[…] This also is why representation or testimony are never innocent: the camera is never here or there in order to register "reality," and the image does not exist to confirm how different it is from us. Instead, Barthes suggests that the essence of photography lies in its affirmation of becoming. Photography names (without naming) the process whereby something stops being what it "is" in order to transform itself into "something else." It "represents that very subtle moment when, to tell the truth, I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter" (CL, p. 14/CC, p. 30). Between life and death, subject and object, subject and image, in a kind of parenthesis, the specter I am becoming declares that the only image or subject that could really be an image or subject would be the one that shows its impossibility, its disappearance and destruction, its ruin.

To look at a photograph therefore means to contemplate the singular adher­ence that transforms me into an image and what the image demonstrates to me (without demonstrating anything at all) about what it means to be a photographic subject. The relation between the object and its image, among the image-object, the object-image, and my gaze, links me to the adventure of experiencing the pho­tographic fragment as a mirror that returns me to my own image. As Barthes explains, "I am the reference of every photograph, and this is what generates my astonishment in addressing myself to the fundamental question: why is it that I am alive here and now?" (CL, p. 84/CC, p. 131). In other words, why am I not there—in the fragment of paper that I hold in my hand or in the place in which the photo­graph was taken? Why am I not there then, in the moment in which the click of the shutter was heard, in the precise instant in which what the image shows me was transformed into this image? If photography is "the cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity" (CL, p. 12/CC, p. 28), it is not only because photog­raphy signals a crisis in the identity of the subject but also because it introduces a mediation and break into the very interior of the concept of identity. Within the photographic space, I "discover" that I am never self-identical to myself, and that there is no object, no act, no instant that ever coincides with "itself." Each time we hold an image in our hands, the magic of photography returns to repeat itself and the photographed and the photographic apparatus encounter themselves again as if for the very first time, in part because the observer, haunted and constituted by this earlier encounter, is himself a photographic apparatus. Photography prevents us from ever recognizing this or that identity—ours, but also that of someone or something else—because "photography" is the name of the destruction of any consciousness of identity.  This law of both love and photography—a law that interrupts identity by marking it with the sign of difference and transformation—belongs to what makes Barthes' meditation on love and photography so radically provocative: against a sense that photography's signature lies in its capacity to fix and preserve—to arrest—what is before the camera, he mobilizes a network of associations that, practically and textually, seek to disorganize and destabilize the opposition or dif­ference between opposing terms, such as stasis and movement, preservation and destruction, survival and death, and memory and mourning. That this work of dis­organization and destabilization is shown to be at the heart of the experience of love—as Barthes would have it, love is nothing else than a process of disorganiza­tion and destabilization—is what we are meant to trace, as if we were tracing and listening to a kind of secret, and as we follow the Ariadne's thread which, like the Winter Garden Photograph of his mother as a child, brings together photography, love, and death.

What would it mean to formulate an ontology for photography—for this medium that, according to Barthes, is characterized only by "contingency, singu­larity, adventure" (CL, p. 20/CC, p. 40)? Camera Lucida opens with this ontological desire and, as the text advances, ontology gives way to a space entirely devoted to desire: "I was interested in Photography only for 'sentimental' reasons," Barthes writes, "I wanted to explore it not as a question (a theme) but as a wound" (CL, p. 21/CC, p. 42). If photography is not to be thought as a theme (or as a question to which we might provide an answer), it is because it cannot be reduced to a theme; it is because, "unclassifiable" (CL, p. A/CC, p. 15), it wounds the very possibility of theme and, in particular, of the theme or concept of photography. This is why the language and concepts mobilized throughout this text require a reading attentive to what he calls, at the end of the first part of the book, his "palinode," his retrac­tion of his desire to name or conceptualize photography in a determinate manner. We might even say that this palinode—as a mode of assertion that countersigns a kind of withdrawal from what is being asserted—is one of the text's signatures. It belongs to an effort of conceptualization that moves the text in one direction in order later to follow the reverse path in search of a language willing to risk a rela­tion to "affect," a language that, as he puts it, can only "speak of desire or of mourning" (CL, p. 21 /CC, p. 41). The entirety of Camera Lucida, in other words, proceeds by seeking a language commensurate with the paradoxical character of the photograph—a language that is guided and interrupted by the desire for the very thing that, always lost, and never comprehended, remains to be mourned: photography itself. 

The notorious distinction that Barthes makes between the photograph's punctum and studium—a distinction that, as we will see, is only the simulacrum of a distinction (even if, at the same time, these two terms always remain different from each other)—appears to be the exemplary instance of this paradoxical com­promise with desire or mourning. As he would have it—at least initially—the studium is a field of predictability and repetition: "it always refers to a classical body of information"; it is what "I perceive quite familiarly as a consequence of my knowledge, my culture" (CL, p. 25/CC, p. 47). It constitutes (or "figures") a total­ity that always refers to something that precedes the image: the intention that might govern the photograph's production, whether it is generated by the photog­rapher, the technology, or the object captured in the image. This field is scanned by the detail that Barthes calls the punctum, which he claims is excluded from the field of intentions, in the strongest sense of the term "intentionality"—that is, in terms of a subject's will of expression—but also in the sense of what this or that photographic technology or photographed subject can or wishes to say. "Certain details may 'prick me,'" he writes, "If they do not, it is doubtless because the pho­tographer has put them there intentionally" (CL, p. 27/CC, p. 49). The punctum therefore escapes from what counts as the art of the photographer, but also from what we could call the art of the photographic technique or of the object—the capturing of the present moment, the precision of technical processes, the exhibi­tion of rarities—precisely because punctum is the name with which Barthes seeks to designate what cannot be seen in advance, "that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me" (CL, p. 47/CC, p. 79). Defined as a detail that fascinates, but also as a wound that interrupts the studium, that cuts or pricks the image and the corporeal gaze that would view it, the punctum points directly toward that affective field opened by images—a field that always evokes enjoyment as both pleasurable and wounding. […]