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Still XX
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69 still XX Return to Athens. Let one not hasten to conclude that photography does away with words and can do without translation, as if an art of silence would no longer be indebted to a language. “After all,” the tourist of photographs will say, “these images of Athens are all the more precious to me insofar as they speak to me in a universal language. If they remain untranslatable and untranslatably singular, it is because of their very universality; they show the same thing to everyone, whatever their language may be: the divine play of shadow and light in the Kerameikos Cemetery, in the Agora, the Acropolis, the Parthenon, the Adrianou Street Market, the pause of a photographer before the name Persephone.” No, photographs are untranslatable in another way, according to the laconic ruse of a specter or a phantasm, when this economy acts as a letter, when it succeeds in saying to us, with or without words, that we owe ourselves to death. —We? What “we”? And, first of all, who is included in this we? Like a negative still in the camera, an impressed question remains in abeyance ,stillpending.Williteverbedeveloped?Whowillhavesignedthe nous,whetherthefirstorthesecond,ofthisnousnousdevonsàlamort? Me, you, she, he, all of you? And who will have inherited it in the end? —But I am reading this in translation, am I not? It was written in French and I am reading it in English° ... —What does that prove? Every time you look at these photographs, you will have to begin again to translate, and to recall that one day, around noon, for some, having come from Athens and on their way back to it, the verdict had come down but the sun was not yet dead. 70 • 34 • [3.131.13.194] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 23:16 GMT) 71 ...