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are ccrtłinly consurutcd as persons, but only bccause of their resemblance to human heings, without any spccial intentionality. Thcy drift betwcen thc shorcs of pcrcep-tion, betwcen sign and image, without ever approaching either.”

In rhis glum desert, suddcnly a specific photograph reaches me; it animates mc, and I animatc it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animatięn. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not bclicvc in "lifelikc” photographs), but it animates mc: this is what creates evcry advcnturc.

In this invcstigation of Photography, I borrowed something from phcnomenology's project and something from its languagc. But it was a vague, casual, evcn cynical phenomenology, so readily did it agree to distort or to cvade its principles according to the whim of my analysis. First of all, I did not cscape, or try to escapc, from a paradox: on the one hand thc desire to givc a namc to Photography's csscncc and then to sketch an cidcric science of the Photograph; and on the other the intractable feeling that Photography is essentially (a con-tradiction in terms) only contingcncy, singularity, risk: my photographs would always participatc, as Lyotard says, in "something or other": is it noc the very wcakness of Photography, this difiteulty in existing which we cali banality? Ncxt, my phenomenology agreed to com-

promisc wifh a power, afjecf, afFcct was what I didn'r want to reducc; bcing irtcducibJc, it was thercby what I wantcd, what I ought to reducc thc Photograph to; but couid I rctain an affective intentionality, a view of thc ob-ject which was immediatcly steeped in desire, repulsion, nostalgia, euphoria? Classical phenomenology, thc kind I had known in my adolescencc (and therc has not bccn any other sincc), had ’cver, so far as I couid remember, spoken of desire or of n^urning. Of coutsc I couid make out in Photography, in a very orrhodox manner, a whole network of cssenccs: materiał essences (necessitating the physical, Chemical, optical study of the Photography), and regional cssenccs (dcriving, for instancc, from aestheócs, from His-tory, from sociology); but ar thc moment of rcaching the essence of Photography in generał, I branched off; instead of following thc path of a formal ontology (of a Logic), I stopped, kccping with me, like a tteasurc, my desire or my grief; the anticipated cssencc of the Photograph couid not, m my mind, bc sepatated from the ‘pathos" of which, from thc first glance, it consists. I was like that friend who had nirncd to Photography only because it allowed him to photograph his son. As Spectator I was interested in Photography only for "sentimentar reasons; I wantcd to cxplore it not as a question (a theme) but as_a wound: I sec, I feel, hcnce 1 notice, I observe, and I think.