“Dasein is ontically distinctive in that it is ontological” (HEIDEGGER, 1962:32).
The ontico-ontological dimension of Dasein refutes ontology. Being cannot be ontological. The being of beings, Being(,) in itself(,) catches sight of everything outside itself. Dasein realizes that everything about itself is contained within itself – DNA. It is then a willful decision of Dasein to orient itself towards the Other. But this orientation or stance does not occur after ontology. The orientation towards the Other is pre-ontological but is necessarily not, and in fact can not be, prior to Being. Dasein now faces its aloneness, and rightfully, though through no decision of its own, sights everything crowding it as other other (Dasein does not like to admit its aloneness). Dasein is the unit left out of Everything, is the unit omitted from Everything. Dasein is singular; there can be no other Dasein. The world determines itself otherly, otherwise than Dasein.
As Nothing emerged out of itself as Being(,) being Dasein, it became capable of uttering to itself that in the Nothing there lies the Nothing of the Other too.
To be is to be ethical. The ethical is the pre-ontological orientation or stance of Dasein as it sights. Dasein purposefully flattens the world. Dasein finds its intention in the truly other.
Photography came as evidence was preparing for its nocturnal emission. This is tantamount to saying that photography is yet to come. Nothing is more evidentiary than a photograph (or any one of its derivatives) captured in hindsight. Evidence is post-historic; and photographs look back. Captured in the nexus of historical time, photographs have not yet come to be. Photography captures self-evidentiary evidence; the advent of evidence is then met by the collapse of evidence, ushering in the post-historical. Post-processing techniques only aid to further tear apart context and the contextual. Evidence germinates. The photograph, quintessentially ‘the photographic’, henceforth calls into question any notions of association; the photograph refutes the in relation to.
The most important invention of mankind will be photography. The dream of photography resolves the Sisyphean task imposed by historical time, this through the chance necessity of its deferred futurity. Presently, photography remains somewhat undetermined. Photographs, including ones captured in the present era, will persist as an orientation or stance. The art of photography was discovered after the art of painting, but the art of photography comes after.
Everything(,) containing ‘the photographic’(,) is a proof of itself. Everything(,) presented as evidence(,) is evidentiary. Maps, fundamentally unlike the terrain, require that we all learn to navigate without them.
Do you know that ‘if’ is the middle word in life?
Photojournalist to Willard, in Apocalypse Now, 1979
Reality is a possibility. Meanwhile, ‘the photographic’ keeps iterating over itself.
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References:
Apocalypse Now. 1979. [Film]. Francis Ford Coppola. dir. USA: American Zoetrope.
HEIDEGGER, Martin. 1962. Being and Time (1927). Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. USA: Blackwell Publishing.
