5 & 8 3 g 5 z 3 s 3 a Borrower: FBC Lending String: *CTL,FAU,NRK,NOC,ZCU Patron: Journal Title: Connecticut review. Volume: 24 Issue: MontniVear: 2002Pages: 113-198 Article Author: Article Title: Gerhard Richter: History's Flight Anselm Kiefer's Angels, Imprint: [New Britain, etc.] Board of Trustees for Connecticut State Colleges. ILL Number: 166953831 I call #; PERIODICALS Location: $15IFM ODYSSEY Chargs Maxcost: $15.001FM Shipping Address: ILUBARRY UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 11300 NORTHEAST SECOND AVENUE MIAMI SHORES, Florida 33161 United States Fax: 305-899-3775 Ariel Email: mdixon@mail.barry.edu THIS MATERIALGERHARD RICHTER Hisrory’s FLIGHT, ANSELM KiEFER’S ANGELS Joy, sorrow-—try to retain only their intensity, the very low or (it matters not) the very high intensity which is without intention ‘Then you live neither within nor without yourself, nor close to things, but the quick of fife passes . . . into the presentless time where it is in vain that you would seck yourself. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster Put differently, an image brings something to a standstill, —Anselm Kiefer, Gespréich ‘The variegated production of German artist Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945)—his canvases, objects, and installations, together with his conceptual “Book Projects,” photographic meditations, and mixed- media assemblages—returns us again and again to the difficulty of a series of open questions. What is history? What will its relation to presentation have been? What are the links between strategies of aesthetic figuration and the politics of memory and counter- memory? What makes it possible, today, to continue to evoke history in a time of stasis, a moment that seems out of joint? Does the presentation of history necessarily imply a search for lost former presences, fugitive moments of temporality that were once simply themselves and transparently comprehensible? Or may historical presentation involve the recognition that these temporal moments were never simply “present” as an essence in the first place? What does it mean that the historical presents itself not as a former presence but rather in the space of intersecting traces that inscribe its genealogical shifts and movements, and that, by extension, the historical was always already—even at the time of its retroactively projected former presence, the fiction of its anteriority!—a network of traces and relays? Must the presentation of such networks of traces assume a particular form by necessity, or is its formal structure always already a matter of dynamic textual and ideological negotiations that remain to be thought?CONNECTICUT REVIEW What, then, is the form that our responsibility to historical thinking assumes when we can no longer in good faith take its closure and unencumbered readability for granted? Although deeply rooted in both the promises and the aberrations of the German artistic and intellectual traditions, Kiefer’s enigmatic work is, in the theoretical intensity and aesthetic obsession with which it confronts the historical, without common measure in much of contemporary art. It is as though his art staged and intensified Martin Heidegger's observation that “the truth that opens itself up in the artwork can never be substantiated or derived from what came before. What came before is, in its exclusive reality, contradicted by the work. That which art founds can therefore never be offset by what is present and available. Its founding is an excess (Gberflup), a giving (Schenkung)” (62). Heidegger, one of Kiefer's abiding intertexts, stresses the rupture that removes the artwork from its historical embededn that permits the specific forms of this rupture to spell the work's historicity. What is truly historical—rather than merely mimetic about a work is inseparable from what within it exceeds its history. This is what Kiefer gives us to think, his Schenkung. That the historical specificity of an artwork emerges in the moments when it can no longer be fully contained by history means, for Kiefer’s work, that it presents itself in the strange figure of a singularity that meets in unforeseeable ways with the generality of its historical and philosophical structure. Kiefer's project thus does not quite fit in the context of his German contemporaries such as Rainer Fetting, Georg Baselitz, and larkus Liipertz or in the more predictable currents of modern German art.? Nor can the complex mobilizations of historical meanings that work simultaneously to construct and to undo the rigor and beauty of his images easily be reduced to yet another version of postmodernism,’ While Kiefer’s engagement with issues of history and presentation shares certain concerns with the projects of his teacher Joseph Beuys, the strange meeting of the singular and the general that occurs in his art enacts neither a specific program nor a closed system—“not an idea that could be a user's manual for action” (Gespréch 120)—-that could be translated into a stable philosophy of history but, rather, offers us a series of conceptual and figurational dilemmas without which the in a way 4GERHARD RICHTER historical can hardly be thought. As a perpetual meditation on the very possibility of articulating the hidden relays between the singular or unverifiable and the demands of what is generalizable, Kiefer's art is concerned not only with absence, traces, and geometrical experimentations but also with the materiality of surfaces, the relation between painting and writing, and the secret colors of melancholia in collages and photographic studies. Whether in his images about the relation of painting and burning, his post-religious allegories, or his series of apocalyptic visions of the desert—for Kiefer, there can be no rigorous presentation of history that does not articulate a sense of historicity precisely by confronting the limits of its own possibility. His art engages history by rethinking conventional historicist notions of chronology, progression, and transparency even when it explicitly confronts such ambivalent and variegated scissions of German history as Hermann’s Battle in the Teutoburg Forest or the uneasy legacies of German idealism, the architecture designed by Speer for Hitler or the myth machines of Wagner and the Nibelungs or, indeed, the fate of the Jewish people in a paranoid fascist system. Kiefer's work is concerned with the Sisyphean task of working through history and its imbrications in the mythical: to attempt to come to terms with their ghostliness, but also to employ them as the vexed prime material out of which a thought may flow into artistic form. Yet even some of his well- meaning commentators have difficulty with this complexity, which they often wish to reduce—for entirely understandable reasons—to the presence of this or that historical or presentational determination. But given the rigorous indeterminacy that his images stage, it is hardly possible to agree with the claim made by one of these commentators that Kiefer’s “works are of an unambiguous and clear self-determination” and that they might give us access to a “final meaning” (Honisch 9, 14). That, by the same token, Kiefer’s self-reflexive citation of historical myth presents itself neither simply as an unambiguous rejection nor as an apologetic celebration or strategic re- mobilization has caused considerable consternation among his critical detractors. A recent critique is symptomatic of the view that Kiefer’s work is unduly infatuated with a set of myths that were central to the fascist aestheticization of art—and that it therefore cannot escape fascism’s movements. Not surprisingly, this 11SCONNECTICUT REVIEW mimeticist approach, in which Kiefer is accused of generating essentially fascist art, finally contents itself with the comforting conclusion that as “long as artists like Kiefer take ideologically loaded materials as the subject of their work, critics should be prepared to practice the kind of nonformalist Ideologiekritik that such art demands” (Brooks 121). The problematic assumptions of such a view of art are that there could be something like non- ideologically charged and therefore entirely “natural” material, that critique and formally rigorous presentational considerations are mutually exclusive binary opposites, and that confronting a certain material is equal to endorsing it. More importantly, such a reading implies that Kiefer’s art manufactures a meaning whose purpose is simply to reveal itself as historical and political presence—a presence that could be triumphantly endorsed or reprimanded from a position of secure historico-political knowledge and moral certainty. From this perspective, it seems that the ideology of the artist-hero that this view ascribes to Kiefer is silently replaced with a new ideology, embodied by the generic type of the critic-hero, who may police the meaning, reception, and political determination of an artwork from a omniscient perspective of critical correctness, ethical propriety, and political superiority—all grounded in full hermeneutic closure. But it would be very difficult to sustain such fantasies of mastery through responsible and careful readings that remain open to the fundamental indeterminacy and paratactical structure of Kiefer’s art, especially his unweavings of the certainties of historical presentation and his calls for a new and aporetic responsibility that these unweavings engender. We could say, therefore, that Kiefer’s confrontation with myth—in its tendency to expose the hidden maneuvers without which mythical dissimulations are unthinkable—works to counterbalance the movement of historical myth itself.” This concern places his artistic meditations on myth into relation with Roland Barthes’s semiological reflections on the ways in which “myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal” (142). But it would be a mistake to read Kiefer’s art simply as a belated postmodern myth machine or as a painterly form of transparent Ideologiekritik. The ambivalence that traverses his work at any moment would foreclose such typologies. Rather, his art engages, 116GERHARD RICHTER as Andreas Huyssen reminds us, the ways in which myth and history remain painfully inseparable, exploring the view that the historical ideology of overcoming myth once and for all may be the most powerful myth of all. These movements of thought connect Kiefer, along with Beuys, less to the work of fellow contemporary artists than to the monumental mythological image productions of filmmaker Hans-Jiirgen Syberberg (211). What is germane to Kiefer’s art are the mute gestures that invite us to consider—again and again, and always as if for the first time—how the task of thinking historically is tied to a specific ethical and theoretical commitment that responds to the predicaments of his images’ elusiveness. This commitment would ask us to assume a critical responsibility for the inability of presentation to capture a history that will not linger as a fully readable image in a moment of crisis. Kiefer’s canvases, along with his forays into Object Art, link such issues to the ways in which they become affected, in the moment of presentation, by the competing demands of variegated materialities: oil, acrylics, and shellac are put into. grammatical relation with sand, earth, cardboard, photographic paper, lead, straw, and other materials. This technique of imbricating a variety of materials and thematic images belongs, as a historicizing practice, to an aesthetics of subterranean relays linking objects and thoughts which on the surface seem to have little to do with one another. Indeed, there is an elective affinity between Kiefer and certain impulses of Dadaism and Surrealism. “When one connects two distant things with each other,” Kiefer suggests, “there appears a line that is all the more beautiful the less this conjunction is sensible or full of meaning (sinnvoll); only then does the line appear purely as a line” (Raume 166). The haunting image of history that emerges from the fragmented materiality of such uneasy relations is always in Tetreat, even as it ceaselessly calls upon us to revisit questions concerning the space in which memory, politics, and figuration intersect. While Kiefer’s paintings are often extended meditations on history and visual presentation in general, they remain inscribed in the conflicted discourses of a specifically German genealogy. Indeed, Kiefer’s work would be unthinkable outside of the legacy that it perpetuates and ruptures all at once, and that includes proper names such as Kant, Hélderlin, Heidegger, Nietzsche, Rilke, and oeCONNECTICUT REVIEW Celan. His massive 1980 woodeut Ways of Worldly Wisdom Herman's Battle, for instance, places into a constellation a multitude of significant German thinkers and writers, grouping their faces around the image of a dark, strangely disfigured forest and the camp fire burning in front of it” Here, the forest imagery Fesonates with the pine tree (in German: Kiefer) that is encoded in the artist's name. And the epic German battle evoked by the Picture poses a dark threat to the faces that surround the forest: in a deadly struggle, their jawbones (Kiefer) may well be broken. In order to protect themselves, these faces might need either a god (Anselm) or at least a strong helmet (Anselm). While Kiefer’s images often work to create an artistic space that is informed by the tradition of Renaissance and Post-Romantic art as well as the visual syntax of German Expressionism, these images always transgress their own genealogy by confronting the disasters of more recent German history, especially Nazism and the Holocaust." Here, Kiefer's interest in charred surfaces and the movement of the flame aligns him with the writings of Paul Celan, whose Shoah poem “Death Fugue” has served as a touchstone for several of Kiefer’s canvases.’ In these obsessive engagements with the political legacy of German history, his project hardly, as H.W. Janson claims, “reweavefs] the threads broken by history” (727) Rather, in keeping with Kiefer’s premise “not to do something Synthetic, but something rupturous (etwas Briichiges)” (Gesprich 19), it works to intensify the rupture of history so that a new articulation of historicity becomes thinkable, Pethaps nowhere does this commitment become more urgent than in Kiefer's little-known 1989 poster design for a Cologne exhibition at Galerie Paul Maenz, “The Angel of History” (“Der Engel der Geschichte”) (figure 1). By analyzing the ways in which Kicfer’s image cites and reconceptualizes Walter Benjamin's rearticulation of history—his 1940 theses “On the Concept of History’—I wish to suggest that Kiefer’s reading of history stages &@ movement of presentation whose politics and ethics are predicated upon a g of the teleological model of progress and hermeneutic mastery associated with certain more traditional a rt—“——Ss—S<—é<é 3WTrmrrl Benjamin’s angel of history, Kiefer takes the breakdown of Presentation and decidability as his point of departure for a evisitation of what it might mean to speak of history. Kiefer’s art 118GERHARD RICHTER annoiinces itself as an event that ruptures its time in order to enable a thinking that views history not only as a matter of the past but also as a concer for a future responsibility that has yet to be thought and that does not exhaust itself in reconstructing what once was.'" Kiefer’s image is divided horizontally into two parts, The top section depicts in black and white with grayish shades a partially dilapidated brick wall that is opened in its center by a door preceded by an entrance or exit. The allusive movement of shadow that separates the upper half of the door from its lower half silently reenacts the larger division of the entire image. The bottom section shows a damaged jet, pointing upwards to the left, that is either descending or has already crashed. The jet is surrounded by gray and black brush strokes, and the tip of its tail crosses the dividing line between the two sections of the image, partially touching the right-hand side of the brick wall. In addition to the jet’s tail, the two sections are also connected through their common, erratic touches of light blue. It is possible to read the deep black regions in the lower part of the bottom section as piles of rubble, the debris of bombed buildings perhaps, and the contours of the gray and black area above the plane as the faint outlines of a damaged cityscape. Even though the image is inscribed, along its dividing line, with the words “der Engel der Geschichte,” there is no angel to be scen, at least not in mimetic or representational terms. The history that this absent angel announces is itself a form of absenc a void or blind spot around which multiple readings are called into presence.!! Kiefer’s image is an implicit citation of the angel of history that Benjamin evokes in his theses on the concept of history. There, the famous image of the angel appears precisely in the central or axial position around which the entire constellation of theses turns, namely in the ninth of eighteen theses. Benjamin writes: There is an image by Klee named “Angelus Novus.” It presents an angel looking as though it were about to distance itself from something at which it is gazing. Its eyes are staring, its mouth is open, and its wings are spread. This is what the angel of history must look like (Der Engel der Geschichte mug so aussehen). Its face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, it sees a single catastrophe which 119CONNECTICUT REVIEW keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of its feet. The angel would like to tarry, awaken the dead, and reassemble what has been shattered. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in its wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm inexorably propels it into the future to which its back is turned, while the pile of debris before it grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (697-8) Benjamin here encrypts his general wish to reconceptualize history, which involves a rejection of historicist linearity, a strategic exploding of the teleology of progress, and a rupture of temporality that results in a revolutionarily charred moment of “Now-Time,” in the image of Paul Klee's angel (figure 2)."° Depending on one’s reading of the phrase “must look like,” this angel is an Angelus Novus—a new angel—either because it is the image of what has already taken place, or because something has yet to take place that can only be imagined in the future figure of this angel. Whether read as an affirmation or as a predictive promise, in Benjamin’s text Klee’s angel becomes invested with the figurative force that alone could underwrite the “weak messianic power” (694) and open “the narrow gate (kleine Pforte) through which the Messiah might enter” (704). Benjamin appropriates the image of Klee’s angel for a rearticulation of the historical that understands messianism neither as a concrete historical movement nor as a religious doctrine but rather as a more general commitment that refuses to foreclose the hope for what is still to come. In order to keep the promise of the narrow gate alive, the angel of history calls upon us not to fetishize the ultimately elusive image of “the way it really was” but instead to “articulate the past historically” (695). To articulate the past historically means to activate the historicity of our objects of study in a way that places them on the far side of the teleology of progress and the grand claims of conventional historicism. Like photography, which he so often evokes and which always both memorializes the image of an event and removes it from the stream of history, Benjamin's “true image of the past flits by” and it “flashes up in the moment of its recognizability never to be seen again” (695). The angel of history presents itself as such an image. For Benjamin, its historical elusiveness is at the same time the 120GERHARD RICHTER political hope that it holds in store. Kiefer’s image belongs simultaneously to the theoretical legacy of Benjamin and to the painterly genealogy following Klee’s angel. In his version of the angel of history, the top part of the image can be read as enacting the reconceptualization of temporality, which endowed Benjamin’s angel of history with the hope that “every second was the narrow gate (kleine Pforte) through which the Messiah might enter” (704). Here, Kiefer seems to follow Benjamin’s wish to think an innovative form of historicity that keeps a certain hope, however weak, alive. Yet at the same time Kiefer’s kleine Pforte also belongs to the visual repertoire of the Holocaust: it stands in syntactical relation to the entrances of concentration camp crematoria. While his kleine Pforte is a passageway into something else, its function as a passage is also negated. In its undecidability it simultaneously becomes the opposite of a passage or pass: an impasse. Far from an arbitrary form of “anything goes,” this impasse names the specific paradox that inhabits the heart of Kiefer’s work: “We must establish laws and oppose them at the same time” (Gespriich 12). This vacillation between an affirmation and a negation is perpetuated by the looming presence of the jet. Indeed, the jet in “The Angel of History” belongs to a specific register of Kiefer’s work characterized by the leitmotif-like presence of this lead airplane. In 1991, for instance, the jet reappears as a sculpted object with the title “Melancholia” (figure 3).'' While Diirer’s woodcut “Melencholia I,” of which Benjamin also was aware, could be read as staging the mood of the early modern age in the figure of a brooding female angel who is tormented, as Erwin Panofsky suggests, by an overabundance of thoughts and signs to be interpreted, Kiefer’s staging of melancholia employs the military-technicist formation of the jet-cum-angel. In a further reference to Diirer’s enigmatic woodcut, Kiefer installs a polyhedron on the jet’s wing, the same geometrical structure that can be seen to the angel’s right in Diirer’s image. In both Diirer and Kiefer, the iconographic significance of this polyhedron cannot be reduced to a single meaning; historians of iconography suggest that it could signify, among other things, the remains of a pillar, a misshapen primal body, or even a crystal structure (Bhme 8). Panofsky argues that Diirer here shows “the truncated thomboid for descriptive geometry, particularly stereography and 121eT a egw hS By cor ces perspective” (161). In the grand Kiefer exhibition at Berlin’s Nationalgalerie during the same year, a series of such jets were ominously grouped around one of Kiefer’s most significant works, the installation of leaden books and shelves entitled High Priestess (Zweistromland)."" Two years earlier, a similar jet appeared in an installation entitled Poppy and Memory, a visual homage to, and reworking of, Celan’s poetry. Kiefer’s leaden jets not only belong to the realm of the artist's interest in the status of lead as a specific discursive material, they also implicitly call into question the West’s notion of history as progress: whereas Leonardo da Vinci and Arnold Bécklin boldly envisioned the possibility of flight when this was not yet a technological possibility, Kiefer’s planes, as part of an image or bolted to the floor, strangely never leave the ground (Schneider 116). Their formal features signify the idea or possibility of flight without ever participating in its practice. Here, Kiefer’s jet can be read as the postmodern technicized equivalent of Klee’s high modernist Angelus Novus—as the angelic apotheosis of technicity or technophilia itself. Kiefer’s metonymic mobilization of the angelic in “The Angel of History” is paralleled in his oeuvre by the presence of works that stage angelic figures more directly. These works, from a variety of nodal points in the artist's career, include, among others, the two versions of “The Painter’s Guardian Angel” (1975), the four works that share the name “Angel” (1977), “The Order of the Angels” (1983-84), “Seraphim” (1983-84), and “Seraphim” (1984).'° More recently, a subtle meditation on angels is also present in the monumental installation, exhibited in Venice in 1997, entitled “The Heavenly Palaces.” Here, in a reflection on space, light, and architectural design, the angelic assumes an uncanny presence in the form of seemingly free-floating white robes and costumes suspended in tall tubular vitrines. The angelic names the moment of displacement in Kiefer in which what becomes visible is “the impossibility of placing one’s self in a particular territory” (Celant 13), and any subjective or individualist reading of the angelic order is perpetually turned back upon itself as though it were an ephemeral wound that would not close. Some twenty years earlier, a prior version of this pattern becomes visible in the oil-on-canvas painting “The Painter's Guardian Angel”. While Kiefer cites and plays with the art historical tradition that conceives of angels carrying palettes as the guardians and enablers 122GERHARD RICHTER of painters and their work of presentation (Harten 70), this angel, without facial features, appears to be swept up in the very movement of presentation—the broad, deft brush strokes—that it is supposed to enable. This angel thus appears caught in a figurative space in which it is both the agency of presentation and the victim of its incessant failures. Likewise, such movements of presentation and thought are cited and reworked in Kiefer’s pictorial meditations on the ill-fated flights of “Icarus” and in his series of fallen angels. In these meditations on the angelic it becomes clear that if Kiefer’s art wishes to take history seriously, it does so by obsessively investigating the dimension of history that pushes itself to the limit: both the limit of history’s thinkability and the limit of presentation. What makes it possible, indeed vital, to continue to speak of history cannot be thought in separation from the forces that move it toward its own excess (Nancy 105). By being exposed to its own excessiveness, the historical returns again and again not simply as a normative question but, more importantly, as an open question. It is as though Kiefer's kleine Pforte not only literalizes Benjamin’s messianic passage and simultancously figures the crematorium door in a chiastic reversa it also presents the necessary opening onto history’s excess itself, In this context, it stands in grammatical relation with such images as “Siegfried’s Difficult Way to Brunhilde” (1991)'* and the variations on “Comet” (1976-88),"” which set into motion difficult passages, paths, and unexpected openings that, like the angel that will not arrive, always threaten to exceed their felos. This possibility of excess, the Heideggerean Uberflup, is precisely what makes them figures of history. Unable to reduce their own internal codes of relation to a transparent model of departure and arrival, these images liberate history as a future event that always remains yet to be fully understood, They call for the ethical and political confrontation of history’s lack of transparency, indeed, for the lack that is history. This lack is inseparable from a belief in angels, As Kiefer explains, belief consists in the fact of realizing that something is not what it appears to be (and) that one ought not to orient oneself according to it. This realization of lack (Mangel) is simultaneously the belief in what could undo or sublate lack 123CONNECTICUT REVIEW (den Mangel aufheben kénnte). But this is no simple equation in the sense of: Here we have lack, there is the remedy, Because the undoing or sublation of lack will immediately lead to another lack. Belief does not consist in a solution, but in the activity as such. (Gespréich 59) Similarly, Kiefer’s encounters with history, that is, with a structure of historicity that presents itself as lack, can never cancel and fill in the void that is at its core, because this movement would only produce new voids. Rather, the promise of Kiefer’s presentations of historicity can only be experienced through a responsible, and therefore unnamable, opening up to the lack that names the self-differentiation of its structure. The tensions that characterize Kiefer's mobilizations of history therefore do not simply imply the rejection of political commitment, the striving for a future whose history has not been emptied in advance. While his angels of history interrupt temporality in order to freeze the moment of the event—for Kiefer, implicitly echoing Benjamin's aesthetics of the dialectical image at a standstill, “an image brings something to a standstill” (Gespréch 53)—this interruption is also the condition of possibility for what is yet to be thought. As Kiefer tells us: “My stance may be a form of resignation. Yet this is not a resignation that one has because one cannot go on but rather a resignation in the face of a vast expanse, the yet unknown possibilities. By resignation I do not mean giving up.” He continues: “At the same time, I do not attempt, like the Baron von Miinchhausen, to pull myself out of the swamp by my own hair; rather, I attempt to see just where in infinity I am located” (Gesprdch 114). In Kiefer's angelic iconography, an encounter with the contingency and finitude of history marks the departure point for a thinking of the political that lies on the far side of triumphant optimism and programmatic closure. As Kiefer argues, the “belief in a linear, eschatological development leads to the danger of legitimating transitory catastrophes” (Gespréich 157), a movement that his art, confronting its own limits, can never erase or transcend but only thematize one more time. Hence, the perpetual provocation of Kiefer’s engagement with historicity can be measured not only by the extent to which it “succeeds in dealing with and exorcising the ghosts of the German 124eee pait” (Huyssen 212). Kiefer’s confrontation with historicity is also a seismographic scale that registers the level of acceptance that the ghosts of history enjoy within a culture. Indeed, being incapable of hospitality toward the ghosts that always already vex a subject, a nation, or a philosophical system signals, as Jacques Derrida has argued apropos of Marx’s ill-fated exorcisms, an ethico-political untenability2” Kiefer invites us to accept the uneasy angel of history in the form of ghosts. For him, angels and ghosts, for all their historical and figurative differences, are fundamentally inseparable. Only by making peace with, rather than attempting to lay to rest, the perpetual trauma and disturbance of this ghostly angel can historicity be experienced. Here, historicity is this angelic ghostliness, To take seriously the historical tasks placed upon us by the innovation of Kiefer’s angelic ghostliness is not to denigrate the significance and absolute necessity of empirical and factual research and the irreducible importance of uncovering and making available the material content of historical events. For all its contradictions and ideological appropriations, the archive, understood in the broadest sense, remains indispensable. After all, every knowledge has a vicissitudinous history, every truth a genealogy full of contradictory tensions, even such seemingly unchangeable concepts as Reason itself. To grasp the demands of reading responsibly and of engaging sensitively with texts and images and their infinite intertextualities is always also to grasp the requirement of a radical archaeology of knowledge that first made such reading and thinking possible. Along these lines, Derrida reminds us that “at the moment one forms the project of writing or saying anything, it is always better to go as far as possible into historical knowledge and the formalization of already available programs, set to work and finished. Infinite work, of course—but today it is better, as much as possible, to know the history and material logic” of one’s object of concern. “This always better,” he continues, “at least so as not to reproduce while believing oneself to innovate, not to write without knowing while letting oneself be dictated to by programs that are already ‘initialized’ . and already exhausted or saturated.” Here, the “effort at historical knowledge and interpretive formalization is the minimal condition for a ‘responsible’ form of writing: at least as regards history and historiography, not to mention otherCONNECTICUT REVIEW a ee_=sese _éseéséé—ssés neglect or denigration of historical knowledge, even in the Postmodern condition of historical amnesia, leads only to Compulsory tautology, temporal blindness, and involuntary petition, there can be no responsible cultural and theoretical Production ‘that does not perpetually confront the historical Benealogics in which it remains embedded even when it breaks with them. The dangers of right-wing revisionism and the disputation of well-documented historical facts and atrocities, of which the recent so-called German Historikersireit (Historians Debate) concerning the specificity and singularity of the Holocaust is only one example, attest to the importance of evidence and ot eneamation based on fact, even when these are lodged in the tensions of competing ideological constructions and harrativizations. By the same token, there can be no ethi i —.”D—rti—_C——CCSC—S—