Piotr Zawojski

The article presents Jacques Derrida’s reflections on photography. Although the philosopher himself declared his “lack of competence” in matters concerning visual arts and, more broadly, the image because his domain was word/text, he often spoke/wrote about the nature of the image, including the photographic one, as he was often provoked/invited to make such statements. Derrida did not create a coherent theory of the photographic image and it was never his ambition. However, scattered in several texts, his original reflections on the essence of photography – not in the commonly accepted thinking about this medium as the phenomenon of “writing of light,” but rather a medium that uses a kind of “writing of shade” (or sciagraphy) – force us to reflect and think critically. This article presents analyses and interpretations of Derrida’s texts in which the problem of photography is merely a context for broader philosophical considerations (The Postcard, Memoirs of the Blind, Aletheia, Rights of Inspection), as well as those in which photography becomes the basic material of reflection (The Deaths of Roland Barthes, Copy, Archive, Signature, Athens, Still Remains). Derrida’s thinking (even in darkness) turns out to be worth considering as reading his “amateur” texts on photography proves that his voice can be inspiring in this field as well.

Biometrics in the Art of New Media

The review is devoted to the main themes presented in the book by Ewelina Twardoch-Raś Sztuka biometryczna w perspektywie filozofii post- i transhumanizmu. W stronę estetyki postafektywnej [Biometric Art in the Perspective of the Philosophy of Post- and Transhumanism. Towards Post-affective Aesthetics]. The author emphasizes the pioneering nature of this publication on a global scale, because so far no monographic author’s study of this issue has been published. Biometric art can be included in the broad context of contemporary new media art, but its specificity is considered in this case primarily in the context of posthumanist and transhumanist philosophy and the author’s interpretation of post-affective aesthetics. The review pays particular attention to the author’s accurate recognition that biometric art is a practical step beyond the world of new media and establishing a new area of ​​post-media practice. In this case based on biomediation defined as “post-media hybridization” of biological and technological components.

The postmedia era forces us to rethink the status of a new generation of images and new postdigital imaging. Referring, inter alia, to the proposals of Ingrid Hoelzl and Rémi Marie, the article sketches a proposal for a theoretical approach to postimages as hybrid visual representations that arise as a result of the application of algorithmic procedures during their production. Postimages can be treated as a manifestation of a new paradigm of image culture in postantropocentric times, in which nonrepresentationalist approaches to digital image theory point to its ontogenetic methods of producing by “digital machines of vision.” Postimages become important reference points for the formation of a posthumanist order in which the symbiosis of man and machine becomes the foundation for the creation of a new pictorial paradigm based on algorithmic procedures that follows the photographic paradigm.

Thomas Bernhard and photography. Around Extinction and not only

Thomas Bernhard was not an expert in photography, its history and especially theory. He never dealt with the discursive description of her phenomenon. However, in his last great novel, Extinction (1986), he made several photos a kind of memory trigger and a center for building a story. The article deals with the issue of a special, extremely critical, not to say iconoclastic, assessment of the role of photography as a medium of stupefying people who succumb to its seductive power. The analysis of the fragments of photography appearing in the novel is just a starting point for deeper reflection on the impossibility of erasing photography as a medium of memory, it is a fundamental polemic with the thesis of the novel narrator, which the author identifies with the author himself. Here, Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction is an excuse to reflect on how photography and photographing can be considered a disease of our time, as the Austrian writer anticipated in his novel in the eighties of the last century.