Finally, when man entirely appears, it’s the first time we see him seen by an eye that is not, it too, the eye of a man. For me the place for thinking the most beloved living machine was that zone of almost absolute death that surrounded the first craters one or two kilometers away.… I was lying down right in the cinders that were as warm and moving as a big beast’s fur.
—Jean Epstein, Le cinématographe vu de l’Etna.
[Translation mine.—Trans.]
“Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”: We know the fate and misfortune of this statement that appears under Derrida’s pen for the first time in 1967 in De la grammatologie. And its first English translation by Gayatri Spivak—“There is nothing outside the text”—probably did nothing to make things any easier.1
Why then run the risk of making things even worse by diverting this statement, which has almost become a bad sales pitch for deconstruction, toward the filmic image? Why place an attempt to think cinema, or more generally film, under the sign of this formulation already overburdened with misunderstandings, film, a medium for which Derrida—and I’ll be coming back to this—never hid his fascinated admiration nor his incompetence?
There are many texts where Derrida protests against the misunderstandings or the unwarranted appropriations of this little phrase, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which he sometimes mentions not without irritation, as if it has become foreign to him, as “a sort of slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction.”2 In his 1988 postface to Limited Inc., he recalls that “the text is not the book,” that it is not “confined in a volume, itself confined to the library,” in short that “the concept of text” as he understands it “does not suspend reference—to history, to the world, to reality” (137).
Keeping these misunderstandings and clarifications in mind, how then should we understand that “there is no extrafilm [il n’y a pas de hors-film]”? And what changes—if in fact, concesso non dato, something does—if we substitute film for text in the aforementioned slogan? These are the questions I would like to begin to consider here, after having dared, in the last pages of Apocalypse-Cinema, this formulation that may appear a bit nonchalant or sudden—“il n’y a pas de hors-film”—as if it were a question of awkwardly entering into competition with the most striking taglines in the history of Hollywood cinema (one might think in particular of the famous one from Alien: “In space no one can hear you scream”).
But after all, is it not Derrida himself who will have pointed out the importance of commercial and popular cinema as the site par excellence for filmic experience? Even though he said he didn’t know anything about it, in an interview he gave to the Cahiers du cinéma he made it a point to emphasize the importance of the entertainment movie, its structural and constitutive importance, and not only its quantitative or economic one:3
Yet just before this secret, before this avowal that is immediately converted into a necessity—I don’t know anything about it, I only enjoy the most spectacular kinds of spectacle, but that is how it must be—we encounter a phrase that, taken out of context and transformed into another tagline, could also be a prelude to all kinds of misunderstandings, dictating, for example, to readers who are in a hurry to fight it out the conviction that deconstruction decidedly has nothing to tell us about the filmic image. Derrida in effect declares: “I have no memory for cinema. It is a form of culture that, in me, does not leave a trace” (76).
Here, we need to resist the temptation, however great, to see cinema as a kind of blind spot or point: what the thinker of the trace was unable to think. For if we are willing to continue to read, a bit further on we come across another statement that considerably complicates the preceding declaration. Cinema, Derrida says, “recounts what we don’t get over, it recounts death for us”:
It designates for us what should not leave a trace. It is therefore a trace twice over: a trace of the testimony itself, a trace of oblivion, a trace of absolute death, a trace of what is without trace. (80)
How should we understand these two apparently contradictory statements (on the one hand, cinema is said not to leave a trace; on the other, cinema would in a way be the trace par excellence, the trace of the absence of trace)? How should we understand these two phrases that I am thus juxtaposing—or that are juxtaposed—while we read a text where, in a more direct way than elsewhere, Derrida speaks of his relation to cinema as a spectator?4
Here, we need to start again from cinder.
From cinder as a trace that is such only if it can be completely erased.
In Points … , we in effect find this important clarification:
The words I had somewhat privileged up until now, such as trace, writing, gramme, turned out to be better named by “cinder” for the following reason: Ashes or cinders are obviously traces—in general, the first figure of the trace one thinks of is that of the step, along a path, the step that leaves a footprint, a trace, or a vestige; but “cinder” renders better what I meant to say with the name of trace, namely, something that remains without remaining, which is neither present nor absent, which destroys itself, which is totally consumed, which is a remainder without remainder. That is, something which is not.… The cinder is not: This means that it testifies without testifying. It testifies to the disappearance of the witness.5
Cinder, then, provides a possible point of departure as we start or restart an elaboration of a deconstructive thinking of cinema and film.
Let us take the anachronistic risk of taking a huge step backward. To find a new point of departure in a very old text from an archive that speaks to us across an infinite distance, from which it nonetheless allows a question to resonate that seems to be asked in advance of cinema and its cinders.
O even as here thou art, aslumber in death,
So shalt thou slumber down the rest of time,
Released from every harrying pang. But we,
We have bewept thee with insatiate woe,
Standing beside whilst on the awful pyre
Thou wert made ashes; and no day shall take
For us the eternal sorrow from the breast.6
“Made ashes,” become cinders, or reduced to ashes: In Lucretius’s Latin, this is stated as cinefactus. “Cinefied,” as we might also translate it, a translation that would open a space for a secret and anachronistic resonance between the two possible meanings of the root cine- that would thus oscillate between cinder and movement, from the Latin cinis to the Greek kinēma, from cineration to cinema.
This is much more than a matter of simple homonymy that blithely spans the abyss of centuries or millennia in an offhand way, from Lucretius to the Lumière brothers. For cinder belongs to cinema, kinēma and cinis belong to one another, so true is it that cinder is the name or the figure for what cinema shelters within itself structurally: the apocalyptic possibility I was able to describe as ultratestimonial: The camera is always already carried to the limit of all possible testimony or testament—“It testifies without testifying,” as Derrida says in Points … ; “It testifies to the disappearance of the witness.” The camera is structurally carried right up to the last border of testimoniality itself, since it includes in advance within itself the point of view of the after-all, the point of view from after the end of the world, in other words the point of view of no one.
Many Hollywood superproductions endeavor to stage this cine-gaze where cinematography and incineration melt into each other; many apocalyptic blockbusters seek to show it, in their own way, as what comes after the explosion of blinding whiteness,7 after the fade to white of a general atomic radiography. Like in the closing credits of the second volume of the Terminator franchise (James Cameron, 1991), the camera pans over the desert of cinders the planet has become now that it has returned to the minerality of the cosmos.
Does this mean that cinema is dedicated, structurally dedicated to archiving the unarchivable, to being transported in advance toward this place of the “outside-the-archive” that Derrida described as “impossible,” immediately adding that “the impossible is the affair of deconstruction”?8
This question does await us, but we need to make it wait a while longer. It will lead us to interrogate what a certain vein of speculative materialism would now like to call the “arche-fossil.”
Dziga Vertov proposed the concept of a “cine-eye,” a “mechanical eye” that we might also understand as a gaze that is itself ashen or incinerated, in other words as the vision of this “eye of matter” Deleuze spoke of.9 And it is toward this point of view from after humanity (or, actually, from before) that a filmic history of cinder should take us.
We might, of course, be tempted to undertake this cine-history by first of all mentioning the most spectacular and expected appearances of cinder on screen, in particular in what are called disaster movies, whose paradigm is configured in 1974 by Towering Inferno (directed by John Guillermin and Irwin Allen), during a decade that continues to be considered the golden age of the genre. Since then, the dust and scoria of this huge Hollywood fire haunt the memory of more recent films, such as Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006), where we find ourselves under the rubble of the twin towers with two surviving cops, the police officer Will Jimeno (Michael Peña) and the sergeant John McLoughlin (Nicolas Cage). The cinder that is thus offered to our sight—and almost to our taste when one of the two senses it on his parched taste buds and tongue—this cinder appears as what remains of a major sacrificial incineration that the well-minded humanism of the film is constantly reappropriating according to a political trajectory we know all too well. We are supposed to cry, to let tears fall on this dust of the victims who then really do nothing more than nourish the heroism of a cheap defense of democracy and human rights.
Let us therefore look rather to other cinders. For example, to the ones where Ingrid Bergman remains—whether lying down, sitting, or standing up—when she looks from the top of the Stromboli at the world of Sicilian fishermen she is leaving. These ashes filmed by Rossellini in 1950 do not seem to be appropriated by anyone; they accompany or rather ground the experience of radical alterity that the character of Karen undergoes, between earth and heaven, when she exclaims, “Oh God! What mystery! What beauty!”
“No, I can’t go back,” says Karen. Earlier in the film she was indeed the one who seems to have started the flight of the ashes: Her gesture of lighting the fire in the fireplace of the miserable house she was forced to share with Antonio (Mario Vitale) did indeed seem to extend to the sleeping volcano’s awakening. But what we clearly see in the overwhelming final scene at the top of the volcano is that the eruption of cinder in cinema, cineruption, marks precisely the impossibility of any reappropriation, of any return to self and home. Here, cinders signify, they cinefy, if I may say so, the lack of any home to which one might return. In other words the absence of reversal, of katastrophē in the theatrical sense of a happy ending.10
In the register of comedy as well, there is cinder that remains without remaining. And it sometimes happens that these cinders—of the incinerated deceased, of the one who is cinefactus—mime their reappropriating return the better to pervert it. This is what we can see (if it is still a question of seeing, for the gaze itself here seems to have to be literally ashen) in the hilarious scene of dispersing the ashes of Donny (Steve Buscemi) at the end of The Big Lebowski by the Coen Brothers (1998). At the edge of a cliff, the Vietnam War veteran Walter Sobchak (John Goodman) and Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski (Jeff Bridges) throw the remains of their deceased friend into the sea. And the gray dust that comes out of the can (a Folgers ground coffee can that serves as a happenstance urn), the cremation cinder carried by the wind is all over The Dude, clinging to him, sticking to his sunglasses, literally cinefying his eyes.
It is, however, in Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) that cinder not only resists being catastrophically reversed, but also and more importantly ends up cinefying and reducing a cine-eye to ashes, an eye that is precisely no longer an eye since it has definitively disappeared under the eyelid behind which it seemed to be sheltered as the promise of a gaze. The sequence is well known, but we must once again look at it and read its long “film-phrase” (as Vertov would have said).
Immediately following the opening credits, there are first of all the interlaced bodies, She and He (Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada), covered up with a cinder that will soon also seem to sparkle like gold dust: The image’s extinction and brilliance, incineration and shimmering pass into one another and become confused. He says, “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.” She answers, “I saw everything. Everything.”11 Not seeing anything and seeing everything, being extinguished and shining seem to come down to the same thing when it’s a question of cinder, when we look from beyond the catastrophe, there where nothing can be simply reversed any more.
Very quickly, the film starts speaking of cinema. After this ultratestimonial overture in which blindness and hypervision collapse into one another, Hiroshima mon amour cites films while the voice-over comments on them. We first see a sequence from Hideo Sekigawa’s Hiroshima from 1953. And She is the one who glosses, “The films have been made as authentically as possible. The illusion, it’s quite simple, the illusion is so perfect that the tourists cry” (18). Then, when the voice of He says “no,” there are images from “newsreels” going by, until the unforgettable one of a hospitalized woman’s eyelids that open onto an absent eye.
Alain Resnais, dir., Hiroshima mon amour, 1959
The voice of She has just insisted on everything that has “risen again from the ashes,” on everything that will have survived overall cinefaction: “certain species of animals,” or else flowers, those “cornflowers and gladiolas … , morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes.” But what remains in the final count, what emerges at the end of the sequence is that eye that has become pure matter once again, that eye that vision has left: an eye from after the general cremation, from after the holocaust or the everything-burned, an eye that has been incinerated.
This cinecinder that, from Resnais’s Hiroshima to all of Hollywood’s Terminators, haunts films that are so different from one other, this cinefaction or cinefication is also a question that inhabits philosophy, in particular after the Second World War. I am thinking not only, of course, of Günther Anders’s gripping Hiroshima Is Everywhere12 (the first part of which is the journal of his 1958 trip to Hiroshima), but also of a whole series of texts that will have envisaged “the hypothesis of total and remainder-less destruction of the archive,” as Derrida puts it in “No Apocalypse, Not Now,”13 or else the “end pure and simple of anything whatsoever,” as Lyotard writes in The Inhuman:
The sun is getting older. It will explode in 4.5 billion years.… After the sun’s death there won’t be a thought to know that its death took place. That, in my view, is the sole serious question to face humanity today.… With the disappearance of earth, thought will have stopped—leaving that disappearance absolutely unthought of.14
In this ultracastrophic philosophical landscape15—one that projects us after, or beyond the catastrophe—I would like to linger for a bit on one philosophy that seems to seek to singularize itself by breaking with the post-Kantian inheritance of modernity: I am thinking of the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux, who, in After Finitude, attempts to “describe a world where humanity is absent; a world crammed with things and events that are not the correlates of any manifestation, a world that is not the correlate of a relation to the world.”16 For the problem of what Meillassoux calls the “arche-fossil”—in other words “materials indicating the existence of an ancestral reality or event; one that is anterior to terrestrial life” (10)—this problem is also, symmetrically, conceptualized as that of the beyond-catastrophe, in other words from the perspective yet to come of the disappearance of human thought and of earthly life in general:
Closer inspection reveals that the problem of the arche- fossil is not confined to ancestral statements. For it concerns … thus, not only statements about events occurring prior to the emergence of humans, but also statements about possible events that are ulterior to the extinction of the human species. For the same problem arises when we try to determine the conditions of meaning for hypotheses about the climactic and geological consequences of a meteor impact extinguishing all life on earth. (112)
In short, Meillassoux’s interrogation—and, more generally, that of a certain speculative realism seeking to become a reference point alongside him today—bears on the status of the truth of statements relative to events for which “the question of knowing whether they were witnessed or not” is of no importance whatsoever, since this “question of the witness” is in effect “indifferent to knowledge of the event” (116). At stake in this speculative realism is therefore very precisely what I have called the ultratestimonial.
This is the point of departure for a critique of what Meillassoux names correlationism, “the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant,” according to which “we never grasp an object ‘in itself’, in isolation from its relation to the subject” (5). Now this Kantian transcendental subject, the condition of possibility of all knowledge, is described by Meillassoux in a long addition to the English translation of his book as “a point of view on the world” (24). A concept—that of “point of view”—that appears only after the fact in this English interpolation, as if to end with it all and subsume all post- Kantian correlationism in a general perspectivism.
Like other contemporary traditions of thinking, speculative materialism thus also shares disaster movies’ concern with ultratestimoniality. But it seems to me that what escapes it is quite precisely what I am naming here, after Vertov, a cine-eye, by attempting to allow what it necessarily bears as ashes to be heard. More precisely, what Meillassoux’s so-called realist philosophy is missing is this cinefied point of view in which, through a cinematics that in advance reduces every subjective gaze to ashes, the real steps away from itself to make an image. A point of view in which it already or still gives itself to be seen, but without this donation implying some vision constituted in a subject: Every point in which the so-called real is redoubled and becomes repeatable (in other words also erasable), each one of these points of view is opened there where there is precisely no point17 of view, none at all yet or already no longer.
In his 1954–55 seminar, Lacan proposed the following “little apologue”:
Suppose all men to have disappeared from the world.… What is left in the mirror? But let us take it to the point of supposing that all living beings have disappeared. There are only waterfalls and springs left—lightning and thunder, too. The image in the mirror, the image in the lake—do they still exist? It is quite obvious that they still exist. For one very simple reason—at the high point of civilization we have attained … we have manufactured instruments which, without in any way being audacious, we can imagine to be sufficiently complicated to develop films themselves.… Despite all living beings having disappeared, the camera [imagine a surveillance camera, for example, or the eye of a satellite] can nonetheless record the image of the mountain in the lake, or that of the Café de Flore crumbling away in total solitude.18
There is no one in Paris any more at the table in this Café de Flore where “I” am writing these lines—“I,” in other words, “I, a machine,” as Dziga Vertov put it, I who “am showing you the world as only I can see it.”
Like in the cosmos of Alien, there is no ear at the bistro counter to hear you scream. Yet there where silence reigns, there where the view of the point of view has also burned in the holocaust of cinefication, the image nonetheless remains and leaves a trace and a gap. And it is here, at this editing table where no one is seated, that resides the possibility of the cine-eye as the most proper place of the filmic arche-trace.