Corpus Delicti

Author(s): Rosalind Krauss

Source: October, Vol. 33 (Summer, 1985), pp. 31-72
Published by: The MIT Press
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 Corpus Delicti*

ROSALIND KRAUSS

The smoker puts thelast touchto his work

heseeksunity
betweenhimself andthelandscape
- Andre Breton'

A prominentsurrealistpainter, writingin 1933, imagines the following

scene:
A man is staring dreamily at a luminous point, thinkingit a star, only
rudely to awaken when he realizes it is merely the tip of a burning cigarette.
This man is then told that the cigaretteend is in factthe only visible point of an
immense "psycho-atmospheric-anamorphicobject," knowledge, our writer
assures us, that will instantlycause that banal point of burning ash to "recover
all its irrational glamour, and its most incontestable and dizzying powers of
seduction."
These objects--psycho, atmospheric,and anamorphic--we have already
been told, are complex reconstructions,made in the dark, of an originalobject,
chosen in the dark fromamong many others. The reconstruction,allowed to
drop (still in the dark) froma ninety-footheight, to render it unrecognizable
even ifable to be seen, is then photographed. Still withoutbeing looked at, this
photographis then sunk into a molten cube of metal which hardens around it.
This reproduced shadow of an unseen shadow, in the vise of its now inertcase,
our writerwill subsequently referto as informe, unformed.
Our writer,who can only be Salvador Dali, goes on to imagine the story
he will tell his now-rapt listener, about the historyof this particular object,
whose burning tip only can be seen. This history,of extremecomplexity,will
persuade the listenerbeyond a shadow of a doubt that among other elements
buried in the object are "two authenticskulls- those of Richard Wagner and of
Ludwig II of Bavaria. And," Dali adds, "it will be demonstratedthat it is these
two skulls, softenedup by a special process, that the cigaretteis smoking."The

* A version of this essay will appear in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L'Amourfou:
Surrealismand Photography,New York, Abbeville Press, 1985.
1. "Le fumeur met la derniere main a son travail/ II cherche l'unite de lui-meme avec le
paysage," from"Le soleil en laisse," Clairede Terre,Paris, Gallimard, 1966.
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glamour of rotand decay going up in smoke, is as we shall see, the veryessence

of the informe.
Dali closes his textwiththe assertion,"The tip of thiscigarettecannot but
burn with a brilliance more lyricalin human eyes than the airy twinkleof the
clearest and most distant star."2
Ten years earlier Man Ray had made the followingimage: a strangecon-
structionrises fromthe bottomedge of a photograph,pyramidingtowards the
top of its frame. The tip of the pyramid is a cigarette,its ash just kissingthe
edge of the sheet, its otherend clenched in the teethof a barely-seenmouth at
the apex of thisconstruction'shuman base. For we are able to read as the sup-
port for the cigarette a face rotated 180 degrees, its humanness hardly
recognizable fromthisposition,the mass of fallinghair thatfillsthe bottomhalf
of the frame, a swirling,formlessfield.
With the dispassionate economy of only two moves- rotationand close-
up- Head, New York,1923, produces the image of the informe. Made just before
the "SurrealistManifesto"firedthe startingshots of Andre Breton'srevolution
(but not beforethe movement's"'poquedessommeils"),3 May Ray's image could

2. SalvadorDali, "Objetspsycho-atmospheriques-anamorphiques," Le Surrialisme de

au service
No. 5 (May 1933), 45-48.
la revolution,
3. The "ipoquedessommeils"is oftenused to referto the years 1922 and 1923 as the group
aroundAndreBretonbeganto experiment withautomaticwriting, therecording ofdreams,and
hypnoticallyinducedtrances.
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Far left:Man Ray. Head, New York. 1923.

Left:Man Ray.Anatomy.1930.
Brassai.Untitled.1933.

nonethelesshave occupied the page in Le Surrialisme au service that

de la revolution
carried Dali's text, hardly unusual for the photographerwhose work was in-
stantlyto be fullyintegratedinto the full range of surrealistliteraryspaces.
From 1924 Man Ray was treatedas a kind of staffphotographerforLa Revolu-
contributingsix images to its firstissue. Afterturningover to his
tionsurrialiste,
assistantJacques-Andr6 Boiffardthe illustrationof Breton's Nadja, Man Ray
went on to contributeimages to Breton'sL'Amourfou, to make photographsthat
would be chosen by Tristan Tzara to electrifyhis text on the "Automatismof
Taste," or to set up shots of phantoms to illustrate a 1934 Dali essay on
"AerodynamicApparitions."
But Head, New Yorkis notjust an isolated case in Man Ray's work,a lucky
coincidence that Dali could have found and used but, as chance would have
it, did not. Its strategiesare repeated within the scope of Man Ray's photo-
graphic output, defamiliarizingthe human body, redraftingthe map of what
we would have thoughtthe most familiarof terrains.Anatomy is another such
image, with similar, unsettlingeffects.Once again human fleshpyramids to
the top of the page, but here there is no invertedhead, no reassuring eyes
34 OCTOBER

and nose, however strangelysited. In Anatomy we stare at the underside of a

violentlyup-ended chin, our eyes sliding along the muscularityof a distended
neck rendered nonethelessweirdlygelatinous by the image's lightingand con-
tour, producing the apparition on this page of somethingpuffilyreptilian,like
the belly and head of a frog.No eyes and nose, just this point where the head
should be.
The surrealistphotographerswere masters of the informe, which could be
produced, as Man Ray had a
seen, by simple rotationand consequent disorien-
tation of the body. This is how Boiffardperformedit in his poignant nude for
Documents, or how one findsit in the extraordinaryimage by Brassai that was
chosen to open the essay "Variiitsdu corpshuman,"in Minotaure.4There the
Anatomystrategyis chosen, the camera looking steeply up at the recumbent
formto catch, or to fabricate,or is it to imagine?, the nude body revealed as
beast. For the lighting,which plunges the hips and thighs of the figureinto
shadowed obscurity,and the angle of vision, which forcesthe head out of sight
behind the upper torso and shoulders, combine to image the face of an
unknown animal: the protuberant breasts suggesting the horny tuftsof the
forehead; the luminous torso and upper arm, doubling as face and ear.
In describing,as I have, this process of seeing as if- the breasts seen as if
horns, the arm as if ear- I might seem merely to be saying that the photog-
raphersoperatingwithinthe circuitof surrealismadopted just thatpredilection
for metaphor of an extravagant and unexpectedlyirrationalkind that was so
dear to the surrealist poets and so tirelesslydescribed in the various tracts
issued by the movement. And further,since the enthusiasticdiscoveryof the
poetic bestiary of Lautreamont's Maldoror, the exploration of the thoughtof
man-as-animal had become a commonplace of surrealism.But thatwould be to
ignore the precise conduct of this as if- its achievement throughthe syntaxof
the camera's hold on its object, its inversion of the body, its angling from
below, its radical foreshorteningand cropping, so that this particular ex-
perience of the human-as-if-beastoccurs througha specificallyspatial device:
one that suggeststhe dizziness to which Dali refers;one that propels the image
into the realm of the vertiginous; one that is a demonstrationof falling. The
body cannot be seen as human, because it has fallen into the condition of the
animal.
There is a device, then, thatproduces thisimage, a device thatthe camera
makes simple: turn the body, or the lens; rotate the human figureinto the
figureof fall. The camera automates this process, makes it mechanical; a but-
ton is pushed and the fall is the rest.
Yet it is here that one feelsa tinyrupturebeginningto appear withinthe
calm theoreticalsurface of surrealistpractice. For the surrealistmetaphor--
beauty imaged as the strangeyokingoftheumbrellaand the sewingmachine- is

4. Maurice Raynal, "Varietis du corps humain," Minotaure,No. 1 (February 1933), 41.

 CorpusDelicti 35

Untitled.1930.
Boiffard.
Jacques-Andri
36 OCTOBER

an as ifspecificallyproduced by chance. It comes automatically,descending on

the passive, expectantpoet who waits forhis dreams, his doodles, his fantasies
to bringhim the outlandishsimilesofhis unconscious desires. The aleatory,the
happenstance, the dictum of "objective chance" had been laid down and re-
peated by Andre Breton. So that this photographicmechanization of the pro-
duction of the image is indeed a break, ifever so small, with the poetics of the
movement. And, we mightbe promptedto ask, is thislittleriftthatwe glimpse
here not the tip of somethinglarger, more fundamental,like that cigaretteash
that had signaled the immense constructionof the psycho-anamorphicobject,
informe and inert, that lies beneath it?
Inside the domain of the photographicimage, the riftin question enacts a
strugglethat went on outside, among the surrealistsduring the last half of the
1920s and into the early '30s. This is a strugglethat has been told only glanc-
ingly in the historical accounts of the movement, accounts that have almost
universallybeen given fromthe point of view of surrealism'sleader, the man
who has been called its "arbiter"or its "magus."5 Thus anythingthat Andre
Breton banished fromthe center of the movement, symbolicallycalled at the
outset surrealism's"Centrale,"was expelled into a darkness thatbecame, in the
eyes of history,a kind of oblivion.6 Andr' Masson had been so dismissed, and
Robert Desnos.7 But they were eventually recalled to the center to function
once more as the unquestioned players in the surrealistdrama. Jacques-Andre
Boiffard,once the secretaryofthe Centrale, had departed to thismarginal posi-
tion not to reappear in any historyof the movement until the late 1970s.8
The excommunication of Masson and Desnos which was proclaimed in
the SecondManifestoof Surrealismmerely articulated the break that these two
figures,among many others,had already had withBreton, a break thathad led
to their defection to the camp of dissatisfiedor "dissident surrealists"who,
thoughno longer playingon Breton'steam, stillthoughtof themselvesas in the
same game. Gravitatingaround Georges Bataille and his magazine Documents,
these renegades associated themselveswith the enemy leader, but not one who
contestedthe movementas such. Bataille was carefulto characterizehimselfas
surrealism's"old enemy fromwithin."And it is to Bataille, not to Breton, that

5. Two of the standard works on Breton are so subtitled: Anna Balakian, AndreBreton.-
Magus
ofSurrealism,New York, Oxford UniversityPress, 1971; and CliffordBrowder, AndriBreton,Ar-
Geneva, Droz, 1967.
biterofSurrealism,
6. The firstnumber of La Revolution announced the opening of Le Bureau Central
Surrialiste
de Recherches Surrealistes, giving its address as 15, rue de Grenelle. The cover photomontage
for this number pictures the surrealistsassembled there.
7. Among many others they were publicly expelled in the "Second Manifeste du
Surr alisme," La RevolutionSurrialiste,No. 12 (December 1929), pp. 1-17; translated in Andre
Breton, Manifestoes Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1969.
ofSurrealism,
8. See Dawn Ades, Dada and SurrealismReviewed,Arts Council of Great Britain, London,
1978, pp. 228 ff.
 CorpusDelicti 37

Dali owed the word informe with the particular, anamorphic spin. Further,it
was Bataille who developed the concept of bassesseto implya mechanism forits
achievement, throughan axial rotation fromvertical to horizontal, through,
that is, the mechanics of fall.
Breton undoubtedly feared the lure of Bataille on the young poets,
painters,and photographerswho had lefttheCentrale forthisstrangeperiphery.
He thus prevented Dali from allowing the painting Le Jeu lugubreto be
reproduced in Documents to accompany Bataille's analysis of it, forcingBataille
to resort to presenting the painting by means of a diagram.9 Short-lived,
Documents only ran forthe two years 1929 and 1930. But Bataille's impact on
surrealist thinking- on the production of images that do not decorate, but
ratherstructurethe basic mechanismsof thought- resurfacedin 1933 in the very
name forMinotaure,a magazine that operated as a surrealistvehicle. Bataille's
was also Bataille's concept, foras we shall see this man/beast
title,"minotaure,"
blindly wandering the labyrinthinto which he has fallen, dizzy, disoriented,
9. GeorgesBataille,"Le 'Jeulugubre,'"Documents,
No. 7 (December1929),297-302.The in-
cidentis discussedin Ades, p. 240.

Man Ray. Minotaur. 1934.

38 OCTOBER

having lost his seat of reason - his head - this creatureis another avatar of the
informe.10
If I am stressingthisconvergence(if only by proxy)of Bataille and Breton
in the pages of Minotaure,this is because we are not used to reading surrealist
productionthroughthe gridof Bataille's thoughtand on those verygroundswe
mightbe temptedto disallow such images a status as "surreal." But Minotaure's
imprimaturconveyedto themthe movement'sstamp, securingmembershipfor
Hans Bellmer's Poup&es,for example, beyond any doubt that mightbe raised
about the proprietyof this association for the man who illustratedin both
graphic and photographicformBataille's Histoirede l'oeil,a book excoriatedby
Breton as obscene."

10. Fora discussion ofBataille,theMinotaur,and thefigure ofthelabyrinth, see Denis Hollier,

Paris,Gallimard,1974,pp. 109-133.See as well,my"Alberto
La Prisedela Concorde, Giacometti,"
"Primitivism"in20thCentury Art,New York,The Museum of ModernArt,1984,pp. 523-524.
11. Hans Bellmer,"Poupee. Variationssur le montaged'une mineurearticul&e," Minotaure,
no. 6 (Winter1935), pp. 30-31. Bataille'sHistoire de l'oeilwas publishedin 1928 under the
pseudonymLord Auch. Bellmerprovidedetchingsfora subsequentpublicationin 1940. The
photographs thatcan be identifiedas relatingto specificscenesfromBataille'snovel(Simone's
seductionofthenarrator
first as shesitsin a plateofmilk;Simoneridingnakedon a bicycle;etc.)
have been dated fromthe mid-1940s.See Hans Bellmer, Photographe,Paris, Filipacchi,1983,p.
148, cat. no. 129.

Untitled.1930.
Boiffard.
Jacques-Andri
Hans Bellmer.Untitled. 1946.

Oppositepage:
Jacques-Andr?Boiffard.Untitled. 1930.
CorpusDelicti 39

Informe, Bataille's term,has been pronounced by Dali, and will possiblyil-

lumine the procedures of a whole list of photographers,beginning with Man
Ray, continuing to Boiffardand Brassai, and going on to Ubac, Bellmer,
Tabard, Parry, or Dora Maar. What, however, is the meaning of informe?
For Bataille informe is the categorythatwould allow all categoriesto be un-
thought. His entryforit in the "Dictionary"in Documents likens it to crachator
spittle, noxious in its physical formlessness,providing therebya simile that
would figure forththe noxious, conceptual implicationsof informe: forthisterm
is meant to allow one to think the removal of all those boundaries by whichcon-
cepts organize reality,dividing up it into little packages sense, limitingit by
of
giving it what Bataille calls "mathematical frock-coats,"a phrase that points
both to the abstractnessof concepts and to the prissinesswith which they are
meant to constrain.12 Allergic to the notion of definitions,then, Bataille does
not give informe a meaning; rather he posits for it a job: to undo formal
categories, deny thateach thinghas its"proper"form,to imagine meaning as
to
gone shapeless, as thoughit were a spider or an earthwormcrushed underfoot.
This notion of informe does not propose a higher,more transcendentmeaning,
12. GeorgesBataille,"Informe," No. 7 (December1929), p. 382.
Documents,
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througha dialectical movement of thought.The boundaries of terms are not

imagined by Bataille as transcended, but merely as transgressedor broken,
producing formlessnessthroughdeliquescence, putrifaction,decay.
Or can formlessnessbe produced as well by mechanical means, such as
the turningof a camera or a body 180 degrees? Bataille's substitutionof the
idea of a dictionaryas a giverof meanings, by an idea of it as a giverof tasks,
heralds the active, aggressive tenor of his thought,separating it fromthat ex-
pectantlypassive attitudeof Breton's availabilityto chance. The idea that one
could constructa machine to make somethinghappen, a machine that would
leave nothing to chance but the working out of detail, operates in Bataille's
novel Histoirede loeil. There, as Roland Barthes has demonstrated,Bataille
devises a combinatorymechanism for associating two stringsof images- one
generatedby associations withthe shape ofthe eye (eye/egg/testicles), the other
by associations with its status as a container of fluid (tears/yolk/semen)- to
writeits perverselyspectacular story.'3In much the same way Dali's paranoid-
critical method was also intended as a device. He described his strategyfor
simulatingdelirium as a machine for generatingan active, aggressive assault
on reality.14

13. Roland Barthes,"La metaphorede l'oeil,"Critique, No. 195-6 (1963), p. 772.

14. The prologue of Dali's "Interpretation Paranodiaque-critique de l'Image obsidante
No. 1 [1933]) is titled,"New GeneralConsiderations
'L'Angelus'de Millet"(Minotaure, on the
 Bofard. Mouth.
Far left.Jacques-Andrd
1929.

Left:Raoul Ubac. Irrational Image.

1935.

Thispage.Jacques-Andre
Boiffard.
Untitled. 1929.
Anotherof these mechanisms or devices was the rotationof the very axis
"proper"to man-his verticality,a station that defineshim by separating his
uprightposture fromthat of the beasts-onto the opposing, horizontal axis.
This operation, productive of bassesse,is the one most closely linked to the
photographicpracticewe have been discussing. Two of the textswhich explore
this rotationinto baseness, "The Big Toe," and "Mouth," were illustratedwith
photographsby Boiffard.15 In the essay "Mouth" where the issue of rotationis
most explicit,Bataille contraststhe mouth/eyeaxis of the human face withthe

Mechanism of the Paranoid Phenomenon fromthe Surrealist Point of View." The image from
the Dali/Bufiuel film Un Chienandaluof a razor slicing throughthe open eye of a woman enacts
this sense of aggression. Bellmer also devises a "machine" forassaulting the familiarterrainof the
body: "Onto the photograph of a nude, set an unframed mirrorat a perpendicular angle, and
constantlymaintaining the 90 degree angle, progressivelyrotate it, such that the symmetrical
halves of the visible ensemble diminish or enlarge according to a slow and regular evolution...
Whether, throughthis entrance of the mirrorand its movement, it is a question of the whipcord
that spins the top or the expressive reflexof the organism, we grasp the same law: opposition is
necessary' for things to exist and for a third reality to come into being." Bellmer, "Notes sur la
jointure boule," Hans Bellmer,Paris, Cnacarchives, Centre Nationale d'Art Contemporain,
1971, p. 27.
15. Bataille, "Le Gros orteil,"Documents, I, No. 6 (November 1929), pp. 297-302; and Bataille,
"Bouche," Documents,II, No. 5 (1930), p. 299.
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 CorpusDelicti 43

mouth/anusaxis of the four-leggedanimal. The former,linked to man's ver-

ticality,and his possession of speech, definesthe mouth in termsof man's ex-
pressive powers. The latter, a functionof the animal's horizontality,under-
stands the mouth as the leading element of the systemof catching,killing,and
ingestingprey, forwhich the anus is the terminalpoint. But to insist,beyond
this simple polarity, that at its greatest moments of pleasure or pain, the
human mouth's expression is not spiritual, but animal, is to reorganize the
orientationof the human structureand conceptuallyto rotatethe axis of lofti-
ness onto the axis of material existence. With this act of Bataille's, mouth and
anus are conflated. Boiffard'sphotograph for this essay is a woman's open
mouth, wet with saliva, its tongue an amorphous blur. A fewyears later Raoul
Ubac would, in effect,recreate this image when he pictured a woman's head
and neck, the head cropped just above her mouth fromwhich depends a long,
organic but at firstindeterminateobject which, upon inspection, turns out to
be a piece of liver. The poster-manifestoAffichez vospoemes/Affichez vos images
(1935) was the occasion forthis work.
Ubac's participationin the creation of a photographicformlessnesslinked
to the depiction of the human body was as persistentand as concentratedas
Boiffard'sor Man Ray's ever was. But except forhis SleepingNude, axial rota-
tion was not the device to which he resorted. Instead, he oftenexplored the
technical infrastructureof the photographicprocess, submittingthe image of
the body to assaults of a chemical and optical kind. La Nibuleusewas achieved
by attackingthe emulsion on the negative image of a standingwoman with the
heat of a small burner. The resultantmelting,which ripples and contortsthe
fieldof the photo, is oftenrelated in the scholarlyand criticalliteratureto auto-
matism: the creation of suggestiveimagerythroughthe operations of chance.16
But the titleof thiswork supposes the disintegrationratherthan the creation of
form,and the procedure whose trace suggeststhe workingsof fireis a device for
producing this formlessness.
Ubac's optical assaults on the body took place over a long series of am-
bitious, complex photomontageswhich he workedout in the late 1930s. Under
the generic titleLe Combatdes Penthisilies, these images are the results of suc-
cessive attacks of solarization. In a firststage a montage would be produced,
grouping togethervarious shots of the same nude. This image would then be
rephotographedand solarized, the resultantpositive becoming a new element
to be recombined, throughmontage, withotherfragments,and then to be both
rephotographedand resolarized. Solarization, which bares the light-sensitive

16. This is how it is characterized, for example, by Nancy Hall-Duncan, Photographic Sur-
realism,Cleveland, The New Gallery of Contemporary Art, 1979, p. 8. Eduard Jaguer does not,
however, link brfilageto techniques of the immediate past so much as he sees in it an avatar of the
informelpictorial preoccupations of the 1940s. See Eduard Jaguer, Les Mysteres de la chambre noire,
Paris, Flammarion, 1982, p. 118.

Raoul Ubac. Sleeping Nude. 1939.

 44 OCTOBER

paper of an eventual positive printto a moment'sreexposureduring the print-

ing process, opens the darkestareas of the positive image - usually those very
shadows thatdefinethe edges of solid objects- to what will later read as a kind
of optical corrosion. A mode of producing a simultaneous positive/negative,
solarization most frequentlyreads as the optical reorganizationof the contours
of objects. Reversing and exaggeratingthe light/darkrelationshipsat thispre-
cise registrationof the envelope of form,solarization is a process that can ob-
viously be put to the service of the informe.In the most extremeof this work
Ubac pushes his proceduretowardsthe representationof a violentdeliquescence
of matteras lightoperates on the boundaries ofa body thatin turngives way to
this depicted invasion of space.
Indeed, one of theways we can generalize thewhole of what we have been
seeing so far is that a varietyof photographicmethods have been exploited to
produce an image of the invasion of space: ofbodies dizzily yieldingto the force
of gravity;ofbodies in the gripof a distortingperspective;ofbodies decapitated
by the projectionof shadow; of bodies eaten away by eitherheat or light. We
might say, followingthe usual formulae for explaining the surrealistimage,

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 CorpusDelicti 45

that this consumptionofmatterby a kind of spatial etheris a representationof

the overturningof realityby those psychic states so courted by the poets and
paintersof the movement: reverie,ecstasy,dream. But while some of these im-
ages would support that reading- Dali's Le Phenomene de 1'extase,Man Ray's
work forFacile, or his ironicallytitledLe Primatde la matiere
surla pensie,forex-
ample, or Ubac's Ophelia- others, clearly do not. They do not seem to depict
bodies seized fromwithin,and transformed,but ratherbodies assaulted from
without.So thatwe are temptedto say thatifthereis a psychologicalcondition
onto which these images open, it may not be found in the usual catalogue of
surrealistexperiences.

Prendsgarde:ajouer au
fantome,on le devient.

Roger Caillois opens the article"Mimitisme et Psychasth6nieLegendaire"

- his curious contributionto a 1935 issue of Minotaure- with the above cau-

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Raoul Ubac.Battleof theAmazons. 1939.

 46 OCTOBER

tion, a warning that the fate of playing at chimeras may be that of becoming
one. 17
During the opening years ofMinotaure,Caillois published two long essays,
the firston the praying mantis, the second on the biological phenomenon of
mimicry.These early foraysinto a kind of socio-biologyof consciousness were
writtenout of the beliefthat insectsand humans partake of "the same nature,"
thus eradicatingthe boundaries thatare thoughtto establisha distinct,or prop-
erly humannature.'8
Because of the ubiquity of the image of the praying mantis withinboth
poetic and pictorialsurrealism,Caillois's discussion of the gripof thisinsecton

17. RogerCaillois,"Mimitismeet Psychasthinie

Ligendaire,"Minotaure,No. 7 (June1935),5.
18. Caillois,"La Mante religieuse," no. 5 (May 1934), pp. 23-26.
Minotaure,

Thispage: SalvadorDali. Le
ph6nom'nede l'extase.1933.
above:Man Ray.Le Primat
Opposite
de la mati'eresur la pensee. 1931.

Oppositebelow:Raoul Ubac. Ophelia.

1938.
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48 OCTOBER

human imagination has entered the literatureon the thematicsof the move-
ment.19The female mantis's sexual practices- in certain species its consump-
tion of its mate afteror even during the act of copulation- and its voracity,
made it the perfectsymbol of the phallic mother,fascinating,petrifying,cas-
trating. In this guise the mantis swarms over surrealistwork of the 1930s; in
the paintings of Masson and Dali, in the sculpturesof Giacometti, in the col-
lages of Ernst. It appears as well in anotherguise in one of the rare instancesof
Hans Bellmer's sculptural production, where his Machine Gunneress in a State
of Grace(1937) depicts the insect in that aspect, also described by Caillois, of
androidlikeautomation. In factit is Caillois's conclusion that it is in this open-
ing onto the imaginative possibilityof the robot, the automaton, the nonsen-
tient, mechanical imitation of life, that the mantis's link to the fantasm of
human sexuality is to be found. And it is just this aspect that connects his
discussion of the mantis with his subsequent exploration of mimicry,for the
mantis comes most stunninglyto resemble a machine when, even decapitated,
it can continue to function,and thus to mime life. "Which is to say," Caillois
writes,"thatin the absence of all centersof representationand of voluntaryac-
tion, it can walk, regain its balance, have coitus, lay eggs, build a cocoon, and,
what is most astonishing,in the face of danger can fall into a fake, cadaverous
immobility.I am expressingin thisindirectmanner what language can scarcely
picture, or reason assimilate, namely, that dead, the mantis can simulate
death."20
Caillois's essay on mimicryhad extraordinaryresonance withinthe psy-
choanalyticcircles developing in Paris in the 1930s. Jacques Lacan, forexam-
ple, continued to express his debt to thistext,particularlyin his workingout of
the concept of the "mirrorstage" and its effecton the formationof the human
subject, a principle he firstpresented publicly in 1936, though he did not
publish it until 1949.21 With this connection, and its explicit attentionto the
operations of doubling, of the replicationof a conscious subject by his pictured
duplicate, we mightalready realize that in some kind of general way this issue
of mimicryopens onto surrealistphotography'spersistentexploration of the
double as a structuralprinciple: simultaneouslyformaland thematic. But in
relationto the images we have been discussing,withtheirdepictionof a curious
invasion of the body by space, Caillois's treatmentof mimicryhas a rather
more specificpertinence.

19. See William Pressly, "The Praying Mantis in Surrealist Art,"ArtBulletin,LV (December
1973),pp. 600-615.
20. Caillois, "La Mante religieuse,"p. 26.
21. Jacques Lacan, "Le stade du miroircomme formateurde la fonctiondu Je," Ecrits,Paris,
Seuil, 1966, pp. 93-100; in English as Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the
Function of the I," Ecrits,trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, Norton, pp. 1-7. Lacan cites Caillois's
importance, p. 96 in the French edition and p. 3 in the English.
CorpusDelicti 49

Most of the scientificexplanations foranimal mimicryrelate it to adaptive

behavior. The insecttakes on the coloration,the shape, the patterningof its en-
vironment,it is argued, in order to fool eitherits predator or its prey. But the
adaptation hypothesisfounderson two counts, Caillois shows. First,the fusion
of the insect with its environmentcan and oftendoes work against survival, as
when the animal is mistakenlyeaten by its own kind or cannot be perceived by
membersof its species forpurposes of mating. Second, thisphenomenon which
functionsexclusivelyin the registerof the visual, is largelyirrelevantto animal
hunting- a matter of smell and of motion. The specificvisuality of mimicry
can be shown, Caillois attests,to be more thanjust the projectionthat human
observers,withtheirquite different systemsof perception,make upon thisfield
of natural pattern. Mimicry seems to be a functionof the visual experience of
the insect itself,as when, forexample, camouflagebehavior in certainspecies is
suspended either at night or when the ocular antennae are cut.
Tying mimicry to the animal's own perception of space, Caillois then
hypothesizes that this phenomenon is in fact a kind of insectoid psychosis--
the psychastheniaof his titlereferringto PierreJanet's psychiatricnotion of a
catastrophicdrop in the level ofpsychicenergy,a loss of ego substance, or what
one writerhas called a kind of "subjective detumescence."22The life of any
organism depends on the possibilityof its maintaining its own distinctness,a
boundary withinwhich it is contained, the termsof what we could call its self-
possession. Mimicry, Caillois argues, is the loss of thispossession, because the
animal thatmergeswithits settingbecomes dispossessed, derealized, as though
yieldingto a temptationexercised on it by the vast outsideness of space itself,a
temptationto fusion. Lest it seem too bizarre to apply psychologicalconceptsto
this occurrence, Caillois reminds his readers of the terms of primitive,sym-
patheticmagic, in which an illness is conceived of as a possession of the patient
by some externalforce,one which dispossesses the victimfromhis own person,
one which can be combatted by drawing it offfromthe patient throughthe
mimicryperformedby the shaman in a rite of repossession.
There is an obvious connectionbetween thistext,appearing in the review
that bore as its titleone of Bataille's favoritefigures,and the concerns that we
have been tracingunder the conditioninforme. For what could be more formless
than this spasm of nature in which boundaries are indeed broken and distinc-
tions truly blurred? Likening the responses of schizophrenic subjects to the
phenomenon of animal mimicry, Caillois writes, "Space seems for these
dispossessed souls to be a devouring force. . . it ends by replacing them. The
body then desolidifieswithhis thoughts,the individual breaks the boundary of
his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself
fromany point whateverof space. He feelshimselfbecoming space. . . . He is

22. Denis Hollier, "Mimesis and Castration, 1937," October,no. 31 (Winter 1985), pp. 3-16.
50 OCTOBER

alike, not like somethingbut simply like.And he inventsspaces of which he is

'the convulsive possession.'"'23
And, indeed, it is this aspect of realitythat is explored by Ubac's 1938
photographof the surrealistmannequin constructedby Masson, in which the
caged head of the female, her prey in her mouth, evokes the mantis. For in
Ubac's termsthis mantis, which possesses, is simultaneouslypossessed by the
mesh of space, an effectthat is to be found as well in Boiffard'simage of the
woman/spider(1931). If the effectof mimicryis the inscriptionof space on
the body of an organism, then this is, of course, the theme of one of the very
firstphotographsever to be published by the movement: Man Ray's Retouracla
raisonof the firstissue of La RevolutionSurrialistewhere the nude torso of a
woman is shown as ifsubmittingto the possession by space, an image thatMan
Ray was to returnto several timesthroughoutthe 1920s, mostlyricallyin a trip-
tychof Lee Miller before a window.
Now this inscriptionof the body by space, this operation throughwhich
the seeing subject is definedas a projection,a being-seen, correspondsto that
very moment in Caillois's argument where he examines the subjectivityof vi-
sion. For Caillois moves to a rather differentlevel in his analysis when he
defines the nature of this breakdown in the organism's relation to space as a
structuralproblem in the fieldof representation.As Caillois describes it:
Space is inextricablyboth perceived and represented. From this
point of view it is a double dihedron, changing at each moment in
size and situation: a dihedron[orfigureconstructed of two intersecting
planes]of action the horizontal plane of which is formed by the ground
and the vertical plane by the man himselfwho walks and who, be-
cause of this, carries the dihedral relation along with him; and a
dihedron determinedby the same horizontal plane as
of representation
before(but representedand not perceived), intersectedverticallyat
the distance where an object appears. It is with representedspace
that the drama becomes clear: forthe living being, the organism, is
no longer the origin of the coordinates, but is one point among
others; it is dispossessed of its privilegeand, in the strongestsense of
the term, no longerknowswheretoput itself.24
A diagram in one of Lacan's later seminars depicts this double dihedral

23. Caillois,"Mimitisme,"pp. 8-9.

24. Ibid.,p. 8.

Boiffard.Untitled. 1929.
Jacques-Andri
Raoul Ubac. Mannequin. 1937.
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52 OCTOBER

effect,although with a different set of figures.25 Using two opposing triangles,

Lacan constructs,first,the usual visual pyramid of perspective projection-
with the viewer's eye stationed at the apex and the object he sees deployed
along the field that makes up the triangle'sbase- a pyramid that locates the
viewer at Caillois's "origin of the coordinates" and thereforerepresents the
perceptual halfof the double dihedron. It is in termsof the second trianglethat
Lacan plots Caillois's dihedron of representation.For in this figure,the occu-
pant of the apex of the triangleis not a sentientbeing but a point of light- irra-
diant, emanating fromspace at large- and the base plane of the triangleis now
indicated "picture."It is along this plane that the perceivingorganism occurs,
although no longer as the privileged point fromwhich realityis constructed,
but as Caillois's "one point among others,"a figurein a picture forwhich it is

Object image Geometral

point

Pointoflight n Picture
scr<

not viewer but viewed. Significantly,this relationshipin which the subject oc-
curs only as alienated fromhimself- forhe is definedor inscribedas a being-seen
without,however, being able to see eitherhis viewer or his own figurein the
viewer's picture- is the one that Lacan constructsas the domain of the essen-
tially visual. For here, where the field of the "picture"separates offfromthe
geometric,ultimatelytactile conception of perspectivalspace, Lacan findsthe
termsof an irresolvableand perpetual tension, and it is here that he is able to
diagram the "scopic drive," to elaborate, that is, the dynamics of a specifically
visual dimension, withinwhich the subject is dispossessed.
The peculiar conception of the visual that Caillois depicted and Lacan
was to go on to develop (most immediatelyin his theoryof the mirrorstage)
both coincides with the primacy that modernistart gave to pure visualityand
conflictswith the utopian conclusions that the theoristsof modernism drew
fromthisidea of optical power. For theirnotionsdid not supportthe modernist

25. Jacques Lacan, The FourFundamental

Concepts trans. Alan Sheridan, New
ofPsycho-Analysis,
York, Norton, 1981, p. 91.
 CorpusDelicti 53

idea of sensuous mastery,with each sense liberated into the purityof its own
experience; the visuality Lacan and Caillois were describing was a mastery
fromwithout,imposedon the subjectwho is trappedin a cat's cradle ofrepresen-
tation, caught in a hall of mirrors,lost in a labyrinth.
Nothingis more available to photographythan thislabyrinthinedoubling,
thisplay of reflection.Characterized as being itselfa mirror(the "mirrorwitha
memory"),the camera nonethelessenacts Caillois's double dihedron. For there
is a fundamentalschismbetween the subject that perceives and the image that
looks back at him, because thatimage, in whichhe is captured, is seen fromthe
vantage of another.
The photograph that Ubac took to accompany Pierre Mabille's article

X",,

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Man Ray. Retour' la raison.1923.

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 CorpusDelicti 55

"Mirrors"--published in Minotaurein 1938 as a kind of popularization of

Lacan's theoriesof the mirrorstage- is a stunningdemonstrationof the disar-
ticulation of the self by means of its mirroreddouble. In brilliant sunlighta
woman's face is seen in a mirrorwhose state of decay returnsher image to her
strangelyaltered, transformed.Her eyes, her forehead, part of her hair, ob-
scured as though by shadow, are in fact corroded and dispersed throughthe
veryagency of reflection.So thatthissubjectwho sees is a subject who, in being
simultaneously"seen," is entered as "picture"onto the mirror'ssurface. And
in this very moment of inscription,as in a doubling reminiscentof Caillois's
theory of mimicry,one discovers an image of the informe, the crumbling of
boundaries, the invasion of space.
It is here, in relation to a concern with the subject's mirroring,that one
locates the participation by Maurice Tabard with the concerns of the move-
ment, in that briefperiod- 1929-1931 - during which he used photomontage
to explore the essential double-sidedness of the photographicsupport. For what
is unique to photography, shared by no other image-making process, is the
transparencyof the photographicnegative, the informationon which, though
reversed leftand right,is fullyintelligiblefromboth frontand back.26 In this
fundamentalcondition of reversal Tabard located the fusionof the image with
its flipped,mirroreddouble.
Continually recombiningand repeating an extremelylimitedvocabulary
of elements, Tabard chose two types of objects with which he created two in-
dependent series. The first,composed of elements like ladders, cane-backed
chairs, or tennisrackets,enteredthe image to functionas representationsof the
negative itself.Objects which are themselvesdouble-sided and gridlike,they
became in Tabard's hands, the figuresof the infrastructure of the photographic
screen in its ideal condition of reversibility.
It was against this firstseries that Tabard then introduced the human
figurethrougha doubling that would call attentionto the body's own rever-
sibility,the two-sidedness of its profiles,the paired doubleness of hands and
arms and breasts. But unlike a grid, the human body is not identical fromone
side to the other. Though symmetrical,it is, like realityitself,imbedded in the
question of aspect, of bodies perceived in space. The identitybetween the right
and lefthand is always mediated by the fact of mirrorreversal.
In the most brilliant of Tabard's photomontages these two factors are
simultaneously made visible: reversibilityand mirror reversal, constantly
working togetherto reinflectthe naive notion of the mirror-with-a-memory.
For Tabard's mirroris double dihedral; thereone discoversa pictureofthe sub-

26. It could be argued that stained glass is yet another medium that is reversible. Yet the same
informationis not intelligiblefromthe back of the glass as that applied to its front.

Raoul Ubac. Portrait in a Mirror. 1938.

 56 OCTOBER

ject wedged onto the paper-thinplane of reversibility,simultaneouslya front

and a back, a subject thatlooks out fromthe point at which it exists,and a sub-
ject that is dispossessed withinits very being by the factof being seen.
Tabard's transformation of the subject is, in thissense, the resultofa sim-
ple manipulation: the flippingof the negative. This process is both as struc-
turallytied to the procedures of photographyas the other strategieswe have
seen - rotationand solarization- and, forall thatTabard's images are layered
and complex, as fundamentallyefficient.It is thus, no more than Ubac's
brdlages,or his optical meltings,not a matterhere of automatism,of an open-
ness to chance. The premeditationevident in Tabard's choice of elements,the,
linking of the double series to forma combinatorymechanism, the use of a
single operator to produce his transformations:all of this is reminiscentof the
operations we have been reading throughthe grid of those linked concepts
which at this moment combine to redefine the visual- Bataille's informe,
Caillois's mimicry,Lacan's "picture."
In most of this work Tabard builds the idea of the mirrorinto the image

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Maurice Tabard. Untitled. 1929. Maurice Tabard. Untitled. 1929.

 CorpusDelicti 57

througha kind of structuraloperation; but in the montage that is perhaps his

most famous-the photograph chosen by Foto-Auge-the issue takes another
form." For in Hand and Womana lookingglass is explicitlypresent,a hand mir-
rorheld by the woman in such a way that it both obliteratesher face and seems
to call into being the shadowy, threatening,faceless, male presence behind
her- as though it were his image, on the otherside of hers, as its obverse, that
the mirrorreflected.This location of the mirrorin the registerof dread ir-
resistiblycalls to mind another text withinthe psychoanalyticcorpus dear to
the surrealists. In its linking of the experience of the double to a sense of
menace, the work seems to open onto the terrainof Freud's "uncanny," par-
ticularlythatmomentwhere he ties the uncanniness triggeredby the idea ofthe
doppelgaingerto the primitivefearofmirrors.Referringto Otto Rank's studyof
this phenomenon, Freud writes:
He has gone into the connectionsthe "double" has withreflectionsin

27. Franz Roh, Foto-Auge, Akademischer

Stuttgart, Verlag, 1929, no. 44.

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Maurice Tabard. Hand and Woman. 1929.

58 OCTOBER

mirrors,with shadows, guardian spirits,with the belief in the soul

and the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the
astonishingevolution of this idea. For the "double" was originallyan
insurance against destructionto the ego, an "energeticdenial of the
power ofdeath," as Rank says; and probablythe"immortal"soul was
the first"double" of the body. This inventionof doubling as a preser-
vation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of
dreams, which is fond of representingcastration by a doubling or
multiplicationof the genital symbol. . . . Such ideas, however, have
sprung fromthe soil of unbounded self-love,fromthe primarynar-
cissism which holds sway in the mind of the child as in that of prim-
itive man; and when this stage has been leftbehind the double takes
on a differentaspect. From having been an assurance of immortal-
ity, he becomes the ghastlyharbingerof death.28
This double, this firstnarcissisticprojection, is thus thoughtprimitively
through the agency of all doubles: shadows cast by the body as well as the
body's mirroredreflections.The shadow is the earliest formthroughwhich the
soul is imagined. Projecting the persistenceof the bodiless self afterdeath in
the formof a "shade," the shadow is also formany cultures the formin which
the souls of the dead return,to haunt or take possession of the living. And in-
deed, in Tabard's image of threatenedpossession, the facelessnessof the male
figure,the blackness of his disguise- made all the more emphatic in contrastto
the woman's white shift- projectshim throughthe conditionof the shade. But
in the Ubac Portraitin a Mirror,too, the possibilityof reading the obliterating
condition of the mirroras an effectof shadow, bringsthe fullthrustof the "un-
canny" into this image - although it must be added that superstitiousbelief
projects the polished surfacesof mirrors,also, as the medium forthe returnof
the dead. 29 The extraordinarywoman who stares at us from the depths of
Ubac's mirror,the lower halfof her face youthfuland lovely,the upper portion
distortedand sightless,could be an image of thatfamous characterwho pushes
Andre Breton to rewritethe question, "Who am I?" in the form,"Whom do I
haunt?"30

28. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," The StandardEditionof theComplete Worksof

Psychological
SigmundFreud,trans. James Strachey, London, The Hogarth Press and the Instituteof Psycho-
Analysis, 1953-74, XVII, pp. 234-235. See also, Otto Rank, The Double, trans. Harry Tucker,
Jr., Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1971.
29. Rank, pp. 62-63.
30. Nadja opens, "Who am I? If this once I were to relyon a proverb, then perhaps everything
would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.'" Andre Breton, Nadja, trans. Richard Howard, New
York, Grove Press, 1960.
CorpusDelicti 59

Together, it would seem, both Nadja and L'Amourfouperforma strange

kind of gloss on the "Uncanny." For in these accounts that develop during the
decade 1928-1937, Breton's notion of objective chance is generated fromthe
web of accident and circumstanceof which Nadja seems to have foreknowledge
and to which Breton feels himselfeventually to gain admittance throughthe
agency of desire. Breton's insistence on the patterns of significance that
underlie and control the operations of chance takes on a strange resonance
when read against Freud's analysis of coincidence. The uncanniness that seems
to surroundcertain repetitionsof names, or numbers, or concatenationsof ob-
jects withinone's everydaylife,"forcesupon us," Freud acknowledges,"theidea
of somethingfatefuland unescapable where otherwisewe should have spoken
of 'chance' only." The temptationto ascribe a secret meaning to what seems
like the obstinaterecurrenceof a number, forexample, leads people, Freud at-
tests, frequentlyto read into these repetitionsthe language of fate.31
In Freud's argumentthis ascriptionof meaning to happenstance and this
assumption of powers of clairvoyance(offhandedlyreferredto by his patientsas
their "'presentiments'which 'usually' come true") can be understood as the
reassertionwithin adult life of more psychologicallyprimitivestates, namely
those related to the "omnipotence of thoughts"and to belief in animism.32All
those bonds which children and tribal man create between themselves and
everythingaround them in order to gain masteryover an all-too-threatening
and inchoate environment,are firstgiven visual formby the image of the self
projected onto the external world in the formof one's shadow or one's reflec-
tion. And then, throughmechanisms of projection,these doubles - inventedto
master and sustain the individual- become the possessors of supernatural
power and turn against him.
The experience of "convulsive beauty," of something that shakes the
subject's self-possession,bringing exhaltation through a kind of shock-an
"explosante-fixe"-the experience of the manifestationsof Breton's objective
chance cannot but be illuminatedby what Freud means by the uncanny, where
shock mixed with the sudden appearance of fate engulfsthe subject:
Our analysis of instances of the uncanny has led us back to the old,
animisticconception of the universe, which was characterizedby the
idea that the world was peopled with the spiritsof human beings,
and by the narcissisticoverestimationof subjective mental processes
(such as the beliefin the omnipotenceof thoughts,the magical prac-
tices based upon this belief, the carefullyproportioneddistribution

31. Freud, "The Uncanny," p. 237.

32. Ibid., p. 239.
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 CorpusDelicti 61

of magical powers or "manna" among various outside persons and

things),as well as by all those otherfigmentsof the imaginationwith
which man, in the unrestrictednarcissism of that stage of develop-
ment, strove to withstand the inexorable laws of reality. It would
seem as though each one of us has been through a phase of in-
dividual developmentcorrespondingto thatanimisticstage in primi-
tive men, that none of us has traversedit withoutpreservingcertain
traces of it which can be re-activated,and thateverythingwhich now
strikesus as "uncanny"fulfilsthe condition of stirringthose vestiges
of animistic mental activitywithinus and bringingthem to expres-
sion.33
The collapse of the distinctionbetween imaginationand reality- an effect
devoutlywished by surrealism,but one which Freud analyzes as the primitive
beliefin magic - animism, narcissisticomnipotence,all are potentialtriggersof
that metaphysical shudder which is the uncanny. For they represent the
breakthroughinto consciousness of earlier states of being, and in this break-
through,itselfthe evidence of a compulsion to repeat, the subject is stabbed,
wounded by the experience of death.

As Spectator
I wantedtoexplorephotography
notas a question(a theme)butas a wound.
- Roland Barthes

The fear of a wound to the eye, and the revelationthat the beautiful girl
Olympia is in facta doll/automaton,combine in E. T. A. Hoffman'sstory"The
Sandman" as Freud's firstexample of the uncanny. The frequentsense of the
eeriness of waxwork figures,artificialdolls, and automata, can be laid to the
way these objects trigger"doubts whetheran apparentlyanimate being is really
alive; or conversely,whether a lifelessobject might not be in fact animate."
This confusionbetween the animate and the inanimate, is an instance of that
class of the uncanny that we have already followed, involvinga regressionto
animistic thinkingand its confusionof boundaries. To the effectproduced by
dolls, one could add, Freud acknowledges, the uncanny effectof epileptic
seizures and the manifestationsof insanity,"because these excite in the spec-
tator the feelingthat automatic, mechanical processes are at work, concealed
beneath the ordinaryappearance of animation."34

33. Ibid., pp. 240-241.

34. Ibid., p. 226.

Man Ray. Explosante-fixe.

1934.
62 OCTOBER

But Freud's reading of "The Sandman" and its extreme effectof uncan-
niness turns not simply on the doll's ambiguous presence, but on her
dismembermentwithin the story, a dismembermentthrough which she is
deprived of her eyes. For, in this regard she becomes a figureforthe second
class of the uncanny, which arises fromthe surfacingof anotherorder of infan-
tile experience: that of the complexes, specificallyhere, the fear of castration.
Hans Bellmer recountsthatin 1932 he saw The TalesofHoffmann - the first
act of which focuses on the Coppelia/Olympia storyderived from"The Sand-
man"-and it was this that triggeredhis firstPoupie. This entire series, an
endless acting out of the process of constructionand dismemberment,or per-
haps the more exact characterization would be constructionas dismember-
ment, could not be more effectively glossed than by Freud's analysis of "The
Sandman." For the Poupies- the firstseries of which were constructedin 1933
and published in Minotaurein 1934, while the second series, LeJeu de Poupie,
was finishedby 1936 but not published until 1949- stage endless tableauxvivants
of the figureof castration. Yet there is another section from"The Uncanny"
that is importantforreading Bellmer'sPoupie: in the passage already cited with
regard to the double, we findan analysis of its place in dreams. For the inven-
tion of the protectivestrategyof doubling, Freud writes,findsits way into the
language of dreams to operate thereon the subject of castrationby representing
it throughthe multiplicationor doubling of "the genital symbol."
In Bellmer'smanipulation of thiscycle, everythingis concertedto produce
the experience of the imaginaryspace of dream, of fantasy,of projection. Not
only does the obsessional reinventionof an always-the-samecreature--con-
tinually recontrived, compulsively repositioned within the hideously banal
space of kitchen, stairwell,parlor- give one the narrative experience of fan-
tasy, with its endless elaboration of the same; but the quality of the image with
its hand-tinted,weirdly"technicolor"glow, and the sense that though it is in
focus, one can never quite see it clearly, combine to create both the aura and
the frustrationthat are part of the visualityof the imaginary.
Within this dream-space the doll herselfis phallic. Sometimes, deprived
of arms, but endowed with a kind of limitlesspneumatic potentialto swell and
bulge with smaller protuberances,she seems the veryfigureof tumescence. At
other times, she is composed of fragmentedmembers of the doll's body, often
doubled pairs of legs stuck end-to-end, to produce the image of rigidity:the
erectiledoll. But in this very pairing that is also a multiplication,a pairing of
the pair, one meets the dreamer'sstrategyof doubling. As he triesto protectthe
threatenedphallus fromdanger by elaborating more and more instances of its

La Poupde. 1938.
Hans Bellmer.
La Poupde. 1938.
Hans Bellmer.
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64 OCTOBER

symbolic proxy, the dreamer very

produces--although transformed--the
image of what he fears. This is what Freud would later identifyas the Medusa
effectwhere the decapitated, castrated head is surrounded by snakes, which
"however frighteningthey may be in themselves, they neverthelessserve ac-
tually as a mitigationof the horror,forthey replace the penis, the absence of
which is the cause of the horror.This is a confirmationof the technicalrule ac-
cording to which a multiplicationof penis symbols signifiescastration."35
To produce the image of what one fears, in order to protectoneselffrom
what one fears- this is the strategicachievement of anxiety, which arms the
subject, in advance, against the onslaught of trauma, the blow that takes one
by surprise. This analysis throughwhich BeyondthePleasurePrinciplerecasts the
propositionsof "The Uncanny" in termsof the lifeand death of the organism,
speaks of the trauma as a blow that penetrates the protectivearmor of con-
sciousness, piercing its outer shield, wounding it by this effectof stabbing.
Bellmer's connection of the doll, the wound, the double, the photograph,
in a series in which each one stands in symbolicrelationto the other,develops a
logic thatprefigures,in each of its parameters,the analysis that Barthes was to
make fourdecades later in CameraLucida. For this work, too, is an elaboration
of the uncanny- of the photographiceffectsof the uncanny- announced with
the veryfirstwords ofhis text:"One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a
photograph of Napoleon's youngest brother,Jerome, taken in 1852. And I
realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: 'I am
looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor."'36
The storythat Barthes recounts in his book starts with this moment of
shock, which, he tells us, he could not share with others, for they seemed to
understandneitheritsnature nor its power on him. Alone withthissensation of
unease, he eventually forgotabout it. After that, he says, "My interest in
Photography took a more cultural turn." Which meant he began to think
photography analytically, by constructinga differencebetween the general,
human interestthatphotographselicit: the"studium"; and the kind ofdetail they
may or may not contain, which punctures that generality, rupturing or
lacerating it, and thus prickingor bruising the spectator: the "punctum." Over
half the course of his book is devoted to his attemptto articulatethe nature of
thispunctum,this photographicdetail that arrestshis attention,that pricks it.

35. Sigmund Freud, "Medusa's Head," S.E., XVIII, p. 273.

36. Barthes, CameraLucida, trans. Richard Howard, New York, Hill and Wang, 1981, p. 3.

Hans Bellmer.La Poupee. 1938.

Hans Bellmer.La Poupee. 1938.

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Hans Bellmer.La Poupee. 1936.

Hans Bellmer.L'Idole. 1937.

CorpusDelicti 67

Barthes's scholarlynarrativeis then broken by a ratherdifferent construc-

tion of the punctum,one which connects it to the kind of sudden frightthat
punctures the organism's defenses or to the shudder of fatefulnessthat is the
uncanny. For the punctumnow is used for the experience of seeing a ghost.
Barthes begins to tell about looking throughan album of photographsafterthe
death of his mother,and, miraculously,findingher essential image in a photo-
graph of her as a child. Once more thereis the shock thatwas delivered by the
image ofJerome Bonaparte, only now more radical and wounding as he con-
frontsthe beingof his motheras a being-pastestablishedby the verymedium that
recorded her as a being-who-was-going-to-die.And Barthes realizes that the
scandalous effectof photographyis the certaintyof the "that-has-been"that at-
taches itselfto the image, a certaintywhich the punctum -"the real punctumof
the photograph [that] is Time"-- decodes as the image of mortalityitself:"By
givingme that absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photographtells me death
in the future.I shudder, like Winnicott'spsychoticpatient, over a catastrophe
which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every
photograph is this catastrophe.""37

The appeal to our emotions. . . is largely

due to the quality of authenticity in the
photograph.The spectator
acceptsitsauthor-
ityand, in viewingit, perforce believeshe
wouldhaveseenthatsceneorobjectexactly so
ifhe had beenthere.
38
- Edward Weston

The revelationthat CameraLucida recountscenterson the one photograph

the book does not reproduce because, as Barthes says of this image, "It exists
only forme. For you, it would be nothingbut an indifferentpicture . .. at most
it would interestyour studium:period, clothes,photogeny;but in it, foryou, no
wound.""39 The science of photographythat Barthes founds here is, then, "the
impossible science of the unique being," the paradox of "the truth- for me."
The grip of photography'svaunted objectivityis loosened here, and photog-
raphy's "authenticity"is redefined.
But the whole of this century'sphotographicaesthetics,the nature of the

37. Ibid., p. 96.

38. EdwardWeston,"TechniquesofPhotographicArt,"Encyclopaedia
Britannica,1941,as cited
in Hollis Frampton,"Impromptus
on EdwardWeston:Everything
in Its Place," October,
No. 5
(Summer1978), p. 64.
39. Barthes,p. 73.
68 OCTOBER

photographic image is such, as Edward Weston admonishes, "that it cannot

survive correctivehandwork."40Which is one way of saying that the supposed
authorityof the photographis in its truth-value,in the objectivityof its objectif
(or lens), in the "straightness"with which it views the world. The code of
StraightPhotographydiscourages to the greatestdegree any tamperingwith
the image. Barthe's subjectivism, in which the photograph exists as a con-
struct- fabricated"forme"- is a scandal forthe aestheticsof StraightPhotog-
raphy, as is all photographicactivitythat resortsto construction:to darkroom
manipulation, to the manipulation of scissors and paste, to any contrivance
which would seem to construct"the real." For how can it be real, if it is fabri-
cated?
This is the same scandal that surrealist photography has long-since
delivered, and continues to deliver, to the congregation of Straight Photog-
raphy. For surrealistphotographyis contrivedto the highestdegree, and that
even when it is not involved in actual superimpositions,or solarizations, or
double exposures, or what have you. Contrivance we could say is what insures

40. Frampton,p. 49.

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Man Ray. Untitled.1935.

 CorpusDelicti 69

thata photographwill seem surrealist:why Man Ray's Anatomy is so, forexam-

ple, even in the absence of any darkroommanipulation. For surrealistphotog-
raphydoes not admit of the natural, as opposed to the culturalor made. And so
all of what it looks at is seen as if already, and always, constructed,througha
strangetranspositionof thisthinginto a different register.We see the object by
means of an act of displacement,definedthrougha gestureof substitution.The
object, "straight"or manipulated, is always manipulated, and thus always ap-
pears as a fetish.It is this fetishizationof realitythat is the scandal.
A directenunciation of thisprincipleoccurs in both Tristan Tzara's essay
in certainautomatisme du gout"- and Man Ray's photographs
usedMinotaure--"D'un
to illustrateit.41 Analyzing fashion as the unconscious constructionof a
changing set of signs forthe erogenous zones of the body, Tzara's textgoes on
to definefashionas a systemforrewritingthe sexual organs in the registerof a
peculiar displacement of sexual identity- the fashionsof 1933 having decreed
thatwomen wear hats that create representationsof female genitalia in theform
ofmasculine garb, namely, the split-crownfedora (and that effectheightened
41. TristanTzara, "D'un certainautomatismedu gout,"Minotaure,
No. 3 (1933), pp. 81-85.

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Brassai. Untitled. 1933.

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CorpusDelicti 71

even further,Tzara pointsout, by the additionsof ornamentin the formof such

male attireas bow ties, garters,and so forth).In the images he created forthis
essay Man Ray puts thisprecise constructionin place. One of his photographs,
forexample, produces the image of collapsed sexual identityas the hat's round-
ed expressionof the head beneath it articulatesboth male and femaleorgans at
once. Only one other image in the surrealistphotographiccanon puts this col-
lapse of sexual differencequite so directly:Brassai's 1933 Nude where the fe-
male body and the male organ have become each the sign forthe other.
If fetishismis this substituteof the unnatural for the natural, its logic
turnson the refusalto accept sexual difference."To put it plainly: the fetishis a
substituteforthe woman's (mother's)phallus which the littleboy once believed
in and does not wish to forego- we know why."'42And the fetish-as-substitute is
not only a denial of sexual difference,it also oftenbears the imprintof its in-
stitution within a moment of arrest that occurs within the visual register.
"When the fetishcomes to life,"Freud writes,"some process has been suddenly
interrupted. . . what is possibly the last impression received before the un-
canny traumaticone is preserved as a fetish. . . the last moment in which the
woman could still be regarded as phallic." This blow that stops time, and
decrees that on the site of its arrest there be built the sexually indeterminant
substituteof the fetish,this blow occurs in the realm of the visual, which now
becomes the theater for the endless rehearsals of a fabricatedvision. Freud's
firstexample of the fetish- the famous "shine on the nose"- in its chain of sub-
stitutionsthat are furthercomplicated througha displacement of language (as
the English "glance at the nose" was transposed into German as Glanz [or shine]
aufdernase),demonstratesthe visual componentof thisinstitution:a momentof
sightwhich fabricatesthe real.
Surrealism can be said to have explored this possibilityof a sexualitythat
is not grounded in an idea of human nature, or the natural, but is instead,
woven of fantasyand representation,fabricated.One hears thismost distinctly
during that famous collective mapping of the terrainof the sexual act, at the
rue Fontaine in 1928, when Aragon imperiouslyinterruptsBreton's strictures
on the unnaturalness of this or that practice with,"I wish to signal that forthe
firsttime in the course of thisdiscussion the word 'pathological'has been put in
play. That seems to implyon the part of some of us an idea of normalcy. I wish
to take a stand against this idea."43
Surrealism'shaving taken the love act and its object- woman - as its cen-
tral, obsessional subject, it must be seen that in much of surrealistpractice
woman, in being a "shine on the nose," is nowhere in nature. Having dissolved
the natural in which "normalcy" can be grounded, surrealism was at least

42. SigmundFreud,"Fetishism," S.E., XXI, p. 152-153.

43. "Recherchessur la sexualitY,La Rdvolution No. 11 (March 1928), p. 37.
Surrialiste,
72 OCTOBER

potentiallyopen to the dissolving of distinctionsthat Bataille insisted was the

job of the informe. Gender, at the heart of the surrealistprojectwas one of these
categories. If withinsurrealistpoetry/woman/was constantlyin construction,
then at certain moments that project could at least prefigurea next step, in
which a reading is opened onto deconstruction.It is forthisreason thatthe fre-
quent characterizations of surrealism as antifeministseem to me to be
mistaken.44
Within surrealistphotographic practice, too, /woman/was in construc-
tion, for she is there as well the obsessional subject. And since the vehicle
through which she is figured is itselfmanifestlyconstructed, /woman/and
/photograph/become figuresfor each other'scondition: ambivalent, blurred,
indistinct,and lacking in, to use Edward Weston's word, authority.
The nature of the authoritythat Weston and StraightPhotographyclaim
is grounded in the sharplyfocused image, its resolutiona figureof the unityof
what the spectatorsees, a wholeness which in turnfoundsthe spectatorhimself
as a unifiedsubject. That subject, armed with a vision that plunges deep into
realityand, throughthe agency of the photograph,given the illusion of mastery
over it, seems to findunbearable a photographythat effacescategories and in
theirplace erects the fetish,the informe, the uncanny.
There are, of course, otherprojects to rethinkphotography.And thus to
returnto CameraLucida, we should note the ending that Barthes gives to this
mythic tale of the science of photography. The night that he found the
photographof his mother,Barthes tells us, he saw a movie in which therewas
an automaton, whose dancing with the hero stirredin Barthes pangs of love
that he linked to the madness he associated with his newly organized feelings
about photography:"a new formof hallucination. . . . a mad image, chafedby
reality." The automaton, the double of life who is death, is a figurefor the
wound that every photographhas the power to deliver, foreach one is also a
double and a death: "All those young photographerswho are at work in the
world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are
agents of Death. . . . Contemporarywiththe withdrawalof rites,photography
may correspond to the intrusion, in our modern society, of an asymbolic
Death, outside of religion, outside of ritual, a kind of abrupt dive into literal
Death. Life/Death: the paradigm is reduced to a simple click, the one
separating the intitialpose fromthe finalprint."45
That simple click is what Bretonhad called the explosante-fixeand thatcom-
bination of madness and love, released by the doll and by the essence of
photography,which Barthes describes as a "gone mad" and an instance of "la
viritifoll'eis, in its uncanniness, its convulsiveness, a kind of amourfou.

44. This is maintained,for example, in Xavibre Gauthier,Surrialisme

et sexualiti,Paris,
Gallimard,1971.
45. Barthes,p. 92.