Notes on Love and Photography

CADAVA, EDUARDO/CORTES ROCCA, PAOLA

Photography degree zero: reflections on Roland Barthe’s Camera lucida

MIT Press

Lugar: Massachusetts; Año: 2009; p. 105 - 140

Camera Lucida is not only a reflection on photography, but also a text on love and eroticism. It is perhaps Barthes’ true text on love and we might even imagine it coming to us under another title: Fragments on a Lover’s Discourse. While it is very much like Barthes’ earlier meditation on the language of love—it, too, is traversed by amorous rhetoric—it also comes clothed in photographic rhetoric and thereby asks us to understand the ways in which photographic language is always a language of love, or vice versa, and that to speak of photography is always to speak of a subject who looks, and of an object that is contemplated, posed, rescued from oblivion, and inscribed within the heart of memory. To speak of photography, in other words, is always to speak of love. The essay seeks to demonstrate this claim by reading several of the concepts that circulate through Barthes’ text in relation to the experience and language of love: 1) indexicality, which, in relation to love and eroticism, can be read in relation to the love of the referent, of the lover’s body, even if this relation cannot be reduced to a question of representation since the referent and the body always exceed such representation; 2) the punctuum, which can be read in relation to the temporal logic of the loved one’s body (what is always on the verge of being lost, what is always parcelled out in a process of eroticization, and what makes the lover’s body singular and therefore something that interrupts us, that seizes our attention, and gives birth to our fascination; 3) time, which can be read in relation to the temporality of both the photograph and the lover, and in relation to the motifs of ruin, loss, death, and finitude that touch the entirety of Barthes text. (This article is a slight revision of the essay published in October).