Memory, Moment, and Tears A Speculative Approach to the Problem

of Latin American Singularities1

Oyarzun R. Pablo

CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 7, Number 3, Winter

2007, pp. 1-20 (Article)

Published by Michigan State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/ncr.0.0000

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ncr/summary/v007/7.3.pablo.html

Access Provided by Universidad de Los Andes at 10/21/11 2:33AM GMT

 Memory, Moment, and Tears
A Speculative Approach to the Problem
of Latin American Singularities1

Pablo Oyarzun R.
University of Chile

when you say that something is singular, you are surely sorting
out a distinct meaning from a set of them. There is the colloquial use, in
which “singular” refers, on the one hand, to something that is exceptional,
remarkable, excellent, and on the other, to something that is particularly
curious, strange, extravagant. Both meanings are evidently associated in
that they stem from the original sense of uniqueness that the word bears.
“Singular” is what is single, unique, as something that exists separately.
To take it generally, being separate is being different. Again, being differ-
ent is virtually to have an identity. And, in its turn, to exist separately is
to be self-sufficient, autonomous, ontologically grounded in itself, as, you
know, the Aristotelian first substance is. The combination of this ontologi-
cal consistence with the uniqueness of what is singular carries a difficulty

© Michigan State University Press. CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2007, pp. 1–20. issn 1532-687x

● 1
2● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

concerning identity. For identity is a function of intelligibility, and the

singularity of what is strictly singular seems to oppose the exigences of
rational clarification of beings.
Anyway, philosophy has always been confident of an inner light in things
that is responsible for their respective identities, be it the discernability of the
structure of their beings for the cognoscent, or the aboriginal endowment of a
being that is capable of self-representation, and that is, of course, the light of
conscience. But this confidence cannot be really firm without a complement.
The problem with singularity is not only that it implies an incommensurability
that is virtually resistant to its elucidation (among other things, only the work
of art is acknowledged as being the measure of itself), but that this punctual-
ity is also a temporal one—the stigmatic now of its existence. Therefore, to
be actually intelligible, the thing requires a certain permanence, a span of
time along which, by virtue of its repetitive presence, it becomes, so to speak,
readable, the traces of its physiognomy recollectible.
So, something singular is liable to the attribution of identity inasmuch as
it is continuous. And this continuity demands, on the part of the cognoscent,
a peculiar receptivity: let us call it by its proper name, memory.
In the following, my purpose is to discuss briefly the import of memory
on the problem of Latin American singularities. The line of my argument may
somehow seem tortuous, this I cannot contradict; for the worse, it doesn’t
deal with Latin American philosophy in any of the figures that were proposed
for this symposium; my only intention is to suggest the need for establishing
some conditions under which a thinking of the singular may be possible.

1.

Memory, it is said, is a function of identity. You must surely recall the ob-
session of the replicants in Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner: they eagerly
collected photos, ordinary images of ordinary moments that could give
them the illusion of a past of their own and the sense of a personal identity,
memories, as it is said in English, according to a use that, to my native Span-
ish speaker’s ear, sounds like a very suitable one. The motive that incited
them to this unavoidably futile operation was the search for themselves, not
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 3

at all divergent from our own anxieties: what are we, where do we come
from, what awaits us—and just in the way it is stated in Deckard’s foreseeable
speech, at the end. Among the impeccable products of genetic engineering
and the well-known sprouts of natural procreation there is no difference, no
real difference: they are all twinned in the fruitless longing for a guaranteed
identity, for a definitive and steady self-possession; they are twinned in the
ignorance of their lives’ coming vicissitudes. Or rather a single difference:
the tenancy of personal memories. For everyone’s identity would depend on
the possibility of the evocation of something that is strictly one’s own, non-
transferable; identity would depend on the possibility of truthful memory—if
there is one.
The most vigorous argument in support of the idea that memory is the
basis of identity was offered by Hegel. Even if not a substantial connection,
memory provides at least a thread of continuity to identity. It releases the
ego from its imprisonment in the merely formal, abstract equation I = I, and
at the same time from the abyss of infinite regression that threatens self-
conscience. In Hegel, memory is the mediating link, full of the sense and
the presence of otherness, which gives concretion to the ego and secures
its sameness in the process of its return to itself from the estrangement in
exteriority. This import of substantiality is the virtue of Hegel’s argument. The
prize is the assertion of a continuity and universality of meaning that tends Why?
to exclude singularities.
The essential claim that lies in the Hegelian experience of memory is the
constitution of what may be called the absolute recollection. The German
term that designates what we call “recollection” is Erinnerung. Hegel, who
congratulated himself on the virtues of his Muttersprache—the very idiom,
he would imply, that the Spirit spontaneously speaks—played with the word,
making use of the meaning of interiority that it implies: Er-Innerung, literally
“interiorization.” So, the absolute recollection is a recollection that recalls
(that interiorizes) the condition on which it itself is possible, and that in
this way recovers itself fully in its present. In this respect, it is advisable to
read the passage that gives the Phenomenology of Mind its finishing touches,
which precisely describes the mnemonic operation of the Spirit in its entire
far-reaching historical span:
4● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

The other aspect, however, in which Spirit comes into being, History [namely
other with respect to Nature], is the process of becoming in terms of knowl-
edge [das wissende Werden], a conscious self-mediating process—Spirit exter-
nalized and emptied into Time. But this form of abandonment is, similarly, the
emptying of itself by itself; the negative is negative of itself. This way of becom-
ing presents a slow procession and succession of spiritual shapes (Geistern), a
gallery of pictures, each of which is endowed with the entire wealth of Spirit,
and moves so slowly just for the reason that the self has to permeate and
assimilate all this wealth of its substance. Since its accomplishment consists
in Spirit knowing what it is, in fully comprehending its substance, this knowl-
edge means its concentrating itself on itself (Insichgehen), a state in which
Spirit leaves its external existence [Dasein] behind and gives its embodiment
[Gestalt] over to Recollection (Erinnerung). In thus concentrating itself on
itself, Spirit is engulfed in the night of its own self-consciousness; its vanished
existence is, however, conserved [aufgehoben] therein; and this superseded
existence—the previous state, but born anew from the womb of knowledge—is
the new stage of existence, a new world, and a new embodiment or mode
[Gestalt] of Spirit. Here it has to begin all over again at its immediacy, as
freshly as before, and thence rise once more to the measure of its stature, as
if, for it, all that preceded were lost, and as if it had learned nothing from the
experience of the spirits that preceded. But re-collection (Er- [808] innerung)
has conserved that experience, and is the inner being, and, in fact, the higher
form of the substance. While, then, this phase of Spirit begins all over again its
formative development, apparently starting solely from itself, yet at the same
time it commences at a higher level. The realm of spirits developed in this
way, and assuming definite shape in existence, constitutes a succession, where
one detaches and sets loose [ablöste] the other, and each takes over from its
predecessor the empire of the spiritual world. The goal of the process is the
revelation of the depth of spiritual life, and this is the Absolute Notion [der
absolute Begriff]. This revelation consequently means superseding its “depth,”
is its “extension” or spatial embodiment [Ausdehnung], the negation of this
inwardly self-centred ego [dieses insichseienden Ich]—a negativity which is its
self-relinquishment, its externalization, or its substance: and this revelation
is also its temporal embodiment, in that this externalization in its very nature
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 5

relinquishes (externalizes) itself, and so exists at once in its spatial “extension”

as well as in its “depth” or the self. The goal, which is Absolute Knowledge or
Spirit knowing itself as Spirit, finds its pathway in the recollection of spiritual
forms (Geister) as they are in themselves and as they accomplish the orga-
nization of their spiritual kingdom. Their conservation, looked at from the
side of their free existence appearing in the form of contingency, is History;
looked at from the side of their intellectually comprehended organization, it
is the Science of the ways in which knowledge appears [Wissenschaft des er-
scheinenden Wissens]. Both together, or History (intellectually) comprehended
(begriffen), form at once the recollection and the Golgotha of Absolute Spirit,
the reality, the truth, the certainty of its throne, without which it were lifeless,
solitary, and alone. Only

The chalice of this realm of spirits

Foams forth to God His own Infinitude (Hegel 1952, 363–64)

The “absolute” character of this recollection consists primarily in a power

of transformation, by virtue of which the hardened being-in-itself of the past
is overcome; it is, so to say, liquefied. The proper element of this “absolute
recollection” is, expressed in Hegelian terms, the concept. And it is precisely
under the regime of the concept, of science, that the modern world reaches
its essential firmness grounded in a knowledge that knows its own condition,
that is, in a knowledge of the unconditioned, which brings to culmination the This implies
process of self-appropriation that the Spirit has been stubbornly carrying out that PhG is a
historical
from the beginning throughout the whole of history, despite the appearance
approach to
of loosing itself in every new stage. But in order for this process to be pos- Spirit
sible, so that the appropriation of the “own” can take place in the manner and
terms according to which Hegel conceives of it, it is necessary that the latter
possesses a substantial identity that is preserved throughout the historical
flux. This identity, of course, is not at the immediate disposal of the particular Is this what
spirits that parade one by one, in colourful sequence: spiritual identity is leaves out
properly universal, and it is only accomplished by the means of history. It is singularity?
for this reason that Hegel maintains that identity is not a presupposition
or a mere given fact of the process, but its product, its outcome, inasmuch
6● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

as history is, at the same time, the transformation and the capitalization of
the proprium of Spirit: that is to say, the transformation and, in every case,
the capitalization of the transformation. But precisely on this account it is
necessary to assume an undamaged, permanent nucleus of the proprium to
guarantee the continuity of meaning of the historical process. And for the sake
of what I shall later say, allow me to adduce that this very assumption of a
continuity and the assumption that Europe’s history is the objectification of I like this
emphasis on
the former is the one that permits Hegel to equate universal history with thecontinuity, but I
history of the Western world (that is, of Europe). still don´t see
how this
constitutes
history, and not
2. another form of
memory. [Which
The invention of photography occurs a few years—very few—after Hegel’s
is not the same!!]
death. Among the signs, social and massive signs, of the advent of the modern
world that his system celebrates (notwithstanding some critical remarks), he
could in the end only get to know the newspaper. You may recall that famous
statement that Karl Rosenkranz records in his great Hegel biography: “Read-
ing the newspaper in early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer.
One orients one’s attitude against the world and toward God (in one case),
or toward that which the world is (in the other). The former gives the same
security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands” (Rosenkranz 1977,
543).2 Reading the newspaper amounts to a sort of evidence of our being
here, and indirectly of our being ourselves.
The case of photography may be a little different. What is precisely the
sort of accreditation that delivers one’s own appearance on a photo? Does it
amount to a certification of identity when I say, “Look! I’m the one smiling
on the right,” or is it a surreptitious acknowledgment of the fact that one can
no longer hold the line of one’s continuity in time? When I say, to myself or
to others, that I’m the one that one in the photo, that is not properly an act
of stating one’s identity, it is rather an act of identification, with its latent
recognition of a discontinuity rather than a continuity.
It seems to me that photography would have probably upset the great
idealist philosopher, and not because of its condition of image. In the passage
I was quoting, you will recall, Hegel referred to the historical development
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 7

as a “gallery of pictures”; the Spirit tours unhurried through this vast gallery,
taking all—and this is literal—all the world’s time until it accomplishes, at
the end of such a tour, the full coincidence with itself, giving over to recollec-
tion, as it reads every one of its “embodiments,” of its “figures” (Gestalten), as
if it were a heap of deposits that go on increasing the capital until it reaches
the peak of its richness and establishes per secula the emporium of identity.
This presupposes, of course, a certain peculiarity of the pictures that build
the universal patrimony of the Spirit’s gallery, a certain quality of the picture.
Such quality would undoubtedly be the figurative and, above all, expressive
power of painting, “born and reborn from the Spirit,” as Hegel says in general
terms of the beauty of art (Hegel 1970, 14).
Instead of this, photography would have appeared for Hegel, perhaps, as
the lucid index of an impasse to the desired and postulated fluidity, to that
agility of the Spirit—in slow or rapid motion—that was Hegel’s most inveter-
ate belief, his irrevocable bet. Photography bothers the Spirit. It slows down
its mobility to the point of freezing it. It teaches the Spirit that there is the
irretrievable, the punctum, or better, the insoluble momentum in the ocean of
time, of its time. Photography notifies the Spirit that there is another time, a
primeval and inappropriable history of which that momentum is, as it is with
icebergs, the visible top.
What kind of eyes does the Spirit have to look at a photograph? And has
it any eyes for the photograph? Could they be the bodily eyes? Certainly not.
The Spirit doesn’t see with the sense: it sees the sense. If it somehow has the
capacity to look at a photograph, it will see it with the eyes of the difference
between spirit and body, between universality and particularity, between
that which is everlasting and that which is mortal. It doesn’t see anything
other than what is meaningful, and for it the condition of every meaning
is precisely that difference. So, photography, which it only will see on the
condition of the difference, will signify for Hegel the annoying memento of
the body, as a particularity that is reluctant to any intention of universality,
and a moment that is perhaps definitively insoluble. It is the moment, the
singular moment of mortality.
I’ll try to explain myself: it is likely that the photograph could not prop-
erly count as a sign for the Spirit, but it would oscillate, so to speak, at the
8● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

threshold of what constitutes the very possibility of the sign. For Hegel, who
says categorical things about the issue in a few paragraphs of his Encyclopae-
dia, what characterizes the sign is negativity; negativity confers the sign its
ontological specificity. Because of this negativity, the sign (language) lacks
an autonomous being, it doesn’t exist on its own ground, but solely in the
Spirit’s life, that is, in the intelligence that bestows it with the vis significativa,
as it negates the mere exteriority and the particular and primitive content
of external intuition, making of it the vehicle to express representations that
the intelligence itself has engendered. Inasmuch as the sign as such has its
existence in intelligent activity, its essential validity consists in the repre-
sentation (Vorstellung), which, “as the recollected-inwardized intuition (erin-
nerte Anschauung), is the middle between that stage of intelligence where
it finds itself immediately determined and that where intelligence is in its
freedom, in thought” (Hegel 1975, 363). This same representation, inasmuch
as the intelligence, starting from the intuitive material, produces for it a cor-
responding image, belongs then to fantasy, whether as the free combination
and subsumption of that material under the internal content (and that is
creative fantasy as “symbolic, allegoric or poetic imagination”), or as an intel-
ligence that produces external intuitions, that produces signs (367–68).

The true place of the sign is the one that was indicated, that the intelligence—
which as intuiting generates the form of time and space, but appears as recipi-
ent of sensible matter, out of which it forms representations—now gives its
own independent representations a definite existence from itself, making use
of the intuition, space and time filled full, as its own, destroying its immediate
and peculiar content, and conferring it a different content as signification
and soul. This sign-creating activity may be distinctively named productive
memory (the primarily abstract mnemosyne), since memory [Gedächtnis],
which in ordinary life is often confounded with recollection, and also with
representation and imagination, and is employed as if it meant the same, has
always to do with signs only.” (369)

I think that one would have a right to ask if it is generally possible to apply
this great representational model to photography, that is, to ask if it would
not be cancelled with such a model its original and essential documentary
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 9

condition, that is, its vis indicativa, in that this demands an irretrievable ex-
teriority to accomplish its task. To this purpose, I would only mention that
it is frequently agreed that indication (which I link here to that documentary
condition, in view of the effect of exhibition and also because of the evi-
dence of traces, of vestiges) belongs to the prehistory of signification; and it
is necessary to add that the latter exists and unfolds itself in the reign of the
universal (representations, common names, concepts), and that indication,
the document, reveals, allied to an irreducible sense of exteriority, a pathos
of particularity, of singularity. But if it is so, then, in this present that was still
hidden as a future for Hegel, although very near, imminent, in the present
of the invention and the advent of photography, the strange return of that
prehistory was about to happen, it happened, it happens. Hegel maintained
that the sign, conceived as a link of the representation, which is something
interior, with the intuition, which is exterior, is in itself something exterior;
and that memory (Gedächtnis) is anything but recollection, that is to say, the
interiorization (Erinnerung) of this exteriority, its recovering and immersion
in the autonomous and fluent life of the Spirit. And thus, paradoxically, if
what I’ve previously said bears some validity, photography could only appear
to the latter as the ominous exteriorization of the recollection itself, as the
exposition of the Spirit to the most unprotected inclemency, to mere pain,
to the intimation of mortality.
So it is, then: if I were urged to say what is precisely that which, in my
opinion, in photography has the power, as I have said, to bother the Spirit,
I would answer that it is a peculiar, unique sort of negativity alien to the
one that constitutes the living movement of the Spirit. Let me call it the
negativity of the (photographic) negative.3 This kind of negativity is resistant
to the powers of the Spirit, in particular to its capacity of interiorization:
it is the residue of negativity that does not enter in the process of spiritual
enduring, living through, and overcoming the force of (dialectical) negativity
by means of negativity itself. The emblem of this peculiar negativity is death,
in contrast to the life that is constantly reaffirmed by the Spirit’s dialectical
overcoming-and-conserving of all its evolutionary stages. To give an idea of
what this peculiar negativity is, one can return to the meaning of the image,
of the picture in the Hegelian description of the historical spiritual process.
For the image, namely its expressive quality, is precisely what is obliterated
10 ● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

by the negativity of the (photographic) negative, since this negativity buries

the image in the lapsarian interstice between the negative and the photo-
graphic image.4 The Hegelian description is secretly indebted to an inveterate
faith in the mimetic capacity of the image, not so much in the sense of its
faithfulness to the original, but in its appurtenance to the temporality of the
present. It is this temporality that is eternally preserved in the Gestalten that Picture is
form the aforesaid “gallery of pictures.” The temporality of the negativity of painting,
the (photographic) negative is alien to the sense of the present, and to the not
present of the sense. photograph

3.

Allow me to touch on a pair of topics about America.

The first bears—again—the signature of Hegel, and it comes from his
remarks on “The New World” that are contained in the appendix to Die Ver-
nunft in der Geschichte, which is the opening of the Philosophy of Universal
History. I presume it will not be superfluous to mention that this appendix
considers the “natural context or the geographical foundation of universal
history.” Although the discourse about this foundation comprises all the
regions of the Earth, it is in relation to the “New World” that the physical
and geographical element, the material body on which the communities
settle, acquires a determining importance, by virtue of which, although it is
a mere substrate, the history that takes place on it could at most be valued
as rudimentary, and that, in plain words, one should estimate no more than
a prehistory.
Moreover, this same substrate is immature, and the major American
civilizations carried the mark of the physis on which they established
themselves:

Of America and its grade of civilization (Bildung), especially in Mexico and

Peru, we have information, but it imports nothing more than that this culture
was an entirely [natural] one, which must expire as soon as Spirit approached
it. America has always shown itself physically and psychically powerless, and
still shows itself so. For the aborigines, after the landing of the Europeans
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 11

in America, gradually vanished at the breath of European activity. [Even in

animals shows itself the same subordination as in men.] (Hegel 1955, 200)5

For Hegel, who perceived a marked difference between North and South
America (which obviously includes Mexico), because the former was born
from colonization and not from conquest, and it is protestant, industrious,
and republican, South America offered the panorama of several melancholic
bunches of “children without understanding, who live from day to day, far
away from higher thoughts and ends” (1955, 202). But this doesn’t prevent
him from adding to the judgement of immaturity and weakness the sen-
tence of incompleteness. Reaching the conclusion of his considerations
and thinking principally of the United States, Hegel stipulates that America
is not finished, neither in the domain and configurations of its elemental
consistencies, nor—much less—in its political construction. And if America
can appear in the nostalgic daydreams of the Europeans, weary of the longev-
ity of their “historical arsenal,” as the land of the future, a fascinating land
of opportunities, until now it isn’t but the “echo of the Old World and the
expression of an alien vitality” (210). Naturally, this could be a divertimento
for fantasy, but in no way a business for science and historical knowledge,
much the less for philosophy. With regard to the latter, such expectations
don’t count: we, philosophers, Hegel proclaims, “have nothing to do with
prophecies, [but, in] history . . . with what has been and with that which is,
and in philosophy with that which is and is eternally, [that is] with reason,
and with that we have already enough” (210).
Of course, one can think that these assertions have no other pregnancy
than that of eccentricity and of a certain penchant to abusive inference,
characteristic of a philosopher who is obfuscated by the zeal of making ev-
erything fit within the too rigid mold of his system. Nevertheless, it is clear
that Hegel is not alone with these imprecations. He bears the company of all
the champions in the history of logos, in fact, he is supported by the history
of Europe, declared to the title of universal history, stubbornly promulgated
as substance and horizon of universal memory.6
Under the various modulations of the second topic you can find a thousand
signatures, and they are ours, from Latin American hands, and although we
12 ● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

have them dimly scribbled and almost effaced in our memory, they are none-
theless indelible. First in the line, I would say, are those that reveal through
the tremor of their strokes the wrath, the indignation, the failure, the disap-
pointment. When the signatories affirm that the Latin American people lack
memory, the reason therefore is that they have suffered in person the proof of a)
this truth, and have ended their lives in rejection, exile, ignominy, or plainly
“New”,
no
in oblivion. But you should not think that Latin American experience and
history,
reflection is merely incumbent to those who risked their names, their wealth,
becaus
or their bare expectations in the initial struggles that led to emancipation
e of
and to the establishment of our questionable republics: they recur again and erasure
again in the discourses, whether critical or apologetical, theoretical, literary,
or political (if it is generally possible to hold the difference between these
three genres among us), and they recur uninterruptedly from the very hour
we began to have a feeling of independent life. A proof of that would be the
foundational syndrome that afflicts—and not merely intermittently, but at
every instant of our socio-political ups and downs—leaders, cliques, clubs,
movements, parties, classes, and entire communities, driven, demagogically
or not, by an insatiable hunger for identity. And this appetite would be a con-
stant stigma in the attempt to set up a historical destiny among us. If I am
permitted only to allude to one salient point, the prize of the introduction into
modernity would be here the abolition of every memory, the final sanction of
that atavistic amnesia that has been denounced in so many ways.
But forgetfulness is only one aspect of this second topic; from the other
side, it curiously connects with Hegel’s assertions. I call it curious, because
the defenders of a strong identitarian Latin American point of view used to
utter ardent protests against the discriminatory threats that were advanced
by Hegel and his former and latter associates without any sign of hesitation
nor restraint. Nevertheless, those same ideologists exploit the attribution to
our peoples of a youth that is pregnant with future. On such a basis, it has
been attempted to emphasize the hope and promise value that these peoples
would carry with themselves: they are the beginning of a new race, maybe
a cosmic one, blood and soil for the renewal of humanity. Such things have
been said. But precisely for the same reason that is argued in such theorems,
this lively dawn becomes an alibi for forgetfulness. If we are so new, if we
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 13

have scarcely entered into history, the past cannot be a heavy load for us. We
b) “New”,
may be, if you like, a sort of replicant, although—and I guess it’s honorable
no history,
to confess it—in no way impeccable.
because
This double and almost triple topic, which I have scarcely outlined, leaves
we are
us—I mean us, Latin Americans—in an uncomfortable limbo. Pulled from mostly
one side and from the other, impelled at the same time to both of them, held future
back in prehistory, pubescent or in ripening age, or again, viewed form its
reverse (which doesn’t cease to make itself evident), outrageously raped and
plagued with horrors, Latin America, out of a land of utopia, becomes for us
rather an alien magnitude, an a-topic out-of-the-way place.

4.

I think we should not be perplexed if this uneasiness, with all its countless
variations, is reflected in the photos that documented Latin American land-
scapes and people around the middle of the nineteenth century. Shortly after
Daguerre announced in 1839 the invention of a method for making a direct
positive image on a silver plate, photography landed in Latin America: the
year 1840 is registered as the date of the first use of a photographic camera
in Brazil. A French abbot, Louis Compte, was the pioneer.
During the first period, photos were largely taken in Latin America by
foreign voyagers, adventurers, and visitors, driven by a curiosity morbidly
awakened by the strangeness of the land and the wonder of the other, a
curiosity that was frequently sublimed to the condition of scientific knowl-
edge, documentary register, and anthropological enlightment, if not—and
this with great assiduity—concomitant with the surveying of the land for
economic purposes. The quality of the gaze of this early documentation is
that of an essential detachment, not without shades of astonishment, and
it tends to underline even more the feeling of estrangement with which this
gaze perceives its newly found objects. From another side, however, in such
strangeness and detachment plays also an impulse to visual hunting, which
unequivocally gives itself away in the condition of fantastic trophies that
assume the photos, and which is in various ways parallel to the projects
of political domination and economic exploitation of the Latin American
14 ● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

countries, their natural resources, and their native communities. From a cul-
tural point of view, it is hard not to notice that this gaze was richly nourished
by the ideological representations of the New World that had filled for the
past centuries the abundant literature on the subject. Hegel was indeed an
heir to this legacy, who tried unsuccessfully to make a coherent picture out
of its heterogeneous materials.
If one turns to the first photos taken by vernacular photographers, it
would be hard to indicate some perceptible difference from their European
and North American counterparts. For the most part, they yield mimetically to
the modelling force of the Eurocentric eye, formed by those representations.
So, if one wishes to have the idea of a difference, there is probably no
use in acquiring the kind of gaze that looks through the lens, its special pro-
clivities, its strategies of selection. The question is, how does it appear what
this gaze sees? We are largely instructed about the affect that produces on
our acquired optical behaviors the mechanical interruption at the moment
of the occlusion of the camera’s diaphragm, a moment of blindness for the
natural eye, in which the device constitutes on its own an image that is tech-
nically conditioned. Benjamin famously spoke of the optical unconscious
to highlight the peculiar autonomy of the apparatus, the immense change
that it induces in our conception of the real and in our relation to visuality,
and certainly the transformation of the image’s status that it provokes (1991,
500). Briefly, it is presumed that, in a similar way as it apparently happens in
other orders of the impact of technology on the structure of human experi-
ence, this transformation, more than to introduce dimensions that would be
entirely new, reawakens those that were latent. Such dimensions constitute
the body of memory but are always fleeting, elusive: they do not enter in any
actual remembrance. In this sense, I would say that technology points to
what I would call the immemorial.
It is perhaps this that announces itself, not of course in the intentional
and interested character of the photographer’s eye, but in the unintentional
apparition of his or her circumstantial subject. That is because of the en-
counter—an encounter that amounts to a rediscovery of America—between
a technology that arises from a historical process with which it keeps strict
coherence and a world of landscapes and people that are fundamentally
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 15

alien to such a process. The only explanation to disown the evidence of the
abyss that haunts this encounter is to refer to categories such as the primi-
tive and the exotic. But the haunting prevails: nature and natives emerge by
virtue of the indifferent operation of the camera as an undeniable difference,
as a past that short-circuits with the present of the observer. The snapshot is,
temporally and historically considered, such a short-circuit.
These are photos that show a fading line that goes back to prephoto-
graphic times (and this, I guess, is somehow equivalent to prehistoric times),
made visible in the appearance of the landscapes and the countenance of the
human models, as if they were fossils, in a way that perhaps differs slightly
but significantly from the temporal gap revealed in the European photos of
the first epoch of photography. That line points to the immemorial.
Of course, one could object that this incommensurability becomes also
visible at the dawn of European photography. In the end, the coherence of
the historical process to which I referred—with all its social, economic,
cultural, political, and technological ingredients—is something much more
complex and internally differentiated than could be thought of at first, and
it is precisely photography that helps to grasp this complexity. But perhaps
one can suggest that the Latin American case has a certain privilege in Latin American
that it shows with irrefutable evidence the gap (temporal, historical) that privilege
(reality?)
separates the kind of phenomenon that appears in the photographic image
from the photographic event itself. Such a gap undermines the universe
of representations that sustained the aforesaid coherence, according to
a measure that is only comparable with the impact of photography itself
on that universe. This gap, nevertheless, is not one determined by the his-
torical inscription of both the technological performance and the specific
subject involved, but is structural to photography; in other words, it is pre-
cisely the structural temporal gap of photography that redefines historical
inscription.
This is because photography brings about a sort of archaeological exhu-
mation of the present, bringing to light (to a dim light) the various temporal
layers that constitute it, and at the same time it refers the present to the
archaic (and by this I do not mean necessarily the remote, but that which,
even in what we call the present experience, escapes every possibility of
16 ● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

perception or remembrance). In any case, these two crossed movements

constitute (“at the same time”) one single moment that bears the character
of a shock (the snapshot) that refuses the present its (simple) presence, defer-
ring it. And allow me to suggest that, for the Spirit, this deferral would be
the essence of pain, considered as a haunting memory of moments lived, This is then
each of which announces the imminence of death; moments that are not at not absolute
the sovereign disposal of recollection, but that can only be remembered—as recollection
fleeting images—under the pressure of that imminence, and as the persistent
presage of death. The image of those images could be a tear.
So, mine is an innuendo about the relationship among memory, photog-
raphy, and tears. But I do not want to tell you that, by virtue of the deferral
of the presence of the present, the photograph is something like a tear that
reflects all the moments lived and all the times to come. Or that there is a
lachrymose constitution of the image, although I am convinced that every
image is the pain of an absence. Nor am I suggesting that memory’s misty
atmosphere is like a fog formed by the slow evaporation of so many tears.
Please delete it all.
I only want to remember some words about the tear: the great Chilean
poet Gabriela Mistral concluded her speech “How I write my verses,” deliv-
ered 70 years ago in Montevideo, in the company of the 2 other great Latin
American women poets at that time, Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina
Storni, speaking of the beam or rafter that poets would have laid across their
eye, a beam that goes away, leaving the eye clean, at the moment of death:7
“They tell that most of the dying people, when they come to the end, shed
a tear, a strange tear that falls very slowly” (1977, 35). [And this slowness
is so different from the spirit’s parade and the Spirit’s patience; it is a final
surrender to exteriority.]

5.

Let me briefly return to the limbo of the Latin American identity issue. For
the reasons mentioned, and notwithstanding the chronic oblivion and the
auspices of youth, certain experience of memory persists for us, Latin Ameri-
cans, and it persists perhaps in a more powerful way than any other. It is the
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 17

traumatic memory. Of course, the evocation of this term “trauma” has no

clinic purpose in this context. Let us remember that “trauma” means wound,
harm. In its semantic spectre lies the idea of a blow. For us Chileans, who had
to suffer more than 30 years ago what we call in our language a “blow,” un
golpe,—that is, a coup d’état, a golpe de Estado, and from then on its never-
ending consequences (and this is the case for most Latin American countries
in different spans of time)—this idea brings with it an unmistakable and
atrocious weight, but I’m not mentioning it with that intention. I rather think
that the trauma summarizes the rhythm of every experience, if it is true that
in the core of experience we find the event of a blow as the operation of
a “before” that constitutes experience in its very possibility, although the
experience never can arrive to incorporate it to its “now.” From this point of
view, it would be fair to say that the notion of trauma is one of the notions
that expresses the contemporary thinking of the event and—allow me to
add—the thinking of the singular.
In an immediate temporal sense, trauma is something of the past that
continues to happen in the present. Therefore, it is something that never
ends to belong to the past. According to this condition, it resists every in-
clusion by and under memory’s powers and activity, and therefore to every
labour of self-construction. It has not the hardened substance of the past
that is closed and can only be recalled as a ruin and as something definitively
lost, but that nonetheless admits the transformation into representation and
meaning that operates the Spirit; trauma opposes an invincible impediment
to this operation, because first of all it is not expressive nor expressible: it is
the inexpressive and inexpressible as such. (And I’m seduced to think that
the Hegelian explanation of the recollection is constructed to secure that, in
the end, there be no trauma for the Spirit.) Its situation, then, is curious: it
evades memory, and nonetheless it is there; it insists on being there, like a
shadow that escorts every remembrance. A way to describe this paradoxical
relationship of trauma with memory would be to say that its emblem could
be a photograph, for photography is indeed essentially traumatic.
Two memories, then: The one, that corresponds to the recollections we
call “our own,” that is, our personal and truthful (supposedly truthful) memo-
ries, in whose asymptote of universality lies Hegel’s absolute recollection.
18 ● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

The other is the memory that, marked ( for instance) by photography, by a

photograph, houses in its shadowy edge the prehistoric, the immemorial.
What would be the relationship between them? For it must exist, if the
memory on which we establish our identity remains always embarrassed by
the immemorial. I would say that this relationship is very much of the mo-
ment. The moment would be the slip between these two memories, a passage
between both that it is impossible to locate and is therefore literally atopic.
It announces itself in the question that one, anxiously seized by doubt and
confusion, directs to oneself, when it is impossible to know how one has
come to the situation in which one finds oneself: “But, in what moment . . . ?”
“Pero, ¿en qué momento . . . ?”
I prefer the word “moment” over “instant,” which seems to speak of a
pure present, full in its rigorous constriction and raised to its punctuality. The
former comes from a root (meu_-) that means “to move, to push, to shake.”
Momen, momentum, movimentum. “Moment” speaks of a temporality that is
determined by a shock, a blow—a blow that is not actually experienced as
such, but only as traces of itself, that never allows the present to coincide
with itself. It is a sort of clinamen.
(To tell the truth, in writing these lines with no fixed plan, I began to
think that this one word “moment” is something more than a simple term:
that it is a concept, but a concept that does not constitute itself in the place
of recollection; a concept that would permit one to think toward the im-
memorial. And I am inclined to believe that this issue of the immemorial,
of the traumatic immemorial, could be a key to the issue of Latin American
philosophical singularities.)
The moment can be defined as the minimal time required for something
to take place and the minimal place required for something to have time.
(The concept of moment extenuates, if not prohibits, the epic that threat-
ens the notion of event.) This minimum certainly cannot be appropriated
by any sovereign operation of the Spirit, but it transmits the tremor of its
furtive movement to each of those operations: so, in an inevitable way, for
the Spirit, if it were prepared to confess to itself (although that would be
absolute pain) every recollection that appears to it maliciously disturbed
 Pablo Oyarzun R . ● 19

by a movement that is not its own, like a blurred photograph, or as we say

in Chile, “una fotografía movida.”
I briefly return to Blade Runner: in the beautiful speech delivered by the
dying android Roy, telling all the things he has seen in his cosmic adven-
tures—a sort of sidereal epic, if you wish, telling the things he has seen “with
your eyes,” as he ironically said to the Chinese genetic designer shortly before
he was frozen; the things he has seen with the eyes, of course, of photographic
memory—ends with: “all those moments will be lost in time like tears in
rain.” The teardrop, sign of interiority, has no interiority of itself. Monad of
pain, it is the aleph of the world, of the world’s moments. Even disappeared in
the rain, it preserves what in front of the Spirit and from within itself resists
to every universality.

>

notes
1. This paper was read at the Symposium on Latin American Singularities, held at the
University at Buffalo (SUNY) in April 2007, organized by the Department of Comparative
Literature. It is a revised and much extended version of a paper originally written for
a congress of psychoanalysis in 2001. All translations, unless otherwise noted are the
authors.
2. Indeed, Hegel was editor of a newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung (1807–8), shortly after
finishing his Phenomenology of Spirit.
3. And here it is important to observe that this kind of negativity does not owe exclusively
to the analogical photography; it is rather an ontological attribute, if I can say it this
way, of photography as such. The reason therefore will be indicated in the following.
4. In other, more complementary words: the photographic image releases the import of
mortality that is latent in every image.
5. “Natural” amends Sibree’s translation (which used “national”). I’ve also added a phrase
from Hoffmeister’s text.
6. For a critical appraisal of Hegel’s view of the New World, see also the classical study of
Antonello Gerbi (1982, 527–58).
7. We have in Spanish this saying about “seeing the little straw in another’s eye, and not the
beam in ours” (the phrase comes from the Sermon on the Mountain, Matthew 7:3), which
refers to the human fondness of criticizing the smallest flaws of other people without
acknowledging our own flagrant faults. There is a poem by Mistral that uses, inversely, the
20 ● M e m o r y, M o m e n t , a n d Te a r s

motif of the straw: “Ésta que era una niña de cera; / pero no era una niña de cera, / era
una gavilla parada en la era. / Pero no era una gavilla / sino la flor tiesa de la maravilla.
/ Tampoco era la flor sino que era / un rayito de sol pegado a la vidriera. / No era un
rayito de sol siquiera: / una pajita dentro de mis ojitos era. // ¡Alléguense a mirar cómo
he perdido entera, / en este lagrimón, mi fiesta verdadera!” (1992, 221)

references
Benjamin, Walter. 1991. Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. In
Gesammelte Schriften, Walter Benjamin, Band I-2. Herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann
und Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Gerbi, Antonello. 1982. La disputa del Nuevo Mundo. Historia de una polémica: 1750–1900, 2nd
Edition. México: FCE.
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1952 (1807). Phänomenologie des Geistes. Herausgegeben von
Johannes Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. J. B. Ballie
(New York: Prometheus Books, 1991).
———. 1955 (1837). Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Herausgegeben von Johannes Hoffmeister.
Hamburg: Felix Meiner. The Philosophy of History. Trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover,
1956).
———. 1970 (1835, 1842). Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik. Herausgegeben von Eva Moldenhauer und
Karl Markus Michel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
———. 1975 (1830). Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften. Herausgegeben von
Friedrich Nicolin und Otto Pöggeler. Hamburg: Felix Meiner.
Mistral, Gabriela. 1977 (1938). Cómo escribo mis versos, Revista de Crítica Cultural 15, (Novem-
ber).
———. 1992. Antología Mayor. Poesía. Santiago: Cochrane.
Rosenkranz, Karl. 1977 (1844). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben. Darmstadt: Wissenschaft-
liche Buchgesellschaft.