But of the secret itself, there can be no archive, by definition. The secret is the very ash of the archive. . .
– Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever
From the ashes of the archive, from its cinders, emerges the figure of another archive, a secret archive, an archive of secrets, "the very ash of the archive." Other because, as Derrida says, there can be no archive of the secret itself, "by definition." "In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner." By definition, the archive is always open, undivided, visible, and accessible. One stands in the archive always before the law of the archive and defined by it. A law that calls forth the secret in order to banish it.
Undefined, then, reduced to ash, the shadow archive, an "archive of the virtual," as Derrida calls it, erupts from the feverish imagination of a mal d'archive, an archive illness and desire that burns with a passion. (An archive sickness in the sense of lovesickness, the secret archive remains a phantasy enflamed by longing and fever. ) Against this fever, the secret archive seeks to protect the archive, its interiority, from detection and destruction. From infection, contagion, fire.
But a secret archive is not the same as an archive of secrets. The latter is achieved through a passage made possible by psychoanalysis. "As if one could not," Derrida writes, "recall and archive the very thing one represses, archive it while repressing it (because repression is an archivization), that is to say, to archive otherwise, to repress the archive while archiving the repression." To archive otherwise, anarchivize.
Two anarchives. Sigmund Freud's Moses and Monotheism (1934-38) and Jun´ichirô Tanizaki's In Praise of Shadows (1933-34) locate the sites of two archives that were never constructed, or rather, were constructed in the architecture of the virtual. Almost or nearly archival, these structures name two virtual sciences, one Jewish, the other "Oriental." From two ends of the twentieth century, these two archives speak to the question of the end, an end, one might say of the twentieth century, what will have been its end-in cinders and ashes. Psychoanalysis, claims Derrida, "aspires to be a general science of the archive, of everything that can happen to the economy of memory and to its substrates, traces, documents, in their supposedly psychical or technoprosthetic forms." A virtual science, perhaps, of the shadow, a shadow science.
Moses and Monotheism, which serves in part as the occasion for Derrida's reflection on the archive, and more generally psychoanalysis and Freud's house in exile, begins with a secret. Freud's 1938 Prefatory Note, written in Vienna before his own exodus, concludes with this determination: "I shall not give this work to the public." Freud then adds:
But that need not prevent my writing it. Especially as I have written it down already once, two years ago, so that I have only to revise it and attach it to the two essays that have proceeded it. It may then be preserved in concealment till some day the time arrives when it may venture without some danger into the light, or till someone who has reached the same conclusions and opinions can be told: "there was someone in darker times who thought the same as you!"
Writing is here severed from giving, relegated instead to an alternate passage to the archive. Freud consigns this manuscript of many disparate pieces-itself a Mosaic-to darkness, but also to the outside. "There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside." Freud exiles this work to the outside, to a period of latency. "Concealed" and suppressed, Freud's Moses forms a cryptic archive, sealed, secret, and remote like the prehistories of Moses himself. Moses is thus, according to the logic of the archive, destined to return from the outside, from the future to which it has been designated. It is this exteriority and deferral that inscribes the law of the archive. The exiled text, banished to the darkness, forms a "prosthesis of the inside." It is sent outwards in order to protect the interior, serving to establish that interiority from the outside. Moses haunts from the outside and future the origin of the archive.
In concealing the manuscript, Freud seeks to protect it from the destructive forces that surround him in 1938, the Catholic Church and National Socialism. By June of the same year, however, Freud's secret archive was complete. The manuscript, now ready for publication from England, was irreversibly estranged from its author. In exile, Freud writes: "I feel uncertain in the face of my work; I lack the consciousness of unity and of belonging together which should exist between an author and his work." In a sense, Freud has been forced to destroy his relationship to the manuscript, relinquish his authorship, in order to preserve it. It returns to him as the text of another, signed by another; the book arrives like a returned gift.
To protect the archive, Freud has had to remove himself from it, erase his relation to it. This erasure signals a shift in the economy of the archive. The destruction that threatens the archive changes from a desire to a drive; it no longer originates in an agency (Catholicism, Nazism) but rather a force, the force of destruction itself. Preservation is made possible by destruction, by the figureless drive to destroy. The secret archive is bound by this paradox. The death drive, as Derrida notes, never leaves "any archives of its own. It destroys in advance its own archive," leaving only traces, ghosts. It "is above all anarchivic." And yet "The archive is made possible by the death, aggression, and destruction drive, that is to say also by originary finitude and expropriation." The archive is driven by destruction, by its relation to death, achieved in the finitude established by the drive.
The drive that at once destroys and preserves the archive also renders it spectral. "It is spectral a priori," writes Derrida: "neither present nor absent 'in the flesh,' neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met." Neither corporeal nor ethereal, transparent nor opaque, the secret archive assumes the properties of a phantom, a shade. From the cinders of the archive, in its cooling embers, a shadow appears: a shadow of the archive, its impression, but also a phantom archive. An archive haunted by the archive. And haunting "implies places, a habitation, and always a haunted house."
The archive, from the Greek arkheion, Derrida notes, designates "a house, a domicile," an address that "shelters in itself [the] memory of the name arkhê." The archive is first a building, a physical structure that carries within it the trace of a place. Of the Western-style hotel, an archive of the other in modern Japan, Tanizaki complains about the lights and more importantly, the heat they emit. In the Miyako Hotel in Kyoto, Tanizaki describes "a white ceiling dotted with huge milk glass lights, each sending forth a blinding blaze." The excessive illumination (here a Western law, law of the West, enlightenment) drives away the shadows:
As in most recent Western-style buildings, the ceilings are so low that one feels as if balls of fire were blazing directly above one's head. "Hot" is no word for the effect, and the closer to the ceiling the worse it is-your head and neck and spine feel as if they were being roasted. One of these balls of fire alone would suffice to light the place, yet three or four blaze down from the ceiling, and there are smaller versions on the walls and pillars, serving no function but to eradicate every trace of shadow. And so the room is devoid of shadows.
The Western archive, its arkhê, descends from above and assails the body like a fever. It burns away the shadows, the virtual archive of an Oriental science. Total illumination. The blinding heat dispels for Tanizaki, the fantasy of a "visible darkness."
Tanizaki concludes his discourse on the house, the arkheion, by summoning another domicile, his proper dwelling; "the mansion called literature." There, he would "push back into the shadows the things that come forward too clearly." "I do not ask that this be done everywhere, but perhaps we may be allowed at least one mansion where we can turn off the electric lights and see what it is like without them." Against the electric archive, Tanizaki imagines a shadow archive, a literary archive of the Orient.
In 1945, a Western force greater than electricity assailed the Japanese arkheion. The atomic assault on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States unleashed the heat of atoms, which threatened not only the Japanese archive, but the "mansion called literature," the literary archive. The possibility of nuclear war, Derrida writes, "is obviously the possibility of an irreversible destruction, leaving no traces, of the juridico-literary archive-that is total destruction of the basis of literature and criticism." Derrida consigns the nuclear war to the archive, literature, and the human habitat, as an absolute referent. The fable of nuclear war comes to serve as a death drive, the limit against which the archive survives: "If, according to a structuring hypothesis, a fantasy or a phantasm, nuclear war is equivalent to the total destruction of the archive, if not of the human habitat, it becomes the absolute referent, the horizon and condition of all others." The hypothetical referent of a "total and remainderless destruction of the archive," Derrida insists, remains a fable, a fabulous fiction, which aligns it in some fundamental manner, with literature, the arkheion or mansion of literature, the law of literature.
If "literature" is the name we give to the body of texts whose existence, possibility, and significance are the most radically threatened, for the first and last time, by the nuclear catastrophe, that definition allows our thought to grasp the essence of literature, its radical precariousness and the radical form of its historicity.
In this light, in the light of a searing Western heat, Tanizaki's anxiety over the precariousness of the mansion of literature, its fragility, appears prophetic. Yet, as Derrida notes, the "explosion of American bombs in 1945 ended a 'classical,' conventional war; it did not set off a nuclear war." In the end, the mansion remained, remains, manêre, stands still in the smoldering embers of the archive. "Trace destined, like everything, to disappear from itself, as much in order to lose the way as to rekindle memory. The cinder is exact: because without trace it precisely traces more than an other, and the other trace(s)." The "total and remainderless destruction of the archive" remains a hypothesis cast beneath the shadows of the archive.
When the smoke dissipates, the incinerated archive resurfaces. "Il y a là cendre." From Cinders: "-What a difference between cinder and smoke: the latter apparently gets lost, and better still, without perceptible remainder, for it rises, it takes to the air, it is spirited away, sublimated [subtilise et sublime]. The cinder-falls, tires, lets go, more material since it fritters away its word; it is very divisible." Cinder words, like atoms, can be divided further. They scatter and disperse across the literary archive, forging another archive in its shadows. The cinders of literature preserve the hypothesis of total destruction, its fiction, as memory, or rather, hypomnêma, "mnemotechnical supplement or representative, auxiliary or memorandum." "The archive," writes Derrida, "is hypomnesic." It leaves traces on the surface of the body, a pyroprosthetic body that in turn burns the archive. "All these cinders," writes Derrida elsewhere, "he feels them burning in his flesh."
There, in the pyroprosthesis of the archive, are cinders. "Il y a là cendre." Of the place of the archive, its Dasein, Derrida poses the following question: "How are we to think of there? And this taking place or this having a place of the arkhê?" For Derrida, the topology of the archive, its geography, requires one to think and write atomically. "From this point on, a series of cleavages will incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon." In the archive, or towards it, language becomes atomic-microscopic, deconstructed, splitting incessantly into near imperceptibility. The "archiving trace," Derrida concludes, "its immanent divisibility, the possibility of its fission, [is] haunted from the origin." Haunted by an atomic divisibility and fever that burns the archive.
– The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others that is a cinder. Memory or oblivion, as you wish, but of the fire, trait that still relates to the burning [trait qui rapporte encore à de la brûlure]. No doubt the fire has withdrawn [retiré], the conflagration has been subdued, but if cinder there is [s'il ya là cendre], it is because the fire remains in retreat [retrait]. By its retreat it still feigns having abandoned the terrain. It still camouflages, it disguises itself, beneath the multiplicity, the dust, the makeup powder, the insistent pharmakon of a plural body that no longer belongs to itself--not to remain nearby itself, not to belong to itself, there is the essence of the cinder, its cinder itself.
The fire retreats into the shadow, hides only to retrace the path of the secret destruction of a virtual archive carried on the body, a mnemic archive inscribed on the surface of the skin-burned, as it were, on the surface of the skin.
The pellicular surfaces-skin and film-yield an archive marked on the body. In the Freudian archive, Derrida discovers "a private inscription," one he describes as the second exergue. It consists of an inscription on the skin, the gift of a book, the book, from father to son: "A very singular monument, it is also the document of an archive. In a reiterated manner, it leaves the trace of an incision right on the skin." The private archive that moves, in this instance from father to son, takes place on the surface of the book and the skin:
The foliaceous stratification, the pellicular superimposition of these cutaneous marks seems to defy analysis. It accumulates so many sedimented archives, some of which are written right on the epidermis of a body proper, others on the substrate of an "exterior" body. Each layer here seems to gape slightly, as the lips of a wound, permitting glimpses of the abyssal possibility of another depth destined for archaeological excavation.
The private inscription elicits an archaeology of the surface. To dig deeper, to excavate, is to return to the surface not as the inability to probe depths, but rather as the capacity to render the abyssal features of the surface. What remains in the destruction of the archive returns always to the surface, to the skin, as a skin, a remainder etched onto the skin, a book. A "memory," Derrida calls it, "without memory of a mark."
Of the impressions left by Freud's death drive, Derrida remarks: "This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful. As memories of death." The impressions are "scriptural or typographic." From cinders and skin to shadows and impressions, another archive of surfaces emerges. In 1895, the year that Freud and Josef Breuer published Studies on Hysteria, cinema was born. 1895 also marked the year that photography crossed the threshold of the human body in the form of the x ray. The x ray, also known as skiagraph, or shadow script, rendered the body a pure surface, a translucent film. A shadow of the literary archive, film can be seen as an electric theater of shadows.
Tanizaki imagines an interior darkness, inherent to Japanese skin that spreads outward and stains the Western other, like black ink on white paper. This image of an ontology of shadows is virtually reversed in what has become a poignant symbol of the atomic assaults, the so-called black rain. In his 1965 novel Black Rain (Kuroi ame), Ibuse Masuji approaches the unfigurable event through a symptom, one of its after-effects. Yasuko, Ibuse's ill-fated protagonist, describes the black rain that fell from the irradiated Hiroshima sky. In a diary entry from 9 August 1945, she writes: "I suddenly remembered a shower of black rainThundery black clouds had borne down upon us from the direction of the city, and the rain from them had fallen in streaks the thickness of a fountain pen." The black rain materializes, makes visible, the atomic violence, serving as a writing instrument that transforms the radiation into a script. Yasuko's body provides the writing surface. She finds that the dark streaks had stained her skin: "I washed my hands at the ornamental spring, but even rubbing at the marks with soap wouldn't get them off. They were stuck fast on the skin." The image of black rain, atomic residue, falling on Yasuko's face in Imamura Shohei's 1988 film adaptation of Ibuse's novel seeks to render the displaced point of contact between the atomic blast and its victims. The secret archive of the atomic referent. As an after-effect of the Hiroshima bombing, the liquid inscriptions remain on her skin as a visible mark of the radiation-an unabsorbed trace of the violence; an emulsion "stuck fast on the skin." The stain serves as the only visible sign of the radiation that will eventually destroy Yasuko. Inscribed on her skin as an initial sign of radical exteriority, the mark of radiation eventually vanishes into Yasuko's body, remaining in it as the imperceptible origin of her sickness.
Tanizaki's phantasy of an essential, interior darkness and the uncanny phenomenon of black rain frame a specific topographical problem. In both instances, there is no fusion, synthesis, or sublation at the place where interiority and exteriority converge-only an uneasy stasis. Tanizaki's Oriental physics suggests the impossibility of ever merging the light, or auras, that surround Eastern and Western peoples into a harmonious whole. The black rain, as a literary trope, underscores the impossibility of understanding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it is a signifier that indicates the inability of language to absorb and stabilize the atopicality of atomic destruction. Black rain, like Tanizaki's shadows, can be seen as a figure for the limits of language; a form of writing that is, at the same time, not a part of language, unabsorbed, and unassimilated by the archive. It forms the inscription on the skin of a secret archive, literally in this case, an archive of secrets. The idea that certain elements can never mix (races and cultures, for example) may have already been part of a Japanese self- consciousness prior to 1945; the atomic assaults on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, however, expanded that notion into a philosophical crisis. The atomic bombings created what might be termed a conceptual emulsion.
By definition, an "emulsion" consists of "any mixture of two immiscible liquids (e.g. oil and water) in which one is dispersed throughout the other in small droplets" (OED). The phrase "an immiscible mixture" suggests a paradox, a synthesis that remains, in the end, unsynthesized. As a chemistry, the principle of emulsion facilitated the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century. By fixing visible light and other forms of radiation on chemically treated photosensitive plates-in the first instances with a mixture consisting of a silver compound held in suspension in collodion or gelatin-the photograph holds the image between surface and atmosphere, film and air. The photograph is neither absorbed by the surface nor is it allowed to dissipate into the air. Suspended between two dimensions and arrested in time, the photograph appears as an effect of the interstice opened by the immiscible mixture. The photograph also marks an encounter between light and liquid. As an active agent in the inception of photography, the emulsive logic continues to operate in the photographic and filmic unconscious.
The opening shots of Alain Resnais's 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour render the idiom of emulsion in the realms of catastrophe and love, history and memory, and sexual and cultural difference. The immiscible mixture highlights the impossibility of reconciling the disparate experiences of suffering into a unified whole. "You saw nothing in Hiroshima." On the bodies and between them, an emulsion informs Duras and Resnais's narrative: it effects a film or tissue between the two principal characters, Hiroshima and Nevers. Their bodies are indistinguishable, covered alternately in ash and fluid. Hiroshima and Nevers are ultimately unable to merge, unable to perform the phantasmatic syntheses of love. Symptomatically, the substances that fall onto their skin remain unabsorbed, disappearing from the surface by the third dissolve. The scene suggests an attempt to designate the body as the writing surface of an atomic script.
The attempt to transcribe the atomic experience directly onto human skin represents perhaps, a visceral response to the advent of atomic warfare. Not only a response, however, the act can be seen as a kind of trope-an atomic trope. The surface of the body is where many of the atomic marks were recorded, at times with an excessive visibility, at others with an uncanny invisibility. Writing on the body serves as a kind of ritual repetition of the original violence, the act of anarchiving. A ceremonial act that seeks to make visible a kind of writing that is not itself always apparent. For, the sometimes imperceptible atomic radiation determines a mode of inscription that does not hold fast to the surface, a writing that seems to leave traces before there have ever been marks. Radiation hovers between the surface and the atmosphere, impermanent, appearing only momentarily before vanishing either into the body's depths or the environment that surrounds it. Cinema, a medium bound by the logic of surfaces, provides a metonymy of the human surface: screen and skin. The displaced layers suggest a relationship between cinema space, world, and body, which Siegfried Kracauer has linked with the figure of an imaginary "umbilical cord." Film and body: the terms are conceptually bound by a phantastic maternity, an emulsion that keeps them at once apart and together. In the postwar era, Japanese cinema served as a site for the another urgent convergence, that of fact and figure, photographic and allegorical representation. The fusion of fact and figure, or art in the postwar Japanese cinema produced an array of film artifacts that retained the logic of emulsions: films that explored the encounters between heterogeneous elements, which resisted the moment of a dialectical writing, representation, knowledge.
A number of postwar Japanese films can be seen as having attempted to represent non-dialectical writing. Two scenes, from two different postwar films, register the complexity of representing atomic phenomena. These scenes, from Mizoguchi Kenji's Ugetsu (1953) and Kobayashi Masaki's Kwaidan (1964), exemplify the structures of emulsion in post-atomic Japanese cinema, its permeation of the narrative space. Both scenes can be read as allegories of atomic annihilation-the fear of being enveloped and dissolved by unseen forces. In Mizoguchi's film, an adaptation of Ueda Akinari's 1758 literary text Tales of Moonlight and Rain (Ugetsu monogatari; first published in 1776), the scene involves an encounter between Genjuro and his demon seducer, Wakasa. Disguised as a woman, Wakasa has, in the course of her relationship to Genjuro, gradually depleted him of his vitality, thrusting him closer to death. Genjuro-who has forgotten his former life, his abandoned family, and dreams-has become a shade. In contrast, Wakasa has increased her presence in the material world, drawing sustenance from Genjuro's life. In the scene, the two subjects have been displaced from their proper worlds, occupying bodies that are in varying states of liminality. A local priest has diagnosed Genjuro's condition and, reading the phantom marks on his face, proposes to save Genjuro by inscribing his body with Sanskrit prayers. According to the Buddhist belief, the holy text will protect Genjuro from the phantom grasp.
In the encounter between the marked Genjuro and the unsuspecting Wakasa, the talisman intervenes, disrupting the final exchange between the living and the dead. The scene begins when Genjuro announces his intention to depart from Wakasa's mansion where he has been kept. Attempting to persuade him to stay, Wakasa leans forward to take hold of her captive. As she makes contact, however, Wakasa recoils in pain, burned by the heat of Genjuro's body. The two are separated at that moment by the surface of Genjuro's skin, his living flesh, which has been stained, re-materialized, by the priest's inscription. Here, the written word intervenes as a kind of screen. If Wakasa can be understood as a metaphor for atomic annihilation, then Genjuro's textured body has countered the atomic force with its own searing materiality. Reclaimed by the living word, Genjuro is turned into an emulsion: part living and part dead, part skin and part text, he has become a suspended animation. In fact, the entire scene is figured by the rhetoric of the emulsion. The registers of spirit and body, feminine and masculine, tactile and optical are suspended within the frame of this encounter. Only by marking his skin, affirming the materiality of its surface, can Genjuro hope to recover his humanity. Not only do the two subjects form an immiscible mixture, Genjuro, who bears the sign of the liquid ink on his flesh, embodies it. The scene concludes when Wakasa retreats into the shadows, unable to overcome the divide that Genjuro's painted skin imposes, and he lapses into unconsciousness. Genjuro awakens the next morning, as if from a dream, lying half-naked and alone beside Wakasa's mansion, which has been reduced to ruin during the course of the night. Wakasa had been, for Genjuro and the audience, a sustained hallucination, a film within a film, a kind of cinematic mise-en-abîme. The very nature of Genjuro's experience with Wakasa is emulsified; never resolved as either dream or reality.
The mise-en-scène that suspends Genjuro and Wakasa determines a unique topography, one that can only take place within cinematic space. The immiscible properties that Genjuro and Wakasa represent are neither blended nor eliminated but rather sustained to produce a third space, a unique realm of phenomenality. That third realm is produced not only as a consequence of the narrative but as an effect of the medium. In the vocabulary of cinema, the encounter between Genjuro and Wakasa can be seen from the vantage point of what Christian Metz has called an "impression of reality." Impressions open, for Metz, a space between fantasy and reality. Seen in this light, one can note the physical as well as psychological nuances that resonate in the term "impression": that is, impressions can be made on the body as well as on the mind. (Aristotle, who is believed to have identified the phenomenon of "persistence of vision," connects the physical and psychological forms of impression in his treatise "On Dreams." According to Aristotle, dreams are the effects of physical sensations that have been impressed directly upon the dreamer's body.) Both forms of impression are enmeshed in the scene from Ugetsu: cinematically and thematically, one witnesses the spectacle of impression, the representation of Genjuro's liminality. Put another way, Genjuro has been reduced to a cinematic impression, to a photogram pressed between the surfaces of imaginary and real space. In Mizoguchi's film, the regimes of illusion and impression are never sublated. They remain until the end, suspended in an existential emulsion. While praising Ugetsu, film critic Ueno Ichiro notes this disturbance, "regret[ting] that the fantastic and real realms do not blend harmoniously." The divide separating Wakasa's fingertips from Genjuro's skin and the spectator from the screen represents the atopical tissue that holds the emulsion apart and together.
In Kobayashi's Kwaidan, also adapted from a literary work (Lafcadio Hearn's 1904 text of the same name), the emulsion suffuses another scene, another encounter between immiscible elements. The encounter between phantom and flesh is similarly mediated by the liquid ink script. Kobayashi's vignette "Hoichi the Earless" begins with the depiction of a battle from the Tale of Heike (Heike monogatari), which chronicles the twelfth-century defeat of the Heike at the hands of the Genji clan. The decisive battle of "Dan-no-ura" in the Straits of Shimonoseki marks the site where the Heike "perished utterly, with their women and children, and their infant emperor."
The story of the blind monk Hoichi unfolds at the water's edge. Famed for his musical skills on the biwa lute, Hoichi's recitation of the battle of "Dan-no-ura" is said to have reduced even goblins [kijin] to tears. Hoichi's ability to induce tears in monsters signals his anomalous status at the threshold of the natural world. Hoichi is, from the beginning of the film, liminal. Surrounded by waves and tears, Hoichi is approached by the spirits of the dead warriors who ask him to recite the story of the battle. Unable to see his patrons, Hoichi believes he has been summoned to a palace. Over the course of several nights, Hoichi performs the epic tale at the gravesites of the Heike warriors.
As Hoichi's nocturnes begin to exhaust him and the signs of his decay begin to appear on his face, an alarmed priest follows Hoichi to his nightly rendezvous with the Heike. Upon confirming his suspicions, the priest prescribes the textual Buddhist remedy: Hoichi's naked body is to be covered with prayers in order to protect him from the ghosts who are drawing Hoichi closer to the threshold of death, as Wakasa had done to Genjuro. During the ritual inscription, the red paint is first applied to Hoichi's body, merging with the reddish hue that filters the shot. The black ink prayers are then inscribed across the surface of Hoichi's body. The attempt to saturate the body with prayer reveals a strange shift from text to liquid and reveals a fantasy of immersion. (This fantasy invokes the narrative of a Greek emulsion Achilles, a half-mortal, half-god warrior who was dipped in the river of immortality. ) Unlike Genjuro, whose body is marked strategically with the Sanskrit characters, Hoichi is covered from head to foot in wet calligraphy. Immersed in scripture, Hoichi is instructed to remain immobile and mute when the phantom escort comes for him.
The encounter between Hoichi and the warrior-ghost begins with the slow materialization of the phantom in the temple courtyard. As his shape solidifies, stopping just short of full opacity, the phantom starts to call Hoichi's name. The trace of echo, pronounced at first, gradually recedes as the phantom's voice, like his body, begins to stabilize. The point-of-view that determines this scene posits the spectator as its subject. That is, the phantom is rendered from the perspective of a seeing human subject. Receiving no answer from Hoichi, the phantom enters the temple and attempts to locate the blind monk. At this point, the camera captures Hoichi, who is now shown in a semi-transparent state. The shift in perspective transfers the position of the subject to the phantom. Hoichi's invisibility is seen from the unseeing perspective of the phantom. The point-of-view lingers between two subjects, opening a vantage that belongs neither to the phantom nor the spectator.
At work in the shift from one perspective to another is the creation of a distinctly phantom view, which renders the entire scene transparent. The dialectic of visibility and invisibility is mediated by the trope of transparency. The invisible Hoichi is not, however, entirely protected from the phantom's gaze. As the title foreshadows, Hoichi's ears are vulnerable. Having forgotten to cover Hoichi's ears with prayer, the priests have left them exposed to the ghostly touch. Seeing only Hoichi's ears, the phantom tears them from his body. The blind Hoichi is rendered earless.
In Kwaidan, the optical divide separates flesh from shade, the real from the fantastic whereas the existential threshold in Ugetsu is determined by the tactile senses. The phantom warrior is able to tear off Hoichi's ears but cannot see him, while Wakasa sees Genjuro but cannot touch him. Vision and touch-opticality and tactility-define two modes of perception that mediate a series of oppositional elements: masculine/ feminine, life/death, language/body, and natural/ supernatural. Opticality and tactility surface in these two films as inadequate means of perceiving the ghostly impression. The two senses converge over the inscribed body, revealing, at that site, their inability to penetrate the phantom world. The deathly encounters in Ugetsu and Kwaidan chart a space between the two senses, at once optical and tactile, and yet properly neither. Somewhere between the two, a sensual topology begins to take shape. The suspension of the traditional dialectic between opticality and tactility effects an emulsion of the senses, opening the space for more complex sensualities-for impressions rather than perceptions.
The disturbance of the senses in Ugetsu and Kwaidan is engendered in part by the movement from literary text to cinematic image, by the impression of the written text onto the surface of the skin. The relationships of Ugetsu and Kwaidan to their literary origins are structured to a large degree by their renderings of the transition from literature to cinema, text to specter. Within each scene, the metamorphic force of the literary corpus is figured by the writing that covers Genjuro's and Hoichi's bodies. In both films, the gesture of writing on the body functions as a mechanism for preventing the destructive contact that threatens to absorb Genjuro and Hoichi into the other world of the imaginary. The phantoms can be seen here as figures for atomic annihilation, their mode of being, thanatographic. They force the body to retreat into the secrecy of the archive.
The act of writing on the body in the two scenes suggests a desire to reestablish the absolute separation between life and death. In each case, the exscription seeks to clarify the bodies that have become shadows. The exscription can also be seen as a symptom of the catastrophic collapse of meaning, of discernible space, and of the boundaries of existence brought about by the atomic radiation. The supplemental tissue intervenes between the liminal corpora, illuminating the profound confusion between the living and the dead in the wake of 1945.
Between literature and film, then, a liminal archive begins to emerge: phantom being overflows into the living realm, producing an uncanny world that cannot be entirely exhibited nor, for that matter, perceived. Both postwar films revisit pre-World War II literary texts that are themselves reflections on war. The literary text itself appears as a trace, a memory, a remnant of the Japanese archive that was virtually destroyed in World War II. The final shot of Oshima Nagisa's In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no korida, 1976) captures the crisis: Sada lies alongside her dead lover Kichi, whom she has dismembered. On his corpse, Sada has inscribed, with Kichi's blood, a declaration of eternal love. A voice-over reveals the film's historical frame, 1936, marking the escalation of the war and its disastrous end. On the eve of an imagined total war, Sada and Kichi have suspended their impossible consummation, preserving it in the static temporality of a photogrammatical instant. Like Hiroshima and Nevers, Sada and Kichi are frozen in the moment of an ill-fated synthesis: the phantasmatic economy of love cannot suture the logic of a disaster that has, according to Blanchot, already past and is yet still to come. "To think the disaster," he writes, "is to have no longer any future in which to think it." The liquid inscription on Kichi's skin can be seen as a form of protection against the imminent catastrophe, a sign of the graphic events to come, and the impossibility of writing, that is, archiving disaster.
For Blanchot, the disaster "is what escapes the very possibility of experience-it is the limit of writing. This must be repeated: the disaster de-scribes." The disaster, which cannot be described, itself de-scribes, unwrites, assails the archive by erasing it. Seen in this light, the figure of erasure initiates a graphic system that annihilates graphics by destroying the graphicality of the graph. The destruction of graphicality, however, must also be understood as a form of preservation: it prevents, or postpones indefinitely, the eruption of a catastrophe. The figure under erasure, signals perhaps the possibility of a truly atomic archive, a writing that can only ever be yet to come, since its arrival would, as Derrida implies, signal the total destruction of writing itself, of the future which is made possible by writing. The shadow archive, cinema, protects writing as such, by erasing the text, textuality, and, in the end, the very texture of the body on which the writing takes place. If an archive of the atomic bombing is to be written, it must first be unwritten, erased, described in the rhetorical economy of an antigraphy.
June 2000
A section of this essay appeared as "Antigraphy: Notes on Atomic Writing and Postwar Japanese Cinema" in Review of Japanese Culture and Society vol. X (December 1998 [1999]): 56-65.
1 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3 (original emphases).
2 In Archive Fever, Derrida traces the etymology of the archive to its origins in the law, the house of the law, the place where the archons "recall the law and call on or impose the law" (2).
3 Derrida, Archive Fever, 66. "We are en mal d'archive: in need of archives ... To be en mal d'archive can mean something else than to suffer from a sickness, from a trouble, or from what the noun mal might name. It is to burn with a passion" (91).
4 Jean-Claude Lebensztejn has