Seeing What Remains: on the Enigma of the Look, Between Mourning and Melancholia

SEEING WHAT REMAINS: ON THE ENIGMA OF THE LOOK, BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA by Ricky Raju Varghese A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education Ontario Institute for Studies in Education University of Toronto © Copyright by Ricky Raju Varghese (2014) SEEING WHAT REMAINS: ON THE ENIGMA OF THE LOOK, BETWEEN MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA Doctor of Philosophy, 2014 Ricky Raju Varghese Graduate Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Social Justice Education University of Toronto Abstract Walter Benjamin, in Thesis IX of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” wrote of the angel of history looking back at the past from the now-time of the present moment, at the historical wreckage, a single catastrophe as it were, piling in front of its feet, as it gets pulled forward facing back into the temporality of the future and the space of modernity’s violent excesses, heralded by the promise of apparent progress. As the title to my dissertation suggests, my study begins, following the angel’s look, with these three words, seeing what remains, and as such it is structured around the very nature of this arresting “look back” and that which is being regarded, the ruins, or the remains and remainders that exist after, and in the aftermath of, traumatic loss. Working with and across a variety of mediums, I conduct a series of exegetical studies of recent “texts” – literary, photographic, and cinematic – within which, I argue, this look back figures as central to the concern of how we might understand the simultaneous existence of the forces of remembrance and forgetting, and of mourning and melancholia in memory-work. The various “texts” within which I explore this look back are Anne Michaels’s novel Fugitive Pieces, the photographic series titled Library of Dust by David Maisel, the movies Hiroshima, mon amour by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais and Amour by Michael Haneke. I situate my exploration of the enigmatic nature of the look back in these different textual scenes alongside Sigmund Freud’s critical work on ii transference and transference love and Kaja Silverman’s rigorous expansion of the psychoanalytic objective of the “cure by love.” Here, it is my intention, as such, to work toward and expand on my thesis that this look, of the angel (or the materialist historian or the artist as witness), is a look of redemptive love, both against erasure and against the possibility of invisibility, “to awaken the dead” as it were, so as to address the loss inscribed in historical experiences with catastrophic temporality and to thereby redeem the ethical from within the scene of trauma. iii Acknowledgements The cure by love, Kaja Silverman suggests, following Freud, “represents the triumph of relationality, it is a cure through and for displacement…[it] suggests that creatures and things are in need of this care because without it they cannot help but suffer from the most serious of maladies: invisibility” (Silverman, 2005, p. 42). Acknowledgments are, in their most distilled and simplest sense, inscriptions against such invisibility. Over the many years that it took me to see this project to its completion, I have been cared for in the most significant and, dare I say, transformative manner; I have been cared for through the many ways in which the people who have supported this project both directly and indirectly have offered me instances of not just insight, but lessons I can take with me elsewhere and everywhere. As such, I have been so utterly displaced. When I started my doctoral work, I arrived at it with a strange, though perhaps expected, set of drives and fantasies – about who I wanted to work with, about what I wanted to study, research and write about, about what this project would offer me, both in the midst of it, as I lived both with it and through it, and in its possible aftermath. I arrived at the University of Toronto with the sole purpose of wanting to study under Roger Simon and Rebecca Comay, both of whose theoretical work I had been following with great rigor for so long till then, since the very early days of my post-secondary training. Unfortunately neither relationship was seen to their intellectual fruition, at least not in the way that I had initially wanted or hoped for. Roger, my erstwhile dissertation advisor, passed away, just over a year prior to my completing this project. His death, thus, marks this work. Rebecca, who I had idolized and idealized for so long, taught me the significant lesson that the text and author might be disparate entities, and as such, despite our best efforts and my unwavering iv commitment to her longstanding intellectual project made it difficult for me to work with her. Perhaps, the difficulty was mine and not hers. Intellectual inheritances are difficult, at best. Sometimes, they place the block that prevents you from the very task at hand, the task of thinking thought, the task of thought and its inscription. However, despite it being marked by loss, this project, as well, is so deeply influenced by what I have had the opportunity to learn from them in the years they were present for my intellectual growth. As such, what is to come to the reader in the pages to follow reverberates with their respective eternal yet absent presences that inform every bit of the core of this text. I cannot thank them enough, not in the least bit for the difficult lessons in epistemological humility they both imparted to me. As such, in the end, it was not the project that I had initially fantasized about writing in all my prior intellectual bravado, but it became, perhaps unconsciously, over the course of its time the very one I was always meant to write. Another significant death, and a loss inscribed in that dying, marks this project as well. In a sense, this project is flanked in the midst of two deaths. Roger’s toward the end, and the death of my maternal grandfather, T.S. Simon at the very start of my graduate work. I often catch myself wondering what he would have said regarding my completion of this program of study. He, like Roger, taught me the importance of being kind as such, and kind, more specifically, to memory itself, the importance of remembering, of trying hard not to forget, but knowing that I would inevitably not remember everything as it had happened, and the importance the demand of ethics held in the caring and careful act of looking back, to watch over the otherness of the past as it watches over me. It is to the memories of both Roger and my grandfather, memories that keep fading into ruin, that I dedicate this work. v This work, then, remains as a singular testimony of what continues to remain of them in my life. Rinaldo Walcott was so deeply generous in his offer to take over the reins of the advisory duties in the aftermath of Roger’s passing. For this, I am incredibly grateful to him; in his ability to see that this project was worthy of being completed and in his assistance as he offered it to me to do so. Robert Gibbs and John Zilcosky, as members of my dissertation committee, were equally supportive throughout the efforts I made toward completing this project amidst the loss it was surrounded and informed by. Bob gave the earlier drafts of this work such close and intimate attention while reading them – attention only one so skilled in the task of exegetical reading is capable of offering. His suggestions have given this work more strength and stamina than I had initially hoped for it. I met John while taking a course with him in the early stages of my doctoral work on Freud’s concept of the uncanny. Little did I know then what I know now regarding what it means not only to theorize the experience of the uncanny, but as well to live with it, to embody it in the work I endeavored to do here. Again, a mere thanks seems so limiting and limited for how I feel in regards to how all of them helped rescue this project from its own possible demise. I, as well, want to offer my acknowledgement and thanks to Tanya Titchkosky who agreed to act as an internal- external reader in the final stage of this dissertation, at my defense. Allan Pero, who graciously accepted the invitation to act as my external reader was, in my opinion, one of the most ideal readers I could have hoped for, outside of my own immediate committee. Both of their comments regarding the political and aesthetic categories I consider here offered me the much-needed provocative challenges I require to think about and continue to address as I move beyond and forward after this dissertation. vi This project could not have also been possible if it were not for the years of work, the simultaneous work of psychoanalysis, I was undergoing with the ongoing support of my analyst Dr. Oren Gozlan. This work is an extension of the work I was doing with him in gaining a much deeper understanding of my unconscious processes and my conscious processing. Neither can I privilege intellectual work over the work of psychoanalysis nor can I privilege the work of analysis over its intellectual description in the form of the work here. Both speak to such profound internal ways in which I distill the social world around me, internal ways that have affected me and continue to affect me in how I experience the ruins of life in the form of the experiences it has offered me.

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