Academic literature on the topic '(auto)-contemplation'

The central theme of this article is the question of whether the narrator of a witness account or a critical auto/biography can also be the (co-)author of a scientific or literary written record. Based on reflections from her own biographical research on revolutionary movements in the Global South and oppressed and silenced groups, the author has identified the characteristics of testimonies which she has positioned in relation to Santos’ Epistemologies of the South. The research is reflected through the author’s contemplation of her fieldwork over the last ten years and through examples of literary written records which have empowered social emancipation; it shows how the pedagogy of testimonies can be used innovatively in learning and research as well as how testimonies can also make a fruitful contribution to much-needed considerations on silenced epistemologies in the classroom and in society.

The Anthropocene is a multifaceted phenomenon. One aspect that is often overlooked is that it constitutes a heritage. Heritage is itself a complex notion that manifests in different ways depending on subjective and/or ideological positions taken towards it. The picture is further complicated if we attempt to take non-, pre- or post-human perspectives into account. This paper attempts to unravel various aspects of Anthropocene heritage through a case study of a small area of Sydney’s inner harbour. The area concerned is one explored and experienced on a daily basis by the author as a resident engaged in auto-ethnographic contemplation of the locale and aware of the contradictions of living in such an urban space whilst advocating and campaigning for various Green concerns. The paper thereby addresses the entanglement of human and nonhuman, urban and ecological ways of living, and various senses and perceptions of space in a particular terrestrial/marine interzone. More particularly, it examines the manner in which mangroves are an active agent and key marker of space within this area.

Sarah Phelps’s screenplay The Witness for the Prosecution (2016) does more than simply rekindle interest in Agatha Christie’s original short story; rather, it points to its salvation. My understanding of adaptation follows Armelle Blin-Rolland’s model, which refuses to privilege either the source or the adapted text, considering both instead to form part of a textual multiplicity. The relationship between the two resembles, for Blin-Rolland, a vortex. Thus, the meanderings of Phelps’s adapted text cause us to take stock and to read the original itself as loiterature (Chambers) and thus as a text that eschews self-coincidence, that offers more to the idle reader than an efficient delivery of truth. Christie’s text, in other words, if I may myself adapt a term from Walter Benjamin, has an inherent adaptability. Rather than simply conjuring its own adaptation in a virtual future, “The Witness for the Prosecution” contains, in an immediate pre-diegetic past, the original source of itself as adaptation. This source text is not an alternative solution, but runs parallel to the actual reading—appealing, almost subliminally, for readers to produce it; it also runs idly, however, and, unlike its hasty corollary, is content to wait to catch a distracted eye.Before shifting the focus more squarely from the 2016 adaptation to the original text (and its status as auto-adaptation), I should like to draw attention to the format of Phelps’s screenplay. As a mini-series, and thus an adaptation for television rather than a feature film, Phelps’s text presents something of a readerly paradox in and of itself. The series was originally aired by the BBC on two consecutive nights over the 2016 Christmas period (26 and 27 December). Thus, viewers were forced to pause for thought, but not over a week, which has traditionally been the cadence for episodes of television mini-series; instead, the 24-hour pause represented something of an extended intermission. For this reason, it is not clear whether the effect of the pause was to heighten anticipation, and thus to madden readers, or to enable them to take time out to review the case and to ask questions that the reader of the short story may not have time to ask. For, of course, the story is a short one, on the shorter side even by the standards of Christie’s shorter fiction. The mini-series does not present an abridged version, therefore, which is often the case for feature film adaptations; rather, it lengthens the story considerably. The whole experience is drawn out, not condensed. And yet, it is not clear whether this change of pace significantly alters the viewer/reader’s experience.I shall argue here that what it in fact does is to draw out elements of the source text that otherwise pass by unseen. Thus, whether or not the experience that one has of the television mini-series is loiterly per se, it certainly causes the reader who is aware of the short story to reread the latter and, I argue here, to see it as itself an adaptation, and further as an adaptation of itself. Lastly, it is perhaps worth reflecting that, after this initial airing of the mini-series on BBC television, The Witness for the Prosecution became available on DVD and for online streaming. In these formats, the hiatus of the episode break can readily be skipped. The binge-viewer has the ability to view in haste. In addition to erasing, to some degree at least, the difference between a feature film and a television series, such viewing practices recall the perceived generic differences between literature, with its descriptive passages and detours, and crime fiction, with its tendency to be highly plot-, and especially end-, driven. In either case therefore, to apprehend crime fiction in a loiterly fashion is a learned activity, a process that may seem somewhat counterintuitive, but one that Christie’s texts reflexively promote even as they ensnare the reader in the cleverness of their plots.The short story is famous for its twist in the tale: the person who appears the most likely murderer and who is tried for the crime turns out, in fact, to be guilty, much to the surprise of his solicitor, Mr Mayherne. Phelps’s adaptation, for its part, ends with the solicitor, John Mayhew (an alternative surname already used in Christie’s own adaptation for the stage in 1953), walking into the sea off the French coast, determined, or so it would appear, to take his own life, having been informed by his client’s partner that she has known all along that Leonard Vole was guilty. In addition to a new ending, the mini-series also receives a substantial new beginning: Leonard and Romaine receive a back-story; so too, over the course of the mini-series, does Mayhew himself. His determination to save Leonard is set against the death of his own son, who left to fight in the First World War despite being too young for service. Mayhew’s wife, we learn, has never forgiven him for the loss of her son. Saving the innocent Leonard is Mayhew’s way of redeeming himself. When he discovers that he has been duped and that he has saved a guilty man, the only atonement he can see is his own death.While Mayhew’s probity is made ambiguous by Phelps, Leonard and Romaine’s common back-story serves to some degree to explain, if not to justify, their callous behaviour. Phelps’s dramatic first scene shows a soldier drifting almost literally blindly across no-man’s land between the trenches of a First World War battlefield, taking cover from exploding shells and finding refuge in a crater where he finds his future partner Romaine. What is staged here is a looking back to the past, but not in the kind of nostalgic longing for times gone by associated with Christie; instead, Phelps points back to the trauma of war, in the light of which the present is to be survived and negotiated. In her introduction to the edition of the short story republished following the success of the mini-series, Phelps discusses her expectations when being commissioned to adapt Christie’s works, with which she claimed to be familiar without having previously read them. She labels Christie the “epitome of a particular nostalgia-laden Englishness” and mentions, for example, having to step out of the way of people queuing to see The Mousetrap in London’s West End (Christie v). In the light of such comments, it is tempting to see Phelps’s mini-series as a means of circumnavigating popular conceptions of Christie and combating this nostalgia for things past (not only better times, perhaps, but also better detective fiction).A vortical reading of The Witness for the Prosecution as multiplicity, however, in no way works against the original short story; in fact, rather than stepping around it, Phelps’s extended diegetic frame causes us to reflect on the way in which the story itself looks back, making room for, and even conjuring, an unseen pre-diegetic space. Thus, the battleground scene serves a reflexive end, not simply excusing Leonard and Romaine’s subsequent behaviour, but also graphically staging the textual no man’s land of adaptation—the space between the entrenched positions of two authorial powers. The bomb craters suggest both the violence done to the source text and the possibility for a new start and an end to the dominion of previous masters. Not only Leonard and Romaine, but Sarah Phelps, the reader, and even John Mayhew—who steps out of the shadows of Mr Mayherne—all escape the certainties of an era, an empire, and embrace a new future. My argument here is not simply that Christie benefits from the new beginning of another’s adaptation, but that she herself adapted what precedes Mr Mayherne’s first interview with Leonard Vole in her original text.In the story’s final revelation, Romaine opposes Mr Mayherne’s purchase on the truth to her own: he, she states, “thought [Leonard] was innocent”, whereas she “knew – he was guilty!” (29). This is the truth that Phelps’s adaptation appears to mitigate with its staging of extenuating circumstances and casting of Mr Mayherne as the ultimate victim of the story. I do not wish to argue here that Leonard Vole is innocent; rather, what I shall argue is that Romaine and generations of readers have misunderstood the dynamics of the narrative, for the fundamental binary at play is not “thinking versus knowing” but “knowing versus believing”. In this case, therefore, I almost, but not quite, agree with Phelps’s statement that “it’s not the truth that matters […] but performance” (Christie viii). While the text is very much a performance, it is one that serves to “screen” a truth in the Freudian sense, as well as in the cinematic one: the truth that is showcased in the last line of the story also hides another truth, which is, paradoxically, the same one. By revealing the truth in the form of Romaine’s victory, the text hides the fact that Mr Mayherne has known the truth from the very start, and indeed, before that. The story is a performance therefore, but a fetishistic one that points to the truth precisely in order to keep it just out of view. In this way, what Mr Mayhew knows to be true is neither stated explicitly nor entirely repressed; instead, it is disavowed, and what the short story performs is a screen memory.Read vortically, Christie’s and Phelps’s texts both displace the element that separates knowledge from belief, which, as Ellen Lee McCallum notes (xii), is desire. In Phelps’s adaptation, John Mayhew desires to save Leonard Vole in order to redeem his son’s death; in Christie’s text, Mr Mayherne desires to save Leonard in order to save the text. This is salvation as theorised by Shoshana Felman, who famously considered that Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw could only be saved from the critical binary of ghost story versus psychoanalytical tale by having its ambiguity preserved. If Phelps’s adaptation becomes something of a ghost story (it is, at least, a tale of people haunted by the past), Christie’s original text uses a psychoanalytic move to disavow its own psychoanalytical mechanics. Whereas detective fiction is typically end-oriented, with its focus on the ultimate revelation of truth, the psychoanalytic text locates truth in a pre-text. Thus, to save “The Witness for the Prosecution”, the reader must adopt a beginning-oriented lens and establish the original shape of its pre-diegetic revelation. This means loitering (and enacting that paradoxical mix of idle resistance advanced by Chambers) at that very point where the logics of detective fiction are seemingly designed to fast-track the reader’s pursuit of the ultimate solution. For, while reading to discover the ending is still promoted by the crime narrative here, a counter-logics of hesitation and retrospection always accompanies the reader’s progress forwards. If chances to meander down side-alleys are limited, given the brevity of the story, it is this double movement, this walking with a backwards gaze, with half an eye on the present and half on the past, that forces even that reader most pre-disposed to task-focused digestion of the text to slow down and to wander. What is so striking in “The Witness for the Prosecution” is arguably how Christie makes space for wandering in such a restricted narrative, in a creative format that is, of course, all about punch and economy.This space is created as early as the story’s opening sentence. “Mr Mayherne”, it begins, “adjusted his pince-nez and cleared his throat with a little dry-as-dust cough that was wholly typical of him” (1). Whether or not we can be sure that Mr Mayherne’s cough was typical of him before the story begins is uncertain. His habit of adjusting his pince-nez, on the other hand, which is here associated with the cough, is certainly recently acquired. This we learn at the end of the story: “He found himself polishing his pince-nez vigorously, and checked himself. His wife had told him only the night before that he was getting a habit of it” (27). It is my contention that this habit is a response to a traumatic revelation of truth, which requires Mr Mayherne henceforth to adjust his perspective.Habits, as Mr Mayherne’s wife points out, are born of repetition. The story, too, begins with a repeated act. Indeed, the solicitor’s next action is to look at his client, whom the reader is seeing for the first time at this initial point of the text, but whom Mr Mayherne has already seen: “Then he looked again at the man opposite him” (1, my emphasis). At the outset therefore, this habit of adjusting his pince-nez is proleptic, insofar as it will enable him to realise (albeit apparently, but only apparently, too late) that Romaine and the old woman who gives him the letters that condemn her are one and the same, but also analeptic, as it looks back to a previous contemplation of a disguise. The habit that he detects in Romaine is one of clenching and unclenching her right hand. That he sees this without initially being fully conscious of it and then later understands the gesture’s significance is due to his own fetishistic response to the truth of Leonard’s guilt. When he first sees his client, he recognises his guilt, either in his eyes, which then causes him to avert his gaze and look down to his hands, or in his murderer’s hands, which causes him to displace his gaze and to look instead at his own hands, which he occupies by adjusting his pince-nez. Either way, his failure to look at Romaine’s hands and see them immediately for what they are is itself a displacement of his dual state—of knowing his client to be guilty and believing in his innocence “in spite of the multitude of facts arrayed against [him]” (13).Repetition blunts the reader’s awareness of its fundamental role in the story. The weight of evidence against Leonard Vole is repeated again and again. This is one of the key devices, even a cliché, of detective fiction: the most obviously guilty character must be innocent. At its most basic level, this is how “The Witness for the Prosecution” surprises its readers. My suggestion, however, is that this knowledge serves merely to screen the book’s original, or other, meaning, which is that Mr Mayherne knows the truth. It is not truth, but the knowledge of the truth, that the reader is tasked to discover. To this extent, Phelps is right: “it is not the truth that matters, but performance”. And in this case, it is the performance of the truth of Leonard’s guilt in the actualised story that hides the knowledge of the truth that is its pre-text and whose form is not taken by the story while nonetheless being analeptically staged and virtually formed, or (auto-)adapted, as pre-text. In reflexive terms, the highlighting of repeated gestures, and especially Mr Mayherne’s cleaning of his lenses, can usefully be considered signals for the reader to pause for thought. And yet, as reflexive signals, they are both provocative and provocatively hesitant, for however clearly they are displayed, they fail to check the pace and end-orientation of the short story because the reader’s own habit—the compulsion to read in haste, to read for the solution—is not so easily broken.Leonard’s first words in the story are simply, “I know”, which is, in the framework of the present reading, a pure reflection of what the man sitting opposite him is trying to disavow. What Leonard knows is that his situation is grave and that he must be frank. He knows this because, as he says to Mr Mayherne, “You keep telling me so” (1). But it is this response that in fact causes the story to become a tale of repetition. First, there is Mr Mayherne’s conviction: “we shall succeed—we shall succeed” (2). Romaine then repeats her desire when she first meets Mr Mayherne, twice stating the words, “I want to know the worst” (14). Leonard is nonetheless responding to a prior repetition, which, is predicated on the story’s initial “looking again”. In other words, the story itself is a screen memory, a fetish-made-diegesis. The result, in an apparent paradox, is that the desire to hasten the ending, to bring on the final verdict, however terrible, is at the same time a signal for the reader to look back. Again, to look back to that initial second look is to inscribe circles on circles, and to enforce wandering even at this reflexively-staged moment of end-orientation.Certainly, Romaine’s comment, “I want to know”, performs fetishism’s combination of knowledge and desire. And yet, unlike Mr Mayherne’s desire (to save Leonard), which is opposed to his knowledge (that Leonard is guilty), Romaine’s desire appears aligned with knowledge: she does not say that she knows the worst, but that she wants to know it. She has another secret desire, of course, as she reveals to Mr Mayherne in what is a paradoxical display of secrecy. When he asks why she hates her husband so much, she retorts: “Yes, you would like to know. But I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret” (17). Further, she mocks him for honestly believing Leonard to be innocent.Both characters are honest, then: Romaine wants to know that Leonard is guilty (and certainly does not believe him to be innocent) and openly has a secret that she will not divulge; Mr Mayherne, for his part, knows the case against his client is ironclad but also honestly believes him to be innocent. Their stated aims may well be opposed—she wants Leonard to hang; he wants him to go free. Their “true” aims are nonetheless aligned: she knows Leonard is guilty and will sacrifice her own credibility in court to save her husband; he believes Leonard is innocent and will sacrifice her in court to save his client. Both tell the truth in public when performing their official duties (he as solicitor, she as wife). The only difference between them lies in the nature of their other performance: she lies to him by performing the role of an old woman who knows secrets about her past; he knows Leonard to be guilty but partially represses this by taking up his narrative only after he has erected a fetish to protect himself from this traumatic truth (and the reader from the secret past of the text). This disavowal means that he can honestly believe in his client’s innocence while still knowing him to be guilty. Again then, Phelps’s statement—that it is not the truth that matters, but performance—is itself both true and not true. Romaine performs in the story in order for the truth that she knows to be said and then discredited; Mr Mayherne, on the other hand, performs the story in order for his knowledge of the truth to be disavowed, which it to say, repressed within the form that is given to the reader to see, but also available, and able to take form (for the reader prepared to digress) in what lies just beyond the limits of what is said.The conversation in which Romaine repeats her desire to know also ends in a repetition, this time with one of the solicitor’s signature moves: “Mr Mayherne gave his dry little cough and rose” (17). This cough repeats the one that opened the story. In that first instance, it distracted the reader, allowing the adverb “again” to rush through, seen and unseen. In this way, the first cough, accompanied by Mr Mayherne’s cleaning of his lenses, causes the reader to focus their own gaze on him rather than on what he had been looking at. This is a cough designed to open the narrative on Mr Mayherne’s terms. In this second example, it closes down dialogue. This second cough is motivated by precisely the same traumatic revelation of the truth, except that in this repetition it is displaced onto Romaine. With the words, “I shall not tell you. I will keep my secret”, she says to him in the text what Mr Mayherne said to himself in the pre-text. This is a repetition therefore in a story of repetition and of a story of repetition. Repeating what was said before with different words and, at the same time, repeating with the same words what was not said before, the text here presents itself to the reader in the form of an auto-adaptation, a second look at an original text whose form is otherwise virtual.In this way, words unsaid are repressed partially: they are not said in the diegesis (which stands as a screen memory, simultaneously standing in place of the text and tracing in the present the contours of its form as absence) but are said, instead, by proxy, through displacement, in the reflexively staged performance of another text. The disavowal at play here is such that readers find themselves in two spaces at once, on two lines of flight, with the one being opposed to the other. Steps forwards and backwards are taken in equal measure. We are therefore witnesses to “The Witness for the Prosecution”, looking on as the story follows onwards, but this very act of witnessing counteracts this prosecution, adding the idleness of the gaze to the purposefulness of pursuit (of truth). The result is not so much somewhere between a stalled, or false, start, and a race to the end, as both at the same time. In this way, Christie’s story, despite appearances to the contrary, is the very embodiment of wandering.At the origins of both Christie’s story and Phelps’s adaptation is a common truth. It serves as a pre-text for both texts, for both performances. In both cases, this pre-text privileges performance over truth. Each text also has a pre-text, which precedes and predicates the performance. We may consider that Phelps’s adaptation captures the essence (of truth) of Christie’s original. In this way, it values that truth and holds it necessary to its own performance, without being derivative in relation to it. Again, the same holds for Christie’s text, whose pre-text protects its truth beneath its performance: while the performance partially represses this pre-textual truth (with its gaudy staging of its own truth, which we may perhaps this time consider derivative), it also preserves it. For without the performance (of truth), the knowledge at its origin cannot exist. To read “The Witness for the Prosecution” as an adaptation of itself requires a fetishistic eye, and the fetishist is nothing if not a digressive observer. If you’re quick, you can catch the performance; but if you’re content to wander, the audacity of what Christie does not reveal is well worth the wait.ReferencesBlin-Rolland, Armelle. “Adaplastics: Forming the Zazie dans le métro Network.” Modern and Contemporary France (2019): forthcoming.Chambers, Ross. Loiterature. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.Christie, Agatha. The Witness for the Prosecution and Other Stories. London: Harper, 2016.Felman, Shoshana. “Turning the Screw of Interpretation.” Yale French Studies. 55–56 (1977): 94–207.McCallum, Ellen Lee. Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism. New York: SUNY Press, 1992.The Witness for the Prosecution. Dir. Julian Jarrold. BBC One, 2016.

Bracketed by a quotation from famed 1950s West German soccer coach S. Herberger and the word "Ende", the running length of the 1998 film Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer, is 9 minutes short of the official duration of a soccer match. Berlin has often been represented, in visual art and in cinematic imagery, as the modern metropolis: the Expressionist and Dadaist painters, Walter Ruttmann, Fritz Lang and Rainer Werner Fassbinder all depicted it as the modernising city. Since the '60s artists have staged artworks and performances in the public space of the city which critiqued the cold war order of that space, its institutions, and the hysterical attempt by the German government to erase a divided past after 1990. Run Lola Run depicts its setting, Berlin, as a cyberspace obstacle course or environment usually associated with interactive video and computer games. The eerie emptiness of the Berlin of Run Lola Run -- a fantasy projected onto a city which has been called the single biggest construction site in Europe -- is necessary to keep the protagonist Lola moving at high speed from the West to the East part of town and back again -- another fantasy which is only possible when the city is recast as a virtual environment. In Run Lola Run Berlin is represented as an idealised space of bodily and psychic mobility where the instantaneous technology of cyberspace is physically realised as a utopia of speed. The setting of Run Lola Run is not a playing field but a playing level, to use the parlance of video game technology. Underscored by other filmic devices and technologies, Run Lola Run emulates the kinetics and structures of a virtual, quasi-interactive environment: the Berlin setting of the film is paradoxically rendered as an indeterminate, but also site specific, entertainment complex which hinges upon the high-speed functioning of multiple networks of auto-mobility. Urban mobility as circuitry is performed by the film's super-athletic Lola. Lola is a cyber character; she recalls the 'cyberbabe' Lara Croft, heroine of the Sega Tomb Raider video game series. In Tomb Raider the Croft figure is controlled and manipulated by the interactive player to go through as many levels of play, or virtual environments, as possible. In order for the cyber figure to get to the next level of play she must successfully negotiate as many trap and puzzle mechanisms as possible. Speed in this interactive virtual game results from the skill of an experienced player who has practiced coordinating keyboard commands with figure movements and who is familiar with the obstacles the various environments can present. As is the case with Lara Croft, the figure of Lola in Run Lola Run reverses the traditional gender relations of the action/adventure game and of 'damsel in distress' narratives. Run Lola Run focusses on Lola's race to save her boyfriend from a certain death by obtaining DM 100,000 and delivering it across town in twenty minutes. The film adds the element of the race to the game, a variable not included in Tomb Raider. Tykwer repeats Lola's trajectory from home to the location of her boyfriend Manni thrice in the film, each time ending her quest with a different outcome. As in a video game, Lola can therefore be killed as the game unwinds during one turn of play, and on the next attempt she, and also we as viewers or would-be interactive players, would have learned from her previous 'mistakes' and adjust her actions accordingly. The soundtrack of Run Lola Run underscores the speed and mobility of Berlin by means of the fast/slow/fast rhythm of the film, which proceeds primarily at the pace of techno music. This quick rhythm is syncopated with pauses in the forward-moving action brought on by Lola's superhuman screams or by the death of a protagonist. These events mark the end of one turn of 'play' and the restart of Lola's route. Tykwer visually contrasts Lola's linear mobility and her physical and mental capacity for speed with her boyfriend Manni's centripetal fixity, a marker of his helplessness, throughout the film. Manni, a bagman-in-training for a local mafioso, has to make his desperate phone calls from a single phone booth in the borough of Charlottenburg after he bungles a hand-off of payment money by forgetting it on the U-Bahn (the subway). In a black and white flashback sequence, viewers learn about Manni's ill-fated trip to the Polish border with a shipment of stolen cars. In contrast to his earlier mobility, Manni becomes entrapped in the phone booth as a result of his ineptitude. A spiral store sign close to the phone booth symbolizes Manni's entrapment. Tykwer contrasts this circular form with the lines and grids Lola transverses throughout the film. Where at first Lola is also immobilised after her moped is stolen by an 'unbelieveably fast' thief, her quasi-cybernetic thought process soon restores her movement. Tykwer visualizes Lola's frantic thinking in a series of photographic portraits which indicates her consideration of who she can contact to supply a large sum of money. Lola not only moves but thinks with the fast, even pace of a computer working through a database. Tykwer then repeats overhead shots of gridded pavement which Lola follows as she runs through the filmic frame. The grid, emblem of modernity and structure of the metropolis, the semiconductor, and the puzzles of a virtual environment, is necessary for mobility and speed, and is performed by the figure of Lola. The grid is also apparent in the trajectories of traffic of speeding bikes, subway trains,and airplanes passing overhead, which all parallel Lola's movements in the film. The city/virtual environment is thus an idealised nexus of local, national and global lines of mobility and communication.: -- OR -- Tykwer emphasised the arbitrariness of the setting of Run Lola Run, insisting it could easily have been set in any other urban centre such as New York City or Beijing. At no point does the film make explicit that the space of action is Berlin; in fact the setting of the film is far less significant than the filmic self-reflexivity Tykwer explores in Run Lola Run. Berlin becomes a postmodernist filmic text in which earlier films by Lang, Schlöndorff, von Sternberg and Wenders are cited in intertextual fashion. It is not by chance that the protagonist of Run Lola Run shares the name of Marlene Dietrich's legendary character in von Sternberg's The Blue Angel. The running, late-20th-century Lola reconnects with and gains power from the originary Lola Lola as ur-Star of German cinema. The high overhead shots of Run Lola Run technologically exceed those used by Lang in M in 1931 but still quote his filmic text; the spiral form, placed in a shop window in M, becomes a central image of Run Lola Run in marking the immobile spot that Manni occupies. Repeated several times in the film, Lola's scream bends events, characters and chance to her will and slows the relentless pace of the narrative. This vocal punctuation recalls the equally willful vocalisations of Oskar Matzerath in Schlöndorff's Tin Drum (1979). Tykwer's radical expansions and compressions of time in Run Lola Run rely on the temporal exploitation of the filmic medium. The film stretches 20 minutes of 'real time' in the lives of its two protagonists into the 84 minutes of the film. Tykwer also distills the lives of the film's incidental or secondary characters into a few still images and a few seconds of filmic time in the 'und dann...' [and then...] sequences of all three episodes. For example, Lola's momentary encounter with an employee of her father's bank spins off into two completely different life stories for this woman, both of which are told through four or five staged 'snapshots' which are edited together into a rapid sequence. The higher-speed photography of the snapshot keeps up the frenetic pace of Run Lola Run and causes the narrative to move forward even faster, if only for a few seconds. Tykwer also celebrates the technology of 35 mm film in juxtaposing it to the fuzzy imprecision of video in Run Lola Run. The viewer not only notes how scenes shot on video are less visually beautiful than the 35 mm scenes which feature Lola or Manni, but also that they seem to move at a snail's pace. For example, the video-shot scene in Lola's banker-father's office also represents the boredom of his well-paid but stagnant life; another video sequence visually parallels the slow, shuffling movement of the homeless man Norbert as he discovers Manni's forgotten moneybag on the U-Bahn. Comically, he breaks into a run when he realises what he's found. Where Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire made beautiful cinematographic use of Berlin landmarks like the Siegessäule in black and white 35 mm, Tykwer relegates black and white to flashback sequences within the narrative and rejects the relatively meandering contemplation of Wenders's film in favour of the linear dynamism of urban space in Run Lola Run. -- OR -- Tykwer emphasised the arbitrariness of the setting of Run Lola Run, insisting it could easily have been set in any other urban centre such as New York City or Beijing. Nevertheless he establishes the united Berlin as the specific setting of the film. While Run Lola Run does not explicitly indicate that the space of action is Berlin, viewers are clear of the setting: a repeated establishing shot of the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn stop, a central commuting street near the Brandenburg Gate in the former East Berlin which has undergone extensive reconstruction since 1990, begins each episode of the film. The play between the locality of Berlin and its role as the universal modernist metropolis is a trope of German cinema famously deployed by Fritz Lang in M, where the setting is also never explicitly revealed but implied by means of the use of the Berlin dialect in the dialogue of the film1. The soundtrack of Run Lola Run underscores the speed and mobility of Berlin by means of the fast/slow/fast rhythm of the film which proceeds primarily at the pace of techno music. Techno is also closely identified with the city of Berlin through its annual Techno Festival, which seems to grow larger with each passing year. Quick techno rhythm is syncopated with pauses in the forward-moving action brought on by Lola's superhuman screams or by the death of a protagonist. Berlin is also made explicit as Tykwer often stages scenes at clearly-marked street intersections which identify particular locations or boroughs thoughout east and west Berlin. The viewer notes that Lola escapes her father's bank during one episode and faces Unter den Linden; several scenes unfold on the banks of the river Spree; Lola sprints between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral. Manni's participation in a car-theft ring points to the Berlin-focussed activity of actual Eastern European and Russian crime syndicates; the film features an interlude at the Polish border where Manni delivers a shipment of stolen Mercedes to underworld buyers, which has to do with the actual geographic proximity of Berlin to Eastern European countries. Tykwer emphasised the arbitrariness of the setting of Run Lola Run, insisting it could easily have been set in any other urban centre such as New York City or Beijing. Nevertheless he establishes the united Berlin as the specific setting of the film. While Run Lola Run does not explicitly indicate that the space of action is Berlin, viewers are clear of the setting: a repeated establishing shot of the Friedrichstrasse U-Bahn stop, a central commuting street near the Brandenburg Gate in the former East Berlin which has undergone extensive reconstruction since 1990, begins each episode of the film. The play between the locality of Berlin and its role as the universal modernist metropolis is a trope of German cinema famously deployed by Fritz Lang in M, where the setting is also never explicitly revealed but implied by means of the use of the Berlin dialect in the dialogue of the film1. The soundtrack of Run Lola Run underscores the speed and mobility of Berlin by means of the fast/slow/fast rhythm of the film which proceeds primarily at the pace of techno music. Techno is also closely identified with the city of Berlin through its annual Techno Festival, which seems to grow larger with each passing year. Quick techno rhythm is syncopated with pauses in the forward-moving action brought on by Lola's superhuman screams or by the death of a protagonist. Berlin is also made explicit as Tykwer often stages scenes at clearly-marked street intersections which identify particular locations or boroughs thoughout east and west Berlin. The viewer notes that Lola escapes her father's bank during one episode and faces Unter den Linden; several scenes unfold on the banks of the river Spree; Lola sprints between the Altes Museum and the Berlin Cathedral. Manni's participation in a car-theft ring points to the Berlin-focussed activity of actual Eastern European and Russian crime syndicates; the film features an interlude at the Polish border where Manni delivers a shipment of stolen Mercedes to underworld buyers, which has to do with the actual geographic proximity of Berlin to Eastern European countries. Yet the speed of purposeful mobility is demanded in the contemporary united and globalised Berlin; lines of action or direction must be chosen and followed and chance encounters become traps or interruptions. Chance must therefore be minimised in the pursuit of urban speed, mobility, and commications access. In the globalised Berlin, Tykwer compresses chance encounters into individual snapshots of visual data which are viewed in quick succession by the viewer. Where artists such Christo and Sophie Calle had investigated the initial chaos of German reunification in Berlin, Run Lola Run rejects the hyper-contemplative and past-obsessed mood demanded by Christo's wrapping of the Reichstag, or Calle's documentation of the artistic destructions of unification3. Run Lola Run recasts Berlin as a network of fast connections, lines of uninterrupted movement, and productive output. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that Tykwer's idealised and embodied representation of Berlin as Lola has been politically appropriated as a convenient icon by the city's status quo: an icon of the successful reconstruction and rewiring of a united Berlin into a fast global broadband digital telecommunications network4. Footnotes See Edward Dimendberg's excellent discussion of filmic representations of the metropolis in "From Berlin to Bunker Hill: Urban Space, Late Modernity, and Film Noir in Fritz Lang's and Joseph Losey's M." Wide Angle 19.4 (1997): 62-93. This is despite the fact that the temporal parameters of the plot of Run Lola Run forbid the aimlessness central to spazieren (strolling). See Walter Benjamin, "A Berlin Chronicle", in Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1986. 3-60. See Sophie Calle, The Detachment. London: G+B Arts International and Arndt & Partner Gallery, n.d. The huge success of Tykwer's film in Germany spawned many red-hair-coiffed Lola imitators in the Berlin populace. The mayor of Berlin sported Lola-esque red hair in a poster which imitated the one for the film, but legal intercession put an end to this trendy political statement. Brian Pendreigh. "The Lolaness of the Long-Distance Runner." The Guardian 15 Oct. 1999. I've relied on William J. Mitchell's cultural history of the late 20th century 'rebuilding' of major cities into connection points in the global telecommunications network, City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn. Cambridge: MIT P, 1995. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Claudia Mesch. "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.3 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php>. Chicago style: Claudia Mesch, "Racing Berlin: The Games of Run Lola Run," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 3 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Claudia Mesch. (2000) Racing Berlin: the games of Run Lola run. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(3). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0006/speed.php> ([your date of access]).

The Leichhardt Highway is a six hundred-kilometre stretch of sealed inland road that joins the Australian Queensland border town of Goondiwindi with the Capricorn Highway, just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Named after the young Prussian naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt, part of this roadway follows the route his party took as they crossed northern Australia from Morton Bay (Brisbane) to Port Essington (near Darwin). Ignoring the usual colonial practice of honouring the powerful and aristocratic, Leichhardt named the noteworthy features along this route after his supporters and fellow expeditioners. Many of these names are still in use and a series of public monuments have also been erected in the intervening century and a half to commemorate this journey. Unlike Leichhardt, who survived his epic trip, some contemporary travellers who navigate the remote roadway named in his honour do not arrive at their final destinations. Memorials to these violently interrupted lives line the highway, many enigmatically located in places where there is no obvious explanation for the lethal violence that occurred there. This examination profiles the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. All humans know that death awaits them (Morell). Yet, despite this, and the unprecedented torrent of images of death and dying saturating news, television, and social media (Duwe; Sumiala; Bisceglio), Gorer’s mid-century ideas about the denial of death and Becker’s 1973 Pulitzer prize-winning description of the purpose of human civilization as a defence against this knowledge remains current in the contemporary trope that individuals (at least in the West) deny their mortality. Contributing to this enigmatic situation is how many deny the realities of aging and bodily decay—the promise of the “life extension” industries (Hall)—and are shielded from death by hospitals, palliative care providers, and the multimillion dollar funeral industry (Kiernan). Drawing on Piatti-Farnell’s concept of popular culture artefacts as “haunted/haunting” texts, the below describes how memorials to the dead can powerfully reconnect those who experience them with death’s reality, by providing an “encrypted passageway through which the dead re-join the living in a responsive cycle of exchange and experience” (Piatti-Farnell). While certainly very different to the “sublime” iconic Gothic structure, the Gothic ruin that Summers argued could be seen as “a sacred relic, a memorial, a symbol of infinite sadness, of tenderest sensibility and regret” (407), these memorials do function in both this way as melancholy/regret-inducing relics as well as in Piatti-Farnell’s sense of bringing the dead into everyday consciousness. Such memorialising activity also evokes one of Spooner’s features of the Gothic, by acknowledging “the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present” (8).Ludwig Leichhardt and His HighwayWhen Leichhardt returned to Sydney in 1846 from his 18-month journey across northern Australia, he was greeted with surprise and then acclaim. Having mounted his expedition without any backing from influential figures in the colony, his party was presumed lost only weeks after its departure. Yet, once Leichhardt and almost all his expedition returned, he was hailed “Prince of Explorers” (Erdos). When awarding him a significant purse raised by public subscription, then Speaker of the Legislative Council voiced what he believed would be the explorer’s lasting memorial —the public memory of his achievement: “the undying glory of having your name enrolled amongst those of the great men whose genius and enterprise have impelled them to seek for fame in the prosecution of geographical science” (ctd. Leichhardt 539). Despite this acclaim, Leichhardt was a controversial figure in his day; his future prestige not enhanced by his Prussian/Germanic background or his disappearance two years later attempting to cross the continent. What troubled the colonial political class, however, was his transgressive act of naming features along his route after commoners rather than the colony’s aristocrats. Today, the Leichhardt Highway closely follows Leichhardt’s 1844-45 route for some 130 kilometres from Miles, north through Wandoan to Taroom. In the first weeks of his journey, Leichhardt named 16 features in this area: 6 of the more major of these after the men in his party—including the Aboriginal man ‘Charley’ and boy John Murphy—4 more after the tradesmen and other non-aristocratic sponsors of his venture, and the remainder either in memory of the journey’s quotidian events or natural features there found. What we now accept as traditional memorialising practice could in this case be termed as Gothic, in that it upset the rational, normal order of its day, and by honouring humble shopkeepers, blacksmiths and Indigenous individuals, revealed the “disturbance and ambivalence” (Botting 4) that underlay colonial class relations (Macintyre). On 1 December 1844, Leichhardt also memorialised his own past, referencing the Gothic in naming a watercourse The Creek of the Ruined Castles due to the “high sandstone rocks, fissured and broken like pillars and walls and the high gates of the ruined castles of Germany” (57). Leichhardt also disturbed and disfigured the nature he so admired, famously carving his initials deep into trees along his route—a number of which still exist, including the so-called Leichhardt Tree, a large coolibah in Taroom’s main street. Leichhardt also wrote his own memorial, keeping detailed records of his experiences—both good and more regretful—in the form of field books, notebooks and letters, with his major volume about this expedition published in London in 1847. Leichhardt’s journey has since been memorialised in various ways along the route. The Leichhardt Tree has been further defaced with numerous plaques nailed into its ancient bark, and the town’s federal government-funded Bicentennial project raised a formal memorial—a large sandstone slab laid with three bronze plaques—in the newly-named Ludwig Leichhardt Park. Leichhardt’s name also adorns many sites both along, and outside, the routes of his expeditions. While these fittingly include natural features such as the Leichhardt River in north-west Queensland (named in 1856 by Augustus Gregory who crossed it by searching for traces of the explorer’s ill-fated 1848 expedition), there are also many businesses across Queensland and the Northern Territory less appropriately carrying his name. More somber monuments to Leichhardt’s legacy also resulted from this journey. The first of these was the white settlement that followed his declaration that the countryside he moved through was well endowed with fertile soils. With squatters and settlers moving in and land taken up before Leichhardt had even arrived back in Sydney, the local Yeeman people were displaced, mistreated and completely eradicated within a decade (Elder). Mid-twentieth century, Patrick White’s literary reincarnation, Voss of the eponymous novel, and paintings by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker have enshrined in popular memory not only the difficult (and often described as Gothic) nature of the landscape through which Leichhardt travelled (Adams; Mollinson, and Bonham), but also the distinctive and contrary blend of intelligence, spiritual mysticism, recklessness, and stoicism Leichhardt brought to his task. Roadside Memorials Today, the Leichhardt Highway is also lined with a series of roadside shrines to those who have died much more recently. While, like centotaphs, tombstones, and cemeteries, these memorialise the dead, they differ in usually marking the exact location that death occurred. In 43 BC, Cicero articulated the idea of the dead living in memory, “The life of the dead consists in the recollection cherished of them by the living” (93), yet Nelson is one of very few contemporary writers to link roadside memorials to elements of Gothic sensibility. Such constructions can, however, be described as Gothic, in that they make the roadway unfamiliar by inscribing onto it the memory of corporeal trauma and, in the process, re-creating their locations as vivid sites of pain and suffering. These are also enigmatic sites. Traffic levels are generally low along the flat or gently undulating terrain and many of these memorials are located in locations where there is no obvious explanation for the violence that occurred there. They are loci of contradictions, in that they are both more private than other memorials, in being designed, and often made and erected, by family and friends of the deceased, and yet more public, visible to all who pass by (Campbell). Cemeteries are set apart from their surroundings; the roadside memorial is, in contrast, usually in open view along a thoroughfare. In further contrast to cemeteries, which contain many relatively standardised gravesites, individual roadside memorials encapsulate and express not only the vivid grief of family and friends but also—when they include vehicle wreckage or personal artefacts from the fatal incident—provide concrete evidence of the trauma that occurred. While the majority of individuals interned in cemeteries are long dead, roadside memorials mark relatively contemporary deaths, some so recent that there may still be tyre marks, debris and bloodstains marking the scene. In 2008, when I was regularly travelling this roadway, I documented, and researched, the six then extant memorial sites that marked the locations of ten fatalities from 1999 to 2006. (These were all still in place in mid-2014.) The fatal incidents are very diverse. While half involved trucks and/or road trains, at least three were single vehicle incidents, and the deceased ranged from 13 to 84 years of age. Excell argues that scholarship on roadside memorials should focus on “addressing the diversity of the material culture” (‘Contemporary Deathscapes’) and, in these terms, the Leichhardt Highway memorials vary from simple crosses to complex installations. All include crosses (mostly, but not exclusively, white), and almost all are inscribed with the name and birth/death dates of the deceased. Most include flowers or other plants (sometimes fresh but more often plastic), but sometimes also a range of relics from the crash and/or personal artefacts. These are, thus, unsettling sights, not least in the striking contrast they provide with the highway and surrounding road reserve. The specific location is a key component of their ability to re-sensitise viewers to the dangers of the route they are travelling. The first memorial travelling northwards, for instance, is situated at the very point at which the highway begins, some 18 kilometres from Goondiwindi. Two small white crosses decorated with plastic flowers are set poignantly close together. The inscriptions can also function as a means of mobilising connection with these dead strangers—a way of building Secomb’s “haunted community”, whereby community in the post-colonial age can only be built once past “murderous death” (131) is acknowledged. This memorial is inscribed with “Cec Hann 06 / A Good Bloke / A Good hoarseman [sic]” and “Pat Hann / A Good Woman” to tragically commemorate the deaths of an 84-year-old man and his 79-year-old wife from South Australia who died in the early afternoon of 5 June 2006 when their Ford Falcon, towing a caravan, pulled onto the highway and was hit by a prime mover pulling two trailers (Queensland Police, ‘Double Fatality’; Jones, and McColl). Further north along the highway are two memorials marking the most inexplicable of road deaths: the single vehicle fatality (Connolly, Cullen, and McTigue). Darren Ammenhauser, aged 29, is remembered with a single white cross with flowers and plaque attached to a post, inscribed hopefully, “Darren Ammenhauser 1971-2000 At Rest.” Further again, at Billa Billa Creek, a beautifully crafted metal cross attached to a fence is inscribed with the text, “Kenneth J. Forrester / RIP Jack / 21.10.25 – 27.4.05” marking the death of the 79-year-old driver whose vehicle veered off the highway to collide with a culvert on the creek. It was reported that the vehicle rolled over several times before coming to rest on its wheels and that Forrester was dead when the police arrived (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Traffic Incident’). More complex memorials recollect both single and multiple deaths. One, set on both sides of the road, maps the physical trajectory of the fatal smash. This memorial comprises white crosses on both sides of road, attached to a tree on one side, and a number of ancillary sites including damaged tyres with crosses placed inside them on both sides of the road. Simple inscriptions relay the inability of such words to express real grief: “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed” and “Gary (Gazza) Stevens / Sadly missed / Forever in our hearts.” The oldest and most complex memorial on the route, commemorating the death of four individuals on 18 June 1999, is also situated on both sides of the road, marking the collision of two vehicles travelling in opposite directions. One memorial to a 62-year-old man comprises a cross with flowers, personal and automotive relics, and a plaque set inside a wooden fence and simply inscribed “John Henry Keenan / 23-11-1936–18-06-1999”. The second memorial contains three white crosses set side-by-side, together with flowers and relics, and reveals that members of three generations of the same family died at this location: “Raymond Campbell ‘Butch’ / 26-3-67–18-6-99” (32 years of age), “Lorraine Margaret Campbell ‘Lloydie’ / 29-11-46–18-6-99” (53 years), and “Raymond Jon Campbell RJ / 28-1-86–18-6-99” (13 years). The final memorial on this stretch of highway is dedicated to Jason John Zupp of Toowoomba who died two weeks before Christmas 2005. This consists of a white cross, decorated with flowers and inscribed: “Jason John Zupp / Loved & missed by all”—a phrase echoed in his newspaper obituary. The police media statement noted that, “at 11.24pm a prime mover carrying four empty trailers [stacked two high] has rolled on the Leichhardt Highway 17km north of Taroom” (Queensland Police, ‘Fatal Truck Accident’). The roadside memorial was placed alongside a ditch on a straight stretch of road where the body was found. The coroner’s report adds the following chilling information: “Mr Zupp was thrown out of the cabin and his body was found near the cabin. There is no evidence whatsoever that he had applied the brakes or in any way tried to prevent the crash … Jason was not wearing his seatbelt” (Cornack 5, 6). Cornack also remarked the truck was over length, the brakes had not been properly adjusted, and the trip that Zupp had undertaken could not been lawfully completed according to fatigue management regulations then in place (8). Although poignant and highly visible due to these memorials, these deaths form a small part of Australia’s road toll, and underscore our ambivalent relationship with the automobile, where road death is accepted as a necessary side-effect of the freedom of movement the technology offers (Ladd). These memorials thus animate highways as Gothic landscapes due to the “multifaceted” (Haider 56) nature of the fear, terror and horror their acknowledgement can bring. Since 1981, there have been, for instance, between some 1,600 and 3,300 road deaths each year in Australia and, while there is evidence of a long term downward trend, the number of deaths per annum has not changed markedly since 1991 (DITRDLG 1, 2), and has risen in some years since then. The U.S.A. marked its millionth road death in 1951 (Ladd) along the way to over 3,000,000 during the 20th century (Advocates). These deaths are far reaching, with U.K. research suggesting that each death there leaves an average of 6 people significantly affected, and that there are some 10 to 20 per cent of mourners who experience more complicated grief and longer term negative affects during this difficult time (‘Pathways Through Grief’). As the placing of roadside memorials has become a common occurrence the world over (Klaassens, Groote, and Vanclay; Grider; Cohen), these are now considered, in MacConville’s opinion, not only “an appropriate, but also an expected response to tragedy”. Hockey and Draper have explored the therapeutic value of the maintenance of “‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead” (3). This is, however, only one explanation for the reasons that individuals erect roadside memorials with research suggesting roadside memorials perform two main purposes in their linking of the past with the present—as not only sites of grieving and remembrance, but also of warning (Hartig, and Dunn; Everett; Excell, Roadside Memorials; MacConville). Clark adds that by “localis[ing] and personalis[ing] the road dead,” roadside memorials raise the profile of road trauma by connecting the emotionless statistics of road death directly to individual tragedy. They, thus, transform the highway into not only into a site of past horror, but one in which pain and terror could still happen, and happen at any moment. Despite their increasing commonality and their recognition as cultural artefacts, these memorials thus occupy “an uncomfortable place” both in terms of public policy and for some individuals (Lowe). While in some states of the U.S.A. and in Ireland the erection of such memorials is facilitated by local authorities as components of road safety campaigns, in the U.K. there appears to be “a growing official opposition to the erection of memorials” (MacConville). Criticism has focused on the dangers (of distraction and obstruction) these structures pose to passing traffic and pedestrians, while others protest their erection on aesthetic grounds and even claim memorials can lower property values (Everett). While many ascertain a sense of hope and purpose in the physical act of creating such shrines (see, for instance, Grider; Davies), they form an uncanny presence along the highway and can provide dangerous psychological territory for the viewer (Brien). Alongside the townships, tourist sites, motels, and petrol stations vying to attract customers, they stain the roadway with the unmistakable sign that a violent death has happened—bringing death, and the dead, to the fore as a component of these journeys, and destabilising prominent cultural narratives of technological progress and safety (Richter, Barach, Ben-Michael, and Berman).Conclusion This investigation has followed Goddu who proposes that a Gothic text “registers its culture’s contradictions” (3) and, in profiling these memorials as “intimately connected to the culture that produces them” (Goddu 3) has proposed memorials as Gothic artefacts that can both disturb and reveal. Roadside memorials are, indeed, so loaded with emotional content that their close contemplation can be traumatising (Brien), yet they are inescapable while navigating the roadway. Part of their power resides in their ability to re-animate those persons killed in these violent in the minds of those viewing these memorials. In this way, these individuals are reincarnated as ghostly presences along the highway, forming channels via which the traveller can not only make human contact with the dead, but also come to recognise and ponder their own sense of mortality. While roadside memorials are thus like civic war memorials in bringing untimely death to the forefront of public view, roadside memorials provide a much more raw expression of the chaotic, anarchic and traumatic moment that separates the world of the living from that of the dead. While traditional memorials—such as those dedicated by, and to, Leichhardt—moreover, pay homage to the vitality of the lives of those they commemorate, roadside memorials not only acknowledge the alarming circumstances of unexpected death but also stand testament to the power of the paradox of the incontrovertibility of sudden death versus our lack of ability to postpone it. In this way, further research into these and other examples of Gothic memorialising practice has much to offer various areas of cultural study in Australia.ReferencesAdams, Brian. Sidney Nolan: Such Is Life. Hawthorn, Vic.: Hutchinson, 1987. Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Motor Vehicle Traffic Fatalities & Fatality Rate: 1899-2003.” 2004. Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973. Bisceglio, Paul. “How Social Media Is Changing the Way We Approach Death.” The Atlantic 20 Aug. 2013. Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Brien, Donna Lee. “Looking at Death with Writers’ Eyes: Developing Protocols for Utilising Roadside Memorials in Creative Writing Classes.” Roadside Memorials. Ed. Jennifer Clark. Armidale, NSW: EMU Press, 2006. 208–216. Campbell, Elaine. “Public Sphere as Assemblage: The Cultural Politics of Roadside Memorialization.” The British Journal of Sociology 64.3 (2013): 526–547. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. The Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero. 43 BC. Trans. C. D. Yonge. London: George Bell & Sons, 1903. Clark, Jennifer. “But Statistics Don’t Ride Skateboards, They Don’t Have Nicknames Like ‘Champ’: Personalising the Road Dead with Roadside Memorials.” 7th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal. Bath, UK: University of Bath, 2005. Cohen, Erik. “Roadside Memorials in Northeastern Thailand.” OMEGA: Journal of Death and Dying 66.4 (2012–13): 343–363. 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Poser la question du divin chez Aristote, c’est déterminer à quelle question la conception aristotélicienne du divin est censée répondre. L’examen méthodique de l’intégralité du corpus aristotelicum et, tout particulièrement, des trois textes dans lesquels Aristote place l’étude des réalités divines au centre de son enquête (Physique, VII-VIII ; De Cœlo, I-II, Métaphysique, Lambda) permet de formuler deux conclusions principales. En premier lieu, il apparaît clairement que la question du divin n’est pas, aux yeux d’Aristote, de nature théologique, mais archologique. Nulle part, en effet, l’étude du divin n’est menée pour elle-Même ; elle s’ancre, au contraire, dans un examen explicitement dédié aux principes premiers de la phusis ou des ousiai. La conception aristotélicienne du divin et des dieux est ainsi le produit d’un examen méthodique des êtres premiers et des principes, examen grâce auquel Aristote espère produire une détermination rigoureuse du mode d’être du principe en tant que tel et résoudre, par là même, certaines apories relatives à la question de l’archè. En second lieu, il convient de noter que les principaux textes dévolus à l’étude des êtres divins se distinguent les uns des autres par des nuances méthodologiques significatives. Selon que la question du divin prend naissance au sein de la science naturelle ou de la science des substances, selon qu’elle appartient à la physique ou à l’ousiologie, la preuve de l’existence des réalités divines, de même que la description de leur nature et de leurs fonctions, font l’objet de formulations diverses, toutes inféodées à la logique conceptuelle de la science qui les rend possibles. En somme, chaque examen des réalités divines se distingue par sa tournure singulière, qui n’est autre que le produit de la régionalisation des discours, c’est-À-Dire de leur adaptation méthodologique aux outils de la science qui les engendre<br>Studying the question of the divine in Aristotle implies to determine to which problem the Aristotelian conception of the divine is supposed to answer. Two conclusions can be drawn from close examination of the corpus aristotelicum in its entirety, and particularly of these texts in which the study of divine realities is Aristotle’s major concern (Physics, VII-VIII; De Cœlo, I-II, Metaphysics, Lambda). In the first place, it clearly appears that, according to Aristotle, the question of the divine is not a theological question, but an archological one. Indeed, nowhere Aristotle studies the divine beings in order to explore deeply the nature of the gods, but rather with the intention of investigating the first principles of phusis and ousiai. The Aristotelian conception of the divine is thus the consequence of the detailed examination of the first principles, thanks to which Aristotle thinks he will be able to define precisely the nature of the principle qua principle and then to solve some aporia about the archè. In the second place, it is worth noting that each of the three main texts in which Aristotle develops his conception of the divine is characterized by slight but significant differences in method. Depending on whether the question of the divine belongs to the science of nature (physics) or to the science of ousia (ousiology), the demonstration of the existence of divine beings and the description of their nature and causality are expressed in different ways, in accordance with the concepts employed in each science. In short, each investigation about divine beings is characterized by its singular form, which is the product of the regionalization of each inquiry, i.e. of its methodical adaptation to the conceptual tools of the science to which it belongs