Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Memento Mori
- 2 The Death-Drive Does Not Think
- 3 A Subject Is Being Beaten
- 4 White Over Red
- 5 Literature – Repeat Nothing
- 6 A Harmless Suggestion
- 7 The Rest of Radioactive Light
- Postscript: Approaching Death
- Index
7 - The Rest of Radioactive Light
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Note on the Text
- Series Editor's Preface
- Author's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Memento Mori
- 2 The Death-Drive Does Not Think
- 3 A Subject Is Being Beaten
- 4 White Over Red
- 5 Literature – Repeat Nothing
- 6 A Harmless Suggestion
- 7 The Rest of Radioactive Light
- Postscript: Approaching Death
- Index
Summary
La matière, étant éternelle, devait avoir des propriétés éternelles, comme la configuration, la force d'inertie, le mouvement et la divisibilité.
(Voltaire)The philosopher should begin by meditating on photography, that is the writing of light, before setting out toward a reflection on an impossible self-portrait.
(Derrida)Like the light from a dead star, waves still emanate toward us from, among other times, the early seventeenth century – from Shakespeare's Macbeth, for instance, as we saw in the last chapter, or from Hamlet. In some sense the play remains contemporary with us, though in a sense quite different from the broadly humanist assertion of its universal and continuing relevance.
The persistence of an old thing, even a dead one, the continuance of light over time, the concept of the photograph, the ‘radioactivity’ of artworks, Hamlet, Samuel Beckett and, again, Freud – these are the themes I want to braid together in this final chapter. And if it is possible to combine them (obviously it is) then this possibility itself has some relevance which can serve as a sort of protocol for what follows: the condition for combining such historically and culturally different material must be a potential contemporaneity of each thing with every other. Their historical and cultural difference restrains them insufficiently to stop them coming together. Though time separates Shakespeare and Beckett, for example, it cannot do so absolutely or there would be no chance now for a comparative analysis.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Death-DriveFreudian Hauntings in Literature and Art, pp. 166 - 179Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2010