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civc style”; but the Photograph breaks the "tonstirutive style” (rhis is its astonishment); it is mthout futurę (this is its pathos, its melancholy); in it, no protensity, whereas the dnema is protensive, hence in_nft_gąy melancholie (what is it, then? —It is, then, simply "normal,” likc life). Motionlcss, the Photograph flows back from presentation co retention.

1 can put this another way. Here again is the Winter Garden Photograph. I am alone with it, in front of it. The circlc is closed, cherc is no escapc. I suffer, motionless. Cruel, stcrile deficiency: I cannot transform my grief, 1 can not ler my gazę drift; no culture will help mc utter this suffering which 1 experience entirely on the lęycJ_oL.tbe imagc’s finitudc (this is why, despite its codcs, I cannot read a photograph): the Photograph—my Photograph— is without culture: when it is painful, nothing in it can

negation of death into the power to work, then the photograph is undialeccical: it is a denatured theater where death cannot “be contemplated,” reflectcd and interi-orized; or again: the dead theater of Death, the fore-closure of the Tragic, excludcs all purification, all uithur-sis. I may well worship an Image, a Painting, a Statuę, but a photograph? I cannot place it in a rirual (on my desk, in an album) unlcss, somehow, I avoid looking at it (or avoid its looking at me), deliberatcly disappointing its uncndurable plcnitude and, by my very inattention, at-taching it to an entirely different class of fetishes: the

icons which are kissed in the Greek churchcs withoui bcing scen—-on their shiny glass surface.

In the Photograph, Times immobilizacion assumes only an cxccssive, monstrous modę: Time is engorged (whencc the relation wirh the Tableau Vivani, whose mythic proto-type is the princess falling aslccp in Sleeping Beauty). That the Photograph is "modern," minglcd wich our noisiest evcryday lifc, does not keep it from having an enigmatic point of inactuality, a strange stasis, the stasis of an arresi (I have rcad that the inhabitants of the villagc of Montiel, in the province of Albacete, lived this way, fixatcd on a time arrested in the past, cven while reading newspapers and listening to the radio). Not only is the Photograph nevcr, in cssence, a mcmory (whose gram-matical cxpression would bc the perfect tense, whereas the tense of the Photograph is the aorisc). but it actually hlocks me mory, guickly liecomes a counter-mcmory{ One day, somc friends were cal king about their ehildhood memorics; they had any number; but I, who had just been looking at my old photographs, had nonę left. Surrounded by these photographs, I could no longer console myself with Rilkes linę: "Sweet as mernory, the mimosas stecp the bedroom": the Photograph docs not "steep" the bed-room: no odor, no musie, nothing bur tlie exorbitant thing. The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, bur because on cach occasion it filłs the sigbt by lorce, and because in it nothing can be refuscd or transformed (that we can sometimes cali it mild does not contradict its violcnce: many say that sugar is mild, but to me sugar is violcnt, and 1 cali it so).