The Lover's Fatal Identity Is Precisely This:

For Death Must Be Somewhere In A Society; If It Is No Longer (or Less Intensely) In Religion, It Must Be Elsewhere; Perhaps In This Image Which Produces Death While Trying To Preserve Life. Contemporary With The Withdrawal Of Rites, Photography May Correspond To The Intrusion, In Our Modern Society, Of An Asymbolic Death, Outside Of Religion, Outside Of Ritual, A Kind Of Abrupt Dive Into Literal Death.

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.

To Eat, To Speak, To Sing (need We Add: To Kiss?) Are Operations Which Have The Same Site Of The Body For Origin.

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.

Literature Is Like Phosphorus: It Shines With Its Maximum Brilliance And The Moment When It Attempts To Die.