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

Still VI

11 in reserve. I had the impression that, by focusing on these words like a photograph, one could—and the analysis would be endless—discover within them so many “things” that their letters showed by concealing themselves, remaining [demeurant] immobile, impassive, exposed, tooobvious,althoughsuspendedinbroaddaylightinsomedarkroom, some camera obscura, of the French language. Still VI For I had already sensed, through these photographs, a patient meditation , one that would take its time along the way, giving itself the time for a slow and leisurely stroll through Athens (fifteen years!), the pace of a meditation on being and time, being-and-time in its Greek tradition , to be sure, from the exergue from the Sophist that opens Being and Time. But being and time in the age of photography. Had not many trips to Greece over these past few years prepared me for this feeling? (There was, first of all, Athens (three times in fact), and Mykonos and Rhodes (where I had the impression of swimming for the very first time),andthenEphesusandPatmos,withGeorgeandMyrto,andthen theKaisarianiMonasterywithCatherineVelissarisand Demonsthenes Agrafiotis, following the footsteps of Heidegger, who, near the very same Greek Orthodox temple, did not fail to indict yet again in his Aufenthalte not only Rome, along with its Church, its law, its state, and its theology, but technology, machines, tourism, tourist attractions— and above all photography, the “operating of cameras and video cameras ,” which, in organized tours, “replaces” the authentic experience of the stay or the sojourn.) We owe ourselves to death, we owe ourselves to death, we owe ourselves to death, we owe ourselves to death: the sentence kept on repeating itself in my head, so full of sun, but without reproducing itself. 12 • 3 • 13 It produced itself each time for the first time, the same, to be sure, but each time anew completely new, like an original—or a negative without origin. Once and for all, the thing itself was lacking in this original negative. It’s now time; let us begin to look. Look at the Photographer on the Acropolis (no. 9), whom you can see meditating or sleeping, his head restingonhischest,inthemiddleofthebook.Iwonderifhehasn’tset up in front of him, in front of you, an archaic figure of this delay mechanism .Inordertophotographthephotographanditsphotographer,in order to let everything that has to do with photography be seen, in order to bookmark everything in this book. What exactly would he have done, the author-photographer of this book, the author, therefore, of this self-portrait? He would have set the animal-machine up on a Delphictripod .Infollowingheretheechoofmyfantasy,everythingwould thus be suspended in the interval of this delay, a sort of diaphanous time in an air of invisibility. His eyes are closed, but the photographer protects them further from the light with sunglasses. The author of a photograph would have also looked for, indeed even sought out, the shade of a parasol, unless it happens to be a reflector. still vii We owe ourselves to death. This sentence was right away, as we have come to understand, greater than the instant, whence the desire to photograph it without delay in the noonday sun. Without letting any more time pass, but for a later time. Why this time delay? An untranslatable sentence (and I was sure, from the very first instant, that the economy of this sentence belonged to my idiom alone, or rather, to the domesticity of my old love aVair with this stranger whom I call my French language), a sentence that resists translation, as if one could ...