Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Author(s): Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Hubert Damisch
Source: October, Vol. 85 (Summer, 1998), pp. 3-17
Published by: MIT Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/779179
Accessed: 05-01-2016 16:02 UTC
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A ConversationwithHubertDamisch*
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4 OCTOBER
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A ConversationwithHubertDamisch 5
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10 OCTOBER
2. Hubert Damisch, Moves: Playing Chess and Cards withtheMuseum, exhibition catalogue
(Rotterdam:BoymansMuseum,1997).
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withHubertDamisch
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16 OCTOBER
onto the future.I have the impressionthat thereare two models of history
thatare incompatiblehere: the one thatwe could call the historyof transfor-
mationand the one in a sense thathas to be called historyat a dead end.
Damisch:I'm not speaking of a historyat a dead end; but we are completely
trapped. Marxism,as Derrida says,has become a specter that haunts our
nightsand our days.As a matterof fact,we are now livinga certainMarxism
become real. We livein a worldin whichthe economic subsumeseverything.
Logic now is simplyeconomics. How can we stillreferto "late" capitalismas
if capitalismwere approachingits end? We live in a momentof suspension.
Is it the end of somethingor the beginningof somethingelse?
Bois:We've been talkingabout rupturealong withthe longuedurie:perspectiveis
not over; it continues in another form.Could you speak more about your
relation to anthropologywhich you mentioned at the beginning?Because
what has always struckme about your work is its strong anthropological
dimension,since the idea of the longuedureein yourworkhas alwaysseemed
linkedto thisanthropologicalimpulse.
Damisch:In the 1950s whatwas strikingabout anthropologywas its preoccupation
with societies supposedly withouthistory.Levi-Straussresponded to this
problem by drawingthe differencebetweenso-called hot societiesand cold
ones, societies that developed veryrapidly or societies that evolved very
slowly.But it was also a matterthat these societies didn't thinkin termsof
history.It wasn'tjustthattheydidn'tevolve.As MarcAuge says,anthropology
has to deal with the issue of the other. The question that occupies me
enormouslyis one-typically Lacanian-that asks what type of truthone
strivesfor in each domain of work.In anthropologywe strivefora kind of
truthrelatedto the issue of the "other,"whichof course isn'ta disinterested
truth.If I ask the question of alterityit is because it concerns me in my
being-as-subject.The passage to arthas somethingof the same thing.There
is an alterityin artthatconcernsme in the same way.
Krauss:Well,to bucklethe buckle,you said at the beginningthatdoing contextualist
history,a historywhere you would have to tryto imagine yourselfin the
shoes of historicalcharacters,is not interestingto you. But this notion of
ethnographyis one preciselyof imaginingyourselfin some sortof intimate
connectionto people who are absolutelyother.So youwould succeed spatially
whereyou sayit is impossibleto do so in a temporaldimension.
Damisch:Relating to the past as well as to distance is alwaysa matterof alterity
(times as well as spaces are different)and a matterof identity(the past, the
distance as such, being part of our presentculture).The problemis how to
deal both with alterityand identity(or continuity)simultaneously.Social
anthropology, in its classical days, implied the possibility of dialogue
betweenthe anthropologistand his informers.As faras the artof the past is
concerned, this is more of a monologue: the workskeep silent. I repeat:
what mattersto me is less how to make the work of art "speak" (as Aby
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A Conversation
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