Paintings are atemporal; a painting can be painted at any time. History is the history of the photograph. History, then, is the history of colour. Following Runge, white and black are to be treated as colours and not as transparencies. Colour is colourful but must still appear to appear as such. Following Heraclitus very loosely, “You cannot step into a photograph”. If one could possibly step into a photograph (and there is no reason to believe that this act is wholly impossible), then the world would look just the same.
I hold a photograph, therefore I exist.
Light sheds light on; light and its absence (the absence of light is light conceptualised, hence, for all intents and purposes, light) give appearance to. Being appears in light or in light’s absence, no matter what matter might matter. Matter, as a matter of fact, only matters outside of the photograph. Matter is what matters to matter outside of the photograph; had one to step inside a photograph, matter would become a matter of matter once again.
Just as Space is a dimension of Time (see here), Touch is a dimension of Vision.
What can still be posited as being if the worldly All, the All of reality, remains parenthesized?
HUSSERL (1983: 63n3)
Memory is always memory of. Another way of stating that would be that in the act of remembering a figurative light is shone on… If the claim that the photograph is memory made tangible is successfully validated (see here), we must then give credence to the ensuing claim that the photograph is ‘simply’ light showing us what it sees… or, more correctly, saw.
The action which damned (and was the very sign of damnation – neigh, was damnation itself!) is now the only action redeemed: communicating in language (to be understood in the same manner as when one, for example, says “we were communicating between us in English”; communicating in language entails communicating in the language of language, which leads back to language [see here])… only to be potentially lost for good… or shared fairly.
No definition of ‘the photographic’ can subsist within reality. To define or theorise within reality simply causes a recycling of that reality. This recycling process is after all affected by the unblinking eye of ‘the photographic’.
And the Law gives sight to the congenitally blind.
‘The photographic’, the miracle that appears as nothing miraculous, necessarily is the real, and yet it is not real. Being in light, expresses. Light without Being is in perpetual falling. Light looks for something to fall on. Light intimates Being. Being is a property of light. Whether matter matters is a matter of contention. My Being is the Being of the Other; my Self is outside itself – it is appropriately located beyond itself. (One only says ‘nothing’ when one’s Being is not experienced as such.) Being other to oneself and recognising oneself as such can only come about through the sole constitutive power, which is Alterity – the Other found(s) me. ‘The photographic’: the it is what it is, which is what is. ‘The photographic’ ultimately is only responsible for instating the terrible and inevitable age of supreme defeatism. ‘The photographic’ leaves in its wake beings stuttering at the entrance to the gaping, fathomless hole home to The Unknown, also known by its other term, Alterity. Ironically, it is now that life starts; in our baggage, only ‘the photographic’.
Featured Image:
Caravaggio, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons (crop by the author)References:
HUSSERL, Edmund. 1983. Ideas Pertaining To A Pure Phenomenology And To A Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction To A Pure Phenomenology (1913). Translated by F. Kersten. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
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