des Gedächtnisses’ [theory of memory].22 Indeed, Barthes’s text avoids nostalgic excursions into the past. While passionately seeking to recover something that has been lost it remains strangely attached to the present. Ronald Berg suggests in his analysis the term ‘Wesensschau’ [viewing of an essence] rather than ‘memory’ or ‘remembrance’ to better grasp what may be the actual vanishing point of Barthes’s text.23 The term substitutes timelessness for retrospection and at first glance the example of the ‘image juste’ seems to justify his interpretation. Whereas in the case of Proust it is the coincidence between a past and a present sensual sensation that reveals the true memory image of the narrator’s grandmother, Barthes’s description of the Winter Garden Photograph does not so much lean towards the past as it remains within the realm of the observer’s present. The following passage from La Préparation du roman helps to further illuminate this point. Meditating on his project of an autobiographical novel, Vita Nova, Barthes once again refers to what he had earlier called his weakness of memory. La ‘pulsion’ romanesque (l’amour du matériau) ne va pas vers mon passé. Ce n’est pas que je n’aime pas mon passé, c’est plutôt que je n’aime pas le passé (peut-être parce qu’il déchire), et ma résistance prend la forme de cette brume, dont j’ai parlé → sorte de résistance générale à réciter, à raconter ce qui ne reviendra plus (le rêve, la drague, la vie passée). Le lien affectif est avec le présent, mon présent, dans ses dimensions affectives, relationnelles, intellectuelles = le matériau que je souhaite (cf. ‘peindre ceux que j’aime’) (PR, 45). [The novelistic ‘drive’ (the love of the material) is not directed toward my past. It’s not that I don’t like my past; it’s rather that I don’t like the past (perhaps because it rends the heart), and my resistance takes the form of the mist I spoke of → a kind of general resistance to rehearsing, to narrating what will never happen again (the dreaming, the cruising, the life of the past). The affective link is with the present, my present, in its affective, relational, intellectual dimensions = the material I’m hoping for (cf. ‘to depict whom I love’) (PN, 17).]

The same resistance to a recollection of the past is ref lected in La Chambre claire. In contrast to the Proustian mémoire involontaire, here the photograph as ‘image juste’ does not help to experience a sensation that had thus far remained unconscious. Instead, it triggers the viewer’s present affection. The function of the photograph is hence not to help remember the past but rather to certify that the object which the viewing subject is looking at in the present moment, in the here and now, has truly existed (OC, V, 858). In contrast to Proust and Benjamin, Barthes is not interested in using the photographic process as a metaphor that helps to explain the workings of memory. His fascination with the photographic is not so much derived from the

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temporal structure of the future perfect as deferred retrospective cognition, but rather from the disconcerting experience of simultaneity which the act of looking at the photograph as product may cause. ‘[...] ce que je vois’, he maintains, ‘ce n’est pas un souvenir, une imagination, une reconstitution, un morceau de la Maya, comme l’art en prodigue, mais le réel à l’état passé: à la fois le passé et le réel [...] (c’est peut être la définition du satori), le mystère simple de la concomitance’ [what I see is not a memory, an imagination, a reconstitution, a piece of Maya, such as art lavishes upon us, but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real [...] (this is perhaps the definition of satori) [...] the simple mystery of concomitance] (OC, V, 855–56 / CL, 82, 84). According to Barthes it is through the photograph’s confirmation of the viewer’s present perception — through the photographic inscription of authentication into his Imaginary — that essence emerges to endure over time. This brings us back to the following question: does the metaphor of the Winter Garden Photograph stand in contrast to the ‘anamnèses’ as we encountered them in Roland Barthes, or does the Barthes of La Chambre claire in fact continue to explore the same idea by other means? Once more, Barthes’s ref lections in La Préparation du roman can offer a way out. Debating the relationship between ‘instant’ and ‘reminiscence’ Barthes contrasts the time structure of the haiku to that of the Proustian mémoire involontaire: [...] le satori (la Madeleine) produit une extension — toute La Recherche du temps perdu sortie de la Madeleine, comme la f leur japonaise dans l’eau: développement, tiroirs, dépli infini. Dans le haïku, la f leur n’est pas dépliée, c’est la f leur japonaise sans eau: elle reste bouton. (PR, 74). [[...] the satori (the Madeleine) produces an extension — the whole of In Search of Lost Time unfurls from the Madeleine like a Japanese paper f lower in water: development, drawers opening, infinite unfolding. In haiku, the f lower is still compact, a Japanese f lower without the water: it remains a bud (PN, 39).]

Further down Barthes repeats the idea, now embedding it in what he would summarize as a philosophy of the moment (PR, 85): [...] le haïku n’est pas un acte d’écriture à la Proust, c’est à dire destiné à ‘retrouver’ le Temps (perdu), ensuite, après coup (enfermé dans la chambre de liège), par l’action souveraine de la mémoire involontaire, mais au contraire: trouver (et non retrouver), le Temps toute de suite, sur-le-champ (PR, 85). [the haiku is evidently not an act of writing in the Proustian style, that is to say, one destined, through the sovereign action of involuntary memory, to ‘recover’ (lost) Time later on, after the event (PN, 48).]

The same figure of thought marks Barthes’s conception of the photograph in La Chambre claire. Not only does he emphasize again that both haiku and photograph share in that they cannot be developed, but Barthes also points out that ‘ L’effet qu’elle [la Photographie] produit sur moi n’est pas de restituer ce qui est aboli (par le temps, la distance), mais d’attester que cela que je vois, a bien été’ [The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed] (OC, V, 855 / CL, 82). Hence, what Barthes develops here neither complies with the concept of memory as recollection, nor with the idea of a coincidence between a past and a present sensation that

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results in metonymical proliferation, nor does it correspond to the notion of an epiphanic revelation of a timeless essence. Rather, it is grounded in the opposition between two categories: the notion of immediate fruition between the picture and the viewer’s visual-affective sensation in a pure moment in time, and the idea that this takes place, as Barthes notes, ‘pour me souvenir’. Out of this dialectical tension Barthes forges a new and paradoxical category. He calls it ‘la mémoire immédiate’ (PR, 86). In La Chambre claire Barthes further specifies the dialectical relationship between movement and immobility upon which this category is based. With reference to the photograph and the haiku he contends: ‘Dans les deux cas, on pourrait, on devrait parler d’une immobilité vive: liée à un détail (à un détonateur), une explosion fait une petite étoile à la vitre du texte ou de la photo: ni le Haïku ni la Photo ne font “rêver” ’ [In both cases we might (we must) speak of an intense immobility: linked to a detail (to a detonator), an explosion makes a little star on the pane of the text or of the photograph: neither the Haiku nor the Photograph makes us ‘dream] (OC, V, 828 / CL, 49). Barthes’s image of the ‘immobilité vive’ recalls Benjamin’s expression of the ‘Bild erstarrter Unruhe’ [image of paralysed agitation] (GS, V.1, 402), and indeed it has been compared to Benjamin’s conception of the ‘dialektisches Bild’.24 It is true that both conceptions are based on the idea of disruption and discontinuity. And yet the apparent resemblance seems deceptive. The crucial difference lies in the temporal structure. Benjamin’s dialectical image is a configuration within the historical process. It stands out from the f low of time inasmuch as it is determined by the arresting moment of recognition, a sudden awakening which reveals a truth out of unlived life. At the heart of this experience lies what Benjamin calls a ‘Zeitdifferenzial’ [time differential] (GS, V.2, 1037): the reality of dialectical recognition in the ‘Now of Recognizability’ (GS, V.2, 1038) lights up in a citation, or an evidence, from the past. Thus the past contracts into the present moment, the dialectical image. The temporal structure is that of Proust’s mémoire involontaire. Yet while Benjamin rather asks, ‘Was mag, in mir [...] sich wohl ereignet haben?’ [What may have happened within me?] (GS, V.2, 1050), Barthes, by contrast, is interested in the certification of a mental image. The question he is driven by in La Chambre claire is: ‘est-ce que je la reconnaissais?’ [did I recognize her?] (OC, V, 843 / CL, 65). This is why Benjamin, when seeking to figure his conception of the dialectical image, turns to the metaphor of the photographical process, just as Proust before him had used this image to depict the process of involuntary memory. Barthes, on the contrary, links the term ‘immobilité vive’ to the photograph as finished product. Barthes’s concern is not the time-difference between the ‘Dunkelkammer des gelebten Augenblicks’ [dark room of the lived moment] (GS, II.3, 1064) and the future moment of exposure, but the immediate presence and magical animation of a chemical light-trace. This difference leads us to another point that becomes important when we compare Barthes’s with Benjamin’s autobiographical writing. Both writers defy the potential metonymical outbreak of Proustian picture torrents and write their autobiographical texts in favour of a theory of the moment. Thus, Benjamin’s memory images of Berliner Kindheit as ‘Bewegung im Stillstand’ [movement in standstill] seem to correspond to Barthes’s allegory of the Cartesian

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devil that may well be transferred onto his conception of Photography. The allegory sports a ‘petite figurine suspendue dans l’eau, qui se meut tout en donnant l’impression d’une finalité d’immobilité’ [little figurine suspended in water, which moves about while giving the impression of a finality to immobility] (PR, 87 / PN, 50). But while Benjamin opposes the Proustian chains of endlessly unfolding memory images as part of his strategy of self-writing as self-immunization, Barthes, conversely, searches for moments of complete and immediate self-exposure to photographic affect contagion. We find these differences ref lected in the contrasting scenarios Benjamin and Barthes choose as role models for their respective poetics of life writing. While Benjamin, like Proust before him, opts for the camera obscura, Barthes selects the apparatus that gave his book its title, the camera lucida. Camera obscura — Camera lucida Proust uses the metaphor of the apparatus of the camera obscura to figure the trajectory of the latent image from the unconscious to consciousness, from depth to surface, inside to outside, darkness to light. Benjamin follows suit to depict the sensation of the deferred recognition of an unconscious experience in memory. For both Proust and Benjamin the camera obscura thus offers an attractive scenario of redirection, although Proust emphasizes the idea of light and illumination while Benjamin underscores the element of shadow and disguise. In La Chambre claire Barthes refers to the camera obscura several times (OC, V, 813, 873 / CL, 31, 106) but dismisses it as both a valid predecessor of photography and as a model for his own life writing. Mistrusting the camera obscura as a ‘passage obscure’, a place of mysterious and uncanny transformations, Barthes chooses instead the instrument with the help of which one can draw an object through a prism, one eye directed at the object, the other eye fixed upon the drawing paper (OC, V, 873). In the face of photography, Barthes does not aim, like Proust, at processing and translation, nor does he aim, like Benjamin, at the eventual erasure of trace in the conjuration of secondary images. Rather, Barthes’s photographic poetics of life writing is driven by the following question: if description always means to signify something else, if language is always ‘fictionnel’ (OC, V, 858) and as such leads to falsification and deception, how then can we capture the sensation of the ‘c’est ça’ [that’s it] in an autobiographical work? Here lies the main difference to Benjamin and Proust. For Proust it is only through the imaginary act of translation that the original impressions can be saturated with meaning. What follows from this is that the relationship between original and representation is inverted; the literary text turns out to be truer than life. Benjamin, by contrast, abandons the categories of original and representation when radicalizing the idea of the palimpsest as a model for his autobiographical writing. For him original and representation are equally original. And Barthes, eventually, does not opt for the permutation of original and representation but rather for their equation. His question is, accordingly, ‘comment écrire longuement, couramment (d’une façon courante, coulée, filée) en ayant un œil sur la page et l’autre sur “ce qui m’arrive”?’ [how to write at length, fluently (in a f luent, f lowing, f luid manner) with one eye on the page and the other on ‘what’s

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happening to me’?] (PR, 45 / PN, 17). Barthes aims hence at the creation of what he calls an ‘effet de réel’ [effect of the real] (PR, 113 / PN, 70). Yet this is certainly no longer the well-known ‘effet de réel’ of 1968 where the concept referred to a description of objects in literary texts that are without function for the plot but serve as markers of a referential illusion (OC, III, 25–32). And although Barthes alludes to Lacan here, his use of ‘réel’ does not comply with a strict Lacanian understanding either.25 The definition which Barthes offers in La Préparation du roman differs from the Lacanian distinction when he explains: ‘J’entends par “effet de réel’ l’évanouissement du langage au profit d’une certitude de réalité: le langage se retourne, s’enfouit et disparaît, laissant à nu ce qu’il dit. En un sens, effet de réel = lisibilité’ [By ‘effect of the real’ I mean: language fading into the background, to be supplanted by a certainty of reality: language turning in on itself, burying itself and disappearing, leaving bare what it says. In a sense, effect of the real = readability] (PR, 113 / PN, 70). What Barthes is envisaging in this passage is a marriage between the opposing terms of ‘réalité’ and the ‘réel’. This marriage lights up in the ‘readability’ of the photograph where the authentication of past presence meets with the subjective imagination of what is actually absent. And yet, Barthes does not stop here. One more time he takes the debate to another level when radicalizing his conception of the ‘effet de réel ou plutôt de réalité’ [effect of the real or rather of reality] (PR, 113 / PN, 70). In his last seminar at the Collège de France, ‘Proust et la Photographie’, Barthes hands over to the totality of photographic radiation. Before we look at the manuscript and the photographic material Barthes had intended to use during this session, however, we shall discuss the relationship between photography, subjectivity and affect in Barthes’s autobiographical projects. This will turn out to be indispensable for our understanding of the immense fascination expressed in this seminar for the collection of photographic portraits taken from the world of Proust. Notes to Chapter 7 1. Title of a seminar convened by Roland Barthes at the Collège de France on 19 January 1980 (PR, 275). 2. I draw the term from Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), p. 89; trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 60. 3. ‘ “Cela va m’arriver bientôt.” Et ce fut vrai’ [‘It will happen to me soon.’ And it was true], Derrida, ‘Les Morts de Roland Barthes’, Poétique, 47 (1981), 269–92 (p. 290); trans. by PascaleAnne Brault and Michael Naas as ‘The Deaths of Roland Barthes’, in The Work of Mourning, ed. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 31–68 (p. 64). 4. For comments on the lecture course in general see, among others, Jürgen Pieters and Kris Pint (eds.), ‘Roland Barthes Retroactively: Reading the Collège de France Lectures’, Paragraph, 31/1 (2008), 1–8, and Antoine Compagnon who uses Barthes’s manuscript notes to underpin his classification of Barthes as ‘antimoderne’, Les Antimodernes: De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), pp. 404–40. 5. Roland Barthes and Jean Montalbetti, ‘Un Homme, une ville’ [A Man, a City], Cassettes Radio France (Paris: 1978), third transmission: ‘A l’ombre des Jardins et des Bois’ [In the Shadow of Gardens and Woods]. 6. ‘A l’ombre des Jardins et des Bois’.

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7. Barthes, Vita Nova (OC, V, 994–1001). Outline 6 lists photography as the first of the ‘Formes’ of expression: ‘Le Récit, la relation de quête (intellectuelle) cf. Photo’ [Narrative, account of an (intellectual) quest cf Photography] (OC, V, 999/1015 / PN, 404). 8. Benjamin, ‘Les Analphabètes de l’avenir’, Nouvel Observateur: Spécial Photo, ed. by Robert Delpire et al., 2 (1977), 6–25. 9. Barthes refers to Benjamin three times in the Œuvres complètes (OC, I, 1075; V, 551, 932) and ten times in his lectures between 1976 and 1980, here mostly with regard to the allegedly mindtransgressing dimension of Benjamin’s Hashish-protocols (N, 41, 62, 69, 76, 111, 127, 137, 189, 202; PR, 81). When Barthes makes a statement on Benjamin with regard to photography he does this with almost ostentatious nonchalance. In an interview of 1980 Barthes contends: ‘Il y a peu de grands textes de qualité intellectuelle sur la photographie. J’en connais peu. Il y a le texte de Walter Benjamin qui est bon parce qu’il est prémonitoire’ [There are few great texts of intellectual quality on photography. I know very few. There is the text by Walter Benjamin which is good because it anticipates what came after it] (OC, V, 932).This lack of recognition is mirrored in an anecdotal account of the following scene: during the conference in Cerisy in 1977 on Roland Barthes, which he attended, Hubert Damisch suggests that it is necessary to read Benjamin in order to understand the ‘Barthes politique’ [Political Barthes]. Damisch underpins his claim with a quotation from ‘L’Œuvre d’art à l’ère de sa reproductibilité’ [The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction]. Barthes reacts to this remark with silence, Prétexte: Roland Barthes, actes du colloque de Cerisy, ed. by Antoine Compagnon (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1978) pp. 404–05. 10. As Barthes tells Alain Robbe-Grillet at the conference at Cerisy in 1977: ‘Je me suis dit que, en arrivant ici, on avait traversé une rivière normande qui s’appelait la rivière Mémoire et que, au lieu que ça s’appelle ici Cerisy-la-Salle, ça s’appelait Brume-sur-Mémoire’ [I mused that, on our way here as we passed through Normandy, we crossed a river called the river Memory and that, rather than Cerisy-la-Salle, the name of this place was Mist-upon-Memory], Compagnon (ed.), Prétexte:, pp. 249–50; (PN, 412). 11. The commentary in Préparation wrongly notes ‘affect’ instead of ‘effort’ (PR, 43, note 18). This is corrected in the English translation (PN, 412, note 19). 12. Barthes also describes this event in his Journal de deuil [Mourning Diary], which he began to write the day after his mother had passed away, 26 October 1977, and kept until 21 June 1978. In the entry of 13 June 1978 Barthes writes: ‘Ce matin, à grand peine, reprenant les photos, bouleversé par une où mam. petite fille, douce, discrète à côté de Philippe Binger ( Jardin d’hiver de Chennevières, 1898). Je pleure. Pas même l’envie de se suicider’ [This morning, painfully returning to the photographs, overwhelmed by one in which maman, a gentle, discrete little girl beside Philippe Binger (the Winter Garden of Chennevières, 1898). I weep. Not even the desire to commit suicide], Barthes, Journal de deuil, ed. by Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/Imec, 2009), p. 155; trans. by Richard Howard, Mourning Diary (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), p. 143. 13. Berg offers the etymological background to this affinity: ‘air’ stems from the Latin word ‘aër’ = ‘air’ as well as the Latin word ‘aire’ = ‘quasi sub sole, halo’. In French ‘air’ implies ‘appearance, manor, tone, charisma, radiation, emanation, wind, breeze’. ‘Air’ as ‘air of life’ also implies ‘animation’ and hence a connection to ‘soul’. In all these implications Barthes’s ‘air’ meets with Benjamin’s aura, Ikone des Realen, p. 291. Amongst other critics who have stated the connection between aura and air is Richard Stamelman, Lost beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern French Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 249–84. Liliane Weissberg rather emphasizes the similarity between aura and punctum, ‘Bilderwechsel: Barthes, Benjamin, Freud und der Exkurs der Photographie’, in Kulturtheorie, ed. by Ortrud Gutjahr (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2005), p. 222. 14. Barthes quotes Kaf ka in this respect: ‘On photographie des choses, pour se les chasser de l’esprit. Mes histoires sont une façon de fermer les yeux’ [We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes] (OC, V, 833 / CL, 53). 15. See Fig. 5. Félix Nadar, Mére ou femme de l’artiste, 1890. 16. The portrait shows Nadar’s wife Ernestine. 17. Benjamin speaks of the child standing in ‘einer Art von Wintergartenlandschaft’ [a kind of winter garden landscape] (GS, II.1, 375). The French translation which, I assume, Barthes had

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read, further emphasizes this idea: ‘on l’a installé au milieu d’un jardin d’hiver’ [they placed him in the middle of a winter garden], ‘Les Analphabètes de l’avenir’, p. 16. 18. Satori, from the Japanese, means literally ‘awakening’. As a key concept of Zen Buddhism it refers to the experience of sudden enlightenment. 19. See Anselm Haverkamp, ‘Lichtbild — Das Bildgedächtnis der Photographie: Roland Barthes und Augustinus’, in Memoria: Vergessen und Erinnern (Poetik und Hermeneutik, XV) (Munich: Fink, 1993), pp. 47–66 (p. 58). 20. See, paradigmatically, Morel escaping from Charlus’s photographic portrait which he takes for a magic emanation of the original (RTP, III, 468). 21. See again Haverkamp here, who notes: ‘Barthes [insistiert] auf einer Referenz, die unmarkiert, als Spur wahrt, was im Gedächtnis Wahrheit, “une image juste” ermöglicht’ [Barthes (insists) on a reference which, unmarked, preserves as trace what facilitates truth, ‘une image juste’, in memory], ‘Lichtbild’, p. 58. 22. For an interpretation in light of the practice and theory of memory, see, Doris Kolesch, ‘Vom Schreiben und Lesen der Photographie: Bildlichkeit, Textualität und Erinnerung bei Marguerite Duras und Roland Barthes’, Poetica, 27 (1995), 187–253. The formulation ‘Theorie des Gedächtnisses’ is used by Haverkamp, ‘Lichtbild’, p. 46. 23. Berg, Die Ikone des Realen, p. 249. 24. See Coquio, ‘Benjamin et Barthes’, pp. 1157–58. 25. According to Lacan the ‘réel’ is the experience of being in its original non-differentiation and positiveness as it is owned by the subject in its initial stage. The ‘réel’ marks the sphere where inside and outside, self and other, fantasy and reality fall into one. As prototype of the fulfilment of human desires it is associated with the self-abandonment to phantasms and lures. As such it stands in opposition to the conception of ‘réalité’. For a detailed account of the Lacanian ‘réel’, see, Gerda Pagel, Jacques Lacan zur Einführung (Hamburg: Junius, 1999), p. 57.

CHAPTER 8

v

Transgressing Egotism: Self hood, Vision and Affect Reaching beyond the Self Le paradoxe du ‘seconder le monde’ et ‘se dévouer à l’Œuvre’ peut s’exprimer dans cette nuance: ne pas être égotiste, mais accepter d’être égoïste (PR, 274). [The paradox of ‘backing the world’ and ‘devoting yourself to the Work’ can be expressed in this nuance: not being egotistic but accepting that you have to be egoistic (PN, 206).]

In one of his most famous essays Roland Barthes proclaims the death of the subject. ‘La mort de l’auteur’, originally published 1967 in English as ‘The Death of the Author’, struck a chord with a trend in literary criticism that sought to break free from traditional ways of reading. It shows Barthes at the prime of his structuralist phase. In a way that recalls Benjamin’s ideological battle against the category of ‘Persönlichkeit’ [personality], in his essay Barthes discards the category of the ‘per­ sonne’ (OC, III, 40–41). Opting for what he calls a desacralization of the author (we will see that ten years later he argues in turn for his resacralization), Barthes maintains with Paul Valéry that the notion of the interiority of a writer is nothing but a superstition (OC, III, 41). Outside of enunciation the subject is a cavity, emptied out of its passions, sentiments, impressions, humours. Only performatively produced in writing, the subject appears as ‘sujet’ or ‘scripteur’ on the surface of the text. Originating from language the subject has no origin because language, as a differential sign system, is the medium that subverts the very notion of origin (OC, III, 43, 44). Drawing on Brecht’s ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ [alienation effect], Barthes turns against the Romantic idea of reading and understanding as the emo­tional act of identification between author and reader. Meaning, he claims, emerges somewhere between the formation of the text and its reception. Yet both author and reader are textual coordinates, devoid of history, biography, psychology, and they do not coincide. For the author dies the very moment the reader is born (OC, III, 45). Barthes’s critique of the subject has been very inf luential. What tends to escape the reader, however, is a dimension that seems at first contradictory. This is the idea that the emptying out of the subject, that, in Barthes’s wording of 1975, ‘dans le champ du sujet il n’y a pas de référent’ [in the field of the subject, there is no referent] (OC,

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IV, 637 / RB, 56), is an idea which is aimed at the abolishment of the subject, but which is, at the same time, rather egocentric. If we look closely at Barthes’s works up to the late 1970s, the other, not as the source of doxa, not in the appearance of the ideological gaze, not as a category that provokes the othering of the self, not as a mere construction of reception, but the other as an individual and hence as an object of investigation in its own right, is hardly given any space. As Peter Bürger points out: ‘die negative Subjekttheorie blieb ich-zentriert, insofern der Andere darin keinen Ort hatte’ [the negative theory of the subject remained self-centred inasmuch as the Other had no place in it].1 In Barthes’s writing of the time, the other is always seen from the viewpoint of the self, with regard to its inf luence on the self, as a screen for the self ’s projections. Inter-subjectivity in the sense of an ethical encounter, as Levinas or Blanchot theorize it in their writings for example, is for a long time no object of interest to Barthes. We can observe this paradigmatically in L’Empire des signes of 1971, where Japanese culture features as the epitome of an otherness that is not to be deciphered. The same tendency still marks Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. Although opening with a photograph of the mother, the text predominantly revolves around the various manifestations of the autobiographical self. We even find that this tendency characterizes Barthes’s later writings which have love relations as their object of enquiry, the largely autobiographical Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977), and the posthumously published autobiographical entries called Incidents. In both texts the other appears as the unattainable object of the self ’s desire, with an impenetrable surface on which, like Marcel’s gaze at Albertine, the lover’s desiring glances can only slide off to be referred back to the subject-as-look as their point of origin. In both works we have, rather than the meeting of souls in the reciprocal look, the expansion of visual and emotional cavities. Love, in most of these fragments, is marked by a mutual blindness and, just as in the respective Proust episodes, turns out to be a solitary relationship with oneself. The tendency towards ego-centrism does, however, change in Barthes’s last projects, not only in La Chambre claire, but also in his Proust lecture of 1978, ‘Long­ temps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...’. Here, for the first time, the text not only focuses on the problem of how to say I love you, which was one theme of Fragments, but to say the you I love, in Barthes’s own words: ‘de me permettre de dire ceux que j’aime [...] et non pas de leur dire que je les aime’ [permit me to say whom I love [...] and not to say to them that I love them (OC, V, 469 / RL, 288). This change in direction is new and, with the death of Barthes’s mother, it has acquired its biographical motif. Yet we cannot reduce it to the traumatic experience of loss and the grief it causes the writing son. On the contrary, against Barthes’s own report, this change can already be detected in Barthes’s earlier writings and it has wider philosophical and ethical implications. What Barthes aims at is to overcome the conceptual impasse into which the structuralist theory of the subject had manoeuvred itself. The utopia that drives Barthes is to overcome the egotism of his own earlier writings by opening up the self towards the other, by overcoming the seemingly insurmountable boundaries of the self ’s imaginary and to picture the other in his or her unique and irreducible alterity.

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Two themes that had previously occupied Barthes play a decisive part in this process: photography and emotion. Yet they are used in rather new forms. Photo­ graphy, which on the opening pages in Roland Barthes features as a medium that helps staging the imaginary of childhood, now turns into a medium that may pave the way to seeing beyond the boundaries of that imaginary and to reaching the sphere of the other. Emotion, as ‘affect’ and ‘pathos’, which Barthes often disqualified in the vein of Gustave Flaubert and Friedrich Nietzsche as ideological, deceptive categories, reappears in the shape of ‘ “compassion”: le Philosophème de Rousseau’ (PR, 226). In this form it turns into the emotive sensation that allows the I to recognize himself in his own feeling and on the basis of that to recognize and to portray the other. In recent years Barthes criticism has closely followed the Barthesian twists and turns of self-observation, of self-draining and self-refilling whereby the funda­ mental change in the role of the other in Barthes’s writing has often been left aside.2 Yet there are important exceptions that need to be mentioned here. Among the first is Ann Jefferson’s essay on the self–other relation in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes. Discussing the ‘bodymatters’ in Barthes’s late writing (Le Plaisir du texte, Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire) with regard to their implications for reading and writing, Jefferson argues that Barthes’s ‘carnival of reading’ under the gaze of the other that manifests itself in conceptions such as the ‘troisième sens’ [third meaning] and the punctum, is ‘a very ungregarious carnival, in which the subject discovers the singularity of his own body rather than the collective embrace of the people.’ Barthes’s aim remains, as Jefferson concludes, individualistic, inasmuch as he seeks ‘to extricate the subject from any (linguistic) embrace’.3 Ingrid Wassenaar, discussing Barthes’s coming to terms with death through his ref lections on Proust, particularly in the lecture ‘Longtemps...’ and the Proust recordings ‘Un Homme, une ville’, reaches a similar conclusion. She portrays a relationship between self and other that eventually remains self-centred when Barthes turns Proust into the medium of his own mourning that leads to the substitution of self for lost other. ‘Self-talk’, she argues, becomes a means to mourning an end.4 Philippe Roger and the above mentioned Peter Bürger offer different accounts of the self-other relation when shifting the emphasis more radically than Jefferson and Wassenaar from the self to the other. Looking at Barthes’s late conversion to the novel, Roger finds him to have moved away from trends such as the ‘exemption of meaning’ and towards a new pathos-weighted form of novelistic writing as the depositary of love that under the sign of caritas overcomes egocentrism and incarnates ‘those I loved’.5 Bürger, in turn, has most inspired my own reading inasmuch as he first directed my attention to the substitution of egoism for egotism in Barthes’s late writing, an egoism in service of writing the other. Bürger emphasizes the religious element in Barthes’s redefinition of literary texts which are seen to offer the reader the unmediated truth. In lectures such as ‘Longtemps...’, Bürger argues, Barthes abandons his earlier theoretical principles, seeking to introduce a treatment of texts that differs dramatically from that he would have offered back then, an old-fashioned treatment that has as its precondition an I that loves, suffers, and remembers, in short: ‘das alte, längst verabschiedete bürgerliche Subjekt’ [the old,

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long-dismissed bourgeois subject]. Bürger concludes: ‘Darin liegt das Skandalon des Proust-Essays [‘Longtemps...’]: Barthes kehrt sich hier von allem ab, wofür sein Name bisher gestanden hat.’ [This is the scandalon of the Proust essay: Barthes turns his back on everything that until then was associated with his name].6 In this chapter, I shall not argue in line with Jefferson and Wassenaar that Barthes’s conception of the I in his late projects eventually remains within the realms of the same, nor shall I read Barthes’s late works with Roger and Bürger as conversions that renounce the subject-conception Barthes had favoured before. It is true that Barthes in his late texts aims towards individualization; in that we can agree with Jefferson. But he does so in order to transgress the boundaries of self hood and to open up the self towards the other. Self-talk is here the first step towards saying the other. This does not mean, however, that the late Barthes seeks to refill, as Roger and Bürger conclude, what the earlier Barthes had helped to empty out. Once more mapping Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes and La Chambre claire against La Préparation du roman, I shall, by contrast, explore the following hypothesis: in La Chambre claire Barthes bases the self on emotion. The self is not because he thinks but because he feels, because he feels compassion for the beloved other. To say the self through saying the other is to overcome egotism. Text is not enough here. It requires the medium of photography to reach beyond the sphere of the self. Barthes no longer draws on contemporary sources but uses, like Proust and Benjamin before him, Classic and Romantic models, combining them with later pathfinders of modernity. On this basis Barthes offers contrasting conceptions of subjectivity to his readers while the true self emerges in the nuances in-between. Thus Barthes no longer sets old against new, essence against destruction, but transgresses these oppositions by conjuring a dialectical model of subjectivity as inter-subjectivity. Both fortified and dislodged by his own feelings for the other, the self that emerges from his relation to the other is — or shall be, for this is the utopian vanishing point of both La Chambre claire and La Préparation du roman — at once ‘très classique et ultra-moderne’ (PR, 79). However, before returning to Barthes’s autobiographical writings to discuss this hypothesis, we shall brief ly look at another of Barthes’s earlier attempts to think the subject: L’Empire des signes, of 1971. The Subject: Focused on an Empty Centre In L’Empire des signes Barthes describes how, analogous to the Japanese city with its empty centre, the Imaginary unfolds in circles, via detours and returns, around an empty subject. Its voided centre, as Barthes contends, is not only ‘interdit’, that is forbidden and speechless, it is also ‘indifférent’, devoid of feeling (OC, III, 374). The photographs Barthes uses to complement the text further emphasize this point. One picture features the wooden statue of a Chinese monk. His face is split, but the fracture does not let us see inside his head; it only opens up to another face. Barthes comments: ‘le signe est une fracture qui ne s’ouvre jamais que sur le visage d’un autre signe’ [the sign is a fracture which only ever opens onto the face of another sign] (OC, III, 389). Another photograph, entitled, ‘Visage’ [Face], is a close-up onto a young man’s face. We only see the area around his eyes and nose. The

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caption reads: ‘Les yeux, et non pas le regard, la fente, et non pas l’âme’ [The eyes, and not the gaze, the slit, and not the soul] (OC, III, 435).7 If we recall Benjamin’s depiction of self hood as dilapidated facade in Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert the resemblance is striking.8 Just as in Benjamin’s image of the self and his emotions, in Barthes’s photographs the face appears as a mask that only ever opens onto other masks. The face is cut off from what may be inside, or rather, there is no inside. The categories of inside and outside as basic components of the conception of expression are abolished here. There is no soul that may function as the vessel of the emotions, there is no eye, no look that may serve as a window to it. As in Benjamin’s metaphor of the face as ‘Mal’ there is no inside nor outside, only surface. Even if there is a face behind this face there is nothing that could ever be expressed. No longer the mirror of our soul, the face is only ever referring to other faces as other surfaces, other signs. ‘Que’est-ce-que donc que notre visage’, Barthes asks accordingly, ‘sinon une citation?’ [What then is our face, if not a ‘citation’?] (OC, III, 420 / ES, 90). Barthes uses the examples of Japanese art which are foreign to him to signify alternative models of self hood. Like Benjamin he seeks to destroy the concepts of ‘personality’ and ‘character’. Like Benjamin he rejects a conception of the subject which is based on bourgeois sentimental culture [bürgerliche Gefühlskultur], built upon the heavy-weighted, ideologically laden categories soul, personality, emotion. Feeling as ‘sentimentalité’, Barthes would suspect with an air of the Nietzschean ‘Pathos der Distanz’ that also inf luenced Benjamin’s and Brecht’s thinking, is an ‘illusion morale’ and as such forms part of the bourgeois Imaginary. Sentimentality appears as an ideological category which is potentially deceptive and repressive.9 Like Benjamin, who turns to Chinese theatre in order to formulate his notion of depersonalized and hence purified feeling, like Brecht, who develops his ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ largely under the impression of the Beijing Opera art of performance,10 Barthes turns to the foreign code of Japanese theatre to illustrate the argument that it is not expression, not identification, but emotionally detached, externalized signification that should be the aim.11 In the (preserved) otherness of Japanese art and culture Barthes finds an alternative to Western discourses on self hood and representation. Just as Barthes opts for the ‘exemption du sens’ [exemption from meaning] in L’Empire des signes (OC, III, 407 / ES, 73), he also opts for an exemption of the subject and with it for an exemption of feeling. The self can only ever be presented as a series of differences revolving around an indifferent cavity. Any attempt to refill this cavity could only ever mean, as Barthes maintains in Sade, Fourrier, Loyola (1971), ‘la méconnaissance que le sujet a lui-même au moment où il assume de dire et de remplir son je’ [the subject’s misapprehension of himself at the moment he assumes stating and fulfilling his I] (OC, III, 744 / SFL, 49–50). The subject needs to be emptied out, voided of its essence, voided of its feelings and mobilized, so as to escape arrest and subjection. Only in the form of a cavity, in a state of emotional impoverishment and alienation, so it seems, can the subject be free. Barthes’s description of the self and his emotions in L’Empire des signes leaves him with a question: how can this model of self hood be translated into an autobiograph­ ical text? How can one say ‘I’ without falling prey to falsification? Should one

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abandon oneself to the Imaginary or rather defy it? Barthes’s autobiographical text Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, as suggested in the previous chapter, is marked by this conf lict. Barthes here renews the metaphor of the self as a cavity. In the form of a ‘chambre d’échos’ (OC, IV, 652) it reappears in the autobiographical text. The metaphor recalls Benjamin’s depiction of the autobiographical subject in the image of the loggia as camera obscura and echo chamber from Berliner Kindheit. Yet a chamber which collects echoes is no longer altogether voided. A closer look at Barthes’s model of the self and the course of its modifications from Roland Barthes to La Chambre claire will offer some clarification. Struggling with the Emotions An obvious aspect we have thus far only mentioned but not discussed becomes significant here: Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes begins with a series of photographs. They show the people and places of his childhood, illustrate the genealogical history of the family, and offer some insights into Barthes’s life as an academic, including a short sequence of portraits of him seated at his desk. The commentary begins in the distant third person singular (‘l’auteur’) yet swiftly changes to the first person singular, ‘je’. The selection of these photographs, as Barthes points out in the opening, was guided exclusively by personal pleasure and fascination and is as such ‘assez égoïste’ [quite selfish] (OC, IV, 581 / RB, 3). Coming from L’Empire des signes, which focused on the vacancy of the subject, this openly autobiographical tone that seemingly presupposes the identity of the written and the writing self is surprising. And so is the criterion this ‘je’ offers for his choice of the pictures. The photographs reproduced in these pages are those that hit him, Barthes tells us, pictures that startled him and hence provoked his very personal, affective reaction. Barthes anticipates what he will later theorize as the punctum here, the sudden, affective, and potentially wounding sensation the act of looking at photographs may inf lict on the viewer. It is the affect contagion that photographic authenticity and singularity can cause, the dimension of photography which Benjamin increasingly sought to erase from his own autobiographical writing. We find here, before the actual text corpus of this so-called anti-autobiography has even begun, an autobiographical ‘je’ that identifies itself as the author of the text disclosing to his readers his most intimate, emotive sensations. There is another section on these first illustrated pages that addresses the rel­ ationship between the writing self, his self-portraits and his emotions. Com­menting on a photographic portrait that features Barthes as a toddler alone on the beach, with his face invisible under a huge white hat, Barthes notes: Du passé, c’est mon enfance qui me fascine le plus; elle seule, à la regarder, ne me donne pas le regret du temps aboli. Car ce n’est pas l’irréversible que je découvre en elle, c’est l’irréductible: tout ce qui est encore en moi, par accès; dans l’enfant, je lis à corps découvert l’envers noir de moi-même, l’ennui, la vulnérabilité, l’aptitude aux désespoirs (heureusement pluriels), l’émoi interne, coupé pour son malheur de toute expression (OC, IV, 603). [From the past, it is my childhood which fascinates me most; these images

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Transgressing Egotism alone, upon inspection, fail to make me regret the time which has vanished. For it is not the irreversible I discover in my childhood, it is the irreducible: everything which is still me, by fits and starts; in the child, I read quite openly the dark underside of myself — boredom, vulnerability, disposition to despairs (in the plural, fortunately), inward excitement, cut off (unfortunately) from all expression (RB, 22).]

Clearly Barthes refers to what he had earlier sought to erase, to an interior of the self, ‘en moi’, to an emotive disposition that forms the unchangeable essence of a character. It is a misfortune, he claims, that this emotive state cannot be expressed by words. Yet the photograph, not as the analogous reproduction of the self but as the physical trace of his body, can reveal it. In the opening text–photo collage the previously hollow subject thus appears to accumulate psychological substance. And yet, upon closer consideration, this impression is quickly to be contradicted. The use of pronouns suggests this as well: from ‘je’ and ‘moi’ to ‘il’ to ‘lui’, ‘nous’ and ‘vous’, Barthes is also eager to carry the reader away from the idea of an emotive core of the autobiographical subject he had just referred to and that may be revealed. The ensuing commentaries on the photographs further enhance this tendency in which, instead of aiming for affective authentication, Barthes seeks to fictionalize instead.12 ‘Ce que je dirais de chaque image’, Barthes informs us, strategically relativizing the first impression of affective immediacy, ‘ne sera jamais qu’imaginaire’ [What I shall say about each image will never be anything but... imaginary] (OC, IV, 581 / RB, 3). The photographs themselves help to illustrate this Imaginary of a self that is dispersed and always the result of misrecognition. ‘Nous, toujours nous’ reads the caption to a portrait that shows Barthes as an elegant teenager lying on the beach. Later, he delivers the complete Diderot citation: ‘Nous, toujours nous, et pas une minute les mêmes’ [we are ourselves, always ourselves, and never one minute the same] (OC, IV, 717 / RB, 144). Moreover, Barthes names one of the photo­g raphs after Lacan’s ‘stade du miroir’ [mirror stage] (OC, IV, 600 / RB, 21) and further illustrates the impossibility of recognizing one’s true self, the sensation of seeing the self as other, when commenting on two photographic self-portraits: ‘même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamné à l’imaginaire’ [even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its imaginary] (OC, IV, 616). Consequently, rather than subverting the Imaginary, the photographs assist in creating it. Together with the commentaries the photographs form an ‘imaginaire d’images’ (OC, IV, 582), helping to shape the ‘roman familial’ [the family novel] (OC, IV, 599 / RB, 19), the ‘imaginaire primordial de l’enfance’ [primordial image-hoard/imaginary of childhood] (OC, IV, 584). Together, texts and photographs perform a phantasmatic ‘spectacle’, based on the interplay of images and discourses evoked. This strategy of fictionalization is further enhanced by the references to Proust, whom Barthes introduces as his potential contemporary (OC, IV, 603). Not only does the choice of illustrations resemble that which characterizes the volume Proust par lui-même of the same series, Écrivains de toujours.13 They also implicitly quote some of the most prominent locations and scenes from Proust’s autobiographical novel: the ‘ville romanesque’ [fictive (city)], a Brittany town (Balbec/Bayonne) (OC, IV, 584 / RB, 6), first erotic experiences in public gardens, mother and

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grandmother as the carriers of the family discourse, family genealogy, drinking tea...; as Barthes notes: ‘(la suite dans Proust)’ [the rest in Proust] (OC, IV, 592 / RB, 13). Photographs and captions thus create ‘le temps du récit (de l’imagerie)’ [the time of the narrative (of the imagery)] which the following text fragments cannot (and are not meant to) offer. For ‘le Texte’, Barthes contends, ‘ne peut rien raconter’ [the Text can recount nothing] (OC, IV, 582 / RB, 3–4).14 Wilfully oscillating between fact and fiction, this image-narrative at once seduces and repels the reader who, according to the customary expectations of the genre, is secretly hoping for biographical, personal and emotional insights. According to this strategy, Barthes’s mother, whose portrait opens the photo-series, is not introduced as the mother of the author, but as ‘La mère du narrateur’ [The narrator’s mother]. The same holds true with regard to all other family members.15 At the same time, however, the last of the desk portraits shows Barthes in the summer of 1974 in Juanles-Pins, sitting at the desk where Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes was composed (OC, IV, 619). In this way the text–image collage at once stages the self as ‘narrateur’ [narrator], creates the phantasm of an ‘écrivain’ [writer] with a Proustian air, and sets traces that lead to the heart of the biographical ‘je’ who speaks. If photographs, as Barthes claims, reveal ‘la fissure du sujet’ (OC, IV, 581), then Barthes’s photo–text collage stages, in a slight variation of the Lacanian divide, a self that is split into a true ‘je’, replete with the emotions he seeks to express, and an imaginary ‘moi’ without substance, only ever created through these photographs and words, resident on the surface of portraits and text. This ‘moi’ is at once seductive and deceptive, his changeable and phantasmatic qualities are the source of both pleasure and pain. And yet, we have to keep asking, is it so simple? For the corpus of text fragments that follows the opening photo–text collage further complicates the matter. The complication hinges on the rather ambivalent conception and location of emotion within this arrangement of interior, substantial ‘je’ and superficial, f lat ‘moi’. Contrary to first expectations, emotion in Roland Barthes is not always equated with authenticity or truth. Whenever Barthes introduces the thought of a true self, substantiated by the weight of an emotive essence which photography may uncover, he is later quick to pour out again what this self had earlier appeared to contain. When seeking to define ‘le privé’, for example, Barthes notes that the sphere of the private, ‘la passion, l’amitié, la tendresse, la sentimentalité, le plaisir d’écrire’ [passion, friendship, tenderness, sentimentality, delight in writing], has nothing to do with authenticity but rather appears as a part of ‘mon imaginaire dans sa consistence la plus forte’ [my image-system/imaginary in its strongest consistency] (OC, IV, 659). In a complementary passage, Barthes maintains, drawing on Marcel’s aunts Flora and Céline as cases in point, ‘le champ de l’affectivité — [...] ne pourrait être dite sans gêne, puisqu’elle est de l’ordre de l’imaginaire’ [the field of affectivity [...] could not be spoken without embarrassment, since it belongs to the order of the imaginary] (OC, IV, 644 / RB, 65). In passages like these the distrust against the realm of affectivity, earlier so vehemently expressed in L’Empire des signes, reclaims its previous position. The link between affectivity and deception is even further underscored in the following passage, as, revealing roots not only in Lacanian psychoanalysis but reaching back to the French Moralists of the seventeenth

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century, Barthes writes: ‘Lacanien, “imaginaire” s’étend jusqu’aux confins de l’ “amour propre” classique” ’ [The Lacanian ‘image-repertory’ — imaginaire — extends to the borders of the classical ‘self-love’ — amour-propre] (OC, IV, 652 / RB, 74). Bürger informs us that the passage refers to François de La Rochefoucauld’s con­ cep­tion of self-love.16 As a discoverer of the human unconscious avant la lettre La Rochefoucauld argued that the I is not just the place of reason but to the same extent a place of self-deception.17 He criticized self-love as being inauthentic and as such the instance of this self-deception.18 And yet, in Roland Barthes Barthes does not simply repeat the critique of the subject and its emotions which he had earlier given voice to in L’Empire des signes. He rather reformulates this critique, taking it, according to one of his favoured thought figures, ‘à un autre tour de la spirale’ [at another turn of the spiral] (OC, IV, 647 / RB, 69). In his ‘anti-autobiography’ of 1975 Barthes no longer merely favours the carving out of the emotive self as he once did in Empire des signes. His Nietzschean pathos of distance begins to show its first cracks inasmuch as the interplay of photographs and text fragments reveals a self that is caught in a battle with his own emotionality. On the one hand the idea of the self ’s interior, private, emotive core is suspected of being a place of imaginary illusion, of misrecognition, that does not lead us to an authentic self but always already belongs to the sphere of others. In opposition to this deceptive concept of a self that is affectively replete, Barthes conceptualizes a self that is emptied out of its emotions, that is at once superficial and atopic and that can only appear in a state of dispersal, scattered all over the surface of the writing. ‘Loin d’approfondir’, Barthes notes, ‘je reste à la surface [...] la profondeur appartient aux autres’ [Far from reaching the core of the matter, I remain on the surface [...] depth, profundity, belongs to others] (OC, IV, 716 / RB, 142). As distant ‘lui’ this is a prosaic self, ‘jamais lyrique, jamais homogène au pathos en dehors duquel il doit chercher sa place’ [never lyrical, never homogenous with the pathos outside of which he must seek his place] (OC, IV, 662 / RB, 86)].19 On the other hand, however, emotionality also appears as something cherished. Located beyond the ‘diction d’un “émoi” central’ [as the utterance of a central ‘emotion’] (OC, IV, 664 / RB, 86) it is evoked as a dislocated, hetero-topic emotionality that wants expression. Having the potential of dissolving all lure and seduction, it may even suspend the freewheeling of the Imaginary and facilitate momentary, affective cognition in the ‘expression première et comme insignifiante d’un comblement’ [primary and somehow insignificant expression of a fulfilment] (OC, IV, 689 / RB, 112). In the Frame of the Same When analysing the self ’s struggle with his own emotionality in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, the question becomes where the place of the other may be found in this struggle. There are several photographs and text-fragments that broach the idea of otherness. The most obvious example is the figure of Barthes’s mother. The photographic portrait with which the book opens, shows her on a beach, walking directly towards the photographer. The portrait is, like the Winter Garden Photograph in La Chambre claire, slightly faded, and the facial features of the mother

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are out of focus to the point that we can hardly make them out. The portrait is placed next to the book’s title: ‘Roland Barthes’. In this way, both photograph and text seem to engage in a peculiar dialogue, begin to overlap.20 If we were to remain within a Lacanian framework, an imaginary consolidation could be imagined here, the conjuration of physical security before any individualization, a symbiotic state where the bodies of mother and child are not yet separated. In La Chambre claire we find this motif further developed. Gazing at the Winter Garden Photograph, Barthes notes: Une sorte de lien ombilical relie le corps de la chose photographiée à mon regard: la lumière, quoique impalpable, est bien ici un milieu charnel, une peau que je partage avec celui ou celle qui à été photographié. (OC, V, 854). [A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze: light, though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed (CL, 81)].

The body’s ref lection in the photograph turns into the skin or the umbilical cord which connects the on-looking self with the portrayed other. The photographic portrait as the emanation of the mother’s body thus suggests a restoration of the original physical unity between mother and son. As Barthes contends with reference to Freud, by representing the mother’s body the photograph reconstructs the only place of which we can say with certainty that we have already been there (OC, V, 819). The second photograph that thematizes the mother–son relationship is the portrait entitled ‘le stade du miroir’, featuring the mother with her baby–son, both looking into the direction of the camera. Here, the approving gaze of the mother sanctions and verifies the imaginary self-perception of the I. It tells him: ‘tu es cela’ [That’s you] (OC, IV, 601 / RB, 21). In both cases the figure of the mother, her gaze, only gains meaning with regard to the beholding son. Her role is reduced to that of a medium, a catalyst for the son’s perception of his own self as well as for the production of his own self-writing: ‘et tout cela se fait, c’est ici bien évident, à travers la Mère, présente à côté du Miroir’ [And all this happens, as is obvious here, through the Mother, present next to the Mirror] (OC, IV, 726 / RB, 153). What holds true for the figure of the mother concerns most instances of otherness in Roland Barthes. The other — or, the others — appear either as beholders of the gaze that constitutes, sanctions and oppresses the self. Or they appear as beholders of the doxa, the prevailing discourse from which the self equally seeks to distinguish himself through strategies of individualization as he also painfully feels his exclusion.21 The other hardly ever appears as an object of interest in his or her own right. Particularly in passages where the other features as the object of the self ’s desire, he or she remains strangely undefined and out of focus. When Barthes transforms his recollection of scenes in Morocco into the conception of the ‘entretien amoureux’ [erotic discourse] which manifests itself in matt, imageless discourse, the other remains an anonymous, plural ‘ils’ [they]. Rather than opening up towards a dialectical self-other relationship, as Barthes claims (OC, IV, 623), the desiring self eventually only collapses back into his original state of isolation. Even if Barthes stages the self as mobilized, pluralized,

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dispersed and engaged in a process of constant transformations, his ‘livre du Moi’ (OC, IV, 695) is a book of a self who does little more than narcissistically record his own blow-ups and def lations, scrutinizing his own ‘déchets’ [scraps] (OC, IV, 672 / RB, 95). In this way the self that emerges from the interplay of photographs and texts in Roland Barthes corresponds to a definition of subjectivity Barthes offers in La Préparation du roman by drawing on Nietzsche: ‘ “Le point de subjectivité est mobile” [...] Ce qui est important dans la citation de Nietzsche, c’est la notion de point (de subjectivité): la subjectivité non comme un f leuve, même changeant, mais comme une mutation discontinue (et comme aheurtée) de lieux.’ [‘The point of the subject is mobile’ [...] What’s important in the Nietzsche quotation is the notion of the point (of subjectivity): subjectivity not as a river, even an ever-changing one, but as a discontinuous (and yet unabrupt) mutation of sites]. Barthes adds in brackets: ‘cf. Kaléidoscope’ (PR, 79). The metaphor of the kaleidoscope captures the idea of self hood as a mobile, dispersed plurality, as a series of ever different formations. At the same time, however, a kaleidoscopic self can never reach out towards the other. And yet this claim needs adjustment. Inasmuch as we found a tendency towards authentic emotive expression in Roland Barthes, there are also passages that seemingly seek to overcome the constraints of self hood. There are sections that ponder upon the question of how to speak to someone one loves (OC, IV, 664). There is, already, the longing for a utopian love dialogue where two ‘je t’aime’ would ideally coincide and keep each other in a state of suspension (OC, IV, 689). These thrusts towards the other are, however, repeatedly re-apprehended in images of isolation and sterility. Their joy is frequently counteracted by self-portraits of isolation, the anxiety of being confined to an undialectical self hood, of being ‘un être pour rien’ (OC, IV, 599). In fact, the radical opening of the self towards the other only takes place in La Chambre claire. The Shift from the Self to the Other If — in the vein of L’Empire des signes — Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes for long stretches was still a work that produced ‘plusieurs masques (personae), échelonneés selon la profondeur de la scène (et cependant personne dernière)’ [several masks (personae), distributed according to the depth of the stage (and yet no one — personne, as we say in French — is behind them)] (OC, IV, 695 / RB, 120) this changes fundamentally in La Chambre claire. Here the autobiographical I, who had so far just occasionally emerged between the lines and photographs, wholly steps into the limelight. Now Barthes not only chooses the ‘je’ as a single, unified narrating instance and openly suggests the identity between written and writing self, he also abandons adjectives and metaphors that may have implied a self-writing marked by appearance, surface and hollowness. The increased use of expressions such as ‘moimême’ [myself ], ‘en moi’ [in me], ‘pour moi’ [for me] creates the image of a self with a substance, a replete self, endowed with an interior from which the ideas, sensations and emotions he expresses originate.22 At first glance, Barthes’s modified rhetoric of self hood in La Chambre claire appears surprisingly naïve. It seems to accept ordinary, everyday language. Moreover, it seems to imply a deliberately unsophisticated

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re-conception of self hood, a re-conception which the Barthes of 1975 would simply have called ‘démodé’ [unfashionable] (OC, IV, 700 / RB, 125). Can we, however, fully believe in statements such as a diary entry of 13 August 1977 where Barthes exclaims: ‘Tout en coup, il m’est devenu indifférent de ne pas être moderne’? [All of a sudden, not being modern became a matter of indifference to me] (OC, V, 676). It seems more plausible that Barthes’s modified use of the I in La Chambre claire is neither simply naïve nor staged but rather the result of an altered epistemological strategy. In La Chambre claire Barthes once again refers to Nietzsche, who is not only notorious for his theses on the ‘Subjekt als Vielheit’ [subject as plurality] but also for the unmasking of the subject as a (linguistic) illusion and fiction.23 ‘Mieux valait, une bonne fois pour toutes’, Barthes notes in one of his opening sections, ‘retourner ma protestation de singularité en raison, et tenter de faire de “l’antique souveraineté du moi” (Nietzsche) un principe heuristique’ [It was better, once and for all, to make my protestation of singularity into a virtue — to try making what Nietzsche called the ‘ego’s ancient sovereignty’ into an heuristic principle] (OC, V, 795 / CL, 8). For Barthes egotism not as a naïve notion but rather as a deliberate, hypothetical and temporary assumption becomes method. Accordingly, the on-looking self is not only turned into the measure of photographical knowledge — ‘me voici donc moi-même mesure du “savoir” photographique’ (OC, V, 795). He also becomes the ultimate referent of all photographs used in the book: ‘Je suis le repère de toute photographie, et c’est en cela qu’elle m’induit à m’étonner, en m’adressant la question fondamentale: pourquoi est-ce que je vis ici et maintenant?’ [I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?] (OC, V, 856 / CL, 84).24 The I Barthes depicts here is not grounded in otherness but individualistic, seeking the sources of his contemplations within the depths of his own self. The basis of this self is, however, not reason but rather the deliberate awareness of his most intimate emotional responses. As Barthes proclaims: ‘J’ai decidé de prendre pour guide la conscience de mon émoi’ [I have determined to be guided by the consciousness of my feelings] (OC, V, 796 / CL, 10). Bürger points out that Barthes here implicitly refers to Descartes, whom he opposes. According to Descartes the precondition of one’s control over the self is grounded in the idea of the separation between the rational self and one’s own body. As an epistemological ref lection this separation takes place in the act of doubt or thinking. Hence, for Descartes the self is an exclusively thinking being: ‘je suis un être pensant’.25 Barthes suspends Descartes’s clear-cut distinction between mind and body when he suggests that the self is not grounded in ratio but in affect, the sphere where bodily and psychological reactions fuse. According to Barthes the self is not because he thinks but because he feels. Barthes thus follows the footsteps of Romantic Descartes criticism. In the eighteenth century, the sentence ‘Je sens donc je suis’ [I feel therefore I am], formulated in provocative opposition to Descartes, had widely announced a new, emphatic conception of emotion.26 By placing affect before reason, by trusting entirely the knowledge potential of his own individual affective responses that crystallize in the photographic punctum-sensation, Barthes revitalizes this philosophy and gives it a media-theoretical turn: ‘Comme Spectator, je

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ne m’intéressais à la Photographie que par “sentiment”; je voulais l’approfondir, non comme une question (un thème), mais comme une blessure: je vois, je sens, donc je remarque, je regarde et je pense’ [As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for ‘sentimental’ reasons; I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound: I see, I feel, hence I notice, I observe, and I think] (OC, V, 805 / CL, 21). Barthes’s choice of Romantic role models for his conception of affective (self-) knowledge becomes even more obvious when we consider his Proust lecture ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bon temps...’ in this respect. Confronting the audience with his new conceptions of reading (Proust) and his own utopian project of Vita Nova, Barthes concludes the first section with a programmatic explanation: Je vais donc parler de ‘moi’. ‘Moi’ doit s’entendre ici lourdement: ce n’est pas le substitut aseptisé d’un lecteur général (toute substitution est une asepsie); ce n’est personne d’autre que celui à qui nul ne peut se substituer, pour le meilleur et pour le pire. C’est l’intime qui veut parler en moi, faire entendre son cri, face à la généralité, à la science (OC, V, 465). [Hence I shall be speaking of ‘myself ’. ‘Myself ’ is to be understood here in the full sense: not the asepticized substitute of a general reader (any substitution is an asepsis); I shall be speaking of the one for whom no one else can be substituted, for better and for worse. It is the intimate which seeks utterance in me, seeks to make its cry heard, confronting generality, confronting science (RL, 284).]

Barthes’s categorical individualism, based on weight, rather than lightness, on affect instead of indifference, on essence in lieu of appearance, and proclaimed in opposition to a generality, to the prevailing scientific discourse, ref lects the methodological programme he seeks to put into practice in the first half of La Chambre claire. In the same way that the ranking of affect over ratio sprang from a Romantic source, this radical individualism, the refusal to inherit the gaze of the other(s), draws its inspiration from a Romantic predecessor. The following passage from La Chambre claire further specifies Barthes’s position: ‘je suis un sauvage, un enfant — ou un maniaque: je congédie tout savoir, toute culture, je m’abstiens d’hériter un autre regard’ [I am a primitive, a child — or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own] (OC, V, 828 / CL, 51). The imagery of this passage is geared to a Rousseauean position. In opposition to Descartes, Rousseau famously did not anchor his selfassurance in the grounds of general reason but based it on the unique particularity of the individual who is guided by the laws of his own heart alone. This individual claims for himself universality, the universality to have remained an ‘homme naturel’ [man of nature] within a corrupted civilization. Rousseau turns this exceptional position into the point in space of his theoretical work. It is a position that, in its hubris, has often been located on the brink to madness.27 By combining the motifs ‘sauvage’ [primitive], ‘enfant’ [child], ‘maniaque’ [maniac] with the rejection of adopting a foreign perspective, Barthes not only alludes to Rousseau’s radically individualistic, pre-civilized gaze, but also points to the risk of insanity which this position entails. We soon realize, however, that in La Chambre claire Romantic individualism is not an end in itself. The second half of the text states

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this clearly. To develop one’s own, radically individual gaze is merely a means to become able to picture the other. In this way, a second Romantic conception comes to the fore, ‘peut-être tout simplement parce que Rousseau lui a donné la dignité d’un “philosophème”: la pitíé (ou la compassion)’ [perhaps, simply because Rousseau had given it the dignity of a ‘philosopheme’: pity (or compassion)] (OC, V, 468 / RL, 288). For Rousseau compassion was an affect prior to all rational ref lection. As ‘la seule vertu naturelle’ [the sole Natural virtue] and as the basis of human ‘bonté naturelle’ [natural goodness], compassion is the first relational emotion that truly connects human beings with each other. As such it becomes a moral principle.28 It is this dimension of compassion that motivates Barthes. In Préparation he explains his position with an astonishing degree of openness: ‘Permettez moi une notation personnelle, très personnelle: ce n’est qu’au bout de quelques mois après la mort d’un être aimé que j’ai pu dire simplement, nuement, “absolument”: “Je souffre de la mort de cet être” ’ [Allow me a personal, a very personal notation: it was some months after the death of a loved one before I could say, simply, nakedly, ‘absolutely’: ‘I’m suffering because that person died’] (PR, 126 / PN, 81). To say I suffer from the loss of the beloved other preconditions the ability to testify for that suffering other. As Barthes confesses in ‘Longtemps...’: ‘j’espère du Roman une sorte de transcendance de l’égotisme, dans la mesure où dire ceux qu’on aime, c’est témoigner qu’ils n’ont pas vécu (et bien souvent souffert) “pour rien” ’ [I expect from the novel a kind of transcendence of egotism, insofar as to say whom one loves is to testify that they have not lived (and frequently suffered) ‘for nothing’] (OC, V, 469 / RL, 288).29 La Chambre claire, the ‘petit recueil sur elle’ [little compilation about her] (OC, V, 841 / CL, 63) is a first attempt to realize this utopia, to realize it through the means of photography. In contrast to the photographs used in Roland Barthes, the Winter Garden Photograph is no longer on the side of fiction, surface, or deception. As a dissimilar portrait in the eyes of the on-looking son and as a photograph that remains invisible to the eyes of the reader, the Winter Garden Portrait is an arbitrary and therefore immediate realization of the lost loved object. As such it enables the observing son to reach beyond the prison house of his own Imaginary and to access the sphere of the other. As an ‘image folle, frottée de réel’ [a mad image, chafed by reality] (OC, V, 882 / CL, 115) the photograph simulates the transgressive, hallucinatory sensation of an exchange of glances between the beholder and the photographed object. Thus photography achieves what language, the sign system that is by definition ‘invention’, can never accomplish. The photograph both resurrects and testifies for ‘le génie du visage aimé’ [the genius of the beloved face] (OC, V, 843 / CL, 66). And yet, as Barthes maintains, the photograph is without future. It can only ever authentically reproduce what lives, but is to die. In this temporal structure of the inevitable ‘will-have-been’ resides the ‘pathétique’ [‘pathos’] of photography (OC, V, 805 / CL, 21). Hence, the thread that draws Barthes irresistibly to the Winter Garden Photograph is twined out of a combination of ‘ce qu’on appellerait romantiquement l’amour et la mort’ [what we romantically call love and death] (OC, V, 849 / CL, 73). It is this combination, as Barthes later specifies, ‘entre la Photographie, la Folie et [...] la souffrance d’amour’ [between Photography, madness and [...] the pangs of love] (OC, V, 882–83 / CL,

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116) that drives the beholding self to the verge of madness. Barthes equates his own insane affective sensations in the face of the Winter Garden Photograph to Nietzsche’s legendary mental breakdown during which the philosopher falls prey to compassion, the very affective sensation he had formerly dismissed as a depressive and contagious instinct.30 Barthes writes: ‘j’entrais follement dans le spectacle, dans l’image, entourant de mes bras ce qui est mort, ce qui va mourir, comme le fit Nietzsche, lorsque, le 3 Janvier 1889, il se jeta en pleurant au cou d’un cheval martyrisé: devenu fou pour cause de Pitié’ [I entered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my arms what is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzsche did when, as Podach tells us, on January 3, 1889, he threw himself in tears on the neck of a beaten horse: gone mad for Pity’s sake] (OC, V, 883 / CL, 117). Madness through passionate compassion. ‘ “Comment puis-je survivre à la mort de qui j’aime?” ’ [‘How can I survive the death of someone I love?’] (PR, 278 / PN, 210). In La Chambre claire this question is inher­ ently linked to the phenomenon of the reciprocal look. When contemplating the relationship between mourning and seeing, in his essay ‘Perdre de vue’ Pontalis tells the story of a philosopher who had recently lost his mother. A friend tries to console him, whereupon he exclaims: ‘ “Mais vous ne comprenez donc pas que je ne la verrai plus!’” [‘But you don’t understand: I will never see her again!’] Pontalis comments as follows: Le philosophe savait que la conversation intérieure se poursuivrait, il pressentait même qu’il penserait et écrirait désormais à partir de ce vide qu’opérait la disparition. Mais la douleur, et la douleur seule, restait là: il ne la verrait plus. Et ne la voyant plus, il ne serait plus vu par elle.31 [The philosopher knew that the internal conversation would continue, he even felt that from this moment he would think and write starting from this emptiness which her disappearance had brought about. But the pain, and the pain alone, remained: he would never see her again. And no longer seeing her, he would no longer be seen by her.]

Pontalis’s story recalls Barthes’s situation. If the mother is our first mirror, the loss of the mother causes the loss of our own self. Without the loved object the self remains ‘inqualifiable (sans qualité)’ (OC, V, 850). The only means to survive is to testify for the lost loved object and to preserve her look, her ‘visage’, in the artwork, ‘ “immédiatement” (sans médiation)’ (PR, 280). The artwork thus takes on a sacred dimension. As testimony, in the sense of ‘témoigner pour eux (aux sens religieux)’ [to testify for them: in the religious sense] (PR, 40 / PN, 14) the artwork is bestowed with the power to testify to the suffering other and through this act of testimony to heal the mourning self. Artistic creation, Barthes seems to believe, may lead the self out of ‘acédie’ [indifference], ‘cet état ténébreux’ [this gloomy state], and help him in overcoming this melancholic ‘impuissance d’ aimer’ [inability to love] (PR, 28 / PN, 5). The spiritual hope of finding healing power in the act of artistic, textual and photographic conjuration is one of the driving forces behind La Chambre claire. Barthes was planning to pursue this further in his phantasmatic project of a novel that may have helped him, so he was hoping, to recreate himself as a new self, to begin a new life, Vita Nova. Here, in an act of ‘conversion’, the self was to transform

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into what Barthes depicts as the persona scribens, ‘le je qui est dans la pratique de l’écriture, qui est en train d’écrire, qui vit [...] l’écriture’ [the I who’s engaged in the practice of writing, who’s in the process of writing, who lives writing] (PR, 280 / PN, 211). Next to Rousseau and Nietzsche, Proust, who takes on a Romantic existence in Barthes’s late writing, is both key witness and medium through whose help the healing process will be brought about.32 In contrast to his previous position in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, in La Chambre claire Proust no longer resides on the side of fictionalization. Rather, Proust’s work turns into the ideal for Barthes’s aim to express the ‘originalité de ma souffrance’ [originality of my suffering] (OC, V, 850 / CL, 75) in his autobiographical collage. Proust shares with Nietzsche the biographical moment of crisis that divides, according to Barthes, both their lives into a before and an after. Yet whereas Nietzsche loses his mind, Proust finds his vocation as a writer at this point that marks the ‘ “milieu de la vie” ’ [‘middle of life’] (PR, 27 / PN, 5). With A la recherche du temps perdu Proust meets Novalis, who, as Barthes notes in ‘Longtemps, ...’, ‘présentait la poésie comme “ce qui guérit les blessures de l’entendement” ’ [called poetry ‘that which heals the wounds of the intellect’] (OC, V, 41 / RL, 279). Proust, Barthes argues, develops the autobiographical novel according to this ‘tradition romantique’ [romantic tradition] as a ‘forme qui recueille la souffrance et la transcende’ [form which will accommodate suffering [...] and transcend it] (OC, V, 461 / RL, 279). If for Benjamin Proust was ‘der größte Zerstörer der Idee der Persönlichkeit, den die neuere Literatur kennt’ [the greatest destroyer of the idea of Personality in modern literature] (GS, IV.1, 750 / SW, II, 339) as well as an author who predicted the waning of affect in modernity, then Barthes, in his late work, emphasizes the opposite strand in Proust’s writing. For Barthes Proust is not only the writer who reintroduces the resacralization of the author as the one who is going to write, ‘un être sacré, en tant qu’il fait (et non en tant qu’il est)’ [a sacred being in terms of what you do (and not who you are)] (PR, 295 / PN, 224–25). Proust also overcomes the divide between reality and art in the involuntary ‘moment de vérité’ [Moment of Truth] which for Barthes resides at the core of Proust’s writing. The ‘moment de vérité’ is the point in time at which, as we have seen, from ‘une coalescence affective’ there emerges ‘une fermeté de l’affect et de l’écriture’ [concision of affect and writing] (PR, 159 / PN, 107). Interestingly, Barthes chooses those scenes from La Recherche that revolve around the grandmother’s agony and death to illustrate his claim. They are the same passages which we identified earlier as examples not of the immediacy of reciprocal visual and affective recognition but, conversely, as examples of the increasing expansion of visual and emotional cavities.33 Surprisingly, Barthes depicts these scenes as the quintessence of the moment of truth, as the ‘Moment de l’Intraitable: on ne peut ni interpréter, ni transcender, ni régresser; Amour et Mort sont là, c’est tout ce qu’on peut dire’ [Moment of the Intractable: we can neither interpret nor transcend nor regress; Love and Death are here, that’s all that can be said] (PR, 159 / PN, 107). It is in these scenes as it is in the Proustian sensation of the ‘image juste’, that Barthes finds the satori of the ‘c’est ça’, the cathartic moment of the ‘affect écrit’ [written affect] (PR, 159 / PN, 107) which he then takes to another level when staging

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the transgressive, hallucinatory, reciprocal look in the face of the Winter Garden Photograph in La Chambre claire. If the text–photo collage of La Chambre claire can express the originality of the self ’s suffering by recuperating the other from the obscure realms of ‘non-Mémoire’ (PR, 34), must we then conclude that the book eventually aims to restore the notion of a wholesome subject? In other words, does Barthes’s note on photography stage a self who eventually reaches the redemptive state of substantiation and completion by visualizing his own suffering self as well as the suffering other? If this were the case, how could we then explain that in La Chambre claire Barthes can easily write of the ‘essence précieuse de mon individu’ [the precious essence of my individuality] only to describe the self shortly afterwards as ‘léger, divisé, dispersé’ (OC, V, 797)? Or, conversely, how does Barthes manage to establish a conception of self hood that is atopic, only then to aspire to the possibility of expressing one central emotion (OC, V, 664)? Barthes’s choice of role models such as Nietzsche and Proust offers a first indication here. Nietzsche stands for the plurality of the subject as well as the conception of the sovereignty of the I as a heuristic principle. He personifies both the refusal of sentimentality as treacherous and repressive and the passionate conversion to compassion. Proust, in turn, appears as a romantic redeemer of self hood, the one who stands for ‘l’entrée massive, audacieuse de l’auteur’ (PR, 278) as well as an example of the ‘pulvérisation du sujet’ (PR, 279). How exactly does this work? In Roland Barthes Barthes once exclaims his enthusiasm for binaries (OC, IV, 631). These two-term dialectics, he later explains, should never result in the synthesis of a third term but rather open up to a stage of ‘départ’ [departure]. In this way, everything returns, yet again, with Giambattista Vico, ‘à un autre tour de la spirale’ [(at) another turn of the spiral] (OC, IV, 647 / RB, 69). Barthes’s thinking and writing, more literary than systematic, works like a palimpsest, where, according to a dialogical model, contrasting conceptions keep shimmering through on the overlapping levels, or, to remain with the image of the spiral, where they are taken up again in ever modified forms. The Barthesian Dialectic of Hollowness and Repletion Drawing on the Lacanian division of the I into a conscious, imaginary ‘être-poursoi’ [being-for-itself ] that emerges under the gaze of the Other, and an uncon­ scious, excentric ‘être-en-soi’ [being-in-itself ] that escapes all rational ref lection,34 Barthes notes in La Chambre claire that the analogous photographic portrait can only ever reproduce an imaginary self. Heavy and immobile, the gaze of the camera can never capture the true self, who, being light and dispersed, will never coincide with his picture (OC, V, 797). Barthes then goes on to contrast the impact of the gaze of the Other on the self with the effect of the individual look of the mother. It is not indifference that abolishes the verdict of self-exposure and restores the degree zero to the body, but the affectionate look of the other as the gift of love, ‘l’amour extrême’ (OC, V, 797–98). What characterizes the description of the emergence of the true self under the affectionate look of the other also marks the recognition of self and other staged in the reciprocal look. The experience of the

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hallucinatory exchange of glances in the face of the Winter Garden Photograph is not one of Proustian visual and emotional incorporation. In Barthes’s text, the observing self does not appear as a container who captures and preserves the lost other within himself.35 In Barthes’s staging of the reciprocal look, neither the ‘I’ nor the other are taken into the gaze.36 Nor does this staging comply with the Romantic conception of an intimate relationship, as what we earlier saw Luhmann depict as ‘intersubjective interpenetration’. Rather, the self–other relationship that emerges in Barthes’s writing recalls Maurice Blanchot’s notion of the ‘rencontre sans rencontre’ [encounter without encounter]. And indeed it is Blanchot whose words enable Barthes to describe the peculiar emanation of the mother in the Winter Garden Photograph as simultaneously internal and external, present and absent, ‘irrévelée et pourtant manifeste’ [unrevealed yet manifest] (OC, V, 873 / CL, 106). In the same way that the self-as-spectacle is all but classified or endowed with meaning through the affectionate look of the other, the other-as-spectacle in the photograph also resists any integration into the gaze of the observing self. This is why the act of looking at the Winter Garden Photograph allows for an immediate communication between souls (OC, V, 875). The idea of this encounter between mother and son is not based on mutual repletion or penetration, but is marked by the dialectic of mutual completion and withdrawal. There will always be something left that remains infinitely other.37 The experience of the reciprocal look thus corresponds to the description of ‘la jubilation (d’amour)’ which Barthes offers in La Préparation du roman. It leaves the subject both voided and filled. To empty the subject of signification is a precondition to its repletion with emotion. In Barthes’s words: ‘c’est parce qu’il y a dans le sujet un vide de langage, lorsque le langage se tait, qu’il n’y a plus de commentaire, d’interprétation, de sens, c’est alors que l’existence est pure: “cœur plein” (qui “déborde”)’ [it’s because there’s a language void within the subject: it’s when language is silent, when there’s no longer any commentary, interpretation, or meaning that existence is pure: a ‘full’ (‘overf lowing’) heart] (PR, 84 / PN, 47). In La Préparation du roman Barthes coins the term ‘individuation’. It depicts the process whereby the subject’s fortification, its individuality as the ‘ “quant à moi” ’, engages in a dialectical relationship with its extreme converse: the subject’s multiplication, pulverization and displacement (PR, 78–79). This process of indivi­ duation is, as Barthes further elucidates in the next seminar session, ‘un apprentissage de la subtilité’ [an apprenticeship in subtlety] that might best be defined with the term ‘nuance’. Barthes notes: ‘la Nuance: ce qui irradie, diffuse, traîne’ [Nuance: that which irradiates, diffuses, streaks] (PR, 82 / PN, 45–46). Like the Barthesian nuance the Winter Garden Photograph radiates, beams with the light traces of the lost loved object. Like the nuance it is diffuse, and its meaning only fully unfolds with a slight temporal deferral. In the photograph, the loved object is both hypervisual and absent, like the nuance, it is ‘comme un tourment du vide’ [a torment of the void] (PR, 82 / PN, 46). Surprisingly — because it happens only once in La Préparation du roman — Barthes draws on a quotation from Benjamin here. ‘J’ajoute ce mot de Walter Benjamin’ [I add these words of Walter Benjamin’s], he points out to his audience to then provide the quotation: ‘ “...les choses sont, nous le savons,

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technicisées, rationalisées, et le particulier ne se trouve plus aujourd’hui que dans les nuances” ’ [‘things are, as we know, technicalized, rationalized, and nowadays the particular is only to be found in the nuance’] (PR, 81 / PN, 45). Although I was unable to identify the exact source, the passage resembles a formulation we earlier found in Benjamin’s Proust essay and according to which ‘in den Falten erst sitzt das Eigentliche’ [only in the folds does the essential reside] (GS, VI, 467). Transferred onto Barthes’s staging of the hallucinatory, affective encounter between self and other in the face of the Winter Garden Photograph, the subject that emerges here is neither self nor other, but formed by the different nuances, the shadings that unfold in the sphere in-between. Hence what arises out of Barthes’s crisis of subjectivity is not a replete self that recuperates and reconsolidates himself by incorporating the lost other into his own gaze and into his own writing. Rather, it is a heterotopic self, whom the eyes of the other in the photograph catapult into a ‘sorte de horschamp subtil’ [a kind of subtle beyond] (OC, V, 834). The Barthesian self that emerges from the photographic encounter in La Chambre claire is also a self who fears that the wish to transgress the restraints of the same, to reach out for and to envision the other, may eventually turn out to be an impossible utopia. The figure of the isolated lover which we could identify in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes and which then predominates the Fragments d’un discours amoureux as well as Incidents, where not mutual eye-contact but visual and emotional isolation prevails, still marks the writing of La Chambre claire.38 It formulates the fear that the self may eventually only ever fall back and collapse into the isolation of a non-dialectical existence and that not even the reinvention of the self as persona scribens who suspends his life in writing and picturing the other could eventually preserve the subject from his non-dialectical death. ‘Voilà ce que je lisais dans la Photographie du Jardin d’Hiver’, Barthes also notes in La Chambre claire, ‘ma mort totale, indialectique’ [That is what I read in the Winter Garden Photograph [...] my total, undialectical death] (OC, V, 848 / CL, 72). The I that hence arises from this contrast both of transgression and retreat, repletion and dissolution, is marked by uncertainty. It is a residual I. ‘Je’, to use Barthes’s own words, ‘est toujours un reste’ [I is always a remainder] (PR, 129 / PN, 83). Become who you are The Roland Barthes of L’Empire des signes shares with the Walter Benjamin of Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert the ideological misgivings about bourgeois sentimental culture combined with the rejection of the category of the ‘Person’ inasmuch as it implies the subject’s potential subjection. Against the backdrop of what they both regard as the prevailing discourse of their times, Barthes and Benjamin establish a conception of the self as a visual and emotional cavity. Behind the f lattening and arresting photographs there is not a ‘Person’ that could be grasped or represented but a free-f loating, atopic I who constantly withdraws. When looking at Barthes’s later autobiographical writing, however, the differences between him and Benjamin become quite striking. Benjamin seeks to overcome the constraints of the ‘Person’ by means of de-individualization. In the course of his autobiographical writing, the self increasingly merges into generality, anonymity. No longer anchored in its

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emotions, Benjamin’s self is turned into an echo-chamber where detached feelings as secondary sound and shadow images pass through. This is different with the late Roland Barthes. Rather than generalization, he suggests ‘individuation’ as a means to move away from the doxa and to overcome the fixed contours of the category of the ‘personne’, a process whereby the self becomes both replete and emptied out at the same time. It is not self-immunization but self-exposure to photographic affect contagion that is the strategy here, pure affect, instead of no affect. Whereas Benjamin increasingly erases photography as a motif and metaphor in the course of revising his autobiographical work, Barthes composes his last completed auto­ biographical work around the absent photograph of his mother. Inasmuch as reality and truth coincide in this photographic portrait, the portrait leads to that ‘mad’ point where affect authenticates being: ‘elle porte l’effigie à ce point fou où l’affect (l’amour, la compassion, le deuil, l’élan, le désir) est garant de l’être’ [it bears the effigy to that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, enthusiasm, desire) is a guarantee of Being] (OC, V, 880 / CL, 113). This difference between Barthes’s and Benjamin’s self-writing also characterizes their respective use of Proust. To Benjamin, Proust is first and foremost the modernist destroyer of the category of ‘Personality’. Depicted as a master of showing (GS, II.1, 321) Proust also eventually appears as a writer who reveals the hallucinatory sensation of involuntary realization in the reciprocal, affective look to be isolated, arbitrary, and in a state of decline. To the late Barthes, by contrast, Proust mostly plays the role of a Romantic creator whose ‘moments of truth’ may bring about emotional and spiritual redemption. And yet we have to be careful in reading the develop­ment of Barthes’s thinking and writing from L’Empire des signes via Roland Barthes to La Chambre claire and La Préparation du roman in light of a clear-cut break away from everything he had argued before, as kind of a radical conversion under the impression of death. Not only Barthes’s constant re-thinking of the subject, but also the continuously shifting transformation of his autobiographical writing, progresses in accord with what he defines in La Préparation as the ‘vrai devenir dialectique’ [real dialectical becoming]. Once more it is Nietzsche who serves as a role model here: ‘Deviens qui tu es’ [Become who you are].39 Or, in Kaf ka’s radi­ calization of Nietzsche’s bon mot: ‘ “Détruis-toi... afin de te transformer en celui que tu es” ’ [‘Destroy yourself... in order to make yourself into what you are’] (PR, 38/ PN, 304). Barthes concludes his lecture course in November 1979 with an example that is not drawn from the sphere of literature or photography but from music. And yet, I shall quote it here since it does not only summarize the theoretical premises on the basis of which La Chambre claire was written. It also gives these premises a surprisingly optimistic turn: Alors, aussi, se trouve tout naturellement abolie la distinction du Nouveau et de l’Ancien, tracé le chemin de la spirale, et honoré le mot de Schönberg, fondateur de la musique contemporaine et reconducteur de la musique ancienne: il est encore possible d’écrire de la musique en ut majeur. C’est là, pour finir, l’objet de mon désir: écrire une œuvre en Ut Majeur (PR, 384). [Thus, in this way, the distinction between the Old and the New would quite naturally be abolished, the path of the spiral marked out, and these words from

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Notes to Chapter 8 1. Bürger, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, p. 212. 2. A recent example is Daniela Langer’s dissertation Wie man wird was man schreibt: Sprache, Subjekt und Autobiographie bei Nietzsche und Barthes (Munich: Fink, 2005). 3. Ann Jefferson, ‘Bodymatters’, p. 173. 4. Ingrid Wassenaar, ‘Le Juste Milieu... Proust’s Transmission’, in Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers, ed. by Martin Crowley (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 114–28. 5. Philippe Roger, ‘Caritas Incarnate: A Tale of Love and Loss’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14/2 (2001), 527–34 (pp. 529, 539). 6. Bürger, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, p. 211. For an early example of reading, like Roger and Bürger, Barthes’s late projects in light of a conversion, see Gerald J. Kennedy. He interprets La Chambre claire as an act of liberation from the self-constructed ‘prison house’ of Barthes’s own theory and as a ‘practice against the coldness of the heart’, ‘Roland Barthes, Autobiography and the End of Writing’, The Georgia Review, 35 (1981), 381–98 (p. 397). 7. Both photographs and their respective captions are missing from Richard Howard’s abridged English translation. 8. See chapter II.6. 9. This will soon be questioned, however. In Le Plaisir du texte (1973), for instance, Barthes writes: ‘L’émotion: pourquoi serait-elle antipathique à la jouissance ( je la voyais à tort tout entière du côté de la sentimentalité, de l’illusion morale)?’ [Emotion: why should it be antipathetic to bliss (I was wrong when I used to see it wholly on the side of sentimentality, of moral illusion)?] (OC, IV, 233 / PT, 25). 10. Brecht saw Mei Lanfang, the world star of the Beijing Opera, at a theatre festival in Moscow in 1935 and was hugely impressed by his non-illusionary acting that reduced all movement to a fixed canon of gestures. 11. See the portraits of the Kabouki-actor on stage dressed as a woman; as Barthes points out, the Kabouki-actor does not identify with his role but signifies it (OC, III, 392–93). 12. Langer describes Barthes’s tendency to fictionalize the photographs with the help of the captions, in Wie man wird was man schreibt, p. 264. 13. Claude Mauriac, Proust par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1959). Ottmar Ette points this out in Roland Barthes: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), p. 390. 14. On Barthes’s self-staging as Proustian ‘écrivain’, see again Ette, Roland Barthes, p. 390. 15. Except for Barthes’s half-brother, who does not feature at all. See the list of illustrations in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes (OC, IV, 764–66). 16. See Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, p. 207. 17. As La Rochefoucauld notes: ‘On ne peut sonder la profondeur, ni percer les ténèbres de ses abîmes [...]. Là il est souvent invisible à lui-même, il y concoît, il y nourrit, et il y élève, sans le savoir, un grand nombre d’affections et de haines ; il en forme de si monstrueuses que, lorsqu’il les a mises au jour, il les méconnaît, ou il ne peut se résoudre à les avouer’, François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, ed. by Jacques Truchet (Paris: Garnier, 1967), p. 134 [No one can fathom the depths of its chasms, or penetrate their darkness [...]. There it is often invisible even to itself; there, unknowingly, it breeds, nurtures, and raises a vast number of affections and hatreds. Some of them are so monstrous that, when it has given birth to them, it either fails to recognize them or cannot bring itself to acknowledge them], trans. (in parallel text) by E. H. Blackmore, A. M. Blackmore and Francine Giguère as Collected Maxims and Other Reflections (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 147–49. 18. Lacan himself makes this connection: ‘Ce qui est scandaleux chez La Rochefoucauld, ce n’est pas que l’amour-propre soit pour lui au fondement de tous les comportements humains, c’est

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qu’il est trompeur, inauthentique’, Séminaire II: Le Moi dans la théorie de Freud et dans la technique de la psychanalyse (Paris: Seuil 1978), p. 18 [In La Rochefoucauld, what is scandalous is not so much that for him self-love is the basis of all human behaviour, but rather that it is deceiving, inauthentic], trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli as The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), p. 10. 19. This rhetoric lives on in Fredric Jameson’s discussion of Postmodernism, and in Rei Terada’s deconstructive study of the relationship between subject and emotion, in Feeling in Theory. Fredric Jameson, following Lyotard, sees the outmoded concept of ‘feeling’ as being replaced by what he calls a ‘new emotional ground-tone’ consisting of free-f loating and impersonal ‘intensities’, Postmodernism, pp. 6, 15–16. Inveighing against the ‘ideology of emotion’, Terada argues in favour of an understanding of feelings not as individual expressions, but as effects of subject-less networks of signs. 20. This is suggested by Doris Kolesch, in Das Schreiben des Subjekts: Zur Inszenierung ästhetischer Subjektivität bei Baudelaire, Barthes und Adorno (Vienna: Passagen, 1996), p. 171. 21. For ref lections on means of individualization against visual or rhetoric incorporation and subjection, see paradigmatically, the desk portraits. They succeed and oppose the unrecognizable self-portraits, showing Barthes in the only space where his body is ‘libre de tout imaginaire’ [free of its image-repertoire/imaginary] (OC, IV, 616–19). Concerning the anxieties and delights associated with exclusion, see ‘L’Exclusion’ (OC, IV, 662) and ‘Un souvenir d’enfance’ (OC, IV, 697). 22. Gratton draws attention to this when he examines La Chambre claire in terms of a rhetoric of subjectivity based on strategies of ‘remplissage’. At the same time, however, Gratton relativizes this observation when identifying a strong element of theatricality in the text. ‘The rhetoric around the “pour moi” ’, he concludes, ‘is not self-expression but its staging’, ‘The Subject of Enunciation in Barthes’s La Chambre claire’, French Studies, 50/2 (1996), 170–81 (pp. 172–73, 180). 23. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. by Giorgio Colli et al., 15 vols (Munich: dtv/de Gruyter, 1988), xi: Nachgelassene Fragmente, p. 650. 24. It is therefore idle to criticize, as is often done, Barthes’s eclectic choice of photographs and his at times imprecise interpretation and contextualization. Barthes’s point, as I understand it, is less to say something relevant about these photographs than to use them in order to say something relevant about the observing self and, eventually, about the beloved other whose loss he is contemplating through the use of these photographs. 25. I quote Descartes from Bürger, whose commentary I follow here, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, p. 41. 26. The quotation stems from the Marquis d’Argens’s La philosophie du bons sens (1746). As a variation, see: ‘Je sens, donc j’existe’ [I feel, therefore I exist], in Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Etudes de la nature (1784). Both d’Argens and Saint-Pierre were representatives of the era of ‘sensibilité’. I draw both quotations from Sigrid Weigel, Literatur als Voraussetzung der Kulturgeschichte (Munich: Fink, 2004), p. 151. 27. For a more detailed description of Rousseau’s position, see Bürger, Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, pp. 100, 102. Bürger does not comment on this affinity between Rousseau and Barthes, though. 28. Rousseau, Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, in Œuvres complètes, III, pp. 154, 156. 29. See Bürger’s comment: ‘Paradoxerweise muß er [Barthes] also ich sagen, um vom Egotismus loszukommen, nämlich sich als den sagen, dem die Andere alles ist. Literatur wird so für den Schreibenden und, insofern dieser sich mit den Gestalten identifiziert, auch für den Lesenden zu dem Ort, wo das Leiden anerkannt ist […], und zwar das besondere Leiden des einzelnen Individuums’ [Paradoxically he [Barthes] has to say I in order to escape egotism, namely to speak of oneself as the one for whom the other is everything. In this way, for the writer — and the reader, should he identify with the characters — literature turns into the place where suffering is recognized […], that is, the special suffering of the particular individual], Das Verschwinden des Subjekts, p. 213. 30. Nietzsche explains: ‘Das Mitleiden steht im Gegensatz zu den tonischen Affekten, welche

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die Energie des Lebensgefühls erhöhn: es wirkt depressiv [...] Mitleiden ist die Praxis des Nihilismus. Nochmals gesagt: dieser depressive und kontagiöse Instinkt kreuzt jene Instinkte, welche auf Erhaltung und Wert-Erhöhung des Lebens aus sind: er ist ebenso als Multiplikator des Elends wie als Conservator alles Elenden ein Hauptwerkzeug zur Steigerung der décadence — [...]’, Nietzsche, Der Antichrist, in Sämtliche Werke vi.3, pp. 170–71. [Pity is the opposite of the tonic affects that heighten the energy of vital feelings. Pity has a depressive effect. [...] pity is the practice of nihilism. Once more: this depressive and contagious instinct runs counter to the instincts that preserve and enhance the value of life: by multiplying misery just as much as by conserving everything miserable, pity is one of the main tools used to increase decadence], Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and other Writings, ed. by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 7–8. 31. Pontalis, ‘Perdre de vue’, in Perdre de vue, p. 275. 32. In La Préparation du roman Proust becomes a representative of what Barthes calls a ‘Romantisme large’ [broadly conceived Romanticism]. This is a rather peculiar assembly which unites Proust with writers as diverse as Flaubert, Mallarmé and Kaf ka (PR, 383 / PN, 303). 33. The passages Barthes refers to are from La Recherche (RTP, III, 610ff. / SLT, V, 90ff.). 34. Lacan’s division shows the inf luence of Sartre who develops these concepts in L’Être et le Néant. 35. For Proust’s container–contained model, see, chapter I.2. 36. In that Barthes’s image differs from Pontalis’s depiction according to which the work of mourn­ ing is completed once the self is able ‘to take the other into his gaze’, Perdre de vue, p. 298. 37. In this sense the self-other relation Barthes stages in La Chambre claire also resonates with Levinas’s concept of the ethical encounter as discussed in chapter I.2. 38. Another striking example is Barthes’s text Droit dans les yeux (1977) [trans. by Richard Howard as ‘Right in the Eyes’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 237–42] where Barthes translates the lover’s isolation of Incidents into visual terms. Barthes writes: ‘Or, dans la relation amoureuse, le regard, si l’on peut dire, n’est pas aussi retors; il manque un trajet. Sans doute, dans cette relation, d’une part je vois l’autre, avec intensité; je ne vois que lui, je le scrute, je veux percer le secret de ce corps que je désire; et d’autre part, je le vois me voir: je suis intimidé, sidéré, constitué passivement par son regard tout-puissant; et cet affolement est si grand que je ne peux (ou ne veux) reconnaître qu’il sait que je le vois — ce qui me désaliénerait: je me vois aveugle devant lui. “Je vous regarde comme on regarde l’impossible” ’ [Now, in the lover’s relation, the gaze is not so devious, so to speak, it lacks one of these trajectories. No doubt, in this relation, on the one hand, I see the other, with intensity; I see only the other, I scan the other, I want to penetrate the secret of this body I desire; and on the other hand, I see the other seeing me: I am intimidated, dazzled, passively constituted by the other’s all powerful gaze; and this panic is so great that I cannot (or will not) recognize that the other knows I see him (which dis-alienates me): I see myself blind in front of the other. ‘I gaze at you as one gazes at the impossible’] (OC, V, 356 / RF, 240–41). 39. Nietzsche, ‘Werde, der du bist’, Also sprach Zarathustra, in Werke, vi.1, p. 293; and as a variant, in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in Werke, v.ii, p. 197, § 270. Nietzsche, in turn, takes this instruction from Pindar, Pythian Ode, II, verse 72.

CONCLUSION v

Barthes, Benjamin, Proust ‘et la Photographie’ As this study comes to a close, we shall finally consider Roland Barthes’s last seminar ‘Proust et la Photographie: Examen d’un fonds d’archives photo­g raphiques mal connu’ [Proust and Photography: Examination of a Little-Known Photo­ graphic Archive]. Barthes was preparing this seminar during the first weeks of 1980 but, because of his fatal accident in February, it never took place. The seminar is the visual vanishing point of La Préparation du roman. It was here that Barthes sought to investigate the ‘énigme de création’ (OC, V, 654) of the photographic portraits that Paul Nadar, son and successor of the more famous Félix Nadar, had made of the inhabitants of Proust’s world, including the Proust family and both sons. These portraits were representations of the people Proust remembered, transformed and preserved in his Search for lost time.1 In Barthes’s seminar, the author Marcel Proust was to serve once again as the object of identification. Using Proust and the photographs of his world as a medium, Barthes sought to stage the transformation process from life into the work of art. Yet Barthes’s last seminar is not simply a continuation of the ref lections on autobiography and photography which we have traced from Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes to La Chambre claire and the earlier lectures of La Préparation du roman. Rather, we shall see that in his manuscript of ‘Proust et la Photographie’ Barthes both takes up again his earlier ref lections and lifts them onto a new level. Moreover, by doing so, he is not only moving closer to Marcel Proust, but also to Walter Benjamin. Thus this brief analysis of Barthes’s last seminar will shed new light on the argument which I have thus far established, and will enable me to knit more tightly the themes that have guided the comparative analysis of the autobiographical projects of Benjamin, Barthes and Proust. Contrary to what one might suspect, Barthes’s seminar is not, as he claims in his opening remarks, about Proust the pre-eminent writer, nor is it about the role of photography in A la recherche du temps perdu. Barthes’s interest is directed towards ‘Marcel’, the ‘personne civile’ [social being] (PR, 391 / PN, 309), and hence the people whose photographs this Marcel desired and partly possessed; the people he looked at and who returned his look, in reality or in photographs. The fascinating sensation of looking into the eyes of a person who had seen Marcel Proust and who had, in turn, been seen by him, is certainly part of the attraction of these photographs.2 Barthes’s idea was to project Nadar’s portraits in alphabetical order onto the wall, and to provide his listeners with as little conceptual, methodological or analytical framework as possible. After a short introduction Barthes the lecturer was to offer only a few biographical data, spoken ‘à côté’ (PR, 392), so as to interfere

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as little as possible with the visual radiation of the portraits. For ‘une image’, Barthes was to remind his audience, drawing on his observations in La Chambre claire, ‘c’est, ontologiquement, ce dont on ne peut [rien] dire’ [(an image is, ontologically, what we can’t say anything about] (PR, 391 / PN, 310). Thus the aim of the seminar was not an intellectual one, but to transfer Barthes’s own individual intoxication by these photographs onto the audience, to provoke a collective punctum-experience by exposing the group to pure photographic affect contagion. What Barthes does here is to give in to the reader’s desire that we have encountered earlier: the desire to rummage in Proust’s drawers, to find and display what in Proust’s novel itself remains hidden in the cupboard. By looking at the same photographs that Proust would have used as aide-mémoire, as inspiration for his own imaginative enterprise, Barthes merges into the biographical person Proust. He appropriates Proust’s gaze. The seminar thus stages the process of a double disappearance: of Barthes into Proust, and of Barthes-as-Proust into the darkness that surrounds the photographs as the objects of his gaze. What Barthes performs here in the manuscript of his last seminar is hence what in an earlier session he called the Proustian way to ‘faire ses adieux’ [say your goodbyes]: a ‘Fête pour entrer dans un livre — et non pour sa publication’ [Party to mark entering into a book — and not its publication] (PR, 283 / PN, 214).3 Using Proust and the photographs of his world as a medium, Barthes the illustrious intellectual figure disappears, visually and acoustically, in front of his audience, to recreate himself in the autobiographical work of art that was to come: Vita Nova. Yet the seminar does not only stage the transformation process from the world into the artwork which Barthes had contemplated in theory over the course of La Préparation du roman. ‘Proust et la Photographie’ also tells us something about the poetics of this new life writing which differs in many aspects from the poetics that Barthes had outlined earlier in La Chambre claire. The decisive difference can be detected in the photographic portraits themselves, and concerns Barthes’s conception of true and truthful presentation. While the portraits inhabit the same position within the context of the seminar series as the Winter Garden Photograph did in La Chambre claire, they do not share the same qualities. If the Winter Garden Photograph had drawn its magic power from its tautological nature, the Nadar photo­ graphs are affectively contagious precisely because they are posed and, as Barthes underscores, often retouched. In fact, Barthes systematically selected portraits that reveal the process of retouching and with it the element of the ‘cuisine photo­ graphique’ (PR, 390 / PN, 309). This is a dimension of the photographic which, in La Chambre claire, he had systematically bracketed off. Hence the portraits combine what in Barthes’s Note sur la photographie had remained mutually exclusive: the component of the object’s authentic realization and the component of technological manipulation, falsification and imaginary (self-)creation. As Barthes maintains: ‘La Photo — c’est là l’originalité, la nouveauté (je crois) de notre séminaire — va fonctionner comme un affrontement du Rêve, de l’Imaginaire de lecture, au Réel’ [The Photograph — and herein lies the originality, the novelty (I believe) of this seminar — will function as a confrontation between the Dream, the Imaginary of reading and Reality] (PR, 397 / PN, 314). The photographs thus paradigmatically

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reveal the dialectical tension that lies at the heart of the autobiographical novel. For ‘Le Roman’, as Barthes now contends in contradistinction to the autobiographical poetics he had earlier established in La Chambre claire, ‘commencerait [...] quand on mêle sans prévenir le vrai et le faux: le vrai criant, absolu, et le faux colorié, brillant, venu de l’ordre du Désir et de l’Imaginaire [...] → le poikilos du roman = un hétérogène, un hétérologique de Vrai et de Faux’ [the Novel would start [...] from the point at which truth and falsehood mingle without warning: the true (striking, absolute) and the false (colorful, brilliant), of the order of Desire and the Imaginary [...] → the poikilos of the novel = a heterogeneity, a heterology of Truth and Falsehood] (PR, 161 / PN, 108). Retouching, both as a photographic technique and as a literary device, is no longer associated with simulation and hence with the arrest and disempowerment of the object portrayed. Rather, Barthes draws on the Proustian notion that we need creatively to deform the original trace so as to endow the portrayal of a loved one with meaning. If we want to succeed in creating a true and truthful autobiographical work, Barthes tells us here, we need to learn how to lie.4 A further difference discernible from Barthes’s seminar notes does not concern the presentation of the other as the object of the look but refers to the position of the observing self. If, in the course of ‘Proust et la Photographie’, Barthes the biographical person was to disappear in front of his audience so as to reappear, eventually, in the autobiographical artwork, then the envisaged recreation of the self in Vita Nova differs decidedly from that performed in La Chambre claire. In the same way that during the seminar Barthes was to disappear in the face of the Proustian portraits, the recreation of the Barthesian self in Vita Nova is a recreation under the sign of self-disguise. The last sketch of Barthes’s autobiographical project tells of this: ‘Faire comme si je devais écrire ma grande œuvre (Somme) — mais Apologie de quoi? là est la question! En tout cas pas de “moi”!’ [Proceed as if I were writing my major work (Summa) but an Apology for what? That is the question! Not for ‘me’ at any rate!]. Further down Barthes even radicalizes this concept. The novel that should have followed the ‘absolute law of the mother’5 was to contain ‘Plus de Je’ [No more I] (OC, V, 1016 / PN, 405). Barthes’s suggestion of an erasure of the self in the artwork resembles the vanishing process which we earlier discussed in connection with the story of the Chinese painter in Benjamin’s first version of Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert. In front of his audience, the Chinese painter leaves the world to enter his work of art in which he finally disappears. We saw that in Benjamin’s use of the allegory the displacement of the self into the image, and the subsequent disappearance of this self, is associated with cognition and with salvation.6 Yet he also links it to the idea of reconciliation and of consolation. In his 1933 review of Adorno’s habilitation on Kierkegaard, published in the Vossische Zeitung at a time when Benjamin had already left Germany, we read: Es ist die aus chinesischen Märchen überlieferte Bewegung eines Verschwindens (des Malers) in dem (selbstgemalten) Bilde, das er [Wiesengrund] als letztes Wort dieser Philosophie erkennt. Das Selbst wird ‘als Verschwindendes gerettet durch Verkleinerung’. Dieses Eingehen ins Bild ist nicht Erlösung; aber es ist Trost [...] (GS, III, 382–83).

174

Conclusion [He [Wiesengrund] discerns the ultimate statement of this philosophy in the image of a (painter’s) vanishing in a picture (painted by himself ) — an image borrowed from the tradition of Chinese folktales. The self is ‘something vanishing that is rescued by a process of reduction’. This entry into and dissolution in (Eingehen in) the image is not redemption but consolation [...] (SW, II, 704–05).]

Barthes’s public staging of visual and acoustic self-deletion in ‘Proust et la Photo­ graphie’, as a preparation for the self-recreation as self-abolishment in Vita Nova, is motivated by a similar longing; this despite the fact that at the end of Benjamin’s vanishing process stands free-f loating anonymity, while Barthes’s autobiographical project remains dedicated to the portrayal of the other. In staging this rite de passage from life into art, Barthes aspires to an act of consolation. In the end, the mournful autobiographical self disappears so as to be rescued in the image of the beloved, suffering other. This image of the other is ‘juste’ not because it offers the closest possible approximation to ‘pure denotation’, but because it pairs authentic impression with imaginary creation. In this way, at the end of his life Roland Barthes is closer than ever to the fantasy we heard him earlier voice in the Proust recordings of 1978, the fantasy ‘de reécrire A la recherche du temps perdu’ [of rewriting In Search of Lost Time]. * * * * * Although Barthes’s cognitive interest in his seminar ‘Proust et la Photographie’ is obviously different from my own, the question that drives Barthes when looking at the photographic emanations from the world of Proust is the same question with which we started out in this study: how does one write one’s own life? How does one get from reality to representation in a century that, as László MoholyNagy famously contends, ‘belongs to light’ and hence to the age of photographical reproducibility?7 In their autobiographical works Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes describe the structural transformation of memory, of experience and of affect by using corporeal and technological practices of looking as their primary means of signification. Where Proust describes what I called the expansion of ‘visual and emotional cavities’ that increasingly thrust aside the momentary sensations of immediate, affective, yet arbitrary recognition, Benjamin translates this ‘Verkümmerung der Erfahrung’ [deterioration of experience] (GS, I.2, 643 / SW, IV, 354) into the idea of the decline of the aura as the look that is returned. With Barthes, this figure of reciprocal recognition coagulates into the idea of the ‘Ça a été’ which is, just as Proust’s impression and Benjamin’s aura, in the process of disappearing. Or rather, as Barthes poignantly notes in La Chambre claire: ‘Il a déjà disparu. J’en suis, je ne sais pourquoi, l’un des derniers témoins (témoin de l’Inactuel), et ce livre en est la trace archaïque’ [It has already disappeared: I am, I don’t know why, one of its last witnesses (a witness of the Inactual), and this book is its archaic trace] (OC, V, 865 / CL, 94). Photography is, for all three writers, less interesting as a cause than as a source of metaphors, as thought figures that help to depict this process of disappearance. As such, the photographic is used both to conjure the sensation of immediate experience as well as to figure its

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impoverishment. Yet despite these common grounds, each of the writers gives the photographic a different emphasis within his own life writing and, as a result, for each of the writers the autobiographical text takes on a different function. Proust’s autobiographical work is driven by the incessant desire to conjure and preserve immediate, affective cognition. Yet, by doing so, he reveals it to be marginalized and endangered. On the one hand, in A la recherche du temps perdu the photographic is used to figure the sensation of an immediate encounter with the world in the metaphor of the latent image which is then to be processed within the observer’s mind. On the other hand, the photographic is employed in the form of the photograph as a product, to figure the screen that inserts itself between the world and the observing self and obstructs the recuperation of (past) experience. And thirdly, when conf lated with the human eye, the lens of the camera is used to figure the visual and emotional cavities that expand in the spaces between the self-as-look and the other-as-spectacle, as they expand within the subject itself. As a consequence, we find the Proustian subject to be torn between the desire to restore intersubjective affective completion and its reverse: the sensation of affective isolation. Although driven by the incessant desire to reconstruct what is in the process of waning, Proust’s autobiographical text functions, essentially, as the stocktaking of loss. Just like Proust before him, Benjamin also draws out the double dimension of the photographic as mortification of what it arrests and, conversely, as possessing affective potential, linked to the sensation that in the photograph the subject immediately and incessantly erupts. Yet Benjamin adds a component that Proust’s uses of the photographic lack. In Benjamin’s theoretical and in his autobiographical writings, the lens of the camera is no longer conf lated with the individual subject, but appears as the de-anthropomorphized, ideological gaze of the Other that effects the ratification, subjection and, potentially, the destruction of the individual who gets into its sight. Whereas Benjamin’s theoretical writings on photography develop this dialectic between the mutually animating and the blind and blinding effects of the medium, in his autobiographical project, by contrast, the photographic, both as a process and as a product, is increasingly erased. I explained this erasure of the photographic by identifying two motivations. In defiance of the ideological gaze, and against visual arrest and subjection, the self transforms from sight into site, turning from an identifiable ‘Person’ into an atopic being that travels the voided spaces and places of the past. Moreover, the act of autobiographical writing turns into a means of self-immunization against the potentially traumatizing affect pot­ ential of immediate (photographic) realization. This is why in Benjamin’s pro­ ject mnemonic representation as visual and acoustic detour comes to replace the originally Proustian conception of impression. Depersonalized secondary images as dripped-off secondary emotions supersede the Proustian game with the encoun­ tered sign. The auratic look is increasingly displaced by what I called the ‘restric­ted look’, a look that does not heal but freezes at a distance what at the same time it preserves. Following Proust and Benjamin, Barthes also bases his conception of photography on a double dimension, and, like Benjamin, he phrases this double-dimension

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ideologically. Either, Barthes argues, we can submit the photographic performance to the civilized code of perfectly indifferent simulacra that insert themselves between the observing subject and the world, or we can acknowledge the ‘extase photographique’ (OC, V, 885) of the reciprocal look that penetrates the screen and confronts us with unrelenting reality. La Chambre claire, as the endless rapprochement to the photographic tautology of the ‘c’est ça’, courts the Proustian ideal of immediate affective impression. This is why, despite earlier affinities between the spatial and affective mapping out of the self, the trajectory of Barthes’s autobiographical writing eventually takes on a different direction to Benjamin’s project. Where Benjamin opens the self towards the other to hand it over to collective anonymity, Barthes reintroduces the individual self to say the individual other. And while Benjamin increasingly avoids the affect potential of the photographic, for Barthes the self-exposure to the punctum turns into the predominant aim of the autobiographical text. In what is also the result of a creative misreading of the Proustian hypotext, Barthes does not see the role of the autobiographical text in the stocktaking of loss. Nor does he define its purpose, as Benjamin does, in a strategy of self-immunization. According to Barthes, the function of the autobiographical text is more to affront what he depicts as the indifferent theatricality of the world. Hence, Barthes’s vision is not painstakingly to describe the expansion of visual and emotional cavities but, conversely, as he notes in a draft outline of Vita Nova, to stage the ‘expansion d’amour’ (OC, V, 995 / 1009).8 This redemptive Ersatzfunction of the visual-autobiographical project is less naïve, and less anachronistic, than it may first appear. Rather, it is the result of a specifically Barthesian dialectic that — by seemingly turning backwards — opens itself up to departure. In Barthes’s own words (LA, 274), which summarize the art of autobiographical writing as they may summarize the trajectory of this enquiry: — on tourne, en spirale, avec le même objet —

Notes to the Conclusion 1. The photographs were the object of a now famous exhibition that took place in Paris in 1978. Barthes took most of his material from the catalogue Le Monde de Proust, ed. by Anne-Marie Bernard (Paris: Direction des Musées de France, 1978). It has been re-edited and translated several times since. 2. We saw that La Chambre claire opens with the same fascination, here with regard to Napoleon (OC, V, 791 / CL, 3). 3. Before withdrawing from society and devoting himself entirely to his novel, Proust hired three boxes at the Théatre des Variétés for the performance of George Feydeau and Francis de Croisset’s Circuit, inviting his friends to come along (PR, 283). Barthes takes this information from George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, 2 vols (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959–65), ii, p. 147. 4. As Barthes earlier points out to his audience: ‘Peut-être donc: parvenir à faire un roman (telle est la perspective — le point de fuite — de notre cours), c’est au fond accepter de mentir, parvenir à mentir (ce peut être très difficile, de mentir) — mentir de ce mensonge second et pervers qui consiste à mêler le vrai et le faux’ [Perhaps, then: managing to write a novel (such is the prospect — the vanishing point — of our lecture course) comes down to conceding to lie, to being capable of lying (it can be very difficult, lying) — to telling that second-order and

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perverse lie that consists in mingling truth and falsehood] (PR, 161 / PN, 108–09). In ‘Proust et la photographie’ this is most beautifully illustrated by Barthes’s choice of a portrait of the Prince of Wales, one of the few characters in Proust’s novel to feature under their real name. Barthes comments: ‘Swann et Haas, ses amis’ [Swann and Haas, his friends] (PR, 422 / PN, 340). 5. In Barthes’s words: ‘Quelle loi? celle, absolue, de mam.’ [Which law? the absolute law of mam.] (OC, 1016 / PN, 405). 6. See Chapter 5. 7. László Moholy-Nagy, ‘Unprecedented Photography’ (1927), trans. by Joel Agee, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913–1940, ed. by Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989), pp. 83–85 (p. 85). 8. The complete passage reads: ‘IV La décision du 15 Avril 1978. La littérature comme substitut, d’amour’ [IV. The Decision of April 15, 1978. Literature as a substitute, of love]. Concerning the illegible word, the editor comments: ‘Nous croyons lire “expansion” ’ [the word would appear to be ‘expansion’]. Diana Knight, however, suggests ‘expression’, which, she claims, would fit with the phrase in the fifth plan: ‘Je me retire pour entreprendre une grande œuvre où serait dit...l’Amour’ [I’m withdrawing from the world to begin a great work that will be an expression of... Love.] (OC, V, 995, 1009 / PN, 399, 454).

BIBLIOGRAPHY v

Works by Marcel Proust Correspondance, ed. by Phillip Kolb, 21 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1970) Jean Santeuil, précédé par Les Plaisirs et les Jours, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) Contre Sainte-Beuve, ed. by Pierre Clarac and Yves Sandre (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) A la recherche du temps perdu, ed. by Jean-Yves Tadié, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1987–89)

Translations used: Against Sainte–Beuve and Other Essays, trans. by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 1994) Selected Letters, ed. by Philip Kolb, trans. by Terence Kilmartin, 4 vols (London: Harper­ Collins, 1983–2000) In Search of Lost Time, ed. by Christopher Prendergast, trans. by Lydia Davis et al., 8 vols (London: Allen Lane, 2002)

Works by Walter Benjamin Briefe, ed. by Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, 2 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1966) Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, 7 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1972–89) Gesammelte Briefe, ed. by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995–2000) Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000)

Translations used: ‘Les Analphabètes de l’avenir’, Nouvel Observateur: Spécial Photo, ed. by Robert Delpire et al., 2 (1977), pp. 6–25 A Berlin Chronicle, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. by Peter Demetz, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 3–60 The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, ed. by Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. by Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994) The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. by John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998) The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999) Selected Writings, ed. by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland et al., 4 vols (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1996–2003) Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. by Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006)

Bibliography

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Works by Roland Barthes Roland Barthes and Jean Montalbetti, ‘Un Homme, une ville’, Cassettes Radio France (Paris: 1978) Œuvres complètes, ed. by Éric Marty, 5 vols (Paris: Seuil, 2002) Le Neutre: Cours au Collège de France (1977–78), ed. by Thomas Clerc (Paris: Seuil/Imec, 2002) La Préparation du roman I et II. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1978–79 et 1979–1980), ed. by Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/Imec, 2003) Journal de deuil, ed. by Nathalie Léger (Paris: Seuil/Imec, 2009) Le Lexique de l’auteur: Séminaire à l’École pratique des hautes études 1973–1974 suivi de Fragments inédits du ‘Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes’ (Paris: Seuil, 2010)

Translations used: Writing Degree Zero, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967) Image Music Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977) Empire of Signs, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983) ‘Roland Barthes: “Towards a Semiotics of Cinema”: Barthes in interview with Michel Delahaye, Jacques Rivette’, trans. by Norman King, in Cahiers du Cinéma: Volume 2: 1960–1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Re-evaluating Hollywood, ed. by Jim Hillier (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 276–85 The Rustle of Life, trans. by Richard Howard (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986) ‘Right in the Eyes’, trans. by Richard Howard, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 237–42 The Pleasure of the Text, trans. by Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990) Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 1993) The Semiotic Challenge, trans. by Richard Howard (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994) Roland Barthes, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Papermac, 1995) Sade/Fourrier/Loyala, trans. by Richard Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997) A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. by Richard Howard (London: Vintage, 2002) The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978), ed. by Thomas Clerc, trans. by Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005) The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1978–1979), trans. by Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010) Mourning Diary, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010)

Critical Works Adams, Timothy Dow, Light Writing & Life Writing: Photography in Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Charakteristik Walter Benjamins’, in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1971–86), x.1, 238–53 —— ‘Kleine Proust-Kommentare’, in Noten zur Literatur, II (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1961), pp. 203–15 —— ‘Short Commentaries on Proust’, in Notes to Literature, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991–92), i, 174–84

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—— Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography (London and New York: Continuum, forthcoming 2012)

Index ❖ Adorno, Theodor W. 11, 63, 69, 87, 102, 108, 109, 173 aesthetics, anaesthetics 112, 128 affect: and aura 43, 99, 111 in Barthes 137, 140–44, 146–70, 172, 174, 175–76 in Benjamin 43, 74, 83, 99, 111- 129, 175 and cognition 27, 28, 39, 55, 56, 57, 65–66, 74, 111–12, 123, 140–44, 156, 163, 172, 174 -contagion 120, 127, 128, 144, 153, 167, 172 -control 58 -denial 120 etymology of 68, 114, 128 and identity 5–6, 10, 12, 28, 39, 43, 54–69, 113, 146–70 killing of (Benjamin) 117 and photography 5–6, 39, 54–69, 119–20, 137, 140–44, 146–70, 172, 174–76 in Proust 27, 28, 39, 43, 54–69, 124–25, 126, 140–44, 175 Romantic conceptions of 60–61, 64, 150, 160, 161, 168 and seeing 5–6, 12, 27, 39, 54–69, 111–29, 146–70 waning of 9, 10, 111, 163 see also emotion Albaret, Céleste 17, 34, 36, 38, 51 Albers, Irene ix, 34, 35, 51, 52 Albertine (Simonet) 22, 34, 38–40, 45–50, 52, 53, 60–64, 65–67, 68, 69, 149 alienation [Entfremdung] (and photography): in Barthes 140, 148, 152 in Benjamin 44, 65, 111–12, 117, 121, 126 -effect 148 in Proust 20, 39–41, 44–45, 50, 57, 65, 140 Argens, Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, Marquis d’ 169 Ariès, Philippe 57, 59, 60, 68 Assmann, Aleida 23, 24, 35, 87 atopos (the other as, in Barthes) 108 author, authorship: in Barthes 132, 133, 148, 153, 163 death of the author 5, 138, 148 in Benjamin 83, 101, 113, 122 in Proust 36, 38, 62 autobiography 1–3, 5, 10, 11, 13, 16–17, 33, 127 Barthes and 132, 153, 156, 168, 171 Benjamin and 17, 72, 86, 87, 102, 109, 127, 171 and biography 10 and film 8, 12 and photography 2, 10, 12

Proust and 13, 16–17, 33, 38, 171 theory of 2–3 Bal, Mieke 18, 34, 47, 51, 52, 68 Barthes, Roland: works: La Chambre claire 1, 3, 7, 9, 13, 39, 46, 57, 97, 132, 133, 134, 136–45, 149, 150, 151, 153–70, 171–76 L’Empire des signes 149, 151–53, 155, 156, 158, 166, 167 Fragments d’un discours amoureux 108, 149, 166 ‘Un Homme, une ville’ 145, 150 Incidents 149, 166, 170 Journal de deuil 146 Le Lexique de l’auteur 132, 176 ‘Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure’ 68, 149, 150, 151, 160, 161, 163 ‘La Mort de l’auteur’ 5, 148 Le Neutre 8, 13 Le Plaisir du texte 113, 150, 168 La Préparation du roman 17, 132, 133, 134–35, 140– 45, 148, 150–51, 158, 161–70, 171–74 ‘Proust et la Photographie: Examen d’un fonds d’archives photographiques mal connu’ 134, 145, 171–74 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes 3, 132, 133, 134, 135–36, 140, 142, 149, 150, 151, 153–59, 163, 164, 166, 167, 171 Sade, Fourrier, Loyola 152 Vita Nova 3, 134, 135, 141, 146, 160, 162, 172–74, 176 terms: ‘air’ 3, 137 ‘anamnèse’ 135–36, 140–42 ‘biographème’ 135 doxa 149, 157, 167 ‘effet de réel’ [reality effect] 145 haiku 136, 142–43 ‘image juste’ 138, 140–42, 147, 163 ‘jouissance’ [bliss] 168 ‘mémoire immédiate’ [immediate memory] 143 ‘moment de vérité’ [moment of truth] 163 ‘nuance’ 165–66 punctum 3, 120, 146, 150, 153, 159, 172, 176 satori 140, 142, 147, 163 ‘spirale’ 10, 156, 164, 167, 176 Batchen, Geoffrey 35

190

Index

Baudelaire, Charles 26, 43, 65, 83, 87, 97, 98, 111, 112, 124–25, 126, 127, 128, 129, 138, 169 Baudrillard, Jean 10 Bayard, Hippolyte 23 Beckett, Samuel 51 Belting, Hans 4, 11 Benhaïm, André 52 Benjamin, Walter: works: ‘Aus einer kleinen Rede über Proust, an meinem vierzigsten Geburtstag gehalten’ 24, 75 ‘Ausgraben und Erinnern’ 76, 83 ‘Der Autor als Produzent’ 83, 113 Berliner Chronik 3, 72–74, 76–78, 80–81, 85, 88, 100, 102, 109, 111, 114, 115, 117, 119, 121, 122 Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert 3, 11, 38, 72–76, 78–88, 89–110, 111–29, 134, 138, 143, 152, 153, 166, 173 Briefe 73, 87, 89, 101, 103, 108 Denkbilder 82, 86 Einbahnstraße 73, 103, 104, 108, 123 ‘Der Erzähler: Betrachtungen zum Werk Nikolai Leskows’ 85–86 ‘Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften’ 85 ‘Kleine Geschichte der Photographie’ 1, 10, 43, 77, 93, 96, 134, 137 in French trans. as: ‘Les Analphabètes de l‘avenir’ 134, 146, 147 ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit’ 3, 109, 112, 134 Das Passagen-Werk 105, 106, 124, 169 ‘Protokolle zu Drogenversuchen’ 107 ‘Robert Walser’ 122 ‘San Gimignano’ 79 ‘Der Sürrealismus — Die letzte Momentaufnahme der europäischen Intelligenz’ 113 ‘Über das mimetische Vermögen’ 78 ‘Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire’ 26, 43, 65, 98–99, 112, 138 Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels 117 Zentralpark 125 ‘Zum Bilde Prousts’ 11, 17, 84, 101 terms: ‘Andenken’ [souvenir] 125 ‘Aufmerksamkeit’ [attention, attentiveness] 26, 28, 35, 43, 98 aura 26–28, 34, 35, 43–44, 49, 56, 75, 77–78, 87, 96–99, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 137, 138, 146, 174, 175 ‘Bildraum’ [image space] 91 ‘Blickraum’ [visual space] 91, 99, 105 ‘dialektisches Bild’ [dialectical image] 13, 24, 75, 77, 87, 134, 143 ‘Erlebnis’ [isolated experience] 84, 125 ‘Eingedenken’ [commemoration] 86, 124, 125 ‘Erfahrung’ [experience] 26, 43, 74, 108, 122, 125, 129, 174

‘Hohlraum’ [cavity] 9; see also cavity ‘Jetzt der Erkennbarkeit’ [Now of Recog­nizability] 75, 143 ‘Sachgehalt’ [material content] 83, 85 ‘Wahrheitsgehalt’ [truth content] 85 Bennett, Jill 120, 128 Berg, Ronald 13, 141, 146, 147 Bergson, Henri 52, 65 Bersani, Leo 38, 51 Bhabha, Homi K. 109 biography 10 Blanchot, Maurice 108, 149, 165 Bloch, Ernst 103, 109 Boehm, Gottfried 4, 5, 11, 35 Bohrer, Karl Heinz 87, 108, 127, 129 Bolz, Norbert W. 13 Bowie, Malcolm ix, 12, 13, 52, 53, 68 Brassaï (Gyula Halász) 33, 34 Brecht, Bertold 13, 97, 98, 99, 104, 106, 108, 110, 113, 148, 152, 168 ‘bricolage’ (in Benjamin) 81–82 Bruno, Giuliana 12 Bruss, Elisabeth 8, 12 Buck-Morss, Susan 112, 128 Bürger, Peter 13, 149, 150–51, 156, 159, 168, 169 Burgin, Victor 92, 107 Busch, Bernd 11, 88 Cadava, Eduardo 34, 87, 107, 108, 127 camera lucida 144–45 camera obscura 83–84, 88, 144–45, 153 Cartwright, Lisa 11 cavity 9, 80, 88, 104–05, 113, 148, 152–53, 166; see also Benjamin, ‘Hohlraum’ Chabot, Jacques 11, 52 character: in Barthes 152, 154 in Benjamin 99, 108, 123, 152 Chateaubriand, François-René de 56, 68 Chevrier, Jean-François 34, 35 Clark, Stuart 12 Clarke, Graham 10 Cocteau, Jean 17 Cohn, Dorrit 33 Compagnon, Antoine 13, 145, 146 compassion 59–60, 150–51, 161–62, 164, 167; see also pity Coquio, Catherine 13, 147 Corbineau-Hoffmann, Angelika 11 Corcoran, Andreas, ix Corngold, Stanley 12 Crary, Jonathan 4, 11, 51 Crosman Wimmers, Inge 68 Crowley, Martin ix, 68, 168 Daguerre, Louis 1, 23 daguerreotype 39 Benjamin on 29, 43, 97, 111, 137

Index

191

Davis, Colin 53 déjà-vu 80–81, 88 Deleuze, Gilles 34, 35,119, 128 Derrida, Jacques 33, 52, 88, 132, 145 Descartes, René 159–60, 169 Didi-Huberman, Georges 99, 108

Gordon, Lyndall 10 grandmother of the Proustian narrator 17, 38, 40–45, 48, 49–50, 51, 57–60, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 68, 138, 140–41, 154–55, 163 Gratton, Johnnie 169 Günter, Manuela 109, 128

egoism, egotism (Barthes on) 148, 149, 150, 153, 159, 161, 169 Elkins, James 6,12 emotion: in Barthes 148, 150–70, 176, 177 in Benjamin 111–29, 175 in Proust 54–69, 149, 174, 175 research on 5–6, 12, 169 and space 124, 129 see also affect Epicurus 80, 135 eros, eroticism: in Barthes 137 in Benjamin 111, 128 in Proust 47 Ette, Ottmar 168 expression: in Barthes 132, 137, 146, 152, 153–54, 156, 158, 169 in Benjamin 137 in Proust 29, 31, 48, 57, 62, 119

Hamacher, Werner 87, 103, 109 Hanney, Roxanne 34 happiness: Benjamin on 115, 124 in Proust 47, 115, 124 and seeing 124 Hart Nibbrig, Christiaan L. 60, 68, 87, 109 Haverkamp, Anselm 147 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 126 Heinle, Fritz 128, 112, 122 Hörisch-Helligrath, Renate 34 homesickness [Heimweh]: in Benjamin 101, 114–15 in Proust 101

fear 6 Barthes and 166 Benjamin and 118, 120, 121, 126, 128 Fiedler, Konrad 11 film 12, 34, 92 and photography 7–8, 12, 108, 109, 112 Finkelde, Dominik 13, 85, 88 Flaubert, Gustave 150, 170 Foster, Hal 13, 112–13, 128 Frank, Manfred 6, 11, 12 Freud, Sigmund 23, 24, 53, 55, 68, 69, 75, 76, 108, 112, 146, 157, 169 Jenseits des Lustprinzips 24 ‘Konstruktionen in der Analyse’ 87 ‘Notiz über den Wunderblock’ 23, 25, 54 ‘Das Unheimliche’ 41, 52 Frevert, Ute 12 Gabara, Rachel 12 gaze 4 in Barthes 5, 136, 149–52, 157, 160–61, 164–66, 170, 172 in Benjamin 5, 35, 43, 45, 91–110, 111–29, 175 in Lacan 41–43, 52, 54, 91, 157, 164, 175 and Levinas 48 in Proust 5, 18, 26–28, 33, 39, 40, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47–48, 50, 54–71, 149, 172 see also look, looking Genette, Gérard 32, 33, 35, 84

identity 5, 16, 109, 112–13 in Barthes 5–6, 9, 137–38, 153, 158 in Benjamin 5–6, 9, 94, 98, 109, 112–13, 120, 138 in Proust 5–6, 9, 13, 17, 38, 40, 44, 49–51, 52, 61, 68 image: -repertoire (in Barthes) 169 -system (in Barthes) 136, 155 theory of the photographic 4, 11, 92 see also photography Imaginary: in Barthes 107, 132, 136, 142, 149, 150–57, 161, 164, 169, 172–73 in Benjamin 101 see also Lacan imperial panorama (in Benjamin) 82 impression: in Barthes 135–36, 144, 174, 176 in Benjamin 22–23, 75, 76, 79, 81, 82, 86, 114, 115, 118–19, 119–20, 144, 175 Deleuze on 119–20 in Proust 18, 22–23, 25–26, 28, 29–30, 32, 33, 34, 35, 39, 82, 86, 114, 115, 118–19, 119–20, 135–36, 144, 174, 175 indifference 6 in Barthes 159, 160, 162, 164 in Benjamin 89, 113, 123, 127 in Proust 28, 40, 54, 57, 59, 64 individuality: in Barthes 39, 164, 165 in Benjamin 94, 97, 113 in Proust 36, 38, 39, 46, 57, 59, 61, 68 Jacobs, Carol 109 Jameson, Fredric 5–6, 11, 12, 13, 169 Jauß, Hans Robert 34

192

Index

Jay, Martin, ix 11, 112, 122, 128, 129 jealousy 6 in Proust 54, 55 Jefferson, Ann 12, 150, 151, 168 Joyce, James 33, 99, 140 Kafka, Franz 95 in Benjamin 96–99, 107, 108, 109, 123, 138 in Barthes 146, 167, 170 Kahn, Robert 13 kaleidoscope: in Barthes 158 in Proust 19 ‘kalte persona’ [cold persona] (Lethen; in Benjamin) 113, 128 Keller, Luzius 68 Kennedy, J. Gerald 168 kinetoscope (in Proust) 17, 19–20 Knips, Ignatz 86 Kodak technique 1 in Proust 10, 17 Kolesch, Doris 147, 169 Koppenfels, Martin von 34, 69 Kracauer, Siegfried 18, 34, 35, 39, 51, 109 Krauss, Rosalynd 8, 12 Kristeva, Julia 34, 41, 52 Lacan, Jacques 35, 41, 43, 44, 46, 52, 53, 54, 68, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 101, 107, 108, 145, 147, 154, 155–57, 164, 168, 169, 170 Lacis, Asja 128 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe 97, 108 Lanfang, Mei 168 La Rochefoucauld, François de 156, 168, 169 Lejeune, Philippe 8, 12 on ‘le pacte autobiographique’ [autobiographical pact] 2, 11, 16, 33 Lethen, Helmut 128 Levinas, Emmanuel 47–48, 50, 52, 53, 98, 108, 149, 170 linguistic turn 16 Link-Heer, Ursula 33, 106, 108 look, looking: and aura 3, 43, 98, 112, 127, 137, 153, 175 in Barthes 136–47, 148–70, 171–77 in Benjamin 28, 82, 89–110, 111–29, 137, 171–77 history of 3, 11 Lacan on 41, 52, 91–92, 108 in and around the photograph 4–5, 28, 39, 43, 51, 92–98, 106, 107, 120, 136–42, 153, 157, 160–62, 164–67, 171–77 practices of 3–5, 11 in Proust 18, 25–28, 39, 40, 46–48, 51, 56, 60, 67, 124, 171–77 reciprocal or mutual 6, 18, 26, 28, 40, 43, 56, 60, 91, 93, 96–98, 106, 107, 111, 119–20, 124–29, 136–49, 153, 157, 161–62, 164–67, 171–77

restricted 125–29, 175 subject-as- 2, 5, 8, 27, 39, 96, 97, 137, 149, 175 see also gaze love 6, 12, 60, 63 in Barthes 132, 137–38, 140, 141, 149–51, 156, 158, 161–70, 173–74, 177 in Benjamin 96, 102, 108, 122, 137–38 in Proust 27, 38, 39–47, 49, 54, 56, 57, 60–64, 67, 68, 111, 122 Luhmann, Niklas 60–61, 68, 165 Man, Paul de 33, 38, 127 Marty, Éric 13 Matzat, Wolfgang 61, 68, 80 Mauriac, Claude 168 Maurois, François 17, 34 Mehlman, Jeffrey 33 melancholia 111, 127 memory 9 and affect: in Barthes 140–44, 174 in Benjamin 83, 112, 114–27, 174 in Proust 9, 43, 55, 56, 65–66, 140–44, 174 in Barthes 9, 132–47, 174 in Benjamin 9, 28, 72–88, 89, 96, 101, 104, 109, 112–29 involuntary: in Barthes 134, 138, 140–44 in Benjamin 29, 75, 77, 113–15, 119–20, 127, 143 in Proust 3, 18, 21, 24, 27–29, 31–34, 35, 43–44, 49, 50, 51, 56, 64–65, 67, 68, 75, 77, 84, 86, 87, 114–15, 119–20, 134, 138, 140–44; see also Proust, mémoire involontaire and photography: in Barthes 132–47, 174–77 in Benjamin 43–44, 65, 72–88, 89, 96, 119–20, 174–77 in Proust 18, 16–35, 43–44, 48–49, 50, 51, 65, 119–20, 174–77 in Proust 9, 18, 19–35, 44, 49, 56, 65–66, 117 voluntary in Benjamin 75, 115, 121 in Proust 28, 30, 35, 51, 75; see also Proust, mémoire volontaire Menke, Bettine 88, 105, 109 mimesis: in Benjamin 13, 102–03 in Proust 30 Mitchell, W. J. T. 3 Moholy-Nagy, László 10, 174, 177 mourning: in Barthes 133, 145, 146, 150, 162, 170 in Benjamin 72, 99, 111, 125, 127 in Proust 49–50, 55, 57, 68, 69 Müller, Heiner 106 Muller, Marcel 33

Index Nadar, Félix 137, 139, 146, 171 Nadar, Paul 171, 172 narcissism: in Barthes 158 in Proust 5, 38 Niépce, Joseph Nicéphore 1, 23 Nietzsche, Friedrich 87, 150, 152, 156, 158, 159, 162, 163, 164, 167, 168, 169, 170 Novalis (Georg Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg) 26, 163 Nussbaum, Martha C. 12, 68, 119, 128 Odette (de Crécy) 39, 67 palimpsest 23 in Barthes 164 in Benjamin 84, 32, 86, 144 in Proust 32, 35, 84 pathos 55, 150, 152, 156, 161 personality [Persönlichkeit] 2 in Barthes 148, 152, 163, 167 in Benjamin 101, 105–06, 148, 152, 163, 167 in Proust 101, 163, 167 Pethes, Nicolas 73, 79, 86, 87, 88, 108, 109, 128, 129 photography: and affect 5–6, 39, 54–69, 119–20, 137, 140–44, 146–70, 172, 174–76 as art 18 and autobiography 2, 10, 12 digital 2, 106 and film 7–8, 12, 108, 109, 112 flatness of 18, 34, 51, 68, 74, 85 and memory: in Barthes 132–47, 174–77 in Benjamin 43–44, 65, 72–88, 89, 96, 119–20, 174–77 in Proust 18, 16–35, 43–44, 48–49, 50, 51, 65, 119–20, 174–77 as metaphor 2, 7 in Barthes 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 167, 174, 175 in Benjamin 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 84, 86, 93, 96, 119 portrait- (of others) 1, 10, 17 in Barthes 46, 137–38, 140, 145, 146, 147, 153, 15–157, 161, 168, 171–76 in Benjamin 89, 96–98, 108, 123, 137–38 in Proust 38, 39, 46, 57, 140, 145, 171–76 portrait- (of the self): in Barthes 138, 153–54, 158, 159, 164, 167, 169 in Benjamin 88, 89–110, 119–20, 138 in Proust 36–40, 51, 89 in Proust 18, 19–20, 22, 23–24, 29, 30, 31, 35, 41, 65 theory of 3–4, 92 as visibility formation [Sichtbarkeitsgebilde] 4, 11 Pindar 170 pity 161, 162, 170; see also compassion

193

Plato 84, 88 Pontalis, J.-B. 49, 53, 162, 170 Poulet, Georges 35 Proust, Marcel: works: A la recherche du temps perdu 2, 7, 9, 11–13, 16–35, 36–53, 54–69, 73, 75, 119, 128, 133–34, 140, 142, 163, 170, 171, 174–75 Les Esquisses 17, 25, 26, 34, 35 Les Carnets 23 Contre Sainte-Beuve 19, 67, 69 ‘Journées de Lecture’ 62, 69 La Correspondance 17, 18, 34 Jean Santeuil 24, 25, 68 terms: mémoire involontaire 3, 18, 21, 24, 27–29, 31–34, 35, 43–44, 49, 50, 51, 56, 64–65, 67, 68, 75, 77, 84, 86, 87, 114–15, 119–20, 134, 138, 140–44; see also memory mémoire volontaire 28, 30, 35, 51, 75; see also memory reader, readership: and Barthes 138, 148, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 160, 161, 169, 172 and Benjamin 128 and Proust 16, 17, 19, 35, 47, 62, 68 reading encounter 9, 13, 68, 73 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 11, 146 Roger, Philippe 150, 151, 168 Rosenzweig, Franz 123 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 55, 56, 68, 150, 160–61, 163, 169 Rugg, Linda Haverty 11, 87 Saint-Loup, Robert de 1, 10, 39, 49, 51, 57, 140 Saint-Pierre, Jacques-Henri Bernardin de 169 Sartre, Jean-Paul 12, 33, 108, 150, 170 ‘Schein’ [appearance] 9, 13, 125 Schmid, Marion 12 Schneider, Manfred 11, 12, 13, 18, 53, 91, 108, 109 Schönberg, Arnold 167–68 self, selfhood: in Barthes 132, 148–70, 172–74, 176 in Benjamin 43, 73, 74, 77–78, 80, 82, 88, 89–110, 115, 116–17, 122–24, 126, 144, 152, 167 in Proust 20, 36–53, 89, 91, 115, 116–17, 172, 176 -alienation 112, 125 -defacement (de Man) 38 -erasure, -deletion, -abolishment 173, 174 -exposure 100, 102, 111, 144, 164, 167, 176 -expression 132, 169 -immunization 111, 112, 119, 120, 125, 127, 144, 167, 175, 176 -loss 113 -love 156, 169 and other 5, 9, 11, 12

194

Index

in Barthes 138, 147, 148–70, 171–74 in Benjamin 74, 92–99, 122, 124 in Proust 36- 53, 124, 167, 168 ratification of 94, 175 Seligson, Frederika 128 Silverman, Kaja 10, 43, 52, 93, 107 Sontag, Susan 18, 34, 35, 127 space: and autobiography 86–87 and emotion 57, 124, 129 and identity 28, 116, 175 in-between- 86, 103, 106, 175 and memory 22, 75, 104–05, 122–23 and photography 75 see also atopos, topography, cavity spectacle object-as- 5, 27, 28, 35, 96, 137 other-as- 165, 175 self-as- 96, 165 Stiegler, Bernd 11 Stierle, Karlheinz 35 Stoessel, Marleen 108 Straus, Erwin 124, 129 Stüssi, Anna 107 Sturken, Marita 11 subjectivity, inter-subjectivity 4, 5 in Barthes 145, 149, 151, 158, 166, 169 in Benjamin 93, 99, 102, 105–06, 111, 120 death of (the subject) 5, 11, 148 in Proust 38, 50, 51 see also self, selfhood Sueur, Valérie 34 Swann, Charles 39, 67, 177 Swann, Gilberte 49 Szondi, Peter 87 Tadié, Jean-Yves 33, 34 Talbot, Henry Fox 13, 23 Terada, Rei 6, 11, 169

Teschke, Henning 13, 87 Todorov, Tzvetan 33 Tomkins, Silvan 128 topography 72, 81, 87; see also atopos, space trace: in Barthes 108, 137, 143, 144, 147, 154, 155, 165, 173, 174 in Benjamin 24, 75, 80–82, 86, 94, 101, 104, 108, 144, 165 and memory 22, 23, 80–82, 86, 94, 143, 144, 147, 154, 173 and photography 4, 11, 24, 29, 65, 94, 101, 108, 137, 143, 144, 147, 154, 155, 165, 173 in Proust 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 32, 35, 36, 65, 81–82 trauma 6, 112–13, 128 in Barthes 149, 175 in Benjamin 94, 112–13, 118–19, 122, 127, 128 in Proust 33, 38, 49, 57, 175 Valéry, Paul 88, 98, 148 Vico, Giambattista 164 Wagner, Richard, Tristan und Isolde 59–60, 63 Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina 10 Wales, Prince of (Edward VII) 177 Warburton, William 88 Warning, Rainer 18, 34, 35, 52, 53, 60, 63, 68, 69, 87 Wassenaar, Ingrid ix, 47, 52, 68, 150, 151, 168 Weber, Annette 34 Wegner, Frank 34, 52 Weigel, Sigrid 128, 169 Weinrich, Harald 35 Weissberg, Liliane 146 Wilson, Emma ix, 13, 68 Witte, Bernd 87, 88, 97, 107 Wood, Michael 12 Yacavone, Kathrin ix, 13