In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like winnicott's psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Television doomed us to the Family, whose household instrument it has become-what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.

I want a History of Looking. For the Photograph is the advent of myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity. Even odder: it was before Photography that men had the most to say about the vision of the double. Heautoscopy was compared with an hallucinosis; for centuries this was a great mythic theme.

To dope the racer is as criminal, as sacrilegious, as trying to imitate God; it is stealing from God the privilege of the spark.

He who reads a story only once is condemned to read the same story his whole life.

Is not the most erotic part of the body wherever the clothing affords a glimpse?

Literature is the question minus the answer.