Date: Mon, 20 Feb 1995 16:12:23 -0600
Subject: MB: Picture me dead


Let me get this straight.  If, as Roland Barthes suggests,
the photograph is an initiation to death ("Contemporaneous
with the decline of ritual, photography corresponds perhaps,
in our modern society, to an asymbolic Death, beyond religion,
beyond ritual, a sort of sudden immersion into literal Death"
--La Chambre claire, 1980, p. 144, my trans.), it seems to
me that Blanchot should be delighted with, if not transfixed by,
photos of himself, i.e. of his own cadaver.  Didn't Blanchot say,
in La Part du feu, that we desire to see ourselves dead ("nous
voulons etre surs de la mort comme achevee... nous desirons
pouvoir nous regarder morts, nous assurer de notre mort en
dirigeant sur notre neant, d'un point situe au-dela de la mort,
un veritable regard d'outre-tombe")?  Why can't Blanchot
consider the (his) photo as performing this "gaze from beyond
the grave?  Get over it, Maurice.

John R. Barberet
Asst. Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Department of Modern Languages & Literatures
Case Western Reserve University
10900 Euclid Ave, Cleveland, OH 44106-7118
Messages (voice) 216-368-3071
Fax 216-368-2216