Radical Revisions of the Punctum

Abstract

Essay| March 01 2023 Radical Revisions of the Punctum: Roland Barthes After Fred Moten and LaToya Ruby Frazier David Markus David Markus David Markus is a multidisciplinary writer and educator who teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is the author of Notes on Trumpspace: Politics, Aesthetics, and the Fantasy of Home (2022). Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2023) 50 (1): 15–23. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2023.50.1.15 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation David Markus; Radical Revisions of the Punctum: Roland Barthes After Fred Moten and LaToya Ruby Frazier. Afterimage 1 March 2023; 50 (1): 15–23. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2023.50.1.15 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search Few reflections on the power of photography are as memorable as Roland Barthes’s discussion, in Camera Lucida (1981), of the “Winter Garden Photograph” of his deceased mother. It is on the basis of this “unreproducible” image that Barthes is able to reassure himself that photography is capable of capturing the truth of an individual. The decision not to include the photograph among the book’s images underscores the intensely personal nature of Barthes’s project, as does the telling confession that emerges from these somber passages. Following his mother’s death, we learn, Barthes struggled to concern himself with the fate of humanity in its totality. “My particularity could never again universalize itself,” he writes.1 As Fred Moten suggests in In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (2003), the inward retreat marked by these well-known reflections is symptomatic of greater limitations within the French author’s thinking about the visual... You do not currently have access to this content.