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Artículos

Vol. 14 No. 1 (2023)

Roland Barthes, or, the photographic burning Photography and madness in La chambre claire (1980)

DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8212569
Submitted
February 22, 2023
Published
2023-07-31

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation of Roland Barthes’s La chambre claire based on the syntagma “madness of photography”, as a sign of an original and radical theory of photographic experience. By virtue of its ontological and technological core (concerning the unprecedented configuration of an image-time) and of a strong articulation between the referential status of the image and the drive status in the Spectator (linking photography mainly to the proccesses of the unconscious), the photo owns a unique power: that of marking in the subject an exceptional affective intensity. I propose to demonstrate that Barthes understands photography as the place of an extreme experience, as for in the event of punctum, the Spectator pushes the limits of meaning and the coming of the unnamable

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