Home > Work > Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
41 " Photography transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object: in order to take the first portraits the subject had to assume long poses under a glass roof in bright sunlight; to become an object made one suffer as much as surgical operation; then a device was invented, a kind of prosthesis invisible to the lens, which supported and maintained the body in its passage to immobility: this headrest was the pedestal of the statue I would become, the corset of my imaginary essence. "
― Roland Barthes , Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
42 " I could read my nonexistence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her. "
43 " Elle morte, je n'avais plus aucune raison de m'accorder à la marche du Vivant supérieur (l'espèce). Ma particularité ne pourrait jamais plus s'universaliser (sinon, utopiquement, par l'écriture, dont le projet, dès lors, devait devenir l'unique but de ma vie). "
44 " Thus the life of someone whose existence has somewhat preceded our own encloses in its particularity the very tension of History, its division. History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it — and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. As a living soul, I am the very contrary of History. I am what belies it, destroys it for the sake of my own history (impossible for me to believe in "witnesses"; impossible, at least, to be one; Michelet was able to write virtually nothing about his own time). "
45 " History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it. "
