Screen shot 13 02 08 at 05 31

can continue to speak of "likeness" wichout ever having scen the model. As in the case of most of Nadar’s portraits (or of Avedon's, today): Guizot is "like" becausc hc eon* forms to his myth of austerity; Dumas, swoi len, beaming, becausc* I already know his self-importance and his fecundity; Offenbach, becausc I know that his musie has something (reputedly) witty about it; Rossini looks falsc, cvcn crookcd (the scmblance that rcsembles); Marcelinę Dcsbordes-Valmorc reproduccs in her face the slightly stupid virtues of her vcrses; Kropotkin has the bright eyes of anarchizing idealism, etc. 1 sce them all, I can spon-tancously cali them "likenesses" becausc they conform to what f expect of them. A proof a conłrario: finding myself an uncertain, amythic subject, how could I find myself “like"? All I look like is other photographs of myself, and rhis ro infinity: no one is ever anything but the copy of a copy, real or mental (at most, 1 can say thar in certain photographs I endure myself, or not, depending on whether or not 1 find myself in accord with the image of myself I want to give). For all its banał appearance (the first thing one says about a portrait), this imaginary anal-ogy is fuli of extravagancc: X shows mc the photograph of one of his friends whom Ite has talked about, whom I havc nevcr scen; and yet, I tell myself (I don’t know why), 'Tm surę Sylvain doesn't look like that.” Ulti-mately a photograph looks like anyonc cxccpt the person it represenrs. For resemblance refers to che subfcct’s identity, an absurd, purely legał, even pcnal affair; likeness givcs out identity "as irself," whereas I want a subject —in Mallarme’s terms—"as into itsclf eternity transforms

102 j

it.” Likeness leavcs mc unsarisftcd and somehow skeptical (ccrrainly this js the sad disappoinnnent I expericnce Iooking at the ordinary photographs of my mothcr— whereas the only one which has gi%^rcn me the splendor of her ttuth is precisely a lost, remott photograph, one which does not look "like" her, the photograph of a child I ncvcr

knew).

43

But morę insidtous, morę penetrating than likeness: rhe Photograph sometimes makes ap-pear what we never see in a real face (or in a face rełlected in a mirror): a genecic feature, the fragment of oneself or of a relative which comes from some anccsror. In a ccrtain photograph, I have my father’s sis-ter's "look.” The Photograph gives a little truth, on condi-tion that it parcels out the body. But this truth is noc that of the individual, who remains irreducible; it is the truth of lineage. Sometimes I am mistaken, or at least I hesi-tatę: a medallion represents a young woman and her child: surcly that is my mothcr and myself? But no, it is her mothcr and her son (my uncle); I dont know this so much from the clothes (che etherealized photograph does not show much of them) as from the structure of the face; betw-een my grandmother’s face and my mothers there has been the incidence, the flash of the husband, the fa-ther, which has refashioned the countcnancc, and so on down to me (the baby? nothing morę neutral). In the