The Aura of Terror?

Abstract

Roland Barthes’s famous insight in his La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida) states that the horror of the photograph is that it certifies that the corpse is alive. For him, the photograph of his mother signifies that the person portrayed was alive (then), but is already dead (now). The Barthesian gaze underlines the photograph as temporally twofold, signifying, for instance, life of the dead. Walter Benjamin refers to the temporality of an image as dialectical. In an image, the past has the potential to become crystallized into the moment—into a dialectical image—simultaneously with becoming a part of the mémoire involontaire. The notion of the dialectical image remains on the historical and theoretical levels, and also on the level of the configuration in terms of approaching the epistemological questions of understanding the signs of the present time. My task in this chapter is to touch on various aspects of our present time by highlighting the significance of its images. In connection to this, I will also attempt to reveal some of its epistemology in this sense, that is, to reveal a temporal epistemology of the image.