Backstage of the Eye

Abstract

An often-overlooked performative aspect of Roland Barthes' influential approach to the analysis of photography in his Camera Lucida lies in the act of closing one's eyes while studying a photograph. In his article ‘The backstage of the eye—On interrupting sight in order to see’, Jan Kühne presents Barthes' approach as a technique of interrupting eyesight in order to enable a unique experience, which fuses projections of dynamic visual and sonic imagination on the stage of the mind. For its case study, the article focuses on a bilingual ekphrastic poem by renowned Hebrew poet Dan Pagis, which turns a photograph into the stage for an imaginary poetic performance. As key to this synesthetic experience is the phenomenon of simultaneous bilingualism (or: homophonic translation), whose axiomatic principles are further illustrated with the help of a short story by Franz Kafka.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the Martin Buber Society of Fellows and the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Center at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem for this research project, and in particular for their critical comments Christian Wollin, Rebekka Grossmann and Freddie Rokem. Also, the author thanks for their friendly reprint permissions Ada and Merav Pagis for the photograph of Dan Pagis's mother (Pagis 1996: 96), as well as the Gnazim Archive, Tel Aviv for the typescript of Dan Pagis's poem Ein Leben (Sign., 28074).

Notes

1 Throughout Camera Lucida, the notion of the punctum develops from a passive experience into an active, self-reflected approach. The original experience might have taken place when Barthes was overwhelmed by the unexpected discovery of a photograph of his 5-year-old mother (the focus of Camera Lucida) to which his mourning-diary attests: ‘I weep. / Not even the desire to commit suicide’ (Barthes 2010: 164 [13 July 1978])

2 Jacques Derrida, in his last interview, on why he didn’t like to be photographed: ‘I don’t like the death effect, so to speak, the kind of death that’s always implied when one takes a picture’ (‘Plus, l’effet de mort qu’il y a toujours dans les photographies—comme maintenant, d’ailleurs, la mort rôde’). From the 2002 documentary Derrida (see Kirby and Kofman 2005). Online: https://bit.ly/3tPhW4g

3 Barthes’ own example for a punctum could be rephrased to meet our case in the following manner: ‘The photograph is handsome, as is the [mother]: that is the studium. But the punctum is: [she] is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future’ (Barthes 1981: 96, emphasis in original).

4 Ada Pagis (2020)

5 Though not translated into Hebrew during his lifetime, Pagis might well have been familiar with the English translation, published in 1981, that is, five years before his death (Ein Leben was published posthumously).