No matter the passage of now over forty years, the question of the relation of language and transcendence raised in Derrida’s “Violence and Metaphysics” is decisive. On first glance, this is a simple matter: to speak/write is to traffic in the logos, so any move outside being or essence (in a word, the ‘logos’) is stalled before it begins. This is not to say that transcendence is muted or erased. Rather, transcendence is interrupted in the same measure that it interrupts. The overstep on Levinas’ part is the failure to catch site of this reversal of interruption. Thus, Derrida captures his critique of Levinas in the single phrase “the dream of a pure heterology.”

Still, this is not the final word. Derrida’s criticisms stand as the measure of any language of difference, I would say, but Levinas famously gives his rejoinder in Otherwise than being, Derrida continues to write critically, and so on. Whatever the phase of the conversation, the question is the same: is it possible to bear absolute alterity in language?

This question is largely pursued in terms of philosophical and literary language. What of cinematic language? How might cinematic language function as a philosophical discourse irreducible to the play of signs typical of spoken/written language? Is it possible – to pose this in Levinasian language – for the Saying to dismantle the Said in cinematic language? What draws me to this question is a series of remarks in an interview with Deleuze (much more than his two volumes on cinema). In this interview from March 1968, concerned with the function of image and thinking in Nietzsche’s work, Deleuze proposes that cinematic language (Godard’s, in particular) can think. “Theoretically,” Deleuze writes, “Godard would be capable of filming Kant’s Critique or Spinoza’s Ethics, and it wouldn’t be abstract cinema or a cinematographic application. Godard knew how to find both a new means and a new ‘image’ – which necessarily presupposes a revolutionary content.” “Content,” for Deleuze in this interview, is what drives innovation in philosophical language.

Transcendence is just such content, even if it is as old as philosophy’s first words. What kind of transcendence? To what end? After what challenge to immanence?

Godard is one matter. Another site is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, a film whose cinematic challenge is precisely transcendence: how can the cinematic image bear the transcendence of pain and loss? “Bearing transcendence” is the crucial phrase, I think, for if cinema is to be a kind of philosophy, the cinematic image cannot be an example. Bearing and manifesting – this captures the movement Levinas describes as the birthing of the Said from the Saying, a birth from an abyss that ultimately dis-ables (if not destroys) the Said. The Medea of language, perhaps. How might we catch sight of this movement in Lanzmann’s film?

Lanzmann’s exhaustive (and exhausting) documentary on the Holocaust begins, of course, with the unrepresentable: the disaster itself. Simon Srebnik, who, upon returning to the site of his internment and giving the first testimony, repeats to Lanzmann that what happened there is “beyond understanding.” Against, say, Renais’ Night and Fog, which adopted a morally didactic and historically documentary position in relation to the disaster, Lanzmann wants to complicate our consumption of images out of an obligation to the unspeakable character of that same disaster. Shoah does not deploy silence as a response to the unspeakable. Rather, Lanzmann’s film aims at rendering our incomprehension visible and aural, which is to say, he aims at speaking about the unspeakable in a manner that represents, yet ruins that very same representation. Lanzmann conceives this ruinous representation as blindness in looking, a way of rendering the unspeakable in order to blind the spectator/consumer at the very moment we anticipate insight and comprehension. Lanzmann writes that “[n]ot to understand was my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I clung to this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical and at the same time the only possible operative attitude. This blindness was for me the vital condition of creation. Blindness has to be understood here as the purest mode of looking, of the gaze, the only way to not turn away from a reality which is literally blinding.”

Now, this is already a provocative theoretical position to take, but Lanzmann is of course talking about cinematic composition. And the onus of this composition rests on a revolutionary transformation of montage.

Lanzmann accomplishes this blindness in cinematic language by complicating the time-structure of the image-sound relation. I call this a montage because Lanzmann dispenses completely with narrative form, which grants to image and sound an independence akin to that of distinct shots in standard montage sequences. Further, because he eschews documentary footage in favor of survivor testimony and ponderous shots of sites of memory, Lanzmann blends multiple times within both sound itself (memorialization) and the image itself (haunted space). Essential here is that all of these multiplicities are simultaneous, rather than in a sequence of shots. In a handful of critical passages from Shoah, Lanzmann transitions from the face of the survivor to the site described by the testimony. The survivor’s voice remains in sound, telling a story of one or another concentration camp, while the image switches from the survivor’s face to the ruined remains of the camp described in that testimony. Lanzmann repeats this strategy of displacement throughout Shoah. I say ‘displacement’ because the survivor’s narrative, insofar as it makes sense to us (the narratives are always haunted by the unknowable), can never match the landscape set out in an unfolded image. As an example, Abraham Bomba’s detailed description of the camp at Treblinka is especially noteworthy. Bomba’s voice is steady even as it tells us about the mechanisms of mass murder, while the image unfolds and moves toward, and even against, that testimony. The image cannot match the testimony. Rather, Lanzmann pans the camera across the memorial gravestones at Treblinka, which themselves are nameless and only shards of the stones remaining from the destroyed factories of death. No faces. No documentary footage. Only what remains, which is only a fragment of the unthinkable.

What do we see in this discontinuous image and sound? In a sense, we see nothing. Lanzmann’s composition refuses us the kind of presence and continuity necessary to make sense. The pure gaze is blind. But he does give us something. Very little, perhaps, but not nothing. This very little is the crossing of the already crossed sound (the ghosts of the survivor’s memory with the voice of testimony) and already crossed image (systems of violence with the fragments of what remains). This layered and discontinuous representation decomposes itself, and we register this ruin in the affect of exhaustion—we are unable to get footing or catch our breath as spectators. The transmission of this affect, and so the thinking it bears in cinematic language, is immediate and directly descendent from the unspeakability of what the film ‘documents’: catastrophe.

Perhaps, then, in this peculiar fragmentation – which is unlike most senses of the fragment, I think – is cinema thinking, manifesting, and bearing the absence we can call transcendence. Is this a pure heterology? Or a dream? Is the purity contingent upon certain catastrophic contexts, or is there a lesson to be drawn from Lanzmann about the singularity of the common and everyday?

That is for another post.