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sonal impulscs, I would try to formulate the fundamenta! feature, the univcrsal wirhout which thcre would bc no Photography..,

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Then I dccidcd that this disordcr and rhis diiemma, revealed by my dcsire to writc on Photography, corrcsponded to a discomfort I had always suficrcd from: che uneasiness of bcing a subject tom between two languagcs, one exprcssive, the other critical; and ac the hcarc of tłiis critical languagc, betwcen sevcral discourscs, those of sociology, of semiology, and of psychoanalysis— but that, by ulrimate dissatisfaction with all of thcm, I was bearing witncss to the only surc thing that was in me (however naive it might be): a desperate resistance.to any reductive system. For cach time, having resorted to any such languagc to whatcvcr degree, cach time I felt it hardening and thereby tending to reduction and repri-mand, I would gcntly lcavc it and seek clsewhere: I began to speak differently. It was better, once and for all, to make my protescation of singularity into a virtue—to try making what Nietzsche called the "cgo's ancicnt sov-ereignty” into an hcuriscic principle. So I resolved to start my inquiry with no morę than a few photographs, the ones I was surę existcd for me. Nothing to do with a corpus: oniy some bedies. In this (after all) conventional debate becween science and subjcctivity, I had arrivcd at this curious notion: w-hy mightn> thcrc bc, somchow, a ncw science for cach object? A matbesis sin gul arii (and no longer universalis)7 So I dccided to take mysclf as mediator for all Photography. Starting from a few per-

So I make mysclf the measurc ot photographic "knowledge.” What does my body know of Phoro-graphy? I obscrved that a photograph can be the object of three practices (or of chrce emotions, or of three intentions): to do, to undergo, to look. The Operator i$ the Photographcr. The Spectator is ourselvcs, all of us who glance through collections of photographs—in mag-azines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives . . . And tl>c person or thing phorographed is the target, the referent, a kind of litclc simulactum, any eidolon cmictcd by the object, which I should like to cali the Spectrum of the Photograph, because rhis word retains, through its root, a relation to "spectaclc” and adds to it that rather terrible thing which is therc in cvery photograph: the return of the deaa.

One of these practices was barred to me and I was not to investigate it: I am not a photographcr, not even an amateur photographcr: roo impatient for that: I must sec right away whar I havc ptoduced (Polaroid? Fun, hut disappointing, cxccpt when a great photographer is in-volved). I might supposc that the Operator s emotion (and conscquenrly the essence of Photography-according-to-the-Photographcr) had some relation to the "littlc

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