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From che bcginning, I had determined on a pnnciple for mysclf: ncver to rcduce myself-as-subject, confroming ccrtain phocographs, to the disincamared, disaffected socius which science is con-cerned with. This prineiple obliged mc to "forget" two insritutions: the Family, the Mothcr.

An unknown person has written me: “I hcar you are preparing an album of family photographs” (rumor’s cx-travagant progress). No: neither album nor family. For a long timc, the family, for mc, was my mother and, at my side, my brother; beyond that, nothing (cxcept the mem-ory of grandparents); no "cousin," that unit so necessary to the constitution of the family group. Desides, how op-posed I am to that scicntific way of treating the family as if it were unkjuely a fabric of constraints and rites: cither we codę it as a group of immediatc allcgiances or else we make it into a knot of conflicts and repressions. As if our cxperts cannot conceivc that there arc families "whose members love one another.”

And no morę than I would reduce my family to the Family, would I reduce my mother to the Mother. Reading ccrtain generał studies, I saw that they might apply quite convincingiy to my situation: commenting on Freud (Moses and Monolheism^J- J■ Goux explains that luda-ism rejcacd the image in order to ptotcct itself from the risk of worshipping the Mother; and that Christianity, by making nossihlr rhf-rcprr»rnranon of the maternal fem-inine, transccnded the rigor of ihc Law for the sake of the Image-Rcpertoirc^ AIthough growing up in a religion-without-lmages where rhe Mother is not worshipped (Protcsrantism) but doubtlcss formed cu Im rally by Cath-olic art, when 1 confronted the Winter Garden Photo-graph F gave mysclf up to the Image, to the Image-Repcr-toire. Thus I could understand my generality; but having understood it, invincibly I escaped from it. In the Mother, there was a radiant, irrcducible corc: my mother. It is always maintained that I should suffer morę becausc I have spent my whole life with her; but my suffering pro-ceeds from who she was\ and it is becausc she was who she was that I lived with her. To the Mother-as-Good, she had added that grace of bcing an individua! soul. I might say, likc the Proustian Narrator at his grand-mother’s dcath: "I did not insist only upon suffering, but upon respecting the originality of my suffering"; for this originality was the reflection of what was absolucely irrcducible in her, and thereby lost forever. It is said that mourning, by its gradual labor, slowly erases pain; I could not, I cannot believc this; because for me, Time eliminates the emotion of loss (I do not weep), that is a 11. For the rest, everything has remained motionlcss. For what 1 havc lost is not a Figurę (the Mother), but a being; and not a being, but a quality (a soul): not the indispensable, but the irrcpiaccable. F could live without the Mother (as we all do, sooner or latcr); but what life remained would be absolutely and cntirely unąualifuthle (without quality).