According to André Rouillé the search for photography's ontology is both fruitless and pointless. Six decades after André Bazin's seminal essay, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, there is a concerted attempt to remove photography from the ‘reliquary’ of death in which Bazin had locked it. Preferring ‘genesis’ to ‘result’, Bazin had suggested that photography benefited from an ‘essential objectivity’ and that it was close to being a ‘natural phenomenon’: for the first time in history, representation of the external world (...) emerges, mechanically, without human intervention. For Rouillé however, this is a ‘poverty of ontology’, a theory of the ‘index’ based on Peirce erroneously attached to a semiotics of the photographic image. So what happens to the photograph's temporal dimension, crucial to Bazin's definition, if we reject the image as record of the ‘that-has-been’? Can we still use Bazin's ontology in the twenty-first century? (shrink)

The “photo-text,” as he defines it, is concerned as much with the oral as it is with visual and written culture.

By considering S/Z as an early example of the romanesque in Roland Barthes's oeuvre, this article considers the generic and thematic anticipation of La Préparation du roman in Barthes's seminars of the late 1960s. It suggests that his seminar notes on Balzac's Sarrasine written in 1968 and 1969 are a form of proto-essayism, albeit given as seminars in the institutional context of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. This essayism is traced through the notion of perte de soi (...) evident in two aspects of the seminar notes: firstly, in the ‘drugged reading’ that Barthes proposes, and then through his ambivalence to the literary character. Working ‘retroactively’, the article concludes that La Préparation du roman can help us to explain S/Z and its genesis, that is proactively, by applying this perte de soi to the act of one about to write a novel. (shrink)