[b]Roland Barthes
Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.[/b]
Or, sure, “I feel like shit”.
…the book creates meaning, the meaning creates life.
Meaning whatever you want it to.
But I never looked like that! - How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it - by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where is your authentic body? You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens…even and especially for your own body, you are condemned to the repertoire of its images.
Meaning whatever you want it to. Or, in this case, need it to.
The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.
Even if it’s pornography? Or, perhaps, especially if it’s pornography?
One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon’s youngest brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: ‘I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor.’ Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even to understand it…I forgot about it.
So, ought he not have?
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
Come on, he thought, not every single one of them.