ABSTRACT
The power of the fragment was of crucial importance to the German Romantics especially the Schlegel brothers and their collections. A photograph, to keep its creative potential alive to possible future actualization, must not drain this potential in any single moment. Unlike the hedgehog of the Schlegels’ fragment, such a photographic fragment should never be complete in itself or isolated from the world. A photographic image articulated as a fragment should exist in a metastable state such that any becoming into being either re-energizes the potential from which it individuates, or never quite depletes the pool of possibilities in its pre-individuating milieu. Fragments can become stuck in closed systems. One wonders of the accidental fragment and its ontological status. As a life, the worm’s specific locations are able to offer up a particular temporally specific individual that may be singled-out at any place. Nevertheless, the non-dialectical relation between atoms and worms remains.
