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amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they arc glued togcthcr, limb by limb, like rhe condcmncd man and the corpsc in certain torturcs; or evcn like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michclct) which navigate in eonvoy, as though unitcd by an etcrnal coitus. The Phorograph belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two Icaves cannot be sep-arated withour destroying them both: the windowpane and the landscapc, and why not: Good and Evil, desire and its objeet: dualities wc can conccive but not pcrccive (I didn’t yet know rhat this stubbornncss of the Referent in always being there would produce the essencc I was looking for),

This fatality (no phorograph wichout łomot bing ot someone) involvcs Photography in che vasr disorder of objects—of all the objects in the world: why choosc (why photograph) this objeet, this moment, rather than somc other? Photography is unclassifiablc because there is no reason to nutrk this or that of its occurrcnces; it aspires, pethaps, to bceome as crude, as cercain, as noble as a sign, which would afford it access to the digniry of a lan-guage: but for there to be a sign there must be a mark; deprived of a principle of marking, photographs are signs which don't takt, which tum, as milk docs. Whatcvcr it grants to vision and whatcver its manner, a photograph is always invisib!c: it is not it that we sec. i '•? . (-    In jhort, the referent adheres. And this singular adher-

- " ence makes it very difficult to focus on Photography. The books which deal with it, much less numerous moreovcr than for any other art, are victims of this difficulty. Somc

arc technical; in order to "scc" the photographic significr, they are obliged to focus at vcry close rangę. Others are historical or sociological; in order to observc the total phenomenon of the Photograph, these arc obliged to focus at a great distance. I rcaióed with irritation that nonc discusscd precisely the photographs which interest me, which give mc plcasure or emotion. What did l care abouc the rules of composition of the photographic land scapc, or, at the other end, about the Photograph as fam-ily ritc? Each time I would read something about Photog-raphy, I would think of some photograph 1 Iovcd, and this madę me furious. Mysclf, 1 saw only the referent, the desired objeet, the bcIoved body; but an importunatc voice (the voice of knowlcdge, of scientia) then adjured me, in a sevcre tonę: "Get back to Photography. What you arc seeing here and what makes you suffer belongs ro the category Amateur Photographs,’ dcalt with by a team of sociologists; nothing but the tracę of a soda! protocol of integration. intended to reassert the Family, etc." Yct 1 persisted; another, louder voicc urged me to dismiss such sociological commcmary; looking at certain photographs, I wanted ro be a primitivc, without culture. So I went on, not daring to rcduce the world’s countlcss photographs. any morę than to extend several of minę to Photography: in short, I found myself at an impasse and, so to speak, "scientifically’’ alone and disarmed.

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