An illuminated Plaza. Yigal Amir is sitting on a big plant at the back of the municipal building by thePlaza. He's waiting for the Prime Minister's departure from the rally in support of the peace process. Ronny Kempler, an amateur photographer, is expulsed from the security zone by a policeman.He moves away to the roof of a nearby building to get a wider view of the area. The Prime Ministerdescends the staircase and approaches his car.Amir draw a 9 mm Beretta pistol. He fires three shots at the Prime Minister's back. A few weeks after the assassination, Kempler reveales to the Commission of Inquiry that he possesses a video testimony of the assassination.On the evening of the assassination, Yigal Amir arrived at the Plaza and observed the crowd. He felt completely alienated. "I roamed through the crowd - he later said - and saw the emptiness. I didn't understand this language. It was Arabic. And then I went to the parking lot area." Amir understood that his destination was no longer the outcome of his feverish mind but an actuality hat was gradually realised through the reaction of the crowd and the policemen to his own presence among them. Amir's purpose - Rabin's assassination - was the pinnacle of a critical practice with regard to History. For Amir, History was a clear visual field which provides select individuals with the opportunity to realize their vision in a single act; at the same time, History (or God as its meta-subject) uses such an individual as an instrument for the realization of its telos. Being the instrument of History, Amir can nevertheless be conceived as a critical subject because he sees what others cannot see. The plaza became for a while the space where history was unfolding. From Amir's point of view there stood in that space only Yitzhak Rabin and himself. The one was standing on the stage's front seeking to govern the people with an understanding of the boundaries of governance; the other was roaming in the square among the crowd, wishing to redeem the people from this governance. Amir imposed upon both of them a fateful encounter that took place under the glaring light and watchful eye of a divine Supervision, or the camera, suspended above these is something that is done continuously, by everyone.

Imposition of such a space means observation and control of the world from a relatively fixed point of view. But such a pointof view, which momentarily considers itself external to the world, is also intertwined in a network of points of view which cancel each other out by dint of functioning as points of presence and relay stations. A basic character of this space is its being composed of networks of presences lacking points of view upon thenetwork. A presence that is something which takes place apart from, together with, and with regard to other presences - will be that basic unit from which are composed the various networks, which are not networks of purposeful speech and action. Imposing upon the world an intersubjective space of discourse means also fixing the distinction between subject (as a pole of action, speech and

view) and object (as a pole wherein these converge). The critical position is one such pole, a point of view focused on a homogeneous visual field. However the two spaces cannot be united within the same visual field. They exist concurrently in an unsynchronized fashion, i.e.without a single point of view from which one can observe them together. These two spaces can neither be compounded into one, nor be compounded into a unity of time; except, of course, for the time and space of a text, like the present one, which purports to represent them after the event.

Amir acted in a visual field of total visibility:

street lights, cameras, policemen, reporters, security men, a crowd, and divine Supervision. Amir did not seek to hide. He was master of an omnipresent point of view and an omnipotent position of action, and therefore he could take and give life. Amir's explicit remarks, his confessions, and the crime having been committed in a floodlit area made it difficult for the different experts and interpreters of the murder to perform their job. Usually experts know how to operate only in a twilight zone between the hidden and the manifest, between the arcane and the explicit. However, the assassination took

place between the manifest and the hyper-manifest, the explicit and the hyper-explicit. In order to perform their job, these interpreters created ex nihilo a discrepancy between Amir's explicit remarks - which could not have been more explicit, as were his actions - and his hidden intentions. Amir candidly admitted there had been no conspiracy, no long-term plan of action, no strategy. Amir hadn't planned to capture power or incite a mass uprising. The implicit dark side of his actions was imputed to him by others who needed that side, for their job has been to interpret them.

To this day, photography takes part in the practices of both governmentality and critique. The camera lens - which, ever since the invention of photography, has often replaced the human eye - is generally represented as being in the hands of the subject who operates it. The camera lens, on its own, cannot assume a critical point of view, unless a subject organizes what is seen and endows it with meaning. Only when it is governed in connection with a logic typical of the disciplinary site, and operated by a reflexive subject, can the camera lens take part in the what Foucault terms as a "critical onthology of ourselves". However, the camera is not subject only to power relations in the space of governmentality and critique. The camera has another ethos as well; not that of a subject who uses the camera to confirm himself as an "author" of a photographic enunciation, but its very own ethos, the ethos of an instrument that interpelates the subject, the camera as part of a network of blind presences. Sometimes the camera may follow reality, and sometimes vice versa. The camera has a defined purpose, which the photographer attempts to realize. But it also has a destiny, of which the photographer may become the victim. In the intersubjective space, the camera that is operated from the position of a subject follows the event. At the end of the day, when the pictures are printed in the newspaper or placed in the album, two points of reference in time are created: first the event, followed by the documenting photograph. In contradiction, in the space composed of networks of presences, the subject doesn't really govern the camera he's operating; the camera is always already there, part of the network in which the event will take place, and capable of reversing the points of reference in time: first the documentation, followed by the event which destiny has summoned for the camera. (This was the case of Kempler's camera which documented Rabin's assassination.)

The photographer who assumed the observer's position, overseeing a visual field, might suddenly find himself not only observed by other subjects (a reversal of intersubjective relations), but also activated by something else, something which attracts, seduces, or repels - and in this case the governing relations between subject and object are reversed. The object is a presence to which one can attribute neither a point of view nor a destination or a purpose; for this, a subject is required, but the subject is now being conducted according to the order of things. Therefore, the reversal of relations between object and subject makes it impossible to assume a homogeneous space-time, in whichthings flow according to the inclination of time, preparing themselves, as it were, for History's point of view, represented by the authorized power or by its critics, who will weave it into a seamless story.

In Amir's visual field, he and Yitzhak Rabin faced each other; in between them there was the Jewish people, between perdition and redemption; and the eye of divine Supervision was the interpretative law. Amir's vision existed independently of the assassination site. One might say that he was searching for a location for a screenplay that already existed in his mind: He previously tried two other locations: the "Yad Vashem" memorial and a new highway intersection inaugurated by P.M.Rabin . Finally he chose the "Malchey Yisrael" Plaza; the center stage of the public plaza and of history, where Rabin already stood and would be replaced, in a single act, by Amir himself. Until the moment of the assassination, the intersubjective space of discourse and action, in which Amir was destined to be the Prime Minister's assassin, was not tied to any defined location. At the moment of the assassination, this imaginary space became palpable in the Plaza.

The perfect arena also interpellated RonnyKempler who walked around the Plaza, filled with a premonition of impending disaster. He sensed "a feeling in the air that something might go wrong, I have no proofs or evidence [...] There was tension, I had a bad feeling." In his mind's eye, he already directed a movie about the Prime Minister's assassination at the peace rally.

Kempler planned the final scene was planned down to the last detail. He would film the Prime Minister leaving the frame. Instead the video ended uncunningly with another disappearence: The Prime Minister vanished from Kempler's view not only as a result of beeing shot but also because Kempler flinched and ducked precisely when his camera was suppose to record the Prime Minister falling to the ground. A double rereat: Two points of view retracting from each other precisely at the moment of impact when the sound of the bullets connected them in time. Kempler was convinced that destiny had toyed with him.Yet his hand upon the camera - moved, perhaps, by destiny - had toyed with Amir as well. More than once during the filming, it seems that eye contact was established between Amir and Kempler.

For a span of fifteen minutes, Kempler stood with his camera in an observer's position overlooking the very site which was to become the scene of the assassination. Amir wanted to be seen, at any cost. His actions were directed towards the greater eye of divine Supervision. By chance Kempler provided him with one such eye. And Kempler's screenplay became a (cinematic) reality.

The videotape plunged everyone - investigators, reporters, the home audience - into the darkroom of history. The movie could be rerun back and forth, to show how the security conception collapsed, or how Amir sat in one spot waiting for the P.M. without anyone paying attention. His movements where interpreted as the culmination of a causal sequence of events which had to be reconstructed and deciphered. The visibility of the assassination, its senselessness and lack of purpose, was what everyone sought to deny or disavow in order to discover what "really" lay concealed behind it. The video demarcated clear boundaries for interpretation and also determined what was worthy of interpretation. It focuses observation on what is seen on the screen while the camera itself is reduced to an instrument in the hands of the observing subject who documented the event. Implicit in the video's presentation to the public was a two-stage conception of time, which unequivocally differentiated between the event, which "was there," and the documentation that recorded it for posterity: in this view, the assassination, product of a distinct causal sequence, connected with Amir and certain political conditions, had presented itself to Kempler, who - along with his camera - was depicted as having been positioned outside the event. The causal readings, by their very nature, ignore the actual ìeventuationî of the event, its unique and purposeless departure from any prior causal order and from any pattern of meaning which can be produced for it in retrospect. Thus the audience was invited to be immersed in a murky film with the pictures flickering before their eyes. Let me propose to move slightly away from this view of the television screen and reposition Kempler camera at the site of the assassination: the camera as the one who saw Amir, but was also seen by him; this is not the camera that bares witness to an event from outside but the one that frames the stage ahead of the action and creates the space in which the assassination was eventuated, outside any known causal sequence. Hence it is not an instrument in the hands of a subject to control it but an object with an independent existence and a destiny of its own, which is capable of contaminating the destinies of others who are caught in its path.

The camera's entry into the arena detaches the event from the intersubjective space and its own causal order. It frames the event's rupture of the causal order, and makes its fatality more palpable. But fatal, entirely coincidental links, devoid of intent or purpose, usually have no place in such explanations. They cannot be observed, spoken of, or interfered with. They avoid any regime or management. Such is the coincidental and surprising connection created between Kempler's camera and Amir's pistol, between Kempler's identity as the photographer of the assassination and Amir's identity as the assassin; the connection which gives rise to the model of the event as meaningless, although possessing an aesthetic form all the same.

A few weeks ago I read a horrifying story about Bosnia. It describs a snipers' post and a photographers' post that were manned anew each morning, in perfect mutual equilibrium: a sniper facing a photographer. I tried to imagine what it would be like if one of the cameras happened to be a television camera. I imagined myself sitting at home and watching a live broadcast, devoid of any secret, interpretation or critique, of the sniper sniping; but instead of seeing the photographer taking pictures, I am sitting at his post, seeing a man or woman crossing the street below and being snipered to death, live on television. The only possible interference I can offer is to shut the television. The possible interference that can be offered by the photographer who is there is to shoot the sniper, of course. But such an act would take place only if he forgot for a moment to whom his gaze belongs and by whom it is being managed. But if he did so, he would have lost his point of view which would have enabled him to be immune from the sniper, and would have become in turn, the next victim in line whom I shall watch on my television screen.

The television camera during a live broadcast no longer produces signs which need be deciphered in the future. In the name of all discourses concerning freedom of information, of the press etc, the scenes of crime are becoming transparent; in fact, no effort is any longer required in order to assume a point of view from which the crime can be seen committed. The photographer is no longer a messenger of light illuminating the horror, the public eye in whose wake the executive arm of the law shall appear to restore justice to its rightful place. The space is discontinuous; the vision and the possibility of action are disconnected; only the scales of justice are still located in a defined disciplinary site, in a grand hall in which space is still homogeneous and time still linear, a site wherein all testimonies are to be gathered. Apart from this site, the entire public space is strewn with cameras. Even when they are points of view, they are not extensions of a subjectivitycapable of action. They are intertwined in a network of points of view like themselves, whose presences in the network cancel each other out. There is no one who sees. Or, at least, there is no one who sees more than another, and no one who doesn't see either. We're all peeking into an arena bathed in light.

Let us return to the television camera broadcasting from Bosnia. For the photographer to be only a photographer - that neutral position which merely documents - the sniper must be only a sniper. From the moment in which the photographer is not only a photographer, he becomes a murderer too, or at least an accomplice to murder. And, at that moment, the murderer becomes an accomplice to the photographic act. Justice can be executed only after the fact, when the two sides shall be able to prepare for its arrival, equipped with photographic evidence of the crime. This kind of justice calls upon the photographer present at the event to bring his proofs to court. But if the witness is also an accomplice to murder, he too should be included in the prosecution's visual field. So, too, with regard to the witnesses whose testimony leads to the conviction of that witness. The courts can no longer remain confined within their halls of justice. The Last Judgement is perhaps the day in which the judiciary system, like photography, no longer requires a place of its own, but extends over the entire public space, is networked like communication satellites, and operates in real time; i.e. it will be able to realize itself as a sanction, as a kangaroo court, and pronounce sentence on the sniper immediately, on the spot. Then the photographer shall regain his glory. He will be sent then to illuminate this judiciary work and supervise it. On whose behalf?

The explanations of Amir's motives presented the Halakhic discourse or turgid air as conductors of murder. Any connection between such as these and the event, the very moment when Amir played the role of assassin before the camera and pulled the trigger - is very loose, if it exists at all. Many have spoken in its behalf, but nobody has yet managed even to describe it in persuasive fashion, let alone prove it. Words, however great their potential for incitement, are not generally translated, just like that, on one evening, into pulling the trigger.

The darkroom is the ultimate bunker to which the photographer descends in order to force the secret to reveal itself, to slowly expose it on the photographic paper. The picture presentifies an unbridgeable gap because what is seen in the picture was there, whereas whover sees it, is here. In order to act with regard to "what was there," one requires the help of a third party, one must go forward in time, to a next tribunal. What is seen in the picture was there, testimony to the time lapse that produces the gap between a seemingly stabilized object seen in the photograph and the photographer's apparently external point of view. Thus, the spectator is liable to plunge into what's seen in the photograph, and forget that a photom as in the Day of Judgement.In the paper I discuss the question of critique in terms of point of view and spatial relations. My assumption is that a critical attitude is always a simulation of an exterier point of view in relation to the discourse or object to be criticised. Amir's position lied outside the hegemonic discourse, or in Lyotard terms, between his discourse and the hegemonic one there was a differend. In order to adopt a critical stance he did not have to simulate an external position; he was pushed into one. He actually saw and spoke from outside the hegemonic discourse, and finally he also acted from outside. I intend to conduct this discussion of the assassination (as a critical act) and discussion of criticism (as a violent activity) on the borderline between two spaces: the intersubjective space imposed by subjects, and the space composed of networks in which each subject is also a presence existing alongside other objects.The imposition of an intersubjective space of action and discourgrapher had been there.

The Photos

The North-South-East-West (NSEW) Camera was developed by Aim Deuelle Luski and presented for the first time in Nir Nader's and Erez Harudi's exhibition ìthe gallery of education.î The camera consists of a simple wooden box with four openings made out of crossed razors, each in the middle of one of the box's sides. The box is placed in and covered by another box, which allows for a controlled exposure of the openings. The four openings are exposed together and light enters the inner box from four directions at once. It falls on two sides of a negative that form an angle of 45 in relation to the openings. The camera was developed for taking photographs of the border zone between east and west Jerusalem, where the demarcating line between the Arab and Jewish city has been gradually erased in the course of (then) 27 years of Israeli Occupation. I thought that the NSEW camera could serve to illustrate the unique, un-synchronized encounter among the four points of view presented in the paper: of the victim, of the assassin, of the amateur photographer, and finally mine, in the author's position. I asked Aim Deuelle Luski to operate the NSEW camera in the scene of the assassination. We went together to the plaza and looked for the exact spot where the fatal meeting between Amir and Rabin took place. We took four photos. The four photographs contain segments of visual information about the plaza, juxtaposed in a vertigo of points of view.

Kempler's tape was broadcast on Israeli television, with extensive commentary, only a month after the assassination - a delay which has never been explained.