The Mark of Theory: Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories 9780823277506

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The Mark of Theory

The Mark of Theory Inscriptive Figures, Poststructuralist Prehistories

Andrea Bachner

fordham university press New York

2018

Copyright © 2018 Fordham University Press 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, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. This book’s publication was supported by a subvention from Cornell University. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18

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contents

Introduction: At the Scene of Inscription

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1.

Savage Marks: Subjection and the Specters of Anthropology

25

2.

Impact Erasure: Psychoanalysis and the Multiplication of Trauma

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3.

Stings of Visibility: Picture Theories and Visual Contact

105

4.

Out of the Groove: Aural Traces and the Mediation of Sound

145

Conclusion: Against Inscription?

189

Acknowledgments Notes Works Cited Index

211 213 249 265

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“Inscription” 1. The action of inscribing; the action of writing upon or in something. 2. concr. That which is inscribed; a piece of writing or lettering upon something; a set of characters or words written, engraved, or otherwise traced upon a surface; esp. a legend, description, or record traced upon some hard substance for the sake of durability, as on a monument, building, stone, tablet, medal, coin, vase, etc. 3. spec. a. A short piece of writing placed at the beginning of a book or other composition, descriptive of its nature, contents, authorship, etc.; a title, heading, superscription. b. A brief dedication of a book or work of art to a person; the superscription of a letter. c. In early Music, a motto or sign, or a combination of both, placed at the beginning of an enigmatical canon, to indicate (often itself enigmatically) the manner of its resolution.

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4. Anat. A marking upon some organ or part produced by another in contact with it; esp. a marking on the fleshy part of a muscle where a tendon crosses it. 5. Geom. The action of inscribing one figure in another. 6. Civil and Sc. Law. An accusation or challenge at law made under the condition that if it were false, the accuser would undergo the same punishment that would have been inflicted on the accused if found guilty.1

Inscriptive Turns Literature, art, and theory are shot through with scenarios of inscription: from Franz Kafka’s inscriptive execution machine in “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony”) to contemporary performance art that rewrites the number tattoos of Auschwitz victims; from Sigmund Freud’s metaphor of the “mystic writing pad” as a model for the psyche to nostalgias of photographic indexicality in the digital age; from early twentieth-century fascinations with gramophone grooves as alternative mode of writing to gender and racial differences imagined as corporeal marks in recent theoretical discourses. What accounts for this fascination? What aesthetic and theoretical aims does inscription serve? What role does it play in a global imaginary constructed and negotiated by new media technologies as well as in the present and future of theoretical thought? I argue that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theoretical thought, one that forms part of a theoretical unconscious, part of the partly visible, partly hidden conceptual matrix that underlies the laws and assumptions of theoretical thought. In this book, I understand inscription as a scene that takes place where and when a material surface is breached and forced to bear marks. As a figure that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints to phonographic grooves, inscription has provided an imaginary that oriented, governed, and irritated theoretical thought at least from the late nineteenth century up to today. Even though theoretical concepts such as Paul de Man’s notion of inscription or Jacques Derrida’s trace provide some of the most notorious avatars of inscription, figures of marking are not only at the core of deconstructivist theories or merely the object of media studies in the form of reflections on concrete technographic media.2 They also play an important role in many theoretical texts, even there where their presence is not explicitly marked: in Foucauldian theories of subjection, trauma theory’s

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impact metaphors, feminist reflections on the mark of gender, or the contestation of epidermal schemas and stereotypes in theories of race. Rather than a symptom of the linguistic turn, inscription as a theoretical figure is the legacy of earlier inventions, such as the disciplines of anthropology and psychoanalysis or the technologies of photography and phonography, even as it inspires and fuels much of contemporary theory. Inscription, understood as a conceptual deep structure, a medial imaginary, has an inception point that coincides with the beginning of modernity: with the emergence of new scientific paradigms such as psychoanalysis, anthropology, and sexology, with the invention of new technologies of vision and sound, and with the development of a modern sense of aesthetics. Inscription as a theoretical figure might well have an end date, although, despite incessant invocations of newness and rupture, such as the mantra of the digital revolution, it is yet to come. Inscription forms part of a profound epistemic structure. Although we can see it at work in the writings of many major theorists over the past 150 years, there is no school of inscription, no coherent group of thinkers that espouses “inscriptionism” as a doctrine. And yet, scenes in which a body becomes the surface of marks or traces are ubiquitous in much of twentieth-century cultural theory and philosophy, from psychoanalysis to (post)structuralism, from postcolonial theory to gender studies, from trauma theory to media studies. Theorists of inscription—though not forming a coherent group, let alone sharing a program —use scenes of inscription as theoretical figures, often for concepts that lie at the very heart of their projects. Even though much of contemporary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics follow an inscriptive logic, I am not claiming the existence of an inscriptive turn. Thinking in terms of inscription is not just one of many turns according to which we like to describe conceptual shifts in theoretical thinking. Unlike such turns—be they linguistic, pictorial, or sonic—inscription does not constitute a surface phenomenon. Inscription is not just a subphenomenon of the linguistic turn that seeks to decode reality as if it was a linguistic system. Thinking in terms of inscription would be unthinkable without the linguistic turn, and yet, at the same time, it consists of a reaction against it, or even a turn away from it, since, for proponents of inscription, the levels of material and structure can no longer be differentiated as neatly. Instead, through the lens of inscription, thinkers focus their attention on how materiality and signification interact; and inscription becomes one of the most prominent models for theorizing this interaction. As part of a theoretical unconscious, inscription cuts deeply into the fabric of philosophical and critical thought. Indeed, rethinking theory through the

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figure of inscription also involves a scrutiny of the way in which theoretical genealogies privilege the figure of the turn, a pattern of endless ruptures, of a series of breaks—all too repetitive in the never-ending desire for inhabiting the cutting edge of theory. Inscription provides a more general logic for some of the most popular turns—in Chapters 3 and 4, I will read the pictorial and the sonic turn through the lens of inscription—and for the overall structure of theoretical historiography and the fetish of the theoretical turn as such. In The Mark of Theory, I offer a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought through the figure of inscription. The narratives that I provide trace inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as grounds for the theoretical movements of the last few decades. In the book, I present clusters of inscriptive configurations whose conceptual development comes to theory not only, and not even primarily, from the realm of philosophy but from other sister discourses, such as anthropology, psychoanalysis, and medicine, from literature, media practices, and theories about art. For instance, I show how anthropological interest in tattooing at the turn of the twentieth century became a crucial, yet partly suppressed, imaginary for Michel Foucault’s theories of subjection and influenced feminist and queer critics such as Elizabeth Grosz and Judith Butler. And how the cultural practice of circumcision inflected Sigmund Freud’s theory of trauma in complex ways and inspired Jacques Derrida to reflect on the links between ethics and mediation by way of his own marked body. In The Mark of Theory, I scrutinize how theories of indexicality around the emergence of the photographic medium were retooled by thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Georges Didi-Huberman as theories of visual violence rife with metaphors of impact and shock. And how the gramophonic inscription of sound allowed intellectuals in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Rainer Maria Rilke, Theodor W. Adorno, and László Moholy-Nagy, to negotiate between mediation and nonmediated reality, leading to recent media-theoretical paradigms (by theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, Frances Dyson, Lisa Gitelman, or Jean-Luc Nancy) and to reflections on how theory itself is mediated. The Mark of Theory works according to a double methodology: a poststructuralist attention to figurative language coupled with a media-studies focus on objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation. Inspired by poststructuralist methodologies and insights, I intend The Mark of Theory also as a critique of poststructuralism. It traces some of the prehistories of poststructuralism as a way of working through poststructuralist thought as

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a past legacy of a thought to come, thus also framing poststructuralism as prehistory of our current moment. By scrutinizing theory’s obsessions with inscriptions, I also analyze a legacy of inscriptive figures that have left their mark on theory and by way of which theoretical approaches have attempted to leave their conceptual, political, and ethical mark on the way we think now. By reading inscription as part of a historically contextualized theoretical imaginary, The Mark of Theory allows for a new perspective on the logic of contemporary theory. While drawing on pretexts from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries and paying attention to poststructuralist fascinations with traces and marks, I extend these reflections to the contemporary afterlives of inscription and analyze its conceptual and ethical impact in a range of theoretical discourses. My focus on the figure of inscription (i.e., the way in which theoretical works express, illustrate, and concretize their conceptual tenets) enables a reflection on the role of materiality and mediation in theory. As such, the book also mediates in the contemporary theoretical debates around and against the legacies of poststructuralism (for instance, in the form of theory’s material and objectontological turns, or the new wave of interest in systems theory, as well as media theory). In this book, I view inscription and its different embodiments in the light of mediality, doubly so: On the one hand, inscription is a medial phenomenon, represented by concrete medial practices and technologies, such as tattooing, circumcision, photography, and phonography. On the other, inscription also becomes a medium by way of which theory stages and concretizes its conceptual moves. In The Mark of Theory, I analyze how theory uses material forms and how these media, in their specific inscriptive embodiments and practices, shape conceptual thought. Deconstructivist thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man have taught us that language is fundamentally figurative and that our access to reality passes through the metaphorical transfers of language. This also means that theoretical thought needs concrete imaginaries for its inspiration; multiple representations, imaginaries, and discursive movements adhere to it and aid or hinder its tropological duties. If literality is figurative, if everything is always already software and yet must also rely upon hardware, then the strategic deployments of these categories, the manipulation of their supposed boundaries, and the ways in which we construct theoretical hardness or softness matter profoundly. I have written The Mark of Theory as a critical tropology that takes the medium and materiality of theory seriously and argue that different inscriptive practices and media imaginaries shape

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conceptual thought and determine representational politics and ethical choices. What, then, is inscription understood in this way? In its most basic sense, inscription is ubiquitous and timeless, present in the stroke of a pen, the magnetic trace on a hard drive, or the pricks of the tattooing needle. The simple, concrete act of cutting into a surface and its result, a surface that has been altered—indeed, marked—becomes the kernel of a theoretical framework that forges new links between signification and materiality. As such, inscription is a figure of liminality and ambiguity, a bridge between bodies or other material surfaces and meaning. It stands at the threshold between materiality and signification, between the material act or gesture of marking and the potential production of meaning, as its mark is being read as a sign—hence theory’s infatuation with inscriptive scenarios that combine signification as textual abstraction with profoundly corporeal imaginaries. Even though inscription can encompass a range of surfaces, scripts, and scenarios, more often than not inscription is couched in violent terms, as a marking that wounds. Even there where the surface to be marked is not directly the body, an imaginary of corporeality still haunts inscriptive scenes as medial supports are figuratively corporealized, when visuality violently affects the beholder or when the phonograph needle traces the cranial sutures instead of wax plates, inspired by Rilke’s essay “Ur-geräusch” (“Primal Sound”) of 1919. This has to do with poststructuralism’s infatuation with the material and corporeal even as textuality becomes its driving force. In the guise of inscriptive practices, textuality reinvents itself as a material practice and claims to influence material reality. Inscription mediates (and manages) this contradiction not merely by equating textuality and materiality but by connecting both in such a way as to allow for the manipulation of both as equivalent and (at the same time) as opposites. Inscription is the interface and hinge for paradoxical theoretical maneuvers. Minimally, inscription enters signification as the production of a difference: between what has been marked and that which does not bear a mark. On this basis, by way of its status as a liminal figure, inscription allows for the construction and management of various other differences — such as sex, race, culture, or medium. Inscription—understood as the scene in which a material “body” is marked into signification—is doubly connected to the construction of difference. Inscriptive figures capitalize on specific writing techniques, scriptural practices, and media technologies for their theoretical message, often introducing these as in contrast to signification or writing proper, aligned with materiality or corporeality instead, for

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instance in the guise of tattooing or circumcision as forms of “writing” (although not writing proper) or of photography and phonography, which can be compared to the graphic output of writing but differ from its symbolic and signifying function. As a theoretical and aesthetic strategy, inscription becomes a conceptual tool for mediating differences precisely because it can be aligned with writing (as signification) and framed as other (or more) than writing and signification at the same time. The manipulation of the boundaries between materiality and signification is frequently projected onto other limits: between different cultures, between different temporalities, between different media, as well as between reality and mediation. For this to function, theories that work with inscriptive figures— especially in the context of poststructuralism —stage inscription as a series of paradoxes, open to theoretical maneuvers and difference management. In the form of laws of inscription, as I sketch them in what follows, these theoretically operative aporias are open to different theoretical and political outcomes, especially as paradoxical structures can be strategically highlighted or else put under erasure.

Laws of Inscription 1. Inscription’s First Rule: Through Its Cut, Inscription Draws a Distinction Inscription introduces a difference between the mark and its inscriptive surface, between what remains unmarked and what has been marked.3 This basic act of drawing a distinction, of introducing a difference, however, has profound conceptual consequences. As a mark, inscription results in the production of meaning, in however basic a way. 1.1 The Rule of Materiality Transcended The surface to be marked and the instrument that marks are entirely of the material realm, colluding in a process of contact that changes at least one of these two agents physically. And yet, these changes in material reality become symbolically and conceptually significant as setting up a threshold between materiality and meaning. By being breached by a cut, the surface thus inscribed accrues more physicality, whereas the trace that cuts through it “transcends” its material roots through the potential to signify.

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1.2 The Rule of Production By the same token, however, the space thus marked is also “produced.” This is not to say that an object does not exist materially prior to becoming the site of inscription. However, the fact of its mark sets it apart—marks it off—from its material surrounding, its stretches and folds that have not been marked thus. Inscription makes a material space special, discrete, and intelligible. Embodied realities are at once the surface for and the outcome of processes of marking. 1.3 The Rule of Distinction Breached Even as inscription draws a distinction, thus establishing a divide between materiality and meaning, it also depends on the intertwining of both sides. Indeed, signification and materiality interact doubly. As discussed in 1.1, in inscription, signification emerges from materiality. And yet, as a virtual set of marks—letters or graphs, images or discernible patterns of lines and dots—signification acquires visibility only by way of being inscribed onto a material surface. Mutual intertwining of bodies and texts, as bodies are intextuated and signs embodied.4 1.4 The Rule of Specificity Inscription, although sutured into an abstract concept, is radically specific. Inscription underlines that we cannot really conceive of signification prior to its material expression. When we talk about a text, a concrete, if variable, image of a writing surface and graphs, as well as an idea of their meaning, forms in our mind, in accordance with the etymology of the term that, still visible in words such as texture or textile, points to the eminently material basis of the term text. Nor can we conceive of flesh as a general, unshaped materiality prior to an organism and its social markers. Not only do the surface that undergoes incisive re-significations and the hand that traces them merit attention. At least of equal importance are the script that is being used, the cultural system (in) which it signifies, and its position and functioning within a whole field of different scripts and their contexts and media. Inscription is invested in the materiality of the writing implements and surface, in the concrete facets of its processes, in the fact that writing cannot be thought without a particular language, script, or cultural context. Even as the rules of inscription traced here attempt to paint a conceptual, generally valid, and hence abstract picture, our imagination constantly fills the concept of inscription with specific images or examples.

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2. The Paradox of Spatiality: Inscription Sets up Spatial Differences, Though Never Fails to Contest These Very Differences 2.1 The Rule of Topology: Inscription Opens up a Three-Dimensional Space by Working on a Surface Inscription is a surface phenomenon. For it to mark, it has to accede to visibility. Hence it must manifest itself on a material boundary, invest the outermost membranes of material objects. At the same time, inscription creates a depth effect by transforming a heretofore smooth and even surface into a relief. Of course, the difference between unmarked and marked is relative to the presentist perspective of each single inscriptive act, since there is no surface that is not already multiply marked, though, from the vantage point of a cut in process, it might appear pristinely blank (but this is the stuff of another rule). Inscription is poised between surface and depth, and it maintains a paradoxical relationship to the distinction between surface and depth. It thrives on and, indeed, produces the spatial dichotomy of surface and depth, of two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional space. On the one hand, inscription needs the surface: It inhabits and invests it. On the other, it questions and, to a certain extent, invalidates the very idea of a surface. It is that which, by marking a surface, cuts through to something beyond (and below) it, opening up the two-dimensional space of a flat plane to three-dimensionality, transforming extension into depth. Even so, inscription is never deep enough. It always faces another depth beyond it, an interiority that defies the grasp of the superficial mark. Such a transcendent elsewhere is not really “in” something, or only by imagination and convention. Rather, as an invisible, ever-elusive center it holds out against the lure and, well, the superficiality of the surface. Imagined as the deepest depth, the interiority of things, but more insistently of human beings—their core essence, self, or soul—it paradoxically transcends the realm of materiality and space. Inscription mediates between spatial surface and depth and can also draw and foreground a distinction between material superficiality and the depth of immaterial essence. 2.2 The Rule of Inclusion: The Outside of Inscription Is Already Necessarily within Inscription The other of inscription is unmarked space, matter that has yet to suffer the imprint of meaning. In order for processes of marking to occur, inscription needs its own outside. And yet, such an exterior already falls

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within inscription’s purview.5 It depends on inscription for its very definition: as inscription’s precursor or antagonist. As such, the outside of inscription must be both radically exterior and its necessary part: excluded within, included at the outside.

3. The Paradox of Action: Inscription Is Both Action and Stasis 3.1 The Rule of Performance: Inscription Stages a Scene When a surface is inscribed, inscription as such is always multiple, designating both the process of marking and the resulting text. The cut of a surface, the “text,” or indeed, inscription, such a mark leaves does not define or exhaust inscription. Inscription is not merely a state or simply an act. Rather, it consists of a whole scene with multiple props and actors. A mark does not appear by pure magic; instead, a hand wields a knife, scalpel, needle, or stylus, an instrument or mechanism punches holes, imprints signs, produces grooves. As a scene, inscription appeals to an audience. Minimally, in order to make sense, an inscription has to be seen or felt, or else at least potentially intended for “reading.” Perceiving inscription as a scene adds complexity. Other factors and actors, other levels of perception, enrich and complicate its basic differential structure. 3.2 The Rule of Agency: Inscription Marks the Line between Activity and Passivity Inscription acts as a strange dividing line between activity and passivity. It is both the expression of an active principle and that of passivity, in the split of he/she/it who inscribes and he/she/it who is inscribed. Inscription, the performance of material incision, perceived as a scene, comes complete with different actors: an instrument of inscription and its wielder, a surface about to be inscribed, as the host of inscription, as well as, potentially, the eye that sees the spectacle of inscription, and, indeed, “reads” the inscription. While not all roles in the play of inscription are equal, no preconceived distribution of activity and passivity need exist here. Inevitably, though, the surface of inscription, the thin line between he who wields the blade and she who has her body cut, implicitly marks the border between he who has power and she who has none, between he who dominates and penetrates and she who receives and suffers. (The use of gendered personal pronouns is entirely intentional here, as a reminder of how activity and passivity are convention-

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ally projected onto gender differences.) Should the scene make coincide in one body the hand that cuts and the skin breached, passivity still becomes the overriding share—and the power behind the hand is desperately searched for beyond and outside of that body and located elsewhere. This is not to say that cutting one’s skin or having one’s body incised empowers that body. And yet the surface that receives inscription is not merely a passive plane; instead, it is curved rather than flat, mutable rather than fixed, and thus, from a different vantage point, active rather than passive. Indeed, the constellations of power in different scenes of inscription can be infinitely more complex. Even so, the theoretical coding of inscription tends to do just that: simplify the difference between passivity and activity, between power and its absence, poising it precisely on the tip of a blade or a pen . . . or complicate matters if the theoretical problem in question calls for more complex scenarios.

4. The Paradox of Temporality: Inscription Exists in Double Time 4.1 The Rule of Iteration: Inscription Happens Once Only, and yet It Has Always Already Happened The cut takes place once only, and once it takes place, it takes place once and for all.6 The cutting edge that inflicts the cut strikes once only, yet the cut remains in place. The cut, once it has taken place, cannot be undone. What has been cut apart cannot be joined again. The surface that has been incised will never return to its original state. The cut cannot be undone, and therefore it cannot be redone either. And yet, inscription never happens only once. Whenever it cuts, it already cuts at least twice. Even before the first incision into a surface, inscription has already happened. This can be understood in two ways. (1) Even though inscription capitalizes upon the temporality of the event and upon singularity, as a material trace it merely follows in the tracks of other contacts or cuts suffered by an object. Indeed, no surface can ever be completely pristine or unmarked. (2) On a more conceptual level, inscription partakes of the temporal logic of the “always already” so frequently vaunted by poststructuralist logic.7 The temporal mode of the future perfect—closer to the structure of a paradoxical loop than to the grammatical tense of the same name—applies to the same act of inscription, no longer, as in (1), to the necessary repetition of inscription. This can be understood by scrutinizing the structure of the process of drawing a distinction: its double nature between conceptual and

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material operation. When inscription manifests the drawing of a distinction, a distinction has already been drawn, even before any inscriptive act has happened. In other words, the conceptual distinction between marked and unmarked predates and prepares its drawing. Thus, the scene of inscription as an interface between materiality and signification presents itself as a paradoxical primal scene. In order to provide a powerful model of the interaction between two terms that are often presented as opposites, inscriptive theories both must and cannot stage inscription as an encounter of two separate forces, materiality and signification. Consequently, scenes of inscription repeat what has already happened, while keeping alive at once an awareness of iteration and the pretense of the “first time.” In more than one sense, then, inscription is both always (already) in the past even when it is just about to occur. 4.2 The Rule of Anachronicity: As a Figure, Inscription Is Anachronistic, and yet It Is Profoundly Modern In contrast to 4.1, the second part of the paradox of temporality does not apply to the temporal dimension of the operation of inscription itself but rather to its conceptual historiography (i.e., to the way in which different modes and media of inscription have been aligned on a virtual time line). Though most media depend (at least partially) on inscriptive operations, since they find their base in differently produced material traces, inscription often invokes a premodern imaginary. It takes us back to practices that, at first glance, seem far removed from contemporary body politics or from contemporary technologies of writing. Even though the production of all signifying traces is an inscription of sorts, from the impregnation of paper with ink to letters engraved on a tombstone, inscription tends to highlight the materiality of signification, the process of carving into a surface. As the Greeks’ graphein, the marks a stylus engraves into a wax plate, as Mesopotamian cuneiform imprints on clay tablets, as the Chinese incisions on oracle bones, inscription evokes writing in its “primal” form. Consequently, the images or examples that give concrete shape to the concept of inscription often have an archaic flavor. For instance, in L’Anti-œdipe (AntiOedipus), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari use inscription in the form of “savage” rituals of bodily marking to illustrate the most primitive form of social organization.8 In histories of media in general, or of writing more specifically, inscription often makes its appearance quite explicitly in an early phase—in spite of the general applicability of it conceptual structure.

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For instance, in the essay “L’excrit” (“Exscription”), Jean-Luc Nancy— though aware of the constructed nature of such an account—evokes a teleological vision of media technology that places the book at the end of a history at whose beginning stand performance, music, chants, and dance, and that reaches the “perfection” of inky traces on paper only after another period, that of inscription. Though no longer in the guise of supposedly even more primal media, such as the circumcised bodies of Deleuze and Guattari’s model of savage sociality, Nancy’s inscription, as words that “must have a characteristic aspect of depth or prominence, engraving or sculpture” to be read publicly, not individually, is still the hallmark of past social structures, of “monumental communism, architectural writing and hieroglyphic monarchy.”9

5. The Paradox of Multiplication: Inscription Is Both Singular and Multiple 5.1 The Rule of Displacement: Inscription Has the Tendency to Multiply and Shift Levels In syntony with its inherent double (and doubling) logic, inscription manifests itself often in different shapes and on different levels at once. Almost as if one cut triggered a chain reaction of other inscriptions. More precisely, representations of inscription in its basic physical form frequently echo on formal or figurative levels, translating materiality into textual, medial, or theoretical moves. Such proliferations of inscription forge interesting nodes at which conceptual differences are mediated, negotiated, and, potentially, complicated: Where the material and the abstract, the literal and the figurative become inextricably entwined, where inscription is both at its most real and at its most virtual. 5.2 The Paradox of Plenitude: Inscription Is at Once in Excess and Always Found Lacking With the rule of iteration (4.1) and the rule of displacement (5.1) comes another paradoxical feature of inscription: its oscillation between excess and lack. Inscription fills a blank space, and yet it also adds emphasis and remarks something not in need of marks. It adds to and thus disrupts material plenitude. Its cut leaves a wound; its trace interrupts a surface that was never blank or empty to begin with.

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Difference Management; or, Inscriptive Quandaries What does inscription as a conceptual figure do? Inscription acts as an interface. It is a Schnittstelle—the German term for interface, but also, quite literally, a cutting point—a site where something must be severed in order to be connected differently. What inscription severs and reconnects is materiality and signification, as a difference that becomes its operational basis. By extension, analogy, contiguity, and displacement, multiple other differences become mapped onto this basic dichotomy. The dichotomy of materiality versus signification, often translated as body versus meaning, extends to spatial—hence surface/depth and exteriority/interiority—and temporal metaphors of duration (permanence/event) and chronology (past/ present and primitive/modern), as well as categories of agency (passivity/ activity). It can also be mapped onto racial, ethnic, and cultural identity (alterity/sameness) or differences of gender, sex, and sexuality, such as female/male, feminine/masculine, sexually passive/active, receptive/ insertive, homosexual/heterosexual. Inscription can be mobilized to cement and complicate differences of medium (analog/digital, sound/image, image/ text, logographic/alphabetic) and has profound stakes in the distribution of concretion versus abstraction, as well as managing the difference between literality and figurativity and between the mediated and the unmediated. Starting as a simple physical act charged with conceptual baggage, inscription thus becomes an instrument of difference management, of establishing, aligning, renegotiating, even complicating binary differences. As a conceptual figure, though derived from a material imaginary, inscription rules some of the ways in which we perceive reality, in which the multiplicity of the real becomes intelligible and structured. Inscription as such does not necessarily create materiality and signification as discrete and, at times, dichotomous categories. Nor does it necessarily produce and cement the other binary pairs with which it tarries. In fact, even as it illustrates, concretizes, and embodies these differences, it can also complicate and subvert them. The different participants in a scene of inscription—the surface or medium, the instrument, the “text,” the agent, and the audience of inscription—assume the role of placeholders under whose guise differences can be acted out. The laws of inscription favor paradox, they show that the drawing of a distinction also invites, even mandates, the breaching of this very distinction. In other words, inscription as such does not cement differences or reify dichotomies. And yet, inscriptive scenarios can be (and are, indeed, frequently) used for such purposes. Inscription can manage differences precisely because it encom-

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passes both sides. This encompassing means a conceptual coexistence of both as virtually discrete and intertwined. And yet, conceptual difference management always involves a selective representation and distribution. A specific version of the scene of inscription might highlight some links between binary pairs and components of inscription and strategically eclipse others or emphasize multiplicity and paradox instead. The fault lies not with inscription per se but rather with scenarios and alignments of categories, especially those that have become naturalized. But, inscription is not a foolproof means of avoiding the violent reification of differences either, in spite of the insistence on undecidability or paradox in much of poststructuralist theory. Inscription’s ontological and epistemic aporia—the double indeterminacy of the marked-unmarked dyad—allows for the unequal distribution of meaning, and hence for the political distribution of value. As such, inscriptive imaginaries often collude with violent adscriptions of difference, apparently giving the lie to the de facto indeterminacy of inscription in signification. Metaphors of marking frequently draw on physical characteristics and turn them into stigmata of sexual and racial difference, as deviance from the norms of masculinity, whiteness, heterosexuality, or physical and mental ability. Such constructions take visible physical marks as indices of categorical differences, as god- or nature-given markers. Modern accounts of race, for instance, thrived on the nineteenth-century connection between essence and visuality, framing “race as pure visual phenomenon located on the surface of the human body.”10 Even in the present with its scientific advances, technological possibilities, and critical discourses on race “the brutal simplicity of racial typology” still carries rhetorical weight.11 Skin color, accompanied by other phenotypal characteristics, seems particularly appealing to such formulations, recast from a variety of skin tones depending on different factors into what Frantz Fanon calls an “epidermal racial schema.”12 Race thus becomes a form of difference, through practices of symbolic marking, causing the body to be “simultaneously (if conflictually) inscribed in both the economy of pleasure and desire and the economy of discourse, domination and power.”13 Race, thusly construed as epidermal marker, has long functioned as an “ineradicable sign of negative difference.”14 The imaginary of racial inscription aims at establishing two mutually exclusive symbolic categories along the lines of the binary of white versus nonwhite. And to categorize implies to hierarchize: To establish visible markers of difference results all too often in stigma, as a visible stamp that seals and casts a group and its individual members into inferiority. According

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to such logic, not to be white equals being (morally, intellectually, sexually, etc.) inferior. To attach a series of negative stereotypical markers to the binarily read “index” of skin color involves imposition in contexts of political and social inequality, as the discursive badge of shame that imperialism, colonialism, and segregation turn on its other. As a powerful stereotype, it transforms itself into an account of supposed racial “truths” that become almost impossible to dislodge, especially since the subjects who bear the stigma of “color” are forced to internalize and thus negatively identify themselves visà-vis the norms of whiteness. Frantz Fanon’s Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) provides a narrative of such scenarios of alienation, for instance when he describes his reaction to being interpellated as “black” (nègre) by a white gaze as an act of aggression, of sustaining bodily harm, an act of disorientation, a “[peeling], stripping [of his] skin, causing a hemorrhage that left congealed black blood over [his] body.”15 The fact that evidence that contests the neat division along lines of skin color does not do much to disable this logic of racial difference showcases its discursive tenacity. After all, it operates not on the basis of reality— or only as the flimsiest of pretexts for the erection of a system that, though hinging upon the power of visual suggestion, only needs a thin veneer of visual “evidence” for the functioning of its perpetuum mobile: The incessant feedback loop in which “known truths” about the racial or ethnic other and supposed visual marks validate and reinforce each other as visual representations become “truth effects.”16 As Homi Bhabha argues, the machine of racial stereotyping is not rendered inoperative by the underlying ambivalence of its tenets and functioning. On the contrary, this is what keeps it in motion: “[The] stereotype . . . is a form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is always ‘in place,’ already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated.”17 Since racial logic thrives on ambivalence, examples of crossing the color line—such as passing—need not contest it. After all, the difference between whiteness and nonwhiteness construed in this way is not simple (i.e., its structure is not that of a difference between two marks—A versus B, white versus nonwhite). Instead, the logic of white versus nonwhite espouses an imaginary of norm and deviance in which the norm contrasts with its other precisely because, symbolically, it does not bear the mark or stigma of alterity. Only nonwhites bear the sign of race, hence the rhetorical insistence on nonwhiteness as embodied category, as integrally connected to physicality, corporeality, even sexuality. Whiteness, in turn, is often framed as disembodied, thus equating the difference between white and nonwhite with the dichotomy between mind and body.

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Whiteness, as the tacit (or not so tacit) norm, “does not need to be made visible to be present in an image” or to be in evidence as a conceptual category; unlike nonwhiteness it is always in the picture anyway.18 And yet, invisible itself, it needs its other — nonwhiteness — as conceptual and visual foil: Nonetheless, because whiteness is distinguishable from embodiment, it is a somewhat mercurial category. Whiteness often requires otherness to become visible. In other words, white people look whiter when there are nonwhite people around them. Whiteness can also be articulated as the capacity to masquerade as a racial other without actually being one. Whiteness emerges most clearly when it can mold others into imitations of itself.19

This contrastive logic of same and other, as Coco Fusco evokes it in this passage, involves complex maneuvers between what is marked and that which is not, as well as between the acts of marking and erasure. The construction of racial difference implies that the mark of nonwhiteness effectively also serves, negatively, as index of whiteness, since whiteness itself, as the norm, must, of necessity, remain unmarked. Those privileged by the absent mark of whiteness can temporarily assume the mark of otherness as a masquerade without risking their racial identity and authenticity. In contrast, from this vantage point, the other’s attempt at assuming whiteness will always remain inauthentic, of the order of an imitation or copy: “almost the same but not quite/white.”20 After all, even those who pass successfully as white are no real threat to the symbolic valence of racial difference: An erased inscription, for instance in the act of passing, can never equal the absence of marking in evidence in the white norm. The complex, unequal relationship between self and other that violent inscriptive logics presuppose also functions to symbolically cement sexual difference. Much as the mark of race grounds its power in the negativity of a reversed mirror image—skin color as a sign of difference contrastively subtends the very concept of whiteness as unmarked category—in the construction of sexual difference, value is inscribed in the absence of marking. According to a patriarchal, phallogocentric system, the unmarked norm of maleness accrues value, whereas woman—marked not as one of two sexes but as the sex par excellence, as the embodiment of sexual difference— remains without value. Only woman, as Monique Wittig argues, bears the mark of gender, or, in Judith Butler’s words, “ ‘sex’ is always already female, and there is only one sex, the feminine. To be male is not to be ‘sexed’; to be ‘sexed’ is always a way of becoming particular and relative, and males within

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this system participate in the form of the universal person.”21 According to Peggy Phelan’s analysis, in the construction of sexual difference, the binary of marked and unmarked, as epistemological markers in the field of visuality, is exactly reversed in the symbolic adscription of value: One term of the binary is marked with value; the other is unmarked. The male is marked with value; the female is unmarked, lacking measured value and meaning. Within this psycho-philosophical frame, cultural reproduction takes she who is unmarked and re-marks her, rhetorically and imagistically, while he who is marked with value is left unremarked, in discursive paradigms and visual fields. He is the norm and therefore unremarkable; as the Other it is she whom he marks.22

In the chiasmus that links markedness (the badge of alterity) negatively with the attribution of value or meaning, however, the mark of woman is, paradoxically, an absence. From the vantage point of psychoanalysis, one of the master narratives of sexual difference, female identity is defined negatively. In the rigged visual logic of Freudian psychoanalysis, woman’s “lot is that of ‘lack,’ ‘atrophy’ (of the sexual organ), and ‘penis envy,’ the penis being the only sexual organ of recognized value.”23 Judged according to male parameters, the second sex—imagined frequently as body vis-à-vis maleness identified with the mind—lacks the allegedly most visible and discursively potent marker of sex, the penis, a “shortcoming” that is underscored rather than remedied by the clitoris perceived as a paltry imitation. Woman is—according to the suggestive description of the female protagonist in a novel by Elfriede Jelinek—“a stone without an inscription (the chisel slipped already at the first letter and has left behind nothing but a hole).”24 Marked by an absence, a hole, woman’s inscriptive production is paradoxical: She does not signify, since she signifies only as and through the hole of nonsignification. Woman’s exclusion—from symbolic value, signification, morphological privilege—functions as an integral part of the symbolic order of patriarchy as described by feminist critics such as Luce Irigaray.25 In other words, female sexuality does not form an alternative outside but something that is included, yet marked as outside. Woman’s definition as outside of signification, but at the inside of a system that sustains itself through an unequal play of mirrors, cements man’s place in language. When she is marked as unmarked, thus bearing the stigma of difference, he is marked as that which bears no mark but is inscribed with value by way of woman’s double lack of marking that is, in this paradoxical symbolic economy, also a surplus of markedness.

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If the violent inscriptive models of race and sexual difference simply attached unequal value to two different marks or types of marks, we might try to counter inscription with erasure, to disable and reconfigure the flawed bonds between strategically selected and often misconstrued visual evidence and supposed inherent characteristics. Instead, these models themselves already operate with a complex interaction of marking and erasure, by proliferating different levels of marks and their absence—from corporeal “signs” to adscriptions of value or meaning—and by prescribing a stable link between these two levels. In fact, inscription here always happens at least twice: as a symbolic act of scripting difference that draws on supposedly “natural” marks—skin color, lack of a penis—and thus feigns to be just a secondary act, a re-mark, consequence of a prior inscription, while obliterating the fact that only its symbolic script produced its own pre-mark (as visible and significant sign). What becomes elided here is also the question of inscriptive agency, of who can assume the power to mark, to decide on the existence, status, or value of a mark.

Critical Genealogies The ways in which figures of inscription operate to cement racial and sexual difference represent a necessary caveat against the implied political and ethical optimism of poststructuralist invocations of difference not as absolute dichotomies but rather in the form of undecidability and ever-shifting micro-differences. By the same token, figures of inscription as a means of difference management have to be handled with care, part and parcel of a critical genealogy of poststructuralist reason. Derridean deconstruction made inscription—in the form of the trace and the mark with their close ties to iteration and difference—one of the prevalent figures of theoretical thought. However, Derrida’s use of inscription under the guise of écriture strategically limits the concept, in spite of its close ties to undecidability or paradox. On the one hand, Derrida universalizes inscription, as the fundamental logic of all signification. On the other, he aligns it selectively with a set of valued categories, such as materiality, iteration, difference, absence, activity, or event. While Derridean inscription recognizes the profound intertwining of materiality and signification (albeit, at times, more figuratively than concretely), its generalizing thrust excludes a set of categories, such as permanence, sameness, and presence, as illusionary denizens of the phonologocentric regime of Western metaphysics. It thus equates an inscriptive scene with one side of the binary of truth/illusion rather than

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treating it as a strategic construction that allows for radically different scenarios and perspectives. Even though my reflections resonate with the Derridean concepts of the trace or écriture and their different avatars and conjugations, Derrida’s inscriptive theories, albeit of crucial conceptual importance, are only one act in a larger scenario of inscription. Derrida’s theory of écriture emerged in the context of French theory of the 1960s and 1970s, when thinkers such as Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and Severo Sarduy became obsessed with the links between signification and materiality; when historians of ideas such as Michel Foucault, Michel Serres, and Michel de Certeau sought new models for the conjugation of knowledge, power, and bodies; when feminist thinkers, often inspired by and reacting against Jacques Lacan’s rereading of Freud’s psychoanalysis, such as Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray began to reflect on the signifying regimes that established the difference of the sexes. However, these reflections on the scripts that determine and produce reality did not surge ex nihilo. Rather, they developed in dialogue with earlier theories of inscription, paradigms that emerged in the last decades of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as psychoanalysis, anthropology, medical science, sexology, race theory, and media studies; illustrated in foundational texts such as Friedrich Nietzsche’s Zur Genealogie der Moral (The Genealogy of Morals), Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” Sigmund Freud’s “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock’ ” (“A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ ”) Rilke’s “Primal Sound,” or Walter Benjamin’s “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (“A Short History of Photography”). The genealogy of contemporary theory through the lens of inscription provided in The Mark of Theory begins there. The Mark of Theory is not a book about Derrida and his work in the traditional sense. In it I do not offer a close analysis of his textual corpus or trace the development of a concept—such as the trace, for instance— throughout his oeuvre or as a history of philosophical reference or influence. It is, however, a book in which Derrida and his thought occupies an important place, as the subject of a critical scrutiny of poststructuralist reason. For one, Derrida’s formulation of the trace and its various avatars constitutes one of the most sophisticated examples of theories of inscription, as one important voice in a larger chorus. Derridean concepts and tropes haunt this book—and I gladly welcome their presence. Indeed, this book owes a debt to Derrida’s work—which is both one of its objects of inquiry and a crucial methodological inspiration, supplemented with a good dose of media studies. However, I understand my work as a postDerridean and post-poststructuralist approach—in spite of the fact that a

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critique of poststructuralist patterns cannot step outside of the peculiar temporal loop of poststructuralism, which has ejected, and thus also introjected, the idea of origin or beginning and which, by espousing the “post” has also voided the future. In this context, the term poststructuralist prehistories in the subtitle of the book resonates with a double meaning: It designates the gesture of tracing some of the histories before poststructuralism —the prehistories of poststructuralism —as a way of working through poststructuralist thought as a past legacy of a thought to come—poststructuralism as prehistory of the present. Here is a roadmap of the conceptual path that I forge in The Mark of Theory, a condensed overview of the eclectic histories that plot inscription as its main protagonist. In each chapter I trace one inscriptive technology—tattooing, circumcision, photography, and phonography—as inspiration for specific theoretical questions: from subjection to trauma, from reception to mediation. Literary and aesthetic texts frequently function as counterpoints to theoretical texts, formulating their own inscriptive theories and thus providing additional perspectives on the conceptual quandaries under scrutiny. In Chapter 1, “Savage Marks: Subjection and the Specters of Anthropology,” I investigate the conceptual genealogy of theories of subjection that imagine the production of the socialized subject as acts of inscription. How did contemporary theories start to imagine subjection—the production and control of the subject in and through social structures—as a process of inscription by which power quite literally “writes” its script into human flesh? This chapter traces the obsession of poststructuralist theories of subjection with Franz Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony” by recontextualizing Kafka’s text in discourses on tattooing and body ornamentation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—from ethnographic treatises to histories of writing, from philosophical reflections to sociomedical case studies. The movement from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals in the late nineteenth century to Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) marks the erasure of the specific discursive, cultural, and social contexts of the imaginary of inscriptive subjection. The link between subjection and bodily inscription is rooted in anthropological interest in tattooing, first in the context of other, “primitive,” cultures (Wilhelm Joest, Heinrich Wuttke), then in the service of criminal anthropology (Alexandre Lacassagne, Cesare Lombroso) in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. But rather than remaining tied to an imaginary of primitive cultures or deviant individuals “at home,” in the end tattooing, deployed figuratively, became a universal theoretical imaginary.

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In a complementary move, theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, and Alphonso Lingis allowed themselves to be haunted by the specters of anthropology and thereby rediscovered inscription as another technology of writing, exemplified by the practices of other cultures, often in the service of countering Western theories of subjection. In this chapter I analyze how poststructuralist theory forgot and then rediscovered its roots in anthropology and explore how the ways in which we think and theorize now rely on the translation and management of particular cultural, ethnic, and social differences. In the next chapter, “Impact Erasure: Psychoanalysis and the Multiplication of Trauma,” I focus on the use of inscriptive metaphors in trauma theories, from Freud’s psychoanalytical models of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to contemporary theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Cathy Caruth, Marianne Hirsch, and Jean-François Lyotard. Trauma relies on figuration for its definition: Physical harm becomes a vehicle for imagining and describing an injury of the psyche. We imagine psychic shock in the form of a wound, in the guise of a mark, and yet, trauma also signifies as a lack or suspension of inscription. Paradoxically, as an unregistered shock that continues to haunt the individual, trauma is an inscription whose impact leaves no trace. Accordingly, the inscriptive metaphors deployed in theories of trauma tend to multiply, since they are caught in the dilemma of representing trauma without sacrificing a definition of trauma as the unrepresentable par excellence. For instance, Auschwitz tattoos and their uses in theoretical and literary texts as well as contemporary performance art serve as instances in which trauma has become visible as a corporeal mark. And yet, as visible representations of trauma they also remain insufficient—mere specters of the ineffable core of trauma. For a thorough analysis of the ways in which trauma turns inscriptive, I zoom in on a scandalous counterpoint: that between the number tattoos of Holocaust victims and the mark of circumcision. Whereas the number tattoo brands and produces a human body as inhuman, but can be rewritten as a corporeal memorial, circumcision can be misconstrued as traumatic mark, as a supplement to castration, for instance in Freud’s writings and the debates about the mark of Cain in the psychoanalytical journal Imago in the 1910s. Derrida’s conceptual appropriation of circumcision as personal experience and as a model for an ethical thought brings to the fore the constant tension that links corporeal marks and trauma: between metaphor and experience, between the irreducibly singular and the generally translatable.

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In “Stings of Visibility: Picture Theories and Visual Contact,” I shift focus to the ways in which media studies uses inscription by probing the imaginary at work in theoretical and artistic conceptualizations of visual media, especially photography. Photography is often read as a flat medium, a “message without a code” whose mimetic powers merely produce a superficial and potentially fraudulent representation — a perception exacerbated by the advent of digital photography.26 At the same time, however, theorists constantly endow photography with an additional force, that of affecting and shocking its observers. This chapter traces how descriptions of the photographic act as a process of impression mediated by light have turned into metaphors of reception in which the luminous imprint of the photograph is “translated” into a violent impact on she who looks at a photograph. Inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of indexical signs at the end of the nineteenth century, metaphors of visual contact often highlight photographic indexicality, the idea that photographs are physical traces of their referent. With the advent of digital media, after a wave of indexical theories in the 1970s and 1980s (such as those by Barthes, Susan Sontag, Rosalind Krauss, and Philippe Dubois), contemporary interest in indexicality has turned away from imaginaries that insist on the coexistence of object, photograph, and observer. Instead, linked to shock and trauma, photographic impact began to signify, often with a reference to Benjamin’s writings on film and photography, as a trace of the unexpected, a flash of the heretofore unseen come to light (pace Ulrich Baer, Mary Ann Doane, and Peter Geimer). As I investigate the various ways in which reflections on photography and poststructuralist theories of the image (like those of Nancy and Didi-Huberman) flatten and “translate” the material traces that produce the visual object in order to focus on its impact —figurative stings of visibility that point from the image to a viewer —I offer two literary and artistic counterpoints, two examples of the interaction of photography and text in the context of Chilean post-dictatorship art and literature, Diamela Eltit’s Lumpérica and Guadalupe Santa Cruz’s Quebrada. The final chapter, “Out of the Groove: Aural Traces and the Mediation of Sound,” turns its attention to theoretical models of sound media. As in the case of photography, sound media—such as the tellingly named gramophone—are often theorized in terms of writing. Through the graphocentric lenses of some proponents of media studies, the recording and reproduction of sound thus becomes yet another technology of inscription. After Friedrich Kittler’s influential book Grammophon – Film – Typewriter (Gramophone,

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Film, Typewriter), published originally in the 1980s, cited Rilke’s essay “Primal Sound” a range of German writers (e.g., Marcel Beyer and Durs Grünbein) began to draw on an imaginary of reversed inscription—in Rilke’s essay, a gramophone-like contraption is imagined as tracing the skull sutures and thus producing a primal sound of corporeality. In this chapter I explore different links between sound and writing, from Rilke’s and Adorno’s reflections on phonographic grooves as a type of proto-writing in the early decades of the twentieth century to contemporary media theories that invest sound with the powers of immediacy, immersion, and corporeal resonance, to poststructuralist fantasies of sound as an embodiment of écriture. Sound theorists from Adorno to Gitelman, from Dyson to Nancy, from Kittler to Derrida invest sound with contradictory desires: as a counter to phonocentric phantasms of presence as well as an alternative, resonant way of thinking, as that which is most mediated as well as a figure of nonmediation. And figures of inscription—as overt or disavowed imaginary, as well as negative foil—frequently represent and mediate between these differing theoretical approaches to sound. The genealogy of intextuated sound that I narrate in this chapter throws light on the strategic deployment of media in theory, for which sound and sound media (and their conceptual imaginaries) become a hallmark of reconceptualizing corporeality and materiality as well as a way of negotiating between mediation and the unmediated. I close the critical genealogy of The Mark of Theory with a reflection on the role inscription might play in future theoretical thought. “Against Inscription?” probes different critiques of inscriptive theories: The desire to escape from inscription, and indeed to forgo marking by invoking the power of the unmarked, on the one hand, and the critique of the limited figurative economy and disregard for materiality ascribed to inscriptive theories, on the other. In spite of their anti-inscriptive stance, however, these interventions still implicitly work within the logical bounds of inscriptive theories. In contrast, I argue that only a thorough critical working through of the politics of inscription and a scrutiny of their pervasiveness can lead to a scenario in which poststructuralist theories and their inscriptive figures can become the prehistories of a thought to come.

chapter 1

Savage Marks Subjection and the Specters of Anthropology

Inscriptive Scenarios, Exemplary Fallacies The culprit lies prostrate on the cotton-covered bunk, his hands and feet tied to the apparatus, his head immobilized, his mouth silenced by a cone of felt. Just above the surface of the culprit’s body hangs a harrow, a glass structure covered with needles, about to begin its work—at a hand’s movement, with the grinding in place of a mechanical wheel: to sting and prick, to pierce the skin, in order to inscribe the judgment, the text of the law, into live flesh until death ensues. This execution machine, described in minute detail by an officer of the penal colony to a traveler in Franz Kafka’s short story “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony”) of 1914, is a powerful example of inscription.1 In his text, Kafka imagines a mechanized process of tattooing as a punishment that inscribes the criminal’s sentence quite literally on the skin. After six hours of painful inscription, the culprit, formerly ignorant of the verdict and the functioning of the law, is “enlightened” as a bodily “reading” leads to interior understanding, before the culprit’s body succumbs to the trauma of the multiply repeated subcutaneous piercings. Writing here incises, cuts, 25

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and imprints a material body with the letters of the law and carries out the death sentence: bodily inscription become at once law, sentence, and punishment. “In the Penal Colony” invokes a complex scenario in which the inscription of a corporeal surface produces a semblance of interiority as internalized guilt leads to a quasi-epiphanic experience—hence the fascination of many theorists with this story. Different critics have endorsed Kafka’s text as an example of the drama of subjection as a corporeal process—the painful alteration of the bodily surface—that produces something else: from the perspective of the narrating officer in Kafka’s story, an epiphany for the culprit; through the lens of theorists, subjecthood as a newfound interiority. Much as the culprit’s body feels the painful stings of the law, which leaves his skin textually imprinted and, after hours of torture, supposedly produces a moment of heightened consciousness, granting him a glimpse of the law’s working, so too do some thinkers depict the production of subjectivity as a scene of inscription. A disembodied, transcendent “law” incarnates its text by inscribing the surface of a body, taking hold of what is to become a subject through both painful and meaningful incisions of flesh. For Michel de Certeau, Elizabeth Grosz, or Judith Butler, Kafka’s text from the beginning of the twentieth century illustrates the production of a social subject through processes of bodily marking; its “punishment machine” literalizes the workings of a disciplinary apparatus that forces a body to conform to society’s scripts. As de Certeau explains in L’invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life), “the law constantly writes itself on bodies. It engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its subjects.”2 According to de Certeau’s inscriptive scenario, the law, an abstract, disembodied force, achieves visibility only by tracing its text onto flesh. While it thus accrues a supplemental, textual body, the bodies that enable the incarnation of the law are diminished in their very corporeality. Intextuated, turned into signifiers, they become instrumental to the signifying system of the law. Kafka’s story has all the ingredients of theories of subjection that function with an inscriptive imaginary: a structure of power embodied in an apparatus of subjection and the incarnation of the law as a painful process of signification that uses the body as inscriptive surface. No matter whether theoretical texts endorse or critique inscriptive metaphors of subjection, “In the Penal Colony” inevitably figures as privileged illustration, often accompanied by discussions of Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. For instance, in Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz activates Kafka’s text as an example of the social construction of gendered bodies. We can imagine the

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production of the subject as an act of corporeal writing in which the “body is the parchment on which the text is written” in blood.3 What is more, the inclusion of Kafka’s literary text among theories of corporeality also subtly underlines the multilayered creativity attributed by Grosz to just such a production: the corporeal “text” thus produced is “as complicated and indeterminate as any literary manuscript.”4 In spite of its imaginary of violence and pain, for theories of cultural constructivism such as Grosz’s, inscription can be harnessed to a creative rewriting of identity beyond essentialism. Identity becomes an effect produced a posteriori through the writing of the law on the surface of a body, no longer an innate and unchanging core. In contrast to Grosz’s affirmative use of inscription, for Judith Butler, inscriptive scenarios—by Kafka, Nietzsche, but especially by Foucault— default to problematic binaries of material and signification, as the inert blank page of the body suffers acts of cultural inscription that give it form and meaning: If inscription produces identity, the material it molds to its purpose must be inert, passive matter.5 Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of inscriptive theories in Corpus also ties inscription to a problem of corporeality, albeit from a slightly different perspective. Nancy’s tirade against a notion of the body as produced as well as absorbed by writing becomes a rant against Kafka’s text: (I hate the story of Kafka’s “Penal Colony,” false, facile, and grandiloquent from beginning to end.) “Written bodies”—incised, engraved, tattooed, scarred—are precious bodies, preserved and protected like the codes for which they act as glorious engrams: but this isn’t really the modern body, this isn’t the body that we’ve projected, there, ahead of us, approaching us, naked, merely naked, and exscribed [excrit] in advance from all writing.6

Irrespective of the validity of Nancy’s argument about corporeality, his treatment of “In the Penal Colony” seems suspect. Maybe the bodies narrated by Kafka’s text are not modern bodies, are not the bodies of the horrors of the Holocaust invoked in Nancy’s Corpus. But then Kafka is neither our contemporary (or the contemporary of Grosz, Butler, or Nancy) nor does a literary text have to adhere to the same conceptual standards as philosophical treatments of the problem of corporeality. The problem highlighted by Nancy’s text, as well as by other theoretical treatments of “In the Penal Colony,” is not Kafka’s use of an inscriptive model but rather theory’s logic of exemplarity. As theorists critique Kafka’s story in the name of inscription, or inscription in the name of Kafka’s

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story, theory and literary text become nearly interchangeable. Of course, we can (and should) read literary texts theoretically. But we must remain aware of the stakes and potential pitfalls of illustration. The examples provided here—with the exception of de Certeau, whose intellectual history of social and medial imaginaries of production contextualizes and historicizes different social models (such as that of inscription)— decontextualize Kafka’s story for the sake of theoretical valence, even though most theorists seem to sketch a vague genealogy of inscription via Nietzsche, Kafka, then Foucault. Two problems surface here: 1) these theorists treat the inscriptive model of subjection as universal rather than as culturally and historically delimited, and 2) they expect a specific literary text to exemplify a supposedly generally valid concept. Here, exemplarity is at its most problematic: Theory’s gesture of illustration by way of a literary texts suggests contextual specificity as a façade for a double generalization— of the concept and of its literary example. As a consequence, “In the Penal Colony” no longer functions as a test case for the validity and the limits of theory. Instead, it has become coterminous with inscription, even as subjection as inscription has become an almost implicitly accepted theoretical imaginary.

European Inventions of Tattooing Allow me to undo theory’s hasty steps by placing Kafka’s texts and its inscriptive imaginary back into its historical context. Though not without parabolic touches as most of Kafka’s texts, “In the Penal Colony” makes reference to a specific historical and cultural context: that of European imperialism. After all, Kafka situates his cruel apparatus of inscription not just anywhere. It functions on a tropical island, a penal settlement, established by an unspecified European imperial power. The setting incessantly reminds us readers that we are not witnessing some generic working of an abstract law but rather a temporally and spatially defined regime that exerts its power over specific bodies: the marginalized, expelled, and interned subjects of the European homeland, as well as the bodies of the original inhabitants of the tropical island that houses the penal colony. Indeed, Kafka’s text resonates with accounts of colonial life, especially its cruel regime of punishments, available to readers of the time, often in the form of popular adventure fiction.7 In addition, Kafka’s meticulously described punishment machine also invokes a related set of texts particularly in vogue from the 1870s to the 1920s: treatises on the phenomenon of tattooing in anthropology and medicine.8 Kafka’s inscriptive paraphernalia, bundled

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needles for punctuating the skin, layers of cotton for absorbing blood, and sheets of paper that model the pattern to be tattooed, repeat the description of the process of tattooing in many of these treatises, in mechanized as well as morbidly exaggerated form, of course.9 Once we recontextualize “In the Penal Colony,” three insights emerge. First, Kafka’s portrayal of an inscriptive machine was not born ex nihilo. Rather, a rich tradition of treatises and works on tattooing across a range of different textual genres inspired Kafka’s story. Second, techniques of bodily inscription constituted a powerful yet conflicted imaginary at the time, part and parcel of new preoccupations about the identity of Western culture and the structure of modern society. Third, contemporary models of subjection as a process of inscription have their particular historical, cultural, and discursive contexts. Forged in the fires of the newly fledged discipline of anthropology with its ideological ties to colonialism, inscription first policed cultural, racial, and social differences before subjecting the unmarked European body. Before turning into a generalized model of subjection, it first functioned as a tool for marking the symbolic boundaries between savage and civilized bodies, then for identifying and marginalizing undesirable subjects within Western societies.10 In short, inscriptive theories, though used as universal models for the interaction of individuals and society, cannot rid themselves of their ideological baggage: They were born as mechanisms of othering. The specters of anthropology haunt inscription. The Western infatuation with the marked body of the cultural other has a long history, frequently coupled with a violent encroachment on another culture’s territory.11 Those who inhabit the “blank spaces” of the earth, who occupy the “unmarked” terrains of the globe, who dwell in the uncharted mazes of the rainforest are also, paradoxically, those who cover their bodies with inscriptions. According to Western stereotypes, the savage lack of inscribing a habitat, of clearing the wilderness, of parceling off land into private property, is countered by an excess of body painting, scarification, and tattooing. Both the “empty” spaces of the unknown (to Western eyes) and the marked body of the primitive other are thus always in need of another inscription: an “efficient” use and governance of spaces and bodies, as well as another script, that of alphabetization. Fantasies about inscribed bodies are a supplement to the imaginary of empty space, to colonial discourses that de Certeau calls, in the context of the conquest of the Americas, “writing that conquers,” that “[uses] the New World as if it were a blank, ‘savage’ page on which Western desire will be written.”12 Western desires for inscription always find their surfaces: hallucinated

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blank spaces that await inscription, and inscribed spaces, or indeed bodies, that can be compared and contrasted with civilized forms of marking. Even though this logic is a recurrent mainstay of Western civilization, the preoccupation with inscribed bodies experienced a renaissance at the end of the nineteenth century, in the marriage of colonialism and modernity. Even though the decorated body still bore the stigma of racial, cultural, and moral difference, as tattooing became a normal, though not normalized, European practice, corporeal inscription needed to be recontextualized for the contemporary moment and for the domestic sphere. Tattooing was becoming a widespread practice in Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth century, so much so that some critics even talk of a tattooing craze at the turn of the century.13 In the eighteenth century, tattooing signified as an exotic (and exoticized) practice, imported after the contact with Polynesian societies and their sophisticated tattoos —hence the term tattoo from tatau.14 In the nineteenth century, tattooing became a European phenomenon, no longer only in evidence on the skin of cultural others, sailors, subjects of freak shows, or eccentric aristocrats. At the same time, tattooing found another inscriptive surface in a wave of writings on the subject — from respected scientific texts to lowbrow divulgations. However, even as tattooing turned into a common practice, thoroughly Westernized in pattern, inscriptive technology, and meaning, scientific (and pseudo-scientific) interest in the subject still took great pains to continue to construct bodily inscription as a marker of difference. As Western intellectuals of all hues became increasingly enthralled by the thought of finding civilization’s prehistory embodied in those now renamed as primitives, tattooing and other corporeal decorations marked the universal human, on the one hand, and served to highlight the differences between “us” and “them,” on the other.15 As expressions of human nature, practices of body modifications, such as tattooing, body paint, and piercings, connected “the most savage man” and “the most refined woman.”16 And yet, in spite of their common impulse for ornamentation, a cultural abyss separated the scarified body of the African man and the pierced earlobes of the French woman.17 In other words, whereas the argument of a common human nature made it possible to read other cultures as the prehistory of Western civilization, such a cultural continuum was strictly bound by temporal differences: The primitives were (safely) comparable to the civilized only whenever they remained confined to an analogy with civilization’s past— only whenever the gulf between our now and their then remained insurmountable.

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Consequently, tattooing, as expression of cultural difference, occupied a specific position on a linear timeline of civilizational development. For instance, at the end of the nineteenth century, German historian Heinrich Wuttke read tattooing as an early form of writing. Wuttke’s Geschichte der Schrift und des Schrifttums von den rohen Anfängen des Schreibens in der Tatuirung bis zur Legung electromagnetischer Dräthe (The history of writing from its uncouth beginnings in tattooing to electromagnetic cables) of 1872 frames writing as the crown of human culture, since it allows the transmission of thought and thus assures that new achievements and ideas remain part of the treasure trove of human knowledge. For Wuttke, as for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, alphabetic writing is the jewel in civilization’s cultural crown, aided by media that accelerate the pace of its inscription, such as stenography and the typewriter, or that facilitate the communication of text, such as telegraphy.18 Writing is culture’s prosthesis, since it extends “man’s power beyond the measure of his natural abilities [natürliche Ausstattung].”19 On the other end of Wuttke’s teleological model of development lie nonalphabetical scripts and, at the cusp of writing but outside of writing proper, tattooing. For Wuttke, tattoos are a type of writing by etching (Aetzschrift), symbols of a pictorial code (bildliche Schrift) punctured into the bodily surface. Even though human skin proves a medium that renders inscription slow and painful and, because of its proneness to harm, death, and decay, makes for less than ideal storage space, Wuttke still conceives of the human body as the first archival medium and of tattooing as the bridge between nonwriting and writing. Likewise, in one of the most influential works of the time on tattooing, Wilhelm Joest’s 1887 Tätowiren: Narbenzeichen und Körperbemalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Ethnologie (Tattooing: Scar signs and body paint: A contribution to comparative ethnology), tattooing marked a midpoint of cultural development: after (and above) even more primitive practices, such as body paint and scarification, but before (and below) a civilized state in which the individual covers his body with clothes and dispenses completely with ornamentation that affects the body permanently. In his book, Joest constantly oscillates between cultural relativism and the enforcement of a strictly teleological system of cultural levels. Joest advocates for a contextual definition of beauty, even for seemingly “barbaric” practices of body modification that might strike a European observer as disfiguration rather than decoration. For instance, the two intricate Japanese designs that Joest had tattooed onto his arms, referred to in detail as well as present in the form of illustrations in his book, highlight the author’s cultural tolerance on his own body. Joest also professes a profound nostalgia for

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the fact that tattooing as a culturally embedded system of meaning, for instance in Polynesia, disappears before “the white man’s breath,” resulting in a “loss of originality” and a “flattening” (Verflachung) of cultural multiplicity.20 And yet, civilization can only be envisioned as a progress narrative, fueled by each individual’s implicit desire to leave the “miserable stage of the savages [Wilde]” and aspire to closeness to the ideal human being, crafted in god’s image.21 While the drive to ornament one’s own body, to alter corporeal nature, is a universal mark of culture, the degree of refinement displayed in different practices becomes a hallmark of cultural difference: The custom to change the surface of the body with which nature has gifted man through painting [Bemalung], through scarification [Narbenzeichnung] or through colored tattooing [farbige Tätowirung] is found among the most different peoples distributed all over the globe. These ornaments [Hautverzierungen] or mutilations [Verletzungen] of the skin, as well as the way in which they are being infl icted, correspond naturally [naturgemäss], apart from geographical and anthropological modifications, to the state of culture [Culturstandpunct] which said peoples occupy: Among uncouth, savage men of nature [rohe, wilde Naturvölker] the operation will be cruel and bloody, whereas more civilized peoples already require some, in some cases even a high degree of aesthetic sensitivity and taste.22

For Joest, the original, unadorned state of the human body is natural, and cultural difference, framed as a hierarchical system, is natural (naturgemäss), too. They, the savages and wild men, perform cruel and bloody inscriptions, unlike more civilized body modifications. And yet, Joest’s scalar system of cultural progress that tries to construct a conceptual chasm between “them” and “us” cannot (and does not want to) cover up the fact that both “we” and “they” mark our bodies. If Joest insists throughout his book, like many other thinkers who use tattooing as proof of a cultural progress narrative, that tattooing, as a practice of the past, is a species on the brink of extinction, he also points to the increasing spread of tattooing in Europe.23 This leads him to conclude, somewhat contradictorily, that the difference between the primitive and the civilized is not an insurmountable abyss after all but that the gap between “us” and “them” is narrow indeed, since knowledge of ourselves and our past has to rely on “their” cultural evidence:24

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The times during which Europeans looked down on natural men [Naturmenschen], on “savages” [“Wilde”] with sovereign contempt are over. Every day the conviction becomes more widespread that we with our modern ideas and habits are but little ahead of the savage whom we had neglected or ridiculed for so long, even that we are forced to have recourse to natural peoples in order to understand our own inner life [Geistesleben]. The more our knowledge of ourselves [Selbsterkenntnis] increases, the narrower the gap that seemed to separate us from natural men . . . becomes.25

Of course, the primitivist discourse at evidence in anthropological work of the period on the subject of body modification was marked throughout by a fundamental contradiction: the desire for self-definition through the other by genealogy as well as by contrast. On the one hand, such reasoning needed a “perfect analogy of ancient tattoos with those of our epoch.”26 On the other, civilized modernity needed to be far removed from its ancient mirror images, its primitive contemporaries. The modern spread of tattooing throughout Europe, the irritating contemporaneity of an archaic practice, threw this contradiction into high relief. Tattooing could not be contained for long as a phenomenon of the past or the strange custom of other cultures. So-called primitive cultures both embodied civilization’s prehistory and stood in for culture’s suppressed other. The popular and scientific obsession with tattooing during the decades around the turn of the twentieth century posited the practice squarely within modernity. What happens when a supposedly primitive, alien practice strikes root at the European center of civilization? When tattooing, as the allocation of difference, no longer constitutes a visible stigma that singles out the cultural other? When the gap between one’s own culture and the other becomes ever less visible (if we were to believe Joest)? Differentiation turns inside, trying to maintain its initial distinction by subdividing one’s own culture into those who are more representative of civilization and those others who, even as part of one’s own culture, are also almost like the cultural other. In other words, the original distinction has just been reintroduced on one of its sides, as civilized society symbolically casts out some of its members as quasi-primitives. Especially in the fields of criminal anthropology and legal medicine, under the scrutinizing gaze of science, often operating in tightly policed social spaces, such as the military, the prison, the asylum, or the brothel, tattoos began to signify as markers of difference within Western societies. Tattooing among the lower rungs of society, such as sex workers or prison

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inmates, became one of the pet subjects of criminal anthropology from the 1870s to the First World War. Cesare Lombroso’s L’uomo delinquente (Criminal man) of 1876 famously adduces tattooing as proof of a theory of atavism, according to which criminal impulses testified to a regression to cultural traits and practices that civilization had long since left behind.27 For Lombroso, tattooing is the modern “reproduction of a wide-spread custom among primitive populations and savages [popolazioni primitivi e tra i selvaggi]” whose “violent passions” (violenza delle passioni), “blunted sensitivity” (torpida sensibilità), “puerile vanity” (puerile vanità), and “prolonged leisure” (lungo ozio) are shared by criminals.28 Their inurement to the pain caused by prolonged sessions of tattooing and the decoration of sensitive regions of the body, as well as the substitution of alphabetic writing with a supposedly precivilized “script of symbols and hieroglyphs” (scrittura con simboli e con geroglifici) written on their bodies served as further proof of the primitive regress of Lombroso’s delinquent contemporaries.29 Even though other anthropologists were quick to refute, or even ridicule, Lombroso’s atavistic theories and his methods, the basic logic intended to put tattooing and civilization at odds remained intact. For instance, Alexandre Lacassagne critiqued Lombroso’s atavism but replaced it with a theory of unequal development and degeneracy in Les Tatouages (Tattooing) of 1881. In an uninterrupted series of similar practices, such as graffiti or heraldry, tattooing as a modern phenomenon marked not the return of “ancient types” but rather the presence of “retarded types” who had not yet reached the heights of civilization.30 Even though tattooing in criminals, sex workers, and soldiers manifested an influence of milieu for Lacassagne, and not, as for Lombroso, an expression of atavistic “genes,” the individual prone to tattooing was still in need of being shown “that he degrades and demeans himself by moving closer to the savage.”31 The contemporary discourse was not without critical voices. For instance, Joest censured Lacassagne for generalizing on the basis of his research in the French foreign legions, and thus for ignoring the fact “that there are thousands of upright, proper Europeans who have tattoos.”32 But as late as 1925, Rudolf Erhard Riecke, though quite dismissive of Lombroso’s choice of limiting his research to prison inmates to prove the coincidence of criminal behavior and tattooing, still subscribed to the connection between a lack of civilization and an excess of bodily marks: “It is safe to conclude that tattooing generally indicates a lower level of culture [Kulturzustand], is not a sign of an advanced civilization, and does not speak to a particularly high level of intelligence [Intelligenzgrad].”33 In spite of the modern incidence of tattoo-

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ing in Europe, in spite of critical voices against theories of atavism and degeneration, the practice remained the hallmark— symbolic more than real— of the savage, the criminal, or the lower-class body and its cultural and moral lack in comparison to the modern civilized subject: Either the tattooed subject had remained primitive or regressed to the status of savage. Kafka wrote “In the Penal Colony” in a context in which these and similar reflections on civilization and bodily inscription were rampant. Not only did Kafka know Lombroso’s work, he also listened to a lecture by the Austrian architect Adolf Loos in 1911 based on Loos’s essay “Ornament und Verbrechen” (“Ornament and Crime”) on the link between decoration and primitive cultures.34 Loos’s text, heavily influenced by Lombroso, relentlessly fustigates the use of ornamentation, stylistic characteristic of the then-fashionable art nouveau or Jugendstil, as a sign of cultural degeneration and economic exploitation. For Loos, the excess of decoration, exemplified paradigmatically as tattoo, characterizes human prehistory when found on savage bodies but indicates moral turpitude on the bodies of supposedly civilized men: “The Papuan covers his skin with tattoos, his boat, his oars, in short everything he can lay his hands on. He is no criminal. The modern person who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.”35 While art originated, according to Loos, in the erotically charged drive to ornamentation, the progress of civilization has rendered it obsolete, even nefarious. To sustain his argument, Loos relies not only on the comparison between primitive and modern man but also on a transfer through contiguity: He insists that the ornamental drive in the primitive takes hold of his body as well as his objects. In analogy, Loos insinuates that the use of decorated objects in modern society marks the individual who appreciates them as degenerate, even criminal. In his plea for an aesthetic devoid of ostentation, Loos replicates a logic à la Lombroso that links as well as contrasts the primitive and modern man by way of tattooing. Kafka’s story turns contemporary reflections on tattooing with their cultural progress narratives and the use of the primitive as a negative, since superseded, model into a more complex constellation. Not the savage other but Western civilization has recourse to tattooing. Bodily inscription no longer expresses an artisanal impulse for ornamentation but instead consists of a mechanized process of punishment. In “In the Penal Colony” the envoys of Western civilization’s colonial mission use savage means to inscribe the body of the other—the inmate of the penal colony on an unnamed tropical island. Consequently, Kafka’s story puts tattooing back

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into its cultural and historical context: Not the primitive or the degenerate civilized are obsessed with tattooing. Rather, Western intellectuals such as Joest, Wuttke, Lombroso, Lacassagne, or Loos fantasize about it. Not the spread of tattooing in Europe’s nineteenth century, but theoretical writings about tattooing converted the practice into a profoundly modern phenomenon. This is not to say that tattooing and ornamentation did not exist in non-European cultures. Only that the metaphorical use of such practices “at home” was a more compelling motive for the West’s cultural obsession with them than their real existence at large. As a fantasy that originated in the West, tattooing is projected onto the past, outward onto so-called primitive cultures, inward onto the undesirable elements of society. In other words, the West’s hallucinatory imitation of the savages, the discovery of another inscriptive practice, of writing’s other elsewhere, really consisted in its fabrication and projection onto the (external and internal) Other.

Subjection’s Savage Marks What made tattooing so compelling a metaphor? What caused historians, ethnologists, anthropologists, practitioners of medicine, and even architects to latch onto the imaginary of tattooing in such a way? Of course, then, as always, the unfamiliar fueled imaginaries with the titillation of the exotic. More important, however, tattooing became useful as a real and figurative way of conceiving of the new (modern) ties between the subject and society in the force field of individual agency and societal control. With the notable exception of Joest, who saw body modifications motivated in the desire to enhance one’s physical attraction, most thinkers of the epoch who reflected on tattooing were keen on reading bodily marks not as ornaments, but as signs. Throughout, tattoos were treated as a type of proto-writing, more primitive than full-fledged (i.e., alphabetic) scripts but equally expressive of meaning. Apart from the important role ascribed to tattooing in Wuttke’s genealogy of writing, it frequently appears in contiguity with heraldic or professional icons or nonalphabetic scripts, such as hieroglyphs and ideographs.36 As such, bodily marks convert their bearer into written, and thus readable, matter—from the savage body with his “wandering archive, in which the individual marks the most remarkable deeds of his life” to the Camorra member whose tattoo serves as distinguishing mark and signature.37 But for Western thinkers the identifying marks of the tattoo were not primarily thought as an expression of individual agency, of somebody’s

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willful shaping of one’s own body. Rather, tattoos, though self-inflicted or self-willed, frequently accrued the status of social markers. For instance, Wuttke compared the tattooer in primitive cultures to the “Notarius publicus” or notary of Western society, treating tattoo marks as indelible signs of social accountability.38 If, according to Lombroso, bodily marking among primitive cultures constitutes “the true writing of savages, their first registry of civil condition,” tattooing among civilized criminals operates as fateful social stigma, uncanny self-denunciation or harbinger of a presaged bad ending.39 Thus, cases of tattooed criminals with inscriptions such as “born under a bad star” or “I began badly—I will end badly— This is the end that awaits me” accompanied by the image of a guillotine—are emphasized.40 Here the tattoo marks its bearer as outlaw—against the delinquent’s interest of blending in with “normal” society, maybe even against his or her volition. Loos’s shocking dictum condenses the latent logic of such reflections: “If somebody with tattoos dies in liberty, this only means that he died some years before committing murder.”41 Much as tattooing became an infallible sign of a criminal identity, its mark turned individual agency into destiny. While most contemporary thinkers of tattooing held much more nuanced opinions than Loos’s intentionally polemical challenge, the fantasy of being able to read visible markers of somebody’s identity on her body seemed compelling.42 Tattoos potentially heralded the possibility to disambiguate a person’s identity for criminal apprehension and legal identification. Joest, for instance, advocated for a person’s tattoo to be included in passports and military permits (and not only in prison registers as had become common practice) as “special identifying mark” (besonderes Kennzeichen).43 Even though Joest, unlike Lombroso and Lacassagne, decriminalized tattoos, such a use explicitly abets the classification and control of an individual by society’s disciplinary powers. Examples of such a significance of tattoos are almost exclusively drawn from the medico-legal realm of frauds unveiled, criminals arrested, and corpses identified.44 But the expressive power allotted tattoos went much further than mere identification. They potentially held the key to understanding the circumstances and characters of their bearers—with the help of the categorizing gaze of the anthropologist. Lacassagne, for instance, describes tattoos as vocal scars: Even though scars are sometimes valuables signs [signes précieux], they allow one at best to reconstruct the circumstances of an event

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according to their appearance and placement. In contrast, tattoos, by their varieties and numbers, often mark steps in the life of an individual and, sometimes, his moral nature. They are vocal scars [cicatrices parlantes]. In legal medicine, there is no better sign of identity, because of their nature of permanence, duration, and the difficulty of making them disappear.45

The metaphor of the vocal mark, of the tattoo that speaks, is not gratuitous, since it inflects the imaginary of a permanently visible graphic sign system with the presence and directness of speech. Like an individual’s voice, tattooing embodies the fantasy of a direct expression, inextricably linked to a person’s core. At the same time, however, according to Lacassagne, such body scripts with their naïve figurality are “sensible signs” (signes sensibles) that, much as hieroglyphs or icons, “engrave themselves more strongly on the heart” since they are “the expression of custom or the effect of a submission to usage.”46 Although the engraving referred to here is on the level of reception, since the act of seeing the tattoo leads to its inscription on the hearts of its audience, this doubled inscription works because the engraved message resonates with and, indeed, obeys its social and cultural context. In the discourses of the time, tattooing occupied an unstable, contradictory position, potentially serving double duty: on the one hand, external signs of an individual; on the other, tools of social control. Tattoos—as both vocal scars and sensible signs—merge an imaginary of an individual’s natural expressivity and her determination by social forces. They are both outward projections of an inner nature and exterior forces that permanently shape and control a person’s interiority. As such, tattoos had to be thought both as a performative, repeatable repertoire of inscriptions and as permanent, ineradicable archival traces. They needed to adapt to and express a subject’s characteristics as well as fix a person’s identity until death—hence the fixation among theorists of the time on the question whether tattoos were permanent or whether they could disappear or be removed. Reflections on the almost fateful choice of tattoos among criminals, read as an expression of the higher force of determinism by Lombroso and Lacassagne, symbolically removed bodily inscription from free will. Instead, the site of individual agency moved to the control (or lack thereof ) to eradicate such marks—a topic of much speculation though largely dismissed as improbable or unfeasible. Limited and controlled in such a way, the figure of tattooing embodied (even forged, to a certain degree) the idea of the subject as inflection of

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social forces that determined an individual’s development (in the form of milieu) and that curtailed his potentially disruptive impulses (in the form of a society’s disciplinary apparatuses). From an individual’s will to decorate his body, tattooing had become the symbol for a regulated set of social signs. From the exotic bodily inscriptions of the savages out there, tattooing had become a means of fantasizing about, as well as embodying, society’s grasp on and production of subjects. In the late nineteenth century, tattooing was not only increasingly domesticated—no longer merely visible proof of outlandish practices—but also a profoundly Western practice of body modification and, as such, object of theoretical speculation. Furthermore, its conceptual and symbolic weight was lifted from the other’s body—the primitive or socially marginalized individual—and applied to the civilized body in general in order to illustrate the production of the socially accountable individual. One of the source texts of inscriptive models of subjection, Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1887 Zur Genealogie der Moral (The Genealogy of Morals) has to be understood in the context of such contemporary discussions of bodily marking.47 Nietzsche’s reflections on the emergence of morals were influenced by the new paradigms of anthropology and acutely interested in the cruel spectacles of the past as a counterbalance to the mediocrity of the present. The second essay in The Genealogy of Morals, “ ‘Schuld,’ ‘schlechtes Gewissen,’ Verwandtes” (“ ‘Guilt,’ ‘Bad Conscience,’ and Related Matters”) consists of a different mix of some of the ingredients at large in contemporary ethnological and anthropological work: corporeal inscription, socialization, and the emergence of moral ideas, framed in a diachronic timeline.48 In contrast to most of the literature of his time on such topics, Nietzsche reversed the linear progress history of civilization. Rather than with the savage, supposedly non-European practice of tattooing, Nietzsche associated corporeal inscription with earlier practices of bodily marking in vogue in Europe: not the self-inflicted tattoos of the criminal but the branding or tattooing of a body as physical punishment and social stigmatization.49 Indeed, some of the practices of spectacular and exemplary punishment that left their marks on the culprits’ bodies, such as branding, had still been in use until well into the nineteenth century before they gave way to other corporeal disciplines—in a paradigm shift famously described in Foucault’s 1975 Surveiller et Punir (Discipline and Punish).50 Unlike contemporary evolutionary logic, Nietzsche’s genealogical timeline that reveals morality as a construction, not as a natural progress of refinement of culture and civilization, shifts value from the present back to the past. To Nietzsche,

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the past was a happier age than the dreary present hampered by societal limitations and individual inhibitions. At the beginning of the second essay of The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche sketches a scene that relates the infliction of pain on a body directly to the socialization of the human animal. Nietzsche develops a theory of mnemonic technique that entails the inception of social accountability: “Whenever humans have thought it necessary to make themselves a memory, this never happened without blood, tortures, sacrifices [Blut, Martern, Opfer].”51 This is a scene of inscription, in its literal sense of a carving of the body, a bloodletting or blood-writing. It highlights the psychic reactions to a corporeal process, variously evoked through a terminology of imprinting (Eindruck, Einprägen), branding (Einbrennen), or incision (Einritzen). The link between memory and pain, mediated through corporeal marks, was common knowledge at the time, especially in a German context in which the etymological ties between mark and remembrance were still visible, for instance in such words as brandmarken (to brand), merken (to feel and, especially used in its reflexive form, to memorize) or Merkmal (an identifying sign, a sign or trace as memory aid).52 For instance, in his genealogy of writing, Wuttke treats the infliction of pain as mnemonic technique as one of the primitive memory aids of a cultural state without writing.53 If cruel bodily practices are the evidence of a primitive age or stage in cultural development, not yet arrived at the blessings of civilization for many of his contemporaries, for Nietzsche, the spectacles of corporeal pain are tied to visual pleasure. The jouissance elicited in he who witnesses another’s pain is the byproduct of Nietzsche’s corporeal mnemotechnics. In Nietzsche’s account, the “augenfällige Welt” of the past, a world fallen to the gaze, that attracts and is beholden to the pleasure of looking, a world in which the infliction of pain triggers a cruel pleasure not yet fettered by moral ideas, is already a bygone era, forever lost to the less glorious present.54 According to Nietzsche, the present is subject to other scenarios of inscription. The cruel pleasure of inflicting pain or watching pain inflicted gives way to another scenario, one of internalized guilt, triggered by an outside force, the instauration of a despotic regime in the form of Nietzsche’s notorious “pack of blonde predators” (Rudel blonder Raubthiere) that wrests the power over another away from the individual.55 Impelled by this externally imposed “violent artistic power” (Künstler-Gewaltsamkeit), inscription turns inside.56 The instauration of state control renders the infliction of pain on another the privilege of sovereign power; it is no longer an expression of debt and retribution among equals. Barred from the

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sovereign freedom of inflicting pain on others and deriving pleasure from it, the individual turns to and on himself. Object and direct subject of inscriptive agency become one and the same—with state power as its indirect subject. Through the painful inscription of the self, the individual’s interiority, formerly “thin, as if stretched between two skins” (dünn wie zwischen zwei Häute eingespannt), expands: an act of folding toward the inside causes a surface to be replaced by an effect of depth.57 In this new form, inscription has just doubled itself, from the physical to the psychological, from the literal to the figurative. It is both present in the despot’s unconscious “imprinting of forms” (Formen-aufdrücken) and, as its effect, in the subject’s interior self-creation:58 This secret self-violation [heimliche Selbst-Vergewaltigung], this artistic cruelty [Künstler- Grausamkeit], this pleasure to impose a form on oneself as a heavy, recalcitrant, and suffering matter, to brand [einzubrennen] oneself with a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a no, this sinister, yet horribly pleasurable task [unheimliche und entsetzlich-lustvolle Arbeit] of a soul willingly divided against itself that makes itself suffer for the pleasure of making suffer, this entire active “bad conscience”—has it not finally, as one can guess already, as the real womb of ideal and imaginative events, brought to light a wealth of new, strange beauty and affirmation, and maybe beauty itself?59

Here, the subject in the making becomes its own creator, spectacle, and audience. True, the spectacle is now being performed on a smaller stage, the individual’s interior, and smacks less of bloodshed and sacrifice. As such, it seems less grand and less cruel at once. And yet, in the end, Nietzsche does not depict it as less fascinating. Rather, he obliquely stylizes himself into an almost divine spectator, able to savor the subject’s interior spectacle and the despotic state power that impels it—precisely because he chooses to imagine and describe the spectacle in terms similar to the cruel pleasure upon beholding bodies in pain. In his essay, Nietzsche thus sketches two scenarios of inscription in temporal succession. Both scenarios describe the painful process through which an individual is formed, first through physical force, through painful corporeal inscription, then through the internalization and the folding back of the process onto the subject. Even though both scenarios are contrasted— especially in Nietzsche’s appraisal of a loss of the splendor and uninhibited cruelty of another age—they share the imagery of inscription. Indeed, both scenes of inscription underpin each other. The first scene

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provides an imaginary according to which the second scene, the private, internal, and invisible drama of subjection, becomes imaginable. Even though Nietzsche places the cruel and spectacular scenario of bodies in pain in the past, it still constitutes the necessary precondition for making (modern) subjection visible and readable. As the present constructs its own prehistory as a lost past, the nostalgically invested process of inscription thus produced becomes the template for imagining the emergence of modern interiority. Though probably influenced by the prolific production of theories on bodily marks and identity of his contemporaries, Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals distances itself from the prevalent templates of primitivist inquiry. The past provides Nietzsche a contrastive foil for the description of modern man, though not in the service of a teleological success story of Western civilization. The similarity between the past and the present no longer responds to the felicitous anachronicity of primitive man that allows civilized man a privileged glimpse into his own past. Rather, the past is at once relegated to an inaccessible realm tinted with nostalgic colors and serves as the prevalent imaginary for modern subjection. Two important things happen in the shift between Nietzsche’s two scenarios of inscription. The blood writing of an imagined era of physical punishment and pain gives way to a reign in which the scripts of society have been internalized and thus become less spectacularly cruel. At the same time, inscription has moved from a punitive exemplar to a generalized human condition. This almost imperceptible shift from corporeality to interiority, from the material to the figurative, from the exemplary to the general, made Nietzsche’s text an appealing model for constructing modern subjectivity well into the twentieth century and beyond, for instance in Michel Foucault’s genealogical model of discourse analysis. With its explicit reference to Nietzsche, Foucault’s 1971 essay “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire” (“Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”) describes the work of history on a body in inscriptive terms as incessantly repeated incidences of signification that slowly erase and obliterate its corporeal surface: The body is the inscribed surface [surface d’inscription] of events (marked by language and dissolved by ideas), the locus of a dissociated Self (adopting the illusion of a substantial unity), and a volume in perpetual disintegration. Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history that destroys the body.60

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Genealogy, as a reading of the inscribed body, traces not an origin but a descent, not a moment or event in which something comes into being fully formed (Ursprung) but its vicissitudes of construction (Herkunft). As Foucault’s reading of Nietzsche shows, a body’s descent is its incessant subjection to inscription, not conceived of as a spectacular “execution” of the body (as in Kafka’s story) but rather as the exposure of the corporeal surface to an unceasing chain of molecular happenings and habits that leave behind their traces. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault theorizes the production of the modern subject as the generation of interiority, a “soul,” by way of disciplinary mechanisms that render the individual socially docile through bodily interventions. In a manner not unlike Nietzsche’s description of an individual’s turn upon itself and the production of an interior space, Foucault reframes interiority as an effect produced through work on a corporeal surface and prolonged and stabilized through the virtual internalization of rules. As a corporeal effect, the “soul” thus created is both inside and on the surface of the body, a straitjacket converted into the semblance of an individual core. This “soul” wraps itself around the body and regulates its performances: “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body.”61 Before the advent of modern subjection—roughly up until the French Revolution—before the corporeal dressage of education, military, and prison begins to discipline bodies, for Foucault, not unlike for Nietzsche, a more spectacular scenario of physical punishment reigns supreme: the blood-drenched theater of pain intended to serve as deterrent and to symbolically re-establish hierarchies through the visible corps-à-corps of the criminal and sovereign power. In the opening pages of Discipline and Punish, Foucault spares one last glimpse at such older forms of social control by describing the execution of the regicide Damiens. But even this scene of torture and quartering with its reek of Nietzsche’s visualized realm of cruelty already shows the ancient regime of physical punishment in decay: as a scene in which the machinery of execution, having fallen into disuse, no longer runs smoothly.62 Foucault’s genealogical account of the changing patterns of social control echoes Nietzsche’s two scenarios in The Genealogy of Morals. In tune with earlier attempts at describing what he designates as epistemic shifts, changes that reshape the knowledge and view of reality prevalent in a given period, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault brings Nietzsche’s two scenarios into historical sequence.63 For Foucault, the first scene coincides with a European penal system based on spectacular executions and visible

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deterrents; the second echoes a disciplinary and educational system contemporary with the birth of the prison. Cruel corpographies during which a bodily inscription draws blood, cuts flesh, and causes pain inhabit a past that has given way to a bleaker present —bleaker because, by moving inward, modern strategies of control have become nearly inescapable. While inscription remains the prevalent imagery of subjection, its bifurcation into two different modes also entails a much clearer redistribution of ontological value: from the literal to the figurative, from the corporeal to the psychic. As in Nietzsche’s two scenarios, Foucault deploys different characteristics of inscription when describing the two different disciplinary systems. The first inscriptive scene highlights exposure, visibility, and cruelty. It produces meaning as a by-product of pain and its spectacular display, since its cruel corporeal inscriptions are intended for others to read. As deterrents, as marks of power, the traces of inscription signify less for the body that becomes its material surface than for those who witness the body’s marking. In contrast, the second type of inscription produces the subject as a socially intelligible, embodied entity. This type of inscription is no longer tied to a spectacular scene of punishment but rather exists as myriad micro-inscriptions, incessant coercions and pressures on the self to discipline itself. Even though modern subjection is a process, not an event, it has its template in the first inscriptive scenario. As a primal scene that illustrates the less spectacular and less visible modern drama of subjection, the spectacle of a body’s painful inscription is relegated to a superseded past. Inscription thus accrues a double temporality in Foucault’s work, as it remains suspended between the first scenario that illustrates the shaping of a body by power and the second scenario with its multiple iteration of micro-inscriptions. Inscription here has shifted from the literal to the figurative. This does not mean that the continuous disciplining of a body does not have a very physical reality to it but rather that inscription becomes so multiplied as to make its visualization difficult. Consequently, the strong imagery of the first scenario acts as a metaphorical supplement to the second scene— only that while we are supposed to take it literally for the first, it becomes figurative for the second scene. In other words, the myriad disciplining inscriptions of modern subjection can be imagined like so many acts through which laws are carved into the body. Even though both inscriptions are presented as separate, one symbolizes the other, much as the corporeal becomes the crutch for the expression of the psychic, and vice versa. But the shift from literal to figurative inscription does not divest the scene of

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its power. On the contrary, the construction of temporality that accompanies them stabilizes both inscriptive scenarios. This is achieved by the function of the first type of inscription. It expresses, bundles, and visualizes the perpetual, virtually invisible micro-inscriptions that go into the production of a subject. Both Nietzsche and Foucault invoke the past as a contrastive and explanatory foil for the present—though Foucault’s past has much more historical tangibility than Nietzsche’s vision of long-bygone cruel spectacles. What sets both thinkers apart from primitivist anthropologies, though, apart from their turn away from the cultural other toward Europe’s past, is their different validation of the present. Although their genealogical approaches trace a temporal sequence, they lack progressist and teleological baggage. The present no longer represents an important step in a triumphant march from barbarism toward civilization. Instead, even as the past helps us understand the present, it also begins to function as a nostalgia-infused other to a negatively viewed present.

Anthropological Specters What has disappeared in Foucault’s theories of inscription and remains even more elided in recent reflections on inscriptive scenarios is the anthropological framework, as historical sequence supplants cultural (and social) difference. An imaginary that originated in the policing of alterity, of cementing the abyss between civilization and its primitive others (whether external or internal), has rid itself of specificity and become a generalized model of subjection, shedding its non-Western referents and elevating a specifically European (view of) history to universal valence. And yet, inscriptive theories of subjection remain haunted by the specters of anthropology. The erased subtext of cultural difference incessantly reasserts itself. The figure of inscription forgets its intercultural origin in order to become a metaphor for a universal concept, subjection. At the same time, in a supplemental movement, theories begin to rediscover cultural differences in inscription as the basis for a critique of the discontents of Western society. From this vantage point, rather than acknowledging that the imaginary of inscription-as-subjection emerged thanks to a decontextualization of savage marks, critiques of inscription return to culturally specific (i.e., non-European) marked bodies to conceive of an alternative to the strictures of Western societal scripts. On the one hand, a general theory of subjection domesticates the tattooed other, reintroduces the marks of alterity as social inferiority at the heart of civilization. On the other, theory

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recuperates the body of the other and discovers the tattooed savage as a positive, anticivilizational and also antisubjectional value. A paradoxical double movement, then: On the one hand, the oblivion of cultural specificity for the sake of theoretical universality, on the other, the belated rediscovery of cultural difference as a means to critique subjection, all the while elevating the inscriptive model to an even more naturalized validity. At the heart of this double movement lies poststructuralism’s redefinition of writing. Jacques Derrida’s early texts of 1967, De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) and L’écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference), famously framed the history of Western thought as a medial fraud. This imaginary delusion— dubbed phonocentrism by Derrida— consists in elevating speech to the privileged metaphor of signification, imagined as akin to the living breath of presence and inspiration. Instead, according to Derrida, signification really functions like writing, the counterpart to speech so constantly denigrated throughout the history of Western metaphysics.64 Only writing illustrates that signification is based on absence rather than presence, on difference rather than coincidence, on lack rather than plenitude, on interruption rather than communion—writing, after all, visualizes the disjunction between the enunciating subject and the enunciation, between signifier and signified. Writing proper thus becomes a metaphor for a notion of generalized writing or écriture. Such writing writ large encompasses all forms of signification (even and especially speech). Many of its privileged embodiments, however, are figures of inscription tied to images of violent processes of marking: the path or track cleared in the wilderness or the furrows (frayage, Bahnung) that trauma slashes into the psyche.65 In order to formulate the difference between writing proper and writing as a concept of signification as one of degree, not kind, to show that writing proper is merely a limited case within writing writ large, Derrida evinces a keen interest in anthropology.66 Of Grammatology’s critique of phonocentrism entails a scrutiny of Western ethnocentrism, especially via the prevalent link between phonetic script systems and civilizational progress at work in much of Western philosophy.67 As such, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s 1955 travelogue Tristes tropiques (Tristes Tropiques) becomes one of the foci of Derrida’s antiphonocentric analysis. For Lévi-Strauss, writing—as writing proper, though seen as part and parcel of systems of societal control—signifies violence. This view emerges especially forcefully in the famous chapter “La leçon d’écriture” (“Writing Lesson”) in which LéviStrauss recounts the anecdote of a Nambikwara chief in the Brazilian wilderness who imitates the anthropologist’s acts of writing in order to exert

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power over his tribe. Where writing is present, according to Lévi-Strauss, human beings can be administrated, controlled, and exploited. Rather than a necessary basis for cultural bloom, writing is a tool of oppression. If writing implies the violence of social control, however, pace Derrida’s analysis, those who do not (yet) write have to be cast in the idealized light of cultures untouched by violence. Paradoxically, even though Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of different indigenous tribes of Brazil thus disclaims the progress narrative of cultures so prevalent in the nineteenth century, it still draws a clear line between “them” and “us.” Even though the absence of writing warrants a positive assessment, far from common denigrating equations of writing and culture, peoples such as the Nambikwara are still cultures without writing. As Derrida highlights, for Lévi-Strauss’s argument to work, writing and its absence have to be absolutes. Writing proper allows for no gray zones. Either one writes (having thus succumbed to societal control) or one does not. There is no middle ground. From Derrida’s vantage point, of course, the Nambikwara, though a culture without a script, do write. After all, they have language as well as other systems of inscription, for instance the decoration of calabashes with zigzagging lines. Even though they do lack writing proper, they, as all human beings, live with and within systems of representation and communication that obey the laws of écriture. A matter of definition, then, of the scope and delimitation of writing? After all, for clarity’s sake, not even Derrida completely elides the boundary between écriture and writing proper. Admittedly, Lévi-Strauss’s attempt at wedding the absence of writing and the absence of violence seems worthy of critique, especially paired with his descriptions of the violent encounters and intersubjective paranoia of Nambikwara culture. Nevertheless, in spite of Lévi-Strauss’s delimitation of writing proper in the case of the Nambikwara, his text as a whole sets up writing and its other in much more intricate and complicated ways. Even before the famous “Writing Lesson,” Lévi-Strauss’s text obsessively returns to systems that are almost writing but not quite, most notably the almost exclusive focus on tattooing and ornamentation in the part of Tristes Tropiques dedicated to the culture of the indigenous Caduveo. During his visit, the anthropologist encounters a sophisticated system of patterning on bodies and objects. Not unlike his nineteenth-century predecessors, Lévi-Strauss likens Caduveo tattoos and paintings to Western sign systems such as the markings on a deck of cards or to heraldry.68 Of course, the intricate designs traced on different surfaces are not really writing. And yet, Lévi-Strauss treats them almost as if they were writing

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proper.69 First, the anthropologist manipulates the inscriptive material of Caduveo patterns. Instead of copying the intricate ornaments he sees on bodies and objects onto paper, he soon has recourse to collecting designs by asking indigenous artists to draw directly onto paper. The Caduveo women who comply take marvelously to the new medium —a reason for Lévi-Strauss to symbolically flatten the women’s designs by claiming “the lack of dependence of their art on the natural contours of the face” rather than admiring the medial flexibility of the artists.70 Lévi-Strauss in turn reproduces many of these newly transmedial tattoo designs as illustrations in Tristes Tropiques—the one chapter on Caduveo ornaments, “Une société indigène et son style” (“A Native Community and Its Life-Style”), is more copiously illustrated than any other part of Lévi-Strauss’s text. Lévi-Strauss constantly spreads the emblematic media of Western writing—pen and paper—among the natives: to obtain Caduveo designs from the original artists, to have Bororo informants explain the structure of their village to him, to see what Nambikwara tribe members can produce. More important, however, Lévi-Strauss also treats some of these “writings” as anthropological “texts” that explain—much like his own texts— sociological strata and cultural structures. For instance, Lévi-Strauss adjudicates Caduveo designs and tattoos a signification close to the work of the anthropologist himself. The corporeal ornaments mark their bearers as part of culture: “To be human it was necessary to be painted; to remain in the natural state was to be no different from the beasts.”71 Tattooing and body paint as a mark of culture, not as stigma of barbarism; inscription as passage from nature to culture. Yet Lévi-Strauss does not merely analyze the Caduveo art of design. Rather than studying it on its own terms, LéviStrauss elevates this art to a sign system about the style and the structure of its society.72 He reads the two main traits of patterns used—flowing, asymmetrical lines and geometrical figures—as a representation of the Caduveo social system or, actually, an idealized version in which the real problems of Caduveo society’s segregation and strict hierarchy become sublimated in a harmony of mutual dependency. Caduveo art, for LéviStrauss, is “the phantasm of a society ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand in the way”; its traces are “hieroglyphs describing an inaccessible golden age, which they extol in their ornamentation, since they have no code in which to express it.”73 For Lévi-Strauss, the Caduveo lack a code or symbolic system and thus resort to design as ideal representation of social structures. And yet, designated as hieroglyphs—a script often used as a metaphor to symbolize something more

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but also less than writing—these designs really are treated as a sign system in their own right. And they definitely function like one. Caduveo patterns are not only close to the cultural “language” the anthropologist reads but also close to what the anthropologist himself might write—in function, if not in form.74 Rather than setting writing strictly apart from other practices, LéviStrauss both requires an absolute abyss between writing proper and ornamentation and constantly treats painting, drawing, or tattooing (almost) like anthropological texts. For the graphophobic anthropologist, the internalized guilt of deploying the violent tool of writing —by producing written accounts of other cultures and introducing writing to cultures “innocent” of writing—might thus be mitigated by dreaming of other sign systems for anthropological work, while treating these (such as the Caduveo designs) like writing but denying them the status of code. By a similar token, Derrida’s own concept of écriture needs the delimitation between writing (proper) and its other so that writing’s other can be treated as writing but, more important, so that writing (proper) can acquire, by contagion, traits of that which is often excluded from writing: the violent incision of a mark, the forceful cleft of a track cleared in the wilderness. Consequently, the conceptual struggle in place does not really rage around the definition of writing. Neither Derrida nor Lévi-Strauss are primarily interested in policing the boundaries of writing. Rather, it is the flexible play of inclusion in and exclusion from the category of writing that allows for a manipulation and conceptual use of difference. Writing’s nebulous margins—writing’s other but not quite, such as drawing, ornamentation, tattooing—become the operating ground for poststructuralist theories. Two paths open up for theory’s manipulation of writing: either all is writing or some things are excluded from writing, even though they are symbolically aligned with it. Both theories, those that set writing apart from other methods of inscription and those that conflate inscription and writing proper, are the inheritors of early anthropology. If histories of writing or reflections on tattooing in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Wuttke’s or Joest’s treatises, were interested in constructing a realm outside of writing but close to it, as a prehistory of the present, poststructuralist theory invests in a similar liminality: for some not in order to limit but to extend the scope of writing; for others in order to set inscriptive practices apart from writing and thus remove them from Western systems of signification and their pitfalls. In both cases, though, a limited notion of writing proper is pitted against a fantasy of an ideal writing — ideal since it would not really be writing. And cultural alterity

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often provides the examples for writing’s desired other. Ultimately, this functions not as the relegation of nonwriting to the other of civilization but rather establishes the other of writing within writing. The anthropological specters of poststructuralism result in a frame of inscription that allows for the re-entry of the other at the heart of the same: at once writing and the other of writing. While Derrida’s critique of Tristes Tropiques in Of Grammatology relies on the radical opening up of the category of writing to other systems, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari reassert the difference between writing proper and other inscriptive systems in L’Anti-œdipe (Anti-Oedipus) of 1972–73. For Deleuze and Guattari, inscription is characteristic of the very first phase of social organization centered on the earth and cemented by territorial markers and networks of kinship and association.75 Inscription, not yet writing proper, as the coding of production and desire in a primitive, earthcentered phase, consists of an interaction between different systems: voice and aurality, hand and graphism, eye and pain. The examples for this kind of coding are drawn from anthropology, for instance the Gourmantché rite of female circumcision in which the cutting edge of a calabash, provided by the husband’s group, is used to mark the woman’s body, while the marking itself is done by the wife’s family.76 Like Nietzsche, Deleuze and Guattari also ascribe a mnemonic function to the marks in life flesh, though not in the context of the emergence of morality but rather as the necessary prerequisite for the formation of language:77 The sign is a position of desire; but the first signs are the territorial signs that plant their flags in bodies. And if one wants to call this inscription in naked flesh “writing” [“écriture”] then it must be said that speech in fact presupposes writing, and that it is this cruel system of inscribed signs that renders man capable of language, and gives him a memory of the spoken word.78

This passage resonates critically with Derrida’s definition of écriture. It also sets writing proper and the inscriptive techniques of primitive societies further apart by underlining a genealogy of human communication in which inscription—as a mnemonic technique à la Nietzsche—allows the emergence of speech. For Deleuze and Guattari, inscription is not primarily an act of signification but the way, or style, in which social (re-)production interacts with, uses, tames, and codes desire. The “graphy” of this social system is the opposite of linear writing that emerges only in a second phase of social

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organization. In its first phase, inscription—as dance, mural painting, or bodily marks—is not yet quite writing: “It is not a sign of a sign nor a desire of a desire. It knows nothing of linear subordination and its reciprocity: neither pictogram nor ideogram, it is rhythm and not form, zigzag and not line, artifact and not idea, production and not expression.”79 The mark of inscription predates and, indeed, allows social and economic interactions: “The essential thing is to mark and to be marked. There is circulation only if inscription requires or permits it.”80 Inscription is production, not signification: “It is not content to inscribe all things, it must act as if it produced them.”81 In other words, inscription does not register economic patterns; rather, as a form of production, it actively partakes in and forms the basis of a society and its economic system. The treatment of inscription in Anti-Oedipus is symbolically based on cultural difference—after all, the chapter in which Deleuze and Guattari reread Nietzsche in ethnographic terms is titled “Sauvages, barbares, hommes civilisés” (“Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men”). If Foucault rewrites Nietzsche’s two scenarios as an epistemic history of the Western world, Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogy of economy and desire finds the examples for the prehistory of Western capitalism elsewhere, in an unspecified past. To evoke such a past the authors of Anti-Oedipus draw on anthropological descriptions of the cultural other: Our savage past with its economy of inscription can only be made present through an analogy with contemporary savages. Hence, inscription— envisioned as cruel marks on corporeal surfaces, as ornamental traces and patterns in the context of rituals rendered in ethnographic thick description— embodies a genealogy of our own modernity through cultural difference and the seemingly anachronistic mediality of physical traces. What is key here is, once again, the comparison between savage bodily marks and writing. Whereas theorists of inscription at the end of the nineteenth century—such as Wuttke, Lombroso, or Lacassagne— compared tattooing to writing so as to imagine socially readable bodies, Deleuze and Guattari insist on the difference between primitive corporeal marking and writing. Their description of inscription as resistant to linearity, form, and signification puts it in the place not so much of a stage prior to, and thus in preparation of, writing but rather frames it as a kind of antiwriting: productive rather than descriptive, active rather than passive, corporeal rather than scriptural. Such returns to an anthropologically stabilized difference between “our” writing and “their” inscription harbor the possibilities of exoticism, of reading inscription (yet again) as the hallmark of primitive cultures, as

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in Alphonso Lingis’s 1983 book Excesses. Inspired by Nietzsche, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari, the chapter “Savages” from Lingis’s book pits two types of inscriptions against each other. If both Nietzsche and Foucault seem to posit the spectacular, cruel, yet pleasurable other of inscriptive subjectivation in a (however precariously defined) past, Lingis translates this difference onto the old binary of civilization and savagery by nourishing savage inscriptions with the violence and cruelty of an exotic other: Of all that is savage about savages, the most savage is what they do to themselves. They paint, puncture, tattoo, scarify, cicatrize, circumcise, subincise themselves. They use their own flesh as so much material at hand for—what? We hardly know how to characterize it—Art? Inscription? Sign-language? Or isn’t all that more like hex signs? Aren’t they treating themselves like the pieces of dikdik fur, bat’s penis, warthog’s tooth, hornbill bird’s skull they attach to themselves? All that excites some dark dregs of lechery and cruelty in us, holding our eyes fi xed with repugnance and lust.82

While Lingis’s reflection on our civilized eye-pleasure vis-à-vis savage bodily inscriptions reads, at first, like a mockery of the Western gaze, this is quickly transmuted into theoretical exoticism. The native’s scar-covered body no longer elicits a reaction of “repugnance and lust” but is made useful for Western theory. Its “use,” however, lies exactly in the discovery of its uselessness, at least in the context of a signifying system. Lingis burdens the other’s body, like that of the African Maasai, with the responsibility of signifying an alternative to the paradigm of inscriptive subjection. Lingis’s essay relies on a strong binary between two types of corporeal inscription: that of the modern disciplined body comes to stand for the prison of signification, whereas the savage inscription of bodies outside of civilized society cathects jouissance and nonsignification; one is invested with extreme corporeality, the other reduced to an expression of civilization’s discontents. Lingis’s images of savage body modification counter modern Western patterns of inscription and subjection. The inscriptive model that he sees at work in civilized societies invokes a Foucauldian scenario in which the disciplined body internalizes the scripts imposed by power. In contrast, tattooing and scarification on the surface of a savage body are directly related to erotic pleasure. In Excesses, the pleasure of inscription is no longer only centered on the jouissance of the spectator who witnesses the infliction of pain but instead on the pleasure that the body feels under and after inscription. Even though Lingis’s savage inscription also marks social status or group identity, unlike civilized inscription

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it does not primarily signify; rather, it redistributes pleasure all over the body by creating multiple smaller holes, furrows, and protruding skin parts, like so many erotic organs in miniature. From Lingis’s perspective, examples of savage practices of body modification become a positive other to the social straitjacket of subjection. And yet, the infibulated, encrusted, or patterned body of the savage is precisely the imaginary token in analogy to which theory constructed the modern subjectified body. The construction of subjection depends on inscriptive metaphors for its conceptual currency. In other words, theories of the socialized body, a body disciplined and formed by power, a body gifted (or cursed) with interiority and subjecthood, such as in Nietzsche’s or Foucault’s reflections, make use of an imagery of cruel inscription. This constitutes by no means a historical account, a genealogy of different methods in which the body is brought to heel by power and in which power manifests on and as bodies. Rather, the thinkers under analysis here use figures of inscription to construct and produce an account of subjection. Practices such as corporeal punishment, tattooing, scarification, or circumcision — projected more or less explicitly onto the cultural other —become the symbolic building blocks of an imagined prehistory of the present. The cruelly marked body of an imaginary past is the necessary backdrop for the formation of the modern subject. But in a second movement, the very scenario that helped imagine subjection as a type of inscription becomes the nostalgically charged antidote to modern forms of body control. If the metaphor of inscription, the figure of the body written and reduced by power, has come to designate subjection, Lingis’s regress to savage forms of bodily marks no longer acts as an illustration. Rather, as writing’s other, such primitive dermal ornaments enable Lingis to script a way out of subjection, albeit only as a nostalgia projected onto other (and othered) bodies. This has profound implications. As a paradoxical move, it is also a logical consequence of the way in which Western theory employs inscription. Inscription with its archaic imaginary is a modern invention, dated back to an ever elusive moment in the past, preferably embodied by non-Western bodies and ciphered as outdated media: surface instead of depth, ornamentation instead of signification, pictographic instead of alphabetic scripts, flesh instead of paper, blood instead of ink. The savage’s corporeal decoration is both the violent archi-writing to a more civilized, less spectacular inscriptive socialization and, with its emphasis on patterns or, at best, picturesque representations, the cultural other to subjection’s lettered discursivity of the law. The metaphor of inscription obeys a paradoxical logic: On

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the one hand, literal inscription, as real marks on a body, becomes an illustration, a symbolic embodiment of a more figurative regime of inscription— the scripting and disciplining of the body, the production of the subject as subjection. On the other, corporeal inscription is also set up in contrast to the production of the socialized subject. Inscription has effectively been doubled, or rather, internally divided: between the civilized and the savage, cultural inferiority and nostalgia, the modern and the archaic, the cultural same and other, the literal and the figurative. Consequently, the two sides of the coin of inscription can be manipulated at will, depending on if the similarity between the two is downplayed or highlighted. By the same token, markers of difference have shifted from absolute binaries, such as marked and unmarked, subject and body, signification and materiality, to relative differences within the imaginary of inscription itself. Difference can now be translated—since allocated within the category of inscription itself—into a difference between inscriptive processes, media, and styles. For poststructuralist theory, bodily marks are both the same as subjection via discursive determination and its other; inscription is writing as écriture, but some writing is more writing than other writing. To read poststructuralist theories and their anthropological forebears through the lens of inscription leads us to the heart of difference. In order to function, poststructuralist theory constantly has to elide and highlight its anthropological specters. It does not really thrive on a new regime of molecular differences opposed to a logocentric regime of difference versus sameness. Rather, it needs both categories of difference. Only if inscription is both writing and not, if the cultural other is both absolute other and almost the same, can the particular become a template for the universal and for an alternative to universalized theoretical structures. Inscription harbors the secret to poststructuralist theory’s paradoxical figurality: the use, reuse, and abuse of the specific for the reification of conceptual universals, even as singularity is constantly invoked and celebrated.

Inscriptive Short Circuits Read through a lens of inscriptive critique, Kafka’s short story “In the Penal Colony” invokes the imaginary of inscription in all its complex facets and actively highlights inscription’s contradictory economies. It offers a metaperspective by combining, indeed conflating, both binary pairs at the basis of inscription’s logic: past and present, archaic and high-tech, ornamental and lettered, savage and civilized. Kafka’s text spells out the contradictions

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inherent in the paradigm rather than leaving them for the discerning (and critical) reader to discover. Inscription in “In the Penal Colony” is connected to a cruelty that we have learned to date as premodern, archaic, and savage, at least according to the West’s self-definition of its own modernity. And yet, the apparatus that marks bodies with its multiple components and its complicated functions is at the height of modern technology. Kafka’s story situates the realm of cruelty far away from the center of Western civilization, in a penal colony on an unspecified tropical island. And yet, the cruel practice described does not originate with a barbaric other but characterizes a colonial system that acts out its worst impulses and passions elsewhere. Tattooing no longer signifies the West’s hallucination of exotic marks of difference. Instead, cruel inscription is an export of Western modernity. Kafka draws attention to the paradoxical character of inscription, as a modern and colonial technique, on the one hand, and as a supposedly savage and archaic process, on the other. The text or script of Kafka’s punitive apparatus further highlights the conceptual stretto of inscription’s two sides. What does the law “write” in Kafka’s story? At a closer look, the inscription of the law onto the culprits’ bodies signifies in a complex way; and yet, signifying is not all it does. The reader, like the traveler, must rely on the officer for access to the two sets of letters, the tattooing templates of the two sentences explicitly mentioned in the story: “HONOR THY SUPERIORS!” (Ehre deinen Vorgesetzen!) and “BE JUST!” (Sei gerecht!).83 These are not easily decipherable, but form part of a “ ‘secret code’ of sorts, a cryptogram known neither to the condemned culprit nor to the spectators.”84 The traveler only sees “a labyrinth of lines crossing and re-crossing each other [labyrinthartige, einander vielfach kreuzende Linien], which covered the paper so thickly that it was difficult to discern the blank spaces between them [die weißen Zwischenräume].”85 As the officer explains, in order to kill slowly, the script of the sentences to be inscribed on the body of the condemned cannot be “simple.” Rather, it forms supposedly superfluous arabesques—“flourishes” (Zieraten) and “embellishments” (Verzierungen)—that prove central to its function: a prolonged process of scripting until death ensues.86 Although it is unclear if Kafka knew Wuttke’s Geschichte der Schrift—apart from the fact that Wuttke, unlike other works on tattooing mentions the possibly deadly outcome of sustained tattooing sessions — the description of the tattooed sentence in “In the Penal Colony” closely echoes Wuttke’s description of tattooing: “We behold queer figures and doodles [wunderliche Figuren und Schnörkel], multiply intercrossing and entangled traces [auf mannichfache Weise sich durch-

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kreuzende und verschlingende Züge], circles and semicircles, zigzag stripes and spiral-shaped curves, angular shapes and cube-like fields.”87 As intricate as the tattoos Wuttke describes, Kafka’s painful corporeal “ornamentations” are at once in excess of and innate to the law’s inscription. Supplemental to the signifying script of the law, they are also that which, by slowing down the destruction of the body, makes signification—in terms of the culprit’s corporeal understanding, as well as the spectators’ perception—possible. At the same time, however, their arabesques also obstruct the reading of the legal script for those who witness its execution on another’s body. The indecipherability of the script that is to be tattooed onto the body questions its purported educational goal. Even though the machine’s harrow is made of glass, seemingly designed to permit the spectator to witness the inscription, it only grants unobstructed visibility to a spectacle of pain and blood, since the text of the law remains unreadable.88 The ornamentally enhanced secret code of Kafka’s execution machine presents itself as a hybrid script, neither writing nor its opposite, neither only alphabetic script nor merely aesthetically pleasing doodles. This conflation of alphabetic letters and ornament underscores the strange superimposition of the modern and the archaic, the civilized and the savage in Kafka’s text. If it were not for the machine-mediated form of inscription, or its supposedly lettered, though unreadable, text, the process described would correlate with the obsession at the cusp of the twentieth century with primitive practices of tattooing. The hallmark of such a writing system is not only its material, the life flesh of a human body instead of paper or vellum, but also its script that is not one, since in the form of ornaments, arabesques, or picture writing but never quite letters it fails to reach the status of writing. In Kafka’s text, however, the alphabetic script (though othered in the shape of arabesques), tied to a sophisticated machine and an implacable corporeal dressage, embodies the extremes of civilized barbarism and cruelty. “In the Penal Colony” effectively reverses the primitivist logic of inscription by attributing apparent tokens of savagery, such as ornamentation, tattooing, and cruelty, to Western culture. What is more, in contrast to Lingis’s celebration of savage bodily regimes that keeps the dichotomy of culture and barbarism intact, while shifting conceptual emphasis and value from the former to the latter, Kafka’s story effectively dismantles the underlying binary altogether: Both sides are part and parcel of a Western generation of difference. A case in point is the temporal logic of the punitive regime described in “In the Penal Colony.” Part of an outdated system, the whole mechanism

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of execution in the text has lost its former prestige, its power of attracting a rapt public, and is actually on the verge of material and symbolic destruction. The officer’s description of the former splendor of punitive inscription echoes Nietzsche’s evocation of the spectacular cruel sceneries of the past. It evokes the spectacle of the culprit’s pain and the spectators’ pleasure in aesthetic terms, as “marvelous” (herrlich).89 But the screeching of the apparatus, an inescapable sign of its decayed state, situates this splendor irrevocably in the past. The machine and its punitive logic merely constitute vestiges of a superannuated regime, as the legacy of the colony’s former commander that is only honored by the officer who seeks an advocate for its renewal in the story’s traveler. What is more important, however, is the incessant intrusion of a metalevel in Kafka’s story. The seamless functioning of the inscriptive mechanism is never really present in Kafka’s text. It exists only in the officer’s memory and imagination, as well as in his description for the traveler’s sake. Apart from the officer’s second-order narration, neither the traveler nor we readers ever actually “witness” inscription-cum-execution. Even in the officer’s description, not so much the process as its effects and, above all, its reception stand at the center. Toward the end of the story, as soon as the machine is finally put into action, the traveler’s — as well as our readerly — expectations are thwarted again. As the officer, faced with the abolition of his cherished mechanism, decides to undergo inscription himself, the machine first seems to move of its own accord, apparently in tune with the officer’s will, and then begins to fall apart. Instead of inscribing a body, it pierces and hacks, killing at once, without producing the inner understanding of the law that had been presented as the sublime moment of the process earlier but that had only been accessible to the reader through the memory filter of the machine-worshipping officer. The final breakdown, or rampage, of Kafka’s inscription machine takes the form of a short circuit. The system cannot inscribe itself. At the heart of the machine and its functional logic lies a profound paradox: To remain operative and perpetuate itself, Kafka’s machine would need to reproduce its own outside, corporeal surfaces as food for inscription. But the bodies that are “executed” only become subjects of the law in a moment of enlightenment, before the “material” that is imprinted is destroyed. The machine needs two different components (or subjects) for its functioning: one that is subjected to the machine, but not subject to inscription (the officer/ executioner), and one that undergoes inscription (the culprit). The punitive system, consisting of machine and officer in mutual dependence, ceases to

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function when one of its own components (the officer) reneges its executive role and becomes subject to inscription. In The Practice of Everyday Life de Certeau describes Kafka’s text, together with texts and artwork by Alfred Jarry, Raymond Roussel, and Marcel Duchamp, as a phase of “celibate” (célibataire) inscription, one in which the difference between inscription and its outside has ceased to exist, rendering inscription effectively inoperative.90 But Kafka’s text is not merely one more step in a genealogy of inscriptive regimes. Rather, “In the Penal Colony” willfully conflates and implodes the logic of inscription itself. “In the Penal Colony” is so compelling as a literary and theoretical text because it brings out the contradictions of inscription in a particularly glaring manner. Rather than merely embodying the symptom of a belated phase of a scriptive regime or its swan song, Kafka’s story actually incarnates one of the textual moments in which inscription is being born as a modern imaginary. Kafka’s is not a reaction to an inscriptive tradition but a critical reflection on the emergence of a new paradigm that constructs its own others in the form of cultural and temporal alterity. Kafka’s short story becomes a self-reflexive take on a theoretical machine of modern thought, one that scripts the production of the modern subject through archaic imaginaries of cruel bodily dressage. In the very moment in which inscription asserts itself as a master trope of conceptual thought, an imaginary for the management of difference, Kafka’s text tells a cautionary tale, it puts up a literary signpost, appraising its reader of the paradoxical economy hidden behind the sensationalist façade of blood and marks. In spite of Kafka’s literary short circuit of the tattooing machine in “In the Penal Colony,” however, the system of inscription remains operative, in spite of, or, indeed, precisely because of its paradoxical logic.

chapter 2

Impact Erasure Psychoanalysis and the Multiplication of Trauma

Inscription without Inscription What is most traumatic about trauma is its resistance to signification: It is an “event whose force is marked by its lack of registration.”1 Trauma, so many theorists agree, consists in an impulse triggered by a shock so strong that it overwhelms the system of the psyche by breaking its protective barriers. Instead of being recorded as stimulus, this impact overrides the psyche and its ability to register sense impressions. Unaccounted for by normal psychic parameters, the shock of trauma continues to haunt the psyche, without marking it. Lying dormant, sometimes for long stretches of time, it suddenly ceases to remain latent and repeats its painful impact.2 The shock of trauma hinges upon absence: no trace of its psychic shockwave but for a void; no intelligible imprint of its passing, and thus its eternal repetition. Consequently, theories of trauma set themselves an impossible task from the outset: to describe a phenomenon that derives its very definition from a resistance to description. Much as the key to trauma’s traumatic core is its strained relationship with cognition, trauma theories themselves grapple with an epistemological quandary. 59

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From the first descriptions of trauma in the nineteenth century onward, the newly discovered phenomenon presented contradictory traits. To medical practitioners and proponents of the fledgling discipline of psychoanalysis, similar symptoms seemed to affect both the male victim of railway accidents or shell shock and the female hysteric. Trauma—known by such differing names as “railway spine” and “traumatic neurosis”— connected disparate groups of patients with widely diverse circumstances. By the same token, trauma’s trigger was ascribed to very different kinds of events: either the shock of accident or a premature, possibly violent sexual experience, or even the fantasy of such a sexual encounter. Sigmund Freud, one of the most influential early theorists of trauma, oscillated between different accounts of trauma and different illustrative examples and cases throughout his work. From descriptions of the traumatic neuroses of female subjects in the 1895 Studien über Hysterie (Studies on Hysteria, co-authored with Josef Breuer) to the war neuroses of combatants in Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) of 1920, Freud never quite settled on any definitive theory of that most elusive of subjects, trauma.3 As Freud postulated in Studies on Hysteria, the kernel of traumatic neurosis in the hysteric could be either factual or imaginary, of the nature of experience or fantasy, even though the psychic consequences did not differ significantly from those suffered by the victims of accidents or warfare.4 Apparently more tangible, such causes of trauma as railway accidents and shell shock led to other types of material quandaries. Even though such traumatic neuroses had been observed in contiguity to bodily hurt, no clear link between organic damage and psychic symptoms could be established. The physicians who diagnosed some of the early cases of trauma after train accidents struggled with the fact that some patients who presented symptoms had sustained no visible injuries, which located them in the medical no-man’s-land between victims who had suffered corporeal injuries and impostors who faked symptoms with a view to insurance fraud. Some physicians, such as John Eric Erichsen, who described trauma in On Railway Spine and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (1867), still sought a physical causality in trauma, adducing trauma to imperceptible disturbances of the nervous system by mechanical shock that would have major repercussions for the whole organism.5 Others disconnected physical and mental trauma completely, claiming that the psychic disturbances related to traumatic neuroses even appeared there where no mechanical cause was in evidence, hence disclaiming the hypothesis that these symptoms had an interior organic cause, such as damage of the nervous system suffered through strong mechanical impact. In the discussion of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud even highlighted

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that the presence of physical wounds seemed to preclude the development of traumatic symptoms in combatants.6 Instead of a cause of trauma, physical injury could be seen as excluding or even preventing the development of trauma. Etymologically, trauma (from Greek τραῦμα for “wound”) refers to damage suffered by a body, especially as a wound that breaches (τιτρώσκω, “to pierce”) the corporeal boundaries with grave consequences for the organism as a whole.7 Until the nineteenth century the term trauma designated a surgical wound, then the term started to define psychic as well as physical damage—resonating at first with the possibility that psychic trauma had physical causes, however minute and thus imperceptible to the diagnostic eye, then becoming of the order of an analogy.8 In spite of the gradual transition from the physical to the psychic in theories of trauma, trauma never fully lost its physicality, even where its description implied a purely mental impact. In fact, theorists such as Catherine Malabou have marked a return to corporeal scenarios by ascribing trauma to neurological ruptures or restructurings.9 And yet, for theorists like Freud or those who made his theories productive for poststructuralist thought, trauma itself was related to corporeality only in indirect ways. For instance, trauma, even understood as a purely mental phenomenon, was frequently placed in contiguity to extreme physical hurt and remained conceptually tied to situations of extreme pain and suffering, such as torture. More important, however, physical hurt continued to act as a figurative sine qua non for many theories and representations of trauma. Apparently, only corporeal images endowed trauma with an intelligible “body”; only bodily pain— however resistant to representation itself—rendered (and continues to render) trauma’s psychic pain intelligible.10 Trauma acquired a name only by catachresis, borrowing a term from another object or phenomenon for something that has no proper name, almost as if, devoid of a signifier of its own, it needed to patch a hole in signification with another signified’s hand-me-downs. Catachresis, J. Hillis Miller explains, is a trope that ruptures the distinction between figure and ground.11 In other words, since signification works only by way of figuration in the case of catachresis, the supposed supplement of the rhetorical figure becomes the core of processes of meaning-making. A figure of abuse—as in the Latin term for catachresis, abusio— catachresis is a “monstrous mutation,” one that challenges the very bases of representation in language.12 Trauma consists in a tropological, indeed teratological, crossing between body and psyche—a problematic translation between two zones precariously divided by an uncertain line. After all, the question of embodiment remained

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one of the main quandaries of psychoanalysis, echoed in Freud’s transition from a medico-anatomical understanding of the brain to an abstract topology of the psyche, to his enigmatic observation of the unconscious areality of the psyche: “Psyche is extended [ausgedehnt], does not know about it [weiß nichts davon].”13 Since trauma is catachrestic at heart, trauma never fully crosses the figurative threshold from bodily pain to psychic suffering. It inhabits the gray zone between the literal and the figurative instead. Never purely a psychic analogy to corporeal hurt, trauma participates in the physical without simply being the equivalent of bodily pain. As Jean Laplanche notes, “It is not easy to retrace the ‘transposition’ of this medicosurgical notion into psychology and psychiatry. Indeed, for so long has the notion of a shock with a physical ‘break in’ and that of danger to life been the model for an allegedly psychical symptom that to this day psychical trauma is still bound to the concept of surgical shock.”14 However, the frequent contiguity between physical pain and mental shock bars trauma theory’s catachrestic terminology from ever taking flight into pure analogy. In fact, theorizations of psychic trauma often have to function by way of a violent imaginary of destruction, incessantly painting concrete material images of barriers ruptured and defenses breached. In other words, while theory’s catachrestic transfer from physical trauma to psychic trauma might have been motivated by a perceived similarity at one point, the way in which trauma (of the psyche) continued to be theorized remained beholden to and circumscribed by the term and its concomitant imaginary, one in which trauma was “conceived on the model of a rupture of the skin or protective envelope of the body resulting in a catastrophic global reaction in the entire organism.”15 Even Freud’s model of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that suggests an economy of psychic stress cannot do without trauma’s tropological wound. Even though Freud’s model stipulates a law of energetic equilibrium according to which the psyche attempts to re-establish homeostasis and to defuse any unpleasant surplus of excitation, Freud has to frame trauma as a violent act by replacing the notion of an energy imbalance at the heart of trauma with the evocation of a psychic topology vulnerable to the rupturing force of excess stimuli.16 Freud visualizes the psyche’s excessive stimulation as the consequence of a wound, a breach in the outer defenses of the psychic system. He pictures the psyche not as a precariously balanced constellation of different energetic states but in the guise of a primitive organism, little more than a bubble of organic matter, separated from its environment by a membrane, tenuous bulwark against intrusion. In this strange spherical shape, the psyche remains eternally suspended between materiality and abstrac-

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tion, because the ontological status of this model remains in suspension as well: Are we to read this as a mere metaphor, or are we to imagine it as a psychic topology, spatially and materially embodied, rather than as mere figure? In fact, this very question simplifies the complex use of inscription to a dichotomy. Instead, to deploy inscriptive figures to theorize trauma implies that the very limits between the figurative and the literal, as well as the psychic and the corporeal, are being redefined. The figure of inscription manages their difference while also keeping it open to manipulation. What is important here is not the act of drawing a dividing line between these apparent opposites but rather analyzing what happens at their points of intersection. What is accomplished when theoretical thought can flexibly suggest the equation of the psychic and the corporeal, at one point, while insisting on their difference at another? When corporeal scenarios signify, at times, as mere analogies for psychic processes while becoming inextricably intertwined with them at others? This openness to oscillation, to changing interfaces between apparent binaries, allows theorists to conceptualize trauma while also enshrining it as that which eludes cognition. In order to do this theoretical work, much like (and in fact inspired by) Freud’s psychic metaphors, trauma has to oscillate incessantly between the literal and the figurative. Wound without a wound, inscription without inscription, trauma is the absence of a mark that can only be embodied by its other, its proxy: as a violent piercing that leaves a hole, as a void that cannot but be constantly remarked. Trauma—an inscription that is all impact but leaves no visible trace. But how can there be inscription without a mark? How are we to imagine a tracing without the trace? The strange temporality ascribed to trauma partly accounts for its inscriptive logic and vice versa. While the definition of trauma remains elusive, many trauma theorists agree on a structural feature that defines the temporality, as well as the epistemology, of trauma: The traumatic shock cannot be assimilated, or only incompletely or belatedly so. The extreme suddenness of the trauma-inducing experience leads to a temporal mismatch, the paradox of a “record that has yet to be made.”17 As Sigmund Freud explains in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trauma attacks the unprepared psyche and takes it by surprise (Überraschung) in an overwhelming experience of frightful shock (Schreck).18 This excessive immediacy preconditions trauma’s lingering presence—as future repetition. Although the traumatic event has already struck home, it is also always about to arrive. Once trauma returns in the guise of a compulsion to repeat, it becomes visible, but only as the mysterious symptom of an unknown cause.19

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Trauma warps notions of temporality, turning the sequence of before and after into the complex folds of belatedness, or Nachträglichkeit, future anterior, and proleptic past. This effectively doubles the violent impact of trauma, as Jean-François Lyotard discusses in Heidegger et “les juifs” (Heidegger and “the jews”): Nachträglichkeit thus implies the following: (1) a double blow that is constitutively asymmetrical, and (2) a temporality that has nothing to do with what the phenomenology of consciousness . . . can thematize. (1) The double blow includes a first blow, the first excitation, which upsets the apparatus with such “force” that it is not registered. . . . The first blow, then, strikes the apparatus without observable internal effect, without affecting it. It is a shock without affect. (2) With the second blow there takes place an affect without shock. . . . This “before” of the quod is also an “after” of the quid. For whatever is now happening . . . does not come forth [provient]; it comes back [revient] from the first blow, from the shock, from the “initial” excess that remained outside the scene, even unconscious, deposited outside representation.20

The paradoxical temporality of trauma springs from the splitting of inscription into impact and affect. The impossible suspension of the immediate sequence, the delayed sequencing of a near coincidence of two moments allows for the absence of a trace. And yet, this also effectively doubles the impact of trauma. In the scenario of two traumatic blows that are imagined in similar terms, both can only be kept apart by careful sequential labeling into first and second—a move counter precisely to the insistence on trauma’s paradoxical temporality. For trauma theory, the two blows of trauma are decidedly asymmetrical: Only trauma’s first impact constitutes a real shock, if not the experience of shock (its “affect”), whereas trauma’s second blow is conceptually secondary, even though trauma actually makes itself felt here, as “affect without shock.” Even though trauma’s return must be understood as real, not symbolic, the experiential consequences of trauma as formulated by trauma theory are often derivative: repetitions or returns of a primal impact. Unconscious shock trumps the experience of pain, ontology trumps phenomenology, ineffability trumps cognition. Trauma inhabits a realm of paradoxical temporality—always belated and yet always about to strike back. As such it constitutes a before (and after) that is constantly out of reach.21 Consequently, by definition, those who suffer from trauma, as well as theorists of trauma, have no access to

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trauma’s primal impact. Unless through trauma’s repetitions, of course. Trauma enters cognition once we work back from its symptoms to its cause. But if to apprehend trauma signifies a witnessing as and of impossibility, maybe seeing or knowing trauma does not merely happen after a delay.22 Maybe theory’s working through trauma (and the way in which it imagines an individual’s coming to term with trauma) consists not in an archeological unearthing of what has been. Maybe the apparent reconstruction of a lost past really fabricates a prehistory of the present. Construction instead of reverse interpretation, trauma’s first impact would constitute a copy that merely plays the role of an ineffable origin.23 This is not to say that trauma does not exist. Only that trauma theory often highlights the aporia of knowing and representing around trauma by privileging trauma’s first shock over what is never treated as more than its symptoms. Hence trauma becomes at once virtual (something that is always in abeyance) and radically real (something so “raw” that it defies signification). But trauma works as a concept precisely because of the multiplication of impact. It can be all impact, no trace, because it truncates and suspends the course of inscription. While trauma theory voids temporal logic, it also relies on a staggered sequence of traumatic shock and aftershock. As the infliction of a wound that leaves no mark, trauma is the negation of inscription. As an impact that never ceases to impress, trauma is also the excess of inscription. Through the need to represent trauma while insisting on trauma’s resistance to cognition, trauma theory causes the mark of trauma to multiply. By marking the first impact of trauma as all-important blow, then erasing it as inaccessible, essence of the unintelligible, the empty center of the impossible first shock becomes the black hole that spawns inscriptive monsters. By framing trauma in the paradoxical mode of an inscription without an inscription, inscription is also constantly multiplied. Since there is no intelligible origin to trauma, theory cannot conceive of an end to trauma’s inscriptive movement either. What suspends but also keeps trauma in balance between virtuality and reality, between the figurative and the literal, between origin and copy, is an inscriptive imaginary. The metaphors of inscription — imageries of marks, traces, and wounds — that trauma theory deploys in order to illustrate its elusive object of analysis highlight trauma’s paradoxical ontology. Impact without registration, inscription without inscription, trauma’s only mark is the absence of a mark. Instead of an intelligible trace the shock of trauma leaves a void or hole.24 And thus, trauma is incessantly haunted by inscription.

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But if trauma’s uncanny mark— negated and disavowed as mark— disables the smooth functioning of the psyche, trauma, as negative inscription, interrupts something that is itself imagined as a strange inscriptive apparatus. The psychic system that trauma shatters with its violent impact is itself a strange writing machine, a storage system of physical traces. Or so one of the most famous metaphors of the psyche suggests: the mystic writing pad in Sigmund Freud’s 1925 short essay “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock’ ” (“A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ ”). There, Freud elucidates the structure of the psychic apparatus through a description of a trivial, newly invented commodity: the mystic writing pad. This comparison helps Freud convey a solution to a fundamental problem of memory. It must unite two seemingly incompatible functions: the ability to receive new information and the possibility to download and store it, awaiting its future use. The challenge at hand is an inscriptive dilemma: the creation of a space marked at once by the retention of an impact and by the erasure of its trace. The mystic writing pad effectively circumvents the incompatibility of impression and storage through the use of three different layers: a wax sheet that receives and conserves whatever is written onto it, a layer of wax paper that through its graphic Fort-Da game of adherence or nonadherence to the wax sheet grants visibility to the most recent layer of writing, and a layer of celluloid that protects the wax paper. Freud’s writing pad thus registers marks carved into its wax surface, returning us from the imaginary of pen and paper to that ancestor of writing, graphein, the incisions of a stylus: “It is a return to the ancient method of writing on tablets of clay or wax: a pointed stylus scratches the surface, the depressions upon which constitute the ‘writing’ [‘Schrift’].”25 Writing assumes the form of penetration, traces become wounds. But whereas the instrument leaves its mark in the wax plate, the at once more vulnerable and less moldable layers that cover it are left intact. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud’s model of the psychic apparatus as fragile bubble began to draw attention to the boundaries of the psyche, imagining a membranous outer layer consisting of formerly sensitive tissue that had become inured by excessive stimuli and started to serve as a protective buffer instead. The subsequent development of the model in Freud’s 1925 essay illustrated by the writing pad differentiated and expanded the functions attributed to the psychic envelope. Only the multiplication of surfaces allowed for a multifunctional model responding to the dilemma of conjugating impact and erasure. The wax paper’s adherence to the deeper surface of the wax plate that has been marked by the stylus renders the

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inscription readable. Unhurt by the pointed instrument, it clings to and covers the sheets. Through the very movement with which the stylus incises the wax sheet, the wax paper sutures the cuts. To cover up the marks of the stylus, however, does not “erase” them. Rather, the closeness of wax sheet and paper renders the incisions visible, since they are thus distinguished from the multitude of inscriptions that cover the wax sheet with a chaotic crisscrossing of lines. Without a “first” surface, the marks in the wax sheet would remain unintelligible, since indistinguishable from a multitude of other traces. Whenever the contact between the two layers is interrupted, even though both have been marked, they revert to what appears to be an unmarked state. As if it had not been inscribed, the wax paper appears to become a pristine surface once again, returning to a state prior to marking. In contrast, the wax sheet loses its cover that singles out a specific set of markings, reverting to a state of excessive, indistinguishable traces. Writing here functions only whenever it cuts deep without penetrating the surface(s). The surface that receives inscription (the layer of wax) is not the real surface, whereas the wax paper and celluloid that cover and protect it are not really surfaces of inscription—they admit no trace. But what is the status of the mystic writing pad? What its role in Freud’s concept of the psyche and his strategies of illustration? Of course, the writing pad, a curious real-life object, merely models the psyche. Its relationship to memory is one of analogy. And yet, from the outset, Freud’s essay toes around the issue of a mnemonic prosthesis, of writing not merely as a process analogous to the working of memory but as a supplement of memory: If I distrust my memory . . . I am able to supplement [ergänzen] and guarantee its working by making a note in writing [schriftliche Aufzeichnung]. In that case the surface upon which this note is preserved, the pocket-book [Schreibtafel] or sheet of paper, is as it were a materialized portion of my mnemic apparatus [Erinnerungsapparates], which I otherwise carry about with me invisible. I have only to bear in mind [sich merken] the place where this “memory” has been deposited and I can then “reproduce” it at any time I like, with the certainty that it will have remained unaltered and so have escaped the possible distortions [Entstellungen] to which it might have been subjected in my actual memory.26

Freud prefaces his discussion of the psyche as an inscriptive model in the guise of the mystic writing pad by contrasting memory and external storage media. In a reversal of Plato’s harangue against the corrupting

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influence of writing on memory, Freud privileges writing over memory as the more reliable and durable inscriptive medium.27 Writing can never work without memory, though: as Freud underscores, we have to remember where (but also that) we have set something down in writing. We can only outsource some of the functions of memory to another, external medium but remain, ultimately, dependent on memory to access and integrate data stored elsewhere. While writing can never completely take over memory’s role, it can—according to the premise of Freud’s essay— express memory by analogy. The writing pad provides Freud a convenient metaphor to illustrate the workings of memory, a Versinnlichung—both representation and sensual materialization— of the functioning of the psychic apparatus of apperception, or rather of the way in which Freud wanted to imagine it.28 But the doubled role of writing in Freud’s essay—as a more reliable, if partial prosthesis of memory and as a model for the workings of the psyche—prevents a smooth folding of writing and memory into one, on the one hand, and a neat division between memory and writing, on the other. Writing at once represents memory and constitutes memory’s prosthesis; writing is both a figure for and part of (an extended) memory, described as an externalized and detached piece of the mnemonic apparatus itself. Freud’s mystic writing pad supplements the psyche doubly: On a level of analogical explanation the psyche is (like) a writing pad, it provides a figure for a phenomenon that eludes representation; but writing also embodies the means by which we might aid the psyche and avoid its potential shortcomings. As a model, the mystic writing pad resolves the quandary of representation at the heart of Freud’s psychic apparatus, that of the combination of inscription and erasure. At the same time, as a model, it opens up a problem of representation in that a clear boundary between analogy and object, between figure and ground, never materializes. Freud’s scenarios for the apperceptive apparatus and trauma share a problem of representation. As two phenomena that depend on the aporia of traceless inscription, both require models that grapple with impossibilities and voids. Both analogies help solve a conceptual problem by way of duplication: The mystic writing pad relies on different topological layers that effectively reduplicate a systemic surface; trauma functions because of different temporal layers that effectively multiply its psychic impact. In each case, however, the combination of an inscriptive impact and the erasure of its trace—at least at a certain place, at least at a certain moment in time—leads to a proliferation of inscription. At the same time both models, vehicles for the expression of Freud’s theoretical objects, structurally

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reflect the quandary of the concepts they are supposed to transport. In fact, Freud himself reflected on the problematic status of analogies for the psychic apparatus in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) of 1929. After spinning out the famous Rome metaphor—a “flight of imagination” (phantastische Annahme)—namely that we imagine the fact that the psyche contains all the layers of past developments through an image of the city of Rome with all its historical layers intact, Freud dismisses his drawn-out image as an “idle game” (Spielerei), only fit to illustrate the difficulty of representing the psyche: An attempt that “shows us how far we are from mastering the characteristics [Eigentümlichkeiten] of mental life by representing them in pictorial terms [durch anschauliche Darstellung].”29 When he tries to describe the mnemonic apparatus as a writing pad and trauma by way of a spherical imaginary, Freud has recourse to equally problematic figures of illustration— ones in which the figures stand too close to, or even participate in, the concepts or entities they elucidate, resulting in a tainted, impure, and thus particularly evocative figurality—as impure as the figure of inscription itself, which stands in for something else while also signifying only itself. In addition to the internal frictions of each model, an analogical short circuit happens when we imagine both in conjunction: one an illustration of the workings of the psyche, one an illustration of its potential unmaking. If inscription—via the mystic writing pad and its system of surfaces and traces—is a figure for the function of the psyche, it is also a figure of what shatters the very core of the psyche: trauma. Freud imagines trauma, like memory, as a system of inscription. And even as trauma destabilizes the working of the psychic apparatus, its conceptualization is analogical to it. Affected by trauma, the functioning of the system is stalled, but the disruptive charge functions on the same conceptual and tropological terms as the system it challenges. The model of the psyche as inscriptive apparatus allows, and indeed prescripts, the workings of trauma. Or obversely, to imagine trauma in terms of a problematic inscription reinforces the scenario of a psychic machine that, even as it malfunctions, still “writes.” The psyche as writing pad functions with impressions and erasures in complex ways. Its inscriptive undoing mirrors as well as ruptures mnemonic inscription by translating its contradictory principle of impact and erasure from topology (the different layers of Freud’s model of the psyche) to temporality (the suspended sequence of trauma’s impact). That Freud relies heavily on figures of inscription for his models of the psyche has interested thinkers at least since Jacques Derrida placed Freud at the “scene of writing.”30 Consequently, trauma theorists—at least the

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ones who follow in Freud’s footsteps and espouse a poststructuralist direction— continue to frame trauma by way of figures of inscription, conceptual tropes easily aligned with poststructuralist notions of writing. But the paradoxical use of such imageries of inscription remains largely unexplored— even though they are at the basis of the construction of trauma as at once ineffable and in constant need of rehearsing, retelling, and reinscription. And so inscription is at once constantly invoked and constantly disavowed in reflections on trauma. Let me ask again then: How are we to imagine the other of inscription? As void, the absence of a mark, a pristine surface? As hole, a rent in the storage medium of the psyche, a space or surface blocked from receiving inscriptions? But what would bar a hole from becoming the mark of another system, the trace of another (even catastrophic) event? After all, a mark (or hole) always signifies, at least minimally, by setting its trace apart from the surrounding surface, by making visible the moment of its imprint. So far, the negation of inscription has only led to a renewed assertion of inscription elsewhere, even to a multiplication of inscription. If, by definition, trauma cannot be inscribed, then inscription becomes trauma’s supplement. Not quite trauma itself, inscription is both trauma’s manifestation and trauma’s other. Seemingly, inscription has no counterpart—not even erasure, since this would just be another process of inscription, rendering a negative mark, but still a mark of kinds. To negate inscription can only have success in a limited economy of inscription, once we complicate (and thus multiply) the system that is being inscribed. This is the secret of trauma— or at least the secret of the phenomenon trauma theory attempts to grasp by constantly postponing its conceptual capture. Trauma multiplies inscription; inscription supplements the paradox of trauma.

Inscription upon Inscription Poststructuralist theory finds in trauma its conceptual hallmark, a phenomenon that by definition resists cognition but can be theorized through a theoretical paradox at the heart of poststructuralism. Precisely because trauma eludes traditional epistemologies, poststructuralist reason with its foregrounding of aporia is ideally posited to conceptualize it, as that which resists conceptualization. Which also means that poststructuralism constructs its object—trauma—with a view to keeping its own theoretical sleights of hand in motion. By the same token, the inscriptive figures deployed with and around trauma maintain the paradox of trauma by way of oscillation, as an inscription without inscription, as well as suggest an

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analogy between the theorization of trauma and the making of poststructuralist theory: as processes of forceful impact and material inscription. In other words, in order to be captured perfectly by poststructuralist tenets, trauma cannot signify differently than as a barrier to signification. The regard for poststructuralist methodology overdetermines the description of its object of analysis. Many trauma theorists engage in a similarly paradoxical and ultimately problematic maneuver when they grapple with representability in the face of trauma. The theoretical question here is no longer how to conceptualize trauma but rather how to conceptualize its representation. The answer, however, follows an equally aporetic scenario, theorizing a type of antirepresentation, a representation of that which cannot be represented. And figures of inscription again play an important role in managing the paradox of the unrepresentability of trauma. For instance, Lyotard muses on an ethically valid way of representing trauma in Heidegger and “the jews” as a kind of nonrepresentation in the guise of a scene of (non-)inscription: Whenever one represents, one inscribes in memory, and this might seem a good defense against forgetting. It is, I believe, just the opposite. Only that which has been inscribed can, in the current sense of the term, be forgotten, because it could be effaced. But what is not inscribed, through lack of inscribable surface, of duration and place for the inscription to be situated . . . cannot be forgotten, does not offer a hold to forgetting, and remains present “only” as an affection that one cannot even qualify, like a state of death in the life of the spirit. One must, certainly, inscribe in words, in images. One cannot escape the necessity of representing. It would be a sin itself to believe oneself safe and sound. But it is one thing to do it in view of saving the memory, and quite another to try to preserve the remainder, the unforgettable forgotten, in writing.31

According to Lyotard’s logic in this passage—resonant with a Freudian imagery of psychic processes as scenes of writing—the inscription of memory cannot successfully shield against forgetting. Rather, it invites forgetting, since only what has been inscribed can be subject to erasure. In contrast, that which remains uninscribed need not fear erasure. But what would such a type of unmarked memory look like? Lyotard can only invoke its lingering presence negatively. After all, since it is not of the order of inscription or representation, it can be neither written nor read. Couched in the familiar paradoxical metaphors of poststructuralist ineffability, this memory, or other to memory, is also the other of representation, uncanny

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remainder, presently absent. However, it cannot completely evade the realm of signification with its words and images, since we cannot access that which has no material or mediated presence. Instead, or at least this seems what Lyotard suggests, representation bends itself around this strange presence without enveloping it. Representation here can only work by indirection and self-negation, pointing to its own inability to represent. But would not such an antirepresentation that is also, in spite of all, a kind of representation defeat its own purpose and reify a supposed unrepresentable by way of representation, albeit one that eschews representing the unrepresentable but signals its unrepresentability instead? This, at least, is Jacques Rancière’s critique of Lyotard’s insistence on unrepresentability. According to Rancière, Lyotard’s problem consists in “[inscribing] the trace of that unpresentable [cet imprésentable]” by way of an aesthetic system with its set of rules protesting too much that it does not represent, because it claims that its subject, as the unthinkable, the unimaginable, exceeds representation.32 At the same time, as a strategy for dealing with the unrepresentable, such an aesthetic risks becoming a mere index of unrepresentability by default, since its representative success depends on the premise that no representative strategy can capture certain subjects, such as the Holocaust. According to this logic, commuting the impossibility of representation into its interdiction, certain events ought not to be represented. However, the aesthetics of unrepresentability can only represent by expressing a generalized condition of intentionally failed representation. This leads, as Rancière shows, to the transformation of “the ‘impossibility’ of art after Auschwitz into an art of the unpresentable.”33 It also renders precarious the decision of what content such an antirepresentation is worthy of. After all, the self(ab)negating rhetoric of antirepresentation is merely a tool of representation against representation. The inscriptive logic of trauma repeats itself here. The ethical response to trauma purports to copy trauma itself: affectation without inscription, representation that reserves, by way of marks, images, scripts, that which no writing can convey. Trauma’s resistance to representation opens up a dilemma. On the one hand, we cannot but represent trauma, be it for the purpose of an individual who tries to work through and thus escape the vicious circle of trauma’s eternal return by moving a traumatic event into consciousness; be it out of the ethical responsibility to represent atrocities and safeguard them from history’s oblivion. On the other hand, by definition, once trauma has become representable, its claim to, well, trauma, stands in danger of being lessened. Of course, this is only really a dilemma within the framework of

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poststructuralist theories of trauma and their self-defined limits. This is at least what much of theory’s tarrying with the unrepresentability of trauma suggests. Trauma’s figurative impact incessantly calls for literal embodiments, yet these embodiments have to accomplish the impossible: to represent nonrepresentation. As the Holocaust has become modernity’s prime example of trauma, one inscriptive figure asserts its power especially unrelentingly: the concentration camp tattoo that reduced the inmates of Auschwitz and its affiliated camps to numbers scheduled for erasure, individual lives reduced to entries on a to-do list of elimination. What might seem —in a cynical relativism of horrors—an insignificant addition to the atrocities of the extermination of the Jews perpetrated under Nazism has burnt a profound trace into people’s imaginations. In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, the number tattoo remained at the margins of historiography. For instance, the Nuremberg Trials, with all their transcripts, interviews, and documents, rarely mentioned it. Rather, they treated the Auschwitz tattoo, apparently without second thought, simply as necessary proof of a survivor’s right to witness, or mention it as part of the protocol of Auschwitz and its associated camps.34 And yet, the symbolic significance of the tattoo and its cultural afterlife—in survivors’ accounts, artistic processes of working through, and cultural criticism —more than compensates for this apparent omission. Steeped in the mystique of half-knowledge, rather than an object of thorough historical research, the camp tattoo became a particularly powerful cipher for imagining the Holocaust.35 In fact, from a practice limited to some Lager, a horrid detail of the deadly bureaucracy of the “Final Solution” (Endlösung), the concentration camp tattoo has become one of the epitomes of Nazi cruelty— crooked, indelible figures inked into the skin as shadowy ciphers of an incomprehensible enormity. As Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer point out, the tattoo—minute traces of ink on human skin—has come to signify the horrors of the Holocaust like no other part of the Nazi machinery of death: “The number tattoo is the one predominant signifier of the Shoah. This small part of a history of persecution, humiliation, and dehumanization—no more than a step in the process of Nazi genocide—has become its emblem.”36 What makes the forced inscription of a sequence of numbers so significant in the face of genocide? According to Hirsch and Spitzer, the tattoo makes permanently visible a process in which human beings were transformed into numbers in a bureaucratic system (cifras bureocráticas).37 The tattoo forms part of a sequence of humiliation and dehumanization. It takes the form of a mark, intended and experienced as stigma, a badge of shame.

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As part of the demeaning Nazi mechanism of death, the tattoo maintains an indexical relationship to the horrors of the Holocaust. There can be no doubt that she who carries its number sequence preceded by a letter, formed of dotted lines, has been touched by Nazism.38 It also means that its bearers are miraculous contradictions, living proof—by the very fact that they are alive in spite of the tattoo’s promise of death— of the end of Nazism’s inhuman system. As an individual index of the mass destruction of human life at Auschwitz, the tattoo serves as irrefutable mark of suffering, investing she who is forced to carry it with the power of witnessing. For the survivors, instead of a mark of shame, symbol of its bearer’s reduction to a number, the tattoo has become a living memorial inscription for the dead, a tribute of the survivors to the many who did not survive.39 As a sign written on the body, yet subject to multiple interpretations, the Auschwitz tattoo accrues special power, lending itself to becoming an icon of the Holocaust as such. Accounts of survival amid the horrors of Auschwitz often single out the imprint of the tattooed number as a particularly affecting experience, one that will haunt its bearer for the rest of his life. In I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved), Primo Levi reflects on the disconnection between the relatively insignificant physical impact and the terrible psychological and symbolic charge of the process of receiving the number tattoo: The operation was not very painful and lasted no more than a minute, but it was traumatic. Its symbolic meaning was clear to everyone: this is an indelible mark, you will never leave here, this is the mark with which slaves are branded and cattle sent to the slaughter, and that is what you have become. You no longer have a name; this is your new name. The violence of the tattoo was gratuitous, and in itself, pure offense: were the three canvas numbers sewed to pants, jacket, and winter coat not enough? No, they were not enough: something more was needed [occorreva un di piú], a non-verbal message, so that the innocent would feel his sentence written on his flesh. It was also a return to barbarism, all the more perturbing for Orthodox Jews: in fact, precisely in order to distinguish Jews from the barbarians, the tattoo is forbidden by Mosaic law (Leviticus 19:28).40

In the scene of inscription that Levi narrates, what is traumatic about the tattoo is not the corporeal trace and its literal, numerical signification, per se, or the pain that accompanies its infliction. Rather, trauma lurks in the tattoo’s symbolic impact, evoked by a long history of bodily marks and their signification. Where self-imposed tattoos might be read as mere

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ornamental body modifications or even expressions of an individual’s agency over his body, the forcible inscription of indelible marks quite literally stigmatizes a body, placing it apart and outside of the realm of the human. Branded criminal or tattooed slave, the bearer of such marks is stripped of agency and humanity, reduced to another’s possession.41 In lieu of the individual marker of a name, the number tattoo brands the body as another’s property or, worse, as matter scheduled for annihilation. The Auschwitz tattoo served no other purpose; its number sequence held no meaning. The number, as Ruth Klüger, a German Auschwitz survivor, comments in unterwegs verloren (lost on the way), was not even used as identifying mark or for roll calls. It was no more than a “dog tag” (Hundemarke), and thus, because of its gratuitous violence, its dehumanizing and humiliating intent, became a “symbol of absolute evil” (Symbol des absolut Bösen).42 Not because of the meaning of its components—the numbers themselves were “neither evil nor abstruse” (weder böse noch absonderlich)—but because of the charge of its inscriptive practice.43 The Auschwitz tattoo, as discussed by Levi, partakes of the logic of excess (un di piú). Superfluous, since without any pragmatic use, without any real meaning, the tattoo is the final step in a series of marks. The numbers sewn onto the prisoners’ clothes that Levi mentions, but also the infamous Judenstern, the yellow star-shaped badge Jews had to display on their clothes, the imposition of adding generic Jewish first names to official documents, or the catalogs of “racial” marker—all attempted to give visible expression to the Nazi construction of the Jews as a race or species apart, even though the seemingly necessary proliferation and excess of such supposedly expressive signifiers alone is ample proof that none of these had any foundation in reality. To this, the tattoo added the offense of its medium —indelibly written in flesh (with more than a hint of Kafka’s scenario in “In der Strafkolonie” [“In the Penal Colony”] in Levi’s account)—and a culturally specific symbolic violence. Since marking the body was forbidden by Mosaic law in order to set the Jewish body apart from others, the forced corporeal inscription of the tattoo was particularly humiliating.44 Levi’s account explicitly connects the number tattoo with the impact of trauma. His use of the adjective traumatic is by no means gratuitous but points to a prevalent conceptual link between the figure of the tattoo and the structure of trauma. Pars pro toto as well as indexical mark of the Holocaust, the tattoo echoes, and indeed reproduces, the conceptual charge of trauma. As a trace, it indicates the atrocities and humiliations suffered, though without registering them in any representative, complete, or even meaningful way. The relationship between the Holocaust and its

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privileged mark, the tattoo, remains problematic, as signification is constantly deferred. Even though the numbers tattooed into human flesh are legible, they do not signify; rather the act of inscribing them itself constitutes a “pure offense.” The tattoo is such an apt sign for the trauma of the Holocaust, since it is conceptually parallel to trauma— or at least to the ways in which we imagine trauma. It is an inscriptive embodiment of trauma, visibly present on the body, no longer merely a psychic wound. As traumatic experience, as traumatic mark, the number tattoo is not the mark of trauma. As a figure of inscription, it echoes trauma precariously by embodying trauma and by giving corporeal expression to trauma’s catachrestic supplements. With its link to trauma, the number tattoo literalizes Giorgio Agamben’s description of witnessing in Quel che resta di Auschwitz (Remnants of Auschwitz) as the “inscription of life in a dead area and, in death, of a living area.”45 The tattoo marks its bearers as the living dead, those whose annihilation has been irrevocably scheduled. As a mark of dehumanization, of systematic and systematized inhumanity, as a “mark of the inhuman” (segnatura dell’inumano) the tattoo carves out a space of the inhuman on and with human bodies.46 Those who survive and continue to carry the number tattoo, in contrast, also carry the mark of death into their lives and, as living witnesses, bring it into contact with the lives of others. Agamben’s reflections on the contradictory task of testifying to the horrors of the Holocaust, however, do not employ inscription in such a literal way. Rather, the vocabulary of inscription subtends Remnants of Auschwitz as a complex metaphor. Inscription, for instance in the phrase quoted above, serves as a bridge between the nearly unbearable tensions that witnessing has to withstand—between life and death, between the human and the inhuman, between representation and the unrepresentable. Elsewhere, however, it predominantly signifies a negative force, namely the impossible ideal of a signification of presence, a phonocentric hallucination that can never become reality: “There is no moment in which language is inscribed in the living voice, no place in which the living being is able to render itself linguistic [ha potuto logicizzarsi], transforming itself into speech.”47 According to Agamben, witnessing plays itself out in a death zone of signification where meaning is barred from ever taking shape: No living voice or human body can testify to the horrors of the Holocaust because these consisted in the very dehumanization of the human, in the destruction of all meaning. This redefinition of witnessing sustains its logic in analogy to a poststructuralist understanding of signification, based not on the supposedly living presence of the voice but rather on the ever-elusive

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absence of writing. Witnessing trauma, like any other act of signification but also more virulently than any other act of signification, can only take place in the void or nonplace of signification for Agamben, thus claiming a general deconstructionist understanding of the trace as the specific condition of testimonies of trauma: It is in this non-place of articulation that deconstruction inscribes its “trace” and its différance, in which voice and letter, meaning and presence are infi nitely differed. . . . But precisely this impossibility of conjoining the living being and language, phone and logos, the inhuman and the human—far from authorizing the infi nite deferral of signification—is what allows for testimony.48

Agamben imagines the possibility of witnessing as akin to the infinite play of language, the endlessly deferred (and differed) meaning of deconstruction: precisely the impossibility to conjugate the nonhuman and the human, death and life (or their avatars in signification: écriture and phone) allows witnessing. Rather than inhibiting testimony, the death zone of meaning enables the working of witnessing. Not unlike Lyotard, who insists on a radically different memory of trauma as an uncanny presence that would function outside of, or at least at the margins of representation, Agamben theorizes testimony as a positive impossibility—witnessing works in spite of everything, against all odds—by embracing the contradictory equation of signification and death, on the one hand, and writing and productivity, on the other. At first glance, Agamben seems to claim that testimony trumps deconstruction’s trace, even as this very definition of witnessing depends on poststructuralist concepts of signification. Without the poststructuralist penchant for figures of inscription, such as deconstruction’s trace of différance, Agamben could not claim the death zone of meaning for Holocaust testimony. Though there is no denying that such metaphors take on a grim, literal meaning in the context of Nazi genocide, Agamben’s theorization of witnessing happens on the conceptual terrain of poststructuralist theory with its tendency for paradoxical figures that fantasize about alternative representations at the core of the unrepresentable. In hindsight, though, maybe it is not trauma theory that capitalizes on the metaphors of deconstruction. Maybe the obverse is true: Deconstruction’s obsession with signification as a death zone might owe its origin to (or might be partly based on) the global catastrophe of World War II and the collective trauma of the Holocaust. Dominick LaCapra starts the preface to Representing the Holocaust by stressing the link between the Holocaust

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and contemporary theoretical movements. He regards the Holocaust as “a more or less covert point of rupture between the modern and the postmodern” and suggests that the tendency to privilege lack, absence, and death in contemporary theory sustains genealogical connections with the traumatic experience of the Holocaust.49 The analogy of representing or witnessing trauma with poststructuralism’s insistence on differed signification in the guise of the trace can (and should) thus be construed as doubleedged phenomenon: as method that subsumes and overdetermines its object and as historical experience that shapes theoretical thought. As an inscriptive figure, the number tattoo resonates particularly uncannily with poststructuralist theory, since it mirrors the contradictory conceptualization of trauma as well as being contiguous to figures that stand in for the poststructuralist trace. In order to echo the structure of trauma, the tattoo needs to remain an unstable cipher. What renders it such an apt icon of trauma, its physical manifestation, also disqualifies it as a structural expression of trauma. Precisely because the tattoo represents trauma, it cannot represent trauma, since trauma is that which cannot be represented. Hence representations of the Auschwitz tattoo tend to oscillate between underscoring the absolute indexicality, indeed, iconicity, of its mark and endowing it with semiotic polyvalence. More important, however, reflections on the possible erasure of the number tattoo resonate with trauma’s paradoxical impact erasure, mimicking trauma’s hole of signification. Klüger’s unterwegs verloren (lost on the way), for instance, opens with the description of the removal of Klüger’s number tattoo, after another act of inscription, the writing and publication of the novel still alive—“precondition for taking off the number [Ablegen der Nummer], for the newly unmarked [wieder unversehrten] arm”—had taken on its role of witnessing.50 And yet, the process of erasure, the recovery of an arm devoid of marks, devoid of wounds (unversehrt), comes at an additional prize. Even with the supplemental, propitiating act of writing and sharing one’s memory, the tattoo cannot simply be discarded —Klüger uses the term ablegen, “to take off clothes,” but also “to archive documents.” Indeed, throughout the passage Klüger obsessively places the tattoo in contiguity with metaphors of things that can be worn or discarded at their bearers’ discretion: a piece of clothing, a wedding ring, a name.51 In stark contrast to these examples of superficial trappings that can be easily taken off, the prolonged act of erasing the tattoo becomes a process of branding, as the laser burns out the tattoo’s mark. Erasure thus manifests itself as another process of inscription:

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In a laser clinic in California, where dermatologists make a fortune from removing the wrinkles of aging women and the tattoos of drunk adolescents who are sorry to have allowed their cultivated appearance to be ruined for fun and bragging rights, a young female dermatologist burnt away this piece of “memorial” [Mahnmal] in three sessions over several months. Then I fi nally knew it by heart, because I always had trouble to remember it before: A-3537. . . . Until then the numbers had only been on my skin, not in my head.52

The laser operation is not only an act of reverse inscription (i.e., a process that replicates and retraces the tattoo’s trace to annihilate it). If Klüger compares the laser’s untracking of the number marks to a type of negative branding in this passage, later on she likens it to a process of inoculation: “It was like those vaccinations that one has to repeat several times, before they become effective.”53 In the act, the tattoo does not disappear; it simply relocates to another site. Even as every trace of the tattoo is erased, the mark of the tattoo has just moved deeper, as a memory trace—the remembrance of the number sequence a metonymical stand-in for the indelible psychic mark of the Holocaust, of its tattooed emblem. The moment in which the tattoo no longer visibly marks a body, in the process of its removal, its permanence is all the more assured. In still alive, after suffering a psychic crisis triggered by the resurfacing of traumatic memories after the shock of an accident, Klüger likens the return of the traumatic repressed to the undo function of the computer. But the tattoo’s paradoxical visualization of traumatic logic trumps any archival media and their metaphorical magic. Erased from the surface of the body, the number tattoo has just become trauma’s perfect token: illegible while visible, uncannily present even when invisible. However, when trauma’s mark moves from the surface of the body to the psyche, it retraces its steps, going against the grain of the number tattoo’s figurative journey: In a paradoxical loop, the visible replica of trauma has been transmuted, once again, into psychic matter. As the vicious circle of traumatic inscription repeats its gyre, the circular stretto of trauma and its embodiments turns analogy’s direction upside down. Klüger’s mention of another type of tattooing in the passage above— inked skin as body ornamentation—is no coincidence. Ornamental tattooing is indeed the number tattoo’s uncanny other: similar in inscriptive technique but incommensurable in meaning.54 Argentinian artist Mirta Kupferminc explores this very tension between the imposition of the demeaning stigma of the number tattoo and voluntarily tattooed body enhancement in her installation La piel de la memoria (The Skin of Memory),

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on exhibition in Buenos Aires in 2007.55 Two gigantic photographs— one of Kupferminc’s mother, a Holocaust survivor, the number tattoo visible on her bared arm, one of a heavily tattooed young male— dominate the space of the exhibit. Its visitors, already marked with the stamp of the ticket, have the opportunity to receive impermanent tattoos executed by a tattoo artist. However, some of these, according to a randomly selected characteristic that is never disclosed to the audience, receive painted versions of the Auschwitz number tattoo instead.56 Kupferminc’s installation highlights the difference between contemporary body tattoos and the offense of the Auschwitz tattoo, thus enhancing the stark contrast between two similar techniques of bodily inscription. It also celebrates the skin’s importance as a site of memory. For Kupferminc, the number tattoo signifies primarily in the intimate context of the family, since the memory of growing up “embraced by arms with the number tattoo” (abrazada por brazos numerados) forms an indelible part of her childhood experience.57 For the child of Holocaust survivors, the mark of the number tattoo is personal first—linked to the affective space of the family—before it becomes the sign of trauma. For the child whose parents carry it, it is tangible, intimate, and experiential, before becoming a signifier of history. But does this mean that trauma has become transferable? That the constant exposure to her parents’ traumatic past literally “inscribed onto their skin” causes the daughter to share in it, to have come “to live inside the skin of memory,” as Hirsch and Spitzer argue?58 Undoubtedly, the marks on her parents’ arms, as visible reminders of the trauma of the Holocaust, place Kupferminc—as well as others who underwent similar experiences— onto the threshold of trauma. The peculiar temporality of trauma multiplies its impact, creating traumatic shockwaves whose ripples affect those in close vicinity to the traumatized. But how does trauma travel? How can its impact strike other psyches? If trauma transcends the individual psyche and becomes collective, who is affected, who spared? With increased distance from the events of the Holocaust, the gradual passing of witnesses of the Holocaust has made the link between trauma and memory a question of the utmost importance. Consequently, at least since the 1990s discussions of the Holocaust have turned increasingly to the phenomenon of second-generation survivors and thus to the problem of the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Hirsch starts The Generation of Postmemory with a catalog of concepts that grapple with traumatic relay: “absent memory” (Ellen Fine), “inherited memory,” “belated memory,” “prosthetic memory” (Celia Lury, Alison Landsberg), “mémoire trouée” (Henri Raczymov), “mémoire des cendres” (Nadine Fresco), “vicarious

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witnessing” (Froma Zeitlin), “received history” ( James Young), “haunting legacy” (Gabriele Schwab), and “postmemory.”59 As Hirsch underlines, the very idea of postmemory, whatever a theorist’s preferred terminology, straddles the two sides of a contradiction: It proclaims the possibility, even the ethical necessity of an indirect memory, one that does not need for the event consigned to memory and she who remembers to have coincided in time and space. And yet, as some of the indicators of belatedness or precariousness show, as they are added to notions of transmission, such acts of remembrance cannot (and, indeed, may not) replace direct memory, especially not when we speak of traumatic experiences. The conceptual challenge here replicates trauma’s impossible imperative to represent, present now at the level of intergenerational communication. Traumatic memory must be transmitted across generations, and yet, trauma, as an unrepresentable, is also untranslatable: Resistant to signification, trauma refuses to travel. Its passage between different parts of the psyche, from individual to individual, through time and space, is barred. Or rather, trauma itself is the barrier to such a passing. And yet, trauma’s uncanny presence— often described in terms of latency or haunting— knows no bounds. But this is precisely the problem. Trauma is so elusive— or at least many theorists from Freud onward have grappled with its elusive nature—as to make it difficult to define what inflicts trauma and who will suffer its touch. If trauma can result, as Freud hypothesized, from imagined or real traumatic impacts that can be either physical or psychological in nature, then potentially everybody can develop symptoms of trauma or lay claim to its suffering. Geoffrey H. Hartman suggests in accordance with Israeli historian Saul Friedländer that all of us “even as bystanders—as nonparticipant observers, either during the events or in the fifty years since—. . . suffer something like a trauma, a breach in normal thinking about human and civilized nature.”60 Hartman’s use of “we” to designate victims of Holocaust trauma generalizes trauma’s impact, expanding the category of victims of trauma. Of course, an observer at the scene or even somebody exposed to Holocaust documents decades after the fact does not suffer trauma, even if they can undergo “something like trauma.” Neither Hartman nor other critics argue that trauma has become so generalized as to lose its singularity. After all, Hartman describes our reaction (and by “our” I mean those of us who were not direct participants, victims, or witnesses) merely as analogous to trauma. But since trauma is often treated as an absolute precisely because it bars representation, what does it mean to posit something that is like trauma but not quite? Where do we draw the line between trauma and its

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weaker approximations? Like Hartman, Dori Laub underlines the role of the critic or listener as witness as somebody who is affected by trauma without being traumatized in the way Holocaust victims are.61 And these are only two instances of a general theoretical tightrope walk between affirming that trauma transcends the individual, as well as the traumatic moment, and the conceptual and ethical imperative to preserve trauma’s singularity and control its translatability. If trauma can, and indeed must, become a shared burden and responsibility—at least by transferring some of its affective charge and generating some kind of ethical insights—are there more immediate, more direct, more authentic heirs of trauma, or do all who have been touched by the radiation of trauma share in it equally?62 Once we describe indirect exposure as a kind of trauma (albeit not quite trauma), does that mean that there are different levels of traumatization? Would that mean relativizing trauma by inserting it into a gradated series of trauma-like states? And who would want to judge and rank the supposed authenticity of affective affinities or traumatic sensitivities? The quandary here is not that trauma, often treated as an absolute, risks becoming only one part of a gliding scale of more or less severe cases or states of trauma. The problem lies with the conceptual structure of trauma itself as poststructuralist theory frames it, with the way in which trauma needs figuration for its conceptualization, while at the same time being posited as so real that it eludes cognition and representation. In fact, trauma signifies only by way of analogy. What does it mean, conceptually, but also ethically speaking, if we treat trauma as a measure of (almost) analogous states even as our very understanding of trauma is itself sustained by the crutch of (imperfect) similarity? On the one hand, an ethical imperative warrants that trauma must transcend its immediate scene and its immediate victims and yet remain singular and distinct. Trauma cannot become a universal condition, and yet it cannot remain in splendid isolation either. On the other hand, when theorists invoke trauma, they often have to do so in the figurative mode, always aware that, by definition, their attempts to speak or write it must fail. Hirsch aims to resolve the problem of traumatic transfer—namely to make trauma transmissible without jeopardizing its singularity—through a focus on inheritance and genealogy. As exemplified in Hirsch and Spitzer’s discussion of Kupferminc’s installation The Skin of Memory, postmemory privileges a specific constellation of contact: the tie between parental trauma and filial experience. According to Hirsch and Spitzer, Kupferminc, for instance, suffers a type of “inherited trauma” (trauma heredado).63 But can the burden of trauma be inherited? What is at stake when we con-

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struct trauma in such a way, even if trauma becomes “inherited” only figuratively? In Family Frames, Hirsch defines postmemory by “generational distance” and a “deep personal connection.”64 Even though genealogical links and familial contact serve as the privileged basis for the intergenerational mediation of trauma in Hirsch’s reflections, postmemory is not a form of automatic familial or cultural osmosis. Its link to the traumatic events of the past is “not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation.”65 Hirsch developed the model to describe the experience of children of Holocaust survivors, but she also believes in its applicability to other cases of “second-generation memories of cultural or collective traumatic events and experiences.”66 In spite of its limited economy of transmission—taking the family as a model that effectively, or at least metaphorically, controls the transfer of trauma—the notion of postmemory does not resolve the tensions inherited from theory’s grappling with trauma. Rather, the metaphors of filiation and genealogy at work in much of Hirsch’s writings reduplicate trauma’s uncanny insistence on precarious similarity. If theory’s description of trauma itself can never constitute more than a figurative approximation—via figures of corporeal wounds and strange inscriptions—trauma’s intersubjective spread is even more deeply embroiled in a logic of impossible likeness. And this is where the figure of inscription comes into play once again. Inscription, in the guise of personal and artistic re-enactments of the number tattoo, provides a figure for negotiating the quandaries of postmemory, for balancing the contradictory needs of trauma theory. The number tattoo, as a specific, material avatar of inscription, suggests a visual and corporeal representation of trauma not as an equivalent of trauma but as its index and simulacrum. It comes into its full conceptual power in the context of postmemory, incessantly captured, mediated, and reinscribed. Where it would be unthinkable for individuals from the post-Holocaust generations to seek to replicate— even if symbolically or by imagination—the trauma of Holocaust victims on their own bodies and psyches, the mark of the number tattoo allows the thought of such a precarious identification. As Hirsch suggests, by way of recrafting the mark of trauma, somebody’s trauma can be transposed and creates another’s corporeal memory. She treats the reinscription of number tattoos—in different form, onto different material—as a type of body memory, a means of transposition, rather than identification.67 When Hirsch discusses the example of an artist unrelated to the Holocaust, she still insists that family ties (or frames) can be imagined and constructed. Thus, the artist adduced as example appears in the guise of a mediator of generational patterns. The replication of traumatic

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marks is thus “safely” removed several steps from the bodies of the original victims of trauma. And yet, the imaginary structures of kinship and inheritance are still in play. The logic of traumatic transmission with a difference can account for the post-generation’s obsession with Holocaust tattoos, as it haunts the imagination of writers and artists, both Jewish and/or second generation and not.68 Mirta Kupferminc’s installation The Skin of Memory, with its fixation on inscribed bodies and corporeal marking provides a reflection on the promises as well as the impossibilities of traumatic transposition via the mark of the tattoo. On the one hand, Kupferminc lays claim to the number tattooby way of her personal experience and her emotional connection to it. Because of the tattoo marks on her parents’ arms, Kupferminc’s link to tattoos is different from that of most people: “Tattoos always filled me with horror. They are never just neutral to me.”69 On the other hand, Kupferminc treats her own role as one of affected spectator rather than another surface for trauma’s mark. Consequently, her performance does not replicate her parents’ marks of trauma on her own body. Kupferminc works with and through the Auschwitz tattoo by indirection instead. Instead of replicating it on her own body, Kupferminc becomes a medium for its precarious transmission by setting up a scenario in which the tattoo is forced to travel and proliferate not only beyond the traumatized body whose mark the tattoo has become but also beyond the genealogical economy of circulation. The installation shows and thematizes marked bodies as well as actively produces them. A replica of the number tattoo finds its mark in other, arbitrarily selected bodies, bodies whose connection with the stigmatized body and its history is profoundly fleeting and aleatory. This is precisely not of the order of a personal investment, a contagion via affective identification, but rather by mere happenstance. Although Kupferminc’s comments point to the pressure of interfamilial contagion from the outset, the logic of transposition is broken in The Skin of Memory. The juxtaposition of the tattooed arm of Kupferminc’s mother with the ornamental tattoos on the body of a young male establish the similarity and yet incommensurability of similar practices of inscription. At the level of the production of tattooed bodies during the installationperformance (i.e., the “tattooed” visitors) this difference is replicated: They either receive an ornamental tattoo or a number tattoo—all erasable, of course. The fundamental difference reasserts itself here: between the tattoo as ornament and the bodily mark as stigma and memorial. And yet, once the number tattoo has been transformed into the mark of an impermanent tattoo in the carefully constructed context of an art exhibit, we

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have moved to the copies of copies. Is the form and content of the tattoo enough to serve as an echo of the Auschwitz tattoo? Or the faint simulacrum of imposition? (After all, visitors can choose to receive a tattoo, though they cannot exclude the number tattoo.) Or maybe, by heaping replica upon replica, the performance actually blurs the boundaries between the number tattoo and the ornamental tattoo. Kupferminc’s performance seems to suggest that the visible mark of trauma can retain its power as a sign charged with an affective and political force. What cannot be replicated, however, is the impact of traumatic inscription. In the form of copies, the tattoo marks point to the Auschwitz tattoo, but they are not imprints of its trauma. In other words, the corporeal mark works as a symbol but not as an index of trauma; its similar form conjures up the specter of trauma without, however, transmitting the touch of trauma. Where Kupferminc opts to pose the transmissibility of trauma as a question, Hirsch sidesteps the problem of traumatic transposition. Firstly, the figure of genealogy, however metaphorical, suggests a pattern of inheritance and, by extension, naturalizes the transmission of trauma. Secondly, Hirsch underlines the inescapability of transposition, not its impossibility. Her concern is with ways in which members of the postgeneration can escape the repetition of trauma. Hirsch worries that “the bodily memory of the mark” entails “the violent self-wounding of transposition,” advocating instead for ways of replicating the mark of trauma that also allow for its creative mediation and a process of working through.70 But once we acknowledge that the impact of trauma on the post-generation is not identical to that of their parents, why insist that there exists a difference “between, on the one hand, a memory that, communicated through bodily symptoms, becomes a form of repetition and reenactment, and, on the other hand, one that works through indirection and multiple mediation?”71 Is not the marking frenzy of the post-generation always a process of recreation and not an automatic duplication, an (at least semi-)intentional reprint rather than an imprint of trauma? The ambivalent figure of memory’s bodily mark asserts itself at a theoretical meta-level in Hirsch’s reflections as the transposed mark of postmemory plays the role of a theoretical medium. The corporeal reality of the marks lends visibility and valence to the claim of (secondary or “inherited”) trauma, much as trauma has always needed some kind of embodiment (real or imagined). Something intelligible, tangible (and potentially painful) is in evidence, rather than nothing. And yet, in the same way in which the visible mark of trauma—such as the number tattoo— can only point to, but never encompass or represent, trauma, the replication of a

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bodily mark on another body never risks claiming to appropriate somebody else’s trauma. Hirsch’s logic of the traumatic post-mark necessarily conflates production and imposition: The second-generation individual creates marks as traumatic placeholders, but she is compelled to do so by the intergenerational contact-nebula of trauma. As such, Hirsch’s transposed marks of memory can function both as imprints of trauma themselves (though as part of a traumatic series of nearly inevitable transposition) and as creative ways of working through intergenerational trauma. According to Hirsch’s logic, figures of inscription function both as the supplemental marks of trauma and as its remedy. Hirsch’s dictum that the “mark of untranslatability becomes the untranslatability of the mark” at once veils and unveils the double logic of traumatic marking.72 The chiasmatic repetition of the terms mark and untranslatability gives the sentence an air of repetition. But the two different statements of the phrase are only superficially interchangeable. In reality, they form two halves of a tautological circle in which each half upholds the other. Trauma is by definition the non-mark, that which cannot be comprehended or translated. Because it resists translation, it can have no other content or function but to mark the impossibility to represent or translate. And yet, trauma signifies as the untranslatable mark precisely because it had been placed into the realm of untranslatability to begin with. Nevertheless, the constant emphasis on translatability or the impossibility of translation protests too much. Is the problem really that trauma is untranslatable or rather that it translates all too well? Trauma, it seems, obeys a double logic of absolute singularity and absolute translatability. The very proliferation of traumatic copies (in the form of corporeal inscriptions, for instance) only further enshrines its original—trauma writ large—as the unreachable mark and measure. By the same token, the protestation that trauma cannot be represented triggers the incessant reproduction of traumatic replicas, like particles that revolve around an empty center. Trauma, because it is constructed as an inscription without a trace, an impact in impossible time, defaults into an infinite regress of real and symbolic marks. Trauma is promiscuous because it celebrates and overemphasizes singularity. Much as no inscription can ever embody the traceless impact of trauma, the black hole of trauma cannot control the excess of marks it spawns. For such a logic to function, that which cannot but remain singular and that which can be translated have to be fundamentally different. At the same time, they have to be fundamentally similar—for instance by being imagined in the form of inscription. What can be repeated, for instance by

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reappropriating and reinscribing avatars of the Auschwitz tattoo, is not the experience of trauma but its mark. Not the internal wound of trauma but its external placeholder can be re-enacted. And yet, the mark of trauma can also be conflated with trauma, imagined as a strange process of inscription—all impact, no trace. Consequently, the post-mark of trauma oscillates between identification and difference: It is both (like) the impact of trauma and its incommensurable copy. Because the transposed mark is both a reincidence of trauma and its weak echo, intergenerational transmission is both assumed as inevitable and as already problematic. Poststructuralist theories of trauma suffer from a repetition compulsion all their own. Their incessant duplication of inscriptive scenarios stems from a desire to enshrine the impact of trauma and its resulting pain as an untouchable and, indeed, ungraspable absolute. This is an ethical imperative, one intended to safeguard the distinctness (if not sanctity) of trauma and to enforce our care and respect, whenever we tackle the problem of trauma. It is also an operative imperative within the logic of poststructuralist theory, according to which the marks of indeterminacy and resistance to representation often function as markers of theoretical and conceptual value, leading to a conflation of theoretical methodology and ethical injunction. But this raises the problem of how to limit, control, and judge the marks that radiate outward from the impossible non-mark of trauma. If trauma cannot be represented and repeated indiscriminately or at will, then who decides what marks are legitimate and authentic placeholders of trauma, and according to what criteria? Not the multiplication of traumatic marks per se, but theory’s attempt at dividing inscriptive figures of and around trauma into different categories becomes problematic. This subdivision starts with theoretical figures that imagine trauma in the shape of inscription, thus roping off the impossible non-mark of trauma from the realm of visible marks, even though it is by way of such marks (both real and imaginary) that trauma accrues meaning to begin with. In a second movement, the marks that visualize trauma—such as the number tattoo and its artistic re-enactments—are explicitly or implicitly subdivided into different categories: those that express the impact of trauma (however indirectly) and those that merely exploit trauma, those that merely replicate trauma’s impact and those that work through and attenuate trauma. The second group of difference markers is open to interpretation, and yet it is rhetorically and conceptually stabilized through and in analogy to a supposedly essential difference: between the traceless mark of trauma and its visible simulacra. And yet, this function undermines the absolute status of trauma to begin with, at least for a theoretical perspective for which

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trauma is both the unrepresentable absolute and the template for its legitimate avatars in this equation. This makes it necessary to define trauma as an ontological truth that resists and exceeds epistemology. But such a definition is its own contradiction, since, by placing trauma out of bounds to epistemology’s grasp, its resistance to representation can only be the consequence of rhetorical maneuvers, of styles of representation that simulate the absence and indeed the breakdown of representation. When they theorize trauma, poststructuralist legacies circumvent the limitations of their theoretical tenets. Its conceptual relativity, undecidability, and deferred meaning themselves become naturalized as the ideal ethical way of scripting trauma, since trauma has been theoretically constructed according to the logical structures of poststructuralism: as a non-mark that nevertheless leaves a trace, as a signifying void that nevertheless leads to a proliferation of inscriptions, as an absolute that nevertheless surrounds itself with its analogical avatars.

Inscription around Inscription Does it matter what figure of inscription serves as the medium for theory making? What if we shifted conceptual attention to another physical scripting of Jewishness and trauma? When I insisted earlier that the number tattoo was trauma’s inscriptive embodiment par excellence, another inscriptive specter already haunted and partly destabilized my assertion: the mark of circumcision. Even though the mark of circumcision has engendered less discussion in the context of the Holocaust than the Auschwitz tattoo, it nevertheless appears frequently, mostly in the tragic guise of an indelible sign of Jewish identity, twisted to the Nazi purpose of exposing and persecuting Jews.73 In the 1990 film Europa, Europa, directed by Agnieszka Holland and based on a true story, for instance, a Jewish youth who passes as German is constantly in fear that others will discover the one Jewish mark that cannot pass for German: the cut of circumcision.74 If, for the film’s narrative, circumcision manifests as the secret that resists any effort of alteration (at one point the film’s protagonist even attempts to draw up and tie down his foreskin to make the mark disappear) and thus disturbs the youth’s efforts at passing and integration, at the end of the film, circumcision reverts to its meaning as sign of cultural distinction, proudly handed on to the males of the next generation.75 Circumcision, the practice of ritually cutting away an infant’s prepuce, exists in different cultural contexts. In Jewish ritual, it is a mark of alliance and belonging, the sign, seal, or signature of the covenant between the

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Hebrew god and Abraham.76 As a physical mark that is ritualistically assumed and embraced by a cultural group, not imposed as a stigma, circumcision has nothing in common with the Auschwitz tattoo—apart from the fact that both are produced through cuts or stings that leave indelible marks on a body symbolically marked and thus produced as Jewish. And yet, the mark of circumcision becomes the uncanny and incommensurable echo of the number tattoo. Originally a mark that sets apart, but as badge of distinction and belonging rather than as sign of exclusion, its meaning can be twisted to become violently exclusionary: a sign that is intended to exclude the group so marked from the very bounds of humanity. With its differing cultural forms and meanings—from Judaism to Islam, from religious mark to hygienic practice— circumcision is an inherently unstable sign. As a bodily mark, it represents the outcome of a bid to forge a visible, indelible fait accompli, to visualize (and physicalize) a supposed identity. As Julia Reinhard Lupton underlines, circumcision as a mark of allegiance allows for the production of a group beyond any “natural” ties. The ethnos that it forges is already a cultural construct: “Physical yet not physiological, genealogical but not genetic, circumcision marks the Jews off as a distinct people without being a ‘racial’ indicator in the modern sense of an inherited trait.”77And yet, the very logic of inscribing and scripting identity as corporeal trace is fraught with problems. The link between inward state and outward sign is troubled from the outset: If a mark is needed, supposedly as expression of something latent, waiting to arrive at visibility, then the mark is already an imposition, the production of a content that is supposed to predate the mark but whose meaning is only produced and supposedly affirmed by and because of the mark. If circumcision is a multiply unstable mark, the way in which it was being read in Europe toward the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth century, especially in the halo of such newly fledged disciplines as anthropology and psychoanalysis, started to congeal in one direction: Circumcision, viewed increasingly as a stigma, became associated with trauma. The concomitant debates on circumcision reflected a climate in which anti-Semitism emerged with force and in which the question of Jewish identity was becoming increasingly important. Even as the practice of circumcision started to recede, especially among Jews in Western Europe, discourses on circumcision served as signposts for questions of Jewish identity and integration.78 At the same time, anthropology and psychoanalysis presented tools to think about Jewish identity in terms of culture and rituals, on the one hand, and character and psyche, on the other.

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One of the ways in which circumcision and trauma started to fuse conceptually was through the equation of circumcision with yet another corporeal mark: the mark of Cain. In 1917, psychoanalyst Theodor Reik published an article on the mark of Cain in Freud’s journal Imago, a publication that was meant to extend the methods of psychoanalysis to other fields of knowledge, especially the humanities. In “Das Kainszeichen: Ein psychologischer Beitrag zur Bibelerklärung” (The mark of Cain: A psychological contribution to the exegesis of the Bible), Reik argues that the mark of Cain takes the physical shape of circumcision.79 Reik’s reflections on the mark as an instance of self-mutilation by a guilt-ridden Cain followed the anthropological argumentation of James George Frazer, who had compared Cain’s mark with similar inscriptive rituals in a wide range of “primitive” cultures in his 1909 essay “The Mark of Cain” and had identified it as a means to ward off the vengeance of the dead.80 However, neither Frazer’s piece nor another earlier article cited by Reik (Bernhard Stade’s “Beiträge zur Pentateuchkritik: Das Kainszeichen” [Contributions to the critique of the Pentateuch: The mark of Cain]) mentioned circumcision as a possible instantiation of Cain’s mark. Only a short, speculative follow-up article to Stade’s thorough philological analysis, H. Zeydner’s “Kainszeichen, Keniter und Beschneidung” (Cain’s mark, the Cainites, and circumcision), proposed this equation. Justified by Zeydner’s suggestion, Reik’s article put together the anthropological and the psychoanalytical. After a vertiginous series of arguments, Reik indicts Cain with the crime of incest with an apocryphal sister as the motive for fratricide. Hence, Cain’s mark, as circumcision, signifies as a self-inflicted retribution for a sexual, not a moral, transgression in symbolic anticipation and thus avoidance of another punishment: castration. In Reik’s analysis of the Bible, the mark of Cain has shifted from a sign of god’s protection to a simulacrum of castration. Through a psychoanalytical lens, even religion is only about one thing: the management of sexual desires.81 We do not need Ludwig Levy’s rebuttal of this thesis in a subsequent issue of Imago to realize that Reik’s explanation and logic are extremely tenuous.82 It is irrelevant if the mark of Cain really could have taken the form of circumcision—allowing the Cain figure had some kind of referent outside of the imagination of the authors of that Bible passage. What is not irrelevant, though, is why a renowned psychoanalyst might have found it compelling to connect the mark of Cain and the rite of circumcision. Indeed, the link between circumcision and castration had almost become a psychoanalytical commonplace by the time Reik published his article. Such a connection had been haunting Freud’s work since his first theorizations

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of the Oedipus complex. What seems less commonplace, however, is Reik’s link between circumcision (and, by extension, castration) and the mark of Cain. This is all the more surprising since the commonality of both marks is no longer a visible trace of a sacred passage or allegiance. Rather, Reik already assumes that the mark of Cain has been reframed as a sign of stigma. Indeed, Reik’s article from 1917 closely echoes the beginning of Stade’s piece from 1895 by establishing the common, negative use of Cain’s mark in contemporary discourse, though with updated examples. As the mark of Cain becomes circumcision, or rather, as circumcision becomes conflated with the mark of Cain, however speculatively, the specific cultural practice of circumcision acquires a double negative image: It references castration, via the mark of Cain, and functions as a mark of infamy rather than a sign of election. Suspended between two negative bodily modifications— one that carries a symbolic brand of shame via superficial impact and one that cuts more deeply— circumcision embodies the strange inscription of trauma. As such, it has to negotiate carefully, or, indeed, precariously, between the singular— or, really, between different singularities—and the universal. For Freud, circumcision and castration are indelibly connected, even though the cut of circumcision can be and has been read in multiple ways.83 For the European racial imaginary of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, circumcision was the mark that set the Jew apart from the nonJew. Through the hallucinatory lens of racializing bias, the Jew’s difference functioned according to a sexualized logic, erected and sustained by the genital location of the differential trace. Consequently, so this logic suggests, the Jew’s difference is also sexual, imagined either as hypersexuality or, more often, feminization.84 For instance, Otto Weininger’s infamous Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and character) of 1903, a much-touted polemical work on sexuality, argued in egregious terms about male superiority and female inferiority and strongly resonated with contemporary equations between women and Jews.85 It is in reference to Otto Weininger that Freud raises the question of circumcision in a much-discussed footnote of his 1909 work Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben (Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy), a case study read through the full-fledged lens of the Oedipus complex: The castration complex is the deepest unconscious root of antisemitism; for even in the nursery little boys hear that a Jew has something cut off his penis—a piece of his penis, they think—and this gives them the right to despise Jews. And there is no stronger unconscious

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root for the sense of superiority over women. . . . What is common to Jews and women is their relation to the castration complex.86

Freud’s marginal comment is telling for several reasons. In the context of a case study on the fear of castration, the slip from cutting something at the penis to cutting away (a piece of ) the penis—the first an act of removing an accessory part, the second an essential cut—seems a logical association. In Freud’s own system, castration signifies symbolically through a comparative visual economy: the boy’s small penis (or Wiwi-macher) against the father’s big penis, on the one hand, and against the mother’s and sister’s lack of a penis, on the other. That a, however slightly, diminished penis—with the prepuce cut away— could raise the specter of castration might be plausible at first sight, too (at least within Freud’s logic). Consequently, Sander L. Gilman reads the footnote in question as proof of the racializing logic that binds circumcision to castration and hence diminishes Jewish maleness to a kind of powerless femininity: “It is important to follow Freud’s stated train of thought: if—says the child—I can be circumcised and made into a Jew, can I not also be castrated and made into a woman?”87 Daniel Boyarin similarly reads this passage, through Freud’s eyes, as “little boys hear in the nursery that Jews have something cut off their penises and thereby conclude that they are women who look like men, or, perhaps more exactly, that they are men who have become women.”88 The problem here, however, is one of visualization: The boy hears about the Jew’s cut, but, in Freud’s hypothesis of a non-Jewish nursery, the boy does not see it. Except, as Boyarin points out, this is precisely one of the blind spots of the passage: Both Otto Weininger and Hans, the little boy of the case study, like Freud himself, are Jews. “Hans . . . did not hear about Jews having something cut off their penises; he possessed such a ‘damaged penis.’ ”89 Hence, so Boyarin’s conclusion, Freud has to distance himself from his own Jewish body and espouse a nonparticular, general (though not neutral) perspective by looking through the eyes of the gentiles. Only such a maneuver in perspectival shifting, even mimicry, allows Freud to postulate castration anxiety and the Oedipus complex as a universal economy rather than a specific Jewish condition. But the duplicity of the gaze in this passage does not stop with Freud’s construction of a “neutral” narrative voice. Instead, it is just the beginning of a series of hallucinations, of oscillations between hearing and seeing, between the cut of circumcision and its absence, between the “neutral” little boy of the footnote and little Hans the Jew. What does the little boy

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in Freud’s fantasy of domesticated racial prejudice see? In fact, he does not see anything at all. His alleged fear of castration via the specter of circumcision comes from hearsay, unsustained by any available visual evidence. It is only because of such a change in medium that the circumcised penis can be misimagined as something that has undergone a radical cut. Whereas castration anxiety here works nonvisually or, maybe, through an imagined visualization that builds on the supposed equivalence of women and Jews seen as pre-established truth in the European culture of that time, elsewhere Freud insists on the importance of visualization to suture the male infant into his role in the drama of the Oedipus complex—namely the visual confirmation that women do not have penises. But reading (or rather imagining) the circumcised penis as castrated penis is a profound misperception, one in which what one knows (from hearsay) does not align with what one really sees. Would the little gentile boy really “see” the circumcised penis as what he is supposed to recognize it as? When circumcision is thus aligned with castration, when hearsay trumps visual evidence, when the symbolic overrides the visual and corporeal, the difference between having the penis and not having it enters a symbolic realm, one in which genital difference (or at least such a slight difference as the presence or absence of a little piece of skin) might not be enough to stabilize sexual difference and to lead to the erection of Oedipus. What would a little Jewish boy make of the hearsay surrounding circumcision? If the little boy of Freud’s footnote were to be Jewish like little Hans and in possession of a circumcised penis himself, then what notion of his own penis (and that of his father) can he conceivably have? If the acceptance of sexual difference is the result of a visual comparison, what makes it plausible to suggest that the boy’s gaze would see his sister’s (or mother’s) lack of a penis as equivalent to his own penis minus prepuce? What would be the hallmark and model of an undiminished penis? What the future fear of a diminished penis? For Hans, the father’s penis (or so Freud argues), because of its size, becomes the model of what is desired and of what threatens Hans’s smaller widdler. But this economy of “falling short” does not work once Hans realizes that he is a Jew and has a “damaged penis.” Of course, were he able to compare his own penis with an uncircumcised one, Hans might acknowledge his own genital insufficiency—albeit the difference is, after all, quite tiny. But would he know enough about his Jewish identity and anti-Jewish hearsay to identify his own penis as a circumcised (and thus symbolically castrated) specimen? Would that alter the threatening model status of the father—another Jew with a “damaged penis”—and thus throw the Oedipal mechanism off track? Or, more radically, would

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not Hans’s potential acknowledgment of penile reduction on his own body derail Oedipus more effectively by eliminating the anticipatory, projected threat of castration? If Hans is already symbolically castrated, what more is there to fear? If the boy in the nursery, in Freud’s footnote, is (like) little Hans, Freud’s logic does not work. Neither would castration anxiety be operative if the boy in the nursery is not (like) little Hans. For circumcision, as castration’s specter, to haunt little psyches, Hans’s/the nursery boy’s own little prepuce has to engage in a hallucinatory game of Fort-Da: there and yet not there, at the same time. This means that circumcision is both the best and worst model of castration; the Jew is both Freud’s Oedipus par excellence and falls short of embodying it: always too perfect or not perfect enough. This means, then, that the Jewish elements, such as the ritual of circumcision, do not predetermine the path of psychoanalysis.90 Rather, psychoanalysis, especially its tenets of castration anxiety and Oedipus complex, is born there where Jew and non-Jew mutually haunt each other, where circumcision and its absence work together, where hallucinatory wholeness and hallucinatory lack are pitted against each other. The spectral connection between the boy whose castration is symbolic and prospective and the boy whose castration is equally symbolic but foreshadowed by the pre-cut of circumcision resonates with, and indeed presupposes, the logic of trauma. Only the oscillation between the visible pre-mark of circumcision and its absence cements castration as a re-mark, the haunting (non-)presence of the return of the repressed. Through the lens of contemporary discourses, assumed and redirected by Freud, circumcision itself is a traumatic event. As early as Freud’s 1893 “Preliminary Communication” to Studies on Hysteria, coauthored with Breuer, one of the first sustained reflections on trauma, circumcision and trauma are inextricably linked: “[Circumcision] is, no doubt, a trauma.”91 This experience, however, is not simply traumatic as a moment in the male infant’s life in which he feels the sharp edge of a knife and undergoes the painful induction into the social order and a system of filiation; circumcision is not simply a cut that sutures the boy into sociality, the name of the father inscribed symbolically on the body by cutting off a piece of flesh.92 In Gilman’s reading, for Freud, the mark of circumcision is a stigma that resonates with the experience of the exclusion and discrimination of the Jews, for instance in that of life in the Jewish ghettos: “We still bear these stigmata impressed on our minds and bodies just as we bear the mark of circumcision.”93 Even though the stigmata of diaspora and circumcision

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are not directly equated, their contiguity in Gilman’s comment effectively connects them. Contiguity is also the reigning logic by which trauma and circumcision enter into a complex relation in Freud’s Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion (Moses and Monotheism) of the 1930s. Written in the atmosphere of rising anti-Semitic sentiment, under the shadow of Nazism’s sway over Europe, Freud himself only revisited, finished, and published his book after relocating from Vienna to London.94 Freud’s Moses and Monotheism takes up the legacy of Imago’s interest in psychoanalytical insights into human culture and harkens back to Freud’s earlier anthropologically tinted works, such as Totem und Tabu (Totem and Taboo) of 1912–1913, by thematizing the question of Jewish identity and the genealogy of the Jewish religion in connection to trauma. From the second (1937) to the third part (1938) of Moses and Monotheism, Freud increasingly connects Jewish identity and circumcision with trauma. In 1937, in the second part of Moses, Freud’s verdict on circumcision still upheld a neutral stance by referring both to the unease of those who do not practice circumcision —“Those who do not practise it look on it as very strange [sehr befremdlich] and are a little horrified by it [sie grausen sich ein wenig davor]”— and to the pride of those who do — “those who have adopted [angenommen] circumcision are proud of it, ennobled [erhöht, wie geadelt], as it were and look down with contempt on the others, whom they regard as unclean.”95 In contrast to this almost artificially objective stance of 1937, in 1938, in the third part of Moses, circumcision has become completely uncanny because it symbolizes castration: “Further, among the customs by which the Jews made themselves separate, that of circumcision has made a disagreeable [unliebsam], uncanny [unheimlich] impression, which is to be explained, no doubt, by its recalling [die Mahnung an] the dreaded castration and along with it a portion of the primaeval past which is gladly forgotten.”96 The relation between circumcision and castration is not only, as Freud notes later, one of supplementarity —“Circumcision is the symbolic substitute [der symbolische Ersatz] for . . . castration”—but also one of “Mahnung,” a structure of recall, of the return of a repressed memory that is threatening, promising censure and punishment.97 Circumcision, castration, and trauma are brought together by a shared temporal structure. Both the origin of the Jewish religion and the trauma suffered by an individual are marked by belatedness. The experience of trauma and the event that triggered it in the first place are separated by a

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time of incubation that Freud names latency (Latenz). Much as the person in Freud’s example who walks away unscathed from the scene of an accident only to have to psychically relive this experience, according to Freud, Jewish identity incessantly harkens back to a forgotten, indeed repressed, originary trauma: the murder of Moses at the hands of the disgruntled Hebrews who no longer supported the harsh regime of monotheism that their leader, a highborn Egyptian who led them out of Egypt, was upholding. As Freud argues, Moses, the murdered leader, was later replaced by and symbolically fused with another revered Moses, priest to the volcano god Jahwe. In this scheme of things, circumcision as the Jewish mark par excellence actually originated as an Egyptian custom that Moses transferred to the Hebrews. A cultural import stands at the origins of Jewish religion. Freud suggests that circumcision itself is a visual reminder of trauma, of the trauma of the Hebrew culture, namely of a suppressed murder of the overwhelmingly powerful father figure of Moses. Even after Moses’s removal, his rebellious Hebrew “sons” keep and perpetuate the sign of his power on their bodies, not unlike Reik’s Cain who commemorates and expiates an act of sexual usurpation by circumcising his penis. Symbolically speaking, the Hebrew “sons” have gone back on their assumption of power and symbolically sacrifice their manhood to the sacrificed (and thus consecrated) father figure of Moses. This narrative is only intelligible as an echo of Freud’s theory about the phylogeny of human sociality in Totem and Taboo. There, Freud uses anthropological evidence, such as the phenomenon of totemism, as a way of laying the collective foundations for the Oedipus complex. At the inception of social organization stands the primal horde (Urhorde) with an overwhelmingly powerful father figure controlling access to all females and oppressing his sons, until his sons rebel and overthrow the father’s reign in a violent act of castration, murder, and cannibalistic feast. And yet, the sacrificed father returns as religiously heightened, internalized law that controls the sons’ aggressive and sexual impulses through a symbolic subjection to the law of the father, thus rendering sociality possible. The ur-scene of Judaism in Moses and Monotheism repeats this primal scene of humanity, thus indelibly linking circumcision and trauma. As a visible reminder (Mahnung) of the traumatic memory of a murder that founds Jewish identity, circumcision also commemorates the primal trauma common to all of humanity: the murder of the ur-father. Jewish history repeats human history; circumcision points to a culturally specific trauma while also awakening an uncanny memory common to all of humankind.

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For Freud, circumcision functions as a bridge between the particular and the universal, since it knits together the individual psyche, the collective memory of (the Jewish) culture, and humankind at large under the sign of trauma. Much of part three of Moses and Monotheism is an extreme stretto between the reflections on Jewish identity formation and traumatic neuroses in the individual, via the discussion and explanation of latency. The phylogenetic development of the Jewish religion and culture is placed in contiguity with a discussion of trauma, as the case of an individual’s (arrested) psychic development becomes an illustration of the development of a culture. When Freud illustrates the concept of latency via his example of an accident that begins to haunt an individual’s psyche, since its initial impact remained unregistered, he does not only propose an analogy that helps us conceive of the formation of a collective ( Jewish) psyche. In other words, trauma makes the individual psyche and the collective comparable, helping us understand one through the other. Trauma is the connection between individual and ethnos, between the psyche of the individual and that of the collective, between psychic ontogeny and phylogeny, cementing the double embodiment of human beings as “both nations and individuals” (Völker wie Einzelne).98 Circumcision, as a culturally specific ritual symbol, marks the intersection between individual psyche and collective memory, both for those who are so marked and for those who are not. For Freud, the primal trauma that founds human sexuality and sociality infinitely regresses in the (male) individual’s psychosexual development. If all individuals bear the memory trace (Erinnerungsspur) of originary trauma and exist under the injunction to relive a traumatic past that predates their individual existence, then trauma’s latency cuts across the boundaries of individual lives and life spans, much as the compulsion to repeat traverses the gap between individuals and collectives.99 By the same token, in order for an event to become collective memory, it cannot happen just once but has to recur, strengthening its traumatic capacity to haunt individuals and groups with each incidence. Freud’s emphasis on the link between circumcision and castration, on the one hand, and between castration and trauma, on the other, establishes the individual’s sexual etiology and Jewish ethnohistory as inextricably intertwined. From this vantage point, circumcision as the visible reminder of a significant repetition of the ur-trauma—sacrificed Moses as avatar of the slain primal father—is no longer a mark that sets apart. Circumcision is uncanny (following Freud’s own definition of the concept in his essay of the same title) not because of its difference but because of its familiarity.100

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The specter of the circumcised penis strikes too close to home, since it constitutes an overdetermined, visual (or at least visually imagined) repetition of a deeply buried memory. Circumcision as a corporeal mark sends the submerged mnemonic trace of castration as culturally constitutive symbol into overdrive. It is its structure of reduplication that renders circumcision traumatic: not a lesser copy of castration—though its location indexes castration’s cut and though its line of filiation as ritualistic repetition takes us back to the past—but rather an excessive repetition of a psychic trace that is already haunting us. For Freud, circumcision is both of great importance and profoundly superfluous: It is at once only the repetition of something that is already latent and the necessary visualization of this elusive presence, since what is there can only register as a return. Circumcision is not traumatic by dint of its painful impact or because of its location—though the contiguity of its cut to that of castration does accomplish much in Freud’s scheme of things. Circumcision is traumatic because of its inscriptive logic. It visualizes another psychic inscription, the memory trace of human prehistory, but its relation to that psychic mark is conflicted. An index of something beyond cognition, circumcision’s embodiment of this mnemonic trace or track works by indirection. According to Freud’s logic, circumcision itself symbolically repeats and thus preempts the threat of circumcision. In other words, even as the circumcised penis activates a dormant memory trace, it does so especially (if not only) for psyches housed in uncircumcised bodies. Circumcision physically expresses the psychic inscription of those without circumcision. The trauma of circumcision, or, rather, trauma as circumcision, is the trauma of the absence of a mark as well as the trauma of its presence. If trauma is constitutive of psychic and cultural development in general, as Freud’s sexual etiologies suggest, its embodiments (such as circumcision) are physically and culturally specific. The connection between circumcision and trauma, between a culturally specific mark and a generalized psychic and human structure, is not merely analogical for Freud. Instead, the very connection between the figurative and the literal, the symbolic and the corporeal, establishes rather than simply illustrates the bond between the psychosexual etiology of the human individual, the genealogy of Jewish culture, and human culture as a whole. Much as the sexual becomes also cultural, culture is sexualized, indeed, sexed. The cut of circumcision, the mark that sets apart—Jews versus gentiles but also men versus women— also marks the exception that establishes the rule. In order to become symbolically operative (i.e., reflective of a submerged mnemonic trace), circumcision does not have to be present on each and every body. Indeed,

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its visible presence on some select bodies— caused by historical chance— assures, but also suspends, the latency of its psychic double in all bodies. If circumcision is a figure of trauma, a trace that inscribes, erases, and resuscitates traumatic memory, what kind of figure is circumcision? And what kind of inscriptive system is Freudian psychoanalysis if its archive takes shape, indeed assumes a body, by way of circumcision, suspended between historical trauma and sexual repression? In Mal d’archive (Archive Fever) of 1995, Derrida develops a theory of the archive by way of a return to Freud, to the traces, tracks, inscriptions, and impressions of Freudian thought that had dominated the rereading of psychoanalysis in “Freud and the Scene of Writing.” A thought that conjugates the “archival” and the psychoanalytical leads Derrida to describe the archive as traversed by the death drive: incessantly working to store and preserve traces and inclined toward its own destruction, dealing both in inscription and erasure.101 It also asks the question of the type of archive that is Freudian psychoanalysis by placing the figure of circumcision at its center. If we are to read psychoanalysis as a Jewish science, as Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argues in Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, a work that is as much a dialogic basis for Archive Fever as Freud’s own writings, then its Jewishness, so Derrida suggests, lies in its fundamental archival drive and imaginary, in the trace of circumcision. Circumcision, as a mark that resembles the inscriptions an archive can lay claim to and organize, is also at the margins of an archive. It is the “Leitfossil” (conducting fossil) of the archive, the pre-trace of psychoanalysis’s archival impression, and thus also outside of the archive proper.102 A proper sign, circumcision is at the heart of psychoanalysis only symbolically, but its individual imprint, such as the cut around Freud’s own penis, is confined to the marginalia of the archive of psychoanalysis: too close and personal for conceptual comfort, too central for psychoanalysis’s system to be expendable. Derrida’s reflections on the archive and on psychoanalysis, on the ways in which Freud’s circumcision is both excluded and included in the science he founds, also point to the crucial place of circumcision in Derrida’s own archive. Circumcision returns obsessively in Derrida’s work, but its overt appearance in Derrida’s writings is delayed, except for a passage in Glas of 1974 and Derrida’s 1976 notebook for a work on circumcision that remained unpublished.103 If Archive Fever of 1995 returns to one of Derrida’s earliest “scenes of writing” (his essay on Freud), it also remedies the suppression of one inscriptive figure there: the cut of circumcision. Circumcision is not only Freud’s figurative master medium, it is also Derrida’s.104 Derrida acknowledges circumcision’s sway in his 1991 work

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“Circonfession” (“Circumfession”), but by indirection, subterfuge, textual turns: Circumcision, that’s all I’ve ever talked about, consider the discourse on the limit, margins, marks, marches, etc., the closure, the ring (alliance and gift), the sacrifi ce, the writing of the body, the pharmakos excluded or cut off, the cutting/sewing [couture/coupure] of Glas, the blow [coup] and the sewing back up [recoudre], whence the hypothesis according to which it’s that, circumcision, that without knowing it, never talking about it or talking about it in passing, as though it were an example, that I was always speaking or having spoken, unless, another hypothesis, circumcision itself were merely an example of the thing I was talking about, yes but I have been, I am and always will be, me and not another, circumcised, and there’s a region that is no longer that of an example, that’s the one that interests me and tells me not how I am a case but where I am no longer a case.105

The work of circumcision for Derrida’s thought is potentially of two kinds. Either all the various figures and concepts that people Derrida’s work prefigure and, indeed, supplement circumcision or, alternatively, circumcision itself is just one expression, one embodiment, one example of Derridean theory. Circumcision either drives Derrida’s discourse and speaks through him or is relegated to the status of mere illustration—a possibility that Derrida disclaims, however. Circumcision ceases to function as a figure, by way of the textual gesture of pointing to, of singling out, one specific circumcision, that whose mark Derrida bears. It is this denial of circumcision’s exemplarity, of its status as conceptual metaphor, that returns circumcision to trauma. And yet, circumcision’s tie to trauma also lies precisely in this conflicted relationship to figurality—in Archive Fever, Derrida describes the enigmatic core of circumcision precisely as the question of figurality: “It carries [entraîne] literal singularity into figurality.”106 Circumcision makes itself heard, especially there where it fails to appear or only surfaces in disguise, camouflaged as other cuts, incisions, inscriptions. Circumcision, as ineradicable mark, points to an ever-elusive moment, the wound of a wounding under erasure, inaccessible to memory and cognition, a “wound . . . never seen,” a “phantom burning” (brûlure fantôme).107 Derrida’s reflections on circumcision are circuitous, perverse: They treat circumcision as the traumatic core that triggers his theoretical concepts, like so many symptoms made flesh in writing. While expounding on the latency of circumcision, Derrida’s auto(bio)graphical meta-reflection also grants circumcision the rank of figurative master medium, even as he insists on its irreducible singularity. Indeed, Derrida’s comment that I

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quote above is itself a quote within “Circumfession,” namely of the beginning of the notebook on circumcision, dated December 12, 1976. In a work that signals its interest in circumcision and confession in its very title— one that will be followed by Derrida’s reflections on Freud, circumcision, and psychoanalysis in Archive Fever and that is preceded by Derrida’s work on Paul Celan in Schibboleth (“Shibboleth”), figuratively invested in circumcision—Derrida recuperates, fifteen years after the fact, some reflections on the latency of circumcision in his own writing. Put differently, returning to the 1976 notebook means both to point to the latency of circumcision in Derrida’s work by avowing its covert existence (as notes that were never published) and to disavow its latency. Betrayal, indeed selfbetrayal, of the vow to never disclose and make public the jottings contained in his notebooks, its “recircumcision” (recirconcision) by writing.108 This treacherous temporal return, mise-en-scène of a textual haunting, of the scene of being written by circumcision, rewrites the trauma of circumcision and makes writing, as circumcision’s uncanny other, pay tribute to trauma even as it circumvents it. In this sense, circumcision is the best archival medium, even as it stands outside of the archive. Between the singularity of its cut and the collective meaning of its mark, circumcision suffers from archive fever, the archival death drive at the heart of the desire to store, conserve, organize, and catalog. Its form challenges the definition of the inscriptive trace, the minimal medial unit: It is both a cutting away (in the common German term Beschneidung as something that cuts, schneiden, at or upon, be- that Freud uses) and a cutting (cision) around (circum), as in the Latinate term that dominates Derrida’s “circoncision” in French. Circumcising the penis, as Derrida writes in Glas, means cutting off a piece without cutting it all; it means “cutting but, at the same time and in the same stroke [du même coup], remaining attached to the cut.”109 The cut of the foreskin cuts around, leaving as the mark of its impact the absence of a piece of skin. Circumcision no longer understood and read as an absolute mark or simply as a castrating cut. For Derrida, putting to work circumcision’s mark with its singular form, its circular shape and its superficial depth, also means to imbue circumcision with both the pain of trauma and the possibility of an ethical script. For instance, when Derrida deploys circumcision in “Shibboleth,” it is in order to think about the circular structure of trauma, with and for Paul Celan. “Shibboleth” asks about the power of the date, of dating traumatic events. Will such a commemoration disable and betray the singular impact of an event? How to turn to, as well as return to, traumatic impact without

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courting its eternal repetition, on the one hand, and its trivial replication, on the other? Derrida’s solution lies in the figural, and thus also conceptual, force of writing, of writing understood in one specific form, a “cutting, sharpened, concise, but also rounded, circumvenient form of a sickle, of yet another writing, of a sickle-script (‘Sichelschrift’). This writingsickle does not round [tourner autour] what it slices, since it does not avoid it, not altogether, but rather cuts in coming around, all the way around [elle coupe en faisant le tour].”110 This is writing imagined as circumcision, circumcision imagined as writing: an inscription that cuts into a surface, circumventing and thus conjuring up a radical cut, a cutting off, an obliteration. It happens only once, and yet it is writing that turns around, that evades, even as it cannot but turn back, forced to return to the scene of inscription. Turning, returning, but never closing the circle, avoiding closure and (cir)completion.111 In “Shibboleth,” Derrida translates the dictum by Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva that every poet is a Jew through the lens of circumcision: “Every man is thus circumcised. Let’s translate, according to the same trope: as well as every woman.”112 Inasmuch as every individual—irrespective of ethnicity, culture, and sex—sustains a precarious relationship to language, every woman, every man is circumscribed, circumcised by language, and circumcising language. Even there where a body does not carry the visible mark of circumcision, it is inevitably inscribed, branded, wounded by language and signification, even though not everybody is ever marked in the same way. Only this common yet disparate experience of circumcision, as a script of trauma and loss, enables the translation of individual pain into an ethical script, such as a practice of memory that does not erase the singularity of trauma or a style of writing and theorizing that remains open to the intrusion of the unexpected, of what troubles and disrupts its conceptual circles. Indeed, Derrida’s theories of circumcision, his circumscriptions, need such an interruption in order to function. Otherwise, circumcision would simply be relegated to a trope, abstracted from the cultural context of Judaism, from sexual specificity, and from corporeal singularity. In other words, circumcision can only function as an ethical figure, whenever its status as trope is constantly challenged, whenever something resists the figural urge. In all of what we are calling its tropic dimensions, circumcision remains a matter of the body [une chose des sens et du corps]. It offers itself for writing and for reading on the body. Or rather: the sense of the senses, the body, offers itself for thinking, signifying, interpreting thus, as it is revealed through this response to the question “What is the body proper, said to be proper?”: a place of circumcision.113

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Corporeality inevitably intrudes upon the tropology of circumcision and disarms its figurative turn. And yet, the body, the body proper, or one’s own proper body, opens itself to thought and experience, is a proper body only as inscriptive site: marked to bear a mark, even without or before bearing a mark proper. Corporeality here is always already imagined as a scene of reading and writing. While the body as inscriptive site is singular and specific, its inscribability and potential readability depend on an erasure of singularity, as it is poised to cross the threshold of signification. A bodily mark is never only what it is but is always on the verge of being translated beyond itself, placeholder and figure for another meaning. Trauma’s inscriptive figurations double this dilemma between the singular and the universal, between the literal and the figurative, since trauma itself (according to poststructuralist theories) is both what is most real and what cannot but be grasped through precarious repetitions, analogies, and figurations. Trauma is inscription without inscription precisely because its representation and theorization heap inscription upon inscription. The link between circumcision and trauma adds an inscriptive detour, while foregrounding the dilemma between individual bodies and collective cultural scripts. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud’s juxtaposition of an individual’s traumatic experience and the origins of Judaism is of the nature of an analogy. Congealed in the mark of circumcision, it folds the individual, collective identity, and humankind into one. The specific (the trauma of an individual, the circumcision of a Jew) instantiates a common human condition that remains latent— expressed by the cut of circumcision in some, unmarked in others. Freud thus places circumcision at the core of trauma’s structure as a means of replicating its logic on the level of the common human: the non-mark of trauma repeated obliquely on the circumcised bodies of some and remaining in abeyance on others. The problem with this selective distribution of inscriptive visibility, however, is the potentially facile equation of circumcision with a stigma ascribed to one group only, a group that, as it is singled out, allows the uncircumcised body to imagine itself at the outside of the economy of generalized traumatic return. Derrida’s reflections on circumcision attempt to stall the function of such a limited, prejudiced economy of inscription by extending circumcision—as a mark that all bodies are vulnerable to trauma—symbolically to everybody. Of course, this extension, pace Tsvetaeva, only works after circumcision has become equated with the trauma of the Holocaust, turning Jewish bodies into examples of precarious corporeality. The circular figure of circumcision, inscription around inscription, avails Derrida the opportunity of a rhetorical sleight of hand: a cut that is not quite a cut, a mark of trauma that is not quite trauma itself. The oscillation between the body proper and the

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fact that it only accrues legibility as a body by way of cultural scripts is kept in play by Derrida’s circuitous figure. Here, the inscriptive imaginary of trauma has come full circle, or rather, it has failed to complete its tour, marking an exit strategy, the failure of a complete encirclement, an opening formed by the disconnect between the circle’s beginning and end points. Or maybe the image of circular openness merely diverts our critical gaze from the all-too-perfect turn of thought. After all, the figure of circumcision, in its conceptual complexity and beauty, can easily grow all too remote from the bloody realities and the traumatic pain it encircles. What circumcision manages, as inscriptive figure with a specific, corporeal referent, or remainder, is precisely to keep the enigma, the shibboleth of trauma open: to keep it suspended between the corporeal and the conceptual, the singular and the general, the literal and the figurative. Because of its oscillation between the corporeal and the cultural, circumcision is a duplicitous trace, “carnal mark [ marque charnelle], written, spaced, and inscribed in a network of other marks, at once endowed with and deprived of singularity.”114 But who guarantees that the translation between the singular and the universal will be an ethical one, an understanding of a shared situation of being marked rather than a convenient way of singling out or scapegoating the other? Poststructuralist theory implies that its conceptualization of trauma is an ethical choice, when, in fact, it merely projects its general theoretical tenets onto trauma and finds them reflected there. Or, from a slightly different, yet not incompatible, vantage point, we could also argue that, much like Freud’s investment in trauma after World War I, poststructuralism was profoundly affected by World War II and its aftermath and that its theorizations of trauma, as well as of signification in general, were forged as a way of coming to terms with the horrors of the Holocaust. But such a paradoxical feedback loop— one that, not unlike trauma’s catachrestic logic, breaches the difference between the absolute singular and the generalizable, between ground and figure— does not in itself constitute an ethical injunction. It merely attempts to control and manage the dichotomies it scripts by folding them into a logically aporetic form that nevertheless keeps poststructuralism’s trauma management in play: trauma as the unceasing return of an impact and as the anticipation of a cut that is always about to fall. The inscriptive turns of trauma keep spinning, inscribing the absence of the trace, annihilating inscription by inscription, producing cultural and theoretical scripts in the abyss between the absolute singular and the eminently figurative and repeatable: impact erasure.

chapter 3

Stings of Visibility Picture Theories and Visual Contact

Indexical Turns In the debates about photography’s aesthetic, epistemological, and ethical value since its invention in the 1830s, one trait about its ontology has remained of central interest: indexicality. Early reactions to photography were dominated by its powers of representation—namely, that it captured each minute detail with the utmost fidelity, causing the observer to detect “with every step ever new and more delicious details and an infinite number of intricacies and nuances that elude the unarmed eye in reality,” as an 1839 report on the daguerreotype marvels.1 Beholders of early photographs were also intrigued by the absence of a creator: Unmediated by an artist’s hand, the photographic images, literally a type of writing with the medium of light, seemed carved by nature’s pencil itself, “as if impressions [Abdrücke] fallen from the sky.”2 The fact that the photographic process is multiply mediated—from the production of the photosensitive plates, or later film, to the camera’s mechanism, the photographer’s skills, and the chemical development—paled in comparison to the imagery of photography as reality’s imprint, double, or negative. 105

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We still tend to take a photograph instinctively at face value, even though we know that it can be made to lie in so many ways. This reveals photography’s special symbolic position. The innate belief in the veracity of the photographic medium derives from its privileged link to the world of objects. In spite of charges of manipulation, retouching, or forgery, we still trust photography to have the ability to produce a perfect likeness of its referent. This is because, to us, photography represents its object and effectively enshrines and reproduces its presence. Analog photography results from chemical processes that reveal, fix, and make visible light waves connecting the photosensitive surface and the object photographed through the camera lens: “Each picture point is causally connected to its object point through an optically enhanced beam of light.”3 The photograph quite literally confirms an object’s existence and presence at the moment of its photographic capture.4 It has been touched, via the medium of light, by the object it consigns to chemically fixed permanence. Photography belongs to a category of signs that Charles Sanders Peirce designated as indexical in “What Is a Sign?” (1894). Even though photographs resemble their objects exactly—which would make them signs based on likeness or, in Peirce’s definition, icons—“this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature.”5 The photograph, then, as an index, shares a physical connection with the object it represents. Reading the photograph as indexical means to recognize the extreme closeness between reality and photographic representation. Like a “fingerprint,” as André Bazin argues in “Ontologie de l’image photographique” (1945, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image”)—the “photograph as such and the object in itself share a common being,” so that “we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced [représenté], actually re-presented [re-presénté], set before us [rendu present], that is to say, in time and space.”6 If the photograph is a trace of reality rather than simply its mirror, if it shares in rather than simply mimics the real, then photography holds an uncanny power. Indeed, iconophobic critiques of photography have been wary of photography’s contact magic. Critics often describe photography as lacking, as a paltry copy of art, memory, or writing, and, indeed, reality. Photography is frequently faulted for its superficiality, for the fact that it does not render any meaning; that it is, as Bertolt Brecht argued in his aptly titled remark “Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht” (No insights through photography), the “possibility of a copy [Wiedergabe] that paints over [wegschminkt] context [Zusammenhang].”7 Even more radically, Siegfried

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Kracauer’s 1927 reflections “Die Photographie” (“Photography”) censure the medium as an amalgam of waste, a fragmented surface phenomenon that merely registers and catalogs presence without distilling meaning, a fetish reflective of the capitalist regime and concomitant changes in the perception and representation of reality.8 But in many of these critiques, photography’s menace does not derive from the insufficiency of the medium. Photography is threatening not because of lack but because of excess. Photography is too much like reality, too close to the object world for critical comfort and conceptual clarity. If, as Roland Barthes put it in La chambre claire (Camera Lucida) of 1980, reality adheres to the photograph, since it carries its referent with it, then its uncanny magic relies on proximity, on the promiscuous link between representation and object.9 Since the division between a photograph and its referent remains fuzzy, photographic representation might taint reality, even erase the very boundary between reality and medial semblance. Photography’s dazzling surface effects are faulted for being in excess of reality: As screens, they veil our perception of reality, make us reassess the world on the basis of its false images, or, even worse, force reality to present itself in the guise of objects amenable to the capturing click of the camera. In the 1980s, Vilém Flusser’s Towards a Philosophy of Photography likewise battles (with) the reality status of photography. For Flusser, instead of the “window on the world” that they seem to open, photographs “emanate magic, seducing their observers to project this undeciphered magic onto the world ‘out there,’ ” effectively contaminating reality as such.10 Photography’s charge of duplicity, the deviant power attributed to it— namely, to project a mere semblance of reality that effectively distances us from an understanding of the realm of reality—hinges on contact anxiety. Only a medium that sticks too closely to the real, that lacks the detachment necessary for marking the difference between object and representation, might supplant reality itself. Such theoretical discontent with photography is merely the learned avatar of superstitious investments of photography with magic powers in the early days of this technology, such as the fear that a person’s essence will diminish with every click of the shutter, since part of it adheres to and is captured by the photograph, or, seen through the satirical lens of Chinese intellectual Lu Xun, the belief that a partial body shot prefigures and presages the cutting up of the real body.11 Photographic contact anxiety relies on an indexical imaginary of photography. But what about digital photography? In spite of its new technological shape, similar debates still dominate the descriptions of photography in the digital age. Some critics indict digital photography for its increased

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proneness to manipulation, while others point to the equally mutable and flexible nature of analog photography —but in either case the imaginary that rules the photographic medium is still closely tied to questions of reality.12 As Bernd Stiegler argues, even in the age of digital media, photographs “remain visual reflections on reality, they are realism, medially brokered and concentrated in images — even if that reality is radically constructed and, at times, does not consist of anything but image material that has been generated and altered on the computer.”13 As the digital supersedes analog media, as critics either celebrate the infinite possibilities of digital photography or bemoan the demise of analog certainty, indexicality has become one of the centers of theoretical debate yet again. If the increased interest in indexicality in the 1970s and early 1980s with a wave of index-driven theories of photography, art, and cinema (from Susan Sontag to Roland Barthes, from Rosalind Krauss to Philippe Dubois) began to augur a medial sea change, the 1990s and 2000s confirmed the uneasy relationship between the digital and the indexical. Rather than dying with the much-touted death of analog (or old) media, indexicality has in fact been multiply resurrected in recent media theory. Rather than defanging the concept of the photographic index, media theorists continue to explore its theoretical validity not merely as a swan song to the photochemical age but because, as Mary Ann Doane argues, an “indexical imaginary” persists in the realm of digital photography since it has incorporated, rather than erased, the logic of its photographic predecessor.14 Laura Mulvey’s reflections on (digital) cinema and death, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, even take the indexical sign of photography as the basis for film’s traumatic temporality: The cinema (like photography) has a privileged relation to time, preserving the moment at which the image is registered, inscribing an unprecedented reality into its representation of the past. This, as it were, storage function may be compared to the memory left in the unconscious by an incident lost to consciousness. Both have the attributes of the indexical sign, the mark of trauma or the mark of light, and both need to be deciphered retrospectively across delayed time.15

Here, the photographic index, as a mark of light that resembles the mark of trauma, no longer stands in contrast to digitality. Instead, the index, as a marker of trauma, death, and loss, spells the very meaning of cinema, thus inscribing the post-digital mourning of cinema’s death into the very essence of (analog and digital) film. Contemporary reflections on visuality do not instrumentalize indexicality as a mere means of contrasting

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the analog and the digital. Rather, indexicality resurfaces with a vengeance as a means of recrafting the digital imaginary itself. But what is the point of an index when we know that contemporary photographic technology registers differences in light by way of numerical codes rather than producing a photochemical imprint?16 Or, put more radically, was there even a point to the photographic index before the sway of digital code? After all, among the plethora of technical processes, the luminous inscription of the image happens in a mere instant. In the midst of complex technology and chemistry, does a flash of light really define photography? Or, does, as Tom Gunning contends, “[the] mediation of lens, film stock, exposure rate, type of shutter, processes of developing and of printing become magically whisked away if one considers the photograph as a direct imprint of reality”?17 And how direct an imprint happens in the photographic moment anyway? After all, unless we talk about the photogram rather than the photograph, a process in which the object is placed directly onto a photosensitive surface, the contact between object and photographic medium is further mediated by light’s light touch. In fact, critics or artists who view the photogram as a general model of photography rather than as one of its special cases seek to enhance the indexical mystique of the medium. László Moholy-Nagy, for instance, advocates for the importance of the photogram in his 1936 “fotografie: die objective sehform unserer zeit” (photography: the objective way of seeing of our time): the photogram, creation with light without a camera [kameralose lichtgestaltung], is the real key to photography. in it is embodied the absolute peculiarity of the photographic act [fotografisches verfahren] that allows us to fi x processes of light directly, independently of any camera, by way of a layer sensitive to light. it gives us the perspective of a type of optical research that follows its own rules and has been unknown until now. it is the most profoundly intellectual weapon in the fight for a new vision [die am meisten durchgeistigste waffe im kampf für das neue sehen].18

Rosalind Krauss echoes Moholy-Nagy’s emphasis on the photogram in the 1970s by claiming that it “only forces, or makes explicit, what is the case in all photography.”19 For Krauss the issue of contact in photography is key: Photograms are pure models of indexicality, because, like footprints, they are “the ghostly traces of departed objects.”20 Indexicality proves irresistible for theories of visuality even when they underline traits that restrict photographic contact figures. For instance, Philippe Dubois points to the

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temporal limitation of the image of photography as natural imprint, its momentariness, sandwiched between an array of other technological and chemical processes: The principle of the natural imprint in all its “purity” only functions between this before and this after, between these two series of codes and models, during the single fraction of a second in which the luminous transfer itself happens. This is its limitation. Only then, in this infi nitesimal moment, in this gap, in this indecision of duration, is the photograph a pure act-trace, does it have a connection of full immediacy, of real co-presence, of physical proximity with its referent.21

And yet, instead of disabling the indexical mystique, the image of a momentary, flash-like duration abets the notion of a miraculous coincidence of object and photographic capture, tinted by terms like “indecision” or “gap” that echo poststructuralist terminologies. But what is photographic indexicality anyway? If for Peirce photography served as an illustration of the indexical sign, discussions of photography teem with different metaphors, almost as if the photograph needed help from other indices in order to lay claim to indexicality. Sometimes in one and the same essay, multiple indexical figures vie with each other. Bazin’s “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” likens the photograph to a fingerprint and displays a range of metaphors related to preservation and the cult of the dead, from Egyptian mummies to insects trapped in amber, from death masks to relics, such as the Shroud of Turin.22 Susan Sontag’s reflections on the essence of photography in the 1970s likewise range from the “trace, something stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask” to the relic in the space of a single page.23 All these are metaphors that underline the copresence of referent and medium, albeit in very different forms.24 Is the photograph an imprint of reality, like the footprint, the death mask, or the fingerprint, a moment of contact between an object and a surface that leaves the trace of a presence now absent? Or does the photograph—mummy or ambered insect— contain its object, as Bazin’s dictum of the photographic image as “the object itself ” seems to suggest?25 Or is it a relic, a remnant of the object or its metonymic substitution—a nail of the cross, a shroud stained with Christ’s blood? Is the photograph born out of contiguity or continuity with the object world? Rather than fixing the image of the photograph once and for all, the indexical imaginary seems intent on flexibility, on multiple versions and reflections rather than on one single crystalized figure. The photographic image hides behind a kaleidoscope of indexical figures, dazzling likenesses

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that obliterate the question of figurative resemblance: What does it mean to claim that the photograph is like these indexical figures? But then, indexicality itself is far from a discrete category. Peirce, who proposed the term index to designate a type of sign that is physically connected to its referents, in contrast to the symbol (based on arbitrary relations between referent and sign) and the icon (based on an analogy, a likeness between referent and sign), provided widely differing examples himself: The index is a trace, smoke to a fire, the gait of a sailor, the shadow of a sundial, the movement of a weather vane, the symptom of an illness, the finger that points at an object, deictic markers in language, such as demonstrative and personal pronouns.26 In spite of the material connection that ties sign and referent together in each case, what is indexical about this relation seems to shift constantly. At times, the index partakes of the iconic (as in the case of photography), at times the symbolic traverses it, for instance in the case of linguistic shifters, such as “this” or “here.”27 In “Of Reasoning in General” Peirce even defines some indexical links between referents and signifiers as purely conceptual connections: “An index stands in for its object by virtue of a real connection with it, or because it forces the mind to attend to that object.”28 Of course, for Peirce, icon, index, and symbol form a trinity out of whose intersections emerges the world of signification; consequently, describing a medium as exclusively tied to any one of these lies outside of his conceptual purview.29 Indeed, no sign is purely indexical, nor would it be possible “to find any sign absolutely devoid of the indexical quality.”30 Given the flexible, fuzzy nature of the index, what is its use for a definition of photographic ontology? Let us ask a different question. Instead of trying to define what an index is, let us ask the following: What does an index do? An index constructs an undeniable link between object and representation, between referent and sign. Such a connection, however, does not arise out of thin air, rather it presupposes that the object participate in the act of representation. The object sustains a physical relation to the sign, because, as a medium, it is involved in producing the sign. In other words, the scandal (or advantage) of the index lies not only in the unclear relationship between referent and sign but also in its integral involvement with mediality. Rather than remaining a mere auxiliary to signification, the medium comes to the forefront in the form of the indexical sign. We could even claim that every sign is an index of its own medium; every sign points back to its moment of production, to the material processes of which it is the outcome. While this signifying content is perceived as secondary for most signs—as signs are read

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for the meaning they communicate, medium specificity often becomes a mere vehicle—the type of signs that Peirce calls indices activate and foreground the question of mediality. For this reason, theories of photography are particularly drawn to the idea of indexicality, since it allows the construction of an ontology as well as an epistemology of the photograph. In other words, seen through the lens of an index, photography can be read as a medial and artistic practice, as well as a sign system. But the very hybridity of indexicality troubles attempts at distinguishing clearly between these two levels. If, for indices, the object is also the medium, then photographs further complicate matters. Because of the iconic relation between a photograph and a photographed object, the photographic sign contains, to a certain extent, object, medium, and message all at once. And it contains them in the form of an amalgam in which it is difficult to extricate any one single component from the whole. Stating that the photograph is indexical, then, is not the point. But saturating the photograph with indexicality means to have recourse to an arsenal of metaphors that allow us to project and manage the potential aesthetic, conceptual, and ethical values of photography in particular, and visual media in general. For instance, the figure of photographic indexicality helps propose an ethics of spectatorship. Susan Sontag famously described her first exposure to photographs of the Holocaust in terms of shock: Nothing I have seen—in photographs or in real life—ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about. What good was served by seeing them? They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.31

In the context of a reflection on the mental inurement to photographic images in On Photography and their limited ethical impact, this passage oscillates uneasily between the possible impact photographs can cause and the caveat of their potential futility. Written several decades after the spectatorial event, the scene has all the ingredients of a traumatic experience:

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To see the horrors of Bergen-Belsen—through the mediated frame of photographs—means to be wounded. Such a reaction does not depend on comprehension; indeed, it hits all the more strongly because of the delayed nature of understanding. The profound cut of, or rather by way of, the photograph, rendered in corporeal metaphors that designate a psychic shock, is instantaneous, but its presence lingers. In spite of the strong imagery of a mental and visceral reaction to the photographic image, the passage expresses skepticism as to its possible ethical value. In spite of its intensity, photographic shock does not lead to political action, since its affect is divorced from understanding. The photographs that Sontag chances upon as a young girl blur the boundaries between the seeing subject and the suffering objects in the picture, as the “I” oscillates between acute pain and deadening shock, as the subject’s grief is both personal and impersonal. After all, what, who, and where is that “something” that “is still crying”? Even as Sontag’s description invokes a scene of heightened contact between image and viewer, the photograph’s political investment remains in doubt. As image, it can solicit an emotional reaction but does not deepen comprehension, since it does not provide an interpretation, just the instant captured by the camera that is in need of framing by other media.32 What is more, even the affective impact of a photograph cannot be taken for granted: Exposed to the unceasing flow of visual stimuli, spectators are no longer shocked by photographed horrors.33 In contrast to Sontag’s verdict of the photograph’s fickle emotional impact and its failure to enhance understanding, Roland Barthes’s reflections on photography, published posthumously as Camera Lucida, distinguish between a photograph’s appeal to our desire to learn and to recognize what we already know (an element he calls studium) and its emotional impact, the photographic “point,” or punctum: [This] second element will break (or punctuate) the studium. This time it is not I who seek it out (as I invest the field of the studium with my sovereign consciousness), it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument: the word suits me all the better in that it also refers to the notion of punctuation, and because the photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely, these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium, I shall therefore call punctum; for punctum means also: sting, speck, cut, little hole [piqûre, petit trou, petite tache, petite coupure]—and also a cast of the dice.

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A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me [me point] (but also bruises me, is poignant to me [me poigne]).34

If the photographic studium activates an observer’s capacities of cognition and interpretation, the punctum is pure affect. The punctum, the cutting edge of the image, pierces the viewer. Its singular force overwhelms and hurts. A photograph’s punctum is always double. As a point, a period, a speck, or a hole, it manifests as mark on the image itself: a detail that draws the eye and triggers our emotional investment. At the same time, the mark in the picture turns into an edge itself, one that hits, cuts, and marks she who looks at it. A surface marked or sprinkled with wounds or spots reproduces itself in the viewer’s reaction as a psychic mark, a figurative wound. In the face of photographic impact, what the image presents becomes secondary here. Even though Barthes provides examples of the poignant force of specific photographs in his own experience, the punctum obeys no law; its effect is personal and unpredictable. One spectator’s reaction might well point back to a photographic detail. But its poignant force can derive either from a potentially calculated compositional effect or from a completely personal association. Barthes’s concept of the punctum effectively doubles and diverts the indexical mystique of photography: It consists not only, not even primarily, in the trace of an object chemically transformed into an image but rather in the emotional imprint produced in a viewer. This is by no means a simple effect of photographic contact—between object and viewing subject by way of photography—but rather a structure that hides a complex process of translation: from object to subject, from marked image to imaged impact, from the literal to the figurative. Here, the photograph is newly connected to questions of inscription. No longer simply (or not so simply) the impression of light onto a surface, no longer merely the mark of representation, but rather a supplemental mark, one that occurs between the photograph and the eye of the beholder. The affective logic of photography formulated by Barthes in Camera Lucida feeds off the figurative contiguity between indexicality and impact. The facile gliding between the rays of light that hit a photosensitive surface and the photograph that hits the person who looks at it depends on a similarity of figures in an inscriptive continuum from impression to impact, where the almost imperceptible transition from trace to wound also bridges the gap between representation and reception, between medium and psyche, between materiality and figure. What subtends this equation hinges upon the figurative deployment of contact as impact as well as the mystique of photographic presence. Since

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a photographic representation cannot exist without the copresence of object and camera during a take, the photograph as object of contemplation projects some of the referent’s presence back at the viewer. In other words, in front of a photograph we can think that we feel the presence of he who is captured in the picture. However mediated and fragmented such a presence (after all, we tend not to regard the photographic negative— real recipient of an object’s emissions—but its copy as photograph), its symbolic power still holds true for the photographic believer, such as Barthes: “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.”35 Of course, figuration is always already inherent in our thoughts on photographic indexicality. The substance that, after experimentation with different materials, crystalized as the best medium for storage (since then superseded by the computer chip)—namely, film —betrays an etymologically mediated metaphorical closeness between the human body and photography, as Friedrich Kittler explains: “I am happy to report that the Anglo-Saxon word aegfelma or egg skin and the Old Frisian word filmene or soft skin are joined to the West German felmon, meaning skin.”36 In addition, photography can also be read as replacing techniques of corporeal marking, as suggested by Kittler, who provides an anecdotal connection between the disappearance of the practice of branding in Europe and the advent of photography with its uses in criminology and surveillance.37 Whatever its basis, however, photography is rife with images of corporeal inscription. Barthes’s notion of the punctum capitalizes upon such inscriptive figures by transferring inscriptions from the medium of the body to photographic surfaces and from the photographic imprint back to the (body and psyche) of the beholder. Clinging to photographic presence means translating the immaterial into the corporeal, by reading light, in a strange conflation with the photographic medium or film, as skin—metaphorical pathos of physical copresence and nurture through the photographic tether. It also means, however, to translate the corporeal into the figurative. As the photograph serves as medium of theoretical contact figures, it opens a temporal rift. In the photographic act, the material presence of an object, as the absolute singularity of contact, is doubled and stretched between the moment of the camera’s click and the observer’s reaction to the photograph. It is indeed the warped time of the photograph that Barthes singles out as the ontological essence of photography in a second definition of the punctum. In the second part of Camera Lucida, Barthes’s definition of the punctum shifts from an impact metaphor to the uncanny

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temporal twist that an insistence on photographic presence produces. Time is immobilized, “engorged” in an “excessive, monstrous mode” by the photograph.38 The photograph enshrines those of whose existence it bears witness in a temporal bubble that confronts the viewer with the reality of a future anterior. From the vantage point of the past, he whom the photograph captures alive is also inscribed in death, avatar of both “this will be” and “this has been.” Hence another punctum is born, no longer formally described but related to time. A photographic “stigma” that wounds, because it fills us with the horror of the “will-have-been,” of life in death: “The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”39 For photography to wield the punctum like a cutting edge, photographic reception needs to be steeped in a passive mode. In spite of the very personal investment that Barthes’s “I” in Camera Lucida models for a reader, a photograph actively overwhelms its audience of one. In spite of the double relay of presence, the photograph’s sting knows only one direction. She who looks cannot reciprocate; or so photography’s “law” asserts for Barthes: “I cannot penetrate, cannot reach into the Photograph. I can only sweep it with my glance, like a smooth surface [surface étale]. The Photograph is flat [plate], platitudinous in the true sense of the word.”40 In order to invest the photograph with the piercing force of the punctum, photography has to be flattened and smoothed. This assertion of photographic flatness so as to conserve the impact metaphor of reception returns us to Barthes’s discussion of photography as a problematic sign system at the beginning of Camera Lucida. Even before Barthes first develops the concept of the punctum as a plea for the impact of the photograph, he makes sure to underline the superficiality of the medium, not so much for the purpose of representation but for the purpose of developing a theory of photography. For Barthes, photography cannot be categorized, because, unlike other signs, it does not form a system (or, as Barthes has it, a language):41 “For there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking [ marquage], photographs are signs which don’t take, which turn, as milk does. Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.”42 Unlike the imagery of marks that characterizes Barthes’s description of the punctum, photography here lacks signifying power—since its own material and medial presence is erased in favor of that which it represents— couched as an absence of marking. This logic erases real processes of inscription or at least relegates them to a secondary role in favor of figu-

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ration. For the photograph to prick us, it cannot mark its own presence, as medium or sign system. For photography to embody a contact fantasy of impact, a force beyond representation and understanding, it has to activate as well as downplay inscription at strategic moments. On the one hand, the indexical mark of the photograph prefigures its visual punctum; on the other, the photograph needs to be perceived as a flat medium, unmarked and inured to intervention. Even as indexicality is translated into impact, the inscription that is the photograph—as a medium covered by traces rather than as the poignant iconic edge that inscribes or impacts—needs to be underexposed. Photography—both as a photochemical and as a digital medium —is essentially inscriptive on a figurative level as well as on the level of the literal functionality of the medium. Indexicality marks the extreme contact of photographic inscription. It also downplays inscriptive agency, since, imagined as technologically mediated copresence, an imprint of light takes over the role of she who actively marks a surface. This notion of an automatic inscription translates smoothly to the scene of reception, framing the beholder of the photograph as a sufferer of its punctum. Of course, theorists like Barthes actively script such a stance of passivity. After all, it allows for a privileged affective access to and an ethical investment of photography. The conceptual insistence on photographic flatness—precisely because of its proximity, even potential interchangeability with its referent—prefigures the transfer of inscription from the real to the figurative, from the material to the psychological. The theoretical and ethical problem inherent in this logic is not, per se, the doubling or proliferation of inscription but rather the naturalized analogy between receptive inscription and wound: The photograph stings, cuts, wounds its beholder. The precarity of such a figurative conflation emerges particularly clearly in a scenario in which we are faced with real corporeal wounds, as in the following literary and photographic counterpoint: a scene in the 1983 novel Lumpérica (translated into English as E. Luminata) by Chilean writer Diamela Eltit, in which the protagonist, E. Luminata, inflicts cuts to her arms, resulting in a complex reflection on the representation of bodily pain.43

Counterpoint 1: Cutting Eyes The woman’s body is slightly tilted forward, part resignation, part defiant exhibition. Her hands, palms side down, lie side by side while her forearms rest on her knees. Her garment (a blouse? a dress?) hangs down loosely, its folds visible as dark furrows in the surface exposed to the light. The light,

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from an invisible source, comes from the right, brightly illuminating the woman’s upper arm, an unbroken surface of white. Our eyes search for her eyes, but we only see them lie in deep shadows, as do her legs, fusing into the background. The play of light and shadow exposes her arms, thus highlighting the woman’s own gesture of exposure. Both arms are covered with black spots and stripes, almost a continuation of the folds of the garment on her shoulder. A second look presents the black marks in a different light—as wounds cut into the skin, as places where the corporeal surface has been burned. The photograph I am describing here is included in the novel Lumpérica by Diamela Eltit. Lumpérica, a highly experimental text, evokes a square in Santiago de Chile, during the nightly curfew hours of the Pinochet dictatorship, in which the novel’s female protagonist, E. Luminata, interacts with a group of homeless people under the incessantly changing light beams of an advertisement billboard. Thematically charged with medially reflected violence and precariousness, Lumpérica, the first novel by an author who has since become one of the most powerful voices on Chile’s literary scene, was created and published under dictatorship, ten years after Pinochet’s military coup and years before the country’s return to democracy. Evading censorship through literary and experimental density, Eltit’s novel obliquely remarks and reflects not only upon the human pain inflicted under dictatorship but also on the suffering caused by the country’s neoliberal sellout that continues to drive large parts of the population into abject poverty. The single photo included in the novel complicates the problem of representing pain and suffering. Taken in the context of the 1980 performance Zona del dolor (Zone of pain, also known for its location as Maipú), it shows Diamela Eltit, the novel’s author, after she inflicted cuts and burns on her arms during a reading of parts of what was to become Lumpérica in a brothel in Santiago’s red-light district Maipú. In the text, the picture appears at the beginning of chapter 8, “Ensayo General” (“Dress Rehearsal”), a series of textual fragments in which a nameless protagonist—supposedly E. Luminata—inflicts cuts and burns on her arms. The photo is the point where text and performance intersect—a point of connection and a point of interruption that juxtaposes two different media through a third one, photography. It also serves as the nodal point for a reflection on pain’s graphic or, indeed, photographic representation. The challenging question of how to represent pain in an ethically responsible way continued to hold a special importance in the context of Chilean writing under (and after) dictatorship. For many writers, artists,

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and thinkers, an imaginary of wounds, marks, and traces became one of the prevalent metaphors, starting with stripping the metaphoricity from the word golpe, retranslating it from the abstraction of “coup d’état” to the physical pain of a “blow.” For instance, critic Nelly Richard frames the political, economic, and cultural debates after dictatorship as a war of inscriptions: Dictatorship has left its marks on both individual bodies and, symbolically, Chilean society as a whole, whereas the period of transition and the continued orientation toward neoliberalism attempt to erase these wounds. This erasure works hand in hand with a passive forgetting, as well as with new types of physical inscriptions in the incessant flows of capitalism and mass media: The traces of the past suffer today repeated processes of erasure [borradura], and not only of a political and institutional nature. They exist also disguised as the seduction of television and commercial bliss. A fin-de-siècle globalization that moves to the evanescent rhythm of commodities without having time for nor taking pleasure in asking itself what each novelty leaves behind, dissipates the value of a historicity painfully ciphered in the experience of the dictatorship and causes that which we thought impossible to erase [imborrable] to become each time more blurred [borroso].44

According to Richard, resistance against neoliberalism’s planned obsolescence of the past must happen in the realm of cultural activity—literature, art, performance, and theory—by holding on to memory and trying to reinscribe bodies in danger of a double erasure: the disappeared during dictatorship and the subsequent obliteration of their remembrance. Answering an inscription, erasing it with another inscription, or giving a cut for a cut are strategies that emerged during the dictatorship in the form of artistic movements that used “interruptive strategies.”45 Figures of cutting and (counter-)inscription are not only an instrumental part of their nonmimetic artistic practices, often inflicted in quite literal ways onto the artist’s own body, but also part and parcel of the language used in discussions of the works of these artists.46 But Eltit’s act of self-mutilation is not a facile reproduction of the impact of dictatorship. Instead, it reflects critically on the possibility of representing (another’s) pain or collective trauma. Eltit’s text-cum-performance signals from the start that it constitutes a supplement, a precarious stand-in. Eltit’s photograph in Lumpérica is central to her critical agenda. By introducing a commentary on the photograph within the text, the novel cuts back to the visual medium that stands in its midst as an intruder. The

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passage in question, however, is not just a textual interruption that returns readerly attention to the photo. By turning back to the photograph, it forecloses the viewer’s tautological turn from the photo to the “real” object. The commentary makes the photo visible as a medium. The title of the passage that contains the commentary, “(En relación al corte de la fotografía)” ([Concerning the photographic cut]), is ambivalent: It can be read as concerning the cut in the photograph and as related to the cut that the photograph achieves or embodies.47 Consequently, it already prepares readers or viewers for a complex scenario related to wounds, as well as their representation and reception: Does the cut represent itself as in the photograph? Rather it is fi xed as such [se lo fija como tal]. The representation takes place to the degree that the cut is acted upon. For example, the track of the cut [el trazado del corte] is a furrow that is operated on by divulging it in that way as a signal. Yet, being like a furrow, it becomes a trench or breastwork behind which is protected or hidden a performance. As furrow, it is sunk beneath a surface that has been penetrated. If it is restored photographically [Si se lo devuelve fotográficamente] it becomes flattened by the rigor of a new surface, which will be broken only by the eye that cuts its gaze there [que solamente será rota por el ojo que corta allí su mirada].48

This passage uses the photographic medium to reflect on the representation of pain in general. The new surface of the photograph distinguishes itself from other media for its precision, but its representation also flattens the three-dimensional materiality of the objects it captures. It converts the three-dimensionality of cut skin with its “furrows” and “trenches” into a flat, smooth surface. The cut as represented in the photo is no longer a cut, it is an image of, but not equivalent to, the marks on the writer’s arms, or rather on the arms of the photographic double that we identify (or not) with the author and her proper name, Diamela Eltit. The commentary forecloses a reading that would efface the medium of photography and thus equate a representation of a cut with bodily wounds. It eschews a mimetic reading, and yet it offers a supplemental way in which the photograph can, after all, represent a wound by investing it with the possibility to cut, by shifting the cut from representation to reception, from imaged object to imagined impact. At first glance, this resonates with Barthes’s punctum, since it translates the photographic representation of a bodily

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wound into an affective impact suffered by the observer. And yet, Eltit’s text proceeds to a critique of just such a translation from the corporeal to the figurative. According to the text, the photographic cut is a “trompe l’oeil,” conjuring up the illusion that the cut of the photo is the same as the cut(s) in the photo.49 Instead, the cut takes place on the level of looking and consists in the very interruption of a mimetic logic of photography. The cut happens again, imagined on a different level within the medium of photography, namely in its reception: The new surface of the photograph “will be broken only by the eye that cuts its gaze there.” But this is yet another trompel’oeil for the reader. Instead of a unidirectional cut from image to viewer, the cut here is doubled, the photographic surface breached by the gaze, even as it also cuts the eye of the beholder. In the proliferation of different cuts, corporeal marks never quite translate smoothly into a viewer’s pain. Instead, the transfer between the corporeal and the figurative itself is interrupted. The multiplicity of cuts can never quite replace and erase the pain of breached flesh. Eltit’s text marks that the representation of the cuts is not the same as the cuts themselves but is merely the means by which the replica or shadow of a cut can be reproduced endlessly. The point of the photo is not its representation of the author’s cut arms, or the replica of such a cut by way of readerly impact, but its interruption of exactly this kind of reading: “The eye that surveys the photograph stops at the cut (its cut) and reforms the gaze when confronted by an annoying, unexpected interruption.”50 The whorl between the photo and its commentary highlights the cut as representation, as the textual blade creates a disruption of the representation’s trompe l’oeil—namely, its imposture of nonmediation. The cuts in the photo are not cut into flesh. The chiasmic point of the photo, as remainder and reminder of the paradoxical intertwining of text and performance, prevents the equation between an object and its representation. The author’s photograph with cut arms multiply stands in for the hole pain opens in signification, even as its signifying strategies cannot fill it. It achieves this through a perspectival twisting, by including our gaze upon the photo in the text we are reading. Both ways: cutting eyes. Can a physical impact happen in and through visuality? Can a look hurt— either the viewer herself or the look’s object? Since an image or a text—as the representation of a cut— cannot be that cut, why should we trust it to create an impact, inflict a metaphorical wound, when our gaze hits it? The equation of image and object is as dangerous as endowing an image with the power to shock whomever looks at it. Would one and the

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same mark on and of the image always produce the same reactionirrespective of individual viewers, contexts, repetitions, and mediations? And what guarantees that we actually take a visual hit or that this shock turns eventually into an ethical response rather than remaining an aesthetic (if sublime) sensation? When we talk about the sting of visibility, the corporeal impact an image—not even the direct sight of an object— can cause, we reify photography’s immediacy by way of a dangerous supplement: a replacement of vision by touch. Even as an ethics of witnessing thrives on the image, or fantasy, of an image’s power to testify and to move those who contemplate it, can it allow itself to fall prey to the lure, the subterfuge of the touch of visuality? When we attempt to repeat physical pain that is only precariously expressed in a photograph through a figurative deployment of pain through vision, are we not at once overwriting pain and erasing the mediality of photography? When we replace the traces of the real in a photograph with an image of visual impact, we extend, rather than contest, the relation between photographic medium and reality. We translate the contact between object and medium into the spectator’s relationship to the photograph as an object. In this conceptual act, we will have duly bracketed and questioned the referential powers of representation, only to ascribe more force to an even more tenuous tether between reality and photography. In the act, the figurative indexicality from image to eye accrues more reality—as visceral event rather than as cognitive experience—than the mediated trace of the object world. Why does the figure of inscription find itself so frequently in need of doubling? Such supplemental marks, rather than becoming less important in the age of new media, become ever more virulent, strengthened rather than weakened by the advent of digital imaging and storage technologies. Almost as if “new” media lend themselves more readily to an imaginary erasure of materiality, only to be gifted with the capacity to influence or absorb us spectators. An art of the surface thriving on supplemental marks, so that the functioning and material support of the medium —art, architecture, analog or digital photography, etc.— can become secondary, replaced by the way in which an image affects us. But if we are ready to ignore the material specificity and depth of media—such as the processes of physical inscription at the basis of digital technology—why fault them, at the same time, for their shallowness, and why replace real depth and contact with a virtual material imaginary, granting pseudo-physical power to the figurative?51 By critiquing the powers of photographic representation, theorists of visuality in fact reify it on another level. This still holds true for a conceptual shift from presence to absence, as poststructuralist

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theories inherit indexicality and reshape it for their purpose. While Barthes still insists on the mystique of copresence as an integral part of photographic ontology, poststructuralist theories focus instead on immediacy and on the visualization of absence as they retool photographic presence in the guise of the photographic trace.

Flash Theories, Shock Therapies Unlike Barthes and other devotees of photographic indexicality in the 1970s and 1980s, theorists of photography after the digital turn needed to turn their attention away from the material presence attributable to the older photochemical avatar of the medium. If Barthes’s temporally informed concept of the punctum still relied on a creed in the copresence of object, medium, and spectator, more recent reflections show photographic temporality trumping spatial continuity. In his 2001 essay “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” for instance, Peter Geimer proposes to divorce the photographic index from the imaginary of a transubstantiation of the object. For an updated and more inclusive understanding of visual media, indexicality needed to sacrifice physical continuity—a tenuous notion even for the multiply mediated realm of photochemical photography anyway. Instead, Geimer advocates for contingency as the key feature of a differently understood indexicality, for a photographic act that reflects a chance encounter between unwittingly captured object and observer. Instead of presence and consubstantiality, Geimer resurrects the photographic trace as a nod to “contingency, to the unforeseeable event, to that which is unsusceptible to being composed.”52 To refer to the power of photography to take in anything that comes before its lens during the instant of exposure as an instance of the trace is a suggestive conceptual maneuver. On the one hand, it allows photography a remainder (indeed, a trace) of its indexical force. On the other, the redefinition of the trace as contingency swerves away from ontological presence toward an imaginary of eventfulness more in tune with poststructuralist tenets. Geimer’s choice of a quote from Henry Fox Talbot’s “Pencil of Nature” that lists examples of photographic chance capture as a series of inscriptions is hardly innocent here, since all these are instances of writing—placards, dial-plates, house numbers, or shop signs—textual intruders into the image.53 The photographic trace as the medial projection of the unexpected and the details thus photographed that are themselves textual traces coincide to effect a metaphorical contagion: Photography becomes automatic writing once again.

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By pointing to the indexical force of the contingent in photography, at work in the flash-like instant of exposure, however, the spatial relation between object and photographic apparatus is not voided. Rather, contingency remains closely tied to contiguity—after all, both terms indicate an idea of proximity, of a coincidence (con-) of touch (tangere). What has changed here in comparison to Barthes’s understanding of indexicality pertains to the realm of spectatorship: Since the object is no longer perceived as present in the picture, the force of an observer’s reaction can no longer derive from the impact of a captured object. What touches he who looks at a photograph is not the object or its emanations. Rather, it is the surprising event of the trace of something unexpected in the picture that hits a spectator: absent presence. The impact of photography consists in the intrusion of an unwanted part of reality into the picture during the photographic act that comes to light only belatedly as the photograph is exposed to the gaze. Walter Benjamin, so often cast in the role of the mourner of the auratic power of images, already proposed such a reading of photography in his 1931 “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (“A Short History of Photography”) and his 1936 “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”). In Benjamin’s words, all photographs—with the exception of the earliest daguerreotypes—are divested of aura, since they convert the distance of the image into an excess of closeness, singularity into the iteration of a potentially infinite series of reproductions, thus “prizing . . . the object from its shell” (Entschälung des Gegenstandes aus seiner Hülle).54 But Benjamin’s view of photography, as many critics note, is more than a mere swan song to auratic wholeness.55 Toward the end of his essay on photography, while reflecting on the lessons to be learned from the medial specificity of the photograph, he links the medium to a new, “modern” type of experience, that of shock (or, in Benjamin’s spelling, “Choc”):56 “The camera becomes smaller and smaller, ever readier to capture transitory and secret pictures which are able to shock the associative mechanism of the observer to a standstill.”57 At first sight, shock is, of course, nothing like the aura, a “peculiar web of space and time” (sonderbares Gespinst aus Raum und Zeit), and yet the “Gespinst” (web but also gossamer) of the aura is never far from “Gespenst,” or specter, much as the shock effect is invoked in “A Short History of Photography” as the uncanny effect of the unconscious made visible.58 The description of shock as an effect of the (then) relatively new media of photography and film in conjunction with Benjamin’s reflections on an

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optical unconscious prefigured more contemporary thoughts on the analogies between trauma and photography. The very relation of photography to the unconscious, and thus to a representation of the unsayable, the unrepresentable under the sign of trauma, has garnered new positive power for the photograph. Photography is no longer thought of as a tool of witnessing because of its alleged representative precision alone but rather because of its uncanny relation to time. It freezes time—in the famous words of Barthes—into an uncanny future anterior since that which we see in the photo as present and alive actually functions in the temporality of the will-have-died, and it also visualizes what has not or could not have been experienced. Echoing Benjamin, Ulrich Baer applies the imaginary of an imprint that has not been semantically integrated and is not amenable to meaning to both trauma and photography. According to Baer, photography is exceptionally suited to a representation of trauma because its temporality breaks through the illusion of a continuous, teleological timeline and situates us in the disconnection and suddenness of the instant: “Photographs can capture the shrapnel of traumatic time. They confront us with the possibility that time consists of singular bursts and explosions and that the continuity of time-as-river is another myth.”59 Clearly, photographs capture and freeze an instant into an eternity— or at least until the photographic storage media gives out. But what are we to make of the constant use of images of instantaneity and violence around descriptions of photography, of the obsession with explosions, bursts, flashes, and shocks? Such images assert themselves at different levels of the photographic process. For one, photography potentially presents the possibility of capturing and making visible phenomena whose speed dazzles the human eye, as with the galloping horses of Eadweard Muybridge’s experiments, as well as with even more fleeting moments, such as the clashes of technologized war. With more than fifty years difference, both Oliver Wendell Holmes and Ernst Jünger, for instance, were fascinated by the thought of recording the violence of warfare on camera, from Holmes’s fantasy of photographing “bursting shell” or the “lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets” in 1859 to Jünger’s invocation of the impassive camera eye that registers a “bullet in mid-flight” or a “man at the moment an explosion tears him apart” in 1921.60 If photography emerged as the medium best suited to eternalize the violence of deadly bursts, it was itself framed as an explosive medium that needed a burst of light in order to work its peculiar magic. In Holmes’s reflection on photographing warfare in his 1859 essay “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” photography is credited with the ability to document war because it resembles the violence it makes visible:

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The next European war will send us stereographs of battles. It is asserted that a bursting shell can be photographed. The time is perhaps at hand when a flash of light, as sudden and brief as that of the lightning which shows a whirling wheel standing stock still, shall preserve the very instant of the shock of contact of the mighty armies that are even now gathering. The lightning from heaven does actually photograph natural objects on the bodies of those it has just blasted,—so we are told by many witnesses. The lightning of clashing sabres and bayonets may be forced to stereotype itself in a stillness as complete as that of the tumbling tide of Niagara as we see it self-pictured.61

That visual technology and warfare are next of kin has been amply discussed by critics such as Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler.62 But the imagery at work in connecting the photographic act and technologized warfare also functions via the metaphorical contamination of photography with lightning: Even though photography, unlike lightning, does not blast bodies, its flash, like the strokes of lightning, captures and marks objects. Implicitly, photography’s bursts of light are thus aligned figuratively with the violence of explosions and lightning strokes—not usually as lethal but potentially as shocking. Photography can record the moment of explosion since both events are of a kind; by extension, photography as representation of shocks can also be endowed with the power to shock. Imagined akin to lightning, especially by pointing to the fickle early technology of the magnesium flash, a part of the photographic apparatus effectively consisted in a contraption that triggered controlled explosions. The photographic flash becomes crucial in translating violence from that which is photographed to the photographic act itself, and, finally, to the reaction of she who looks at the photograph. Baer eloquently invokes the disorienting power of the photographic flash as a kind of shock effect in Spectral Evidence: The flash takes you by surprise, no matter how long in advance you have been warned. It cuts into a scene with the violence of the lightning bolt and yet instantly displaces attention from itself to the darkness of its surroundings. Presumably you recover, only momentarily blinded by an excess of artificial light, and try to regain your composure. The flash creates a physical disorientation. . . . An excess of light that promises total (as we will see, illusory) visibility, and that goes out at the same moment that it goes on, the flash cannot be integrated into sensory experience but only registered, belatedly, incompletely, possibly as shock; too much light produces a loss of sight.63

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In a footnote to this passage, Baer warns us not to confuse the impact of the photographic flash with the Benjaminian notion of shock, since the former is simply based on a physical reaction to a technological apparatus, whereas the latter, as aesthetic phenomenon, causes a suspension of cognition with a view to enhancing “cognitive fulfillment” afterward.64 Of course, aesthetic shock is not at all like the mechanical shock of the camera’s flash. After all, we experience the impact of the flash only during the act of photographic capture, while shock as an aesthetic experience is mediated and occurs upon contemplating a representation. Whereas the photographic flash hits us on scene, aesthetic shock happens in the closely controlled realm of literature and art, induced by contact with repetitions and copies rather than in the act of production. In spite of its rhetoric of singularity and eventfulness, aesthetic shock usually presupposes a circulation and distribution of (not always technologically) reproduced artistic and literary ware. Shock is the culture industry’s other to, as well as part of, cultural commodification. Conceptualized and imagined as an experience of displacement, as the unmooring of the self that is triggered by sense perceptions and turns into a psycho-physical reaction, shock simulates the rarefied experience of singularity in and with objects that are no longer singular and rarefied themselves.65 And yet, Baer’s caveat to keep the “shock” of the photographic flash and the “shock” felt upon observing a photograph apart already bespeaks their potential contamination. After all, it remains ultimately unclear what makes any single photograph (or other object of art and literature) potentially “shocking.” To become imaginable beyond a completely arbitrary reaction dependent on the sensibilities of a spectator, shock needs a conceptual anchor, such as Benjamin’s insistence on photographic shock as a potential unique to its specific medium —namely, to capture the unanticipated. The flash of the camera effectively anticipates the shock that jolts the beholder of a photograph, since the impactful recognition of the unexpected in the image connects back to the instant in which the photograph came into being. The connection between photographic representation and shock (or, for Baer and Mulvey, trauma) seems to circumvent the negative link so often drawn between the reproducibility of a photograph and its lack of singularity. Even as photography freezes and consecrates one specific, singular, unrepeatable instant of the real, its technology allows for the event’s almost endless repetition, reproduction, and multiplication in the form of copies or prints. Photography constitutes the infinite repetition of a singular moment, act, or pose by technical means, but instead of erasing the single event that it can reproduce infinitely, the photograph

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always points to the event. It is, in Barthes’s words, an “absolute Particular.”66 Instead of discounting photography as unable to represent, its very superficiality turns the tides of representation. Photography can be both the absolute singular and the infinitely reproducible, it captures the traumatic instant and refigures its compulsive returns, as well as makes it visible (if not accessible or intelligible). The temporal incidence of the photograph brings with it a different aftereffect, one that does not spell plurality into singularity but that doubles singularity, from the click of the camera to the shock of the beholder. In Benjamin’s texts on photography, these two instantaneous imprints are already present in nuce, since the camera transfixes invisible and fleeting phenomena whose mediated images, now become visible, though not necessarily intelligible to us, in turn transfix us in the act of looking. What is shocking, then, is not the content of an image but the fact that something unremarked has become visible. While the shock-effect of the photographic flash is not—pace Baer—the same as an image’s shock-effect on the viewer, photographic and filmic speed are effectively doubled in Benjamin’s concept of shock. For Benjamin, the evanescence of technologically produced visual images—the speed of the filmic frame, the sudden aperçu of the photograph—mirrors our perception of the past.67 To think historically, as Benjamin formulates it in “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”), means to capture the past only as an “image which flashes up [aufblitzt] at the instant when it can be recognized [im Augenblick seiner Erkennbarkeit] and is never seen again [auf Nimmerwiedersehen].”68 The image of a flash-like visual apparition of history that Benjamin reiterates throughout the essay is contiguous to yet another definition of shock, as the arresting of thought internal to the very act of thinking: “Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts [Bewegung der Gedanken], but their arrest [Stillstellung] as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.”69 The image that appears like a flash is not an epiphany of perfect cognition or instant insight. Rather, it is the image of a memory “as it flashes up [aufblitzt] in the moment [Augenblick] of danger,” pure event and peril that impacts us and, by dint of the shocked pause it induces, forces us toward thought and potentially allows us to develop a different kind of perspective or knowledge.70 The problem with Benjamin’s concept of shock lies not only in the conceptual contiguity, even coincidence, of the moment of visual capture and reception. This merely points to a more basic and widespread quandary:

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What is the relation between image and shock? It seems clear that the potentially violent impact of an image cannot derive from its content (i.e., what it represents). But neither can it hinge entirely upon its mediality (i.e., its technological characteristics). And what is the status of imageries of flash and shock? Do they characterize visual media, such as photography, by way of their technical conformation (such as the flash) and affective mechanics (such as shock), or do they use photography as images that conceptualize shock? In other words, is photography the object to be described or merely the vehicle that gives concrete shape to the ineffable concept of shock? Or are both part of a theoretical Ouroboros, continually biting its own tail? Two different scenarios of visual contact emerge. On the one hand, an overinvestment of photographic contact: The remnant of the object caught in the photograph collides with the observer with unsettling psychic consequences. On the other, an insistence on the temporal, and thus visual, mismatch of the photograph: the spectral apparition of an object unintentionally plucked from reality whose photographic displacement resonates with an observer. Imaginaries of the same medium tied either to presence and continuity or absence and displacement; and yet, similar metaphors of violent contact describe the act of perception in either case. Pushed to its extreme, the conceptual link between visuality and contact results in a generalized violence attributed to the image—no longer tied to a personal affective impact or defined by its content or specific visual medium (such as the photograph). Rather, the image becomes charged with violence figuratively, by dint of its status as image, its logic of representation. Barthes theorized the photographic punctum as closely tied to the temporality of the medium and, thus, potentially present in all photographs. And yet, visual poignancy remained virtual; its activation dependent on a given viewing subject and a given moment of contemplation. In contrast, some theories of visuality elevate violence to a general characteristic of images: All images wound, since they tear open reality. In Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (What we see, what regards us), Georges Didi-Huberman invokes the double nature of the image as a conceptual basis for its violent force. On the one hand, the image or visual object is all there is; it is a presence, an object, a thing itself. On the other, an image always points to something else. The image in general—without regard for medium specificity—at once presents a visible surface (what we see) and points to an absence. Thus arises a scission in representation: the presence of absence, the evocation—in a visual sign system — of that which is lacking, of loss and death (what regards us). Didi-Huberman invests the

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realm of the image with an especially pointed paradox of presence and absence: Precisely because the image represents nothing but itself, and yet constantly urges its observer to think beyond it, to perceive it as a screen for something else not immediately visible to the eye, it elicits our affective involvement. Didi-Huberman formulates two (false) extremes or strategies in front of an image: that of a tautology that reads an image as nothing but that image and that of a transcendence that only seeks the meanings that lie behind and beyond the image. In contrast to both extremes, the visual experience in front of an image or visual object should be alert to an absent present that opens the visual regime up to something that is not or no longer there, likened to an experience of shock or trauma: of being touched, violently affected, hurt. Between presence and absence, the image is a cut, an opening that wounds us, precisely because the image is not flat, not a mimetic representation or an uncomplicated mirror of what is there. This shock, this violence of the image is seen by Didi-Huberman as necessary, even curative, much as it is also violent and mind-shattering. Much as the throwing away and pulling back of a spool in the infant’s game of Fort-Da is theorized in Freud’s Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) as a renegotiation of loss, of the absence of the mother, the scission of visuality becomes a working through of visual loss. The rent that runs through the visible world cuts us deeply whenever it is made evident; it is “pure attack, pure visual wound” (pure atteinte, pure blessure visuelle).71 Didi-Huberman’s theory of visual representation endows the image with a dimension of depth. In other words, because of its referential connection to the real object that it substitutes, the image is not all superficial; indeed, “we can probably only think the image radically beyond the principle of the surface.”72 In fact, Didi-Huberman’s descriptions of the image are obsessed with images of “thickness, depth, the gap, the threshold, and the compartment.”73 On the one hand, this is a thickness found in the movement of reference; on the other, it is one that points at, reaches toward, and touches the viewer. But this thickness is always prefigured, paradoxically, as an absence or lack, a gap in, and thus a gaping of materiality. This is doubly true: The wound in reality that the image opens consists in the paradox that images an absence. This scission, in turn, cuts us; it is, if we so want, the translation of an opening from one surface to another, both figurative, both of the mode of being virtually present—present but not quite, present but not really there. When reflections on visuality plumb a figurative dimension of depth in the image, as an index of absence (since it points to an object that it has displaced) this comes, it seems, at the expense of the material “depth” of an

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image—the brushstrokes, paint layers, and canvas of a painting, or the camera, choice of focus and exposure or development options of a photograph. As a consequence, what is absent or insufficient in an image—the gap that images open up in reality—and not what is present, there in the image, affects us: figurative density before physical materiality, figurative impact by way of absence, contact as lack of contact. Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of visual violence in Au fond des images (The Ground of the Image) similarly hinges upon the status of the image as distinct, set apart, sacred and cursed. An image is a thing, and yet it is not really (just) a thing. It marks the passage to a thing, but this passage does not pass through to that which it represents, since the presence of the image marks the distance to its referent. Images precipitate resemblance into the realm of the heterogeneous by pretending to be like the referents they transpose and displace. In the process, they cut openings into our reality, setting themselves apart. Images extract what they image, they distinguish it, throwing it in front of us like a challenge. Like Didi-Huberman, Nancy couches this distinctness in terms of multiple marks: “This projection . . . makes its mark, its very trait and its stigma: its tracing, its line, its style, its incision, its scar, its signature, all of this at once.”74 The image, no longer seen in its representational function, no longer image of anything, becomes marked, since it is set apart from normal reality, something that cannot be touched and, consequently, is distinct, distant, cut off from the viewer’s sphere. The very etymology of distinct underlines an imaginary of marking: “It is what is separated by marks (the word refers back to stigma, a branding mark, a pinprick or puncture, an incision, a tattoo.”75 Throughout the essays of The Ground of the Image Nancy deploys multiple figures of inscription in vertiginous sequences, applied to quite different components of visuality: the trace in the image, the trace (or mark) that is the image, and the mark that the image causes us—from the material traces that form an image to its stigmata, its marks of distinction, and finally to the psychic traces as the image touches, impacts, and penetrates us. [The image] is therefore not a representation: it is an imprint of the intimacy of its passion (of its motion, its agitation, its tension, its passivity). It is not an imprint in the sense of a type or schema that would be set down and fi xed. It is rather the movement of the imprint, the stroke [frappe] that marks the surface, the hollowing out and pressing up of this surface, of its substance (canvas, paper, copper, paste, clay, pigment, film, skin), its impregnation or infusion, the embedding or

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the discharge effected in it by the pressure applied to it. The imprint is at once the receptivity of an unformed support and the activity of a form: its force is in the mixing of the two. The image touches me, and, thus touched and drawn by it and into it, I get involved, not to say mixed up in it [je me mêle à elle].76

Here the image becomes mark again as an imprint, as a trace of its production, and as a sting of visibility. If, for Nancy, the image creates distance by producing a distinct extract of (though also in) reality, at the same time it elides the distance between viewer and image, allowing, or even forcing, that she who stands in front of an image access it. The image both creates and breaches distance; it both touches and detaches. The two possible relations that an image can maintain with its other— namely its reference to an object and its reception—are mediations between material reality and representation. Both represent desires we vest in the image: to be (like) the real object and to act like a real object. Both desires, however, are already tempered by a safety mechanism, the possible assertion that a picture is only a picture, set apart from and unrelated to reality. Both are thus important ways in which we negotiate between the self and the world, between materiality and signification. The image, by dint of its representative function, will always fall short of replacing, of presencing, what it merely pictures. At the same time, its own status as material object is often elided in favor of its role as an object’s representation. An image—however abstract—is never merely an image in and of itself; we will always be tempted to read it, first and foremost, as an image of something else. An image points away from itself. As such, it is indexical precisely because we perceive it as iconic of something beyond. Yet this indexicality is profoundly different from Barthes’s fantasy of a material adherence of the referent in the photograph, since it points to an absence rather than a presence. Indexicality, rather than merely creating the impression of presence, can also be spun in a different direction: presencing of absence, index of lack. The imagery in Nancy’s, as well as in Didi-Huberman’s, reflections no longer targets representation but force. It is no longer a reference of or to anything but references the problem of reference itself instead. In this sense, it echoes the poststructuralist, especially Derridean, concept of the trace: a mark that happens rather than existing, a mark that points to its own structure of lack, and thus, ultimately signifies itself as lack.77 Yet, this signifying void also fuels the theoretical dream of a contact between image and viewer. By theory’s definition, no image—not even the photograph

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with its iconic and indexical powers— can represent a wound. By poststructuralist theory’s definition, no image breathes presence. Instead, the image itself becomes a wound in the fabric of reality. As such, it transfixes he who looks at it, not by way of contact but by way of absence. Or rather, by way of contact that carries absence rather than marking presence.

Afterimages of the Trace In 2003 Didi-Huberman critiqued postmodernism for its premature turn away from indexicality, suggesting that the index could still do important work for contemporary culture and theory.78 Nevertheless, in the 1984 essay “L’indice de la plaie absente: Monographie d’une tache” (“The Index of the Absent Wound [Monograph on a Stain]”), Didi-Huberman himself had critically taken on indexicality in a reflection on the Shroud of Turin and its interpretive afterlives. For the believer, the Shroud of Turin represents visible proof of the existence of Jesus, a miraculous imprint of a bodily outline and facial features onto a piece of linen. For visual theorists, the shroud symbolizes one of the powers of photography, a creation without human intervention that “resurrects” its referent, underpinned by an imaginary of contact.79 Didi-Huberman uses the shroud as basis for a theory of indexicality that doubles as a (meta-)theory of figuration. An extreme indexical reading of the mysterious stains on the cloth—also of a stain that is in excess of the barely visible, slightly darker patches that a photograph supposedly “revealed” to be Christ’s figure—seems to reject any encroachment of figuration. For the eye of the believer, the stain—blood of Christ’s blood, or, semen of Christ’s semen—is pure contact with Christ’s passion. It does not signify; instead it makes the holy adhere to the trivial, weds the transcendent and the sordid. For the “transubstantiation” of the stain to take effect, however, as DidiHuberman points out, complex processes of symbolization and figuration had to take place: after all, a formless stain needed to be connected, without a doubt, to the (physical) emanations of the holy. What is at stake here, according to Didi-Huberman, is a disfiguration, or a disavowal and erasure of figuration: “At the very place where every figure abolishes itself—as in this stain—there every figure has its origin. . . . The effacement of all figuration in this trace is itself the guarantee of a link of existence, of authenticity; if this is not a figure it is because contact has taken place. The noniconic, nonmimetic nature of this stain guarantees its indexical value.”80 The stain on the Shroud of Turin becomes meaningful precisely because it has no meaning beyond sticking to its otherworldly (yet embodied) referent.

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Indexicality—the stain consubstantial with its corporeal origin—becomes the hallmark of the authentic. Precisely because it lacks any other meaning—in contrast to the iconic likeness that some claimed they perceived in the shroud’s other stains after its photographic exposure, namely the shadow of a human figure—the stain exhausts its meaning by testifying to contact: Ecce homo. But meaning as the absence of meaning has to be produced. As DidiHuberman points out, the lack of figuration, and thus indexical force, depends on an active erasure of figuration. In the “transcendental phenomenology of the visible” that frames the stain as holy emanation, “appearance (phainesthai, which, however, has the same root as phantasia in the element signifying light)” becomes “disfiguration”: “It . . . [describes] how this stain came not to possess a figurative aspect [à ne pas figurer]” by way of “inventing a structure of substitutions, returns and representation.”81 This metaphysics of the visible does more than nurture itself from the parasitical splitting of visuality into true appearance and fraudulent fantasy. In a movement that Didi-Huberman punningly refers to as a “retracement,” the indexical mystique of the stained Shroud of Turin functions, “because it will tell, retell [retracer, autrement dit reconter, ressasser] a story, but also trace a line over it, [sur cette trace repasser un trait en décalque] a line that, let’s say, will make the original trace ‘represent a subject for other traces.’ ”82 By hijacking the imaginary of contact, a stain here poses as original and originary trace, as designating nothing but a lingering presence—namely, that a contact has taken place. The logic here is tainted, tautological: Contact becomes both the cause of the stain and the meaning it points to. As origin and event, the tainted trace of the Shroud of Turin opens the way for other traces—such as religious interpretations—precisely because it erases its own status as trace, masking itself as absolute sign, instead of as only one mark in a series of equals. Indexicality seems particularly prone to such processes of disfiguration and, to follow in DidiHuberman’s train of thought, needs to be re(con)figured—reminding ourselves constantly that the index is not a direct conduit to its referent, a hotline from medium to object, but rather the carefully calculated effect, or, indeed, afterimage, of the figure of contact and presence. According to Didi-Huberman, “Every figure has its origin where it is effaced, if that place of origin is a place of contact.”83 By the same token, however, contact itself is subject to figuration. In other words, once we shift perspective and look critically at poststructuralist uses of figures of contact, a reverse (dis)figuration occurs: not an erasure of signification with a view to reifying authenticity via copres-

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ence but rather an erasure of contact with a view to reifying absence via violent noncoincidence. There is no trace and hence no signification without contact. But poststructuralism carefully restrains and indeed polices contact in order to curtail its tether to presence. This involves a selective theoretical configuration of visuality. In Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy), Jacques Derrida addresses the difference between sight and touch in a series of questions: [Let’s] see, can eyes manage to touch, fi rst of all, to press together like lips? To which surface of the eye do lips compare? If two gazes look into each other’s eyes [deux regards se regardent dans les yeux], can one then say that they are touching? Are they coming into contact—the one with the other? What is contact if it always intervenes between x and x? A hidden, sealed, concealed, signed, squeezed, compressed, and repressed interruption? Or the continual interruption of an interruption, the negating upheaval of the interval, the death of between?84

Derrida’s questions are, of course, rhetorical ones, meant to highlight the very material differences of a look and a touch. A look does not embrace the immediate contact of two bodies that can range from a loving caress to a painful blow. For vision to work, not bodily closeness but distance proves crucial. Sight necessitates, even solicits, an interruption of contact for a visual relation between subject and object to happen. The potential mutuality of sight, of two gazes crossing each other, of an eye being simultaneously the organ of sight and something exposed to another’s look is strangely muted in Derrida’s phrase of “two gazes [looking] into each other’s eyes” (deux regards se [regardant] dans les yeux): a game of disembodied gazes and floating reflexivity. Is this really a scene in which two individuals look at each other, or does the other’s eye merely become the reflective surface of a narcissistic mirror? If looking depends on a cut—a separation between that which is looking and that which is looked at— then the equation of touch and sight proves theoretically fraudulent. And yet, from a different vantage point, Derrida’s reflection turns around, even against, the divide between touch and sight. After leading the equation of sight and touch ad absurdum by rejecting the comparison between the touch of lips and the interaction of the eyes, Derrida moves against received notions of contact itself. Instead of offering an image of extreme closeness, the passage above insists on figures of (double) negation and absence: Touch becomes the interruption of an interruption, the negation, even death, of the

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in-between. Even though such observations continue Derrida’s critical musings on an imaginary of visual contact, touch as such (and not the potentially misleading imaginary of visual touch) is under scrutiny here. Instead of establishing a gap between sight and touch, by highlighting the gap crucial to visuality, touch is figuratively aligned with sight: Despite all appearances, touch thrives on distance and absence, like sight—though by way of slightly different rhetorical and metaphorical maneuvers on Derrida’s part. In the end, touch and sight—no longer conceptual opposites— collude in forging a scenario in which sensory perception and interaction, irrespective of which of the senses we are talking about, only function via a presence in absentia, a coincidence that is temporal but can never be completely spatial. Conceptually, visuality contaminates touch here. At the same time, touch returns to dominate the scene but in a radically different garb: not the loving touch of lips but a violent upheaval, interruption, and disruption, the “death of between.” Even though touch can be thought in the longue durée as continuous, as the interruption of interruption, touch also signifies as an exception, where distance is the rule—underscored by figures of immediacy and impact. For Derrida, contact—however fleeting—is not the other of a reality that pivots around absence, the severance between entities sentient and perceivable. Its interruption adds violence to violence: As it cuts through the scission of the real, it potentially opens another conceptual cut or wound. In Picture Theory of 1994, W. J. T. Mitchell announces that we live in a world dominated by the pictorial turn and that Derrida’s attention to the materiality of traces embodies one important example of the seminal importance of visuality for contemporary thought.85 In this scheme of things, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of speech, or phonocentrism, opened the way for a turn to visuality. According to Mitchell, thought in the wake of Derrida’s inclusive definition of écriture no longer maintains a divide between image and text, since both are part of the pictorial face of the world, examples of our overwhelmingly visual interaction with our surroundings. And yet, are the figures that we have naturalized in a post-Derridean age as absolute avatars of the divide between absence and presence, écriture and speech, really the only expression of this conceptual battle? Or is the iconography of the pictorial turn itself traversed by another divide? Not simulacrum versus logos, icon versus symbol, image versus speech, but rather a question of touch, of the unequal scripting of contact? The figure of the trace maintains an uneasy truce with touch. In the context of indexical theories of visuality, such as the fantasies of contact in photography, the trace makes a case for presence, albeit always struck through with loss

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and absence. In the context of theories of visuality that hinge upon absence, especially for Derrida’s definition of the trace, as representation no longer partakes of a myth of presence, touch is repurposed: not comforting presence but violent impact. From such a vantage point, the trace, or rather the event of its inscription, no longer emanates the presence of a referent but screams its absence in the aftermath of its sudden cut. For the trace, physical contact is still indispensable. The question is how to frame touch and contact—as forceful impact or as lingering presence. On which side of visuality’s play of absence and presence are we supposed to fix our gaze? Depending on what conceptual desires it has to fulfill at any given moment, we reconfigure contact, either as insignificant to signification or as signification’s other: contact, afterimage of the trace. Indexicality, as an inscriptive imaginary that weds visuality and touch (for instance, in the guise of the photographic imprint), becomes a theoretical hinge for poststructuralism’s framing of representation and reception. For thinkers such as Derrida, Nancy, or Didi-Huberman, visuality as a poststructuralist master medium denies presence and, indeed, insists on distance, interruption, rupture. And yet, the insistence on visual impact on a beholder—the basis for ethical and political uses of the image—reintroduces contact, although in the form of a violent, shocking cut. For this translation from medial inscription to impactful reception to function, indexicality (the touch between referent and medium) has to be disavowed, and yet, as an analogical shadow that prefigures the transfer that will erase it, its afterimage lingers in the figurative touch of visual reception. Framed in this way, visuality is both what comes about as a trace and what produces another trace, what contains traces and points away from the object to the spectator. In the labyrinth of analogies at play here—between contact, trace, cut, and wound—visuality celebrates and questions presence even as it also courts absence. The play between the material and the immaterial, the concrete and the figurative that the scenario of double inscription—medial inscription versus stinging visuality—allows, lends itself to a renegotiation of representation and perception, between distance and closeness, immediacy and duration, cognition and feeling. The problem here is not a flight into the figurative and a leaving behind of reality—whatever that might be. Rather, what is at stake is the strategic flattening of medial and material—and, yes, figurative—specificity. The multiplication of inscription is not problematic. What is problematic is the fact that some inscriptions are highlighted at the expense of others, as well as the oblivion of the specific differences, circumstances, and material surfaces hit by inscription. Is a cut always only

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a cut, a mark a mark, a trace a trace? When we call an inscription inscription is that all we have to say about it? What is it that puts image and touch inevitably at odds and yet cannot prevent their mutual attraction? Why cannot we give each their due and marvel at the multiple interactions of the visible and the touchable? Instead, there is always either excess or lack of touch at work in our theories of the visible. We either overinvest visuality with images of contact and contiguity or else divest visuality of its material touch. Can artistic work that reflects on indexicality, on the entanglement of visuality and touch, provide us with an alternative scenario? One in which look and touch collaborate rather than being bound into a paradoxical structure of mutual disavowal and tacit complicity? Quebrada, a hybrid of text and photo-etchings by Chilean artist and writer Guadalupe Santa Cruz, attempts such a critical reconciliation of the gaze and the touch.

Counterpoint 2: Surface Promiscuity No horizon opens up the frame; all is surface. No depth there; just lines in movement. Superimposition of the flat, two scenes crossing each other. A horizontal sway, like an open book, black planes crisscrossed by whitish traces, mottled by red imprints in vertical flight. Surface differences, as the smooth black shapes fuse with rugose reds. Not interruption but detour. Tracks converge and diverge, overlap or share directions for a time, without erasing each other or creating a seamless concordance. Ascending serpentines through mountainous terrain, rivers cascading toward the edge, spurious traces chiseled in rock? What catches the eye here? What lets itself be captivated by vision? Nothing makes sense in the uncertainty of scale— extreme distance brought too close; oscillating between the bird’s eye of an aerial panorama and the close-up of a rubbing, as if of dermal folds. Unsettled eye without attachment point; invitation to digital touch immediately spurned by grainy visuality: trompe l’oeil, trompe le doigt. This photo-etching forms part of Quebrada: Las cordilleras en andas (2006) by Chilean writer and artist Guadalupe Santa Cruz. Quebrada, with its polysemic title that can be tentatively rendered as “Ravine/broken: Shouldering the Andes,” is a book turned art object, a composition of photo-etchings and text that mixes the genres of travelogue, interview, and theoretical essay, thus eschewing any single literary genre. Sometimes on one and the same page the text juxtaposes the cited voices of the inhabitants encountered on the protagonist’s journey through Chile’s north, the traveler’s reflection on the experience of traveling, descriptions of the land-

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Figure 1. Photo-etching from Quebrada, reprinted with permission.

scape, and detailed renditions of the process of photography and the subsequent creative steps in the artist’s atelier that led to the engravings included in the work. The referents of Santa Cruz’s work, the quebradas of the title, are a system of crisscrossing traces: narrow mountain passes or clefts, a geographical trait of the Chilean Andes that the protagonist, the traveler of the book, traverses by following in their tracks. The term quebrada refers to an unequal terrain, a winding, tortuous path with ups and downs. However, as an adjective, quebrado also designates something that is broken, fragmented, debilitated, or bankrupt. And, finally, las quebradas are also the lines and spaces without lines on paper designed to assist students in their first writing exercises. The quebradas, as a concrete space, a landscape formation

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prevalent in Northern Chile, are thematized openly as a crossroads, as sites where bodies cross each other, but also as where there is a change in, a crossing-over of, perspectives. The quebradas, textual demarcations or marks made landscape, prefigure the appearance of an intricate system of traces and inscriptions in Santa Cruz’s book-cum-art object. The photoetchings (such as the one reproduced here) feature the tracks of the quebradas and fixate on other marks that the traveler and her camera chance upon. Many of the images in Quebrada superimpose the inscriptive process of etching onto photographic images that capture already marked surfaces: petroglyphs, graffiti, and reliefs that echo the breaks and folds of the quebradas on a microlevel. The complex, overlapping inscriptions in Chile’s landscape find their echo in the multiple textual and visual traces in Quebrada. Emphasized through the blank spaces that separate text and engravings, the visual and the linguistic work together without ever forming one coherent body. On a visual level, cross shapes and images of crossing permeate and define the book. Rather than occupying the center of individual book pages, the engravings are grouped around and traverse the longitudinal axis of the book, the fold or break that joins and separates two pages that are opened up to our vision at the same time. Guadalupe Santa Cruz’s work with different material surfaces translates marks, traces, and imprints back into the medium of photography through the hybrid form of the photo-engraving. In textual aperçus entitled “La matriz” (The matrix), the artist’s persona draws attention to the process of artistic creation itself. Engravings are produced through a multiplicity of ways of marking an aluminum plate, the matrix, with traces and patterns to which ink can be applied to serve as a negative for printing. The artist employs acid to corrode the unprotected areas of the aluminum plate or incises it with the help of pointed instruments. In most cases, digital photographs taken by the artist become the basis for the selective exposure of the matrix. This is done with the help of a photoresist, a photo-sensitive substance applied to the metal plate onto which the photographic negative is projected, and a solvent that washes out the parts of the photoresist that have not hardened during exposure. As molds, daubed with paint, the aluminum plates serve as negatives to the photo-etchings included in Quebrada. Different ways of marking concur in producing a photo-engraving: the digital image of the camera, the contact between metal surface and the viscosity of the photoresist, its exposure to light, the aluminum surface of the matrix indefensive vis-à-vis the corrosive touch of acid, the sting of the dry point, the touch of ink, the rubbing onto paper.

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Drawing attention to the concrete materiality in motion that results in the photo-etchings points to unusual connections between image, referent, and medium. Santa Cruz’s etchings and their photographic bases are not meant as representations. The multiplicity of surfaces and traces that they make visible eschews the iconic in favor of patterns of crisscrossed marks. Instead, the medium of the etching, through its various steps of inscription and imprint, resembles its referent not by way of mimetic likeness but by way of medial concordance. The etchings are not images of a landscape; rather, as Santa Cruz highlights particularly forcefully in relation to the town of Potrerillos, a copper-mining town that had to be abandoned because of its contamination with heavy metals and acid, the corrosion of the land resonates with the touch of acid in the production of the images in Quebrada. The same substance that corrodes the abandoned city is the corrosive force that etches shapes into aluminum plates. The “illusory correspondence between image and landscape” gives way to the “caress between aluminum and transparency.”86 The engraving is image and landscape only in that it reproduces the multiplicity of marks that define a landscape by similar means—namely, through corrosion and exposure—as a logic of contact, rubbing, and contiguity. To reformulate inscription as corrosion resignifies a relation between the material surface and the process of marking. For instance, in Volatile Bodies, Elizabeth Grosz replaces inscription with etching in her reflection on the formation of gendered bodies, in order to underline the codependence and, indeed, collaboration of “ground” and mark.87 Rather than passively receiving the mark of a pointed object, an acidic substance requires the chemical interaction with the surface it touches in order to corrode it. While etymologically unsound, we could read the “con” of corrosion also as an interaction, even collaboration, in the process of marking. In the always-imperfect control of the corrosive process of marking—because of the acid’s proneness to seepage but also because of the unequal receptivity of the surface— a lot is left to chance. The emphasis on corrosion and contact imbues Quebrada with a strong indexical penchant that challenges the iconic quality of photographic media. Instead, it highlights the desire to “multiply the bliss of writing” by “[translating] the sign from one material basis to another.”88 Quebrada’s artistic process is not about representation but about contact. The text’s artist and traveler does not reproduce what she has seen during her travels; rather, she stages her voyage in and through a different medium. The process of traveling, to move from one place to another, resonates with the

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figurative meaning of translation and turns into a textual and visual movement or translation: “To carry the stain from one place to another, leaving traces of recognition, distant from here to there, dissolved in all the inks in which the written and the seen emerges. I live in the ink that produces lived experience for me.”89 Both processes involve contact or “promiscuity”: between referent, written signifier, and image, between the different materials and techniques involved in the creative process, as well as between these and the artist. No longer merely disembodied eye, the traveler comes into contact with the spaces she traverses and the things that create and define these spaces. Rather than being passive objects sought out by a subject, things enter into contact with the artist-traveler: “Things come toward me, remain with me, and cannot be sloughed off.”90 Places and bodies rub off on each other; bodies and spaces imprint and mark each other. The body receives the touch, the dirt of things, that reduces the distance between subjects and objects to almost nothing. The receptivity of bodies, their capacity to impact and be impacted, to imprint and be imprinted, also defines the process of etching. The aluminum plate becomes a model for an inscriptive surface that blurs the boundary between activity and passivity: Its strength lies precisely in its sensitivity to inscription but also—a transfiguration of Freud’s famous mystic writing pad—in its limited inscriptive attention span.91 Unlike Freud’s model, Santa Cruz’s rewriting of memory insists on a promiscuity of inscriptive traces that are not clearly distinguishable from one another: It has no memory, the aluminum, it is soft, it takes effort to make a trace persist below the new bite of the acid. Or maybe, that softness gives it another type of memory, a susceptibility that makes it alert to the immediate. One cannot bypass it, since it registers the minimal gesture of an error, a dry point that changes place, another plate that inadvertently rubs against it, everything scratches it and dirties the work. It dirties it precisely because the aluminum is soft, because it does not resist complete erasure, it never becomes blank again.92

The softness of the artistic surface, the aluminum plates exposed to the sting of the dry point or to the bite of the corrosive acid, subtracts from the capacity of memory or, as the artist’s voice in the text adds as clarification, it confers another type of memory. The aluminum used in the etchings on which Santa Cruz reflects stands out for its unlimited susceptibility to inscription. An arbitrary touch, the unintentional impact of another object, can alter its surface at will. Consequently, it does not conserve definite or definitive memories but registers everything, the intentional and the arbi-

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trary, the important and the superfluous, deep impacts and light touches, to the point of conserving nothing because of an excess of inscription. Thus, the aluminum plate has never been and will never become a blank page or a virginal surface again: promiscuous surface, avid for traces and consequently unfaithful to each individual mark that disappears under so many other traces; surface resistant to complete erasure precisely for its lack of resistance. In Quebrada, Guadalupe Santa Cruz reframes the figure of inscription under the signs of promiscuity and interactivity, of crossing and corrosion. She tantalizes her reader-spectator with a myriad of different surfaces and traces. And yet, the book ends with a caveat against an easy transfer of marks: “The grime that is the joy of this work, and filthy like the journeys, has been turned into a clean copy, and there is no passion there any longer, I only contemplate an object.”93 Even though the pages of a book can invoke the promiscuity of a body’s movement through a landscape, the corrosion of metal by acid, the sting of a dry point, the friction of aluminum, paint, and paper, they remain flat. Whereas the traveler’s body interacts with the landscape, whereas the artist’s body receives the stain of her work, the book is only an object for the spectator’s gaze. The contrast between Quebrada’s various evocations of contact and inscription and its final reminder of the flatness of digital print is extreme. It also breaks, or at least complicates, the fantasy of mutual contact between referent, artist, and medium by reminding us readers of the digital photographs that form the basic material for Santa Cruz’s etchings, a medial echo of the digital reproduction of Quebrada that we hold in our hands. By reminding us that digital photography and the medium of the book break indexicality and contact, Guadalupe Santa Cruz’s text resists a facile translation of impact from textual and visual production to reception. Her etchings, aided by self-reflexive comments, stage multiple marks, traces that traverse Chile’s landscape and are represented and mimicked by the furrowed aluminum plates that serve as print negatives. And yet, the promiscuity of marks that are translated from surface to surface, from medium to medium, has its limits. In spite of Santa Cruz’s valorization of contact under the sign of corrosion, in spite of her emphasis on the interaction and the contiguity of crossing, the line between signification and corporeality, between text and image, between literal marks and their figurative avatars, is never completely erased. The incessant transfers of incisions onto different material and media question a logic in which bodies, objects, and texts become interchangeable too quickly and with too much ease. Quebrada provides a lure of indexicality only to present itself, in the form of a book,

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as the sacrifice of contact. After a kaleidoscope of surfaces and touches it leaves us with an evocation of distance and flatness. Its combination of writing and visuality, body and landscape, memory and creation, functions both as simulacrum and critique of the tendency of figures of touch in visual media to proliferate and change conceptual level: from production to reception, from material traces to psychic impact, from the camera’s flash to a spectator’s experience of shock. Quebrada invokes another scenario of inscription, another scene in which the visible deploys its stings. Not one in which the singular marks of an image become transposed into the visual sting that wounds an observer but one in which the literal and the figurative do not morph back into one mark, but rather branch out into several marks, without a seamless figurative translation between concrete individual inscriptions and their figurative copies.

chapter 4

Out of the Groove Aural Traces and the Mediation of Sound

Primal Groove Rainer Maria Rilke’s 1919 essay “Ur-Geräusch” (“Primal Sound”) proposes a strange experiment at the intersection of media technology and human anatomy: to redirect the needle of a phonograph over the lines of the coronal sutures to sound out the music of the human skull.1 The coronal suture [Kronen-Naht] of the skull (this would fi rst have to be investigated) has—let us assume—a certain similarity to the closely wavy line [dicht gewundene Linie] which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus. What if one changed [täuschte] the needle and directed it on its return journey along a tracing [Spur] which was not derived from the graphic translation [graphische Übersetzung] of a sound but existed of itself naturally [ein an sich und natürlich Bestehendes]—well: to put it plainly, along the coronal suture, for example. What would happen? A sound would necessarily result, a series of sounds [TonFolge], music.2

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Rilke’s experiment owes its origin to the juxtaposition of two memories. Conjured up in Rilke’s textual remembrance of 1919, two scenes appear. The first is set during Rilke’s schooldays in the 1880s, in which, shortly after Thomas A. Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877, young Rilke’s physics class engaged in the reconstruction of the apparatus by the simplest, homely means: a cardboard funnel is equipped with a paper membrane to which a bristle has been affixed. Upon the production of sound close to the funnel the membrane transfers its vibrations to the bristle that inscribes the sound as traces into a wax-covered, revolving cylinder. Upon reversion, when the bristle “reads” the inscription it produced earlier, a remote echo of the original sound makes itself heard. From a retrospective vantage point, Rilke contrasts his own fascination with that of the other children who are riveted by the overwhelming experience of technological innovation embodied by the tentative, incipient, puny sound of newness. Whereas his classmates are in awe at the reproduction of sound, what impresses young Rilke, or so the essay suggests, is not the sonic but the graphic output of the primitive phonograph. What inscribes itself in Rilke’s memory as particularly “eigentümlich”— as strange and surprising but also as something uncannily proper — is not “the sound from the funnel” but rather “the markings [Zeichen] traced [eingeritzt] on the cylinder,” the graphic tracks for the reproduction of sound.3 The second scene echoes this interest with visible traces. During his studies in Paris, around 1902–1903, Rilke becomes fascinated with the structure of the human skull, especially with the lines on the cranium that mark the places in which the openings of the skull, in evidence in infants, have been closed in adults, curvy sutures that bear witness to the knitting shut of bone. What causes Rilke to reminisce about his childhood lesson in media technology years later is indeed this similarity between the hardware and inscriptive trace of phonographic technology and the naturally “marked” body. The title of the essay, which refers to the sound that the tracing of the coronal sutures by technological means might produce, implies an emphasis on the sonic realm. Indeed, the medial ingredients and the output of this textually imagined experiment, an eerie sound that oscillates in Rilke’s description between a type of (white) noise (since Geräusch, or “sound,” resonates with Rauschen, or “static noise”) and a sequence of tones, a type of music or harmony, suggest as much. But sound is derived from graphic tracks; it is not a result of a mediated sound inscription, such as the phonograph’s grooves, but rather the sonic translation of a naturally occurring trace. Rilke’s emphasis lies, above all, on the transla-

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tion of graphic constellations into sound and, potentially, into other sensory experiences. For Rilke, the coronal suture serves only as the first example of a line traced by nature, a first association that invites an extension of the experiment to other tracks. The first part of “Primal Sound” concludes with the desire to “put under the needle and try out” (unterschieben und auf die Probe stellen) other “lines . . . occurring anywhere” (irgendwo vorkommende [Linien]).4 In a letter to Dieter Bassermann dated April 1926, Rilke returns to the basic idea of “Primal Sound” but provides further examples of natural traces potentially subject to sonic mediation: Since the nature of the gramophone has its origin in the graphic impression of sound, why should it not be possible to transform lines and patterns of elementary origin [von elementarischer Herkunft] that occur in nature into sonic phenomena [Klangerscheinungen]? The special lines of the cranial sutures, for instance translated into a dimension of depth, might they not really emit a kind of “music”? And would it not be something unheard of (and immediately accepted) to give sound to [vertonen] the infi nite signatures of creation [Namenszüge der Schöpfung] in their quaint changes and windings that are in evidence in the skeleton, in rocks, . . . in a thousand places? The cleft in the wood, the tunnel [Gang] carved by an insect: our eye is practiced in following and detecting them. What a gift to hearing were we to succeed in changing this zigzagging (in which chance only forms part of a rule-bound stock company) into auditory events [auditive Ereignisse]!5

Not just the coronal sutures but all kinds of traces in nature, subject not only to the design of natural structures such as the skeleton but also to the random tearing of wood or the whims of insectile carving, lend themselves to sonic activation in Rilke’s scheme, as long as they are visible as lines but not man-made. In both this passage from the letter to Bassermann and “Primal Sound,” Rilke designates the graphic form that awaits sonic activation as a “line” (Linie). This term pervades Rilke’s aesthetic reflections since the late nineteenth century almost as a leitmotiv: from the insistence on the line as the basic unit of design and graphic art in his “Münchener Kunstbrief ” (Letter on the arts from Munich) of 1897 to the importance of contour (used in accordance with French as “der Kontur”) in his work on Auguste Rodin at the beginning of the twentieth century.6 The line asserts its role in descriptions of visual art, such as painting or sculpture, and in Rilke’s “Notizen

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zur Melodie der Dinge” (Notes on the harmony of things) of 1898, the line also becomes the prevalent aesthetic shape for discussing sound, as “the living line” (die lebendige Linie) that sustains and emerges from the background noises and the chorus of life.7 The line, as a graphic unit, serves as a master metaphor of aesthetic form. As a visual trace that stands out from its background, as a division between different spaces, Rilke’s line encompasses different sensory realms, as he signals at the end of the first part of “Primal Sound,” before its second part segues into a reflection on multisensory experience and poetry. Rilke closes his reflections on the strange experiment of craniophony by marking the transition between the line and the contour and other sensory realms: “What variety of lines, then, occurring anywhere, could one not put under the needle and try out? Is there any contour that one could not, in a sense, complete in this way and then experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense?”8 The active tracing of a visible contour prompts its transmutation into another sensory experience that the individual is exposed to, much as the experimenting poet changes from an active “medium” to a sensitive receiver of sensory experiences. In spite of the constant interest in the line, a crucial difference asserts itself between the earlier writings and Rilke’s “Primal Sound” and its aftermath. In the writings that explore Rilke’s experiment in craniophony the artist no longer actively inscribes or produces a line. Instead such lines already exist—Rilke uses the verb dauern, “to last”—in nature, awaiting discovery and manipulation by the artist. This is a far cry from the romantic notion of the wounded artist who “has to inscribe [ritzen] the yet unlived lines of his body into the walls with raw fingers” that closes Rilke’s 1898 essay “Über Kunst” (On art).9 Whereas the artist here suffers as well as inflicts the traces of his art, he who thinks up and controls the experiment in “Primal Sound” remains physically untouched by the natural traces that fall under his inventive gaze. At first glance, Rilke’s focus on the skull sutures suggests a preoccupation with the human body, even, possibly, with some mysterious human essence that the phonograph needle might make audible. In this vein, Ulrich Baer reads Rilke’s “Primal Sound” as written under the influence of Franz Kafka’s “In der Strafkolonie” (“In the Penal Colony”) and thus as a decoding of “the trace of writing on one’s own body.”10 And yet, both “Primal Sound” and the passage from the letter to Bassermann indicate a different relation between artist and inscriptive line. Rilke’s letter opens up the apparently anthropocentric inquiry by phonograph to other natural traces. In the context of a series that leads from the human skeleton to rock, from

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the coronal sutures to clefts in wood and to insect tunnels, the skull sutures, rather than privileged signs of human existence, embody merely one set of traces, residues and remains of phenomena and events in nature. The essay’s and the letter’s “I” observes and hypothesizes about “quaint changes and windings” that “our eye is practiced in following and fixing”; but nowhere does he fantasize about a sonic tracing of the lines of his own body. Rather than part of a creative feedback loop, the artist becomes an agent of translation. A creative process of translation that sounds out visible traces and lines in nature allocates an ambivalent role to the artist. On the one hand, inscribed objects seem on the verge of sending out their harmony, as the cranial sutures that “might . . . emit a kind of ‘music,’ ” awaiting the correct medium, such as the phonograph needle prompted by the artist’s ingenious idea, almost as if the zigzags and curves visible to the human eye exuded their own rhythm, calling for sonic activation. On the other hand, without the artist’s intervention, the sound of the coronal sutures or rock meanders remains inaudible. Only the artist can change one medium into another and “sound out” (vertonen) primarily visual phenomena. The artist’s collaboration with the medium of the phonograph remains fraught in this constellation. Even as the apparatus reduces the artist’s intervention—after all, the marvel of the phonograph resides in a kind of automatic writing without direct human intervention— only the artist can use the phonograph for such experimental purposes, by cheating (täuschen) the mechanism and forcing it to run in unusual grooves (unterschieben). A focus on the artist’s active intervention, however, is tempered by the multiply repetitive structure invoked in “Primal Sound.” The experiment described in the essay consists of various processes of repetition. The very “invention” of craniophony owes its existence to suggestive analogies— patterns of similarity that catch the artist’s eye—and to persistent, periodically recurring memories and suggestions in their “obstinate recurrence” (eigensinnige Wiederkehr) that haunt Rilke’s persona. Rilke describes them explicitly as phonic phenomena, “a rhythmic peculiarity of [his] imagination” (eine rhythmische Eigenheit [seiner] Einbildung), even though their origin lies in graphic resemblances.11 “Primal Sound” thus echoes the experiment it proposes by marking various processes of translation, not least in its regressive time line. Rilke “frame[s] his own process of creation and his own text ‘Primal Sound’ as repetition of an already existing trace.”12 This meta-textual repetition also resonates with Rilke’s transmedial shuttle between visual and sonic phenomena. In such a multiply mediated scenario, activity and passivity, production and reception, become inextricably linked.

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If “Primal Sound” proposes a reflection on poetic creation, as its second part suggests, as Baer asserts, for the Rilke of “Primal Sound” “poetry does not mean to create anew, but rather to transcribe and retrace [Transkript und Nachschreiben].”13 However, “retracing” needs to be read as an active tracing of existing lines here, not as a simple process of copying. Rilke’s thought experiment is a pseudo-scientific test case for the functioning of poetry as a generalized and heightened synesthesia or transmediation. As translation, poetry renders reality not by opening it up to signification but by expressing it in a different medium. To this end, poetry is a medium in its own right and has to function as a node for a multiplicity of media at the same time. Poetry can only do justice to reality by not being slave to visuality only, but by capturing the whole spectrum of possible sense perceptions instead. In the second part of “Primal Sound,” Rilke imagines the spectrum of human perception as a circle of sensory plenitude that poetry must strive to encompass in all its complexity. The image of the “five-fingered hand of [the] senses” (fünffingrige Hand der Sinne) in “Primal Sound” embodies the ideal of a poetic expression that would provide access to all five senses. As Rilke shows in a sketch that illustrates the theory of “Primal Sound,” the circle of sensory experience, with its segments pertaining to the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, is traversed by dark segments between each of the senses, picturing realms as yet inaccessible to human sensation.14 The artist’s responsibility is to enhance aesthetic experience by probing these dark zones, by extending the world of sensory potentialities. Technological innovations, such as the microscope or the telescope, give access to new worlds beyond the reach of human vision. But they only extend sight within an already accessible segment. What they cannot achieve is access to the unknown between those realms of reality accessible to human perception through one of the senses.15 What remains elusive, the space that the experimenting artist tries to traverse, are the gray zones between the senses. To Rilke the winding lines and patterns in nature — such as coronal sutures, rock crevices, and insect tunnels — are also, potentially, the limits or contours that mark the division between two sensory realms, thus serving as a bridge between them. The fact that Rilke gives his experiment textual expression and underpins it with the help of a sketch highlights the importance of medial plenitude. As expected, the sketch shows the phonographic contraption as well as a diagram of the circle of sensory experience. But is also contains a multiply zigzagging line, such as that of the coronal sutures, though its form is flattened onto paper with no attempt at sketching its “natural”

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context, the human skull. Even though Rilke refrains from putting his experiment into action, he retraces the naturally occurring lines, first through textual evocation, then again in the graphic form of a sketch. The artist’s hand becomes an alter ego of the phonograph’s needle, an instrument that traces and transduces existing lines. It also echoes the hands that craft and operate the ersatz phonograph. Between sight and sound, the primary sensory fields in evidence in “Primal Sound,” touch enters the picture, almost furtively. The five-fingered hand as a metaphor of sensory plenitude highlights touch, at least figuratively, as capable of becoming a master medium. The application of craniophony to poetry evidences the paradoxical objectives linked to mediation and translation in Rilke’s essay. The primal sound, and, by analogy, poetry, evokes the desire for the seamless translation of ineffable reality—a translation so perfect that it would not really be a translation so much as an alternative expression or manifestation of that same reality. The “original” to be transcribed does not consist in an existing script, nor does its “copy” simply copy it. In the first part of “Primal Sound” language does not play a role— or only insofar as writing is the medium that describes the nonlinguistic media involved in Rilke’s experiment. Neither the strange lines of the coronal sutures nor their hypothetical sound inhabit the realm of human language. In his letter to Bassermann, Rilke imagines the primal sound as bordering on the ordered harmonies of music and invokes the natural “traces” that capture his attention as the “signatures of creation”—sign systems that lurk just outside the threshold of human language. And yet, language cannot capture what happens in the sounding out of nature’s traces, not even in the artist’s account. Even the term “UrGeräusch” remains merely a tentative label for something one cannot name. As Rilke textually stages an indefinable feeling of awe in “Primal Sound,” rendered in a prose ruptured by repetitions and syntactical quirks, punctured by dashes and question marks, he casually designates the hypothetical sound of the coronal sutures as “Ur-Geräusch” and maintains that, overwhelmed by emotions, he has to refrain from naming it: “Feelings—which? Incredulity, timidity, fear, awe—which of all the feelings here possible prevents me from suggesting a name for the primal sound which would then make its appearance in the world. . . .”16 After all, the result of the sonic translation of the patterns visible in nature is something unheard of, as well as something heretofore inaudible, newly born into the world of sounds. In spite of its absolute newness, there is nothing transcendent or mystical about this experience. The added value of Rilke’s medial experiment is

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aesthetic—a “gift to hearing.” It does not result in an increase in meaning but in an increase of sensory stimuli. In fact, after its initial strangeness, it integrates itself smoothly into the world accessible to the human senses, becomes something “immediately accepted.” This sonic experience is “primal” (Ur-) not in the sense of originary— as in the revelation of some secret origin—but rather in that it derives from elementary lines and patterns in nature. It contrasts with the conventional use of the phonograph, since its translation is not of a second order. Rather than just tracing the grooves that result from sound recording — a literal retracing, repetition, or copy—Rilke’s repurposed phonograph “translates” originally visual phenomena into sonic stimuli; previously mute lines start to produce sound, graphic patterns begin to resound. While this process requires technological mediation, its character of translation across media makes it unique and creative. In this respect, Rilke’s thought experiment differs from the phonograph that simply plays back existing sounds. Rilke imagines the primal sounds of the coronal sutures as a sequence of sounds, a music, in contrast to the weak sound reproduced by the phonographic contraption of Rilke’s physics lesson alienated from the fullness of human sound: “The sound which had been ours came back to us tremblingly, haltingly from the paper funnel, uncertain, infinitely soft [unbeschreiblich leise] and hesitating and fading out altogether in places.”17 And yet, the primal sound itself is already secondary with respect to the cranial sutures, which, following Rilke’s own model of the phonograph, would not just be another mark that points to a more primal content; not a trace of anything but itself as a trace. What role does sound play in Rilke’s multisensory scenario? In spite of the importance ascribed to sound by the title of the essay, in spite, also, of the privileged position that sound inhabits as the expression of a transsensory creation that translates between sight and hearing, sound seems secondary rather than primary (or primal) in Rilke’s essay. What is primal in “Primal Sound” is not sound but the inscriptive trace that produces sound. Rilke’s interest focuses on sound as translation of a trace, whereas the phenomenon of sound as such—for instance, the sound that generates the inscriptions on the phonograph’s wax cylinder—remains marginal to the artist’s discussion. Rilke’s “Primal Sound” at once naturalizes sound and renders it strange and uncanny. Of the speech or song of Rilke’s classmates that the homely phonograph of the physics lesson records, the essay only makes mention as something that the apparatus translates from a sound proper to the speaker or singer to a strange, disembodied whining. The sound at the phonograph’s receiving end is—though designated as

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sound waves and thus, in principle, already removed from the individual who emits it—not prone to further scrutiny. Only (further) mediated sound— emitted by the phonograph as a repetition of previously recorded sound or, better, as the sound effect of a graphic form —is of interest here. Sound as such lacks mystery, unless it accrues an additional medial layer. Or from a slightly different perspective, scientific scrutiny, as well as modern aesthetic reflection, ignores sound or cannot capture it, unless as the effect of technological mediation and storage (rather than the equally mediated production of sound waves by the vocal organs). Only through a complicated experimental setup does sound become “primal”—as the expression of a natural inscription by sonic means. What Rilke finds interesting about sound falls within an extremely narrow spectrum, between the realm of supposedly “natural” (i.e., human or articulated) sound and that of sound as mere copy or record, between a lack and an excess of mediation. Paradoxically, sound matters only in its role as medium of translation. Only there where sound is secondary to another medium it also harbors the possibility of newness, of the primal, of the unheard-of. Rilke exploits sound (with the help of sound media) to think about a phenomenon that would be both primal and in need of mediation: inscription understood as a primal or ur-groove. On the one hand, in this conceptual scenario, sound (and sound media) merely play the role of handmaiden. In spite of the title “Primal Sound,” sound is a means to an end but not the object of reflection per se. Rilke’s primal groove is, first and foremost, a visual and tactile phenomenon—a passing glance gets caught up in its meanders, a finger or phonograph needle traces its windings. On the other hand, the idea of a natural trace, a kind of ur-groove, becomes only possible and intelligible via a phonographic imaginary that foregrounds the concept of the medium: Only the possibility of thinking in terms of mediation allows Rilke to conceive of something unmediated. The very idea of mediation both creates and contests the notion of something outside of and prior to mediation. Only four years after the publication of Rilke’s essay, in 1923, László Moholy-Nagy muses in similar ways about the graphic possibilities of phonographic media without, however, imagining natural traces. Instead, in his essay “Neue Gestaltung in der Musik: Möglichkeiten des Grammophons” (New creation in music: The possibilities of the gramophone), Moholy-Nagy suggests that one can turn the gramophone into an instrument of musical composition by working directly with the gramophone record, “so that the acoustic phenomenon originates on the gramophone record without any prior acoustic existence by inscribing [Einkratzen] the

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necessary sequence of incisional script [Ritzschriftreihe].”18 Even as Moholy-Nagy envisions this as an opening up of the sonic register beyond the tonal system of the West, he refers to this new graphic technique by way of alphabetic writing, as resulting in an “alphabet of incisional writing” (Ritzschrift ABC).19 This interest in (phono-)graphy echoes Rilke’s fixation on visual traces and speaks to the prevalent script imaginary in the early decades of analog sound media like the phonograph or the gramophone. In contrast to Rilke, however, Moholy-Nagy completely medializes his reflections by disconnecting them from any thought about natural phenomena. In Rilke’s experiment, sound and inscription are at once complexly linked and at odds with each other. Sound enters Rilke’s purview only as the outcome of inscription, as expressive translation of an existing trace. And yet, sound itself is not featured as an inscriptive medium. That sound can be recorded graphically, through grooves in a wax cylinder, for instance, does not matter. What is important is that inscription tout court, without an inscriber or inscriptive medium, as naturally occurring rather than made, can produce sound. As traces of nature, the grooves of Rilke’s thought experiment are primal inscriptions, since these tracks are not drawn by human hands or simply inscriptive traces of another medial event. Rather, processes of retracing and mediating originate there. Instead of primal sound, Rilke probes and inscribes the medial possibilities of primal grooves or traces. And yet, these unmediated tracks resemble the output (or at least one output) of media. Rilke’s ur-grooves forge a strange feedback loop of something that is (in) nature and at the same time mediates and expresses nature. Sound plays a complex role in this scenario: Its conceptual centrality lies in its very secondariness vis-à-vis the graphic form of inscription. For Rilke, only sound can translate (rather than simply transduce, as in sonic media) the visual trace of the ur-groove. Rilke’s interest in grooves as origins, not products of sensory (especially sonic) experiences, explains a telling omission in “Primal Sound”: a reference to visual media that function inscriptively, such as photography or film. Even for the purpose of negative examples, only noninscriptive mechanisms, such as the microscope or the telescope, embody visual technology in Rilke’s piece, even though photography and film as media that receive and store visual traces closely resemble phonographic inscriptions. In spite of the driving force of analogy in “Primal Sound,” the analogy of photography as the visual pendant to the phonograph or the gramophone is markedly absent, even though German usage had conventionalized this analogy by referring to Platten, or “plates,” to designate the inscriptive

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surface of both the camera and the gramophone.20 Rilke omits any reference to such media, since the “translation” of naturally occurring traces through photography, for instance, would only lead to a duplication of a visual trace as visual trace, resulting in tautology, not newness. The sonic process in “Primal Sound” consists in a management of tautology: The translation between sensory realms, from sight to sound, masks the problem of the fundamental indifference (i.e., lack of difference) between nature and representation, between the mediated and the unmediated. Rilke’s primal groove is both a medium and its other. Its “translation” into sound makes it readable as something unmediated that is translated into something mediated. But the conceptual use of the phonograph complicates matters: It implicitly “lowers” the primacy of the ur-groove by “elevating” its level of mediality. The phonographic analogy medializes and mediates the naturally occurring trace retroactively. It also points to the fact that this whole conceptual movement only makes sense once the difference between medium and content becomes important. The ur-groove becomes primal only through an analogy with that which is not (i.e., the incisions caused by the phonograph). The imaginary of its inexpressible and, ultimately, inaudible sound masks the fact that nothing substantial sets the coronal sutures apart from the grooves of the phonograph: transmedial magic for the purpose of establishing the difference between mediality and its other.

Sound Tracks As the concept of mediality entered the era of massive technological reproduction under the aegis of newly invented analog media such as photography, film, and phonography, inscription became its paradoxical figurehead. The then-new media of vision and sound functioned primarily on the basis of processes of mechanized inscription.21 For the most part, the medial revolutions of the nineteenth century—such as photography or phonography—are inscriptive in kind, based on the analog inscription of traces onto a material carrier. For such technographic media, writing, as an older inscriptive medium, played an important role. The analogy between technological media such as the phonograph and writing was accepted discursive currency from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century. For instance, Sigmund Freud’s description of the modern human as a “prosthetic god” (Prothesengott) in his 1930 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontent) places camera and gramophone at the heart of a carefully gradated catalog of media that includes writing:

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[By] means of spectacles he corrects defects in the lens of his own eye; by means of the telescope he sees into the far distance; by means of the microscope he overcomes the limits of visibility set by the structure of his retina. In the photographic camera he has created an instrument which retains the fleeting visual impressions, just as a gramophone disc retains the equally fleeting auditory ones; both are at bottom materializations of the power he possesses of recollection, his memory. With the help of the telephone he can hear at distances which would be respected as unattainable even in a fairy tale. Writing was in its origin the voice of an absent person; and the dwelling house was a substitute for the mother’s womb, the first lodging.22

For Freud, modern media, such as photography and phonography, constitute merely individual examples in a series of human prostheses. The “old” medium of writing, for instance, appears as yet another medial switch between the visual and the sonic. In fact, Freud’s description of writing as an instrument that translates human speech beyond immediate presence echoes the way in which “newer” media, such as the telephone or the gramophone, advertise their cutting-edge contributions: the ability to traverse distances, even, in the case of the phonograph, of that between the living and dead.23 Even though the curvy grooves inscribed and retraced by the phonograph are graphically similar to writing’s lines and squiggles—more so than the photochemical imprints of photography—the way in which they mediate content and the very content they express differ radically from written language. And yet, writing often served as the hallmark of medial understanding, by way of similarity and contrast. In the process, writing itself was profoundly altered. As writing helped make mediality intelligible, writing effectively was perceived as and thus became a medium. Indeed, the analogy between writing and inscriptive media was incisive for the invention and the conceptualization of new media, such as the phonograph. As Lisa Gitelman argues in Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, a flood of writing and print accompanied and, to a certain degree, made possible Edison’s invention: from the paper trail resulting from the phonograph, such as Edison’s correspondence or his patent files, to technological innovations, such as mimeographs, shorthand, electric pens, or typewriters, that prefigured or copied sonic inscriptions for textual media. The analogies between newer inscriptive media and texts in (hand-)writing and print allowed for an integration of technological innovations and made them intelligible to a larger community of prospective users.

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In her essay “Souvenir Foils,” Gitelman further explores the power of a textual imaginary that drives the fascination with the newly invented phonograph. Not unlike Rilke’s obsession with the zigzagging lines of the primitive phonograph of his childhood lessons, the audiences of demonstrations of Edison’s phonograph hungered for pieces of tinfoil— the first medium of phonographic inscriptions before wax cylinders and shellac discs — as mementos of their experience. These snippets of tinfoil, unintelligible without the phonographic apparatus, nevertheless held immense symbolic power for audiences. Tangible reminders of the possibility of recording sonic phenomena rather than as records of such an experience themselves, “[these] sheets of foil were talismans of print culture. They were pure ‘supplement,’ . . . illegible and yet somehow textual, public and inscribed. Although themselves neither written nor printed, their apprehension became a necessary part of the social practices according to which printed and other text-objects were understood. They literally contextualized.”24 If textual media formed a ground for imagining and understanding inscriptive sonic media—after all, both hinge upon sound and visible lines—medial inscription also influenced how people perceived writing and print. In a conceptual feedback loop, writing did not remain unaffected by what it served to gauge: “Many [ medial inscriptions], like the grooved surfaces of phonograph records, provoked explicit questions about textuality, about how some inscriptions might or might not be like texts.”25 Comparison and analogy worked in both directions: Much as “the literal language of texts was being stretched to encompass . . . new material forms,” illustrated, for instance in the term record, the production of written text became just another case within the category of inscriptive media.26 If we think of textuality and the new technographies—such as the phonograph or the photograph—as caught up in a feedback loop because of their common ground of inscription, writing can prepare the conceptual ground of inscriptive media. At the same time, such media can imbue writing with a different energy. Of course, the furrowed tinfoil of the phonograph— or, in a slightly later phase of sound reproduction, the grooves on shellac plates—are not really writing. And this is precisely the allure of such an analogy: the gray zone of the almost but not quite that allows writing to rediscover its materiality, its affinity to traces that it can resemble, albeit without reproducing their content or copying their function. But what is at stake here is not simply mapping the newly invented analog media onto older textual media, such as writing and print. Inscription, perceived as medial form, invoked textuality and raised the question of

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reality in new ways. Inscription as a material and symbolic form negotiated between the new and the old, as well as between reality and mediality. In other words, the grooves of new media such as the phonograph might evoke textual traces, such as writing. But, as in Rilke’s experiment, they also resemble tracks that are neither textual nor produced by any medium, such as the coronal sutures. Thus, they raise the question of the relationship between inscriptive mediality and textuality. In addition, they also broker a strange link between the mediated and the supposedly unmediated. As such, they resonate with the dream of a type of “writing” before and outside of any writing—like Rilke’s natural traces: one that is before any mediation but whose very idea cannot do without mediation. Inscription became a particularly important medium or theoretical bridge in early reflections on sound in particular and media in general. Inscriptive sound media, such as the phonograph, straddle the imaginaries of writing as a system of signification based on graphic symbols and of reality as the outside of signification—as sound beyond speech, as trace beyond meaning. As such it becomes a means of constructing and expressing the differences between media, as well as the difference between what is mediated and what is not. For Theodor W. Adorno in the 1930s, for instance, the analogy between gramophone curves and writing allowed a different approach to the question of the aesthetic form of technographic media. The gramophone presented a formal problem for Adorno precisely because nothing set its content apart, beyond the fact that its reproduction of artistic forms such as music were often considered a far cry from the “unmediated” experience of a concert. In his 1934 essay “Die Form der Schallplatte” (“The Form of the Phonograph Record”), Adorno treats the gramophone record with suspicion. After all, its format makes it a commodity par excellence, sonic art abased into collectibles whose limited storage capacity renders it the perfect medium for conveniently timed doses of distraction and vapid enjoyment. Unlike Rilke, who remembered Edison’s primitive phonograph’s double function of recording and replaying, Adorno wrote of this sound technology after it had entered a phase of mass production and distribution as a playback device for recording.27 For Adorno, in the absence of any “gramophone-specific music” (grammophoneigene Musik) the record lacks artistic form, or, its form is a “nonform” (Nicht-Form).28 In spite of this dictum, however, the form of the record remains an unstable quantity throughout Adorno’s essay, or rather, the record challenges Adorno to redefine what form means. In the opening passage of the essay, amid lan-

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guage that multiply indicts the record for its lack of authenticity, another appreciation of the phonograph starts to emerge: One does not want to accord it any form other than the one it itself exhibits: a black pane [Scheibe] made of a composite mass which these days no longer has its honest name any more than automobile fuel is called benzine; fragile like tablets, with a circular label in the middle that still looks most authentic when adorned with the prewar terrier hearkening to his master’s voice; at the very center, a little hole that is at times so narrow that one has to redrill it wider so that the record can be laid upon the platter. It is covered with curves, a delicately scribbled, utterly illegible writing [einer fein gekräuselten, gänzlich unleserlichen Schrift], which here and there forms more plastic figures for reasons that remain obscure to the layman upon listening; structured like a spiral, it ends somewhere in the vicinity of the title label, to which it is sometimes connected by a lead-out groove so that the needle can comfortably fi nish its trajectory. In terms of its “form,” this is all that it will reveal [Mehr will sie als “Form” nicht hergeben].29

According to Adorno, the record disappoints or misleads from beginning to end while maintaining a modicum of false authenticity via its nostalgic prewar label: Apart from its fragility and the often-insufficient size of its central hole, not even its material deserves “its honest name.” In fact, the whole object is wrapped in mystery, covered by grooves of “illegible writing,” whose logic remains forever “obscure to the layman.” In Adorno’s litany of inauthenticity, the relationship between the critic and the record is fraught with ambivalence. Is it the critic’s task to “accord” or deny the record a form, or does it lie within the record’s power to exhibit, reveal, or choose not to reveal its form? And what is the status of this form, a concept so much at the center (and in the title) of Adorno’s essay? In the last sentence of the passage quoted above, Adorno puts the term “form” in quotation marks, thus adumbrating that the “form” he has been writing about so far—namely, the visible, material shape of the record—is not the record’s true form but rather, or so it seems, a surface effect, a series of trappings that obscures a real form. But does the record in fact have such a real form? As Adorno explains in subsequent passages, such a form would consist of a structure specific to and intrinsically linked to its content. Or, if such a form does not exist, as Adorno suggests—since, as he writes “[nowhere] does there arise anything that resembles a form specific to the phonograph record” ([eine] eigene Form . . . [der Schallplatte] ist nirgends

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mehr gewährt)—how can it be withheld either by the object itself or he who analyzes it?30 As Adorno sharpens his critical teeth on the commodity of the record, the binary between deceiving façade and true form seems to falter, as “form” accrues, after all, some semblance of form. Or rather, the record, with its apparently formless form puts the concept of form itself to the question. What Adorno faces here, then, is not simply the avatar of technologically assisted alienation, the embodiment of the commodity form in the “dominance of things over people” (Übermacht der Dinge über den Menschen).31 What emerges, in the absence of an aesthetically specific form, is the problem of mediality, of a technologically specific shape that one can neither reduce to something completely external nor elevate to the apparent dignity of aesthetic form. And this is precisely the difference between a musical instrument and a medium for storing sound. Adorno’s response to the question of medium is ambivalent. He addresses the question of medial functionality by acknowledging the contribution of sound recording—namely, that its technology radically reshapes the relation between time and music. Sound stored in modern media, such as the record, freezes the evanescent and makes it permanent and tangible. In spite of Adorno’s negative evocations of the “rigidity of its repetitions” (Starrheit ihrer Wiederholungen) or the “pitiless eternity of the clockwork” ([trostlose Ewigkeit] des Uhrwerks) of reproduced sound, the contradictory character of the sound record that straddles the modern and the age-old proves creative: “As music is removed by the phonograph record from the realm of live production [lebendige Produktion] and from the imperative of artistic activity [Erfordernis der Kunstübung] and becomes petrified [erstarrt], it absorbs into itself in this process of petrification, the very life that would otherwise vanish. The dead art rescues the ephemeral [flüchtige] and perishing art as the only one alive.”32 This ambivalent power of the record, however, has little to do with sound or with the gramophone as sound medium. The medial freezing of sound produces only “mute music” ([stumme] Musik).33 Indeed, for Adorno the record’s importance lies in its status as “thing” and not in its character of “surrogate for music” (Musiksurrogat).34 The record congeals sound in visual form, as graphic lines, thus resurrecting the age-old, half-forgotten link between music and writing. Rather than celebrating the gramophone for its medial functionality, Adorno effectively sidesteps the question by replacing the idea of medium with a kind of pseudo-form, by shifting his focus from what the record can do as a medium to what it looks like—its visible form, or at least part of it: its

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grooves with their “delicately scribbled, utterly illegible writing.” Adorno’s essay conjoins the record’s grooved surface and writing by way of their formal resemblance that is established from the outset—a likeness that pervades early (and not so early) reflections on inscriptive sound media. In “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” this analogy is underpinned by Adorno’s exclusive interest in music that tunes out sound in general. From the vantage point of musical composition and notation, the phonograph record intensifies the relationship between music and writing. Whereas musical notation provides a written form for music, “through the curves of the needle on the phonograph record, music approaches decisively its true character as writing [wahren Schriftcharakter]” and becomes “true language [echte Sprache] to the extent that it relinquishes its being as mere signs [bloßes Zeichenwesen]: inseparably committed to the sound that inhabits this and no other acoustic groove [Schall-Rinne].”35 This specificity to a particular sound—not merely as a symbol of a note—makes phonography the true writing of music. Despite this focus on pairing a sound with a trace, sound is yet again secondary to this scenario. The phonographic grooves, signs that are both more and less than signs, can “draw” (zeichnen) music without it ever having sounded.36 Paradoxically, language and writing accrue figurative currency precisely there where they express an ideal beyond their functionality as media. Writing in this sense, as true language, would no longer function as a symbolic system for lack of abstraction and generalization. To each sound its proper groove would be the stuff of analog media, of writing as material traces, not as signifying economy. Even though such a maneuver behooves Adorno’s penchant to privilege writing over other artistic media, especially for conceptual purposes, the gesture of ennobling the lowly commodity of the record thusly seems counterintuitive.37 Especially since Adorno expresses his discontent with analog media, such as film, quite vocally elsewhere.38 But here, in its scriptural guise of true language, the record no longer functions as a medium for Adorno—at least if we applied a somewhat limited understanding of media. Instead of a technology that would simply record and reproduce phenomena in reality without aesthetic restructuring of its form, the phonographic groove stands in for a type of writing that is motivated by reality: sonic tracks as indexical traces of real events. As true writing, the inscriptive curves on the phonograph record are not like the easily apprehended hieroglyphs for the masses provided by film but rather partake of a mysterious system of traces that do not readily signify.39 Or rather, signifying is not all they do; they also exist as tangible, permanent (and visual) proof of sonic phenomena.

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But Adorno’s conceptual reflections do not stop there. Instead, they take one more turn that transforms the gramophone record into an ominous harbinger by way of scriptural metaphors, taking up the constant tensions at work in the essay: between commodity and hieroglyphic trace, between life and death, between past and future. Toward the end of Adorno’s essay, the form of the phonograph record finally finds its true meaning: “the scriptal spiral [Schriftspirale] that disappears in the center, in the opening of the middle, but in return survives in time.”40 By this time, considerations of mediality and form have been left behind for the sake of the suggestive mixed image of the record as embodiment of loss (via the disappearance of the graphic trace in its central black hole), on the one hand, and as medium of (sonic) survival in material form, on the other. Heightened by metaphorical pathos, the record marks the beginning and the end of times: “Ultimately the phonograph records are not artworks but the black seals on the missives that are rushing towards us from all sides in the traffic with technology [im Verkehr mit der Technik]; missives whose formulations capture the sounds of creation [Laute der Schöpfung], the first and the last sounds, judgment upon life and message about that which may come thereafter.”41 On the one hand, the record takes on the ominous role of harbinger of change, of the challenges of technology and its potential fallout. On the other hand, the record also enables the survival of that which it destroys. As such, the record no longer constitutes a kind of writing (or true language) itself. Rather, in the suggestive, portentous image of a black seal, it becomes writing’s supplement: at once a crucial and superfluous medium, a guardian of secrets, but not the meaning or secret itself. Records store but without restoring—they symbolize survival (as “written” trace of sonic events), but, as analog media, they also harbor the seed of loss and destruction, medial carriers of the end of life and the beginning of technology. For Adorno, the record is Janus-faced: Indicted as devoid of an aesthetic form, and thus potentially subject to critique, it is gifted with a pseudo-form that overrides mediality. As a medium —a format of sound recording, not a sonic form — the record can only be misunderstood. To imbue it with a semblance of form by having recourse to a type of phenomenological reading of its thingness, however, results in supplementing another medium for it: writing. But for Adorno in the 1930s (even more so than for Rilke in the 1910s), the idea of a “writing” as hieroglyphs of nature, a writing as cosubstance of meaning and thing and thus radically nonmedial, can only amount to a nostalgic fantasy. Instead of asserting a difference between writing—as “true” writing—and (then) new technographic media, this means, effectively, to push writing into the quagmire of mediality.

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Both Rilke and Adorno use analog sound media as a means of coming to terms with the challenges posed by modern technology and the mechanization of artistic practices. The liminal status of the sound media of their time, their medial brokerage and inscriptive fixing of ineffable and elusive sound, allows them to reinvent writing in the age of mechanized inscription. In the guise of Rilke’s ur-groove or in that of Adorno’s “true writing,” writing becomes more than just a means of signification and communication: It provides access to reality’s singularity. And yet, as inscriptive sound media enabled writing (at the threshold of its supersession by newer media) to exceed itself, it also meant thinking about the unmediated (the urgroove, the singularity of writing) only in mediated form — captured only in analogy to the sound technologies of phonograph and gramophone.

Inscriptive Resonances From this vantage point, we can read Rilke’s and Adorno’s reflections on inscriptive sound media as predecessors of contemporary media studies. They centrally feature and reflect on examples of analog sound technology as well as showcase how sound media turn into conceptual vehicles. Not unlike these two thinkers in the early decades of the twentieth century, contemporary sound studies indulges in equally contradictory desires: to describe sound as what is most mediated, on the one hand, and to imbue sound with a veneer of the unmediated, on the other. In fact, sound and sound media have become privileged figures in theorizing mediation itself. And much of this debate still turns around figures of inscription, even though inscription’s contiguity to writing is often frowned upon as narrowly medial rather than endorsed as a line of flight beyond mediation. For instance, in Reason and Resonance of 2010, Veit Erlmann traces an alternative history of sound and aurality, one that thinks of “the interaction between media and sensation . . . in more multilayered terms than those typified by processes of inscription.”42 For Erlmann, inscription embodies a limited perspective on aurality, one that falsely privileges logos while eliding the resonant, immersive characteristics of sound. This antiinscriptional direction characterizes a trend in sound studies that theorizes sound as a methexic phenomenon, one that, as Jean-Luc Nancy asserts in his 2002 A l’écoute (Listening), foregrounds participation and contact in the formless form of vibrations.43 Frances Dyson provides an entire catalog of related attributes of sound in Sounding New Media: Sound is “immersive,” “three-dimensional,” “interactive,” “synesthetic,” “invisible,” “intangible,” “ephemeral,” “vibrational,” it endows a listener with the feeling of being

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“engulfed,” “enveloped,” “absorbed,” “enmeshed,” “immersed.”44 This shift from inscription to immersion in the wake of the digital turn tends to downplay medial sound storage and reproduction (the focus of reflections on analog sound media) and turns toward aurality as corporealized reception as a phenomenon that can be disconnected from specific technological forms.45 The immersive, methexic imaginary of sound, however, fulfills a conceptual function not unlike Rilke’s ur-groove or Adorno’s “true writing”: the carving out of an imagined (almost) unmediated space within a highly mediated context. In other words, where Adorno and Rilke saw the inscriptive features of analog sound media as a means of staking out a territory beyond mediation—the unmediated traces in nature, the pure, singular reference of an acoustic groove—the immersive turn in contemporary sound studies capitalizes upon sound’s corporeal resonance as the equalizer of all medial form and as a fantasy of immediacy and contact: the entanglement of medium, content, and sensation. But like Rilke’s and Adorno’s inscriptive scenarios and their thoughts toward the unmediated, the discourse of immersion depends for its fantasy of nonmediation on an excess of mediation. In other words, the impression of immediacy has to be carefully crafted, indeed, mediated. It is also prone to medial slippage, transposed from one medium to another. As Dyson points out, the immersive features of sound have become a model and metaphorical vehicle for the claim of digital media to immediacy and telepresence. As such, the very feature of unmediated (or minimally mediated) immersion, devoid of medial specificity, serves the apparently smooth transfer from one medium to another that, in fact, traverses complex processes of revision and remodeling.46 So, the effect of nonmediation passes through an excess of mediation, a paradox that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe as remediation—namely, the incongruent, and yet highly operative, confluence created as culture “wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.”47 The concomitant oscillation between “immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity” becomes a hallmark of media culture through the ages.48 Rilke’s and Adorno’s reflections from the first decades of the twentieth century can be read as putting into action the concept of remediation avant la lettre. By battling a fundamental dilemma of the ways in which we theorize mediation they also help us think about the politics of media studies today, in which scales of mediation are often strategically transposed onto differences in medium. And inscription as the fundamental mechanism of analog media such as phonography or photography lends itself in particularly suggestive ways to being aligned with mediation, or else, in a slightly different guise, to invok-

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ing the unmediated— either as a way of capturing reality (pace Rilke and his ur-groove) or as an avatar of mediation and thus at a remove from real phenomena. Friedrich Kittler’s reflections on mediality in the 1980s, especially in Grammophon—Film—Typewriter (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter), make a particularly forceful argument about sound and inscription and their relationship to the capture of reality. In a gradated scale mapped onto Lacanian theory, Kittler aligns the gramophone with the real, film with the imaginary, and the typewriter (as well as writing in general) with the symbolic. Since ( mechanized) writing and phonography stand at the antipodes of mediation for Kittler, the inscriptive technology of the phonograph has to be distanced from the symbolic realm of linguistic signification. If, for Rilke, the ur-groove of the cranial sutures embodied a type of writing that was beyond writing proper and partook of a multiplicity of sensations — after all, Rilke was interested in reframing the sensory characteristics of poetic writing in the age of analog media — Kittler’s reading presents Rilke’s “Primal Sound” as a compensatory swan song to the power of writing. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, which features Rilke’s essay and made it visible to the fledgling discipline of media (and sound) studies, Kittler reimagines Rilke’s primal sound not as a sequence of tones but as white noise, and thus in stark contrast to language. Writing and the analog sonic media that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century share the fact that they express and store sound graphically. But these similarities also provoked reflections on difference. After all, the sound tracks of the gramophone and the imprinted letters or flowing lines of writing coded, contained, and expressed information in radically different ways. What is more, each type of medium defined anew what counted as information and what was simply an effect of its medial transmission or white noise. Early audiences of the phonograph were mainly intrigued by human speech or music—sounds that writing or musical notation was also able to capture, without, however, the same ease of reproducing these sounds and abstracted from any specific sonic source. In other words, one could read written text aloud and thus sonically reactivate its graphic form. One could also sing or play music on the basis of notation that indicated tones, tone lengths, and pauses, thus translating written symbols (back) into sound. But these gave no indication of a specific tone or pitch or the grain of a voice or an instrument.49 Only media capable of sonic reproduction opened up the whole (i.e., for our purpose here, humanly audible) spectrum of sound.

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Sound media thus also drew attention to the medial specificities of the sonic events they recorded, to the nuanced intonations of a speaker or to the individual modulations of a singer. As Jonathan Sterne explains with the help of the neologism “ensoniment,” between 1750 and 1925 a new interest in the whole spectrum of sound emerged, beyond the human voice or music, as “sound itself became an object and a domain of thought and practice.”50 The sonic interferences of sound apparatuses — the mechanical gyrations, the stutter of a phonograph needle, the rustling of tape — obstacles to the “pure” enjoyment of recorded music, also highlighted the affinity of sound media to noise. Unlike language that, as speech or writing, could only name or describe most sonic phenomena rather than reproduce them, the phonograph and its fellow apparatuses inscribed and played back all types of sound, from human speech to inarticulate cries, from animal sounds to mechanical screeching. Whereas Gitelman’s work traces the intricate connections between textuality and technographic media, for Kittler, the ability of the phonograph to capture “all the noise produced by the larynx prior to any semiotic order [Zeichenordnung] and linguistic meaning [Wortbedeutung]” puts sonic media at odds with the symbolic realm of writing.51 Not unlike the gramophone, writing, wherever it functions according to phonetic principles, is a “technology” that translates sound into graphic signs. Unlike the gramophone, however, even the most purely phonetic script can only express a very limited spectrum of sounds, measured in distinct meaningful units. Even punctuation marks or spaces that indicate intonation or rhythm only precariously supplement the possibilities of language to serve as the notation of sound phenomena.52 Kittler sees technographic media not as a development of writing but as something that outperforms writing and renders it outdated. The gramophone embodies a technology that writing cannot measure up to. If, in Kittler’s Lacanian analogy, writing belongs to the realm of the symbolic, the phonograph partakes of and, indeed, mediates the real. What matters for Kittler, then, is sound as noise, reproducible and storable, audible but not intelligible. This divorces sound radically from the human voice, replacing an idealized notion of sound as the hallmark of interiority and presence with noise as expression of an ineffable realm closed to signification.53 With the conceptual and medial taming of the world fallen to the ear also emerges yet another mysterious, uncanny sonic realm: Sound becomes the ghost in the machine, mediation, but not erasure of the unrepresentable. Consequently, for Kittler, “Primal Sound” marks the paradoxical desire of literature in the wake of its medial supersession: Its textual medium can

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only thematize, but not reproduce, sound beyond speech. Since Rilke’s text takes as its focus precisely a type of sound that is clearly beyond the reach of writing, Kittler reads it as reflecting on the inability of language, even literary language, to aspire to the level of the sophistication shown by media that capture sensory phenomena directly, instead of merely ciphering them with the help of symbols. From this vantage point, “Primal Sound” describes a scene in which “[anatomical] contingencies become sound. Deprived of its shellac, the duped needle produces sounds that ‘are not the result of a graphic transposition [Übersetzung] of a note’ but are an absolute transfer [Übertragung], that is, a metaphor. A writer thus celebrates the very opposite of his own medium —the white noise no writing can store.”54 In his reading, Kittler introduces an unbridgeable gap between sound and writing, by way of framing the primal sound that Rilke’s essay thematizes as white noise and by limiting poetry to the role of one of its media, writing. Without a doubt, the sound of the cranial sutures that Rilke imagines but dares not name beyond the designation “Ur-Geräusch”—primal sound, or maybe also primal noise—is a strange one, a sound beyond and outside of any known sound, let alone speech. And yet, Rilke’s unnamable primal sound is not quite white noise, as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter suggests, not static sighs or screeches but rather a sequence of notes still partly steeped in an imaginary of a synesthetic approach to the world of phenomena. The sound of the cranial sutures imagined in “Primal Sound” is not quite white noise, nor do the skull and its bone furrows function as media that record or replay existing messages. When the phonograph as a medium makes the cranium sing, the skull produces and emits its own music or harmony and not, as Kittler suggests, static noise as would a channel of communication. From a media-theoretical perspective Rilke’s experiment might strike us as rather traditionalist. Even though it hinges upon mediality—both pragmatically, embodied by the phonograph as medial handmaiden, and conceptually, through its impulse of translation or, indeed, transmediation—for Rilke the coronal sutures, even though they resemble phonographic grooves, are unmediated: trace without the tracing. In addition, Rilke’s project of trans-sensory poetry cannot simply be reduced to writing understood, as by Kittler, as a medium with severe limitations. Of course, Rilke’s own medial imaginary no longer conceives of writing (and poetry) as all-powerful expressive vessel. Nor would or could he read primal sound wholeheartedly as some kind of cranial speech that gave voice and meaning to silent material. After all, at the beginning of the twentieth century, not even poetry dared believe in some mysterious

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harmony of the universe any longer (although it could still invoke it more or less obliquely). And yet, not all sound has to be imagined as medial rustling. Before sound becomes the content of things turned media for storage and transmission, it has to originate somewhere material. Rilke’s “Primal Sound” negotiates this sonic interstice: The sound it imagines is no longer meaningful whisper, nor is it yet sound fully imagined in its medial and mediated shape.55 Of course, sound is always mediated, because no sound simply exists without material vibrations. But without being some ineffable expression of the real, sound is also not fully captured and conceptually contained by sonic media. Instead, sonic media allow for a technological depiction and reproduction of sound. From this perspective, Rilke’s reflections are a case in point for Kittler’s own media logic that equates sound, and by analogy sound technologies such as the gramophone—but not visuality—with Lacan’s notion of the real, a part of reality that cannot be represented or understood. For Rilke, the translation between the mysterious bone folds of the human skull and their eerie music made audible by a gramophone-like contraption consists of a mediation between two different realms of the senses. It does not translate a cryptic message into an understandable one, nor does it reify the medial capture of the ineffable real. The coronary sutures are not quite a medium for Rilke, and that makes them so intriguing for a thought about mediality. But, even though Rilke’s primal sound also constitutes a metaphor for the trans-sensory power of poetry, it is not all metaphor as Kittler claims. The “translation” of a visual inscription into sound that Rilke pursues so keenly is based on material and medial realities— even though the actual experiment might prove unfeasible. Kittler’s smooth transition in the passage quoted above, from “transposition” (Übersetzung) to “transfer” (Übertragung) to metaphor, pushes Rilke’s thought experiment into the realm of the purely figurative. This cements Kittler’s binary between writing and analog media, between the symbolic and the real, between metaphor and medial capture. But Kittler’s terminological gliding highlights rather than erases the close vicinity of translation, transduction, transmediation, and metaphorical transfer. To fault Rilke for a merely figurative use of media means to pass sentence on writing for two mutually exclusive crimes: being too much of a medium or not enough of one. On the one hand, writing that signifies without being able to reproduce stands apart from other media, its way of encoding—referred to by Kittler as symbolic also in a Lacanian sense—is transfer, or metaphor, not capture of reality. On the other hand, only when scrutinized as one medium

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among others, writing reveals its inferiority to the media theorist’s eye and ear. Behind the intent to introduce an absolute difference between writing and analog media, such as the gramophone, by playing metaphorical transfer or translation against mediation, lurks the suspicion that writing mediates quite as well as other media, only differently so. By the same token, Kittler’s absolute opposition between writing and technographic media fails to capture their complex interaction. In fact, the very description of writing’s reaction to such medial challenges in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter opens up a quite complex scenario in which textuality borders on mediality rather than asserting itself as mediality’s other. According to Kittler’s celebratory swan song for writing, in the face of optical and acoustic media with their production, management, and transmission of data flows, writing loses its primacy. Superseded by other inscriptive media whose messages text cannot communicate, it can no longer uphold its illusion of providing direct access to reality. According to Kittler, with increased rates of alphabetization in Europe around 1800, “effort had been removed from writing, and sound from reading, in order to naturalize writing [um Schrift mit Natur zu verwechseln]. The letters that educated readers skimmed over provided people with sights and sounds.”56 This function of writing as a pseudo-medium that pretends to open up imaginary worlds whose sensory experience it can only represent or symbolize becomes bankrupt in the face of media that actually reproduce such sights and sounds. But if writing before the advent of technographic media erased its materiality, its status of medium for the sake of a perfect illusion of nature, in the wake of this nineteenth-century media revolution, writing finds another way of becoming (like) nature. Or this is, at least, what Rilke’s “Primal Sound” suggests: Writing imagines itself as nature, not as medium. It does so in the form of a primal inscription, a natural trace that looks like a phonographic groove but exploits this very likeness for the sake of embodying an other to, a before of any mediation. If writing masqueraded as a pseudo-medium at the beginning of the nineteenth century by erasing its textual materiality in favor of its content, as so many textually mediated sensory illusions, toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century writing symbolically mimics its high-tech competitors such as the gramophone in order to highlight its affinity to an inscriptive materiality beyond and before any medium, or so the phonographic reflections of Rilke and Adorno suggest. Whereas Kittler indicts Rilke’s essay for sealing the dire fate of writing with a wistful metaphorical gesture, we can actually read “Primal Sound”

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also as a reinstatement of writing via a focus on inscription, a material form shared by writing, nature, and the phonograph. Indeed, inscription—as material form and imaginary—allows writing to maneuver between unmediated nature and mediality: as potentially meaningful trace that is either merely medium to a message or as pure, unmediated content. As such, even as writing senesces as a medium, as a metaphor it assumes another responsibility: to mediate between mediality and its other. Rilke makes inscription’s ambivalence operative for the imaginary of a type of “writing” that is not a medium, without having to fake or gloss over its mediality. His primal groove has it all; inscription can tilt either way, toward mediality and toward immediacy. In contrast, Kittler sets writing and analog media, with the gramophone as its ideal embodiment, apart, having different types of mediation—symbolic versus analog—stand in for and cement the uncertain line between medium and reality. If Rilke’s obsession with a primal groove makes sound secondary, Kittler frames sound as primary—as proxy to unrepresentable reality, as resistant to capture by any other than technological sound media. But in Kittler’s bid for the primacy of analog technographic media, sound itself becomes a metaphorical token rather than resonance of the real.57 Kittler himself deals in medial translation, or metaphor, when he uses analog sound media and their content as a supplement of the real. Nowhere does this become more evident than when inscription and writing (as almost analogous but not quite) return to the focus of attention. Whereas the analog capture of sound usually channels Lacan’s notion of the real for Kittler, he also has analog sound media embody a completely different theoretical notion: Derrida’s concept of écriture, as “grammatological ur-writing” (grammatologisch[e] Urschrift).58 “The trace preceding all writing, the trace of pure difference still open between reading and writing, is simply a gramophone needle, the tracing of a track and the movement along the tracing coincide.”59 Kittler’s appropriation of Derrida’s notion—namely, to posit the most basic form of signification as a trace or mark that establishes a difference—takes the form of an ambivalent emulative gesture. For Kittler, Derrida got his concept right but his metaphors wrong. Instead of drawing on an imaginary related to writing—“urscript” or (archi-)écriture—he should have seen the perfect avatar of his theory: the gramophone needle or, to clean up Kittler’s metaphor, the grooves it inscribes. Kittler transfers conceptual power from the medium of writing or script to that of sound media. The ground for such a “translation” or, really, theoretical transmediation of Derridean theory on Kittler’s part is no longer the ineffable realm of sound (as in Lacan’s real) but rather

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a functionality that has nothing to do with sound per se: the fact that the gramophone both inscribes and “reads.” The gramophone “writes” automatically, without direct human intervention (at least during the act of inscription), and hence certainly resonates with Derrida’s project of thinking signification independently from subjectivity or human agency. From a different vantage point, one foregrounded in Brian Kane’s Sound Unseen, since phonographic technology cannot record and play back sound at the same time, its emphasis on an unavoidable time lag between reception and emission also plays into the hands of Derridean theory and its critique of a sonic mystique based on presence.60 But the gramophone groove is no trace of pure difference— even though Kittler wishes to think it in such terms in order to play analog media (such as the gramophone) against writing and to cement the difference between signification and (mediated) reality. No such trace of pure difference exists. In fact, Derrida’s concept of the trace accrues theoretical energy because it admits different avatars. It cannot exist as a disembodied abstraction alone—hence it has recourse to primarily inscriptive, even scriptive (i.e., related to writing), metaphors. But it cannot wed itself univocally to any single medium, neither writing nor phonography. This is a fundamental quandary of theoretical figuration that Kittler’s suggestion highlights rather than solves. Trying to pinpoint Derrida to one medial imaginary (that of the gramophone) underlines that the theory of the trace (and its different avatars, such as archi-écriture, écriture, différance) relies on a flux of different figures in order to maintain the illusion of a kind of primal script, albeit without origin. And for this interface or nexus of gliding figures to function, writing as inscription, in the guise of writing proper as well as of that which exceeds writing proper, plays an important role. There never is a pure ur-trace, since all its potential embodiments already translate and transduce a fundamental difference that they depend upon for their existence; in other words, difference itself is, from the outset, mediation. There exists no inscription of pure difference, since inscribing only ratifies a difference after the fact. Yet, there is no before to its logic of after the fact either. Inscription’s very act of symbolic stabilization and naturalization has to be secondary. The fundamental aporia of inscription is that the difference between origin and mediation, act and retracing, has to be mediated constantly. In other words, mediation serves to invent and posit its other, as differences in medium become repurposed as markers of the absolute difference between mediated content and immediate reality— or, alternatively, signal their indifference.

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Interlude: Echo Chambers The conjunction between writing and media, between the visible and the audible, between materiality and mediation, in Rilke’s essay influenced the fledgling discipline of media studies and found resonances in German literature and culture of the 1990s. Not unlike media-studies reflections, these literary echoes of “Primal Sound” sought to explore questions of materiality and mediation, especially with regard to the function of literature in an age of hypermediality, on the one hand, and of poststructuralist constructivism, on the other. After Friedrich Kittler included the text of Rilke’s short essay “Primal Sound” in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, it became a creative catalyst for a number of German writers in the 1990s. Its complex tale of translation, compressed into a short text, seemed to make it a text particularly prone to intertextual citation and rewriting. In a literary atmosphere drawn to textual explorations of corporeality and invested in rethinking and recrafting literature through the lens of scientific discourses, Rilke’s text prompted a number of literary echoes, two of which I will explore in what follows. As an interlude, these analyses show conceptual concerns that echo media-studies approaches, but as literary texts they reflect more strongly on the medium of writing by way of which they craft their investigations into different medial realms.

I This leads us to Rilke and his primal sound [Urgeräusch]. Years before I heard about Rilke’s short, addictive essay about the phonograph, I had a so-called lasting experience during my school years after an accident: I was x-rayed. . . . What was important to me was not the uncanny process, nor the feeling of exposure to the apparatus, nor the adjusting of the head in its contraption, nor the fact of being traversed by light, or rather, of being shot at with an all-destroying radiation that could pierce anything. Instead the sensation was the moment when I held the x-ray image in my hands later, this negative in different shades of gray that transformed the skull and all the bones into hazy shadows and the eye sockets into black holes. Something unheard-of had happened here. . . . The thought that one could strip off my skin photographically in the split of a second and sever my flesh from the bones impressed me deeply. . . . What held my attention then was the technological aspect, the process itself, namely the analytical gaze’s infringement on the composition of its object, i.e., in this case, the

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human body. Is it not true that speech as a physiological act functions in a similar way from the moment in which it proceeds not only descriptively?61

This passage from Durs Grünbein’s 1991 essay “Drei Briefe” (Three letters) uses Rilke’s “Primal Sound” as an intertextual reference. The addictive character that Grünbein ascribes to Rilke’s piece plays itself out in textual form, in the way in which “Primal Sound” forces its logic and structure onto Grünbein’s account. Grünbein’s face-off with technology— though technology takes the form of x-ray imaging rather than phonography in this case— closely follows the pattern of Rilke’s text, from the scenario of the childhood experience and its lasting impact to the emphasis on the graphic outcome of the technological phenomenon: x-ray image versus inscriptive groove. The key difference here is the status of the textual “I.” The younger self evoked by Grünbein turns into the medium’s operating ground. Even the look at the x-ray images after the act no longer allows him the role of a detached observer. The corporeal language connected to radiography frames it as an aggressive, invasive process that actively affects its object instead of merely presenting a copy. Grünbein’s direct reference to Rilke’s “Primal Sound” occurs in the context of a reflection on the links between literature and corporeality, between poets and doctors. Availing himself of the inscriptive figure of the engram, of the notion of memory traces stored in the brain, Grünbein discusses hearing as a privileged channel for the outside world to leave its imprint in the human psyche. After mentioning Rilke, however, the poet quickly diverts the reader’s attention to another coupling of the body and technology: Rilke’s imagery of the sounding out of bodily marks, the skull’s sutures, is replaced by a visual medium of representation, x-ray imaging. Grünbein’s juxtaposition of Rilke’s phonographic model and radiography effects a shift in media metaphors: first from sound (Rilke’s primal sound) to visuality (Grünbein’s radiography), then back to sound, since Grünbein focuses on language as a physiological act, as speech. While the reference to Rilke allows Grünbein a conceptual bridge to the sound medium of speech, his imagery of radiography underlines the physical effect of technology. The translation from primal sound to x-ray image highlights a different facet of fascination not equally at the forefront of Rilke’s thoughts: If not by technological means, such as radiography, the cranial sutures are invisible, unless the flesh that covers them is cut open. If Rilke saw the cranial sutures as mysterious inscriptions that awaited, if not interpretation, at least transposition by other means, made audible as

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sound, Grünbein sees them as potential openings in the human bodies, marks that can become visible again by another inscription, the cut of the scalpel. Instead of translating a visible trace by sound, the sutures thus invoke the cut of dissection. Instead of merely representing reality, media such as radiography, so Grünbein suggests, in its equation with dissection, actually alter the object they capture. In analogy, language becomes both a medium and a technology: Speaking (and, by extension, literature) changes reality. Language does more than describe material reality: Body and language are mutually linked—and Grünbein’s function as a poet is to explore “the lines where body and language interact.”62 In the aphoristic 1993 essay “Neun Variationen zur Fontanelle” (Nine variations on the fontanelle), the cranial sutures move even more forcefully to the center of Grünbein’s attention.63 Here, Grünbein reflects on the fact that the cranial sutures are the remains of the fontanelles, the parts of the human skull that are flexible in infants and ossify only gradually, leaving the cranial sutures as their remainders. For Grünbein, the fontanelles illustrate a detour, a deviation, a one-way street of human development. As points where the human body, especially its top-heavy skull, remains permeable after birth, before a solid circle of bone completely encases the brain, the holes of the fontanelles, the cleavages of the sutures, trace entryways into the body. Their closure is one fold too many: Every imagination that reaches into the unfathomable [das Unabsehbare], is, in its origin, at the same time an invagination—the folding in [Einstülpung] of a tissue in the course of embryogenesis (of the physis or of thought), the curling [Kräuselung] of that which had just now been a smooth and tensed surface, infi nitesimal folding and pleating in ever fi ner degrees. Fontanelles are points through which that folding becomes palpable—the closeness to the center, mimetically rendered as a gap, a collapse [Einbruch], a depression [Vertiefung], a gradually vanishing discontinuity. Once again the cerebral tissue below is merely receptive substance, before it closes itself off, encapsulates itself, and, as a consciousness-machine [Bewußtseinsmachine], clears itself a path through the space outside.64

The closure of the fontanelles signals the moment at which the brain, part of the body, receptive to stimuli from the outside, detaches and encloses itself. In its osseous cocoon, the brain symbolically divests itself of its corporeality and, as mind, immaterializes itself. The folding shut of the sutures puts an end to the brain’s further development, to its potential further folding and unfolding. According to Grünbein, the ossification of

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the fontanelles is a plaiting of bone that allows for a warping of tissue— away from organic materiality into the illusion of immateriality. In Grünbein’s musings, in the course of human development “the folding has turned out to be a trap” (die Faltung erwies sich als Falle), a phrase in “Nine Variations on the Fontanelle” that prepares the ground for Grünbein’s 1994 collection of poems, Falten und Fallen, with a title that can be translated as “Folds and traps” or as “Folding and falling.”65 Consider the writer’s injunction in one of the poems from this collection: Think from the edges of the wounds, from the veto Of the entrails, from the silence Of the skull’s sutures.66

This poetic plea for an alternative to the split between mind and body, the imaginary of a radically corporeal thought, proposes bodily marks—both natural to the human body or inflicted ones—as the sites of such a thought process. The edges of the wound, a cut of the surface, quickly give way to the entrails’ coils and the skull’s sutures. Unlike Rilke’s fantasy of a primal sound, however, the cranial sutures remain silent.67 If the body as the site of thought resists meaning, it does so figuratively by embodying impossible or negative media: The cut of the wound is and is not a meaningful mark, the entrails are and are not gestures of negation, the cranial sutures are and are not capable of sound. The negative translation of body parts into media inscribes corporeality into language while marking it as resistant to signification at the same time. Language, and poetry in particular, happens from the body and encroaches upon the material world. Grünbein’s desire for corporeal thought folds physiology into literature.68 The multiple processes of translation between visuality and sound, between meaning and corporeality, are Grünbein’s problematic solution to the paradoxical circularity that results when writing tries to take stock of the body as both subject and object, both agent and content. A thought that starts from “the silence of the skull’s sutures” as an injunction for literary work produces the body as translation, between reality and representation and between different media technologies.

II I lie silent, feel no pain, just the gentle pressure of fi ngertips palpating my skull, hear the skin parting as the scalpel slices effortlessly through my scalp. . . . Now it’s Professor Sievers turn: “Taking our cue from Dr. Gall’s informative craniological measurements, gentlemen, we

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shall run this gramophone needle along the cranial suture. First, though, we must swab the furrow [Rille] again, or the needle may become obstructed by blood. . . . We should soon be able to hear the impulses via the electrodes, amplifier and loudspeaker.” Then, in the midst of renewed silence, I hear a faint crackle [ein schwaches Knattern]. It grows steadily louder, and a current of cool air fans my face as a hand moves across my bare skull, to and fro, faster and faster, up and down the furrow. The crackle increases in volume, becoming a highpitched hum [ein hoher Summton]. . . . The cranial hum [Knochensummen] is a sound of human origin that no man has ever heard before, the authentic skull sound [Schädelklang], and yet it sounds completely inhuman [menschenfremd], it fades again, becomes a dull rattle, on the verge of dying out, relapses into the initial metallic screeching, my skull under these vibrations, as if bone splinters were starting to detach themselves from it, a terrible noise [ein furchtbarer Ton] that gives me gooseflesh. Can this be the characteristic sounding of my own cranial suture [Schädelnaht]? The primal sound [Urgeräusch]?69

This key passage toward the end of Marcel Beyer’s 1996 novel Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes) features a Rilke-inspired nightmare suffered by the novel’s protagonist, Karnau, years after the end of World War II. Reminiscent of the horrid experiments on concentration camp inmates in which Karnau participated as a sound technician, this scene literalizes Rilke’s model as the ultimate nightmare— German-style. Tied down and silenced by a gag, Karnau remains sentient while his former SS colleagues perform an experiment on him. They remove flesh and skin from his skull in order to record the sound of his cranial sutures with the help of a gramophone needle. The Karnau Tapes is a sonically driven text.70 It interlaces the voices of the sound technician Hermann Karnau and of Helga Goebbels, the daughter of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, to sketch a soundscape of the Nazi regime. Karnau is instrumental in setting up the sound system for Nazi mass rallies or in taping dissident voices during the linguistic purge in occupied Alsace. He also becomes an active participant in SS experiments on the vocal organs of life subjects. The novel’s thrust to provide a soundscape of Germany’s dark past is replicated in the text itself in Karnau’s project of a sound map, a complete recorded collection of the whole sound spectrum, from the sweet voices of children at play to the death cries of soldiers in combat. This mise en abyme already hints at a means of translating between the textual medium of the novel and its sonic

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contents that it can only render in writing. Beyer’s focus lies as much on sound itself as on the modes of recording, storing, and replaying it, thus underlining the inscriptive functioning of sound media such as the record and the tape. Unlike in Rilke’s musings, where the primal sound remains an elusive, imagined possibility, here, the cranial sound becomes audible, painfully so. Staged as a dream within a literary text, Beyer puts Rilke’s craniophonic experiment in motion. And yet, Beyer’s rendition differs from the imagination of a sequence of tones or music that “Primal Sound” invokes. In The Karnau Tapes the cranial sound hums and rattles, screeches and vibrates. Quite clearly, Beyer’s Rilkean inspiration comes mediated through a Kittlerean lens that imagines Rilke’s primal sound as inarticulate noise. Apart from static crackle, Beyer’s cranial hum pulls other registers and turns decidedly nasty as metallic scratching. In Beyer’s rewriting of Rilke, the primal sound of the cranial sutures triggers an instantaneous feedback loop: The body emits sound as a rendering of the natural marks on the skull, and the very sound it produces in turn inscribes the body. Thus, the novel is interested in cathecting the roles of listener and producer of the “primal sound” that Rilke’s account had kept apart. This forms the basis for a complex coupling of the imaginary of inscription with sound. In this scene from The Karnau Tapes, the primal sound that results from the marks of the cranial sutures becomes a force that affects the human body. It resonates so strongly in the body that it becomes its medium as well as its audience and threatens to destroy the material surface that had brought it forth to begin with. Throughout, The Karnau Tapes insists on the double impact that links individual bodies and their context through sound. From Karnau’s perspective, the human voice becomes an inscriptive medium even before its output is recorded by sound technology. Each and every one of the uses of the voice leaves its traces in the vocal apparatus, as knots and scars on the vocal cords, which gradually alters the voice itself. This is especially true for extreme uses of the voice, such as the bellowing of a Hitler Youth leader in imitation of Hitler’s discursive voice that triggers Karnau’s reflection: Isn’t he aware that every shout, every utterance of such volume, leaves a minuscule scar on the vocal cords? Aren’t they aware of this, the people who so brutally erode [gewalttätig aufreiben] their voices and subject them to such reckless treatment? Every such outburst imprints itself [zeichnet sich ein] on the overtaxed vocal cords, steadily building

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up scar tissue. Marks of that kind can never be erased; the voice retains them [bleibt markiert] until silenced forever by death.71

These corporeal impressions of the voice, however, are shaped by external factors. Individual voices are trained, they consciously or unconsciously imitate the prevalent tone required for a specific role, a context, or even an era—for instance, the authoritarian commands of the Nazi regime. Much as external sounds resonate with and affect a body, forcing it to vibrate, making its entrails churn, the education of the voice offers another way in which sound determines the body, in which a body becomes the medium, not the agent, of sound. In Beyer’s novel, sound in general and the human voice in particular become a symptom, an unresolved remainder of a traumatic past. Instead of allowing the copresence of the self, of guaranteeing its individual identity, the voice turns into a medium of alienation. Even before any intervention of technological media, the site of the speaking “I” only echoes with absence. The primal sound of the cranial sutures in Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes is inhuman not because it allows its audience access to an inaccessible part of reality. Rather, it renders the gap in the embodied self painfully audible. There where the self as body seems at its most originary, Beyer’s adaptation of Rilke’s thought experiment shows it to be other to itself, always in translation. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Rilke attempted to come to terms with a new understanding of mediality and conceive of his own literary endeavors in the light of mediation, by comparing and contrasting poetry and phonography. The key quandaries lay in the differences between literary representation and medial capture and in the relationship between these modes of “translation” and their objects. What started to emerge was the realization that the difference between mediated content and its other might become increasingly flimsy and that writing—as literature—might not have a privileged role in the representation of reality any longer. Rilke’s tentative solution in “Primal Sound” used medial difference (between the visual and the sonic) as a proxy for the distinction between the unmediated (ur-groove) and the mediated (ur-sound). This involved the activation of the undecidability of inscription: as a naturally occurring trace and as the material form of phonographic mediation. That the inscriptive imaginary also resonated with an understanding of writing as the tracing of crosssensory contours was an additional forte of this model. The echoes of “Primal Sound” in German literary texts of the 1990s retool Rilke’s problem for a new context. Their problem still hinges on mediation, but now from the vantage point of the conceptual anxiety that

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everything is potentially always already mediated and constructed. Or that what eludes such mediation, in fact, completely resists capture by means of representation and media. Rilke’s fine line between reality, mediation, and literary representation has now been translated into a conceptual abyss in dire need of bridging. Filtered through a Kittlerean lens that regards the symbolic economy of language with suspicion, this posed a particular problem for literary language: If everything is constructed (especially the body), then literature, or so it seems, can only retrace and copy existing constructions rather than have access to a beyond or an outside. Even if literature can claim to participate in the crafting of reality, what would be its artistic and conceptual surplus value with regard to other discourses? In this context, Rilke’s model is restructured as a feedback loop, as a scenario that wires the body, via its traces and marks, directly into literature. As imaginary models for the negotiation of writing and the body, these are rendered in textual form. But the logical feedback loops invoked within their texts are projected onto the textual outside, mirroring the link between corporeal reality and text within the realm of textuality. In these scenarios, sound takes an even more secondary role than as the mediation of the osseous groove in Rilke’s essay, since its tracing stands in for the inscriptive relationship— one of mutual impact—between bodies and texts. Even Beyer, whose textual soundscape allocates a more important role to the sonic realm (albeit in textually mediated form), sees sound primarily in terms of material impact: as exertions of the voice that engrave the vocal cords, as vibrations that affect and splinter resonant matter. Referring to these texts as Rilkean echo chambers, then, evokes a medium that exists only by way of metaphorical resonances. Are these texts, after and in spite of their medial detours, not only about writing? Of course, these texts engage in the pleasure of translating back and forth between different media only figuratively, since their medium is, after all, written language. And yet, by evoking different media, signifying systems, and modes of perception, these texts also put writing to the test. Textuality no longer functions as the disavowed master medium in which other media are invoked, framed, and contained, but rather comes under scrutiny itself as yet another medium. As these texts allocate inscriptive figures an important role, by analogy writing—as graphic form —is pushed into the realm of mediality. Inscription—in the form of writing as graphe or phonographic grooves—is a mixed medium, between the visual and the sonic, between contact and touch and the production of meaningful marks. This allows for a reflection on representation— of reality, history, corporeality—as translation or, indeed, transmediation. This does not mean that representation can never

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do justice to some elusive, ungraspable, or ineffable realm of the real, or that representation can completely and seamlessly make present and material what it represents. Rather, each representation embodies a viable translation, especially since it reminds us that there is no original.

Graphic Vibes Are sound and writing always at odds? Either pitted against each other as conceptual opposites or, alternatively, conjoined so that one always eclipses the other? It appears that way, especially in the historiography of poststructuralism. As critics thinking in the aftermath of poststructuralism, we have been taught to take one tale of translation for granted: the shift from sound to visuality. Jacques Derrida’s critique of the phonocentric complex in Western philosophy replaced the privileging of speech with a generalized metaphor of writing (or écriture). While writing, understood in this way, was meant to encompass all types of signification, Derrida’s prevalent imaginary of the trace and the mark promoted a graphic, and thus visual, regime to the status of prime object of theoretical interest. For W. J. T. Mitchell, Derrida’s philosophical intervention constituted one symptomatic example of a sea change in the media politics of our cultural unconscious, which he dubbed the pictorial turn: a profound shift from sound to visuality, and from language to image.72 In syntony with Mitchell’s celebration of Derrida’s conceptual investment in things visual and graphic, deconstruction and its companions are routinely regarded as anti-sonic theories. As Sterne points out in The Audible Past, echoing Mitchell’s appraisal from the camp of sound studies, “[deconstruction] inverts, inhabits, and reanimates the sound/vision binary, privileging writing over speech and refusing both speech-based metaphysics and presence-based positive assertions.”73 In spite of such a statement, in spite of (or, actually, because of ) his relentless critique of phonocentrism, Jacques Derrida is also a sound theorist of sorts. Of course, to critique the penchant of Western metaphysics to privilege speech as an expression of presence implied a paradigm shift from speech to writing, from sound to visuality. After all, the phonic mystique of the personal union of speech and breathing soul had to cede its place to another medial imaginary: writing (or écriture) in its most basic form, as a graphic trace of difference. But from the outset, this implied an intense reflection on sound. Derrida’s takes on sound are everywhere—from the early reflections on Edmund Husserl in La voix et le phenomène (The Voice and Phenomena) and the full-fledged critique of phonocentrism in De la

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grammatologie (Of Grammatology) to the phonic metaphors of Ulysse grammophone (Ulysses Gramophone). Sound also stands at the center of his essay “Tympan,” the preface to the 1972 Marges de la philosophie (Margins of Philosophy). In syntony with the objective of the book—namely, to explore the margins of philosophy, to push philosophy to its limits—“Tympan” provides an array of different metaphors, avatars of the polysemic word tympan or tympanum, that embody and probe liminality in different ways. Derrida’s essay is about the tympana of philosophy and assumes the guise of a vestibule or tympanum itself, as the often heavily ornamented space above temple entrances or church arches that, at the outside of an enclosed sacred space, is an integral part of its function. According to Derrida’s analysis of the margin, philosophy as a discourse masters its own limits. The relation to its own outside is conceptually rigged, since it constructs its own margin as both an outside and an inside: “[Within], because philosophical discourse intends to know and to master its margin, to define the line, align the page, enveloping it in its volume. Without because the margin, its margin, its outside are empty, are outside: a negative about which there seems to be nothing to do, a negative without effect in the text or a negative working in the service of meaning.”74 As such, philosophical discourse is circular and self-perpetuating, like the revolving movement of a waterwheel—another meaning of tympanum—whose movement of inclusion (or Aufhebung) brooks no interruption. One of the many tympanic avatars, the tympanic membrane that is both the outer protective layer of the internal organs of the ear and, as receptor of vibrations, integral to hearing, invokes philosophy’s enclosed conceptual space particularly forcefully in Derrida’s essay. How does one “tympanize” (tympaniser)—that is, criticize or ridicule—philosophy?75 How does one impress philosophy’s tympanum differently when it controls both the outside and the inside, when to pierce its membrane also means to render it deaf ? To take the ear as one of the crucial figures of theoretical reflection means to challenge Western metaphysics on its own metaphorical ground, where the ear as a “distinct, differentiated, articulated organ . . . produces the effect of proximity, of absolute properness [propriété absolue], the idealizing erasure of organic difference.”76 According to Derrida’s critique, for Western philosophy, the personal union between ear and voice, as hearing-oneself-speak, constitutes the master metaphor of identity, being, and presence, hinging upon “sonorous representations” and “sonic vibration.”77 One of the strategies of “tympanizing” philosophy involves reintroducing organic specificity by drawing attention to the concrete mechanics of

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hearing and speaking; it lies in interrupting philosophy’s phonocentric sleight of hand—the sonic shortcut between voice, hearing, and being— and in emphasizing the gap between voice and hearing and the complex, multiply mediated transmission of sonic vibrations in the ear instead. Derrida’s focus on the tympanic membrane, the eardrum — one of the multiple participants in the auditory process—invokes an imaginary of impact and impression that prepares the way for yet another meaning of tympan. The term refers to parts of a manual printing press, frames that protect the margins of the page from ink smudges and covers that protect the paper to be imprinted. An imaginary of sound has just given way to one of printing and, by extension, to one of inscription, underpinned by Derrida’s quick juxtaposition of the manual printing press and Freud’s mystic writing pad in the course of his reflections in “Tympan.”78 The play between tympanic membrane and the tympan in printing introduces a new “type”—the pun is Derrida’s, not mine— of imaginary that finds its other at the heart the phonic: impression, inscription, writing. Derrida posits that to escape philosophy’s conceptual sway, its categorical voracity, theoretical thought must dare to deal with multiple meanings, for instance by sounding out suggestive polysemias like the one that weaves its textual and conceptual magic in “Tympan,” instead of reducing multiplicity always to one pattern or structure and bringing every singularity back into the fold of a general theory. This warrants a new treatment of the outside and, consequently, of the margin, to blur the boundary between text and margin. Such a “gnawing away at the border” ([ronger] la frontière) involves “recall[ing] that beyond the philosophical text there is not a blank, virgin, empty margin, but another text, a weave of differences of forces without any present center of reference . . . and also to recall that the written text of philosophy . . . overflows and cracks its meaning.”79 In spite of philosophy’s neat construction of its own conceptual space as both allencompassing and clearly set apart, the textual forces that interrupt and impress philosophy’s tympan /um are already at work: at once as excesses and gaps within its own discourse and as a textual universe outside of, at the margins of, philosophy. Such an attack on and from the margin takes concrete form in Derrida’s essay through a textual maneuver: that of creating a margin for the very text of “Tympan” by including a long passage from Michel Leiris’s Biffures (Scratches) that, set apart from the main text of “Tympan” typographically, runs along the right side of each page.80 Unlike Kittler, who integrates important texts on mediality (often in their entirety, such as Rilke’s “Primal Sound”) as part of his own text and a matter for commentary and reading in

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Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, the passage from Scratches adorns the margin of Derrida’s text—put in quotation marks and marked as a quote by providing Michel Leiris’s name at the end—but remains unmentioned in the main text of “Tympan.”81 At times, phrases from Leiris’s text appear in Derrida’s text, a concrete textual echo that reinforces the thematic resonance between both and suggests a breach to their textual limits. By the same token, the passage from Scratches stands side by side with Derrida’s text. Not subject to any framing and containment, it appears as an autonomous chunk of text, not merely food for Derrida’s commentary or enclosed by the cage of exegesis. But can a text— especially a theoretical text—include its margin without pressing it into service? After all, the marginally included passage in “Tympan” resonates strongly with Derrida’s text. Taken from the chapter “Perséphone” (“Persephone”) of Scratches, the first volume of Leiris’s 1948 autobiographical oeuvre La règle du jeu (Rules of the Game), the cited passage engages in a circuitous reflection on sound. Persephone, the daughter of the nature goddess Demeter and wife of Hades in Greek mythology, becomes the verbal and thematic inspiration for a series of associations. Prompted by homophony, Leiris indulges in reading the word “Persephone” (disaggregated into a pseudo-etymology of perse reminiscent of the verb percer, “to pierce,” and phone as pertaining to sound) as a strange synonym to the earwig, the “perce-oreille” or literally ear-piercer—hence its echo of Derrida’s reflections on how to attack, how to pierce the ear of philosophy. Furthermore, Leiris’s sonic musings take a decidedly graphic form in a catalog of arabesques, spirals, and labyrinths that move from the floral imaginary or the labyrinthine caverns linked to the mythic figure of Persephone to the spirals and mazes of the ear: The stem of a morning glory or other climbing plant, the helix inscribed on the shell of a snail, the meanders of the small and large intestine, the sandy serpentine excreted by an earth worm, . . . the marblings that bloom on the edges of certain books, the curved wrought iron, “modern style,” of the Métro entries, . . . the cerebral convolutions exemplified by, when you eat it, mutton brains, the corkscrewing of the vine, . . . the circulation of the blood, the concha of the ear, the sinuous curves of a path, everything that is wreathed, coiled, flowered, garlanded, twisted, arabesque, . . . all this I believe uncovered in the name of Persephone.82

At the end of the passage included in “Tympan” a familiar nexus between graphic form and sonic expression makes its appearance: the gramophone.

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Leiris zooms in on three of its component parts that bear a particularly suggestive connection to his musings on arabesque forms, phonic intrusion, and musical vibration in the preceding passages: the appendix (or gramophone needle), the diaphragm, and the tight “helicoid” of furrows on the roll.83 It is in these concrete embodiments—by way of technological apparatuses, as well as “transcribed into a frozen form”—that the mystery of sound (Leiris is particularly interested in sound as “sung language”) can be expressed and translated without, however, losing any of the ineffability that surrounds it as a “margin” a “fringe” or a kind of “irisation.”84 The secret of melodic elocution (as well as of spoken language) for Leiris lies in the challenge of seeing the human body as a medium — of something that, though close and familiar, emits a sound that resonates with other nonhuman sounds. Rather than reassured by the presence of the human body as origin of sound, a listener loses her firm ground when listening to music. Hence also Leiris’s rapid transition from the human voice to the gramophone that constitutes an increased sonic mystery, since it adds a layer of technological reproduction to the sonorous idiom of human singing, itself a translation of what cannot be expressed by words (alone). Much of the thematic stretto of Leiris’s text resonates with Derrida’s reflections in “Tympan”—from its associative method (Persephone versus tympan /um) to thematic similarities, even, at times, verbal echoes, for instance that of the suture between tympanum and voice that Derrida takes over almost verbatim from the margins. “Tympan” stages its own margin not as a blank page but rather admits another text that resonates with, even intrudes upon, Derrida’s reflections. In this gesture, “Tympan” showcases how theoretical reflection does not happen in a void, ex nihilo. Rather, it emerges from the incessant traffic between texts that effectively creates a movement of interlocking, meandering patterns—like the spiraling forms that recur throughout both texts—instead of a neat hierarchy of Chinese boxes. Instead of as a “secondary virginity” the margin manifests itself as “an inexhaustible reserve, the stereographic activity of an entirely other ear.”85 In order to rethink the margin of philosophy, as well as that of deconstructivist thought, however, in the textual dance with Leiris’s “Persephone,” Derrida’s text reconstructs the aural as a split domain: between the phonocentric mystique that he indicts Western philosophy for and the graphic metaphors of sound, which, in the guise of stereography—a technique that designates a graphic transposition and invokes sound only in the form of the prefix stereo that we associate with auditive authenticity—become “an entirely other ear”: an ear whose function has been made entirely graphic in “Tympan” as a type of writing or oto-

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impression. Both the passage from Leiris’s Scratches and Derrida’s “Tympan” apparently put sound and hearing at the center of attention. But, finally, the sonic realm, reduced to its oto-graphic (and technographic) forms, asserts itself in “Tympan” only as metaphor, the hinge that constitutes the difference between Western philosophy and deconstructivist thought by way of a deft manipulation of the margins and centers of the phonic. In contrast—almost three decades after the publication of Margins of Philosophy and in the wake of new approaches to media studies—Jean-Luc Nancy takes up Derrida’s treatment of sound in A l’écoute (Listening) of 2002. The book opens with a direct, if implicit, reference to Derrida’s “Tympan” by returning to the fundamental question of the opening of Margins of Philosophy, that of the limits of philosophy: “Assuming that there is still sense [sens] in asking questions about the limits, or about some limits, of philosophy (assuming, then, that a fundamental rhythm of illimitation and limitation does not comprise the permanent pace [allure] of philosophy itself, with a variable cadence, which might today be accelerated), we will ponder this: Is listening [l’écoute] something of which philosophy is capable?”86 In this opening paragraph that deploys a sonic vocabulary of “rhythms” and “cadences,” Nancy shifts Derrida’s question from sound as the phonocentric imaginary at the basis of a metaphysics of presence and being to the question of how philosophy treats sound. Is the philosopher capable of hearing or listening (écoute) without always reducing it to a process of understanding (entente)? For Nancy, listening pays attention to the medium rather than the message, bracketing the understanding of sound, for instance as spoken language, in favor of a body’s resonance with a rhythm or its affective reaction to melody. On this basis, Nancy insists on characteristics proper to sound and hearing in order to rethink the status of the self and its connection to its surroundings. Nancy understands sound as a phenomenon of vibrations and resonance, a medium built on methexis (i.e., participation and contact) and not, as the visual realm, on pattern or Gestalt recognition from a distance: “The sonorous . . . outweighs [emporte] form. It does not dissolve it, but rather enlarges it; it gives it an amplitude [ampleur], a density, a vibration or an undulation whose outline [dessin] never does anything but approach. The visual persists even in its disappearance; the sonorous appears and fades away even in its permanence.”87 In contrast to the phonocentric mystique of Western philosophy critiqued by poststructuralist thinkers such as Derrida, in Nancy’s reflections, sound is no longer limited to speech, nor does it function to cement the

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suture of voice and ear to turn hearing-oneself-speak into an imaginary of the full presence of the self. Instead, cadenced sound waves constitute the self as an echo chamber, not identical to itself but always as part of a series of relays, as one of the stations or spaces touched by sound. Viewed according to the sonic parameters of resonance, human sentience and the cognition of the self depend on an outside, since sound will always travel on or come from elsewhere, present only in the delayed propagation of sound waves and as vibratory repetition. Sound becomes the prime metaphor of self-knowledge—though no longer quite framed in terms of knowing as an intellectual or conceptual grasp. The “self ” resonates—neither absent nor fully present; no longer the living breath of the voice as the presence of spirit but rather the echo that fills the void, establishing the self not as full presence but as deferred and yet insistent resounding. Listening rereads sound as a master medium of poststructuralist notions of self, not as metaphysical shorthand for presence or being. In this “new” metaphorical shape—new to deconstruction, though not new to theorists of sound or music—sound as vibration, cadence, rhythm claims a close kinship to touch and thus presents as an oscillation between closeness and distance, between presence and absence. In this shape, inscriptive metaphors that pervade attempts to theorize sound throughout modernity, especially in the wake of the analog media revolutions of the nineteenth century, resound only as a weak echo. Instead, sound is unleashed from its graphic tether still strongly in evidence in Derrida’s “Tympan” and imagined as tension and collusion between reason and resonance instead. In addition, sound media— or, as in Derrida, the particularities of the auditory system — do not play an important role in Listening. Maybe, in the wake of the digital revolution, new sound media and formats do not lend themselves (yet) as well to becoming the reference for cultural metaphors.88 Or maybe, sound imagined as master metaphor of human sentience and environmental embeddedness, as well as of mediality in general—since sound comprises all other media, listening rules all other senses for Nancy—as a direct medium of theoretical thought, has to shed or downplay its technological and medial specificity here. After all, Listening (as so many other texts that foreground sound or sound media) thinks less about sound than about thought. In other words, sound is only its object as a metaphor for something else. And indeed, sound is the perfect vehicle for theoretical thought, especially for a thought about mediation or a thought about thought, precisely because of its fungibility: as basis or counter to phonocentric phantasms of presence, as an alternative, resonant way of “thinking,” as sonic distraction

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or invasion, or as new connections between the individual and its environment. Sound is the medium par excellence, since it lends itself to mediating mediality itself: Depending on the sonic avatar in use, sound can stand either at the antipodes of mediation, embodying what is most proper, present, or resonant, or alternatively come in a clearly mediated form —as gramophone grooves, tympanic vibrations, phonetic script, or MP3 files. On the one hand, sound can be marked as what is most mediated, always imagined in, translated or transduced into another shape, one that can also be framed as not its own, proper form —for instance, in Adorno’s quandary of the form of music in his reflections on the gramophone record. On the other hand, sound also signifies as what is least mediated, as pure, ineffable phenomenon. As such, sound becomes a mediator of representation and mediality, of the ways in which cultural discourses imagine and construct the difference between mediation and immediacy. Metaphors of inscription—as overt or disavowed imaginary, as well as negative foil— frequently represent and mediate between differing sonic approaches and phonetic tropologies. Inscription— especially in the form of phonographic grooves, for instance—serves as a particularly compelling imagination in tandem with sound’s Janus face: at once other to the unrepresentable real of sound and its medial and mediated double.

Conclusion Against Inscription?

Inscriptive Quandaries, Inscriptive Passions The mark of inscription is duplicitous, hypocritical. It is at once absolute and absolutely flexible. A mark cannot be undone. Once something has been marked, once its surface appearance has been affected, it can never return to a state prior to marking. The difference between the before and after of inscription leaves no space for ontological uncertainty: Either inscription has happened or it has not, either inscription’s cutting edge has found its mark or it has not. And yet, the epistemological status of the mark—and hence its symbolical and ideological valence—remains open, suspended. Precisely because of the binary logic that materially and procedurally divides the marked and the unmarked absolutely and without fail, states of marking and unmarking blur into each other. What constitutes the unmarked ante factum of one inscriptive event merely signals another inscription’s post factum. With the strict operational need to delimit an inscriptive act, to seal its event character with the stamp of its concomitant trace, arises the limitation and, hence, quandary, of the relative and 189

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relational absolute of unmarking. Only the shadow of another mark in the making returns a surface to an “unmarked” condition. Of course, it does not really turn it into an empty canvas or a blank slate, but only with regard to the particular inscription that is to come. But even as inscription produces its unmarked other, a sine qua non for its own impact, inscription’s necessary prefatory unmarking precludes the existence of the unmarked. Inscriptive logic stages a zero degree of inscription — other to marking only insofar as it lives (and dies) only in the swooping cadence and by the instantaneous grace of inscription’s sting. The analyses in the chapters of The Mark of Theory alert us to the cunning of inscriptive logic: Inscription thrives on binaries that are set up only to be complicated; inscription proliferates, appearing in multiple forms and guises on different conceptual levels. The difference management enabled by inscription as a paradoxical bridge between the material and the figurative is at the core of poststructuralist theories, even as they capitalize upon undecidability, aporia, and multiplicity. Even so, inscriptive figures function because they strategically highlight, or else eclipse, their conceptual alliances. In this way, as discussed in Chapter 1, inscription could become a means of imagining subjection—as social scripting and intextuation of individual bodies—while also lending itself to a fantasy of corporeal marks that counter social control. This implies a splitting of inscription into two scenarios that carry different theoretical valences, and it theoretically mobilizes and ultimately disregards cultural difference, since images of savage marked bodies serve as figurative foil for both avatars of inscription: one socially oppressive, the other violently liberatory in its anticivilizational excess. In the guise of trauma theory’s formulation of impact erasure, of an inscription without a mark, as analyzed in Chapter 2, poststructuralist reason deploys inscription as a way of controlling the limits between the individual and the collective, between the radically singular and the universalizable. The erasure of the mark of inscription at the scene of trauma prompts the figurative proliferation of other inscriptive marks (such as Auschwitz tattoos and circumcision in their artistic and theoretical embodiments) that echo the cut of trauma—almost the same but not quite. The status of these analogous inscriptions, however, remains suspended between illicit copy and artistic re-enactment, between the symbolic inheritance of traumatized bodies and the problematic universalization of trauma, between the radically proper and the common human. Since aporia lies at the heart of poststructuralist concepts of trauma, where impact and erasure are indelibly linked, such theories can claim that their concep-

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tual practice doubles as an ethical tenet—the only way of doing justice to trauma’s complexities. When poststructuralist theories, inspired by a varied tradition of indexical theories of the visual, tackle questions of visuality, as Chapter 3 suggests, inscription serves two aims. First, it allows for the manipulation of depth and flatness of visual representations so that the inscriptive processes in the production of images can be translated onto their imagistic and emotional impact on a viewer. Second, this “translation” also involves poststructuralism’s management of visuality and touch. In order to counter presence—the anathema of Derridean thought—touch and visuality have to present themselves as inextricably intertwined yet clearly set apart. Vision, as a sense that needs distance not closeness, stands in for touch, touch, as violent, momentary impact supplements vision. Inscription, couched in this limited economy, connects vision and touch as well as helps keep them apart. In a similar vein, as Chapter 4 underlines, poststructuralist uses of sound and sound media are profoundly strategic. They build on the reflections of sound theorists in the first decades of the twentieth century who compare phonographic grooves to writing as well as framing them as more than writing proper, laying the foundation for sound as a medium for the concept of écriture. By investing in sound beyond speech, such as white noise, by framing sound and auditory processes in the graphic guise of inscription or impression, phonocentric embodiments of sound could be bracketed. Reframed into a contact medium, sound decenters rather than self-centering the subject—resonant echo chamber, not sovereign center of consciousness. Depending on the strategic deployment of inscriptive scenarios around sound, sound mediates between mediation and fantasies of the unmediated. Poststructuralism lays implicit (or, at times, explicit) claim at an ethical theoretical practice, pitted on the impartiality of relativity, undecidability, difference. And yet, its uses of inscription show the limited, strategic deployment of conceptual difference at the heart of poststructuralist maneuvers. Rather than functioning with a general, open economy of inscription poststructuralism instead relies on a limited economy of inscription itself. What makes inscription as a figure so desirable for theoretical thought in general and for poststructuralist thought in particular? Inscription is so compelling because it gives theory power over reality. If we go back to its etymological roots, theorizing designates an act of contemplation and scrutiny of phenomena. As such, theory is always secondary to what it analyzes. However brilliant a reading theoretical thought constructs, it

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inevitably remains an afterthought to reality—unless theory’s link to the material world changes profoundly. Such a change indeed characterizes the many reflections and concepts conventionally grouped under the term poststructuralism—namely, to theorize reality as construction. Critics were quick to lead constructivist claims ad absurdum by pushing them to unintended extremes. Jacques Derrida’s much-cited statement of the nonexistence of anything extra-textual, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text]), for instance, became a mantra for those who wanted to discredit the idea that reality was a mere product of text.1 Likewise, Judith Butler’s theories of the performative nature of sexuality, formulated first in Gender Trouble, received harsh criticism by being construed polemically as the thesis that material or corporeal reality did not exist. Hardly any constructivist thinker would sustain such claims. Instead, viewing reality as the product of textual and discursive acts means that the way in which reality makes sense for us depends on patterns of thinking and conventionalized categories. As thinking individuals, as beings who inhabit language (and are inhabited by language), our relation to phenomena is always mediated. We never interact with “raw” materiality directly but apprehend it by means of a network of experiences, acquired knowledge, and systems of signification. The constructivist turn in theory reversed the secondary status of theoretical thought. If (our perception of ) reality depends on the ways in which we think and communicate about phenomena, then theory can potentially alter reality, since it can critique and thus induce changes in the conceptual structures that rule our interactions with the world. Since the material world has become textual—a matter of conceptual pattern recognition, representation, and interpretation—textual endeavors, such as the production of theory, can interfere with the very fabric of reality. Inscription as an imaginary underscores theory’s hold on the material world, since it concretizes conceptual power. As an interface between materiality and signification, inscription is both a material and a conceptual act. Inscription is close to writing—the creation of potentially signifying graphic marks—but construes the production of text as impactful for material reality. In other words, inscription both changes an object and changes our perception of it by making it readable. Consequently, it constitutes a perfect figure for theoretical work (as the production of text) that transcends the limitations of “theorizing” about the world to accrue the power to define and reimagine it instead. When a theory talks about inscription, it also fantasizes about its own power to shape the world. Scenes of inscription also potentially embody

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the primal scene of theory’s emergence as writing. Thus, inscription is a theoretical tool and also represents a theoretical unconscious. If difference management constitutes the pragmatics of inscription, then its metatheoretical imaginary is theory’s inscriptive passions. The textual production of inscription—as a figuration, a mise-en-scène within a theoretical text—represents meaning’s coming into being and links it to an act of writing similar to the very production of the theoretical text itself. Theory’s scenes of inscription can also be read as metaphors for and reflections upon its own textual production. But if inscription becomes a figure for the work of theory itself, a selfaffirming cipher of theoretical might, then it also harbors a self-reflexive power: In the guise of inscription, theoretical thought also must accept that it itself is yet another construction without right to any absolute truth claim. With this ontological and epistemological relativity also comes the burden of theoretical responsibility. If truth or faithfulness to reality no longer constitute the yardstick of theory, but thought takes part in constituting (our vision) of reality, then the measure of theory—apart from rhetorical appeal and logical limpidity (themselves the outcome of conventionalized structures, values, and disciplines)— can only be ethical. And yet, such an ethics can never be established a priori, since ethics itself—and here language fails us or, rather, highlights that our ideas are partly determined by their linguistic garb— expresses the universalization of a historically, culturally, and ideologically specific construction. In fact, an ethics of inscription has to be relative and provisional rather than exclusive, prescriptive, and stagnant—not writ in stone, but responsive to the multiple, ever-changing differences that face off against difference as absolute, universal, unquestionable, and unyielding category. Indeed, inscription illustrates the urgency of such ethical considerations. After all, in many cases, its scenes have formed the repertoire of sexism, racism, and homophobia, based on constructing and performing difference as absolute. But inscription is not per se wedded to dichotomy and, thus, potentially dangerous hierarchies and structures according to which we shape reality. At a first glance, the scenes of inscription that theoretical texts depict or invoke might seem quite similar, and thus seen as subscribing to just such biased and ethically problematic agendas—after all, in each case a material surface is subjected to a process of marking. And yet, each scene of inscription can channel multiple possibilities in different ways and focus its attention on a specific set of differences. Consequently, to reflect on the uses of inscription in theory, literature, art, and many other media allows us to probe inscriptive choreographies for their underlying agendas and their

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way of constructing difference: What is at stake in the staging and representation of scenes of inscription? What differences does inscription highlight? How are these constructed and what is their status? In what ways, for what purpose, and to what end does inscription deploy them? How do texts use such scenes to subvert or reify binaries like male and female, the cultural same and the other, the body and the text, the figurative and the literal— even as (and particularly whenever) they purport to deconstruct dichotomies in general? Seen as a multiply paradoxical scenario, inscription precludes difference from ever becoming total. Inscription as Schnittstelle functions as a hinge, a motor of differences. Since paradox reveals that two (or more) seemingly contradictory statements can be equally valid, inscription also urges us toward alternative and variable constructions of difference. In this sense, inscription as a scene evoked in theory, literature, art can also become the basis for an ethics, not in the sense of prescribing a set of binding rules but rather as a tool for questioning and, potentially, changing oppressive, violent, and hurtful constructions of difference. In fact, poststructuralist thought frequently claims to embody precisely such a theoretical ethics, one that equates theoretical tenets with ethical outcomes, especially through its procedural insistence on difference, understood not as essentializable categories but as micro-differences and shifts, as conduit to a less violent understanding and, indeed, construction of cultural, racial, sexual, etc., differences. While I do not want to disclaim some of the political potential of poststructuralist reason, we have to be wary of all-too-smooth transitions between conceptual and real differences, between theoretical thought and ethical outcomes. To think toward a viable theory of inscription means not only to analyze the aesthetic strategies of inscriptive tropes, to contextualize inscription as culture- and medium-specific, but, above all to reflect selfconsciously on theory’s desire to mark and on its inscriptive agendas.

Anti-Inscription But why tarry at all with poststructuralist thought and its inscriptive passions? In the face of the politically and theoretically fraught structures of inscriptive thought, why not do away completely with such an imperfect, problematic figure? What is the other of marking, which is to say, how can we undo the inscriptive logics of contemporary theory? Is it possible to escape inscription? For anti-inscriptive theories, marks often signify as stigmata of sexual and racial difference, as deviance from the norms of masculinity, whiteness, humanity, heterosexuality, or physical ability. In the

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face of the construction of such norms as unmarked social compass, theories of race, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and those that counter anthropocentrism have increasingly turned from a model of representation to one of unmarking by contesting the valence of marks of alterity. For instance, Peggy Phelan’s critique of inscriptive models in Unmarked starts with a scrutiny of sexual and racial stereotyping and its logic of corporeal marks. In order to disable inscription, to forgo marking, Phelan advocates for a resistance to visibility. Since symbolic value and visibility are not aligned in any simple way, the representation of marked deviations from the norms of whiteness, maleness, heterosexuality, or ability, especially as visible presence in the media, does not necessarily mean an increase in value. Visual inclusion does not automatically result in equal status. In fact, the opposite might be true. Of course, this is not to say that visibility can never be aligned with symbolic value or political power or that all instances of increased visibility of marginal subjects are always only examples of systemic co-optation. However, since the construction of difference, which is frequently visually mediated—as imaginaries, as visible phenomena turned into conceptual truth effects, often by way of visual media—itself turns on metaphors of (in)visibility and of the (un)marked, these concepts are integral parts of such a symbolic order rather than innocent concepts that can be tied to strategies of resistance in any simple way. As a “theory of value,” Phelan’s approach involves contesting the naturalized nexus between physical characteristics (such as skin color) and identity by challenging the ways in which the visible is used as truth-effect.2 An emphasis on what remains invisible lies at the basis of this approach: “The binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility is falsifying. There is real power in remaining unmarked; and there are serious limitations to visual representation as a political goal.”3 How does one remain unmarked, though? By refusing the parasitical connection between self and other that structures how we construct our identity; by stopping to define one’s self in contrast to the dark mirror image of the (sexual, racial, etc.) other and by accepting one’s own alterity to oneself: “Until one can accept one’s internal other as lost, invisible, an unmarked blank to oneself and within the world, the external other will always bear the marks and scars of the looker’s deadening gaze.”4 Assuming one’s unmarkedness in such a way promises an escape from one’s own psychic and political investment in economies of marking. According to Phelan, by accepting, indeed embracing, one’s identity as lost and uncertain, we can step outside of the circle of violent constructions of self and other and interrupt the self-perpetuation of the economy of difference that will

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always be based on a “marked” and thus “unequal” relationship between self and other.5 But what is the status of such an “unmarked” state if the symbolic economy of marking that Phelan works against already has its unmarked categories built in? Does to become or to remain unmarked—and there is a world of difference in the gap between remaining and becoming—imply the same for those who bear the mark of alterity and for those who remain the unmarked norm of this system? And if the power to mark and to determine the value of the mark is unequally distributed, why should the power to remain unmarked be any different—within anybody’s reach? And does remaining unmarked automatically provide access to power? While visibility is not equivalent to value or power—being branded with the stigma of difference actually accomplishes the opposite—the absence of a mark does not automatically guarantee access to value or power either. After all, according to Barbara Johnson’s astute analysis of muteness—a sonic analogy to invisibility—to remain silent (much like to remain unmarked) can signify a state of disempowerment or, alternatively though not randomly, carry a charge of power, for instance whenever male privilege assumes the role or mask of female muteness.6 Not unlike muteness in Johnson’s analysis, the power of unmarkedness hinges upon its position within (or at the outside of ) a given system. What is the power of the unmarked if it is also one of the sides of the equation, an integral part of the structure? Phelan’s category of the unmarked projects the desire for an outside to inscriptive economies, for a complete resistance to the reign of the mark. But Phelan’s own account in Unmarked oscillates between a position completely removed from prevalent economies of inscription and an investment in a resistant energy inherent to such economies. In this second role, the unmarked resonates with systemic inconsistencies, “the blind spots laced through the visual field,” the excesses, ruptures, and gaps inherent in representation.7 That these blind spots, also for theories of visuality, might lie in structures of invisibility, as Phelan argues, rather than only in what becomes visible, is inspiring—but only as long as invisibility does not result in a facile shorthand for resistance. Hence, what Phelan calls unmarked is always only un-marked, marked as that which escapes marking but, unable to shed its allegiance to the mark, dependent on marking for its very definition and existence. Phelan’s invocation of the unmarked, then, is itself reminiscent of an inscriptive logic, one in which marking and unmarking, inscription and erasure, function as two sides of the same coin. And this is not an anti-inscriptive stance but rather another embodiment of the figure of inscription itself.

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Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of exscription underlines such an intertwining between inscription and its other. Even as exscription consists in writing something out of signification, what is exscribed, as Nancy insists, does not constitute some kind of ineffable or unsayable that would exist absolutely outside of writing’s script. Much as the syllable ex- (as opposed to the in- of inscription) signals an outside, that which undergoes exscription is still part of “é(x)criture”:8 The exscribed [L’excrit] is exscribed [excrit] from the first word, not as an “unsayable” [“indicible”] or as an “uninscribable” [“ininscriptible”] but on the contrary as that opening into itself of writing itself, to its own inscription as the infi nite discharge of meaning—in all the senses one should give the expression. Writing, reading, I exscribe the thing itself, “existence,” the “real”—which is only exscribed and whose being alone is what’s at stake in inscription. In inscribing significations, we exscribe the presence of what withdraws from all signification, being itself (life, passion, substance . . .). The being of existence can be presented: it presents itself when exscribed.9

In other words, the content of exscription is not the unwritten but that which writing defines as its own outside. However, according to Nancy, the exscribed presents itself as a point of resistance to signification within signification itself. The prefix ex- points to an outside from within that opens up writing and redefines it as a process where meaning is assigned, dismissed, even expended in excess. Exscription in this sense is akin to Derrida’s notion of écriture and toys with it. To treat writing (or scription) in such a way means to emphasize extension, spacing, materiality as a pièce de resistance against signification and against inscription in a limited definition as belonging to the reign of meaning and involving an erasure of corporeality as well as of the materiality of language: Exscription is produced in the loosening of unsignifying [in-signifiant] spacing: it detaches words from their senses [sens], always again and again, abandoning them to their extension. A word, so long as it’s not absorbed without remainder into a sense, remains essentially extended between other words, stretching to touch them, though not merging with them: and that’s language as body.10

In “On the Subject of Ravishment,” Peggy Kamuf emphasizes the paradox of signification and erasure at work in exscription: “The ‘X’ introduced into ‘écrit’ forms the exteriorizing prefix that brings the word into the

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vicinity of excrete or excreta, exuded matter of organic, finite existence. At the same time, the ‘X’ stamps the ‘écrit’ with the mark of cancellation, places it under erasure. It is the written mark of writing’s effacement.”11 Kamuf ’s reading of exscription as an echo of Derrida’s Heideggerian notion of putting under erasure or crossing out (“sous rature,” or “Durchkreuzung”) highlights the complex play between marking and cancellation, both agon and symbiosis.12 In the guise of exscription, the complicity between inscription and its supposed other, erasure, is reaffirmed yet again. Nancy pits exscription—a concept very close to Derrida’s notion of the trace, as well as to the semi-open economy of inscription that I have analyzed as part and parcel of deconstruction throughout this book—against a narrow definition of inscription as a violent conceptual maneuver: the reduction of materiality to pure meaning via an imaginary of inscribed (i.e., intextuated) bodies. But the difference between inscription and exscription that Nancy regards as the linchpin of a theoretical as well as ethical thought about corporeality consists, after all, in a divergence of conceptual perspective or style: that between theoretically transubstantiating all materiality into meaning and the positing of a textual materiality as spacing that resists signification. Nancy’s substitution of an ex- for an inreflects two different understandings of inscription: one in which signification carries all the weight and one in which materiality holds its own (within the fold of signification). This quandary results from a thought that wants to have its own outside and consume and include it, too. In other words, exscription is merely a means of managing inscription itself by splitting it into two supposedly different notions that, however, receive sustenance from the same figurative basis. Once writing’s outside (and here we have to read writing in its broadest sense) shifts from an absolute exterior to a space that writing itself defines as its other, what surface remains for writing’s inscription? If a mark no longer finds its place in the unmarked, it can only become a remark. Inscription turns into reinscription, even hyper-inscription, inscription upon inscription. As Nancy advocates for exscription as another combination of inscription and erasure, the problem of inscription reappears at a meta-level. Inscription is, after all, a theoretical scenario, a figurative medium of conceptual reflection. If we are to inscribe inscription differently, then what is the valence of this figure and the status of figurality as such? Who gets to decide how inscription inscribes and how we are to inscribe inscription? And who judges if inscription has happened? Most violent constructions of difference via inscriptive metaphors assert themselves as corporeal marks. Bodies become visible as different only whenever physical characteristics are naturalized as differential signs. And

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yet, to bear or not to bear such a mark is not the only way of having one’s difference forcibly expressed. Inscription functions as imposed stamp of approval or disapproval, and discriminating and discriminatory conceptual practices can also hinge upon inscription as a performance by using the very ability to inscribe (or not) as the basis for categorical differences. In the essay “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien” (“The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious”), Jacques Lacan describes the animal through its inability to pretend or to erase its own traces.13 The difference between humans and animals in Lacan’s essay hinges not upon bearing a mark or being unmarked—as do many inscriptive economies of difference, especially those focused on sexuality and race—but upon the agency of inscription. Or rather, it depends not upon inscription, on leaving one’s mark or track, which is an ability ascribed (by Lacan and others) to the animal, but rather upon the erasure of inscription. The divide between animal and human emerges there where inscription and pretense reach their second degree: not lying or inscribing but dissimulating by selling a lie as a lie or leaving behind not a mark but its absence. While animals can leave traces, and can thus be tracked, according to Lacan they lack inscriptive agency, since they cannot (or do not) control their traces. In his reflection on Lacan’s discourse on animality in the essay “Et si l’animal répondait?” (“And Say the Animal Responded?”) Jacques Derrida disproves this train of thought above all by reminding us of the undecidability of the trace. If we contest, with Derrida, the difference between tracing and erasing, by extension the difference between animals and humans becomes void. Consequently, Derrida counters Lacan’s assertion by insisting on the blurred boundaries between inscription and erasure, the impossibility “to have an indivisible line pass through the middle of a feigned feint” or “to situate one between inscription and erasure of the trace.”14 For Derrida, erasure and inscription become interchangeable, indeed undistinguishable, precisely because of the definition of the trace: Since the trace is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, and refers itself, it properly has no site—erasure belongs to its structure. And not only the erasure which must always be able to overtake it (without which it would not be a trace, but an indestructible and monumental substance), but also the erasure which constitutes it from the outset as a trace, which situates it as the change of site and makes it disappear in its appearance, makes it emerge from itself in its production.15

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According to Derrida, the fundamental shortcoming of Lacan’s reasoning lies in the assumption of definitional power itself: the power to judge between inscription and erasure and thus, by extension, the power of erasure. But, for Derrida, the agency of erasure lies in the trace itself rather than in some “master subject” be it “God, human, or animal.”16 In this sense, neither humans nor animals can actually boast of the power of erasure, nor can they claim to adjudicate this power to themselves and withhold it from others: “Traces erase (themselves), like everything else, but the structure of the trace is such that it cannot be in anyone’s power to erase it and especially not to ‘judge’ its erasure, even less so by means of a constitutive power assured of being able to erase, performatively, what erases itself.”17 In other words, the undecidability between inscription and erasure productively disempowers constructions of difference also at the level of inscriptive ability. No mark is tied unequivocally to one meaning, and it cannot be read univocally as mark or erasure either. This implies, also, that in principle nobody has absolute inscriptive power. In the act of inscribing or erasing, any intent vested in the gesture potentially voids itself, open to reading or misreading a mark (or its absence) as imbued with meaning, even, more fundamentally, to acknowledge or disallow its character as mark or, alternatively, as its alter ego, the unmarked or the (invisible) sign of erasure.

Materiality, Mediality, Method Inscription is so deeply rooted in today’s conceptual thought that its simple ejection (pace Phelan, for instance) often proves insufficient. Even there where it is explicitly shunned and evicted, it has a tendency to reassert itself in a different guise. Inscription has no outside. Or at least this is true for the way in which poststructuralist theories deploy this figure, especially since they often pit a limited, critiqued notion of inscription against one that underlines undecidability and openness. If it is impossible to escape the trope of inscription through anti-inscriptive turns, or, if theory is not yet ready to relinquish this figurative framework, then what about critiques that step outside of inscriptive parameters altogether? For instance, theories that counter the logic of inscription not by insisting on marking’s other but by censuring poststructuralism’s relationship with materiality. These approaches do not accept the theoretical basis of inscriptive theories but clamor for different theoretical paradigms altogether, ones that replace poststructuralist investments in figuration with an attention to material realities.

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For instance, from the vantage point of media studies, Marc Hansen faults poststructuralist logic for its figurative use of material realities. As Hansen argues in Embodying Technesis, in order to dominate and construct its own outside as part of its theoretical system, poststructuralism integrates theory’s outside in the form of metaphor, only as theory’s medium, never as its message. For Hansen, poststructuralist theories—as well as the theories of culture, media, science, and technology that they have influenced—are guilty of “technesis,” of “the putting-into-discourse of technology.”18 Such theories use technology as a means of tethering abstract thought to concrete historical and cultural contexts but without attending to the multiple “robust materiality”—a term that recurs throughout Hansen’s book— of technology. Instead, according to Hansen, whose critical language makes abundant use of figures of inscription, of marking and imprinting, theory translates concrete technological materiality into cultural materiality, as the “material markings that technology (like all cultural productions) acquires in entering the cultural domain.”19 Technology gives material and ontic semblance to cultural phenomena by “stamping [theoretical claims] with the indelible mark of the empirical.”20 But in the end, technology is only a placeholder of something else, an “enabling means” and “material support” for theoretical concepts.21 In contrast, Hansen suggests that the materiality of technology operates at an infrastructural level, subtending, rather than part and parcel of cultural representation. Hansen’s technetic critique provides a welcome caveat for the figurative thrust of theory, especially for a type of theory in which textualized constructivism complicates or even interrupts any reference to a material out there. Much like technology, concrete processes of inscription find their way into theory often as a figure rather than as the focus of conceptual attention. That poststructuralist theory itself, especially in Derrida’s work, reflects on its potentially problematic relation with an outside or acknowledges figurality as conceptual engine does not automatically invalidate Hansen’s critique. But it raises questions about the status and construction of mediation and materiality. Of course, not everything is literally text or only present (and thus also absent) in representation— or at least, even if we subscribed to such a theoretical attitude, we would not entirely act upon this notion as embodied individuals in our pragmatic dealings with an environment. Material phenomena, such as technology, are not merely social effects, are not only the stuff of cultural discourses. But how would we give an account of their “robust materiality” without having recourse to systems of representations—be they algorithms, schematics, or, indeed, cultural theories?

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Catherine Malabou’s critique of Derrida’s privileging of writing as a theoretical figure echoes Hansen’s critique by scrutinizing the way in which theory mediates reality. In her essay “Grammatologie et plasticité” (“Grammatology and Plasticity”), Malabou analyzes the failure of Derrida’s project of a grammatology in part as a symptom of a superannuated ground for figuration, since “writing . . . is no longer pregnant in the real. Writing is no longer the privileged hermeneutic stylus of the epoch.”22 Whereas the historical and scientific context of Derrida’s 1967 De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) framed reality in terms akin to writing—the programming of a computer, the genetic coding of DNA sequences— contemporary science relies on different patterns: form and forming, no longer script and inscription. Consequently, Malabou claims that deconstruction and its focus on différance needs updating in order to survive theoretically. Rather than continuing to have recourse to graphic figures, Malabou proposes the notion of plasticity as new conceptual anchor closer to contemporary reality: Plasticity refers to the dual ability to receive form (clay is plastic) and give form (as in the plastic arts of plastic surgery). The deconstruction of concepts must therefore now be apprehended as a change of form, a metamorphosis. And all this also presupposes that the schema of writing gives way to a new schema in virtue of the very plasticity of its meaning, its modifiability, in a word, its aptitude for metamorphosis.23

While Malabou’s theoretical and figurative updating of deconstruction strikes an appealing balance between preserving poststructuralist tenets and paying attention to material realities, it also raises conceptual and methodological questions. Most important, Malabou’s approach oscillates in its use of reality and conceptual figuration. Is Derrida’s graphic model to be critiqued because it does not adequately take material reality into account or rather because its theoretical metaphors are no longer up-todate? While this seems to constitute only a minor difference, it determines what we perceive as theory’s function: a reflection of reality or else an investigation into how we frame reality. If, as deconstruction suggests, we adhere to the latter, scientific paradigms certainly form part of the objects under theoretical scrutiny, not as an objective description of reality but as a way of understanding and thus shaping it. This also means that deconstruction’s own figurative ground does not necessarily have to conform to newer scientific paradigms. After all, most of the approaches to media studies analyzed in this book have come to terms with new technologies precisely by creating figurative links to older media, such as writing. While Derrida’s Of Grammatology highlights some contemporary scientific and

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medial advances, it also traces a much longer prehistory of inscriptive techniques that have influenced the present. In fact, the critical genealogy of poststructuralism traced in these pages shows that the prevalence of figures of inscription in contemporary theory does not necessarily depend on contemporary media imaginaries. For the purpose of The Mark of Theory, however, Malabou’s turn to plasticity and her critique of deconstruction’s graphic metaphors encounter an additional conceptual problem. They only work with a limited economy of inscription, that is, by highlighting the graphic components of Derridean figures such as the trace. And while a graphic imaginary subtends them, poststructuralism’s inscriptive figures also strain beyond their graphic bounds by investing in material impact and the malleability of surfaces. This is not quite exactly the same as Malabou’s notion of plasticity, and yet, it is also not that far removed from it. And while inscription’s graphic resonances might indeed make it apparently less timely for a thought of the present, its openness, and conceptual necessity to reach beyond the purely graphic, constitutes poststructuralism’s malleability and ability to metamorphose, as desired by Malabou. In fact, this very graphic penchant allows theories based on inscriptive figures potentially to reflect on the way theory mediates—that is, how it constructs its own relation to material reality—precisely because its analogy to processes of writing can point back to the textual production of theory. Putting inscription, in all its complex shapes, at the center of theoretical reflection endows the question of medium with new centrality: the medium, not only the message, the vehicle, and not only the content, forms theory’s core. The way theory imagines, illustrates, expresses, embodies, and materializes (textually and figuratively) its conceptual claims accrues new importance. Theory is always about mediality. It needs figurations and imaginary embodiments to construct and communicate its concepts. Granted, material reality is (and should be) more than just a metaphor. But then, metaphors are more than mere rhetorical games, too. To agree that figuration lies at the heart of all theoretical endeavor does not mean that theory constitutes a self-involved space, incessantly resonating with itself only, or to view theory necessarily as a maneuver that cannibalizes its other and renders outside matter immaterial. Instead, theoretical thought is embodied; it happens in and for the material world. The way it uses things does not have to erase their materiality, even though, since the main medium of theory is language, it cannot concretely contain but rather needs to point to things. Theoretical metaphors need not be the site of a radical dematerialization. Instead, they can serve as reminders of theory’s dependence on the world. Thought cannot function as pure abstraction;

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the way in which theory thinks and formulates its thoughts cannot remain unaffected by the material world. Even as figure or metaphor, things and phenomena fundamentally shape how theory theorizes. To think otherwise means to relegate materiality from the outset to a secondary role— not even as base to a superstructure. To indict thought for its seamless subsumption of the material world might also indirectly naturalize a dichotomy of materiality versus signification, of concretion versus abstraction, and of the singular versus the general. It also means to adjudicate signification—in isolation from, but also as a force that overpowers, reality—the upper hand from the outset. But this division is itself mediated, rather than a pre-existing given, often in terms of inscriptive models. On the creative flipside, theory’s conceptual movements live and die by concrete material examples—and this is particularly true for inscriptive models, since they need to invoke specific scenarios of inscription as placeholders and engines of general theoretical tenets. Specific media technologies can become particularly compelling phenomena for the renegotiation of mediation (also of mediation and immediacy), since, as material objects and media, they fold materiality into representation by foregrounding the specific embodiments and forms that ground representation. What it at stake, then, is not to pit materiality against signification, nor to bemoan theory’s immaterializing grasp, but rather to think through the ways in which materiality and its other are themselves mediated— conceptually but also, by way of concrete metaphors and referents, materially. This involves, however, a question of the power, as well as the responsibility, of theoretical thought, of the theorist’s role in constructing, indeed, scripting, reality by conceptual and textual means. Poststructuralist theories of inscription are not ontologies but tropologies, not ways of describing a reality or truth but styles of thinking. This has somewhat paradoxical consequences for the discursive power claimed by poststructuralist reason. Pre-poststructuralist theories claimed an analytical relation to an outside, deriving power from interpretive truth claims, often couched in the apprehension of a deeper truth or meaning. At the same time, as mere interpreters of pre-existing objects or phenomena, they also relinquished the power to be more than insightful representations or reflections. In contrast, poststructuralist theories erase or at least bracket the notion of an outside. Their objects of inquiry are other discursive constructs of a reality that is otherwise inaccessible. This claim gives poststructuralism real power, since it potentially allows for a fusion of theory and politics as theory is imagined as leaving its mark on (the construction

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of ) reality. After all, if reality is constructed or comes to us as constructed, theory’s participation via acts of construction harbors the possibility of changing what we perceive and treat as real. However, with discursive empowerment, as it disempowers the truth claims of other theories, poststructuralism also relinquishes some of its own theoretical agency. By way of its own logic it can only constitute one discursive construction among others. Even though it claims a special theoretical insight by putting other theories in their discursive place— rather than accepting them at face (or truth) value—and operates as a kind of meta-construction, its own tenets cannot claim an exception from the constructivist relativity of theory itself. If poststructuralism is based on theoretical methexis, as participation in the production of the intelligible world, it also opens the door to its own relativization: Constructions can be constructed differently. If, pace Derrida, we frame this paradoxical claim of theoretical superiority by establishing a shared conceptual humility in inscriptive terms, poststructuralism allocates itself the power to erase the truth claim of other theories by marking them as marked (i.e., as construction rather than accounts of reality) while relinquishing the very power to erase or mark. Deconstruction grounds itself on the need to inscribe, even to prescribe, a theoretical perspective. At the same time, it is subject to the injunction not to prescribe. While this is not a logically disabling paradox, it does have serious implications for the link between theoretical procedure and ethical and political relevance. In Judith Butler’s reflections in Frames of War the politics of poststructuralism emerge as a particularly fraught scenario, since the notion of the frame that stands at the center of Butler’s text invites a meta-reflection about how mechanisms of framing influence us and how poststructuralist reason frames the frame. For Butler, the frame as an instrument of control forges and prescribes a specific way of seeing, but it remains ultimately too unstable to hold its shape for long. Subject to functioning in ever-new contexts, to iterating its vision, the frame, like a fragile mirror, shows its limitations, becomes distorted, and breaks: The frame that seeks to contain, convey, and determine what is seen (and sometimes, for a stretch, succeeds in doing precisely that) depends upon the conditions of reproducibility in order to succeed. And yet, this very reproducibility entails a constant breaking from context, a constant delimitation of new contexts, which means that the “frame” does not quite contain what it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give defi nitive organization to its content. In other words, the frame does not hold anything together in one place,

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but itself becomes a kind of perpetual breakage, subject to a temporal logic by which it moves from place to place. As the frame constantly breaks from its context, this self-breaking becomes part of the very defi nition.24

Here, the rhetoric of rupture allied to the poststructuralist tenet of iterability and performability—since what seems stable and self-identical is actually the outcome of incessant repetitions—reappears on a meta-level as inherent in the very structure that conditions how we perceive or construct something. But can the frame be framed differently, so that it holds true to its version, even in spite of its inbuilt instability? Even Butler recognizes that the frame indeed succeeds (only for a stretch?) in cropping and freezing what it shows. Or, in other words, how can we guarantee that a frame is seen as creative and productive? If Butler’s notion of the frame is itself subject to its laws—namely, to disintegrate and break— can its very instability also be subject to distortion and breakage? And how can we be sure that—in spite of such an unstable construction of the frame—we do not turn a blind eye and let ourselves be conscripted by a violent freeze frame that shows us others as less-than-humans rather than seeing according to Butler’s framing of the frame that allows us to break through the violence of framing?25 If the framer is framed, then who frames the framer who frames the framer?26 And what can arrest the potentially infinite regress of framing? A similar problematic structure is at work in poststructuralism’s staging of inscription as a flexible, paradoxical figure. Even as poststructuralist thought contests some uses of inscription, because of their ethically problematic fallout (for instance, in theories of race and sexuality), it also elevates some inscriptive metaphors to the status of resisting structures. Some types of inscription (for instance, the Derridean trace) become mainstays of ethical and theoretical energy. Their political potential is often invoked in a rhetoric of resistance that celebrates rupture, undecidability, and excess. To work through structures and models (of inscription) and to point out their instability, their proneness to breakage, their innate tendency to overflow and exceed themselves and their ideological aims, often grounds a political or ethical impulse in (poststructuralist) theory. Theory’s intervention can either be strategically downplayed, as a claim to merely locate what resistant energy a structure contains of itself, or highlighted, as (conceptual) activation of rupture. It is surely of great conceptual value to think through repressive ideologies and to show that their complex structures lend themselves to more creative as well as more ethical patterns. But

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it can also lead to a theoretical shortcut in which pseudo-ontologies of resistance and excess become automatically equated with or replace political and ethical acts. Sheer complexity rarely makes oppressive structures inoperative, even though an insightful analysis can show entry points for a different theoretical thought. And an obsession with difference and undecidability in theory does not yet convert it into a politics or an ethics. Inscription as a theoretical figure engages in structures of mise en abyme— of inscriptions of inscriptions—and in strange loops of inscribed inscribers. Much as inscription hinges upon an oscillation of basic procedural differences, between materiality and signification, the literal and the figurative, inscription and erasure, it also negotiates between inscribing and being inscribed, between scripting and reading inscription. To use one of the many puns of Jacques Derrida, inscription is “écrypture.”27 It encrypts as it scripts or inscribes and invites us to decrypt its text. Inscription necessitates and attracts the reader’s gaze. Inscriptive theories encrypt and decrypt inscription: They are meta-reflections as well as part of inscriptive processes. What is significant is how theories encrypt inscription for us and, consequently, how they guide and channel our acts of decrypting. What kind of (inscription of ) inscription can guarantee that we decrypt it in productive ways? If inscription is the framework through which poststructuralist theory is conscripting us to look (for now), and if we want to arrive at a more ethical construction of differences, we need to formulate an ethics of inscription that would also be an ethics of theory. If we accept that the tropological field of inscription is itself neither inherently violent (conducive to unequal, discriminatory scripts of reality) nor inherently benign (unstable and undecidable and thus a space of political productivity), we need to invest in its construction. If we accept that much depends on our interpretation, on how we see things and work upon the perspective of others, we have to assume theoretical responsibility and initiative, even if we cannot think agency in facile terms or believe that any of our acts truly initiates something (rather than being itself scripted). Rather than masking ethical investment in conceptual terms, as undecidability, excess, free play of differences, we might admit that we have already made an ethical decision by aligning a certain theory with an ethical impulse, which does not, however, disburden us from implementing, activating, and putting this impulse into theory and practice incessantly without, however, forgetting that theory and practice are not simply interchangeable, even as they are also not completely at odds. From the vantage point of inscription, I propose two related strategies in order to manage theory’s relation to the material and the political in a

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responsible manner: a reconfiguration of theoretical tropologies and a demarcation of theoretical ethics. To reconfigure theory implies a responsible use of the figurative. It means not to indulge in disfiguration, for instance by insisting on a strict dichotomy of the literal and figurative or by naturalizing the nonfigurative. As Georges Didi-Huberman shows, in order to present something as nonfigurative, it needs to be constructed and actively divested of its figurality rather than existing “naturally” beyond and before any figuration.28 To claim that the literal is the effect of figuration means that the way in which phenomena or practices become metaphors matters profoundly. Even as conceptual thought is figurative at heart, this figurality does not lack a concrete basis. Instead, the metaphors we live by assume importance, and so does the specificity of that which becomes food for theoretical troping. Since theories thrive on metaphors, their specific material vehicles affect and shape theoretical tenets. Rather than subsuming their concrete, singular materiality under the abstracting gaze of theory—and concretion and abstraction are themselves constructed binaries—we might take these “vehicles” seriously and scrutinize how they inspire, shape, and are shaped by concepts. For this link between vehicle and theoretical tenor to be left open to re(con)figuration, instead of naturalizing it as a figurative shorthand, figuration has to be thought as a process, one in which all participants are subject to being configured and reconfigured. Changes in figuration do not mean that metaphors are fundamentally fungible, that figures are easily interchangeable, or that concepts can draw at will on different vehicles. After all, these “vehicles” do not come in neatly packaged units as univocal, monolithic blocks but form part of complex scenarios. Theoretical figures and their different embodiments, with their specific references to other discourses and practices, have theoretical consequences. They also prefigure and reconfigure how theory theorizes. That one can imagine inscription with different scenarios in mind—from tattooing to phonographic grooves— does not mean that it can encompass and contain just any scenario but rather means that inscription itself can always be imagined differently and is subject to the changes that come with different scenarios. In reading inscription, as well as other theoretical metaphors, the trick is not to allow one’s gaze to become petrified or petrifying, not to fall for Medusa’s gaze, but to keep inscription’s construction open and flexible instead. Inscription as act, not only as result, as scenario, not only as text, is multifaceted, multifigurative, and polyperspectival. Its different levels—the inscribed text and the acts of its inscription and decrypting, as well as its textual and theoretical representations—allow for

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a constant oscillation in which different levels can be collapsed into or strictly differentiated from one another. This instability lends itself to managing and constructing differences. But it also means that the movement of construction and management, and hence its political consequences, are dependent on our active inscription of inscription. To demarcate theory implies a responsible construction of theoretical politics and ethics by scrutinizing theory’s own construction of its theoretical and political potential. By sounding out the different resonances of the prefix de-, which can serve as both an intensifier and as a mark of reversal and undoing, to demarcate theory implies to separate theory from politics and ethics rather than to simply conflate the two, as well as to think about strategic, yet responsible, ways of blurring this very delimitation. Much as theory receives decisive impacts from the vehicles of its metaphors and needs to take into account how it manages figurality, theory itself can become a conduit or medium for potential political change, but it is not in itself that change. Poststructuralist theory is at once intensely invested in material and political realities and profoundly detached. As culminating point of theoretical tendencies and imaginaries that were more than a century in the making, poststructuralist constructivist tenets have erected intricate mazes of paradoxical loops and self-reflexive regresses, but they have also claimed unprecedented power in the construction of what we perceive and live as reality. Of course, as theory, it is not in the political “thick of things”—such an image of participation and distance is itself a construction, and poststructuralist theory also participates in the construction and deconstruction of dichotomies such as this one. But this does not permit a facile slippage between theory and politics—for instance, by claiming that making a difference is the same as marking a difference— or a seamless cathexis of the procedural and conceptual differences so frequently invoked by poststructuralism and differences of race, sex, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, ability, class, etc.29 Rather, difference cannot remain an abstract conceptual token but needs to remark the concrete differences that inspire it, as well as translate itself into alternative constructions and reconstructions that counter violent differences. The reading of inscriptive scenarios as theoretical constructions that, to some extent, imagine, stage, and authorize their own coming into writing lies at the beginning of a reflection on the specific modalities of the scene of inscription and its construction in theoretical texts. In other words, the textual production of inscription—as a figuration, a mise-en-scène within a theoretical text—represents how meaning comes into being and ties it to an act of writing similar to the very production of the theoretical text itself.

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Consequently, theoretical scenes of inscription must also be read as figures for and reflections upon the textual production of theory. Inscription is writing’s fantasy of its other and writing’s textual staging of the origin of writing—as theory. Theory—as mediated by concrete figures, as process of mediation—needs to construct and reconstruct its relationship to its own metaphors and meta-metaphors. As such it must take into account its own inscriptive passions, its figurative penchants, its own dreams about what is ethical and what theoretical, what is material and what conceptual, as well as its own status as a (theoretical) construction of construction. Before suggesting how somebody can inscribe or theorize differently, or look differently at inscription or theoretical reason, theoretical work has to scrutinize its own investment in the figures that fuel it. By the same token, before moving past what arrests us in the theories of poststructuralism, we have to work through what arrests poststructuralism —namely, its inscriptive tropologies. This is not a goodbye to agency or material (and figurative) specificity— even if we want to construct both as byproducts or aftereffects. But construct them we must, and thus we must also assume the responsibility that our mediation entails.

acknowledgments

The process of thinking toward and writing The Mark of Theory happened over a span of many years. Interrupted by other projects and drawn in different directions by intellectual influences and impulses, the book has experienced radical changes and conceptual shifts throughout. The Mark of Theory follows Elizabeth Grosz’s advice to focus on theories about materiality and corporeality with less of an emphasis on literary analysis. It heeds Brad Epps’s caveat that theoretical thought needs to be carefully contextualized and attentive to specific textures and materialities. It tries to do justice to Sepp Gumbrecht’s injunction toward theoretical daring. Even though the project was originally planned as a reflection on theories of corporeality in general, inscription became the book’s central figure thanks to Barbara Johnson’s insistence on the importance of this concept. Although I was not able to profit from her insights during the writing phase, I still hope that she would have deemed this book worthy of having received her attention and advice in its very early stages. Chilean writers and artists Diamela Eltit and Guadalupe Santa Cruz had the generosity to discuss their creative processes and theoretical visions with me during a research trip to Chile in 2006, and their insights have inspired this book beyond the vignette-like analyses in Chapter 3. The short piece on Santa Cruz’s Quebrada is meant as a reminder of the brilliance and creativity of an artist and writer whose career was cut short by cancer in 2015. (I published a longer version in Spanish, “La corrosión del sentido: Quebrada de Guadalupe Santa Cruz,” Taller de Letras 47 [November 2010]: 69–88). I would like to thank Cristóbal Santa Cruz for his kind permission to reproduce one of the images from Quebrada in Chapter 3 of The Mark of Theory. I was able to start writing what would become The Mark of Theory thanks to a fellowship year at the Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania in 2010 –2011, generously funded by a Mellon grant, and received insightful feedback on a part of the manuscript from my colleagues there. I am particularly thankful to Jim English and Catriona MacLeod for their kind support of the project and to Alison Shonkwiler who suggested that 211

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this should be a short, theoretically focused book rather than a compendium of all things inscriptive. Eric Hayot read drafts of some of the chapters and steered me toward a more accessible style of writing. Since he included a fragment from the original manuscript as an example of microstructuring in his Elements of Academic Style, I hope the book as a whole lives up to some of his structural and stylistic standards (even though the example in question did not make it into The Mark of Theory and will be included in a subsequent book project instead). The final stretch of writing and revising was made possible by the productive intellectual atmosphere and collegial generosity at Cornell University. Nick Admussen and Paul Fleming helped me fine-tune the book proposal (and thus also the narrative of the book as a whole), and Jonathan Boyarin, Cathy Caruth, and Neil Saccamano provided suggestions and critiques for parts of the manuscript. The opportunities to workshop chapters at Cornell, as a talk for the Comparative Cultures and Literatures Forum and at the German Colloquium series, were extremely valuable test-drives for the book’s central theoretical arguments, and I would like to thank my interlocutors for their incisive and productive comments. During the final stages of writing and revising, Rey Chow’s belief in my work sustained me, and her witty and generous advice that one book did not have to do it all became the mantra that helped me get through the painstaking process of rewriting. I would also like to thank the manuscript reviewers for their insightful observations. A small portion of Chapter 4 has been published as “Between the Visual and the Sonic: Rewriting Rilke’s ‘Ur-Geräusch’ ” in the volume Un /translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures, edited by Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2016). I am grateful to Northwestern University Press for permission to include a revised and expanded version here. My editor, Thomas Lay, and Fordham University Press have my special gratitude for daring to invest in a book on theory and to recognize its intellectual worth where other publishers let themselves be guided by the assumption that theory does not sell well any longer. None of my work would be possible without the unceasing encouragement of my family: my parents, Renate and Michael Bachner, who taught me that I should always remain true to myself, and my spouse, Itziar Rodríguez de Rivera, who makes it possible to do so, both academically and personally.

notes

introduction: at the scene of inscription 1. Oxford English Dictionary, Online Edition, December 2016, s.v. “inscription.” 2. For an exploration of inscription in the work of Paul de Man see Andrzej Warminski’s Material Inscriptions: Rhetorical Reading in Practice and Theory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 3. Inscription’s first rule is inspired by G. Spencer-Brown’s basic injunction in his Laws of Form (New York: Bantam, 1972): “Draw a distinction” (1). However, as will become apparent in the course of my discussion, unlike Spencer-Brown, who defines distinction as “perfect continence” (1), the creation of two completely discrete spaces, the distinction inscription draws is always strategic, never absolute. Indeed, for inscription to operate as apparatus of difference management, it needs to transgress and breach the very distinction that sets it up. Many of the basic rules of inscription formulated here owe much to systems theoretical thought, especially to Niklas Luhmann’s reflections on systemic self-reflexivity, detautologizing, and paradox management as he develops it in Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, 7th ed. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1999). 4. In his discussion of the production of subjected and socialized bodies through inscription, Michel de Certeau pairs the neologism “intextuation” with the term “incarnation” to set up both as complementary operations. Even as a body becomes text, signification—referred to by de Certeau as logos—makes itself flesh. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien 1. Arts de faire, ed. Luce Giard, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 206; trans. by Steven F. Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 139. 5. For reflections on the paradox of inclusion and exclusion, of the investment of the margin, or the limits between inside and outside, see Jacques Derrida, “Hors livre: Préfaces,” in La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 11–20; trans. by Barbara Johnson as “Outwork, Prefacing,” in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 3–59.

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6. See Martin Hägglund’s discussion of Derrida’s Husserlian legacy for the formulation of arche-writing and its temporal structure in Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 2, “Arche-Writing: Derrida and Husserl.” 7. Reflections on paradoxical temporality are ubiquitous in poststructuralist theory. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida’s treatment of temporality in the “Envois” to La carte postale de Socrates à Freud et au-delà (Paris: Flammarion, 1980), 5–273; trans. by Alan Bass as “Envois,” in The Postcard: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 3–256, and in his essay “At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am,” in Re-reading Levinas, ed. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 11– 48. 8. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-œdipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972, 1973); trans. by Robert Hurley et al. as Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). 9. Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’excrit,” Po&sie 47 (1998): 107–21, quotation at 113; trans. by Katherine Lydon as “Exscription,” Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 47–65, quotation at 55. 10. Coco Fusco, “Racial Time, Racial Marks, Racial Metaphors,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry H. Abrams, 2003), 13– 49, quotation at 34. 11. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000), 51. Gilroy also discusses how “epidermalization” cedes its place to other imaginaries in the age of molecular biology (47– 48). 12. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1952), 90; trans. by Richard Philcox as Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 92. 13. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 67. 14. Ibid., 75, emphasis in text. 15. Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 91; Black Skin, White Masks, 92. 16. Jennifer González discusses the economy of visual truth effects as shared by racial discourses and photography, see “Morphologies: Race as Visual Technology,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: International Center of Photography and Harry H. Abrams, 2003), 379–93. 17. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 66. 18. Fusco, “Racial Times,” 37. 19. Ibid., 37–38.

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20. See Homi Bhabha’s pun throughout “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse” in The Location of Culture, 85–92. 21. Monique Wittig, “The Mark of Gender,” Feminist Issues 5, no. 2 (1985): 3–12; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 144. 22. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 5. 23. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 23; trans. by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke as This Sex Which Is Not One (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 23. 24. Elfriede Jelinek, Die Kinder der Toten, 2nd ed. (Reinbek, Germany: Rowohlt, 2000), 78. Where not indicated, translations are my own. 25. See most of Irigaray’s writings, especially the essay “La ‘mécanique’ des fluides,” in Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un, 103–16; trans. Porter and Burke, “Fluid Mechanics,” in This Sex Which Is Not One, 106 –18; as well as “La tache aveugle d’un vieux rêve de symétrie,” in Speculum: De l’autre femme (Paris: Minuit, 1974), 7–161; trans. by Gillian C. Gill as “The Blind Spot of an Old Dream of Symmetry,” in Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 11–129. 26. Roland Barthes, “Le message photographique,” Communications 1 (1961): 127–38, quotation at 128; trans. by Stephen Heath as “The Photographic Message,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15–31, quotation at 17. 1. savage marks: subjection and the specters of anthropology 1. Much of Kafka criticism reads Kafka’s short story as depicting a writing machine or an inscriptive process; see, for example, Klaus Mladek, “ ‘Ein eigentümlicher Apparat’: Franz Kafkas ‘In der Strafkolonie,’ ” in Franz Kafka, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1994), 115– 42; Jeffrey A. Netto, “Violence and the Scene of Writing: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and Technologies of Inscription,” in The Image of Violence in Literature, the Media, and Society, ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Pueblo: Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, University of Southern Colorado, 1995), 351–56; and Arnold Weinstein, “Kafka’s Writing Machine: Metamorphosis in the Penal Colony,” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 7, no. 1 (Fall 1982): 21–33. Ulrike Landfester reads the inscriptive machine of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” as a reflection on the creative process of writing, see “Der delinquente Autor,” in Stichworte: Tätowierung und europäische Schriftkultur (Berlin: Matthew & Seitz, 2012), 293–312. Though my reflections take a different direction, they were inspired by Landfester’s contextualization of Kafka in contemporary discussions of tattooing.

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Notes to pages 26–28

2. Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire, ed. Luce Giard, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 206; trans. by Steven F. Rendall as The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 140. 3. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 135. Later in her book, the concept of etching, rapidly sketched in the course of Grosz’s reflections, seems conceived as an even more creative counterpart to inscription, since it underlines the fact that the material surface becomes an active, or resistant, agent. 4. Ibid., 117. 5. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 163–66. This is in syntony with the critique of inscriptive models of subjection in favor of performative scenarios in Gender Trouble. In contrast, in an endnote to an earlier chapter of Gender Trouble, Butler reads Kafka’s story not as an illustration of an inscriptive model but, because Kafka’s apparatus can be read as a fundamentally fragmented and inoperative system, as resonating with the diffuse power structures at work in Foucault’s later texts (202n1). 6. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions Métailié, 2000), 12, emphasis in original; trans. by Richard A. Rand as “Corpus,” in Corpus, by Jean-Luc Nancy, 2–122 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 11. 7. For examples of postcolonial readings of “In the Penal Colony,” see Karen Piper, “The Language of the Machine: A Post-Colonial Reading of Kafka,” Journal of the Kafka Society of America 20, no. 1–2 ( June–December 1996): 42–54, and Paul Peters, “Witness to the Execution: Kafka and Colonialism,” Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur 93, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 401–25. Among Kafka’s likely sources are Octave Mirbeau’s Le jardin des supplices (The Torture Garden) and Schaffstein’s Grüne Bändchen (Little green books) series thematizing colonial adventures, for instance Oskar Weber’s Der Zuckerbaron (The sugar baron). See John Zilcosky, “Wildes Reisen: Kolonialer Sadismus und Masochismus in Kafka’s ‘Strafkolonie,’ ” Weimarer Beiträge 50, no. 1 (2004): 33–54. 8. The interest in body modification at the turn of the twentieth century can be seen in a range of publications on tattooing, from both anthropological and medical perspectives. Apart from treatises discussed more at length in what follows, see also Wilfrid Dyson Hambly, The History of Tattooing and Its Significance: With Some Account of Other Forms of Corporal Marking (London: H. F. & G. Witherby, 1925), Eugen Holländer, Äskulap und Venus: Eine Kultur- und Sittensgeschichte im Spiegel des Arztes (Berlin: Propyläen, 1928), and Rudolf Erhard Riecke, Das Tatauierungswesen im heutigen Europa ( Jena, Germany: Fischer, 1925).

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9. In contrast to Kafka’s complex machine, many treatises paint an intentionally simple image of tattooing, in harmony with their arguments about tattooing’s premodernity. However, tattooing had already been mechanized in Europe and the United States around the turn of the century, for instance with Samuel O’Reilly’s and Charles Wagner’s inventions of tattooing machines, patented in 1891 and 1904 respectively, see Nicholas Schonberger, “Inking Identity: Tattoo Design and the Emergence of an American Industry, 1875–1930” (PhD diss., University of Delware, 2005). 10. In what follows I will omit quotation marks around terms such as savage, primitive, or civilized, with the understanding that we read these terms as part and parcel of a biased world view. 11. This imaginary is not limited to Western civilization either. For instance, Chinese culture has a long tradition of reading the marked body as the sign of the cultural (inferior) other, see Daphne Lei, “From Inscription to Incorporation: The Blood-Stained Text in Translation: Tattooing, Bodily Writing, and Performance of Chinese Virtue,” Anthropological Quarterly 82, no. 1 (2009): 99–128. 12. Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xxv. Michael Gaudio’s analyses of the engravings of New World subjects provide a nuanced reflection on the symbolic difference and equivalences of the savage writing of the tattoo and another technique of inscription, the engraving. See Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), esp. ch. 1, “Savage Marks: The Scriptive Techniques of Early Modern Ethnography.” 13. See Jane Caplan, “ ‘National Tattooing’: Traditions of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 156 –73, quotation at 165. 14. For studies of the rediscovery of tattooing in Europe through contact with Polynesian cultures in the eighteenth century, see Juniper Ellis, Tattooing the World: Pacific Designs in Print & Skin (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Many treatises on tattooing dwell on the etymology of the word tatau, tying it to the tat-like tapping sound of the hammer-like implement upon its impact with the bundle of tattooing needles used in Polynesian tattoos, and to the meaning of wound. See Wilhelm Joest, Tätowiren: Narbenzeichen und Körperbemalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Ethnologie (Berlin: A. Asher, 1887), 5–6. 15. For thorough discussions of primitivist tendencies in Western modernism, see Elazar Barkan and Ronald Bush, eds., Prehistories of the Future: The Primitivist Project and the Culture of Modernism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

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Notes to pages 30–32

University Press, 1995), and Marianna Torgovnik, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 16. Dr. Jaf, Les tatouages (Paris: J. Fort, 1908), 118. Where not indicated otherwise, translations are my own. 17. Ethnologist Wilhelm Joest compares primitive and civilized practices of body modification to relativize their difference. He asserts that tattooing “is, after all, no more barbaric than our custom of piercing the earlobes.” And yet, for all their comparability, both practices still symbolize different stages of cultural development for Joest. Joest, Tätowiren, 53. 18. See Heinrich Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift und des Schrifttums von den rohen Anfängen des Schreibens in der Tatuirung bis zur Legung electromagnetischer Dräthe (Leipzig, Germany: Fleischer, 1872), 9–10. Wuttke’s reference is to Rasmus Malling-Hansen’s writing ball, one of the earliest commercialized typewriters. Throughout much of his work, Hegel treats the alphabetic script as “in and of itself the more intelligent writing system” (an und für sich die intelligentere [Schrift]), while dismissing other scripts, such as the Chinese writing system, as inferior prequels. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Dritter Teil, in Werke in 20 Bänden (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), 10:274. See also Jacques Derrida’s critique of Hegel’s alphabetic bias in “Le puits et la pyramide: Introduction à la sémiologie de Hegel,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 79–127; trans. by Alan Bass as “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 69–108. 19. Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift, 1. 20. Joest, Tätowiren, 46. 21. Ibid., 28. 22. Ibid., 1. 23. As late as 1960 Walther Schönfeld understood his somewhat belated compendium on tattooing as a swan song to the dying practice of tattooing for aesthetic and social purposes. Walther Schönfeld, Körperbemalen—Brandmarken—Tätowieren: Nach griechischen, römischen Schriftstellern, Dichtern, neuzeitlichen Veröffentlichungen und eigenen Erfahrungen, vorzüglich in Europa (Heidelberg, Germany: Alfred Hüthig Verlag, 1960). 24. Only decades later, Joest’s path-breaking contribution to comparative ethnology would become outdated, replaced by anthropological work that placed indigenous practices more thoroughly within their cultural contexts. For instance, Hambly’s The History of Tattooing begins with a justification of methodology in contrast to Joest’s. Hambly, The History of Tattooing, 13. While this is certainly a more viable anthropological approach, one cannot but wonder if it also returns the native to her place, removed from the

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dangerous conceptual proximity to the civilized that resonates at the end of Joest’s work. 25. Joest, Tätowiren, 109. 26. Ernest Berchon, Histoire médicale du tatouage (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1869), 11. 27. Lombroso’s book saw numerous editions in the last decades of the nineteenth century, with at times significant variants with regard to its text as well as illustrations. 28. Cesare Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, in rapporto all’antropologia, alla giurisprudenza ed alle discipline carcerarie (1876; Rome: Napoleone, 1971), 178. 29. Ibid. 30. Alexandre Lacassagne, Les tatouages: Étude anthropologique et médicolégale (Paris: J.-B. Baillière et fils, 1881), 115. For a discussion of Lacassagne’s and Lombroso’s thoughts on tattooing, see Caplan, “ ‘National Tattooing.’ ” 31. Lacassagne, Les tatouages, 114. 32. Joest, Tätowiren, 104. 33. Riecke, Das Tatauierungswesen, 16 (emphasis in the original is shown by adding spaces between letters). 34. Even though Loos’s essay is normally dated as written in 1908 and was given as a talk by Loos in 1910, it is unclear where its original German version first appeared, or even if it was published first in German; see Adolf Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” in Sämtliche Schriften ed. Franz Glück (Vienna: Herold, 1962), 1:457–58. For Kafka’s familiarity with Loos’s essay, see Mark Anderson, “The Ornaments of Writing: Kafka, Loos and the Jugendstil,” New German Critique 4 (Winter 1988): 125– 45, quotation at 128, and Landfester, Stichworte, 306. Landfester also speaks to Kafka’s knowledge of Lombroso’s theories, see Stichworte, 303. 35. Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” 276; “Ornament and Crime,” 167. 36. See, for example, Lacassagne, Les tatouages, 88–89. 37. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, 163. 38. See Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift, 102. 39. Cesare Lombroso, “The Savage Origin of Tattooing,” Popular Science Monthly (April 1896): 802. 40. Lombroso, L’uomo delinquente, 171–72. 41. Loos, “Ornament und Verbrechen,” 276. This phrase has been omitted in the English translation; I am adding it here in my own translation. 42. Let us not forget that the nineteenth century was also the epoch of physiological readings of bodies and theories of racial determinants. Though unlike these, tattoos, as literal inscriptions on the body, did not even require sophisticated systems of analogies and interpretations. Supposedly, they could be read directly.

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Notes to pages 37–40

43. Joest, Tätowiren, 104. 44. Many works on tattooing mention two famous examples. An episode from the memoirs of the famous criminal turned criminalist Eugène François Vidocq, in which a tattoo allowed the apprehension of a criminal, and the Tichborn case, in which the absence of a tattoo helped prevent a case of fraudulently assumed identity. Theodor Storm’s novella “Hans und Heinz Kirch” of 1882 manifests the popularity of these and similar cases. See Landfester, Stichworte, 257–92. 45. Lacassagne, Les tatouages, 99. 46. Ibid., 89. 47. Some critics suggest that Kafka’s story was inspired by Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals; see, for instance, William D. Melaney, “Kafka’s Nietzschean Risk: Writing against Memory,” Journal of the Kafka Society of America 26, no. 1–2 ( June/December 2002): 24 –33. In any case, both Nietzsche and Kafka draw on concepts and imaginaries of inscription prevalent at the time. 48. Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1999), 291–337; trans. by Francis Golffing as The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 189–230. 49. Indeed, the word stigma refers to the practice of correctional marks as tattoo, see C. P. Jones’s essay “Stigma and Tattoo,” in Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History, ed. Jane Caplan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 1–16. 50. According to Friedrich Kittler, the abolition of branding coincided roughly with the invention of photography, a different way of registering and visually fixing the criminal; see Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien: Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 2002), 190; trans. by Anthony Enns as Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2010), 141. For theorists like Lombroso and Lacassagne, tattooing, especially among criminals, resonated with earlier practices of stigmatization. And yet, their very abolition probably opened the way for the increasing popularity of readings of tattoos as body ornamentation, as well as permanent, self-chosen identity markers. 51. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 295. For the English translations, I have consulted Francis Golffing’s translation in The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals, though chose in most cases to provide my own translations in the interest of remaining closer to Nietzsche’s original text. 52. Walther Schönfeld points to the etymological link via the middlehigh-German term Merken; see Körperbemalen—Brandmarken—Tätowieren, 21. 53. See Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift, 58. 54. Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, 305. 55. Ibid., 324.

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56. Ibid., 325. 57. Ibid., 322. 58. Ibid., 325. 59. Ibid., 326, emphasis in original. 60. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire,” in Dits et écrits I, 1954 –1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1004 –24, quotation at 1011; trans. by Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon as “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139–64, quotation at 150, translation slightly altered. 61. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 38; trans. by Alan Sheridan as Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1995), 30. 62. In this sense, Discipline and Punish remotely echoes Kafka’s story, in which the smooth functioning of the execution apparatus is only present in the officer’s account, as the machine malfunctions in the story’s diegesis. 63. Similar epistemic blocks and shifts are described in Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966; trans. as The Order of Things [New York: Vintage Books, 1994]) and in L’histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976; trans. by Robert Hurley as The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, Introduction [New York: Pantheon Books, 1978]). Upon closer scrutiny, it becomes evident that Foucault does not intend a historically accurate account and that the boundaries between epistemes remain vague at best. 64. Albrecht Koschorke charges Derrida with reducing the complex medial metaphors of Western metaphysics to phonocentrism in order to mount his critique. See Körperströme und Schriftverkehr: Mediologie des 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Fink, 1999). 65. These examples come from Derrida’s discussion of the chapter “Sur la ligne” in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955; trans. by John Weightman and Doreen Weightman as “On the Line,” in Tristes Tropiques [New York: Atheneum, 1974]) in Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967; trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology [Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976]) and from “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967, 293–340; trans. by Alan Bass as “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference [New York: Routledge, 1978], 196 –232). See Chapter 2, “Impact Erasure,” for a discussion of inscriptive metaphors in psychoanalysis and trauma theory. 66. For a reflection on Derrida’s engagement with anthropology (and anthropology’s engagement with Derrida), see Rosalind C. Morris, “Legacies of Derrida: Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 36 (2007): 355–89.

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Notes to pages 46–50

67. Apart from Derrida’s critical engagement with the notion of “cultures without writing” via Lévi-Strauss that is at the center of my analysis here, the Western treatment of the Chinese script constitutes another test case for Derrida’s critique of ethnocentric phonocentrism in Of Grammatology. 68. See Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 205 and 212, 206 and 220; Tristes Tropiques, 178 and 184, 180 and 191. 69. Maybe partly because of the fact that Lévi-Strauss does not have enough time to master the Caduveo language and consequently needs another system of signification on which to build his ethnographic theories. 70. Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 213; Tristes Tropiques, 185, translation slightly altered. 71. Ibid., 216, see also 224; English translation, 188, translation slightly altered, see also 195. 72. Lévi-Strauss begins the chapter on Caduveo art by asserting a structuralist approach to cultural analysis, based on the identification of key structures that are recurring combinations of a set of limited universal options. The contiguity of style and system in the first sentence of the chapter already prepares the equation of a society’s aesthetics with social and cultural deep structures: “The customs of a community, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to systems” (Tristes tropiques, 205; Tristes Tropiques, 178). Lévi-Strauss’s swift passage from a description of Caduveo design to their allegorical reading as an expression of social structure might be motivated by the fact that his informants are unable or unwilling to go into detail about their art, its meaning, or its function. Consequently, in LéviStrauss’s text, Caduveo design does not constitute a system in its own right but rather a representation of a social structure. 73. Ibid., 227; English translation, 197. 74. As a means of intentionally misrepresenting social realities, Caduveo design can also be read as writing in another sense: as a violent means of social control and deception. 75. Deleuze and Guattari’s genealogy of systems of production and desire consists of three different phases, in which production and desire are grafted onto and coded by different surfaces (or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, socii). The earth stands at the center of the first phase, the body of the despot dominates the second phase, whereas the third phase, capitalism, is characterized by incessant decoded flows of commodities and information, desire and productive forces. 76. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Capitalisme et schizophrénie 1: L’Anti-œdipe (Paris: Minuit, 1972, 1973), 223; trans. by Robert Hurley et al. as Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 188–89.

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77. There are clear echoes of a Nietzschean inspiration here. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of inscription as savage economy of coding and decoding takes up Nietzsche’s first scenario. Drawing on Nietzsche’s first scenario, Anti-Oedipus provides an alternative genealogy of economy. In contrast to prevalent anthropological theories that focus on savage economy as a system of circulation and exchange (as theorized by Marcel Mauss and Claude LéviStrauss), Deleuze and Guattari take up Nietzsche’s focus on debt. For Nietzsche, as for the authors of Anti-Oedipus, social organization begins as accountability, as the responsibility for an incurred debt. For Nietzsche, the marked body liquidates a debt in the form of the pleasure of he who is repaid by the power of inflicting pain. As a painful reminder, corporeal punishment also enforces memory and accountability. Likewise, for Deleuze and Guattari, the inscription of the body marks a debt, both for the inscribed body and those who witness its marking. In this context, Deleuze and Guattari also rewrite Lévi-Strauss’s elementary structures of kinship. Not the circulation of women is important for the functioning of systems of filiation and association, but inscription. 78. Deleuze and Guattari, L’Anti-œdipe, 170; Anti-Oedipus, 145. 79. Ibid., 240; English translation, 203. 80. Ibid., 166; English translation, 142. 81. Ibid., 182; English translation, 154. 82. Alphonso Lingis, Excesses: Eros and Culture (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1983), 22. 83. Franz Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” in Die Erzählungen und andere ausgewählte Prosa, ed. Roger Hermes, 5th ed. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), 164 –98, quotations at 169 and 190; trans. by Willa Muir and Edwin Muir as “In the Penal Colony,” in The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony and Other Stories (New York: Schocken, 1995), 191–227, quotations at 197 and 219. 84. Beate Müller, “Die grausame Schrift: Zur Ästhetik der Zensur in Kafka’s ‘Strafkolonie,’ ” Neophilologus 84 (2000): 107–25, quotation at 114. 85. Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” 175; “In the Penal Colony,” 202. The indecipherability of the execution machine’s script echoes another layer of malfunctioning communication and multiplicity of codes in Kafka’s story: As the text underlines, the conversation between officer and traveler—who is not a citizen of the penal colony’s homeland—is carried on in French, a language that neither the soldier on the scene nor the prisoner about to be executed understand. 86. Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” 175; “In the Penal Colony,” 202, 203. 87. Wuttke, Geschichte der Schrift, 120. 88. The German term used in this context, Inschrift, underlines the outcome rather than the process of inscription; it is a script that marks and is to be read, see Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” 173.

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Notes to pages 57–61

89. Kafka, “In der Strafkolonie,” 175; “In the Penal Colony,” 203. The term herrlich shares etymological roots with Herr, thus creating an analogy between aesthetic spectacle and social power. 90. See de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, 220; The Practice of Everyday Life, 150. 2. impact erasure: psychoanalysis and the multiplication of trauma 1. Cathy Caruth, “Introduction: Trauma and Experience,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 3–12, quotation at 6. 2. For Cathy Caruth, latency or belatedness is one of the most important characteristics of trauma, see Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 16 –18. Caruth draws on Sigmund Freud’s theorization of latency (Latenz) as formulated in Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion: Drei Albhandlungen (Amsterdam: Allert de Lange, 1939); trans. by James Strachey as Moses and Monotheism, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 23 (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974); see esp. part three, chapter C, “Die Analogie.” The concept of latency has resurfaced in recent intellectual debates; see, for instance, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Florian Klinger, eds., Latenz: Blinde Passagiere in den Geisteswissenschaften (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprech, 2011). 3. Ruth Leys discusses the vicissitudes of trauma in Freud’s work in relation to Freud’s sources and depending on historical context (e.g., the importance of World War I for a renewed interest in trauma). Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 18– 40. 4. See Sigmund Freud and Joseph Breuer, Studien über Hysterie (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1985); trans. by James Strachey as Studies on Hysteria (London: Hogarth Press, 1955). 5. See John Eric Erichsen, On Railway Spine and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (Philadelphia, Pa.: Henry C. Lea, 1867). Sigmund Freud reacts to theories of organic shock in “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” in Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften, 8th ed. (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 2000), 191–247, quotation at 197– 98; trans. by James Strachey as Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton, 1961), 10 –11. 6. See Freud, “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” 198, 218; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 11, 38. 7. See Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, “Trauma ou Traumatisme (Psychique),” in Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), 499–505, quotation at 499; trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith as “Trauma (Psychical),” in The Language of Psycho-Analysis (London: Hogarth, 1973), 464 –68, quotation at 465.

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8. See Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995), 13. 9. See Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés (Paris: Bayard, 2007), 20. 10. In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), Elaine Scarry describes pain as irrepresentable and incommunicable, to the extent that extreme pain, such as torture, is intended to destroy the victim’s ability to relate with reality. And yet, in the case of trauma, physical pain, albeit as problematic proxy, still seems the only viable vehicle for expressing psychic suffering. 11. See J. Hillis Miller, Ariadne’s Thread: Story Lines (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), 24. 12. Jacques Derrida, “Deconstruction and the Other,” in Debates in Continental Philosophy: Conversations with Critical Thinkers, ed. Richard Kearney (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 139–56, quotation at 153–54. See also the discussion of catachresis in Eamonn Dunne, J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading (New York: Continuum, 2010), 78–81. 13. See Jean-Luc Nancy’s discussion of Freud’s posthumous observation in Corpus, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions Métailié, 2000), 22–25; trans. by Richard A. Rand as “Corpus,” in Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2–122, quotation at 21–25. 14. Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 129–30; quoted and discussed in Leys, Trauma, 19. 15. Leys, Trauma, 19. 16. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud sets up this psychic topology to discuss subsequently that the conscious part of the psyche is threatened not only by extremely strong external stimuli but also by internal excitations from the unconscious against which the psychic apparatus has no protective barrier, since these are an integral part of the system. Both external and internal “excesses” seem to be linked, though their connection remains vague in Freud’s text. One can potentially activate the other, or one might be the remnant of an earlier external stimulus. Hence the problem of sexual trauma: Is it caused by an external force or is its nature an integral part of the psyche and psychic development? 17. Dori Laub, “Bearing Witness, or The Vicissitudes of Listening,” in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, ed. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57–74, quotation at 57. 18. Freud distinguishes strictly between sensations of frightful shock (Schreck) and fear (Angst). Only frightful shock, a dangerous situation that takes the individual by surprise, induces trauma. In contrast, fear, a state of expectation of imminent danger, involves psychic preparedness. See “Jenseits des Lustprinzips,” 198; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 11.

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Notes to pages 63–67

19. A similar paradoxical temporal doubling is already at work in Freud’s prior work on trauma in the context of hysteria. There, however, Freud ascribes the shock of trauma not to the first explosure to sexual shock (which remains submerged) but to a trigger event that capitalizes upon the hitherto unrecognized and unactivated earlier exposure. See Laplanche and Pontalis, “Trauma ou Traumatisme (Psychique),” in Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 499– 505; trans. by Donald Nicholson-Smith as “Trauma (Psychical),” in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 464 – 468. 20. Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger et “les juifs” (Paris: Galilée, 1988), 33–35, emphasis in original; trans. by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts as Heidegger and “the jews” (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 15–16, emphasis in original and emphasis added by the translators, translation slightly altered. 21. Lyotard critiques the diachronicity constructed by psychoanalysis, its sequential narrative in favor of cotemporality and temporal indeterminacy, see Lyotard, Heidegger et “les juifs,” 33–38; Heidegger and “the jews,” 15–17. And yet, he never challenges the priority of the “first” blow. 22. See Caruth, “Introduction,” 10. 23. This train of thought owes its logic to poststructuralist reflections on the status of origins and originals, for instance Judith Butler’s deconstruction of sexual identity in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 24. See Henry Kristal, quoted in Caruth, “Introduction,” 6. 25. Sigmund Freud, “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock,’ ” in Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften, 8th ed. (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 2000), 313–17, quotation at 315; trans. by James Strachey as “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’ ” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1961), 19:225–32, quotation at 229. Decades before Freud’s essay on “The Mystic Writing Pad,” Josef Breuer had formulated the same principle of incompatibility between the storage of memory traces and the reception of stimuli with the help of an updated medial imaginary in Studies on Hysteria (1895): “It is impossible for one and the same organ to fulfill these two contradictory conditions. The mirror of a reflecting telescope cannot at the same time be a photographic plate.” Freud and Breuer, Studien über Hysterie, quoted in Laplanche and Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse, 490; The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 247. Digital technology might have availed Freud yet another model, closer to energetic and economic than graphic metaphors—and yet metaphors of digital storage can still be inscriptive at base, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). 26. Freud, “Wunderblock,” 313; “Mystic Writing Pad,” 227.

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27. See Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of Plato in “La pharmacie de Platon,” in La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 77–213; trans. by Barbara Johnson as “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63–171. In spite of Plato’s diatribe against writing as memory’s death, memory presupposes writing, if only as a metaphor for memory in Plato’s text. 28. See Freud, “Wunderblock,” 318; “Mystic Writing Pad,” 232. 29. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1997), 37; trans. by James Strachey as Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 18–19. 30. See Jacques Derrida’s essay “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 293–340; trans. by Alan Bass as “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1978), 246 –91, in which Derrida traces the development of graphic metaphors in Freud’s work. 31. Lyotard, Heidegger et “les juifs,” 51–52, emphasis in original; Heidegger and “the jews,” 26. 32. Jacques Rancière, “S’il y a de l’irreprésentable,” in Le destin des images (Paris: La Fabrique, 2003), 123–53, quotation at 127; trans. by Gregory Elliot as “Are Some Things Unrepresentable?,” in The Future of the Image (New York: Verso, 2007), 109–38, quotation at 111, translation slightly altered. 33. Ibid., 150; English translation, 134. 34. See Ulrike Landfester, Stichworte: Tätowierung und europäische Schriftkultur (Berlin: Matthew & Seitz, 2012), 355–58. 35. Indeed, contradictory details about the tattoo can be found even in survivor accounts. Ruth Klüger professes her disgust at treatments of the Holocaust that falsify details, such as the letter Z (for “Zigeuner,” i.e., “gypsies”) as part of the Auschwitz tattoo for interned Roma and Sinti; see weiter leben: Eine Jugend (Göttingen, Germany: Wallstein Verlag, 1992), 115. This same practice, however, forms part of Primo Levi’s account of the Auschwitz tattoo, see I sommersi e i salvati (Turin, Italy: Einaudi, 1986), 95; trans. by Raymond Rosenthal as The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Vintage, 1989), 119. 36. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer, “La piel de la memoria,” Debate Feminista 18, no. 36 (October 2007): 171–72, quotation at 171. 37. Ibid. 38. Landfester points out the evidentiary role of number tattoos during the Nuremberg Trials, see Stichworte, 354. Ruth Klüger similarly relates the story of a woman who has to look up her tattoo number when asked to identify its number during the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, see unterwegs verloren: Erinnerungen (Vienna: Zsolnay, 2008), 13.

228

Notes to pages 74–79

39. Ruth Klüger describes her reaction to receiving the tattoo, from the slightly ironic vantage point of a distance of decades, overwhelmingly as a feeling of importance, as a momentous experience of responsibility, see Klüger, weiter leben, 115. Later, in a subsequent work, she describes bearing the tattoo as the heavy burden of a living memorial inscription, see unterwegs verloren, 11–12. 40. Levi, I sommersi e i salvati, 95; The Drowned and the Saved, 119. 41. Certain types of body modification have also been read as setting their bearer apart from the human by transporting her to a privileged realm of religious initiation and communion with the divine, such as the supposedly spontaneous apparition of stigmata, the likenesses of Jesus’s crucifixion marks made visible on the body of a believer. For a discussion of the link between stigmata and tattooing, see Hans-Walter Schmidt-Hannisa, “Eingefleischte Passion: Zur Logik der Stigmatisierung,” in Schmerz und Erinnerung, ed. Roland Borgards (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005), 69–81. 42. Klüger, unterwegs verloren, 12, 13, where not indicated, translations are my own. 43. Ibid., 13. 44. See also Dora Apel, “The Tattooed Jew,” in Visual Culture and the Holocaust, ed. Barbie Zelizer (New Brunsick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 300 –20, quotation at 302–3. 45. Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L’archivio e il testimone (Turin, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998), 76; trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen as Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (New York: Zone, 2002), 81. 46. Ibid., 71; English translation, 77. 47. Ibid., 121; English translation, 129. The original term logicizzarsi, translated by Heller-Roazen as “render itself linguistic,” resonates strongly with the idea of logos and its multiple significations. 48. Ibid., 121; English translation, 129–30. 49. Dominick LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), xi. 50. Klüger, unterwegs verloren, 13. See the recurring mentions of the number tattoo in Klüger’s previous novel weiter leben, 85, 235–36, as well as Landfester’s discussion of Klüger’s texts in Stichworte, 350 –82. 51. In German, the verb tragen designates both the ideas of “to carry” and “to wear.” In a similar vein, Klüger also refers to the tattoo as something that one can “continue to wear” (i.e., anbehalten). See unterwegs verloren, 12. 52. Ibid., 12. 53. Ibid., 15. 54. Another type of body inscription in the context of Nazism is even more of an uncanny other to the number tattoo: the practice to tattoo mem-

Notes to pages 79–84

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bers of the SS with their blood type. While by no means commensurate— after all, the blood type tattoo marked its bearer as “valuable” material, slated to be kept alive and healed in case of injury, in stark contrast to the number tattoo that stamped its bearer as expendable matter—both types of tattoos deindividualize bodies and subject them to their quite different systemic functions. 55. For a discussion of Kupferminc’s installation and its companion pieces, Bordado en la piel de la memoria (2009 [Stitched onto the skin of memory], basis for the video El nombre y el número, [The name and the number]) and En la palma de mi mano (2011 [In the palm of my hand]), see Daniela Goldfine, “Deshilando el entramado de la memoria en el arte de Mirta Kupferminc,” Ambitos Feministas 2 (Fall 2012): 59–75. Images, videos, and descriptions of these and other works by Kupferminc can be found on the artist’s website at http://www.mirtakupferminc.net /. 56. For the author’s description of the video installation and performance, see Mirta Kupferminc, “La piel de la memoria. Videoinstalaciónperformance,” Debate Feminista 18, no. 32 (October 2007): 173–74. 57. Ibid., 173. 58. Hirsch and Spitzer, “La piel de la memoria,” 171. 59. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 3. 60. Geoffrey H. Hartman, The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 39. 61. See Laub, “Bearing Witness.” 62. In “The Tattooed Jew,” Dora Apel circumvents this quandary by merely pointing out the question of traumatic legacy (i.e., who has the right to assume Holocaust memory on their bodies) without providing an answer. Her answer is implicit, though, since she juxtaposes reinscriptive acts by the post-generation by individuals who define themselves as Jewish and those who do not. 63. Hirsch and Spitzer, “La piel de la memoria,” 172. 64. Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 22. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. See the chapter “Marked by Memory,” in Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 79–99. 68. In addition to Hirsch’s “Marked by Memory,” in The Generation of Postmemory, Dora Apel provides further examples of tattoo-inspired practices and artistic pieces. She also discusses the tensions between the Jewish orthodox prohibition of bodily marks and the trend of the post-generation to commemorate the Holocaust through tattoos, see “The Tattooed Jew.”

230

Notes to pages 84–90

69. Kupferminc, “La piel de la memoria,” 173. 70. Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory, 85. 71. Ibid., 82–83. 72. Ibid., 81. 73. Harry Brod starts an essay on circumcision by recounting how his uncle was identified as a Jew because of his circumcised penis and subsequently murdered by the Nazis, see “Circumcision and the Erection of Patriarchy,” in Men and Masculinity in Christianity and Judaism: A Critical Reader, ed. Björn Krondorfer (London: SCM Press, 2009), 358–63, quotation at 358. 74. The film is based on Solomon Perel’s memoirs, published as Ich war Hitlerjunge Salomon (Munich: Heyne, 1993). 75. The mark of circumcision thus also takes on the role of corporeal memorial of the Holocaust. See also Brod, “Circumcision and the Erection of Patriarchy,” 358. 76. For a reflection on the changing significance of circumcision for Jewish cultures, see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Self-Exposure as Theory: The Double Mark of the Male Jew,” in Thinking in Jewish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 34 –62. 77. Julia Reinhard Lupton, “Ethnos and Circumcision in the Pauline Tradition: A Psychoanalytic Exegesis,” in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 193–210, quotation at 194. 78. Robin Judd discusses this phenomenon for the context of Germany from 1843 to 1933 for discourses on circumcision as well as kosher butchering. See Contested Rituals: Circumcision, Kosher Butchering, and Jewish Political Life in Germany 1843–1933 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007). 79. In a footnote, Reik makes reference to Sigmund Freud’s Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben, in Jahrbuch für psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen (Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1909), 1:1–109; trans. by James Strachey as Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (Little Hans), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), 10:3–149. See Theodor Reik, “Das Kainszeichen: Ein psychologischer Beitrag zur Bibelerklärung,” Imago 5, no. 1 (1917): 42n2. 80. James George Frazer, “The Mark of Cain,” in Folk-lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law (London: Macmillan, 1919), 1:78–103. 81. Sander L. Gilman mentions Theodor Reik’s essay in the context of a discussion of Sigmund Freud’s reflections on Jewish masculinity. See Freud, Race, and Gender (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 85. 82. Levy’s argument—namely, that it would be impossible “that a sign of religious and national sacredness, such as circumcision, would be traced back

Notes to pages 90–94

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to a murder in the Bible”—itself is rather unconvincing. After all, the mark of Cain, supposedly God’s protective mark, is represented as inscribed on the first murderer, see “Ist das Kainszeichen die Beschneidung?,” Imago 5, no. 4 (1919): 290 –93, quotation at 290. Levy psychoanalyzes the paradise episode of the Bible through a reading of erotic metaphors in his earlier article “Sexualsymbolik in der biblischen Paradiesgeschichte,” Imago 5, no. 1 (1917): 16 –30. 83. For an exhaustive discussion of the links between circumcision and castration in Freud’s work, see Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 49–92. Several chapters of Gilman’s previous book, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991), also discuss the links between Judaism and Freudian psychoanalysis. Since Gilman’s books, there has been a vibrant scholarly debate around the differing meanings of circumcision. See, for instance, Lupton, “Ethnos and Circumcision”; Daniel Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,” in The Psychoanalysis of Race, ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 211– 40; and Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, “Unmanning Israel,” in Men and Masculinities in Christianity and Judaism: A Critical Reader, ed. Björn Krondorfer (London: SCM Press, 2009), 167–83. In “Self-Exposure as Theory,” Boyarin and Boyarin point to the Jewish tradition of circumcision not as an infliction of lack but rather as a perfection of the body (see 42– 46). 84. Gilman tells the story of this and other racial stereotypes in Freud, Race, and Gender, especially chap. 2, “The Construction of the Male Jew,” as well as in The Jew’s Body. 85. See Weininger’s discussion of Jewish identity as a lack of masculinity in chap. 13, “Das Judentum,” in Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung, 11th ed. (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumüller, 1909). 86. Freud, Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben, 24n1; Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy, 198–99. 87. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 77. 88. Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?,” 214 –15. 89. Ibid., 215. 90. Such a link between Judaism and Freudian psychoanalysis is suggested and interrogated by critics. See, for instance, Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender; Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?”; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); and Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive: Une impression Freudienne (Paris: Galilée, 1995), trans. by Eric Prenowitz as Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 91. Quoted in Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 87. 92. Lupton reads circumcision through a Lacanian lens, see “Ethnos and Circumcision,” 197–98.

232

Notes to pages 94–99

93. Gilman, Freud, Race, and Gender, 87. 94. Freud published parts one and two in the journal Imago (in 1934 and 1937, respectively) but did not finish part three until 1938. 95. Freud, Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, 52; Moses and Monotheism, 29–30. 96. Ibid., 164; English translation, 91. 97. Ibid., 215; English translation, 122. 98. Ibid., 52; English translation, 29. This bridge between the individual and the collective is casually thrown in with the discussion of circumcision at this early point of Moses and Monotheism. It will run through the rest of Freud’s book like a leitmotiv. 99. Cathy Caruth shows that the concept of the memory trace, in evidence at the very beginning of Freud’s work, already anticipates his definition of trauma and repetition compulsion in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. If Freud’s reflection on trauma, for instance in Moses and Monotheism, resurrects the concept of the memory trace, we could also say that trauma is already built into Freud’s early formulation of the memory trace. See Cathy Caruth, Literature in the Ashes of History (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 80. 100. See also Freud’s reflections on the uncanny in “Das Unheimliche,” Imago 5, no. 6 (1919): 297–324; trans. by David Mclintock as The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003). 101. See Cathy Caruth’s reading of the Derridean archive as in analogy to traumatic memory that “totters between remembrance and erasure, producing a history that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted by the erasure of its traces.” Literature in the Ashes of History, 78–79. 102. See also Derrida’s comment: “From a historical point of view, it is a ‘conducting fossil’ (Leitfossil) for investigating memory and interpreting the Israelites’ relations with the servitude in and the exodus from Egypt (where circumcision was an indigenous practice). From a more structural point of view, circumcision is the symbolic substitute of the castration of the son by the primitive father.” Derrida, Mal d’archive, 69n1; Archive Fever, 42n6. 103. Derrida inscribed the Hebrew term for circumcision, milah, in Hebrew letters on his notebook cover, see Jacques Derrida, “Circonfession,” in Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida (Paris: Seuil, 1991), 85–86; trans. by Geoffrey Bennington as “Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 87–88. An image of the cover of Derrida’s notebook is included on page 87 (89 of the translated edition). Derrida punningly juxtaposes circumcision (or “foreskin” in English in the French original) with his theoretical writing (or “moleskine”), see “Circonfession,” 149; “Circumfession,” 158.

Notes to pages 99–106

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104. Hélène Cixous’s tribute to Derrida, Portrait de Jacques Derrida en Jeune Saint Juif (Paris: Galilée, 1991), consists of an extended playful commentary or glossary of the motif of circumcision in Derrida’s work. 105. Derrida, “Circonfession,” 70 –71, emphasis in original; “Circumfession,” 70 –71. 106. Derrida, Mal d’archive, 39; Archive Fever, 20. 107. Derrida, “Circonfession,” 66; “Circumfession,” 66. 108. Ibid., 202; English translation, 217. 109. Jacques Derrida, Glas (Paris: Galilée, 1974), 51; trans. by John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand as Glas (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 41. 110. Jacques Derrida, Schibboleth (Paris: Galilée, 1986), 68–69; trans. by Joshua Wilner as “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan,” in Word Traces: Readings of Paul Celan, ed. Aris Fioretos (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 3–72, quotation at 40. 111. For a reflection on the open circle of circumcision “which never circumpletes [circomplète] itself,” see Derrida, “Circonfession,” 17; “Circumfession,” 15. 112. Derrida, Schibboleth, 99. This sentence is omitted in the English translation; I provide it here in my own translation. 113. Ibid., 105–6, emphasis in original; English translation, 64. 114. Ibid., 98; English translation, 59. 3. stings of visibility: picture theories and visual contact 1. Ludwig Schorn and Eduard Koloff, “Der Daguerrotyp,” in Texte zur Theorie der Fotographie, ed. Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2010), 26 –33, quotation at 28. This passage cites the words of an unnamed correspondent. Where not indicated, translations are my own. 2. Ibid. See also Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), xvii, and Bernd Stiegler’s Bilder der Photographie: Ein Album photographischer Metaphern (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2006), 130 –33. 3. Gottfried Jäger, “Analogue and Digital Photography: The Technical Picture,” in Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age, ed. Hubertus von Amelunxen, Stefan Iglhaut, and Florian Rötzer (Munich: G+B Arts, Siemens Kulturprogramm, 1996), 107– 9, quotation at 107. 4. See Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 3. 5. Charles Sanders Peirce, “What Is a Sign?,” in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Peirce Edition Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 2:4 –10, quotation at 6.

234

Notes to pages 106–9

6. André Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1981), 9–17, quotation at 13–14; trans. by Hugh Gray as “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4 –9, quotation at 8. 7. Bertolt Brecht, “Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht,” in Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie, ed. Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2010), 44, emphasis in original. 8. See Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Photographie,” in Das Ornament der Masse (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1977), 21–39; trans. by Thomas Y. Levin as “Photography,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47–64. 9. See Roland Barthes, La chambre claire: Note sur la photographie (Paris: Seuil & Gallimard, 1980), 18; trans. by Richard Howard as Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 6. 10. Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Göttingen, Germany: European Photography, 1984), 10 –11. 11. Friedrich Kittler discusses Honoré de Balzac’s mystic phobia vis-àvis photography, see Grammophon—Film—Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), 21; trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz as Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 10 –11. Lu Xun’s satire of photographic superstition can be found in “Lun zhaoxiang zhi lei,” in Lu Xun quanji [The complete works of Lu Xun] (Beijing: Renmin wenxue, 1981), 1:181– 90; trans. by Kirk A. Denton as “On Photography,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893 –1945, ed. Kirk A. Denton (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), 196 –203. 12. For examples of these positions, see W. J. T. Mitchell’s defense of digital photography’s difference in The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992) and for Tom Gunning’s claim of a common photographic medium that spans both analog and digital examples, see “What’s the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs,” in Still Moving: Between Cinema and Photography, ed. Karen Redrobe Beckmann and Jean Ma (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008), 23– 40. 13. Bernd Stiegler, Montagen des Realen: Photographie als Reflexionsmedium und Kulturtechnik (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 24. 14. See Mary Ann Doane, “Indexicality: Trace and Sign,” Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 1–6, quotation at 5. 15. See Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006), 9. 16. My question here references Tom Gunning’s essay title “What’s the Point of an Index?”

Notes to pages 109–11

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17. Gunning, “What’s the Point of an Index?,” 25. 18. László Moholy-Nagy, “fotografie: die objektive sehform unserer zeit,” in Texte zur Theorie der Fotografie, ed. Bernd Stiegler (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2010), 45– 49, quotation at 45. See also “Fotografie ohne Kamera: Das ‘Fotogramm,’ ” 30, and examples of photograms by MoholyNagy and Man Ray respectively in László Moholy-Nagy, Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Berlin: Mann, Neue Bauhausbücher, 1986), 69, 76. 19. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October 3 (Spring 1977): 68–81, quotation at 75. 20. Ibid. 21. Philippe Dubois, L’acte photographique et autres essais (Brussels: Nathan, 1990), 84, emphasis in original. 22. This imagery is ubiquitous in the text of Bazin’s essay as well as in his footnotes. For more examples of photographic metaphors of preservation, see Stiegler, Bilder der Photographie, 88–95. 23. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Picador, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 154. 24. For a thorough analysis of indexical metaphors and their differences, see Peter Geimer, “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” trans. Katia Gellen, Differences 18, no. 1 (2007): 7–28. 25. Bazin, “Ontologie de l’image photographique,” 14; “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 8. 26. Throughout Peirce’s work, examples of indices recur and change. For instance, in “What Is a Sign?,” Peirce illustrates the index with such divergent examples as a guidepost, relative pronouns, and vocative exclamations (see 5), the rolling gait of a sailor, a weathercock, a sundial, or a thunderbolt (see 8); in “Of Reasoning in General” (in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Peirce Edition Project [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], 2:11–26) additional examples are the barometer, the polestar, a pointing finger, a spirit level, a yardstick, and demonstrative pronouns (see 14). In Pragmatism and Pragmaticism (in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 5 [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934]), Peirce describes medical symptoms as indices (see 324). In other works, such as “Sundry Logical Conceptions” (in The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Peirce Edition Project [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998], 2:267–88), Peirce introduces more specific categorizations for the index and brackets pronouns and proper names as subindices or as signs excluded from the category of index proper (see 274). 27. Mary Ann Doane points to the double nature of the index, between trace and linguistic shifter, between icon and symbol, see “Indexicality.”

236

Notes to pages 111–16

However, Peirce’s examples allow for an even greater range of what constitutes the indexical qualities of a sign. 28. Peirce, “Of Reasoning in General,” 14. 29. In “Logic of the Sciences” (in Writings of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Max H. Fisch [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982], 1:322–36) of 1865, Peirce highlights the essential impurity of indexical signs, presenting as the “only adequate example of an index . . . the representation to one’s self of one’s own identity by one’s relation to anything” (334)—an extremely selfenclosed, even tautological notion of “pure” indexicality. Consequently, no sign is ever purely of one category. In fact, in “What Is a Sign?,” Peirce insists that reasoning can only happen by way of a combination of all three types of signs (see 10). 30. Charles Sanders Peirce, Elements of Logic, in Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press, 1932), 172. 31. Sontag, On Photography, 20. 32. Judith Butler critiques Sontag’s view of the photograph as an image without interpretation by pointing to the fact that an image, by way of framing, already produces its own context and perspective, see Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 66 –70. 33. The spectator’s inurement to affect through a flood of mediated images has become a theoretical cliché, often tied to the commodification of the image in the context of capitalism. See, for instance, Guy Debord, La société du spectacle, 3rd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Jacques Rancière provides a poignant critique of this cliché in “L’image intolerable,” in Le spectateur émancipé (Paris: La Fabrique, 2008), 93–114; trans. by Gregory Elliott as “The Intolerable Image,” in The Emancipated Spectator (New York: Verso, 2009), 83–105. 34. Barthes, La chambre claire, 48– 49, emphasis in original; Camera Lucida, 26 –27. 35. Ibid., 126 –27; English translation, 81. 36. Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien: Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 2002), 180 –81; trans. by Anthony Enns as Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 135. 37. See ibid., 189–90; English translation, 141. 38. Barthes, La chambre claire, 142; Camera Lucida, 91. 39. Ibid., 143, emphasis in original; English translation, 91. 40. Ibid., 164, emphasis in original; English translation, 106. 41. In an earlier essay, Barthes had defined the photograph as a “message without a code.” Roland Barthes, “Le message photographique,” Communications 1 (1961): 127–38, quotation at 128; trans. by Stephen Heath as

Notes to pages 116–24

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“The Photographic Message,” in Image—Music—Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 15–31, quotation at 17. 42. Barthes, La chambre claire, 18; Camera Lucida, 6, emphasis in English translation. 43. The novel’s title consists of a neologism built around terms like lumpen, perica (a prostitute in Chilean Spanish), and America, as well as alluding to lumen (light) (see Robert Neustadt, “Diamela Eltit: Clearing Space for Critical Performance,” Women & Performance 7, no. 2 (1995): 228). Ronald Christ’s English translation of the text that I will be using, at times with minor changes, replaces the title with a slightly anglicized version of the protagonist’s name, resulting in E. Luminata. Diamela Eltit, Lumpérica, 3rd ed. (Santiago: Planeta, 1993); trans. by Ronald Christ as E. Luminata (Santa Fe, NM: Lumen, 1997). 44. Nelly Richard, Residuos y metáforas: Ensayos de crítica cultural sobre el Chile de la transición (Santiago: Cuarto Proprio, 1998), 15. 45. Idelber Avelar, “An Anatomy of Marginality: Figures of the Eternal Return and the Apocalypse in Chilean Post-Dictatorial Fiction,” Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature 23, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 211–37, quotation at 214. 46. In discussions of Eltit’s work, the metaphor of the cut is ubiquitous in terms of a rupture with existing models, of a violent transgression of conventional literary codes. This becomes especially visible in the first booklength essay collection on the author’s work, Una poética de literatura menor: La narrativa de Diamela Eltit, ed. Juan Carlos Lértora (Santiago: Para Textos/ Cuarto Propio, 1993). 47. Eltit, Lumpérica, 169; E. Luminata, 157. 48. Ibid., 169; English translation, 157, translation slightly altered. 49. Ibid., 169; English translation, 157. 50. Ibid., 169; English translation, 157, translation slightly altered. 51. For an account of the processes of material inscription as the basis of new media, see Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008). 52. Geimer, “Image as Trace,” 24. 53. Ibid., 19. 54. Walter Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” in Aufsätze, Essays, Vorträge: Gesammelte Schriften II: 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1977), 368–85, quotation at 379; trans. by Stanley Mitchell as “A Short History of Photography,” Screen (1972): 5–26, quotation at 21. The passage also appears in the first version of “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Abhandlungen: Gesammelte Schriften I: 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and

238

Notes to pages 124–28

Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1974), 431– 69, quotation at 440; trans. by Harry Zohn as “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 217–51, quotation at 223. 55. See the discussions of Benjamin in Baer, Spectral Evidence, and Cadava, Words of Light. 56. On the notions of “shock” in the work of Benjamin, in comparison to the concept of “Stoss” in the work of Martin Heidegger, see Gianni Vattimo, La società transparente (Milan: Garzanti, 1985). 57. Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” 385; “A Short History of Photography,” 25. 58. Ibid., 378; English translation, 20. In the English translation, the word Gespinst is rendered (correctly) as web, a term that does not capture the associations with fleetingness and the uncanniness (via a near homophony with Gespenst) of the German original. 59. Baer, Spectral Evidence, 7. 60. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic, June 1, 1859, and Ernst Jünger, “Über den Schmerz,” in Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart, Germany: Ernst Klett, 1980) 7:143–91, 182; trans. by David C. Durstas as On Pain (New York: Telos, 2008), 39. 61. Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph.” 62. For discussions of the connection between technologies of war and visual media, see Paul Virilio, Guerre et cinéma: La logistique de la perception (Paris: Éditions de l’Étoile, 1984), and Kittler, Grammophon—Film— Typewriter. 63. Baer, Spectral Evidence, 188. 64. Ibid., 188n34. 65. See Rita Felski’s description of shock as displacement in Uses of Literature (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2008), 105–31. 66. Barthes, La chambre claire, 15; Camera Lucida, 4. 67. In “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” Benjamin develops the notion of shock as a reaction to film’s character of moving, discontinuous pictures, see 464; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” 238. 68. Walter Benjamin, “Über den Begriff der Geschichte,” in Abhandlungen: Gesammelte Schriften I: 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1974), 691–703, quotation at 695; trans. by Harry Zohn as “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1969), 253–64, quotation at 255. 69. Ibid., 702–3; English translation, 262–63.

Notes to pages 128–36

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70. Ibid., 695; English translation, 255. Georges Didi-Huberman discusses Benjamin’s notion of “flash” in relation to photography and film, then applies Benjamin’s reflection on the flash-like apparition of history to four photographs from Auschwitz, as representing “a ‘flash’ that tears the sky when everything seems lost.” Georges Didi-Huberman, Images malgré tout (Paris: Minuit, 2003), 210 –11, 225; trans. by Shane B. Lillis as Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 169–70, 181. 71. Georges Didi-Huberman, Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (Paris: Minuit, 1992), 54. 72. Ibid., 61. 73. Ibid., 61. 74. Jean-Luc Nancy, Au fond des images (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 16; trans. by Jeff Fort as The Ground of the Image (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 2. 75. Ibid., 12; English translation, 4. 76. Ibid., 21; English translation, 7, translation slightly altered. 77. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida’s De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967); trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); and the essays in Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988). 78. See Didi-Hubermann, Images malgré tout, 97; Images in Spite of All, 75. 79. For a discussion of the imagery of photographic resurrection, see Stiegler, Bilder der Photographie, 26 –31, as well as the discussion of Secondo Pia’s photograph of the Shroud of Turin in Bernd Stiegler and Felix Thürlemann, Meisterwerke der Photographie (Stuttgart, Germany: Reclam, 2011), 144 – 45. 80. Georges Didi-Huberman, “L’indice de la plaie absente: Monographie d’une tache,” Traverses 30 –31 (March 1984), 151–63, quotation at 154, emphasis in original; trans. by Thomas Repensek as “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” October 29 (Summer 1984): 63–81, quotation at 67–68, translation altered. 81. Ibid., 153–54, emphasis in original; English translation, 67. 82. Ibid., 154; English translation, 67, translator’s emphasis. 83. Ibid., 154, emphasis in original; English translation, 68. 84. Jacques Derrida, Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), 12, emphasis in original; trans. by Christine Irizarry as On Touching—JeanLuc Nancy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2. 85. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–13.

240

Notes to pages 141–45

86. Guadalupe Santa Cruz, Quebrada: Las Cordilleras en andas (Santiago: Francisco Zegers/Ocho Libros, 2006), n.p. 87. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 191. 88. Santa Cruz, Quebrada, n.p. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 91. Santa Cruz’s reflections on the deficient and promiscuous “memory” of the aluminum plate echo the Freudian metaphor of the mystic writing pad. In contrast to the mystic writing pad that Freud uses as a metaphor for the functioning of the psyche in his 1925 essay “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock,’” (in Das Ich und das Es: Metapsychologische Schriften, 8th ed. [Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 2000], 313–17; trans. by James Strachey as “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad,’” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud [London: Hogarth, 1961], 19:225–32), Santa Cruz’s aluminum plate lacks complexity, consisting only of a single layer susceptible to inscription. See also my discussion of Freud’s model in Chapter 2, “Impact Erasure.” 92. Santa Cruz, Quebrada, n.p. 93. Ibid. 4. out of the groove: aural traces and the mediation of sound 1. In spite of the common usage of the word phonograph in English (namely, to designate any number of sound apparatuses that function as mechanisms that inscribe sound vibrations onto a surface), throughout this chapter, I will use the term phonograph to refer to Thomas A. Edison’s invention—a mechanism for storing and reproducing sound that used a tinfoilcovered cylinder, then a cylinder covered with wax as inscriptive surface (Edison later changed to the more convenient storage medium of discs). Likewise, the term gramophone will refer to a sound-recording device based on discs as inscriptive material, as invented by Emile Berliner in 1887, the predecessor of the record player. An early competitor to Edison’s phonograph, the so-called graphophone first used wax cylinders—a technology that was later used and adapted by Edison. I have maintained the original terminology in quoted passages. In contrast, the terms phonographic or phonography indicate not a specific apparatus but rather a group of inscriptive sound media and their “graphic” characteristics. 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Ur-Geräusch,” in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel-Verlag, 1966), 6:1085–93, quotation at 1089–90; trans. by G. Craig Houston as “Primal Sound,” in Selected Works, by Rainer Maria Rilke (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), 1:51–56, quotation at 53.

Notes to pages 146–55

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3. Ibid., 1087; English translation, 52. 4. Ibid., 1090; English translation, 53–54. 5. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Brief an Dieter Basserman, 5. April 1926,” in Briefe: Zweiter Band 1914 –1926 (Wiesbaden, Germany: Insel-Verlag, 1950), 525–27, quotation at 527. Where not indicated, translations are my own. 6. See Rainer Maria Rilke, “Münchener Kunstbrief ” and “Auguste Rodin,” in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel-Verlag, 1965), 5:321– 28 and 5:135–280, respectively. 7. See Rainer Maria Rilke, “Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge,” in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel-Verlag, 1965), 5:412–25, quotation at 418. 8. Rilke, “Ur-Geräusch,” 1090; “Primal Sound,” 53–54. 9. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Über Kunst,” in Sämtliche Werke (Frankfurt, Germany: Insel-Verlag, 1965), 5:426 –34, quotation at 434. 10. Ulrich Baer, Das Rilke-Alphabet (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2006), 160, emphasis in original. See my discussion of “In the Penal Colony” in Chapter 1. 11. Rilke, “Ur-Geräusch,” 1089; “Primal Sound,” 53. 12. Baer, Rilke-Alphabet, 162. 13. Ibid., 161. 14. For a reproduction of Rilke’s sketch and an in-depth reading of the sketch in relation to “Primal Sound,” see Adrianna Hlukhovych, “. . . wie ein dunkler Sprung durch eine helle Tasse. . . “ Rainer Maria Rilkes Poetik des Blinden: Eine ukrainische Spur (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 265 and 237–63. 15. See Rilke, “Ur-Geräusch,” 1092; “Primal Sound,” 55. 16. Ibid., 1090; English translation, 53. 17. Ibid., 1087; English translation, 51. 18. László Moholy-Nagy, “Neue Gestaltung in der Musik: Möglichkeiten des Grammophons,” Der Sturm 14, no. 7 ( July 1923): 104. 19. Ibid. 20. See Theodor W. Adorno, “Die Form der Schallplatte,” in Gesammelte Schriften Band 19: Musikalische Schriften VI (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1984), 530 –34, quotation at 531; trans. by Thomas Y. Levin as “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 56 –61, quotation at 57. 21. See Lisa Gitelman, Script, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2. For a history of inscriptive technologies that led to the invention of the phonograph, see Friedrich Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter (Berlin: Brinkmann & Bose, 1986), 37– 49; trans. by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and

242

Notes to pages 155–61

Michael Wutz as Gramophone—Film—Typewriter (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999), 21–29. For a history of early photography, see Friedrich Kittler, Optische Medien: Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin: Merve, 2002), 155–95; trans. by Anthony Enns as Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999 (Malden, Mass.: Polity Press, 2010), 118– 45. 22. Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Frankfurt, Germany: Fischer, 1997), 57; trans. by James Strachey as Civilization and Its Discontents (New York: Norton, 1961), 43. 23. One of the uses that Edison had listed for the phonograph was to record the last words of the dying (i.e., to make audible the voices of the dead). See Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter, 23; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 12, as well as Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 8. 24. Lisa Gitelman, “Souvenir Foils: On the Status of Print at the Origin of Recorded Sound,” in New Media, 1740 –1915, ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 157–73, quotation at 157–58, emphasis in original. 25. Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 3. 26. See Gitelman, “Souvenir Foils,” 166. 27. Several years earlier, in 1927, Adorno had already formulated some thoughts about the gramophone in the essay “Nadelkurven” (in Gesammelte Schriften Band 19: Musikalische Schriften VI [Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1984], 525–29), some of which resonate with “The Form of the Phonograph Record.” In spite of the title and its reference to the gramophone grooves, the pseudo-graphic form of the gramophone record remains in the background. 28. Adorno, “Die Form der Schallplatte,” 530, 531; “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” 57. As Thomas Y. Levin points out, contrary to Adorno’s assertion, there actually were compositional experiments with a view to the medium of the phonograph, such as Paul Hindemith and Ernst Toch’s project “Neue Musik Berlin 1930.” See Thomas Y. Levin, “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 23– 47, quotation at 34. 29. Adorno, “Die Form der Schallplatte,” 530; “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” 56. 30. Ibid., 530; English translation, 56. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 532; English translation, 58–59. 33. Ibid., 532; English translation, 58. 34. Ibid., 531; English translation, 58. 35. Ibid., 533; English translation, 59.

Notes to pages 161–66

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36. Ibid., 533; English translation, 60. The English translation opts for the verb “to inscribe” to render Adorno’s zeichnen. 37. For a discussion of Adorno’s attitude toward writing, especially in the ambiguous figure of the hieroglyph, see Miriam Hansen, “Mass Culture as Hieroglyphic Writing: Adorno, Derrida, Kracauer,” New German Critique 56 (Spring/Summer 1992): 43–77. 38. For Adorno’s critical attitude toward film, see “Filmtransparente” (1:353–61), “Prolog zum Fernsehen” (2:507–17), and “Fernsehen als Ideologie” (2:518–32), in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft, 2 vols. (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 2003). 39. Levin discusses Adorno’s emphasis on the gramophone grooves as an interest in a kind of hieroglyphic ur-writing inspired by Romanticism — hence Adorno’s references (via Walter Benjamin’s reference to Johann Wilhelm Ritter’s work on Chladni) to the sound figures that the German physicist Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni developed at the beginning of the nineteenth century, see “For the Record,” 31–33. 40. Adorno, “Die Form der Schallplatte,” 533; “The Form of the Phonograph Record,” 60. 41. Ibid., 534; English translation, 61. 42. Veit Erlmann, Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (New York: Zone Books, 2010), 19. 43. See Jean-Luc Nancy, A l’écoute (Paris: Galilée, 2002), 13; trans. by Charlotte Mandell as Listening (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 1. 44. See Frances Dyson, Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 4. 45. A notable exception is Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: The Meaning of a Format (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012). 46. See Dyson, Sounding New Media, 7. 47. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 5. 48. Ibid., 19. 49. The phrase “grain of the voice” alludes to Roland Barthes’s essay of the same title. See Roland Barthes, “Le grain de la voix,” in Œuvres complètes, vol. 2, 1966 –1973 (Paris: Seuil, 1998), 1436 – 42; trans. by Stephen Heath as “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image, Music, Text, ed. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 179–89. 50. See Sterne, The Audible Past, 2. 51. Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter, 29; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 16. 52. For discussions of punctuation marks and their function within writing, see Theodor W. Adorno, “Satzzeichen,” in Noten zur Literatur (Frankfurt,

244

Notes to pages 166–75

Germany: Suhrkamp, 1974), 1:106 –13, and Brian Rotman, Becoming beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Beings (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008). A slightly different case can be made for musical notation that, while not restricted in the same way as written language, also constitutes a set of symbols only for a limited group of sonic phenomena. 53. Sterne sums up the stereotypical values attributed to vision and sound in his “audiovisual litany,” see The Audible Past, 15. 54. Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter, 72; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 45. The first sentence of this passage has been omitted from the translated edition; I have supplied my own translation here. 55. Katja Stopka traces the changing representation of static noise in German literature, from Romanticism’s meaningful whisper of nature to the white noise of technologized modernity, in Semantik des Rauschens: Über ein akustisches Phänomen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2005). 56. Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter, 18; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 9. 57. Throughout his work, Kittler is quite vocal in his critique of digital media. Apart from Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, see also Daten, Zahlen, Codes (Leipzig, Germany: Institut für Buchkunst, 1998). The equation of inscriptive media, such as the gramophone, with the real is, from the vantage point of digital new media, a kind of theoretical media nostalgia. 58. Kittler, Grammophon—Film—Typewriter, 55; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 33. 59. Ibid. 60. See Brian Kane, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 192–93. 61. Durs Grünbein, “Drei Briefe,” in Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle und bleibt an den Maßen hängen: Aufsätze 1989–1995 (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1996), 40 –54, quotation at 44. This essay was originally part of a correspondence with Marcel Beyer whose Rilkean echo is examined below. 62. Peter Hamm, “Vorerst— oder: Der Dichter als streunender Hund,” in Durs Grünbein: Texte—Dokumente—Materialien, ed. Wolfgang Heidenreich (Baden-Baden, Germany: Elster, 1998), 90 –91, quotation at 90. 63. Durs Grünbein’s “Neun Variationen zur Fontanelle” (in Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle und bleibt an den Maßen hängen: Aufsätze 1989–1995 [Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1996], 246 –61), formed part of the exhibition catalog Fontanelle: Kunst in (x) Zwischenfällen (Ausstellung Kunstspeicher Potsdam), ed. Nike Bätzner and Christoph Tannert (Berlin: Reison, 1993). 64. Grünbein, “Neun Variationen zur Fontanelle,” 257. 65. Ibid., 259.

Notes to pages 175–82

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66. Durs Grünbein, Falten und Fallen (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1994), 38. 67. As Judith Ryan underlines, Grünbein insists on the “resistance of the human physiology to reveal its own secrets.” See “Das Motiv der Schädelnähte bei Durs Grünbein,” in Schreiben nach der Wende: Ein Jahrzehnt deutscher Literatur 1989–1999, ed. Gerhard Fischer and David Roberts (Tübingen, Germany: Stauffenburg Verlag, 2001), 301–15, quotation at 311. 68. Grünbein has a keen interest in literature and science as two potentially interconnected analyses of reality and especially of human nature, as he underlines in his speech upon the award of the Büchner Prize in 1995, tellingly entitled “Den Körper zerbrechen” (Breaking the body), in Galilei vermißt Dantes Hölle und bleibt an den Maßen hängen: Aufsätze 1989–1995 (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1996), 75–86. 69. Marcel Beyer, Flughunde (Frankfurt, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1996), 225–27; trans. by John Brownjohn as The Karnau Tapes (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997), 181–83. I have slightly altered the English translation in order to conserve Beyer’s original broken syntax and reinstate the reference to “primal sound” that the translator had opted to weaken by translating “Urgeräusch” as “the most primordial of sounds.” 70. For discussions of sound in Beyer’s novel, see Leslie Morris, “The Sound of Memory,” German Quarterly 74, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 368–78, and Ulrich Schönherr, “Topophony of Fascism: On Marcel Beyer’s The Karnau Tapes,” Germanic Review 73, no. 4 (Fall 1998): 328– 48. 71. Beyer, Flughunde, 14 –15; The Karnau Tapes, 6 –7. 72. See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 11–13. 73. Sterne, The Audible Past, 17–18. Indeed, according to Sterne, sound is rarely a concern for cultural theory at all (see ibid., 4). Sterne provides two exceptions: the importance of the concept of voice for phenomenology and the talking cure of psychoanalysis. 74. Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), i–xxv, quotation at xx, emphasis in original; trans. by Alan Bass as “Tympan,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), ix–xxix, quotation at xxiv. 75. Ibid., i; English translation, x. 76. Ibid., x; English translation, xvii. 77. Ibid., xiii; English translation, xix. 78. See ibid., xxi; English translation, xxv. Derrida treats Freudian metaphors of inscription at length in “Freud et la scène de l’écriture,” in L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967), 293–340; trans. Alan Bass as “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” in Writing and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1978),

246

Notes to pages 182–96

246 –91. For a discussion of inscription in psychoanalysis, see Chapter 2, “Impact Erasure.” 79. Derrida, “Tympan,” xix, emphasis in original; English translation, xxiii. 80. In the French original, the difference between Derrida’s text and the quoted passage from Scratches is more pronounced than in the English translation, since Leiris’s text is printed in a larger font than the rest of the text. 81. Unlike the English translation by Alan Bass, the French original does not provide the title of Leiris’s work. Derrida later exploited a similar principle of graphic and conceptual juxtaposition in Glas. There, as announced by Derrida’s insert (“Prière d’insérer”), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Jean Genet become strange bedfellows, distributed into two columns that feature Derrida’s own text as well as quotes, mainly from Hegel and Genet, that dialogue with and productively interrupt Derrida’s own thought. Could Kittler’s penchant to include short texts in his Gramophone, Film, Typewriter be read as under the influence of Derrida? Irrespective of any verifiable influence, it seems quite intriguing to read Kittler’s treatment of Rilke and Derrida’s treatment of Leiris as resonant. 82. Derrida, “Tympan,” i–iv; English translation, x-xii. 83. See ibid., xxi–xxv; English translation, xxviii-xxix. 84. Ibid., xviii; English translation, xxv, xxiv. 85. Ibid., xix; English translation, xxiii. 86. Nancy, A l’écoute, 13; Listening, 1. 87. Ibid., 14; English translation, 2, translation slightly altered. 88. In his study of the MP3 format, Jonathan Sterne explicitly poses the question of the embodiment of music: “Is music a thing? If it was, is it still?” MP3: The Meaning of a Format, 186. conclusion: against inscription? 1. Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 227, emphasis in original; trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak as Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158. Spivak provides both a more readable translation (in italics) and a translation closer to the French original (in square brackets), as well as providing the French original. 2. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1. 3. Ibid., 6. 4. Ibid., 26. 5. Ibid., 3.

Notes to pages 197–202

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6. See Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy,” in The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 129–53. 7. See Phelan, Unmarked, 2, 3. 8. Jean-Luc Nancy, “L’excrit,” Po&sie 47 (1988): 107–21, quotation at 121; trans. by Katherine Lydon as “Exscription,” Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 47–65. Lydon does not reproduce Nancy’s pun on écriture in her translation. 9. Ibid., 120, emphases in original; English translation, 64. 10. Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions Métailié, 2000), 63, emphases in original; trans. by Richard A. Rand as “Corpus,” in Corpus (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 2–122, quotation at 71. 11. Peggy Kamuf, “On the Subject of Ravishment (A même Jean-Luc Nancy),” Paragraph 16, no. 2 (1993): 202–15, quotation at 206. 12. See also Derrida’s discussion of the Heideggerian concept of “Durchkreuzung” or “crossing out,” in Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 349– 445; trans. by Barbara Johnson as Dissemination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 287–366. 13. See Jacques Lacan, “Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien,” in Écrits (Paris: Seuil, 1966), 2:151–91; trans. by Alan Sheridan as “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,” in Écrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), 292–325. 14. Jacques Derrida, “Et si l’animal répondait?,” in L’animal que donc je suis, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris: Galilée, 2006), 163–91, quotation at 185, emphasis in original; trans. by David Wills as “And Say the Animal Responded?,” in The Animal that Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 119– 40, quotation at 135. 15. Jacques Derrida, “La différance,” in Marges de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), 1–29, quotation at 25; trans. by Alan Bass as “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–27, quotation at 24. 16. Derrida, “Et si l’animal répondait?,” 186; “And Say the Animal Responded?,” 136. 17. Ibid., 186, emphasis in original; English translation, 136. 18. Mark Hansen, Embodying Technesis: Technology beyond Writing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 4. 19. Ibid., 7. 20. Ibid., 5. 21. Ibid. 22. Catherine Malabou, “Grammatologie et plasticité,” in Changer de différence (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 51–79, quotation at 67–68; trans. by Carolyn

248

Notes to pages 202–9

Shread as “Grammatology and Plasticity,” in Changing Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Polity Press, 2011), 41–66, quotation at 55–56. 23. Ibid., 75–76; English translation, 63. 24. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (New York: Verso, 2009), 10. 25. Butler draws attention to the term conscription as a suggestive, militarized variation of inscription, see Frames of War, xiv. 26. Butler plays with different meanings and levels of framing, also in reference to Trinh T. Minh-ha, Framer Framed (New York: Routledge, 1992). 27. See Jacques Derrida, “Scribble: pouvoir/écrire,” in William Warburton, Essai sur les hieroglyphes des Égyptiens, ed. Patrick Tort, trans. Léonard de Malpeines (Paris: Aubier Flammarion, 1977), 5– 43. 28. See Georges Didi-Huberman, “L’indice de la plaie absente: Monographie d’une tache,” Traverses 30 –31 (March 1984): 151–63; trans. by Thomas Repensek as the “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),” October 29 Summer 1984): 63–81. See also my discussion in Chapter 3, “Stings of Visibility.” 29. See Homi K. Bhabha’s critique of theoretical equations of deconstructivist “difference” and cultural difference in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 70.

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index

Adorno, Theodor, 4; analog sound technology, 163–64; “The Form of the Phonograph Record” (“Die Form der Schallplatte”), 158, 161–62; and gramophone, 158–61; medial functionality, 160 –61; phonograph record, 162; remediation, 164 –65; true writing, 163–64 Agamben, Giorgio, 22; Remnants of Auschwitz (Quel che resta di Auschwitz), 76 –77 agency: activity, 10 –11; passivity, 10 –11 anachronicity, 12–13 analog media, 164 –65; Adorno and, 161; digital and, 108; mediality and, 155; textuality and, 157–58; writing and, 168 Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben) (Freud), 91–95 anthropology; circumcision and trauma, 89–95; Jewish identity and, 89–91; tattooing and cultural differences, 45–54 anti-inscription, 194 –200 Anti-Oedipus (L’Anti-œdipe) (Deleuze & Guattari), 12, 49–51, 223n77 Archive Fever (Mal d’archive) (Derrida), 99–101 The Audible Past (Sterne), 180 aurality, 163–64 Auschwitz tattooing, 73, 227nn35,38; Hirsch, Marianne, 22, 73, 80 –86; Klüger, Ruth, 75, 78–79, 228n39; Kupferminc, Mirta, 79–80, 82–84; Levi, Primo, 74 –76; Mosaic law and, 75; purpose, 75; Remnants of Auschwitz (Quel che resta di Auschwitz) (Agamben), 76 –77; Representing the Holocaust (LaCapra), 77–78; Spitzer, Leo, 73; tattoo removal, 78–79; versus voluntary tattoos, 79–85 Baer, Ulrich, 23; on Rilke, 148– 49; Spectral Evidence, 126 –27

Barthes, Roland, 4, 20, 23; Camera Lucida (La chambre claire), 107–8, 113–16 Bazin, André, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (“Ontologie de l’image photographique”), 106, 110 “Beiträge zur Pentateuchkritik” (“Contributions to the critique of the Pentateuch”) (Stade), 90 belated memory, 80 Benjamin, Walter: image and shock, 129; on photography, 124; “A Short History of Photography” (“Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”), 20, 124; “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte”), 128; on thinking historically, 128; visual representation, 128–129; “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”), 124 Beyer, Marcel, The Karnau Tapes (Flughunde), 175–78 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) (Freud), 60 –61, 66 –67, 130 Bhabha, Homi, 16 Biffures (Scratches) (Leiris), 182–84 binaries, 190; inscription and 190; marked and unmarked, 54; of materiality and signification, 27 Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs) (Fanon), 16 bodily inscription: pleasure and, 52–53; subjection and, 21; writing and, 49–52 Bolter, Jay David, 164 Boyarin, Daniel, circumcision, 92–93 Brecht, Bertolt, “No insights through photography” (“Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht”), 106 Breuer, Josef, and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie), 60

265

266 Butler, Judith, 4; Frames of War, 205–6; Gender Trouble, 192; on inscription, 27; sex, 17 Caduveo tattoos, 47– 49, 222n72; in LéviStrauss, 222n74 “Cain’s mark, the Cainites, and circumcision” (“Kainszeichen, Keniter und Beschneidung”) (Zeydner), 90 Camera Lucida (La chambre claire) (Barthes), 107–8, 113–16 Caruth, Cathy, 22; belatedness and trauma, 224n2; memory trace, 232n99 castration, circumcision and, 91–92, 95–96 catachresis, 61–62 Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde (What we see, what regards us) (Didi-Huberman), 129 celibate inscription (de Certeau), 58 Certeau, Michel de, 20; The Practice of Everyday Life (L’invention du quotidien), 26, 58 La chambre claire (Camera Lucida) (Barthes), 107–8, 113–16 “Circonfession” (“Circumfession”) (Derrida), 100 circumcision, 4, 88, 91–92; Boyarin, Daniel, 92–93; “Cain’s mark, the Cainites, and circumcision” (“Kainszeichen, Keniter und Beschneidung”) (Zeydner), 90; castration and, 91–92, 95–96; “Contributions to the critique of the Pentateuch” (“Beiträge zur Pentateuchkritik: Das Kainszeichen”) (Stade), 90; corporeality and tropology, 103; cultural contexts, 88–89, 97–98; in Derrida, 22, 99–104; Europa, Europa film, 88; Freud and, 91–98, 103; inscriptive logic, 98–99; and Jewish maleness, 92–95; as mark of allegiance, 89; Mark of Cain, 90 –91, 230n82; Sex and Character (Sex und Charakter) (Weininger), 91–92; stigma of Jews, 94 –95; trauma association, 22, 89–90; unstable mark, 89; ur-trauma, 97–98 “Circumfession” (“Circonfession”) (Derrida), 100 Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur) (Freud), 155–56 Cixous, Hélène, 20 colonialism: European imperialism, 28–29; inscription as modern and colonial in Kafka, 55–57; tattooing and, 29–30 concretion versus abstraction, 14

Index “Contributions to the critique of the Pentateuch” (“Beiträge zur Pentateuchkritik”) (Stade), 90 coronal sutures experiment: lines, 147–151; mediality, 158, 167; poetry and, 151–52; repetition, 149–50; sensory experience, 150. See also Primal Sound corporeality, 198–99; body parts’ translation into media, 175; brain and, 174; circumcision and, 103; Foucault, 43; Grünbein, 173; inscription and body’s descent, 43; inscriptive figures, 6; Kafka’s literary text and, 27; Nancy, Jean-Luc, 27, 198; Nietzsche, 43; shift to interiority, 42; sound of in Rilke, 24; subjection and, 26 –27; trauma and, 61; whiteness/ nonwhiteness, 16 Corpus (Nancy), 27 craniophony (Rilke), 148–51 criminal anthropology, tattooing and, 33–35, 37, 220n44 Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente) (Lombroso), 34 cultural development: tattooing and, 31–32, 218n17; writing and, 31 cuneiform, 12 De la grammatologie (Of Grammatology) (Derrida), 46, 181, 202 de Man, Paul, 2 Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Mulvey), 108–9 deconstruction: Agamben, 77–78; as anti-sonic theory, 180; Derridean, 19; exscription and, 198; Malabou on, 202–3; need to inscribe, 205; sound and, 186; testimony and, 77–78 Deleuze, Gilles, Anti-Oedipus (L’Anti-œdipe), 12, 49–51, 223n77 Derrida, Jacques, 4, 21; 1976 notebook, 99; “And Say the Animal Responded?” (“Et si l’animal répondait?”), 199; Archive Fever (Mal d’archive), 99–100, 101; circumcision, 22, 99–102, 103– 4; “Circumfession” (“Circonfession”), 100; écriture, 19–20, 24, 46 –50, 136, 170 –71, 180, 197; erasure, 199–200; the extra-textual, 192; Glas, 99; Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie), 46, 181, 202; phonocentrism, 46 – 47, 180 –81; and Scratches (Biffures) (Leiris), 182–83; “Shibboleth” (Schibboleth), 101–2; as sound theorist,

Index 180 –81; On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy), 135–36; trace, 2, 20 –21; “Tympan,” 181–87; The Voice and Phenomena (La voix et le phenomène), 180 –81; Writing and Difference (L’écriture et la différence), 46 dictatorship, war of inscriptions and, 119 Didi-Huberman, Georges, 4; indexicality, 133; “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)” (“L’indice de la plaie absente: Monographie d’une tache”), 133; Shroud of Turin, 133–34; What we see, what regards us (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde), 129–30 digital photography, 107–8 Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir) (Foucault), 21, 39– 40, 43– 45 Doane, Mary Ann, 23, 108 doubling, inscription and, 122–23 drawing of distinction: rule of distinction breached, 8; rule of materiality, 7; rule of production, 8; rule of specificity, 8 “Drei Briefe” (“Three letters”) (Grünbein), 172–75 The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati) (Levi), 74 –75 Dubois, Philippe, 23, 108 “Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht” (“No insights through photography”) (Brecht), 106 Dyson, Frances, 4; Sounding New Media, 163–64 écriture, 46, 47, 49, 136, 170 Edison, Thomas, 146, 156 Eltit, Diamela, Lumpérica (E. Luminata), 23, 117–22; Zone of pain (Zona del dolor) (aka Maipú), 118 Embodying Technesis (Hansen), 201 erasure, 199–200 Erichsen, John Eric, On Railway Spine and Other Injuries of the Nervous System, 60 –61 Erlmann, Veit, Reason and Resonance, 163 etching, 216n3 Europa, Europa film (Holland), 88 European imperialism, “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”) (Kafka) and, 28–29 Excesses (Lingis), 52–53 exscription, 197–98 “Exscription” (“L’excrit”) (Nancy), 13

267 Family Frames (Hirsch), 83–84 Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, masques blancs), 16 feminism, mark of gender, 3, 17 figuration: the literal and, 208; Malabou on, 202–3; materiality, 200 – 4; photographic indexicality, 115; post-structuralism, 135; signification and, 61; Didi-Huberman, 133–34; textual production of inscription, 193, 209–10; trauma and, 22, 82, 103 Fine, Ellen, 80 Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes) (Beyer), 176 –78 Flusser, Vilém, Towards a Philosophy of Photography, 107 Au fond des images (The Ground of the Image) (Nancy), 131–33 fontanelles, 174 –75. See also coronal sutures experiment “The Form of the Phonograph Record” (“Die Form der Schallplatte”) (Adorno), 158, 161–62 Foucault, Michel, 4, 20; Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir), 21, 39– 40, 43– 45; interiority, 43; “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (“Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire”), 42– 44; social control, epistemic shifts, 43– 44; subjection 2, 26 –28, 43– 44; temporality of inscription in, 44 – 45 Frames of War (Butler), 205–6 Frazer, James George, “The Mark of Cain”, 90 Fresco, Nadine, 80 Freud, Sigmund, 4; Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy (Analyse der Phobie eines fünfjährigen Knaben), 91–95; Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips), 60 –61, 66 –67, 130; on circumcision, 91–98, 103; Civilization and Its Discontents (Das Unbehagen in der Kultur), 155–56; human as prosthetic god, 155–56; Jews’ originary trauma, 96; latency, 95–96; mark of Cain, 22; media and, 155–57; Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion), 95–98, 103; mystic writing pad, 2, 66 –69; “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ ” (“Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock’”), 20, 66; phonography and, 156; “Preliminary Communication” to Studies on Hysteria 94 –95; psyche as inscriptive model, 67–68;

268 Freud, Sigmund (continued) psychic apparatus, 66 –69; Rome metaphor, 69; Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie) (with Breuer), 60, 94; Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu), 95; trauma as system of inscription, 69–70; trauma theory, 60 –63, 225nn16,18, 226n19; writing and memory, 67–68 Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable (Yerushalmi), 99 Friedländer, Saul, 81–82 Fusco, Coco, 17 Geimer, Peter, 23; “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm,” 123–24; photographic capture, 123–24 gender: mark of, 3, 17–18; social construction of gendered bodies, 26 –27; Wittig, 17 Gender Trouble (Butler), 192 The Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral) (Nietzsche), 20, 21, 39– 42 The Generation of Postmemory (Hirsch), 80 –81 Geschichte der Schrift und des Schrifttums von den rohen Anfängen des Schreibens in der Tatuirung bis zur Legung electromagnetischer Dräthe (The history of writing from its uncouth beginnings in tattooing to electromagnetic cables) (Wuttke), 31 Gilman, Sander L., 92, 94 –95 Gitelman, Lisa, 4; Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines, 156 –57; “Souvenir Foils,” 157 Glas (Derrida), 99 Gourmantché rite of female circumcision in Deleuze and Guattari, 50 “Grammatology and Plasticity” (“Grammatologie et plasticité”) (Malabou), 202–3 gramophone, 155–56, 183–84, 187, 240n1; Adorno and, 158–61; Beyer, 175–76; grooves, 2; inscriptive surface, 154; Kittler, 165; Moholy-Nagy, 153–54; Rilke, 147, 168; versus writing, 166, 169–171. See also phonograph Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Grammophon - Film - Typewriter) (Kittler), 23–24, 165 graphein, 12 Grosz, Elizabeth, 4; Volatile Bodies, 26 –27 The Ground of the Image (Au fond des images) (Nancy), 131–33 Grünbein, Durs: “Nine variations on the fontanelle” (“Neun Variationen zur Fon-

Index tanelle”), 174 –75; “Three letters” (“Drei Briefe”), 172–75 Grusin, Richard, 164 Guattari, Félix, 21; Anti-Oedipus (L’Antiœdipe), 12, 49–51, 223n77 Gunning, Tom, 109 Hansen, Marc, Embodying Technesis, 201 Hartman, Geoffrey H., 81–82 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, on writing, 31 Heidegger and “the jews” (Heidegger et “les juifs”) (Lyotard), 64 Hirsch, Marianne, 22; Auschwitz tattoo, 73; Family Frames, 83–86; The Generation of Postmemory, 80 –81; transmission of trauma, 85–86 The history of writing from its uncouth beginnings in tattooing to electromagnetic cables (Geschichte der Schrift und des Schrifttums von den rohen Anfängen des Schreibens in der Tatuirung bis zur Legung electromagnetischer Dräthe) (Wuttke), 31 Holland, Agnieszka, Europa, Europa film, 88 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” 125–26 Holocaust: contemporary theoretical movements and Holocaust, 77–78; Judenstern, 75; as modern trauma example, 73–74; Representing the Holocaust (LaCapra), 77–78; witnessing trauma and (Agamben), 76 –77. See also Auschwitz tattooing; Nazism “Image as Trace: Speculations about an Undead Paradigm” (Geimer), 123–24 images, shock and, 126 –28, 128–30 Imago journal, 90 immersion, sound and, 163–64 imperialism. See European imperialism “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”) (Kafka), 2, 20 –21, 25–26, 34 –35; Butler on, 26; European imperialism and, 28–29; inscription as modern and colonial, 55–57; machine inscribing itself, 57–58; Nancy on, 27; theory and literary text, 27–28 indexes, Peirce on, 106, 111–12, 235n26 indexicality, 235n27; contact of photographic inscription, 117; photogram, 109–10; photographs, 108–11; of photography, 105–6, 111–12; representation

Index and reception, 137–38; Shroud of Turin, 133–34 inscription: aims, 191; analog media, 164 –65 anthropology and, 28–30, 45–54, 89–91; anti-inscription, 194 –200; in art, 2; aurality and, 163–64; binaries and, 190; bodily, 21, 49–53; celibate (de Certeau), 58; circumcision, 98–99; definition, 1–2; doubling, 122–23; as an imaginary, 192; laws of, 7–13; linguistic turn, 3– 4; in literature, 2; mediality, 155; modern invention in Western theory, 53–54; modernity and, 3; photographic, indexicality and, 117; racial difference, 19; reversed inscription, 24; sexual difference, 19; theoretical thought and, 2–3, 193–94, 207; trauma as system of inscription, 69–70; upon inscription, trauma and, 70 –88; visibility and, 195–96; without inscription, trauma and, 59–70, 63–66 inscriptive media, 156 –58. See also photography inscriptive scenarios: Butler on, 27; “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”) (Kafka), 25–26; Nancy on, 27; Volatile Bodies (Grosz), 26 –27 interface, 14 interiority, Foucault, 43 intextuation, 190, 213n4 Irigaray, Luce, 20 iteration, 11–12 Jelinek, Elfriede, 18 Jenseits des Lustprinzips (Beyond the Pleasure Principle) (Freud), 60 –61, 66 –67, 130 Jews: Auschwitz tattooing, 73–78; Freud on Jewish identity, 94 – 96; maleness, circumcision and, 92– 93; originary trauma, 96 Joest, Wilhelm, 21; Tattooing: Scar signs and body paint: A contribution to comparative ethnology (Tätowiren: Narbenzeichen und Körperbemalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Ethnologie), 31–33; tattoos as official identifying marks, 37 Judenstern, 75 Jünger, Ernst, 125 Kafka, Franz, “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”), 2, 20 –21, 25–26, 34 –35 “Das Kainszeichen: Ein psychologischer Beitrag zur Bibelerklärung” (“The mark

269 of Cain: A psychological contribution to the exegesis of the Bible”) (Reik), 90 “Kainszeichen, Keniter und Beschneidung” (“Cain’s mark, the Cainites, and circumcision”) (Zeydner), 90 Kamuf, Peggy, “On the Subject of Ravishment (A même Jean-Luc Nancy),” 197–98 Kane, Brian, Sound Unseen, 171 The Karnau Tapes (Flughunde) (Beyer), 175–78 Kittler, Friedrich, 4, 115, 126; Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Grammophon - Film Typewriter), 23–24, 165; phonograph, 165; on “Primal Sound” (“Ur-geräusch”) (Rilke), 165–67; sonic media and writing, 166 –71; white noise, 165; writing and analog media, 168, 170 –71 “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (“A Short History of Photography”) (Benjamin), 20, 124 Klüger, Ruth: lost on the way (unterwegs verloren), 75, 78–79; tattoo removal, 78–79, weiter leben, 228n39 Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography” (“Die Photographie”), 107 Krauss, Rosalind, 23, 108–9 Kristeva, Julia, 20 “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) (Benjamin), 124 Kupferminc, Mirta, The Skin of Memory (La piel de la memoria), 79–80, 82–84 Lacan Jacques, 20; “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (“Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien”), 199 LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust, 77–78 Lacassagne, Alexandre, 21; Tattooing (Les Tatouages), 34; tattoos as vocal scars, 37–38 Landsberg, Alison, 80 L’Anti-œdipe (The Anti-Oedipus) (Deleuze & Guattari), 12, 49–51, 223n77 Laplanche, Jean, 62 Laub, Dori, 82 laws of inscription, 213n3; drawing of distinction, 7–8; paradox of action, 10 –11; paradox of multiplication, 13; paradox of spatiality, 9–10; paradox of temporality, 11–13

270 A l’écoute (Listening) (Nancy), 163–64, 185–86 L’écriture et la différence (Writing and Difference) (Derrida), 46 Leiris, Michel, Scratches (Biffures), 182–84 “Letter on the arts from Munich” (“Münchener Kunstbrief ”) (Rilke), 147 Levi, Primo: Auschwitz tattooing, 74 –76; The Drowned and the Saved (I sommersi e i salvati), 74 –75 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: Caduveo tattoos, 47– 48, 222nn72,74; Tristes Tropiques, 46 – 48 Levy, Ludwig, 90 “L’excrit” (“Exscription”) (Nancy), 13 Lingis, Alphonso, 21; Excesses, 52–53 linguistic turn and inscription, 3– 4 L’invention du quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life) (de Certeau), 26, 58 listening, 185–86 Listening (A l’écoute) (Nancy), 163–64, 185–86 Lombroso, Cesare, 21; Criminal Man (L’uomo delinquente), 34 Loos, Adolf, “Ornament and Crime” (“Ornament und Verbrechen”), 35 lost on the way (unterwegs verloren) (Klüger), 75, 78–79 Lu Xun, 107 Lumpérica (E. Luminata) (Eltit), 23, 117–22 L’uomo delinquente (Criminal Man) (Lombroso), 34 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 89 Lury, Celia, 80 Lyotard, Jean-François, 20, 22; Heidegger and “the jews” (Heidegger et “les juifs”), 64; representation of trauma, 71–72 Mal d’archive (Archive Fever) (Derrida), 99–101 Malabou, Catherine: “Grammatology and Plasticity” (“Grammatologie et plasticité”), 202–3; on trauma, 61 Mark of Cain. See circumcision “The mark of Cain: A psychological contribution to the exegesis of the Bible” (“Das Kainszeichen: Ein psychologischer Beitrag zur Bibelerklärung”) (Reik), 90, 91 marks: of allegiance, circumcision as, 89; of gender, 3, 17–18; versus inscriptive surface, 7–8; metaphors, 15; race and, 15–17. See also circumcision; tattooing materiality, 8, 200 –210; signification and, 14, 20; transcendence, 7; writing, 157–58

Index memory: absent memory, 80; mémoire des cendres, 80; mémoire trouée, 80; prosthetic memory, 80; writing and, 67–68 metaphors, marking, 15 Miller, J. Hillis, catachresis, 61–62 Mitchell, W. J. T., 180; Picture Theory, 136 modernity, 3; tattooing and, 32–33 Moholy-Nagy, László, 4; graphics and phonographic media, 153–54; “New creation in music: The possibilities of the gramophone” (“Neue Gestaltung in der Musik: Möglichkeiten des Grammophons”), 153–54; photogram, 109 Mosaic law and Auschwitz tattooing, 75 Moses and Monotheism (Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion) (Freud), 95–98, 103 Mulvey, Laura, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image, 108–9 “Münchener Kunstbrief ” (“Letter on the arts from Munich”) (Rilke), 147 Muybridge, Eadweard, 125 mystic writing pad, 2, 66 –69; psyche as inscriptive model, 67–68; psychic apparatus and, 68 Nachträglichkeit, 64 –65 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 4; Corpus, 27; exscription, 197– 98; “Exscription” (“L’excrit”), 13; The Ground of the Image (Au fond des images), 131–33; on “In the Penal Colony,” 27; Listening (A l’écoute), 163– 64, 185– 86 Nazism: circumcision and stigma of Jews, 94 –95; construction of Jews as race apart, 75; Europa, Europa film, 88; The Karnau Tapes (Flughunde), 176 –78; SS tattoos, 228n54. See also Auschwitz tattooing; Holocaust “Neue Gestaltung in der Musik: Möglichkeiten des Grammophons” (“New creation in music: The possibilities of the gramophone”) (Moholy-Nagy), 153–54 “Neun Variationen zur Fontanelle” (“Nine variations on the fontanelle”) (Grünbein), 174 –75 “New creation in music: The possibilities of the gramophone” (“Neue Gestaltung in der Musik: Möglichkeiten des Grammophons”) (Moholy-Nagy), 153–54 Nietzsche, Friedrich: bodily marking and, 39– 40; corporeal pain and visual pleasure, 40 – 42; The Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral), 20 –21, 39– 42; in-

Index scription and body’s descent, 43; morality as construction, 39– 40; social accountability, inception, 40 “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” (“Nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire”) (Foucault), 42– 44 “Nine variations on the fontanelle” (“Neun Variationen zur Fontanelle”) (Grünbein), 174 –75 “No insights through photography” (“Durch Fotografie keine Einsicht”) (Brecht), 106 “A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ ” (“Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock’ ”) (Freud), 20, 66 “Notes on the harmony of things” (“Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge”) (Rilke), 148 “Notiz über den ‘Wunderblock’ ” (“A Note upon the ‘Mystic Writing Pad’ ”) (Freud), 20, 66 “Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge” (“Notes on the harmony of things”) (Rilke), 148 Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie) (Derrida), 46, 181, 202 “Of Reasoning in General” (Peirce), 111 “On art” (“Über Kunst”) (Rilke), 148 On Photography (Sontag), 112–13 On Railway Spine and Other Injuries of the Nervous System (Erichsen), 60 –61 “On the Subject of Ravishment” (Kamuf ), 197–98 On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy (Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy) (Derrida), 135 “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” (“Ontologie de l’image photographique”) (Bazin), 106, 110 “Ornament and Crime” (“Ornament und Verbrechen”) (Loos), 35 pain: infliction, 225n10; infliction as mnemonic technique, 40; photographic representation, 120 –21; visual pleasure in infliction, 40 – 42 paradox, 14; of action, 10 –11; of multiplication, 13; of plenitude, 13; of spatiality, 9–10; temporality, 11–13 Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) (Fanon), 16 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 23; index, 111; “Of Reasoning in General,” 111; “What Is a Sign?”, 106 Phelan, Peggy, 18; Unmarked, 195–96 phonocentrism, 46 – 47, 180 –81

271 phonograph, 240n1; Adorno, 158–62; conceptual use, 155; contextualization and, 157; Freud and, 156; Kittler, 165; photography and, 154; Rilke and, 6, 145–53; sonic versus graphic output, 146; sound spectrum, 165–66; textuality and, 157; writing and, 154, 156. See also gramophone phonographic grooves, 24, 145–53 phonography, 7 photo-etchings, Santa Cruz, 138– 41, 139 photogram, 109–10 “Die Photographie” (“Photography”) (Kracauer), 107 photographs: effects of, 112–15; representation of pain, 120 –21; violence of, 116 photography, 23; categorization, 116; creator lack, 105; digital, 107– 8; duplicity, 107– 8; emanation of magic, 107; fingerprints and, 110; and freezing of time, 125–26; indexicality, 105– 6; ontological essence, 115–16; phonograph and, 154; photographic capture, 123–24; photographic flatness, 116; photographic indexicality, 108 –12, 115; photographic inscription, indexicality and, 117; as problematic sign system, 116; and reality, 106 – 8; shock and, 124 –25; signs, 106; spectatorship and, 124; superficiality, 106 –7; temporal limitations, 110; threat of, 106 –7; veracity, 106; war and, 125–26 “Photography” (“Die Photographie”) (Kracauer), 107 physical impact, visuality and, 121–22 Picture Theory (Mitchell), 136 La piel de la memoria (The Skin of Memory) (Kupferminc), 79–80, 82–84 plasticity, 202–3 pleasure, bodily inscription and, 52–53 postmemory, 81 poststructuralism, 4 –7, 190 –91; always ready, 11; conceptual structure of trauma, 82–83; Derrida and, 20; figures of contact, 134 –35; indexicality, 122–23, 137; presence, images and, 133; sound, 191; sound and visuality, 180 –87; trace, 132; trauma conceptualization, 104; trauma theory and inscription, 70 –88; undecidability and, 19; witnessing trauma and, 78; writing and, 46 –54 poststructuralist prehistories, 21–24 The Practice of Everyday Life (L’invention du quotidien) (de Certeau), 26

272 “Preliminary Communication” to Studies on Hysteria (Freud), 94 –95 “Primal Sound” (Rilke), 20, 24, 145–50, 165–68; Beyer and, 176 –77; Grünbein on, 173–75; Kittler on, 165–170; media studies and, 172–73; origins of experiment, 146; sonic experience as primal, 152; sonic means of inscription, 153; sonic realm, 146 – 47; sound’s role, 154; static noise, 146; white noise, 146. See also phonograph; Rilke, Rainer Maria prosthetic memory, 80 psyche as inscriptive model, Freud, 67–68 psychic apparatus, 66 –68 punctum, Barthes, 113–17 Quebrada: Las Cordilleras en andas (Santa Cruz), 23, 138– 44 Quel che resta di Auschwitz (Remnants of Auschwitz) (Agamben), 76 –77 race, marking and, 15–17 Raczymov, Henri, 80 Rancière, Jacques, representation of trauma, 72 Reason and Resonance (Erlmann), 163 recording, inscriptive media and, 157 Reik, Theodor, “The mark of Cain: A psychological contribution to the exegesis of the Bible” (“Das Kainszeichen: Ein psychologischer Beitrag zur Bibelerklärung”), 90 –91 Remnants of Auschwitz (Quel che resta di Auschwitz) (Agamben), 76 –77 repetition in Rilke, 149–50 Representing the Holocaust (LaCapra), 77–78 reversed inscription, 24 Richard, Nelly, 119 Riecke, Rudolf Erhard, 34 –35 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 4; Bassermann letter, 147; coronal sutures of skull experiment, 145– 47, 167–68; craniophony, 148–50; grooves as origins of sensory experiences, 154 –55; human perception, 150 –51; “Letter on the arts from Munich” (“Münchener Kunstbrief ”), 147; line, 147–51; mediation in, 151; “Notes on the harmony of things” (“Notizen zur Melodie der Dinge”), 148; “On art” (“Über Kunst”), 148; phonograph and, 146; poetry and craniophony, 151; primal experience, 151–52; “Primal Sound” (“Ur-Geräusch”), 20, 24, 145–87; repetition, 149–50; sonic experience as

Index primal, 152; sonic means of inscription, 153; sonic realm, 146 –51; sound’s role, 152–54; translation in, 151 rules of inscription. See laws of inscription Santa Cruz, Guadalupe: Quebrada: Las Cordilleras en andas, 23, 138– 44 Sarduy, Severo, 20 Schibboleth (“Shibboleth”) (Derrida), 101–2 Schwab, Gabriele, 80 Scratches (Biffures) (Leiris), 182–84 Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (Gitelman), 156 –57 Serres, Michel, 20 Sex and Character (Sex und Charakter) (Weininger), 91–92 “Shibboleth” (Schibboleth) (Derrida), 101–2 shock, images and, 126 –30 “A Short History of Photography” (“Kleine Geschichte der Photographie”) (Benjamin), 20, 124 Shroud of Turin, 133–34 signification: materiality and, 20; trauma and, 59 signs: indexes and, 111; photography, 106 The Skin of Memory (La piel de la memoria) (Kupferminc), 79–80, 82–84 social construction of gendered bodies, 26 –27 social markers, tattoos as, 37 I sommersi e i salvati (The Drowned and the Saved) (Levi), 74 –75 Sontag, Susan, 23, 108; On Photography, 112–13 sound: contemporary sound studies, 163–64; coronal sutures of human skull, 145– 47; Edison’s phonograph, 146; immersion and, 163–64; inscriptive media, 158; listening and, 185–86; medial layers, 153; role in Rilke, 152–53. See also Derrida, Jacques; Kittler, Friedrich sound media, 23–24 Sound Unseen (Kane), 171 Sounding New Media (Dyson), 163–64 “Souvenir Foils” (Gitelman), 157 spectatorship, photography and, 124 Spectral Evidence (Baer), 126 –27 Spitzer, Leo, Auschwitz tattoo, 73 Stade, Bernhard, “Contributions to the critique of the Pentateuch” (“Beiträge zur Pentateuchkritik: Das Kainszeichen”), 90 static noise, 146 “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” (Holmes), 125–26

Index Sterne, Jonathan, The Audible Past, 180 Stiegler, Bernd, 108 Studies on Hysteria (Studien über Hysterie) (Freud & Breuer), 60, 94 studium, Barthes, 113–14 subjection: bodily inscription and, 21; as corporeal process, 26 –27; inscriptive imagery, 26 –27; inscriptive model as universal, 28; writing and, 46 – 47. See also Foucault, Michel “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (“Subversion du sujet et dialectique du désir dans l’inconscient freudien”) (Lacan), 199 surface, 9–10 Surveiller et punir (Discipline and Punish) (Foucault), 21, 39– 40, 43– 45 Les Tatouages (Tattooing) (Lacassagne), 34 Tätowiren: Narbenzeichen und Körperbemalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Ethnologie (Tattooing: Scar signs and body paint: A contribution to comparative ethnology) ( Joest), 31–33 tattooing, 4, 21–22; Caduveo, 47– 49; colonial marking of the other, 34 –35; colonialism and, 29–30; criminal anthropology and, 33–35, 37, 220n44; cultural development and, 31–32, 218n17; decoration and primitive cultures, 35; as expression of cultural difference, 30 –31; history, 29–30; “In the Penal Colony” (“In der Strafkolonie”) (Kafka), 25–26, 34 –35; individual agency versus destiny, 37; Lacassagne on, 34; Lombroso on, 34; Loos on, 35; mechanization, 217n9; as modern and colonial in Kafka, 55–57; modern spread through Europe, 32–33; modernity and, 32–33; Nietzsche, 39– 40; nineteenth century, 30, 219n42; number tattoo versus voluntary tattoo, 79–85; as official identifying marks, 37; Polynesian culture and, 217n14; as signs versus ornaments, 36 –37; as social markers, 37; SS tattooing under Nazism, 228n54; stigmata and, 228n41; as system of meaning, 32; tattooed persons and unmarked terrain, 29–30; as vocal marks, 37–38; West’s cultural obsession, 36; Wuttke on, 31. See also Auschwitz tattooing Tattooing (Les Tatouages) (Lacassagne), 34 Tattooing: Scar signs and body paint: A contribution to comparative ethnology (Tätowiren:

273 Narbenzeichen und Körperbemalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Ethnologie) ( Joest), 31–33 temporality of inscription, 44 – 45 temporality of trauma, 63–65 textuality, inscriptive media and, 157–58 theoretical thought, 207; inscription and, 2–3, 193–94 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte”) (Benjamin), 128 “Three letters” (“Drei Briefe”) (Grünbein), 172–75 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu) (Freud), 95 Le toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (On Touching— Jean-Luc Nancy) (Derrida), 135–36 Towards a Philosophy of Photography (Flusser), 107 transmission of trauma, 80 –81; Hirsch, 85–86; inherited trauma, 82–83; placeholders, 86; singularity and, 82–83 trauma: circumcision association, 89–90; conceptual structure, 82–83; etymology, 61; freezing of time in photographs, 125–26; inherited, 82–83; inscriptive logic, 63–64; Jewish identity and (Freud), 94 –96; latency, 95–96; multiplication of impact, 65; name acquisition, 61–62; photographs of Holocaust, 112–13; railway spine, 60; representation, 71–72; signification and, 59; as system of inscription, 69–70; temporality, 63–65; transmission, 80 –86; traumatic neurosis, 60; untranslatable mark, 86; ur-trauma of circumcision, 97–98 trauma theory, 3, 22; aporia of knowing, 65; deconstruction and, 77; Erichsen, 60 –61; experiential consequences, 64; figuration and, 22; Freud, 60 –62; impact erasure, 190; metaphors of inscription, 65; physical causality, 60 –62 traumatic neurosis, 60 Tristes Tropiques (Lévi-Strauss), 46, 47– 48 Tsvetaeva, Marina, 102 “Tympan” (Derrida), 181–87 tympan, printing press and, 182 tympana of philosophy, 181–82 tympanic membrane of the ear, 181 tympanum, 181 “Über den Begriff der Geschichte” (“Theses on the Philosophy of History”) (Benjamin), 128

274 “Über Kunst” (“On art”) (Rilke), 148 Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents) (Freud), 155–56 the unmarked, 189–90 Unmarked (Phelan), 195–96 unterwegs verloren (lost on the way) (Klüger), 75, 78–79 ur-trauma of circumcision, 97–98 violence: photography and, 116; visual, 131–33 Virilio, Paul, 126 visibility, inscription and, 195–96 visual violence, 131–33 visuality: contact and, 129; depth in image, 130 –31; physical impact, 121–22; theoretical configuration, 135 The Voice and Phenomena (La voix et le phenomène) (Derrida), 180 –81 Volatile Bodies (Grosz), 26 –27 Weininger, Otto, Sex and Character (Sex und Charakter), 91–92 “What Is a Sign?” (Peirce), 106 What we see, what regards us (Ce que nous voyons, ce qui nous regarde) (Didi-Huberman), 129–30 white noise, 146, 165 witnessing trauma: Holocaust and, 76 –77; poststructuralism and, 78 Wittig, Monique, 17 “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (“Das Kunstwerk im

Index Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”) (Benjamin), 124 writing: and analog media, 168, 170 –71; civilized culture and, 31; contextualization, 157–58; Kittler and sonic media, 166 –71; man’s power and, 31; materiality, 157–58; and memory, 67–68; phonograph and, 156; poststructuralist redefinition, 46 –54; privilege, 161; punctuation marks, 243n52; savage bodily marks and, 49–52; Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines (Gitelman), 156; speech’s privilege, 180 –81; subjection and, 46 – 47. See also écriture Writing and Difference (L’écriture et la différence) (Derrida), 46 Wuttke, Heinrich, 21; Geschichte der Schrift und des Schrifttums von den rohen Anfängen des Schreibens in der Tatuirung bis zur Legung electromagnetischer Dräthe (The history of writing from its uncouth beginnings on tattooing to electromagnetic cables), 31; pain infliction as mnemonic technique, 40 Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable, 99 Young, James, 80 Zeitlin, Froma, 80 Zeydner, H., “Cain’s mark, the Cainites, and circumcision” (“Kainszeichen, Keniter und Beschneidung”), 90 Zone of pain (Zona del dolor) (Eltit), 118