The Right to Opacity:

On the Otolith Group’s Nervus Rerum

T. J. DEMOS

We clamor for the right to opacity for everyone.

—Édouard Glissant

Taking as its subject the Jenin refugee camp in the Palestinian Occupied
Territories, Nervus Rerum (2008) is a thirty-two-minute film by the London-based
Otolith Group, commissioned by Homeworks IV: A Forum on Cultural Practices,
which met in Beirut in 2007, and recently screened at Tate Britain in February,
2009.1 Juxtaposing excerpts from the writings of Fernando Pessoa and Jean Genet
with mystifying imagery of the West Bank camp, the film builds on the artists’
remarkable Otolith trilogy of 2003–2008, for which its two members, Kodwo Eshun
and Anjalika Sagar, exploited the critical potential of the “essay film”—a distinc-
tive mixture of documentary and dramatic imagery accompanied by poetic,
historical, and often autobiographical narration that, in the tradition of such
diverse filmmakers and groups as Black Audio Film Collective, Harun Farocki,
Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker, and Anand Patwardhan, works to disrupt the
clear boundaries between fact and fiction, subjectivity and objectivity, the real and
the imaginary. In the process, the Otolith Group has invented inspiring new polit-
ical and creative possibilities for filmmaking as a critical and conceptual art.
Most significantly, Nervus Rerum—its title borrowed from Cicero’s Latin,
meaning “the nerve of things”—confronts the problem of the representability of
a people confined to a geographical enclave by a longstanding military occupa-
tion. Established in 1953, the Jenin refugee camp was built to shelter Palestinians
who fled or were expelled from their native towns and villages in the areas that
became Israel following the nation’s founding during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
Under Jordanian control for nearly twenty years, the Jenin camp fell to Israeli
occupation during the Six-Day War of 1967, and was later handed over to the
Palestinian National Authority in 1996. With a population of some 13,000

1. The screening was one part of a series of exhibitions by the Otolith Group this spring in
London, with successive shows at two of the city’s prominent alternative galleries: Gasworks and the
Showroom.

OCTOBER 129, Summer 2009, pp. 113–128. © 2009 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
114 OCTOBER

Palestinians, most of whom are descendents of refugees of 1948, Jenin’s inhabi-

tants resist settling in the West Bank, clinging instead to their displaced status
and thereby refusing to surrender their right of return to their historical land.
Nominally self-governing territories, camps such as Jenin today form so many
extraterritorial islands surrounded by Israeli military power. Writing about the
West Bank’s “multiplying archipelago of externally alienated and internally
homogenous ethno-national enclaves,” composed of Israeli settlements and mili-
tary outposts and Palestinian occupied territories and refugee camps, Eyal
Weizman states: “In this unique territorial ecosystem, various other zones—those
of political piracy, of ‘humanitarian’ crisis, of barbaric violence, of full citizen-
ship, ‘weak citizenship,’ or no citizenship at all—exist adjacent to, within, or over
each other.”2
Nervus Rerum brings visibility to the Jenin camp, populated by refugees who
have no political rights or means of political representation. Yet it does so, strik-
ingly, without positioning the camp’s Palestinians as transparent subjects of a
documentary exposé. This refusal to represent the unrepresented delivers us to
one particularly arresting aspect of the film: the visual experience of passing
through narrow labyrinthine passages of tightly grouped buildings while gaining
no information about the camp’s inhabitants—neither from direct testimonials
nor descriptive commentary. Nervus Rerum depicts those who live in a political
state of exception; but where one would expect anthropological insights and cul-
tural access to Jenin’s inhabitants, there is only blankness and disorientation. In
other words, this film is ruled by opacity, by the reverse of transparency, by an
obscurity that frustrates knowledge and that assigns to the represented a source of
unknowability that is also a sign of potentiality. As suggested in the “Trialogue on
Nervus Rerum,” in which Eshun and Sagar discuss the film with film historian
Irmgard Emmelhainz, one starting point for their project was “the conundrum of
representing Palestine.”3 What is that conundrum? There are many. Unraveling
them will also assist in locating the framing conditions and motivations that
define Nervus Rerum’s starting point.
First off, in their Trialogue the Otolith Group points to their desire to avoid
reproducing what has been termed “Pallywood” cinema; that is, the clichéd—and
thus all too easily dismissed—genre of victim reportage intended both to expose
the truth of the traumatic suffering that results from Israel’s political and military
policies, and to elicit the audience’s emotional sympathy as a way of mobilizing

2. Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (London: Verso, 2007), p. 7.
3. I cite the Trialogue as it appears reprinted in these pages. An earlier version of the Trialogue
was published in the 7th Shanghai Biennial catalogue. See “A Trialogue on Nervus Rerum,” in The
Shanghai Papers, ed. Annette W. Balkema, Li Ning, and Xiang Liping (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2008),
pp. 74–80. The Trialogue has also been performed publicly by Eshun and Sagar as “A Dialogue on
Nervus Rerum,” as in the exhibition Image Wars at the Institute of International Visual Arts (InIVA) in
London, forming one edition of a series of research workshops I organized under the rubric “Zones of
Conflict” between October 2008 and February 2009. All subsequent quotes of Eshun and Sagar refer to
the Trialogue as published here.
The Right to Opacity 115

The Otolith Group. Still from

Nervus Rerum. 2008.

support for Palestinians (as we saw recently with Israel’s 2009 bombing and inva-
sion of the Gaza Strip).4 Whereas those who make such documentaries attempt
“to speak truth to power” by documenting the human cost of Israel’s occupation,
these filmic or video-based treatments often only reaffirm the oppressive power’s
control—as when, for example, “breaking news” stories are neutralized by their
seamless assimilation into the dominant narratives and recursive structures of
mainstream media reporting, raising ratings without altering opinion. If main-
stream reporting refers primarily to its own set of codes rather than to reality
itself, as media theorist Niklas Luhmann has argued, then what hope can the doc-
umentary exposé have in challenging public perception in the mainstream
media’s regulated environment?5 It is for this reason that we might agree with the
Otolith Group’s rejection of such filmic and video-based strategies as ineffective.
Yet not all Palestinian cinema, one could argue conversely, is trapped in this
dilemma, nor must all documentary accounts end up merely providing mass media

4. “Pallywood” is a term coined by Boston University historian Richard Landes in 2000 in refer-
ence to the sensationalized televised death of the twelve-year-old Palestinian Mohammed al-Durrah,
who died in Gaza crouching next to his father after being allegedly shot by the Israeli Defense Force.
In its original usage, the word identified the ostensibly staged theatricality of al-Durrah’s shooting,
defining a convention of Palestinian propaganda on the melodramatic level of Bollywood film. The
term is raised by Emmelhainz in the Trialogue.
5. See Niklas Luhmann, The Reality of the Mass Media, trans. Kathleen Cross (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000).
116 OCTOBER

with sensationalist fodder.6 Consider, for example, the case of Mohamed Bakri’s Jenin,
Jenin (2002) a documentary film that portrays what the filmmaker calls the “truth"
about the “Battle of Jenin,” referring to the bombing of the refugee camp by the
Israeli Defense Forces in April of that year, which drew Palestinian accusations of a
massacre.7 Comprising footage of buildings reduced to rubble and firsthand
accounts of the attack, the film presents the evidence of catastrophic destruction
alongside emotional testimony from its survivors.8 On the one hand, Jenin, Jenin per-
petuates the longstanding Palestinian strategy of producing documentaries about
the horror of Israel’s military incursions in order to raise international public con-
sciousness and encourage condemnation. The film’s conventions, in this regard, date
back to the “revolutionary” period of Palestinian film of the 1970s (consider, for
instance, Qais il Zobaidi’s Away From Home (1969) which portrays Sabina Camp near
Damascus—in operation since 1948—through the voices of the children who live
there; and Mustafa Abu Ali’s They Don’t Exist (1974) which presents the history of
South Lebanon’s Nabatia Camp, which was bombed by the Israeli Air Force on May
15, 1974, with numerous civilian casualties).9 Following suit with its documentary
expose, Jenin, Jenin appeared to represent a clear instance of cinema’s political effec-
tiveness, particularly on the basis of its ostensible threat to the Israeli public’s support
for the government’s militarized policies against the Occupied Territories, as judged
by the Israeli Film Ratings Board, which charged the filmmaker with libel and
banned the film from public cinemas in Israel immediately upon release10 (although
the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem Cinematheques screened the film despite the Israeli ban,
which was later overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court11). Despite the act of censor-
ship, however, Israeli filmmakers have made no less than three filmic retorts to the
censored film—all aired on primetime television—rebutting Bakri’s version of the
events, which demonstrates that documentaries, in addition to whatever oppositional
energies they may promote, often serve to entrench conventional views.12

6. See, for instance, Ariella Azoulay, Atto di Stato. Palestina-Israele, 1967–2007. Storia fotografica
dell’occupazione (Milan: Mondadori Bruno, 2008), which represents an archive of documentary pho-
tographs of Israel’s occupation, untranslated as of yet into English. Its original Hebrew version in
Hebrew, makes quite an important contribution to the public archive.
7. “My crime was to tell the truth,” explains Mohammad Bakri, The Electronic Intifada, July 31, 2008,
at: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9727.shtml.
8. Hamid Dabashi points out that the film’s basic criterion for the selection of interviewees was
one’s ability to say: “I held the truth, I was there,” in his introduction to Dreams of a Nation: On
Palestinian Cinema, ed. Hamid Dabashi (New York: Verso, 2006), p. 12.
9. Both films were included in “Palestinian Revolution Cinema,” a program organized by
Annemarie Jacir that focused on the years between 1968–1982 and screened as part of the New York
Arab and South Asian Film Festival in 2007. See Annemarie Jacir, “‘For Cultural Purposes Only’:
Curating a Palestinian Film Festival,” in Dreams of a Nation, pp. 23–31.
10. See Joshua Mitnick, “Israeli film board bans Jenin, Jenin,” Star Ledger ( January 1, 2003),
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article1026.shtml (consulted June 30, 2009).
11. Nirit Anderman, “Tel Aviv Cinema to Screen Jenin, Jenin on Eve of Director’s Libel Trial,”
Haaretz (February 2, 2008), www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/957775.html (consulted June 30, 2009).
12. See Bakri, The Electronic Intifada.
The Right to Opacity 117

On the other hand, Jenin, Jenin is clearly bound up with the “traumatic real-
ism” that is commonly under stood to character ize Palest inian cinema in
general—providing us with another reason that the representation of Palestine is
problematic. Given the film’s prominent scenes featuring a mute young man who
can only gesture pathetically toward the bullet-holed walls and exploded infra-
structure to express the ineffable psychological effects of the camp’s devastation,
the implication is clear that violence can sometimes best be measured by the
absence, even the impossibility, of speech. According to literary theorist and cul-
tural cr it ic Hamid Dabashi, this impossibilit y of speech responds to the
experience of depoliticization: “What ultimately defines what we may call a
Palestinian cinema is the mutation of that repressed anger into an aestheticized vio-
lence—the aesthetic presence of a political absence. The Palestinians’ is an
aesthetic under duress . . . ”13 Taking a longer view, the filmic response to the
recent bombing of Jenin might be said to constitute a mere repetition of
Palestinian cinema’s relation to the originary “traumatic” event of Palestinian his-
tory: al-Nakba, or “day of the catastrophe” in Arabic, which accompanied the
founding of the state of Israel in 1948, and corresponded to the violent expulsion
and exile of scores of Palestinians from their homeland. Indeed, that the Nakba
shines like a dark star over subsequent Palestinian cultural production—including
film—and renders problematic representation is accepted as fundamental for vir-
tually all commentators. This “foundational trauma of the Palestinian struggle,”
writes Joseph Massad, is also traumatic for its very “unrepresentability.”14 For
related to that trauma, as Edward Said similarly argued, is the continued threat of
erasure in the present, occasioned by Israel’s exclusionary narratives and the
repression that accompanies and forms part of its continued occupation of
Palestinian territories: “the whole history of the Palestinian struggle has to do with
the desire to be visible,” Said writes. “Remember the early mobilizing phrase of
Zionism: ‘We are a people without a land going to a land without a people’? It pro-
nounced the emptiness of the land and the non-existence of a people.”15 Because of
this erasure, the Palestinian’s diasporic conditions have entailed both a disordering
in time and a disorientation in space, which, Said notes, has structurally disabled
historical thinking.16 As such, films like Jenin, Jenin, which offers a paradigmatic

13. Dabashi, Dreams of a Nation, p. 11.

14. Joseph Massad, “The Weapon of Culture: Cinema in the Palestinian Liberation Struggle,” in
Dreams of a Nation, p. 34. Although Hamid Naficy broadens the determinants of “erasure” significantly
by suggesting that it is imposed by “lovers, dominant social orders, social upheavals, military and politi-
cal occupation, economic hardship, technological in efficiency, political censorship, surveillance,
exile.” See Naficy, “Palestinian Exilic Cinema and Film Letters,” in Dreams of a Nation, p. 104.
15. Edward Said, “Preface,” in Dreams of a Nation, p. 2.
16. How one might arrange time, Said asks elsewhere, when “every progress is a regression,” when
“there is no direct line connecting the home to the place of birth, school and adulthood, when all
events are accidental.” Edward Said, “Afterward: The Consequences of 1948,” in The War for Palestine:
Rewriting the History of 1948, eds. Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002); cited in Nurith Gertz and George Khleifi, “Introduction,” in Palestinian Cinema: Landscape,
Trauma and Memory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), p. 2.
118 OCTOBER

example of the cinematic documentary as a mode of historical truth-telling put to

task as political resistance, appear caught in a vicious cycle of struggling for self-
expression against the forces of erasure, even as their imagery inevitably manifests
the fragmenting effects that drive the desire for ever more totalizing—and equally
ever more unattainable—accounts in turn.
This brief digression on Jenin, Jenin is useful for understanding what Nervus
Rerum is not. The Otolith Group’s innovative approach declines the attempt to
overcome the numerous challenges to represent Palestine via ever more truthful
exposures of its “reality”; rather, the artists opt to record the camp environment
only to reveal its opacity as a system of images. They choose to “turn their back

Mohammad Bakri. Still

from Jenin, Jenin. 2002.

on power” instead of “speaking truth to power,” as Eshun explains. In filmic

terms, this gesture is carried out by the mobile visual portal into the camp that is
the Steadicam, the technical system by which the camera glides about as if undis-
tracted and unconcerned with individual figures, including sometimes curious
children. If it does momentarily dwell on them, the camera’s focus soon moves
on, wandering ever deeper into the maze of tight channels between buildings
and cul-de-sacs that compose Jenin’s enclosed and claustrophobic space, as if
seeking a way out but endlessly discovering only frustration. As such, the film
refuses to furnish power—whether governmental authorities or corporate media
elites—with more material for its publicity campaigns. Not only is Jenin’s geogra-
phy rendered opaque to cartographic reason, the architecture’s function and
meaning is left similarly unexplained, and the graffiti on the exterior walls goes
untranslated. Similarly, people ignore the camera and go about their business for
the most part without looking back. The eyes of the camp’s figures and those of
the viewer rarely meet, never become the site of mutual recognition. The effect is
to eliminate possible avenues of identification between viewers and the film’s sub-
jects. There is no cinematic suture, no fuel for the construction of conventional
The Right to Opacity 119

narrative desire. Nor is there the likelihood of an adoption of the camera’s vision
as one’s own, as its continual wraith-like drifting through the camp—“like a tired
drunk ghost of the camp,” as Sagar observes—differs markedly from the lived
perception that might otherwise be mimicked by the embodied movements of a
handheld camera, as in Jenin, Jenin. As Eshun notes, here, there is no “ethno-
graphic shortcut to empathy.”
This breakdown of the conventional documentary approach leads us to a
further explanation of the difficulty of representing Palestine. Because “Palestine”
exists as a form of collective consciousness and identification that is based on the
absence of a state, an imagined community without a sovereign geography, it

The Otolith Group.

Still from Nervus
Rerum. 2008.

thereby presents a challenge to the norms of representation. It is from this point

that the Otolith Group attempts to reconfigure the possibilities of documentary
representation. That said, Nervus Rerum does not give up on intimating the psy-
chic and spatial conditions inside the camp, and it indeed relays the horror of
enclosure that permeates the camp’s ambience by offering an “intimacy without
transparency,” as Eshun provocatively notes: “any evocation of the quotidian” in
an environment like the longstanding refugee camp of Jenin “cannot help but
yield the texture of life lived under occupation.” He then asks, rhetorically: “What
if the saturation of the spatial and the psychic by the pressure of the occupation
relieved us of the necessity to address it as a frame?” And here we come to the sig-
nificance of the Otolith Group’s experiment with cinematic opacity. If names
ascribe a conventional identity to things in the world, then naming risks the reifi-
cation of reality by language, particularly in those cases where geography and its
people are inextricably linked to seemingly fixed, substantialized essences that
generate the litany of familiar stereotypes—camp, bare life, victim, refugee, mili-
tant, martyr—to which Jenin is so often reduced. Choosing to avoid this trap
120 OCTOBER

while still evoking the oppressive carceral conditions of the camp, the artists reject
the sociology of authoritative explanation and its potentially colonizing activity of
naming in favor of an unexpected détournement of the very labyrinth in which the
inhabitants of Jenin are trapped.
In its place we are presented with the recourse to fiction. However, rather
than an escapist evasion or fanciful flight, this gambit provides what is perhaps
the most direct acknowledgement of the impossibility of representing Palestine.
Rather than using a conventional and informative voice-over, Nervus Rerum
includes a lyrical commentary performed by Sagar that runs intermittently
throughout the film, its content based entirely on passages borrowed from
Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet, and French author Jean
Genet’s Prisoner of Love. 17 Published more than fifty years after the author’s
death in 1935, Pessoa’s text is written in the voice of Bernardo Soares, one of the
writer’s “heteronyms” (his term for character-authors, each with a specific tem-
perament, philosophy, and writing style, through which Pessoa would “write” his
texts), and as such the Book of Disquiet already begins to blur the lines between
autobiography and fiction. Genet’s book, also published posthumously, is a
philosophical first-hand account of the author’s memories of living amongst
Palestinians in Jordan in the early 1970s, memories reignited during his experi-
ence visiting Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon a decade later.
While Genet’s thematic engagement would seem to come close to the con-
cerns of Nervus Rerum, the excerpted sections, as with those of Pessoa, in fact
focus on the obduracy of the “image” and its tricky relation to “reality,” the lat-
ter constituted by the inextricable connection to the imagination. The resulting
sense of perceptual disorientation is intensified by the film’s inclusion of
repeated and repetitive selections from British musician Ryan Teague’s postmin-
imalist Prelude V (from his Six Preludes, 2005) as its soundtrack. The piece’s
mixture of synthesized sounds and clarinet lends to the film a sonic atmosphere
of meandering harmonic progressions without fixed tonal center, correlating
the visual and literary experience of the loss of reality with the sensation of
musical dislocation. It is therefore not surprising, given the film’s complex mix-
ture of paradoxical genres (documentary and fiction), historical contexts
(1910s, 1980s, 2000s), and mediums (film, literature, and music), that its mosaic
of conventions, temporalities, and materialities renders any pure and transpar-
ent documentary transcription inconceivable. The resulting “heterogeneous
sensible” regime of the image—to invoke Jacques Rancière’s term, which helps
to define the irreducible hybridity of film—perfectly defines the cinematic

17. The full references are: Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. and ed. Richard Zenith
(New York: Penguin, 2002); and Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (London: Picador,
1990). Quotes are also drawn from Jean Genet, The Declared Enemy: Texts and Interviews, trans. Jeff
Fort, ed. Albert Dichy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004). Nervus Rerum references these
texts in its closing credits.
The Right to Opacity 121

image as the intersection of the real and the imaginary, as their intertwinement
is conceptualized in Genet’s and Pessoa’s borrowed texts.18
As for the content of the film’s commentary, viewers are introduced immedi-
ately to the elusiveness of the “real,” as it is placed in an unstable reversibility of
presence and absence, dream and wakefulness, life and death: “What we call life is
the slumber of our real life, the death of what we really are,” narrates Sagar’s
Pessoa, cryptically. “The dead are born, they don’t die. The worlds are switched in
our eyes. We’re dead when we think we’re living; we start living when we die.” The
implication, when recontextualized and focused by the film’s imagery of narrow
thoroughfares, is that the so-called life in the camps is akin to a living death, and
that the freedom of life proper will only begin, hopefully, upon death. These con-
ceptual realizations pressure linguistic articulation—resulting in the catachreses,
paradoxes, and mixed metaphors that work to join irreconcilable categories—and
are corroborated in the film’s subsequent quotation of Genet, which blurs the
oneiric and the actual: “Sometimes events from this former life became so vivid I
had to wake myself up. I was in a dream, which I am able to control now by recon-
structing and assembling its various images.” In Genet’s dream imagery, the
meaning is similar to Pessoa’s: life at times reaches an intensity that denies lan-
guage’s ability to capture or express it; at these points, reality’s significance can be
intimated only through its fictionalization—meaning not only the significance
that imagination can supply, but also the literary breakdown that “represents” lan-
guage’s failure. Adding to the subject matter’s corrosion of the common-sense
understanding of reality is the fact that these appropriated sections are relayed
without any indication of the text’s origin and are spoken as if forging a continu-
ous passage; in “reality,” they are sourced from various parts of the books.
In Rancière’s constructivist reading of Chris Marker’s “documentary fic-
tion”—which represents an important and influential precedent for the Otolith
Group’s practice19—fiction suggests the “forging,” not the “feigning,” of reality.20
Because film, according to Rancière, designates a unification of the camera’s
mechanical perception and the subjective vision of the filmmaker, it both consti-
tutes a post-Platonic ontological model for the conceptualization of cinema and
resonates with Marker’s innovative reinvention of the documentary mode, for
which fiction is the only possible outcome. Yet perhaps here, in view of Nervus
Rerum’s evocation of the traumatic spatial ambience of the Israeli occupation,

18. See Jacques Rancière, “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes,” New Left Review 14
(March–April 2002), p. 142; and Jacques Rancière, “Documentary Fiction: Marker and the Fiction of
Memory,” Film Fables, trans. Emiliano Battista (New York: Berg, 2006), p. 168; and Jacques Rancière, The
Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible (2000), trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum,
2004), pp. 63–64, where he discusses film as the “play of heterologies.”
19. In addition to formal affinities with Marker’s precedents, the Otolith Group, for the 2007 Athens
Biennial, collaborated with Chris Marker to produce Inner Time of Television, a project that screened
The Owl’s Legacy, a rarely seen thirteen-part television series on the afterlives of Ancient Greece, which
Marker made in 1989. See the Otolith Group, Inner Time of Television (Athens Biennial, 2007).
20. See Rancière, “Documentary Fiction,” p. 158.
122 OCTOBER

The Otolith Group.

Still from Nervus
Rerum. 2008.

reality can only be newly forged because representation under such oppression is
by necessity damaged, invalid, and insufficient, as Genet’s and Pessoa’s accounts
also demonstrate. Nervus Rerum repeats Genet’s insight that “death is a phenome-
non that destroys the world”—a world that is as much made up of language as it is
by the massacres at Lebanon’s Sabra, Chatila, and Bourj Barajnah camps in the
early 1980s that are his immediate point of reference.21
Manifesting that derealization and simultaneous fictionalization of reality,
Nervus Rerum at times combines the script’s textual sources and its visual footage to
create uncanny constellations of sudden revelation. For instance, as the film cuts to a
shot of young men engaged in a game of cards, the narrator intones the words of
Genet: “The card players, their hands full of ghosts, knew that however handsome
and sure of themselves they were, their actions perpetuated a game with neither
beginning nor end. Absence was in their hands just as it was under their feet.” In this
moment, the text, stolen out of the past, abruptly comes to possess illuminating cur-
rency; likewise, contemporary Jenin is strangely transported into history, inviting the
viewer to read its condition as being one with Genet’s accounts of massacred
Palestinians of decades past. Whatever the interpretation, which can only appear pro-
visional, its possibilities endless, these images of “reality” are far from obvious or
self-evident. In fact, they too reveal only absence when a firm ground is sought.
Given fictionalization’s denial of a transparent reality, it is imperative to
cross-examine cinematic imagery for its potential manipulations, for its false leads
and dead ends—a course of action that is duplicated in the Otolith Group’s film’s
visual exploration of the camp. “It would be tempting,” suggests Sagar in the
“Dialogue on Nervus Rerum,” “to attempt to place documentary images on trial.”22

21. As the Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif points out in her introduction to the New York Review of Books
edition of Prisoner of Love (1986), Genet “was, it seems, one of the first foreigners to enter the Palestinian
refugee camp of Chatila after the Christian Lebanese Phalange, with the compliance of the Israeli com-
mand, tortured, and murdered hundreds of its inhabitants” (x). For a moving and exhaustive history of
these events, see Robert Fisk, Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
22. The Otolith Group performed “Dialogue on Nervus Rerum” at “Image Wars,” a research workshop
I organized at InIVA, on October 10, 2008. See: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/zones_of_conflict/image_ wars/.
The Right to Opacity 123

This direction is also picked up in the film’s commentary: “The [cinematic] image
shows what it shows, but what does it hide?,” wonders Genet in the voice of Sagar.
“Since I have an imaginary world of my own, like everyone, a palm tree, there on
the screen, obliges me to see only it and to cut short my imaginary world, which
means what?” On the one hand, for Genet, such elisions might constitute or pro-
voke “a gesture of revolt,” for the image might bracket the subjective imagination
in a pragmatic gesture to spark revolution’s collective unification. On the other
hand, such visual obfuscation also reveals, for Genet, the “prison” that is our
habituated image-world, one capable of binding viewers to a political instrumen-
talization that bars creative interpretation, collapses temporal multiplicity, and
abridges individual agency and creative thinking. Does Genet’s warning here not
also point out the very danger of the testimonial documentary that the Otolith
Group is so keen to avoid—that in substituting an image for a person, the poten-
tial for subjective becoming is suppressed in the act of concretizing being, thereby
entrapping its existence within the urgency of political contingency?
It is precisely when imagery becomes ensnaring that it is imperative to invoke
new creative strategies—and this represents the ambition of Nervus Rerum. As Eshun
makes clear: the film constructs “an opacity that seeks to prevent the viewer from
producing knowledge from images,” and, Sagar adds, which “complicates normative
modes of address,” thereby declaring a rupture from longstanding documentary con-
ventions of witness-bearing. Following from this ethical-aesthetic dedication to
opacity, the film’s disorienting images of prison unexpectedly become a way to avoid
Genet’s warning about images as prison. If the Otolith Group refuses to surrender
Jenin to transparency, however, then this decision should not be taken as a capitula-
tion to the insurmountable challenge of representing Palestine (even if that
challenge is acknowledged in the artists’ Trialogue). Rather, Nervus Rerum deploys
opacity as a political demand, one making a claim for a decolonized, subjective, and
collective formation. According to French-Caribbean poet and literary critic
Édouard Glissant—whose essay, “For Opacity,” was an important source for the
Otolith Group’s concept—“the right to opacity” is not an “enclosure within an
impenetrable autarchy,” but rather a “subsistence within an irreducible singularity.”23
As Sagar, taking up Glissant’s lead, remarks: “Opacity is understood as the right to a
singularity that displaces the demand of difference for transparency.” On the one
hand, “singularity” might suggest in this context both the non-repeatability of being
and existence, as well as the inimitable quality of what D. N. Rodowick terms the
inimitable quality of the “singular becoming multiple” through time and across
space, which positions singularity as a particular relationality between changing
states of metamorphosis.24 On the other hand, and with Nervus Rerum in mind,

23. Édouard Glissant, “For Opacity,” in Over Here: International Perspectives on Art and Culture, ed.
Gerardo Mosquera and Jean Fisher (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2004), p. 253. Glissant’s text is dis-
cussed in the Trialogue.
24. As Rodowick explains in reference to Deleuze’s Cinema 2: “There is no singular or self-identical
subject because we think, exist, and live in time; subjectivity is becoming, change, deterritorialization,
repetition becoming difference, the singular becoming multiple. Reactionary thought wants to bolster
124 OCTOBER

singularity might also express itself negatively, as not only that which escapes or eludes
representation and conventional communicative codes, but also as an “event” that
problematizes representation insofar as cinematic images and signs become genera-
tive and transformative of new experiences and non-conventional meanings.
This notion of the “event” only reaffirms the film’s dissolution of the bound-
aries between the real and the imaginary, for if the image is forever the source of
newly wrought configurations between its appearance and its meanings, then it
becomes impossible to consider it as simply reflective or representative of a frozen
reality. As such, Nervus Rerum constitutes a continuation of the Otolith Group’s com-
mitment to the notion of the “event” operative in Otolith I (2003) and II (2007)
where the focus was placed on the “past potential futures” of the 1960s’ Non-
Aligned Movement, Indian socialism, and Third-World feminism—the erstwhile
revolutionary dreams of decades past inspired by the archives of Sagar’s grand-
mother, Anasuya Gyan Chand, president of The National Federation of Indian
Women, who figures as protagonist in the two films. Narrated by an imagined future
descendent of Sagar’s during a coming space age when the human species will have
adapted to non-gravitational living, Otolith I looks back on the catastrophe that is
our present, beginning with the 2003 war in Iraq. By constructing defamiliarizing
montages of sound and image, the Otolith Group—taking their name, appropri-
ately, from the small particle of the middle ear that helps maintain orientation and
balance—creatively recalibrates our relation to reality. Its sequel, Otolith II (2007),
focuses on modernity’s aftermath in India, exploring the country’s legacy of twenti-
eth-century utopian projects. The film-essay juxtaposes scenes of the decrepit
architecture of Chandigarh, Corbusier’s ideal city and onetime symbol of Nehru’s
secular modernity, with Mumbai’s current-day mega-slum. Yet, unexpectedly, it
avoids telling the familiar tale of progressive failure; contemporary India instead
prefigures both a coming planetary impoverishment as well as a model of creative
survival within informal architectures and adaptive urban living.25
These works pivot on the Otolith Group’s notion of the event, as the open-
ing lines of Otolith I have it: “An excess which neither image nor memory can
recover, but for which both stand in. That excess is the event.” While this notion
might be creatively related to Agamben’s concept of potentiality (which parallels
in some ways Deleuze’s account of virtuality in his book Cinema 2 [1982]), it also
recalls Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent discussion of the “event” that occurs when
“images, signs and statements” form “possible worlds” and “intervene in both the
incorporeal and corporeal transformations” of reality.26 But in distinction to the
Otolith Group’s earlier work, Nervus Rerum unleashes an event where the self

the ego against the forces of change, to anchor it in a true, good, and changeless world; it exhausts life
by freezing identity.” D. N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham: Duke University Press,
1997), p. 140.
25. I examine Otolith in greater detail in my forthcoming essay in Grey Room, “Moving Images of
Globalization.”
26. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Struggle, Event, Media,” (2007), http://eipcp.net/transversal/1003/laz-
zarato/en.
The Otolith Group. Two stills from Otolith II. 2007.
126 OCTOBER

discovers its singularity in its impossible transparency to difference—in an image

that fails to represent the subject. This is clear in those scenes depicting figures—
for instance, the one referred to in the Trialogue as “Zacharia”—who are
unmoored from their identities, their appearance invested with resistance to
familiar modes of understanding and endowed with an existence otherwise denied
to them in expected modes of identification, whether it be Israeli political resumés
(Zacharia as the wanted “terrorist” affiliated with Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade) or
Palestinian narratives (Zacharia as the “heroic resistance fighter” and “proto-martyr,”
as he is depicted in Nervus Rerum’s shot in the graveyard of martyrs, where he may
likely end up). In this regard, we might reformulate a notion of Genet’s that is para-

The Otolith Group.

Still from Nervus
Rerum. 2008.

phrased in the Trialogue—“it is the image that cannot be emulated that becomes
heroic through the paradox of the generalization of its singularity”—so that the
political force of opacity designates the right to singularity as exception. As such, the
“state of exception”27 that is the Jenin refugee camp—as a place that corresponds to
the legalized lawlessness of Giorgio Agamben’s conceptualization of the “state of
exception,” where political representation is denied and inhabitants are reduced to
an existence that is excluded from the rule of law in Israeli society—suddenly finds
itself transvalued as a space beyond representation and not deprived of it. This space
is, in other words, one of opacity, a site of a politics to come.
There are certainly risks to this strategy. Might the embrace of opacity as a strat-
eg y of resist ance against oppressive ident ificat ions, for inst ance, end up
unintentionally silencing the other, as the unforeseen mimicry of political erasure
reenacts the very effect of colonization? And does this invocation of the opaque not
also negate positive identifications with Palestinians in the act of collective and
transnational solidarity, mitigating or undermining support for their struggle for lib-

27. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
 127

eration and self-determination? And if “Pallywood” cinema is deemed ineffective,

then what real consequence does the recourse to opacity promise? And where does
the evocation of the non-discursive phenomenological experience of the camp, cre-
ating the existential sense of estrangement, leave the viewer, if not in a state of
debilitating confusion and alienation?
While these questions are not easy to dismiss, they do indicate the stakes of
Nervus Rerum, which centers on the ambition to move beyond the instrumentaliza-
tion of essentialist identity politics and managerial multiculturalism, and toward a
reshuffling of the cards via the Otolith Group’s theory of the event.28 And if this
event corresponds to the political claim of “the right to singularity as exception,”
then its productive corrosion of the transparency of identity and difference also rep-
resents an escape from the problematic “speaking for the other” so well critiqued in
postcolonial studies. Whereas the risk of silencing the other might appear legiti-
mate, the recourse to authenticity and transparency that traditional documentary
conventions presuppose may be much worse. Moreover, opacity does not equal era-
sure. Glissant is clear on this account: “the opaque is not the obscure”; instead, it is
“that which cannot be reduced,” saving one from “unequivocal courses and irre-
versible choices.”29 Additionally, Nervus Rerum’s cinema of opacity cannot be
generalized as a final and definitive approach to Jenin, for it represents an experi-
mental gesture made to open up space for play. It is true that the relegation of Jenin
to opacity means the transportation of the viewer to a similar disorientation, as
when identification with the Steadicam is thwarted owing to its mechanized and
non-human gaze. Yet this is not meant to be an alienating act, but the constitution
of a new mode of social relations: the documented subject is not situated as funda-
mentally different and distant from the self; rather, opacity—conceived here as the
right to singularity as exception—defines the viewer’s experiential condition of per-
ception, which mirrors that of the film’s subject, forming a bridge of non-totalizing
empathy between the two. As Glissant observes, opacity proposes a “relation” that is
“an open totality evolving upon itself,” and as such constitutes “the force that drives
every community: the thing that would bring us together forever and makes us per-
manently distinctive.”30
Finally, pointing out the ineffectiveness of traditional documentary approaches
does not necessarily equal an implicit argument for the effectiveness of a cinema of
opacity. Can effectiveness even be definitively measured when the experience of film
is imbued with potentiality, and when its image is understood as an event that
remains infinitely generative? With this conceptualization of the event in mind,
Nervus Rerum might be said to operate in the realm of the ethical rather than that of

28. For a reading that presciently warns of multiculturalism’s institutionalization as social engineer-
ing and as a “race industry” of managerial practices, see Chandra Mahonty, “On Race and Voice:
Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s,” Cultural Critique 2 (Winter 1989–1990). On the con-
sumerist instrumentalization of multiculturalism, see Slavoj Zizek, “Multiculturalism, Or, the Cultural
Logic of Multinational Capitalism,” in The Universal Exception (London: Continuum, 2006), pp. 151–82.
29. Glissant, p. 254.
30. Glissant, pp. 254 and 256.
128 OCTOBER

the political, where ethics relates to matters of subjective reasoning and conceptual
positioning, and politics to the management of outcomes and calculable effects.31
The recent ethical turn is propelled in part by globalization’s media ecology, wherein
digital reproduction and Internet dissemination bring the potential for the image’s
endless manipulability and recontextualization, making meaning infinitely unstable
and elastic. Essayist, filmmaker, and theorist Hito Steyerl has termed the resulting
representational condition one of “documentary uncertainty,” which for her is the
fundamental basis of documentary practice today.32 But are ethics not the basis of
contemporary art as well? Unable to predict the outcomes of their events, and often
unwilling to instrumentalize their work, artists, according to such a view, must be said
to operate in the field of ethical concerns. And it is the same with opacity: “The rule
of action (what is called ethics or else the ideal or just logical relation) would gain
ground,” writes Glissant, “by not being mixed into the preconceived transparency of
universal models.”33
However, we might also conclude by resisting this ethical turn on the basis of its
definition, for it risks the depoliticization of artistic practice—that is, the limiting of
its operations to the field of subjective motivations. Instead, we might turn to another
view of the political, one that sees it as constituted in and by challenges to the conven-
tional partitioning of the visible and the audible, the division of appearance and
speech into a hierarchy of significance, reproducibility, and dissemination, ranging
from matters of urgent public concern to disregarded noise, as in such formulations
as Jacques Rancière’s in The Politics of Aesthetics. “Is it possible for the dispossessed, for
those that have little or no capacity for self-appearance, for those that have no space
to be visible in the global distribution of the sensible, is it possible for these subjects
to appear as other than victims or witnesses?,” asks Sagar in the Trialogue.
Responding to this question, Nervus Rerum assumes a political cast insofar as it pro-
duces a different discourse, rejects familiar codes of identification, and makes a
demand for a just rearrangement of forms of appearance. While the Otolith Group’s
notion of the event may designate an open ontology, it need not be considered as
devoid of political force, for it also suggests, perhaps paradoxically, an “operative
image,” in the sense Genet extends to the word in the film: “images as delegates
[sent] into the future, to act in the very long term, after death.” Creating such images
as “delegates sent into the future,” Nervus Rerum’s imagined world does not begin with
uncertainty and lead to authoritative explanation—as in conventional documentary
approaches such as Jenin, Jenin; instead, it begins with an over-determined field of rep-
resentation, and, drawing out the opacity of the image, unleashes its potential.

31. For example, according to one definition, that of Faisal Devji, what makes militant Islam, for
instance, into a primarily “ethical” practice is its inability to control the results of its actions and the
outcomes of its media broadcasts. See his Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity (London:
Hurst & Company, 2005).
32. See Hito Steyerl, “Documentary Uncertainty,” A Prior 15 (2007); also see my essay on Steyerl’s
videos, “Traveling Images: Hito Steyerl,” Artforum 46, no. 10 (Summer 2008), pp. 408–13, 473.
33. Glissant, “For Opacity,” p. 255.