University of Florida



Chapter Four:

Restitution, Recognition, and Reattachment Disorders:

Reversing the Work of Art and the Missing Jewish Corpus:

Deporting “Degenerate” Art in John Frankenheimer’s The Train

Final Extermination?: as Restitution and the Missing Jewish Body in Mr. Klein and The Counterfeiters [i]

When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.

Jacques Derrida, Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52

The dark boundaries separating life from death in order to identify a new living dead man, a new sacred man.

Homo Sacer (131)

Agamben at his best and worst in the “Biopolitics and the Rights of Man of Man chapter of Homo Sacer.

Quote the parts of Homo Sacer on the problem the Nazis had constructing categories once bare life is declared.

Until this time, the questions “What is French? What is German?” had constituted not a political problem but only one theme among others discussed in philosophical anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition, these questions now begin to become essentially political, to the point that, with National Socialism, the answer to the question “Who and what is German?” (and therefore also “Who and what is not German?”) coincides immediately with the highest political task. Fascism and Nazism are above all, redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when situated—no matter how paradoxical it might seem—in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declarations of rights. (130)

Kind of odd that Agamben conflates national sovereignty here with man and citizen (of a nation), when classifications of who is a citizen (french and German but not German and German Jew or German versus Jew) become problems, requiring medical testing, certificates, provenance. Hence the work of art kicks in—relation to provenance—who owns the painting. But provenance is not reducible to Specters of Provenance ethnic cleanings of the museum’s holdings by its own deNazification process—to a question of intellectual property or legal title.

Bringing to light the difference between birth and nation, the refugee causes the secret presuppositions of the political domain—bare life—to appear for an instant within that domain.

Eschatological time, th efuture to come, the messianic, the time that does not remain, death as irreducible to “organic” death.

Biopolitics and thanatopolitics (142). Agamben’s default for bios is organic versus inorganic, but the essence of the human is technological. Media may be spectral, however.

Figuren, the term for dead victims used by the Nazis) means puppets, dolls, marionettes (the words corpses and “victims”). See Lanzmann film, part one.

Bare lfe is dead man walking, for us it is de (man walking.

He begins with the refugee (via Arendt) as a paradox that he then uses to deconstruct the ancien regime (the subject, in which both makes no difference to the subject’s subjugation to the sovereign) and the Rights of Man (in which birth opens a circle that the nation closes, transferring the rights of man to the citizen of the nation and in the process dividing the citizen’s into passive and active rights: the citizen to men who belong to the nation state citizens have passive rights, but only some citizens (not women, children, the insane or foreigners) have active rights (like voting in elections; naming law, etc). Agamben maintains that modernity, or biolitics, begins with the Declaration of he Rights of Man.

The refugee is a paradox: “The paradox from which Arendt departs is that the very figure of should have embodied the rights of man par excellence—the refugee—signals instead the concept’s radical crisis” (126)

“It is not possible to understand the ‘national’ and biopolitical developments and vocation of he modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries if one forgets that what lies at the basis is not man as free and conscious political subject but, above all, man’s bare life, the simple birth as such is, in the passage from subject to citizen, invested with sovereignty” (128)

When the hidden difference [scarto] between birth and nation entered into a lasting crisis following the devastation of Europe’s geopolitical order after the First World War, what appeared was Nazism and fascism, that is, two properly biopolitical movements that made of natural life the exemplary place of sovereign decision. (129)

Fascism and Nazism are, above all, redefinitions of the relations between man and citizen, and become fully intelligible only when situated –no matter how paradoxical it may seem—in the biopolitical context inaugurated by national sovereignty and declaration of rights. (130)

Refugees . . . put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis. (131)

A kind of Catholic rhetoric recurs

“the hidden difference” (12(

“must never come to light” (128)

“fully intelligible” (128)

“we are only beginning to discern” (128)

Of use to me in this chapter is the way questions of classification according to nationality take on new importance:

Until this time [of the French Revolution] the questions ‘What is French? What is German?’ had constituted not a political problem but only one theme among others discussed in philosophical anthropologies. Caught in a constant work of redefinition, these questions now begin to become essentially political, to the point that, with National Socialism, the answer to the question “Who and what is German?’ (and also, therefore , “Who and what is not German?’) coincides immediately wit the highest political task” (130)

This question in reverse (Who is a Jew? Who is not a Jew?) is the central concern of Mr. Klein. Agambendoes nt think about the uncanny double (Klein is and is not french, is and is not Jewish), the faked passport, or about passports at all (refugees are only one group among others who travel; Fittkow’s stateless persons are another) and the Kafkaesque possibilities the bureaucratization of classification (answers after exams to answer these new questions) as well as transport system (transport trains become boxcars for deportation in which humans are packed in like animals). I will work the passport into my discussion of The Counterfeiters.

How German is it? La Regle du Juive

As for written or inscribed language, it appears in Hegel’s text only in the most literal of ways: by means of the parabasis which suddenly confronts us with the actual piece of paper on Hegel, at that very moment and in this very place, has been writing about the impossibility of ever saying the only thing he wants to say, namely the certainty of sense perception . . . unlike the here and now of speech, the here and now of the inscription is neither false nor misleading: because he wrote it down, the existence of a here and now of Hegel’s text of the Phenomenology to the endlessly repeated stutter: this piece of paper, this piece of paper, and so on. We can easily enough learn to care for the other examples Hegel mentions: a house, a tree, night, day—but who cares for his darned piece of paper, the last thing in the world we want to hear about and precisely because it is no longer an example but a fact, the only thing we get. As we would say, in colloquial exasperation with an obscure bore: forget it! Which turns out to be precisely what Hegel sees as the function of writing. . . . Writing is what makes one forget speech . . . the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace . . . the determined elimination of determination. (42; 43)

Fingerpointing

In the context of so much free floating blame in de Man’s work and of de Man’s work after he died and his journalism came to light, the discussion of Riffaterre’s finger pointing seems something really important to read in relation to indexicality and reference, perhaps in connection with Holbein’s Jesus in a box.

To write down this piece of paper (contrary to saying it) is no longer deitic, no longer a gesture of pointing rightly or wrongly, no longer an example of a Beispiel, but the definitive erasure of a forgetting that leaves no trace . . . the determined elimination of determination. At any rate, it makes [Riffaterre] misread Hegel (and Derrida) when he summarizes them as stating: the only that (ca) which gives certainty is an abstract that, the fact of pointing ones finger, obtained by negating the multitude of heres and nows that concretize that” (“Trace,” p. 7) “Pointer-du-doigt,” which is indeed the abstraction par excellence, belongs to language as gesture and as voice, to speech (Sprache) and not to writing, which cannot be said, in the last analysis to point at all. (43).

Final Destinerrance, Auschwitz?:

The Box Car as Loco-Motif of History in The Train

and Europa

The Toy Trains of Europa,

Also discuss Frank Zinneman, The Search and Lars von Trier’s Europa.

The Search involves muteness, misunderstanding, and children reunited with mothers.

Happy / sad ending. Confessional booth with Montgomery Clift in I Confess!

La silence de la mer

Derrida’s film metaphor leads to an account of dream, which is then given a response that Derrida terms an unconscious image that turns his dream upside down, reversing he binary.

How do the train and film figure in this dream dialogue, this dream of dialogue, or bad dream of dialogue, or dialogue as a bad dream, dreamt by the Other.?

When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy=y structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.

Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52

Ferrais then quotes from Levinas, who compares Derrida to a Nazi.

“This is, beyond the philosophical scope of propositions, a purely literary effect, the few firsson, the poetry of Derrida. When I read him, I always recall the exodus of 1940. A retreating military unit arrives in an as yet unsuspecting locality, where cafes are open, where the ladies visit the ‘ladies fashion store’, where the hairdressers dress hair and bakers bake; where viscounts meet other viscounts and tell each other stories of viscounts, and where, an hour later, everything is deconstructed and devastated, Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, Wholly Otherwise, trans Simon Critchlety, p. 4

A strange kind of dialogue here, where only people like themselves talk to each other, as if stuck in mirror stages. That is the idea of peace here. The real is purely external to this mirroring.

As well as the steps he takes and does not take in Beyond the Pleasure, what Derrida calls paralysis , p. 337.Principle,

Derrida on Freud and Trains in The Post Card, the train of the child’s Fort-da game, his grandson, the suspended train he could not take when his daughter Sophie died.

The title sequence of John Frankenheimer’s The Train follows a prologue in which a Nazi officer visits a closed Paris museum and surveys some its Impressionist paintings before conversation with the French woman curator about saving rather than burning the “degenerate” art by having it shipped by train to Berlin. The title sequence shows the paintings being packed into crates labeled with the names of the artists, as if the crates were caskets; the activation of the latent connection between museum and mausoleum (noted by Theodor Adorno) in the title sequence is made explicit at the end of the film when long and close up shots of dead French civilians are contrasted with matching long shots and close ups of the scattered crates of paintings lying outside the train cars and left there by the retreating German Army. In this essay, I maintain that The Train’s matching of work of art and human life, and casting of American actor Burt Lancaster and French actress Jeanne Moreau as members of the French Resistance drive over and repress the full and dark history played by the train company used to transport the paintings, namely, the SCNF. In 2006, the French train company was sued by for its role in shipping 67,000 French Jews to Nazi concentration camps.[ii]

The last painting we see before the film’s title appears is Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s “Woman with Lilacs” (1880s) (see figure 1, upper left and right). The lilacs take on an anticipatory funeral meaning even though the painting is being saved rather than destroyed.

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Figure 1

Moreover, Renoir’s name is the first stenciled on a crate of paintings after the Gaughin painting entitled “When Will You Marry?” is packed up and the crate nailed shut (see figure 1, lower left). The shot of the painting’s title with the rolled up packing material being carried across the screen recalls and even perhaps alludes to the record in the first shot of Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), which is being played by a Frenchman in the French mess hall. A similar record player appears in the German officer’s mess as well (See figure 2).

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Figure 2

In The Train’s opening title sequence and ending, French POW Vallard’s dream of co-operation with the “good German” von Waldheim is being buried with the paintings along with a recording mechanism for memory that operates on automatic pilot.

Why the connection? Because Renoir’s film takes place in a concentration camp and because a Jewish character is a prisoner in the camp. The Train resists, as it were, the myth of the French Resistance.

Why is the train as the film’s central (titular) character? Why is the train the unstoppable engine of the film? Why doesn’t the train stop making smoke or a puffing sound even after Labiche derails it and turns it off? The train is a figure of twi-lightenment in the film. It is supposed to be on the side of progress, but in WWII, under the Nazis, it becomes a vehicle of regression, the agent of a death drive that destroys human beings in the name of perfecting human being. The montage of crates (as coffins) and the unburied corpses at the end of The Train call up the SNCF’s role in the Vichy regime (never mentioned in the film). The opening text calls up this history inadvertently through the word “cooperation” and by modifying “men” with a phrase that syntactically and uncannily equates “the living and dead” as a “spirit” even it means to separate them:

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The SCNF logo appears in several shots, but only in one does it appear near the Nazi insignia stamped on the crates.

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The train is a shock to the (railyway) system that routes historical meaning (the evil only they, not we, did is over and can be sanitized, the past can become a prophylactic to secure the future). Notice the way the Nazi insignia in sign in the first shot of the film (below) returns in a visually degraded form near the end of the film in the shot of the French train (the wing shapes at the bottom of the shot, near Lancaster).

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We see the shot above after a shot of Lancaster from below on the other side of the train, exactly where two boxcars meet, at the end of a relatively long tracking shot that alternates evenly spaced crates with train wheels. 

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The Nazi enemy is on side opposite of Lancaster, so here the repressed again returns through a partially legible sign. The Resistance is not resistant.

What is being resisted? Consider the sign in this briefly held Expressionistic shot--"danger of death" with the weird  "Z" shape scrawled on it. 

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Like the often partially visible names of the painters in the crates shown at the end of the film, the sign is only partially visible (it too is a symptom), though, if one knows French, one may infer reasonably that it reads: " [Atten]tion aux [c]atenaires” (“Danger: High Voltage”). (The first word we hear in the film is "Achtung," “attention” in English) The “Z” shape unfolds into from a single point on the left into an open track--like a train track—on the right.  The train leaves Paris after a switch is thrown open. What may be read as the letter “Z” loosely resembles an “S” in the style of “SS” (shock troops) lightning-like lettering, opening the French track onto a German track.  The mortal danger announced as a partially visible warning to avoid being electrocuted is not just to Colonel von Waldheim (whom Labiche murders a few minutes after this shot) but also to the French Jews the SCNF carried to the camps and who are missing from the film but recalled in the shots of the murdered French hostages.  (The barbed wire fences of the death camps were electrified at night.)

A similarly fragmented “Z” shape appears on a Nazi map earlier in the film when Schmitt pays for Labiche’s bill at the inn.

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Instead of moving from place to place, we move from place to space (the ashes in the ashtray above the swastika being one destination).  

Like the closed switch that Labiche has to thrown open to let Papa Boule take the train out of Paris, the Z mark opens a figurative switch that routes Labiche and von Waldheim on the same destination death track.

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The Train does not resist the myth of the French Resistance, it does not totally deconstruct it (as if the Resistance were really collaborators with the Nazis, after all). Instead, the film stalls out in the final shot (the train engine is still on as Labiche limps away) in a refusal to settle scores, as that would mean entering a regime of calculation (which is, in the logic of the film, resisted and transcended by the incalculable value of human life and art). The montage of corpses and crates in the final sequence makes both comparable, but not exchangeable; their value cannot properly be recorded by an accountant.

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Neither the numbered (seen tattooed on the boxes in the title sequence) coffins of paintings nor the corpses are reducible to cash value or instrumentality: they remain, beyond calculation. The Train redefines the meaning of collaboration as non-cooperation (between dissenting forces on the same track instead of complicity between forces on seemingly opposite sides of the track).

So troping things becomes a carousel of stagings and intervals.

“The inclusion of images changes the status of the text, prompting a reciprocal effect. The interplay of text, documentary images, and image captions was an important element of the publication for Benjamin. This is demonstrated by notes on the Russian toys and the photo captions, found in the bequest. . . More explicitly than in the shortened essay (whose manuscript has not survived), they deal with the physiognomic aspects of the toy world” p. 73

“In the twenties he was apt to offer philosophical reflections as he brought forth a toy for his son.” Scholem, WB, Friendship, p. 47 (cited on p. 73 as an epigraph).

On “Dantiest Quarters: Notebooks”:

Notebooks are part of the fundamental equipment of writers, artists, architects, scientists, in short, all intellectuals who devise things—thoughts, images—that they need to record and register. Notebooks are handy traveling companions, places for the safekeeping of drafts. They provide storage space for ideas and data. When necessary they can release sheets to be passed on and inserted into another context. They make plain their owners’ “modes of thinking and working.” 151 “He owned many tiny notebooks, not only for taking notes, but also for writing down the titles of all the books he read. Yet another one was reserved from excerpts from his readings.” “The notebooks are a medium that connects author and work.” P. 153 The notebooks hold up a mirror to the author’s face” 153 Strangely specular construction to unify author and work and to see the notes to read the works as if they were self-descriptions (see p. 153)

“homeless thoughts. . he would have had to call printing ‘houses.’” O. 152, destined to become epigraphs” p. 151, from Jean Selz “Benjamin on Ibiza,” 359

“Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens” SW 1, p. 458), p. 153, from The Writer’s Technique in Thirteen Theses.

Briefcase, p. 59

“And today, it is the same with the human material on the inside of the arcades as with the materials of their construction. Pimps are iron bearings of this street, and its glass breakables are the whores. Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver.

From the Chapter on and Physiognomy of the Thingworld: Russian Toys”

Epigraph:

“I’ll bring a new manuscript—one, tiny, book—that will surprise you.” GB IV, p. 144 (p. 50 in WB’s Archive)

Walter Benjamin’s Archive inadvertently assembles a kind of audio commentary for use in a museum exhibition (the book as a museum catalogue), arranging the texts thematically and chronologically, providing a genetic explanation of WB’s writing processes and thought processes.

From the preface, p. 1:

“His last archive remains a secret: the briefcase that Walter Benjamin carried over the Pyrenees in September 1940 is lost. Only one document that was transported in it survives . . . Any more detailed information is lacking. What is certain, however, is that the briefcase had some sort of texts by Benjamin.

On the chapter “Tree of Conscientiousness: Benjamin as Archivist”:

As an epigraph:

Building / Critique: The Event as Mini-Catastrophe

Then we go to the toy train scene in Europa as a segue from the

catastrophe car in WB and how it gets replayed as  a "real" explosion

that is actually a miniature train, like in Hitchcock's Lady Vanishes,

Young and Innocent, The 39 Steps, and Reed's Night Train to Munich (etc, etc).

This allows us to drop the other WB foot, violence and turn to

self-storage as moment of production versus moment of destructive

critique; the difference between using storage units as uninhabitable

places, but the builders designing as no different, as if they were

motels. The catastrophe coach versus the engine is important. You get driven to distraction via catastrophe. It’s kind of like the opening roller coaster sequence in Final Destination 3, a kind of amusement ride (the film ends with a subway wreck in NYC).

Exploding Manuscripts (on Freud archive website). Derrida’s dream of blowing up a train. The Train is about detonation.

“No End of Shelf-Life”

Something here about Williams dying, about incompletion, about Benjamin’s brief case and his suicide. Not a death drive in self-storage (not an academic pyramid scheme). Misrecognition of spectrality as reference; we could use “spectrality” from Werner Hamacher.

For chapter one, segue link from briefcase to boxcars and crates

Link via departures: from Port Bou and Paris.

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Deportation

And also add a note on Closely Watched trains (1966) in which trains pass through the Czech train station that are related to Nazis (weapons, and probably Jews) but we never see what’s inside the boxcars because the trains never stop.

It’s like some weird comedy version of Kafka.

At the end of chapter one, I’ll work in a conclusion on Hans Fallida’s Every Man Dies Alone (the translation comes with an afterward and archival documents on the people on whom the novel is based on which the novel is based attached as an appendix—another case of attachment—I never thought of the appendix as a body part like the footnote, but I guess I will look into that. German word is “Anhang”).

Discussion of Spectres of Provenance exhibition and the problem of restitution for art stolen by the Nazis. Play the exhibition off against Derrida’s chapter “Restitution” and also his chapter on the parergon in The Truth of Painting. Problem of recognizing the Jewish body (as work of art) in both films.

Freud pointed to a process in dreaming, equally observable in the symptom, which he called Verkehrung ins Gegenteil (`reversal into the opposite'):

Incidentally, reversal, or turning a thing into its opposite, is one of the

means of representation most favored by the dream-work . . . it produces a

mass of distortion in the material which is to be represented, and this has a

positively paralyzing effect, to begin with, on any attempt to understand the

dream . . . Hysterical attacks sometimes make use of the same kind of

chronological reversal in order to disguise their meaning from observers.

Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams,

(note 58), p. 328. Cited by Georges Did-Huberman, Confronting Images

Restance, not resistance

Not departing from protocol, but going above and beyond the “proto-call” of duty Give it a rest-itution

Derrida’s film metaphor leads to an account of a dream, which is then given a response that Derrida terms an unconscious image that turns his dream upside down, reversing the binary.

How do the train and film figure in this dream dialogue, this dream of dialogue, or bad dream of dialogue, or dialogue as a bad dream, dreamt by the Other.?

When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.

Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52

Ferrais then quotes from Levinas, who compares Derrida to a nazi.

“This is, beyond the philosophical scope of propositions, a purely literary effect, the few firsson, the poetry of Derrida. When I read him, I always recall the exodus of 1940. A retreating military unit arrives in an as yet unsuspecting locality, where cafes are open, where the ladies visit the ‘ladies fashion store’, where the hairdressers dress hair and bakers bake; where viscounts meet other viscounts and tell each other stories of viscounts, and where, an hour later, everything is deconstructed and devastated, Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, Wholly Otherwise, trans Simon Critchlety, p. 4

A trange kind of dialogue here, where only people like themselves talk to each other, as if stuck in mirror stages. That is the idea of peace here. The real is purely external to this mirroring.

Derrida responds:

A few weeks ago a fried of mine . . [said]: ;Doesn’t it bother you? Look at what they’re accusing you of now. You’re like the enemy army!’ At that point I reread Levinas’s text. . . he says, . . . that I passed through it was as if the German army had hit town, there was nothing left . . . It makes you wonder. It’s bizarre, I’d never looked at the text from that angle.. What is the unconscious of that image? And then the Nazi invader . . . it’s sort of like the Resistnace dream we spoke of, but turned upside down.

(51-52)

Derrida is stunned by his own devastation, his experience of the deconstruction of his dream as a devastation. He pauses, can’t analysis or read Levinas.

He infat exaggerates what Levinas says (Levinas makes no mention of Germans or Nazis). Weber is a bad analyst, a bad reader of Levinas,

Derrida on the Arnolfini portrait in “Restitutions” goes from Moses to Prodigal son to Moses-back and forth from Judaism to Christianity

Paper Machine,

Reliability and faith (Faith and Knowledge)

Autoimmunity

In “The Rigorous Study of Art,” Benjamin begins by discussing Heinrich Wolfflin in the first paragraph and then goes on to contrast him to” Alois Riegel, whom he prefers.

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the “matter itself” is no more than the strata which yield their long-sought secrets only to the most meticulous investigation. That is to say, they yield those images that, severed from all earlier associations, reside as treasures in the sober rooms of our later insights—like torsos in a collector’s gallery. It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations in the dark loam. And the man who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize. In this sense, for authentic memories, it is far less important that the investigator report on them than that he mark, quite precisely, the site where he gained possession of them. Epic and rhapsodic in the strictest sense, genuine memory must therefore yield an image of the person who remembers, in the same way a good archaeological report not only informs us about the strata from which its findings originate, but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.

“Excavation and Memory,” Selected Writings 2 (2), 576

“Painting, or Signs and Marks” in Selected Writings Vol. 1, 84-85

The sign is printed on something, whereas the mark emerges from it. This makes it clear that the realm of the mark is a medium. Whereas the absolute sign does not for the most part appear on living beings but can be impressed or appear on lifeless buildings, trees, and so on, the mark appears principally on living beings (Christ’s stigmata, blushes, perhaps leprosy and both marks). The contrast between mark and absolute mark does not exist, for the mark is always absolute and resembles nothing else in its manifestation.

Seriality of prisoner tattooed numbers like serial numbers on the currency bills they print; the number is not singular; they are one in a series] and is related to the question of who decides who will live, and live what kind of life: shitty life versus a martyr’s death?

The antithesis of the absolute sign and the absolute mark. . . the sign appears to be more of a spatial relation and to have more reference to persons; the mark . . . us more temporal, and tends to exclude persons.

What is striking is that, because it appears on living beings, the mark is so often linked to guilt (blushing) or innocence (Christ’s stigmata); indeed, even where the mark appears in the form of something lifeless . . . it is often a warning sign of guilt. In that sense, however, it coincides with the sign (as in Balshezzar’s Feast), and awful nature of the apparition is based in large part on uniting these two phenomena, which of which only God is capable.

The tattooed numbers tend to exclude the personal (except for the hooker who identifies him in bed), and so resemble the Mark, the German Mark, the Christian mark.

No surprise that the Pieta scene follows. Yet not a symbol, more an alleogircal ruin.

The flip side of counterfeit is copyright, a different kind of seriality.

The easel painting evolved for display in a collector's private home

Takin It Easely

The Easal Painting literally becomes an easal painting when viewed. It is not hung on a wall the way it usually would be.

There’s something uneaslyabout the frame, the detachment.

“The self-portrait is the one form of easel painting that resists being owned.”

Philip Fisher, Art and the Future’s past

Museum studies: an anthology of contexts

By Bettina Messias Carbonell

Contributor Bettina Messias Carbonell

Published by Blackwell Pub., 2004

Come Closer / Stay Back

Put computer on first page of powerpoint play unforgettable on computer

One get on the train and it leaves on time, arrives on time, everything is on track

In the other you get on the train, but there may be delays, luggage may be lost, items stolen, but the good thing is htat we may we get sidetracked, f even go off track./ There may be a trainwreck. Bu thte upside htat it'll be a bullet train.

Not a difference between electric and magnetic—both cases pollution. But the first is diluted. The second is almost purely pollution.

Tell Nina, have a seat.

Endwith Faites vos jeux,and get up and go over to the computer.

Get up

Iis Italk like this.

And 2 is I present, wearing my beret.

Can you stand for it ? Stehen Sie aus?

Just because I don’t work, doesn’t mean I’m out of whack. I’m always in whack beause I’mnever out of whack. Whackey.

Hans Makart25

Portrait of a Lady with Red Plumed Hat c.1873 Oil on canvas 59 3/8 x 39 1/8 inches (151 x 99.6 cm)

Goering gives Hitler Marhart painting

We go on track, train will run on time

We can get sidetracked, may be delays, but it’ll be a bullet train.

Magnetic, eco friendly. But polluted, neverthelsss.Dilution versus pollustion (poluuted in voth cases

Bo pure solution

10precentsolution

Painting as an Art by Richard Wollheim

Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim (Paperback - Sep 30, 1980)

Or as Itell my stdudnets Just because oyou;re out of work doesn't mean yuore out of qhack. I say that after they graudate.

Final solutions are never a good idea

reuniting paintings medieval renaissance diptych ehbit
reunting Germany

Reuinted and it doesn't feel so good


I had to over do it, undermachine, over do, redo, go beyond, because of my topic. I mean to begin a tlak about extermination, well, it just can’t be done.

I conclude. Tonight. .

I am going to fastrack my paper because we got off to a late start tonight. It couldn’t be helped.

Reunion---Non-Jewish painters painting s bought by Jews. So there is a strange impossibility of restitution in Derrida’s terms, or of retribution

No redistribution of guilt and debt.

I begin. Thank you Nina, for inviting me and all of you for coming. It’s very nice to have this occasion to present work in progress that will never be progress to publication. Seriously. The thoughts will remain, but remain only as something unfinished that only saw the light of night. Tonight.

I begin. I am here to present—to alert you to some films and related texts I think you may want to see or re/ read rather than give you my full blown readings. We won’t have time. (I will stay to 30 minutes).

To try to explain myself a bit more fully, let me tell you a story about my relation to secularism and Judaism. My Story about secular Jews has now turned out to be about Jewish secularism. And let me tell you one more story. Quickly.

Berlin—“Nehmen Sie Platz” Stranger there. here. Already occupied. I am alien, foreign, strange, out of place. Here I am a strange goy. There’s always a place for me here, or a dis-place. I am happy here to feel out of place. It’s always nice to be with people who like me are pre-occupied, even if I can’t sit down.

In any case, I’m very happy to be here. So is me. And so is myself. We have achieved weness, more or less. We get along pretty well most of the time.

Let me begin, then. Oh,first let me ask foryou, on your behalf, What does it mean for me to say that I appear tonight before you as a strange goy? It means to suspend certain discourses, to say the unexpected and possibly the unaccepted—you may be pleasantly surprised but you may be unpleasantly surprised and want to use media mail to return the package to sender, or you may even want to refuse delivery. You won’t be delivered by refusal to accept, however. Don’t worry. I will bounce it back to you. Those charges will remain, however, and you will keep being contacted by my Bill collector or Burt collector. I insist.

Please do forgive me for going on like this. I know that my talk is now long overdue. I am now in my anecdotage. It’s a real word. I didn’t make that word up. I thought I had made it up, but then I checked, and It’s in the O.ED. Ancedotage means “a garroulous old man.” O.E.D. gives the first see as in1835. So please realize that I am not to blame for this long delay in getting started tonight. Me is. Myself was egging me on. They refuse to take responsibility, however. So I have to offer their apologies to you on their behalf. So you see I already feel strangely left out. But I am always by myself. But really, I had to be careful because I am setting up a lot of fuses, and I don’t want them to blow, and they are highly explosive. But don’t worry. There’s no bomb attached to them. Sparks may fly.

I conclude. Really. I begin. Tonight, I develop some of the interests in the left and right hand in Freud’s Moses here in I relation to ways of reading paintings in reverse related to European art and WW II, one I want to characterize initially as anti-Semitic and the other as Anti-anti-Semitic.

The first kind of reversal involves seeing a painting backwards, as in a mirror image. Essay by Swiss art historian Heinrich Wolflin. First examples Raphael’s drawings. He left Germany went back to Switzerland.

• Reading from left to right as natural, reading right to left as unnatural (perverse): the political as theological and erotic

• The double meaning is not a hidden, secret code in the work of art or historical document (that is just a variation of genetic criticism and mistakenly reduces the polysemous work to a single meaning) but arises in the drama of reading the work of art and criticism of the image.

As an example, let me turn to the essay I had Michael mention earlier,

[next slide] the essay by Heinrich Woelfflin entitled “Ueber das Rechts und das Links im Bilde,” that is “On the Right and Left of Images.”

[next slide]

As you can see here, Wolfflin reproduced in his essay examples of Renaissance paintings and drawings in order to think about what happens when a slide is put in backwards during a lecture. Wolfflin begins by noting that the response is panic expressed as “Turn it around! You’ve got it backwards!” Quite brilliantly, Wolfflin wants to pause and ask what this panic is about. His answer is that viewing a painting is like reading a book—our gaze is directed from left to right, up from the man on the left looking at to the baby Jesus, then over to the Virgin Mary, and then down to Johanna, whose eyes look down. If the painting of the Virgin, and here we may begin to grasp the extent to which direction, theology, and erotics are connected, is viewed backwards, we do not know where to look and the image becomes incomprehensible. His other point is that the work of art only becomes irreversible when it is completed. The possibility of perversion when the work of art has been perfected.

Wolfflin’s text as itself to be read doubly, however, if we are to grasp the political stakes of. Written in 1924 just after left Munich but published in 1940 when Wolfflin was a professor at the University of Basel, the title itself presents us now, even if Wollflin did not intend it, with two puns in its title on the words “right” and “left.” Both sides of an image are also political sides, and how one side, fascist or Communist can turn an image around to distort it or clarify ir. There are similarly charged words and phrases in the essay. The German word Wollflin uses for the slide put in “backwards” is “umkerht,” a word employed frequently by the Nazis. Similarly, when Wolfflin compares viewing a painting to reading a book, he writes “unser shrift,” or “our script,” which is to say without saying, our Christian script, not a Jewish one (Hebrew is written from right to left). Finally, when he concludes that the work is the German word he uses at the very beginning of his sentence is “Das Enschiede,” or “the decision,” a word used by Carl Schmitt and others in writings on the state of emergency and the power of the sovereign. So the language of the essay itself present us now, knowing as we do what was happening between 1924 and 1940 with a question: how do are we to read Wolfflin’s essay between the lines to grasp his decision to read one way rather than another?

2. Anti-anti-Semitic kind of reading, this is reading not just backwards but from the backside. Politics of restitution exhibition—the back of the frame—European art looted by the Nazi from Jews who owned it. Display is symmetrical-or the photos shows us asymmetry. Back and front.

Back to back

So here the exhibition turns on the information about the owner on the backside rather than on the painting itself.

I say that the first, mirror reversal is anti-Semitic because it is Messianic—perfection has been achieved, first in the birth of Jesus and then in the painting. So it’s about looking toward a past I which incarnation is already fulfillment—it’s a revelation—all in the open.

In the second, one side of the painting is hidden,

So to put it somewhat crudely, let’s call the first reversal by inversion (a specular relation) and the second reversal by backside. In the first you can see the front from both sides; The first way is not uncanny, in that it sees one version as inferior of the other, the means by which its perfection may be furthered revealed, in the second you can see only the backside. uncanny, reversal that conceals as it unconceals. Or the front side, at the a time, one side usually being hidden given the way paintings are hung (with their backsides hidden). The other is. I want to think about two kinds of incredulity here as well (Spectral Evidence).

the binary opposition I am setting up between two kinds of reversal—it’s always already self-deconstructing.

Both look back to an unbelievable event, as in can you believe that Jesus . . . is the messiah? O my G! And as in and looks back to an unbelievable event—can you believe that holocaust? Incredulity that precedes it as well as postdates it. Incredulity shared by Jews and non-Jews—we knew, we didn’t know, we heard but we didn’t know, we should have known, but we didn’t.

And in terms of posing not only the question of who is a Jew but also who has defined who is a Jew, for what purposes, and by what criteria. So that reversal by inversion of backside involves a question of recognition and revelation as well as restitution in Judaism—a problem within Judeities and outside them.

And specifically, there’s a shared discourse of the damage and restitution, of perfection and imperfection, of inversion and backside, of closure—like perfection of Raphael——may not be so different. Need to think through the value of art and owners—here a discourse of identity kicks in necessarily—and is hence vulnerable to the critique, however stated it may be, of the Holocaust industry, which I, even if it is an anti-Semitic critique of anti-Semitism, shows the impossibility of restoring the paintings without reinscribing in some ways the anti-Semitic terms of the arts expropriation. So there is no simply chronology taking us fro purchase and provenance through looting and restoration, partly because the original owners are dead, mostly murdered. The ID papers for the camps and he ID papers for the museum tours, and the ID tattoos for the camps. in terms of the incalculable—and here I would follow Derrida’s chapter entitled “Restitutions” in The Truth of Painting on Heidegger and Meyer Shapiro on Van Gogh’s shoe paintings, and Derrida on the shoelace, in which restitution is not linked to identity. He interrogates the idea of restitution in terms of attribution and retribution, a desire to return, in the case of Heidegger’s shoes, the contents of the painting to its painter, to regard to the shoes as a pair and owned by a city dweller or a peasant. Potential problem here is suits like one against the SNCF is the vulnerability to Norman G. Finkelstein’s scathing and intemperate critique of the Hollow-cast in his The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. The problem of incredulity is that it can’t be divided, that it preexists the Holocaust and follows it; and it, follows, like cars in a train, that Holocaust deniability cannot be limited either to quacks like Mr. Death but also precedes and follows the Holocaust within and without Jewish populations. IS there a limit to ex-termination—or is there a terminus? Or are we talking Extermination Terminable and Interminable? Problem of settling, of settling differences, accounts, of occupying, resettling. People will always take sides, but the problem that requires them to take sides is far deeper and impossible to resolve than those who take sides will ever know.

Judaism is not a discourse of identity but is that which exceeds identity, not the her and now, not the incarnation and revelation, but the now here and not yet, of the yet to be perfected, of justice, , not reducible to the roman legal discourse of ownership, provenance, signature, proper name, authorship, and so on, as well as family genealogy and state census. Judaism is before the law and within the law. It is Judeities. But the law is not universal and yet the heritage of Judaism is universal—from Kant—Greek Jew, Christian Jew, Jew Christian, German Jew, strange Jew. Tonight I want to introduce another opposition, the Jew Jew. Not Jew jew b. Also the Jew non Jew non Jew Jew.

So I want to purse this deconstruction of the reversal by turning to two films, Mr Klein and the Train, both of which concern European paintings, the train, World War II, and misrecognizing or missing the Jewish body.

Both films have circular structures in which their endings reconnect with their beginnings. I am tempted to set up a new binary opposition between them, ranking them in relation to their historical proximity to World War II, hence Mr. Klein is not as good as the Train because it is more open. By the time we get to Europa, we have a terrible film because now the Jew is no longer missing but present, divided into characters by the director writer and actor Lars van Trier, into the bad jew who collaborates and then the good Jew who refuses to collaborate in the future.

In any case, I’ll go backwards chronologically, starting with the more recent Mr. Klein and then taking up the Train.

Questions—relation between Jewish identity and sale of artworks in order to be able to escape the Nazis.

The film begins with a women being seen by Doctors who determine whether or not she is a Jewish. Jewish body aligned with woman body and grotesque body, contrasted to the beautiful woman in bed (she is a prostitute) in Klein’s apartment. But she wounds herself.

. The main character is an art dealer who buys paintings from Jews, and is , he beliefs mistaken for another r Klein who happens to be a Jew. He buys a Dutch painting in the film.

Now this painting is seen in reverse.

I should add here that there was a Danish painter who painted trompe l’oeils, one he called reverse side of a framed painting. I will return to it if there is time.

So the painting is confiscated from him, he chases after a man he thinks is his double, arrives at the train station and gets on a train with Jews being deported. In voice-over, the and here the circle closes, the man he sold the paintings to now speaks to him, So there is a certain kind of avoidance, guilt, and punishment kind of reading possible here. Mr. Klein should have recognized his Jewish identity and not bout the paintings and tried to help Jews escape. Or recognized his non-Jewish identity and tried to help Jews escape. But the train of the film is not limited to the deportation cars at the end. The film is unclear about Klein’s identity. Is he a Jew or not? Relation of painting and his family medallions. The provenance of the painting is aligned with the genealogy of Klein’s family—Dutch art, Dutch Jews. . . ?

Does he end up doing what the Nazis want him to do without them ever ordering or telling him to do it, namely, get on the train? Does he recognize or misrecognize himself as a Jew. Does being a Jew mean in the film that you have to give the art, or same difference, have it taken from you?

What happens to good Jew selling his painting versus bad Jew or bad when the bad non Jew becomes a Jew and replays the scene of stealing? So here is another reading: Not a sort with a moral but a Kafkaesque parable. Here the Jew is he who is hidden form other Jews.

He is a Jew ebcuase he is not a Jew, he is, in other words, the Jew as the missing Jew, the Jew as missing body., the doppelganger one sees and doesn’t.

The good Jew won’t take a bag for the money—no protection or envelope, no aesthetic. Because the money already is aesthetic. Nice looking gold coins.

Problem of calculation—theworht of the paintings, the worth of the lives of their owners and the lives of the woner’s relatives. Questions of guilt and punishment—jew non jew, are all suspended of jewish identity—or due to the uncanniess of Jewish identity—Freudian double here in which cognition can never be sorted out from is recognition, when cognition depends on re-cognition (repetition) and when who is a Jew is never fully decided or decidable by anyone, Jew of anti-Jew.

So the film’s ethics / politics lies in its refusal to settle—to settle accounts, to divide setters from the unsettled, the squatters from the evacuated. But to use the train as a continuum—departing but a return to the beginning, to the arrival, which was a departure about a departure. Backwards reversal is not strictly anti-anti-Semitic—or anti and anti does not equal philo.

The Train

The Expressionist shot of von Waldheim—he becomes a kind of work of art. He calls out to Labiche (Burt Lancaster) from behind the way the curator called out to von Waldheim from behind; Labiche guns down von Waldheim just as the Nazis gunned down the civilians. In both cases, machine gun guns were used.

Is the z shape a cartographic shape—depending on perspective a Z that looks like a S of the SS.

End of The Train—corpses without coffins and crates without bodies—names of the painter stand for the contents.

Waldheim occupies this same peripheral or I would say paratextual and parergonal space.

Now we return to the backside of the frame.

You may have already been thinking about Schlegel’s fragment “

The historian is a prophet turned backwards” or Benjamin’s “angel of history” Benjamin’s famous gloss on a painting by Paul Klee, in Philosophy Theses of History

'There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past.[iii]

Derrida’s differential contamination interiorized and exteriorized in ways that lead to keeping tally, settling score, cashing it and gambling it away by choice

Making more—more money and more Jews—the joke temporarily defuses the bomb of anti-Semitism, the charge made by the Nazis that Jews are all about tricks and deception. Their identity is a non-identity.

This differential contamination—the Nazis identify the Jews as Jews not through the bodies but through the tattoos—German inscription allows Jews to read other Jews as Jews. So to make more Jews is to continue to produce the Jew as a reproduction, a fake, a mimetic of the real, a contamination of the real by the fake. Doubling your bets. Rien va plus.

Also a game—he scores—first the really hot woman is not a whore (whore not spoken) and also the woman who stays to have sex with him twice because he is an artist.

Question of sovereignty among the Jews—who decides who will live and who will not.

He takes the train to Sachsenhausen. Gets a double berth, with another Russian, also an artist.

Shit, shit, shit, bad paper dollar, followed by shitty life confrontation scene.

(Connect up paper and forgery not only to art forgery but also Schmitt’s critique of Jewish trickery and Spinoza and also money and passport analogy.)

In addition to the reversal is that we see parergon in one case and not in the other. In Raphael, the frame diappears. In The Train the crates have paratext—but none in the museum. Exreissionist shot makes von Wladheim into a modernist—he does’t think the art is degenenrate

The Train is better than Mr Klein becase now the Jewish body is entirely missing. Butthis means that resistance fighter and Nazi are in a faux pause, a kind of Z, a loop that goesback and forth between SNCF, tetrain that deported the French Jews, and SS.

Deconstruct this second opposition, however, because Mr Klein rings into view the way money itself is a problematic form of exchange in addition to paintings that has two sides—front and back, and that is linked with Christianity, the halo, and ant-semitism. See Marc Shell book. Coins, script, medallions.

Derriderailed

End with return to Derrida on Heidegger and Shapiro. Turn to Derrida’s failure to analyze his dream. Derrida as Holy jew. Holy Jew cannot be wholly Jew. There are holes in the Jew.

In an interview with Ferrais, Derrida tells the following story:

When I was very young—and until quite recently—I used to project a film in my mind of someone who, by midnight, plants bombs on the railway: blowing up the enemy structure, planting the delayed-action device and then watching the explosion or least hearing it at a distance. I see very well that this image, which translates a deep phantasmatic compulsion, could be illustrated by deconstructive operations, which consist in planting discreetly, with a delayed-action mechanism, devices that all of a sudden put a transit out of commission, making the enemy’s movements more hazardous. But the friend, too, will have to live and think differently, know where he’s going, tread lightly.

Taste of the Secret Polity, 2001, 51-52

Derrida’s life as a film metaphor here leads to an account of a dream, a dream of deconstruction. But it’s something of a bad dream.

Ferrais then quotes from Levinas, who views Derrida’s deconstruction in a negative light. Levinas says that

“This is, beyond the philosophical scope of propositions, a purely literary effect, the new frisson, the poetry of Derrida. When I read him, I always recall the exodus of 1940. A retreating military unit arrives in an as yet unsuspecting locality, where cafes are open, where the ladies visit the ‘ladies fashion store’, where the hairdressers dress hair and bakers bake; where viscounts meet other viscounts and tell each other stories of viscounts, and where, an hour later, everything is deconstructed and devastated, Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, Wholly Otherwise, trans Simon Critchlety, p. 4

Derrida responds to Ferrais on Levinas:

A few weeks ago a friend of mine . . [said]: “Doesn’t it bother you? Look at what they’re accusing you of now. You’re like the enemy army!” At that point I reread Levinas’s text. . . he says, . . . that I passed through it was as if the German army had hit town, there was nothing left . . . It makes you wonder. It’s bizarre, I’d never looked at the text from that angle.. What is the unconscious of that image? And then the Nazi invader . . . it’s sort of like the Resistance dream we spoke of, but turned upside down.

(51-52)

Derrida is stunned by his own devastation, his experience of the deconstruction of his dream as a devastation. He pauses, can’t analysis or read Levinas.

Weber in fact exaggerates what Levinas “is saying” (Levinas makes no mention of Germans or Nazis). Weber is a good or a bad analyst, a good or bad reader of Levinas, but in any case his reading proceeds by way of trnslation from what Levinas says to what he is saying.

A strange kind of dialogue here, where only people like themselves talk to each other, as if stuck in mirror stages. That is the idea of peace here. The real is purely external to this mirroring. / , which is then given a response that Derrida terms an unconscious image that turns his dream upside down, reversing the binary. How do the train and film figure in this dream dialogue, this dream of dialogue, or bad dream of dialogue, or dialogue as a bad dream, dreamt by the Other.?

A totally different case here from Circumfession—here the circaanalysis breaks down into a faux pause. Train not on or off, not forward, backwards or stopped, not just a detour, or return but not a step, a false step, or misstep which is also nota step, not a standing in place but a pause.

I never write or produce anything other than this destinearrancy of desire, the unassignable trajectories and the unfindable subjects, but also the only sign of love, the one gaged on this bet (rather AIDS than lose you) and you try to calculate the itinerary of texts which do not explode immediately, being basically nothing but fuse, intermittently you see the flame running without knowing where or when the explosion will come, when the trance, anguish, and desire of the reader, quick let’s be done with it Circumfession,” in Jacques Derrida, Geoff Bennington and Jacques Derrida, . 199-200.

We come back to final destination interminable disterinerrance.

Two points.

1. About cash and paintings

Frarom tattoo to failed pieta—to full house

Four aces, folds.

holy men and saints with halos painted in the margins. (1995, 38)[iv]

That opposition is further interiorized and doubled I the film Die Falscher, the Counterfeiters where the Jews having arrived in a camp have their death sentence suspended if they will forge bank notes for the Nazis—so resistance becomes not forging, slowing the process down, as in The Train, but again we have the two sided piece of paper, the collusion of Nazi and Jew around forgery and art—forger as artist—as in Orson Welles’ last film F for Fake—Clifford Irving wryly observes that the crucial distinction is not between a forgery and the real thing but between a good forgery and a bad forgery. So that the camp itself is not a final destination—forgery is a means of escaping the camp outside, or of finding unbelievable life, a life both more than life and less than life, suspended while in the camp—still in transit as it were.

It’s an outside inside the inside job. It's a sort of bunker inside the camp.

It’s about work stalling rather than work stoppage. Or gelatin—letting it jell.

Marc Shell links the dematerialization of monetary inscription to what he regards as a parallel dematerialization of visual aesthetics:

The trend toward dematerialization as been a telling hallmark of twentieth-century economics as well as visual aesthetics. . . the relation between face value (or intellectual / metaphysical currency) and substantial value (material / physical currency) . . .The difference between inscription and thing grew greater with the introduction of paper money. Paper, the material substance the engravings were printed on, was supposed to make no difference to exchange . . . With the advent of electronic fund transfers the link between inscription and substance was broken. The matter of electronic money does not matter. (1995, 107-08)

The link between the halo and coins has a long history. As Marc Shell writes in Art and Money:

Just as aureole, or corona, means “halo,” so aurum, or corona, indicates “coin,” generally a coin of Byzantium or Spain. In this philological context, the visual resemblance between certain coins and nimbi … makes sense. Moreover, the colors of halo and coin are the same, the shapes (circles, triangles, and squares) are alike, and the various methods of denomination are similar. Further, halos appearing on coins frequently draw attention to themselves as numismatic objects. . . . some coinlike medals represent halos or partial coins. Many manuscripts include coinlike medals depicting holy men and saints with halos painted in the margins. (1995, 38)[v]

Any future is a future you will in one way or another have to back on.

A life beyond life involves an internal and external calculation of what is life and what is bare life. Accounts, accounting, settling up, settling scores, are inescapable. Reveral reveals that we are not so much between two deaths, as in Lacan and Zizek, but between two lifes or between life and bare life.

No end of extermination—except in the terminal itself—in the interval, maybe not even much hope, but still a drifting away from destination you are also hurtling toward, looking in a rearview mirror or backwards sitting on a train.

In Dutch painting, we are talking about “still lifes”

2. Reversal is not just about the mirror and the backside, the hidden and the revealed, the inverted, the perfected versus the perverted. It’s also abut the frame.

And the backside, the going invisible of the frame and its non return—in the restitution exhibit as well as the lack of paratext in the Train, packing them in their frames. Inside the coffins, they are already inside. The possibility of deception—The Danish painter’s trompe l’oeil as a deception. It’ the only that actually deceives. Thereverse side.

The frame or paregon becomes invisible for Kant, according to Derrida, an aesthetic supplement outside reason but without which reason cannot be reasonable, separate from the aesthetic, the imagination, and so on. We may returns to Cornelius the trompe –framed painting—title—paratext here is the frame, the paregon. Or is always invisible as it frames, Heidegger’s neologism Ge-Stell in, a kind of pre-framing that never appears as such but which discloses a field of being.. This unframing is forgotten in the German restitution exhibition. This invisible remainder of loss goes unnoticed. Not a failure, an impossibility of avoiding the unavoidable. Restitution is not a matter of reversal, or reversal is a returning far more complicated than a backside and mirror inversion ora negative and print would suggest.

Valesquez painting—the mirror and the back of the painting—impossible perspective of the mirror, and the man in the doorway as well. So frame, unframed, doorway (blocked by a man who is leaving but who is looking back at us). If The truth in Painting is not in a painting, not in a singular painting; the truth and the false are both in and out of painting as a universal.

So there is something embarrassing here—the backside has to be left behind, forgotten—memory here works like Christian fundamentalist future.

As I said at the beginning, there is a relation to Freud and the hand, but perhaps now it’s left and right than off hand and on hand, not hands up and hands down, or hands on and hands off (all controlled or controlling), orders. I hope you can better understand why I just can’t grip on myself. Or me. Or I.

As well as the steps he takes and does not take in Beyond the Pleasure, what Derrida calls paralysis in Freud’s Legacy in The Post-Card , p. 337.Principle,

So we returnto the future, the promise, and the incalculable—the uncanny as s the suspension of settlement and resettlement now and in the future.

Also question about deniability and its limits Finkelstein versus Harvard Dershowitz, Deborah Libschitz, and Elie Wiesel. Any criticism is not only anti-Semitic but Holocaust denial-whereas for Finekselstein, insistence on singularity of Holocaust is the means by which Jews can cash in on the suffering of other Jews like his own parents , both of whom were in camps.

No question of "immoral equivalencies" or moral equivalences or singularity of the Holocaust—because it is already heterogeneous-the Jew Jew / non-Jew non-Jew.

Gijsbrechts, Cornelius: The Reverse Side of a Painting (1670)

Cornelius Gijsbrechts is little known and seems to have worked mainly in trompe l'oeil. (His 'Still-Life with Self-Portrait' is seen left). Dutch; second half of the 17th-century: that's about it. He worked for two successive Danish kings, who had a taste for pictorial tricks. He does his best but when you see them, they don't really deceive you. Only one does the business flawlessly...

1670

Oil on canvas, 66,6 x 86,5 cm

Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

The scrap of paper with the number 36 on it gives the impression that this deceptive illusionist painting is actually meant for sale. It is therefore likely that the painting was originally put up at a sales exhibition as a practical joke.

Image displayed at its actual size of 26.2 by 34.1 in.:

“It’s always a strange, rather suspicious feeling when one thinks such and such is going to happen. And yet it is really quite as strange that we should ever be able to know that such and such is as it is—which no one ever notices because it always happens.”

Friedrich Schlegel, Athanaeum Fragments, 218

Freud letter to Fliess about his disvocery of the concept of repression.

Faux Pa(u)s(e)[vi]

And in Mr Klein a Dutch painting (Renaissance) of a man looking at the viewer holding up a book, open, with a magnifying glass over a page.

This painting is sold by a Jew to an art dealer who becomes a Jew, and the painting first appears in reverse when sold. It again alter appears in reverse,

Then Klein will not let it be confiscated,

And when it finally shows up it is gain seen in reverse and finally in close up when we can see the magnifying glass clearly.

The Kleins family, according to the father, who is sitting in a wheelchair, go back to Louis XIV and are Catholics. But he says that there was a Holland branch of the Kleins and his expression suggests he may be lying when he says they weren’t Jewish.

There I plaque of gold medallions to the Kleins in the father’s room.

The medallions are like the currency—francs or not—used to sell and buy paintings in the film.

Fake passport, and so on.

Lots of repetitions—the close up of the girlfriend near the beginning of her mouth in a mirror as she puts on lipstick—recalls the earlier scene of the doctor examining a woman.

She is also seen in mirrors, and Klein’s exchange with the selling the Araiedne van Ostden painting is all off screen.

So female body versus Jewish body

Returns in the anti-Semitic Caberet scene with the transvestites singing (sound seems diegetic—no evidence of lip-synching, as castrato).

Some repetitions become odd clues, like gfriend mentioning Moby Dick in their apartment, and then Klein finding a copy of Moby Dick in the other Klein’s apartment, and filching an add or receipt for photos at a Photo shop.

Also the single white boot at the apartment and the white boots worn by women chorus girls in the cabaret.

Or repetitions of shots of Klein in mirrors, like in the bar where he sees the other Klein when it is really his own image.

But other repetitions are bizarre—like J Moreau ripping up the letter she pulls out of Klein’s hand and then puts it in the fire.

Later Francoise tears up the photo Klein had developed but he doesn’t mind because “I have the negative.”

The negative is reproduced when a guy on a motorcycle, meets Jeanne Moreau at night outside and Klein watches, his face reflecting in the window.

The negative itself is an image of doubleness and reversal—the print is the opposite of the negative.

Question of recognizing Klein, also of his other, and also of recognizing the Jew.

Stars worn by some, including the guy who sold Klein the painting as they are rounded up to be deported.

The voice-over at the end repeats and inverts the voice over at the beginning of the film.

Also repetition of moment when Klein asks seller of the painting if he’s not going to count the money and then he asks his lawyer Pierre if Pierre will ask to count the money and he doesn’t (“I don’t want to give you that pleasure”)

I conclude—the uncanny is not one thing—even the uncanny of the uncanny proliferates—so form incredulity—never one, but two in Spectral Evidence

Or we might add, along with incredulity, the incomprehensible—the perfect is in Christianity what cannot be comprehended by sight—faith in things unseen

And in Schlegel, two kinds of incomprehension, which quickly and from the start is a serious joke about irony impaired judgment.

And so we come to Faith and Knowledge

Araiedne van Ostden

After the frightful labor pains of the last few weeks, I gave birth to a new piece of knowledge. Not entirely new, to tell the truth; it had repeatedly shown itself and withdrawn again; but this time it stayed and looked upon the light of day. Strangely enough, I had a presentiment of such events a good while beforehand. For instance, I wrote to you once in the summer that I was going to find the source of normal sexual repression (morality, shame, and so forth) and then for a longtime failed to find it. Before the vacation trip I told you that the most important patient for me was myself; and then, after I came back from vacation, my self-analysis, of which there was at the time so sign, suddenly started. A few weeks ago came my wish that repression might be replaced by my new knowledge of the essential thing lying behind it; and that is what I cam concerned with now

“Letter to Fliess,” November 14; 1897; 278-79.

Derrida says restitutions is a ghost story—but the ghost is not the former person, he owner. The ghost is the missing frame, the detachment of front and back.

You see the Markat front of the back and the Makart front of the front. But you don’t see the back of the back or the back of the front, which would be indistinguishable as such, in any case.

So the revenant doesn’t quite return, or a ghostly remainder is all that’s left of the ghost that might otherwise haunt—turns haunting into haunting otherwise hauntology—hauntology of the missing body—work of art and owner. As well as painter.

-----------------------

[i] and Holbein’s Jesus in a Box; Marcel Duchamp’s Boite-en-Valise as Traveling Museum, Joseph Cornell’s “Duchamp Dossier” as the hinge linking the infra, see though surfaces, piled up on each other, and the box as resistance, back box takes us to the uncanny theology of attachments in paintings and booksthe reverse sides of medieval Renaissance paintings and books going up through Duchamp and Cornell—frame as question of secular and sacred, uncanny theological, attachment problem that extends from the missing Jewish body in the Train and these two films as well as the problem of Jesus in a box, of displaying the Christian body, the scourging in Man of Sorrows and the stigmata after the crucifixion, of having to detach Jesus in order to store him or transfer his image as revealed and resurrected impression.

[ii]

France faces claims over Nazi deportation



· 200 families to sue state and railway for war role

· Millions of euros may be paid in compensation 

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

Tuesday August 29, 2006

The Guardian 

France and its national railway company, SNCF, face a deluge of compensation claims for their role in the deportation of Jews during the second world war. More than 200 families from France, Israel, Belgium, the US and Canada will launch suits this week against the French state and SNCF for colluding in the transport of Jews, political prisoners, homosexuals and Gypsies to the Nazi death camps during the German occupation. Cases brought in dozens of tribunals across France could last years and, if successful, force the state and the railway to pay millions of euros in compensation. Many of the cases are being brought by pensioners who as children were interned in Drancy, the transit camp north of Paris known as the "antechamber of death" - from which about 67,000 Jews were sent to their deaths in the concentration camps. They were transported to the camp on the national railway system, often crammed into cattle trucks. SNCF classified them as third-class passengers and continued to send bills for their tickets even after the liberation of France.

[iii] Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them.'

[iv] Marc Shell, Art and Money, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

[v] Marc Shell, Art and Money, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

[vi] On the double meaning of “faux pas” in French as a both a blunder in speaking and a misstep, see the translator’s note in Maurice Blanchot, Faux Pas (Stanford, AC: Stanford, UP, 2001), xi. Derrida on the step backward in Restitutions in Truth in Painting.

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