Benjamin, Barthes and the Singularity of Photography by Kathrin Yacavone (review)

This meticulously researched and enlightening study will be essential reading for anyone seeking in-depth immersion in the theory, history, and affective content of photography in two of its key explorers. In company with Katja Haustein’s Regarding Lost Time: Photography, Identity, and Affect in Proust, Benjamin, and Barthes (Oxford: Legenda, 2012; see French Studies, 67 (2013), 271–72), the book makes a captivating case for thinking Benjamin and Barthes together, and focuses particularly on questions of modernity and the possibility of redemption. It shows the need for an integrated account in both writers of lived historical and cultural experiences. In the case of Benjamin, that account develops through engagements with Freud, Simmel, and Kracauer, and through his readings of Baudelaire and Proust in response to post-industrial society. There is a particular emphasis on the childhood portrait of Kafka discussed in Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert. A key passage occurs in Chapter 3, where a discussion develops concerning the relation of the photographic image in Benjamin to Proustian involuntary memory and to Sartre’s understanding of the imagination. The affirmation that Proust’s involuntary memory is redemptive strikes me as a little insistent. Highly engaging, however, is the insight that the distinction between Sartre’s account of perception — in which new things can be known — and of the imagination — which confirms things already known — collapses in Benjamin’s account of the affective magic of the photographic image. This emphasizes the integration of historical awareness and life-writing in Benjamin’s response to photographic portraiture; and the way in which affect may counter forgetfulness is revealed; and here we are at the core of Benjamin’s ambition for historical materialism. An intimate sense of the ethical is involved, and emerges as a leitmotif, in the discussion of both Barthes and Benjamin. The critical dialogue between the two, and particularly between the aura and the punctum, is developed largely in the second part, on Barthes. Here I was struck by the way in which the always mobile distinction of studium and punctum is elaborated by exploring the sequence of photographic portraits Barthes considers in formulating this dynamic. This allows the texture of Barthes’s concern with the obtus to appear — the traumatic content of certain stills that exceeds discursive formulation and which both is and is not rooted in the moment. Such ambivalence highlights the way that suffering is a feature of both singularity and ideology, which for me binds Barthes’s earlier engagement with Brecht and John Heartfield to his own kind of life-writing in La Chambre claire. Kathrin Yacavone gives an attractive account of the way the photographic experience exceeds theory, and also of the ethical value to be found in critical relativity rather than firmness. One wonders whether an ethical sense of relation arises because the suffering of others is represented in moments of viewing and reading, and not because it exceeds those moments. The formal and aesthetic qualities of what it is we are looking at might then emerge as an ethical arena after all. But this is a fascinating book for anyone interested in the affective and lived content of history and theory.