"Follow-Up" #10

"The poem attempts to pay careful attention to everything it encounters; it has a finer sense of detail, of outline, of structure, of color, and also of the 'movements' and the 'suggestions.' These are, I believe, not qualities gained by an eye competing (or cooperating) with mechanical devices which continue being brought to ever higher degrees of perfection. No, it is a concentration that remains aware of all dates of history.

'Attention'--permit me at this point to quote a maxim of Malebranche which occurs in Walter Benjamin's essay on Kafka: 'Attention is the natural prayer of the soul.'
...
And what, then, would the images be?
That which is perceived and to be perceived one time, one time over and over again, and only now and only here. And the poem would then be the place where all tropes and metaphors are developed ad absurdum.

Topos study?
Certainly, but in light of that which is to be studied,: in light of u-topia.
And human beings? and all living creatures?
In this light.

Such questions! Such demands!
It is time to turn back."

--from "Meridian" by Paul Celan, adapted from Jerry Glenn's translation given in Sovereignties in Question: the Poetics of Paul Celan by Jacques Derrida (NY: Fordham UP, 2005) pp. 182-3.

"Follow-Up" #9

From Baudrillard’s the intelligence of evil, or the lucidity pact again:

"The peculiar role of photography is not to illustrate the event, but to constitute an event in itself. Logic would demand that the event, the real, occur first and that the image come after to illustrate it. This is, unfortunately, the case most of the time.

         A different sequence demands that the event should never exactly take place, that it should remain in a sense a stranger to itself. Something of that strangeness doubtless survives in every event, in every object, in every individual. This is what the image must convey. And, to do so, it must also remain in a sense a stranger to itself; must not conceive itself as a medium; must not take itself for an image; must remain a fiction and hence echo the unaccountable fiction of the event; must not be caught in its own trap or let itself be imprisoned in the image-feedback." (99)

"There is a haziness about the real.

         Reality is not in focus. The bringing into focus of the world would be ‘objective reality,’ that is to say, an adjustment to models of representation—exactly like the focusing of the photographic lens on the object. Fortunately, the world never comes definitively into focus in this way. "(98-99)

"We must then strip away, always strip away, to get back to the image itself. Stripping away brings out the essential point: namely that the image is more important than what it speaks of, just as language is more important than what it signifies. "(98)