"Into without image": Paul Celan reading the moving image

Visibility, insurrection, and the moving image

Visibility is a problem in the representation of insurrectionary politics. Dork Zabunyan, for example, suggests that the insurrectionary actions of the Arab Spring of 2011 are represented by a circulation of "missing images": images of insurgency (L'Insistance des luttes 28-31).¹ Zabunyan in this sense reprises an argument made in an earlier context by Serge Daney. Writing about visual representations of Tiananmen Square, the Romanian Revolution, and the Gulf War, Daney concludes that "True images are rare" (La Maison cinéma et le monde 784). The world of moving images more often constitutes the "loop" of visibility, the "visual." How, Daney asks, would a "true image" become visible, if its truth meant that it exited that loop of the visual (327)? Opposing the image to the visual in this way, Daney attaches what we might call a formal insurgency to images of political insurrection. Political uprisings also constitute an uprising in images, an unprecedented visibility that threatens, as Zabunyan's "missing images" attest, to be merely invisible in their contemporary visual regime.

Political insurrection is in this way not only an insurgency against a political regime, but also against a visual regime. This coincidence—or conflation—of insurgencies occupies Paul Celan's response both to the cinema and to the various political uprisings of 1960s Paris. Celan's late poetry will understand politics to consist in a regulation or representation of movement which, in an extreme sense, is both a poetic image and no image at all. Although the relation of Celan's poetry to visual art is explicit² (not least in collaboration with his wife, the graphic artist Gisèle Celan-Lestrange), I think that the problem his poetics share with visual cultures is this problem of images' movement. This essay will trace the circulation of "no image," of what a crucial poem, "Aus dem moorboden," will name "Ohnebild"—withoutimage, no-image, "sans image," as Pierre Joris puts it (BIT 372|373).³ The movement of this poetic Ohnebild through his late poetry will coordinate Celan's response to his contemporary (and past) political commitments: most urgently, the student-worker uprisings of May 1968 which took place in the same streets where Celan lived and worked. But we can see 1968 within a longer historical Parisian framework (reaching back not least to the crisis of 1958, the Fifth Republic, and the war in Algeria). And Celan's meditations on revolutionary politics were much influenced by youthful commitments to socialist politics in the 1930s—as John Felstiner puts it, listing these insurrectionary moments, "Writing in Paris, a victim of the second Great War, Celan could not help facing back" (Paul Celan 82).⁴ But this poetic gaze on political circulation—this movement of political movements through his poetry—is also framed by the broader questions of the moving image. These reflections on politics in the late 1960s coordinate through both their different spaces of their representation and with poetry's contestation, and reflection, of those spaces. The cinema, I will argue here, and in particular the cinema screen-space, will provide one foil of such representation whose obverse side is the space of the street, or the protestor's moving placard on the street. Writing through such spaces, Celan will scan another kind of movement that wrestles precisely, I will argue, with this insurgent, missing image of such space—the image of insurrection itself, and itself an insurrectionary-image.

The question of the visibility of such space, or indeed its legibility, is one of the major concerns of one of Daney's primary interlocutors, Raymond Bellour. Describing what he terms an "invasion" of photography into cinema in the 1960s, Bellour focuses on the "still image" in film as a paradoxical condition of images' movement. Indeed, Bellour's attention in Between-the-Images on the "between" space of images' circulation focuses on the "passageways" between multiple surfaces, a "many sided place" similar to Celan's multiple scenes of circulation. This space of passage is "Floating between two still frames and between two screens, between...