Roland Barthes Reads The Map and the Territory by Michel Houellebecq

摘要

In his most personal book La Chambre Claire.Note sur la Photographie,Roland Barthes proposed a hypothesis,claiming that the genius of photography is concealed in special,one-time,and absolutely idiomatic existence,in a language expressible only with the help of the word:contingence,which means both contiguity and randomness.The evocation of Barthes and meditation on La Chambre Claire are supposed to create a mood for a more inquisitive and sensitive approach to the latest book by Michel Houellebecq:The Map and the Territory.The author was concerned not only with the fact that all the tropes concerning photography and set into motion by Barthes and partly by Benjamin return in Houellebecq’s book.He is also not interested that Barthes or Benjamin provides methodological devises that make it possible to conduct a more scrupulous“interpretation”of The Map and the Territory.Actually,a confrontation of the confessions made by Barthes and the novel by Houellebecq allows me to rethink the category of evidence and the process of providing evidence by the art of photography.It permits to ask the question:What is registration?What is evidence?And what is the function fulfilled today by registration and photographic modelling in“evidence”about the outer surface(if not the nature)of the world,and in particular the world of objects deprived of speech?