The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Where you are tender, you speak your plural.

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

To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not--this is the beginning of writing.

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.

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.

Don't say mourning. It's too psychoanalytic. I'm not mourning. I'm suffering.