Peter Geimer

Philippe Michel-Thiriet's, published in 1999, contains beside biographical data a »lexicon of characters« and a »lexicon of places in the Recherche.« There is, however, no »lexicon of objects:« No directory of the furniture in the parlor of Madame Verdurin, no comment on the »enmity of the violet curtains« in the Hotel of Balbec, the Queen of Naple's forgotten fan or the hanging lamp in the dining room in Combray. Are these objects thus not part of the novel? Are they mere accessories and requisites? Or are they simply not classifiable in the systematic categories of a lexicon? But why? The paper addresses these questions and tries to give the objects in the attention that usually only the novel's protagonists receive. At the same time, it deals with the legacies of Proust's existence that are occasionally identified with the objects in the novel. But how can a real object enter a novel? And does it ever find its way back out?

Die Vergangenheit ist unwiederholbar, zugleich bleiben aber Bilder und Spuren von ihr zurück. Neben solchen Formen des Nachlebens können Darstellungen des Vergangenen aber auch nachträgliche Rekonstruktionen sein, d. h. Formen der Sichtbarmachung, die selbst nicht alt sind, sondern, aus der jeweiligen Sicht einer Gegenwart heraus, Vergangenes nachstellen, simulieren oder anschaulich machen. Beide Formen der Vergegenwärtigung - Nachleben und Rekonstruktion - ermöglichen es einer Kultur, sich mit ihrer eigenen Vergangenheit in Beziehung zu setzen. Zugleich bleibt diese Aneignung des Vergangenen aber zwangsläufig unvollständig und von den Möglichkeiten und Motiven der jeweiligen Gegenwart bestimmt. Am Beispiel konkreter Fallstudien aus dem Bereich der historischen Wissenschaften, der bildenden Kunst, des Dokumentar- und Spielfilms, der Fotografie und der Literatur untersuchen die Beiträge des Bandes dieses besondere Zusammenwirken von Zeugenschaft und Imagination, Wiederholung und Entzug des Vergangenen.

ArgumentIn 1867 Edouard Manet painted the execution of the Mexican emperor Maximilian of Habsburg. Manet broke with the classical tradition of history painting, for he depicted the actual shooting itself instead of choosing moments before or after the execution. Thus, the painting refers to a moment that in real time would have been far too brief to be perceptible. Manet presented a portrait of living actors whose execution has already taken place. This depiction of the imperceptible invites comparison to contemporaneous photographs of extremely short periods of time: attempts to capture flying cannon balls, to take flashlight portraits of patients that would undermine their bodies' reaction time, to visualize the successive stages of a drop falling into water. Like Manet these scientists referred to an “optical unconscious”. A closer look at their work reveals that they dealt with a space of knowledge that went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination, scientific and artistic pictures.

Photography as Science: In 1908 the English physicist Arthur Mason Worthington published A Study of Splashes, a treatise on the physical behaviour of falling drops. The photographic experiments were performed by means of an electric spark „in absolute darkness”. Worthington's experimental practice dealt with two different areas of knowledge production: an area the operator could perceive control from the outside and a corresponding black-box where the photographic recording itself took place. The paper discusses the epistemic challenges of this specific shift from imperceptible events to their photographic representations. It shows to what extent the information revealed by the photographic apparatus had to be converted, for it did not speak for itself. Thus, Worthington's work went beyond the classical dichotomy between objectivity and imagination

It has become a commonplace that "images" were central to the twentieth century and that their role will be even more powerful in the twenty-first. But what is an image and what can an image be? _Releasing the Image_ understands images as something beyond mere representations of things. Releasing images from that function, it shows them to be self-referential and self-generative, and in this way capable of producing forms of engagement beyond spectatorship and subjectivity. This understanding of images owes much to phenomenology—the work of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—and to Gilles Deleuze's post-phenomenological work. The essays included here cover historical periods from the Romantic era to the present and address a range of topics, from Cézanne's painting, to images in poetry, to contemporary audiovisual art. They reveal the aesthetic, ethical, and political stakes of the project of releasing images and provoke new ways of engaging with embodiment, agency, history, and technology.