Athens, Still Remains: The Photographs of Jean-François Bonhomme

by Jacques Derrida, Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael Naas

Overview

Athens, Still Remains is an extended commentary on a series of photographs of contemporary Athens by the French photographer Jean-Franois Bonhomme. But in Derrida's hands commentary always has a way of unfolding or, better, developing in several unexpected and mutually illuminating directions. First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains is Derrida's most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derrida's life and work.The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: we owe ourselves to death.Reading this phrase through Bonhomme's photographs of both the ruins of ancient Athens and contemporary scenes of a still-living Athens that is also on its way to ruin and death, Derrida interrogates a philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Heidegger in which the human-and especially the philosopher-is thought to owe himself to death, to a certain thought of death or comportment with regard to death. Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhomme's photographs and a narrative of Derrida's 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derrida's most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photography-an eminently Greek word-means the writing of light,and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truth-in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823232055
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	10/13/2010
Edition description:	2
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

The late JACQUES DERRIDA was the single most influential voice in European philosophy of the last quarter of the twentieth century. His The Animal That Therefore I Am, Sovereignties in Question, and Deconstruction in a Nutshell have been published by Fordham University Press.

Pascale-Anne Brault is Professor of French at DePaul University. She is the co-translator of several works of Jacques Derrida, including The Work of Mourning and Learning to Live Finally, and of Jean-Luc Nancy's Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (Fordham). Michael Naas is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. His most recent books include Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction and Derrida from Now On (Fordham).

Editorial Reviews

Taking his point of departure from Bonhommeûs wonderful photographs of Athens, photographs that bear the traces of the history of this living anddying city, as well as of an entire network of questions that have remained at the heart of the history of philosophy ever since its earliest Greek beginnings. Derrida offers us a moving meditation on the relations among photography, light, writing, memory, mourning, death, and survival.Presented as a series of photographic stills-in-prose, his exquisite essaynot only enacts and performs what it wishes to convey, but it also tells usthat we did not have to wait for the invention of photography to learn whyüwe owe ourselves to death,ý or why, at every step of this wondrousphotographic and philosophical journey, we also üowe ourselves to life.ý It demonstrates once again why, like Athens, Derrida still remains one of our most cherished resources.-Eduardo Cadava

In this fascinating short book Jacques Derrida ruminates on the photographical instant in the work of Jean-Franois Bonhomme. Confessing his 'passion for the delay' Derrida reads photography as an experience of mourning made possible by the full daylight of Athens and its surroundings. The book presents Derrida at his best, as he travels to ancient sites, contemplates the city and technics, reads ships and Plato - ultimately writing a picture, if that is possible, of photography itself.-Sander van Maas

From the Publisher

Taking his point of departure from Bonhomme¹s wonderful photographs of Athens‹photographs that bear the traces of the history of this living and dying city, as well as of an entire network of questions that have remained at the heart of the history of philosophy ever since its earliest Greek beginnings‹Derrida offers us a moving meditation on the relations among photography, light, writing, memory, mourning, death, and survival.
Presented as a series of photographic stills-in-prose, his exquisite essay not only enacts and performs what it wishes to convey, but it also tells us that we did not have to wait for the invention of photography to learn why
³we owe ourselves to death,² or why, at every step of this wondrous photographic and philosophical journey, we also ³owe ourselves to life.² It demonstrates once again why, like Athens, Derrida still remains one of our most cherished resources.

Princeton University - Eduardo Cadava

In this fascinating short book Jacques Derrida ruminates on the photographical instant in the work of Jean-François Bonhomme. Confessing his 'passion for the delay' Derrida reads photography as an experience of mourning made possible by the full daylight of Athens and its surroundings. The book presents Derrida at his best, as he travels to ancient sites, contemplates the city and technics, reads ships and Plato - ultimately writing a picture, if that is possible, of photography itself.

Utrecht University and University of Amsterdam - Sander van Maas

Athens, Still Remains—from the outset, a remarkable translation of an untranslatable title—is not only Jacques Derrida’s most luminous and in-depth essay on photography: it develops itself as a photograph, bringing into new light the most structural aspects of the medium as well as its most fragile and fleeting ones.
Struck by an enigmatic phrase—“We owe ourselves to death”—that takes a shot at him from the very beginning of his journey through Greece and will taunt him throughout, Derrida’s reflection is irresistibly drawn to the photographic image by its spectral monumentality, the memory in the figure of the ruin it displays, the defer/delay (another name for Derrida’s différance) effect at work in each image, bearing death from within. The departed, the multiple folds in which the departing process is present in the image, mourning and its intricate workings: this is what catches, here as always, Derrida’s philosophical (and “autobiographical”) attention—his meditation, rather, impregnated with melancholy, but always of the most active, creative, lively kind.
But Athens, Still Remains is not only an essay on photography: more audaciously, Derrida suggests that it is philosophy itself that owes something, in its very “essence” or “origin”, to the photographic image. A perfect example of the art of contretemps it analyzes so astutely, this moving essay—magnificently rendered if not heightened by Brault and Naas’s most careful translation—comes to us at just the right moment: just in time. For there is no too-late in the reading of Derrida’s work: it is there, ahead, waiting for us still.

Universite de Montreal - Ginette Michaud