Roland Barthes II: De-Realizing the World.

Camera Lucida is Roland Barthes attempt to come to terms with the transparency of the photograph which seems to "annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself." (45) This transparency is not so much a content but a mechanism for the 'de-realization' (118) of the world. The photo stands as an absolute. Barthes ties the photograph explicitly, and ad nauseum, to death. Dropping in references to de Sade (14) and BDSM porn (41-42, 57-59), there's something very theatrical about this death (31). Even more explicitly, he links the photo to an ancient Etruscan torture (5) which had served as an ontological model to Aristotle.¹ Barthes' description of the phenomenological experience of photography is compared to this torture which, by virtue of the effects of putrefaction, bound the two bodies together thanks to the vermicular culture that grew between them and dissolved their boundaries. He provides an Oedipal image for this experience: "A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze...a carnal medium..." (81) What results, in regards to experience, is a continuation of the putrefying remainder, or in his preferred grammatical register, aphaeresis. This subtraction forms one of the essential poles in Barthes' thinking. The excess which is cut away from it is what he attempts to redeem via a libidinization.

Roland Barthes I: Thinking as a Maggot.

The 'death of the author' demarcates the opening to a negative space. In fact, there is only an author insofar as they are in the process of dying, of entering and become an element of this space. "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing." (Barthes 142) But this is a very specific kind of negativity, one which is focal and pervasive. It is not even a matter of dialectics. In fact, there is no dialogue between this negative and that which is to be scrawled over it. They are in an asymmetrical relation; the one antecedent to, and in excess of, the other.