Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida both speak of their trips to Greece as eagerly anticipated but delayed. Both admit to a reluctance to take the step; Heidegger records “a long hesitation due to the fear of disappointment”:

Derrida too reflects on a similar motif: “This was my third stay in Greece. Barely stays, regrettably, more like visits, multiple, fleeting, and all too late. Why so late? Why did I wait so long to go there, to give myself over to Greece? So late in life?”Footnote ² This is of course partly a commonplace, quite literally a topos, a well-trodden rhetorical path in its own right, the traveler’s signature nod to a weak sublime: one always arrives in Greece too late – witness Virginia Woolf’s diary entry while there in 1906:

Two years earlier, in 1904, Freud experienced a disturbing sense of incredulity (or “derealization,” as he put it in his retrospective rendition of the scene in 1936) at the fact that he, in middle age, actually found himself on the Acropolis, the originary site of the civilization he was busily analyzing at the time of that recollection. The shock was compounded by guilt, for this was a feat his petty bourgeois father, a self-educated merchant, could neither accomplish nor appreciate. The episode has been richly commented upon,Footnote ⁴ not least by Freud himself, who made of it an exemplary manifestation of what Derrida would later call “hauntology,”Footnote ⁵ the persistent presence of the past in the present, as well as a testament to the psychic work of the uncanny, turning the ambivalent feeling of dread toward the dead to “filial piety,” thus temporarily laying to rest familiar phantoms.Footnote ⁶ As Freud put it: “The very theme of Athens and the Acropolis in itself contained evidence of the son’s superiority. Our father had been in business, he had had no secondary education, and Athens could not have meant much to him. Thus what interfered with our enjoyment of the journey to Athens was a feeling of filial piety.”Footnote ⁷ Freud had begun to explore that fraught relationship in Totem and Taboo (1913):

The connection with the uncanny was then made in the important 1919 work of that title:

That uncanny ambivalence toward the past, the incomplete substitution of piety for dread, is conjured up by the visit to Greece. A “visit” can be both literal and metaphorical, or indeed if we are to read the literal into the metaphorical, literally transportative, and in the case of the two visits to Greece on which this chapter dwells, both senses are continually at play. Like Freud’s earlier transcription of his moment of uncanny transport on the Acropolis, Heidegger’s 1962 Greek “sojourn” and Derrida’s “demeure/residence” in Athens thirty-one years later record confrontations with familiar ghosts. That Greece is the common site of this confrontation is no accident, nor simply a stop in a modern-day philosophical Grand Tour; it is rather the destination of that errancy, error and wandering that both haunts and drives philosophy, at least in Heidegger’s and Derrida’s errant terms: “the craft of thinking, unswerving, yet erring,” as Heidegger put it in 1950;Footnote ¹⁰ or as Derrida responded in 1964:

To follow the trail of that destinerrance,Footnote ¹² as Derrida would call it, requires the unpacking of a few mot-valises and the writing off of some considerable debts.

“Nous nous devons à la mort” – “we owe ourselves to death”: the sentence provides the subtitle for Derrida’s Athens, Still Remains, written in 1996 by way of a preface to a collection of photographs by Jean-François Bonhomme. Here, Derrida draws on memories of his brief stays in Greece, “so late in life,” and reflects in an “aphoristic and serial” way on the photographs with which he traveled there.Footnote ¹³ The motif of death, treated exhaustively (though inexhaustible) in his writing, makes an instant appearance:

Though unacknowledged, the provenance of the sentence may lie in a deep memory recalled “by surprise” from the personal archive of Derrida’s encounters with Greek writing, as it features in a celebrated epigraph by Simonides, whose appearance in Plato’s Republic and Protagoras as a poet-bête noire will have registered with Derrida, incidentally at the very least: “A certain Theodorus rejoices because I am dead. Another / shall rejoice at his death. We are all owed to death.”Footnote ¹⁵ As Anne Carson has noted, “What Simonides contributed to our style of thinking and talking about death is a central shaping metaphor: the metaphor of exchange”; more specifically, “[t]he idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides.”Footnote ¹⁶ The instancing of the phrase “in the light,” however, points firmly toward the visual and conjures up an image of a Kerameikos column:

For Derrida, “the phallus or the colossus of Apollodorus immediately becomes the metonymic figure for the entire series of photographs collected in this book” and “each one of them remains in its turn what it becomes: a funerary inscription with a proper name”; as Derrida sees it, “never do any of these photographs fail to signify death.”Footnote ¹⁸ This signification is clear enough in the series of images from Kerameikos, Athens’s ancient cemetery, but Derrida reads a funereal inscription in images of a still living Athens, such as the flea market’s cornucopia of discarded things, and the death-like slumber of a café denizen, as well as the street piano and bouzouki player, a silent soundtrack for this collection, which Derrida hears as “a dirge of mourning.”Footnote ¹⁹

For Michael Naas, this “sense of obsolescence [l’affect de la disaffection]” or “dysfunction function” as he puts it, conveys both disappearance and its premonition. I would “leav(e) behind only its archive,”Footnote ²⁰ although, as Gerhard Richter points out in his introduction to Copy, Archive, Signature: A Conversation on Photography, for Derrida “[t]here can be no photograph that is not about mourning and about the simultaneous desire to guard against mourning.”Footnote ²¹ The response to Bonhomme’s stills of life among the remains, however, like the uncanny protuberance of Apollodorus’s column, captures both the desire for inscription as petrified and thus perpetual attribution to the past, and its impossibility – Derrida’s “I would have loved to … I would have loved to” countersign for eternity the memory of the man who recorded the passing of the gods, but with the added implication of belatedness. Not copying but tracing Apollodorus’s inscription, what Derrida can sign instead is the sentence, his death sentence, his debt:

But why is this an “urgent sentence”?Footnote ²³ How does it compel Derrida to save it? Derrida protests too much. Because by accepting, receiving this death sentence, “for safekeeping,” as he says (perhaps for himself, perhaps for us), he inscribes a caption on every funerary image in this collection that forever defers death. To effect this delay, to make this debt unpayable, to declare it an “odious debt” (a topical term that one can’t help thinking Derrida would have loved), Derrida calls as witnesses a French word, an untranslatable sentence and four familiar ghosts.

This French word is demeure, both a noun meaning “residence,” “usual habitation” and a verb signifying “to stay” or “to remain” in the imperative.

And there are more nuances: the phrase à demeure (permanently, abidingly); the injunction demeure! (stay!), resonant of the ancient epitaphic imperative, urging the passerby to linger at the site of memory; the mise en demeure (to be given notice); the dernière demeure (final resting place, containing an echo of “qu’il meure,” or “that he die” in the subjunctive). Demeure, Athènes, of course, conveys all these connotations, as well as the literal declaration of Derrida’s brief demeure (residence) in Athens that July. But there is a further resonance, not captured by the English translators, a memento of a previous encounter undeclared but still present: Demeure, Athènes shares a title with a near contemporaneous Derridean piece, “Demeure: Fiction et Témoignage” (“Demeure: Fiction and Testimony”), a commentary on a late récit by Maurice Blanchot, entitled L’instant de ma mort (The Instant of My Death).Footnote ²⁵

In that lapidary autobiographical fragment, which Derrida defines as “autothanatographical in truth,”Footnote ²⁶ Blanchot recalls the instant of his near death in 1944, at the hands of the (anticommunist) Russian Liberation Army, operating under Nazi high command. Unspoken but implicit (and confirmed in Derrida’s reading) is Blanchot’s guilt at his escape, his unpaid debt to death, spared as he then resided in a castle, thus recognized by the soldiers as a member of the upper class. His survival made the witnessing of his own death an impossible testimony, his death a fiction, an escape from truth, compounded by the loss of a manuscript he carried with him at the time. Blanchot’s final words trigger Derrida’s deliberation on delayed testimony and “unexperienced experience”Footnote ²⁷:

Thus Derrida revisits this vocabulary in Greece, evoking Blanchot’s stay of execution. Such an ambivalent witnessing haunts Athens, Still Remains like a familiar ghost, adding by way of exemplarity to the “we” of Derrida’s death sentence, “we owe ourselves to death,” but also to its indefinite deferral, its abeyance.

Three more ghosts exemplify the workings of this delaying of the “right moment,”Footnote ³⁰ literalized in Derrida’s text by reference to the delay mechanism in every camera, the photographic shutter [obturateur]: first, Freud, whose “disturbance of memory on the Acropolis” is traced by Derrida as a visual echo in one of Bonhomme’s photographs – the photographer on the Acropolis. For Derrida, this scene from the Athens archive, “the stratified ruin of all the Athenian memories,” is one he “ha(s) never stopped thinking about, especially at the point where Freud meditates upon what he calls in French the “non arrivé.”Footnote ³¹ The moment in Freud’s text that Derrida captures appears by way of illustration of one of the ego’s defense mechanisms (of those “pathological methods of behaviour,” as Freud calls them, that lie “[b]etween repression and what may be termed the normal method of fending off what is distressing or unbearable”; Freud recalls the case of King Boabdil, the last Moorish king of Grenada at the end of the fifteenth century, who, hearing of the fall of his city of Alhama, “feels that this loss means the end of his rule. But he will not ‘let it be true,’ he determines to treat the news as ‘non arrivé.’ … By burning the letters and having the messenger killed he was still trying to show his absolute power.”Footnote ³²

Derrida has written copiously both about Freud’s testimony of the ambivalent workings of reason and about the possibility a letter might never reach its destination, but in Athens, he seems particularly moved to conjure up the specter of Freud as a witness. This is partly to echo Freud’s own confessed disavowal of and encounter with death expressed in the uncanny haunting by the memory of the father, but what Derrida homes in on is the brief instant in Freud’s analysis that accounts for that ultimate refusal, not to receive the news of one’s death, not to pay that debt. Again, one wonders, what would have Derrida made of the Greeks’ refusal to receive the news of the imminent default of their (if it is their) debt, to treat the austerity memorandum as a non arrivé?

Which brings us neatly to the untranslatable sentence and the final ghosts, both philosophers, both witnesses to philosophy’s living death, both guilty. Unlike modern-day Greeks, resistant and singularly unprepared to take the “medicine” prescribed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (in the memorable phrase of its ex-president Dominique Strauss-Kahn, now departed), Socrates is remembered by Derrida here as “knowingly awaiting a death that had been promised him.”Footnote ³³ He lingers on the death of Socrates as the eventful period of a long delay:

Derrida fantasizes on Cape Sounion that he would photograph Socrates awaiting death,Footnote ³⁵ and later dreams of capturing him “as he speaks and claims to have foreseen the instant of his death”Footnote ³⁶ – unrealized negatives that further underline the impossibility of full testimony. This is a cliché, Socrates being Athens’s ghost-in-residence, patron saint of philosophers, whose absent presence would instantly trigger a whole spectrum of disturbances, from dread to filial piety. Derrida lingers on a particular detail from the story of Socrates’s long wait for death, which suggests an association with his reading of Freud: “And yet – a story of the eye – Socrates claimed to know it; he claimed to know when the theoria (ie. Athens’s pledge to Apollo of a yearly pilgrimage/procession to Delos, during which the city must be pure and not conduct any public execution) would end thanks to a dream or, more precisely, by means of a knowledge (savoir) based on a seeing (voir), the seeing of a vision (enupnion) come to visit him in the middle of the night in the course of a dream … My own dream telesympathized with his.”Footnote ³⁷ However, Derrida comes to Athens neither to bury Socrates nor to praise him – aware of the unavoidable encounter, he declares his difference, his respectful distance from that emblematic, definitive scene of death and its afterlife, armed with his own recalcitrant, idiomatic sentence, an uncanny formulation of filial piety:

Ultimately, what the untranslatability resists, though also partly incorporates (in the true manner of Freudian mourning), is the sense “of the great post-Socratic and sacrificial tradition of being-for-death, this ethics of dedication or devotion.”Footnote ³⁹ There are echoes here of Derrida’s reflection on the meaning of another “death sentence” in The Gift of Death: “[w]hat does donner la mort mean in French? How does one give oneself death [se donner la mort]?”Footnote ⁴⁰ but the redoubling of the “nous” complicates the subject–object relationship, rendering the ownership of the debt problematic. The translators of Athens, Still Remains opt for an English formulation that evokes both a “reflexive” and “reciprocal relation.”Footnote ⁴¹ David Wills in his review of the text sees the sentence as photographing the “passactive” relation of “originary mourning and indebtedness,” as well as “philosophising itself, philosophy captured in the necessity or presented with the responsibility of having to think death.”Footnote ⁴² Wills proposes “Photographer on the Acropolis” (fig. 9) as the “iconic photograph [that] photographs the sentence ‘we owe ourselves to death’ at the moment it comes to light.”Footnote ⁴³ The aporetic, uncanny doubling and troubling of the acceptance and refusal of death and the debt are realized in each still, as a “generalised punctum,” as Wills puts it,Footnote ⁴⁴ but also in formal terms. Formally, we see the repetition of the image of the Parthenon in the frame that freezes the “photographic waiting,” or the doubling of the name on the sign on Persephone Street (“ΟΔΟΣ ΠΕΡΣΕΦΟΝΗΣ/PERSEFONIS”). The picture-within-a-picture trope appears in the image of the Greek woman who contemplates a street painter’s attempt at reconstructing a local scene; and finally, photographs directly redouble or mirror each other, as in the flea market seller whose pose echoes the figure of the Silenus on the frieze at the Theatre of Dionysus.

Above all, Derrida concludes, it is what the sentence does, “decontextualized as a photograph,” aphoristic, oracular, an event that resists, that remains:

And perhaps one can see that innocence in those photographs of everyday life, where death (inanimate beings/dead flesh) and life harmoniously, busily coexist, as in the fish market seller handling his produce; and more arrestingly, the two brothers at Athinas Market facing Bonhomme’s camera directly.

For all his protestations, mantra-like invocations of ghosts and ruins-to-be, talk of death and debt, this spectator remains determined to capture in thought that instant of life that fends off the finite, that “inevitable moment – fatal like a click.”Footnote ⁴⁶ This may seem a mere signature move, the kind of “dazzling display of style” that for Vassilis Lambropoulos “philosophy exchanges with its (lost) gravity …, ultimately protecting its (reputation for) agility at a time it can no longer define its relevance,”Footnote ⁴⁷ but I would argue Derrida is on the offensive here. In claiming that way of looking, in the face of the debt, against the “supposed originarity of obligation, of Schuldigsein,” he defines the terms on which philosophy as political (metropolitical, cosmopolitical) discourse can still travel through Greece without de-animating it, without reducing it to ruin.

This is an oppositional move by Derrida, effected as he “photographs” another familiar ghost, fellow traveler to Greece Martin Heidegger, silently invoked in the extract cited earlier. Schuldigsein, being guilty, is dredged up from Heidegger’s Being and Time,Footnote ⁴⁸ but the reference to “the authority of this anteriority,” “the culture of loss and lack, and so on” snap Heidegger too; a delayed and still outstanding debt, this, owed by Derrida to Heidegger, photographed in the form of concealed details, such as in the reference just cited, but also in the obscured-through-translation echo of the two titles: demeure can also mean “sojourn” or Aufenthalt. Earlier, at the Kaisariani Monastery, Derrida had snapped at the German traveler whose footsteps he was following and who

And in Counterpath, a collection of fragmentary reflections on his experiences as a compulsive traveler, Derrida again invokes Heidegger (along with Blanchot), but as counter-companion:

Derrida’s jet-setting ways could not be in starker contrast to Heidegger’s ascetic reticence for travel, and the attendant sense of belonging to his native land is well documented and made meaningful in equal measure by both devotees and detractors – though mainly the latter. Stathis Gourgouris, for instance, finds Heidegger’s obsession with a “German Heimischsein (understood also as ‘being-at-home-in-the-nation’) and his desperate attempts to articulate the uncanny perspective of one’s foreignness within, facilitated by a certain cultural-political climate of enormous symbolic appeal, … expressed by an evident philosophical denial of cosmopolitan life.”Footnote ⁵¹ Gourgouris goes on to ground and gloss the particular connotations of “cosmopolitanism” in the German cultural context of the late 1920s and 1930s, dominated by “German-Jewish thinkers who essentially thought in Greek terms.”Footnote ⁵² Ultimately, Gourgouris argues, Heidegger, though not anti-Semitic per se, was “motivated by a class complex against (mostly Marxist) cosmopolitanism, whose paradoxical content consisted in significant ranks of hellenized Jews.”Footnote ⁵³

In Heidegger’s case, as with Freud (and Derrida too, who engaged closely with the Jewgreek/Greekjew conundrum), issues of anteriority, authority and ultimately truth are entangled with anxieties about cultural entitlement – and, more to the point, played out against a Greek backdrop, agonistically. As Derrida himself stated, “Most of my questions, reservations, perplexities, criticisms before Heidegger’s text, at one moment or another, concern in the end the Greek thing.”Footnote ⁵⁴ If Derrida stands in front of the “Greek thing” as a spectator who defers his dues to its antiquity, Heidegger simply refuses to see it, except when it fully appears in its originary form; or, put in Derridean terms, Heidegger approaches Greece in avoidance.Footnote ⁵⁵

In Sojourns, the account of his first, belated journey to Greece in 1962 (there were more to follow, with the final one in April 1967 for a lecture to the Athens Academy), Heidegger’s hide-and-seek with the “Greek element”Footnote ⁵⁶ is played out in a rhythm of anticipation and failed disclosure, against the inauthentic surround sound of the “unthoughtful (tourist) assault,” and punctuated by his insistent, almost hypnotic, questioning (fifty sentences end with a question mark).Footnote ⁵⁷ These, expressing desire and doubt and delivered didactically, generate an anticipatory dynamic, composed of equal amounts of deference and deferral:

In a series of false clearings, Corfu, Ithaca, Olympia, Mycenae, Epidaurus, Crete, Rhodes, Kos, Patmos (where he refused to disembark), even the Acropolis, Sounion and Delphi, fail to disclose the “proper element” – besieged as they tend to be by crowds of “people taking pictures.” “They throw their memories in the technically produced picture. They abandon without clue the feast of thinking that they ignore.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Throughout the journey, Heidegger relies on the words of Pindar, Aeschylus, Heracleitus and most consistently of Hölderlin, whose imaginary and thus most authentic (in Heidegger’s terms) “sojourn” in Greece he recites and consults as a vade mecum. Only on Delos and the temple of Afaia on Aegina does he accept the possibility of vision – and that, it becomes clear, because of the names, Δήλος – manifest, Α-φαία – unapparent, which contain in them evidence of α-λήθεια, conceived by Heidegger in his rather “coercive” or errant etymology,Footnote ⁶⁰ as “the unconcealed concealment.”Footnote ⁶¹ Denied vision, then, becomes the vision, not in the interpretable, representational or allegorical manner of a dream, but as a failed conjuration, an unheeded call, no less insistent or urgent in its “recollective” force, to quote Marc Froment-Meurice’s analysis of the Greek concept of knowledge:

For Heidegger, indeed, “What is coming only draws near and lasts for an insistent call.” He asks: “Are we today still heeding the call?” and then adds:

The idea of recollection contains a fundamental ambivalence, a doubleness such as we saw captured in Derrida’s reading of Bonhomme’s photographs. Jacques Rancière traces a similar effect in his definition of what he calls “the archaeomodern turn,” a kind of vanishing point for the perspective of modernity:

Derrida’s thought already inscribes the logic (and effect of return) in the encounter with the ruin, as he puts it in Memoirs of the Blind: “The ruin does not supervene like an accident upon a monument that was intact only yesterday. In the beginning there is ruin. Ruin is that which happens to the image from the moment of the first gaze. Ruin is the self-portrait, this face looked at in the face as the memory of itself, what remains returns as a specter from the moment one first looks at oneself and figuration is eclipsed.”Footnote ⁶⁵ The “archaeomodern turn” in Heidegger’s ruminations, however, is cast in the form of an insistent questioning of the very possibility of return, suggesting a negative while maintaining the effect of a derealization, as Freud experienced on the Acropolis. The Parthenon, the ruins of Apollo’s temple in Delphi and on Delos, the temple of Afaia on Aegina are confirmed as “vacant lots,” retaining the power to awake the “sleeping meaning” of still inhabited words. Heidegger’s resistance and recollection proposes a prolonged farewell, or rather an almost ritualistic emptying, a vacation of the site of its weak, false echoes and apparitions. Only a sustained backward look can call up its recollective power and keep open “the field of anticipation.” Heidegger’s look proposes an impossible recuperation that could be seen as doubly focused. As Paul Duro argues,

Suspended thus between fiction and testimony, to echo Derrida’s reading of Blanchot, Heidegger’s “Greek thing” is a forced re-enchantment of the word, of the Greek word, of the poetic word. It is literally an “artificial archaism,” as Gadamer put it,Footnote ⁶⁷ or, in a Benjaminian context, the restoration of its aura, as if it were an artwork. In that sense, the “near” is “preserving its farness,” as in Heidegger’s definition of “The Thing”:

What remains, inscribed by this Heideggerian sleight of hand is the “weak messianic power,”Footnote ⁶⁹ as Walter Benjamin puts it, of the promise of an ever-receding world, conveyed in the double negative of the “not-yet” because “no-longer.” For Derrida, that power resides, remains with memory – as he put it in a late piece: “My first desire is not to produce a philosophical work or a work of art: it is to preserve memory”;Footnote ⁷⁰ and Greece in these accounts seems both a preserved memory and the privileged procedure of preservation itself. Or, to put it differently, Heidegger’s and Derrida’s sojourns conserve in the world’s memory bank, where re-collectors “poetically dwell,” the “Greek thing,” its debts always necessarily unpaid.