Derrida developing Barthes: prolegomena to the philosophy of photography

Gaynutdinov Timur Rashidovich PhD in Philosophy Associate Professor of the Department of Philosophy of P.G. Demidov Yaroslavl State University 150000, Russia, Yaroslavl Region, Yaroslavl, str. Sovetskaya 10, room No. 58 jean-jacques@yandex.ru Other publications by this author

The theme of photography has never been a defining one in Jacques Derrida's philosophy, moreover, we could note the complete absence of this theme in his texts until the early 1980s. It is also interesting that until 1979, Derrida forbade any publication of his photographs in the media, most often explaining this by the idea of defetisation of the author as a necessary condition for deconstruction. Of course, this explanation can hardly be considered satisfactory, especially given Derrida's stable status as a public intellectual, quite consciously nurtured by him. Anyway, since the early 1980s, Derrida's photographic images have been increasingly flashing in the French press, and texts directly or indirectly related to photography appear in his work.

In this article, our goal is not so much to deal with the topic of photography in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, as to try to reconstruct the dialogue that developed in the context of the problem of photography between Derrida and Roland Barthes. We talk about dialogue, while being aware of the full risk of using this concept in the context of the episode we are considering. The fact is that Derrida refers to the book "Camera lucida" ^[1] by Bart shortly after his death, and this book itself was published only a few weeks ahead of this death. Nevertheless, we insist that this dialogue took place even though the defendants were not Bart himself, but only his last and most personal text.

Jacques Derrida's first publication on photography, which was very modest in volume and written, as they say, on occasion, appeared quite late, only in 1981. It is called "The Death of Roland Barthes" (Les morts de Roland Barthes ^[2]) and is a kind of obituary, words of farewell and, at the same time, a tribute to Barthes. In this work, Derrida touches on various texts of Barth, but places special emphasis on his latest book, La Chambre claire (in the Russian translation of the book, made by Mikhail Ryklin ^[1], not the literal Russian translation of the title, "The Bright Room", but its Latinized version, "Camera lucida", is used, this is exactly what we will use the name in the future to avoid unnecessary confusion), just dedicated to photography, that is, it turns out that Roland Barthes and his death acted as a kind of escort for Derrida into the realm of photography, where he entered with great anxiety. Perhaps that's why any conversation Derrida has about photography constantly revolves around the topic of ghosts and death, and he agrees with Bart when he claims: "A photo is a way in which our time accepts Death, namely, using a deceptive alibi of life splashing over the edge, the professional fixation of which, in a sense, is a Photographer" ^{[1, p. 163]}.

The circumstances of Bart's writing of the book "Camera lucida" are also well known, closely related to the death of his mother in October 1977 and the work of mourning that accompanied it. In addition, as we mentioned above, "Camera lucida" was published just a month before the tragic accident that happened to Bart on February 25, 1980, when he, in the very center of Paris, was run over by a small van belonging to a local laundry. It all happened on the Rue Ecole: Bart was crossing the road on his way to the College de France, where three years earlier he had headed the department of literary Semiology, this was his usual route, however, this time he was destined to end not in the university auditorium, but in the ward of the Pittier-Salpetriere hospital, located very close to the scene of the incident. Despite the head injury, several broken ribs and multiple bruises, the doctors' forecasts were generally favorable, and it seemed that the philosopher's life was not in danger. However, shortly after admission to the hospital, Bart had to be connected to a ventilator: he was suffocating, and intubation was the only possible solution. It's all about pulmonary tuberculosis, which the philosopher suffered from since his youth. In fact, lung problems were the greatest concern of doctors, and not the injuries themselves that resulted from the accident, and it was from pulmonary complications that Roland Barthes died on March 26, 1980, a month after the accident.

A few months after Bart's tragic death, in September 1980, Jacques Derrida writes "The Death of Roland Bart", and six months later, on the anniversary of Bart's death, this text will be published. Thirty years later, on September 28, 2011, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, speaking at the Elysee Palace in front of an audience of French intellectuals, on the occasion of awarding Julia Kristeva the Legion of Honor, pronouncing the name Roland Barthes and seeing the final "s" in his surname (Roland Barthes), called him Roland Barthes. For all the comicality of this incident, one can see in it another "death" of Roland Barthes. However, let's leave this anecdotal situation and return directly to the publication of Jacques Derrida. Already in its title ("The Death of Roland Barthes") there is a reference to the double loss of his mother, which Barthes writes about in Camera lucida: "So I lost her twice: in her passing away and in her first photo, which became the last for me: however, in the latter case everything changed places, and I finally found her as she is in herself..." ^{[1, pp. 125-126]}. But there is an indication in this text of Derrida of a much more strange death, so, among other texts, he mentions a small article by Barth, dated 1973, "A textual analysis of a novel by Edgar Poe" ^[3]. In this publication, Barth analyzes the phrase "I am dead" from a short story by 1845, "The Truth about what happened to Mr. Waldemar" ^[4]. Barth refers to this story in a French translation by Charles Baudelaire, made by him in 1856. Analyzing this short novel by Poe, Barth mentions Derrida, who also commented on the phrase "I am dead" in his early 1967 book "The Voice and the Phenomenon"^[5]. Moreover, a quote from Poe's story is given by him as an epigraph to this book, along with Husserl's words from "Logical Studies" ^{[5, p. 10]}. We deliberately give this jumble of dates here and not at all in order to confuse the reader or, moreover, make him bored. In fact, most of these dates are given by Derrida himself and are not without meaning, since the phrase "I am dead", which Barth qualifies as an "absolutely impossible statement" ^{[1, p. 452]}, is analyzed by Derrida in a double time register: on the one hand, I have already died (the register of the past), and on the other the other is that my death is inevitable (the register of the future). That is, it is primarily a matter of time, as always in photography, adds Derrida, or, more precisely, as in any photograph, which we have yet to show in this short article, which, however, can only outline the main aspects of this time shift inherent in photography and deconstructed by Derrida in his appeal to Bart.

Of course, we must take into account the circumstance of writing Derrida's text – the tragic death of Bart, but at the same time we should not think that we are facing a funeral eulogy for a departed friend, warm words of memory mixed with the subtle art of consolation. Re–reading Barth, especially his "Camera lucida", Derrida wants to remain faithful to a friend, he carries his thought, exactly in accordance with the last line of Paul Celan's poem "Here is a huge vault on fire ...": "The universe is no more / and I carry you" ("Die Welt ist fort, ich mus dich tragen") ^[6]. Perhaps we can talk here about a certain sense of duty, but its very essence is not only to follow the letter of the body of texts of a departed friend, but also to continue his broken speech, constantly expanding its boundaries, adding something "in his own name", some additional element, perhaps a very small, almost imperceptible touch. Recognizing a certain mimicry, trying on Bart's discursive practices, Derrida at the same time conducts a kind of double bookkeeping, presenting her own accounts to the books of a departed friend.

In the work "Camera lucida" Roland Barthes introduces a new concept, or rather, a new pair of concepts taken by him from the Latin language: punctum/studium. The word studium "means first of all... diligence in something, a taste for something, something like general diligence, a little fussy, but devoid of special sharpness. It is thanks to the studio that I am interested in many photographs ... in these figures, facial expressions, gestures, decorations and actions, I feel like a person of culture" ^{[1, p. 53]}. Studium expresses a certain general system of knowledge, a cultural code that, due to certain circumstances, education and upbringing, I am able to share with others, perhaps even with many. However, Bart notes, he is really touched only by certain photographs, which have a special point - punctum, which violates the usual culture of the studio. These photos cause him inexplicable excitement — this is a blow, a wound, a hole in the surface of the photo: "There is a word for this wound, a prick, a mark left by a sharp instrument; this word suits me all the more because it refers to the idea of punctuation and that the photos in question are, as it were, marked, sometimes they are even teeming with these sensitive spots; they are precisely the marks and wounds. This second element, which upsets studium, I would designate by the word punctum, because it means, among other things: a bite, a hole, a speck, a small incision, as well as a roll of dice. Punctum in photography is the case that targets me (but at the same time hurts me, hits me)" ^{[1, p. 54]}.

Elena Petrovskaya in the book "The Theory of Image" notes that "in the Russian language, the word "punctum" is closest to the word "dotted line". This is a high–speed, explosive mode of photography - the injection it gives us… There is a reversal of relations in the sense that we find ourselves the object of an attack, attack or attack from the side of photography" ^{[7, p. 168]}. So, in order for a photograph to attract my attention, for it to appeal to me, there must be some detail in it, elusive, unknown, that very punctum – a speck that attracts my attention, a point that causes excitement in me, a prick that sharply brings me out of my stupor. Punctum is like a slap in the face, and it cannot be reduced to a certain experience, a system of knowledge or a certain cultural code that I share with others (studium). Derrida makes an important point here: the concept of punctum, proposed by Barth for the analysis of photography, is in itself illusory, that is, completely non-conceptualized. Punctum is a ghost that cannot be imagined, much less constructed in advance. Punctum is as elusive in photography as it is in thought, as well as in the discourse that anchors it. Therefore, for Derrida, Barth's "Camera lucida" is, first of all, a text about ghosts – they are the ones that permeate his entire fabric and logic in an end–to-end way (which only ghosts are capable of).

Photography gives birth to ghosts, mute witnesses of a bygone moment. Peeling off the images one by one, the photo dissolves the presence of the developer in the water surface. As if taking water into his mouth, and with it a little memory, the photo scoops up a string of ghosts of a long-gone era. She does not utter the slightest word, remaining true to herself, constantly returning to herself. Punctum is a kind of concept without a concept, that is, it is devoid of any conceptual density, its own discursive body, therefore, if it is possible to talk about the art of photography, it is necessary to allow photography itself to interpret itself, to allow the optical apparatus to discover the truth hidden in the system of its functioning, in the process of its formation and development. In absolute silence, photography leaves a clean trail, the imprint of a long-dead vision. Perceiving a photograph, assuming the responsibility of its narrator, we can resort to metonymic substitution, that is, to see through the referent. This is how our "I" works, this is how Barth's punctum works, constantly using these metonymic shifts of images. It is punctum, this unique, singular sign that invades my consciousness, that is most susceptible to metonymy, and it is he who pushes me to spectral escalation and takes me beyond what is depicted in the photo, mobilizing all the power of affect and pluralizing the image. The paradox of punctum is that, being a through wound of photography, it destroys its integrity, but at the same time forms a new integrity. "Punctum ... remaining a "detail", paradoxically fills the entire photograph", it has a "virtual power of expansion", which "often has a metonymic character" ^{[1, p. 86]}. Our gaze, seizing on some, sometimes random detail, takes us significantly further, beyond the boundaries of photography, that is, punctum metonymically triggers a contrapuntal dynamic that makes a lot of through wounds inside the image, taking the viewer beyond the visible frame.

Derrida draws our attention to the fact that photography is as attentive to detail, a kind of punctum, as psychoanalysis. A completely insignificant element, a tiny fragment, focuses attention on itself: it increases, highlights, refracts, thereby collecting the fullness of the view. Thus, we give ourselves the right to look at what is usually not visible, which most often hides itself, evading the demanding persistence of the gaze. This is a kind of "lost object" of Freud, transformed into "object a" by Jacques Lacan. Like the body of another, photography can present itself only in parts, outside the totalizing power of the panopticon. Moreover, any photograph in itself is only a fragment of some more general picture that we do not see, but can imagine; a fragment of a withdrawn integrity, a long-lost completeness. It can be said that photography is a phantasm of ghostly totality, an almost faded promise of completeness.

Photography fragments the whole, turning it only into a ghost, and then only parts of bodies and figures remain, fragments of landscapes and blurred contours of things scaled to the size of totality. This is a very special economy of view, revealed by photography. Each fragment is a promise of the whole, and this promise itself refers us to many other vows, for example, Cezanne's commitment: "I owe you the truth in painting, and I will tell you it" ^[8]. Derrida's book "Truth in Painting" is built around this promise of Cezanne ^[9] (we consider this work of the philosopher in more detail in the article "Restitution of truth in painting: Vincent Van Gogh's "Shoes" and their explication in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida" ^[10]). However, the sesame of truth is in no hurry to reveal itself, so photography, like Cezanne, promising us the truth, in fact only serves to conceal it, taking the eye aside, into a kaleidoscope of random details. In "A Brief History of Photography", Benjamin notes that some photographs reveal details invisible to the ordinary eye, thereby making a kind of hole in the image, piercing it through, pulling down the sliding surface of the gaze ^[11]. This is pretty close to punctum's idea, although Barth does not mention Walter Benjamin in Camera Lucida. But Derrida writes about Benjamin quite often, and it is especially noteworthy for us now that he addresses Benjamin in the book "Back from Moscow, in the USSR" – one of the first books of the philosopher published in Russia: "... as Benjamin argues ... the event of a promise must be taken into account, even if it remains impossible, even when the promise is not kept or cannot be kept: the promise took place and is significant in itself, by the very fact of its existence" ^{[12, p. 60]}. Cezanne promises "truth in painting" in a letter to Emile Bernard on October 23, 1905, that is, almost exactly one year before his death, which will occur on October 22, 1906. A year after his mother's death and a year and a half before his own death, Bart would publicly announce that he was "going to write a novel", reinforcing his words with a new training course "Preparing a novel", which he would begin reading that same autumn 1978 at the College de France: "Being in New York a year and a half ago, Bart publicly announced with still weak determination that he was going to write a novel. Not the novel one would expect from a critic who momentarily turned Rob-Grillet into a central character in modern literature... no, not a modernist one–"a real novel," he said at the time. Like Proust's" ^{[13, p. 160]}.

It is known that Marcel Proust began writing "In search of Lost Time" shortly after the death of his mother, at the end of September 1905 (the same autumn Cezanne makes a promise to Emile Bernard). And perhaps if Bart had had a little more time, a little more than the two and a half years that separate the death of his mother from his own death, we could really have read the novel by Roland Barthes. In his final two-year course at the Collège de France, "Preparing a Novel," referring to Dante and his "New Life," written shortly after Beatrice's death, Bart also sees himself as able to discover a new milestone in his life after his mother's death. "Having gone halfway through his earthly path," he is able to move on, is capable of pure literary creativity outside the confining framework of previous works and despite the aggravated manifestations of pulmonary tuberculosis, because Marcel Proust's asthma especially worsened after the death of his mother, but this only contributed to his "imprisonment" in an apartment on Boulevard Haussmann and writing a great novel. After all, there was only a Seine and half an hour of leisurely walking between Bart and Proust's home addresses, and as for everything else, including the past seventy years since Proust's "search for lost time", Bart believed that this could be ignored. Just as Marcel Proust was extremely pedantic about observing the necessary conditions of writing, Bart, in his last year at the College de France, devotes a significant part of his time to purely everyday aspects of creativity, starting with what to write (pencil or pen) and what to write on (a notebook in a ruler or in a cell, on a spiral or stitched), and ending with the choice of the most concise form for notes about what he saw ^[14]. Or it is better to use not a notebook at all for notes, although haiku, neatly written on its sheets, could successfully cope with the task. Perhaps a camera is the best way to capture images? After all, Proust already writes in the novel "Under the shadow of girls in bloom": "Photography partially makes up for what it lacks when it no longer reproduces the existing, but shows the past" ^{[15, p. 368]}, and that is why a photo album with old family photographs sends us every time to "search for lost time". Of course, we already know that Bart's last course, "Preparing a novel," remained fruitless and the novel, which he began talking about shortly after his mother's death, never followed. We were left with only promises, two promises – Cezanne and Bart, which were never kept. Two promises written on paper, highlighted by death, bleached in our memory. Two sharp notches of words and hopes, two fierce promises in their sincerity. We wrote that they were not executed that way, but maybe it's exactly the opposite: they were lucky enough to fail, and that's why Cezanne and Bart were true to their word. In Cezanne's promise and Bart's statement made much later, we want to hear anticipation, hope and openness to the future, even if in return for all this we end up with only disappointment and doom. After all, we are already used to it and we know all about disappointed hopes, you can't fool us so easily by promising you don't know what. But paradoxically, in these words of Cezanne and Bart, it is the future that is least of all, despite the fact that the construction of the phrase suggests it. Neither Cezanne nor Bart are interested in the future at all, they do not take it into account. Their promises are addressed to the past, to the debts accumulated before: therefore, Cezanne in a letter to Emile Bernard writes that he "owes the truth," and Bart talks about the desire to write "a real novel, like Proust's," that is, both are more "in search of lost time" than in anticipation of the future. And this is the whole essence of the time loop of photography: the future that has already taken place and the past that has yet to take place are reflected on the photographic plate – this promise of a pure form of presence that has never taken place. It seems that photography gives an almost transparent intuition of the presence of the past, without any distortion or speculation. Right here, in front of your eyes, the unparalleled authenticity of the referent, whom the photograph "constantly carries with it," unfolds itself. Moreover, "the photo is a literal emanation of the referent. Radiations emanate from the real, "former there" body, touching me, who is at another point… Light, although intangible, appears in this case to be a bodily conductor, a skin that I share with the one or the one that was photographed [a]" ^{[1, pp. 143-144]}.

Commenting on this idea of "emanation", Derrida speaks about a certain asymmetry of the gaze: of course, we look at the photo, but to a greater extent – this photo looks at us. The "body of the photographed thing" from which the radiation "emanates" is not an archive or library permanently available to us. The figure standing directly in front of us in the photo is like a ghost, and if it turns out to be able to grab us, prick us, it's not because we recognize ourselves there or images of the past that almost escaped us, as Bart writes about it, but only because we feel the searching gaze of another – this irreplaceable, an irreducible, heterogeneous dead man, piercing me with his gaze. He looks at me as if he were me, as if he were me, already dead, looking at myself. It is this experience of seeing – unique, non–reproducible, constructed by the frame, but at the same time located outside the space fixed by it - that invades me. In other words, the other is looking at me, and his gaze carries a prescription, a barely perceptible, but therefore no less clear directive. The challenging gaze, which is at the same time the law of its singularity, captures us in the snares of our own images and experiences. What manifests itself in the photograph, the light rays that take shape there, is the absence of any materiality, a ghostly image devoid of tangible body density. Yes, the photographic image emits light, or rather, is able to capture it, but it is this light that can completely capture us and carry us into the impenetrable darkness. Our extinction, our disappearance, our own death is already in this magical image. We find ourselves spectralized by photography, its lightning-fast punctum, captured by the invasion of ghosts, greedily absorbing our attention. Animated shadows appear in the photo, and the fact that we encounter technology here, most often without understanding how they work, puts us in a faith–faith relationship in the face of an almost miraculous vision.

Barth describes a photograph of Alexander Gardner taken in 1865 and depicting Lewis Payne, a young man who attempted to assassinate U.S. Secretary of State William Henry Seward and participated in a conspiracy against President Abraham Lincoln. Payne is photographed in a cell, with shackles on his hands and awaiting execution of the death sentence. Looking at this "beautiful photo," writes Bart, "I'm reading at the same time: it will happen and it has already happened, and I look with horror at the preceding future tense, the stake in which is death... Looking at the photo of my mother as a child, I say to myself: "She is going to die," and, like a psychotic patient of Winnicott, I tremble in anticipation of the catastrophe that has already taken place… In the end, there is no need to present me with an image of a corpse (corps) in order for me to feel dizzy from the flatness of Time" ^{[1, pp. 169-171]}.

In the work "The Search for Truth through Natural Light" Descartes writes that "it is inconceivable that the same thing both existed and did not exist" ^[16]. However, in the case of photography, we are constantly confronted with this duality, the treacherous duplicity of images. In the frame, the difference between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary, is erased or, at least, takes on new outlines, calling into question the usual logic of demarcation lines. The person we see in the photo smiles at us, and in his gaze we guess joy and openness to the future, but at the same time we know: he is already dead, and this smile is gone forever. Photography creates a "flattening of time" and informs us about death, which has yet to happen, even if it has already taken place. However, this absolute time loop hangs more like a garrote around the neck of the viewer than of the referent looking at you from a photograph: "Any photograph ... contains an imperative sign of our future death" ^{[1, p. 172]}, therefore, whether we want it or not, peering into a string of images from old, yellowed, silver-gelatin prints, we switch places with the dead, occupy their habitable graves. Every time a person looks at a photograph, every time he is pricked by its punctum, he is, in fact, looking at himself: at himself already dead and dissolved in that absolute silence that leaves nothing more to say, but also at himself in the horizon of his inevitable death, almost on the border, literally a step away from death, but still not crossing its threshold. Perhaps, Derrida suggests, this is the same situation, the same time gap that Roland Barthes experienced between the death of his mother on October 25, 1977 and the accident that claimed his life, which occurred on February 25, 1980. It was in this temporal punctum that the book "Camera lucida" was written.

For Barth, photography is "a luminous shadow that accompanies the body" ^{[1, p. 193]} and in this sense is similar to the shadow drawing of antiquity, the distant heir of which is: it reproduces a living body, securely fixing it as a trace. Of course, the artist does the same when painting a portrait of the model in front of him, but only the camera and the technology underlying it can guarantee such reproduction accuracy. Through the technique, the shadow – the most elusive of all things –is transformed into a fixed image that is destined to last forever. Having fixed the moment, having caught it in the frame, as in a snare, the photographer holds the ghost. That is why photography, outwardly reproducing the present existence in all its fullness of nuances, simultaneously raises the question of absence. It is a misconception that each photo is printed from its own special negative. In reality, all the photographs reproduce the same negative: a mortal body, or rather, a body saying over and over again "I'm dead", "I'm dead", "I'm dead", as in the short story by Edgar Allan Poe "The Truth about what happened to Mr. Waldemar" ^[4] which was addressed, as we indicated above, by both Bart and Derrida.

Photography snatches out a fragment of the present, in which a certain fundamental absence is already imprinted forever, the present, which we can see only because of its absence. That's why photography forms a very specific "flattened" time, a special time loop, like the one we find in Poe's story. Analyzing this story, Barth identifies various "codes" that define the semantic registers of the text. In the context of the "chronological code", he quotes Waldemar's words that caused "inexpressible, chilling horror": "Yes – no – I slept – and now – now – I'm dead" ^{[4, p. 636]}. Before, for many, before the body decomposes, turning into a "semi-liquid, disgusting, rotting mass" ^{[4, p. 638]}, Mr. Waldemar utters this "impossible" phrase: "I am dead." Roland Barthes, commenting on it in some detail, writes that the "literalization" of the statement "I am dead" is impossible, it is "overdue", so we are dealing with a "speech scandal" here. "In our case, the actions of a dead man are purely linguistic actions," says Barth, while discovering a "linguistic lacuna, a linguistic cleft" in the space of which this statement is formed, like the whole novel by Poe: "before us is a performative construction, but one that neither Austin nor Benveniste, of course They did not foresee in their analyses: in our case, an impossible phrase performs its own impossibility" ^{[3, p. 453]}. Death "intrudes here directly into linguistic activity." In the statement "I died" we have a "unique enatioseme", where "the signifier expresses the signified (Death), which is in contradiction with the fact of the statement… We are not just facing "denial" in the psychoanalytic sense of the term, we are facing a moment of transgression brought to paroxysm, a violation of the border; we are facing an invention of an unprecedented category..." ^{[3, p. 454]}. The statement "I am dead" expresses at the same time the antinomic meanings of life and death, yes and no, from which Waldemar's phrase begins, that is, this statement is a denial, denying itself, turning the meaning inside out. This is a kind of non-life, which is not death at the same time. Death, being repressed, returns to the language, violating the boundaries of habitual taboos – this is a cry even if we observe a barely visible tremor of the lips, or even their rigor: "While I was hurriedly making hypnotic passes, and from the tongue, but not from the lips of the sufferer, screams burst: "dead!", "dead!" his whole body – within a minute or even faster – settled, spread out, decomposed under my hands" ^{[4, p. 638]}. A scream that breaks the silence and opens up a space of psychosis inside it: "At this point in the novel ... psychosis reigns in the text: the singularity of Poe's story is the singularity of madness" ^{[3, p. 454]}.

It is difficult for us to understand this phrase of Waldemar: it is death arising within life, or, on the contrary, life speaking from the interior of death. This is an unsolvable dilemma. Valdemar's speech is jerky, ragged, completely alien, coming from afar, from the depths, from the underground abyss of Hades, and yet it sounds, we hear it following the heroes of the story. This speech is like a dotted line or punctum, separate incisions with a scalpel dissecting the skin in several places at once, abruptly splitting the body into sonorous fragments of Morse code – dashes and dots, interrupted by the hum of a strangled throat. The antithesis of life here is not death at all, but the ragged speech of a stutterer, in which every word hangs, the language, as if suspending its work for a moment. It is no coincidence that the narrator speaks of the "frighteningly articulate" sounds coming out of Mr. Valdemar's mouth – staccato, abrupt sounds–screams, fragments of language, fragments of torn speech. The statement "I am dead" is "literally" impossible: a dead person cannot say "I" in the present tense, unless, of course, one takes into account multiple fantasies about the "living dead". And yet, following the heroes of Poe's novel, we hear this phrase and even understand its meaning, despite all the absurdity that these words convey. Moreover, in the work "The Voice and the Phenomenon" Derrida writes that "my death is structurally necessary for the utterance of I. The fact that I am also "alive" and concrete appears as something additional to the appearance of meaning… This is not an extraordinary story by Poe, but an ordinary history of the language. Previously, we got to "I am mortal" from "I am", here we understand "I am" from "I am dead" ^{[5, p. 127]}. And exactly the same thing happens in photography, where time is amazingly suspended and suspended – this is its final, non-transformable figuration. This is a theater of death, where at the same time death does not find its reflection and cannot be internalized, so we hear "I am dead" on our lips, but death does not bring liberation and excludes any catharsis. Photography does not stimulate memory at all, but, quite the contrary, erases its last fragments. In this perspective, photography is like writing in the understanding of Socrates: just as Socrates believed that writing is dead, they mortify thought and cool its living beat, in the same way Barth insists that with all the overload of details, the photograph works as a counter-memory, "forcibly filling the gaze", it replaces memory, becomes its false with a prosthesis: "In Photography, immobilization, the shackling of Time takes an excessive, monstrous form; Time is clogged… A photo is not only inherently never a memory..., but it blocks it, very quickly becoming the opposite of a memory (contre–souvenir)" ^{[1, pp. 161-162]}. However, in fairness, it should be said that in his other text ("Fragments of a lover's speech"), written several years before "Camera lucida", Barth claimed exactly the opposite: "... the essence of photography is not to imagine, but to remind" ^[17].

Photography only creates the effect of reality, but it is not a "living" evidence of the past, as it is liked to be represented, that is, it has more to do with substitution than with presence. Photography does not bring back what has been abolished by space (you have irrevocably left this place) or time (you have exhausted the duration of the event), but produces a different kind of effect: it authenticates. The idea of photography as an absolutely accurate reflection of reality has been widespread almost since its appearance, at least we clearly detect this conviction both among the key photographers of the XIX century, say, Talbot or Nadar, and among their great contemporaries, such as Baudelaire or Delacroix. The process of photographing itself, and even more so the photographic image that appeared next, was perceived as a significant event, a kind of phenomenon of truth that has inexhaustible credibility. Therefore, for a long time it was believed that photography is a conductor of truth and carries the power of evidence, such is its fundamental law and immutable essence. No one else can recreate reality with such a degree of completeness and accuracy, no history and no history are capable of this kind of reconstruction. This is authenticity, which stems (quite literally, if we are talking about a tub filled with developer) from the very method of its production. A photograph is just an imprint, an optical footprint, so that the distinct clarity of reality sticks to the image purely chemically, under the influence of light. There is no need to verify the truth of the captured image, because each photo impartially testifies to what really happened, excluding any distortions and interpretations. In fact, this confidence distinguishes photography from other systems of representation.: She is capable of endlessly reproducing what happened only once. Language "by its nature is based on fiction" ^{[1, p. 152]}, is fictitious and needs a huge arsenal of means of persuasion, starting with logic and ending with an oath, so it turns out to be powerless to confirm its authenticity. Photography, on the contrary, is the best evidence of existence – evidence that never invents anything, does not embellish, does not lie. The photo shows reality in its entirety, without exceptions and notes, which is why it fills everything with itself – there is nothing more to add here ^[18].

However, in Barth's "Camera lucida" and Derrida's "The Death of Roland Barthes" we find a different understanding of the essence of photography: it does not deal at all with memory, and even more so with the ability to find "a living reality ... in involuntary and complete memory": "The photo does not remind of the past, there is nothing of Proust in it. The effect it has on me is not that it restores what was destroyed by time, distance, etc., but in verifying that what I saw really happened" ^{[1, p. 146]}. Photography does not reflect reality, but only gives confidence in the authenticity of what it sees, it verifies reality in all its completeness and integrity, and no written document is capable of providing such unshakable confidence. In other words, "the essence of photography lies in the ratification of what it represents" ^{[1, p. 151]}.

So, summing up this philosophical manifestation of Roland Barthes, carried out by Jacques Derrida, we clearly see the unique ability of photography to create a structurally completely new image in which the ability to authenticate is prioritized over the representative function. Any photograph issues a kind of "certificate of presence" ^{[1, p. 153]}, while canceling its very fact, or rather, dissolving it in the ghostly images of the picture. According to Derrida, what is addressed to me in this or that photo, what touches me in my uniqueness, is "the preceding future tense, the stake in which is death" ^{[1, p. 169]}, therefore, the category of Bart's punctum is inseparable from "I am dead" — Waldemar's phrase from Edgar Alan's story By. The other, who looks at me from the photograph, is the same "Referent" with a capital letter, which Bart speaks of, which differs from the "referents of other image systems" ^{[1, p. 135]}, is my own "I", devoid of presence. Through punctum, photography opens up the possibility for extreme self-affectation. Derrida adds one more remark to this: Bart is haunted by this punctum, this elusive ghost, which no determination can foresee in advance, and his very concept of punctum, as we wrote above, turns out to be ghostly and non-conceptualized, challenging both the place of the Real and the Referent in photography (both capital letters belong to Bart). Therefore, photography creates a special, radically different economy of view from painting ^{[19, 20]}, in the optics of which my presence dissolves into another, losing its own density of the extended body.