Once Again
Dean Inkster

Romanticism is our naiveté. This is not to say that it is our error… Naiveté is not something one can discard
— Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute

There is no visual experience that is not at once a confrontation with the fragments and opacity of language: in other words, outside of language in some realm of the purely visual. There is no experience of sight or seeing therefore that is not a ruining of sight — and of experience itself — all experience being an experience of ruins. Such no doubt is the allegorical truth of Fabrice Reymond’s work Nescafe, Cinéma générique, and film credits in general. To begin with the credits (générique) is not only to ask after the ends of cinema as a medium or an art-form (that which constitutes a genre), but to suggest that to rethink cinema means, each time, to begin anew — to begin at the beginning. As such, the credits also suggest that this beginning is already an end or “THE END.” In other words, the “end” of cinema: an interrogation of cinema from the perspective of its demise or ruins, which the current technical possibilities of digital and hyper-textual montage freed of narrative beginning and end would appear to announce.
In another sense, cinema credits will have always already appeared in the realm of death, announcing the finitude of all experience. Not only because, as an experience of illusion or the illusion of experience, cinema itself should remind us — and in its very artifice — that there is no experience that is not an experience of projection, spectral repetitions, and the night in which experience withdraws itself in its very presence. Benjamin suggests in his Artwork essay, the sight of immediate “equipment free” reality in cinema is the Blaue Blume, the unattainable object of the incarnation of desire in the land of technology that brings the former to light. In this sense, the credits can be understood as so many tombstones that bear the inscriptions of those who have labored in this land — already haunted by a time that bears their death. This becomes all the more apparent with the advent of the modern end credits. Accompanied by a repetition of the theme music, a transition between the end of the film narrative and the end of the cinema spectacle replaces the punctuated closure of classical cinema and its abrupt appearance of the letters “THE END.” A radical change is thus introduced in the way the spectator is prompted to leave the film spectacle. A change that may be seen as a means of integrating a mourning of the spectacle into the spectacle itself — part of the integrating impulse of mass culture to master and reify all aspects of human activity and experience. But it also reminds us that mourning is precisely what the spectacle must circumscribe, for as the “other” of the spectacle, mourning — or the recognition of human finitude — remains incessantly at its margins always already undermining its totalizing or integrating impulse.
Recently, Slavoj Zizek, following Janet H. Murray in her Hamlet on the Holodeck, has suggested that the lack of closure in electronic or digital media serves as a denial which protects us from confronting the trauma of our finitude: of the fact that “our story has to end at some point.”(1). In the hypertextual form of digital media, such as the electronic video game and rhizome fiction, there is no culminating or irreversible point of closure, “since there are always other paths to explore, alternate realities in which one can take refuge.” The potential hypertextual form of digital media is seen, at the level of its content, as a defense against the “Real” of human finitude. The active participant immersed in the symbolic thus disavows the trauma of his or her mortality. With the advent of the hypertextual narrative of digital cinema, this would mean a denial of the credits; stripped of beginning and end there is no recognition of the finitude of experience, resulting in a loss of the “scrolling” specters of expended labor in the production of the cinema spectacle.
It is interesting therefore that Fabrice Reymond’s project Nescafé, in openly referring to electronic media and hypertextuality, reinscribes the credits that would otherwise be occluded from experience as a result of the latter’s lack of closure. Not only do the credits reappear, but they return all the more conspicuously — albeit allegorically — as an indispensable part of the visual experience of the project itself. They thus efface the margins in which the credits are understood as remaining outside the frame of the film’s (narrative) meaning. However, it may be that this margin has never been a stable entity, that the demarcation between inside and outside, between the extra-diegetic aspect of the credits and the diegesis proper are never clearly separable. Thierry Kuntzel has analyzed such an instability in his essay “The Film Work, 2.” Through a close reading of the film The Most Dangerous Game, Kuntzel shows that the credits sequence plays a decisive role in instigating the film narrative. Not only does the image or shot that serves as a background to the credits, a hand that moves to open a door, mirror the act of subjectively entering the film spectacle, but the three knocks which precede it, anticipate a number of formal and meaningful events throughout the film — including a condensed staging of narrative repetition itself. He goes further, however, when he argues that the visual narrative proper will have always only been an affirmation of the opening credit sequence:

The three knocks, silently repeated in the margin, are there to inform me that the representation is about to begin, that something is going to appear to be seen on the stage of the screen. Yet in the course of the film itself, what appears to be seen is nothing other than what I had already seen when I was informed that it was about to begin.(2)

The formal “loop,” or ellipse, in which the image of the closed door is again repeated as a background over the “END” title, suggests, as Kuntzel concludes, that the film narrative proper is itself a “void,” the creation of an emptiness. Hence, in the final analysis, his close reading provokes him to raise the question “what did I come to see?” to which he replies “I came to see.” This conclusion might remind us of Max Weber’s remark that “He who yearns for seeing should go to the cinema.” But in a more elliptical sense, in other words, in respect to the ellipse that Kuntzel reveals to be underlying classical narrative cinema, we might also be reminded of Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of the endlessness of the end inherent in narrative fiction. Fiction as a view to an end necessarily submits meaning to an endless circle where the end has already taken place without taking place and remains infinitely deferred as the limit or end gives rise only to its own limitlessness. Yet, is there not a sense in which narrative cinema can be seen as the historical site of the infinite deferral of the end of the history of narrative fiction?
Of course, it will already be clear that the credits sequences of Nescafé are not themselves sequences of credits; they do not contain a list of proper names (producers, authors, actors, technicians, etc.) that make up the production of a film as such. In retaining or appropriating the formal properties that are common to the credits of narrative cinema (white text scrolling vertically against a black background) they do however maintain an allegorical relation to the latter. Allegory as a figural relationship of non-coincidence between signifier and signified, content and form, points to a recognition of difference and non-closure in the event or advent of meaning. And the former reference to Blanchot will not have been gratuitous in this respect; for if the “genre” or allegorical form employed here is that of the textual or literary fragment the juxtaposition and interruption which this genre comprises again points to the recognition of the “irreducible difference” and non-closure that Blanchot defines as the ethical imperative of textuality. It not only challenges narrative order, but is also a commitment to both the end and the “endlessness of the end” which fiction, and thus narrative cinema, must remain blind to. The fragment is thus “an arrangement that does not compose but juxtaposes, that is, leaves each of the terms that come into relation outside one another, respecting and preserving this exteriority and this distance as the principle […] of all signification.”(3). Or again to quote one of the fragments of Nescafé: “12/11/99 12:15. Don’t construct JUXTAPOSE. And, (comma) thus already begun and not yet finished. No past, no future and life continues.” Signification, in contrast to a totalizing notion of truth as closure, is thus the “unrest of a movement without beginning or end.” This is what the early German romantic’s Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, to whom Blanchot’s understanding of the textual fragment is indebted, described as an inscription “eternally in the process of becoming and never completed.”

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And it is in returning to what was at stake in the fragmentary writings of Novalis and Schlegel that we begin to glimpse some of the contemporary import of Fabrice Reymond’s project Nescafé (4). These writings, particularly those published in the Journal Athenaeum between 1798 and 1800, arose as a response to the perceived social and cultural crisis at the end of the eighteenth century — the loss of a sensus communis, the disenchantment of the world, or what Nietzsche later described as nihilism. What is often understood as the ambiguity of the romantic program, its revolutionary desire to write the great novel or encyclopedia of the modern world, and its failure to bring this desire to completion is commonly interpreted as a failed aesthetic absolutism or a melancholic longing for an absent reconciliation of art and life. It is thus seen to have left in its wake a miscellany of unfinished works, programs and projects. Yet the affirmation of the literary fragment in Jena romantic writings indicates a conscious undermining of the desire to impose such a program. They eschewed, that is, from either attempting to re-stage the past or impose the new from a perspective that would lack any critical or dialectical relation to what they sought to overcome. In that fragmentation was perceived as characterizing the modern, romantic epoch (the division of knowledge, the collapse of objective aesthetic criteria, the subjectivization and privatization of aesthetic experience) the fragment was purposely employed as a figure of the crisis itself. “Characterless is the sole character of modern poesy, confusion is what its mass has in common, lawlessness the result of its theory.”(5). Abstaining from an appel à l’ordre or an accusation leveled at their contemporaries, the Jena romantics maintained that a resolution to “the anarchy… covering the entire field of taste and art” was to be generated by critically working through the perceived negativity of the present. As such, the Jena romantic fragments distance themselves from the anecdotes and maxims of the moralist tradition with its professed confidence in its claims to truth. What is aimed at is a freedom of meaning, a freedom, however, that does not dissolve the tension inherent in the fragment itself. A fragment is never isolated, yet neither does it relinquish its singularity within the aggregate of fragments from which it attains its meaning. And if its aim is the affirmation of “an immediate realization” or response, as Schlegel affirms (the decisiveness inherent in the definition of crisis) it does not form the homogeneity or continuity of a program or proscription. Rather, it is an “immediate” projection: a project or pro-ject. What cannot be realized in the present, without the risk of succumbing to a false ideological alternative, is projected as the germination of a future resolution. The fragments of the Jena romantics can thus be read as so many allegories of anticipation and promise. The project itself remains in fragments, or as Schlegel suggests, a project of “future fragments.” The fragments are therefore not yet even fragments but the fragments of fragments that remain to be written; the project, “the subjective embryo of a becoming object,”(6) or the promissory notes of an infinite project or work to come. And even in the figural language of seed and germination, the fragment as anticipation and promise must maintain the negative within itself in order to refrain from projecting the desired resolution of history as a program calculated to succeed in advance. The epigram to Novalis’s collection of fragments, Grains of Pollen, makes this explicit: “Friends the soil is poor, we must richly scatter / Seeds to produce even a modest harvest.”

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While the name Novalis appears at least once explicitly among the fragments of Nescafé, another fragment evokes a reference to the poverty of the soil of his epigram. The fragment “14/10/00 23:22:30 Why I chose poetry?” continues by giving a definition of fallow land, “land that has been left abandoned where forms deteriorate. Everything becomes more malleable. The deformatting of practice. The creation of new territories. Poetry is the action of thinking.” In evoking Novalis’s epigram, it does so in translating it into a literal definition of its author’s name (the Latin adjective novalis: ”that which lies fallow”). Novalis is therefore cryptically named as a source of poetic inspiration. For the response to the question “Why I chose poetry?” is therefore the poet Novalis. And it might very well be that both the name Novalis and the poverty of the soil (in what is revealed as his eponymous epigram) is dialectically inverted to become the poverty inherent in the title of the project Nescafé itself: “31/10/00 12:32:20 PM The Fragment: Novalis, Nescafe.” For what do the grains instant coffee evoke if not the illusion of an immediate synthesis of subjective desire and objective reality by evaporating or diluting the initial substance of these terms. It produces, that is, the very illusion that the Jena romantics sought to avoid when they affirmed the constant state of tension or becoming of these terms in the writing of fragments.
If we can draw all this back to the context of cinema, we might be reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s ironical admiration for the way Nescafe ads can tell a story so fast. Hence, the way in which the instant synthesis of narrative mirrors or mimes the ideological premise of the commodity it promotes. Kubrick’s remark is ironical in that it refers negatively to his own desire for the authentic resolution of narrative cinema. At another level, this irony begins to cancel itself in its very movement when it speaks something of the truth of his work. For no matter how drawn out this resolution was for Kubrick, what he sought to resolve can be traced back to Adorno’s remark, in his correspondence with Benjamin, on the inauthenticity or lack of integral freedom in contemporary culture(7). Adorno describes freedom as a broken whole whose two disjointed halves are represented in the irreducible difference between mass culture and autonomous art. Both carry the stigmas of capitalism, both contain the seeds of change, but in Adorno’s mind, any intermediate term contains neither. It is not by combing the two halves that freedom is restored. And the examples he gives of these broken halves — Schönberg and American cinema — become with only the slightest stretch of the imagination the very examples one finds combined in Kubrick’s cinema. The culmination of subjective freedom in the age of bourgeois humanism, in Adorno’s reading of Beethoven, cannot restore itself in the degraded landscape of its future dystopia in a Clockwork Orange. Neither can the hope of freedom implied in what he once described as “the surviving message of despair of the shipwrecked” in high modernist composition sustain itself in the expression of alienation in The Shining.
Returning to Nescafé, its fragments may be likened to the grains of instant coffee (in evoking the instant synthesis of narrative, content and form, subject and object, etc.). And yet, not unlike the romantic fragments they refer to, they avoid diluting themselves into any such instance of final synthesis. Before its content and form become diluted, as Fabrice Reymond himself points out, art exists as a concentration or contraction — Benjamin once described it as an energy-center. Rather, these fragments project the freedom or autonomy of thought as anticipation: the anticipation of a future moment when technical means can free themselves from the ideology that instrumentalizes them as progress (the claims, for example, of subjective choice and active freedom uncritically accepted in the name of interactivity, hypertextuality, and the like). Their wit, to refer again to Schlegel, is “the substitute for an impossible happiness” that many of the images of Nescafé and the music that accompanies them evoke. Yet, as such, they eschew the pretense of resolving this freedom — the pretense of claiming a consciousness capable of coinciding with itself and thus surmounting the contradictions that face it. Art’s role, as Godard suggests in his quotation of Denis de Rougement, is not merely “to criticize our tools, for we want them to be useful.” “What is important,” as the quotation concludes, “is the weakness of our hands.” In other words, there is no understanding technology that is not at once a recognition of human finitude. And again, as Fabrice Reymond aptly suggests, there is no projection of impossible happiness without a projection of finitude. For the textual fragments of Nescafé, like the end credits which they mirror, are no more than fragments of finitude. Written in the death of time — or so the dates that mark them testify — they mark the time of death as an end without end and thus as the impossibility of dying. Death here does not have the contingent character of a brute fact — as in “THE END” of narrative cinema — but is projected freely as an unworking (désœuvrement) in the heart of meaning:

Characters: they take up the position of characters, and nevertheless they are points of singularity […]. Death here, far from completing its work, has always already done its work: a mortal unworking. In this way, writing in the fragmentary, always taking place where there is a place for dying and thus almost as if taking place after perpetual death, stages, against an absent background, the appearance of sentences, the remains of language, the simulations of being. A lie that supports no truth, a forgetting that supposes nothing forgotten and which is detached from all memory: without certitudes, never.(8)


1. Slavoj Zizek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: The Walter Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, 2000): 37.
2. Thierry Kuntzel, “Le travail du film, 2,” Communications, no. 23 (Paris: Seuil, 1975): 189. English translation “The Film Work, 2,” Camera Obscura, no. 5 (Spring, 1980): 63.
3. Maurice Blanchot, L’Entretien infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1969): 453.
4. The following remarks are an overtly telescoped conclusion of the Early romantic project. It ignores the contradictions and complexities, along with the individual differences, that an interpretation of this history would ordinarily need to address. I have limited my argument for the sake of keeping within the limits of the subject at hand. But then any attempt at a conclusion of romanticism will be haunted by Schlegel’s remark to his brother August: “I can hardly send you my definition of the word Romantic, it is 125 pages long.” For a more detailed account of this history see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Absolue littéraire (Paris: Seuil, 1978); The Literary Absolute, trans. P. Barnard and C. Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
5. Friedrich Schlegel, “Concerning the Study of Greek Poesy” cited in Jochen Schulte-Sasse et al. ed. Theory as Practice: A Critical Anthology of Early German Romantic Writings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 294.
6. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäum Fragments,” no. 22, ibid.: 319.
7. Theodore Adorno, “Letter to Walter Benjamin, London, 18 March 1936,” in Ronald Taylor ed. Aesthetics and Politics (London & New York: Verso, 1980): 123.
8. Maurice Blanchot, Le Pas au-delà (Paris: Gallimard, 1973): 74.