Athens, Still Remains

Presents an analysis of the photographic medium in relationship to the history of philosophy and the author's personal reflection on that medium. This title offers a theory of photography and throws light on the author's life and work.

Reading this phrase through Bonhomme's 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 human - and especially the philosopher - is 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, time and difference, with incisive commentary on Bonhomme's photographs and a narrative of Derrida's 1995 trip to Greece, "Athens, Still Remains" is one of Derrida's most accessible, personal, and moving works without being, for all that, any less philosophical. As Derrida reminds us, the word photography-an eminently Greek word-means '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 truth, in other words, an entire philosophical tradition that first came to light in the shadow of the Acropolis.