Negation and the Evil Eye: A Reading of Camera Lucida

Abstract

In the wake of imagination Richard Kearney argues that Western culture has become obsessed with the making and consumption of images (2–6). The work of Sartre, Althusser, and Lacan on representation and the gaze would suggest the relevance of extending Kearney’s observation into the realm of the conceptual image. Western intellectuals are fixated, so it seems, on the images generated by theory, the etymology of “theory” being to look at, or to contemplate; a “theoretician,” then, one who is a spectator, who, in her turn, is looked at. Theories are, in a sense, both images and eyes: and the West, as Barthes argues in Camera Lucida (CL), has ravenous eyes. ¹

... an ideology is a system (with its own logic and rigor) of representations (images, myths, ideas or concepts according to the case) having an existence and a historical role within a society.

—Louis Althusser, Pour Marx (238; my translation)

He is troubled by any image of himself, suffers when he is named. He finds the perfection of a human relationship in this vacancy of the image: to abolish—in oneself, between oneself and others—adjectives; a relationship which adjectivizes is on the side of the image, on the side of domination, of death.

—Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes (47)