mirroring

London, Winter, 2013.

A Journal of

PHILOSOPHY, POETRY, POLITICS.

Present an essay written by VASILEIOS KANTAS ENTITLED

Mirroring ‘The Imaginary’ onto ‘Camera Lucida’

Mirroring ‘The Imaginary’ onto ‘Camera Lucida’ Vasileios Kantas. Winter, 2013.

W

hat is “Camera Lucida” made of, in a closer look? Roland Barthes contends that

it simply includes ‘reflections on Photography’, or more accurately, according to the original text, ‘Notes on Photography”. Maybe a more apposite translation of the book would put a title such as ‘projections on Photography’. I claim this, as Barthes’ latest book is nothing but a screen, on which some of his main intellectual influences are projected. Issues of literature and reality, mixed with personal quests reflected upon his individual temperament have coloured this screen, giving us an illustration of his personality.

An unsuspecting reading –almost superficial- of his text gives the impression that Barthes constructs a totally new visual theory. All these definitions and terms emanating from Latin and Greek roots predispose an invention. Not that his approach on photography isn’t remarkable in thoughts and alluring in style, though I think it owes its scaffold to other authors. I find it to be a brilliant application of some theories very popular into French intellectual society of the post war period. An excellent cognizant of the written speech, Barthes managed to combine his favorite writers’ texts –Michelet, Lacan, Proust- with his inner need to mourn his mother, through a novelistic essay which apparently seems to refer to photographic theory. At this point, I have to admit his original contribution towards a phenomenological analysis of the photographic image.

In other words, Camera Lucida is a work of theory but it is also a narrative, nearly a novel. It is a miraculously synthesized text –brief, transparent and clear- which breaks, on the level of argumentation, with the uniformly intellectual character of Barthes, previous writings: the argument is in fact emotional and shows the personal foundation of any intellectual enterprise. It is a work of semiology in that it explores 2

the photographic sign; it is also a work of anti-semiology in that instead of studying the interrelationship of signs within a system it looks through the individual sign to the referent (the real object). Moreover it is an elegy for Barthes’ mother (who died in 1977; the book was written between April and June 1979)1 and an exploration of his own mortality; it is his most personal work, yet constantly echoing, in its strategies and even in its verbal rhythms, the literature of the past. Baudelaire, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce reemerge from Barthes’ past as figures of his obsession with language.

Reading Camera Lucida, three main issues seem to stand out of the text: Time, Gaze and Death. Many essays have been written concerning the issues mentioned above, noticing that each one is related to a theorist of which Barthes has obviously been influenced: Proust as regards Time, Lacan concerning Gaze and Michelet regarding Death. Aim of this particular essay is to explore the relation between Barthes’ Camera Lucida and the book to which is dedicated: Sartre’s “L’ imaginaire” and, in expansion, to phenomenological theories in general. It seems to me, that considering Camera Lucida as an artwork consisted of content and form, we could characterize Lacan, Proust and Michelet’s influences as its structure elements, providing the content and Sartre’s thoughts as a veil which covers and binds them all, under a unity, giving the form. From my point of view, L’ imaginaire indicates the way Barthes approached his mother’s resurrection (because this is the aim of Camera Lucida: an attempt to resuscitate the dead using photography as a document of a reality that has existed).

Whereas in former essays Barthes has emphasized the artificial nature of the photography medium and the ideological function it could serve, Camera Lucida explores the phenomenological concept of photography. From his earlier investigations into the works of the French historian Michelet, who endowed universal history with the mythological elements needed to transform his nineteenthcentury bourgeois ideology into an epic, to his later encounter with an Eastern 1

Information drawn from Michel Moriarty, Roland Barthes (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

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otherness so fascinated by the click of the camera, Barthes’ trajectory exhibits a constant and deep concern for the image. Sartrian terms appearing in Camera Lucida account for Barthes’ convergence with Lacan’s early condemnation of the “Imaginary” realm as that of the ego’s subjective illusions. As Jean-Michel Rabate notices, “for both Sartre and Lacan, the stickiness of the subject’s identification produces unwholesome coalescence between signifiers and signifieds; this imaginary projection is the first lure to be debunked”.2 Barthes’ career can thus be described as going from one “Imaginary” –the Sartrian consciousness, which underpins existentialist or neoMarxist phenomenology- to another, the Lacanian “Image-repertoire”, which has to be squeezed between the logical structure of the symbolic and encounters with a real that resists language.

Photography is defined as producing an image for a consciousness that essentially mourns an absent object or person rather than relishing its presence. Photography provides an image of actual people and places that become ‘certified’ as having really been there. If photography bespeaks a past presence, it also ultimately refers to death and each photograph appears as a little poem, a Japanese haiku, forcing us to share more directly at reality. Barthes opposes the ‘studium’, or scientific approach, which risks missing the very point of the photograph, to the ‘punctum’, the small point which is likely to capture the eye of the beholder. The aim of the text becomes a phenomenological analysis of the systematic regularities that unify the photos that touch Barthes. The ‘studium’ captures the relation to the referent by placing it within the comprehensible world of objects. The ‘punctum’ indicates that moment at which the referent touches the subject, destroying the world of objects, and the moment of comprehension disclosing the drives that make the world comprehensible.

2

Jean Michel Rabate, “Introduction”, in Writing the image after Roland Barthes (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997).

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In the search of phenomenological indexes into ‘Camera Lucida’ one can find from the most obvious statements to some well-hidden aspects of its theory. Barthes himself states: “I’m too much of a phenomenologist to like anything but appearances to my own measure”.3 Hubert Damisch, in his essay “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the Photographic Image”, gives a definition of photography: “is nothing other than a process of recording a technique of inscribing, in an emulsion of silver salts, a stable image generated by a ray of light”.4 These last three words, are often met in Barthes’ text, either directly as ‘rays’ -“photograph descended essentially, from the chemical revelation of the object from which I receive, by deferred action, the rays”5, “the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object”6- or indirectly as ‘eidolon’ -“the eidolon emitted by the object”7. One can also find them in Sontag’s texts concerning the image. That’s because according to Damisch, these figures, imprinted by rays of light on a sensitive recording surface, must appear as the trace of an object or a scene emanating from the real world. He continues by saying that there is a difficulty of reflecting phenomenologically on a cultural object, because such an endeavor acquires a sense of an eidetic experience, a reading of essences.8 Barthes claims exactly the same, by trying to “discover the nature/eidos of photography”9 and find the “photography’s inimitable feature, its noeme”10, “what photography was in itself”11.

Danish concludes by admitting that in order to grasp the essence of the phenomenon

3

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography (London: Flamingo, 1984), p.33.

4

Hubert Damisch , “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the photographic image”, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003) 5 Barthes ,Camera Lucida, p.10.

6 Barthes ,Camera Lucida, p.80.

7 Barthes ,Camera Lucida, p.9.

8

Damish, “Five Notes for a Phenomenology of the photographic image”.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.60.

10 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.79.

11 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.3.

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under consideration, one has to submit it to a series of imaginary variations. And this is exactly where -the imaginary process- Sartre comes into play.

Camera Lucida not only dedicates itself to Sartre’s L’ imaginaire but presupposes as its method a traditional phenomenology in which Barthes takes his own reaction to photographs as the fundamental given of his study. This phenomenology is justified by a prior assessment that it is impossible to separate a photograph from its referent.12 After having stated with admirable brevity that “the referent adheres”13, Barthes considers the various attempts in the analysis of photography to ignore this basic fact and through either technical or sociological analysis to produce photographs as signifieds. His reason for rejecting this form of analysis is personal and affective. He admits, “my phenomenology agreed to compromise with a power, affect…I retain an affective intentionality”.14 Sartre has a whole chapter in his text, dedicated to the notion of affectivity, in which he tries to give a definition of the image, as a synthesis of affectivity and knowledge. He writes: “…most affective states are supposed to be accompanied by images, which represent for the desire that which is desired”.15 He continues by noticing the possibility of errors of “confusing the image with its object, the illusion of immanence, negation of the affective intentionality and complete misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness”.16 He concludes by saying that “the image is a sort of ideal for feeling, it represents a limited state for the affective consciousness”.17 Sartre believes that an image (either of a material physis, as a photograph or a caricature, or of a mental physis, as a memory) is not such that we can learn anything from it. All that it contains is immediately available to us, because we put it there ourselves. The image itself carries non-existence on its face. But yet it has enough of 12

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.5.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.6.

14 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.21.

15 Jean Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (London: Routledge, 1995), p.80.

16 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.80.

17 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.80.

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an existence of its own to be properly thought of as an analogue of its object, and that is what it has in common with the photograph or other physical representations of an object. What Barthes does, in front of his mother’s photograph of which the existence is a negotiable quantity is simply to add the missing part of her disintegrated existence, in order to revive her: affectivity (the act of investing affection, as I understand it). Moreover, Sartre defines the image “as an act that is directed towards an absent or non-existent object, as if it were an actual body, by means of a physical or mental content, but which appears only through an analogical representative of the pursued object”.18 He continues by saying that “to see an object is to localize it in space, between this table and that carpet, at a certain height, to my right or left. But mental images do not mingle with surrounding objects, which we try to explain by saying that present sensations act as “reducers”. But why should there be a reduction, why not rather a building-up?”19 Maybe this building-up is occurring every time that Barthes meet the photograph’s punctum, which energizes his affectivity, and transforms the image of the object, into the object itself -flesh and bones, located in time and space. In his own words, “to say nothing, to shut my eyes, to allow the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness”20 This last sentence, in addition to his ‘complaint’ that “in front of the screen, I am not tree to shut my eyes”21 shows clearly that L’ imaginaire can be taken as the philosophical foundation for Camera Lucida, as it expresses the predilection for imagining, rather than analyzing in a semiological way the encounter with Reality.

In his attempt to shape and vitalize his mother’s existence, Barthes notices a notion of ‘softness’

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and ‘gentleness’23 on her body. Sartre observes such a similar feeling,

18

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.60.

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.60.

20 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.55.

21 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.55.

22 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.65.

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when acting an affective consciousness upon the image: “that tenderness I want to revive cannot be produced by the unreal object”.24

Sartre systematically analyzes what happens to his memory of a friend called Peter, whom he considers under three aspects: first as a mental image provided by memory, then through a photograph, then as caricatured by a street artist. He explains that a caricature, which concentrates on just a few expressive or revealing features, can ‘give back’ Peter more accurately than an exact but lifeless likeness. A photograph exists for the subject only insofar as he or she “animates” it.25 He returns to the notion of ‘animation’, by saying: “The imaginative consciousness we produce before a photograph is an act, and this act involves a consciousness which is non-thetic of itself because spontaneous. We become aware, somehow, of animating the photograph, of lending it life, in order to make an image of it”.26 Returning to Barthes, we find his statement: “Suddenly, a specific photograph reaches me, it animates me, and I animate it. So, that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation…the photograph itself animates me: this is what creates every adventure”.27 He repeats the same claim, later, while talking about the boy with the outstretched arm, trying to define the impact that the photograph has on him: “it takes the spectator outside its frame, and it is there that I animate this photograph and that it animates me”.28 A nice last comment by Sartre suits perfectly to the former phrase: “In order to have Peter appear as an image we must animate certain kinesthetic impressions which make us aware of the movements of our hands, eyeballs, etc.”29

23

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.69.

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 25 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 26 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 27 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.20.

28 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.59.

29 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 24

p.164. p.19. p.26.

p.144.

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Having recently mentioned about memory, Sartre mentions that “Memory confers upon it a quality which actual consciousness could not have given it, namely as the real cause of the organic phenomena…memory confuses these two types of existence [object-image and object-present] because real and unreal objects appear before it as memories, that is, as the past”.30 Being aware of this possibility of memory’s false ability, he avoids using her as an approaching tool upon the photographic reading: “In front of a photograph, our consciousness does not necessarily take the nostalgic path of memory, but for every photograph existing in the world, the path of certainty”.31 This notion of certainty, is essential into Sartre’s theory upon the image: “The act of reflection thus, has a content of immediate certainty, which we ‘ll call the essence of the image”.32 This immediate certainty, might be what Barthes believes as fundamental echoing of a photograph: “This”.33 In other words, what Lacan indicates as Gaze, using an Aristotle’s term: “Tyche”. Memory’s weakness to confuse the two types of existence, is also encountered in another point of Barthes’ text: “Photograph actually blocks memory, quickly becomes a counter-memory”.34 Sartre returns later to the issue of memory, by saying that “at times we are able to draw our examples from memory to clarify the nature of the image. There is nevertheless an essential difference between the theme of recollection and that of the image. If I recall an incident of my past life I do not imagine it, I recall it”.35 Barthes, speaking about journalistic photographs in which he is not interested, says that “I glance through

30

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.158.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.85.

32 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.1.

33 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.4.

34 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.91.

35 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.210.

31

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them, I don’t recall them”36, whereas in front of his mother’s photographs, tries to “recall her features”37, irrespective of declaring that he couldn’t manage it after all, to “summon them up as a totality”38.

Sartre continues, by saying “when I recall an incident of my past, I do not posit it as given-in-its-absence, but as given-now-as-in-the-past…it is always real, but past”.39 Almost tautologically, Barthes argues that by looking into a photograph, sees “reality in a past state: at once the past and the real”.40 He also writes that “in photography, the presence of the thing, at a certain past moment, is never metaphoric”.41 I assume that this concrete phrase of “given-now-as-in-the-past” (donne-present-au-passe) is the inspiration for Camera Lucida’s emblematic phrase of “that-has-been” (ca-a-ete) which appears as the noeme of photography. Barthes has expressed it as “the thing has been there”42 and as “what has been”43 as well.

Sartre refers to a dual identity of the photograph, when he defines the essential characteristic of the mental image: “It is a certain way an object has of being absent within its very presence”.44 Sartre frequently discusses this notion of absence. In the imaginative attitude, the picture is but a way in which “Peter appears to me as absent.

The picture thus delivers Peter, though Peter is not here. The sign, on the contrary

36

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.41.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.63.

38 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.63.

39 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.210.

40 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.82.

41 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.78.

42 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.76.

43 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.85.

44 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.81.

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does not deliver its object”.45 In the case of a photograph, Barthes has to combine these attitudes, so he writes that “photography drifts between the shores of perception, between sign and image, without ever approaching either”.46 Sartre has dedicated a whole chapter, in order to give the distinction of a sign and an image. Citing an example of ‘Maurice Chevalier’ and returning once again back to the notion of absence, he claims that “the absent Maurice Chevalier chose the body of a woman to make his appearance”.47 It might be this, the reason why Barthes chooses portraits exclusively (more precisely, staring at the lens, towards adopting a Lacanian approach through the Gaze), in order to extract a punctum, quality capable for an imaginary resurrection.

Sartre translates the absence as unreality or nothingness: ”In the absence of Peter, that which I see directly, which constitutes the essential structure of my image, is precisely a nuance that colors the image completely and it is this we call his unreality”48, “…the absence in actuality, this essential nothingness of the imagined object”.49 Sartre also gives an example on this notion: “Peter as an image and the centaur as an image is that they are two aspects of Nothingness. And this is that also distinguishes the living future from the imagined future”.50 Barthes, under a phenomenological approach, refers to the image as ”object-as-nothing”51, but he also relinquishes from speaking about the Winter Garden’s photograph, by writing “I can say nothing about this photograph”52. Sartre concludes his book by claiming that “any attempt to conceive

45

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.20.

47 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 48 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 49 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 50 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 51 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.115.

52 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.107.

p.25.

46

p.31. p.143. p.209. p.211.

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death or the nothingness of existence directly, is by nature bound to fail…It is the appearance of the Imaginary before consciousness which permits the grasping of the process of turning the world into nothingness”.53 This use of the Imaginary is exactly what Barthes put into play as a defense mechanism towards his mother’s absence.

Sartre believes that “Imagination turns to be an essential and transcendental condition of consciousness. There could be no developing consciousness without an imaginative consciousness, and vice versa”.54 By citing an example of Charles VIII, he tries to prove that “he will appear at the moment when consciousness becomes imaginative”.55 And if this reaches the boundaries of pathology, reveals maybe Barthes’ position in order to obtain the resurrection desired: “gone mad for Pity’s sake”.56

Sartre insists on the notion of absence of a certain person it is the feeling, which was inspired in me by her beautiful hand that reappears”.57 As regards this feeling emanating from an aesthetic investment in the picture, he also provides another example: “It may also happen that I reproduce the gesture in order to revive the tenderness…what I want is to be able to recover, as we commonly say, my feelings of yesterday”.58 Finally, he ends by saying, “at the heart of that object, I recover the event I’m looking for, the handshake of Peter”.59 Once again, Sartre reflects Barthes’ writing attitude and content: “looking for the truth of the face I had loved. And I found it”.60

53

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 55 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 56 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.117.

57 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 58 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 59 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 60 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.67.

54

p.217. p.219. p.219. p.78. p.163. p.210.

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One of Sartre’s interesting conclusions is that the ‘imaging (or image-producing) consciousness’ is not radically distinct from a ‘desiring consciousness’, since “desire is a blind effort to possess on the level of representation what I already possess on the affective level”.61 Such a definition of desire suits perfectly to Barthes strategy, which seeks for a depicted justification of the maternal love. However, despite an apparent convergence with the psychoanalytical approach, Sartre remains extremely critical of the ‘crudely reductive solutions’ provided by French psychiatrists such as Janet, Lagache or Clerambault to the problem of the image in the unconscious. Typically, Sartre refuses to leave the realm of consciousness-for him, “obsession is a type of consciousness, and consequently it has the same traits of spontaneity and autonomy as does the rest of consciousness”62 -though this phenomenological bias allows him to describe the role of images in dreams in a very subtle and innovative way. He gives as an example a dream in which he is a slave running for his life, pointing out that the link between the slave and his consciousness is not merely a relation of representation but a relation of ‘emanation’. He explains: “I feel myself to be him, outside, in him, which is an unreal affective quality that I grasp on him…I am present in him unreally”.63 The notion of emanation is highly respected by Barthes, who declares that “the photograph is literally an emanation of the referent”.64

The dreamer can retrieve his dream as an unreal affective quality, remembering how he was not merely ‘seeing’ a slave but had identified with his fear and despair, emotions that become emblematic as fictional passions. Interestingly, Sartre alludes to Hugo’s ‘Les Miserables’ and refers to both Jean Valgean’s goodness and Tenardier’s evil nature. These novelistic equivalents allegorize the noematic structure of

61

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.80.

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.178.

63 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.201.

64 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.80.

62

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intentionallity through which a subject can believe in the reality of oneiric terror and fascination. The Sartrian dreamer, both transcendent and immanent to his dream, becomes Barthes’ model of eidetic projection in ‘Camera Lucida’. Almost identical expressions describe the viewer of images, caught up in a fascination that exerts itself all the more since he does not know where it comes from, but remaining relatively free to evaluate and contextualize the imaginary nature of photographs.

Although most of the main similarities between the two texts have been spotted until now, there are also some less important, maybe, but indicative aspects of their relationship. Adopting an ontological approach too, apart from phenomenological, Barthes notices that in photographic images, “it is always something that is represented”65 and continues by saying “no photograph without something or someone”66, while Sartre writes: “every perception is a perception of something, that is, it pursues its object in a certain manner and projects upon it a certain quality”.67 Moreover, Barthes calls the photographic referent a “necessarily real thing”68 and Sartre indicates the picture as “a real thing which can be more or less brightened, its colors can peel off, it can burn”.69 More specifically, at the beginning of his text, talking about photographs, he writes that “the photograph lacks life, it presents perfectly the external traits of Peter’s face; it does not give his expression…what is missing in the photograph, vitality, expression is clearly present in the drawing: I rediscover Peter”.70 On the other hand, Barthes questions himself if he could recognize his mother into the portrait: “According to these photographs, sometimes I recognized a region of her face, a certain relation of nose and forehead, the

65

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.28.

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.6.

67 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.30.

68 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.76.

69 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.212.

70 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.17.

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movements of her arms, her hands. I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether.71 It’s obvious that Barthes respects in a way, Sartre’s rule of perceiving reality: “To perceive this or that real datum is to perceive it on the foundation of total reality as a whole.

This reality never becomes the object of my special act of my attention, but is copresent as an essential condition of the existence of the reality actually perceived”.72

Another similarity of content between the two texts is the handling of the relation between the unreal and the real. Sartre claims that “in order to imagine, consciousness must be free from all specific reality…the unreal is always a twofold nothingness -of itself in relation to the world and conversely-…the unreal is produced outside the world by a consciousness which stays in the world. Finally, the Imaginary represents at each moment the implicit meaning of the real”.73 Traces of Sartre’s belief, that “the aesthetic object in a picture is something unreal”74 can be found in Barthes’ conviction while contemplating photographs: “I passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented.75 Sartre also argues that “the object appears to be “behind” itself, becomes ‘untouchable’, it is beyond our reach”.76 Once again, Barthes alters slightly the words in order to illustrate it: “a reality can no longer touch”77 and “the punctum is a kind of subtle beyond-as the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see”78.

71

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.65.

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 73 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 74 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 75 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.117.

76 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, 77 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.87.

78 Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.59.

72

p.209. pp.215-217. p.220. p.225.

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One last observation, is the use of the word which seems to function as the tool during their approaches: “photos”79 / “passion”80. For Barthes is an indispensable element in the search of the photographic essence, and for Sartre a shield against the unreal.

The conclusion of Sartre’s treatise proves even more relevant to the aesthetics of Camera Lucida. Going beyond demonstrating the structural identity between the consciousness of an image and a desiring consciousness, Sartre points out the insufficiency of saying that some natural spectacles are more beautiful than others; they are beautiful only insofar as they are imagined, but the imagination remains at a remove from reality. It even has to kill, destroy reality, to create its own level of autonomy: “Reality is never beautiful. Beauty is a valve applicable only to the imaginary and which means the negation of the world in its essential structure”.81 This is why, as Sartre explains in the last pages of L’ imaginaire, a woman’s extreme beauty kills the desire for physical possession.82 The reality of physical possession will never exactly tally with the unreality of an aesthetic experience. “The imaging or imagining consciousness, which transforms the object into an analogon of itself, is therefore primarily a negating consciousness that has to empty the world of its ordinary qualities in order to transform it into an aesthetic image”83, as Rabate claims.

Such negativity makes it impossible, for instance, to move logically from the domain of aesthetics to the realm of ethics.84 This is the tragic dimension of the imaginary experience, as revisited by Barthes: no easy Hegelian conceptual contortion could elicit the dialectical impetus toward mourning an image. The beholder remains caught in his vision, deprived of any possibility of dialectical sublimation. The dedication of Camera Lucida to L’ imaginaire, selon Rabate, is an acknowledgment of this tragic

79

Barthes, Camera Lucida, p.21.

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.164.

81 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.225.

82 Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.225.

80

83 84

Rabate, “Introduction”.

Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination, p.225.

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limitation: the essay is a novel about the death of its author’s mother as well as a theoretical text reflecting the impossibility of writing a novel about this issue.

Ronald Barthes moves from semiology to phenomenology flirting simultaneously with literature. Without keeping a strict phenomenological strategy (either by not reducing the affective, emotional side of the experience of photographs or by retaining the singular and the contingent), he oscillates among his influences, in an endeavor to heal his wound. Ostensibly, he seeks a photograph of his mother which will enable him to disavow her death and, in sense, bring her back for a moment. This photograph does function in some way as a fetish object, but it also functions more profoundly, selon Sarah Kember, as a transformational object. According to Christopher Bollas, a transformational object is one through which the adult subject remembers not cognitively but existentially an early object experience. The object here is the infant’s primary love object- the mother. What stimulates that memory is an “intense affective experience” or an “aesthetic moment” and what is being remembered is “a relationship, which was identified with cumulative transformational experiences of the self”.85 Despite Barthes’ attempts to put his experience of the Winter Garden photograph into words, the experience itself is wordless and so unique to him that he finds no reason in reproducing the photograph in his book. According to Bollas, the transformation, which the subject seeks through a transformational object or an aesthetic moment, occurs when the shadow of the object falls on the subject, or in this case when the mother’s presence is felt.

It seems that ‘Camera Lucida’ demands a multilateral study, why not starting with a ‘Proustian’ approach. The Sartrian way, shown in this essay, is only one side of the polygon that holds the key to understanding Camera Lucida.

85

Sarah Kember, “The shadow of the object”, in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells (London:

Routledge, 2003)

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I Š 2013

Vasileios Kantas has studied Electrical Engineering (BSc), Photography (BA, PhD), Critical Theory (MA) and Arts pedagogy (PGCert). He has published his research findings as an academic monograph in 2010 under the title Photo Ambiguity. His field of inquiry is the Philosophy of Photography. His theoretical work has been presented in conferences and his visual work has been exhibited in UK, Greece and Japan; his photographs have been purchased by the KMoPA museum. He currently lives and works in London, lecturing (London South Bank University, London School of Liberal Arts) and practicing the medium of Photography.

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BIBLIOGRPAHY •

Barthes , Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on photography. London: Flamingo, 1984.

•

Barthes , Roland . La Chambre Claire: Notes sur la photographie. Paris: Seuil, 1980.

•

Moriarty, Michel. Roland Barthes. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

•

Rabate , Jean Michel. Writing the image after Roland Barthes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.

•

Sartre, Jean Paul. The Psychology of Imagination. London: Routledge, 1995.

•

Sartre, Jean Paul. L’ Imaginaire. Paris, Gallimard, 1940

•

Wells, Liz. The Photography Reader. New York: Rutledge, 2003.

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