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.
