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Double Features: An Interview with Samuel Weber

2015; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/discourse.37.1-2.0148

1522-5321

Peggy Kamuf, Samuel Weber,

Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation

work of Samuel Weber has long been essential for contemporary reflections on modern German and French philosophy, literary theory, and psychoanalysis as well as for thinking today about media or, as he prefers to say, mediality. A foremost interpreter of Walter Benjamin's large oeuvre, Weber has also made important contributions to the ways we are able to read and encounter Derrida's work today. We therefore wanted to ask him to engage with Derrida's interview, which even in its original French has not circulated much beyond its initial 2001 publication in the issue of Cahiers du cinema. Sam graciously consented to take part in this interview-conversation with me, which we conducted by e-mail over several weeks in January 2014.PK: I wanted to begin by asking you to say something about your own memories of cinema in adolescence and how they might compare with Derrida's description of experience in Cinema and Its Ghosts.SW: I tend to regard all of my memories as exemplary instances of what Freud calls memories, which I guess is appropriate since we are talking in part about the and also of the relation between film and psychoanalysis, one of the points Derrida stresses in his interview (referring also to Benjamin in respect). Anyhow, I myself suffer a great deal from this sense of for the simple reason it tends to screen out what I feel was really going on at time, but what remains elusively beyond my grasp. To some extent every memory is inevitably and structurally a screen-memory in this sense-i.e., in the sense of being finite-but in my case the screening-out seems particularly extreme. Nevertheless, let me try to remember what I can and see where it leads. Jacques writes about his early experience with film in a seems to me both utopian and unreachable: a kind of introduction to eros, that adolescent erotic thrill-this erotic shiver of the child. In my case, in my memory, the shiver was there, but it was less erotic than anxious: some of the films I remember seeing as a child were Thing from Another World (1951, directed by Christian Nyby) and Mummy's Ghost (1944, directed by Reginald Le Borg)-but also Black Bart (1948, directed by George Sherman), a Western starring Dan Duryea and Yvonne De Carlo. This was as a boy growing up in New York City, on the upper West Side, an area as I found out much later was home to many of the Jewish exiles from Nazism. Whereas Jacques writes of cinema in his youth as a way of freeing myself from prohibitions,1 what I remember is somewhat different: namely stealing off to see Mummy's Ghost without telling my parents where I was or when I would return. This was a sense of transgression, but not one liberates from the but rather confirms it in its violation. On the other hand, all of the films mentioned-there are others I will come to in a minute-circle around the relation of life and death: both Mummy's Ghost, whose narrative I don't remember (I could look it up: all this is available today easily on the Internet) and Thing involve formerly living beings return to life, but always to wreak havoc among the living. These are definitely not nice specters or ghosts. In the period of the burgeoning Cold War-around 1950-it seems as if the emphasis coming out of Hollywood was more on the production of anxiety as a means of mobilizing aggression rather than as a means of experiencing alterity in any other form. Indeed, what I take to be the basic pattern of politics, in general, but particularly since the Cold War and beyond (i.e., in my lifetime), has always involved the production of anxiety is then transformed into aggression through projection, targeting an enemy. In Thing this is explicit: the Thing is destroyed through quasi-military means, by fire; in Mummy's Ghost it is more implicit. It is quite different in Black Bart, in which the title hero, played by Dan Duryea, is a bandit (based on a historical figure) who ultimately is destroyed by fire, burnt alive in a cabin where he has fled his pursuers, The Law as I remember it. …