Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) by Elissa Marder


…a potent axiom that runs through Les Fleurs du mal: wherever there is conversational speech (as opposed to soliloquy or apostrophe) there is consciousness of time, and wherever there is consciousness of time, there is pain. (18)

Thus, when one receives the returned gaze of the world, one is “remembered” by the world through those very parts of self—the unconscious memory traces—that one has forgotten. The unconscious memory traces that are sent back from the world give meaning and structure to one’s gaze." (27)

Quoting Roland Barthes' in Camera Lucida: Not only is the photograph never, in essence, a memory…, but it actually blocks memory, quite quickly becomes a counter-memory. One day, some friends were talking about their childhood recollections; they had plenty; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, no longer had any. Surrounded by these photographs, I could no longer console myself with Rilke’s line: “Sweet as memory, the mimosas steep the bedroom”: the Photograph does not “steep” the bedroom: no odor, no music, nothing but the exorbintant thing. The photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occasion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed. (95)



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The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton