Title: Palm Reading: Fazal Sheikh's Handbook of Death
Abstract: Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes * This essay first appeared in Fazal Sheikh (Madrid: MAPFRE Foundation, 2009) pp.280-296. I am grateful to Luis Miguel García Mora and the MAPFRE Foundation for their kind permission to reprint the essay here. I also am grateful to Fazal Sheikh for his permission to reproduce the two images around which my essay is organized, and to Dimitris Vardoulakis for his ongoing interest and support. 1 Judith Butler. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (NY: Verso, 2006), p.30. 2 William Faulkner, The Wild Palms (New York: Vintage Books, 1985), p.324. 3 This prologue is a very slightly altered version of the prologue I wrote to introduce my essay, ‘Lapsus Imaginis: The Image in Ruins,’ October 96 (2001) p.35. It is meant to suggest the relation between ruins and death that haunts the present essay, but also the way in which all reading begins elsewhere. I should add that portions of Lapsus Imaginis also appear throughout the essay—often in fragmented form and in very different contexts. 4 These images are reproduced in Fazal Sheik, The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan (Zurich: Scalo, 1998). The two photographs in which I am particularly interested here can be found on pages 101 and 113. 5 I am indebted here to Giorgio Agamben's discussion of the modern refugee crisis in ‘Beyond Human Rights’, in Means Without End: Notes on Politics, Trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2000) pp.15-26. 6 See Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, Trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) p.392. 7 See Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p.13. 8 Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, p.15. 9 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, p.391. 10 On the history of Afghanistan, see, among many others, Diego Cordovez and Selig Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Abdul Ghani, A Brief Political History of Afghanistan (Lahore: Najaf Publishers, 1989); Olivier Roy, Afghanistan, from Holy War to Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University, 1995); and Ahmed Rashid, Taliban, Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 11 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, 7 Vols, Eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhaüser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972), vol. 1, p.1238. 12 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, p.134. 13 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, p.578. 14 Heidegger explicitly discusses the relationship between death and the photographic image in his analysis of the Kantian notions of image and schema. Suggesting that what links death and the photographic image is their capacity to reveal the process of appearance in general—and in a passage that has great relevance to the two photographs that concern us—he writes: ‘The photograph of the death mask, as copy of a likeness, is itself an image—but this is only because it gives the ‘image’ of the dead person, shows how the dead person appears, or rather how it appeared…. Now the photograph, however, can also show how something like a death mask appears in general. In turn, the death mask can show in general how something like the face of a dead human being appears. But an individual corpse itself can also show this. And similarly, the mask itself can also show how a death mask in general appears, just as the photograph shows not only how what is photographed, but also how a photograph in general appears’. See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. Richard Taft (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990) p.64. 15 The phrases within quotation marks in this paragraph are drawn from Derrida's essay, ‘Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand’, Trans. John P. Leavey, in Deconstruction and Philosophy: The Texts of Jacques Derrida, Ed. John Sallis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987) p.173. 16 See Derrida's eulogy for Louis Marin, ‘By Force of Mourning’, in The Work of Mourning, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001) pp.147-48. 17 See The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, Trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977) p.106. 18 Benjamin suggests that childhood already has a particular relation to death when, in ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, he writes: ‘For childhood, having no preconceived opinions, has none about life. It is as dearly attached… to the realm of the dead, where it juts into that of the living, as to life itself’. See ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) p.613. 19 Hal Foster, ‘The Art of Fetishism: Notes on Dutch Still Life’, in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, Eds. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993) p.265. 20 See especially Bryson's chapter ‘Rhopography’, in Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) pp.60-95. 21 Gershom Scholem, ‘Chiromancy’, in Encyclopaedia Judaica (Corrected Edition) (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1982) p.477. 22 See Charlotte Wolff, The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis (London: Methuen, 1951) p.7. See also her Studies in Hand-Reading (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936) and The Human Hand (London: Methuen, 1942). Wolff was a close friend of Dora and Walter Benjamin—they met each other in the early 1920s—and it is not impossible that her obsession with reading the human hand was of great interest to Benjamin, especially given his own references to palmistry. For a description of their friendship, see Wolff's autobiography, Hindsight (London: Quartet Books, 1980) pp.65-72. 23 On the relation between hands and blindness, see Derrida's Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993). 24 Walter Benjamin, ‘Fate and Character’, Trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-1926, Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996) p.201. 25 Walter Benjamin, ‘Fate and Character’, p.204. 26 Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, Trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973) p.87. See also Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, p.590). 27 See Werner Hamacher, ‘The Gesture in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka’, in Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan, Trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.316. Hamacher uses the phrase not to describe the image, but as a ‘name’ for the name. 28 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’, Trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-1934, Eds. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) p.802. 29 Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’ [1928], Trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol.1, 1913-1926, Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996) pp.482-83. 30 As Oleg Grabar has noted, ‘Much has been written about Islamic attitudes toward the arts. Encyclopedias or general works on the history of art simply assert that, for a variety of reasons which are rarely explored, Islam was theologically opposed to the representation of living beings. While it is fairly well known by now that the Koran contains no prohibition of such representations, the undeniable denunciations of artists and of representations found in many traditions about the life of the Prophet are taken as genuine expressions of an original Muslim attitude’. See his The Formation of Islamic Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973) p.75. Grabar goes on to suggest that the Koran does oppose idolatry but without rejecting art or representation as such, and certainly without any prohibitions as direct as that found within the biblical one: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images or any likenesses of anything that it is heaven or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth’ (Exodus 20:4). For a general discussion of the concept of the prohibition of images, see Jean-Luc Nancy's ‘Le Représentation Interdite’, in Au fond des images (Paris: Galilée, 2003) pp.57-100. 31 These passages are drawn from the ‘Sura’ entry in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Vol. 9, ed. C. E. Bosworth, E. Van Donzel, W. P. Heinrichs, and the late G. Lecomte (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1997) p.889. 32 For a general discussion of the ‘evil eye’ and the various means of protecting oneself from it, see the entry for ‘Ayn’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, Vol. 1, ed. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramens, E. Lévi, J. Schacht (Leiden, Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1960), p.786. 33 See my Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997) p.9. 34 See Walter Benjamin, ‘Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility’ (Third Version), Trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) p.258. 35 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Trans. Richard Howard (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981) p.79. 36 Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1, p.590. 37 Quoted in Fazal Sheikh, The Victor Weeps: Afghanistan, p.100. 38 The phrase is from Benjamin's ‘Central Park’, Trans. Edmund Jephcott in Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003) p.170. 39 Man Ray, ‘The Age of Light’, in Photography in the Modern Era: European Documents and Critical Writings, 1913-1940, Ed. Christopher Phillips (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Aperture, 1989) p.53. 40 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, Trans. Harry Zohn, in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935-1938, Eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) p.156. 41 This passage is from an unpublished manuscript entitled Abstracts of ‘Abstracts (of Anamnesis)’. The text was delivered at the Alexander S. Onassis Center at New York University in conjunction with Puglia's exhibition, Abstracts (of Anamnesis) in the spring of 1995.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-11-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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