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COPY, ARCHIVE, SIGNATURE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.............................................................................................viiBetween Translation and Invention: The Photograph in Deconstruction, by Gerhard Richter.....................ixCopy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, by Jacques Derrida.................................1Notes.......................................................................................................55

Chapter One

A Conversation on Photography

JACQUES DERRIDA

Hubertus von Amelunxen: Skiagraphy refers to shadow writing, and to the absence of the referent. You speak of this in your work Memoirs of the Blind. Skiagraphy seems to prefigure the imprint of an absent present. The inventor of the photographic negative, William Henry Fox Talbot, called his invention skiagraphy or "words of light." In 1837 he made a photographic image with an inscription of the alphabet, the name of the place, and the date, as if he wanted to show that the entire alphabet could be taken into the image and that photography was going to be the first optical medium to enter the domain of writing and to bring writing into the very essence of the image. In Memoirs of the Blind you speak of skiagraphy, the writing of shadow, as a simultaneous memory, a memory of the present, a division of the instant. But whence, then, this memory of the instant, whence this archive of the present?

Jacques Derrida: It's a question of point of view, and you are touching on the most acute point [la pointe] of the difficulty. Is it possible to think otherwise than from the point of view of the point? But is it possible also to think from a point of view? How to imagine an archive that is somehow immediate, a present that consists of its own memory or its own reproduction? In that case, which is something more and other than a case, experience itself, the experience of what one calls the present would be constituted as self-preserving, certainly, but in such a way that something may be lost, and something kept and preserved, from the same event, from the point of the event, from its miniscule extremity, its pointedness, its pointe. It is indeed a matter of the pointe, the most acute question, the sharpest and most pointed question about this pointe. For in general one conceives of the instant precisely as a pointe, as stigm, as Punkt, and the punctuality of the point would be, first of all, indivisible. But in the situation that we are evoking, we have to do, paradoxically, with an experience of the singular, of the non-iterable, of the unique that would, however, be divisible enough for an archive to separate off from it somehow: an archive would remain; it would survive, whereas that of which it is the archive has disappeared-a normal phenomenon-but in this case the archive would not be simply the copy, the reproduction or the imprint of another present. If the archive is constituted by the present itself, it is therefore necessary that the present, in its structure, be divisible even while remaining unique, irreplaceable and self-identical. The structure of the present must be divided so that, even as the present is lost, the archive remains and refers to it as to a non-reproducible referent, an irreplaceable place.

I don't know if this introduces us to the specific question of photography, or if this general law would be valid for every archive, or in any case for the phenomena of the signature in the broad sense. It's true that photography performs this miracle as a technology of the miracle, that is, by giving something to be seen. And of course it has often been remarked (Barthes insisted on this) that what seems to give the photogram its specificity is this apparently irreducible viewing of the referent, this pointing at and seeing the referent, insofar as it has taken place only once. In the end, photography seems to say (and to let this be dictated to itself): this took place, and it took place only once. It is the repetition of what has taken place only once. Reference, if not the referent, here seems to be ineffaceable. One would no longer be able to bracket it. That is what Barthes says, with a great deal of good sense. I don't know what you think of this. I think that, in the little text I devoted to Barthes, I hint at a certain reserve regarding this question. I believe I understand what Barthes says, and what he proposes seems necessary to me. I only wonder what, in that case, is proper to photography. Every original imprint is divided as an archive and preserves its reference, as with the original manuscript of a letter, or a signature, for example. What happens, in those cases, when photography reproduces this original without giving to be seen a singular moment of the world, when for example a photocopy is made of this original signature? A photocopy is, after all, a photograph, isn't it?

HVA: Indeed, the photocopy, like the photograph, retraces and reproduces the original by means of light, but whereas the photograph fragments and ruins space, the photocopy seems to preserve the original through an exact duplication. Now the new technology of photography offers us digital cameras. The support is digital, and you have a diskette with twenty-four or fifty or more images, and as with a tape recorder or a VCR you can erase whatever has been recorded, or present it on a television screen. No more negative-and the trace, although it can be read by a computer, becomes invisible to the human eye, to the point that referentiality is called into question. Indeed, what then will be the future status of the referent in a production of images that points toward a repeated obliteration?

JD: This question concerns, perhaps, the name photography and the relation between this name and a certain concept of photography. Its relation to a certain history of this concept-a history that may be finite, that may be reaching an end; a relation in any case with the finitude of this history. That is what I was worried about a moment ago. Given the event and the technical possibility you are speaking of, does what we have available to us now deserve the name of photography? Is it of the same order as what was possible with the earlier technology and with a paper support? If one can erase images, since the imprint is no longer supported by a "support," at least not the support of a stable paper substance, this means that we no longer have to do, one might say, with the recording of an image, even though one is recording something: recording an image would become inseparable from producing an image and would therefore lose the reference to an external and unique referent. As was perhaps always the case without our realizing it, we would be dealing with a photographic performativity, a notion that some might find scandalous and that singularly complicates-without dissolving it-the problem of reference and truth: the problem of a truth to be made, as Saint Augustine would have said, no less than revealed, unveiled, explicated, clarified, exposed, developed. Certain filmmakers, Wim Wenders or Peter Greenaway for...