The Birth Of The Reader Must Be

I Want A History Of Looking. For The Photograph Is The Advent Of Myself As Other: A Cunning Dissociation Of Consciousness From Identity. Even Odder: It Was Before Photography That Men Had The Most To Say About The Vision Of The Double. Heautoscopy Was Compared With An Hallucinosis; For Centuries This Was A Great Mythic Theme.

Each Of Us Has His Own Rhythm Of Suffering.

He Who Reads A Story Only Once Is Condemned To Read The Same Story His Whole Life.

Language Is A Skin: I Rub My Language Against The Other. It Is As If I Had Words Instead Of Fingers, Or Fingers At The Tip Of My Words. My Language Trembles With Desire.

The Photograph Is An Extended, Loaded Evidence — As If It Caricatured Not The Figure Of What It Represents (quite The Converse) But Its Very Existence ... The Photograph Then Becomes A Bizarre (i)medium(i), A New Form Of Hallucination: False On The Level Of Perception, True On The Level Of Time: A Temporal Hallucination, So To Speak, A Modest (o)shared(i) Hallucination (on The One Hand 'it Is Not There,' On The Other 'but It Has Indeed Been'): A Mad Image, Chafed By Reality.