Returning to a famous scene in A la recherche du temps perdu when the narrator sees his grandmother as if his eye were a lens, this paper takes seriously the objectivity attributed to photographic vision in order to trace its consequences for our sense of self. I argue that objective sight is traumatic not because it reveals the future nonexistence of things, but because it reveals the continued existence of things in our absence, signaling thereby the contingency of the perceiving subject.
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2012
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