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Who could help me?

From the First step, that of classification (wc must surcly classify, verify by samples, if we want to constitute a corpus), Phorography evades us. The vari-ous distributions we impose upon it are in fact either em-pirical (Professionals / Amateurs), or rhecorical (Land-scapes / Objects / Portraits / Nudes), or clse aesthctic (Realism / Picrorialism), in any case exrcrnal to the ob-jeer, without relation to its esscncc, which can only be (if it exists at all) the New of w-hich it has bcen the advent; for these classifications might vcry wcll be applied to orher, older forms of representation. We might say that Pho-tography is unclassifiable. Then I wondered what the source of this disorder might be.

The first thing I found w-as this. What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurrcd only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could nevcr be repcated existentially. In the Photograph, the evenr Ls never tran-sccnded for the sake of something clse: the Photograph always leads the corpus I need back to the body I see; it is tlie ahsolute Parricular, the sovereign Ointingency, matte and somchow srupid, rhe Tbis (rhis photograph, and not Photography), in short, what Lacan calls the Tuche, the Occasion, rhe Encounter, the Real, in its indc-fatigable exprcssion. In order to dc-signate rcality,

Buddhism says junya, the void; but bctter still: łathata, as Alan Watts has it, the fact of being this, of being thus, of being so; łat means that in Sanskrit and suggests the ges-turę of the child pointing his finger at something and say-ing: that. there it ii, lo! but says norhing else; a photograph cannot be rransformed (spoken) philosophically, it Ls wholly ballastcd by the contingency of which it is the weightless, transparent envc!ope. Show your photographs to sorr.cone—he will immediately show you his: "Look, this is my brother; this is me as a child,” etc.; the Photograph is never anything but an anriphon of 'Look,” Sec," "Here it is”; it points a iinger at certain vis-d-vis, and cannot escape this pure deicric languagc. This is why, insofar as it is licit to speak of a photograph, it seemed to me jusc as improbable to speak of the Photograph.

A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or gencrally distinguished from its referent (as is the casc for every other image, encumbered— from the start, and because of its status—by the way in which the object is simulated): it is nor impossible to per-ccive the photographic sjgnifier (certain ptofessionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflcction. By naturę, the Photograph (for convenicnce’s sake, let us acccpt this univetsal, which for the moment refers only to the tireless repetition of contingency) has something tautological about it: a pipę, herc, is always and intractably a pipc. It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itsclf, both affcctcd by the same

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