Afterness by Richter Gerhard;

Author:Richter, Gerhard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy/Movements/Deconstruction
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 1

Theodor W. Adorno, “Self in Mirror,” 1964. (Image courtesy of Stefan Moses [Munich, Germany])

Moses’s photograph of an Adornean self-portrait works to transform the self into the image of an object by uncovering the ways in which the self is always already an image. As Barthes writes of photographic portraiture, “Now, once I feel myself observed by the lens, everything changes: I constitute myself in the process of ‘posing,’ I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image. This transformation is an active one: I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice.” If, as Barthes suggests, the photograph is “the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity,” then the “madness of photography” can be said to have “transformed subject into object, and even, one might say, into a museum object.” To the extent that I wish to coincide with myself as an image, “I do not stop imitating myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of inauthenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain nightmares).”19 The inauthenticity or imposture of the scene of photography is inseparable from death itself—for what does photography capture if not the prediction of its subject’s finitude, the pronouncement that what once was no longer is (or no longer is exactly the way it is pictured in the image) and that its subject will at some point cease to be altogether? Yet, these questions become especially urgent in the scene of the photographic self-portrait. For it is here that I, as a self-portraying subject, actively countersign the displacements and the predictions of finitude that the photographic portrait works to encrypt.

The mourning that Moses’s image of Adorno’s photographic self-portrait stages is not only a function of its status as a memento mori, as Barthes famously suggests, but also a function of its status as the embodiment of an impossibility. The subject’s gaze can never simply be itself; that is, its gaze cannot be available as an object to an other who is looking at it and, in the same moment, observe itself as a gaze that is being looked at. In a conversation about photography, Derrida remarks on the impossibility of this simultaneity. “One thinks,” he says, “that the portrait captures the eyes, the gaze that is, among other things, that for which something like photography exists. The gaze is presumed to be what the subject himself cannot see in his own life. When one looks at oneself in a mirror, one sees oneself either as seen or as seeing but never as both at the same time.” Derrida continues: “One believes that in principle the camera—photographic or cinematographic—should capture or hold a gaze which the looking eyes cannot see. I am seen as you see me speaking … but with a look that I, who am alive now in the present, cannot see. And therefore when

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