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of language is perhaps this impotencc, or, to puc it posi-tively: language is, by naturę, fictional; chc attcmpt to render language unficrional requircs an enormous ap-paratus of mcasurcmcnts: we coiwoke logie, or, lacking that, sworn oarh; but the Phocograph is indifferent to all intermediaries: it does not invent; it is authentication it' self; the (rare) artifices it permits are not probative; they are, on che contrary, crick picturcs: the photograph is Jaborious only when it fakes. It is a prophecy in rcverse: like Cassandra, but cycs iixed on the past, Photography never lies: or rather, it can lie as to the meaning of the thing, bcing by naturo tendentious, never as to its exis-tentc. Impotent with regard to generał idcas (to fiaion), its forcc is nonetheless superior to everyching the human mind can or can have conceived to assure us of rcality— but also this reality is never anyching but a contmgency ("so much, tto morę").

Every photograph is a certificate pf presenre. This cer* tificate is the ncw embarrassment which its invention has introduced into the family of images. The first photo-graphs a man contemplated (Niepce in front of the dttiner labie, for instance) must have sccmed to him ro resemblc exactly cenain paintings (still the camera obscura)-, he kneu>, howcver, that hc was nosc-to-nose with a mutant (a Martian can resemblc a man); his consciousncss posited the objcct encounrered outside of any analogy, likc the ectoplasm of "what-had-been”: neichcr image nor rcality, a new being, really: a rcality one can no longcr touch.

Perhaps we havc an invincible resistance_ia-hplirviiłfrjn

the past, in History, exccpt in the form of myth. The Pho-______—_____ _

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