"Lapsus Imaginis": The Image in Ruins

Author(s): Eduardo Cadava

Source: October, Vol. 96 (Spring, 2001), pp. 35-60
Published by: The MIT Press
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 Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins*

EDUARDO CADAVA

The disaster ruins everything, all the while leaving everything intact. It
does not touch anyone in particular; "I" am not threatened by it, but
spared, left aside. It is in this way that I am threatened; it is in this
way that the disaster threatens in me what is exterior to me-an other
than I who passively become other. There is no reaching the disaster.
Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whetherfrom afar or close up, it is
impossible to say: the infinitude of the threat has in some way broken
every limit.

-Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster

There can be no image that is not about destruction and survival, and this is
especially the case in the image of ruin. We might even say that the image of ruin
tells us what is true of every image: that it bears witness to the enigmatic relation
between death and survival, loss and life, destruction and preservation, mourning
and memory. It also tells us, if it can tell us anything at all, that what dies, is lost,
and mourned within the image-even as it survives, lives on, and struggles to
exist-is the image itself. This is why the image of ruin-again, speaking for all
images-so often speaks of the death, if not the impossibility of the image. It
announces the inability of the image to tell a story: the story of ruin, for example.
It is because of this silence in the face of loss and catastrophe-even when ruin

* This essay began several years ago in response to Mark Wigley's invitation to contribute to a spe-
cial issue of Assemblage devoted to the relation between space and violence. It is partially drawn from
this shorter early version, published under the title "Leseblitz: On the Threshold of Violence" in
Assemblage 20; from two longer and different versions I delivered at the Tate Gallery in London in the
spring of 1997 and at the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University in the spring of
2000; and from a brief meditation on the relation between images and history entitled "Vanishing
Remains," published in 1999 in Via Dalle Immagini: Verso un'arte della storia, ed. Salvatore Puglia
(Salerno: Edizioni Menabo). I am grateful to the National Monuments Record in London for permit-
ting me to reproduce this image of the bombed-out Holland House Library and to the many friends
and colleagues who have discussed the essay with me in all its manifestations. I am especially grateful to
Hal Foster and Benjamin Buchloh for encouraging me to gather, recontextualize, and expand these
ruins and fragments into the present essay.

OCTOBER 96, Spring 2001, pp. 35-60. ? 2001 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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36 OCTOBER

remains undeclared-that the image is always at the same time an image of ruin,
an image about the ruin of the image, about the ruin of the image's capacity to
show, to represent, to address and evoke the persons, events, things, truths, histo-
ries, lives and deaths to which it would refer.
This is why, we might say, the entire logic of the world can be read here, and
it can be read as the logic of the image. Like the world, the image allows itself to
be experienced only as what withdraws from experience. Its experience-and if it
were different it would not be an experience at all-is an experience of the impos-
sibility of experience. The image tells us that it is with loss and ruin that we have
to live. Nevertheless, what makes the image an image is its capacity to bear the
traces of what it cannot show, to go on, in the face of this loss and ruin, to suggest
and gesture toward its potential for speaking. In other words, the fact of the
image's existence-and here I refer only to an image worthy of the name "image,"
to an image that would remain faithful to the ruinous silences that make it what it
is-ruins the ruin about which all images speak-or at least seek to speak.
The image, then: this means "of ruin"-composed of ruin, belonging to
ruin, taking its point of departure from ruin, seeking to speak of ruin, and not
only its own-but also "the ruin of ruin," the emergence and survival of an image
that, telling us it can no longer show anything, nevertheless shows and bears wit-
ness to what history has silenced, to what, no longer here, and arising from the
darkest nights of memory, haunts us, and encourages us to remember the deaths
and losses for which we remain, still today, responsible.

What does it mean to assume responsibility for an image or a history--for an

image of history, or for the history sealed within an image? How can we respond,
for example, to the image and history inscribed within this strange photograph-
especially when, before our eyes, it ruins the distinctions it proposes? It bequeaths
to us a space-the space of the photograph as well as the photographed space-
in which we can no longer know what space is. It offers us a time-the time of the
photograph and the photographed time-in which we no longer know what time
is. We know neither what remains inside or outside the violated space, inside or
outside the interrupted time, nor what space and time can be when they are
ruined in this way. The limits, the borders, and the distinctions that would guaran-
tee our understanding of the image have been shattered by an explosion from
which no determination can be sheltered.

How can we begin to read this image, then? In exhibiting and archivizing
the remains of its implosion, the image remains bound to the survival of the

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 Holland House Library (Photo: ? Crown Copyright.NMR).

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 38 OCTOBER

traces of a past and to our ability to read these traces as traces, to read, that is,
what Walter Benjamin would call the image's "historic index." As he explains in a
note from "Konvolut N" of his Passagen-Werk, to say that images are marked histori-
cally does not mean that they "belong to a specific time"-the time of the
camera's click, for example-but that they only "enter into legibility [Lesbarkeit] at
a specific time." "This 'entering into legibility,"' he goes on to say,

constitutes a specific critical point of the movement inside them. Every

present is determined by those images that are synchronic with it: every
Now is the Now of a specific recognizability [Erkennbarkeit]. In it, truth
is loaded to the bursting point with time. (This point of explosion, and
nothing else, is the death of the intentio, which accordingly coincides
with the birth of authentic historical time, the time of truth.) It is not
that the past casts its light on the present or that the present casts its
light on the past; rather, an image is that in which the Then [das
Gewesene] and the Now [dasJetzt] come together into a constellation
like a flash of lightning. In other words, an image is dialectics at a
standstill. For while the relation of the present to the past is a purely
temporal, continuous one, the relation of the Then to the Now is
dialectical: not temporal in nature but imagistic. Only dialectical
images are genuinely historical-that is, not archaic-images. The
image that is read-which is to say, the image in the Now of its recog-
nizability-bears to the highest degree the imprint of the perilous crit-
ical moment on which all reading is founded.'

For an image to be read (for it to "enter into legibility" in the "Now of its rec-
ognizability"), it must encounter a constellation of dangers, not the least of which
is its own dissolution. The possibility of this dissolution, however, belongs to what
makes an image an image, and, in particular, to what makes an image a genuinely
historical image. It names, among so many other things (including the dissolution
of the subjectivity that might wish to read the image), the movement at the
image's interior, the dialectical transfer between the Then and the Now that,
simultaneously composing and fissuring the image, occurs with what we might call
"the flash of history." If the historical index of an image-"the imprint of the per-
ilous critical moment on which all reading is founded"-therefore signals the rela-
tion between an image and the time in which it can be read, it tells this time (the
time that dates it, but a time that is not only the time in which it was produced)
that it can be read "Now." But this "Now," composed, like the present, of all the
images that are synchronic with it, is never simply "Now." It is never separable

1. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 462-63. Hereafter cited as AP. For the German
text, see the "Passagen-Werk," in Gesammelte Schriften, 7 vols., ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann
Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), Vol. 5, pp. 577-78. Hereafter cited as GS.

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 39

from the "Then" that, coming together with it in a "constellation like a flash of
lightning," is before or beyond the time from which the image seems to emerge.
This means that Benjamin's "Now" does not name a present, just as his "Then"
cannot be reduced to the past. Moreover, since the present is constituted in relation
to all the images that "Now" give it its signature-that come to it from elsewhere
but also from other historical moments-it, too, can never be present.
This is why the historical index of an image always claims the image for
another time2-for another historical moment (itself plural, and composed of
several other moments) and for something other than linear, chronometric time
(which would be, for Benjamin, "purely temporal" and "continuous"). This is also
why Benjamin's understanding of the image's historical index cannot be under-
stood as either indexical or referential: it can never index or refer to a single his-
torical moment or event.3 As he puts it elsewhere, "in order for a part of the past
to be touched by the present instant [Aktualitdt], there must be no continuity
between them" (AP, p. 470; GS 5, p. 587). Confirming that the relationship
between a past and a present is dialectical, in the strongest historical and imagistic
sense, the index interrupts the presence of the image. It indicates that the image
only exists in relation to a time that, signaling the explosion that marks both its
birth and destruction, prevents it from ever being simply itself. Every effort to
read the image therefore must expose it there where the image does not exist. It
must displace it (make it standstill elsewhere), and this because, in the "Now" of
the image's legibility, the truth of the image is, in the wording of Benjamin,
"loaded to the bursting point with time." It is because the traces carried by the
image include reference to the past, the present, and the future, and in such a
way that none of these can be isolated from the other, that the image cannot pre-
sent the traces of the explosion it recalls-without at the same time exploding, or
bursting, its capacity to (be) present. It is in this interruption and explosion of

2. I am indebted on this point-and in my discussion of Benjamin's notion of the image's "historic

index" in general-to Christopher Fynsk's "The Claim of History," in his Language and Relation
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), especially pp. 212-223. Associating Benjamin's discussion
of the historic index of the image with what, in the second thesis of the "Theses on the Concept of
Philosophy," is referred to as the image's "temporal index," Fynsk describes the relation it signifies in
terms of what Benjamin calls a "secret agreement between generations" (see "Theses on the Concept
of Philosophy," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn [New York: Schocken Books,
1968], p. 254. See also GS 1, pp. 693-94: "The past 'carries with it' a temporal index: the date of its
emergence and of its expiration." This expiration date, he argues, means that the image "must be read
by" and "will not be readable before" this date. Moreover, "if the present does not read the past (and
itself as implicated in the past)-if it fails to read and write itself-the constellation of past and present
will simply flit by" (Language and Relation, pp. 220-21). This is why the moment of reading is critical
and dangerous: the past and the present are both at stake.
3. Benjamin's conception of the index should be read in its difference from Charles S. Peirce's dis-
tinction between the "index," which bears a physical relation to the object it represents, and the
"icon," which resembles the object without having any necessary physical relation to it. See Peirce's
"Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in The Philosophy of Peirce: Selected Writings, ed. Justus Buchler
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1950), pp. 98-119. For an elaboration of the pertinence of Peirce's medi-
tations to an understanding of photography in general, see Rosalind Krauss's "Notes on the Index," in
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 196-219.

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40 OCTOBER

historical presentation that we engage the conditions of "authentic" historical

understanding, an understanding which, offering us the truth of time, tells us
that history is something to which we can never be present.

II

How are we to interpret this image? How are we to develop or imagine it-
within the space of this essay, within the assemblage of words that occupy the
space of these few pages? What would responding mean here? Each detail of the
photograph has its force, its logic, its singular place-among so many others, the
three standing men looking at books (with each one demonstrating a different
relation to the books-one holding and reading a book, the other about to touch
one, and the last merely looking at them), the splintered wreckage behind them,
the walls made of books, the collapsed ceiling, the shattered glass, the door and
window, only partially visible behind the debris. A condensation of history and
texts, this photograph remains linked to an absolutely singular event, and there-
fore also to a date, to an historical inscription. It opens a space for time itself, dis-
persing it from its continuous present. Looking both backward and forward, it
asks us to think about "context" in general in a different way. Its context would
include not only the date and circumstances of the photograph itself-this photo-
graph of the bombed-out Holland House Library in London was taken on
October 23, 1940, nearly three and a half weeks after the air raid that led to the
library's destruction4-but also those of the initial air raid on September 27 and

4. The photograph was taken by a photographer named Harrison, who worked for Fox Photos. We
know nothing of its early circulation-Fox Photos itself was bombed during the blitz and lost many of
its documents and negatives-although it does appear that the censor of the "Press and Censorship
Bureau" released the image for publication immediately after it was taken. What we know is that in
1926 the financier Richard Fox, along with the photographer Reginald Salmon and the journalist
Ernest Beaver, joined together to purchase a company called Special Press, and renamed it Fox Photos.
In a letter from November 20, 2000, Sarah McDonald, a curator at the Hulton Getty (which bought the
Fox Photo collection in 1989), writes that: "the agency soon established an international reputation,
providing a service of press and industrial photography at a time when the new photo-led magazines
and newspapers were clamouring for picture stories." The agency included the photographers Reggie
Speller, Ernst Hess (who was one of the first to use color film for reportage), and William Vanderson.
As McDonald notes, "Fox was one of the first agencies to use color extensively in outside presswork,
with excellent coverage of personalities and royals. During the war years, the agency purchased
Kodachrome 1 color film, virtually unused in the United Kingdom in 1939, in the United States and
shipped it across the Atlantic on convoys. The exposed film was convoyed back to the States for pro-
cessing and sale. Transparencies were later shipped back to England, forming a now rare collection of
color World War II material." She also includes one interesting anecdote from the bombing of the
Library itself, a little story about the survival of ruins and, in particular, the circulation of books in
ruin: "the damage was extensive and many volumes were destroyed. A librarian from the Augustin
Rischgitz Picture Collection, with the help of a couple of GI's and some wheelbarrows, salvaged several
sets of books from the wreckage, which were otherwise to be disposed of, including a valuable seven-
teenth-century encyclopaedia. Hulton subsequently bought the Rischgitz Collection and we still have
these volumes in our possession today. On the inner covers are the original Holland Library plates."

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 41

of the German Luftwaffe's blitz on London that had begun on September 7.

Moreover, it refers, in however encrypted a manner, to the legendary book burn-
ings of 1933 that confirmed what Denis Hollier has called "a kind of Nazi biblio-
phobia,"5 to the antifascist insistence, in response to the book burnings, on the
survival of books, to the existence of wartime censorship, to our own passivity
toward disaster, and to the disaster that names our passivity toward what we so
often call "our time." It suggests as well our capacity to turn our backs on the disas-
ter all around us by staring into books.
Given the several histories and contexts sealed within the photograph-it is,
as Benjamin would suggest, full of history and time-what could responding
mean here? How can we respond to the experiences commemorated, displaced,
and ciphered by this image? How can we give an account of the circumstances in
which it was produced, or better, of those it names, codes, disguises, or dates on its
surface? What can memory be when it seeks to remember the trauma of violence
and loss? How can we respond to what is not presently visible, to what can never
be seen within the image? To what extent does what is not seen traverse the image
as the experience of the interruption of its surface? If the structure of the image is
defined as what remains inaccessible to visualization, this withholding and with-
drawing structure prevents us from experiencing the image in its entirety, or, to
be more precise, encourages us to recognize that the image, bearing as it always
does several memories at once, is never closed.
If the photograph evokes a moment of crisis and destruction, then, part of
what is placed in crisis is the finitude of the context within which we might read it.
This is why, when we respond to a photograph by trying to establish only the histori-
cal contexts in which it was produced, we risk forgetting the disappearance of con-
text-the essential decontextualization-that is staged by every photograph. The
moment in the image appears suspended and torn from any particular historical
moment-past, present, or future. As Benjamin explains in his early essay on the
Trauerspiel and tragedy, the

time of history is infinite in every direction and unfulfilled at every

moment. This means we cannot conceive of a single empirical event
that bears a necessary relation to the time of its occurrence. For empir-
ical events, time is nothing but a form, but, what is more important, as
a form it is unfulfilled. This means that no single empirical event is
conceivable that would have a necessary connection to the temporal
situation in which it occurs" (GS 2, p. 134).

Time tells us that the event can never be entirely circumscribed or delimited. This
is why the effort to determine and impose a meaning on the event recorded in this
photograph, to stabilize the determination of its context-an act that involves

5. Denis Hollier, "The Death of Paper: A Radio Play," October 78 (Fall 1996), p. 4.

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42 OCTOBER

reading what is not visible within the photograph-involves both violence and
repression. This is also why whatever violence there is in the attempt to establish
the context of this image remains linked, because of this repression, to an essential
nonviolence.

It is in this highly unstable and dangerous relationship between violence and

nonviolence that responsibilities form, responsibilities that have everything to do
with how we read this image. As we have seen, Benjamin refers to the violence or
nonviolence of reading when he claims that "the image that is read-which is to
say, the image in the Now of its recognizability-bears to the highest degree the
imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded" (AP, p.
463; GS 5, p. 578). Suggesting that there can be no reading of an image that does
not expose us to a danger-because such a reading would only demonstrate, if it
could demonstrate anything, the noncontemporaneity of the present, the absence
of linearity in the representation of historical time, and therefore the fugacity of
the past and the present-he warns us of the danger of believing that we have
seen or understood an image. For Benjamin-who committed suicide on the 26 of
September 1940, just one day before the Holland House bombing-the activity of
reading is charged with an explosive power that blasts the image to be read from
its context. This tearing or breaking force is not an accidental predicate of read-
ing; it belongs to its very structure. In a passage from "Konvolut N" that associates
the "critical, dangerous impulse" of truth with the work of "materialist history
writing" (which he also describes as a kind of "blasting"), Benjamin suggests that
the historical object emerges from out of a destructive explosion: "The destructive
or critical momentum of materialist historiography," he writes, "is registered in
the blasting of historical continuity with which the historical object first consti-
tutes itself" (AP, p. 475; GS 5, p. 594). This is why history involves the capacity to
arrest or immobilize historical movement, to blast the details of an event from the
continuum of history, or, as Benjamin puts it, to spring them loose "from the
order of succession" (AP, p. 475; GS 5, p. 594). It is because history breaks down
into images that there can be no photographic image, no force of arrestment,
which does not tell us of the relation between images and history, photography
and memory, and space and violence.

III

To read means being exposed to time and images. But if the reading of
images draws us to the necessity of the disappearance into which they withdraw
and from which they emerge-as Benjamin tells us elsewhere, "what we know we
will soon no longer have before us-this is what becomes an image"6-it is

6. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn
(London: New Left Books, 1973), p. 87. See also GS 1, p. 590.

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 Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 43

because images themselves refer to time. Roland Barthes reinforces this point
when, in his Camera Lucida, he suggests that if "the photograph possesses an eviden-
tial force," its testimony "bears not on the object but on time."7 But what we call
time is precisely the image's inability to coincide with itself. It demands that every
image be an image of its own interruption-an image of the explosion of space
and the erasure of time. Exposing the image to the movement of its disappear-
ance or dissolution, it exposes it to ruin, to damage, to annihilation. A movement
of alteration, it conveys the exposure-the interruption and breakdown-of the
image and thereby prevents it from being merely this image or merely an image.
This is why an image is never already constituted but is always in the process of its
constitution. This is also why, simultaneously constructed and effaced, every image
is a ruin, a lapsus imaginis. The space of ruin is itself exposed to the movement of
ruin. The ruin stands in the image that stands in ruin: a mise en abyme, for which
there are only ever further ruins of ruins. The ruin, the image of ruin, is therefore
without image. It can never be presented.
The ruin in the image is in fact the law that forbids its own presentation.
The image presents an interruption of history and does so only by interrupting
the principle of presentation. Or, to put it another way, the disintegration of pre-
sentation exposes a caesura, a ruin in the presentation of historical experience.
As Benjamin explains in his book on the German Trauerspiel, "In the ruin, history
has materially distorted itself into the scene. And, figured in this manner, history
does not assume the form of the promise of an eternal life so much as that of irre-
sistible decay."8 If ruin is at work in every image, this is because the ruin is not sim-
ply before the image, is not simply what makes the image an image; it is also what,
in and with the image, is not the image and, in not being the image, allows the
image to be what it is: an image in ruins. This ruin means that the image does not
mean, does not designate anything-especially because it refers to time, to a time
whose history is always a history of ruins. In the wording ofJacques Derrida,

the ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that
was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that
which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze.... [It]
is not in front of us. ... It is experience itself: neither the abandoned
yet still monumental fragment of a totality, nor, as Benjamin thought,
simply a theme of baroque culture. It is precisely not a theme, for it
ruins the time, the position, the presentation or representation of any-
thing and everything.9

7. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981), pp. 88-89.
8. Walter Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books,
1977), p. 177. See also GS 1, pp.353-54.
9. Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 68-69. There are, of course, sever-
al indications that Benjamin did not restrict his discussion of ruins to a theme of the baroque culture.

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44 OCTOBER

This is to say that, if time ruins the image, this ruined image also interrupts
the movement of time, in a manner that has, not the form of time, but rather the
form of time's interruption, the form of a pause, of an explosion. This ruined
image wounds the form of time. It suspends and deranges time. But since time-
and all time-can be deranged in this way, time itself is perhaps a kind of madness. 1
Like the image, it is never identical to itself. It can only be what it is by leav-
ing itself, by abandoning itself. It is unrepresentable. Never something, never one
thing, never this or that, it is what is never present. Nevertheless, as Kant reminds
us, everything passes in time but time itself. Time repeats itself endlessly. It begins
in repetition. But what is repeated in time is a movement of differentiation and
dispersion-and what is differentiated and dispersed is time itself. There can be
no passing moment that is not already both the past and the future: the moment
must be simultaneously past, present, and future in order for it to pass at all. This
is why what is repeated in time is what is never simply itself, what is incessantly van-
ishing. If time is a matter of repetition, it is a repetition only of its unrepeatability.
This aporetic exposition of time and the image no longer allows for a linear,
unbroken presentation of history. It presents itself as a repetition of the prohibi-
tion against images, a repetition that tells us that history can only emerge in the
interruption of the continuum of presentation. The sign of this prohibition is leg-
ible in the photograph in the X formed by the collapsed wooden beams at its cen-
ter. It is as if the prohibition that this X should express, however, intervenes in its
sign and makes it into a ruin of the sign that would correspond to the prohibition.
By remaining faithful to the prohibition, the very sign in which it could present
itself is interrupted or ruined. This suggests that, without interrupting the histori-
cal continuum, without blasting the techniques of representation, there can be no
historical time. No history without the interruption of history. No time without
the interruption of time. No image without the interruption of the image. If, how-
ever, this interrupted image is still an image, then "image" means: the disaster of
the image. It means that every image is an image of disaster-that the only image

In the "Berlin Chronicle," for example-in a passage that, suggesting that memory is a medium in
which debris and buried ruins are reinterred in the act of recollection, presents the image as a ruin-
he writes: "Memory is not an instrument for the exploration of the past but rather its theater
[Schauplatz]. Memory is the medium of what has been experienced, as the earth is the medium in
which dead cities lie buried in debris ... facts of the matter are only deposits, layers which deliver only
to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the true assets hidden within the inner earth: the
images which, torn from all former contexts stand-like ruins or torsos in the collector's gallery-as
the treasures in the prosaic chambers of our belated insights" (Benjamin, "Berlin Chronicle, in
Reflections, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978], pp. 25-26.
See also GS 6, pp. 486-87).
10. I am indebted here to Werner Hamacher's discussion of the derangement of time in his essay,
"Des Contrees des temps," in Zeit-Zeichen: Aufschiibe und Interferenzen zwischen Endzeit und Echtzeit, ed.
Georg Christoph Tholen and Michael 0. Scholl (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1990), pp. 30-31.
See also Blanchot's similar discussion in The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1986), especially pp. 78-80 (hereafter cited as WD).

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 Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 45

that could really be an image would be the one that shows its impossibility, its dis-
appearance and destruction, its ruin.11 The image is only an image, in other
words, when it is not one, when it says "there is no image."12 The image therefore
does not demonstrate. No assertion about the image (and this means no "image
of the image") can show us the truth of the image. The image is rather a monster
of time-in which time does not properly tell time. It is, in the wording of Werner
Hamacher, a "monstruum without monstration."13

IV

Let us return to this strange photograph. Taken on October 23, 1940, it

stages a scene of reading that asks to be read in relation to the ruin and violence
within which it takes place. This ruin and violence include not only the ruin and
violence given in the photograph, but also that effected by the German Luftwaffe
air raids on London. One year after it invaded Poland, Germany began its blitz on
London in early September. It turned to night bombing in early October, and con-
tinued its barrage of bombs and incendiaries until November 13. Six hundred
bombers were directed against London in the initial blitz. Until November 13,
with only ten days excepted, between 150 and 300 Luftwaffe bombers dropped at
least 100 tons of explosives on London each and every night. Thirteen hundred
tons of high explosives and almost one million incendiary bombs were dropped,
killing more than thirteen thousand people and injuring twenty thousand more.
First blasting the densely populated dockland streets of terraced houses, ware-
houses, and factories, these bombs and explosives eventually brought fires and the
spread of burning embers across the city of London, in the process transforming
it. Roads were blocked with debris, bus and rail services were dislocated, commu-
nication links were interrupted and even engulfed by fire. Churches, schools, hos-
pitals, public houses, shops, and houses were ruined. Pavements and streets were
covered with wreckage and the fine, frosty glitter of powdered glass left behind by
shattered windows and collapsed roofs everywhere. Thousands of people were left

11. Taking our point of departure from this image of disaster and ruin, we could even say that the
truth of photography lies in the relation it stages between light and ashes. As Man Ray wrote in 1934,
in an essay entitled "The Age of Light," images are always only the residue of an experience. This is
why what we "see" in an image is what has "survived an experience tragically, [what recalls] the event
more or less clearly, like the undisturbed ashes of an object consumed by flames" ("The Age of Light,"
in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, ed. Christopher
Phillips [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989], p. 53).
12. On this point, see Bernard Stiegler's "L'Image discrfte," in Derrida's and Stiegler's Echographies:
de la television (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1996), p. 165.
13. See Hamacher, "The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka," in Premises: Essays on
Philosophy and Literaturefrom Kant to Celan, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1996), p. 316. Hamacher uses the phrase not to describe the image, but as a "name" for the name.

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 46 OCTOBER

homeless. Reading itself declined due to sheltering in ill-lit spaces. Moreover, by

October 9, more than one hundred thousand books had been destroyed or severely
damaged in the bombing of University College Library. The attacks were so
intense that the blitz eventually became routine. Air-raid sirens were even at times
ignored unless the noise of gunfire or bombs was dangerously close.14
During the two months of sustained bombing, the space called "London"-a
space with an immense and stratified history, with its walls, its buildings, and its
streets-became a space that could no longer be inhabited in the same way, that
could no longer be recognized as itself: the German blitz in fact attacked space
more than it did people. During World War II, England lost about 365,000 peo-
ple-only half the number killed in the World War I. The destruction of property,
however, included damage to four million houses, and the total destruction of
nearly half a million.15 This destruction also included the destruction of revered
and talismanic buildings such as the Holland House. The last of the great country
estates in London and one of Europe's last international salons, this seventeenth-
century Tudor house was completely destroyed except for its east wing when, on
the night of September 27, incendiary bombs dropped on its west wing. From the
mid-eighteenth century until the 1840s, the House had been a political, social,
and literary center for the Whig aristocracy. It was frequented by the most emi-
nent patricians and intellectuals of the day: associates of the Edinburgh Review,
members of the diplomatic corps in London, ambassadors and ministers of
European courts, and literati such as Byron. A transmission center for patronage,
political discussion, and gossip, the Holland House was once referred to by
Charles Greville as "the house of Old Europe."16
Taken one day after the one-hundredth anniversary of Lord Holland's
death, this strange photograph therefore figures, among so many other things,
the ruin and memory of "Old Europe": the explosion and collapse of a certain
idea of Europe-with its traditions, hierarchies, social orders, and institutions-
and the traces of its survival in the still standing archive. It evokes a violence that
wished to reduce "Europe" to rubble, that hoped to destroy an "older" Europe in
the name of a younger one attempting to establish its hegemony across the
Continent and beyond. Responding to this violence in the name of another Europe,
England and its allies stalled this European "unification" by combating Nazism.
This war over the identity of Europe, over its spaces and borders, is no doubt
indissociable from a Europe whose spaces and borders are today again not given.
This Europe that has never been and will never be identical to itself, this Europe is
again, as Derrida has noted, the uncertain space of racism, anti-Semitism, and

14. I have drawn here on Angus Calder's The Myth of the Blitz (London:Jonathan Cape, 1991), especially
chapters 2 and 6, and Philip Ziegler's London at War: 1939-1945 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).
15. See Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, pp. 41-42.
16. Cited in Leslie Mitchell's Holland House (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1980), p. 306.

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 47

nationalist fanaticism-and this despite and even because of recent events in

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: what we call "perestroika," the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the different movements of "democratization," and the various
calls for "new" national identities.17 This Europe was already written into both the
space of Holland House and the space of this ruined image, this image of ruins. It
is this space-a space that ruins the distinction between the private and the public-
that will be translated in 1955-57 into a people's park that includes a youth hostel,
teashops, and a series of lawns. The postwar effort that works to transform this
once aristocratic enclave into a more democratic public space will repeat the
explosive work of the violence sealed within this ruined image.

War not only names the central experience of modernity; it also plays an
essential role in our understanding of technological reproduction in general and
of photography in particular. As Ernst Jinger noted in 1930, evoking the relation
that for him exists between war and photography:

A war that is distinguished by the high level of technical precision

required to wage it is bound to leave behind documents which are dif-
ferent from and more numerous than those of earlier times. It is the
same intelligence, whose weapons of annihilation can locate the enemy
to the exact second and meter, that labors to preserve the great histori-
cal event in fine detail.... Included among the documents of particular
precision, which have only recently been at the disposal of human
intelligence, are photographs, of which a large supply accumulated
during the war. Day in and day out, optical lenses were pointed at the
combat zones alongside the mouths of rifles and cannons. As instru-
ments of technological consciousness, they preserved the image of
these devastated landscapes.18

ForJiinger, there can be no war without photography. This is why the entirety
of his writings on photography suggest the ways in which the German war of light
and disaster illuminated the links between photographic technology and the tech-
niques of modern warfare. While the English began equipping their bombers with
photographic apparatuses, the German blitz flashed its death across the skies and
landscape of Europe. Dividing night into night and day, it illumined the space of

17. See Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today 's Europe, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael B. Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 37-38.
18. See Junger, "War and Photography," trans. Anthony Nassar, in New German Critique 59
(Spring/Summer 1993), p. 24.

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48 OCTOBER

war. "What had taken place in the darkroom of Niepce and Daguerre," Paul Virilio
explains, "was now happening in the skies of England."19 Indeed, we could even
say that the blackout that was enforced during the blitz-the event that, accord-
ing to historian Philip Ziegler, "impinged most forcibly on the life of the average
Londoner"20-transformed the entirety of London into a kind of gigantic dark-
room, into a massively photographic space.
Like the camera flash that enables the emergence of an image, the Luftwaffe
bombers dropped incendiaries both to trace the bombing area in London and to
light up nocturnal targets. London became subject to the glare of explosives and
the blinding light of the searchlights whose skyward beams traced a kind of lumi-
nous cat's cradle in the night. To say that there could be no blitz without the pro-
duction of images is to say that there could be no lightning war without the flash
of the camera.21 No blitz without photography-and in part because both are a
matter of speed. Like the rapidity of the blitz, the technology of the camera also
resides in its speed. Like the instantaneity of a lightning flash, the camera, in the
split-second temporality of the shutter's blink, seizes an image, an image that

19. Paul Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso,
1989), p. 75. In the experience of the German light wars, the technology of warfare comes together
with the techniques of perception. As Ernst Junger writes in his essay "On Pain," "photography is a
weapon employed by the modern type. For him, seeing is an act of aggression. ... Today we already
have guns equipped with optical cells, and even aerial and aquatic war machines with optical control
systems" (Juinger, "Photography and the 'Second Consciousness': An Excerpt from 'On Pain,"' trans.
Joel Agee, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, ed.
Christopher Phillips [New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989], pp. 208-9).
Capturing space and capturing images prove to be similar activities. This helps explain why,
today more than ever, the camera is on the side of destruction. We need only recall the tragedy of what
we now refer to as the "War in the Gulf." If this war taught us anything, it taught us what the blitz
already had suggested was true of all wars-that there can be no war that does not depend on tech-
nologies of representation. This was a war whose entire operation depended on the technologies of
sight: satellite aerial photography, light enhancing television cameras, infrared flashes and sighting
devices, thermographic images, and even cameras on warheads. This was a war in which the war
machine was in every way a photographic machine.
Linking war to photography and weapons to images, Junger would go on to argue that modern
technological warfare gives birth to a specifically modern form of perception organized around the
experience of danger and shock. This is why, in his essay "On Danger"-written as an introduction to a
1931 collection of photographs and accounts of catastrophes and accidents entitled Der gefdhrliche
Augenblick (The Dangerous Moment)-he notes that the moment of danger can no longer be restricted to
the realm of war. Identifying the contemporary zone of danger with the realm of technology in general,
he claims that a modern type is arising in response to the "increased incursion of danger into daily
life," whose aim is to develop an anaesthetized relation to danger (Junger, "On Danger," trans. Donald
Reneau, in New German Critique 59 [Spring/Summer 1993], p. 27). The effects of this anaesthetization
can be read, in the image of the bombed-out Holland House Library, in the calm and leisure exhibited
by the three men, and this despite the fact that they are standing amid several signs of war and danger.
20. See Ziegler, London at War, p. 67.
21. As Calder explains, the word "Blitz" was taken from Blitzkrieg, "lightning-war," and "applied by
the world's press to the swift German conquest of Poland in September 1939, and then to the swift
German advance in France and the Low Countries from May 10, 1940. As heavy bombing of London
began in the late summer, the word 'Blitz' became 'almost overnight a British colloquialism for an air
raid"' (The Myth of the Blitz, p. 2).

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 Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 49

Benjamin likens to the activity of lightning. "The dialectical image," he tells us,
"flashes (aufblitzendes)" (AP, p. 473; GS5, p. 592).
Linked to the flashes of memory, the suddenness of the perception of simi-
larity, and the irruption of events and images, Benjamin's vocabulary of lightning
helps register what comes to pass in the opening and closing of vision. Lightning
signals the force and experience of an interruption that enables a sudden
moment of clarification or illumination. What is illumined or lighted by the punc-
tual intensity of this or that strike of lightning, however-the emergence of an
image, for example-can at the same time be burned, incinerated, consumed in
flames. This is why, Benjamin notes in his discussion of the German mourning
play, the "content of truth does not emerge in an unveiling, rather it manifests
itself in a process that one might call, in a simile, the flaming up of the veil that
enters the circle of ideas, the burning of the work, in which its form reaches the
high point of its luminosity."22 A luminosity that blinds as much as it enlightens,
the flame tells us that truth springs forth in the burning of the work-the work
that burns, that is being consumed by the flames, but also the work that burns its
contents. We could even say that truth means the making of ashes. That there can
be neither truth nor photography without ashes means that, like Benjaminian
allegory, both take place in a state of ruin, in a state that moves away from itself in
order to be what it is. Like the photograph that tells us what is no longer before
us, truth can only be read, if it can be read at all, in the traces of what is no longer
present. That history is to be read in its transience means that its truth comes in
the form of ruins. There is no photograph that does not turn its "subjects" to
ruins. This is why this image of ruins tells us that, in every image, in every trace,
and consequently in every experience, there is this explosion and incineration,
this experience of explosion and incineration, which is experience itself.23
Effacing what it inscribes, the image bears witness to the impossibility of testimony.
It remains as a testament to loss.

VI

In Benjamin's etiology, shock is what characterizes our experience. In his

"Work of Art" essay, he links this shock to the work of the camera, claiming that
the camera gives the moment "a posthumous shock" (I, p. 175; GS 1, p. 630). In
linking the experience of shock to the structure of delay built into the photo-
graphic event, he suggests what for him is the latency of experience; namely, the
distance between an event and our experience or understanding of it. This dis-

22. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, p. 31. See also GS 1, p. 211.
23. This sentence is drawn in part from a statement that Derrida made in a 1986 interview, published
under the title "'There Is No One Narcissism' (Autobiophotographies)." See Points... Interviews, 1974-1994,
ed. Elisabeth Weber, trans. Peggy Kamuf et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), p. 209.

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50 OCTOBER

tance tells us that we experience an event indirectly, through our mediated and
defensive reaction to it. For Benjamin, what characterizes experience in general-
experience understood in its strict sense as the traversal of a danger, the passage
through a peril-is that it retains no trace of itself: experience experiences itself
as the vertigo of memory, as an experience whereby what is experienced is not
experienced.
It is here that we can begin to register the possibility of a history which is no
longer founded on traditional models of experience and reference. The sugges-
tion that we cannot experience experience directly requires that history emerge
where understanding or experience cannot. In Benjamin's words, "The greater
the extent of the shock factor in particular impressions, the more incessantly con-
sciousness has to be present as a screen against stimuli, the more efficiently it
operates, the less these impressions enter Erfahrung; rather, they fulfill the con-
cept of Erlebnis. Perhaps the peculiar achievement of shock defense may in the end
be seen in its function of assigning to an incident a precise point in time in con-
sciousness at the cost of the integrity of its [the incident's] contents" (I, p. 163; GS
1, p. 615). "Only what has not been experienced explicitly and consciously,"
Benjamin writes elsewhere, only "what has not happened to the subject as an expe-
rience [Erlebnis], can become a component of the memoire involontaire" (I, pp.
160-61; GS 1, p. 613). It is what is not experienced in an event that paradoxically
accounts for the belated and posthumous shock of historical experience. If history
is to be a history of this "posthumous shock," it can only be referential to the
extent that, in its occurrence, it is neither perceived nor experienced directly. For
Benjamin, history can be grasped only in its disappearance.
This helps explain why these three men, looking at the books in this photo-
graph, remain passive to the disaster behind them: it is as though what has hap-
pened has not happened. If we wish to situate the photograph within a discussion
of the relation between shock and photography, we should note that, in its depic-
tion of the men's seeming indifference to the disaster around them, the photo-
graph also exhibits its relation to what was perhaps the most pervasive rhetoric of
British propaganda during the war and, in particular, during the blitz: the sense
that-despite the fear, apprehension, confusion, and demoralization that so often
attends war-the British were models of courage and fortitude. The speeches of
Winston Churchill, the broadcasts of J. B. Priestley, and the daily and weekly
reports of the BBC Radio News helped perpetuate the sense that civilian morale
not only survived exposure to the violence and trauma of war but also guaranteed,
in the wording of Angus Calder, "that the British people, as a whole, deserved to
save Europe and defeat Hitler."24 Exhibiting calmness, indifference to the danger
around them, resolution in the face of loss and death, Londoners worked to man-

24. See Calder, The Myth of the Blitz, p. 142.

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 Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 51

ufacture an image of themselves as exemplary survivors. The photograph of the

bombed-out Holland House Library is only one of the innumerable photographs
and representations that were circulated to confirm this image of English
endurance.25 The effects of this propagandistic work were legible everywhere, and
led Anna Freud-who with several of her colleagues had set up a network of psychi-
atric clinics to deal with the neuroses caused by the bombing-to say that she had
never seen anything like the calm exhibited by the Londoners. As Ziegler notes,
she expressed her surprise that "not one case of shell-shock had been reported
and that she had not heard of a single breakdown that could be directly attributed
to the bombing."26
If, however, this photograph conjures what Calder has called "The Myth of
the Blitz"-the myth that the entirety of the British population exhibited courage
and strength in the midst of violence and death-it also suggests another model
for reading the presumed distance from disaster, a model offered to us by Anna
Freud's father. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, for example-and here he antici-
pates Benjamin's reflections on shock-Freud insists on the distance between a
traumatic event and our experience of it. Confronted by an event that paralyzes
us by the magnitude of its demand, an event that we recognize as a danger, we
fend off the danger through the process of repression: the danger is in some way
inhibited, and its precipitating cause-in this instance, the blitz itself-is forgotten.
The forgetting that attends the experience of shock, "the fact of latency," as
Cathy Caruth has argued in regard to Freud, "would seem to consist, not in the
forgetting of a reality that can hence never be fully known; but in a latency inher-
ent to the experience itself." The historical power of shock, she goes on to
explain, "is not just that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that it

25. That the image is most probably staged can be confirmed by comparing it to the image of the
bombed-out library that appeared only one day earlier in the London Times. In the photograph of the
destroyed library that was reproduced in the October 22, 1940, issue of the Times (p. 6), the books
along the walls are much more disheveled, there is more debris scattered across the ground, there are
no people inhabiting the space, and the atmosphere of the scene is strikingly more dark and ominous.
In addition, the bombing of the library was not announced in the Times until over three weeks after
the event. While this delay could be attributed to the disarray and chaos resulting from the blitz, it is
also most certainly an effect of censorship: the British Ministry of Information was reluctant to
announce the destruction of some of the city's most revered and historically significant buildings. Both
of these incidents-the reproduction of the image in the London Times and the delay with which it
appeared-suggest that the image before us was, among other things, staged to combat the psychologi-
cal effects of the blitz: the Germans may have tried to destroy our books, our buildings-the symbols
of our civilization-but we are still reading.
For an excellent discussion of the way in which the rhetoric of the survival of books-in the face
of their incineration or threatened destruction-circulated within the several antifascist discourses of
the Popular Front, see Hollier's "The Death of Paper." "Books may burn," he writes, "but the idea of
the book, that is, the presence in itself of the idea of the Book, could never fall prey to the flames... book
burning is destined to remain a symbolic act" (p. 5). Hollier briefly discusses the image of the Holland
House Library ruins, suggesting that it "fits perfectly into the line of antifascist iconography" (p. 9).
26. Cited in Ziegler, London at War, pp. 170-71.

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52 OCTOBER

is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all."27
The force of trauma is so terrible and pervasive that it leads us to believe that we
have not been touched. This is why, Blanchot explains, "we are not contempo-
raries of the disaster" (WD, p. 6); it remains "unexperienced. It is what escapes the
very possibility of experience" (WD, p. 7). In the long run, he goes on to suggest,
the disaster is perhaps our own passivity to the disaster: we experience what we
experience in the mode of forgetting. This is why there can be no reading that is
not under the threat of disaster, that is not under its surveillance. Disaster is per-
haps what gives us our right to read. Reading under the light of disaster-what
Blanchot calls "the passivity of reading" or "passivity's reading" (WD, p. 101)-lets
us know why ruin and disaster belong to the banal. As Benjamin would have it,
"That things just go on," and have gone on this way, "this is the catastrophe ....
Catastrophe is not what threatens to occur at any given moment; it is what is given
at any given moment."28
Staging the relation between traumatic experience and the photographic
effect-both perform their work by arresting time and experience, by disordering
memory and the work of representation-this remarkable photograph evokes a
devastation that destroys our ability to refer to it. It exhibits, in the wording of
Rosalind Krauss, a "trauma of signification."29

VII

What is our world? What can our world be if it can be revealed only by tech-
nology in general and photography in particular? If technology is a mode of
unveiling, in what way can our world-a world that is always touched by technicity
and therefore no longer simply a world-reveal the essence of technology? If
modernity is another name for the globalization of the world, can our world be
said to globalize the meaning of history? These are the questions that motivate
Benjamin's efforts to represent history and modernity in the language of photog-
raphy. In his "Theses on the Concept of History," assembled shortly before his sui-
cide in 1940 while fleeing from Nazi Germany, Benjamin persistently conceives of

27. Cathy Caruth, "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History," in Yale French
Studies 79 (1991), p. 187.
28. Benjamin, "Central Park," trans. Lloyd Spencer, in New German Critique 34 (Winter 1985), p. 50.
See also GS 1, p. 683. Benjamin repeats this point in "Konvolut N." There, he writes: "The concept of
progress should be grounded on the idea of catastrophe. That things just keep going on' is the cata-
strophe. Not an ever-present possibility, but what in each case is always given. Thus, Strindberg-in 'To
Damascus'?-: Hell is not something that awaits us, but this very life, here and now" (AP, p. 473 / GS 5,
p. 592).
29. Krauss uses this phrase in reference to Marcel Duchamp's "With My Tongue in My Cheek." See
"Notes on the Index: Part I," p. 206.

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 53

history in the language of photography, as though he wished to offer us a series of

snapshots of his latest reflections on history. Written from the perspective of disas-
ter and catastrophe, the theses are an historico-biographical time-lapse camera
that flashes across Benjamin's concern, especially in his writings of the '30s, over
the question of what remains of what passes into history-a question he explores
in terms of the photograph.
Within the photograph-as I have suggested, a condensation of past, pre-
sent, and future-time is no longer to be understood as continuous and linear,
but rather as spatial, an imagistic space that Benjamin calls a "constellation" or a
"monad." "Where thinking suddenly stops in a constellation pregnant with ten-
sions," he writes, "it gives that constellation a shock, by which it crystallizes into a
monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he
encounters it as a monad" (I, pp. 262-63; GS 1, pp. 702-3). If this break from the
present signals the taking over of a past, the arrest of present thought in a constel-
lation or monad "blasts" this past open. It "shatters the continuum of history" and
calls forth the history hidden in any given image. It discloses the breaks, within
history, from which history emerges. Focusing on what is sealed or hidden within
an image, on the transitoriness of events, on the relation between any given
moment and all of history, Benjamin's historical materialist seeks to delineate the
contours of a history whose chance depends on overcoming the idea of history as
the mere reproduction of a past.
This history emerges in a moment of disaster, in the time of the disaster that
structures the danger of history. In the almost-no-time of this breakdown, think-
ing comes to a standstill. It experiences itself as an interruption. As Benjamin
explains, historical thinking involves "not only the movements of thoughts, but
their arrest as well" (I, p. 262; GS 1, p. 702). As he explains elsewhere-citing a
remark by Ernst Bloch-history happens when it "flashes its Scotland badge" (AP,
p. 463; GS 5, p. 578), when it enacts this force of arrest. This is why he associates
the radical temporality of the photograph with what he elsewhere calls the
"caesura in the movement of thought" (AP, p. 475; GS 5, p. 595). Announcing a
point when the "past and the present moment flash into a constellation," the pho-
tographic image-like the image in general-interrupts history and thereby facili-
tates another history, another possibility for history. It translates an aspect of time
into something like a certain space, a certain interval, and, in so doing, it works
dialectically to spatialize time and temporalize space-without ever stopping time
or preventing time from being "itself," since time can never be thought away from
this spatialization. Within the photograph, time presents itself to us as this "spac-
ing." What is spaced here-within what Benjamin elsewhere calls "the space of his-
tory [Geschichtsraum]" (AP, p. 458; GS 5, p. 571)-are the always becoming and dis-
appearing moments of time itself. It is precisely this continual process of becom-
ing and disappearing that, for Benjamin, characterizes the movement of time.
Effecting a certain spacing of time, the photograph gives way to an occurrence:
the emergence of history as an image.

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 54 OCTOBER

This is why, from the very moment of the photographic event, the image that
telescopes history into a moment-an abbreviation or miniaturization that tells us
that history can end or break off-suggests that what inaugurates history is written
into a context that history itself may never completely comprehend. This context
exceeds the limits of its representation. This is why what is at stake in reading any
image is the possibility of registering what withdraws from the image-its seman-
tic and referential dimension-and what remains of the image after meaning has
withdrawn from it. To read what exceeds the permeable borders of an image
therefore demands that we respond to what remains of the image, to what is not
exhausted in our effort to understand these remains, beyond or before the tempo-
ralization of the image-a temporalization that renders signification and refer-
ence possible, even as it remains irreducible to them.
To write history-to read an image-is therefore not to re-present some past
or present presence. "To articulate the past historically," Benjamin writes, "does
not mean to recognize it 'as it really was.' It means to take possession of a memory
as it flashes up at a moment of danger" (I, p. 255; GS 1, p. 695). History therefore
begins where memory is endangered, during the flash that marks its emergence
and disappearance. It begins where representation ends. As Jean-Luc Nancy tells
us, "The historian's work-which is never a work of memory-is a work of repre-
sentation in many senses, but it is representation with respect to something that is
not representable, and that is history itself."30 This means that history and memory
can only occur to the extent that they ceaselessly move away from us. If it were not
for the disappearing trace of their own transience, history and memory would in
fact never happen.

VIII

This is why the movement of history corresponds to the photographic event:

both ask us to think about what happens when an image comes to pass. In the fifth
of his "Theses on the Concept of History," Benjamin addresses the possibility of
seizing the image of the past for and in the present, suggesting that the "true pic-
ture" of history intends the present: "The true picture of the past flits by. The past
can be seized only as an image which flashes up [auJblitzt] at the instant when it
can be recognized and is never seen again.... For it is an irretrievable image of
the past that threatens to disappear with every present that does not recognize
itself as intended in it" (I, p. 255; GS 1, p. 695). What "threatens to disappear" here
is not the past, but an "irretrievable image of the past." While we might say that we
can recognize ourselves in this image of the past only insofar as we are destined by
it, the temporality of this picture of history coincides with an interruption of both

30. See Nancy, "Finite History," in The States of Theory, ed. David Carroll (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1990), p. 166.

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 55

recognition and intention: it is irretrievable, it can neither be recognized nor

intentionally realized in the present. This is why what the image intends is the
irretrievability of the present itself.
This image of the past-and of the irretrievable present it intends-may be
"fleeting" and "flashing," but it is also susceptible to being held fast-even if what
is seized is only the image in its disappearance. In other words, if "the true picture
of the past flits by," it is not so much that we are unable to grasp the truth of the
past, but rather that the true picture of the past flits by, the true picture of the past
is the one that is always in a state of passing away. If Benjamin suggests that a "true
picture of the past" does not give us history-or rather, is the only thing of history
we get-he still suggests that it can be viewed as true. This is why to understand
history as an image is neither to assert that history is a myth nor to suggest that a
certain "historical reality" remains hidden, behind our images. Rather, in
Benjamin, it is always as if we were suspended between both: either something
happens that we are unable to represent (in which case all we have are images that
substitute for reality), or nothing happens but the production of historically
marked, fictional images. In either case, the image is a principle of articulation
between language and history. This principle is indissociable from what, within
the image, inaugurates history according to the laws of photography, the laws that
determine-even as they are determined by-the involuntary emergence of an
image. As Benjamin suggests in his notes to the Theses, "History in the strict sense
is an image from involuntary memory, an image which suddenly occurs to the sub-
ject of history in the moment of danger" (GS 1, p. 1243). For Benjamin, these laws
not only account for the force of images on whatever we might call the "reality" of
history, but also for the essential imagism at work within the movement and con-
stitution of history. Images are essentially involved in the historical acts of the pro-
duction of meaning. Their links with knowledge give them their force, and hence
their consequence within the domains of history and politics. This is why the
materialism of Benjamin's theory of history can be allegorized in the photograph-
ic image. To the extent that the function of the camera is to make images, the his-
toriography produced by the camera involves the construction of photographic
structures that both produce and reconfigure historical significance and under-
standing. Benjamin makes this point in his drafts to the "Theses," in a passage that
not only understands history as imagistic, as textual, but also links it to the cita-
tional structure of photography itself:

If one wants to consider history as a text, then what a recent author

says of literary texts would apply to it. The past has deposited in it
images, which one could compare to those captured by a light-sensitive
plate. "Only the future has developers at its disposal which are strong
enough to allow the image to come to light in all its details ...." The
historical method is a philological one, whose foundation is the book
of life. "To read what was never written," says Hofmannsthal. The read-
er, to be thought of here, is the true historian. (GS 1, p. 1238)

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 56 OCTOBER

For Benjamin, the image can only "enter into legibility" at a particular time:
when possible pasts emerge, like an image from a photographic negative, to meet
us from future possibilities. This is why every image is an image from the future-
an image of possible, future pasts. An image of the future, the image can never be
said to exist.

IX

Writing of the Emperor Shih Huang Ti, who "ordered the erection of the
almost infinite wall of China" and "who also decreed that all books prior to him be
burned," Jorge Luis Borges suggests, in his 1950 essay, "The Wall and the Books,"
that "the burning of the libraries and the erection of the wall are operations
which in some secret way cancel each other." He goes on to explain that "the wall
in space and the fire in time were magic barriers designed to halt death," since
"all things long to persist in their being." Nevertheless, if Shih Huang Ti walled in
his empire because he knew that it was perishable and destroyed the books
because he understood that they were sacred, this little parable about the preser-
vation and abolition of history tells us that there can be no burning of books with-
out the erecting of walls and no creating of walls without the burning of books-
and this even if these acts are "not simultaneous."31

But what if the walls are walls of books that remain standing, while buildings
are burned? What is space when it is linked to both texts and violence? What is it
when it belongs to memory? This photograph-only one small piece of the mass
of archival photographic material given to us by the war-this photograph
belongs to the questions of artificial memory and of the modern modalities of
archivation.32 Affecting the entirety of our relation to the world, these questions

31. See Borges, "The Wall and the Books," trans. Eliot Weinberger, in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-
Fictions, ed. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), pp. 344-46. Borges returns to the fig-
ure of the burning library in his 1977 collection of poems, The History of the Night. There, in a poem
entitled "Alexandria, A.D. 641," he writes: "Since the first Adam who beheld the night / And the day
and the shape of his own hand, / Men have made up stories and have fixed / In stone, in metal, or on
parchment / Whatever the world includes or dreams create. / Here is the fruit of their labor: the
Library. / ... The faithless say that if it were to burn, / History would burn with it. They are wrong. /
Unceasing human work gave birth to this / Infinity of books. If of them all / Not even one remained,
man would again / Beget each page and every line, / Each work and every love of Hercules, / And
every teaching of every manuscript. / In the first century of the Muslim era, / I, that Omar who sub-
dued the Persians / And who imposes Islam on the Earth, / Order my soldiers to destroy / By fire the
abundant Library, / Which will not perish" (in Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman
[New York: Penguin Books, 1999], p. 393).
32. Charles Baudelaire was perhaps the first writer to define photography as an archive of memory.
In his "Salon of 1859," in the section entitled "The Modern Public and Photography," he uses this defi-
nition to distinguish photography from art. He notes, writing of photography: "If she saves from obliv-
ion the crumbling ruins, books, engravings, and manuscripts that time devours, the precious things

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 57

not only touch on the relation between technology and memory, on the conse-
quences of new techniques of archivation on our conception of history, but also
on the question of whether or not there is an outside of the archive. In what way
does the archive presume the possibility of memorization, of repetition, or of
reproduction, and thereby a certain exteriority-the exteriority of what is to be
remembered, repeated, or reproduced? To what extent does the logic of repeti-
tion that defines the archive belong to what Freud understands as the death drive,
to destruction in general? To say that the archive begins with the breakdown of
memory is to say that it begins with forgetfulness, with an amnesia that ruins its
commemorative principle. This is why, as Derrida argues in Archive Fever, the ques-
tion of the archive is never simply a question of the past but also a question of the
future.33 To the extent that the archive depends on both the preservation and
destruction of inscriptions, its structure would seem to imply reference to things
beyond its limits. But this strange image of shattered archival space is itself des-
tined for the archive, is even archivized, fleetingly, in the pages of this essay. If the
violence that exposes the archive to its radical precariousness, to its fragility,
allows us to glimpse its finitude, this violence also enables its survival. We need
only recall the history of the burning of libraries-from Alexandria to Strasbourg
to Louvain-and all innumerable written accounts and literatures these conflagra-
tions have occasioned.34

If the archive names a body of texts whose existence is threatened by war,

the war also assures its continued existence. In The Myth of the Blitz, Calder notes
that "the Blitz (the bombing of 1940-41) exists . . . in an uncountable prolifera-
tion of published accounts and published and unpublished documents as well as
in the tape-recorded or filmed memories of 'talking head' survivors." "No archive
of such abundance," he goes on to say, "exists for any other 'major event' in
British history" (MB, p. 119). In linking the destructive violence of the blitz-a
violence often directed at the archive, as evidenced in the German bombing of
the library at Louvain in May of 1940 or in the various book burnings ordered by
the Nazi regime-to the proliferation of texts, Calder here suggests that the blitz
strangely helped preserve the archive, that the very destruction that exposed the
archive to ruin also permitted and conditioned it. Not only is violence the very

whose form will disappear and which demand a place in the archives of our memory, she will deserve
our thanks and applause" (Baudelaire, "Salon of 1859," trans. P. E. Charvet, in Selected Writings on Art
and Literature [London: Penguin Books, 1992], p. 297).
33. "The question of the archive is not," he writes, "a question of the past. It is not the question of a
concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable
concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a
response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what that
will have meant, we will only know in times to come" (Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression,
trans. Eric Prenowitz [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996], p. 36. Hereafter cited as AF).
34. On the burning of the Louvain library, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Die Bibliothek von Lowen: Eine
Episode aus der Zeit der Weltkriege (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1988).

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58 OCTOBER

condition of this preservation, but, in turn, we might say that there could be no
war, no destruction, without the archive: the archive ensures that violence will per-
sist. This fact is all the more legible today when the militarization of technology
corresponds to the textualization of its weaponry. Today missiles and warheads can
be understood more and more as missives, as dispatches in writing, guided as they
are by information and codes, inscriptions and traces.35 To say that today's missiles
are indissociably linked to language, to texts and writing, is not to reduce them to
the inefficacy that some would rush to see in books. Rather, it signals-exposes
and explodes-what in writing corresponds to the power of destruction: no
destruction without texts, and no texts without destruction. As Derrida puts it,
locating the Freudian death drive within the archive itself, what makes archiviza-
tion possible is also what "exposes to destruction, and in truth menaces with
destruction, introducing a priori forgetfulness and the archiviolithic at the heart of
the monument .... The archive always works, and a priori, against itself" (AF, p.
12). The "silent vocation" of the death drive, he adds, is "to burn the archive and
to incite amnesia."36

If texts survive the death they bring, however, it is because they come as what
exceeds the categories of life and death. The archive has always been a name for
both what passes away and what remains. The blitz and its effects announce the
paradoxes of the archive: as what always refers elsewhere, the archive exceeds its
borders, enacting the "anarchivation" without which it would not be what it is. As
Blanchot explains, citing and responding to a sentence from Mallarme:

"There is no explosion except a book." A book: a book among others, or a

reference to the unique, the last and essential Liber, or, more exactly,
the great Book which is always one among others, any book at all,
already without importance or beyond important things. "Explosion," a
book: this means that the book is not the laborious assemblage of a
totality finally attained, but has for its being the noisy, silent shattering
which without the book would not take place (would not affirm itself).
But it also means that since the book itself belongs to shattered
being-to being violently exceeded and thrust out of itself-the book
gives no sign of itself save its own explosive violence, the violence with
which it excludes itself, the thunderous refusal of the plausible: the
outside in its becoming, which is that of shattering. (WD, p. 124)

35. On this point, see Virilio's recent book, The Information Bomb, trans. Chris Turner (New York:
Verso, 2000). See also Derrida's "No Apocalypse, Not Now: full speed ahead, seven missiles, seven mis-
sives," in diacritics 14.2 (Summer 1984), pp. 29-30.
36. Derrida reinforces this point later when he suggests that "the archive is made possible by the
death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation. But
beyond finitude as limit, there is ... this properly infinite movement of radical destruction without
which no archive desire or fever would happen ... [Freud's texts explain] why there is archivization
and why anarchiving destruction belongs to the process of anarchivization and produces the very thing
it reduces, on occasion to ashes, and beyond" (AF, p. 94).

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Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins 59

Pointing to the "dying of a book" that is "in all books" (WD, p. 124), he
evokes Mallarm6's insistence on the abolition and effacement of the book. As
Mallarm6 puts it in Variations sur un sujet, it is "a question of disaster in the library" ("il
s'agissait de desastre dans la librairie').37 For both Blanchot and Mallarm6, this disas-
ter-the dispersion and explosion without which a book would not be a book-is
what brings us to reading.38 But this is why reading books and images means: read-
ing the ruins left behind by a shattering explosion, reading the traces of what is no
longer present. This is also why, we might say, ruins and traces always await us.

There can be no image that does not emerge from the wounds of time and
history, that is not ruined by the loss and finitude within which it takes place, with-
out ever taking place. This means that the image testifies not only to its own
impossibility but also to the disappearance and destruction of testimony and
memory. This is why, if the history and events sealed within this photograph of the
bombed-out Holland House Library call out for memory-and for a memory of
the violence and trauma it evokes-this memory could never be a memory that
aims to restore or commemorate. If the past is experienced in terms of loss and
ruin, it is because it cannot be recovered. Nevertheless, that this violence and
trauma, this loss and ruin, live on in the various historical, political, religious, or
literary forms that today inherit their legacy means that the experiences to which
they would refer are not behind us. There is no historical "after" to the trauma of
loss and violence.39 If we can no longer believe that memory and commemoration
will help us prevent disaster in the future, however, we are still obliged to imagine
a means of remembering what remains without remaining, what, destroying and
consuming itself, still demands to be preserved, even if within a history that can
never enter into history. If nothing can replace what has been lost to history, is it
possible to interrupt the course of history and its catastrophes, or are we endlessly
condemned to reiterate and enact this condition of loss and displacement? This
question tells us why we must learn to read the past, and, in particular, the irre-

37. Stephane Mallarme, "Etalages," in Variations sur un sujet, in Ouevres completes, ed. Henri Mondor
and G.Jean-Aubry (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945), p. 373.
38. In the wording of Blanchot, "Literature is only a domain of coherence and a common region so
long as it does not exist, as long as it does not exist for itself and conceals itself. As soon as it appears in
the distant presentiment of what it seems to be, it flies into pieces, it enters into the path of dispersion
in which it refuses to be recognized by precise, identifiable signs" ("La Recherche du point z6ro," in Le
Livre a venir [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], p. 277).
39. Evoking Adorno's famous claim about the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz,
Hamacher makes a similar point in relation to the possibility of writing history after an "absolute trauma."
See his 'Journal, Politics," trans. Peter Burgard et al., in Responses: On Paul de Man 's WartimeJournalism,
ed. Werner Hamacher, Neil Hertz, and Thomas Keenan (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988),
p. 459.

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 60 OCTOBER

trievable images of the past, in a way that knows how these images threaten to dis-
appear as long as we do not recognize ourselves in them-but ourselves as the
ones who, touched by the ruins of time and history, are no longer simply our-
selves. This is why, as the Italian artist Salvatore Puglia has suggested, what remains
for us is

to collect the fleeting images of what has disappeared, to recollect the

floating fragments of this history of disappearance. What remains is
the possibility of a gesture: to hand, to hold out, in the scattered mem-
ories to which we are condemned, some vestigia, some expressions of a
multiple anamnesis.40

What remains are the fragments, the ruins of an image or photograph-

perhaps one like this.

40. This passage is from an unpublished manuscript entitled "Abstracts of 'Abstracts (of
Anamnesis).'" The text was delivered at the Alexander S. Onassis Center at New York University in con-
junction with Puglia's exhibition, "Abstracts (of Anamnesis)" in the spring of 1995. On the necessity of
interrupting or ruining the image, see Puglia's comments in a recent interview entitled "An Art of the
Possible," included in Fynsk's Infant Figures: The Death of the "Infans " and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 147-49.

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