But I never looked like that!’ – How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it – by which morphological or expressive calibration? Where...

For Death must be somewhere in a society; if it is no longer (or less intensely) in religion, it must be elsewhere; perhaps in this image which produces Death while trying to preserve life. Contemporary...

The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do.

I cannot classify the other, for the other is, precisely, Unique, the singular Image which has miraculously come to correspond to the speciality of my desire. The other is the figure of my truth, and...

Language is neither reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist; for fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech.

A paradox: the same century invented History and PHotography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive...

…The editors of (i)Life(i) rejected Kerész’a photographs when he arrived in the United States in 1937 because, they said, his images ‘spoke too much’; they made us reflect, suggested a meaning — a different meaning...

One of the marks of our world is perhaps this reversal: we live according to a generalized image-repertoire. Consider the United Sates, where everything is transformed into images: only images exist and are produced and...

We don’t forget, but something vacant settles in us.

Don’t say mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.

slow understanding”: a kind of drip-by-drip understanding of problems. People who understand quickly frighten me.

In an initial period, Photography, in order to surprise, photographs the notable; but soon, by a familiar reversal, it decrees notable whatever it photographs. The ‘anything whatever’ then becomes the sophisticated acme of value.

You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen...

The Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent tings, but because on each occasion (i)it fills the sight by force(i), and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed (that we can sometimes...

In 1850, August Salzmann photographed, near Jerusalem, the road to Beith-Lehem (as it was spelled at the time): nothing but stony ground, olive trees; but three tenses dizzy my consciousness: my present, the time of...

The incapacity to name is a good symptom of disturbance.

Engulfment is a moment of hypnosis.

purify” it.

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...

Each of us has his own rhythm of suffering.

I have not a desire but a need for solitude.

The unary Photograph has every reason to be banal, ‘unity’ of composition being the first rule of vulgar (and notably, of academic) rhetoric: ‘The subject,’ says one handbook for amateur photographers, ‘must be simple, free...

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

Are not couturiers the poets who, from year to year, from strophe to strophe, write the anthem of the feminine body?

Where there is meaning, there is paradigm, and where there is paradigm (opposition), there is meaning . . . elliptically put: meaning rests on conflict (the choice of one term against another), and all conflict...

It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by...

To whom could I put this question (with any hope of an answer)? Does being able to live without someone you loved mean you loved her less than you thought…?

Today there is no symbolic compensation for old age, no recognition of a specific value: wisdom, perceptiveness, experience, vision.

Hence the detail which interests me is not, or at least is not strictly intentional, and probably must not be so; it occurs in the field of the photographed thing like a supplement that is...

Literature is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very identity of the body that writes.

La sanción del crítico no es el sentido de la obra, sino el sentido de lo que dice sobre ella.

be interested” in everything that is imposed on you by the world: prohibition of noninterest, even if provisional . . . .

What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence. In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: She is going to die: I shudder… over a catastrophe which has...

As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.

I think that cars today are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals; I mean the supreme creation of an era, conceived with passion by unknown artists, and consumed in image if not...

I feel that the Photograph creates my body or mortifies it, according to its caprice (apology of this mortiferous power: certain Communards paid with their lives for their willingness or even their eagerness to pose...

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing...

there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable.

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to...

The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but...

To make someone wait: the constant prerogative of all power, “age-old pastime of humanity”.

The (i)studium(i) is ultimately always coded, the (i)punctum is not)…

Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.

Ultimately — or at the limit — in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’Janouch told Kafka; and...

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

Each photograph is read as the private appearance of its referent: the age of Photography corresponds precisely to the explosion of the private into the public, or rather into the creation of a new social...

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to...

We know that the war against intelligence is always waged in the name of common sense.

It is by studium that I am interested in so many photographs, whether I receive them as political testimony or enjoy them as good historical scenes: for it is culturally (this connotation is present in...