ABSTRACT
For Derrida, writing after Barthes’s own untimely death, Camera Lucida becomes its own kind of wound, an occasion for rereading and for mourning. Derrida considers Barthes’s many deaths, “his deaths, these and those of his relatives, those deaths which must have inhabited him,” to trace the more general relations between death, language, and thought. While photography is productive for understanding the timing and spacing of death, literature lends Barthes and Derrida a set of more flexible tactics with which to narrate, describe, and pluralize that understanding. In Camera Lucida, Barthes assesses the typical critical positions for reckoning with the photograph. For any individual speaker, Foucault’s language-without-end and Barthes’s stammering have an endpoint, namely in death. Derrida’s click, seemingly deployed to clarify a blurred opposition, introduces life/death as a state of mutual transgression or haunting. The instant of death, like the ellipsis or the photograph, functionally becomes a singularity expressed through plural components.
