schwenger

Spring 2000
Volume 26, Number 3

Excerpt from
Corpsing the Image
by Peter Schwenger

"All those young photographers who are at work in the world," observes Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, "do not know that they are agents of Death," for with a click of the shutter time is frozen in pastness, and reality becomes image.1 The relation between photography and death, predicated throughout Barthes's book, is at one point redoubled when Barthes speaks of photographing actual corpses. But this redoubling, far from reinforcing his point, casts it into a rich ambiguity:

If the photograph then becomes horrible, it is because it certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing. For the photograph's immobility is somehow the result of a perverse confusion between two concepts: the Real and the Live: by attesting that the object has been real, the photograph surreptitiously induces belief that it is alive, because of that delusion which makes us attribute to Reality an absolutely superior, somehow eternal value; but by shifting this reality to the past ("this-has-been"), the photograph suggests that it is already dead. [CL, pp. 78Ð79]

What are the sources of the ambiguity here? First, the common elision of the Real and the Live (for example, "a real live girl") is seen to be enacted in the photograph as well. Attesting to the reality of the object depicted, the photograph implies that it is alive, even if that life is always in the past tense and thus already dead. The real trouble, though, is rooted not in the object but in the image--"the living image," Barthes calls it, in an ironic counter to his pervasive suggestion that the photographic image is aligned with death. When the image is that of a corpse, the photograph "becomes horrible," it seems, largely because of its undecidability; it is "the living image of a dead thing." And this undecidability carries with it an effect of the uncanny, which often involves "doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate."2 The uncanny effect is not that different in a standard photograph. The "living image," whatever its subject matter, is always the figurative corpse of what has been alive--a point reinforced by Barthes's description of the photograph and its referent as "glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures" (CL, p. 6). When a real corpse is subjected to this figurative corpsing, then, certain issues about the photographic image are raised in their most extreme form. And those issues can then throw into question the nature of all images.

1. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1981), p. 92; hereafter abbreviated CL.

2. E. Jentsch, quoted in Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny" (1919), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1953Ð74), 7:226.

Peter Schwenger is professor of English at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of Phallic Critiques (1984), Letter Bomb (1991), and Fantasm and Fiction: On Textual Envisioning (1999). Currently he is working on The Tears of Things, a study of the melancholy associated with objects.

Editorial Office main page * Back Issues * Subscribe to CI