Athens, Still Remains

Athens, Still Remains. is an extended commentary on a series of photographs of contemporary Athens by the French photographer Jean-François Bonhomme. But in Derridäs hands commentary always has a way of unfolding or, better, developing in several unexpected and mutually illuminating directions. First published in French and Greek in 1996, Athens, Still Remains. is Derridäs most sustained analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and his most personal reflection on that medium. At once photographic analysis, philosophical essay, and autobiographical narrative, Athens, Still Remains presents an original theory of photography and throws a fascinating light on Derridäs life and work. The book begins with a sort of verbal snapshot or aphorism that haunts the entire book: we owe ourselves to death. Reading this phrase through Bonhommes photographs of both the ruins of ancient Athens and contemporary scenes of a still-living Athens that is also on its way to ruin and death, Derrida interrogates a philosophical tradition that runs from Socrates to Heidegger in which the humanand especially the philosopheris thought to owe himself to death, to a certain thought of death or comportment with regard to death. Combining philosophical speculations on mourning and death, event and repetition, and time and difference with incisive commentary on Bonhommes photographs and a narrative of Derridäs 1995 trip to Greece, Athens, Still Remains is one of Derridäs most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photographyan eminently Greek wordmeans the writing of light, and it brings together today into a single frame contemporary questions about the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and much older questions about the relationship between light, revelation, and truthin other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.