• fabric – noun [mass noun]1 cloth produced by weaving or knitting textile fibres:
    heavy cream fabric [count noun] stretch fabrics
    2 the walls, floor, and roof of a building. the body of a car or aircraft. the basic structure of a society, culture, activity, etc.: the multicultural fabric of Canadian society
    – ORIGIN late 15th cent.: from French fabrique from Latin fabrica ‘something skillfully produced’, from faber ‘worker in metal, stone, etc.’ The word originally denoted a building, later a machine, the general sense being ‘something made’, hence sense 1 (mid 18th cent., originally denoting any manufactured material). Sense 2 dates from the mid 17th cent.
    —Stevenson, Oxford Dictionary, 624.

 

A return of Moira and Tyche in our day and age? Maybe they have never been away, appearing time and again in other guises.
—Samuel IJsseling, Drie godinnen [Three Goddesses]1

On the Tangiers beach (families, fairies, boys), some old workmen, like very slow ancient insects, rake the sand.
—Roland Barthes, Incidents2

 

Queens 2010. Beat Streuli presents this bustling borough of NYC as the starting point of a photographic journey through ten cities worldwide, all of which bear their own geopolitical marks. A set of exhibition shots reproduced on blue paper resolutely cuts through this opening sequence. It documents an installation entitled Transit, on view at the Zurich-based Galerie Eva Presenhuber in 2011. Some among these large-size digital prints, here rendered in black-and-white, turn out to be blowups of color images included in Queens 2010. These color pictures display (freshly) painted walls, fencing, railing, women, men, at times children, and automobiles. Text characters in Streuli’s images, at first sight, seem to act as no more than rather cryptic leftovers of the reality scene that the artist decided to photograph. One wonders whether these language signs should be considered as something resembling quasi-accidental blobs of slightly excessive paint—comparable to a minor trembling of the brush in the master’s hand. Or did Streuli rather deliberately insert these at times incomplete linguistic fragments in order to heighten the enigma surrounding his works? Those readers who become specifically attentive to the language component in Streuli’s photographs will find it hard to keep their eyes away from it. They may feel puzzled, or even experience a slight sensation of disquietude. What is one to make, for example, of the rather nonsensical inscription more turizat that can be deciphered from one of the prints in the Transit installation views?

From Queens, Beat Streuli invites his readers to embark on a visual voyage that first continues to Western Europe, to two suburbs of Zurich undergoing a swift process of gentrification. In one of the photographs from Altstetten Albisrieden 2015, we discover a smiling man who experiences the need to publicly parade with his utochthon Albanese identity printed on a prominently shown-off black T-shirt. Glued to a storefront window the reader spots, slightly later in the same sequence, Adam&You. Streuli structures Fabric of Reality in such way that another black-and-white set of exhibition views appears somehow to slide over this very image. What we think, what choices we make, where we go, and who we talk to is the title of that monumental digital projection on a floating screen. The artist mounted it in a barn in Altstetten in 2015 for the Art and the City AAA show. When these installation shots fly out of the book’s pages again, ending the second bluish episode, one realizes that this actually caused the Adam&You picture to be split in two. Before Streuli takes his audience on to Marseille, the next stop, he has made sure to display the number 2 twice—even though on the second occasion it rather looks like a question mark. Upon further investigation the right half of the Adam&You photograph does rather read as &et/ou, or “&and/where,” indeed.

Marseille 2016 lures you into this perpetual feeling of mystery that comes with the brightness of daily life near the Mediterranean Sea. You might be tempted to stay just there. Fabric of Reality, however, counterbalances that dream of a finally found seductive melting pot. A wall poster out on the street, which turns out to be part of a public campaign, gives away the following political slogan: Le FN côté obscur de la France. As you discover this “dark side” of the city you decide to move on. This turns out to be an immediately rewarding plan, for it is Tangier, no doubt, that truly takes your breath away. Streuli’s montage of images bathing in glaring sunlight, shot in this city and on its central beach, results in a pattern of colors fusing into a tense patchwork that juxtaposes, for example, the green pentagram of Morocco with the word tribalzone printed on an adolescent boy’s T-shirt.

During a visit to the installation made from this series, some employees at the Maison des Cultures et de la Cohésion Sociale de Molenbeek-Saint-Jean (Brussels) proudly reported to me that each time they walk by the 7 × 20 m large wallpaper Tanger 13 (2014) they discover “new characters” [“des nouveaux personnages” ]—as if they cannot stop to invent their own (fairy) tale while seeing these images. Bringing to mind one of his impressions of spending time in Tangier, Roland Barthes writes:

a handsome, mature-looking young man, well dressed in a grey suit and a gold bracelet, with delicate clean hands, smoking red Olympic cigarettes, drinking tea, is speaking quite earnestly (some sort of civil servant? One of those who slow down files?), and a tiny thread of saliva drips onto his knee. His companion points it out to him.3

Crude oil. Enter Dubai 2015. Fabric of Reality weaves its photographic selection further together into urban mindscapes of a World City, as is the title of Streuli’s large installation made of images from this megalopolis, as well as from Moscow and Hong Kong. If it weren’t for the vividly colored remnants of a prototypically Eastern European socialist realist wall mosaic, Moscow 2015 would almost feel like Brussels, one of the artist’s homes. Hong Kong 2015 offers sensuality all over. It even sends you a French kiss—and isn’t that, after all, “the final cut”?4 Set aside the minor unrest caused by the inscription 警 POLICE 察 on the yellow jackets of law enforcement officers or the inscription Bank of C, Streuli’s rendered impressions of this city might suggest an eternal infatuation—if not a real “enamoramiento.”5 Yet bus 90B—whose electronic LED destination panel is also reproduced on the book’s cover—decisively suggests its commuters should, once more, travel on. As Cotonou 2016 brings you to another strategic port town, this allows you to unwind in its garish delight of splendid curls and curves. Next, switch to Istanbul 2016, sleeping beauty, pregnant with almost insurmountable nostalgia—or so it seems.

Flashback to New York City 1991–1993. There are cars, cars, cars—everywhere. Here and there, in between them, one discovers faces—many of which, at this point in Streuli’s démarche, in profile view. The result is an accentuation of the photographed protagonists’ ears as if they were vortex points. Cars and ears, even more ears, continue to be similarly omnipresent in the other sets of pictures dating from the 2010s. Yet, by contrast, in these later works Streuli provides also numerous resolutely frontal views of faces. Still there are other, even more striking differences between the older and the newer work. Looking back at New York of the early 1990s underscores the datedness of car design. More fundamental, however, is that there is not a single cell phone to be found. Instead one recognizes an abundance of phone booths. Back then there was always the option to make use of a toll free: 1-800 service, from any phone anywhere, or to dial 0 for a collect call. On the other side of the line a reassuring sound would resonate: “AT&T, how can I help you?” Those who ever heard the operator’s voice say these words may still quite tangibly recall them being echoed from somewhere in space—a remote planet or a star now sadly extinguished. It is almost as if these words reverberate like a fond souvenir from a lost dream world, once so intimate and now forever out of reach. In The Infatuations (2011) Javier Marías allows the following thought to slip into the head of María Dolz, the novel’s first person narrator:

People forget that what is said to us on the phone comes not from far away, but from very near, which is why what we are told overthe phone is so much more persuasive than the same words spoken by someone face to face, for such an interlocutor will not, or only in very rare cases, brush our ear with his lips.6

 

  • moire /mwa:/ (also moir /′mwa:reɪ/)  noun [mass noun] silk fabric that has been subjected to heat and pressure rollers after weaving to give it a rippled appearance.
    – adjective (of silk) having a rippled, lustrous finish.
    having a pattern of irregular wavy lines like that of moire.
    – ORIGIN mid 17th cent.: French moire ‘mohair’ (the original fabric); the variant moiré ‘given a watered appearance’ (past participle of moirer, from moire).7

 

A silk scarf can generate a light, fugacious touch on the skin of one’s cheek as one moves about. The soft veil’s woven fabric intimately brushes our face, and its lustrous motif may subtly light up in doing so. Similarly, throughout Fabric of Reality, electricity cables, lead pipes, chains, nets, wrapped cloth (all kinds), hair elastics, earphones, (steering)wheels, and heaps of bags (including the trash variety) build up an irregular pattern that moves on as if following the wavy rhythm of such a shiny, soft veil. Streuli’s photographs thus display how reality itself can become brushed by a rippled moire of components that tend to overgrow the crossroads, turnpikes, sidewalks, and public spaces in which the artist has found his operational territory, and which bears no further name.

In his autobiographical Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes (1975), the author tells his readers that he is on the lookout for “figures of the Neutral.”8 He gives plenty of examples, such as “Adamic language” or “whatever thwarts or ridicules ostentation, mastery, intimidation.”9 “The Neutral,” according to him, is to be situated “at another link of the infinite chain of language.”10 Barthes conceived the Neutral in terms of an “intellectual object” that injects into thinking a floating, fugitive element without a fixed identity.11 The Neutral, he would later on explain to his students, is a “thing” one needs to “postulate,” “desire” for, or even “hallucinate” about.12 As a consequence of its impermanent state, the Neutral is what can only be “glimpsed.”13 Its figures are “twinklings.”14 Precisely because of this inherent instability, says Barthes, it is the Neutral that comes to add “nuance” to reality.15 Nuance for him is a keyword. On various occasions he muses on generating wider knowledge of a “science of the nuances”—that is, a science of the moires, which renders a more literal translation of the French word used by Barthes.16

While looking for figures of the Neutral that help to build this science of the moires, Barthes also searches among visual patterns and colors.17 Thus he comes to the conclusion that the Neutral can reveal itself in the shape of a “colorless… shimmer” such as the grisaille, which is the “color of the colorless.”18 In Hong Kong, Beat Streuli photographed the luxurious decoration of a Prada shop storefront. This very picture offers the impression of a luxuriant golden shine fading into a dynamic mass of grey only lit up by the repetitive shimmering undulation of spiraling metal waves. Archaeologists have named these elongated S-shaped channels or flutings that form an abstract motif of fluidity and flow “strigils”—after the instrument (usually of iron, copper, silver, or ivory) used to scrape the skin clean.19 Vitruvius recognized in this motif an imitation of the folds of cloth, as in a moiré fabric.20 Moreover, strigillation, which prominently flourished on funerary artefacts of Late Antiquity (second to sixth century AD), is also understood as mimicking the movement of water—thus representing a “creative fluid.”21

One is tempted to look back at Streuli’s Prada picture from the perspective of the regenerative energy of these strigils. Reading the image in this way makes you notice a visual dynamic that moves neither downward nor horizontally yet instead seems to push the Prada logo upward, decisively out of the frame. But who would be capable of performing such an operation? On Sundays, when the shops in Hong Kong are closed, women—maids and other low-income service industry workers, mostly Filipino—gather and rest in these then quasi-abandoned public commercial plazas, with their stores showcasing luxury brands. Hong Kong 2015 includes quite a few images depicting these women sitting together on the sidewalks, playing cards, holding a notepaper and pencil, or having a rather messy picnic beneath improvised sunscreens made from sheets and parasols they brought with them.

Close observation triggers all sorts of questions. Who is that woman making a call with her Mickey Mouse phone? And who is she trying to reach? Her boss, a confidant, an intimate friend, a sibling? Or rather Moira? Etymologically speaking, the term moire comes from the Greek Moira (Μοῖρα)—meaning destiny or fate, as well as being the name of the goddess who is unlike any of the gods and goddesses as she alone stands above all of them.22 In English, Moira is rather known in the plural version as Fates or Moirai.23 The three goddesses of fate were Clotho, Lakhesis, and Atropos. Clotho usually carries a spindle or a roll (the book of Fate), Lakhesis a staff with which she points to the horoscope on a globe, and Atropos a scroll, a wax tablet, a sundial, a pair of scales, or a cutting instrument. The Moirai have traditionally been considered to find themselves at the helm of necessity. At each human being’s birth, they spin, measure, and cut the thread of life.24 They decide, so to speak, on what flows into the world and when and how it will flow out of it again.

When finally arriving in Phnom Penh 2018, the reader, increasingly eager to start leafing backward in the book, becomes aware that Moira had in fact allowed us to spot her before. It was only a matter of actually recognizing her various disguises. Firmly clasping a plastic shopping bag between the fingers of both hands, she was already checking her cell phone in Zurich, like an undercover agent. In Dubai, on her way home from an errand, she was spotted carrying groceries, and even though she halted to look at the photographer she did not bother to take off her sunglasses to properly greet him. She has been returning to Moscow incognito, who knows how many times, veiled and with sunglasses, accompanied by a young man—possibly her son, a messenger. Slightly later—just after Hermès was spotted in town—she hesitated to almost undress herself in the full glory of the warm evening sun. On her stop in Istanbul, she was wearing a set of pretty strigil-shaped earrings. Again she was checking her phone there. Was she considering to answer the call from one of her assistants, possibly in Hong Kong?

Soon after, still in Istanbul, we catch Moira again. She has obviously changed tactics. Walking by a huge truck wheel, the emblematic attribute of her Latin twin sister Tyche, she subtly hides her mobile phone in her moiré shawl.25 In the same left hand with which she balances her cell phone she is holding a credit card at the ready. Staring out onto the sea in Tangier, we see her talking to a handsome man in an elegant, mauve shirt humbly observing her. There as well as in Dubai, where one finds her about to cross the street after a white van filled with people will have passed by, she adorned herself with a colorful shawl similar to the one in Istanbul. In Tangier and Dubai, however, this shawl came with the eye-catching repetitive pattern of circular, abstract forms identified as that of the “nameless motif.”26 This nameless motif must be understood as an “energeticon.” 27 It usually takes the form of “a sphere-with-projections or a spiny ball, but it also appears as a diamond shape with indentations or an egg-shape.28 This specific motif is known to refer to “the creation of the world.” Nameless motifs are “characterized by a hard-to-define formal articulation, often featuring blots with bulges and indentations, extrusions as well as intrusions.” 29 For Paul Vandenbroeck such nameless motifs represent no less than the shuttering spasm of the uterus. They are stain-like spots that pulse inside the fabric and embody the source of new life or of a new beginning—a rebirth.

During the first weeks of 1980, Roland Barthes prepared a research seminar on the topic of Proust and photography, which he planned to teach that spring. Tragically, Barthes was fatally hit by a car on February 25, 1980, in the rue des Écoles in Paris—right after a visit to the Collège de France to check the slide projector he wanted to use for the first session of this workshop.30 He left us an introduction explaining the seminar’s basic idea. The plan was to “examine” and discuss “one by one, in alphabetical order” a set of fifty-six photographs that he himself had carefully selected.31 All were pictures taken by Paul Nadar representing family members, friends, and acquaintances of Marcel Proust and used as inspiration for his In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927). The ultimate goal of the exercise was, so we learn from Barthes’s notes, “to produce… a fascination,” and “to intoxicate [the attendants of the seminar] with a world.” As he writes: “the few words I’ll be saying point to something that I’m not saying; I’m not speaking there where it is, I’m speaking to one side of it.”

Barthes compares this conversation from the sidelines to stuttering—to a hesitant, stammering speech. “To be fascinated = to have nothing to say,” he writes. “We fail to speak about what fascinates us.” His intention is that the photographs will not so much be identified but instead be read, so that one both plunges into the observation of the worldly reality depicted in them and relates that very world to one’s own world. “The worldly contains a world.”32 The hypothesis is that as one gets to know this represented world better and better from observing the photographs at length, one may become drawn into it. Photographs, in other words, can gener- ate something like a “love affair, a frenzy: a wild desire.” Barthes himself provides a few visual keys “to decoding (to reading)” the proposed set of photographs.33 He suggests, first, to carefully observe the “morphology (of the faces).” Second, one should pay attention to “dress,” which he considers “a classical social marker,” and finally to the “pose,” “a more subtle marker.”34 When studied in this way, the “photograph… will function as a confrontation between the Dream, the Imaginary of reading and Reality.”35

Let us give in one last time to that wild desire and pursue our imaginary reading of Fabric of Reality slightly further. We then find that in Summer 2018, Moira decided to pitch camp in Phnom Penh, playing hide-and-seek with Streuli for the time he was in town. In the closing sequence of the book, Moira is continuously flowing in and out of the picture, both disguised as the already-described volatile nymphs and as their masculine equivalent Kairos—the god of opportunity, who has winged feet just like Hermes and with whom he was venerated together during Antiquity.36A little girl, with a pizza bag in her hand, gets on the backseat of a motorcycle, joining a young man who is about to put his foot on the starter. His arms seem folded and spread like wings. In this photograph the strigillated motif of a Lexus car dashboard operates as a theatrical background, as if to enhance further the fugitive impression of the overall scene. Walking through the streets of Phnom Penh, we see Moira carry plastic shopping bags in both hands, her left hand in addition being filled with a stack of banknotes, in plain sight. On another occasion it seems that the artist caught her almost unawares and that she, consequently, rather preferred to rush out of the picture. Elsewhere she appears more relaxed again, walking with a boyfriend while both stretch back their legs synchronically. An unruly lock of hair juts out from his head. From afar, he seems to be holding a mirror in his right hand, or is it rather a knife? Barbara Baert brings to mind that the Ancient Greek word kairios (καίριος) refers “to a precise point that provides an opening; it is the ‘right place,’ the ‘mark,’ where the knife can penetrate.”37 Kairos, then, does not only signify “boundary, threshold, limit,” but also “transition, passage, and progress.” It is he, emerging from the remotest of pasts, who has access to unconscious dynamics in the present. This capacity endows Kairos with “revolutionary power.”38

Phnom Penh is an urban jungle and Moira its supreme swan among the lyyons. Bundles of dangling electric and telephone wires cover the city, creating an overpowering snarl (a moire). No surprise it is there that Moira, for now, has sought refuge (Angkor). We don’t know how communication with the Moirai in other cities has been arranged—those goddesses of spinning who are weaving, distributing, and deciding on fates. Nor can we grasp what instructions she gives to the seductive gods of opportunity who, again in retrospect, turn out to have been around everywhere, throughout Fabric of Reality. In Marseille and Moscow, Kairos wore his hair in a nicely trimmed ponytail. In Hong Kong he gave his Fiat—but to what exactly remains unclear. In Cotonou it takes a while before you realize that the tassel pending from the soldier’s cap is actually composed of a few dreadlocks in his hair. Puzzlement grows. How then is one to take time by the forelock?

At the very end of Fabric of Reality, Moira walks with ears cocked, widely pricked-up even. Her ultimate gesture is that of protecting the head of a young child. “The eye is satisfied with the destruction of its own artifacts, the ear responds to the message of mankind’s radical solitude.”39 More than anywhere else in Fabric of Reality, destiny seems to have reached a turning point in Phnom Penh, as already was the case in early 1990s’ New York City. Although Streuli’s photographs invoke any such impression merely indirectly, they reveal that in Phnom Penh of 2018 yesterday’s eternalized faces may well become anchored as those announcing what tomorrow will look like. An installation view of Streuli’s Citizens, made for EACC Castellón in 2013, interrupts this final sequence in bluish grisaille— as a sign of hope.

Photography, as Roland Barthes once said in an interview, “displaces, shifts the notion of art, and that is why it takes part in a certain progress in the world.”40 The final, concluding lines of the last class he taught during his life, on February 23, 1980, reveal his passion for the idea of a rebirth.41 He conceives of such a possibility while referring to Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed to have been able to imagine Zarathustra soon after he experienced a “sudden and radical modification of his taste in music.” Barthes, similarly, speculates on the hypothesis of a rebirth by means of “the art of hearing.”

What could possibly engender such a “new ear for things” is “a trigger, a chance event, a mutation.” During this lecture he presumed music to be a central player for bringing about the fundamental metamorphosis that he was after. However, on repeated occasions during those later years of his life Barthes turned to the study of a very personal selection of photographs—as if he intuited a key role for this medium in the transformation of his hearing, “the real dialectical becoming,” that he wanted to set in motion. It is as if Barthes, while musing about the possible importance of music for triggering the change in his life he so ardently desired, overlooked what he was already doing at that very moment: studying photographs.

This may seem surprising because Barthes himself knew that photographs can create that impression of “a moire of intensities,” as he acknowledged in a 1977 commentary on a set of twelve photographs by Daniel Boudinet (or, more specifically, when describing a picture of what seems to be the entrance of a forest on a summer day).42 Slightly further on in the same text he mused that “the photographs of D.B. are very musical.”43 Thus we have all clues in hand to read Fabric of Reality as an encouragement to also listen to Beat Streuli’s photographs. This heightens our understanding of them as a rustling, deliberately nameless moiré fabric that nonetheless provides insightful glimpses of visual culture in contemporary public space. Streuli, a scientist of nuances, makes each photo perform its function as a figure of the Neutral— as fragments, shimmers, or twinkles that become subtly inter- mingled. In doing so he powerfully expands the reach of artistic representation. “[Bertolt] Brecht,” as Barthes writes in a short entry entitled “What limits representation?”

had wet laundry put in the actress’s laundry basket so that her hip would have the right movement, that of the alienated laundress. Well and good; but stupid too, no? For what weighs down the basket is not wet laundry but time, history, and how represent such a weight as that? It is impossible to represent the political: it resists all copying, even when you turn yourself out to give it all the more verisimilitude. Contrary to the inveterate belief of all socialist arts, where politics begins is where imitation ceases.44

 

 

1 IJsseling, Drie godinnen, p. 81. My translation. Thanks to Beat
Streuli for his invitation to write this essay, and to Ton Brouwers for editing the text.
2 Barthes, Incidents, p. 46. In the original French version the phrase is: “sur la plage de Tanger (familles, tantes, garçons), de vieux ouvriers, comme des insectes très anciens et très lents, déblayent le sable.” See Barthes, Incidents, p. 31. Note that “tantes” has
a double meaning, as referring to “aunts” and “effeminate men” or “homosexuals.” In the context of the present essay, “fairies” turns out to be an apt term as well. Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather, the three fairies in Sleeping Beauty, have been compared to the three Moirai, as discussed later on in my argument. For more on this, see IJsseling, Drie godinnen, p. 59.
3 Barthes, Incidents, p. 54.
4 Baert, Kairos, p. 109.
5 Marías, The Infatuations, p. 260. Original emphasis.
6 Ibid., p. 173.
7 Stevenson, Oxford Dictionary, p. 1139.
8 Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 136.
9 Ibid., p. 132.
10 Ibid. Original emphasis.
11 Ibid., p. 134. Original emphasis.
12 Barthes, The Neutral, p. 12.
13 Ibid., p. 13.
14 Ibid., p. 47.
15 Ibid., p. 11.
16 Barthes assimilates “nuance” to the Nietzschean concept of diaphora. See ibid., p. 11. Original emphasis. Thomas Clerc points out that “diaphorology” or “the science of the nuances, shimmer, or mottled effects” is something Barthes was trying to conceive of throughout his entire oeuvre. See ibid., p. 215 n. 32. The French original says, “la ‘diaphoralogie’, science des nuances ou des moires, qui parcourt toute l’œuvre de Barthes.” See
Barthes, Le Neutre, p. 36 n. 29. Clerc refers to Barthes’s “Délibé- ration” (1979), where Barthes writes the following, “Il y a une odeur de ce qu’on mange et une odeur de ce qu’on prépare (observation pour la «science des Moires», ou «diaphoralogie»).” See Barthes, Œuvres complètes V, p. 674.
17 Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 132.
18 Barthes, The Neutral, 51. The following quotation is on this same page.
19 Sidgwick, “Radiant Remnants,” p. 124 n. 1.
20 See S. Dorigny, “Strigilis,” in C. Daremberg and E.M. Saglio (eds.), Dictionnaire des antiquités grecques et romaines d’après les textes et les monuments (Paris : Hachette,1877–1919), pp. 1534– 1535 (as quoted in Sidgwick, “Radiant Remnants,” p. 124 n.1).
21 Sidgwick, “Radiant Remnants,” p. 112.
22 See IJsseling, Drie godinnen, p. 59.
23 See “Moire Étymol. et Hist. 1865 (Taine, Philos. art, t. 2, p. 110). Empr. au gr. Μ ο ι ̃ ρ α sing. «déesse du destin», plur. Μ ο ι ρ α ι
«les trois Parques», de μ ο ι ρ α «part, portion; part assignée à chacun, lot, sort, destinée»,” http://www.cnrtl.fr/etymologie/moire (accessed 17 December 2018).
24 See http://www.theoi.com/Daimon/Moirai.html (accessed 17 December 2018).
25 See the chapter entitled “Moira en Tyche” in IJsseling, Drie godinnen, pp. 58–85.
26 Vandenbroeck, “The ‘Nameless Motif,’” p. 114.
27 Ibid., p. 174. Original emphasis.
28 Van Loo, “Throat Turnings,” p. 113. The following quotation is on the same page.
29 Vandenbroeck, p. 114. Original emphasis.
30 Yacavone, “Reading through Photography,” p. 110 n. 3.
31 Barthes, “Proust and Photogaphy,” in idem, The Preparation of the Novel, p. 310. The following quotations are on the same page. Original emphasis.
32 Ibid., p. 311. The following quotation is on the same page. Original emphasis.
33 Ibid., p. 312.
34 Ibid., pp. 312–313. Original emphasis.
35 Ibid., p. 315. Original emphasis.
36 See Baert, Kairos, pp. 13–14.
37 Ibid., p. 8. Original emphasis. The following quotation is on the same page.
38 Ibid., p. 105.
39 Kamper, “Nach dem Schweigen,” p. 117. My translation
of “Das Auge hat sein Genügen an der Vernichtung der eigenen Artefakte, das Ohr antwortet auf die Botschaft einer radikalen Verlassenheit der Menschheit.”
40 Barthes, “On Photography,” p. 360.
41 Barthes, The Preparation of the Novel, p. 304. The concept of rebirth also appears earlier in the course, for example,
on pp. 212 and 214. The following quotations are on the same page 304. Original emphasis.
<sup42 “Une moire d’intensités,” in Barthes, Œuvres complètes V,
p. 318. My translation. All photographs are published along with the commentaries.
<sup43 “Les photographies de D.B. sont très musicales,” Ibid., p. 327. My translation.
44 Barthes, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, p. 154. Original emphasis.

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Baert, Barbara, Kairos or Occasion as Paradigm in the Visual Medium. Nachleben, Iconography, Hermeneutics (Leuven: Peeters, 2016).

Barthes, Roland, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes [1975], trans. Richard Howard [1977] (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994).
———, Œuvres complètes V. Livres, textes, entretiens 1977–1980, ed. Éric Marty (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
———, “On Photography [1980],” from interviews conducted by Angelo Schwarz and Guy Mandery, in idem, The Grain of the Voice. Interviews 1962–1980 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1984), pp. 353–360.
———, Incidents (Paris: Seuil, 1987).
———, Incidents [1987], trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (London, New York, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2010).
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Sidgwick, Emma, “Radiant Remnants. Late Antique Strigillation and Productive Dunamis/Energeia,” IKON, 7 (2014): pp. 109–130. Stevenson, Angus (ed.), Oxford Dictionary of English, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).

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