Camera Lucida

I’m looking at the first Part of Camera Lucida.  I noted as I read through what the names of each little chapter was since they aren’t listed in the text itself, just on the title page.

Starting then with Ch. 2: “The Photograph Unclassifiable”

5: “a photograph cannot be transformed (spoken) philosophically,” 
” The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’” it points a finger at certain vis-a-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language.”
deictic: showing or pointing out directly

6: “dualities we can conceive but not perceive (I didn’t yet knowthat this stubbornness of the Referent in always being there would produce the essence I was looking for.”
“as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of language”

Ch. 3: “Emotion as Departure”

8: “I was bearing witness tot he only sure thing  that was in me (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance to any reductive system”

Ch. 4: “Operator, Spectrum, and Spectator”

9: eidolon: an unsubstantial image

10: “camera obscura”

Ch. 5: “He Who Is Photographed”

11: “dependence”

12: ” ‘myself’ never coincides with my image”
“disturbance”

13: “to whom does the photograph belong?”

14: “others – the Other – do not disposses me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object, they put me at their mercy, at their disposal, classified in a file, ready for the subtlest deceptions”

15: “private life” and “political right”
“Death is the eidos of that Photograph”

Ch. 6: “The Spectator: Chaos of Tastes”

18: “the impulses of an overready subjectivity”

Ch. 7: “Photography as Adventure”

18: “Fascination”

19 “Interest? Of brief duration.” 
“This picture advenes, that one doesn’t”
hebetude: lethargy, dullness

20: “it animates me, and I animate it”

Ch. 8: “A Casual Phenomenology”

20: “paradox”

21: “affective intentionality”

Ch. 9: “Duality”

23: “the co-presence of two discontinuous elements”

Ch. 10: “Studium and Punctum”

26: “What I feel about these photographs derives from an average affect, almost from a certain training”
“It is by studium that i am interested in so many photographs”

27: “A photograph’s punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”

Ch. 11: “Studium”

27: “The studium is the order of liking, not of loving“

Ch. 12: “To Inform”

28: photograph as “contrary to the text”

30: “it supplies me with a collection of partial objects”

Ch. 13: “To Paint”

30: “Photography has been, and is still, tormented by the ghost of Painting”

31: “Yet it is not (it seems to me) by Painting that Photography touches art, but by Theater”

Ch. 14: “To Surprise”

33: “All these surprises obey a principle of defiance”

34: “Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs”

Ch. 15: “To Signify”

34: “the mask is the meaning”

36: “Yet the mask is the difficutl region of Photography.  Society, it seems, mistrusts pure meaning”

38: “Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks”

Ch. 16: “To Waken Desire”

38: “For me, photographs of landscape (urban or country) must be habitable, not visitable”

Ch. 17: “The Unary Photograph”
unary: having, consisting of, or acting on a single element, item, or component

41: “The Photograph is unary when it emphatically transforms “reality” without doubling it, without making it vacillate (emphasis is a power of cohesion) : no duality, no indirection, no disturbance”

Ch. 18: “Copresence of the Studium and the Punctum”

42: ” the scene is in no way ‘composed’ according to a creative logic; the photograph is doubtless dual, but this duality is the motor of no ‘development,’ as happens in classical discourse”

Ch. 19: “Punctum: Partial Feature”

43: “Yet the punctum shows no preference for morality or good taste: the punctum can be ill-bred”

45: “However lightning-like it may be, the punctum has, more or less potentially, a power of expansion.  This power is often metonymic”

Ch. 20: “Involuntary Feature”

47: “Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly, intentional, and probably must not be so”
“The Photographer’s ‘second sight’ does not consist in ‘seeing’ but in being there”

Ch. 21: “Satori”
satori:  sudden enlightenment and a state of consciousness attained by intuitive illumination representing the spiritual goal of Zen Buddhism

49: “intense immobility”

51: “I am a primitive, a child–or a maniac; I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anythign from another eye other than my own”

Ch. 22: “After-the-Fact and Silence”

51: “The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance”

53: “I may know better a photograph I remember than a photograph I am looking at”
“Ultimately-or at the limit- in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes”

Ch. 23: “Blind Field Palinode”
palinode:  an ode or song recanting or retracting something in an earlier poem; a formal retraction.

55: on punctum: “it is what I add to the photograph and what is nevertheless already there“

59: “The punctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond — as if the image launched desire ebyond what it permits us to see”
“the fantasy of a praxis“

Ch. 24: “Palinode”

60: “I had perhaps learned how my desire worked, but I had not discovered the nature (the eidos) of Photography”

He then sets up part 2 as his Palinode.

Advertisement