Dead Already

Conversation with G. over a game of Chess, in the unlikely location of a Pub in Soho that houses a sizeable plastic bust of Tony Hancock. G., suriously [sic] enough, looks like (Hancock + beard). Anyway, after hearing John Berger’s recent radio talk, G. expresses consternation, or at least perplexity, at Berger’s preoccupation with the Dead. G. asks baldly whether this is a ‘supernatural’ thing.

I think, in response, that when writers speak of the Dead they are often speaking about a point of view. It can be a point of view from which one speaks or sees, or one to which one speaks. As an impossible point it is, I suppose a fantasy, but a fantasy necessary to thought. EG:

‘Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate—he has little success in this—but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different (and more) things than do the others: after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’ Kafka

“The philosopher is someone who believes he has returned from the dead, rightly or wrongly, and who returns to the dead in full consciousness.” Deleuze

“ For philosophers are beings who have passed through a death, who are born from it, and go towards another death, perhaps the same one.” Deleuze

“I know perfectly well that I will have the truest tone of voice when I will speak, when I will write for the dead” (Genet)

“To free the subject from his anecdotal self and to place him in the light of eternity. Recognised by today, by tomorrow, but also by the dead.” (Genet)

“His works are filled with meditations on death. The peculiarity of these spiritual exercises is that they almost never concern the future death, but rather being-dead, his death as a past event.’ (Sartre on Genet)

So, it is a point from which to measure things - without envy, covetousness, need, self-interest. Berger speaks, for example, of Glenn Gould's piano playing as being like one of the 'already dead, come back to earth to play its music'. The Dead, outside the world, feel it all the more gratefully and sharply. Yet in another sense they are indifferent to it, i.e., they are indifferent to its transitory rewards, pragmatic imperatives, immediate cash-back offers. It is a keen gratitude. But this has nothing to do with acquisitiveness; nothing is being grabbed or hoarded. Released from the pragmatic imperatives wherein they are ordinarily enmeshed, disrobed of their familiar Symbolic freight, objects and people are received and perceived anew.

Another take. Sometimes, this point of view is equated with, or momentarily coincides with the Eye of the Camera. For this mechanical eye, like Death, is at the frontier of the human.

‘In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe. ‘
-- Roland Barthes


Interview with Cartier Bresson:

“As time passes by and you look at portraits, the people come back to you like a silent echo. A photograph is a vestige of a face, a face in transit. Photography has something to do with death. It’s a trace.’

Is the Camera a kind of a-temporal eye? Does it have an affinity with that Eye dreamed of by the Jacobeans:

“When they are up and dressed and with their mask on,
Who can perceive this save that eternal eye
That sees though flesh and all.”

It may seem that the camera is captivated by ‘flesh and all’; but, especially with photos that have lost the sheen of the developing room, it is difficult not to share Barthes’ intuition, that these captive faces have been seen and named by the catastrophe; the little flash bulb was an emissary from the death of the Sun.

That last contrived phrase was introduced only as a tenuous link to this article at K-Punk on the most recent episode of Dr Who, wherein the Doctor and his companion, travel through time to witness the end of the Earth. K-Punk comments on what happens at this terminal point:

"… the scene in which she talked to her mum across time with a mobile phone hastily 'jiggery-pokered' by the Doctor by turns funny, sad and genuinely philosophical. Rose in effect flips from immersion in 'lived duration' to the perspective of Eternity, which is to say, she attains a detachment from any particular pathological 'horizon'. She sees that not only her own organism, but her species and planet are ephemeral."

K-Punk continues:

'The death of the sun is a catastrophe because it overturns the terrestrial horizon relative to which philosophical thought orients itself. Or as Lyotard himself puts it: “[E]verything’s dead already if this infinite reserve from which [philosophy] now draws energy to defer answers, if in short thought as quest, dies out with the sun.” Everything is dead already.'