Notes

What literary and visual texts that abstract images from narrative can do, perhaps, is to focus on a punctum, and to place the studium temporarily in abeyance. What is interesting about Teng’s poem is its persistent focus on the moment. It gives a history of consequences, of what happened afterwards, but in its concluding metaphor it infects the present with a memory, transforms the quotidian of the present into a negative of the image from the past. The images that we know of Lee are inescapably embedded in a historical narrative: we will always remember that moment of anguish. And yet Lee’s own narrative of the Singapore Story, as the popular response to his passing indicates, also possesses a redemptive quality: a possibility, however briefly glimpsed, of a life beyond an individual surrender to neoliberalism’s market. Lim’s image offers more: a moment of arrival to which we can endlessly return, and a continual means of critique of the present.