Yuriko Furuhata - Indexicality as Symptom- Photography and Affect

Indexicality as ‘‘symptom’’: Photography andaffect

YURIKO FURUHATA

Abstract

This article uses Roland Barthes’s text, Camera Lucida: Reflections onPhotography, to critique photography’s truth claim to the real by readingthe photographic discourse of ‘‘indexicality’’ as a ‘‘symptom,’’ as defined inthe work of Slavoj Zizek. The implications of this symptomatic relationshipbetween photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question ofphotographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability ofa¤ect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant’s notion of sub-jective universality as it is challenged by Barthes’s theory of photography.

Keywords: indexicality; photography, symptom; punctum; a¤ect;universality.

Society is concerned to tame the Photograph,to temper the madness, which keeps threaten-ing to explode in the face of whoever looks atit.

—Barthes (1981: 117)

In her discussion of photography, Susan Sontag draws a curious analogybetween the non-linguistic property of the photographic image and thelinguistic act of quotation. She writes, ‘‘Photographs — and quotations— seem, because they are taken to be pieces of reality, more authenticthan extended literary narratives’’ (1973: 74). Sontag casually evokes thisanalogy as if the concept of ‘‘authenticity’’ implied in the photographicmode of inscription and the linguistic act of quotation needs no furtherexplanation. If we follow Sontag, a photograph does not only signify,but it also presents itself as a special kind of inscription that reproducesand repeats the ‘‘real’’ or the ‘‘original.’’ A photographic inscription is,

Semiotica 174–1/4 (2009), 181–202 0037–1998/09/0174–0181DOI 10.1515/semi.2009.032 6 Walter de Gruyter

first and foremost, an infinitely repeatable semiotic sign that makes aclaim to authenticity through its fidelity to ‘‘reality.’’

Sontag extends her analogy to further suggest that a photographer issomeone who directly quotes from reality. The unadulterated mode ofrepetition and the repudiation of originality suggested by the act of quo-tation are then linked to the Surrealist fascination with found objects, thedestabilization of an authorial position, and the evidential power of thereferent: ‘‘[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is animage), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directlystenciled o¤ the real, like a footprint or a death mask’’ (1973: 154). Thephotographic sign is thus defined through its dual semiotic function, ofbeing iconic and indexical at once. It is a type of representational imagethat resembles the real, all the while being an indexical trace that is exis-tentially and causally related to the real.

Curiously, however, when Sontag extends her analogy from quotationto trace, she blurs the di¤erence between the linguistic mode of reproduc-ing an utterance or inscription and the non-linguistic mode of retaining aphysical trace (e.g., a footprint). Yet it is precisely the di‰culty in di¤er-entiating these two types of traces — the former the linguistic and the lat-ter the non-linguistic — that continues to haunt contemporary discourseson photography.

In what follows, I propose to rethink this question of the photographictrace as an indexical sign by positing the hypothesis that indexicality is a‘‘symptom’’ of contemporary discourse on photography. As a point of de-parture, I will borrow Slavoj Zizek’s broad definition of the symptom as‘‘a particular element which subverts its own universal foundation’’ whileat the same time being an indispensable element that constitutes this uni-versality. I will then examine the implications of a symptomatic relation-ship between photography and the real from the perspective of photo-graphic spectatorship. A reading of Roland Barthes’s illuminating text,Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography will highlight the significanceof an a¤ective investment in the spectatorial experience of viewing photo-graphs. In conclusion, I will briefly consider this a¤ective investment inrelation to the problem of ‘‘interested’’ aesthetic judgment, which callsinto question the purported subjective universality of the disinterestedaesthetic judgment.

1. Trace

When one considers the di¤erence between the linguistic trace, as in thecase of a written quotation, and the non-linguistic trace, as in the case of

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a footprint, the semantic uncertainty of the word ‘‘analogical’’ becomesapparent. The expressions ‘‘analogical’’ and ‘‘analog’’ are often used todescribe the medium specificity of photography, yet these expressionsalso disclose the conceptual di‰culty of di¤erentiating these two types oftraces. For instance, the term ‘‘analog inscription’’ is frequently used todescribe both celluloid-based film and photography in the discourse of vi-sual media. Film and photography are said to embody an analog mode ofrecording (in opposition to a digital mode of recording), which relies onthe direct physical contact between the sign and the referent. This senseof the term analogical is used to highlight only the physical, non-mimeticproperties of the trace. A more conventional sense of the term analogical,on the other hand, presupposes resemblance or likeness between other-wise dissimilar entities; it implies a certain similitude between dissimilarforms that constitutes the basis of comparison. When used in relation toforms of visual representation, the analogical in this latter sense no longerpoints to the physical relation between the sign and the referent, but tothe mimetic relation between them.

Indeed, in discourses on the visual and literary arts, the term ‘‘ana-logical’’ is more frequently used in this second sense of mimetic represen-tation. As Raymond Bellour suggests, in this regard a digitally producedimage can also be said analogical insofar as it appeals to this second senseof mimetic appearance (1996: 182). When used in this way, the term ana-logical dispenses with the first sense of physical contact altogether. Whatis interesting about the discourse of photography is, however, its relianceupon both senses of the term analogical. For instance, when Sontag com-pares the photograph to a footprint, she implies the first sense of the termanalogical: the physical contact between the sign and the referent. Bycontrast, when she compares the photograph to a ‘‘quotation’’ Sontag as-sumes the second sense of the term analogical: resemblance. The term‘‘indexical’’ supplements only the first sense of the analogical inscriptionthat the term.

First coined by the American semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, theterm index designates a special kind of sign, which has a direct causallink to the referent but may not have any visual resemblance to it; for in-stance, smoke is an indexical sign of the presence of fire. Notably, theword index used in this semiotic sense slightly di¤ers from its conven-tional use as well as its use in linguistics. As the familiar example of theindex at the end of a book suggests, an index often designates a table, cat-alog or a list of subjects followed by page numbers. In this case, it func-tions as a thumb index, a topographical and classificatory sign, which in-dicates the location of the referent inside the book but which assumes nophysical or existential contact between the index and the items it points

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to. On the other hand, the linguistic use of the word index retains an ety-mological sense through deictic words such as ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘here,’’ ‘‘this,’’ and‘‘now,’’ words whose meanings are completely contingent upon the con-text, agent, time, and place of the act of enunciation. The link betweenthe sign and the referent hence remains contextual. Nevertheless, in allthree cases the index leads the reader of the sign to the referent; it has adirectional or pointing function.

There is also, however, a temporal dimension to the indexical sign.While often overlooked in discourses on the index, there is as a temporallapse between the sign and the referent in the case of the footprint, thefingerprint, or the photograph, all which hinge upon the spatial as wellas the temporal dissociation between the index and its referent. In spiteof this spatio-temporal gap between the index and the referent, theoristsof photography often appear certain of the causal link between the signand the referent. Sontag expresses such certitude in her discussion of thephotographic index:

While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, isnever more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less thanthe registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects) — a materialvestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. (Sontag 1973: 154)

Similarly, Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida fondly expresses his certitudeof the existence of the pre-photographic referent, which he finds in thephotographic trace. He writes: ‘‘The photograph is literally an emanationof the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiationswhich ultimately touch me, who am here’’ (1981: 80). What the indexicalsign of the photograph appears to guarantee, for him at least, is the pres-ence of (and not the resemblance to) the pre-photographic referent.

Because of its singular relationship to the referent, which in the case ofphotography designates a particular presence of ‘‘something’’ at a partic-ular moment in the past, a photograph is said to be a special type of‘‘trace.’’ It never allows the reader of the index to be led to an intendedreferent because, in a strict sense, the intended referent has already van-ished at the moment of the creation of the index. This is why photogra-phy is often described as the memento mori of time; it is a reminder ofmortality and the irreversibility of time itself. Put di¤erently, photogra-phy awakens the viewer’s chronoscopic sense of reality. That is to say,time follows a linear trajectory and becomes ‘‘a homogeneous emptytime,’’ to use Walter Benjamin’s well-known expression (1968: 261).Here time is measured not only by dates in a calendar but also by the pre-cision of a clock that visually segments time into equidistant instances.

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Furthermore, the temporal non-coincidence between the sign and thereferent makes it impossible to identify the sign and the referent becauseof the structural absence of the referent conditioned by the mechanism ofphotography in which the production of the sign (the photograph) isalways temporally subsequent to the pre-photographic referent. This isespecially the case with traditional photography, which involves a time-taking development process, but is equally true of instantaneous (i.e., Po-laroid) or digital photography, where the image always appears at a tem-poral remove — however small — from the instant when the photographis taken. Moreover, physical contact alone does not su‰ce to link thetwo, temporally disjunctive entities together. That is, the recognition andidentification of the referent (for example a landscape) is a logical impos-sibility unless we introduce an element of analogical resemblance betweenthe referent (the landscape) and its sign (the photograph of the land-scape). It is at this point, I believe, that the linguistic analogy of quotationbecomes particularly pertinent, since what is at stake is a certain willing-ness to suspend disbelief in the photographic index: there is a psychicinvestment or trust in the fidelity of the sign to its pre-photographic refer-ent. One may argue that this fidelity is built upon the mechanical autom-atism of the camera and its equally automatic chemical processes. How-ever, this argument is insu‰cient. For what the photographic apparatusguarantees is only the mechanical transmission of light and its interactionwith chemicals; it does not explain the trust or belief that we have in theconnection between this sign and its referent.

In his essay, ‘‘Signature event context,’’ Jacques Derrida raises a similarquestion around the problem of quotation in relation to the notion of fi-delity. In his analysis of J. L. Austin’s study of ‘‘performative speech,’’Derrida detects a point of internal breakdown in Austin’s argument thatthreatens to overturn the very foundation of his claim. In di¤erentiating a‘‘performative utterance’’ from a ‘‘constative utterance,’’ Austin suggeststhat by way of the performative utterance a speaker does somethingrather than simply says something. In a marriage vow, the utterance andthe action referred to by the utterance coincide with the event of the per-formative utterance: ‘‘When I say ‘I name this ship the Queen Elizabeth’ Ido not describe the christening ceremony, I actually perform the christen-ing’’ (Austin 2001: 1432). Performative utterances are thus classified as‘‘first person singular present indicative active’’ utterances, which presup-pose preexisting conventions. However, for the performative utterances tobe successful, ‘‘the conventional procedure which by our utterance we arepurporting to use must actually exist’’ (Austin 2001: 1433). Here arises aparadox; despite the fact that a performative utterance takes place as asingular event, marked by deictic words such as ‘‘I,’’ ‘‘here,’’ ‘‘now,’’ it


must repeat a convention in order to be intelligible and hence successful.Nonetheless, ‘‘quoted’’ or simulated performative utterances (e.g., a mar-riage vow performed by an actor in a play, as a joke or cited in a poem)are deemed ‘‘non-serious’’ utterances by Austin. They are thereby ex-cluded from the purview of his definition of performative utterances(2001: 1435).

Now, as Derrida points out, Austin must exclude ‘‘non-serious’’ simu-lations and quotations of the conventions in order to repress and concealthe structural possibility of all utterances becoming ‘‘quotations’’ andthereby ‘‘infelicitous’’ or unsuccessful. Derrida suggests, ‘‘[Austin] insistson the fact that this possibility remains abnormal, parasitic, that it consti-tutes a kind of extenuation or agonized succumbing of language that weshould strenuously distance ourselves from and resolutely ignore’’ (1988:16). Paradoxically, however, this negated parasitic element is precisely theinternal positive condition of a successful performative utterance. In otherwords, as Austin himself acknowledges, a felicitous performative utter-ance is predicated upon the repetition of a convention; that is, certain for-mal features must be ‘‘quoted.’’ This structural possibility that every ut-terance may become a citation and hence fail to become a ‘‘meaningful’’utterance is what Derrida calls the general iterability of language, whichthe act of inscribing a signature best exemplifies.

It seems like a banal fact that the signature, by convention, certifies thesingularity of the event of signing and the identity of the signer. However,this irreplaceable singularity at the heart of signature is made possibleonly through its iterability: ‘‘In order to function, that is, to be readable,a signature must have a repeatable, iterable, imitable form’’ (1988: 20).The convention requires that a written signature be identifiable on thebasis of its graphic resemblance to the archetypical signature of the samesigner. Moreover, ‘‘a written signature implies the actual or empiricalnonpresence of the signer’’ because the written signature by conventionis a substitute for an oral promise, a performative utterance that says ‘‘Ido’’ (Derrida 1988: 20). This points to the peculiar trust we have in thesignature; while it certifies the intention of the signer in her or his absence,its constitutive iterability does not exclude the possibility of the infidelityof the signature as to its proper origin, such as in the case of forgery. AsDerrida’s well-known critique of Plato’s logocentric depreciation of writ-ing demonstrates, what appears to be a supplementary aid threatens tosubvert the entire premise, as in the case of a signature that is supposedto function as the supplement or replacement for an oral contract, but infact subverts the singular premise of the contract itself.

Sontag uses the comparison between quotation and photography inorder to gesture towards the authenticity and fidelity of the sign to the

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referent. Yet, following Derrida’s argument, we might suggest that thisanalogy between the quotation and the photograph in fact reveals thestructural possibility of the inauthenticity and infidelity of the photographitself. That is, if the quotation is always haunted by the logic of iterabilityand thus infidelity, and if the operation of the photograph is analogous tothe operation of the quotation, then the photograph would similarly beopen to infidelity.

2. Symptom

As I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, Zizek’s definition of‘‘symptom’’ as ‘‘a particular element which subverts its own universalfoundation, a species subverting its own genus’’ is particularly helpful forthinking through the question of the structural possibility of infidelitybuilt into the photographic trace (1989: 21). Following Zizek, we may re-gard photographic indexicality as a symptom of photography. That is,within the purview of a conventional understanding of photography’s evi-dentiality, a photographic ‘‘trace’’ functions like a signature: it certifiesthe presence and the origin of the absent subject to whom such a trace isattributed. Yet, as in the cases of the signature and the performative ut-terance, this very photographic trace threatens the foundation of docu-mentary truth precisely because of its constitutive iterability. The conceptof repetition, as Derrida notes, already incorporates the possibility of dif-ference (1988: 7). One could therefore argue that the structure of repeti-tion is at once a necessary condition as well as an element of possible al-teration inherent in every photograph.

It is in this sense of a symptomatic relationship between the fidelity ofthe photographic index to its referent and its constitutive possibility ofalteration that I would like to read the following sentence from CameraLucida: ‘‘What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred onlyonce: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeatedexistentially’’ (Barthes 1981: 4). This sentence, I would argue, encapsu-lates Barthes’s awareness of the impossible fidelity of photography to thereal — that is, photography’s constitutive iterability, or alterability —and yet his desire to believe in this fidelity nonetheless. Critics such asGeo¤rey Batchen (1997) and John Tagg assert that Barthes ‘‘would haveus believe’’ (Tagg 1988: 3) in the photograph’s evidential power as to theprior existence of the pre-photographic referent. Yet contrary to attackson Barthes that posit him as a naive believer in photographic indexicality,I would suggest that Barthes explicitly posits such a belief in the formof an impossible ‘‘desire,’’ which guides him as what he terms his


‘‘Ariadne’s thread’’ in his labyrinthine search for an ontological ‘‘es-sence’’ of photography.

Barthes’s reference to Ariadne appears in his discussion of a specialphotograph of his mother, ‘‘the Winter Garden Photograph,’’ in whichhe glimpses the ‘‘essential identity’’ of his mother and photography itself:

Something like an essence of the Photograph floated in this particular picture. Itherefore decided to ‘‘derive’’ all Photography (its ‘‘nature’’) from the only photo-graph which assuredly existed for me, and to take it somehow as a guide for myinvestigation. All the world’s photographs formed a Labyrinth. I knew that at thecenter of this Labyrinth I would find nothing but this sole picture, fulfilling Nietz-che’s prophecy: ‘‘A labyrinthine man never seeks the truth, but only his Ariadne.’’The Winter Garden Photograph was my Ariadne, not because it would help mediscover a secret thing (monster or treasure), but because it would tell me whatconstituted that thread which drew me toward Photograph. (Barthes 1981: 73)

What he emphasizes in the above passage is the impossibility of findingsuch ‘‘essence’’ independent of his desire. In other words, Barthes poi-gnantly acknowledges the absence of a universal truth in the center of thelabyrinth constructed from ‘‘all the world’s photographs.’’ In place of theuniversal truth, Barthes discovers his particular truth of photography: thisparticular truth is his discovery of the Winter Garden photograph of hismother at the age of five. Barthes writes: ‘‘Not a just image, just an im-age,’’ Godard says. But my grief wanted a just image, an image whichwould be both justice and accuracy — justesse: just an image but a justimage. Such for me, was the Winter Garden’’ (1981: 70).

As is evident from the beginning of the book, Barthes frames his argu-ment within the context of his subjective ‘‘desire’’ rather than within apurportedly objective universality. In fact, the problem of the particularand the universal is presented in the first pages of the book as both hispredicament as well as the predicament of photography itself:

In the Photograph, the event is never transcended for the sake of something else:the Photograph always leads the corpse I need back to the body I see; it is the ab-solute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This(this photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuche, theOccasion, the Encounter, the Real, in its indefatigable expression. (Barthes 1981: 4)

It is worth noting that in the above passage Barthes emphasizes the abso-lute singularity of each photograph, which cannot be subsumed under theuniversal rubric of ‘‘Photography.’’ (I will come back to this problem ofthe particular and the universal in my discussion of Kantian aestheticjudgment and its relation to desire in my conclusion.) Moreover, Barthes

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relates this impasse in speaking of photography as a general concept orphenomenon to Lacan’s notion of the Real. Taken together with his insis-tence on the particularity of his ‘‘desire’’ as a spectator of photographs,this reference to the Lacanian Real also allows me to reintroduce the no-tion of the symptom, which I mentioned earlier in relation to its subver-sive character.

‘‘The symptom,’’ according to Zizek, ‘‘is not only a ciphered message,it is at the same time a way for the subject to organize his enjoyment’’(1989: 74). What does it mean that the symptom is not only a cipheredmessage, that is, a visible sign of the invisible pathological imbalance asunderstood in Freudian psychoanalysis? Zizek’s theoretical interpretationof Lacan’s notion of the symptom di¤ers from the Freudian sense of theterm. Instead of a hermeneutic imperative to decipher the ciphered kernelof the unconscious through recourse to visible signs of eruptions of invis-ible forces lurking in the depths, Zizek posits the symptom as a necessarycipher, a mask that shields us from the terrifying truth that there is noth-ing at the kernel of the unconscious. As Zizek puts it, the symptom is ‘‘anelement which causes a great deal of trouble, but its absence would meaneven greater trouble: total catastrophe’’ (1989: 78).

Zizek further relates this specific sense of the symptom to the notion ofthe Real: a traumatic kernel that resists symbolization inside our psychicreality. The Real has a paradoxical structure; it is on the one hand ‘‘apositive fullness without a lack,’’ yet it is on the other hand and at thesame time the embodiment of a certain void, emptiness or enabling‘‘lack’’ around which the symbolic order is structured (1989: 170). Inother words, the Real as lack does not lack anything in itself because itis a lack from the point of view of the symbolic order. To put it di¤er-ently, the symbolic order is structurally outside the Real because the sub-ject acquires language as a compensation for the original trauma of sym-bolic castration or repulsion from the Real, a site where the di¤erencebetween self and other does not yet exist. The Real is, therefore, ‘‘some-thing that cannot be negated’’ because it is the very condition of the orig-inal ‘‘lack,’’ the place of the Other and the place of a perpetual return ofan insatiable ‘‘desire’’ (Zizek 1989: 170). One may rightly criticize Lacan’sformulation of desire as the desire of the Other — the desire of a child tobecome a phallus and to fulfill the desire of his (and her) mother’s desiredue to her lack of a phallus — as deeply implicated in the hegemonicstructure of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Nonetheless, I think it is use-ful in the present context to consider Zizek’s re-interpretation of the La-canian Real as ‘‘a pure negativity’’ (1989: 170).

According to Zizek, the Real as pure negativity is an enigmatic centerthat eludes articulation: it is ‘‘the rock upon which every attempt at


symbolization stumbles.’’ It is thereby ‘‘something that persists only asfailed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to graspit in its positive nature’’ (1989: 169). Importantly, in moving away fromhis earlier semiotic analysis of photography, Barthes also returns to pho-tography in Camera Lucida in order to question the limit of descriptivelanguage in articulating a¤ect. For Barthes, the a¤ect generated by pho-tography occupies a position not unlike the Lacanian Real; it is what re-sists symbolization and exceeds the hermeneutic imperative for a semioticreading of the photographic image as a meaningful utterance.

3. Punctum

While Barthes turns to photography with this keen awareness of the rad-ical impossibility of the direct symbolization of a¤ect in Camera Lucida,we should also note that he had already touched upon this same issue inhis earlier texts. However, in these earlier works he was rather optimisticabout the possibility of symbolizing a¤ect. For instance, in the essays‘‘The photographic message’’ and ‘‘Rhetoric of image’’ Barthes estab-lishes general rules for the semiotic reading of a photographic image. Al-though he di¤erentiates the coded iconic message (connotation) from theun-coded iconic message (denotation) of a photograph, ‘‘the perceptualmessage’’ of denotation is presented as a universally recognizable andhence communicable message. According to Barthes, ‘‘in order to ‘read’this last (or first) level of the message, all that is needed is the knowledgebound up with our perception’’ (1977: 36).

In the subsequent essay, ‘‘The third meaning,’’ Barthes further classifiesphotographic signifiers at the level of denotation (the literal message ofthe image) by separating ‘‘obvious meaning’’ from ‘‘obtuse meaning.’’Obtuse meaning is conceived as a ‘‘supplement’’ to the semiotic readingof photographic images that a reader’s ‘‘intellection cannot succeed inabsorbing, at once persistent and fleeing, smooth and elusive’’ (Barthes1977: 54). This supplementary addition of obtuse meaning functions as afloating ‘‘signifier without a signified,’’ malleable and flexible in its powerto signify, depending on the context and the object of signification. AgainBarthes asserts the general applicability of his particular reading of ob-tuse meaning, which he finds in photographic stills taken from Sergei Ei-senstein’s films:

The pictorial ‘‘rendering’’ of words is here impossible, with the consequence thatif, in front of these images, we remain, you and I, at the level of articulatedlanguage — at the level, that is, of my own text — the obtuse meaning will not

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succeed in existing, in entering the critic’s metalanguage. Which means that theobtuse meaning is outside (articulated) language while nevertheless within interlo-cution. For if you look at the images I am discussing, you can see this meaning, wecan agree on it ‘‘over the shoulder’’ or ‘‘on the back’’ of articulated language.Thanks to the image . . . or much rather thanks to what, in the image, is purelyimage (which is in fact very little,) we do without language yet never cease to under-stand one another. (Barthes 1977: 61, emphasis mine)

Yet, it is precisely this optimistic belief in the general communicability ofobtuse meaning that Barthes abandons in Camera Lucida.

Instead of a‰rming the generality of the photographic mode of signifi-cation, Barthes develops a pair of correlative concepts, studium and punc-tum, in his pursuit of the specificity of photographic a¤ect in Camera Lu-cida. He di¤erentiates the culturally informed and hence coded field ofthe studium from the un-coded punctum, which he variously renders as ahole, a speck, a supplement, a detail, or a partial object. The punctum iswhat generates an intense a¤ect by ‘‘pricking’’ and ‘‘wounding’’ Barthes.The di¤erence between the obtuse meaning and the punctum is subtle yetcrucial. While the obtuse meaning is generally recognizable and agree-able, the punctum is not. It is an insignificant detail inside a certain pho-tograph that ‘‘animates’’ Barthes, but which does not a¤ect others in thesame fashion. A good example is the Winter Garden photograph, whichBarthes does not include in his book because the photograph’s punctumto him would be undetectable by other viewers. As Barthes puts it: ‘‘Icannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me.For you, it would be nothing but an indi¤erent picture, one of the thou-sand manifestations of the ‘ordinary’ ’’ (1981: 73).

Although Barthes recasts the punctum as ‘‘time’’ in the second sectionof Camera Lucida, it is initially introduced as ‘‘a detail’’ that has thevalue akin to that of ‘‘a partial object.’’ The punctum is said to be ‘‘[the]element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, andpierces’’ him (Barthes 1981: 26). This element arises from inside the pho-tograph and punctures its surface, leaving a hole, as it were. The punctumpierces and wounds Barthes as a viewer, leaving him heavily a¤ected witha sense of poignancy. Moreover, this encounter with the punctum arrivesunpredictably, accidental like ‘‘a cast of the dice’’ (1981: 27).

Significantly, Barthes also associates the punctum not with intelligibletaste or the realm of ‘‘liking’’ but with the inexplicable realm of ‘‘loving’’that mobilizes his ‘‘desire.’’ Once aligned with desire in this manner, thepunctum leads him away from the cultured province of conscious taste tothe primordial depths of unconscious desire. Yet precisely because thepunctum is intertwined with its counterpoint, the studium, Barthes freelymoves between the two regions.


Playing on the psychoanalytic notion of the partial object or fetish,Barthes also argues: ‘‘Very often the Punctum is a ‘detail,’ i.e., a partialobject. Hence, to give examples of punctum is, in a certain fashion, togive myself up [me livrer]’’ (1980: 73; 1981: 43). This statement begs thequestion of the function of the punctum: What does it mean whenBarthes says he ‘‘gives himself up’’ by giving examples? The verb livrersignifies at once acts of surrender, deliverance, and indulgence, whichcan be assorted as the simultaneous act of giving something up, beinggiven over to something, and giving oneself over to something. It dou-bly connotes activity and passivity, pleasure and displeasure. The no-tion of the punctum defined as a ‘‘partial object’’ thus indicates the im-portance of fetishism as a theoretical concept for Barthes. Indeedfetishism is directly referenced in his discussion of William Klein’s pho-tograph of Moscow: ‘‘[Photography] allows me to accede to an infra-knowledge; it supplies me with a collection of partial objects and canflatter a certain fetishism of mine: for this ‘me’ which likes knowledge,which nourishes a kind of amorous preference for it’’ (Barthes 1981:30).

Zizek interprets Lacan’s notion of objet petit a (Lacan’s term for par-tial object) as a kind of ‘‘residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifyingoperation, a hard core embodying horrifying jouissance, enjoyment, andas such an object which simultaneously attracts and repels us’’ (1989:180). This is what Zizek calls ‘‘a sublime object’’: an ordinary thing,which accidentally attains a kind of sublimity. The notion of sublimityhere refers to the paradoxical immaterial corporeality of objet petit a: aninsignificant, banal, material object that becomes the incarnation of theincorporeal Real, and attains the power to ‘‘produce a series of e¤ects inthe symbolic reality of subjects’’ while remaining a trivial thing in itself(1989: 163).

This formulation of objet petit a as a sublime object can help us under-stand Barthes’’ definition of the punctum. Barthes defines the punctum inthe following terms: (1) as a detail, often an insignificant one, in a photo-graph; (2) as an element that eludes the full disclosure of its meaning; and(3) as a supplementary addition by the spectator to the photograph, andyet ‘‘what is nonetheless already there’’ (1981: 55). As if corresponding toZizek’s definition of objet petit a, the punctum operates as a cause of bothdelight and disturbance. Take, for example, the following passage byBarthes: ‘‘What I can name cannot really prick me. The incapacity toname is a good symptom of disturbance’’ (1981: 51). Moreover, in facinga photograph of Robert Wilson and Philip Glass by Mapplethorpe, hestruggles to translate the a¤ects of attraction and disturbance he feelsinto descriptive language. In his words, ‘‘The e¤ect is certain but un-

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locatable, it does not find its sign, its name; it is sharp and yet lands ina vague zone of myself; it is acute yet mu¿ed, it cries out in silence’’(1981: 53).

In light of these remarks, I would like to return to Barthes’s aforemen-tioned reference to the Lacanian notion of the Real at the beginning ofCamera Lucida: ‘‘Photography evades us . . . We might say that Photog-raphy is unclassifiable . . . it is the absolute Particular, the sovereign Con-tingency . . . in short, what Lacan calls the Tuche, the Occasion, the En-counter, the Real’’ (1981: 4). This unclassifiability of photography, as Isuggested earlier, derives from the absolute singularity of each photo-graph. Thus, one could say ‘‘Photography’’ only provisionally. This iswhy Barthes suggests in a parenthetical note, ‘‘[F]or convenience’s sake,let us accept this universal, which for the moment refers only to the tire-less repetition of contingency’’ (1981: 5). Like the Real, an enigmatic ker-nel which eludes symbolization through language, the ine¤ability of pho-tography can be rendered only conditionally in a form of as if. In otherwords, we only have access to this sublime entity of ‘‘Photography’’ in amediated manner through recourse and reference to particular photo-graphs, and it is only this way that we can talk about the a¤ect generatedby ‘‘Photography.’’

Accordingly, the ine¤able essence of ‘‘the Photograph’’ is presentedthrough the conceptual framework of Buddhism, which Barthes suggestsproblematizes linguistic signification: ‘‘In order to designate reality, Bud-dhism says sunya, the void’’ (1981: 5). His Orientalist fascination withBuddhism notwithstanding, Barthes points out an important aspect ofphotographic indexicality. He suggests that in our gesture or reference toa photograph, we can only name the pre-photographic referent in deicticlanguage: ‘‘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 escapethis pure deictic language’’ (1981: 5). That is, every reference to a photo-graph must begin with a linguistic indexical sign designating ‘‘this’’ or‘‘that,’’ as if our reference to the photograph replicates its own referentialrelationship to the pre-photographic referent.

Interestingly, in his essay ‘‘The deaths of Roland Barthes’’ dedicated toBarthes Derrida mentions just such indeterminacy in the status of the ref-erent in photography. He writes:

[Barthes] first highlighted the absolute irreducibility of the punctum, what wemight call the unicity of the referential (I appeal to this word so as not to have tochoose between reference and referent: what adheres in the photograph is perhapsless the referent itself, in the present e¤ectivity of its reality, than the implicationin the reference of its having-been-unique). (2001: 57)


In this manner, Derrida reformulates the problem of indexicality as aproblem of the inevitable contingency of our own temporal relationshipto the photograph. This temporal contingency inherent to the relation be-tween a photograph and its spectator (rather than a photograph and thepre-photographic referent) is precisely what Barthes calls the second kindof punctum: ‘‘This new punctum, which is no longer of form but of inten-sity, is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), itspure representation’’ (Barthes 1981: 96). Although Barthes calls this punc-tum the noeme (‘‘essence’’) of photography, it is an ironical essence whoseproperty is contingency itself. That is, the awareness of the ‘‘that-has-been’’ (ca-a-ete) of the completely vanished moment of the past embodiedin a photograph is possible only from the present, subjective and tempo-rally contingent point of view of the spectator. Moreover, the temporalpositionality of the spectator is determinable only through her or his re-course to deictic words such as now or maintenant, which guarantee noth-ing but the possibility of marking a contingent point in chronologicaltime. Indeed, this is how Barthes seems to understand the noeme of pho-tography when he writes, ‘‘I am the reference of every photograph, andthis is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the funda-mental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?’’ (1981: 84).

I believe this fundamental question of subjective temporality character-izes Barthes’ relationship to photography. Given his interest in this radi-cally subjective sense of time brought forth by the photograph, it comesas no surprise that Barthes distrusts cinema. For cinema, through itsmechanism of capturing and projecting motion, adds an element of ex-trinsic, automatic duration to photography, and thereby abolishes thespectator’s own subjective sense of time. In his discussion of the punctumas a supplementary addition, he notes: ‘‘Do I add to the images inmovies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time: in front of the screen, I amnot free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not dis-cover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity’’ (1981:55). In brief, the speed of cinema does not allow Barthes the slow timeneeded for reflection on the past moment to which the image points.

Ironically, however, Barthes insists on the cinematic term spectator todescribe his position as a viewer of photography. Following ChristianMetz’s analysis of the primary identification process in cinematic specta-torship, one may argue that Barthes identifies with his gaze by constitut-ing himself as a perceiving subject: that is, to identify with ‘‘a pure act ofperception,’’ which is ‘‘the condition of possibility of the perceived . . .which comes before every there is’’ (Metz 1982: 49). Barthes’s own rea-soning seems equally suggestive: he etymologically links ‘‘the spectator,’’‘‘spectacle,’’ ‘‘spectrum,’’ and ‘‘specter.’’ Thus, Barthes draws a trajectory

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first from the looking subject (the spectator) to the spectacle object (thephotograph), which emits the spectrum or radiant energy (eidolon) of thepre-photographic referent, and finally, this conjures the ghostly specter ofthe past (‘‘the return of the dead’’). What Derrida calls the ‘‘haunting’’economy of photography characterizes this peculiar spectatorial relation-ship between the viewer and the photograph (Derrida 2001: 41).

Moreover, it is precisely this e¤ect of apparition or spectral hauntingthat links photography to hallucinatory madness, giving rise to whatBarthes calls ‘‘a temporal hallucination’’:

Now, in the Photograph, what I posit is not only the absence of the object; it isalso, by one and the same movement, on equal terms, the fact that this objecthas indeed existed and that it has been there where I see it . . . The Photographthen becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination. (Barthes 1981: 115)

Yet, despite his disavowal of cinema, Barthes’s very discussion of photog-raphy is haunted by its specter. For instance, Barthes ironically suggeststhat it was in a film — Federico Fellini’s Casanova (1976) — that he dis-covered the link between temporal hallucination and madness that at-tends the medium of photography: ‘‘I then realized that there was a sortof link (or knot) between Photography, madness, and something whosename I did not know. I began by calling it: the pangs of love’’ (1981:116). It is this element of love, then, that leads Barthes to discover thelast element of photography: pity. The a¤ect of the punctum as pitypierces Barthes and promises compassion and resurrection of the deadlike the luminous arrow of God piercing the heart of St. Theresa of Avila.On the other hand, this intense pity leads to madness, as in the case ofNietzche who, on the eve of his descent to madness ‘‘threw himself intears on the neck of a beaten horse: gone mad for Pity’s sake’’ (1981: 117).

In the midst of this ecstatic moment of being profoundly a¤ected by hismemory of all the photographs in which he discovered the e¤ect of thepunctum, Barthes enters into the imaginary space of photographic spec-tacle. He writes: ‘‘I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, Ientered crazily into the spectacle, into the image, taking into my armswhat is dead, what is going to die, as Nietzche did . . .’’ (1981: 117). As ifentering the realm of the dead, Barthes textually — and utopically —goes back in time, enlisting the photograph of his mother as his guide,his Ariadne’s thread in his labyrinthine quest to discover the essence ofphotography. Here one may argue that the representational absence ofthe Winter Garden photograph from the book further enthrones its statusas a sublime object, that which Zizek calls ‘‘the impossible-real object ofdesire’’ (1989: 194).


This sublime object, as we saw, is a banal object endowed with a cer-tain sublimity, and in which ‘‘we can experience this very impossibility’’of the representation of the Real (Zizek 1989: 194). It is thus only by‘‘the very failure of representation, [that] we can have a presentiment ofthe true dimension’’ of the Real. The presence of this sublime object thusgestures towards the unrepresentable: ‘‘[I]n the very field of representa-tion, [it] provides a view, in a negative way, of the dimension of what isunrepresentable’’ (Zizek 1989: 203).

But precisely because the sublime object as a fetish could function as anecessary cipher that masks ‘‘the emptiness, the void’’ of the Real, it pro-tects the subject from reaching the traumatic kernel of the Real as pureemptiness. It is in this sense of protection that I suggest that Barthes alsopresents his notion of the punctum. The punctum, here, protects Barthesfrom reaching the emptiness at the center of his theory of photography,that is, the emptiness or unfoundedness of the essence of photographythat he purports to have discovered. In sum, the essence of Barthes’s ‘‘es-sence of photography’’ is desire, the contingency fueled by the sublimeobject that is the Winter Garden photograph.

In his exposition of Lacan’s notion of the symptom as sinthome, Zizeksuggests that the sinthome points to the subject’s need for the symptom,because rather than being a pathological imbalance to be eradicated, thesymptom as sinthome is the only positive support of the subject that al-lows the subject to function in the symbolic realm:

In other words, symptom is the way we — the subjects — ‘‘avoid madness,’’ theway we ‘‘choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing (radicalpsychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe)’’ through the bindingof our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation which assures a min-imum of consistency to our being-in-the-world. (Zizek 1989: 75)

The symptom as sinthome, then, should be understood as a veil, whichprevents the subject from discovering the terrible truth that there is indeednothing behind the screen the symptom projects. Is it a coincidence thatBarthes endows the punctum with a certain ‘‘depth’’? The punctum, wemight say, is a kind of screen that presents an imaginary depth, yet be-neath which we will find the nothingness that necessitates its very exis-tence.

Indeed, at the ecstatic moment of jouissance (the moment when Barthesis swallowed by the a¤ect of madness, love, and pity) the ‘‘flat’’ surface ofthe photograph, which earlier agonized Barthes with its metonymic ‘‘plat-itude’’ of Death, is transformed into an imaginary space of depth. Curi-ously, this ‘‘scene’’ in Camera Lucida follows Barthes’s reference to his

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viewing of Fellini’s film. At this juncture, cinema as the haunting doubleof photography becomes indistinguishable from the latter, and enablesBarthes to discuss the utopian depth of photographic spectacle. In this re-gard, it is helpful to turn to Barthes’s evocation of the punctum as a kindof cinematic o¤-screen space. For instance, in speaking of the punctumBarthes quotes Andre Bazin’s dictum that the screen of cinema is ‘‘not aframe but a hideout’’ (Barthes 1981: 55):

[T]he man or woman who emerges from it continue living: a ‘‘blind field’’ [unchamp aveugle] constantly doubles our partial vision. Now, confronting millionsof photographs, including those which have a good studium, I sense no blind field[un champ aveugle]: everything which happens within the frame dies absolutelyonce this frame is passed beyond. When we define the Photograph as a motionlessimage, this does not mean only that the figures it represents do not move; it meansthat they do not emerge, do not leave: they are anesthetized and fastened down,like butterflies. Yet once there is a punctum, a blind field [un champ aveugle] is cre-ated (is divined). (Barthes 1981: 55)

By incorporating the notion of ‘‘a blind field’’ (un champ aveugle) into hisdiscussion of the photograph, Barthes thus creates a kind of ‘‘o¤-screenspace.’’ As Peter Brunette and David Wills suggest, ‘‘the punctum endowsthe photograph with the structure of the moving images’’ (Brunette andWills 1989: 111).

Now, the o¤-screen space in cinema, especially in a conventional narra-tive film, establishes the impression of the spatial continuity of the repre-sented scene in the areas that are blocked from the view of the spectator:namely, the space above, below and beyond each side of the frame, aswell as the space behind the set and the camera. Through the techniquesof continuity editing, shot/reverse shot, reframing, and camera move-ments such as panning, the spectator is allowed to imagine the continuingexistence of the characters and objects in the diegesis of a film, even whenthey are not depicted on the screen. In particular, the moving camera, inusing pans and tracking shots, creates a mobile frame that enhances oursense of three-dimensional space inside the screen. Additionally, the e¤ectof this mobile frame is inseparable from the duration of time in whichsuch camera movements take place. O¤-screen space can also be sug-gested by the characters whose looks and gestures connote the existenceof something outside the frame. Similarly, the intrusion of something orsomeone moving into the frame can also create the sense of an expandedspace outside the frame (Bordwell and Thompson 2001: 216–217). Mostof all, the spectator’s willingness to imagine the invisible space outside theframe plays a significant role in establishing the o¤-screen space.


A new question thus arises: how does the ‘‘blind field’’ created by thepunctum correspond to the cinematic o¤-screen space? The connection be-tween the blind field and the o¤-screen space is o¤ered by the notion ofwhat Barthes calls ‘‘a kind of subtle beyond’’ [une sorte de hors-champsubtil ]. Although the English translation erases the direct reference to thenotion of the field indicative of the field of vision, the original phrase dehors-champ plays with the cinematic concept of o¤-screen space/out-of-field (le hors-champ) as well as with a connotation of a field beyond orout of reach (hors). In aligning the pornographic photograph with ananesthetizing quality of the studium and the erotic photograph with ananimating quality of the punctum, Barthes suggests that ‘‘[the erotic pho-tograph] takes the spectator outside its frame [hors de son cadre], and itis there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me. Thepunctum, then, is a kind of subtle beyond [une sorte de hors-champ subtil ]— as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see’’(1981: 59).

Barthes calls this movement of going beyond the frame of the photo-graph and entering the imagined o¤-frame space ‘‘the right moment, thekairos of desire’’ (1981: 59). What does he mean by the kairos of desire?The term kairos suggests that the space Barthes claims to enter throughphotographic spectacle is outside the realm of chronological time. Ifkairos is understood to be a moment of ‘‘the fulfillment of truth’’ that in-tervenes and suspends our chronological sense of the time (Lindroons1998: 44), Barthes’s reference to ‘‘the right moment’’ in the photographicworks of Mapplethorpe points to the intense moment of jouissance: theimpossible fulfillment of desire. The punctum understood in this manner,then, becomes an a¤ective index that directs Barthes towards the timelessrealm of plenitude, away from the dual threats of death and lack.Through an intense a¤ective movement (fueled by erotic desire, madness,love, or pity) that carries him beyond the frame of the photographBarthes narrativizes a momentary return to the realm outside languageand symbolization. The punctum animates otherwise still photographs,and allows Barthes to enter the o¤-screen, psychic space of his own de-sire, a space that is unknown even to himself before he embarks on hislong, labyrinthine quest for the essential features of Photography.

Barthes’s reference to the metaphor of Ariadne’s thread is, therefore,over-determined; the unseeable blind spot is not only an e¤ect of thepunctum but it is also a crucial element of his narrativization of his questto find the ‘‘essence’’ of Photography. The labyrinthine structure ofCamera Lucida as a text and the blind, non-knowledge of the desire thatguides Barthes’’ inquiry are, in fact, complementary in nature. Here itmay be worthwhile to turn to Pascal Bonitzer’s essay titled, ‘‘Partial

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vision: Film and the labyrinth,’’ which he originally presented in Bar-thes’s seminar on the Labyrinth at the College de France on January 27,1979, one year before the publication of Camera Lucida. In this essay Bo-nitzer o¤ers an intriguing discussion of an a‰nity between the structureof the labyrinth and the constitutive blind spot in the self-knowledge ofthe subject (Bonitzer 1981: 63). While Bonitzer’s emphasis is on the sig-nificance of the partial vision created by the blind spot and the carefulmanipulation of the subjective camera in the filmic genre of suspense, hisreading of a short story written by Luis Jorge Borges, points to a particu-lar narrative economy that characterizes the style of Camera Lucida.

Bonitzer argues that the e¤ects of suspense and surprise folded into thelabyrinthine structure of Borges’ narrative hinge upon the ‘‘blind spot,’’or non-knowledge of the first-person narrator’s own identity (i.e., that heis the Minotaur):

What is important is that our blindness is reflected in that of the narrator. Appar-ently he does know himself any better than we do . . . it is as if the story con-fronted us with our own ‘‘blind spot.’’ At the heart of every labyrinth, in fact,there is the blind spot. And if the subject of the narrative wanders in the labyrinthof his own blindness, the narrative in turn becomes for us readers a labyrinth inwhich we wander until someone like Theseus, just a name, attempts to deliver usfrom it. (Bonitzer 1981: 57)

Just like the reader of Borges’ short story, the reader of Camera Lucidashares the blindness of the narrator about his ‘‘self.’’ Instead of providingan objective, theoretical inquiry on photography, Barthes o¤ers a narra-tive of an inwardly, subjective quest to discover the kernel of his desire.Camera Lucida is in this sense a keenly reflexive text that problematizesthe very premise of its own epistemological inquiry: the desire for an ob-jective, ‘‘scientific’’ knowledge of photography in general. Barthes ex-presses his predicament, facing the disparity between ‘‘science’’ and ‘‘sub-jectivity,’’ or, to put it di¤erently, between semiotic theory and thepersonal memoir: ‘‘I found myself at an impasse and, so to speak, ‘‘scien-tifically’’ alone and disarmed’’ (1981: 7). Barthes begins his reflexive jour-ney with the awareness of this impasse, and it is precisely this awarenessthat marks the singularity of Camera Lucida as a text.

Barthes is aware of the di‰culty of articulating and translating the af-fect generated by photography into theoretical language, but he is equallyaware that without going through this inarticulable realm of a¤ect he isnot able to broach the issue of photographic spectatorship. Barthes there-fore must position himself as both an inhabitant of the labyrinth, theMinotaur who is blind to his own origin (i.e., his own desire), and as


Theseus, an outsider who enters the labyrinth in quest of the Minotaur(i.e., the ‘‘essence’’ of photography), led by Ariadne’s thread (i.e., theWinter Garden photograph). Barthes as a theoretician cannot reach a sci-entific, objective knowledge of ‘‘Photography’’ without killing his own de-sire, which is in fact constitutive of the ine¤able ‘‘essence’’ of photogra-phy. This is why he proposes, in a radical gesture, to turn the verysingularity of his subjective experience into the foundation of a theoreticaldiscourse: ‘‘[W]hy mightn’t there be, somehow, a new science for each ob-ject? A mathesis singularis (and no longer universalis)? So I decided totake myself as mediator for all Photography’’ (1981: 8).

4. Aesthetic judgment

In conclusion, I would like to briefly comment on the implications Bar-thes’s foregrounding of his subjective ‘‘desire’’ as the basis of his theo-retical inquiry has on the Kantian notion of aesthetic judgment. RosalindKrauss, following the work of Pierre Bourdieu, calls photography an artmoyen (middle-brow art). Photography occupies the middle-ground be-tween high art and popular culture because its appreciation often hingesupon the indexical quality of the photograph (to gesture towards the pastexistence of the referent) and the identification of its subject matter,rather than the formal aesthetic judgment of the photographic image(Krauss 1999: 169–182). Photography as the art moyen is the art of ‘‘or-dinary’’ people who make an ‘‘interested’’ judgment of personal taste in-stead of a ‘‘disinterested’’ judgment of cultivated taste. According toBourdieu, most people bring to bear their cultural values and socio-economic interests on their judgments of photographs. Bourdieu thusproblematizes Kant’s categorical exclusion of interests, including‘‘charm,’’ ‘‘emotion,’’ ‘‘ethics,’’ and ‘‘desire’’ from the realm of properaesthetic judgment (Bourdieu 1990: 85–86).

Bourdieu’s theorization of photography in terms of interest rather thandisinterest is useful, and comes close to Barthes’’ emphasis on the a¤ec-tive investment of desire in his discussion of photography. Yet he di¤ersfrom Barthes on one crucial point: Bourdieu bases his argument on thegeneralizable, objective validity of ‘‘popular taste,’’ while Barthes insistson the impossibility of such a generalization. In so doing Bourdieu endsup rea‰rming the universality of a purportedly subjective judgment thatunderpins Kant’s definition of the aesthetic judgment. According to Kant:

We must begin by fully convincing ourselves that in making a judgment of taste(about the beautiful) we require [ansinnen] everyone to like the object, yet without

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this liking’s being based on a concept . . . and that this claim to universal validitybelongs so essentially to a judgment by which we declare something to be beauti-ful that it would not occur to anyone to use this term without thinking of univer-sal validity. (Kant 1987: 57)

Although the problem of the proper aesthetic judgment of the beautifulmay not be applicable to the discourse on photography, the problem ofthe ‘‘subjective universal’’ still haunts it. This problem becomes most ap-parent in contemporary semiotic discourse on photographic indexicality,and its reliance on the purportedly mechanical basis of the photographicsign’s fidelity to the pre-photographic referent.

Anticipating this problem in advance, and as if to salvage the impor-tance of desire, which Kant eliminates as a primitive domain of sensation,Barthes uses his own desire as a radical point of departure for his searchof the subjective universality of the photographic ‘‘essence.’’ At the sametime, as his reference to the impossibility of reaching the center of the lab-yrinth attests, Barthes does not (against the interpretations of critics likeBatchen and Tagg) present his meditation on photography as a universaltruth. As I have argued, Photography reveals its essence to be absolutecontingency. Ultimately, what Barthes discovers and communicates to usis the absolute singularity of our subjective experience that comes fromthe a¤ect of viewing a photograph.

As I have demonstrated in this article, despite the tendency to readBarthes’s theory of photography as a naive a‰rmation of photographicindexicality, his theory problematizes our very desire to believe in thisindexicality. I began by investigating the presumed ‘‘analogical’’ statusof the photograph in its relation to the real, which I suggested is al-ways already haunted by the possibility of betrayal, alteration, and in-fidelity. From there I proceeded to discuss how the spectatorial invest-ment in the fidelity of the photographic sign to the pre-photographicreferent is characterized by the structure of the symptom. The notionof indexicality in this sense is a kind of a constitutive symptom thaton the one hand is necessary in order for the discourse of photographyto foreground its medium specificity (based on fidelity to the real), andyet, on the other hand, undermines the purported universality of sucha discourse. Barthes’s reflexive exposition of his subjective desire in thecourse of his search for the objective essence of photography, high-lights, through the very notion of indexicality, the impossibility ofisolating the universal, objective quality of photography from the sub-jective, a¤ective investment of the spectator. In so doing he o¤ersnot only a theory of ‘‘Photography’’ but also a new method for itspursuit.


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(trans.), Limited inc., 1–23. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.Derrida, Jacques. 2001. The work of mourning, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

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Yuriko Furuhata (b. 1973) is an assistant professor at McGill University [email protected]. Her research interests include film theory, Japanese film, literature, and visual culture.Her publications include ‘‘Desiring resistance in the age of globalization’’ (2004); and ‘‘Re-turning to actuality: Fukeiron and the landscape film’’ (2007).

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Yuriko Furuhata - Indexicality as Symptom- Photography and Affect