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On the Being of Photography

Dag Petersson

The issue that we have been asked to address during this conference is, and I quote from

the CFP, photographic specificiality, or in other words, the particularly photographic

about photography. As I have failed to locate the term specificiality both in Websters

and in the Oxford English Dictionary, I assume that the intended meaning is either

photographic specificity or the specifically photographic. It is beyond my English

skills to decide whether these two terms are exactly synonymous but they feel slightly

different. The explanation given in the CFP, that is, in other words, the particularly

photographic about photography does not quite clarify things for me. What does it mean

how should it be understood, the particularly photographic about photography? Does it

refer once more to the question of an ontological essence of photography? Or does it focus

on the defining characteristics of the medium (but what characteristics? technical, social,

economical, aesthetical, political, juridical, communicative or any other)? Could it not also

refer to photography as a distinct concept or metaphor in some discursive formation, or to a

local quality standard which defines the value of a good photograph or photographer (such

as misty morning in Finnish amateur photography from the 1950s)? In short, although I

think I understand the general ballpark in which we are supposed to play, the field of

discourse feels indistinct enough that any of the suggested answers above can satisfy the

question. And this may become a problem: As the four possible meanings are not reducible

to each other it may be difficult to bridge insights from different interpretations. It must be

recognized that the essence of a particular thing is in no sense related to its typical

characteristics, and neither of those have anything to do with the discursive conceptual

consistency that makes it knowable; finally, none of these three may constitute a quality

standardwithout rather undesired implications.

Because I do not understand what is the photographic about photography any more

than I would understand the telephonic about telephony or the furniturity about furniture

for I fail to find anything about photography that is not in some sense

photographicI apologize for taking the opportunity to speak of something else, that I

can merely hope is a relevant matter.


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I would like to address the discursive consistency of the concept of photography as it

has been deployed in modern dialectic philosophy. This was originally the subject of my

Ph.D. thesis, which is currently undergoing extensive revision for the purpose of

publication. Returning to the dissertation ms. has above all meant trying to simplify my

argument and make it accessible for a wider audience. But it has also meant rethinking

several core notions, and a critique of many of my earlier ideas. What I want to present

here is a few basic outlines of my argument as it stands today along with a

problematization of some of my assumptions that I hope will spark increased insight.

What I propose is that photography, understood in the widest sense as preserving

differentiated light as something intelligible, has in the history of dialectics from Hegel to

Derrida played the role of an aesthetic determination of the being of dialectics itself. This I

understand as the consistency of the concept of photography in dialectics. Because Sarah

Kofman has already worked out the conceptual consistency of photography in Nietzsche,

Marx and Freud, I have been able to follow in her footsteps and investigate Benjamin,

Hegel and Derrida. Most of us are familiar with at least some of Benjamins writings on

photography. Hegel died before the invention of the technology, but the conceptual

presence of photography is strongly articulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the

Aesthetics and not least in the early theological writings. Derrida wrote most explicitly

about photography in his obituary to Roland Barthes and in the famous collaboration with

photographer Marie-Franoise Plissard, Droit de regards. The deconstructive force of

photography is, however, not as strongly articulated in these two works as in the

experimental bookGlas from 1974, in which Derrida simultaneously treats Hegel and Jean

Genet. Similar to Derrida, Benjamins most forceful writings on photography are not in the

most explicit texts on the subject, The Work of Art in The Age of its Technical

Reproducibility and A Small History of Photography (although the latter is strongerthan the former). The truly materialistic use of photography in Benjamins sense is found in

his writings on Baudelaire.

Before I give a sketch of the various conceptual consistencies in these dialectical

systems, I should perhaps clarify what conceptual consistency means, and why it is not the

same as an essence. An essence is a metaphysical concept. It is that which is necessary in

order for something to be what it is. In metaphysics, the being of any given thing is granted

by its essence. Philosophy has produced a wide variety of systematic explanations for this


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relationship: for example, Platonic and Aristotelean essences are no more identical to each

other than those found in Leibniz, Descartes or Spinoza. As a contrast, conceptual

consistency is not a metaphysical notion; in fact it is not even restricted to philosophy.

There are conceptual consistencies in poetry, prose, philosophy, law, art history, medicine

etc. When Michel Foucault described such consistencies in The Archeology of Knowledge,

he emphasized (to many deaf ears) that archeology is not a question of identifying

consistencies of consent between various disciplines but, to the contrary, that the object of

analysis is a consistency of dissent. What Foucault explicated was the particular way in

which a discourse maintained within itself a certain consistent range of possible deviations,

conflicts, variations and dissenting conclusions.

The same is true for my project on dialectics. It is the dissenting variations of

conceptual consistency within dialectics that are of interest. Photography is engaged in this

analysis on the basis of it being conditional for the self-determination of dialectics. On the

one hand, photography can therefore be a variable constant from which to measure these

deviations, but on the other handas the deviances reflect back on photographymy

theory explains the theoretical problems involved in determining the being of photography.

The being of photography is not at all determined by my analysis. What will appear are, to

the contrary, various reasons for the particular indeterminability of the being of

photography.

Why dialectics and not some other field of discourse? A quick survey at the

beginning of my project convinced me that the problem of photography was nowhere as

deeply theoretically integrated as in dialectics. Because, as I said earlier, photography is

involved in the aesthetic determination of the being of dialectics itself, photography is here

more than in any other discourse revealing its most intense relationship to a discourse of

aesthetic determination. Conversely, dialectics have also been an important tool (amongseveral others) to understand and determine the phenomenon of photographyfor example

in Gisle Freund, Hubertus von Amelunxen, Eduardo Cadava and Georges Didi-Huberman.

It is this crossdetermining relationship between photography and dialectics that I have

found particularly promising, both as it might open dialectical thought to its own historical

diversity and transform it as a way of thinking, andbecause it may challenge the discourse

about photography, for example about the relational development of its technology, its


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history, its bulging archives, its social importance, its economical and political power, its

everyday applications and artistic experiments.

From this perspective it should be clear that my work on the conceptual consistency

of photography in dialectics is but a preliminary preparation. The most important thing

about this work, however, is that because photography occupies a position thatprepares for

the aesthetical self-determination of dialectics, its own Being and aesthetic development

cannot be determined dialectically. Photography strives to assume a dialectical

representation, just as dialectics wants to found its expression in photography. Should

either desire manifest itself, however, they would become inert and die.

This relationship is explicitly clear in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit, in the

transition from the chapter Spirit to Religion. What remains after the chapter Spirit is to

determine the being of the word of reconciliation, which is the highest manifestation of

faiththe most perfect unity between finite and infinite knowledge. The believer unifies in

faith with the infinite through Christ, but his mediating word is still a material medium of

salvation. All such material inertness and obstinacy must therefore be negated, and this is

what motivates theAesthetics and Hegels history of art in thePhenomenology. Here Spirit

goes through several stages of aesthetical development, beginning with Mazdaism and the

Zoroastric sunworship and ending with the grammar of the German language, in which

subject and predicate absolutely determine each other. The odd thing, as Derrida points out

in Glas, is that in the beginning of this development, Spirit moves aimlessly about in

[Nature] without stability or intelligence. It has no formal relation to itself but is a shape

of shapelessnessan all-pervading essential light of sunrise; and these torrents of light

are at the same time the genesis of its being-for-self and the return from the existence of

its moments, streams of fire destructive of all structured form. Spirit begins from scratch:

having thus erased all previously structured form it is now unable to recognize the form ofitself and to determine any self-relationship in an intelligible way. There is thus no longer

anything left of the dialectics it has constructed so far. Nevertheless, and this is the strange

thing, it develops through the arts of Mesopotamia, India and Egypt. Its recovery is not

complete, however, until Spirit incarnates in Oedipus, whose self-reflective answer Man

solves the riddle of the Sphinx and reestablishes the Hellenic origin of dialectic expression.

All the previous arts, from the flower religion to the Obelisks (which are petrified rays of


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light inscribed with letters) develop as various forms of photography toward the dialectical

expression of itself, but they develop without Spirit being present to itself.

As Deleuze might have put it: photography approaches dialectics like a line from the

outside with infinite speed. When photography has given enough momentum to dialectical

thought for it to manifest its own expression with Oedipus, photography has already left the

system. The two are intrinsically bound to each other, but wholly irreducible. Photography

is photography as long as it is not becoming subsumed under dialectics, and dialectics is

founded on a photography that it cannot turn into a part of itself.

This relationship, the impossible but necessary coexistence of the two, is, as I have

already hinted, reflected both in Benjamins analysis of Baudelaire and in Derridas

analysis of Genet. However, the relationship manifests itself very differently in each of the

two, both from each other and from the discourse in Hegel. One may see, however, that

several tropes appear in each of the three dialectical systems, as if they belong to

photography, but reconfigure with the particular consistency of dialectics. Flowers for

instance, appear as der Blumenreligion in Hegel, as Les Fleurs du Mal in Baudelaire, and

as the becoming flower of Genet through his name; the sun is das Lichtwesen in Hegel, it

is battled in the faubourgs by Baudelarie and worshipped by Genet on the shores of

Gibraltar; the family is the origin of speculative right in Hegel, the emblem for the

impossible sexual union for Baudelaire, and a powerful void for Genet, the orphan turned

homosexual; representation is incomensurable with pre-Hellenic art in Hegel, with the

theory of correspondence in Baudelaire, with the foreshortening of the symbol in Genet;

memory is neurotically additive for Hegels Spirit, though temporarily erased during the

pre-Hellenic period, it is traumatically induced in Baudelaire and conditional, as the most

treacherous faculty, for Genets writing. These and several other concepts, such as

mourning, quotation, death, loss of self, reconciliation, responsibility, ciphre and beautycorrespond to each other around the concept of photography, albeit in very different

constellations depending on the consistency of the dialectics involved.

It is not necessary here to actually map the relative position of each concept in the

various dialectics. This would be an arduous task and take up far too much space in this

paper. Much more important is to recognize that the particular relationship between

dialectics and photography does indeed organize various conceptual consistencies. In

Benjamins reading of Baudelaire, for example, photography is both the methodological


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tool for picturing life in Paris as laid down in Baudelaires poetry, and at the same time, a

technical idea that informs Baudelaires writings: the quick glances, the traumatic

Nachtrglichkeit and the voyeuristic sexuality. In Benjamins reading of Baudelaire

photography comes to reflect on itself. This reflection of method and subject is a condition

for his dialectical analysis. But again, photography merely prepares for the dialectical

labor. Only in an instigating, instantaneous now of recognizability may a critic snap a

picture of a photographic glitch in Baudelaires language (Benjamin calls itAutentizitt)

that has gone unnoticed in traditional history but which suddenly appears to view. The task

of the critic is to snap enough of these images and to use them as a ground for several

parallel dialectical analyses whichand this is the pointwill not unify opposite entities

into a string of syntheses, but will hold their relations in a constellation of tensions which

forms a dialectical image. This image is Benjamins text.

There is in Benjamin a distinct difference between the task of photographing the

images that appear suddenly in the fleeting moment of the now, and the task of dialectically

working out the dialectical analysis that can hold their forces in a standstill. However,

being distinct from each other does not mean being unrelated. To the contrary, dialectics

cannot perform the task of producing the constellation of tensions unless there have been

these sudden appearances that only photography can hold fast. Photography coexists with

dialectics, as two irreducible registers of analysis, but in a very different way from Hegel.

With Derrida appears another relation between dialectics and photography. In Glas,

which I hold to be the deconstructive book where the relationship between dialectics and

photography is most forcefully staged, the word photography is not even mentioned. This

does not deter my approach, and for several reasons. For one thing, photography is an

indisputably crucial element in Genets writings and it is easy to see how the concepts

relating to it are laid out in Derridas book. Another thing is that Derridas analysis ofHegel has as one of its two focal points the photographic pre-Hellenic arts from the

Aesthetics. As the other focal point is the concept of family in Hegels Philosophy of Right,

ethics becomes a counterweight to the aesthetics. This is, of course, consistent with Genets

probing into elements like love, betrayal, theft, guilt, pride, self-recognition and, not least,

saintliness.

The book Glas is not an ordinary analysis of two writers; it is a virtual tour de force

when it comes to integrating the problems at hand with the physical appearance of the text.


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The graphic design divides the text on each page into two columns, the left column for

Hegel and the right one for Genet. Apart from being typed with different fonts and with

strange intervals of spacing, both columns have inserted into their margins short comments

that add reference to the main body. This graphic design mimics the Indian colons that

Hegel mentions as one of the pre-Hellenic arts. Derrida refers to them in the beginning of

Glas as one of two subjects for his reading; these colons were niched, according to Hegel,

with inserted text. Furthermore, the title Glas refers in part to theKlangfrom the Egyptian

stone colossus Memnon, which, according to a myth that Hegel appropriates, reverberated

with a sound every morning in response to the first rays of light. The book is in many ways

thus imbued with the photographic moments of Hegel. A large part of it analyses what

consequences Hegels philosophy of Right have had for these undetermined pre-Hellenic

arts and finds in several instances a correspondence between a remaining material inertness

in ethical justice and in aesthetics. That photography, or heliogravure as Derrida calls it,

informs Hegels dialectics throughout the system brings his philosophy in a nonsublatable

(unaufhebbaren) dialogue with Genetnonsublatable not because of their radically

opposite stance, but because of their resemblance to each other. In many ways, Genet the

thief, smuggler, whore and homosexual agrees with Hegel the protestant, philosopher,

father and devout citizen. Their agreement on the equal value of all human beings and their

support for the death penalty are examples that for Derrida are criticizable, but that

maintains the unsublatability. Other issues that connect Hegel and Genet are the obfuscated

concerns about motherhood and the ethics of property, their distance toward Jewish right,

the conditional value of guilt and the determination of self by negation of the other. Hegel

and Genet are involved in a complex unpredictable dialectics, which is not Hegelian but is

deconstructive. The intrinsic philosophical condition for this deconstructive dialectics is

photography.In two texts does Genet let photography become an emblem for the problem of

identifying his proper self, or rather, photography becomes something that instigates the

process of a dialectical negation of the other. In both cases, the other is a former self that is

no longer recognized, but which has had, or has been about to have a unifying relation with

the absolute, with God. In this can be recognized the story of Hegels Spirit, and again,

photography has the role of an impossible, but necessary other. The first text is a passage in

The Thiefs Journalwhere Genet stops the narrative to recount the discovery of two mug


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shots of himself, one in which he is about 16 and the other where he is 30 years old. What

is stunning is not so much that Genet cannot recognize his former looks in the teenage

photograph, but that it reveals to him someone who looks completely different from how he

remembered having felt about himself. Comparing it to the other photograph, where Genet

looks radically different, much harder, bitter and colder, induces a particular kind of

memory: a memory of how the future appeared to him at the age of 16, romantically

anticipated, feared, hoped for, anything but how it actually became. He also remembers

how through the journey into the future, the past gradually changed, distorted and

eventually disappeared. The banal realization occurs to Genet, that a memory has nothing

to do with a photograph, that a memory is something completely different than a photo, that

it doesnt even look like one or work like one. Photography merely prepares (from being so

different from ones memory) for a dialectical identification and determination of ones

own mistaken identity, the hopes, dreams, decisions and fantasies that shaped the future

and the memory that misrecognizes them from within that future. The photographic image

corresponds to being lost in the world (as for Hegel and for Baudelaire) but in close

communication with the absolute. The following is from The Thiefs Journal:

At twilight, when I was weary, my head would sink, and I would feel my gaze lingering on

the world and merging with it, or else turning inward and disappearing; I think it was awareof my utter solitude. [] And little by little, through a kind of operation which I cannot quite

describe, without modifying the dimensions of my body, and perhaps because it was easier to

contain so precious a reason for my glory, it was within me that I established this divinity

origin and disposition of myself. I swallowed it. I dedicated to it songs of my own invention.

At night I would whistle. The melody was a religious one. It was slow. Its rhythm was

somewhat heavy. I thought I was thereby entering into communication with God; which is

what happened, God being only the hope and fervour contained in my song. (The Thiefs

Journal, 70)

This is a product of photographic memory, as it were. Only in photography can the subject

be lost to itself but still develop and hold this phantasmatic, dialectical determination of

self, in relation to God. Photography is, in short, the condition for a dialectical

determination and for dialectics itself.

An unfinished stage-play called Elle from 1955 confirms this analysis. In this

absurd theatre, which takes place in a photographers studio, the photographer and the


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popes valet are preparing for a photo session with the pope. The popes dilemma is that he

cannot determine his own being as pope, that is, the highest manifestation of faith (compare

to the word of reconciliation from Hegel). The saintliness of the pope requires a being of

infinity. Such an infinite saintliness cannot be given (from the council of cardinals), or even

assumed without becoming something finite. The problem of being pope is that a pope

cannot be what he is; hence, he becomes an image of the pope. Being an image, in French

une image, is being a feminine noun, and consequently the pope is a she, hence the title

Elle. The pope can now manifest her being pope through the possibly infinite number of

images that can be reproduced photographically. This is the popes plan and the reason for

the studio visit. Now, for the sake of reaching an end to my paper I must fast-forward past

all the wonderful details and intricate suggestions about photography in this play, and

reveal the end. The photographer has foreseen that a conflict will arise between his own

concern about how to photograph the pope, and the pope who does not care which way or

another, as long as the images are multiplied to the masses. As a solution to the

photographers dilemma, he has hired an actor, a stand-in, to play at being the

photographer, while the real photographer is hiding and photographs the spectacle

unfolding between pope and actor.

The moral of the story is of course that only betrayal can reveal the true infinity of

saintliness. As in The Theifs Journal, infinity is also expressed here through song, the

popes five songs that reveal the infinity of saintliness as vanity. The infinite beauty of

human vanity, pride, stupidity and shame is the result of the proto-dialectics that

photography fully participates in.

Saintliness, for Genet, is the blind spot of determination, the place where dialectics is

folding in on itself: I call saintliness not a state, but the moral procedure that leads me to

it. It is the ideal pont of a morality which I cannot talk about since I do not see it. Itwithdraws when I approach it. I desire it and fear it. This procedure may appear stupid.

Yet, through painful, it is joyful. [That is the first fold of dialectics! D.P] It is a gay girl. It

foolishly assumes the role of a Carolina carried off in her skirts and screaming with

happiness. (The Thiefs Journal, 179). Genet is for me the writer who has brought out the

preparatory pre-dialectical becoming-dialectics of photography to its most intense

expression. Genet manages to hold photography in a state of non-equilibrium where its

mode of expression is about to be dialectic.


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Should I at last return to the issue of the particularly photographic about photography

on the basis of what I have tried to explain, my point would be that for several dialectic

discourses, no other mode of expression than photography can (or at least so far have)

express(ed) the task of bridging the infinite with the determination of dialectics itself. One

might ask what it is about photography, or lightwriting, or rendering-light-intelligible that

makes it able to perform this. Such a discussion, I think, would have to trace the conceptual

consistency of light and language, writing and materiality, time and phenomenality. But

considered historically, dialectics have bifurcated since Hegel and proved perhaps more

resilient to variations than what he himself might have expected. If there is indeed an

irreducible difference between dialectical systems, which cannot be bridged by dialectics,

then photography is a remarkable rest, an answer perhaps to the discourse about freedom

that has fueled so many commentators of Hegels prison, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche,

Adorno, and Foucault.

Id like to end with a quotation from the opening of The Thiefs Journal, a passage

that ties one of the photographic concepts together the question of freedom: there is a

close relationship between flowers and convicts. The fragility and delicacy of the former

are of the same nature as the brutal insensitivity of the latter.

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