I said to myself, then, that this disorder and this dilemma, brought to light by the desire to write about Photography, reflected a kind of discomfort that I've always felt : being a subject caught between two languages, one expressive, the other critical, and at the heart of this second language, between several discourses, those of sociology, semiology and psychoanalysis -- but that, because of the dissatisfaction that I finally found with all of them, I bore witness to the only certain thing that existed in me (as naive as it was): a passionate resistance to any reductive system. For each time that I resorted to any such language, feeling it to coalesce, to slide into reduction and reprimand, I softly left it and looked elsewhere: I began to speak in another way. It was better, once and for all, to turn my protestation of singularity into a virtue, and attempt to make the "ancient sovereignty of the self" (Nietzsche) into a heuristic principle. I then resolved to take for my point of departure only several photos, those that I was sure existed for me. Nothing to do with a corpus: only some bodies. In this entirely conventional debate between subjectivity and science, this bizarre idea came to me: why shouldn't there be, in some way, a new science for each object? A mathesis singularis (and not universalis)? I then decided to use myself as mediator for all of Photography: I would attempt to formulate, starting from certain personal reactions, the fundamental trait, the universal without which there would be no Photography.
from
Camera Lucida
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