When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of - as W.G. Sebald puts it - the "natural history of destruction", comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars ...is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of - as W. G. Sebald puts it - the 'natural history of destruction', comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars ...is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald's most prolific interpreters - as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant's story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today's migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
Članak istražuje odnos između kategorije fotografske slike i pojma „memorijski projekt” iscrtavajući pritom historijsku transverzalu koja povezuje prvu knjigu opremljenu fotografskim tablama The ...Pencil of Nature Williama Henryja Foxa Talbota, književni opus W. G. Sebalda i kapitalno djelo Abyja Warburga Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Polazeći od Sebaldova iskaza prema kojemu sjećanje nije ništa drugo doli citiranje i tvrdnje Kaje Silverman da fotografska slika nije ni indeks ni reprezentacija nego analogija, detektiraju se analogije između diskursa Foxa Talbota i Sebalda, odnosno Warburga i Sebalda, i postavlja teza da su The Pencil of Nature i Bilderatlas Mnemosyne te nadasve život i djelo Waltera Benjamina upisani u Sebaldov književni opus kao citati bez navodnih znakova. Ta je teza argumentirana bilješkom iz Benjaminove kartoteke koja se odnosi na spoznajnu teoriju i koja glasi: „Ovaj rad mora maksimalno razviti umjetnost citiranja bez navodnih znakova” te zaključkom Giorgia Agambena da je najenigmatičniji pojam Benjaminove misli, pojam slike, Bild, pravi terminus technicus njegova poimanja povijesti. Susljedno tome, članak razmatra Sebaldovu aproprijaciju i operacionalizaciju Benjaminova pojma dijalektičke slike, kao i elaboraciju koncepta nekronološkog vremena kroz specifični digresivni i tangencijalni narativni postupak „pisanja slikama” koji se manifestira u umetanju reprodukcija fotografskih slika u tkivo književnog teksta i kroz virtuoznu izvedbu ekfrastičkih opisa u kojima se događaju rasprizorenja, odnosno artikulira nesvodiva razlika između povijesne istine i materijalne istine. Članak se usredotočuje na Sebaldovu internalizaciju Warburgova pojma migrirajućih motiva pri „pisanju slikama”. Nadalje, tekst argumentira tvrdnju da je Sebald maestralnom primjenom citiranja bez navodnih znakova ispisao vlastite teze o pojmu povijesti da bi ukazao na ishodišta genocidnih politika dvadesetog stoljeća u povijesti europskog kolonijalizma. Zaključno, u članku se tvrdi da su Sebaldove „prozne knjige neodređene vrste”, poput Warburgove „antropologije slika i ikonologije njihovih intervala”, inaugurirale ono što Georges Didi-Huberman naziva novim žanrom spoznaje.
Across Mangelos’s Landscape Kovač, Leonida
Zbornik Seminara za studije moderne umetnosti Filozofskog fakulteta Univerziteta u Beogradu,
2024, Letnik:
2024, Številka:
20
Journal Article
AbstractIn 1956 Alain Resnais opened his film-essay Toute la mémoire du monde with the statement that owing to the short-lived nature of human remembering, people tend to accumulate countless ...auxiliary memories. The issue of “auxiliary memories” related to the search for one’s own identity is an ostinato theme of Sebald’s last novel Austerlitz where the titles and certain motifs articulated in three films by Resnais are appropriated in order to depict the twentieth century in terms of the uncanny. It was not by chance that a Jewish boy named Jacques Austerlitz, before he was sent from Prague in England by the last Kindertransport, and his mother to Theresienstadt, spent his last summer with the parents in Marienbad, a place to which he would return many years later and become haunted by something unknown. In Sebald’s narrative tissue such reference to L’Année dernier á Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) rhizomatically lead to 1955 Resnais’s film-essay Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), as well as to the psychoanalytic notion of the originally lost object. But, in the novel, Resnais is explicitly mentioned only once, in Austerlitz’s remembrance of the scene from Toute la mémoire du monde as fantastic and monstrous owing to footage of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris that shows the transportation of notes from reading room to storage. The performative of Sebald’s “monstrosity” is through narrative transversal related to the erasure of historical (holocaust) memory: the new library—erected on a site where Nazis had stored Jewish property which they had stolen during the Second World War—was, following a 1988 decision by the French president, to be the most modern and biggest library building in the world.Keywords: Architecture and Philosophy, Auxiliary Memories, Translation, Uncanny, Film and NovelAlain Resnais’s essay film Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) opens with the claim that “because he has a short memory man amasses countless memory aids.”
Introduction Kovač, Leonida
W. G. Sebald's Artistic Legacies,
01/2023
Book Chapter
Most of us, said Austerlitz, know nothing about moths except that they eat holes in carpets and clothes and have to be kept at bay by the use of camphor and naphthalene, although in truth their ...lineage is among the most ancient and most remarkable in the whole history of nature.—W.G. Sebald, AusterlitzIn 2019, an international research project titled Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacy was organized by the Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture at the University of Amsterdam. No one could have guessed when we began our work that December that only two months later, a single microparticle, neither living nor non-living, would radically change the way of human existence. The migration of this invisible entity has confronted us with, among other things, images from Bergamo and Manaus. I now read these scenes as a kind of prefiguration of the low-resolution photographs reproduced on the pages of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn which in the author’s narrative weaving exemplify what Walter Benjamin called a dialectical image. A week before this project began, we were shocked by the sudden demise of one our key contributors, Professor Thomas Elsaesser, who was Sebald’s friend and colleague, and founder of Film and Television Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Both Elsaesser and Sebald began their academic careers in the 1970s at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where they often lectured together on Weimar cinema. We did not hear Elsaesser’s talk in which he would reflect on Sebald’s work to coincide with the anniversary of the writer’s death on December 14, 2001. Instead, the recently deceased media archeologist was commemorated by a screening of his own captivating essay-film The Sun Island (2017) which exudes a Sebaldian impression.Writing this syntagm, I recall the lecture given by Jacques Derrida in 1994 at the conference Memory: The Question of Archives, whose texts were later published under the title Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. In this text, Derrida explicitly identifies archive fever with the death drive, which Freud elaborated in the study Beyond the Pleasure Principle, published in 1920.
When the mind turns more than one would wish towards questions of – as W.G. Sebald puts it – the “natural history of destruction”, comparative consideration by artists and interdisciplinary scholars ...is directed to the interstices between images, novel, essay, (auto)biography, memorial and travelogue. Artists have been among Sebald’s most prolific interpreters – as they are among the more fearless and holistic researchers on questions concerning what it means never to be able to fix an identity, to tell a migrant’s story, or to know where a historical trauma ends. Sebald has - as this book attests - also given artists and scholars a means to write with images, to embrace ambiguity, and to turn to today’s migrants with empathy and responsibility; as well as to let academic research, creation and institutional engagement blend into or substantially inform one another in order to account for and enable such necessary work in the most diverse contexts.
