Home Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect
Article
Licensed
Unlicensed Requires Authentication

Indexicality as “symptom”: Photography and affect

  • Yuriko Furuhata
Published/Copyright: April 2, 2009
Semiotica
From the journal Volume 2009 Issue 174

Abstract

This article uses Roland Barthes's text, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, to critique photography's truth claim to the real by reading the photographic discourse of “indexicality” as a “symptom,” as defined in the work of Slavoj Žižek. The implications of this symptomatic relationship between photography and the real are analyzed in relation to the question of photographic spectatorship on the one hand, and to the inarticulability of affect on the other. In conclusion this article turns to Kant's notion of subjective universality as it is challenged by Barthes's theory of photography.

Published Online: 2009-04-02
Published in Print: 2009-April

© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin

Downloaded on 18.11.2025 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/semi.2009.032/pdf
Scroll to top button