Zapruder and Benjamin

A great new article by Max Holland on the film documenting the Kennedy assassination made by Abraham Zapruder suggests that the first bullet fired at Kennedy (of three bullets) was shot within a gap in Zapruder's filming. Zapruder began filming before Kennedy's Lincoln had made it onto the main road. He turned it off and then, according to Holland, the first shot (that missed) was taken. Turning it back on, we then see the two other shots fired at Kennedy. Most viewings of the film just pick up the tape at the point where Zapruder turned the camera back on. Holland concludes:

If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective — Oswald still did it — it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.

The "transfixing" that goes on when we look at the Zapruder film, is then directly linked to the assassination being a structural part of the film--and, one could say, the structure of any film in general. What is so interesting about documentary films like that of Zapruder's is the fact that they always are viewed like evidence. The film here itself betrays this general quality of film because it was itself used for evidence.

This is similar to what Benjamin has to say about the structure of anything filmed or photographed: photos are photos of a crime. That crime, for Benjamin, is always murder--or assassination. Why? Because photos always document the death of experience, and thus are always already photos of dead people. To be a little more precise: photos and film always capture an experience that is staged for the camera. This doesn't mean that people in films and photos are always posing for the camera--Kennedy in this instance obviously is not--but that reality is becoming filmable and not what the camera is supposedly supposed to capture: "authentic" experience. This experience, then, always lies outside the filmable--in the Zapruder film, experience (and specifically the real experience of the assassination) lies within the gap in the filming. In the end, this is what is appealing to Benjamin about the photos of Atget--as he says in "The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility" they display unabashedly the structure of the photo as the death and murder of experience:

The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. For the last time the aura emanates from the early photographs in the fleeting expression of a human face. This is what constitutes their melancholy, incomparable beauty. But as man withdraws from the photographic image, the exhibition value for the first time shows its superiority to the ritual value. To have pinpointed this new stage constitutes the incomparable significance of Atget, who, around 1900, took photographs of deserted Paris streets. It has quite justly been said of him that he photographed them like scenes of crime. The scene of a crime, too, is deserted; it is photographed for the purpose of establishing evidence. With Atget, photographs become standard evidence for historical occurrences, and acquire a hidden political significance. They demand a specific kind of approach; free-floating contemplation is not appropriate to them. They stir the viewer; he feels challenged by them in a new way.

One could easily see that Benjamin would have similar things to say about the Zapruder film and how it challenges us, transfixes us. If this all sounds a bit too "theoretical," ponder this: isn't that which is fascinating about the Zapruder film the fact that the camera is only one of the devices that is pointed at Kennedy at this moment, tracking his movements? That is, that what gets viewed (from a different perspective, of course) in the scope of a rifle pointed at Kennedy would look the same way as the film?

What if an other were other than an other: Derrida, Lacan, Heidegger

What if the other were not one, single other, but more than one other? This is the question Derrida puts to Lacanians.
More precisely, he asks, what if the other were not one, single other, the other, but other than an other? We have to be more precise here because we are not moving between the terms of singularity and multiplicity but between the terms of singularity and alterity, identity and difference. That is, if we were just to ask if the other were not one but more than one, we would be asking if the other were multiple in its singularity, and not about the alterity of this other. When Derrida talks about "other(s)," with the "s" in parentheses, he is not indicating multiplicity: he is not saying that the other is always multiple. Badiou, in his effort to make a Lacanianism complicit with some Derridian notions, precisely interprets it this way--which is only wishful thinking. This is an important distinction: if we were to ask about whether the other were multiple, we would still be thinking of the other itself, of alterity, as singular, as a singular site where multiple others resided.
We now can see that Derrida's question is more radical. What if an other were other than an other? That is, what if alterity was already othered? What if alterity was other to itself? What if, when one tried to specify the place of alterity, of what is not here or with one in their singularity, one never could find it, because it was always in another place than this other place? What if, looking at Pakistan, the other of India, Indians could not find Pakistan--what if Pakistan were elsewhere? Or Israel, with respect to Palestine? Or "terrorism" (to duplicate the way we here raise concepts to otherness to assert superiority--one cannot point to a nation we are the other of, there are too few or too many--and in doing so only reveal an abysmal lack of understanding and respect for national otherness that exceeds every other nation's) with respect to the US? This is what Derrida is getting at. Indeed, it perhaps implies that the other is multiple, but this is not the thrust of the question, for the multiple could only be accounted for if it were viewed as whole, as singular, that is, as other that was not also other to itself.
An other is other than an other. This is what Derrida means when he says, in The Gift of Death, tout autre est tout autre. But this is not a formula that is localizable to only the "late" Derrida, the "ethical" Derrida. This is prevalent in his earliest work. To see how this is so, lets only substitute "difference" for "alterity." What is identical to itself has its other in difference, in what makes identity different in some way from others. We can translate what Derrida says, then, as this: difference is different than difference. Difference is different from itself. Difference has no identity. In other words, this radical difference, a difference that cannot be commensurable with any system or economy of identity, differs the moment where and displaces the location when it would be merely a singular difference and not already different from this difference. Derrida names this difference that is different than difference, différance.
Why is this a question posed to Lacanian psychoanalysis? Because Lacan merely conceives of difference and alterity as different and other. It does not consider it as different and other from itself. It is in this way that Lacan can speak of the Other, even if this Other does not exist or is nothing. As Derrida puts it in "Envoi" (in Psyche, volume 1) the other conceived this way "would disappear like the wholly other" (127). In other words, any alterity that came on the scene as alterity conceived in this way, would merely disappear into what just gets opposed wholly to what is singular. "Wholly" is used because what is other for Lacan is indeed totally other, but is only other as a whole, as a singular otherness, that is, as an otherness that is identical to itself, even if (as Lacan says) it doesn't exist. To put it in a different way, Lacan's Other is not other, because it is merely a singularity opposed to a singularity. To pass off this Other as otherness, like Zizek or Badiou or any other Lacanian, would need some justification in Derrida's view.
This should further illuminate my other writings below on the difference between Derrida and Lacan, especially with respect to their approaches to Freud. I think I'm getting a grip on it now! With this comes a heavy qualification on my first post, which sought to locate them in relationship to Heidegger's question of being. This can't be done, since for neither of the thinkers being is the real question. The real question is alterity, otherness, and how to be responsible for it. In other words, Heidegger's question only becomes interesting when being engages alterity--and for Heidegger this is when being is as itself, opened up or split open in its essence as ek-sistence, or in presence. Let's just sketch out Heidegger's position quickly in relation to the above. Being in presence is for Heidegger being in otherness to itself, and, as this otherness, precisely itself in its ownmost possibility. Presence, then, is otherness in the sense of the wholly other. In other words, being is the otherness of Lacan. Derrida's critique of presence, then, is not a war waged against presence just because presence is bad for Derrida (as many people and even Derridians think), but because presence does not adequately get at the otherness, the ek-sistence of being, like Lacan's otherness. Derrida thus makes presence encounter différance, an othering of an other, a differing of difference. To put it a different way, Heidegger goes beyond the present to presence, and then Derrida makes him go out of presence back into the present that is other than itself, that differs from itself in its presence as present, that re-presents itself. Lacan, for Derrida, cannot do this just as much as Heidegger.

What is dialectic?

I wanted to elaborate what I was beginning to get at in my post on Derrida and dialectic below. But before I do that, I have to return to the issue of dialectic itself.
What is dialectic? I have two posts below on dialectic and language that were drafts of a presentation that I made to a class on dialectic, and, after seeing how those presentations ended up, I realize it might be better to explain the dialectic in a different way.
The reflections below were motivated by a reading of dialectic that Heidegger makes in "Hegel and the Greeks:" dialectic is the process whereby thought goes through the holding-together and gathering that takes place in language, (in Greek, dia-legein) and comes to appearance that way (so that the whole is, in Greek, dia-leges-thai).
But Heidegger offers a seemingly conflicting reading of dialectic in his early course on the Phenomenology of Spirit: there, dialectic is described as the moving between the speculative and propositional sentence. It is this latter explanation that was a bit clearer to my class, so I'll explain it that way. Hopefully, though, afterwards you can see perhaps how these two explanations are not conflicting. And hopefully we will be led to a position where we can explain a "Derridian dialectic" in a later post.
So, again, what is dialectic? It seems easy to characterize at first, but after a while, you can see that no one is really clear about what it is. Gadamer makes this clear in his book on dialectic (Hegel's Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies--I recommend it). Dialectic for Hegel is not just a mode of allowing thoughts to address their contradictions, like in ancient or medieval philosophy (in saying it is "not just" these, of course I am not indicating that something of the spirit of Hegel is not in them and vice versa.) Nor is it the mere play of falsity and appearance that Kant makes it out to be in his Critique of Pure Reason, though this influences heavily the sense of "phenomenology" that we find in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel's sense of dialectic is more restricted. And yet, because of this restriction, it is also the most vague: divorcing himself from the tradition of dialectic to specify a really precise concept of what it does ends up making it hard to specify without going through the entire Hegelian philosophy. In fact, this is its point: it is the Hegelian philosophy insofar as this philosophy is the interrogation of negativity and its result in spirit. One cannot extract dialectic from the interrogation of which it is a constitutive movement.
But if we understand this, we can perhaps get a little more specific as to what it is, making reference to Hegel but also trying to wrest dialectic from out of Hegel. Let's begin: dialectic is not a force or power, but a result of a force or power--specifically, "the tremendous labor of the negative." That said, dialectic as a result is always being again taken up by this negative labor, so that it can never be said to merely be the sheer content and residue that this negativity deals with. That said, dialectic cannot be a form or method that experience or spirit through the labor of the negative gets processed through--Kojeve is good in showing you that it is not the form of the labor of the negative.
So, dialectic seems to merely be what we sait it was: a "constitutive movement" of a movement (of negativity and spirit) that is larger than it. This gets us nowhere. Or does it?
Understanding dialectic as a result that is not a result, that is, not a content nor a form, allows us to account for three binaries that the dialectic itself introduces in the texts of Hegel:
Immediacy/mediation
Indeterminate/determinate
Universal/particular
The first deals with how dialectic is a result or not, the second with how it is a content or not, the third with how it is a form or not.