23
University of Oregon The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography Author(s): Anselm Haverkamp Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 258-279 Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of Oregon Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771504 . Accessed: 05/09/2013 13:55 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

  • Upload
    anselm

  • View
    248

  • Download
    8

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

University of Oregon

The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on PhotographyAuthor(s): Anselm HaverkampSource: Comparative Literature, Vol. 45, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 258-279Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1771504 .

Accessed: 05/09/2013 13:55

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extendaccess to Comparative Literature.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

ANSELM HAVERKAMP

The Memory of

Pictures: Roland

Barthes and Augustine on Photography'

T HERE IS NO better "souvenir," it seems, than the self-made

photographic picture, which is meant to preserve individual memories from individual moments of an individual life. The univer- sal success of this picture-taking, memory-storing activity has, in the manner of a supplement (the truest supplement, perhaps, of our life- world), supplanted what it is supposed to subserve, memory as well as its content, "life." It is no surprise, of course, that the photographic picture as the most real representation of what there is seems to be most congenial to serve the remembrance of things past and to make

present in a supplementary way what maybe never was (except for the

picture taken and in order to get the picture taken). Nor is it a sur-

prise even for those specialists of the ancient art of memory, ars

memoriae, who remember "mental images" as the agents of memory, imagines agentes.2 The metaphor of "images" as mentally stored visual

representations-the metaphorics of actual pictures carried around in our heads-appear to be most truly illustrated by photographic pictures carried around in our pockets. Meanwhile, the notion of "mental images" has been discarded and dismissed by Wittgenstein's

1 For Jacques Derrida, July 15, 1990. Since this essay was written Derrida has pub- lished his m~moire "circonfessions" in the margins of Geoffrey Bennington's "Derridabase" (Paris: Collection "Les Contemporains," 1991). Also of interest for the present investigation is his exhibition at the Louvre, Memoire d'aveugle from Oct. 26, 1990 toJan.21, 1991.

2 See Frances A. Yates and, more recently, Jean-Philippe Antoine. Meanwhile, Mary Carruthers has shifted emphasis from Yates's paradigm of the Renaissance "imagina- tion" back to the medieval paradigm of "learning." See my comparative review of both Yates's and Carruthers's books.

258

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 3: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

philosophy.3 At the same time the happy photographic sublation of

memory in pictures reveals a destructive, negative dialectics more than it embodies the hoped-for synthesizing effects. The reason for this, I suggest, is a deeply seated misconception of what we call

memory, a forgetting, so to speak, of its mnemotechnical and

tropological structure. The mnemotechnical metaphor of memory images shows the underlying problem, to which its invention pro- vides a truly seminal answer, when it comes to the literal production of such imagery in photography. I want to focus here, with the help of Roland Barthes, on the photographic picture as this apparently non-

metaphoric opposite of pictorial imagination.4 Barthes's last book, La chambre claire, offers a phenomenology of

the photographic picture and, at the same time, a theory of mourn-

ing. It also implies, in practice, a theory of memory. The

phenomenology does more than its dedication to Sartre's

L'imaginaire suggests; and the mourning does more than its theory admits. The title carries, above all, the connotations of a tomb whose chamber, against all expectations of a camera obscura, is a well-lighted place, a camera lucida, whose memory is a clear and distinct one. I shall not attempt to illuminate all of the hidden features of this book, which is as literary as the genre of the essay permits, but restrict my- self to the theoretical side of both what it says and what it does.5

Part 1 sketches the semiological crux of what I have called else- where "marked reference" and the principle of "non-construction." Barthes's semiotics is considered as opposed to Eco's and with re-

spect to Sartre's. Part 2 outlines the work of mourning within a phe- nomenology of dead pictures, "flat death," as Barthes calls them. Bazin's essays on cinema, as well as Benjamin's book on the Baroque Trauerspiel, are taken into account. In Part 3, Barthes's literary perfor- mance is investigated as the supplement to a theory whose aporetic traits defy a solution. Rather than being resolved, the aporia is ex-

posed; the "Winter Garden picture" of his mother is a re-troping of the neoplatonic precursor, Augustine's Confessions. Part 4 tries to ap- ply the model of this metaphor, the translation of light, to the theory of memory developed in Barthes's reading of photography and im-

3 See Henry Staten, especially 72 ff., as well as Edward S. Casey, 88 and 268 ff. on "the photographic paradigm."

4 See my essay "Auswendigkeit" (on the "memory of rhetoric"), especially 27, 45 f., as well as my introduction to the same volume on "text as mnemo-technique," 7-15.

5 All references are to Camera Lucida, the English translation of La chambre claire (occasionally modified). I proceed from a close reading of Barthes's book to some consequences, whose implications I have tried to sketch out in some footnotes and afterthoughts towards the end of my essay.

259

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 4: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

plicitly practiced in the metonymy of his writing on photography, in the displacement of Augustine's model. "The white mythology," as Derrida has named it, informs and frames Barthes's writing as it had framed and informed Augustine's and, for that matter, Proust's.

Against Proust's and Augustine's deconstructive performances Barthes's nostalgia seems naive-a relapse into a state of delusion, but also, in its insistence on a lost hope, a recovery from this delusion's exhaustion. It would be pointless to do away with this hope without asking why it remains so persuasive. The limits of Barthes's theory deserve to be defended against the optimistic misuses of his terms, which take for granted what Barthes kept wishing for. His

looking back refutes those who celebrate as progress what he mourns as myth. More importantly, it debunks as mythic what comes along and is as real as myth's latest version, the "real."

La chambre claire elaborates an old idea, an "id6e fixe" that has in- spired as well as troubled Barthes's writings: the idea of reference, as distinguished, for example, from the famous "effet de reel"-the real

proper, as opposed to the merely fictitious. "What does the photo- graph transmit?" he asks apropos of "Le message photographique" (as early as 1961): "By definition the scene itself, the literal reality" (Image-Music-Text 16-17). The provocative impact of this simple and definitive answer has not waned but rather grown in the

poststructuralist period. It carries the mark of what was once known and became known again as the Sublime. Like the Sublime, the pho- tographic image insists on a message outside a code ("it is a message without a code") but, more precisely, "Of all the structures of infor- mation ["cultural" structures, that is], the photograph appears as the only one that is exclusively constituted and occupied by a 'denoted'

message, a message which totally exhausts its mode of existence" (17- 18). It is easy to invoke, and therefore superfluous to repeat, the semiotic refutation of Barthes's insistence on something intruding from beyond the code. "In actual fact," he has no doubt, "the photo- graphic message too [as a message] is connoted"; the photograph "is not only perceived, received, it is read" within the surrounding con- text and within the stock of signs available. There is no need to teach Barthes basic semiotics; rather, we need to grasp his "paradox" of the photographic image that seems to have "every chance of being mythi- cal" (19). His emphasis on reading as the necessary mode of "naturalization" (in Culler's sense) situates the mythical nature of the picture within the realm of the "unreadable."

Like Wittgenstein, who came at the end of his Tractatus to "things that cannot be put into words," Barthes comes to face in photography

260

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 5: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

things that "make themselves manifest" but resist analysis. Tractatus 6.522 reads in the original: "Dies zeigt sich, es ist das Mystische." Like Wittgenstein, who continued to analyze language, Barthes continued his work in semiology while keeping track of, and being attracted by, "what can be shown," but "cannot be said" (Wittgenstein 4.1212). In the photographic picture, says Barthes, what can be shown but can- not be said resists all possible description: "the feeling of 'denotation' ... is so great that the description of a photograph is literally impos- sible; to describe consists precisely in joining to the denoted message a relay or second-order message derived from a code . . . to signify something different to what is shown" (Image 18-19). This is con- firmed from a completely different angle by the phenomenological reduction performed in Sartre's L'imaginaire (1940): there the image presupposes the absence of what it presents; its re-presentation de- realizes what it fictitiously seems to make present. But whereas the purely imaginary relation that is semiotically framed through the "rhetoric of the image" de-realizes the reality depicted, the very same rhetoric allows for a "truly unprecedented" consciousness in the case of the photographic image. Thus we read in Barthes's essay "Rh6torique de l'image": "it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an aware- ness of its having-been-there"; in short, the paradox of "an illogical con-

junction between the here-now and the there-then. It is thus at the level of this denoted message or message without code that the real unreal- ity of the photograph can be fully understood: its unreality is that of the here-now .. .; its reality that of the having-been-there, . . . the always stupefying evidence of this is how it was, giving us, by a precious miracle, a reality from which we are sheltered" (Image 44).

It is important to note how this miracle differs from the reality- effect, which Barthes similarly describes as merely denoting, in a given context, a concrete reality not otherwise integrated or con- noted. The "effet de r6el" characterizes items which do not have a function in the plot and which therefore become instances of the "referential illusion" ("L'effet de reel" 88). But this effect, while rep- resenting a resistance to meaning, is part of the narrative contract. Like the "realism" it triggers, it is perfectly readable; realism is just another word for its readability.6 To be more precise, the miracle of

6 See the discussion of pictorial "violence" as opposed to "narrativity" in Bersani and Dutoit, 41-42 on Barthes, and 43-47 on early pictorial "ambivalence toward nar- rative" in Assyrian reliefs and the consequence of a "subversion of the narrative sub- ject" in these reliefs. Narrativity, it seems, served the elimination of the violence pic- tured, a violence that otherwise, in the "curious ambivalence" in question, would be the pre-historical (pre-narrative) point of the pictures. The point of my reference

261

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 6: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the photograph is not of an illusory or even hallucinatory nature; it is implied neither by the narrative contract nor by the phenomenologi- cal frame of a Sartrean imaginary. No doubt Barthes credits phenom- enology with an additional descriptive point, which remains uncon- trolled by semiotic analysis. But this advantage in description does not solve the mystery, but rather heightens its need for explanation. It brings out, one could say, its mythical dimension while on the other hand mystifying the semiological problem involved (thus Eco). More than any other representation of reality in the age of mechani- cal reproduction, the photographic image seems to exemplify, as well as to satisfy, a certain notion of "the literary." It "differs from the mi- metic and the semiotic in that it is not constructed" (Fry 45).

"Sovereign Contingency" bringing about a "return of the dead" is the more or less appropriate dramatic expression for what the prob- lem of "non-construction" amounts to semiologically. Semiologically, Barthes prefers to speak of some "unclassifiable" quality that falls short of the semiotic qualification of the sign proper; the photograph "aspires, perhaps, to become as crude, as certain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the dignity of language: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking photographs are signs which don't take, which turn, as milk does" (Camera Lucida 6). However, this quality, by refusing to become

semiotically manifest, remains invisible; it renders every photograph as such invisible: "Whatever it grants to vision . . . it is not it that we see." What, then, is it that we see in a photograph, if not (not essen-

tially and certainly not only) "it" itself? It is "death," no doubt, but we see "it," death, in every single photograph because "the referent ad- heres." Like the famous "Klebrigkeit der Libido," the bone of much Freudian contention, the adhesive power of reference fixes the past and makes it turn, "as milk does"; the past turns up as death. What returns in the past of their pictures are the still-living dead.

Contingency, as Barthes addresses the problem in Camera Lucida (4), is due to the apparatus, the mechanically executed "click," which

opens and closes the camera's artificial eye, the "little hole" through which the photographer "operates" (9-10). While he is careful to dis-

tinguish what he calls the operator from the spectator of the photo- graphic picture, the photographer as operator is dismissed, and his or

here is the analogue offered by Bersani and Dutoit's reading of the Assyrian reliefs to Barthes's reading of post-historical (post-narrative) photography in this sense. Thus, the authors in their introduction relate the rather sad historical commonplace of the period, "Art memorializes and glorifies the notorious atrocities of the Assyrians" (6; my emphasis). Art memorializes, but even in this case one can no longer say that it glori- fies.

262

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 7: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

her "authority" over how she or he "looks, limits, frames, and perspectivizes when he or she wants to take" is set aside in favor of the spectator and the spectrum, which, as the result of the operation, con- fronts him or her. More precisely, Barthes stresses the technicality of the picture taken, not the "emotional" investment of an author: the mechanical execution through an optical device and, even more

importantly, the chemical fixation on a certain material. The

photographer's obsession with the "keyhole" activity of "looking, lim- iting, framing" is of an entirely different order from what he or she triggers, the mechanism of an "objective" eye ("objectif" in French, "Objektiv" in German). In order to maintain the principal point of his analysis, Barthes underscores the paramount manipulation of the

photograph by equally technical means of operation. I do not want to

prematurely raise this objection, which at first glance makes a refuta- tion of Barthes's theory too easy. It would not be fair to the more

important point that is illustrated rather than substantiated by the

photographer's version of the "death of the author."'7 Barthes's main point is the death of the object revealed in the spectrum and "realized"

by the spectator; it hints at a "spectacle," spectaculum, that is at the bot- tom of every photograph: "the return of the dead" (Camera 9). The

spectacular return of the "real" is "not that which resists meaning, rather that which remains after meaning has been evacuated" (Schor 88). The celebrated deictic gesture of pointing, however, as experi- enced in the Empire of Signs, is the point of that other studium, mourn-

ing. Irreducible, incommensurable reference provides a principle not

of construction but of non-construction. It glues together, in a man- ner quite "illogical," the here-now and the there-then. The result, "flat death," is the flatly double image presenting death "live" while repre- senting the dead as living. The theory of mourning implied by Barthes's phenomenological description of the semiotic impasse, the

predicament of non-construction in the photographic picture, is de-

veloped in the second part of Camera Lucida, in what he calls "my palinode" (60): a revocation, that is, of phenomenology's worldli- ness, a conversion from the delusion of pictures to the "madness" of

writing (Roger 219). But before I turn to this second part, I want to consider how Barthes comes to terms with the problem he raises so

stubbornly against the grain of semiotic reason. He calls the point whose evidence he insists on the punctum, as opposed to the studium-or "occupation," as I would say with a similar emphasis on

7 See Michel Foucault's criticism of Barthes's 1968 essay "The Death of the Author" (Foucault 127).

263

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 8: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the Latin occupatio.8 There is no doubt that the studium of photogra- phy belongs to the discipline of semiotics, and only within the realm of this occupation and with continuous reference to it can the

punctum be pointed out. Everything in Barthes's theory of the photo- graphic picture depends on the interplay of the two, although, as I have indicated, the dialectic involved is negative and only tempo- rarily allows for a reconciliation of the point of non-construction with the study of semiotic construction.

The punctum "breaks" the studium; it somehow marks what, as we have seen, already tends to become manifest as a mark but remains, in its tendency towards becoming a sign, latent within the limitation of purely denotative reference. Barthes calls it punctum "for punctum is also: sting, speck, cut, little hole ... that accident which pricks me" (Camera 27). To find the punctum, to perceive it and point it out, means to re-mark what carries latently, but also evidently, the mark of "pure reference." It is the very point of photography-although Barthes is prepared to see this point historically as the "origin" of the

photographic picture-that it is markedly unmarked, punctuated by reference that has to be re-marked and pointed out. Not for the first time, but certainly once more anew, in the photographic picture a

point beyond codes becomes, and remains for a while, the necessary ingredient of pictorial composition. As the new, a poietic principle of

composition, the punctum is not restricted to the punctual detail, frac- ture, symptom, or any other formal feature; it is something more

capital: it "is Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (that has been), its pure representation" (Camera 96). What photography is

taking pictures of, in short, is Time itself. Barthes doesn't stop here, allegorizing Time (always already the

role of allegory before photography). Coming close to Benjamin's concept of modernity in the Ursprung ( Gesammelte Schriften 1) not only of photography but also of the baroque Trauerspiel, Barthes goes on: "Whether or not the subject (of a photographic picture) is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe"; death has "already oc- curred" (Camera 96). Andr6 Bazin, in his essay "Ontology of the Photo-

graphic Image" (1945), compares the photograph to the death mask, which he says similarly involves "a certain automatic process" (1:12n). Bazin's "mummy complex," according to which every plastic art stems from the mummification of corpses in ancient Egypt, conse-

quently entails the notion that painting and sculpture were invented

8 The term occupatio has been rediscovered in the early formalist (or more pre- cisely, morphological) study of "simple forms" byJolles (35 ff).Jolles's very pointed translation of the scholastic term occupatio into German is "Geistesbeschfiftigung."

264

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 9: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

"to keep up appearances in the face of the reality of death" (9). In photography this need can be answered with an unheard-of objectiv- ity: "For the first time, between the originating object and its repro- duction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent"; the picture "is formed automatically," which means it "affects us like a phenomenon in nature, like a flower or a snowflake" (Bazin 1:13). The punctum thus translates the Greek trauma into the latinity of Barthes's choice; it is the semiotic point of "significance" within the realm of semiological reason.9 Trauma is the oldest name for both this affect's natural cause and the blindness of its latency.10

Barthes is interested in both the natural history of death and its automatic transmission. In photography history becomes hysteria again, it turns "hysterical: the photographic picture is constituted only if (... .) we look at it-and in order to look at it, we must be (and consequently are) excluded from it" (Camera 65). Looking back into the eyes of, say, "Napoleon's younger brother, Jerome," as Barthes does with "amazement" on the first page ("I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor") brings us into an uncanny relationship with the past, similar to that of Klee's Angelus Novus, who, like Milton's

angel, looks "homeward" but sees, according to Benjamin, catastro- phe, upon which his eyes are mournfully fixed. There is no need to go further into the mournful studium of Barthes's book, since the punctum of it, the invisible point of his mourning, illustrates his

theory of mourning much better than all his Benjaminian allusions could do. The punctum of his studium of photography is the one pho- tograph not contained in the careful selection of examples, but care- fully excluded from it: his most important but also most singular ex-

ample, a picture of his mother. Since it is his mother, there is obvi- ously no point in printing it; we wouldn't recognize her and no studium would reveal to us the picture's punctum. Instead, the son's writing will create the mother's image as preserved by him. The deci-

' Burgin (84) compares Barthes's punctum to Kristeva's use of the "semiotic" as

opposed to the merely "symbolic" sphere of "signification." See Barthes's pre-figura- tions of the punctum in his notions of an "obtuse," or "third meaning" on the "level" of Kristeva's "signifiance" (Barthes, Image 54). He does not share, however, Kristeva's specific psychoanalytic implications, but rather the (neo-)platonic precursor's. In spite of Barthes's continuous reference to texts like Dante's and concepts of "medi- eval theory" like acedia, notions of "that shadowy state" (Rustle 286) have been mod- ernized into meaningless "obscurity" in order to be existentialized first, and purged of the obscurity inflicted afterwards (e.g. Schleifer 150).

10 For the historical point involved see Caruth 187: "For history to be a history of trauma means that it is referential precisely to the extent that it is not fully perceived as it occurs . . . that a history can be grasped only in the very inaccessibility of its occurence." To grasp the inaccessability of what has occurred is the punctum's point.

265

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 10: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

sive paragraph in Barthes's book is put into parentheses, just as the

picture withheld is kept in his desk: "(I cannot reproduce the Winter Garden Photograph. It exists only for me. For you, it would be noth-

ing but an indifferent picture ...)" (73). The vanishing point for a theory of mourning, as Barthes demon-

strates in his writing, can only be the individuality of what is lost and the incommensurability of the loss. So it is in Barthes's mourning for his mother, whom he barely survived to finish this book, and so it is in

Augustine's mourning for his mother, whom this other true son sur- vived only in order to finish his conversion according to her wishes and to account for it in the book of his Confessions. The adhesiveness of reference-libidinal, Oedipal-is the paradoxical semiotic out- come not only of this individual "drama of the gifted child" Roland, but of the more deeply seated aporia of mourning, of "keeping up appearences" and, more precisely, of preserving memory. Derrida, in a gentle modification of Barthes's intuition, clarifies this paradoxical notion of reference with the help of some Hegelian sublation. The irreducible reference Barthes insists on ("that has been") just survives, while the referent is said by Derrida to be "suspended," "aufgehoben" in the famous double sense of the word (L'Invention 287):11 the "there then" is suspended in the "here now" and simulta- neously preserved in the superimposition of the "there then" within the pictures here and now.

Barthes no doubt intended to remain faithful to the model of pro- jection and superimposition established by Saussure and Jakobson; his analysis introduces the photograph as the ideal paradigm for the interaction of the synchronic and the diachronic axes. "Toujours ce refus francais de l'h6g61ianisme" is his self-ironical commentary in Barthes par Barthes (104, 170). What the Hegelian figure adds to the

picture and Derrida wants to re-introduce into the description is the

preservation of the absently present other, L'invention de Vautre. This leads us to the theory of memory, a memory within which the lost

object, as Freud calls it, survives and persists as a subject. The picto- rial property, the visual (if not hallucinatory) qualification of memo- ries preserved and images recollected, comes true in photography. The sense-certainty of re-membering as imagining could not find a better proof of an old hope. As the Platonic metaphor of light sug-

" Derrida's memorial article "Les morts de Roland Barthes" appeared first in 1981 in a special issue of Poitique on Roland Barthes. It was later reprinted in L'invention de l'autre. References in this text are my translations. For Derrida's translation of "Aufhebung" as "rel&ve" see Bass's translator's notes in Margins of Philosophy, espe- cially in the chapter "Diff6rance," 19-20, note 23.

266

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 11: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

gests, we get hold of the idea of light only insofar as it manifests itself in the "evidence" of what is seen in it.'2 Photography produces this evidence automatically.

In photography, the limits of a phenomenology of the imaginary have become translucent, and what fascinates Barthes is the return not only of the dead but of evidence, of memory not as mental imag- ery but as what this imagery was about and took its attraction from, the "light" of the idea. This is evidence not of what is "gut aufge- hoben," but of what was not well enough preserved at all-forgotten within memory, in a memory without recollection. Such a memory of the forgotten may be accessible, at last, through the medium of pho- tography. The photographic picture reveals to our eyes no more than a primitive drawing could have revealed to primitive man. But the mechanically executed, automatically fixed "intentionality" of refer- ence does more than just represent things referred to; it implies, as Derrida says, the return of the dead in the structure of reference. The photographic picture reveals intentionality as reference (L'Invention 292). The "there has been" of the photographic picture, more than of any other type of pictorial representation, reflects our intention towards representation. It thereby returns to the living their relation to the dead; the return of the dead, it turns out, is a return of the living to the dead-a sublime attraction superbly reformulated by Benjamin with reference to Roman ethics: "Being moved by beauty is an ad plures ire, as the Romans called dying" (Illuminations 198.13).

12 Blumenberg, "Licht" 440r: "wir werden des Lichtes nur inne an der GewiBheit, die es uns am erhellten Seienden gewihrt" (my paraphrase); commenting upon Augustine's critique of the neoplatonic metaphysics of light: "er fifhrt die Lichtmeta- physik auf die Lichtmetaphorik zurfick" (his emphasis). This leads Augustine to a "metaphysics of conversion" (441). For Blumenberg's concept of "absolute meta- phor" see his Paradigmen zu einer Metapherologie 9 ff. There is no paradigm of "abso- lute metaphor" more basic than the metaphor of light, "mythologie blanche" accord- ing to Derrida (Marges). Blumenberg's re-reading of Augustine starts from Heidegger's reading of Plato in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit ("Licht" 434); thus also de Man's understanding of the "light as idea" (Epistemology 15 f.). As far as Barthes is concerned, Merleau-Ponty's punctum caecum is worth consideration, a blind spot within consiousness, said to contain rather than exclude the invisible within the vis- ible. "The visibility of the visible cannot, by definition, be seen" is Derrida's para- phrase of Merleau-Ponty's point in Memoire d'aveugle (50, 57, my translation). Merleau's late reflections on "the visible and the invisible" seek a phenomenology "de l'autre monde" that would be able to explore "the limits of a phenomenology of the imaginary," "du cache," that is (283). Gasch6 (Tain 16) uses Blumenberg's read- ing of neoplatonic light metaphysics ("photology") as an early instance of such "hyper-reflection." In "Deconstruction" (184) Gasch6 considered Merleau's analysis of "the invisible" as the last instance of "hyperreflection" before the analysis of "infra- structures" named "deconstruction." Consequently, Gasche devotes the last chapter of The Tain of the Mirror to what is left, after metaphor's deconstruction, as "quasi- metaphoricity."

267

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 12: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

For Barthes, the attraction of photographs rests on the re-enactment of such an ad plures ire.

The punctum of Barthes's book, the withheld photograph in the center of La chambre claire, is a picture of his mother as a child. As the very point of his studium of photography it keeps his work of mourn-

ing from melancholia; it deepens his mourning in the work of melan- cholia. Barthes is busy, quoting from Val6ry, with "writing a little com-

pilation about her, just for myself," and he announces in another pa- renthesis "(perhaps I shall write it one day, so that, printed, her memory will last at least the time of my own notoriety)" (63). He does, as a matter of fact, write to her memory here, in the guise of parentheses; and he knows very well that he can do so only in the shelter of parentheses. It allows him to write what is invisible for us, the punctum that marks the son's love as the mother's love has left its mark on the son's writing. In the "Winter Garden photograph" Barthes reads his mother's death, which had occurred a few days be- fore he found this picture, "looking for the truth of the face I had loved" (67). Turning to her in memory, he reads, moreover, his own death, which occurred not much later, leaving La chambre claire a

posthumous work: "Once she was dead," he realizes for himself, "I no

longer had any reason to attune myself to the progress of the supe- rior Life Force," "the harsh victory of the race" or any other higher purpose (Camera 72). Again, there is no reason to go into the philo- sophical motifs dealt with in this son's return to his mother. What is, however, most striking in this return is the "luminosity" of her face rediscovered in the photograph, the radiance of her presence brought back, in an act of momentary evidence, to the studium of the son's writing.

Before turning to philosophical problems in Book 10 of his Confes- sions, to meta-critical problems of memory in general and, before that, to the sense and intention of the confessions in particular, Au-

gustine had just finished, in Book 9, the story of his mother's death. Like Barthes's very brief account of the "Winter Garden photo- graph," Augustine's account of his mother's death does not leave the son with any individual sense of living on in this world. Unlike Augus- tine in Books 10-13 of the Confessions, Barthes does not believe in any collective purpose, in any higher aim left to him after his mother's death: "From now on I could do no more than await my total, undialectical death" (72). This is perhaps what Augustine's mother herself would also have thought: after his conversion, as after hers, there was little more to await, but death; a death not total, indeed, but not dialectical either, since the life she expected left her worldly

268

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 13: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

life behind so entirely that her son's concern about her burial place could only heighten her worries about his future faith.

Augustine's mother had more to worry about in her son's life than Barthes's mother ever had. Augustine's conversion to his mother's "religion" was more in danger than Barthes's dedication to his mother could have ever been. Augustine's oblique narrative reflects his mother's worries in a mixture of self-accusation and self-irony, both symptoms of his incurable narcissism. Its vehicle is the philoso- phy that precedes his conversion in the double sense of a prelude to, as well as a pretext for, his writing the Confessions. When her end was near, he remembers-and he also remembers how little he realized how soon she was to leave him-a quite extraordinary conversation that took place between them, the famous scene known as the "vision of Ostia."'" Augustinians are still worried and excited about the "truth" of this event in Augustine's account, a highly sophisticated neoplatonic "mise en scene" of the shared expectation-shared by Augustine and his mother, but also shared by Platonic philosophy and Christian theology-of an afterlife. Monica, the mother, plays, or rather is, the Christian, while Augustine enjoys and indulges himself in impersonating the Plotinian philosopher. As one might expect, Monica is unhappy with her son's "show," his flight in both senses of the word; she even flatly refuses to cooperate and reminds him of her one and only goal, his conversion. Augustine, in turn, admits that he "forgot" what he had to say (Confessions 9: 11, 27 ), or could not say after being definitively interrupted by his mother's urgent exhorta- tion and subsequent death.14 Her death, in fact, remains the only in- stance of unfailing conversion in a book whose basic speech act, the confessio, constantly falls short of what it says because of the very rhe- torical error it confesses, the delusion of illusio. What makes this scene remarkable with respect to Barthes is less the philosophical context (and still less the theological), than the rhetorical staging of the "show," the frame within which the vision takes place, by which it is limited, and through which it is contemplated. It is a camera lucida, the well-lit inner garden of a hotel in Ostia, very much like the garden of the hotel in Milan where the actual conversion took place under a figtree. Looking through the window into the empty but luminous

3 O'Daly (215 f.) interprets the vision of Ostia as a "rare instance" of what in Blumenberg's "concepts of reality" ("Wirklichkeitsbegriff") is called "momentane Evidenz"-neoplatonism accomplished. See again Blumenberg, "Licht" 441.

"1 See Herzog's reading of the "Non in sua voce" (232), as well as Vance (28), who correctly remarks that the mother "promptly dies," while the rhetorician is left be- hind, in this "itinerary of a Christian neoplatonist," with his narrative.

269

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 14: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

space outside, Augustine places in the Ostian garden the revelatory conversation that is said to have given the pleasure of enjoying "what never a man's eye has seen and no ear has ever heard" (10, 13). We haven't seen Barthes's "Winter Garden" either and cannot see, but

only read his reading of, the vision of his mother as a child.15 There, however, in the "luminous glance" of her eyes, we find the proof of his "theory," his "show." What makes the photograph so special is the chemical preservation that allows the mechanical transmission of the actual light carrying in its rays the glance of the dead. Thus Barthes concludes: "Always the photograph astonishes me, with an astonish- ment which endures and renews itself inexhaustibly. Perhaps this as- tonishment reaches down into the religious substance out of which I am molded; nothing for it: Photography has something to do with resurrection" (82).

As I have said, I am interested less in the theology involved than in the metaphorics that enables both this theology and the apparatus in

question: the camera lucida of Augustine's vision as a metaphor literal- ized by the photographic camera in Barthes's description, and

memory, as the apparatus that provides us with visions of the past. It does so rhetorically, with the means of rhetorical illusio, whose irony (illusio is "irony" in Cicero's translation) is present in Augustine's ac- count of his conversion, whereas in Barthes's work of mourning it submits to the total, undialectical melancholy of a Benjaminian reader. What is resistant in his reading, in the "deepening of his

mourning" is a son true to his mother-true, that is, in his writing. "True mourning," however, "is less deluded"; likewise, the "Vertie-

fung der Trauer" of Benjamin's Trauerspiel is only an "impossible mourning."16 Derrida enforces the "metonymical force" of Barthes's

writing: "la metonymie la plus saissisante (...) d'une instantaneite

plus vieille" (L'Invention 299). The punctum, as he points out, saves reference, or incurable desire, in that it "suspends" the referent, the "lost object" in Freud's sense. Thus, Derrida's "relive" explains, in a belated consolation, Barthes's work of mourning in its relief. The un-

certainty of this relief and ultimate impossibility of its success cannot be explained in Derrida's mourning for the deaths of Roland Barthes. He is not persuaded by the magic of the pictures but by

15 The only one, as far as I can see, who has made the same point about Augustine's mother's infancy is Burke (122).

16 "True mourning" according to de Man (Rhetoric 261); "impossible mourning" according to Derrida's "Memoires" (29). For the "deepening of mourning" in Benjamin's Trauerspiel (1928) as opposed to Freud's distinction of "Mourning and Melancholia" (1919), see my essay on "cryptic subjectivity," especially 349-56.

270

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 15: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

Barthes reading them: how he reads his death in the picture of his mother as a child, or reads, to be more precise, his future in the ful- filled past of the picture (the aorist of the picture). Augustine's irony in dealing with his vision is pointless for Barthes. Augustine admits he has forgotten, but Barthes has not; what persists, insists, in his memory is a temporality whose rhetoric Augustine left, or tried to leave, behind in the writing of his confessions. Augustine's anticipa- tion is left behind by Barthes in a past that has already been fulfilled.

Resurrection in Barthes, however, both quotes and defies a much closer precursor's idiom as well: "The Photograph does not call up the past (nothing Proustian in a photograph)" (Camera 82). He abruptly leaves aside what had seemed to be the declared model of his writing (as "circular memory") but proves to be this model's fail- ure at the end (Plaisir59). The "image juste" of his mother is not like the image injuste of Marcel's grandmother in Le c6td de Guermantes. There, the image evoked in Marcel's eyes is called "a real photo- graph," produced "in an entirely mechanical way." As in Barthes's account, the "truth" of this picture is a truth in spite of the picture and exposed only in Proust's writing. Barthes's recognition of the mother as a child is the happy anamnesis of what he cannot possibly have known: the child his mother was. Proust's evidence is a moment of sudden alienation that turns the grandmother into some "old woman he did not know" any longer." The turn against Proust brings about what Proust was about to de-construe, the very remembrance of things past-the Recherche is no recovery; its very procedure waylays the intended result.18

Compared to Proust's disillusionment, the melancholy of Barthes's "folie" seems both deluded and persuasive all the same: "The discov- ery that silver halogens are sensitive to light made it possible to re- cover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object" (Camera 80). The conclusion, that the photograph must be "literally an emanation of the referent," insists not so much on the "magic" of an unmediated vision as on the fixation of a visible trace, the "light-writing" of the photograph.19 The sublime example,

17 See Kracauer's use of this scene for his "theory of film" (Theorie 39 f.). I owe this reference to Inka Millder-Bach, who follows Kracauer's changing attitude from the early article "Die Photographie" (1927) to the film book. See also Benjamin's com- ments on the Proust passage in a note from Passagen-Werk (5: 508; Konvolut K 8,2).

18 Following Jacobs, Schlossman underlines this result of Benjamin's essay on the "Image of Proust": "The Bild, both visual and scriptural, enters the terrain of Proustian invisibilia: it reveals not a life, but the impossibility of revealing that life" (107).

19 Bittner Wiseman remains ambivalent, misled as well as misleading, in this point

271

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 16: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

as highlighted in Boileau's preface to Longinus, was Genesis: "God said, Let there be light, and there was light."20 In the light of this sentence, the textual milieu of Barthes's recognition scene may be

obvious; even more obvious are the gnostic commonplaces support- ing the recognition of his mother's "transparent soul." But the suc- cess of his quest is endangered by the Manichean threat that the pho- tographer might not manage to "supply the transparent soul its

bright shadow," with the result that "the subject dies forever" (Camera 110). The relapse into the sphere from which Augustine was barely able to escape is unquestionable. Augustine's "vain attempts at Plotinian ecstasy," his vain translation of neoplatonic "flights of the soul" into transcendental ecstasies, has seen many rewritings and refutations.21 The attraction of the camera lucida for "enlightenment," passing from the darkness of a camera obscura to the transparency of

representation, goes farther back than the actual invention of the

apparatus in question (see DeJean 103). The apparatus manifests

what, in the latency of the "idea," was operative as a kind of writing rather than the immediacy of an "image."

Thus, what is perceived in photography as "a magic, not an art"

(Camera 88) is the cultural transmission or writing of the trace rather than the pre-cultural "aura," the "air" of the uncoded image with which Barthes seduces us into a post-modern seance of ghostlike ap-

a never-questioned "realism" that unites readers of Barthes like Sontag, Berger, (155). The "madness," to repeat Roger, is the madness of writing, not a hallucinatory holding on to "magic." What Bittner Wiseman describes as "ekstasy" is the reverse of Krauss in their writings on photography, and, with respect even to Benjamin, Buck- Morss. A supreme example for the non-realistic, "meta-physical" quality of photogra- phy is the use Brancusi made of photographs, when he-in a truly supplementary way-took the pictures of his works, skeptically watched by his photographer friends Man Ray and Brassai. An apparently "technically flawed" photograph he took of his "Infinite Column" reveals the column's vibration, "demonstrating," as Bach has shown (126), the poietic principle (or punctum) of infinity that was to be made vis- ible-though precisely not through realistic photography.

20 See Longinus xxxvii and 93 (Russell's commentary and translation of 9,9). Longinus was careful enough to put some emphasis, in his quotation from Moses ("the lawgiver of the Jews") on the poet's mise en scene that interrupts and comments upon the quoted: "God said-said he, and what?-Let there be light. And there was" (On the Sublime 9,9). Moses is said to be writing "at the very beginning of his laws," and what he reports God to have "said," establishes "light" as the arch-trace of the institu- tional act of lawgiving. To call this transposition on Moses the lawgiver's part "sub- lime" reveals, and veils at the same time, the violence involved in the instituting act. See also note 27 below.

21 Notably in Dante's poetics, according to Freccero (9), who gives a comprehen- sive account of a "poetics of flight," the late reversal and counter-example of which would be Proust's Recherche as "incessantly, in flight," according to de Man (Allegories 78).

272

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 17: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

pearances. A note from Benjamin's Passagen on "Trace and Aura"

may be helpful here (M 16a, 4):

Spur und Aura. Die Spur ist die Erscheinung einer Nahe, so fern das sein mag, was sie hinterlieB. Die Aura ist die Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah das sein mag, was sie hervorruft. In der Spur werden wir der Sache habhaft; in der Aura bemichtigt sie sich unser. (5:560)

Like the trace, the photograph is an appearance up close, even

though what appears in it may be far away. And like the aura, the

photograph's appearance of what is far away is triggered by its being in our hands, in front of our eyes. The dialectic of the photographic picture exemplifies like no other instance Benjamin's metaphor of the "dialectical image." It explains the dialectic of what Benjamin calls image as a dialectic of trace and aura operative within the writ-

ing of the photographic picture.22 Like the superimposition of metaphor and metonymy, the dialec-

tic of trace and aura accounts for what Benjamin postulates in "On the Mimetic Faculty": "To read what was never written" (Reflections 336).23 The paradox involved is the same as in Barthes's paradox of the "uncoded image": to see what cannot be read in Barthes's sense is to read the unreadable, to "perceive" the aura produced by the trace of the photograph's light-writing. Again, perception is a metaphor for what is only transferred and finally deciphered in the trace of

transference, the writing of metaphor. There is no code for the auratic after-image, even though it looks as if it would depend in its written state on a code established through the trace, or, more pre- cisely, by the metonymic contexture of metaphoric reference. Barthes leaves no doubt that the trace in itself is no code, although it can become part of a code and thereby lose its qualification as trace. While fixing the photo graphically, the trace enables the auratic ef-

22 The dialectics, as well as the relevant quotations, have been systematically over- looked by Buck-Morss. See my "Notes" on the textual status of the "dialectical im- age," as well as Menke (Nachleben, especially 344-48) on Barthes. Jacobs, who is dis- missed by Buck-Morss (339), has-as far as I can see for the first time and most bril- liantly-analyzed the metaphorological mise en scine of Benjamin's own texts in her seminal article, "Walter Benjamin." AsJacobs was able to show, "the 'image' . . . can only be regarded as a metaphor for itself. . . The very 'presence' of the so-called image . . . indicates the absence of that which it names-itself" (925). The absence, that is, of the "image" itself, not of what it presents. Thus the absence of the mother's picture in Barthes's writing proves the point elaborated in Jacobs's reading of Ben- jamin, the punctum in the precise sense, "when memory was not yet image" (928), before Barthes was even born, and before his mother's becoming an "image" in her son's memory could prefigure her death.

23 Cf. "Kleine Geschichte der Photographie" (1931), 2:368. The same motif sur- faces at the end of Berliner Kindheit um 1900 (4:304). I owe these references to Irving Wohlfarth.

273

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 18: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

fect. It would be an error to reverse the order of things and deduce some "undeniable veracity" from what is commonly called the "docu- mentary status" of the pictures' origin (as, for example in Krauss 211). The realism involved is an effect that does not lend itself to causal speculation.

For the same reason, photography does not really "replace" memory, as is often feared. Rather, it explains the age-old metaphor of the "mind's eye." In coming true the image-metaphor of mnemotechnics is no longer true; deprived of its metaphorical poten- tial, what remains is barely more than the catachrestic souvenir of how memory once was conceived. Proust, whose "involuntary memory" is inevitably invoked at this point, does not prove the oppo- site; Susan Sontag misreads both him and Barthes, to whom she owes most of her book on photography: "Proust," she says, "somehow mis- construes what photographs are: not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement" (164-65). Although they are indeed an invention, they are not a replacement-a re- invention, to "memorialize," for example, what remains from the family in a post-traditional age, a compensation for some evidence lost (Sontag 9). Moreover, this is an invention that re-exemplifies, and revivifies, the writing within memory. Not the least attraction of the neoplatonic metaphysics of light was the analogy to, if not the

explanation of, the mediality of the spoken word, whose "absolute metaphor" it is-the so far unsurpassed model of its writing, "mythologie blanche."24

The comparison with another unit idea of memory, citation, may elucidate this. What is the difference between the voice recorded by linguistic representation and the image preserved through photo- graphic representation? There are even closer analogues to the pho- tographic picture, like phonographic recordings of voices on disks. Documentary status should not mislead us; it may serve as a means of

24 See Beierwaltes 356, or, as Derrida's "white mythology" has it: "the sun repre- sents what is natural in philosophical language," and, therefore, marks the disap- pearance of nature. "If the sun is metaphorical always, already, it is no longer com- pletely natural. It is always, already a luster, a chandelier, one might say an artificial construction [his emphasis], if one could still give credence to this signification when nature has disappeared" (Margins 251; my emphasis). The reinvention of nature in a "system of writing" that made the reading of books a "hallucinatory" af- fair around 1800 is the subject of Kittler, who deals with the final stage of literalizing the metaphor. Kittler agrees with Barthes, whom he does not quote in this connec- tion, that this happens in literature and not in photography-a truly conservative model of writing where, according to my reading of Barthes, the older trace of "evi- dence" and of its vanishing is artificially remembered. Literature after 1800 favors catachresis, as I read Kittler, while photography in Barthes presents us with an after- image of "metaphore vive." See in contrast note 6 above.

274

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 19: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

identification, as in Barthes's book the names of the depicted (Queen Victoria, or Lewis Payne). What distinguishes these pictures or voices from the verbatim quotations recorded in the protocols of, say, the inquisition analyzed by Carlo Ginzburg?" The studium and punctum of written sources undergo different modes of codification, but the point of Barthes's analysis, the punctum within his studium of

photography, is striking only insofar as the new medium, or trace, i.e. the amount of "writing" involved within the new medium of photo- graphic representation, allows for the first time in memory a reflec- tion of our means of remembrance (the amount of "imaging" in- volved within the old technics of representing the past); it is this re- flection we perceive in photography.

Again, a possible point of reference is Benjamin and his theory of citation. On the one hand quotation is an "element," a momentum of the dialectic within the dialectical image; on the other hand, this im-

age is itself a quotation, cited from the text of history and quoting the texture of history (Menke, Sprachfiguren 369-79). Derrida's comment on the photographic picture's intentionality as reference finds in

Benjamin's uses of citation an ideal field of application.26 The textuality of reference, rather than its intentionality, guarantees within the marks of the quotation-as it does in the frame of a pic- ture-the after-life of the quoted, "Nachleben im Zitat" (Menke, Sprachfiguren). What is known as "logocentrism" may have been

"phaocentrism" before and a compromise afterwards; initially "In the

beginning was the Word" may have been the translation of "Let there be light and there was light.""27 The compromise of "white mythology"

25 Ginzburg's book on the "Benandanti" did more than just open up an entirely new register of historical "sources." Le Roy Ladurie's "novel" Montaillou capitalizes on this. As the success of Montaillou proves, the possibility of transcription and the institutionalized transfer from history to narration structurally privileges written traces above merely auratic traces like, for example, Alessandro Moreschi's "the last castratos" (Vatican recordings from 1902 and 1904). See Barthes on Balzac's Sarrasine (L'Empire 77): "la photographie du castrat fictif fait partie du texte; remontant la ligne des codes, nous avons le droit d'arriver chez Bulloz, rue Bonaparte, et de demander que l'on nous ouvre le carton (probablement celui des 'sujets mythologiques') ou nous decouvrirons la photographie du castrat."

26 See the basic design of "Signature Event Context" and the debate that followed (collected under the heading of Limited Inc).

27 De Man, commenting upon Hegel's inability to come to dialectical terms with the "Sublime" in Longinus's quotation from Genesis, emphasizes that "light is indeed the privileged object of predication" in that it "names the necessary pheno-menality of any positing" ("Hegel" 147) and as Chase goes on to read "the difficult part" of that reading: "'Let there be light and there was light' has to be read not only as a speech act that posits the phenomenal world but as a decree in which the Word posits itself as light" (95). "Light" qua metaphor, less for the Word than for its posi- tional power, illuminates this power's invisibly visible effectiveness more than it erases it. See also note 20 above.

275

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 20: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

that allows this translation is reproduced by Barthes in order to re- inscribe into the studium of traces the "folie" of mournful remem- brance. The picture of the mother as child, the invisible though not unreadable punctum of his writing, marks the little space of a tomb, whose inscription remains to be read. The illuminated space of every picture includes such a tomb.

New York University

Works Cited

Antoine, Jean-Philippe. "The Art of Memory and its Relation to the Unconscious."

Comparative Civilizations Review 18 (1988): 1-21.

- . "Ars memoriae: Rhetorik der Figuren, Riicksicht auf Darstellbarkeit und die Grenzen des Textes." Haverkamp and Lachmann 53-73.

Augustinus, Aurelius. Confessiones/Les confessions. Ed. M. Skutella and A. Solignac. OEuvres de Saint-Auqustin, XIII-XIV. Paris: Descleke de Brouwer, 1962.

Bach, Friedrich Teja. Brancusi Photo Reflection. Paris: Seuii/Didier Imbert, 1991.

Barthes, Roland. Essais critiques 1-4. Paris: Seuil, 1964-.

- . "L'effet de r6el." Communications 11 (1968): 84-89.

-- . Image-Music-Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill & Wang, 1977.

The Rustle of Language. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1986.

--. L'Empire des signes. Geneva: Skira, 1970. -

. SS/Z. Paris: Seuil, 1970.

- . Le Plaisir du texte. Paris: Seuil, 1973.

---- . BarthesparBarthes. Paris: Seuil, 1975. - . La chambre claire. Paris: Gallimard-Seuil, 1980.

-- . Camera Lucida. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill & Wang, 1989.

Bazin, Andr6. What is Cinema? 2 vols. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.

Beierwaltes, Walter. "Plotins Metaphysik des Lichtes." Zeitschrift fiur Philosophische Forschung15 (1961): 334-62.

Benjamin, Walter. Gesammelte Schriften. 7 vols. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972-86.

•- . Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken,

1968.

--. Reflections. Ed. Peter Demetz. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schocken, 1978.

Berger,John. About Looking. New York: Pantheon, 1980.

Bersani, Leo, and Ulysse Dutoit. The Forms of Violence: Narrative in Assyrian Art and Modern Culture. New York: Schocken, 1985.

276

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 21: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

Bittner Wiseman, Mary. The Ecstasies of Roland Barthes. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1989.

Blumenberg, Hans. "Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit." Studium Generale 10 (1957): 431-47.

-- . Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Archiv ffir Begriffsgeschichte 6. Bonn: Bouvier, 1960.

-- . "Wirklichkeitsbegriff und M6glichkeit des Romans." Poetik und Hermeneutik 1 (1964): 9-32.

- . H6hlenausgdnge. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1989.

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Burgin, Victor. The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity. Atlantic High- lands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1986.

Burke, Kenneth. The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961.

Caruth, Cathy. "Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History." Yale French Studies 79 (1991): 181-92.

Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Casey, Edward S. Remembering: A Phenomenological Study. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1987.

Chase, Cynthia. Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition.

Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Culler,Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.

DeJean, Joan. Libertine Strategies: Freedom and the Novel in Seventeenth-Century France. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981.

De Man, Paul. "Epistemology of Metaphor." On Metaphor. Ed. Sheldon Sacks. Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 15-28.

--. Allegories ofReading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

"Hegel on the Sublime." Displacement: Derrida and After. Ed. Mark Krupnik. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. 139-53.

- . The Rhetoric ofRomanticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. Marges de laphilosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972.

---. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

--_. "Signature Event Context." Trans. Samuel Weber, Jeffrey Mehlmann. Glyph 1 (1977):172-97.

---. "Les morts de Roland Barthes." Poitique 47 (1981): 269-91.

--- . Mmoires of Paul de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

--. L 'invention de l'autre. Paris: Galilee, 1987.

Limited Inc. Ed. Gerald Graff. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1988.

M. Mmoires d'aveugle: L 'autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: R6union des mus6es nationaux, 1990.

277

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 22: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

. "Circonfession."Jacques Derrida. Geoffrey Bennington andJacques Derrida. Paris: Seuil, 1991.

Eco, Umberto. La struttura assente. Milan: Bompiani, 1968.

Freccero, John. Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-

sity Press, 1986.

Foucault, Michel. "What is an Author?" Textual Strategies. Ed.Josu6 V. Harari. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976. 124-42.

Fry, Paul H. "Non-Construction: History, Structure, and the Occasion of the Liter-

ary." YaleJournal of Criticism 1 (1988): 45-64.

Gasch6, Rodolphe. "Deconstruction as Criticism." Glyph 6 (1979): 177-215.

-- . The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Ginzburg, Carlo. I Benandanti: Stregoneria e culti agrari tra Cinquecento e Seicento. Torino: Einaudi, 1966, 1972.

Haverkamp, Anselm. "Auswendigkeit: Das Gedichtnis der Rhetorik." Geddchtnis- kunst. 25-52.

-- . "Kryptische Subjektivitit: Archaologie des Lyrisch-Individuellen." Poetik und Hermeneutik 13 (1988): 347-83.

--. "Notes on the Dialectical Image (How Deconstructive Is It?)." Diacritics 22 (1992): forthcoming.

- . "Paradigma Metapher, Metapher Paradigma." Poetik und Hermeneutik 12 (1987): 547-60.

---. Rev. of Yates and Carruthers. Rhetorik-Ein internationales Jahrbuch 10 (1991): 188-90.

Haverkamp, Anselm and Renate Lachmann, eds. Geddchtniskunst: Raum Bild Schrift. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991.

Herzog, Reinhart. "Non in sua voce: Augustins Gesprich mit Gott in den Confessiones." Poetik und Hermeneutik 11 (1984): 213-50.

Jacobs, Carol. The Dissimulating Harmony. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

- . "Walter Benjamin: The Image of Proust." MLN 86 (1971): 910-32.

Jolles, Andre. EinfacheFormen. Halle/Tilbingen: Niemeyer, 1930.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Aufschreibesysteme 1800-1900. Munich: Fink, 1985.

Kracauer, Siegfried. Das Ornament derMasse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963.

Theorie des Films: Die Errettung der dufieren Wirklichkeit. Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp, 1973.

Krauss, Rosalind. The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Myths. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

Kristeva,Julia. La revolution du langagepoetique. Paris: Seuil, 1974.

Longinus. On the Sublime. Ed. D.A. Russell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964.

Menke, Bettine. Sprachfiguren: Name Allegorie Bild nach Walter Benjamin. Munich: Fink, 1991.

- . "Das Nachleben im Zitat: Benjamins Gedichtnis der Texte." Haverkamp and Lachmann, 74-110.

278

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 23: The Memory of Pictures: Roland Barthes and Augustine on Photography

BARTHES & AUGUSTINE

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Le visible et l'invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.

Millder-Bach, Inka. "Schlupfl6cher Die Diskontinuitit des Kontinuierlichen im Werk Siegfried Kracauers." Siegfried Kracauer: Neue Interpretationen. Ed. Michael Kessler and Thomas Levin. Stuttgart: Stauffenburg, 1990. 249-66.

O'Daly, Gerard. Augustine's Philosophy of Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Roger, Philippe. Roland Barthes, roman. Paris: Grasset, 1985.

Sartre,Jean-Paul. L'imaginaire. Paris: Gallimard, 1940.

Schleifer, Ronald. Rhetoric and Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse Theory. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Schlossman, Beryl. "Proust and Benjamin: The Invisible Image." Benjamin's Ground: New Readings of Walter Benjamin. Ed. Rainer Nigele. Detroit: Wayne State Univer-

sity Press, 1988.105-17.

Schor, Naomi. Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1977.

Staten, Henry. Wittgenstein and Derrida. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Vance, Eugene. Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages. Lin- coln: University of Nebrasa Press, 1986.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuiness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961.

Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul/Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966.

279

This content downloaded from 129.81.226.149 on Thu, 5 Sep 2013 13:55:22 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions