Batchen: Photography, Desire, Pointing

I found Batchen's discussion of Derrida and Rousseau and their own assertions about desire and representation to be particularly effective and packed with implications, especially after just writing myself on desire in Crimp's "The Photographic Activity of Postmodernism." Batchen states that for Rousseau and Burgin, "[Desire] is what makes representation possible and necessary" (117). He then discusses Derrida's theorization of blindness as "the very condition of the act of drawing" (118). Although Batchen fails to correlate explicitly blindness and desire, I think that the at once motivated and unsuccessful trajectory of desire can be said to be effectively blind. Just as Crimp posits the commodity as a clue in the aforementioned essay, desire functions similarly as a clue: desire points at a solution or origin but fails to reach it--desire points blindly.

Therefore, if desire is the precondition for representation and desire (or at the very least desire's movement) is blind, it is further interesting to think of this theorization in relation to Roland Barthes, the punctum (and pleasure and/or jouissance), and the moment of closing the eyes in the "experience" of the image. It seems that all these theorists are pointing at one coterminous thing: the blindness of the pointing photograph/representation, which, in following the trajectory of desire, unsuccessfully and eternally moves toward the origin. However, it is only in this blindness, this moment of lack of vision, that the representative effect and potentially the essence of photograph can take form (or Platonic Form--the form of the Ideal). And on another level, this pointing activity maintains echoes of indexicality and the linguistic shifter. Batchen, in his discussion of Derrida and Rousseau, manages to generate fascinating and theoretically complex connections between very similar theoretical trajectories articulated around and about the photograph.