A Failed Snapshot [instantané raté]: Notes on Nathanaël (Nathalie Stephens), SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. Theatres of the Catastrophal

 
Nathanaël (formerly known as Nathalie Stephens) writes entre-genre, composes (and lives) betwixt genders, drafts in the non-space of in-commensurability between English and French, both her primary, improper tongues. Troubling borders separating disciplines, dividing countries, and distinguishing words, Nathanaël’s texts borrow meticulously and programmatically from other authors, literalizing the Barthesian “tissue of quotations” as they also draw incestuously from, and thus plicate, her own oeuvre. Each writing is thus in itself, and in relation to Nathanaël’s larger corpus, beset by the calculated vertigo of écriture, as Nathanaël enacts obsessive returns to a cluster of characteristic concerns, each time with a change of lens that profoundly informs her renewed scrutiny and its consequences.
 
Pivotal issues revolved in and unsettled by Nathanaël’s questions, formulations, tropes and language play, and cited textual passages and other media include: language’s asymmetrically yet mutually constitutive relation to the body; architecture’s reciprocal relation to the social and the urban landscape as palimpsest; the ethics of the aleatory and non-intentional aspects of encounter; the breaching, violence, grief, and desire in translation; the amalgamation performed by, as well as the antinomianism and multiplicity subtending, the first-person pronoun; and the representation of world-historical violence at personal and (inter)national scales. The Sho’ah is a major point of reference; with regard to media, Nathanaël has meditated on and incorporated photographs in several recent works, including SISYPHUS, OUTDONE. Theatres of the Catastrophal, the second section of which is presented here.
 
Since we meet Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS excerpted, in medias res, I want to note the main elements of the stage-setting that occur in the first section of the manuscript and, further, to relate this work to some of its main intertexts, including Nathanaël’s own writings.
 
To enter SISYPHUS is to engage with catastrophal, catastrophized time: “§ Still // § After an aftershock, there is stillness. There are reverberations and then there is stillness. The stillness itself is reverberant. Reverberant with the reverberations of the shock. Instilled in me is the shakenness” (SISYPHUS, Part I). These opening passages introduce “aftershock” as structuring figure, though, as Nathanaël then adverts, to be useful the English term will have to be relieved of the linear temporality embedded in it: “After assumes before . . . I would like to suspend the question of before, as it has no bearing on the question of the aftershock. It bears its weight of memory as lost memory and time as lost time. Lost and thus not locatable on a scale of before and after” (Part I). The temporality Nathanaël wishes us to consider here is clearly akin to that of “disaster” as Maurice Blanchot understands it in The Writing of the Disaster: “The fact of disappearing is, precisely, not a fact, not an event; it does not happen, not only because there is no ‘I’ to undergo the experience, but because . . . the disaster always takes place after having taken place, there cannot possibly be any experience of it” (28). Before and after lose their places, their relevance, in such a schema of loss beyond loss; the subjectlessness and objectlessness of experience announced here reverberate in SISYPHUS.
 
Related to the temporality of Nathanaël’s text is the psychical logic of suspension and repetition compulsion elaborated in Cathy Caruth’s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History: “the experience of a trauma repeats itself” whether in “unwitting reenactment” of an injurious event, or in memory (2); the crisis incurs repetition for “the way it was precisely not known in the first instance” (4), repeating as an unassimilated fragment, or piece of lost though stubbornly recurring time, that “simultaneously defies and demands our witness” (5). In its belatedness, and as a response that is a missed encounter, trauma “[oscillates] between the crisis of death and the correlative crisis of life” (7), enjoining the survivor to a layered and never fully present experience of time brushing expiration. Nathanaël’s use of the temblor as trope of a derangement of linear temporality and its reverberation in an affected body also recalls Derrida’s The Gift of Death, particularly his discussion of Abraham’s being called on to sacrifice Isaac and Søren Kierkegaard’s analysis of that scene in Fear and Trembling. For Derrida, the encounter with the divine is always an aftershock, since trembling begins beforehand, the shock already come: “[T]rembling . . . is something that has already taken place, as in the case of an earthquake [tremblement de terre] or when one trembles all over. . . . We tremble in that strange repetition that ties an irrefutable past (a shock has been felt, a traumatism has already affected us) to a future that cannot be anticipated . . . [and is] approached as unapproachable” (53-4).
 
Nathanaël avoids the residue of linearity in “aftershock” by replacing it with the French term “réplique”: “On a French tongue, the aftershock is pronounced réplique. I will speak now, instead, to the réplique, leaving the matter of before and after aside, extricating myself from the misplacement of time in catastrophe. . . . What [the earth] offers is a reply, as réplique, to what is now, which is after all an instance of after, and as such unrecognizable” (Part I). The verbal figure of réplique points to the folds within the “now,” repleat-replete with memory incompletely grasped. “Now” can no longer be thought of as “after” since, if invisibly, it both contains and repeats the past within it, confounding seriation. The earth, too, complexifies: it is always moving, not just in its orbit, but tectonically—if seemingly still, still seized; if seeming our very ground, still displacing and displaced. Moving with the earth in permanent aftershock, the body, as Nathanaël writes, is occupied by, as it occupies, space as it also inhabits this disjunctive time. The body always already bears remnants of its own death within it, beholden to a mortal future joining it to earth, and is made by the continuous catastrophe of living-as-dying inflicted and inflected by a contestative human (re)structuring of space-time. Yet another vexed logic of time is evoked when Nathanaël gestures toward prevented histories and subjunctive, violently eradicated futures: “An ontology of foreclosed possibility. Of foregone eventuality” (Part I). SISYPHUS thus abounds with alternate temporalities that spoil temporal abstraction as a progress of presents that postdate their pasts. It refuses promissory tenselessness in its preoccupation with iterative, traumatized time as ethical demand, with catastrophe as inculpation.¹
 
Nathanaël’s translation (replacement) of “aftershock” as “réplique,” vis-à-vis allusions to the work of geographer Michel Lussault and topologist and catastrophe theorist Rene Thom, rhymes with her exploration of geologic space-time in her recent book Absence Where As (Claude Cahun and the Unopened Book). In “Fa Ille,” the first section of Absence, Nathanaël worries the one-character slippage (space and letter in equivalence) between “la famille” and “la fa ille“: the first is a term of binding filiation; the second (la faille) names a tectonic (among other types of) rift. The difference is effected by the application of an aleatory yet directed faultline that literalizes language as “fluctuating littoral” (22). The figure of la faille also turns up in Nathanaël’s earlier At Alberta, a collection of talks given at the University of Alberta in 2006 and 2008, in a lecture on translation as failure and as an ethics of touch; la faille is exchanged in lieu of défaut, as Nathanaël translates and retranslates the phrase “failure of translation” to demonstrate the passage between languages as multiple and fractured even as this suspension of translation becomes a “substitution for place” itself (13). Faultline is again turned towards geophysics in a talk where Nathanaël discusses an interchange with “a friend who studies fracture mechanics, failure analysis and catastrophe theory” (Michael O’Leary, Chicago-based engineer, poet, and co-publisher of Flood Books) (At Alberta 104). O’Leary explains how an equation based on “the principle of least action” is used to predict, from a field of infinite possibility, the likely pathway of a crack. The formula requires a beginning point and a duration of action (111-2n.8); it uses a fixed time to plot the crack’s endpoint, in turn defined as a consequence, not presumption, of the process. Thus the breach delineates relation, generating an afterward that cannot be known in advance.
 
SISYPHUS is further in conversation with Absence Where As in anchoring its conception of a profoundly destabilized space-time in the photographic medium. The earlier book explores Nathanaël’s relationship to a 1936 photograph of Claude Cahun, transgendered Surrealist photographer and writer. This photograph both reaches across and reinforces the breach of time/geography to convene uncannily with Nathanaël, who views the Cahun of the photograph as her impossible semblable. Nathanaël means such anachronic converse, as she writes, “to extract myself from the place, from the moment riveted to its materiality, the architectural, temporal space made precise by a name, an arrangement of buildings cobbled onto a dismantled horizon, a situation, a location, a there” (Absence 5). As Nathanaël then discovers, her u-topian address to a Cahun photographically ripped from context is hardly her own agenda; it is, rather, a response to Cahun’s inverted, prior address that has perversely overmastered and dislocated Nathanaël. Solicitor solicited, Nathanaël seems to be (super)imposed upon, contrary to “normative temporality” (7), by Cahun’s victorious antecedence. But can she be sure? “The photograph offers itself as an abyss” (28); “There is not only encounter, but collapse. . . . Of one (me) onto the other ((s)he), immediately laid over the self, echoed, propagated, and swallowed back, bringing about a fall toward disappearance. The photograph . . . sends me back to what, of myself, I am already projecting, in a perpetual doubling of stares and faces” (29). Given the interaction’s uncertain reciprocity, Nathanaël relates to Cahun’s gaze in a mode of reflexive indeterminacy, a rebound that displaces and de-entifies her, ripping her too out of time and space and confronting her with an animating (self-)alterity. Far from indexing a historical moment, the Cahun photograph seems to “refuse,” even to kill, the possibility of liaison with a knowable past: “Photography represents dead time. In this instance, it also offers false passage. . . . It opens a door only to close it at once” (28); “There is the erasure of memory . . . and even of history” (29). If the photograph opens the door to referentiality and slams it, it also inaugurates an infinite circuit of rebounding as undoing, leaving the self afloat in a catastrophal desire, perpetually walking through a door without reaching the other side of the threshold: “As in the Sartrian hell, the door is wide open, but there is no veritable exit; there is nowhere to go; the bridges are burned, the sidewalks catastrophied” (35).
 
SISYPHUS presents its own photographic (and painted) analogs of seized, catastrophal time: “Sinister Street” (1928) by Umbo [Otto Umbehr], a work dissolving street, structures, vehicles, and creatures into a single plane of shimmering heatstroke; Maria Elena Vieira da Silva’s Stèle (1964), “which seems to identify the infinitesimal seisms present in the frame, perhaps even provoked by a frame’s imposition of limitation”; official photographs taken by Italian fascists of gutted homes in Florence that were immediately thereafter demolished (all from Part I). Nathanaël refers as well to Hervé Guibert, French writer and photographer (who died in 1991 of AIDS at age 36), whom she notes for taping a photograph of a boy to his body until the image transferred to his skin, for his formulation of the photograph as “Un événement de lumière,” for his theory of “subjectless photography” (Part II); and to Nicolas Grospierre, a Swiss architectural photographer whose 2008 Venice biennale show was titled, “The Afterlife of Buildings,” and who has had a very recent show in Chicago, “One Thousand Doors, No Exit” (Part VII). We move from the directly interrogative photograph of a gaze to (mainly) photographs of architecture as catastrophal theater.² Her discussions of an image from Paul Virilio’s Bunker Archaeology, which features the sunken ruin of an Axis bunker from the Atlantic Wall built in WWII, and a (heavily processed) photograph from Michal Rovner’s series Outside, which depicts a concrete Bedouin farmhouse in an Israeli desert reduced to a bare archetype of dwelling, a view where it seems to lack windows and door, remark on these works’ commentary on a temporality of slow decay over against their subjects’ and objects’ inscription in cultures of accelerated, compressed militarized time.
 
Yet through the term “theater” Nathanaël invokes or constructs a temporality of catastrophe for the photograph beyond that of decay. As she writes towards the end of SISYPHUS: “The present of the photograph is no more documentable than is the present of a book as it is written. If it is a document at all, it is a document of the failure to keep time” (Part VI(b)). The photograph not only indicts the present’s evisceration of the past, but also avenges its lapse of watchfulness over history (and its foreclosed historical potentiality) by fixing the present in a structure of “vigilation,” a perpetual wakeful hauntedness.³ Nathanaël envisions the theater-vigil of the photograph as an architectural frame that is an ethical frame of address-accusation, as well as a stage of performance, in and on which the present time, under the quaver of the réplique, is enjoined to replay a past it has otherwise collaborated in disappearing.⁴ As a non-presencing of a present, the photograph is a moment of “syncope,” a blink. As a disclosure of the trauma nested in the present, the photographic theater is a fury of Hegelian bad infinity: “The réplique is dialogical, combative, echoic, duplicitous. In theatre, it is simply what is said. This theatre, however, is catastrophal . . . a theatre of reiterative ending. With its [for all its] etymological gesturings toward the conclusive and the turn, the overturn, the downturn, the catastrophe’s finality is thwarted” (Part I). “A room is traversed . . . these perambulations are catastrophal in that they register the ends over and over again” (Part I). “Someone carries a door through a door . . . there is an absence of limits, an exacerbated falsehood of traversal” (Part I).
 
Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS overlays Albert Camus’s 1942 Le Myth de Sisyphe, a critique of the action of suicide as response to the human predicament of the absurd. Camus there argues for the ethics of a “life without appeal”—a life lived in the full realization of humanity’s alienation from the rest of the universe, and the worthlessness of human endeavor given the falsity of any transcendental value. To suicide is to acquiesce to the absurd; to continue on, either in a wild lawlessness of action or on a treadmill of habit, while lacking any delusion of worth or of the possibility of change, is to scorn the absurd. As Camus famously writes, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (123): here is a contentment of self-mastery in the discontent of perpetual, meaningless repetition. Camus’s ethical stakes thus concern an impersonal aporia of existence: the absurd is a fact that can be fantasticated, acquiesced to in suicide, or lived through with intellectual vigilance.
 
A Sisyphean allegory, too, shows up in Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster; this is the laying bare of “work” in the concentration camp, where the laborer, for instance, removes and replaces a pile of heavy stones “at top speed” to no purpose:
 

[W]ork has ceased to be his way of living and has become his way of dying. Work, death: equivalents. . . . The meaning of work is then the destruction of work in and through work. . . . [Such labor] makes the worker, whom it reduces to naught, aware that the society expressed in the labor camp is what he must struggle against even as he dies, even as he survives. . . . Such survival is (also) immediate death, immediate acceptance of death in the refusal to die.
 

(81-2)

As for Camus, for Blanchot suicide is not an option; yet for Blanchot, the absurd is a human-authored theater of catastrophe, one indicted by a ghastly, principled survivorship. It is this endgame as vigilant indictment with which Nathanaël’s SISYPHUS most reverberates.

 
In an appendix to Dialectic of Enlightenment, “On the Theory of Ghosts,” Adorno and Horkheimer eloquently deride the temporal logic of capitalist culture, which many have claimed as photographic time: “Individuals are reduced to a mere sequence of instantaneous experiences, which leave no trace, or rather whose trace is hated as irrational, superfluous, and ‘overtaken’ in the literal sense. . . . History is eliminated in oneself and others out of a fear that it may remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence. . . . Men have ceased to consider their own purpose and fate; they work their despair out on the dead” (216). Nathanaël’s untimely meditations on photographs as theaters of the catastrophal open up the filmic medium to let the dead have their day. That day is a violently foreclosed, bygone “today”—a before seizing and seized in its after again.⁵