LAST DAY EVERY DAY: FIGURAL THINKING FROM AUERBACH AND KRACAUER TO AGAMBEN AND BRENEZ Last Day Every Day Figural Thinking from Auerbach and Kracauer to Agamben and Brenez Adrian Martin dead letter office BABEL Working Group punctum books  brooklyn, ny LAST DAY EVERY DAY: FIGURAL THINKING FROM AUERBACH AND KRACAUER TO AGAMBEN AND BRENEZ © Adrian Martin, 2012. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerical-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit: http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0, or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This work is Open Access, which means that you are free to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors, that you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build upon the work outside of its normal use in academic scholarship without express permission of the author and the publisher of this volume, or without proper attribution. First published in 2012 by Dead Letter Office, BABEL Working Group an imprint of punctum books Brooklyn, New York http://punctumbooks.com The BABEL Working Group is a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholar-gypsies with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. BABEL roams and stalks the ruins of the post- historical university as a multiplicity, a pack, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build temporary shelters for intellectual vagabonds. We also take in strays. ISBN-10: 0615719465 ISBN-13: 978-0615719467 Images on Cover: Dorothy Malone and Robert Stack in Douglas Sirk’s 1958 The Tarnished Angels (top); Marlene Dietrich as Lola-Lola in Josef von Sternberg’s 1930 The Blue Angel/De blaue Engel (bottom). Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ http://punctumbooks.com/about/ If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible with- out your support. Vive la open-access. Fig. 1. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490-1500) r Para Cristina Álvarez López In cinema, only the presumption of figures exists. ~Nicole Brenez