"What does it mean to be subject to desubjectification?" (142).

I particularly responded to this Agamben quote questioning peoples' ability to assume the "vacant place" of the subject when they have lost the self-identity necessary to be a subject. The very fact that the place, however, is referred to as "vacant" produces a sentiment of emptiness, much like the individual himself. Can an empty person assume an empty position? For Agamben, the empty person or the "muselmann" loses touch with reality and therefore cannot act as a witness to himself or utilize the "I" shifter. As mentioned in lecture, Agamben opposes the idea that in order to be human, language must be employed as he believes this idea would exclude the musselmann from humanity. By believing the musselmann cannot perceive himself fully and will consequentially fall prey to desubjectification, Agamben also excludes the muselmann from humanity--to what degree is a "subject" solely a tangible being and to what degree is a "subject" the ability to use "I"?

Similar Image or Semblance Image

"The image is neither nothing, nor all, nor is it one--it is not even two. It is deployed according to the minimum complexity supposed by two points of view that confront each other under the gaze of a third" (152).

This quote comes from the beginning of Didi-Huberman's work. As I was starting the essay, I was surprised that I read the specific sentence more than 3 times. Even after doing so, I was still confused and unsure about what he meant. However, the photos illustrated in the later parts of his work definitely help me better understand. During the lecture on Thursday, I found Professor Doane's explanation interesting and very helpful. As Ryan notes in his post, it seems necessary for a photo image that the image needs associable events to "augment" meaning of the image.

I found Prof. Doane's lecture on the 4 images that Didi-Huberman presents and analyzes to be extremely intriguing, especially when juxtaposed with the cropped picture of the women running to the gas chambers. It raises the question to me of if images can represent events due to their extreme changeability; the cropped image loses the traces of risk involved in taking them, thus changing the event in a sense that the photos are trying to represent. While both photo images picture a scene in a larger context, by cropping the photo, the meaning seems to change. Which in my mind suggests that images alone cannot solely represent events such as the Holocaust. More context is needed to augment the images.

"According to the law that what man despises is also what he fears resembles him, the Muselmann is universally avoided because everyone in the camp recognizes himself in his disfigured face." (Agamben, 52)

Something triggered in my memory when I came to this line, and I realized that it reminded me of Freud's Oedipus complex as discussed, I believe, in "The Uncanny." In both of these instances, a human subjected to marginalization by a greater force at power (the woman and the Muselmann) appears to another being as inferior to a degree; the woman has been conquered by castration, the Muselmann has been denigrated as a non-being unable to experience neither life nor death. But doesn't Freud view his concept of the uncanny as a return to an earlier state of things, even a return to death? Does a man, when confronted with the Muselmann, seek a return at all in that vein?

1. Didi-Huberman discusses the Holocaust as an event beyond human interpretation or imagination; the destruction was something entirely incomprehensible to us beyond statistics and death tolls.

2. The sublime, according to Lyotard, is "when the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept" (What is Postmodernism?, p. 78). He goes on to say that "[ideas about the sublime] impart no knowledge about reality..." (78).

Does this mean that (a) the Holocaust was a sublime event? and (b) that it cannot be considered reality or history from which we can learn?

A Re-turn that is not a Return

I will begin by expressing my delight at the gesture towards an apparent return to the real and to the human in the texts assigned for this week and my up-set at the realization that this gesture is performed in light of tragedies that marked the human and (so) real history.

Yet, I note that this (apparent) “return” involves not a bracketing or absolute denial of structuralism or poststructuralism (or postmodernism) but a full embracing and completion of it: both Agamben and Didi-Huberman have learned the lessons of difference “(or to borrow Derrida’s coinage) (of) differences” (Didi-Huberman, 121) and of the annihilation of “the One” (totality) – thus, Didi-Huberman calls for “multiple singularities always susceptible to differences, or to differances” (121) while Agamben sees himself as bringing to completion the work of Benveniste and Foucault. In this sense, Agamben’s and Didi-Huberman’s moves represent not a return, but ,rather, a re-turn.

I also observe that both Agamben and Didi-Huberman ground their theories in the reference to exceptional events that recently marked human history (Auschwitz), (re-)turning to that which has been designated as the un-representable and, thus, realizing Lyotard’s concluding demands in the Manifesto for/about a Post-Modern condition: “Let us wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unrepresentable; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.” (Lyotard, 82)

Lastly, I reflect on the impossibility to see and to speak about “that which remains unspoken”/unseen (to extrapolate and “adjust” Wittgenstein) that both thinkers refer to in the readings for this week. In Didi-Huberman’s case, this impossibility is formulated in terms of “that which remains inaccessible as an all” (p. 138). For Agamben, the impossibility is conceptualized as the impossibility to bear witness (which, nevertheless, becomes a possibility with the figure of the Muselmann).

I propose that in order to fill the “lacunas” that these two undertakings of a re-turn open and confront with, a re-turn to and of metaphysics is necessary.

Didi-Huberman says, "lanzman thinks that no image is capable of "saying" that history, which is why he tirelessly films the witnesses' speech. Godard thinks that henceforth all images will speak to us only of that history (but to say that "they speak of it" does not mean that they "say it", which is why he tirelessly reexamines our entire visual culture in light of this question......They boldly mix the historical archive--which is omnipresent--with the artistic repertoire of world cinema. they show a lot, they make a montage of everything with everything. so a certain suspicion arises: the suspicion that they are lying about everything."

this reminds me of Minh-ha's narration of Reassemblage when she says something to the effect that she doesn't intend to speak about the people but rather, to speak near by the people. the ethnographic context of that documentary (if we can agree to classify at all) is the discourse of the other and the impossibility of understanding the other, which inherently is our inability to represent other. given that thought, how is it that the process transcends the inability of the medium? why is the process less problematic than the representation itself? can ethics be a medium?