Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
The Holy Bible: Genesis. 3:16
Why is this world the only possibility for alterity? In the light of the day, things appear; in the dark of the night, things disappear. In this diurnal activity, Descartes’ ‘cogito’ becomes effectively summarised as such: I am. Day turns into night, night turns into day; light as the main protagonist in the interplay between day and night, light as that something that travels away from its source, sets the time and opens the space. Henceforth, history has its stage.
Death, electric kettles, despair, microwave ovens, umbrellas, poverty, etc., are all one way of looking at the same thing: reality. Henceforth, reality is all about that which is real. The realness, for example, of the electric kettle, or, of poverty, can be very easily contested. What if in the midst of all these things were placed an Other who, although very much like me, is not me, but ‘is’ as much as ‘I am’? …An alterity that is only possible in this world, awarely, in time, yet made clearly impossible due to that very same awareness in time? (The Other does not happen in Time) …Because amidst all this poverty, there is that which is really poor; amidst all this dirt, there is the truly dirty; and amidst all this love, there is real love…
Henceforth, the mode of this world would be ‘the photographic’. ‘The photographic’ was the image of this time – Time(/Light) imaged.
‘The photographic’ of the now hypothetically no more, can a future for photography be at all possible if now it has been clearly understood that ‘the photographic’ can never be divorced from the photograph, from any image, from the Image… nor from that system which makes one able to image? …A new photography, necessarily coupled with the rebirth of ‘the photographic’… a new ‘photographic’?
‘The photographic’ is necessarily ahistorical 🙂
Featured Image:
Esau Meeting Jacob, print, after George Frederic Watts, Dalziel Brothers (MET, 26.99.1(21)). Available at: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Esau_Meeting_Jacob_(Dalziels%27_Bible_Gallery)_MET_DP835809.jpg [accessed 22 March 2022].
References:
The Holy Bible. Genesis. 3:16. King James Version (1611). Bible Gateway [online]. Available at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis%203&version=KJV [accessed 22 March 2022].
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