Physical Cinema in the Parque de la Memoria: Albertina Carri’s Operación fracaso y el sonido recobrado

Abstract

The new century has seen many filmmakers exhibit their images in museums in the form of installations through which these artists rethink their aesthetic in a different spatiality. In 2001, Argentine filmmaker Mariano Llinás premiered Balnearios at the MALBA, creating a new adjacent space for films. In 2006, Paz Encina’s La hamaca paraguaya was a watershed in this encounter between cinema and museums, as the fluctuation between these two spaces would prove vital for the completion of this co-production between Paraguay, Argentina, and some European countries. In 2011, Lisandro Alonso’s Todas las cartas. Correspondencias fílmicas stages a video-dialogue with filmmaker Albert Serra. In 2015, Andrés Denegri’s installation, Instante Bony, curated by Rodrigo Alonso, takes up his collaboration with artist Oscar Bony. The same year, Albertina Carri presented Operación fracaso y el sonido recobrado in the PAyS room of Buenos Aires’ Parque de la Memoria. Although all these works are rooted in national coordinates, many of them foster a transnational convergence as these are displaced objects, existing between the movie theatre and the museum. This article focuses on one such circulation and examines Carri’s installation at the crossroads of contemporary cinema.

Keywords:

• Cinema and museum
• video-installations
• memory
• digital city
• Argentina

Entry 1: Performance adrift

Cities are not maps and we do not look at or use them as if they were. Rarely do we have a bird’s eye view of them, and even if we could (from a plane for example), it would be difficult for us to attain the clarity and level of abstraction of their mappings. Cities are traversed, perceived, and transformed in a state of immersion. We are involved in them, and we engage not with a totality but with fragments, pieces, or zones. Our bodies, in their transits and perceptions, also transform the city, something that many artists highlighted when they engaged in actions that could be seen as performance art avant la lettre:¹ for Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s visit in the 1920s, the Martinfierristas made plans to cross Buenos Aires in an “auto-bañadera” (a “motorised-bathtub”, as buses were called); in 1957, Flávio de Carvalho set out to walk the streets of São Paulo wearing his new-look, a suit that was made with the peculiarities of the tropical climate in mind. In December 1964, Alberto Greco presented himself at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires with his show Madrid querido [Beloved Madrid]. The invitation said: “Madrid querido, vivo-dito painting spectacle, by Alberto Greco, with the participation of the famous Spanish dancer Antonio Gades and introducing Jorge Romero Brest”. As the audience outstripped the gallery’s capacity, the event was moved to the Plaza San Martín, where Gades danced and Greco drew a circle around him: he was turned into another vivo-dito.² For its issue on “Argentina: the death of painting”, Primera plana attached an epigraph to the photograph of this performance: “the beginning of the catastrophe”.³ In October 1968, the artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo invited radio and newspaper audiences to observe a traffic light at the intersection of avenues 1 and 60 with diagonal 79. More than 80 people turned up though the artist was absent.⁴

Oddly, these actions became myths, and memory consists precisely in reconstructing them through documents or testimony. Because of their ephemerality, transience, and situated character, these performances dissolve but leave a trace (photograph, souvenir, programme, testimony) and this leads us to wonder about the relation between art and the city, present and temporality, body and space, action and the dissolution of art. In this article, I am interested in the performative dimension that cinema has acquired in recent years which diminishes the preeminence of the copy in favour of places of exhibition, the mobility of the spectator, and the materiality of the image.

Entry 2: The digital city

In his by now classic essay, Ángel Rama proposed that the cities of Latin America were ciudades letradas, lettered cities. From the beginning of the colonial period, plan and writing were projects of the monarchical metropolis, indifferent to the particular conditions of place (displaying what Rama calls an “anthropological blindness”) and constituting the mystery of power. Cities are not maps but, according to Rama, they do originate in maps drawn up in the metropolis. Though in his introduction Rama does single out the fall of Tenochtitlán and the construction of Brasilia as crucial events, his critical narrative finishes abruptly with the Mexican Revolution (Rama 1984). It is worth wondering whether this is because the author thought that the argument had been sufficiently demonstrated or because continuing with the analysis would have raised questions about the assumptions that organised the book. Some references in the last chapter to the Cuban Revolution and “democratic caesarism” (what today we would call populism, a term that Rama might possibly have avoided because of its poor [theoretical] standing then) would lead us to suppose that Rama would defend the first claim. But a deeper examination of the very examples that Rama advances makes the second alternative more productive: the leaders of the era of mass politics, for example, used the radio intensively; the Cuban Revolution achieved a great part of its impact from visual culture; and the vicissitudes of Latin American reality after the 1960s are incomprehensible without television and, to a lesser extent, cinema. From the 1930s onwards, a time when the masses already occupy the public stage, the lettered city gives ground to the mediatic city, something of which even the most bookish artists and intellectuals were aware. The modes of performance in public space had changed and writers had to confront new conditions of circulation.

The mediatic city dominated a good part of the twentieth century and many of its discursive rules and visual regimes still persist (as did the lettered city in its conflictual articulation with the mediatic city which succeeded it), but with the new century came a new mutation: the digital city.⁵ The appearance of social networks, the constant use of mobile phones and digital apparatuses, the globalisation of the Internet (and globalisation by means of the Internet), and the emergence of maps in real time like the Global Positioning System (or GPS) transform our way of orienting ourselves in the city and our relationship to space (Lois 2016). The analogy may need to be made more complex, but it is by no means ridiculous to think that the plazas that the Iberian Empire traced out on a map and then made real in the cities of Latin America bear a resemblance to the contemporary digital public spaces in which we express ourselves (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube were created in the metropolis of the twenty-first century: the USA). These platforms impose conditions, formats, and alternatives that somehow condition our actions. Trailers, clips, and even entire films circulate across these sites and this entails another mode of looking at the cinematic material. And not just at what is being created now but at the history of cinema which no longer takes the form of shelves in 1980s-style video stores, but instead circulates in many different directions, often without origin but made up of thousands of reproductions and copies. What’s more, the films often share space with advertising, different framings, and user commentaries. They can be watched on a plane or in a bar. Cinemas still exist but they are no longer hegemonic in the world of film.⁶ Given these new conditions, how can cinema be thought?

Entry 3: Outside the room

The transformations that digital networks have produced in our perception, use, and occupation of space have affected life in its totality, and this obviously includes cinema. In a series of transformations that have been slow from the point of view of the short history of cinema – but vertiginously fast in the light of the history of humankind – film projection, which initially took place in a variety of different spaces, became confined in the early decades of the century to, the movie theatres that monopolised the exhibition of moving images. The spectator who wished to see a film had to go out into the city streets and head to a cinema in the neighbourhood or the centre of town (the majority of which had names that were redolent of palaces or fantasy life). Television, which in Argentina became generally available in the 1960s, although the first sets appeared in 1951, had already imposed a modification that was accentuated in the 1980s with the appearance of the videocassette: the potential spectator could choose between the cinema and their own home.

The choice still had its wider modern modulation and wavered between the poles of home and city, intimacy and crowd, private and public. The film continued to be the primary or elementary unit and axis of film theory and cinema’s relation to urban space, and the role of the spectator (the passive, embodied witness, whether in the living room of their home or the seat in the theatre) was only problematic in a certain type of avant-garde experimental cinema that often presented itself as anticinema or, as the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica called it, quase cinema (Aguilar 2016). It is at the end of the twentieth century, just as cinema celebrates its hundredth anniversary throughout the world, that the growth of digital networks and the Internet produces, among other things, the destruction of the primary unit of cinema (the film) and disseminates [images] in such a way that, from then on, any reflection on the film image must address these new spatialities, bodily dispositions, and forms of looking.⁷ Many directors have been conscious of this shift and have linked their productions for the dark space of the cinema to the white cube of the museum under the flexible heading of “installations”. Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, Pedro Costa, Harun Farocki, to mention only the best known, have produced versions of their works for cinemas and for museums, biennials, and galleries.

In Buenos Aires, film director Albertina Carri and playwright Lola Arias have produced work in this hybrid form including films, exhibition of objects, stagings, inventive use of space and soundtrack, and they lead the cinema critic to pose questions about the conceptual and theoretical tools through which they engage with their object. In 2015, Albertina Carri presented her installation Operación fracaso y el sonido recobrado [Operation Failure and Recovered Sound] in the Parque de la Memoria of the city of Buenos Aires, which memorialises the victims of state terrorism.⁸ The daughter of disappeared parents (Roberto Carri and Ana María Caruso), Albertina Carri made a fundamental intervention into the debates about memory with her film Los rubios [The Blonds] from 2003. Her work, presented in the PAyS hall (Presentes Ahora y Siempre; Present Now and Forever) in the Parque de la Memoria, revisits her relationship with her parents and her relation to memory and history.⁹ A room usually devoted to exhibitions of plastic arts or historical exhibitions about memory, Carri’s displacement produces an “outside the hall/room” that locates her practices in an experimental field.

Entry 4: Zigzag memory

The figure of the zigzag articulates dynamic relationships between space, body, and memory. It is no coincidence that the form has been used in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin, in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw (designed by the architects Lahdelma and Mahlamäki) and in the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism in the Parque de la Memoria in Buenos Aires. Why the recourse to this figure in works devoted to memory? Made out of four large blocks of concrete that contain thirty thousand panels of Patagonian porphyry which are arranged on a ramp that descends towards the PayS exhibition hall, the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism of the Parque de la Memoria records by year and alphabetical order the names of those disappeared and murdered by the dictatorship: they are placed at a height that allows the visitor to touch them. To reach the hall it is necessary to cross approximately two hundred metres of the path in the form of a zigzag in three parts. The broken traversal, the false coming and going, puts the body in a situation of expectancy, since the zigzag form, like a labyrinth, hides what is to come. In reality, nothing would appear less adequate to our idea of memory than this form since, by convention, we usually assign the past to what is behind us, at our backs, and the future to what is ahead. Distortion is the key, and in relation to the body, a modification of the convention that assumes that time is linear and can be overcome (or only advances in a straight line). Social memory, then, is not a matter of the past but of the future or, better, of a qualitatively different time in which the conventional divisions are inadequate. But the figure of the zigzag not only affects the relationship between body and time; it also celebrates a mode of thinking that challenges established notions. It is a bid for rupture, fissure, discontinuity, one that places memory face to face with the breach that constitutes it. That is to say, memory is not a given, continuous, homogeneous block but is formed where there is a crack or wound, a difficulty that is evoked by the fragmentary crossing of the Parque’s space. Perception cannot synthesise the monument into a totality but demands its mental reconstruction in parts or [presents] the certainty that reconstruction is no longer possible. In a documentary that Gilles Deleuze made with Claire Parnet, he dedicated an entry – the film is organised like an encyclopedia – to the term zigzag in which he talks about “relating unconnected singularities”: that is to say, the continuity of the line does not cancel the independence of each part as it resists forming a homogeneous whole (Parnet 1996). Walking it, then, is a question of extracting a figure without losing the multiplicity it contains. The visitor then has a task ahead of them: to try and give meaning and at the same time to open up to the unconnected, the irreparable, to what has been broken. In short, the zigzag is the spatial figure of mourning.

The choice of a park of memory instead of a monument sets up even more bluntly the idea of the performative city. It is not a single work to be contemplated, not even an urban landmark, but a place to wander in, walk across, contemplate, stay for a while, reflect. Shifting from one commemorative sculpture to another, the visitor can follow the information notices that signal nothing but an absence, until they arrive at the bank of the Río de la Plata. The river turns out to be a limit and, because of the evocative density of the park, it is seen in the spectator’s imagination as the cemetery that it had been during the dictatorship (this was where they threw the bodies from the Air Force planes). A few metres away (enough for the figure to be visible but still only perceived as a silhouette), a figure is “walking” on the river. This is Reconstruction of the portrait of Pablo Míguez, the figure of an adolescent who was disappeared, made by Claudia Fontes.¹⁰ His face cannot be seen from the bank, which again shows that perception is confronted by a hidden or mysterious zone, which demands that we think about its preconditions rather than try to complete it. Memory, so the Parque “says”, is not something linear (an accumulation that is presented at a single stroke), nor is it a totality that can simply be evoked; memory asks us for perception and a body, a walk, a contact, a performance to experience its powers, obstacles, and conflict. Memory does not exist, it is made.

Entry 5: A physical cinema

Albertina Carri’s installation Operación fracaso y el sonido recobrado was in place in the Parque de la Memoria’s PAyS hall between 4 September and 24 November 2015. The installation was not limited to the white cube or the assigned rooms: the urban situation itself – starting from when the visitor enters and traverses the whole route marked out by works on memory or repression and the stele with its names of the victims of state terrorism until they reach the hall – is connected to the exhibition. The effect then – an effect sought by Carri when she specified where she wanted her work installed – is that of an urban circuit that in one of its loops debouches into the hall where the work is being shown. In fact, the names of her parents – to whom the work is dedicated (Roberto Carri and Ana María Caruso) – are inscribed in the zigzag that precedes the work.

Once they enter the exhibition site, the visitor finds five rooms. To the right there is a dark room in which there is a simultaneous projection on various screens of “Investigation into outlawry [Investigación del cuatrerismo]”, images from the archive with a text by Carri voiced over by Elisa Carricajo that narrates the search for a film about Isidro Velázquez made by Pablo Szir and based on the book by Roberto Carri, Albertina’s father. Then comes “Pure Cinema [Cine puro]”, a construction in celluloid made with discarded 35 mm material which forms something like a large net with a space in the middle – a “filmic skeleton” – to which the viewer has no access. It is a sphere that we cannot enter and once more the body meets an impossibility that demands that the notion of memory be rethought. On a small screen within the celluloid one can see a video with a blurred image of some filmic material – “ghost images” according to the artist – of a roll that was hidden during the period of state terrorism and did not resist the passage of time. It is not known what the film, found buried underground, contained. “Improper point [Punto impropio]”, the third room, consists of a dark space with enlarged images of the letters that her mother, Ana María Caruso, sent to her from the detention camp. Albertina reads the letters, not just the words, but also the punctuation, exclamation, and question marks (“new paragraph”, “question mark”, etc.). On the wall in a contiguous room are projected silhouettes of books that in an abstract design form her parents’ library, which was burned by the dictatorship. Finally, in a large, brightly lit room – like that of the celluloid skeleton – there are two installations: “Allegro” (projectors of various formats running without film) and “A piacere” (the sound of projectors that turn on as the visitors pass by). On one of the walls, in large letters, is inscribed the word “PRESENTE”. The word “present” can be read in different ways: it could refer to her parents who are made “present” through the work; it could be an affirmation – so characteristic of Albertina’s work – of the vital creative present against subordination by the cult of the past; it could be an encouragement to think of memory as a zigzag: not something in the past but something constructed and undertaken in the present. As Walter Benjamin notes, “what is at stake is not to portray literary works in the context of their age, but to represent the age that perceives them – our own – in the age during which they arose”.¹¹ In fact, this was Los rubios’s great innovation in the debates about memory. If historical cinema was concerned with interpretations of the past, the cinema of memory centred more on the discursive and visual mechanisms through which we construct an idea of the past. In the 1990s the documentaries Montoneros, una historia [Montoneros: a history] by Andrés di Tella (1995) y Cazadores de utopías [Hunters of Utopias] by David Blaustein (1996) opened up a way to think about the 1970s. But everything changed after Albertina Carri’s Los rubios. Made at the beginning of the new century, the film begins with an interview with a woman who looked after Albertina (the daughter of a disappeared couple) and who says that she doesn’t remember her. The director lingers over the discourse of someone who is not a direct victim and, with this in mind, does not approach memory as a voluntary discourse that is repeated until it crystallises, but observes the lapsi, holes, moments of forgetting, and especially the childhood perceptions (with their large dose of fantasy) of the children of victims (and in turn these testimonies lead us to wonder about the weight of fantasy in the testimony of adults). Los rubios opened up a path that was followed – even with all their innumerable differences – by numerous documentaries, among which María Inés Roqué’s (2004) Papá Iván and Nicolás Prividera’s (2007) M stand out.

Operación fracaso does not present us with a metaphor for memory but, rather, memory’s materialisation: in addition to the construction of a skeleton out of reels of celluloid in “pure cinema”, a small screen shows a roll of film that was hidden during the military dictatorship but that on being disinterred revealed only stains or strange forms, images corroded by time. The naturalised process of filming, production, audiovisual projection and reception in the dark theatre of the cinema is broken and there are images that show nothing, projectors that show no images, sounds which have become independent of visuality, relationships that are no longer distanced (from one’s seat) but are corporeal and tactile. Carri proposes a physical cinema. The haptic signs [carteles] that reproduced titles or phrases of poems or chunks of discourse in Los rubios already suggested this sort of cinema, but what happens here is much more intense: cinema occupies a space and unfolds beyond the screen and the theatre. Its images are not evanescent or determined by the rectangular format of the screen but have a material manifestation, whether in a byte, on celluloid, or in a projector. But if materiality becomes physical, this is because it involves working with its energy, states, transformations, appearance, and becoming: the way in which a materiality acts acquires a performative aspect. The body moves, touch becomes relevant, the materiality of cinema is exposed to time and the elements. This whole strategy serves to erect, against a structural or crystallised conception of memory (the todo armadito [everything stitched up and in its place] of the militants’ discourse which is referenced in Los rubios), a physical account of memory and life: how to live in a house made out of celluloid, a material so fragile that it becomes the archivists’ nightmare? Is our memory as precarious as celluloid and, like this material, destined to become torn fragments in the not too distant future? Moreover, does cerebral memory function differently after the advent of digital memory? What is the substance of what was there? How to recover meaning from these smears? Carri does not restore memory but engages with forgetting, not as the opposite of memory but as that dimension that – in its failure – signals a potential. As the Brazilian artist Rosangelo Rennó has said: “For me the blank spots and moments of amnesia are more interesting than memory” (Alzugaray 2004). Since Los rubios, what has been most important for Carri is the refusal of the idealist configurations that are acquired by memories when these are organised in crystallised stories at the expense of their concrete materiality: are we sure that it [really] was like this after repeating it so often? (hence the importance of lapsi and what is expressed beyond control over the stories of the past). It is not a question of constructing a complete memory but of taking the pieces, the rubble, and, from the present, reflecting and acting from what separates us and, in this recognition, unites us, connects us with the past. “To continue to recall” – as Carri herself says in the exhibition catalogue – in the middle of memory and forgetting, on the banks of the river and the park.

Physical cinema, then, demands a sort of participation that is different from that of conventional cinema, an exposure to the materiality of the image, an overturning of the hierarchy of the senses (vision ceases to be dominant), a decomposition of its elements and, above all, contact with the bases that make it possible. Not just cinema but memory as well: because collective, social, or individual memory is not something abstract but is sustained and expressed in materialities and on determinate bases. Extracting the energy (the present) of this materiality is what shapes Albertina Carri’s physical cinema.

Entry 6: Exit from the labyrinth

We leave the hall, cross the park again, and exit onto the Costanera: it is impossible not to feel scarred by what one has just perceived and one’s attempts to interact with it. To interact with the space that we cannot enter, with the sounds that overwhelm us, with the images we cannot see (above all those evoked by the letters from Albertina’s mother, so powerful in their everyday concerns and full of a mother’s love, so attentive to circumstances, written by someone we know is going to die). Operación fracaso y el sonido recobrado is implanted in the circuits of our brain, our perception, our affects out of which memory is formed, a mix of visual and sonic images, erasures and traces, moments of forgetting and ramblings. We realise that a performance has indeed taken place and it was ours. Physical cinema is not aimed at the gaze of the seated body but at the body in movement and the senses that struggle to find a place to be. Walking through the Parque, approaching the river, walking through the rooms of the exhibition, the body experiences different concrete and spatial modalities of memory: their continuity with the city, their labyrinthine zigzag construction, sonic dimension, reconstruction through documents, holes and erasures (why a society forgets certain events or people, or forces their forgetting), the materiality of acts and what remains of them, the necessity of never losing the present from which one remembers nor what has been forgotten in order to go on living.

Translated by Philip Derbyshire

Funding

This article has been written in the context of the Research Project “Transnational relations in Spanish-American digital cinema: the cases of Spain, Mexico and Argentina” (CSO2014-52750-P) funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Gonzalo Aguilar is professor of Brazilian and Portuguese literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. He is also a researcher affiliated with the CONICET. He is director of the MA in Latin American literatures at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín and has been visiting professor at Stanford University, Harvard University, and the Universidade de São Paulo. In 2005, he was a recipient of a Guggenheim grant. He is the author of a number of essays and co-author of El cine de Leonardo Favio (1993) and Borges va al cine (2010). He has authored the books Poesía concreta brasileña (2003); Otros mundos. Un ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino (2006), and Episodios cosmopolitas en la cultura argentina (2009), among others. He has most recently published Más allá del pueblo. Imágenes, indicios y políticas del cine with Fondo de Cultura Económica (2015).

Notes

1 The fundamental works on performance as a genre and practice in Latin America and Argentina are those of Taylor (2012) and the collection that Taylor produced with Marcela Fuentes titled Estudios avanzados de performance (2011), as well as Sosa (2014) and Page (2011).

2 The “vivo-dito” is a performance piece by Greco where he traced a circle around a person and signed it. He did this with Jackie Kennedy. This was not the only form assumed by the vivo-dito but it was one of the most constant (2016).

3 Primera plana, issue 333, 13 May 1969, 70.

4 The documents from this show can be accessed on the site “Vivo dito Performances de Argentina” (http://www.vivodito.org.ar/node/39).

5 I prefer the term “mutation” rather than “change” because it gives an idea of greater continuity with the superposition of different phases. So, the digital city does not suppress or supplant the mediatic city but produces displacements, survivals, and modifications. It is worth reading the illuminating work of Néstor García Canclini on this well-studied topic.

6 The crisis of the movie theatre as the privileged place of film reception became evident by the end of the 1960s, where it is a phenomenon driven by political action, as in the case of La hora de los hornos [The Hour of the Furnaces] (1967–1969) by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, which was shown in secret, in political locations, unions, or occupied buildings. However, the definitive and most profound crisis happened in the 1980s with the appearance of video stores and later with DVDs, personal computers, and the Internet. This loss of the theatre’s hegemony occurred in combination with the practices of experimental film and what Krauss (1979) has called (for sculpture) “the expanded field”.

7 The appearance of YouTube in 2005 allowed, for example, students to look at films that I have assigned in class on their computers, which not only changed the dimensions of the image but often meant that the films were divided into fragments mediated at every turn.

8 The Parque de la Memoria is a public space facing the Río de la Plata in the northern part of the City of Buenos Aires. It covers some 14 hectares and was designed by the architectural firm Baudizzone-Lestard-Varas. It contains the Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism and various commemorative sculptures by, among others, Roberto Aizenberg (No title), Magdalena Abakanowicz (Walking figures), Germán Botero (Huaca), Juan Carlos Distéfano (For grace received), Claudia Fontes (Reconstruction of the portrait of Pablo Míguez), Norberto Gómez (Towers of memory), Grupo de arte callejero (Street Art Group) (Posters of memory), Nicolás Guagnini (30.000), Jenny Holzer (No title), Rini Hurkmans (Pietà de Argentina), Per Kirkeby (Spatial memory), Dennis Oppenheim (Monument to the escape), Marie Orensanz (Thinking is a revolutionary act), Marjetica Potrc (The house of history), Nuno Ramos (Olympus), William Tucker (Victory), and Leo Vinci (Presence).

9 The bibliography on Albertina Carri’s Los rubios is extensive. The initial academic studies are those of Amado (2004), Kohan (2004), and Nouzeilles (2005).

10 Reconstrucción del retrato de Pablo Míguez. Cast from stainless steel, polished mirror. 170 × 75 × 50 cm. 2000/2010. Situated in the Río de la Plata, latitude 34° 32.356′, longitude 58° 26.262′. See García (2016).

11 Benjamin (2005). For this Copernican turn and the preeminence of politics over history in Benjamin, see Buck-Morss (1991, 338). “It is important for the materialist historian – says Benjamin in his Arcades Project – in the most rigorous way possible to differentiate the construction of a historical state of affairs from what one would customarily call its ‘reconstruction’. The ‘reconstruction’ in empathy is one dimensional. ‘Construction’ presupposes ‘destruction’” (Convolute N, 7, 6). Quoted in Benjamin (1996, 138).