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image-repertoire, thc Photograph (thc one I intend) rep-resents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subjea who fecls hc is bccoming an object: I then expcricncc a micro-version of dj^ath (of pąf.Qpthesis) L.I    bccoming a spcctcr.

The Photographer knows this very wcll, and himself fears (if only for commcrcial reasons) rhis death in which his gesture will embalm me. Nothing would be funnier (if one werc not its passivc victim, its plaitron, as Sade would say) than the photographers' contortions to produce ef-fects that are "lifelike”: wretched notions: they make mc posc in front of my paintbrushes, they take me outdoors (morę "alivc” than indoors), put me in front of a stair-case because a group of children is playing bchind me. they notice a bench and immediately (what a windfall!) make mc sit down on it. As if the (terrified) Photogra-pher must excrt himself to the utmost to kccp_ihc Photograph from bccoming Death. But I—already an object, I do not strugglc. I foresee that I shall havc to wake from this bad drcam even morę uncomfortably; for what soci-ety^r makes of my photograph, what it rcads therc, I do not know (in any casc, chcre are $o many readings of the same face); but when I discoycr myself.in the^prodpa.of this operation, what. I see is that 1 havc bccome_Tota|-Image, which is_to say, Death in person; othets—the Odier—do not dispossess me of myself, they turn me, ferociously, into an object,, they put me at rhcir mercj', at their disposal, classified in a file, rcady for thc subtlest deceptions: one day an cxcellent photographer took my

picture; I bclieved I coukl read in his image the distress of a rccent bere3vement: for once Photography had re-stored mc to myself, but soon afterward I was to find this same photograph on the cover of a pamphlct; by thc arti-fice of printing, I no longer had anything but a horriblc disinternalized countenancc, as sinisrer and repellent as thc image the authors wanted to give of my language. (The "private life” is nothing but that zonę of spacc, of time, whcrc I am not an image, an object. It is my poltii-cal right to be a subject which I must protcct.)

Ultimatcly, what I am sccking in the photograph taken of mc (thc "intention" according to which I look at it) is Death: Death j$ the eulos of that,Photograph. Hcnce, strangely, tl>e only thing that I tolcratc, that I likc, that is familiar to mc, when I am photographcd, is thc sound of thc camera. For me, the Photographer's organ is not his cyc (which tcrrifies me) but his finger: what is linked to the trigger of thc lens, to thc mctallic shifting of the platcs (when the camera still has such thi.ngs). I love thcsc roe-chanical sounds in an almost voluptuous way, as if, in thc Photograph, they were thc very thing—and the only thing —to which my desire clings, their abrupt dick breaking through thc mortiferous layer of the Pose. For mc the noisc of Time is not sad: I !ovc bdls, eloeks, watchcs— and I recall that at first photographic implcments werc rclated to tcchniques of cabinctmaking and the machinery of prccision: cameras, in short, were eloeks for seeing, and perhaps in mc someonc very old still hcars in the photographic mechanism thc living sound of thc w-ood.