Pyrographies: Photography and the good death

Abstract

This essay theorizes the ethical potential of photography or what I call “pyrography” by enacting a version of care for death in attending closely to a sort of rehearsal for the deathbed in French photographer and writer Hervé Guibert's photo-novel Suzanne and Louise first published by Gallimard in 1980, the same year as Roland Barthes's famous essay on photography, Camera Lucida. The essay develops the transformative ethical possibilities of and queer political potentialities of pyrography by reading Guibert's project with his two elderly aunts in relation to the work of two of Guibert's intimates: Michel Foucault's “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will” and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and Mourning Diary. In Mourning Diary, Barthes describes the plan for Camera Lucida as an ephemeral monument to his dead mother whose loss he calls, following the last work of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott: “the catastrophe that has already occurred.” Through its own writing with fire of the death we fear that has already occurred and that we cannot access directly, photography may enable the kind of “as if” work or projective imaginative enactment for which Winnicott calls. This essay put this concept of the photographic pyre or pyrographies to work to characterize a kind of photographic act. Pyrography is a facture of and with the flammable, not of and about the past, but for the present and future. It is a practice of making volatile structures for feeling with the taboo scenes of the conjunction of old age, desire, and death that create spaces not just for mourning the losses that have actually happened. Pyrographies shape spaces in which one might begin to imagine and transact with care the losses and the letting go yet to come. Pyrographies, I am suggesting, trade in the illusions of presence. They give us the catastrophe that has already occurred in palpable form, enabling us to negotiate shame and fear but also desire toward the seemingly impossible: the good death.

Keywords:

• “good death”
• photography
• queer
• punctum
• “photographic ecstasy”
• “care for death”
• shame

Acknowledgements

This essay is for Bert S. Lev. A preliminary version was presented as a keynote at the Researching the Arts conference at the School of the Arts at Brunel University in London in June 2011. And I thank Gretchen Schiller, P.A. Skantze, and Matthew Fink for the spur of their thoughts on the risks it took. It has been radically revised thanks to the prompts from Debra Levine and the pulse of conversations with Preeti Chopra, Paddy Epstein, Florence Hsia, Chele Isaac, Ann Levine, Nancy Marcus, Michael Jay McClure, and Ann Pellegrini that fuels my efforts along that particular pull of aging, desire, and something like care for death.

Notes

1. See, in particular, Batchen 1999 and Cadava 1998.

2. “Pyrography,” Oxford English Dictionary. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/155491, accessed 18 March 2012.

3. See, especially, two excellent recent studies of post-mortem photography: Geoffrey Batchen, Suspending Time: Life–Photography–Death (2010) and Audrey Linkman, Photography and Death (2011).

4. Barthes [1981] 2010.

5. Dyer, “Foreword,” in Barthes 2010, xi.

6. Among the many excellent pieces on Barthes's Camera Lucida, I am indebted particularly to Jay Prosser, “Roland Barthes's Loss” (2005) and Geoffrey Batchen, ed., Photography Degree Zero: Reflections on Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida (Batchen 2009).

7. Barthes 2010, 73.

8. Barthes 2010, 133.

9. Barthes 2010, 119.

10. Ibid.

11. Winnicott 1974, 103–7.

12. Phillips 1988, 20–22. I am indebted to Ann Pellegrini for the inspiration of her own work on Winnicott and his spaces of the imaginative “as if.”

13. Agamben 2004.

14. Agamben 2000, 3–5.

15. Guibert [1980] 2005. Translations are my own. The novel is unpaginated; I have provided page numbers as a guide.

16. Hervé Guibert Photographe (Guibert 2011). This catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition Hervé Guibert Photographe at the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, 9 February–10 April 2011.

17. “Hervé Guibert, grand photographe et mauvais sujet?” 1 March 2011, http://lunettesrouges.blog.lemonde.fr/2011/03/01/herve-guibert-grand-photographe-et-mauvais-sujet/, last accessed 20 March 2012.

18. Guibert [1980] 2005, 58.

19. Jill H. Casid, Intimographies, installation in New Media at the Charles Allis, Charles Allis Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1 June to 15 September 2010.

20. Bryson 1995, 19–43.

21. Sedgwick 2003, 38.

22. Bersani and Phillips 2008, 29–30.

23. Cristofovici 1999, 280.

24. Guibert [1980] 2005, 49.

25. Michel Foucault, “The Social Triumph of the Sexual Will,” in Michel Foucault: Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (NY: The New Press, 1997), 158.

26. Sarkonak 2000, 28–65.

27. Sarkonak 2000, 31.

28. “The Photograph, As Close to Death As Possible,” in Guibert [1982] 1998, 165–9.

29. Guibert [1982] 1998, 167.

30. Barthes 2010, 69.

31. On the ethics and politics of the decision to photograph and expose the sick, dying, and dead body of an intimate and publicly circulate those images, I have found Nancy K. Miller's essay on Annie Liebovitz's photographs of Susan Sontag especially challenging in its emphasis on the ways in which such a practice of photography, while a work of mourning, may be no less about the posthumous consolidation of the survivor's relation to and claim on the deceased. See Miller 2009, 205–14.

32. This essay is directly related to the article “Handle with Care” that is forthcoming in the TDR/Drama Review special issue on precarity. The article was initially written at the invitation of Janet Jakobsen for the website of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, as a response to the Public Feelings salon with Lauren Berlant (12 April 2011) that centered around her article and now book Cruel Optimism. Emerging in part out of my experience with my grandmother's decision to die (a wish that took 37 long days to carry out), the essay makes an argument for the affective proximities and cathexes in the exercise of close reading and anchors these thoughts about care for dying around a reading of Ishiguro's novel Never Let Me Go and the renewal of interest accompanying the recent film adaption by Mark Romanek of its science-fiction future of children raised to be “carers” and “donors” – literally giving their internal organs and ultimately their lives so that others can live. The essay attempts to think through this case study as a means to propose an alternative to the agonizingly slow death of the bed of trouble which is the current scene of the legally and biomedically constrained and conscripted labors of “care.”

33. Guibert [1982] 1998, 167.