Wounds of Repetition in the Age of the Digital: Chris Marker's Cinematic Ghosts

Abstract

The disturbed relation with the dead-forgotten and embalmed-is one of the symptoms of the sickness of experience today.... History is eliminated in oneself and others out of a fear that it may remind the individual of the degeneration of his own existence. The respect for something that has no market value and runs contrary to all feelings is experienced most sharply by the person in mourning, in whose case not even the psychological restoration of labor power is possible. It becomes a wound in civilization, asocial sentimentality, showing that it has still not been possible to compel men to indulge solely in purposeful behavior. The dead ... are expunged from the memory of those who live on. Men have ceased to consider their own purpose and fate; they work their despair out on the dead. -Horkheimer and Adorno, On the Theory of Ghosts