Lori Marso — Blockbuster Feminisms

Lori Marso
Professor, Union College
Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jenkins, was one of this summer’s biggest surprise hits.  It was enormously successful at the box office with both critics and moviegoers in awe of its fabulous female superhero role model played by Gal Godot.  Many women said on blog posts and in reviews that they were moved to tears to see Diana and her sister warriors (including the glorious character Antiope, played by Robin Wright) on the Amazon island of Themyscira.  These women are powerful, confident, peace-loving, athletic, and in charge. Caroline Framke’s comment in Vox is typical: “After watching movie after movie where men saved the day with a well-timed punch while women cleaned up the mess around the edges, Wonder Woman is a goddamn revelation.”[i]
Wonder Woman was not without its detractors and controversies, however.  Israeli actress Gal Godot served two years of compulsory service in the Israeli Defense Forces during the 2006 war when the IDF fought against Hezbollah-allied forces in Lebanon.  The conflict killed more than one thousand Lebanese and one million were removed from their homes.[ii] This painful recent history was stirred by casting Gal Godot as the star of her own Wonder Woman movie, resulting in the film’s ban in Lebanon. Gadot’s vocal support of the IDF has garnered additional negative attention beyond Lebanon. Media outlets have seized on the fact that in 2014, Gadot posted to Facebook: "I am sending my love and prayers to my fellow Israeli citizens," "Especially to all the boys and girls who are risking their lives protecting my country against the horrific acts conducted by Hamas, who are hiding like cowards behind women and children...We shall overcome!!! Shabbat Shalom!”[iii] In a review published in Aljazeera, Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, provocatively writes: “Suppose you are a father or a mother living in Gaza, and like any other parent from Florida to Oregon you wish for your daughters to have a positive role model - then what? You hear there is this amazing Hollywood blockbuster championing the cause of a young female superhero. Could an Israeli soldier who learned her martial arts skills by helping drop bombs on your brothers and sisters, maiming and murdering them, be perceived as an Amazonian princess who is here to save the world?”[iv] Dabashi’s question upends any naïve wish that Wonder Woman could be a superhero for all young girls.

Jessica Bennett ignores the fact that Gal Godot can’t possibly be a superhero to girls in Gaza when in the New York Times she appreciatively cites Stacy L. Smith, a communications professor at the University of Southern California, whose research focuses on diversity in media: “Anytime we see women in powerful roles on-screen it challenges narrowly defined and antiquated views of leadership . . .” “Whether women are serving as C.E.O.s or, in the case of Wonder Woman, striding across ‘No Man’s Land’ and taking enemy fire, it broadens our notions of who a leader can be and the traits they exemplify.”[v]

But what kind of a leader is this? What kind of feminism does Wonder Woman signify?  I greatly enjoyed the movie, and in particular I loved watching Diana grow up on her all-woman, peaceful island paradise, learning to fight for justice and equality (only, though, when absolutely necessary) at the heels of Antiope. The first part of the film depicts a powerful group of woman warriors, working together, preserving their better world, and hoping to never fight again.  Other than situating her story in the midst of World War I rather than the aftermath of World War II, the film’s vision is true to the Wonder Woman origin story as historian Jill Lepore recounts:

“In Amazonia, women ruled and all was well.” Alas, that didn’t last: men conquered and made women slaves. The Amazons escaped, sailing across the ocean to an uncharted island where they lived in peace for centuries until, one day, Captain Steve Trevor, a U.S. Army officer, crashed his plane there. “A man!” Princess Diana cries when she finds him. “A man on Paradise Island!” After rescuing him, she flies him in her invisible plane to “America, the last citadel of democracy, and of equal rights for women!”[vi]

The fact that in the movie the world is saved by an American soldier allied with an actress who was an IDF soldier should give us pause. But this is to read beyond the movie.  Taking the film on its narrative merits alone, we might still worry that Wonder Woman leaves her Amazonian sisters, experiences sex for the first time with the American soldier (might she not have had sex with other women on the island?  why do we end up in a heterosexual romance yet again?), naively believes that killing one bad man/god will bring world peace (she is subsequently schooled by two man-splainers, the American soldier and the god of war, that this is unfortunately not the case), and is not at all averse to killing lots of people.  Is this the path to bringing down patriarchy?  Can one woman-warrior save us all?  And save us from what?  And from whom?

Let’s consider another Hollywood fantasy from this past summer, Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2, and another from two summers ago, Mad Max: Fury Road.  In Guardians of the Galaxy Part 2, we get a ragtag group of weirdos who stumble, quite literally, into their roles as saviors of the galaxy.  Gathered together are Peter Quill (Chris Pratt) who has cheekily named himself Starlord, Rocket (a raccoon thief voiced by Bradley Cooper), Gamora (Zoe Saldana), the one woman in the bunch and the only green-skinned one, Groot (a baby tree voiced by Vin Diesel), and Drax (Dave Bautista), a tough guy with a soft heart.  In some ways, their group is a cliché, but at the same time it’s the best kind of feminist fantasy possible, one that reminds me of the pleasures of watching Stranger Things on Netflix last year.  Like in Stranger Things where a bunch of bullied queer kids and the excluded, seemingly crazy, members of the community are all proved right and join together in solidarity, in the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, women join with others, others like trees and animals and even men who fight against injustice, inequality, discrimination, and who all have good hearts.  And not only do the marginalized come together; they add another woman along the way (Gamora’s sister Nebula, played by Karen Gillen).   It turns out that the seemingly cruel Nebula all along just wanted her sister to welcome her to the fold.  In this film, sororal and queer solidarity wins over patriarchy.

Likewise in 2015’s summer blockbuster, Mad Max: Fury Road.  Here we get a combination of Wonder Woman and Guardians of the Galaxy, with stunning results for feminist politics.  Furiosa’s (Charlize Theron) superhero skills exceed Wonder Woman’s by a long shot. Like in Guardians of the Galaxy, Furiosa needs others (and in this case, other women) to rescue the world from an even more dark, foreboding, and explicit vision of patriarchal excess where women are reduced to their roles as child-bearers or for sex.  Like our queer friends depicted in Guardians of the Galaxy and Stranger Things, Furiosa is a heroine for the 21st century.  She joins with others to seek justice and restore peace for the disempowered, rather than garner power for superheroes or first world nation-states.  She, and they, are the kind of bad-ass feminist collective we need so badly today. 

In spite of its emphasis on female power and possibility, we might say Wonder Woman offers a realist, or at least very sobering, perspective.  The movie opens and ends with Diana receiving a photo from Bruce Wayne (Batman) as she works at her desk.  At this point Diana is not dressed as Wonder Woman nor as an Amazon, but as a high powered, expensively clad executive.  Importantly, she is alone.  She is isolated from her sisters, having left her home out of curiosity and responsibility.  Although she has friends in the superhero community, she has lost the love of her life.  In too many ways she fulfils the patriarchal demand that if a woman does have power or possibility, she must be isolated and remain unattached.  Where is Wonder Woman’s gang of weirdos?   To make Diana’s story more like Furiosa’s, she could return to Themyscira and gather her sister-forces, or lead her superhero friends into advancing feminist futures.  This is the task of a feminist superhero. 

[i] Caroline Framke, “Wonder Woman isn’t just the superhero Hollywood needs.  She’s the one exhausted feminists deserve.” https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/6/7/15740804/wonder-woman-amazons-feminist

[ii] Max Bearak, “Lebanon bans ‘Wonder Woman’ in protest against Israeli actress Gal Godot.” Washington Post, 1 June, 2017: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/06/01/lebanon-bans-wonder-woman-in-protest-against-israeli-actress-gal-gudot/?utm_term=.02aef6fbae04

[iii] Cited in Hamid Dabashi, “Watching Wonder Woman in Gaza.” Aljazeera. 10 June. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/06/watching-woman-gaza-170610082618366.html.

[iv] ibid.

[v] Jessica Bennett, “If Wonder Woman Can Do It, She Can Too.” New York Times, 5 June: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/opinion/wonder-woman-movie.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region&region=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region

[vi] Jill Lepore, “The Last Amazon,” New Yorker, 22 September, 2014: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon

Bonnie Honig — Trump's Upside Down

Bonnie Honig

Brown University, Antigone Interrupted

We have not lately – not until this election season -- seen or heard the dog whistle politics of racism, sexism, Nativism, and homophobia so eagerly thrust aside by a Presidential candidate and, with such glee: traded for openly racist invective, division, misogyny, nativism, and more…
  It is no accident, as the historians love to say, that this past television season, the breakout show was Stranger Things, which I watched and loved, along with many of you, I am sure. Stranger Things is a romp through 80’s nostalgia, from Steven Spielberg’s E.T. to Alien and more.

  Aspects of the 80’s for which I myself am less nostalgic were also peddled by the show – in particular the Reaganist antipathy to government, as such. Reagan was famous for his witticisms, which he kept on index cards in his desk, piles of them. One of his most famous lines was this:
"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I'm from the government and I'm here to help.’" This sentiment, also a piece of 80’s nostalgia, is central to the show, Stranger Things.

   In the show, the bad guys are from the government and their “help” is a nightmare. The local sheriff, by contrast, is a flawed hero whose intelligence and courage will save the day, more or less. Himself presumably on the public payroll, he does not code “government” because he is local. Government means Washington in 1980’s Reaganism. It is notably only for white communities that the local sheriff is the better representative of justice by contrast with the federal government. Noticeably there are very few minorities in Stranger Things.
  Stranger Things is importantly prescient in this moment, our moment, because it explores the distinction, newly permeable, between what is out in the open, and the secretly subterranean crap that underwrites it and lies beneath it.
In Stranger Things, the world we know and love is underwritten by a place called “the upside down” – in which what is normally unseen – the repugnant --is regnant.
In the Upside Down, a yucky carnivorous gelatinous monster feasts on people and impregnates them with its own progeny. What is that yucky gelatinous stuff? It could be anything; or many things …

Racism? Sexism? Homophobia?
What opens the door to it? What lets it in?
In the show, the monster gains access to the normal world by dint of the rogue and irresponsible science of government technocrats whose ambition knows no bounds and who do not hesitate to engage in torture to get what they want. And then of course they get more than what they want. Things go awry, as Mary Shelley could have told them they would.
   The gelatinous monster lives down below the earth on which we walk, lurking there, normally unseen and unsuspected. But the divide between our world and the monster’s is breached, and the gelatinous monster breaks in, grabbing people, eating and impregnating them. This keeps happening because of technocrats who think they know what they are doing and, confident they are right, are arrogant in their use of power and surveillance, willing even to torture to achieve their aims. They use a water tank that references water boarding. The screams of the child whose telekinetic powers they want to harness will not be easily forgotten by those who watch the show. 

   These people – scientists, technocrats, lawless, self-proclaimed knowing representatives of the public’s good – let’s call them for a moment the Democratic Party – open the door to forces that are unspeakable and are normally more contained. Because of their actions, the gross evils of the world can now get in. As the Observer reported on Nov 10, 2016: the Clinton campaign decided early on that “it was in the best interest of Clinton, and therefore the Democratic Party, that Trump was the Republican presidential nominee. Polls indicated Sen. Rubio, Gov. Kasich, or almost any other establishment Republican would likely beat Clinton in a general election. Even Cruz, who is reviled by most Republicans, would still maintain the ability to rally the Republican Party—especially its wealthy donors—around his candidacy. Clinton and Democrats expected the FBI investigation into her private email server would serve as a major obstacle to Clinton’s candidacy, and the public’s familiarity with her scandals and flip-flopping political record put her at a disadvantage against a newcomer. Donald Trump solved these problems.”[1]

 But, in fairness, the villains of Stranger Things, the people – scientists, technocrats, lawless, and self-proclaimed knowing representatives of the public’s good who open the door to forces that are unspeakable and are normally more contained -- could also be called the Republican Party: the government scientists are clearly interested in awakening, fostering and then nurturing and maintaining the terrible forces of the Upside Down. (think: Tea Party). The government agents clearly think there is here a powerful weapon they can leash to their politics. They clearly hope to control and instrumentalize it, just as they believe they can control and instrumentalize a girl, named 11, whose telekinetic powers prove forceful enough finally to break through.

  In other words, the Upside Down and our regular world are finally connected through the unwitting agency of an innocent child whose body is taken by others as a vehicle for their own projects; what the government agents do, then, is not that different from how the monster makes some people’s bodies into the vehicles of its own wants and desires. Forced impregnation codes Republican (pro-life). The liberty-abrogating enlistment of some for the purposes of others? That codes Democratic, from a Republican perspective. Call it taxation. 

  How then do we code the young girl’s rage at the takeover of her body and her life by others for purposes that are not her own? It is her explosive rage (think Carrie), that punctures the firewall between our world and the Upside Down. Perhaps this is anarchy or populism, raw, emotional REFUSAL.

  Thus the argument for federal oversight on human rights, voting rights, redistribution, social welfare, environmental protection, has no language, no traction, no reality in the world of Stranger Things – which I now recognize as an even guiltier pleasure than I thought it was while I was watching it.
Others will tell the story of how the US media – which made MILLIONS of dollars on this election, what a windfall -- made Trump possible: the free airtime, the legitimating coverage (“they are both flawed”…), and so on.
But, it is notable that print media was better, sometimes MASSIVELY better. The Washington Post in particular wrote expose after expose. But in the world of the Upside Down all that matters are the appetites, not facts. There is no traction for truth in that gelatinous world.

  Which brings me to what happens after the breach, in our world, what we are seeing now: The media cannot legitimate this Presidency quickly enough. It is as if, if we were living in the world of Stranger Things, the media have decided the monster is not THAT gelatinous, and people are having its babies, so we may not like it, but he is the President-elect, after all, and he deserves a certain deference.

 The material result of that deference could be seen in People Magazine, whose own reporter was groped by the man they quickly moved to coronate: “starting the morning of November 9, the first morning Trump became the President-elect, [there was] a definitive shift: People began to cover Trump and his family in a noticeably more positive light. Their first tweeted-out story cheekily exclaimed “He’s hired!,” a reference to Trump’s “you’re fired” Apprentice catchphrase.
… and then the magazine featured pictures of his family, noted the fashion savvy of his wife, and speculated about whether he would turn the White House to gold with his new decorating plans (watch out subcontractors …. better get big up front deposits for that job). No mention was made of what happened to Midas.
  On the same day, that very evening, thousands, tens of thousands of people, hit the streets in cities across the country, protesting the election of this man and rejecting everything he has stood for, has legitimated, and will now mainstream.
  The front page of the New York Times reported on all this, but – like People magazine – the New York Times made a choice. It covered the protests, but put the protest stories below the fold. Above the fold was their lead story: about Trump and his victory. 

  This division is not what democracy looks like.
But it is what the US looks like, always hasty to sweep things under the proverbial rug and get on with legitimate business, or the business of legitimation.
So, as citizens, we will all have a choice to make going forward:
  Do we allow ourselves to be absorbed in to the gelatinous    
  normalization of a Trump presidency? Or do we hold on to   
  our moral compasses? Notably, in Stranger Things, 
  compasses go haywire near the openings to the Upside 
  Down. Do we find ways to give the truth some traction? 
  How do we hold on to our outrage and give it purpose?

Trump Tower Protest Photo by Jeremy Liebman, Vice Magazine

 For starters, we have to turn the NYTIMES Upside Down. Read below the fold, not above. Reverse their priorities.
To do this, you need to nurture your moral compass. Hold on to what you KNOW. Don’t be talked out of what you heard in the Access Hollywood tape and do not forget what you saw at the rallies. You know what you know. 

 We also have to volunteer to work for organizations that will be under pressure, not only for the do-gooding (though, why not?) but also and even more importantly for the membership. Victims taken to the Upside Down by the ravenous gelatinous monster are – so far in the show – always alone, caught in solitude. Action in concert is the only protection against the gelatinous monster.

Trump Tower Jeremy Liebman, Vice Magazine

“The world turned upside down” is the refrain of a song from Hamilton, the words are said to come from a British drinking song of the time. English soldiers, processing the end of Empire, use the phrase that connotes revolution and, for them, loss. The phrase is sung mournfully by the English in the show, while those – like Hamilton -- who are working for the American Revolution rap it out by it’s name.
   We are now in the Upside Down. And it is up to us what to make of it. 
  I note that the kidnapped boy in Stranger Things, is a little bit gay, cast as a Mama’s boy, a darling child, who is – of course -- bullied at school. He is finally (SPOILER ALERT) rescued by his mother and the sheriff. They risk everything to go to the Upside Down and kidnap him back. He is almost dead when they get to him. He has managed to survive, barely to survive, alone with all his fears, by doing what needed doing. He found his way to a little clubhouse, a kind of holding environment, and he hung on. His mother and the sheriff get to him in time. Barely. And then they go home. They repair the breach that allowed the monster to get in. Will we have a happy ending? 

It won’t surprise many of us that, as he returns to health, the boy coughs up what seems to be a residue of the Upside Down, some sort of gelatinous thing, that washes down the drain. Within him, it seems, occupying his body, is the stuff against which he was trying to defend himself, and to which we are all vulnerable. The young boy – innocent and fey – is a Trojan Horse. What are we?

Too Hard to Keep

Alexander Keller Hirsch is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He can be reached at ahirsch@alaska.edu.

Since 2010, the artist Jason Lazarus has been collecting and curating photographs deemed “too hard to keep” by their owners. The growing archive of images contributes to what he calls a “repository of photographs, photo-objects, and digital files” that are, for whatever reason, considered “too painful to live with any longer.” This is a public receptacle for excessive affect, a place where we can deposit material objects charged with the aura of a feeling that is, as Lazarus writes, “too difficult to hold on to, but too meaningful to destroy.”

A brilliant project. But this phrase—“too hard to keep, but too meaningful to destroy”—may be misleading. The “but” is too quick. It might be that some of these pictures are too meaningful to destroy because they are too hard to keep. One must jettison the relic of a memory if it betokens a grief that is overwhelming enough. But, precisely because that grief is so overwhelming, one must take care not to obliterate its artifact, for doing so would threaten a source of meaning and intensified aliveness.

As Kaja Silverman puts it, “A photograph is the umbilical cord connecting us to what we have loved and lost, to what is gone because we failed to save it, or to what might have been, but now will never be.” The Too Hard to Keep archive is flush with photographs that index such a loss. But it also calls attention to the impasses faced by those who inhabit an afterness where it is not only loss that is at stake, but also the loss of loss itself. Lazarus requires that the owners of photographs “truly part” with the images they donate to his project. He accepts digital copies only on condition that other digital copies be deleted: “If you’re going to part with it—part with it, then what you’re seeing hastraction… It is the remnant of the decision to relinquish the image from theirarchive into a public archive.”

Lazarus’ exhibitions are, in this sense, intensely political. Though most of the images depict subjects and themes that are sometimes considered too intimate, or perhaps too quotidian, to be political—the most common motifs include people, open landscapes, pets, death beds, sun sets, erotic connections, empty rooms—indeed, with Too Hard to Keep, it is precisely this ordinary intimacy that becomes a patent source of political experience. The exhibitions summon into a public domain the pain of those who have suffered private loss by inviting witness-spectators to the gallery. By doing so, they reflect a mise-en-scène of grief that builds a felicitous connection between strangers. A demos is assembled at the site of an aesthetic object that beams forth what is too hard to keep, and too meaningful to destroy.

One of the photographs, a black and white taken in what must be the early 1970s, pictures a crowd of a dozen or so friends posing for a group shot. Everyone is smiling and joking around. One man is sitting on another man’s shoulders, dragging on a cigarette. Beneath them a dog is climbing into a woman’s lap.

Everything appears normal, but for the lower right hand corner, where one of the persons originally pictured has had their shape cut out. They have been deleted, and replaced with the trace of a blank white empty space. The effect is disquieting. In an effort to censor a portion of the photograph, the owner has attempted to purge the image of someone, presumably the source of some wounding or loss. But, tragically, as with all cases of censorship, the eye is drawn to what is repressed. Hardly spirited away, the entire photograph becomes about the cut out and, by extension, the person who is no longer there but whose spectral remainder continues to haunt the image as the presence of an absence.

Another picture in the collection appears to be self-conscious about this. The photograph features a woman who is raising her hand to shield herself from being photographed. The corner of her face is glimpsed, as is a curtain of hair clinging to her jaw line, but her face is otherwise obscured. The backdrop, a shock of over exposed green flora, brightens the image, as it shapes and lends dimension to the aegis of her hand.  The owner of the photograph need not edit the image, the woman is already censoring herself. And yet, one wonders whether this attempt to self-erase is itself a part of why the photograph is too hard to keep and too meaningful to destroy.

Lazarus’ submissions are received anonymously, and without explanation, and the images, when exhibited, are displayed without reference or description. The effect is powerful. The viewer cannot help but imagine what makes this empty landscape too hard to keep, or what renders that person’s image too painful to live with. The result is that the art nearly becomes the story we tell ourselves about what happened.

We recognize, of course, that the story we tell cannot possibly encompass the reality behind the images, even if some pictures invite more or less accurate educated guesses. Whatever the distance between fiction and reality, the story we tell reflects the irrepressible desire to craft narrative around an unsettling and furtive object. Great art, Theodor Adorno once wrote, depicts something that we do not and cannot know. He might have added that, in part, what makes such art resonant is that its audience must try, and then generatively fail, to come to terms with it through storytelling.

In this way, Too Hard to Keep suggests an interesting avenue for reckoning with afterness. Instead of placing the emphasis on punishing perpetrators, or capacitating victims through forgiveness, Too Hard to Keep hones in on the role of the witness. In the standard literature, witnessing is often described as a mode of observation, whereby a bystander sees an event unfold, and then later bears testimony to this experience. But with Lazarus’ project witnesses cannot see the event. The photographs offer evidence of something beyond our ken.

And the exhibitions are hardly Truth and Reconciliation hearings. The TRC in South Africa, for instance, invited victims, perpetrators, and witnesses alike to enter into a public sphere and share stories about past suffering such that, A) The truth of atrocity could become official record, and B) Rituals of mass forgiveness could set restorative justice in motion. But with Too Hard to Keep, the goal is manifestly not to be released from resentment through forgiveness. Indeed, the very premise of the collection is that these images represent a source of pain that is too meaningful to neutralize through reconciliation. And rather than focus on delivering an accurate portrayal of what we have observed, witness-spectators are instead acutely aware that their testimony will largely be fantasy.  

“God,” writes Samuel Beckett in Watt, “is a witness who cannot be sworn.” In part, God cannot be sworn as a witness because in vowing to bear truthful testimony He swears an oath to Himself—He promises to tell the “whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God.” An exercise in tautology. With Too Hard to Keep we are also cast as witnesses who cannot be sworn, though not because the authority of our testimony is rooted in a redundant promise to ourselves. Rather, our inability to be sworn is due to the fact that we cannot offer testimony to an event that remains crucially hidden from us.

Remarkably, in the case of Too Hard to Keep, this invisibility of the event, and the accompanying lack of an ability to tell the truth about it, is precisely what gives witnessing its power. In part, this power is located in the affinity that is struck between witness-spectators and owner-victims in the political space of the gallery.

But unlike most other genres of affinity, this one is not quite grounded in empathy. If empathy is like sharing in and responding to another person’s pain because one knows it and has experienced it before, then the feeling nurtures a shared horizon of understanding anchored in memory. With Too Hard to Keep, however, witnesses cannot develop empathy for the photograph owners, because it is unclear what the loss is, and as such it is uncertain whether one too has taken part in it. Instead, the affinity that connects witnesses and owners stems from what I call inverse empathy: a tenderness toward the suffering of the other that is rooted in a creative imagining of what may have been. This inverse case foregrounds conviviality not in a collective public memory, but rather in a shared imaginable.  The emphasis lies not with the truth of what clearly happened, but rather with the fantasy of what might have taken place, and with the stories witnesses tell about this imaginable past.  

A photograph is “in no way a presence,” Roland Barthes tells us; rather, “its reality is that of the having-been-there.” But with Too Hard to Keep, we bear explicit witness to our own having not been there. Peering into these images, it feels as though we have been transformed into a tragic chorus -- the witnessing body par excellence -- but one that has arrived too late to the scene of loss. This is an analogue to Franz Kafka’s parable about the tardy messiah who arrives too late to tender redemption, except that in this case our belatedness turns out to be helpful, actually. Indeed, it provides the precondition for inverse empathy. Only late witnesses need imagine.

But what kind of demos does inverse empathy convene? Not exactly one embedded in a sustained fidelity to the event. Nor is this a demos adhered to melancholia, since the event and its attendant loss are both clandestine for witnesses. Rather, this demos is attuned to the world of possibilities opened up by imagining what others’ pain might entail. As with other forms of democratic relation, this one convokes a public object -- in this case a photograph -- but that object is not like a social contract or a birth right, concepts both that name what is, or ought to be, guaranteed for members of the group. Instead, this becoming-in-relation takes shape around what is ultimately uncertain, and it is exercised through an invitation to envision who the other is, and what has happened to them. Like a will to chance in reverse, Too Hard to Keep signals a supple and precarious world held in common by citizens who enter together into a life without guarantees, except that the focus is trained on the enigmatic past, rather than the unpredictable future.

What can this do for photograph owners? Perhaps not much. Redemption may be limited for those who possess photographs that symbolize a loss that is too hard to keep and too meaningful to destroy. Friedrich Nietzsche famously argued that we ought to forget our painful past, accept life on life’s terms, embrace amor fati and move on (“I wish to be only a Yes-sayer”), such that we can be free to occupy an unfettered present. By contrast, the philosopher and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry called for a “revolt against reality,” arguing that victims ought to embrace their resentments, such that the “criminal is nailed to his deed.”

But Lazarus offers a third way: not sublime forgetfulness, but not infinite despair either. Too Hard to Keep invites photograph owners to forsake, but not erase, what cannot be kept and cannot be destroyed. And it opens an avenue for victims to invoke unwitting witnesses who can only imagine what they are seeing. Crucially, the photo has been capitulated to a demos – a tardy tragic chorus – that may not be able to fix what has been broken, but can bear witness to the trace of what remains.