The Problem of Remains

REMAINS ALWAYS LEAVE US with a feeling of uneasiness. To say this might seem to be a tautology since remains are, by definition, what's left over, what could not be accounted for, or what escaped all calculation. Such calculation may be of the mathematical kind (trying to divide a sum without remainders, for instance) or else of a type more basic to our everyday ways of doing whatever we do. Have I left anything out? we sometimes wonder when we're in the middle of something-a shopping list, say, or instructions to the babysitter, or the writing of an essay-and the very recurrence of this question suggests the extent to which the dilemma caused by things left over is no mere formal tautology. On the contrary, it is a special, and particularly disturbing, kind of circularity that we live deeply, especially during moments of personal loss. When people die (people we're close to, that is), their disappearance is never complete because they invariably leave things behind. One sometimes says, in an attempt to deal with these leftover personal effects, that they are what help one keep the memory of the missing person alive, at least for a few weeks or months. However, this turning of remains into relics merely hides the troubling force that we sense in such leftover objects: a wristwatch lying on our desk, a fancy ballpoint pen waiting to be handled, an almost new pair of gloves that somebody has said you can get use out of. All that these things do is remain, rattling around our living rooms and freezing our gaze, and it is their very status as remains, or as tools without a purpose, signs without a code, that we find so troublesome. I suspect that such troublesomeness gnaws at the heart of all theory, understood in the Greek sense of theoria or an observing of the activities that make up life. It seems that there will just always be things that escape the grasp of explanation, or that fall through the trapper's net of techn- (to use Plato's metaphor for theory in the Symposium: 203D). Even in the literary realm things are invariably left untouched. Literature is a mathesis

Computer Science · Cultural Studies and Postmodernism · Literary, Cultural, Historical Analysis · Multidisciplinary Warburg-centric Studies

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

  Walter Benjamin•Stardom and Celebrity•2007

  Add to list